## 1. The Many Moral Sentimentalisms



Consider the following story related by Frans de Waal:



> 
> 
> J. lives in a small seaside town in France, where he is known as the
> handyman he is. He can build an entire house with his own hands, as he
> is skilled in carpentry, plumbing, masonry, roof work, and so on.
> [...] Being extremely nice, J. usually dispenses advice or lends
> a helping hand. One neighbor, whom he barely knew, kept asking about
> how to put a skylight in his roof. [...]
> 
> 
> 
> J. spent from morning until late evening with the neighbor, basically
> doing the job on his own (as the neighbor could barely hold a hammer,
> he said), during which time the neighbor's wife came, cooked,
> and ate lunch (the main meal in France) with her husband without
> offering J. anything. By the end of the day, he had successfully put
> the skylight in, having provided expert labor that normally would have
> cost more than six hundred euros. J. asked for nothing, but when the
> same neighbor a few days later talked about a scuba diving course, and
> how it would be fun to do together, he felt this opened a perfect
> occasion for a return gift, since the course cost about 150 euros. So
> J. said he'd love to go, but unfortunately didn't have the
> money in his budget. By now you can guess: The man went alone. (de
> Waal 2009: 174-175)
> 
> 
> 



If we assume the story is true and leaves nothing of importance out,
we're likely to have two kinds of response to it: we have a
negative feeling of some sort towards the neighbour, and we think that
the neighbour acted wrongly towards poor J. Roughly speaking,
sentimentalists think that these two responses are intimately related,
with the feeling in the driving seat. Since different theories in the
sentimentalist family make use of different responses, this entry will
adopt a liberal definition of a 'sentiment' that includes
non-cognitive attitudes and states of all kinds - emotions,
feelings, affects, desires, plans, and dispositions to have them.



This core idea gives rise to many questions. One is explanatory: Why
do we think that the neighbour did something wrong? *Explanatory
sentimentalists* believe that moral thoughts are fundamentally
explained by sentiments or emotions. The second kind of question is
constitutive: What does our thought that the neighbour did something
wrong consist in? That is, what kind of thought is it? Is it more like
believing that Pluto is a planet or like wanting to hit an
uncooperative computer? *Judgment sentimentalists* believe that
moral judgments are constituted by emotional or non-cognitive
responses, at least in part, or alternatively are judgments
*about* emotional responses or the tendency of something to
give rise to them. Some judgment sentimentalists are also
*expressivists*, who believe that the meanings of moral terms
must be accounted for in terms of associated non-cognitive states.



Third, assuming that we've got it right, what kind of fact if
any makes our thought that the neighbour acted wrongly true? Is the
wrongness of the action a projection of our sentiments? If it is a
fact, is it like the fact that the square of the hypotenuse is the sum
of the squares of the other two sides of a right triangle, or like the
fact that water is H2O, or perhaps more like the fact that
rotten food is disgusting? For *metaphysical sentimentalists*,
moral facts have to do with our sentimental responses, or moral and
evaluative *concepts* are concepts of properties of causing or
warranting sentimental responses. Finally, we're pretty
confident of our judgment. But even if we assume we know all the
pertinent empirical facts, how do we know that what the neighbour did
is wrong? What if someone disagrees? How can we justify our verdict?
*Epistemic sentimentalists* believe that sentimental responses
of a suitable kind play a central role in moral justification or
understanding.



These sentimentalist views are logically independent of each other.
One indication of this is that they contrast with different views.
Epistemic and possibly explanatory sentimentalist views contrast with
*rationalist* and *intuitionist* views, according to
which we can acquire moral knowledge by reasoning or intuition,
respectively, rather than via emotion. Some, though not all, judgment
sentimentalist views contrast with *cognitivist* *accounts
of moral judgment*. Metaphysical sentimentalist views, in turn,
contrast with *error theory* and *mind-independent moral
realism* in naturalist and non-naturalist variants.


## 2. Explanatory Sentimentalism



It is not uncommon for contemporary philosophers to see sentimentalism
as a theory of moral judgment or facts. But classical sentimentalists
considered the primary question to be a *moral psychological*
one: What feature of human nature - reason, sentiment, or
intellectual intuition - explains why we approve of something or
blame someone? (See David Hume's *Treatise of Human
Nature* (T), 456 and Adam Smith's *The Theory of Moral
Sentiments* (TMS), 312-313.) Some of their main arguments
were introduced in the context of this explanatory question, which
lies on the border between philosophy and what is now the empirical
science of psychology.


### 2.1 Moral Sense Theories



While the importance of emotion in ethical thought has been recognized
by philosophers at least since Aristotle and Mencius, the roots of the
modern sentimentalist tradition in ethics go back to early
18th century debates in Britain. Anthony Ashley Cooper,
better known by his title as the Earl of Shaftesbury, introduced the
notion of a *moral sense* in his *Inquiry Concerning
Virtue*, *or Merit*. According to Shaftesbury, the primary
object of moral evaluation is the "affection" or motive
behind the action. Such affections can, by reflection, become the
object of a second-order affection:



> 
> 
> In a Creature capable of forming general Notions of Things, not only
> the outward Beings which offer themselves to the Sense, are the
> Objects of the Affection; but the very Actions themselves, and the
> Affections of Pity, Kindness, Gratitude, and their Contrarys, being
> brought into the Mind by Reflection, become Objects. So that, by means
> of this reflected Sense, there arises another kind of Affection
> towards those very Affections themselves, which have been already
> felt, and are now become the Subject of a new Liking or Dislike.
> (Shaftesbury 1699-1714: 16)
> 
> 
> 



Moral approval is explained by (and perhaps consists in) this sort of
second-order liking, which Shaftesbury usually designates the
'Sense of Right or Wrong'. This sense is innate or
natural, and can be displaced only by "contrary habit and
custom" (1699-1714: 25), although it may on occasion be
overcome by "rage, lust, or any other counterworking
passion" (1699-1714: 35). On Shaftesbury's view,
what it approves of are natural or public affections, which are the
beautiful and harmonious motives tending towards the good of the whole
system of rational creatures. To be virtuous, a creature must not only
do the right things, but exercise its moral sense and act for the very
reason that something is worthy and honest (1699-1714: 18).
That's why even the kindest dog can't be virtuous, as long
as it lacks the ability to reflect on its affections and act on the
resulting affect.



