Emotions and ethics

Once, a while back, I mused about cuteness and its relevance for ethics. It seems to me that our affective reactions are by and large not part of the way we frame discussion of ethics, in the churches or in the West in general.

Charles Taylor writes this:

Modern enlightened culture is very theory-oriented. We tend to live in our heads, trusting our disengaged understandings: of experience, of beauty (we can't really accept that it's telling us anything, unless about our own feelings); even the ethical: we think that the only valid form of ethical self-directon is through rational mazims or understanding. We can't accept that part of being good is opening oursleves to certain feelings; either the horror at infacticide, or agape as a gut feeling. The Secular Age, p. 555

Of course, the picture is more complicated than this. In one sense, the West celebrates and even sacralises the expression of feelings.