Brentano And Hume's Responses To Moral Relativism

The purpose of this paper is to explain Hume and Brentano's adopting emotion as preconditions for moral judgment. They try to solve the problem of moral disagreements with common point of view and correctness respectively,and they hope to avoid moral relativism.This paper will demonstrate that the former view can only guarantee the intersubjective moral consensus and it cannot establish standards among different social groups.The latter,because of the criteria of correctness and correctness,determines the correctness of one party when moral disagreements occur,thus avoiding relativism and ensuring the universal validity of moral judgment.The first part will focus on Hume's theory.Hume believes that the basis of moral judgment is direct emotion.In order to achieve moral consensus and realize the function of social coordination of morality, moral judgment requires the correction of the common point of view which is an unbiased perspective.However,this amendment is based on the fact that a social group has similar dispositions and it cannot handle disagreements among different social groups. The moral consensus is intersubjective and cannot be legislated among different social groups, so it still leads to the ethical relativism.The second part will explain Brentano's argument about the basis of moral judgment.The basis of moral judgment is the correct emotion directly experienced at the moment. The emotion belongs to the psychological phenomenon, and the correctness is the experience manifested by evidence of our inner perception.Emotion is analogous to judgment in the way that they both express acceptance and rejection.When such emotional reference is correct,they obtain direct confirmation in the same way as judgment. The correctness is also the guarantee of universal validity because the logic law in the emotional field is like that of judgment. When there are disagreements,only one party is correct. When there is moral divergence,we use this correct experience as the final standard. By placing the experience at the core of his theory of moral judgment and revealing the contradictory law in the emotional field,Brentano refiutes moral relativism. In this section, the reasons for the occurrence of moral disagreements will also be explained,and that blind judgment cannot cancel the reliability of it will be demonstrated.The third part is the result of above discussion:In the face of moral disagreements,Hume hopes to achieve a kind of moral consensus through the correction of the common point of view, which is limited to the same social group and cannot be universally valid among different social groups.Brentano built it on the correctness of the experience,and the standard is universally valid. In the face of the accusation of"mysticism", Brentano believes that it must eventually return to the experience of correctness; similarly, faced with the view that this is only a form of subjective conviction,Brentano's^response is that experience is the ultimate standard.In the end,I will show that Brentano's attempt to make the humanities scientific and construct ethics in a scientific way, and the influence of his ethical thoughts on contemporary ethics will also be discussed.