Moral System Submission essay

There is no doubt that emotions and feelings shape people’s mental and social lives. In fact, they are important to a moral system as a whole. Moral consciousness is a spiritual side of morality: norms and principles of conduct, goals, emotions, feelings, beliefs, and other common factors. It is a reflection of people’s vital practical and historical experiences in the form of individual and collective representations, which acts as a mechanism of social continuity and provides an assessment of the results of individual behavior.

Undoubtedly, the most common human emotion is considered to be fear. All human beings are conditioned with different values and attitudes obtained from the environment within which those people are brought up. These values and attitudes identify what should be accepted as morality or immorality. Hence, people’s choices may be helpful and effective or disruptive for themselves and for other humans within the particular environment or community in general.

The relation of emotions or feelings to morality is quite problematic since there are actually different opinions on the place of emotions and feelings in morality. It was argued that there are some disagreements about the place of emotions in morality because emotions are random and chancy animal drives. They not only destabilize a person’s autonomy, but also intervene with his or her reasoning. However, on the other hand, respectable traditions of thought put feelings and emotions such as love and respect to others into the very heart of morality.

Thus, taking the above-stated information into account, it is possible to conclude that our emotions can be considered to be valid sources of moral knowledge. In fact, different emotions including guilt and shame appeal to moral conscience, and thus, are very critical to the normal functioning of people’s social lives.