Frances Hutcheson fills in Shaftesbury's sketch to some extent.
His argument for the existence of a moral sense draws on his rejection
of rationalism and intuitionism (see
 Supplement on Anti-Rationalist Arguments).
 Since we don't approve of actions because of self-interest or
self-evidence, something else must explain our convictions. According
to him, a *sense* is a "determination of the mind, to
receive any idea from the presence of an object which occurs to us,
independent of our will" (1725: 90). There are many more such
senses than traditionally acknowledged. Since moral ideas arise
spontaneously, Hutcheson concludes we have a moral sense,



> 
> 
> a determination of our minds to receive amiable or disagreeable ideas
> of Actions, when they occur to observation, antecedent to any opinions
> of advantage or loss to redound to ourselves from them. (1725:
> 100)
> 
> 
> 



The moral sense, though not moral ideas, is innate, as can be seen
from the sentiments of small children when they begin to respond to
actions (1725: 145-146).



On Hutcheson's early (and best known) view, what the moral sense
approves of is above all "the general calm desire of the
happiness of others", in distinction from particular benevolent
passions like love and compassion (1728: 175). On this picture, in
contrast to Shaftesbury, the motive of morally praiseworthy actions is
benevolence and *not* the thought that the action is obligatory
or that it would be approved of by the moral sense itself. In
Hutcheson's terminology, moral sense is the source of justifying
reasons, but not exciting reasons. (For the development of
Hutcheson's views, see Bishop 1996).



Some key features of these early sentimentalist theories are shared by
the psychologist Jonathan Haidt's (2012) contemporary model.
Haidt's starting point is an increasingly common distinction in
psychology between two kinds of cognitive process. Type I or intuitive
processes are automatic, effortless, fast, often associative,
parallel, affective, and often modular (that is, making use of only
domain-specific information). We are only conscious of their outputs,
not the processes themselves. (They are thus parallel to
Hutcheson's 'senses'.) Type II
'reflective' or 'reasoning' processes are, in
contrast, conscious, effortful, slow, memory-taxing, sometimes
inferential, rational, and linear processes. As is common in
psychology, Haidt uses the term 'intuition' for beliefs
that result from the intuitive processes.



Haidt's empirical claim is that moral judgments are for the most
part intuitions proximally caused by *gut reactions*, quick and
automatic flashes of affect. In support of this, manipulating affect
has been shown to make a difference to people's judgments
(Wheatley and Haidt 2005), and areas of the brain associated with such
affective responses found active when people make judgments (e.g.,
Greene and Haidt 2002; Moll, de Oliveira-Souza, and Eslinger 2003).
Further, in some studies, people are easily dumbfounded when
challenged on their moral views: they cannot (Haidt claims) give
reasons for why they disapprove of harmless sibling incest, for
example (Haidt 2001). On Haidt's somewhat pessimistic picture,
the role of reason is for the most part lawyerly rationalization of
the pre-existing gut reactions, in particular in a social context. In
the same vein, Joshua Greene (2008) claims on the basis of brain
imaging and reaction-time data (Greene et al. 2001), among others,
that it is in particular *deontological* judgments, such as the
thought that it is wrong to kill one person as a means to save five,
that are driven by affective gut reactions, which philosophers like
Kant subsequently try to rationalize. Greene holds that
*utilitarian* judgments, in contrast, result from conscious
reasoning. However, Guy Kahane (2012) argues persuasively that once we
look at broader data, we see that the difference between Type I and
Type II processes corresponds to the difference between intuitive and
counterintuitive judgments rather than deontological and utilitarian
content.



Where the early sentimentalists gesture towards divine providence when
it comes to explaining why we have a moral sense and why it approves
of things like benevolence, Haidt's story appeals to evolution.
He believes we are pre-programmed to respond to suffering with
compassion, the arrogance of subordinates with contempt, cheating with
anger, and impurity with disgust, for example. These culturally
fine-tuned affective responses are in turn distally explained by
having been evolutionary "adaptations to long-standing threats
and opportunities in social life" of our ancestors (Haidt
2012).



One challenge for Haidt's view is that unlike classical
sentimentalist views, it doesn't distinguish between moral and
non-moral evaluations. When talking about intuitions in his sense, he
says that



> 
> 
> the brain has a kind of gauge (sometimes called a
> "like-ometer") that is constantly moving back and forth,
> and these movements, these quick judgments, influence whatever comes
> next. (Haidt and Bjorklund 2008: 186-187)
> 
> 
> 



But we don't regard everything we dislike, or even everything
that makes us angry, as morally wrong. The story is at least
incomplete. Further, as a psychologist, Haidt naturally offers no
*a priori* arguments against the possibility of reason yielding
moral verdicts. All he can claim is that people don't
*usually* engage in reasoning first. Even if that is true, it
doesn't follow that people's judgments are not shaped by
reasoning or that they are insensitive to reasons. Indeed, Daniel
Jacobson (2012) points out that the evidence that people lack reasons
for their judgments is in fact very thin. In Haidt's most famous
example, even harmless sibling incest involves a significant
*risk* of suffering emotional repercussions (Railton 2014:
849). The vibe at your sister's wedding three years later might
not be quite the same. People might not be able to immediately
articulate such reasons, but that doesn't show that they were
not responding to them. Rather than being mere rationalization,
*post hoc* reasoning might then be a process of trying to
articulate the considerations one's intuitive judgments were
responsive to.



