Moral Reasoning Essay

EMOTIONS AND REASONS Humans have loads of moral variations that needed to be explained. To explain this, for many years, people had two options: emotions and reasoning However saying that morality is based on reasoning alone is not easy as saying science is based on reasoning or observation. So, where does morality come from? Because of moral variations, saying that reasoning is the source of morality is odd. Having different cultures, beliefs and rituals affect morality. For example, in some cultures eating your own dead is acceptable but in other cultures it is cannibalism and burning your dead is more appropriate. If reasoning was the case then probably all people would do the same thing. According to this, humans’ moral decisions are

As Prinz (Prinz,2011) states, humans decide whether something is wrong by their feelings. If that situation makes them uncomfortable in a way, us, the humans, conclude that is wrong. According to this, people’s moral judgments are based on their emotional states. Further support for my point can be seen in research by psychologist Simone Schnall (cited in Prinz, 2011), as her experiment about putting people in uncomfortable situations, for example forcing them to watch a disgusting movie, lead them to make more severe judgments even about an unrelated topic. If morals are based on emotions then people who lack strong emotions must be blind to morality. This was explained by James Blair (cited in Prinz, 2011), with his psychological researches on psychopaths. Psychopaths see moral rules as mere orders because they are emotionally blind and they lack emotional attitudes. While cultures may differ on what behaviors are good or bad, the general moral emotion of feeling good or bad about behavior is universal. Bio-cultural Evolutionary model explains moral sense as a moral feeling or emotion generated by actions. As Shermer (Shermer, 2005) explains when people need to eat they just eat because of the feeling of hunger. Humans don’t think about calories they will gain from that meal they just act upon their urges, needs and feelings. As a result, human’s moral values are emotional attitudes that affected by their change of