If emotions can cloud judgment, how does one know his judgment is objective?

[Brant Gaede]

Your emotions clouding your judgment.

--Brant

[Wolf DeVoon]

In my professional career, I settled down in my 40s after about 25 years of heartache, vanity, and whatnot. At age 46, I quit show business, primarily because it didn't make any rational sense to continue and I wasn't emotionally wrapped up in it any more. Writing was often exhausting, but it wasn't emotional, except a feeling of exhilaration when something was beautiful and right (to the extent of my ability). No one is completely immune to anger or worry or life-affirming passion, but most of the old demons and foibles are gone, now that I've retired from writing. I have some mild regret about spending too much money on occasion, but life is pretty much A is A nowadays. Science is science. Business is business.

I've seen it in other old men. They're serene, say and do sensible stuff, aren't troubled or moved by others.

[anthony]

Burying emotions or distancing oneself from them in the name of 'logic', is as much an evasion as evading facts of reality, therefore irrational.

More rubbish. How we "feel" is irrelevant to the business of living, objective science, engineering, medicine, law.

Rubbish, back atcha, Wolf. Interesting your life anecdotes might be, but they don't constitute any contrary evidence to the objective methodology w.r.t emotionality. Quite the opposite since you evince dismissal for this rational method without it seems, trying it, so can hardly criticize it.

I could as easily (and honestly) state: "It works for me, so that's proof".

I think you're missing the thrust of my attempts to explain Rand's theory (with add-ons of my own).

Nothing goes unexamined in objectivity. Relegating an important part of our make-up to just "feelings" which get in the way of 'logic', and rejecting it as such - achieves nothing but evading emotion as the enemy, suppression and repression, becoming a victim to random, mysterious emotions, resenting an integral part of one's consciousness, leaving the field of emotions to the gurus and those self-helpers who advocate stuff like "Emotional Intelligence" - and generally and implicitly accepting an 'emotional mysticism'.

The objectification of emotions is to identify their nature and causality, and realise their 'purpose' and efficacy so that they are placed in their rightful position, as subjugated to reason but never conflicting nor contradictory. Rational egoism, for one, would be tremendously compromised if one permitted this conflict in oneself.

In a nutshell, if you don't 'choose' your emotions, they will 'choose' you.

Not at you, but it's something I've noticed in Objectivish circles, sometimes a rigidity or self-constraint in approach to one's existence and thought. It's as if some believe that Rand said "emotions are subjective, primacy of consciousness - therefore bad!"

Which is nonsense, she was obviously well aware of their criticality, and after her innovative analysis connecting value->reason->emotion, simply specified that one does not act on emotion. She may have presumed that every thinker easily and habitually introspects his emotions. (They are premises to check as thoroughly as others). But it has struck me that self-awareness and introspection isn't that widespread.

[Selene]

In a nutshell, if you don't 'choose' your emotions, they will 'choose' you.

Not at you, but it's something I've noticed in Objectivish circles, sometimes a rigidity or self-constraint in approach to one's existence and thought. It's as if some believe that Rand said "emotions are subjective, primacy of consciousness - therefore bad!"

Which is nonsense, she was obviously well aware of their criticality, and after her innovative analysis connecting value->reason->emotion, simply specified that one does not act on emotion. She may have presumed that every thinker easily and habitually introspects his emotions. (They are premises to check as thoroughly as others). But it has struck me that self-awareness and introspection isn't that widespread.

Correct.

Ayn found that out at a very primal level with Nathaniel.

She acted on her raw emotion as humans tend to do.

When I opened my mail from NBI that fateful Fall day, I accepted what I always sensed about her and accepted that we all have clay feet.

A...

[Brant Gaede]

Not my feet.

--Brant

clay feet my ass

the human foot and upright posture makes man uniquely man by themselves--the opposable thumb isn't unique but it is necessary--add on the voice box and cognitive brain and it's man ready to go ("Go man, go!")

[Wolf DeVoon]

Nothing goes unexamined in objectivity

Don't bother to examine a folly. Just ask yourself what it accomplishes. (I think I quoted that accurately).

Sciabarra quotes it as Don't bother to examine a folly—ask yourself only what it accomplishes.

My recollection was a tad fuzzy. Should I introspect how I feel about fuzzy recollections?

