Deterioration of the Moral Fiber

Moral Philosophy: Hume's Arguments Against The View That Morals Originate In Reason Alone

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 whether 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 whether the action is executed or not. In simpler terms, reason has its 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; not taste" (p.14). If truth were not disputable, there would be no way to prove that a truth was just that... a truth. To make an analogy to mathematics, truth is a function of reason, whereas taste is a function of sentiment. Sentiment is a function of the individual whereas reason is a function of the universe.

The universe as a whole must follow reason, but the catch is that each individual's universe is slightly different in that each individual perceives ...