The limits of sentimentalism

Ethics

Volumn 116, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 337-361

  Schroeter, François ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33644770539     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/498463     Document Type: Review

References (51)

1. I am assuming that evaluative terms have extensions, that they pick out properties, and that an account of their meaning will tell us how these properties are best understood. I'll clarify and defend these assumptions later in this section.
2. On the necessity to enrich the sentimentalist approach with a normative element, see esp. Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson, "Sentiment and Value," Ethics 110 (2000): 722-48, sec. 1.
3. David Wiggins, "A Sensible Subjectivism?" essay 5 in his Needs, Values, Truth (New York: Blackwell, 1987), 185-214.
4. John McDowell, "Projection and Truth in Ethics," chap. 8 in his Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 151-66;
5. Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984),
6. Essays in Quasi-Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)
7. and Ruling Passions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
8. Franz Brentano, The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, ed. Oskar Kraus, trans. Roderick M. Chisholm and Elizabeth H. Schneewind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969);
9. Gerald Gaus, Value and Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
10. and Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
11. Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
12. D'Arms and Jacobson, "Sentiment and Value," 746-47.
13. Consider once again the example of amusement and the funny. It is easy to imagine circumstances in which it makes best sense not to be amused at a genuinely funny joke. Perhaps the joke is morally reprehensible, or one's amusement will offend the people one needs to please. Such moral and pragmatic reasons can make it inappropriate to be amused, but they seem to be irrelevant to the question whether the joke is funny or not. Any proposal for explaining the meaning of evaluative predicates in terms of the appropriateness of an emotional response thus needs a more restricted notion of appropriateness which rules out irrelevant moral and pragmatic considerations. D'Arms and Jacobson, who raise the problem, suggest that the normative notion which sentimentalists need is a notion of "fittingness" (ibid., sec. 5).
14. Whereas McDowell insists that the relevant emotional responses cannot be understood without invoking the corresponding evaluative property, Gibbard argues that they can (McDowell, "Projection and Truth in Ethics";
15. Gibbard, Wise Choices, 126-50 [chap. 7]). It's crucial to have a more precise picture of the nature of the emotional responses invoked in order to resolve worries about the circularity of the sentimentalist program and questions about its reductive ambitions.
16. Frege's notion of sense was supposed to explain both these aspects of meaning. Subsequent theorists, however, distinguish the different theoretical roles played by the Fregean notion of sense, and many have suggested that the two roles cannot be filled by the same thing (see, e.g., Tyler Burge, "Sinning against Frege," Philosophical Review 88 [1979]: 398-432;
17. John Perry, "Frege on Demonstratives," Philosophical Review 86 [1977]: 474-97).
18. This aspect of meaning is sometimes discussed under the rubric of "metasemantic theory" or "determination theory." Such a theory specifies how the reference of an expression is determined by facts about the word's use (David Kaplan, "Afterthoughts," in Themes from Kaplan, ed. Joseph Almog, John Perry, and Howard Wettstein [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989], 565-614, 574;
19. Christopher Peacocke, A Study of Concepts [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992], 17ff.). I take the reference of a word to be its intuitive subject matter - e.g., the object, kind, or property it picks out. The possible worlds framework I appeal to in the text is standard in post-Kripkean semantics. Even though Frege himself did not invoke possible worlds, neo-Fregean theorists now appeal to extensions in all possible worlds to specify the properties picked out by predicates and to characterize the behavior of names under modal embedding
20. (Peacocke, A Study of Concepts, 23
21. Jason Stanley, "Rigidity and Content," in Language, Thought, and Logic: Essays in Honour of Michael Dummett, ed. Richard Heck [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 131-56;
22. David J. Chalmers, "On Sense and Intension," Philosophical Perspectives 16 [2002]: 135-82). Nothing in this article, however, hinges on accepting the possible worlds framework for semantic theorizing.
23. Sophisticated sentimentalists, for instance, often suggest that an evaluative property such as being morally right is "best understood" as being such as to warrant a particular emotion (see, e.g., John McDowell, "Values and Secondary Qualities," chap. 7 in McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 131-50). This claim can be interpreted either as a metaphysical account of the essential nature of evaluative properties or as an epistemic characterization of the key theoretical role that makes evaluative properties important to us and guides our best deliberation as to which things instantiate them. Both the metaphysical and the epistemological claim must ultimately be grounded in the reference-determining conditions associated with our evaluative terms: if the sentimentalist account is correct, it is because the ultimate criterion for falling into the extension of an evaluative term involves a judgment that the object warrants a certain emotion.
