gogol

Although retaining a division between reason and emotion, Hume reverses the Cartesian privileging of reason over emotion. "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.It is easy to Edit my essay with the advices of educated essay editors! Make your essay error-free! " The Humean moral person is the opposite of the Kantian dispassionate, disinterested, autonomous individual. Given his emphasis on emotion over reason, his attention to the moral importance of relationships between people, and the types of traits ascribed to the moral individual, I believe it fair to conclude that Humean moral theory is feminine, or perhaps more fairly that it is androgynous, with an emphasis on the feminine. In this sense, Hume's moral theory can be seen as more balanced than that of Kant. Whereas Kant excludes emotions from the moral realm, Hume recognizes the importance of a balance of reason and emotion. Whereas the characteristics of a Kantian moral individual are male, the Humean moral person blends female and male traits: is sympathetic but, fair, passionate yet reasonable. It would, however, be premature to conclude from this that the Humean moral person is not "gendered," that is, that Hume perceived women as just as capable of moral goodness as men. As we have seen, women have often been seen as incapable or as less capable than men of reason. Therefore, since Hume's moral individual must be capable of reason as well as emotion, it is not obvious that women will be viewed as possessing an identical capacity for moral development. However, the reverse is not the case for men. Men have not been viewed as incapable of emotion. Emotion, often perceived as an inferior faculty of the mind, has been traditionally credited to women and men alike. But reason, seen as a more developed faculty of the mind, has been attributed only to those individuals seen as most evolved or "civilized"--typically upper-class, European males. Thus the question remains, Is the Humean moral person "gendered"? If we look at Hume's discussion of the moral person, it is clear that he was envisioning a man. He tells us, for example, that "when we enumerate the good qualities of any person, we always mention those parts of his character, which render him a safe companion, an easy friend, a gentle master, an agreeable husband, or an indulgent father.If you seek custom written papers, order original custom paper writing help online! " Similarly, at the end of the Enquiry, Hume presents us with a man, Cleanthes, as his model of the moral individual. It is thus important to determine if his description of the moral individual as male is simply a symptom of the sex bias of Hume's culture which he unwittingly inscribed on his moral theory, or if there is an aspect of his moral theory which necessitates the exclusion of women from the moral realm. It is to this question I now turn.