On Moral Thinking

The existing mode of man's life is a kind of conscious one. In all his life he will constantly ask, seek and create the meanings of life, in order to improve the quality of his life .To achieve this, man has to give answers to such questions as " Why does he live? " " How does he live " and " how well does he live? " Moral thinking, whose purpose is to seek after how to live and the virtue of life, gives cardinal answers to the questions above. We must analyze and explore moral thinking in order to find the reason why it can answer the questions, and how it finds the answers. Many scholars in our country or in foreign countries have already discussed some aspects of moral thinking, including it's features, it's development stages, it's levels and so on. But they didn't touch the integrity of moral thinking and make a systematic study. There are many difficult questions to answer. Under the guidance of Marxism this thesis make a careful analysis of moral thinking, including its necessity and possibility, essence and features, origin and development, its structure, implements and medium, process and circumstances, to make a preliminary study of the special thinking mode by means of ethics, cognitive science, psychology and sociology. Specifically speaking, the thesis is divided into seven parts.Part I. This part deals with the necessity and possibility of moral thinking, through exploring its origin and conditions. On the one hand, moral thinking originates in the existing duality of man that is manifested by his demands and interests in the form of the unity of individual interest individualism and social interest. The existing duality of man determines the question that everyone hasto grasp and handle with the contradiction of his needs and interests. Therefore, the moral need becomes one of the most essential ones. To meet moral needs, one must mobilize his conscious activity to the full, develop vigorous thinking to consider, to judge and to grasp. The thinking activity, whose content is moral need, is moral thinking that is the inevitable demand of man's existence. On the other hand, moral thinking has many existing requirements. Man's subjectivity is the basic prerequisite of moral thinking, with his moral practice supplying objective groundings. The system of social ethic and culture provides objective criterion. The individual moral psychological structure becomes the direct intrinsic condition under which moral thinking can take place.Part II. This part brings the notion, essence and features of moral thinking to light, through of which we can separate the special spiritual phenomenon-moral thinking from thinking activities of other kinds to make the former specific and relatively independent. Firstly, the thesis describes the notion and essence of moral thinking, which is a cognitive process of the essence, features, internal relation and development law of moral phenomena after people consider and distinguish them according to moral mental perception. In view of individual essence, moral thinking is a kind of independent thinking to pursue virtue, but in view of social essence, it is a kind of thinking fit for moral principles.Secondly, it reveals the features of moral thinking. In view of the understanding method of the object, and it has the spirit of practice, which is carried out in the virtue-or-evil evaluation method of "should" and "shouldn't". Concerning its structure, it is a kind of resembling-self thinking. In view of the thinking contents, it's a kind of interest-action thinking and in view ofpsychological process, it's a kind of thinking in the process of which feeling mingles reason.Thirdly, it refers to the relations and differences between of moral and scientific thinking, artistic thinking, religious thinking, moral cognition and consciousness.Part III. The exploration of the development of moral thinking should be traced back to the origin of man's moral thinking, namely primitive ethic. The primitive moral thinking, as the sprout of man's moral thinking, laid...