The missing moods

Abstract

People’s moods can indicate if their views are reliable. This is because certain views should cause certain emotions, and if a proponent of a position does not display the expected emotion, that is a sign that their position is less well thought out than it could be. This insight is most useful against popular positions whose reasonable moods are almost never expressed, especially in the presence of hawks, immigration restrictionists, and labor market regulation supporters. Nevertheless, this fallibility can also be seen in anti-positions, e.g., against pacifism and libertarianism. Moreover, different emotions are appropriate for different contexts, meaning that this method of assessing the reliability of a view is context-sensitive. – AI-generated abstract.