24. See, in particular, Allan Gibbard, Thinking How to Live (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003);
25. and Simon Blackburn, "Realism, Quasy, or Queasy?" in Reality, Representation and Projection, ed. John Haldane and Crispin Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 365-83. It is now widely accepted that an evaluative term picks out at least a "minimal" or "thin" property, whose identity is determined by the set of objects that instantiate it in all possible worlds.
26. The example is Hilary Putnam's in "The Meaning of 'Meaning'," Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7 (1975): 131-93.
27. See Gibbard, Wise Choices, 3-22 (chap. 1)
28. and "Moral Concepts: Substance and Sentiments," Philosophical Perspectives 6 (1992): 199-221.
29. The term is introduced by Philip Pettit in The Common Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). For a different elaboration of this idea,
30. see Tyler Burge, "Intellectual Norms and Foundations of Mind," Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 697-720.
31. Many theorists are tempted by an analysis of harm in terms of a rational desire account of well-being, where a harm is roughly whatever adversely affects a person's well-being. This position is not, of course, a sentimentalist account of harm, since desires - in the philosophical sense of the term - are not emotions. However, it's perhaps worth noting that I have strong reservations about a rational desire account as an analysis of harm. As I indicate in the text, I take our commonsense notion of harm to be structured around the idea of an impairment of the subject's basic capacities. If you prevent someone from offering me chocolates, you are not literally harming me - though you may be frustrating my rational desires. Unlike our commonsense notion of harm, the notion of harm generated by rational desire theories does not mark any fundamental distinction here.
32. For some empirical evidence relevant to this point, see Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 62-67.
33. Gibbard, Wise Choices, 40-45.
34. Gibbard, Wise Choices Ibid., 64-68.
35. Like fear, anger is an emotional syndrome we share with lower animals. Whereas fear has a primarily defensive function, anger disposes the organism to attack: as a result of a territorial intrusion or some form of potential aggression, the anger syndrome is activated, and the animal is primed to rebuff the aggressor. Resentment may be seen as a lingering form of anger which remains impotent to express itself toward its target. Your boss has once again insulted you about your work. Had the insult come from one of your subordinates, you would have simply yelled at him and made sure he never did it again. Against your boss, however, you are powerless. You inhibit your urge to fight back, and you are left with deep resentment.
36. Of course, the idea of equal respect doesn't seem to cover the whole scope of morality-the idea applies primarily to persons and not to nonhuman animals or to the environment, which we may nonetheless take to be potential victims of moral wrongdoing. In order to provide a full specification of the extension of 'is morally wrong', additional constraints may need to be brought in to cover less central areas of morality such as the ethics of animals and the ethics of the environment.
37. I'll examine there whether a subject who takes moral wrongness to be what warrants anger can be interpreted as making moral judgments. If his sentimentalist proposal isolates necessary and sufficient conditions for competence with moral terms, Gibbard will have captured an important aspect of the meaning of these terms even if his account fails at the level of reference determination. He will have provided an account of what those who disagree about the nature of morality need to grasp in order to be talking about a single subject matter.
38. I have focused my discussion on anger and resentment and neglected the symmetrical part of Gibbard's proposal - his claim that the morally wrong is what warrants guilt on the part of the wrongdoer. It should be clear, however, that the second part of Gibbard's proposal faces the same problems as the first. Guilt is a very specific emotional syndrome: it is characterized by negative feelings toward the self and the actions it has authorized, as well as by tendencies to make amends for one's faults. Assessing whether or not guilt is warranted is a specialized task which is ill suited to capturing what we ultimately take to be crucial in determining what is morally wrong. Once again, the ideas of fairness or equal respect of persons seem to play a much more central and decisive role in our thinking about what's morally wrong than the ideas of warranted guilt or warranted resentment. To avoid repetition, I won't elaborate on this point here.
39. Notice, however, that, insofar as we agree with the victims of racist slurs when they describe their situation as deeply shameful, we may be inclined to consider the shameful as ambiguous between what warrants shame and what normally causes it. When we say that it is shameful to indulge in a racist slur, what we mean is that one ought to feel shame for doing so. But when we say that it is shameful to be the victim of such slurs, we may mean only that it is understandable to feel shame. After all, it would be odd to normatively endorse the victims' shame.
