Richard Roth

For sentimentalists like Hume, the most basic objects of our approval are actions or character traits that cause pleasure. But Adam Smith instead takes as the fundamental object of approval the propriety of sentiments: a sentiment’s being ‘suited’ and ‘proportionate’ to its cause. Yet he is not particularly clear about what it is for a sentiment to match an object in this way. Moreover, extant interpretations are unsatisfying, because they generally fail to make sense of Smith’s claim that, in order to judge whether someone else’s sentiments are proper, one must use one’s own sentiments as a “rule or canon.” This article provides a novel account of Smithian propriety, based on the idea that Smith sees sentiments as representations of value. Sentimental propriety, on this account, is a kind of representational correctness; one judges the sentiments of someone else to be proper just insofar as ones share their sentimental perspective on the relevant object.

Why should we be means-end rational? Why care whether someone’s mental states exhibit certain formal patterns, like the ones formalized in causal decision theory? This paper establishes a dominance argument for these constraints in a finite setting. If you violate the norms of causal decision theory, then your desires will be aptness dominated. That is, there will be some alternative set of desires that you could have had, which would be more apt (closer to the actual values fixed by your sensibility/ what you intrinsically care about) no matter which world is actual. If we care about having apt desires, then, we should never let ourselves violate these norms of means-end rationality. This argument shares a form with now-standard accuracy arguments for probabilism, opening up a new terrain for that discussion. I show that the foundational assumptions about the shape of accuracy and of aptness required to run the arguments for means-end rationality and for probabilism run closely parallel. I show the argument is robust under different theories of subjective actual value, including nonclassical treatments of indeterminacy in actual value; I show the argument may (but need not!) be generalized to objective theories of value. The upshot is that aptness-domination arguments for decision theories should be added to the philosophical playbook.