Moral Judgment: An Expression of Emotion Bhadra Sweta Guha Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Bijoy Krishna Girls’ College, Howrah, West Bengal, India, Email id: guhasweta@gmail.com Online Published on 29 June, 2023. Abstract A prominent feature in the twentieth and the early twenty first century moral philosophy is that an accurate picture of ethical life must include emotivism. Emotion has an important influence on motivation and proper cultivation of the emotion is essential to lead ethical life. In my paper, I would discuss views of David Hume and Ayer. As passion or emotion is devoid of truth or falsity, it is incapable of being in conflict with proposition of reason. Reason is the discovery of truth and falsehood and the activities of reason involve more than just the ‘objects of reason’. They involve a certain ‘attitude’ that can be interpreted as discovering or believing it. What a person believes can be either true or false, but discovering or believing it is not. Passion covers not only feeling, but also the instinctive bodily appetites, emotion, sentiment and appreciation, found in value judgement. It is natural to discover the trace of Hume’s ethical teaching in what Ayer says. Hume analyses value terms in terms of our feeling and sentiment which may be aroused by certain objective phenomenon. Ayer endorses a similar kind of subjectivism, but the difference is that while Hume believes almost all men in almost all occasions have similar feelings in the presence of similar conducts, Ayer does not share this idea. If we reject reason as a part of moral judgement and wholly depend on emotion, we cannot control our expression of feeling. Top Keywords Reason, Emotion, Hume, Ayer, Virtue. Top |