Naw. Who the hell cares? Emotions are about as interesting as laundry soap.

[Brant Gaede]

Sciabarra's quotation is exactly correct. From Toohey's speech to Keating (p. 679 hb) somewhat inspired by the speech of The Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamasov.

--Brant

[anthony]

Nothing goes unexamined in objectivity

Don't bother to examine a folly. Just ask yourself what it accomplishes. (I think I quoted that accurately).

Sciabarra quotes it as Don't bother to examine a folly—ask yourself only what it accomplishes.

My recollection was a tad fuzzy. Should I introspect how I feel about fuzzy recollections?

Naw. Who the hell cares? Emotions are about as interesting as laundry soap.

Hah, Wolf. "...as laundry soap" - is that including emotions of delight and joy, that elusive "happiness"?

Or do you believe you can cherry-pick the good without the other?

I favor feeling the emotion, experiencing the worst of the bad in order to experience the best of the good ones.

Rand: "...lightning calculators, giving him the sum of his profit or loss".

The Eagles:

Desperado -

Why don't you come to your senses

You've been out riding fences

For so long now.

Oh, you're a hard one,

And I know you got your reasons,

But those things that

Are pleasing you

Can hurt you somehow.

...

Don't your feet get cold

In the Winter time

When the snow don't fall

And the Sun won't shine,

It's hard to tell the night time

From the day --

You're losing all your

Highs and lows-

Ain't it funny how the feeling

Goes away...?

Highs and lows, profit and loss- we need to feel them both - encouragement and warnings.

[Wolf DeVoon]

Highs and lows, profit and loss - we need to know them both - encouragement and warnings.

Good soap, cheap soap, faded colors or phosphate free enzymes.

I don't think you've ever experienced happiness.

Happiness is not mass-produced. It does not arise safely and securely, the cheery product of prudence. Your best interests, individual or collective, most certainly lay elsewhere in the lap of luxury, of certainty and shame. No happy man bows his head or knows what tomorrow may bring. Tomorrow is irrelevant. The old business of life goes on, but with a subtext that nothing can alter hereafter. [Laissez Faire Law, p.150]

[Brant Gaede]

Wynand told Dominique that no one so impervious to pain could be happy.

--Brant

[9thdoctor]

Isn't the OP simply a variation on (/adaptation of) Plato's Cave? How do you know reason works, after all you're not infallible? Emotions could be clouding your judgement as, to quote Obi-Wan Kenobi, "your eyes can deceive you, don't trust them".

[anthony]

Highs and lows, profit and loss - we need to know them both - encouragement and warnings.

Good soap, cheap soap, faded colors or phosphate free enzymes.

I don't think you've ever experienced happiness.

Happiness is not mass-produced. It does not arise safely and securely, the cheery product of prudence. Your best interests, individual or collective, most certainly lay elsewhere in the lap of luxury, of certainty and shame. No happy man bows his head or knows what tomorrow may bring. Tomorrow is irrelevant. The old business of life goes on, but with a subtext that nothing can alter hereafter. [Laissez Faire Law, p.150]

Presumptuous. Nonsense.

[Selene]

Isn't the OP simply a variation on (/adaptation of) Plato's Cave? How do you know reason works, after all you're not infallible? Emotions could be clouding your judgement as, to quote Obi-Wan Kenobi, "your eyes can deceive you, don't trust them".

Your eyes can't deceive you. However, a rose colored brain can get you killed.

A...

[Wolf DeVoon]

Presumptuous. Nonsense.

Ya think? Let's see what else I said about happiness. Tell me if it describes your experience.

We begin as ignorant children, and it takes time to discern which pinnacle is personally mine to renounce as an impossible dream. Happiness, of course, is getting that which was forbidden forever and then suddenly, incredibly mine! That unequivocal, emphatic predicate of ownership is the root of all good, provided that it refers to something no one else can share, that no one else wanted or sought... Happiness is transformative, because it's unexpected. 'Struck on the road to Damacus' begins to state what no man can fully explain without metaphors. Happiness is a free bird in flight, an arrow without target, joy without end, an end in itself. Hegel's 'ground' and Rand's 'passion.' The alpha and omega. God in heaven. Those funny old tarnished conceits point to the real meaning of happiness: an unalloyed experience of Yes to Me. [op cit]

I had no expectation of happiness, the kind that's transformative and permanent, a new "subtext that nothing can alter."

