Daniel Jacobson

The sentimental values play an important role in moral psychology even when they conflict with each other, and with morality. All natural emotions are sometimes fitting, even such morally dubious ones as envy. Hence, all the sentimental values are sometimes instantiated. These values entail practical reasons to act in service of an emotional goal, though the reasons may be overrident or silenced by moral concerns. For instance, fitting anger implies the existence of retributive reasons to blame and punish. Finally, the nature of guilt, as well as the positive moral emotions, constrains which moral theories are tenable for human beings. Strictly impartial theories, such as those given by Sidgwick’s axioms of ethics, cannot be internalized by even admirable people and are therefore alienated from some of the most important sources of human motivation.

Philosophers often infer that an emotion is unfitting because it would be wrong to feel. That is the moralistic fallacy, and it is argued here that this inference and related forms of moralism confound evaluative judgment in both philosophical and ordinary thought. A plausible form of pluralism about sentimental values entails that they can conflict with one another, and with moral and ethical standards. One influential source of resistance to our claims from a neo-Aristotelian thought: that the virtuous person is the standard of both ethical and fitting emotional response. This approach is explored and shown to have implausible consequences. Moreover, it does not rescue the moralistic fallacy from error.

Sentimental value concepts concern whether the corresponding emotions are fitting, not whether anyone is disposed to have them. An emotion is fitting when there is sufficient reason of fit in its favor, where reasons of fit are those that bear on the correctness of the response. Although the idea of reasons to feel can seem peculiar, ordinary evaluative thought subjects the emotions to criticism and regulation with such reasons. Whether something is shameful or dangerous for you depends on the context, as well as on features of your social role and peculiar vulnerabilities. But it does not depend on your evaluative perspective—your sensibility. Hence, there is genuine evaluative disagreement between individuals and cultures over what is shameful, disgusting, and so on. But the same is true of other values. Disagreement does not supply special reasons for skepticism about the sentimental values.

Sentimentalism requires a theory of emotion that is not cognitivist. A compatible theory of emotion cannot invoke beliefs (or thoughts) involving the evaluative concepts it aspires to explain, as cognitivism does. Yet rational sentimentalism requires emotions to be assessable for their fittingness, and cognitivism has the most straightforward account: an emotion is fitting when its constitutive thought is true. But the attractiveness of the cognitivist account is specious. It is argued that the natural emotions must be interpreted holistically, such that each can be understood as appraising an object in a distinctive way. This approach allows for assessments of emotional fittingness without a cognitivist theory of emotion, as illustrated with the examples of pride and shame. The appraisals attributed to emotions are shown to be informative, because they constrain arguments about when these emotions are fitting.

Although the cogntivist theory of emotion faces familiar and compelling objections, moral philosophers retain a default tendency to define emotions in terms of response-independent evaluative thoughts. Philippa Foot’s argument against sentimentalism presupposes a cognitivist theory of emotions. This chapter responds to Foot’s argument and explains the incompatibility between cognitivism and sentimentalism. It argues that the evaluative content of emotions is response-dependent, and that cognitivist taxonomies of emotion obscure that content in ways that lead to significant errors. Bernard Williams’s discussion of agent-regret displays some of these mistakes, due to his implicit adoption of cogntivist methodology. The impulse to embrace cognitivism is understandable, however, because it offers a tidy explanation of how emotions can be fitting or unfitting. Sentimentalism requires an alternative account.

This chapter introduces the book’s central topic: the sentimental values. These values, which include the funny, the disgusting, and the shameful, are specific ways of being good or bad. They are basic and distinctive human values whose foundations like in pancultural, natural emotions. Sentimental values deserve more philosophical attention, in light of their centrality to human concerns. But they can conflict with other values, and with morality, in ways that moral philosophy struggles to accommodate. A theory of these values, rational sentimentalism, is summarized and the argument of the book outlined.

The core idea of Humean sentimentalism is that values are essentially connected to emotional responses. This chapter addresses two challenges to this idea: the instability of affect and shadow skepticism. The instability of affect problem is that values are stable, but emotional responses vary in several respects. This problem can be addressed by invoking sentiments, understood as dispositions to emotional response. A joke can be funny by your lights because your sense of humor disposes you to amusement at it, even if it no longer amuses you. Shadow skepticism argues that the values with which emotions are concerned are either response-independent or insignificant. This chapter argues against shadow skepticism using the case of fear and danger. Dangerousness is best understood as equivalent to a response-dependent value: the fearsome.

