Moral feeling as the foundation of knowledge in the field of morality

In this article I would like to present a hypothesis about how knowledge is organized. My main aim is to show that moral feeling plays a significant role in the process of cognition. Since knowledge in the field of morality seems the most problematic one, we begin with it. The difficulty here lies in the fact that in moral sphere knowledge does not have such a reliable foundation as empirical facts. It seems that there can be only two possible variants of moral foundations, i.e. historical ones and those which consider morality to be transcendent. The former presupposes a notion that morality is just a result of a chain of causes and effects. According to the second interpretation morality does not depend on any phenomena of experience. Apart from discussing the dispute between these two theories of the foundation of morality, we are to notice one important thought, which came to the fore within the framework of the historical way of explaining the emergence of morality. This well expressed by Hume idea is that some personal attitude is necessary for making a certain norm valuable for a subjective will. In the case of transcendent morality this idea is to become a significant problem. It is intuitively clear in this situation to suggest that there should be some "moral" feeling, which differs from other senses by its principal autonomy from the purpose of self-adaptation to the reality. It would be absurd to accept any immoral feelings here for such a role, because in that case following moral claims would be just a contingency. Such idea was close to Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, who supposed that there was some extra moral feeling, such as "a sense of the common good" or "sympathy to others" which guided a person to the moral law. However, it seems that such a salvation is not quite satisfactory and some more specification is needed for moral feeling to be an appropriate solution of the mentioned problem. To understand the otherness of moral feeling I will make a comparison of moral and immoral feelings in the sphere of how motivation works. A good example in such a case is Kantian philosophy and its problem of relation between moral motivation and sensual affects. One of the contemporary researchers, Allen Wood suggests an interesting way out of this debate. According to him, only those good actions can really have moral value, which are presupposed by a deliberate decision. Allen Wood states a very significant idea that morality in its full sense is not possible without a struggle of different motives, without choice. It seems clear that a struggle can occur between congenerous phenomena. In such a case, moral feeling should be a part of phenomenal world like other affects and its triumph should become a result of a relation of all these motivational forces. However I try to show that both such statements are absurd. In the end I ask one simple question: how an attitude to eat an apple differs from an attitude for the world to have its sense? In my opinion, a good answer to it gives us Wittgenstein claiming that an independence of virtues from facts. And finally we came to the main statement I am arguing for in this article that moral feeling which is necessary for any choice, i.e. for any moral knowledge, is not to be considered as a phenomenon, as an object of research.

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