This idea of conscience as a kind of natural moral affection complements Cockburn's view that morality is founded upon human nature: Moral knowledge arises from reflection upon our own natures and moral affection arises out of our natural constitutions.
She argues that conscience is not an immediate source of moral knowledge, as Burnet would have it, but a source of moral affection or feeling that complements, and presupposes, a proper (i.e., rational) knowledge of moral laws.
Because of the intrinsically well-ordered benevolence of our nature, our feelings of approval and condemnation, and their correlative moral affections are inherently pleasurable and painful.
It seems descriptively accurate to suggest that we intuitively engage the fetus and the corpse in different ways, that we assign them to different places in our moral affections and that they possess different emotional registers.
Reid calls the complex state that combines moral judgment, affection, and feeling "moral approbation".
So when we subject affections to moral judgment, we approve most highly of the natural affections.
But whereas reflected affections are themselves the object of the reflected affections of moral judgment, it is "ordinary bodies, or common subjects of sense" that are the objects of aesthetic affections.
If this sends shivers through the markets, it is because outsiders do not understand South Africa's past: "It doesn't scare us," says Mr Mbeki.This is a man who, unlike Mr Mandela, cannot draw his authority either in the ANC or in the country from warm affection or moral stature.
So Scotus relegates concerns about happiness to the affectio commodi and assigns whatever is properly moral to the other affection, the affectio iustitiae.
What the spectator takes as objects of moral evaluation are the affections of rational agents, insofar as they produce intentional actions.
But in almost all theoretical works, the various feelings and emotions of the human heart and intellect were understood to fall into at least two categories: the more violent and self-regarding "passions" and "appetites" on the one hand, and the milder and more enlightened "interests," social "affections," and "moral sentiments" on the other (DeJean, 1997; Dixon, 2003; Hirschman, 1997).
