Abstract

The claim that emotions are unreliable or, more colloquially, “untrustworthy” is sometimes offered as evidence of the epistemic illegitimacy of emotions. In this paper, I consider two initially plausible implications of the epistemic unreliability of emotions: first, that if emotions are epistemically unreliable, then beliefs or actions that are based on emotional reasons are irrational; and, second, that once we have evidence of emotional unreliability, we should not treat emotions as reasons for belief or action. In this talk, I attempt to show why one might want to resist these purported implications and how one might rationally do so. The overall aim is to provide support for the view that even if we have evidence that emotions are epistemically unreliable, that it can nonetheless be rational to form beliefs or perform actions on the basis of emotional reasons.