How about you? Been radically transformed by transcendent peace, because you obtained the unobtainable?

[william.scherk]

Nothing goes unexamined in objectivity

Don't bother to examine a folly. Just ask yourself what it accomplishes. (I think I quoted that accurately).

Sciabarra quotes it as Don't bother to examine a folly—ask yourself only what it accomplishes.

Quoting a very small part of Tony's comment, then quoting an extremely small part of a speech by a fictional character -- what kind of reasoning is that?

Let's accepty Toohey's one-liner as a possibly useful heuristic. Don't examine a folly. Don't analyze a folly. When you meet a folly, simply ask what it accomplished?

Well, let us skip a few steps in reasoning, among them the identification of a folly. What is the folly, according to Wolf? Well, only a very small part of Tony's comment, one line. How did Wolf determine that Tony`s notes on reason/emotion and an 'objective examination' of emotion are folly? Well, we don't know. It is a given to Wolf. It is self-evident.

That is not reasoning -- or at least, we cannot see the reasoning.

The full Randian paragraph from Toohey`s speech, larded through with emotion, salted with words like joy and happiness, shot through with valuations and denigrations, `the soul`and its killers. Toohey is answering a question from Peter Keating, Who does Toohey intend to rule? (what folly has Toohey laid out and analyzed for Keating`s and the reader`s benefit?) I`ve added paragraphs for those old fuckers like me who cannot happily read an unbroken splodge of text of this length.

“You. The world. It's only a matter of discovering the lever. If you learn how to rule one single man's soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It's the soul, Peter, the soul. Not whips or swords or fire or guns. That's why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. We will.

The soul, Peter, is that which can't be ruled. It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it--and the man is yours. You won't need a whip--he'll bring it to you and ask to be whipped. Set him in reverse--and his own mechanism will do your work for you. Use him against himself. Want to know how it's done? See if I ever lied to you. See if you haven't heard all this for years, but didn't want to hear, and the fault is yours, not mine. There are many ways. Here's one. Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity. That's difficult. The worst among you gropes for an ideal in his own twisted way. Kill integrity by internal corruption. Use it against itself. Direct it toward a goal destructive of all integrity.

Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell men that altruism is the ideal. Not a single one of them has ever achieved it and not a single one ever will. His every living instinct screams against it. But don't you see what you accomplish? Man realizes that he's incapable of what he's accepted as the noblest virtue--and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness.

Since the supreme ideal is beyond his grasp, he gives up eventually all ideals, all aspiration, all sense of his personal value. He feels himself obliged to preach what he can't practice. But one can't be good halfway or honest approximately. To preserve one's integrity is a hard battle. Why preserve that which one knows to be corrupt already?

His soul gives up its self-respect. You've got him. He'll obey. He'll be glad to obey--because he can't trust himself, he feels uncertain, he feels unclean. That's one way. Here's another. Kill man's sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it. Great men can't be ruled. We don't want any great men. Don't deny the conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional.

Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept--and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. Laugh at Roark and hold Peter Keating as a great architect. You've destroyed architecture. Build up Lois Cook and you've destroyed literature. Hail Ike and you've destroyed the theater. Glorify Lancelot Clokey and you've destroyed the press.

Don't set out to raze all shrines--you'll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity--and the shrines are razed. Then there's another way. Kill by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. It's simple.

Tell them to laugh at everything. Tell them that a sense of humor is an unlimited virtue. Don't let anything remain sacred in a man's soul--and his soul won't be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in man. One doesn't reverence with a giggle. He'll obey and he'll set no limits to his obedience--anything goes--nothing is too serious.

Here's another way. This is most important. Don't allow men to be happy.

Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men. So kill their joy in living. Take away from them whatever is dear or important to them. Never let them have what they want. Make them feel that the mere fact of a personal desire is evil. Bring them to a state where saying I want' is no longer a natural right, but a shameful admission.

Altruism is of great help in this. Unhappy men will come to you. They'll need you. They'll come for consolation, for support, for escape. Nature allows no vacuum. Empty man's soul--and the space is yours to fill.

