To me, this idea couldn't be more wrong headed. In my experience it is rationality that solves most problems.
Emotionalism is the antithesis of rationality. So framing everything by projecting the outcome that is the most likely to provoke an emotional response (e.g. death) is basically the recipe for a thought process that won't solve the world's problems.
Let me put it another way. We all know it's better to teach a man to fish than to just give him a fish. But if that man refuses to learn the emotional person will give him the fish anyway while the rational person will force him to choose between learning to fish or nothing. In that way the rational person forces the man to learn how to feed himself while the emotional person simply rewards his laziness and feeds him for a day.
And what happens when, faced with the rational person's ultimatum ("learn to fish or you get nothing"), the man chooses nothing? Surely it's his own fault, but suffering still happens. Of course, that's a small-scale, contrived example, but there are plenty of areas in public policy where many or most people's behavior isn't rational.
Health care is actually a great example of this: classical theory and basic common sense suggests that if you make people pay for their health care more directly, they'll have more of an interest to negotiate a better deal, or at least comparison-shop. This is occasionally true, but far more often, people aren't actually comfortable bargaining with the surgeon who's going to be handling their innards.
Likewise, with health care, people often make "irrational" decisions and go into $500K debt to prolong an 89-year-old grandparents' life for 6 days, because life, death and health just seems to be one of those areas that we're not wired to be rational about.
Health care aside, there are all sorts of other examples of irrationality - for instance, I remember seeing multiple studies in which people preferred a lower reward as long as everyone got the same reward (basically they valued relative well-being and parity over absolute well-being).
The point of all this is that while rationality is a great tool for "solving problems" generally speaking, when you deal with people you really must take into account the fact that most people (and I suspect even most people on HN, which is a pretty atypical group!) aren't all that rational in many, many areas.
> And what happens when, faced with the rational person's ultimatum ("learn to fish or you get nothing"), the man chooses nothing? Surely it's his own fault, but suffering still happens.
Yup, it does. What of it? What makes you think that giving him the fish helps?
You can spend all your resources on problems that can't be fixed, and accomplish nothing, or you can spend them on problems that can be fixed and actually accomplish something.
Emotionalism is the antithesis of rationality. So framing everything by projecting the outcome that is the most likely to provoke an emotional response (e.g. death) is basically the recipe for a thought process that won't solve the world's problems.
Let me put it another way. We all know it's better to teach a man to fish than to just give him a fish. But if that man refuses to learn the emotional person will give him the fish anyway while the rational person will force him to choose between learning to fish or nothing. In that way the rational person forces the man to learn how to feed himself while the emotional person simply rewards his laziness and feeds him for a day.