Are my choices to do right driven by sentiment and not just because it is the right thing to do? What makes reason play such a big role in making moral judgments? Hume insisted that morality is grounded in sentiment, not reason. His devastating attack on any “metaphysic of morals” has had an enormous influence on modern and postmodern conceptions of morality, value judgments, and the possibility of moral knowledge. In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume asserts that “reason alone” can never provide a motive for any action; Hume did not deny that reason plays a role in making moral judgments (Soccio, Section 10-8). Morality is defined as “principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior” ("morality: definition of morality", 2016). Hume thought “morality is grounded in sentiment”(Soccio, Section 10-8). One can define sentiment as being “a view of or attitude toward a situation or event; an opinion;a feeling or emotion”("sentiment: definition of sentiment", 2016). Personally, I would like to think that we all do the right thing because we define ourselves by good morale. Would we do the right thing because of the reasons showing us it is the better option or do we base it upon our personal attitude of the situation? For example, I took in an adolescent who was brought to the US by a close friend of his family back in Nigeria. Unfortunately, he was abandoned by those same people. They no longer wanted to help him anymore or take responsibility for him so I decided to take over that role. I did this because he is under the age of 18 and still in need of guardianship. They were the only individuals he knew besides my family. What hurt me the most was how they could just abandon him with no support. I wanted to take him in because it felt like it was the right (moral) thing to do. So was I doing the morally right thing because I was driven by sentiment or by reason? Hume’s argument is that we do the moral thing because of sentiment. Simply put, we choose to do the moral thing based upon how we feel about the situation. I agree with Hume but I do believe there is reason involved as well. In my example above, I certainly made my decision largely based on sentiment. This child became friends with the family and felt like a child of mine. I let my feelings of love for him drive my decision to take him into our home. However, I believe making the right choice is driven by both sentiment and reason; sometimes one more than the other. This decision was driven by more sentiment than anything because I felt so strongly emotionally but reason was still involved. I reasoned that it was good for him to have a home to go to compared to being left to fend for himself. It is a simple reason but a reason enough to help me make the moral choice. Reason plays such a large role because it gives us an objective way to make a decision. Reason drives us to push to the moral decision because there is more positive than negatives that can come from it. Sometimes our feelings may feel different from reason or we instinctively go off sentiment without thinking of both choices. If there are more pros than cons to a decision, then I would say we are make the moral choice. We are choosing the moral choice based on which one will give us the more positive outcome. We are emotional individuals who value our own sentiment but I believe balancing it with reason will make us choose the truly moral decision. References morality: definition of morality. (2016). Oxforddictionaries.com. Retrieved 21 March 2016, from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/morality sentiment: definition of sentiment. (2016). Oxforddictionaries.com. Retrieved 21 March 2016, from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/sentiment