David Hume and Immanuel Kant on our ideas of right and wrong Essay

David Hume and Immanuel Kant on our ideas of right and wrong - Essay Example The human soul is always on the look out for the answers that haunt their reasoning. Philosophy provides one with the answers to all the questions concerned with the universe, human existence, understanding, morality, ethics and the like. One of the major questions that have been asked all through the history is about the meaning and ideology of right and wrong. What is right and what is wrong? How can you identify something as right or wrong? These are some of the questions that involve the awareness of the philosophy concerning right and wrong. Philosophical ethics, as termed by David Hume, deal with such questions and this branch of philosophy methodizes and, sometimes, corrects the practice in which human beings engage in everyday life. Accordingly, we try to understand the right things of life in difficult situations trying to do the good in respect of what we are and how we act in order to strive to do the right things as human beings and to avoid the things that are bad. Somet imes called meta-ethics, the specific part of the philosophical ethics discusses what right and good mean and how to act out for a life of good avoiding the bad in daily life. David Hume and Immanuel Kant are two of the most prominent philosophers to deal with the ides of right and wrong. David Hume (1711-1776), philosopher, historian, political theorist, social scientist, and essayist in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1758) and A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) provide a good knowledge about the understanding of right and wrong. ... The ideas of Hume had their impact on Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Psychology. "Hume is remarkable in that he does not shy away from conclusions that might seem unlikely or unreasonable. Ultimately, he concludes that we have no good reason to believe almost everything we believe about the world, but that this is not such a bad thing. Nature helps us to get by where reason lets us down." (Hume. 2006). The empiricist philosopher tries to make clear the rigidity of scientific methodology rely on philosophical reasoning. According to him, we can understand the world only as a matter of fact and so only experience can prove this. Relations of ideas cannot speak exactly for the existence of human beings, the universe or God. Thus, right and wrong are concepts that need to be experienced rather than described. This empirical understanding of the ideas of right and wrong is needed to have the clear picture of things. In the work An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume discusses the origin and association of ideas. He distinguishes between impressions and ideas which will give us his notion of idea in general. Idea, for him, is livelier than impressions. Also, Hume talks about the train of thoughts, associating different ideas and explains the three kinds of relations between ideas. They are resemblance, contiguity in space-time, and cause-and-effect. Hume discusses the concepts of right and wrong and other related ideas of ethics, prolifically, in his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739). This is an expanded form of the discussions in the short essay An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. In an empirical way, Hume argues that the moral