Philosophy has produced many theories on ethics. Some say it's about happiness and other say it's about duty or about virtue.
The point is we haven't got an infallible guide to ethcial living. Perhaps ethics isn't something that can be understood in a purely rational sense.
Why?
A lot of our moral instincts (in the absence of anything solid in philosophy) involve emotion. Yes, emotion is bad for rationality - fallacies breed in feelings - but we also know that a good moral foundation requires empathy. And empathy is emotion.
So, I ask you, do you think we need to invest our hearts and not just our brains in ethics? — TheMadFool
A lot of our moral instincts (in the absence of anything solid in philosophy) involve emotion. Yes, emotion is bad for rationality - fallacies breed in feelings - but we also know that a good moral foundation requires empathy. And empathy is emotion. — TheMadFool
Absolutely we need to invest our hearts. I would like to add that although empathy might be an emotion, "empathy" can also be a very effective tool in understanding another person, not through proof or evidence but much like Aristotle taught us that "It is a mark of an educated mind to entertain the ideas of others, without taking them on for you own." — ArguingWAristotleTiff
To me, making moral decisions is pretty simple.
I don't often need a lot of deep thought to decide what's right and what's wrong
Simple because passions - feelings about stuff - inspire the reasons to fit the decision in the process of making it. The simplicity is something which hides the complex web of feelings because it is equivalent to that web expressing itself. The most basic feeling about something or motivation for a moral decision is actually very complex when put under the microscope. — fdrake
Moral police" is a fascinating phrase. Maybe I've just read too much Orwell, but doesn't it seem rather ominous, as though such a group would be (or is) ironically, profoundly immoral?
As such, I accept that having morality enforced by an external source is an anathema. However, this doesn't mean that my personal emotional attitude is morally right either.
For example, the hatred I feel for the **** who stole my girlfriend is, even to me, clearly not morally right. How are we to figure out which emotions are morally right except through the application of reason?
Have you ever been in a situation where you made a decision and it was wrong, but not just that, that the way you make those kind of decisions gave you a self sustaining repetition of the same mistake? — fdrake
For example, the hatred I feel for the **** who stole my girlfriend is, even to me, clearly not morally right. How are we to figure out which emotions are morally right except through the application of reason? — Shatter
As Hume elegantly stated, "Reason is and ought only to be a slave of the passions"; a sentiment that has been verified by modern cognitive science (pace Damasio). There is no action, and a fortiori, ethical action, sans emotion. Those who insist on dirempting the two while positioning themselves on the exclusively "rational side" are merely engaging in patronizing snobbery. — Maw
Those who insist on dirempting the two while positioning themselves on the exclusively "rational side" are merely engaging in patronizing snobbery. — Maw
Thank you for the reference (see Maw's post above for the site). Better you had read it a little closer. The term "passion" is correctly rendered as "motivating passion," for Hume a term of art that does not mean what most folks would understand by passion. I would go so far as to say subject to correction that for Hume in this context, "motivating passion" has nothing directly to do with emotion.SEP has a good summary here, but a capsule version is that "motives of the will" stem from the passions, — Maw
This and so many other theories proposed share the assumption that there IS a morally correct way to behave. I find this problematic.
I submit that morals are not discovered, they are created. They are a consequence of the way we share the experience of social life. All well and good, but we don't, at least in the so called civilised world, belong to a single social group. What is the right thing to do if the demands of your workmates contridict those of your local community? What if legal obligations (which routinely claim to be a manifestation of absolute morality) would involve a betrayal of family?
Is it possible that we fail to grasp morality because we are grasping at air?
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