"Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." - David Hume
Be careful in your quest to be rational about all things. The term "rational" has no solid foundation. Quite possibly believing yourself to be rational is at best extremely irrational.
Also keep in mind that the assumption that other people expect and reward what they consider to be rational behavior from you is not always true.
If you define "rational" to be cold logic that ignores human feelings and passions, then it is weakly defined and it is not going to make you friends (if you consider making friends to be a rational thing to do). Ultimately you could postulate that human feelings eventually boil down to cold logic, but unless you can calculate that in your head you're left with heuristics.
taking into account emotions (which are an antiquated reaction system based on choosing a course of action with incomplete information in a hunter-gatherer tribe setting) is an important part of reason. And the term rational has an extremely solid foundation: a set of self-consistent rules that allow you to accurately predict reality. If it doesn't predict reality, throw it out and go back to deductive experiments until you come up with something better. Rationalism is inductive. that's the whole point.
How stupid our old hunter-gatherer ancestors must have been! They chose their actions based on incomplete information! It's a good thing that kind of thing has become antiquated among our intellectual upper class.
A question for you: what's the use of predicting reality if you have no emotional investment in it? The mere act of trying to predict reality to further some end means you have an emotional objective. The universe can get along just fine without you, you know.
Also, how do you determine when your rules have accurately predicted reality? Can you measure your own confirmation bias or congruence bias? Can you be sure that you've rid yourself of your bias blind spot when you make the connection between your mental model and what you perceive as reality?
There are not turtles all the way down. At some level you enter the exciting, terrifying, wonderful, and dangerous world of raw human emotion. Emotions aren't antiquated. They are the turbulent foundation upon which rationality stands. I'm not saying that rationality is baseless or impossible. I'm just saying that you cannot set it apart as a motivational engine that supersedes human passion. I see it more as a system that helps you make effective use of your emotional energy.
Additionally, you can't set up your definition of rationality (a set of self-consistent rules that allow you to accurately predict reality) as a system that encourages morality (rejecting things like torture or other needless suffering, as you said above).
without emotions, you would have no use for rationality. why pursue a start-up or other endeavours? because you have drives to satisfy, because you want to be happy, because you have curiosity -- our emotions are what motivate us. reason is necessary to accomplish complex goals, but by itself it is powerless.
Be careful in your quest to be rational about all things. The term "rational" has no solid foundation. Quite possibly believing yourself to be rational is at best extremely irrational.
Also keep in mind that the assumption that other people expect and reward what they consider to be rational behavior from you is not always true.
If you define "rational" to be cold logic that ignores human feelings and passions, then it is weakly defined and it is not going to make you friends (if you consider making friends to be a rational thing to do). Ultimately you could postulate that human feelings eventually boil down to cold logic, but unless you can calculate that in your head you're left with heuristics.