Recently, Joshua May (2018) has challenged the primacy of affect in
moral thought on empirical grounds. He argues that the best evidence
we have supports only a more modest role for emotions as facilitating
(or hindering) information processing. May notes that manipulating
incidental emotions - that is, emotions that are not directed
towards or aroused by the object of moral judgment, such as disgust
caused by foul odors (Schnall et al. 2008) - has only been found
to have minor effects. He rightly points out that such scarce and
minor effects don't support any claims about a leading or
essential role for affect in moral judgment. Following Heidi Maibom
(2005), he also argues that problems in the moral judgment of
psychopaths are better explained by rational rather than emotional
deficits.



May holds that instead of mere feeling, moral judgments are typically
explained by reasoning, albeit often reasoning of an automatic and
unconscious Type I variety. He supports this claim by appeal to many
studies that suggest that moral judgments are sensitive to features
like intentionality (see Young and Tsoi 2013 for an overview) and the
use of personal force (see Greene et al. 2009), and more generally the
extent of attributed agential involvement. As May summarizes the view,
"We often rapidly infer the moral status of an action in part by
relying on general principles that identify as morally relevant
various features of agents, actions, and outcomes.... This is a
matter of reasoning or inference, whether implicit, explicit, or some
combination of the two across time" (2018: 70).



While May's data and arguments are a healthy corrective for some
exaggerated forms of explanatory sentimentalism, such as
Haidt's, it is unclear how much sentimentalists should worry
about them. After all, the key evidence for explanatory sentimentalism
is not meant to come from *incidental* emotions, but from the
fact that we, say, disapprove of the sort of things that independently
arouse negative emotion. The sentimentalist can relatively easily
explain the targets of our condemnation by appealing to independent
emotional reactions, while for the rationalist, it is merely a
coincidence that apes get mad about the very same sort of things that
our reason tells us to disapprove of. And it is compatible with
explanatory sentimentalism that people *first* reason
(consciously or not) about non-moral facts and then respond with
emotion, which is still needed to cross the gap between non-moral and
moral judgment. As Hume has it, although sentiment renders the final
verdict, "in order to pave the way for such a sentiment, and
give a proper discernment of its object, it is often necessary, we
find, that much reasoning should precede, that nice distinctions be
made, just conclusions drawn" (1751: 15).


### 2.2 Sympathy/Empathy-Based Theories



What is distinctive of David Hume and Adam Smith is that although they
occasionally use the term 'moral sense', they do not take
it to be a primitive, innate capacity, but rather aim to explain its
workings in terms of more basic mechanisms, in particular what they
call 'sympathy'. In contemporary use, the term is often
used for a kind of concern for another. But Hume, Smith, and Sophie de
Grouchy (1798), in different ways, used it for sharing what another
feels. The contemporary term for this kind of mechanism is
*empathy* (for the distinction between sympathy and empathy,
see Darwall 1998; Sober and Wilson 1998; Fleischacker 2019). This
section will nevertheless use the older term, since what the classical
sentimentalists talk about isn't always quite
'empathy' either.



Following Hutcheson, Hume rejects reason or reasoning as the source of
moral distinctions (judgments or facts). Briefly, he believes that
reason alone cannot *motivate* us in the way that morality does
(*motivation scepticism*), and that reasoning alone cannot tell
us what's right or wrong (*content scepticism*). For
discussion, see
 Supplement on Anti-Rationalist Arguments.



On Hume's positive account, moral approval is caused, if not
constituted, by pleasure of a special kind, or a form of love towards
the agent when considering their character impartially:



> 
> 
> 'Tis only when a character is considered in general, without
> reference to our particular interest, that it causes such a feeling or
> sentiment, as denominates it morally good or evil. (T 472)
> 
> 
> 



But why does contemplation of a character without reference to our own
interest give us pleasure in the first place? Not because we're
simply equipped with an innate moral sense, but because of the
operation of sympathy, which offers a more parsimonious and systematic
explanation of the phenomena. For Hume, its mechanism is a kind of
analogical association from the effects of a passion to their cause or
vice versa, which generates the same passion in the observer (T 576).
Grouchy observed that the importance of memory in this process has
political implications: the privileged who skip the "school of
pain and adversity" will be lacking in compassion (1798: 62). On
Hume's account, once the pleasures and pains of others are
communicated to us, we are ourselves pleased in a special way when
contemplating those durable character traits that reliably please
others. This special kind of pleasure 'denominates' the
trait as virtuous or vicious:



> 
> 
> When any quality, or character, has a tendency to the good of mankind,
> we are pleased with it, and approve of it; because it presents the
> lively idea of pleasure; which idea affects us by sympathy, and is
> itself a kind of pleasure. (T 580)
> 
> 
> 



Hume notes two ways in which our moral approval diverges from what
causes sympathetic pleasure, however. First, what comes naturally to
us is taking on the feelings of the near and the dear, those who are
close to or similar to us and those we care about. (This observation
of bias inherent in empathy has recently been rediscovered by Prinz
2011 and Bloom 2017.) Yet we can also approve of the virtues of
distant strangers, even enemies. Second, we sometimes approve of
"virtue in rags": an honest and generous person, who is
(say) imprisoned and thus in no position to benefit others, is not
considered morally worse than someone with the same traits who
actually does please those around her.



Hume's answer to these challenges is that we *correct*
our initial responses for bias and the influence of moral luck, as
well as our present disposition - not because we aim for some
standard that is independent of our responses, but because of
"many contradictions to our sentiments in society and
conversation" (T 583) that result from relying on
"momentary appearances" (T 582). After all, when someone
uses moral language and calls someone "vicious",
"odious", or "depraved", she "expresses
sentiments, in which, he expects, all his audience are to concur with
him" (Hume 1751: 75). It is this expectation of concurrence
characteristic of moral sentiments that pushes us towards a
"common point of view" (ibid.) in moral judging, a point
of view that abstracts from our particular interests, current
disposition, and relation to the agent, and focuses on the effects of
the person's character traits on people around them (T
602-3) (see Sayre-McCord 1994).



