The Expressivity and Rationality of Expressive Action

Abstract Actions expressive of emotion are widely thought to pose a problem for the view that actions admit of rational explanation. Supposing the standard, instrumentalist view of practical rationality, such actions seem not to admit of practical reasons. In this paper, I assess a distinctive line of response to this problem. As Helm (2001, 2016) and Bennett (2016, 2021) have proposed, we can make sense of expressive actions as rational since they are responses to a specific type of evaluative reason, which differs from paradigm instrumental reasons. Whilst sympathetic to this line of response, I argue that Helm and Bennett go awry in developing it since they rely on an inadequate view of the expressive character of expressive actions. As they suppose, emotions are at least in part a specific form of evaluation and expressive actions express this evaluation. This view, I propose, fails to make expressive actions intelligible as rational responses to evaluative reasons. I indicate an alternative way of developing the view, on which it lives up to its promise.