2. BASIC CONCEPTS:
Feelings as instinctive and trained response to
moral dilemmas
Why they can be obstacles to making the right
decisions?
How they can help in making the right decisions?
3. THE MORAL ACT
You make moral decisions daily. However, have you noticed that
some decisions are automatic responses and that you are
unconsciously deciding at all?
For example, you help an elderly cross the road. Without
thinking, you ran to the opposite side of the road, away from
perceived danger. You desire to help and your fear of danger
are gut reactions while reasoned argument is just whirling
beneath conscious awareness.
4. IS IT OKAY TO MAKE MORAL
DECISIONS BASED
ON WHAT WE FEEL? HAVE YOU
DONE SOMETHING GOOD AS A
RESULT OF WHAT YOU FEEL?
5. FEELINGS OF EMOTIONS
Feelings or emotions are cognitive evaluation about
certain situations. The emotional reaction is usually
fast and spontaneous. There are many types of
emotions which are shared universally : love, joy,
pity, sympathy, sadness, hatred, anger, bitterness,
and disgust.
6.
7. FEELINGS OF EMOTIONS
Any feeling reaching the level of universality can become
philosophical. Thus it is necessary to understand the nature of the
universals that constitute the subject of philosophy. A universal is
usually understood as a general concept, the common quality of
many phenomena: for example, ‘white’, ‘beautiful’, ‘number’, or
‘mind’. However, a universal might also be something that evokes
similar feelings: something that brings about joy or wonder, provokes
fear or boredom: e.g. ‘love’ or ‘death’.
8.
9. FEELINGS OF EMOTIONS
The point is not that a feeling can become the object of
philosophical reasoning, but that a feeling itself, when acquiring
universality, becomes philosophical. Not just thinking about joy
but also experiencing joy is a philosophical occupation if the joy is
related not to particular events or everyday circumstances, but to a
multitude of things, to the world order in general, or to the laws of
existence. Such universal feelings or philosophical sentiments might
be labelled ‘unisentals’.
12. Hume and the Philosophy of the Mind
Philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist David Hume (1711-1776)
famously placed himself in opposition to most moral philosophers, ancient and
modern, who argued to regulate actions using reason and that reason has dominion
over feelings or emotions. Hume is best known in ethics for asserting four theses:
1. Reason alone cannot be a motive to the will, but rather is the “slave of the
passions”.
2. Moral distinctions are not derived from reason.
3. Moral distinctions are derived from the moral sentiments: feelings of approval
(esteem, praise) and disapproved (blame) felt by spectators who contemplate a
character trait or action.
4. While some virtues and vices are natural, others (including justice) are artificial
13. Hume and the Philosophy of the Mind
Hume maintained that, although reason is needed
to discover the facts of any concrete situation,
reason alone is insufficient to yield a judgment that
something is virtuous or vicious (Hume, 2003;
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2016). Hume
sided with the moral sense theorists that a person gains
awareness of moral good and evil by experiencing the
pleasure of approval and the uneasiness of
disapproval.
14. Hume and the Philosophy of the Mind
According to Hume’s “Theory of the Mind” humans have what
we he called passions (which he used to describe emotions or
feelings). He further classified passion as direct and indirect. The
direct passions are cased directly by the sensation of pain
or pleasure; the passion that “arises immediately from good or
evil, from pain or pleasure” that we experience or expect to
experience. For example, desire is a direct passion because it is
an immediate response to the pleasure we expect to feel. Other
direct passions include aversion, hope, fear, grief, and joy.
(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2016; Cohon, 2010)
15. Hume and the Philosophy of the Mind
Indirect passions are caused by the sensation of pain or
pleasure derived from some other idea or impression. For
example, pride is a passion that emanated from the pleasure
you get for possessing something admirable (it could be
intellect, physique, property, family, etc.). Pride, therefore, is
but a result of a person, the object of the passion, and
quality of the object. Other indirect passions are humility,
ambition, vanity, love, hatred, envy, pity, malice, generosity.
(Blattner, 2017).
16. Scheler and the Philosophy of Feelings
Max Ferdinand Scheler was an important German Ethical
philosopher distinguished for his contributions in
phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology.
(Davis and Steinbock, 2016).
As a phenomenologist, Scheler sought to know what
comprised the structures of consciousness, including that
of mental acts such as feeling, thinking, resolve, etc. – as
well as the inherent objects or correlates of these mental
acts such as values, concepts, and plans (Frings, 2013).
18. Scheler and the Philosophy of Feelings
Scheler presented four strata of feelings. He claimed that
these strata or levels are constant and it follows and exact
order of importance. He called these levels of feelings as the
“stratification
model of emotive life”.
1. Sensual feelings
2. Vital feelings
3. Psychic feelings
4. Spiritual feelings
19. Scheler and the Philosophy of Feelings
Sensual feelings involve bodily pleasures or pain. Vital feelings are the life
functions such as health, sickness, energy, fatigue, etc. Psychic feelings
are about aesthetics, justice, and knowledge (scientific). Lastly, Spiritual
feelings deal with the Divine. (Moran and Parker, 2015).
According to Scheler, of the four, it is spiritual feelings alone that is
intentional. This means spiritual feelings are directed to the particular special
object or a higher being that he attributed to as the Divine. Scheler believed
that values of the holy are the highest of all values because it has the ability
to endure through time. Thus, since it possessed the nature of intent.
Scheler philosophized that among all the four levels, spiritual feelings is the
most important (Moran and Parker, 2015).
