Topic: are reasoning and emotion equally necessary in making moral decisions.

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Topic: are reasoning and emotion equally necessary in making moral decisions.

Mentor group: Mr P Cairns

Handed in date: 11th February 2008

Word count: 1378

 

Whether reason or emotion is equally necessary in justifying moral decisions is a highly controversial topic. I am going to analyse and evaluate two important approaches from Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham. I will partially focus on these two important figures, as one presents good will as the only thing that is capable of producing morally justified decisions, if that will conforms to practical reasoning.  The other one states that a moral decision is a decision that increases the "Greatest Pleasure for the Greatest Number of People” thereby focusing on the importance of an emotional state of happiness for making morally justified decisions.   In order to come to a conclusion of whether Kant's or Bentham's idea of reason and emotion in moral decisions are justified, I will focus on the building blocks on which their theories are built. The origin of their theories is nature itself, I will analyse certain characteristics of nature, indicating whether Kant's theory supports the significance of reasoning or Bentham's theory supporting the importance of emotions is completely in accordance with nature itself or whether certain limitations can be found.

Immanuel Kant states that the only moral good, that in itself is good in this world is good will, every other characteristic a human being can possess are not initially good in themselves. For example, characteristics such as intelligence, courage are characteristics that are not good in themselves because if the will itself is bad, these characteristics will be used for a bad purpose as well. Kant states that a decision is only morally justified when it is good in itself, regardless of its consequences and so a good will is necessary.

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Kant believes that a good will must be guided by practical reasoning. This is due to the fact that if we all have the same reasoning, the outcome might be good for some and bad for others, For example, If a child gets beaten when he is young and another doesn’t, the child that did get beaten in his childhood may say that it was a good thing as he learnt a lot from it, where as the other may have a bad opinion about it. In order to make moral laws apply to everyone, it has to be ...

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