Adam Smith presents a different theory about the nature and mechanisms
of sympathy and consequently moral and evaluative approval. For Smith,
the key mechanism of sympathy is imaginatively projecting oneself in
another's position, or what would now be called
*simulation* (Gordon 1995), rather than mere emotional
contagion, association, or inference. In Smith's official
definition, sympathy consists in concord between what one takes the
other to actually feel and what one feels oneself as a result of
putting oneself in the other's shoes. Approbation is the
pleasant feeling that results from perceiving this rough coincidence
(TMS 56 note a), perhaps because it simultaneously confirms our common
humanity and the distinctness of our perspectives (Fleischacker 2019,
28-31). Although this account of 'sense of
propriety' is sometimes described as Smith's theory of
moral judgment, he regards it as a perfectly general account of
evaluation, encompassing belief, sense of humour, or business
decisions. When it comes to judgments of moral merit or demerit, or
the qualities of deserving praise or blame, what counts is our
sympathy with the *gratitude* and *resentment* of those
affected by the action, on the one hand, and with the agent's
motives, on the other. Like Hume, Smith recognizes that moral approval
requires departing from one's personal point of view:



> 
> 
> But [resentment and gratitude], as well as all the other passions of
> human nature, seem proper and are approved of, when the heart of every
> impartial spectator entirely sympathizes with them, when every
> indifferent by-stander entirely enters into, and goes along with them.
> (TMS 81)
> 
> 
> 



The figure of an impartial spectator also plays a key role in
Smith's account of self-directed moral judgment or conscience.
Because we want others to sympathize with us (and thus approve of us),
we strive to bring our passions to a level that an imagined informed
and impartial spectator could sympathize with (Kopajtic 2020). Antti
Kauppinen (2010: 236-239; 2014a) argues that this can be seen in
contemporary psychological terms as a form of emotion regulation by
means of refocusing attention and reappraising the meaning of the
action.



Michael Slote's recent sentimentalist account picks up the
thread of empathy/sympathy-based theories, along with
Hutcheson's emphasis on benevolence. Slote's claim is that
moral approval is constituted and explained by empathizing with an
agent's motives:



> 
> 
> [I]f agents' actions reflect empathic concern for (the well
> being or wishes of) others, empathic beings will feel warmly or
> tenderly toward them, and such warmth and tenderness empathically
> reflect the empathic warmth or tenderness of the agents. ...
> [S]uch empathy with empathy ... also constitutes moral approval,
> and possibly admiration as well, for agents and/or their actions.
> (Slote 2010: 34-35)
> 
> 
> 



Some people's actions exhibit empathy toward others. This
empathy is a warm feeling. When we empathize with the agent, we come
to share this warm feeling. And this empathic warm feeling constitutes
moral approval. In contrast, unempathetic actions manifest a coldness
towards others. Since moral approval and disapproval "enter into
the making of moral judgments", Slote believes empathy can
*explain* our intuitions and judgments.



Slote's account has been criticized from within the
sentimentalist camp. Jesse Prinz (2011) notes that the view has
difficulty with disapproval: failure to empathize is not the same
thing as disapprobation, nor does it have the same kind of
motivational effect. Julia Driver (2011) points out that people with
empathy deficits can nevertheless morally approve or disapprove of
things. Slote's view also faces challenges of both necessity and
sufficiency, in that it seems possible that we approve of un-empathic
actions (such as doing something out of a sense of duty, or doing the
right thing for the wrong reason), and that there are empathetic
actions we don't approve of (such as empathy-motivated helping
of one victim at the expense of many others who are less close or
similar to the agent).



Empathic feelings may enter into the explanation of moral judgment
more indirectly, however. Shaun Nichols's (2004) version of
sentimentalism shares the Humean ambition of explaining moral thought
without assuming an innate moral capacity or sense. Instead, Nichols
assumes that normal people have a generic capacity to be guided by
norms or rules of various kinds, and certain non-moral emotional
dispositions, such as the disposition to have an aversive response to
suffering in others. His hypothesis is that we regard a rule-violation
as moral (and thus wrong independently of what anyone tells us to do)
rather than conventional (something that owes its status to being
prohibited by some local *de facto* authority) when the rule in
question is *affect-backed*, that is, when it prohibits actions
of a type that we independently have a negative emotional reaction
towards (Nichols 2004: 62).



One important source of support for this claim is that people who lack
the relevant affective response, such as psychopaths, appear to fail
at distinguishing between moral and conventional rules, even if their
rational capacities are intact (cf. Aaltola 2014). At the same time,
Nichols holds that particular moral judgments can be simply
applications of affect-backed rules, and don't require on-line
affective response. This indirect explanatory sentimentalism was
anticipated by some earlier sentimentalists. Adam Smith noted that we
make the "greater part of" our moral judgments on the
basis of general rules, which are for him based on induction from
emotional responses to particular cases (TMS 377). Similarly, Grouchy
holds that reflection generates abstract and general moral sentiments,
which we obey "without thinking back to the way in which they
were first formed and all that justified them" (1798: 112).
Edward Westermarck held that many judgments are "applications of
some accepted general rule", whose acceptance is ultimately
explained by the existence of an "emotional sanction" in
the judge's mind (Westermarck 1906: 6).



Nichols believes that his sentimental rules account also offers an
explanation of universality of certain norms. We do not have to assume
that people have an innate tendency to regard causing harm to
innocents as morally wrong. Instead, it is plausible that of the
various norms that different societies have come up with, those that
resonate with our non-moral emotional dispositions enjoy a higher
'cultural fitness' (Nichols 2004: 127) and thus become
more prevalent over time. Since we can account for (nearly)
pan-cultural moral rules as well as moral judgment without appeal to
dedicated innate mechanisms, Nichols (2005) concludes that morality is
an evolutionary by-product rather than an adaptation.


