MORAL SENSE, Shibin Antony

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 Moral Sense

Moral sense is the capacity to distinguish virtue and vice. It was the name given by Francis hutcheson and David Hume. Moral Philosophers are referred to as sentimentalists, because we are supposed by them to feel things to be good or bad rather than to reason that they are so.however, in Hume's philosophy, such feelings are not taken away from judgement. A feeling of admiration of virtuous action is properly called Moral Sense, only if it arises from disinterested reflection on the good tendencies of such actions in general. Moral sense, like aesthetic taste, may be ill-founded or well-founded. This view was taken for granted by for example Jane Austen, who thought it as a fault if someone did not feel as he ought .Since the moral theories of Kant; however it has generally been held that moral judgements are matters either of reason or of purely personal reference.

Since good and evil are naturally relative to each individual's private appetites and man's nature is predominantly selfish, then morality must be grounded in human convictions. It is the argument by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. His views provoked strong reactions among British moral philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Moral sense theories comprise one set of responses. A moral sense theory gives a central role to the affections and sentiments in moral perception, in the appraisal of conduct and character, and in deliberation and motivation. David Hume and Adam Smith held that we cultivate a moral sensibility when we appropriately regulate our sympathy by an experience informed reason and reflection.

The moral sense is often described as providing information in a way analogous to other sensory modalities, such as sight in the perception of colours. It is contrasted with the way in which one acquires a priori, non-empirical knowledge, such as mathematical knowledge for example.

One way to understand the moral sense is to draw an analogy between it and other kinds of senses. Beauty is something we see in some faces, artworks and landscapes. We can also hear it in some pieces of music. We clearly do not need an independent aesthetic sense faculty to perceive beauty in the world. Our ordinary five senses are quite enough to observe it, though merely observing something beautiful is not by itself enough to appreciate its beauty.

Moral sense theory also known as sentimentalism is a view in meta-ethics according to which morality is somehow grounded in moral sentiments or emotions. Some take it to be primarily a view about the nature of moral facts or moral beliefs -this form of the view more often goes by the name "sentimentalism".

Others take the view to be primarily about the nature of justifying moral beliefs -this form of the view more often goes by the name "moral sense theory". However, some theorists take the view to be one which claims that both moral facts and how one comes to be justified in believing them are necessarily bound up with human emotions.