Abstract

There are two major trends attaching importance respectively on the reason and the emotion in the history of western ethics. Martha C. Nussbaum, contemporary famous ethics professor at the university of Chicago, believing the emotion and perception take an important part in moral actions, meanwhile she holds that moral education should cultivate humanity in the sense of the reason. Is there a self-contradiction in her theory? Although Nussbaum argues that emotion has the cognitive function of guiding to a moral fact, she develops the reason as the basis of morality, in which the reason is reinterpreted through the relationship of the intellectual and emotional by the Stoic and Aristotle. On one side, Nussbaum adopts the Stoics’ theory that the reason is peculiar of individual, which is in certain way relevance to the emotion. On the other side, inspired by Aristotle, she believes that the reason in ethics should be a practical wisdom, which can be used to aim to the true good in the context of multi-values. Thus the reason in Nussbaum’s moral education becomes a capability of human in modern society, which handles with the concrete matters in proper combination of the emotion and the value, the universality and the individuality.