Moors’ Eliminativism Cross-Examined: Why Emotions Are Not Goal-Directed Cycles

Moors’ eliminativist theory of emotions aims to show that understanding emotional behavior as goal-directed behavior when the goals are high value explains all that is worth explaining about behavior without invoking the concept of emotion. I argue that eliminating emotions in favor of goal-directed cycles has major explanatory costs, because emotional behavior differs in important ways from behavior governed by cost-benefit analysis. I compare and contrast Moors’ theory with my own Motivational Theory of Emotions (MTE) with respect to two explanatory challenges in particular—emotion-induced decisional paralysis and recalcitrance. I conclude that we cannot make sense of these affective phenomena in purely goal-directed terms, and that a stimulus-driven process of behavior causation such as the one posited by MTE is required for explanatory purposes.