## 3. Judgment Sentimentalism



Sentimentalism is commonly understood as a thesis about moral
*judgments* or *concepts*. Moral *thought*
involves or refers to our sentiments, and moral *language*
somehow or other expresses or refers to sentiments. Judgment
sentimentalism comes both in non-cognitivist and cognitivist
varieties.


### 3.1 Non-Cognitivist Sentimentalism



On pure non-cognitivist views, moral thoughts are constituted by
sentiments. To think that *X* is wrong is, at least in part, to
have a negative sentiment towards *X*, or perhaps to have a
higher-order positive attitude towards a negative sentiment towards
*X*. Here is the most famous argument in favour of
non-cognitivism:



*The Argument from Internalism*


1. Moral judgments are intrinsically at least defeasibly motivating.
(Weak Internalism)
2. Only
 non-cognitive psychological states with a world-to-mind direction of
fit are intrinsically motivating; beliefs, which have a mind-to-world
direction of fit, do not alone motivate (The Humean Theory of
Motivation).
3. So, moral judgments are (at least in part) constituted by
non-cognitive psychological states.



The argument is clearly related to arguments from practicality against
rationalism (see the
 Anti-Rationalism Supplement).
 The first premise postulates an internal connection between moral
judgment and motivation. Weak Internalists believe, roughly, that
judging that I morally ought to stop downloading movies entails that I
have at least some motivation to stop downloading movies. Otherwise I
don't genuinely regard the action as morally wrong. My moral
convictions are manifest in my motivational tendencies, if not always
in action. Why? Basically, because the point of thinking in moral
terms isn't to discover some facts about the universe, but to
get ourselves to act in ways that allow us to live together and reap
the benefits of cooperation. Simon Blackburn (1988) and Allan Gibbard
(1990) point out that any evolutionary benefits moral thought might
have depend on its practicality. (See also Lenman (1999) and the entry
on
 Moral Motivation.)



The second premise of the argument is a thesis in the philosophy of
mind. Some mental states, like descriptive beliefs, represent how
things are, and have a *mind-to-world direction of
fit**.* Other mental states are not descriptive, though
they may have the same propositional content as beliefs. If you want
your car to work and notice that it refuses to start, your desire does
not tend to go out of existence, unlike your belief that your car is
working (Smith 1987). Rather, it moves you to do something you believe
would *make* the car work, such as call a mechanic. It has a
*world-to-mind direction of fit*. Although particular ways of
drawing the distinction remain controversial (see e.g. Sobel and Copp
2001; Frost 2014), the key idea that descriptive beliefs themselves
are motivationally inert is widely accepted.



Finally, the conclusion comes in different strengths. Traditional
non-cognitivists believe that moral judgments simply are non-cognitive
states. But what kind of states? They are clearly not mere desires,
since we can desire things we don't regard as desirable. Early
non-cognitivists talked about a special 'ethical feeling'
(Ayer 1936), identified in *phenomenological* terms. But there
doesn't seem to be any common phenomenological character to all
the various moral thoughts we have. So contemporary non-cognitivists
appeal to the *functional role* of moral attitudes instead, to
their distinctive part in our overall psychology. Blackburn's
(1998) idea is that moral thoughts involve higher-order attitudes
towards desires and preferences. When I morally disapprove of
polluting the environment, I don't just desire not to pollute --
I also applaud others who are averse to it and dislike those who fail
to share my desire (Blackburn 2002: 125). When I morally disapprove of
something, I also have these higher-order attitudes towards my own
attitudes: I prefer not to prefer what I disapprove of, which explains
a defeasible link to motivation.



Gibbard (1990), in turn, identifies narrowly moral judgments with
judgments about the rationality of guilt and resentment. To think that
stealing is wrong, for example, is to think it rational to feel guilt
for stealing and resent others for stealing (in the absence of
conditions like ignorance or force that excuse the agent). To think
that something is rational or makes sense, in turn, is to accept norms
that permit it. On Gibbard's original account, norm-acceptance
is a basic kind of non-cognitive state, an evolutionary adaptation for
linguistically achieved coordination that is not analyzable in terms
of other attitudes (1990: ch. 4). It is non-cognitive, because it is
essentially a motivational tendency to act or feel in ways that we are
prepared to avow in discussion about what to do. In later work, he
considers normative thoughts as *contingency plans* that settle
what to do in actual and non-actual situations (Gibbard 2003). These
thoughts are defeasibly motivating, just as the Argument from
Internalism requires.


### 3.2 Expressivism



The above argument concerns moral judgment as a psychological state, a
kind of thought. But the term 'judgment' is sometimes also
used for linguistic utterances. Likewise, the term
'non-cognitivism' is also used for a thesis about moral
language. To minimize confusion, this entry will talk about moral
terms, utterances, and sentences when it comes to linguistic entities,
and reserve the term 'expressivism' for the linguistic
thesis. Bearing these terminological stipulations in mind, any
argument for non-cognitivism can be extended to an argument for
expressivism with the addition of some deceptively simple
premises:


4. The meaning of a sentence is determined by the mental state it
expresses. (Metasemantic Psychologism)
5. Moral sentences express moral judgments.
6. So, moral sentences express (at least in part) non-cognitive
psychological states.
7. So, the meaning of moral sentences is determined (at least in
part) by non-cognitive psychological states.



Premise 4 is the key addition. It is not the only way to arrive at a
broadly expressivist theory in ethics - earlier forms, such as
emotivism (Ayer 1936; Stevenson 1944) and universal prescriptivism
(Hare 1952) relied on the problematic assumption that the meaning of a
sentence is to be understood on the basis of the effects it is used to
achieve or the speech act it is used to perform. Metasemantic
Psychologism doesn't make this assumption, but simply derives
the meaning of linguistic expressions from the thoughts that they
express, rather than their truth-conditions or the possible worlds
they rule out, as standard semantics does (Gibbard 1990: 92)



It is essential to understanding expressivism that *expressing*
a thought is not the same thing as *reporting* a thought
- when I say "The sun is shining", I
*express* my belief that the sun is shining, rather than
*reporting* it, for which I'd have to say "I
believe that the sun is shining." Mark Schroeder (2010) has
recently emphasized that the core expressivist claim is that the
sentence "Murder is wrong" is related to disapproval of
murder in just the same way as the sentence "The sun is
shining" is related to the belief that the sun is shining,
whatever that is. The only difference is that the expressed state is
non-descriptive. This has significant semantic consequences, to be
sure. Famously, since non-descriptive states lack truth-conditions,
(pure) expressivists cannot explain the inferential relations among
them in the usual way, but rather in terms of agreement or
disagreement in attitudes (Stevenson 1937, Gibbard 2003). Attempts to
do so have proven controversial, to say the least. For discussion, see
the entry on
 Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism.



