Expression of Emotions?

I am thinking of the criticism of Hume that moral behaviors turn out to be just expressions of one’s feelings and passions. And I don't think that is the right understanding of Hume. The emotivist standpoint of Hume needs an appropriate understanding—not in terms of expression of feelings—but in terms of a logical point of view about the justification of moral judgments.

I think the passions as justificatory grounding of moral conclusions should be distinguished from the mere psychological states accompanying the process of making moral judgments. For when we consider moral conclusions as mere expression of our dispositions and passions, it is like thnking of the reason for me to sing songs to my husband in his birthday as the mere expression of my emotions, or thinking of the moral decision to salvage the kid falling into the well as an expression of one’s feeling distress. But both sounds strange. In the case of the kid, the sense of sympahty is deeply rooted in our human nature, and our decision to save the kid is not expressions of our own feeling bad about this situation. What Hume is really arguing is that the fact that “I am feeling bad about the situation” itself is not sufficient for me to conclude that I ought to save the kid unless it is supplied with a major moral principle, which is “I ought to always help those in danger”.

Here we can see the difference in Hume’s sketch bewteen two kinds of emotions: E(1) is the psychological states accompanying our thought and behaviors. E(2) is the moral justificatory reason which constitutes the sources of the major moral principle. For illustration, now the moral argument(A) of my singing songs at my husband’s birthday is like this：A(1) Major premise: I ought to do something making him happy. A(2)Minor premise: Singing songs will make him happy. A(3)I ought to sing songs. What Hume means about E(2) is that the reason why one starts with the Major premise is that one will find out the approbation of this idea rather than rational reflections. But E(1) is the one that appears in the A(2) and A(3).

To sum up, E(2) as the justificatory reason for the agent to engage into the major premise is the fundamental one for Hume. Therefore what we should ask Hume is the question of the objectivity of human emotions. In other word, what if the agent feels happy about killing and hurting people? On what grounding we can blame the agent for feeling wrongly and defectively?