Relation to others· Morals
Moral sentiment
Axis: The source of morality — What gives morality its authority?
Morality is rooted in a natural sensibility: sympathy, pity, revulsion at the sight of suffering. Reason clarifies, compares, and corrects, but it does not create obligation; , and a shared human nature explains why moralities, beneath their variations, resemble one another so much.
Philosophers 1
Show inferred positions (1)
Humeinferable
"Morality is more properly felt than judg'd of": reason, which compares ideas or establishes facts, cannot by itself produce moral distinctions. These rest on sentiments of approval and disapproval, which sympathy extends and which the adoption of a general point of view corrects for partiality; reason clarifies the relevant facts, relations and consequences, without itself producing approval or disapproval. The rules of justice and property do arise from a convention of mutual interest, with no original contract or promise, but that origin does not replace the sentimental ground of their moral approval.
A Treatise of Human Nature, III, I, 1-2; III, II, 2; III, III, 1 · An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Appendix I
- Descriptive QuestionWithout God, is everything permitted?
If no transcendent guarantor upholds our duties, do they keep their binding force, or do they become choices that can always be undone? Secularized societies put the phrase to the test every day.
morality without a guarantor - DescriptiveCan a feeling bind?
Observing that nature made us compassionate states a fact; concluding that we ought to be so crosses the step from is to ought. If morality is only a feeling, what do we say to someone who does not feel it?
the authority of a feeling