I don't see why you should look so shocked, Peter. This is the oldest one of all. Look back at history. Look at any great system of ethics, from the Orient up. Didn't they all preach the sacrifice of personal joy? Under all the complications of verbiage, haven't they all had a single leitmotif: sacrifice, renunciation, self-denial? Haven't you been able to catch their theme song--'Give up, give up, give up, give up'?

Look at the moral atmosphere of today. Everything enjoyable, from cigarettes to sex to ambition to the profit motive, is considered depraved or sinful. Just prove that a thing makes men happy--and you've damned it. That's how far we've come. We've tied happiness to guilt. And we've got mankind by the throat. Throw your first-born into a sacrificial furnace--lie on a bed of nails--go into the desert to mortify the flesh--don't dance--don't go to the movies on Sunday--don't try to get rich--don't smoke--don't drink.

It's all the same line. The great line. Fools think that taboos of this nature are just nonsense. Something left over, old-fashioned. But there's always a purpose in nonsense. Don't bother to examine a folly--ask yourself only what it accomplishes. Every system of ethics that preached sacrifice grew into a world power and ruled millions of men.

Of course, you must dress it up. You must tell people that they'll achieve a superior kind of happiness by giving up everything that makes them happy. You don't have to be too clear about it. Use big vague words. 'Universal Harmony'--'Eternal Spirit'--'Divine Purpose'--'Nirvana'--'Paradise'--'Racial Supremacy'--'The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.'

Internal corruption, Peter. That's the oldest one of all. The farce has been going on for centuries and men still fall for it. Yet the test should be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice--run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

But if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it's your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself--that will be the man who's not after your soul. That will be the man who has nothing to gain from you. But let him come and you'll scream your empty heads off, howling that he's a selfish monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries.

But here you might have noticed something. I said, 'It stands to reason.' Do you see? Men have a weapon against you. Reason. So you must be very sure to take it away from them. Cut the props from under it.

But be careful. Don't deny outright. Never deny anything outright, you give your hand away. Don't say reason is evil--though some have gone that far and with astonishing success. Just say that reason is limited. That there's something above it. What? You don't have to be too clear about it either.

The field's inexhaustible. 'Instinct'--'Feeling'--'Revelation'--'Divine Intuition'--'Dialectic Materialism.' If you get caught at some crucial point and somebody tells you that your doctrine doesn't make sense--you're ready for him. You tell him that there's something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel. He must believe.

Suspend reason and you play it deuces wild. Anything goes in any manner you wish whenever you need it. You've got him. Can you rule a thinking man? We don't want any thinking men.”

Highs and lows, profit and loss - we need to know them both - encouragement and warnings.

Good soap, cheap soap, faded colors or phosphate free enzymes.

I don't think you've ever experienced happiness.

Happiness is not mass-produced. It does not arise safely and securely, the cheery product of prudence. Your best interests, individual or collective, most certainly lay elsewhere in the lap of luxury, of certainty and shame. No happy man bows his head or knows what tomorrow may bring. Tomorrow is irrelevant. The old business of life goes on, but with a subtext that nothing can alter hereafter. [Laissez Faire Law, p.150]

Good gosh. Wolf spends time relating his unhinged emotional life (until he passed through emotional menopause) ... and helps us to understand in general terms that his emotional life was once a hideous pit of fury and loss, humiliation and pain, exaltation and bitterness ... and then tries to peddle a position that the `unexamined life` is the best life, at least as it pertains to evaluation of one`s own emotions. This seems like a contradiction -- since Wolf is doing the very thing he says is folly.

I bet I am not the only one who finds this to be incoherent. One can disagree profoundly with Tony (as do I) on points or theory of emotion, but still understand and accept the central point at issue: a human being can increase his happiness and self-actualization by understanding his emotional life.

Does this mean anything like Wolf`s take-home, that emotions are but soap brands?

Isn't the OP simply a variation on (/adaptation of) Plato's Cave? How do you know reason works, after all you're not infallible? Emotions could be clouding your judgement as, to quote Obi-Wan Kenobi, "your eyes can deceive you, don't trust them".

Good call. The OT has given us not much distinguishing information about the puzzlement, but the bare bones are there.