Although it is definitive of expressivism that the meanings of moral
sentences are explained without appealing to their truth-conditions,
it is important to note that contemporary expressivists do not deny
that it makes sense to talk about moral truth or even moral facts. But
for them, doing so is just a different way of expressing first-order
ethical views. As Blackburn puts it:



> 
> 
> To say that an ethical view is true is just to reaffirm it, and so it
> is if we add the weighty words 'really',
> 'true', 'fact', and so on. To say that it is
> objectively true is to affirm that its truth does not vary with what
> we happen to think about it, and once more this is an internal,
> first-order ethical position. (Blackburn 1998: 296)
> 
> 
> 



Making sense of the action-guiding character of moral language is not,
of course, the only motivation for expressivism. Another important
part of the case for it is the Argument from Moral Supervenience,
originally made by Blackburn (1971; 1985), which claims, roughly, that
expressivists can best explain why it is a conceptual truth that
descriptively identical worlds must be morally identical. For more,
see the entry on
 Supervenience in Ethics.


### 3.3 Cognitivist Sentimentalism: Subjectivism and Ideal Dispositionalism



Sentimentalists need not think that moral judgments just are
sentiments or attitudes of some sort. Cognitivist sentimentalists
think they are descriptive *beliefs* about sentiments or the
disposition to cause sentiments. (I'll explore further varieties
below.) The related semantic view is that moral sentences are about
the speaker's (or someone else's) sentiments or
dispositions to cause sentiments.



The simplest semantic account along these lines is *Speaker
Subjectivism*, according to which the truth condition of an
utterance of "Stealing is wrong" is that the speaker
disapproves of stealing. This disapproval need not consist simply in a
negative sentiment towards stealing, but may also be thought of as
endorsement of a moral standard or norm that prohibits stealing. In
other words, the speaker *reports* the same attitude that
expressivists say the sentence *expresses*. This view is
suggested by some things that Hume says, in particular the
following:



> 
> 
> [W]hen you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean
> nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a
> feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it. (T
> 469)
> 
> 
> 



For Speaker Subjectivism, there is a non-cognitive element to moral
judgment, but moral sentences can nevertheless be given standard
truth-conditional semantics. Its attraction is thus making sense of
judgment internalism without the need for non-standard semantics or
metasemantics. A generalized version of Speaker Subjectivism is
*Metaethical Contextualism*, according to which the standard
relative to which something is said to be right or wrong need not be
the speaker's own, but is instead determined by the context of
utterance, in something like the way that the context fixes the
content of a tacitly indexical sentence like "Zheng is
tall" (Dreier 1990; Bjornsson and Finlay 2010). So just
like in uttering "Zheng is tall", we might say that Zheng
is tall *for a child*, in uttering "Stealing is
wrong" we might say that stealing is wrong *by the standards
you and I accept*, for example.



A basic objection to these views is the Missing Disagreement Problem
(Moore 1912). Suppose that Ann says "Eating people is
wrong" and Beth, a committed cannibal, replies "No, eating
people is not wrong." According to simple Speaker Subjectivism,
what Ann said is true if and only if Ann disapproves of eating people,
and what Beth said is true if and only if Beth doesn't
disapprove of eating people. It can obviously be simultaneously true
that Ann disapproves of eating people and Beth doesn't, so their
utterances don't contradict each other. Indeed, since what Ann
says is true on this picture, it looks like it should be possible for
Beth to say "What Ann says is true, but eating people is not
wrong". So it seems they don't disagree any more than if
Ann had said "My name begins with an A" and Beth had said
"No, my name begins with a B". Yet they do, so Speaker
Subjectivism has a problem.



Contemporary subjectivists and contextualists are well aware of this
problem and offer various suggestions to solve it. For example,
Gilbert Harman's pragmatist response holds that when we say that
something is wrong, we *presuppose* that the hearer shares our
moral standards (Harman 2000: 36). Our conversation is about what
follows from our standard, which is something something about which we
can genuinely disagree.



Whatever we otherwise make of Harman's suggestion, the pragmatic
strategy appears to unduly restrict the scope of possible
disagreement, since it is possible to disagree with people who are not
part of the conversation (Bjornsson and Finlay 2010). In
response, subjectivists and contextualists sometimes give up the
notion that disagreement consists of contradictory beliefs, and
account for it in terms of the originally non-cognitivist notion of
*disagreement in attitude* (e.g. Finlay 2017). Assume, for
simplicity, that disapproval involves desire to have the agent
punished, and approval a desire not to have the agent punished. Then,
even if Ann's and Beth's utterances don't contradict
one another, they disagree in the sense that it is not possible to
simultaneously satisfy the desires entailed by the truth of their
sincere utterances when they issue a verdict on cannibalism. If Ann
gets her way, Beth doesn't, and vice versa.



Another question for Speaker Subjectivism is that the subject matter
of the moral thought is not distinctively evaluative: if Ellen is a
Presbyterian and thinks that stealing is wrong, the content of
Ellen's thought might be just that stealing is such as to arouse
disapproval in Presbyterians. Someone else could have a thought with
the same content without thereby making a moral evaluation of stealing
(Egan 2012: 566). The evaluative aspect is *external* to the
belief, and consists rather in something like identifying as a
Presbyterian, which involves a desire-like attitude towards avoiding
things that don't fit the Presbyterian moral code. Consequently,
there is no commitment to a distinct kind of evaluative fact. In Jamie
Dreier's (2009) view, this is an advantage rather than a problem
for the account.



