Ethik auf der Grundlage von Gefühl oder Vernunft? Zur Rolle moralischer Gefühle bei Hume und Kant

This article pursues the question of the significance of moral emotions by exhibiting the similarities and differences of ethical approaches as diverse as Kant's and Hume's. What will be shown through this contrast are aspects often overlooked in these approaches. So, one must agree that on the one hand Kant's idea of the force of moral law as being (necessarily) intertwined with the feeling of respect for others suffers from a lacking support by experience, whereas his ideas about the formation and cultivation of a ” moral sense" undoubtedly have such a support. Hume's theory on the other hand appeals to emotions in order to make explainable our having moral evaluations but falls short when it comes to account for the content of emotions said to be responsible for evaluative judgments. Both accounts therefore can be said to suffer from an unsatisfying explanation of the motivational aspect of moral norms that is due to an unsatisfying conceptualization of the difference between reason and emotion