Right…

What doesn’t make sense, is that there isn’t one thing that makes an emotion positive (/negative). Sometimes, I really enjoy falling asleep to tranquil classical music; it creates a positive emotion in me. At other times, I enjoy almost getting angry, or upset, listening to vicious rock music. I also get a positive emotion when enjoying the juicy sweetness of big fresh oranges, though that emotion in itself is quite different from the pleasure I experience when indulging in rich chocolate fudge cake. Different again is the pleasurable jolt of glancing the person you love. All these positive emotions are quite different sorts of happiness/ pleasure/ enjoyment.

The same disparity can be seen in pains. A paper cut can feel like the worst pain ever… then you loose someone you love. And how does that compare with the fear felt when your own untimely death presents itself to you? Or the shame of acting improperly towards someone, and being publicly “found out”?

We might try and rank these emotions from most to least desirable. In life, we do just that whenever we have to make a judgement about how we should act. But how do we rank emotional outcomes when there is such disparity?

It might seem we’re influenced by how long those emotions last, or by how pleasurable the later side effects of those emotion are. But considering only the present experience of an emotion, it seems impossible to rationally apply any sort of rank whatsoever. Bentham suggested it was simply a matter of intensity of pleasure pain… but is it? Really? Isn’t the pleasure of tranquil meditation simply a different type of pleasure from that we experience listening to angry rock music? I can’t see the significant common quality. All that seems the same is that in both cases, we desire the emotion, and judge it to be “positive”.

So do we rank emotions simply by how much we desire them (or desire not to feel them)? Are our desires therefore arbitrary? I can desire things for many different- and crucially, separate- reasons, and the separateness of these reasons denies the possibility of comparing them on any scale of value. Comparing two types of pleasure to discover which is “greatest” is akin to comparing 10cm and 10 degrees Celsius to deduce which is bigger. Impossible. They’re just not the same type of thing- their values lie in different qualities.

So, how do we do rank emotions? Why do we value “positive emotions” at all, and what puts this in contrast to out distaste for “negative emotions”? Mustn’t there be some common unit if there is to be any sense made of any of our choices whatsoever?

And why is it that even though no one I ask can answer these questions, we’re all (me included) still fairly content to go on in ignorance? We can’t even justify our fear at the potential breakdown of morality until we’ve fully investigated the evidence for the meaninglessness of that morality. If we knew exactly why we went on, we’d have cracked the whole conundrum! But as it is…
*Walks into a wall

**Can’t decide if it really matters, if I'm being philosophically consistent, but gets some anti-bump cream just in case