*Ideal Dispositionalist* views evade problems with Speaker
Subjectivism with two moves. The first is idealization: the beliefs
and sentences refer not to the speaker's views, but to those of
a suitably *idealized* subject (perhaps an idealized version of
the speaker). At the level of logical form, ought claims may have a
tacit argument place for a standard, just as for contextualists
- but the standard is context-invariant. The second is
dispositionalization: the reference is not to anyone's actual
sentiments, but to sentiments they *would* have in suitable
circumstances. Suggestions of this type of view can be found in Hume
and Smith - recall their talk of *correcting* our
sentiments by reference to the common point of view or the impartial
spectator's response. Roderick Firth's (1952) *Ideal
Observer Theory* is a more contemporary variant of this kind of
view. In general form, it is as follows:



> 
> 
> To judge that *X* has a moral property is to believe that any
> ideal observer would have an ethically significant reaction to
> *X* in conditions ideal for doing so.
> 
> 
> 



By an 'ethically significant reaction' Firth means



> 
> 
> the kind of moral experience which we take to be evidence, under ideal
> conditions, for the truth of our ethical judgments. (Firth 1952:
> 326)
> 
> 
> 



He leaves it open whether the reaction is sentimental, so there are
possible variants of Ideal Observer Theory that are not
sentimentalist. In specifying the characteristics of the ideal
observer, Firth uses a 'pragmatic methodology' of



> 
> 
> examining the procedures which we actually regard, implicitly or
> explicitly, as the rational ones for deciding ethical questions.
> (ibid. 332)
> 
> 
> 



If we actually disqualify someone's ethical verdicts because of
ignorance of non-moral facts, failure to vividly imagine what
something would actually be like, partiality, non-moral emotions, and
inconsistency, this shows that we implicitly regard moral judgements
as valid only when made by an omniscient, omnipercipient, impartial,
dispassionate, consistent, but otherwise normal judge (ibid.
333-345). These are then the characteristics of the ideal
observer.



Ideal Dispositionalist views avoid the Missing Disagreement Problem.
For example, if Ann believes that any informed impartial spectator
would disapprove of *X* and Beth believes it's not the
case that any informed impartial spectator would not disapprove of
*X*, their beliefs contradict each other and they
straightforwardly disagree.



However, this victory for idealized views is achieved by detachment
from people's own actual attitudes, which leads to the Missing
Motivation Problem. The attraction that simple subjectivism,
contextualism, and non-cognitivism share is that if moral thoughts
consist in attitudes or beliefs about standards one endorses, their
putative non-contingent connection to motivation is unproblematic. But
how could *beliefs* about dispositions to cause sentimental
responses in ideal subjects necessarily motivate ordinary thinkers,
given the Humean Theory of Motivation (Mackie 1980: 69)? Some might
have the desire to do what an impartial spectator would approve of,
but what about those who don't? As Richard Joyce (2013) has put
it, it appears that one may be just as unmoved by such thoughts as by
the belief that drunken Vikings would mock the performance of an
action, and quite rationally so.



Michael Smith (1994; 1997) offers a distinctively *rationalist*
response to this challenge by appealing to the idea that an agent is
more rational in the sense of coherence if she is motivated to do what
she believes her ideally rational and informed advisor would want her
to do. It merits further exploration whether a sentimentalist view
could make a similar move. For example, an Adam Smithian suggestion
would be that an agent who believes that any impartial spectator would
desire her to do *A* and fails to desire to *A* is less
coherent than one who combines the belief with a desire to *A*.
This assumes that our beliefs about an ideal spectator's
attitudes are inherently authoritative for us (and hence unlike
beliefs about Vikings), as Smith indeed thinks.


### 3.4 Cognitivist Sentimentalism: Sensibility Theory and Neo-Sentimentalism



The cognitivist sentimentalist views discussed in the previous section
appealed to beliefs about *dispositions* to cause sentimental
responses in certain kind of subjects. The other main type of
cognitivist view, *sensibility theory*, regards judgments as
beliefs about *merited* responses (Wiggins 1987; McDowell
1998). Sensibility theory begins with an analogy with secondary
quality concepts, such as colour concepts. These concepts, according
to many, are concepts of mind-dependent qualities. Sensibility
theorists believe they are partially analogous with value concepts,
the difference being that value is



> 
> 
> conceived to be not merely such as to elicit the appropriate
> 'attitude' ... but rather such as to *merit*
> it. (McDowell 1985: 143)
> 
> 
> 



When we conceive of value in this way, we perceive there to be a
*reason* for, say, admiring or emulating someone (McDowell
1979).



This state of perceiving or conceiving of there being a reason is a
belief of a unique and controversial sort. According to John McDowell
(1978), it can explain a virtuous person's action without the
help of a related desire playing a causal role (although we can
rightly attribute a desire to a person as a *consequence* of
their being motivated by the perception of a reason). McDowell thus
rejects the Humean Theory of Motivation
 (premise 2
 in the Argument from Internalism). His arguments are inspired by his
reading of Aristotle rather than the Early Modern sentimentalist
tradition. Roughly, a virtuous person sees situations in a distinctive
way (McDowell 1979: 73), so that certain features, like
someone's need to know something, are *salient* to her,
while other concerns are *silenced*, and thus do not stand out
as calling for action. This 'moral vision' (Murdoch 1970)
then suffices to explain what the agent does.



