Your Feelings vs. Others' Rights

Do we have a moral obligation to act happy toward people even if we feel terrible, or are in a bad mood? By happiness, I don’t mean the bubbly, bouncy, person with the smile always plastered on his or her face.  I am thinking more along the lines of acting content and positive toward others regardless of how we feel.  What do you think?  Try to give reasons to justify your answers.

Interestingly, in a sub-discipline of philosophy called virtue ethics, happiness signifies living a (morally) good life, or flourishing in life, so happiness is not just an emotion in virtue ethics but rather a life.  Unfortunately, happiness has been reduced to mere emotion in modernity…but that is a topic for another post.

The idea for this question comes from a talk show host named Dennis Prager who devotes one hour each week to the topic of happiness.

A Major Philosopher

The Scottish philosopher, David Hume (1711-1776), wrote a major work he titled “Treatise of Human Nature.” In it, he sought to reduce morality to a few laws upon which other observations could be made, much as Newton had done with physics. Hume’s primary thesis is principles of morality are subject to, or based upon, feeling and sentiment, not pure reason. He argued that it is the prospect of pleasure or pain that causes us to act and that reason can only inform us as to the morality of the means by which we secure those ends. He claimed, “Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions.” This resulted in two major ideas that influenced philosophy thereafter. First, that reason was in fact subordinate to emotion. And second, our moral judgments are derived from our passions and not from our reason.

Pojman, Louis P. Ethical Value Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Fourth Edition, (Wadsworth International: 2002), 405 – 406.

Put another way, do you ever reason that something is right and then act upon it, even though it FEELS wrong?  Hume would say it is not possible to act against your feelings even though you've determined something to be morally right or wrong by reason. I believe we are capable of acting against our feelings.   For instance, I doubt the firefighters of 9/11 who had young children FELT like rescuing complete strangers instead of securing their family.  However, they reasoned they had a moral obligation to fulfill their duty to their chosen profession and to the lives of those they committed to save when they entered that profession.

What do you think? Do you agree? Disagree? Please give examples to support your view.

Solipsism

Lately, I have taken much interest in a philosophical idea called Solipsism. It is the idea that one’s own mind is all that exists. This idea branches off into three categories: Epistemological solipsism, Metaphysical solipsism, and Methodological solipsism. According to the epistemological solipsism view, it is possible that an external world exists or that only the self exists. The metaphysical approach to solipsism is that the individual self of the person and that the outside world and other people are representations of that self having no independent existence. The last common approach is called methodological solipsism, which is the thesis that the individual self and its states are the starting point for philosophical construction.

After a lot of thought, I disagree with all three approaches to solipsism. To me, the possibility that to each individual, they are the only people that exist is somewhat logical. However, although all other human mind and emotions are inaccessible to each individual, I do not believe that it makes other humans not exist to the individual’s world, they are just not existent to their perspective.