Practical Irrationality Mystified

In her book Demystifying Emotions (2022a), Agnes Moors introduces a novel theory of emotions which takes emotions to have a goal-directed character. The theory’s core tenet is that emotions, far from being “passive” occurrences, are states designed to serve the emoter’s most important goals. Moors believes that her goal-directed theory can account for all the relevant features of emotions. One feature she appears especially sensitive to as a potential threat to her theory is the fact that emotions often appear to lead us to irrational actions. Nevertheless, she thinks her theory can explain irrational emotional actions as being both goal-directed and irrational. In this paper, I argue that the concept of emotion is in fact not explanatorily eliminable vis-à-vis practical irrationality. My claim is that we cannot make sense of how emotions motivate irrational behaviors if we think of emotions in terms of goal-directed decision-making.