Emotion And Reason In Moral Issues

Emotion And Reason In Moral Issues

When reading through the list of prescribed titles the question stated above immediately caught my attention, perhaps since my family has always discussed moral issues connected to all aspects of society around the dinner table. Ethical issues indeed permeates our lives as we are daily forced to choose between right and wrong, whilst we at the same time are most likely expected to justify our moral decision with an argument. This essay aims to investigate the role of reason and emotion in justifying moral decisions, and by doing so the essay will attempt to answer the prescribed title: Are reason and emotion equally necessary in justifying moral decisions?
In my opinion the two ways of knowing, emotion and reason are equally necessary in justifying moral decisions. In fact I would suggest that reason and emotion are not necessarily separate or even opposed entities as the essay question arguably suggests. Despite the fact that they are two different ways of knowing they still fuse and constitute together, in my opinion, the ideal foundation for justifying moral decisions. This thesis could be visualized by using mathematical notation, though the issue at hand is not as uncomplicated and simple as the equation indicates:
My sisters argue that one should use only reason when justifying moral decisions since our reasoning is to a great extent based on a priori experience, and hence could be seen as obvious, undeniable and logical. Our emotions on the other hand they claim to be unnecessary since they often are based on a posteriori experience and therefore subjective to the ergo and logically deniable. These arguments for using only reason are in my opinion inherently invalid since moral judgments are not logical truths or statements of facts; they could be said to be subjective expressions of an individual’s authorization or non-authorization of an action. It is therefore tempting to epically conclude that morality is in a state of...