In one situation of strong emotion, his judgment seems unclouded -- or at least without doubt as to the correctness. His judgment was supported if not warranted by the strong emotion. In the other situation, his strong emotion was let to subside, as if it were likely to distort his rational cognition. And he wonders, puzzled, how he can know when to trust his emotions. Why trustworthy in one instance, yet not in another?

I`d like to see Wolf stop lazing around, and try to answer the OT`s question. It does no good to decry any and all attention to human emotion -- as if generally a slippery-slope to Ladies Studies and Deepak Chopra -- and then leave the OT unanswered.

Edited October 19, 2015 by william.scherk

[Selene]

Sometimes I truly envy the Tweeting rules on words...

And no, I do not have a Twitter account, although, I am seriously considering it...

A...

[anthony]

lol

I don't have to like a million words, but will defend to the death William's right to pour them over us.

Besides, it was a pleasure to read the Toohey speech after a long while.

[Wolf DeVoon]

I`d like to see Wolf stop lazing around, and try to answer the OT`s question. It does no good to decry any and all attention to human emotion

Oh. Okay, will do.

I don't clearly know conceptually when I can trust my judgment given strong accompanying emotions.

That's why a sensible person should have inflexible, well-reasoned policies. For instance, don't drink and drive. No matter what the provocation, don't shoot someone unless your life or the life of another is in immediate peril. Good policies limit how much damage can be done by emotion.

Brant wisely spoke of temptation. Most of our self-inflicted woe is produced by yielding to temptation.

[william.scherk]

Sometimes I truly envy the Tweeting rules on words...

And no, I do not have a Twitter account, although, I am seriously considering it...

I tried to explain Twitter to a pal whose favourite vocation is to call up and harangue public servants or hopefuls (mayors, councillors, RCMP captains, MPs, candidates, etc). I explained it as a Short Text Message medium. He didn`t get it. I said it was like an SMS to and from multiple people. He didn`t get it. I said it was like a subscription service to other people`s SMSes. He didn`t like that. I explained that almost every entity on Earth has a phone number. People he wanted to harry and verbally spank had also a Twitter account through which they send out short messages, hypertext, images, videos. That scared him off entirely. I don't know if it was the brevity or the enormity.

For those with opinions on the length of my posts here, just consider all my tweets laid end to end. I have 91,000.

At OL, I write until I understand myself. I know I have fans, and I know I have kvetchers. Since I primarily write for myself, I don`t really mind that folks pass by. My self-worth as an OL Old Timer is self-measured.

It`s hard to interpret Adam`s cryptic remark above -- except that he may not always appreciate my efforts -- especially when they run over 500 words. In which case I have to say, who cares? I do not. If you do not like reading longish comments, then scroll on by. You will miss my wisdom, of course, and miss some fine reasoning and argument, of course, but hey. It is a free world here, within reason.

Edited October 19, 2015 by william.scherk

[9thdoctor]

For instance, don't drink and drive. No matter what the provocation, don't shoot someone unless your life or the life of another is in immediate peril.

And as Lazarus Long put it:

Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss.

[william.scherk]

This has been in 'dry-dock' for a while. Sploosh.

Without emotions like fear, anger, disgust, anticipation, sadness, happiness ... you would hardly be able to 'judge' anything.

Certainly one of the most peculiar assertions I have ever read.

He's on to something, but needs refining.

It's rubbish. Justifies whimsy, panic, mob psychosis, grudge, fantasy, conflating Kant for Schopenhauer, not caring what's true or false, playing deuces wild for emotional masturbation. What kind of law judge would it be who ignored the rules of evidence and based decisions on how he felt about a petitioner or defendant? Would you go to a dentist who pulled teeth for fun and didn't use x-rays because radiation scared him?

The challenge in life is to use our eyes and ears and logic, distinguish knowledge from "feelings."

I agree with the final paragraph, more or less. I would rather be a man than an unreasoning brute. It is intensely interesting to me the 'knowledge' claims made on specious grounds, especially intuitions or emotional snap-shot judgments. Many prejudices and bigotries are fueled by 'feelings,' and stand athwart roads to knowledge.