40. A caveat. Perhaps sentimentalism can succeed in the case of aesthetic evaluations. It may be more plausible to attempt to explain the meaning of 'is beautiful' in terms of what warrants some emotional response (like admiration) than to explain the meaning of 'is morally wrong' according to a similar model. After all, aesthetic evaluations seem to tell us how to feel. I'll therefore set aside the aesthetic case: my conclusions should be understood to apply exclusively to those evaluative terms which have been the focus of attention in metaethics: the evaluative terms we use in our deliberation about what to do.
41. See Putnam, "The Meaning of 'Meaning'." There is nowadays broad agreement that it is wrong to think that competent subjects must grasp the essential nature of tigers -and thus necessary and sufficient conditions for being a tiger in all possible worlds. However, theorists disagree as to whether the traditional approach to meaning needs to be weakened or simply abandoned. Neo-Fregeans insist that what competent subjects grasp are necessary and sufficient conditions for being a tiger in the actual world, not in all possible worlds. On the neo-Fregean approach to meaning,
42. see Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982);
43. Peacocke, A Study of Concepts
44. David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996);
45. and Frank Jackson, From Ethics to Metaphysics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Many semantic externalists, however, insist that neo-Fregeans are granting too much to the traditional view of meaning: like Putnam, they believe that competent subjects needn't grasp a necessary and sufficient criterion for identifying tigers even in the actual world. Burge, for instance, seems to agree with Putnam on this point (see "Intellectual Norms"). For criticisms of Jackson's and Chalmers's recent defense of neo-Fregeanism,
46. see Ned Block and Robert Stalnaker, "Conceptual Analysis, Dualism, and the Explanatory Gap," Philosophical Review 108 (1999): 1-46;
47. and Laura Schroeter, "Gruesome Diagonals," Philosophers' Imprint 3 (2003): 1-23. In this section, I will ignore the disputes between neo-Fregeans and their opponents: my examination of the conditions for competence with evaluative terms will remain intuitive and won't presuppose any controversial theoretical model of linguistic competence.
48. Proponents of motivational internalism will insist that there are motivational constraints on competence with moral terms. In their view, a speaker who is never motivated to act in accordance with the judgments she expresses with moral terms cannot count as competent with the standard meaning of those terms. However, motivational internalism is a very controversial thesis. It is platitudinous that moral judgments are normally connected to motivation, but this fact does not establish that psychologically abnormal subjects who exhibit no such motivational tendency cannot count as competent with the meaning of moral terms. Intuitions about such abnormal subjects are mixed, and a firm verdict about such cases will need to take into account more general theoretical considerations. Because motivational internalism is so controversial, I have ignored this requirement in the text. However, adding the internalist constraint to the competence conditions won't make any difference to my argument in this section. There are two points to notice. First, it is not clear why the sophisticated sentimentalist account of competence conditions should guarantee that the internalist constraint will be met by all competent speakers. Since emotions like anger and guilt essentially involve a motivation to act, it is easy to see why traditional sentimentalists - who take moral judgments to be expressions of such emotions - will vindicate the internalist constraint. What remains to be seen, however, is why the judgment that these emotions are warranted should be necessarily tied to motivation in all competent speakers. Second, there's no reason why the internalist constraint must have a psychologically deep explanation. If it's really a condition on "conversability" with moral terms that one be motivated to act in accordance with one's judgments, then a subject who lacks this motivational disposition will be incompetent-regardless of the psychological explanation of his abnormal state. Perhaps normal subjects have a desire to be moral, or perhaps it's part of practical rationality that subjects act in accordance with their moral judgments, or perhaps there's a variety of explanations for the normal motivational disposition. A foe of sentimentalism could appeal to any of these resources to accommodate the internalist constraint - should he accept it. For an extended discussion of motivational internalism in the theoretical and practical domains, see my "Normative Concepts and Motivation," Philosophers' Imprint 5 (2005): 1-23.
49. Provided, of course, that the subject has the right standards of warrant in mind. If a subject thinks that an action is morally wrong just in case feelings of guilt and resentment are justified from a pragmatic point of view (i.e., if they are advantageous to the perpetrator of the action), we may have reasons to doubt that the subject has grasped the meaning of 'is morally wrong'.
50. This is not to deny that sentimentalism may succeed as an account of competence in those cases where it provides a plausible account of the determination of reference. Competence with 'is fearsome' and 'is shameful' seems to require the subject to implicitly understand that what is fearsome or shameful is what makes the relevant emotions appropriate.
51. For a prominent example, see Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Insofar as virtue ethicists are making a claim about how thin normative terms should ultimately be understood - and thus hope to characterize the reference conditions of 'is right' in terms of the endorsed and admirable dispositions we call virtues - they also face, I believe, the kind of challenge I raise in the text.