The natural emotions, including both “affect programs” like fear and anger and complex social emotions like envy and guilt, are explained as universal psychological kinds of motivational state. They arise in bouts involving distinctive goals and action tendencies that take control precedence, and they motivate actions that are discontinuous from practical rationality and sometimes conflict with it. The underlying nature of these emotions is revealed in familiar patterns of irrationality, including acting without thinking and emotional recalcitrance. A motivational theory of emotion is defended on the basis of its explanatory power. Objections to natural emotions from neuroscience and the constructivist approach are addressed. It is argued that an episodic approach to emotion also offers the best account of when a durable state should and should not be understood as emotional. Durable emotions should be attributed by their resemblance to emotional bouts and dispositions to them, and their tendency to produce behavior that is similarly discontinuous with practical rationality.

Several prominent moral psychologists, including Jonathan Haidt and Paul Rozin, suggest that evaluative judgments are post hoc rationalizations of non-rational emotional responses. Some philosophers, including Joshua Greene and Peter Singer, accept this pessimism and conclude that we must either purify ethics of its emotional influences or accept some form of relativism. This chapter argues that this is a false dilemma, and that their pessimism is exaggerated. Emotions are connected to contingent but profound human concerns, and they can be responsive to genuine but anthropocentric reasons. Judgments made on their basis need not be mere rationalizations. Moreover, relativism produces repugnant evaluative conclusions that sentimentalists need not accept. The suggestions that disgust is irrational unless directed at things that threaten disease, and more generally that emotional concerns with anything other than harm and benefit lack rational support, are prejudices of scientism not deliverances of science.

Bernard Williams coined _agent-regret_ with two central examples: the lorry driver who accidentally kills a child, and Agamemnon who must choose between sacrificing his daughter and losing his fleet. Williams uses these two paradigms to support what is termed the _agency principle_ (that we are connected, through our feelings, to even the involuntary aspects of what we do), and the _residue principle_ (that when we must choose between conflicting values or obligations, we can expect some residue of bad feeling even when we make the right choice). In this chapter, it is argued that similar problems plague discussion of both the agency and residue principles, despite their genuine psychological insight. The problems lie with the conception of regret offered and the conclusions drawn about its rationality. It is contended that agent-regret is a chimerical emotion, an amalgam of two fundamentally different sentiments with disparate conditions of rationality: guilt and regret.

Several prominent moral psychologists and philosophers make much of a phenomenon they term _moral dumbfounding_, which is characterized by dogmatic insistence on a moral judgment for which no good reasons can be given. They hold that the phenomenon shows something important about ordinary moral judgment: that commonplace reasons offered for moral judgment are mere post hoc rationalizations of decisions made on other grounds. The chapter argues that the prominent and influential dumbfounding study does not work on its own terms, because its examples ignore crucial distinctions concerning harm and wrongness, and between dumbfounding and inarticulate reason-responsiveness. In fact there are good reasons for moral condemnation of every case they consider, but the problem is not just a matter of poorly chosen examples. By ignoring the symbolic and expressive aspects of action, the dumbfounders adopt an artificially narrow conception of reasons. Moreover, the fact that humans are sometimes dumbfounded and sometimes confabulate does not support their strong claims about the speciousness of reasons and reasoning in ordinary moral judgment.

This chapter is an introduction to the collection of chapters, Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical chapters on the Science of Ethics. The editors briefly characterize each of the ten original chapters and introduce the central themes of the volume. The volume examines the moral and philosophical implications of developments in the science of ethics, the growing movement that seeks to use recent empirical findings to answer long-standing moral questions. Efforts to make moral psychology a thoroughly empirical discipline have divided philosophers along methodological fault lines, isolating discussions that will profit more from intellectual exchange. This volume takes an even-handed approach, including chapters from advocates of empirical ethics as well as those who are skeptical of some of its central claims. The contributors are philosophers who share the conviction that scientific inquiry is relevant to various classic philosophical questions but also show an appreciation of the difficulty of these questions that is not always evident in empirical moral psychology.

The literature on the wrong kind of reason (WKR) problem largely assumes that such reasons pose only a theoretical problem for certain theories of value rather than a practical problem. Since the normative force of the canonical examples is obvious, the only difficulty is to identify what reasons of the right and wrong kind have in common without circularity. This chapter argues that in addition to the obvious WKRs on which the literature focuses, there are also more interesting WKRs that do not overtly refer to the advantages of having some evaluative attitude. Instead they refer to features of the object that bear on the propriety of having certain attitudes toward it. What is interesting about these cases is that their normative force is opaque. It can be clear that some consideration bears on whether or not to feel shame, pity, or amusement, for example, but unclear just how it does so—specifically, whether the consideration helps make the object of the attitude shameful, pitiable, or funny. The problems caused by WKRs are ubiquitous, and they outstrip the wrong kind of reason problem as it has ordinarily been conceived, since extant solutions to the technical problem offer no help resolving the opacity of normative force.

