Ian Hargreaves

Hearts And Minds

Despite the continuing strides of scientific and technological innovation, based on rationality, our thinking on issues like genetics and the environment continues to be polarised between the rational and the instinctive/emotional. For instance, is it reason or gut emotion that makes most of us resist the cloning of human embryos?

"Analysis" questions the assumptions that reason is necessarily pure and objective or that emotions are always irrational. Even the 18th century Age of Enlightenment produced contradictory and complementary rationalist and romantic philosophies.

Clearly, when it comes to making public policy and law, extremes of emotionalism

The notion that science is totally analytic, totally dispassionate, totally objective is a delusion that's only possible to hold if you don't know much about it..

Sir Robert May, President of the Royal Society and until recently the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser

or rationalism can be equally dangerous. But how do we strike the right balance between the two and achieve a kind of emotional intelligence? Politicians today spend most of their time trying to manage and manipulate public emotions.

But how sincere and trustworthy are their own sentiments about the policies they promote? And do we need more or less emotion in public life?

Ian Hargreaves explores the answers with contributors like the government's former Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir Robert May, the philosophers Mary Warnock and Martha Nussbaum, the historian Prof. Roy Porter and the political scientist John Gray.

Producer: Zareer Masani