Neil Roughley

What is the basis of our capacity to act morally? This is a question that has been discussed for millennia, with philosophical debate typically distinguishing two sources of morality: reason and sentiment. This collection aims to shed light on whether the human capacity to feel for others really is central for morality and, if so, in what way. To tackle these questions, the authors discuss how fellow feeling is to be understood: its structure, content and empirical conditions. Also discussed are the exact roles that relevant psychological features - specifically: empathy, sympathy and concern - may play within morality. The collection is unique in bringing together the key participants in the various discussions of the relation of fellow feeling to moral norms, moral concepts and moral agency. By integrating conceptually sophisticated and empirically informed perspectives, Forms of Fellow Feeling will appeal to readers from philosophy, psychology, sociology and cultural studies.

In the book’s first chapter, the topic of practical mind is approached via a brief survey of a number of important positions in the history of philosophy. The founding question for a philosophy of practical mind is raised by Aristotle when he asks what it is in the soul that originates movement. I discuss the answers to this question proposed by Plato, Aristotle himself, Hobbes and Hume, before rounding off the historical survey with a look at the introduction of the notion of “pro-attitude” in the last century. The key question put to the various proposals concerns their capacity to give a unitary account of what it is that “moves” agents. Put in terms of the last of the suggestions discussed: is there a single pro-component that unites the diverse ways of being for something under one genus? And if so, is that pro-component the feature that moves us?

The final chapter of the study argues that the disjunctive analysis of intention provides a distinctively plausible explanation of the intention-consequential (IC) requirements of practical rationality. Consistent with an analysis that sees intentions as optative attitudes accompanied by only minimal, negative doxastic conditions, I reject cognitive explanations of the IC requirements, arguing instead that they represent constraints on an agent’s project of self-forging, a project that is in an important sense orthogonal to her responses to everyday reasons. The chapter discusses the most prominent noncognitivist model, Michael Bratman’s grounding of the norms in the demands of self governance. The model, I argue, is vitiated by its normative functionalist framework, which, because it cannot, on pain of circularity, ground its explanation in features of intending, has to postulate a specific reason behind intention’s subjection to the requirements. However, because the norms are in place for all intentional agency, they cannot depend on specific aims or reasons, even reasons most of us have, but need to be grounded in intentional agency itself.According to my constructive proposal, to postdeliberatively opt to perform certain actions is to “take personal responsibility” for them, thus providing an anchor for their attributability. It is a concern to provide such an anchor, I claim, that has conferred on intention the shape it has. The reason for intending’s subjection to the IC requirements is that their contravention renders responsibility-taking unintelligible: an agent who intends in violation of the IC requirements becomes opaque to himself, thus necessarily losing his hold on his own agency. This fact provides agents with a distinct kind of reason, one that is both stringent and, under certain circumstances strikingly weak, a conjunction of features which suffices as an answer to the scepticism expressed by Broome as to whether rationality can be shown to generate reasons. I then show how the notion of taking personal responsibility extends to cover cases of nondecisional intending. The explanation of this extension is, crucially, in part normative. It grounds in the deeply entrenched demand that persons deliberate on whether they are willing to see themselves as the realisers of their motivationally unrivalled wants*.

Recent philosophical work on the concept of human nature disagrees on how to respond to the Darwinian challenge, according to which biological species do not have traditional essences. Three broad kinds of reactions can be distinguished: conservative intrinsic essentialism, which defends essences in the traditional sense, eliminativism, which suggests dropping the concept of human nature altogether, and constructive approaches, which argue that revisions can generate sensible concepts of human nature beyond traditional essences. The different constructive approaches pick out one or two of the three epistemic roles that are fused in traditional essentialist conceptions of human nature: descriptive, explanatory, definitional, or explanatory and definitional. These turns towards diverging epistemic roles are best interpreted pluralistically: there is a plurality of concepts of human nature that have to be clearly distinguished, each with a legitimate role in respective scientific contexts.

The last three chapters of the book contain my systematic proposal as to how intentions can be reductively understood whilst accounting for the specificity of the intentional syndrome, in particular whilst allowing us to understand the force of the requirements of intention rationality. The proposal is disjunctive and genetic: I claim that intentions are optative attitudes on which a contextually unique practical status has been conferred, a status that can be conferred by one of two aetiological mechanisms.The first of those mechanisms is decision, the most salient form of intention acquisition. This chapter aims to clarify what it is about deciding that enables it to confer that status. I begin by looking at cases in which deciding goes beyond motivational and evaluative phenomena, cases for which decision theory leaves no room and which are metaphysically overdramatised by Existentialism. In order to get a handle on the feature at work in these cases, I compare the different ways judging and deciding depend on at least minimal forms of theoretical inquiry and practical deliberation respectively. The decisive difference concerns the relationship between the motivations for the relevant form of reflection: whereas it is an essential, internal feature of inquiry that it be powered by a want* which specifies the conditions under which some belief content can count as an answer to the question that inaugurated that inquisitive episode, no such criterial specification of the motivation internal to minimal deliberation can be given. Instead, all that is required here is that the answer to the question that inaugurated deliberation be the deliberator’s own answer. An extended discussion of conceptions of the strong ownership of attitudes (Frankfurt, Korsgaard, Velleman) and of the relationship between conclusives reasons judgements and decisions supports this conclusion. After rejecting the claim that decisions might be actions, I conclude with a constructive proposal, according to which a decision is a conscious optative occurrence seen by its bearer as his own answer to the optative uncertainty that triggered an episode of minimal deliberation and which for that reason causes him to desist from further deliberation on the matter.

It is often claimed that humans are rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral creatures. What these characterizations may all have in common is the more fundamental claim that humans are normative animals, in the sense that they are creatures whose lives are structured at a fundamental level by their relationships to norms. The various capacities singled out by discussion of rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral animals might then all essentially involve an orientation to obligations, permissions and prohibitions. And, if this is so, then perhaps it is a basic susceptibility, or proclivity to normative or deontic regulation of thought and behavior that enables humans to develop the various specific features of their life form. This volume of new essays investigates the claim that humans are essentially normative animals in this sense. The contributors do so by looking at the nature and relations of three types of norms, or putative norms-social, moral, and linguistic-and asking whether they might all be different expressions of one basic structure unique to humankind. These questions are posed by philosophers, primatologists, behavioral biologists, psychologists, linguists, and cultural anthropologists, who have collaborated on this topic for many years. The contributors are committed to the idea that understanding normativity is a two-way process, involving a close interaction between conceptual clarification and empirical research.