The Head and the Heart: Incentives and Norms

We wager that on reflection most philosophers would reject any crude dichotomy between reason and passion. We don’t really think Newton unweaved the rainbow, we don’t really think one should ignore the learn’d astronomer to go gaze at the stars - or avoid gazing at the stars because after all you have the star charts. One simply doesn’t have to choose between these ways of accessing the world, and an appreciation for what is humanly significant can be combined quite comfortably with an analytical frame of mind. However, in more sophisticated guises, something of this contrast will find its way into philosophers’ analyses, and we think to their detriment. This contribution is about something that seems to us an example of such, and we shall try to set out where we think it goes wrong and why we think this is important to realise.