The Role of Feelings in Moral Reasoning

The Role of Feelings in Moral Reasoning

The discussion of how feelings affect morality is quite prevalent in both David Hume and Immanuel Kant’s works. While each philosopher touches on the topic of feelings, both men differ in their outlook on the role feelings play in our moral lives. While David Hume, seemed to feel that the human mind was nothing more then a series of sensations and feelings, Immanuel Kant argued that there exists more to our minds than just these feelings.

David Hume based his whole ideology on a pleasure vs. pain scale. According to Hume, in order to make a moral decision, we must look at the given situation, and decide which solution would give us the highest level of pleasure. If the pleasure of said solution would outweigh the pain caused by it, then we would be achieving morality. He says that we need to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

Hume was an empiricist. He felt that knowledge began with the senses. Hume thought that a person could know nothing outside of experience. Experience is based on one’s subjective perceptions and never provides true knowledge of reality. For example, even the law of cause and effect was an unjustified belief. If a person drops an apple, he cannot be certain that it will fall to the ground. It is only possible, through past experience, that certain pairs of events, dropping an apple, and then the apple hitting the ground, have always accompanied one another.

Hume’s empiricism led him to the conclusion that we simply have feelings as to what is right and wrong. Reason would have nothing to do with morality, because we can not know what we have not experienced, and we can not reason what we do not know.

At first glance, we can se...

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...e direction.

If a man does not make enough money to support his family, he might feel the need to steal in order to feed his children. Before this man goes out and steals a loaf of bread, he must stop and reason this action. If every person was stealing to get what he or she needed, then there would be no one manufacturing the goods they needed to steal. So in trying to help his family, he would be committing an immoral act.

On examination of both David Hume and Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophies, we can see that only Kant’s could hold up in practical application. This being true, we would have to say that feelings should only play a role in morality if strong reasoning is involved. We must stop and think about our actions before we make them, making sure not to trust feelings and inclinations without reasoning, because experience can easily taint our minds.