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Moral judgement and decision making
Hume's ethical theory
Hume's ethical theory
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What is a moral? This is a question that has plagued philosophers for many years. Is it possible to have a set of universal morals? There are many questions that surround the mystery of morals. They seem to drive our every action. We base our decisions on what is right and what is wrong. But what is it that actually determines what is right and what is wrong? Is it our sense of reason? Is it our sense of sentiment? This is a question that David Hume spent much of his life pondering. What exactly is it that drives our actions? Yes, morals drive them, but what determines what our morals are? What is it that ultimately drives our actions; our feelings or our minds?
Hume would say that it is our sentiment that ultimately drives our actions. According to Hume, reason is incapable of motivating an action. According to Hume, reason cannot fuel an action and therefore cannot motivate it. Hume feel that all actions are motivated by our sentiment. For example, on page 84 Appendix I, he gives the example of a criminal. "It resides in the mind of the person, who is ungrateful. He must, therefore, feel it, and be conscious of it." Here, it is evident that Hume is saying that unless the person, or criminal in this case, sincerely believes in what he wants to do, he will not be able to motivate the action. In other words, unless the sentiment is there, the action cannot be willed into being.
Hence, the sentiment is the driving force behind the action.
Hume does not however say that reason is incapable of determining wether an action is virtuous or vicious (moral or immoral), but instead he tries to say that the reason for the morality of an action does not dictate the execution or perversion of an act so far as determination of wether the action is executed or not. In simpler terms, reason has it's place in determining morality, but it is not in the motivation of an action. Motivation must come from the heart, or better yet, from within the person; from their beliefs.
Reason merely allows the person to make moral distinctions. Without reason, there would be no morality.
Without reason, one moral clause would not be differentiable from another. That is to say that below all morals, there must be some underlying truth because "Truth is disputable; n...
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...reasons are NOT necessarily the person's sentiments, they do not motivate actions. One other reason why reason does not impel action is because reason is based on truths. Truths are never changing whereas sentiments are dynamic and are in a constant change of flux. At one moment, the criminal could feel sympathy for his victims and decide to spare a life, and the very next, the same criminal could become enraged at the pimple on a hostage's forehead and shoot him.
Of course these are extreme cases, but the point is clear. Reason would dictate that only the first action would be moral. If reason drove actions, then moral behavior would prevail and there would be no immoral actions and hence there would be no crimes. This shows how sentiments can change as the individual's perception of the universe changes. Obviously, the driving force behind the criminal shooting the victim because of a skin blemish is not one based on reason, but instead it is based on feeling, emotion, sentiment. Although it is an abstract idea and a seemingly tiny technicality, it is easy to see that indeed reason is not the ultimate motivator but instead sentiment is.
Hume argues that perception can be divided into two types: impressions and ideas. He states that impressions are our first-hand perception, using all of our senses and emotions to experience them (Hume 2012, 8). For example, an impression of a sensation would be experiencing pain and an impression of reflection would be experiencing anger. Hume states that an idea is thinking about an impression. You cannot use your senses to experience the sensation or emotion, you are just simply reflecting on your experience (Hume 2007, 13). For example, thinking about the pain you felt when you stubbed your toe or thinking about how angry you felt when your football team lost. Hume argues that our thought is limited. He argues that when we imagine things such as an orange sea, we are simply joining two consistent ideas together. Hume argues that ‘all our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones’ (Hume 2007, 13). This is called the Copy Principle.
... The psychological argument Hume proposes supports his claim, and also suggests the cyclic behavior human beings take. While his philosophical contributions are more extreme than Locke’s, Hume’s definition of liberty and the psychological component to his proposition provide an argument for proving all things are determined, but free will is still possible.
David Hume is was a strong advocator and practitioner of a scientific and empirical way of thinking which is reflected in his philosophy. His skeptical philosophy was a 180 degree shift from the popular rational philosophy of the time period. Hume attempted to understand “human nature” through our psychological behaviors and patterns which, when analyzing Hume’s work, one can clearly see its relation to modern day psychology. Hume was a believer in that human behavior was influenced not by reason but by desire. He believed that “Ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity, friendship, generosity, public spirit—these passions, mixed in various proportions and distributed throughout society, are now (and from the beginning of the world always have been) the source of all the actions and projects that have ever...