I repudiate and loathe post-modern conceptions of knowledge, which have proliferated upon stupidity. From shoddy 'alternative' modalities taught in nursing schools to imponderably stupid sociology, a reliance upon epistemic whoopee had alarmed me. This took root early in life as a skeptic of religious claims, and grew past cult studies into an engagement in the Recovered Memory Wars. Please don't mistake me for an epistemic relativist. I had contempt and disgust for the 'knowledge' claims made by practitioners, authors, touts, also-rans, theorists. I cut my teeth on the internet doing battle with such epistemic claims. If you think I am on a bench with Chopra, you're nuts.

Anyhow, to the horror-reaction you showed to my one-liner. I'll call it a reflex action. You judge the statement as bosh, peculiar, rubbish -- on the basis of disgust, perhaps some anger, contempt ...

You say it justifies worse than whimsy, that by asserting emotion influences and can determine judgment, I reject reason. That we may fear mob psychosis or be repulsed by emotional masturbation (artificial 'high'? self-stimulation? over-attention to orgasm?) seems to support my point. The note on panic also supports it. One cannot justify a panic by explaining its genesis, one can only avert, reduce, curb, militate against mob emotions. Merely knowing that a an emotional contagion can take hold (as in the Satanic Panic) does not mean one is part of it or captive to the contagion's irrational epistemology. One can be so angered and disgusted by panic and whimsical pseudoscience that one gives over all one's hobby time to reducing its dire effects and spread and containment and debunking and so on.

What have I left out, grudges. Does knowing emotions influence decisions militate for grudge-keeping? Does knowing some folks will nurse a psychological wound to the point of a grudge, does knowing this approve of grudges, grudge matches, grudge championships, grudge extension into vendetta, vendetta into Albania honor feuds spanning centures? I'd say no. I hope not.

I'm left with some error involving Kant and Schopenhauer, which I can't figure out, and some more about the Judge and the Dentist. Knowing that there are some dentists who are into the woo, I choose rationally, and avoid the off-beam practitioner. A judge whose decisions are fueled by anger or prejudice not otherwise not rational, or who allows his passions to subvert the integrity of his ruling is indeed one to watch for. We expect calm and circumspect reasoning from all our justices, lowly and grand. When we don't get it, we should feel ripped off.

That's all quite true as far as it goes but it can go a lot further than that. There are endless multiplicies of thoughts, emotions and human situations where introspection of feelings is a way to conscious knowledge. There are, however, many people who use their minds exclusively as you do for whatever reasons and that's okay. It's predominantly men with an engineering, not artistic, bent. Women are more prone to be intuitive. As a group I suspect engineers need wives more than most leaving them time to focus on analytics and being productive. This is also common with businessmen. This enables a narrower concentration of focus for great results.

--Brant

I'm being quite speculative with these comments (I don't know as much as they imply)

It's a lovely paragraph. I'd read more on the same lines, extending your scope. It seems to go towards invoking 'complement' as the attachment point of Emotion and Reason. We can market the long-form as "Why Engineers Need Wives (And Why Wives Need Engineers)." We will market it more for men who like engineering and not to women who like engineering. Or we could call it Why Engineers Need Spouses And Other Professions Don't.

Edited November 17, 2015 by william.scherk

[Wolf DeVoon]

to the horror-reaction you showed to my one-liner. I'll call it a reflex action. You judge the statement as bosh, peculiar, rubbish -- on the basis of disgust, perhaps some anger, contempt

Plain speaking doesn't mean it had an emotional cause or emotional component.

[Alexander Warner]

Emotions can cloud judgement but that doesn't mean they make a person blind totally. The most essential step to not let them cloud judgement is by acknowledging to oneself first that one is affected by emotions and is acting on them currently

[anthony]

Alexander: Emotions add the spice to life and are a spur to action and an instant signal. When often introspected and linked to reality, emotions clearly become one's ally and partner. I strongly oppose the tacit belief that one must sometimes/always squelch one's emotions. That's a "logical robot", not man. Unexamined emotions, an 'emotional blur', give this idea credence. Not to say though that emotions, particularly negative ones should constantly be on open display.

IF one reflects and recognizes that the type of emotion you respond with is 'appropriate' to your assessment of a real fact/situation -and- simultaneously appropriate to your standards (in accord with your objective life-view, your convictions and values) -- the consequent action will hardly be "clouded" by it, but instead a rational act, often passionately rational. (Which is not a contradiction in terms, I believe).