Horace recommended that poets "mingle the useful and the sweet"; but the champions of an ethical function for art have yet to explain how moral and aesthetic values can truly be mingled. Their proposed ethical functions too often seem irrelevant to what we most care about in art. Moreover, we need an explanation of what art has to show us that is of ethical significance, and that we don't already know. ;The answer is to be found in the "thick concepts" , which purport to provide reasons to feel and to act. Thick concepts are response-dependent, in that our application of them is guided by certain quasi-emotional responses, which they purport to warrant. These responses, I argue, are given content by their role in an ethical perspective, a value-laden "way of seeing" the world. Morality's aspirations to objectivity require that we gain imaginative acquaintance with the thick concepts of alien perspectives, without which real normative confrontation would be impossible. Fiction thus serves an ethical function by expanding our capacities of moral perception. ;Narrative art is uniquely well-suited to this task, because to give a reading of a story is to make sense of its characters and events in value-laden, emotional terms. Our engagement with fiction thus involves understanding the ethical perspectives that inform the text. This model of art's ethical function is immune to formalist challenges. Moreover, it answers the formidable hermeneutic and epistemological problems on which traditional theories founder

Mill advocated an unqualified defense of the liberty of conscience in the most comprehensive sense, which he understood to include not just the freedom to hold but also to express any opinion or sentiment. Yet considerable dispute persists about the nature of Mill’s argument for freedom of expression and whether his premises can support so strong a conclusion. Two prominent interpretations of Mill that threaten to undermine his uncompromising defense of free speech are considered and refuted. A better interpretation can be founded on Mill’s claim that the liberties of conscience are inseparable in practice. This claim can be defended with modern psychological insight about the nature of cognitive bias, and epistemological insight about why justification of creedal beliefs requires the universal toleration of opinion, insights which are largely anticipated by Mill. This argument is especially vital because it highlights the divide between classical liberalism and progressivism that has become a flashpoint in the current political debate over free speech.

_Rational Sentimentalism_ marks our aspiration to develop a form of sentimentalism that is responsive to reasons and reasoning about emotional response. This paper is a response to Berker, Na’aman, and Yao’s critical engagement with our book on the themes of naturalism, sentimental values, the scope of our theory, and moralism. We defend our view against the charge of naturalistic fallacy and justify the relatively narrow scope of our theory, which focuses on sentimental values such as the funny, the shameful, and the guilt-worthy. These issues turn on our claim that a relatively small number of emotions are psychological kinds, whose concerns are deep and wide in moral psychology. Moreover, these natural emotions appraise their objects in distinctive ways that can only be adequately understood in response-dependent terms. We here explicate these claims and defend them against the challenges offered by our critics.

Rational Sentimentalism develops a novel theory of the sentimental values. These values, which include the funny, the disgusting, and the shameful, are profoundly important because they set standards for emotional responses that are part of our shared human nature. Yet moral philosophers have neglected them relative to their prominence in human mental life. The theory is sentimentalist because it holds that these values are emotion-dependent—contrary to some prominent accounts of the funny and the disgusting. Its rational aspect arises from its insistence that the shameful (e.g.) is not whatever elicits shame but what makes shame fitting. Shameful traits provide reasons to be ashamed that do not depend on whether one is disposed to be ashamed of them. Furthermore, these reasons to be ashamed issue in reasons to act as shame dictates: to conceal. Sentimentalism requires a compatible theory of emotion and emotional fittingness. The book explicates a motivational theory of emotion that explains the peculiarities of emotional motivation, as other theories cannot. It argues that a class of emotions are psychological kinds with the same goal across cultures, despite differences in their elicitors. It then develops an account of fittingness that helps to differentiate reasons of fit, which bear on the sentimental values, from other considerations for or against having an emotion. Some significant and controversial conclusions emerge from rational sentimentalism. The sentimental values conflict with one another, and with morality, but nevertheless provide practical reasons that apply to humans—though not to all rational agents.

Mill advocated an unqualified defense of the liberty of conscience in the most comprehensive sense, which he understood to include not just the freedom to hold but also to express any opinion or sentiment. Yet considerable dispute persists about the nature of Mill's argument for freedom of expression and whether his premises can support so strong a conclusion. Two versions of a prominent interpretation of Mill that threatens to undermine his uncompromising defense of free speech are considered and refuted. It is shown how Mill's classically liberal commitments in moral psychology, ethology, and epistemology make the empirical grounds of his defense considerably more plausible than is commonly understood. This argument is especially vital because it highlights the divide between (classical) liberalism and progressivism that has become a flashpoint in the current political debate over freedom of speech.