Presentation "To what extent do emotions help us make decisions" - ToK presentation

[Yueykabuey]

For my ToK presentation, I have decided to explore the question above ^^^
My real life situation will most likely be a court case since there are other ways of knowing involved:
Reason: via evidence, answer from witness
Language: how lawyers aim to persuade (yet this evokes emotion)
Perception: as the jury is made up of different people with different personalities

However, I'm not sure whether this would be TOO FOCUSED on my real life situation instead of the question itself & I'm not quite sure how to best present my idea & structure my presentation... && are there any situations where emotions do NOT have a role in helping us make decisions?

[-._._.-]

In maths, emotions do not really have a role in helping us make decisions. For example, if you are solving a quadratic equation to find the length of a side of rectangle and a negative answer comes up, you'll use reasoning to dismiss the negative one and to take the positive answer. Emotion is not really involved in this (unless you take into consideration intuition).

To me, emotion and reasoning complement each other, although they are on different ends of a spectrum. Take deforestation as an example. Since we know that trees take up carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas, by pure reasoning we should keep the trees and to plant more. But if we use emotion, we might consider other stakeholders and aspects, such as jobs. I just feel that you have to use both to make a decision and cannot solely rely on one of them. Reasoning is used to justify and emotional decision, and at the same time, emotion is used to justify a decision that came as a result of reasoning.

For the court case, it's unlikely that a judgement can be made through pure reasoning as they may be other reasons behind a crime. Maybe the person was forced to or something, or unconscious, etc. But then we can also say that there is always choice. But still, my point is, you'll need emotion to evaluate the evidence and to make a judgement.

This may be off topic but I just find it interesting. It is the concept of ethical responsibility and responsibility (May 2013 TOK essay title).

From Arrowhead (http://www.ibsurvival.com/topic/22429-responsibility-vs-ethical-responsibility/?hl=%2Bethical+%2Bresponsibility+%2Bresponsibility#entry174838)

The law says that when a natural person dies, his estate and assets are given to his successor per his will under the Testator and Wills Act.

Now, X died and according to his will, everything should go to Y. But Y is the person who killed X. Y confessed to having killed X. But Y made it clear that he didn't kill X for the estate, Y didn't even know that he was willed to receive X's estate and he killed X for some completely unrelated reason and this explanation was held up in Y's criminal trial where he was found guilty and sentenced for murdering X based on that unrelated motive alone. Should Y still inherit the estate?

The judge in this case has a responsibility to bequeath the estate to Y according to the law, but he has an ethical responsibility based on the principles of natural justice to ensure that a murderer does not inherit from his victim's estate.

----------------------------------------

While this is not directly related to reasoning and emotion, we can compare responsibility to reason and ethical responsibility to emotion. In a sense reasoning because it is more objective and emotion because your own personal views come into play. Does that make sense?

I don't know how much I helped here. But that was some stuff to consider.

-----------------------------------------
p.s. My 100th post!