Question

Hello Rabbi Michael,
I am currently studying the Open University book on problems in moral philosophy, and I wanted to ask about the subjectivist approach, and in particular Hume’s approach, which sees emotion as the source of morality. I was debating between two possibilities in understanding the approach:
A. There is no such thing as “something proper” or “something moral.” When people say that something is moral, they are merely expressing an emotional judgment (“It is bad to murder” — murder makes me feel bad). According to this, there is really no point in moral arguments, since taste cannot be argued about. I distinguish here between emotion and intuition, for example, which can serve as a cognitive tool.
B. Another, less extreme possibility is that it is only trying to propose a subjective criterion for the question of what is moral. According to this, each person should (morally speaking) act in accordance with what seems right to him. That would mean that in practice this approach grants moral legitimacy to a whole range of different behaviors (and in that sense it is subjective), but at the same time it contains an objective component (in the very general assumption that each person ought to act according to the dictate of his own conscience). This approach is basically a kind of moral relativism, but one that does not treat society as determining moral values, rather the individual himself.
When I read Hume, I get the impression that on the one hand emotion is what constitutes morality according to his view (“morality is determined by emotion”), and on the other hand, it is not entirely clear to me whether he would agree to claim that there is no such thing as binding morality. I would be happy if you could clarify this matter a bit.
Thank you very much,
Shlomi