The position that I hold regarding the essay’s question is that I do not believe in an objective morality or in objective moral truths, I believe that all morality is entirely relative and subjective based on cultural norms because moral relativism is the philosophized meaning that right and wrong are not absolute values and that they are personalized based on the individual and the circumstances or cultural orientation. Morality applies within cultures but not across them. Ethical or cultural relativism and the various schools of pragmatism ignore the fact that certain ethical percepts probably grounded in human nature do appear to be universal and ancient, if not eternal. Ethical codes also vary in different societies, economies, and geographies
Hume distinguishes two categories into which “all the objects of human reason or enquiry” may be placed into: Relations of Ideas and Matters of Fact (15). In regards to matters of fact, cause and effect seems to be the main principle involved. It is clear that when we have a fact, it must have been inferred...
...er pleasure later. However, this opinion does not account for actions excluding one’s appetite taken at the end (or even causing the end) of one’s life, like in giving one’s life for that of a loved one. In that case, the person would be intentionally forgoing passion forever in search of something else. Hume’s argument does not make provision for this. In fact, the only objection one could make to this last example is to say that a man who gives his life for his friend has a miseducated or depraved soul, yet no one seems to make this argument.
...ouple of spots in his argument may be hazy, you are able to make a logical leap from statement to statement, in my opinion. His argument should also convince anyone else with a remotely open mind about where morality really comes from.
... but one about reason, that it is not this, but habit, which forms the basis of our beliefs. While it may be the case that denying an empirical fact may not result in a contradiction, Hume seems to be suggesting that it would still be irrational to do so. That abstracting from events to laws is a rational, though inductive, act seems hard to deny. Thus, at best, Hume can only show that it is experience which first provides the matter for reason.
... Hume proposes attributes a sense of moral responsibility lost in Hume’s interpretation for the doctrine of liberty and necessities, for humans are responsible only for their choices.
In this essay Hume creates the true judges who are required to have: delicacy of taste, practice in a specific art of taste, be free from prejudice in their determinations, and good sense to guide their judgments. In Hume’s view the judges allow for reasonable critiques of objects. Hume also pointed out that taste is not merely an opinion but has some physical quality which can be proved. So taste is not a sentiment but a determination. What was inconsistent in the triad of commonly held belief was that all taste is equal and so Hume replaced the faulty assumption with the true judges who can guide society’s sentiments.
Aristotle in his virtue ethics states that a virtuous individual is someone with ideal traits. These characteristic traits normally come from an individual’s innate tendency but should be cultivated. After they are cultivated, these character traits supposedly become stable in an individual. Moral consequentilaists and deontologists are normally concerned with universal doctrines that can be utilized in any situation that requires moral interpretation. Unlike these theorists, Aristotle’s virtue ethics are concerned with the general questions such as “what is a good life”, “what are proper social and family values”, and “how should one live” (Bejczy 32). Aristotle developed his virtue ethics based on three central principles; eudaimonia, ethics of care, and agent based theories. Eudaimonia stipulates that virtues can be seen in the way an individual flourishes; flourishing under this concept refers to one’s ability to perform their functions with distinct accuracy (Bejczy 33).
Something must be desirable on its own account, and because of its immediate accord or agreement with human sentiment and affection” (87). In conclusion, I believe that Hume thinks that reason, while not completely useless, is not the driving force of moral motivation. Reasons are a means to sentiments, which in turn are a means to morality, but without reasons there can still be sentiments. There can still be beauty. Reasons can not lie as the foundation of morality, because they can only be true or false.
The racism to the African Americans was the strongest and is the reason as to most of the civil wars that have happened in the country. During the great migration of the African Americans to the industrialized areas in the country, there were harsh conflicts between the whites and the African Americans. This was in the year 1920 when the influx of the African American people in the white areas of the country led to conflicts and civil war. The African Americans were being discriminated against in a number of lifestyle facets such as education, employment and any economic opportunities that may have benefited the. This led to civil war in the 1920s (Juran
The belief that morality requires God remains a widely held moral maxim. In particular, it serves as the basic assumption of the Christian fundamentalist's social theory. Fundamentalists claim that all of society's troubles - everything from AIDS to out-of-wedlock pregnancies - are the result of a breakdown in morality and that this breakdown is due to a decline in the belief of God. This paper will look at different examples of how a god could be a bad thing and show that humans can create rules and morals all on their own. It will also touch upon the fact that doing good for the wrong reasons can also be a bad thing for the person.