On Being Reactive

Philosophers often write as if means-end reason were the factory setting for human agency. More or less efficiently, we act in pursuit of ends. Temptation, depression, anxiety, fear: distortions like these impede the smooth pistoning of the instrumental engine; they prevent us from doing what we will. But for the most part, we are means-end machines.

It’s not my experience and I doubt it’s yours. When I deal with conflicts at work, I am routinely stopped short by the question: to what end? Drafting an email, or a memo, to protest a policy or justify a decision, I find myself articulating frankly what is wrong with the policy or why the decision was made. With alarming regularity, I have to be made to ask: will doing this improve the situation? And very often, the answer is, quite obviously, no. Collating my objections to your action, rehearsing the reasons for my own: these communications are more likely to exasperate, or anger, than persuade. And this comes as no surprise. Means and end were patently misaligned. My actions had not even the semblance of instrumental rationality.

What happens at work occurs, as well, in close relationships. We act from anger, jealousy, shame, without thinking what we hope to achieve, or how. The deliberate pursuit of goals is not stymied but short-circuited by emotion: one is operating in a different mode.

The mode in question was recognized by the philosopher Rosalind Hursthouse in an essay whose lightness and brevity conceal its depth. Hursthouse opens with an inventory of what she calls “arational actions”:

explained by a wave of love, affection, or tenderness—kissing or lightly touching in passing, seizing and tossing up in the air, rumpling the hair of, or generally messing up the person or animal one loves

explained by anger, hatred, and sometimes jealousy—violently destroying or damaging anything remotely connected with the person (or animal, or institution) one's emotion is directed toward, e.g., her picture, letters or presents from her

explained by excitement—jumping up and down, running, shouting, pounding the table or one's knees, hugging oneself or other people, throwing things

… and more. In each case, the action is expressive of emotion—but not done in order to express emotion, as one might vent one’s feelings, deliberately, at the direction of one’s therapist. Nor are such actions taken with a false pretense of efficacy: I do not believe, for instance, that burning my enemy’s book will cause her harm, as in my anger I wish to do. Means-end reasoning is irrelevant.

Rosalind Hursthouse

Psychologists warn about “emotional reactivity”:

When you’re reactive, your feelings depend on external events outside your influence or control. … A good friend says something hurtful; a romantic partner is in a lousy mood; your child refuses to eat what you cooked for dinner; your boss asks you to have work done by Monday, and it’s Friday afternoon. … Instead of seeing whether the insult was intended, you respond with an insult of your own; instead of inquiring about why your partner is in a bad mood, you give them the cold-shoulder in retaliation; you punish your child rather than find a solution; and you resentfully accept the work rather than ask for an extension. Your reactive behavior then makes the situation worse.

Like Hursthouse’s inventory, this description foregrounds immediate action. It gives the impression that being reactive is being overwhelmed by emotion in the moment, as we sometimes are. We need to take a breath.

But arational behaviour can be calm and calculated, not just hot and bothered. As Hursthouse goes on to remark, her examples “justify our looking with a skeptical eye at actions done in the grip of an emotion to which the full rational panoply of belief, desire, and ‘intention with which’ is usually ascribed.” When I draft an email protesting an unjust policy, I do not look like someone wildly defacing a picture of the Associate Dean. But my action is guided by emotional, not instrumental reason: I am protesting what I see as wrong, not in order to express my outrage, or because I believe the protest will make a positive difference, but from the logic of indignation.

In more extreme examples, my action may be more radically unfitted to my end, as when I lose my cool and yell at an administrator in a meeting. But arational action is not as rare as yelling in public. It pervades our interaction with others. We are often guided by emotion, not beliefs about the best means to our ends. Instrumental reason is not a default possession but a hard-won aspiration.

Nor is the achievement of instrumental rationality always for the best. “When I have read this paper to discussion groups,” Hursthouse reflects, “I have found that the list of the examples at the beginning always provokes instant delighted recognition; everyone knows what it is like to act in some of these ways, and is somehow pleased to hear it acknowledged and described.”

Now, someone might maintain that this is just a case of the weak and fallible taking (improper) pleasure in having company. But to me it suggests that we value ourselves and each other as emotional creatures … and do not believe that the perfect human being would never act arationally.

Sometimes, it’s fine, or even good, to act from love, or anger, or joy, without interrogating ends.

The catch is that, once you recognize an action as arational, you have to choose: take effective means to an ameliorative end or act on the logic of emotion—a logic that is now self-conscious, so that you have the end of enacting it. Either way, your action falls under the governance of instrumental reason.

In this way, arational action, though intentional, is akin to autonomic breathing: if you attend to it, you cannot carry on.