Kant vs Hume: Ethics and Moral Dilemmas
Kant vs Hume: Ethics
Critical to the ethics of Kant and Hume. The critical position transcends personal experience, drawing us into the realm of the hypothetical. We must strive to avoid the moral support of a “transcendent.”
Hume’s Perspective
I agree with Hume that there are reasons to discover whether an action is bad or good. Strictly speaking, there is no truth or ethical lapses. We have only a clear impression of inner feeling of approval or disapproval that certain behaviors cause us. Therefore, the heart, not judgment, determines good and evil.
Critique of Kant
We cannot defend Kant’s establishment of a moral law that is the same for everyone. This is a course that experience cannot refute. Basing morality on a “transcendent” condemns the realm of the hypothetical.
Critique of Hume
We cannot defend Hume without risking moral relativism and subjectivism. Hume holds that a basic feeling or “humanity”—a positive feeling for happiness and a negative feeling for misery—is common to all humans and manifests the same way in perceiving actions or qualities.
- We consider positive actions that arouse a pleasant feeling.
- We consider vices actions that arouse displeasure.
This statement not only transcends experience but seems to be disproven by it.
Kantian Morality
Kantian morality is formal and rational. There is no hierarchy between upper and lower values to meet different situations. Therefore, it is universal and necessary but not good for resolving “real” moral conflicts.
Emotivism and Dilemmas
Ethical theory emotivism can also lead to many moral dilemmas. It bases the ethical evaluation of an action on the moral sentiments it triggers.
Example: You perceive abortion as morally right, prioritizing the mother’s right over her body. Your partner perceives it as immoral, prioritizing the fetus’s right to life. From an emotivist perspective, the same act is perceived in two different emotional ways.
Hume’s Abstraction
For Hume, moral assessment should not be solely based on personal pleasure or rejection. We must abstract personal aspects (interest, pre-cultural learning, individual desires) to match that feeling with a universal feeling of rejection or approval of the action.
Limitations of Abstraction
Hume’s approach of abstracting personal circumstances seems insufficient.
Model of Staff Position
On one hand, it is ‘liberating’ to be free from absolute moral precepts. On the other hand, it is disheartening to think that all ethics are arbitrary. Morality might not be entirely arbitrary as we observe similar solutions to moral problems across different cultures, but this doesn’t prove a universal moral.
This thesis is not empirically demonstrable. Basing morality on a transcendent moral law or a universal basic feeling is contradicted by daily human actions, many of which seem clearly immoral.
Morality is an instrument of power serving shared interests across time and place. This explains the similarities between our different moral judgments. It also explains the often immoral behavior of humans fighting for freedom from internal sanctions.
If Hume and Kant were right, humans would continue working as usual without social coercion, reacting differently to reason or feelings. With the ring of Gyges, wouldn’t we all indulge our instincts? The limits to our instincts may be the result of moral education.
The answer would only be available to those with invisibility or freedom of action. As social control relaxes, such as in war, there is a disproportionate increase in unethical behavior.