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; the heart is what first tells good from evil, and a shared human nature explains why moralities, beneath their variations, resemble one another so much.

Foundations and implications

↑ What grounds it

A leaf — an application that grounds nothing further here.

↑ What grounds it

Nature and culture

If our conduct is rooted in a stable human nature, an innate moral sensibility becomes possible: Hume's sympathy, Rousseau's pity, or Mencius's sprouts suppose that the moral heart is given by nature before being shaped by culture.

↓ What it implies

A leaf — an application that grounds nothing further here.

Problems

Descriptive Question
Without 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
Descriptive
Can 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