A familiar objection is that it is possible for someone to share the
virtuous person's belief or "conception of the
situation" but nevertheless lack the motivation. McDowell denies
this:



> 
> 
> [T]he relevant conceptions are not so much as possessed except by
> those whose wills are influenced appropriately. (McDowell 1978:
> 87)
> 
> 
> 



One argument in favour of this is that there is a difference between
being virtuous and being continent. Both kinds of agents do the right
thing - for example, both remain faithful to their partner. But
the continent agent has to struggle with competing desires that cloud
their attention on the noble and the fine. She has to muster willpower
to keep from temptation. The difference between her and the virtuous
person, on this picture, is not in the first instance a conative one,
but a difference in what is salient, which is simultaneously a
cognitive and affective difference. In David McNaughton's terms,
"a way of seeing a situation may itself be a way of caring or
feeling" (McNaughton 1988: 113). A consequence of this view is
that the process of coming to appreciate practical reasons will
involve shaping the agent's motivational sensitivities and may
itself be akin to a non-rational conversion rather than to rational
deliberation from existing motives (McDowell 1995: 100-101).



Sensibility theories belong in the category Justin D'Arms and
Daniel Jacobson (2000a) have labelled *neo-sentimentalism*. It
is, officially, the view that evaluative *concepts* are
concepts of appropriateness of sentimental responses. (As will be
discussed in
 Section 4.3,
 neo-sentimentalists often make related metaphysical claims about
evaluative *properties*.) That is, to think that something is
shameful is to think that shame is appropriate or that there is
sufficient reason for it. A key motivation for neo-sentimentalism is
that making a judgment about desirability or shamefulness is distinct
from desiring or being ashamed. The point of using and introducing
normative concepts is to *guide* our attitudes rather than just
express or report them. (See the entry on
 Fitting Attitude Theories of Value.)


### 3.5 Hybrid and Pluralist Approaches



Hybrid theories solve the problem of fitting together the
representational and practical aspects of moral judgment by arguing
that both cognitive and non-cognitive states are in play somehow:
moral judgments have both a sentimental and a non-sentimental aspect.
Several options have been explored recently, including hybrid
expressivism, hybrid state theories, and moral thought pluralism,
which will be discussed below.



*Hybrid expressivism* comes in many varieties. Perhaps the
best-known is Michael Ridge's 'ecumenical
expressivism' (Ridge 2006). Take the judgment that I must tell
the truth to the judge. As a first approximation, such judgment
consists in approval of actions of a certain kind, and the belief that
telling the truth to the judge is an action of that kind (cf. Barker
2000). Maybe I approve of actions that maximize utility, and believe
that telling the truth to the judge maximizes utility. For Ridge
(2014), the non-cognitive element is embracing a normative perspective
that admits a set of standards as authoritative for practical
reasoning (in this case, a utilitarian one), and the cognitive one an
ordinary belief to the effect that those standards require telling the
truth.



Ridge argues that this type of view accounts for the attractions of
non-cognitivism, chiefly avoiding problematic ontological commitment
to non-deflationary moral facts and explaining practicality. When they
have a normative perspective that involves a desire-like attitude
towards what they believe to be required by certain standards,
practically rational agents form an instrumental desire to perform
such actions. The cognitive element of the judgment, in turn, serves
to explain the compositionality and inferential features of moral
language in the familiar truth-conditional fashion. For other versions
of expressivism that involve expressing suitably related desire-like
states and beliefs, see especially Boisvert (2008), Toppinen (2013),
and Schroeder (2013), and Fletcher and Ridge (eds.) (2014).



Jesse Prinz's (2007) account of moral judgment can be classified
as a *hybrid state theory*. The key to his view is his theory
of emotions (Prinz 2004), according to which they are perceptions of
patterns of bodily changes that represent what they are "set up
to be set off by" - what it is their function to detect
- just the same way as any other psychological states do on
teleological theories of representation. For Prinz, a moral
*sentiment* is a disposition to respond to certain actions with
a range of self- and other-directed blame- or praise-constituting
emotions, such as guilt, contempt, anger, and gratitude. A moral
*judgment* consists in the emotion that results from activating
a sentiment, such as anger at stealing or shame for fleeing. The anger
represents stealing as being such as to cause disapprobation in the
judge - that is, as morally wrong, according to Prinz's
relativist moral metaphysics
 (see Section 4.1).
 This means the judgment can be true or false (relative to a judge).
It also motivates punishing the agent. Other emotions, and hence
judgments, have different motivational effects - disgust may
motivate to avoid the agent instead. An evident challenge to this view
is thus the seeming possibility of our making non-emotional moral
judgments, as well as having non-judgmental moral emotions.



Finally, *moral thought pluralism*, according to which
different moral thoughts are constituted by different kinds of
psychological state, is a very new approach, although Elizabeth
Radcliffe (2006) argues that already Hume distinguished between two
kinds of moral thought. Linda Zagzebski (2003) and Uriah Kriegel
(2012) argue in different ways that there are two kinds of moral
judgment, one of which contains an affective element. Kriegel's
suggestion is that moral judgments that result from automatic,
non-conscious Type I processes consist in what Tamar Gendler (2008)
labeled "aliefs", cognitive states that affect our
behavior even if they go against our conscious judgments. Moral
judgments that result from conscious, effortful Type II thought are
for Kriegel ordinary beliefs with an objectivist phenomenology. Since
Kriegel accepts that ordinary beliefs don't motivate on their
own, on his view internalism is true only of moral aliefs. (For
skepticism about aliefs, see Sinhababu 2017: 129-134.)



In a similar vein, Kauppinen (2013; 2015) distinguishes between moral
*intuitions* or appearances, which are constituted by
(typically emotional) manifestations of sentiments we expect others to
share, and moral *judgments*, which are (implicitly) beliefs
about what would be permitted, required, or recommended by standards
an ideal subject would endorse. As with other appearances, the
existence of moral thoughts that are not judgments is clearest in
cases in which they clash with judgment, such as when it appears to
Huck Finn that it is wrong to reveal where Jim is, though he believes
he ought to do so. Kauppinen maintains that moral seemings have a
distinctive and diverse phenomenological and motivational character
(in contrast to, say, mathematical intuitions), which is best
explained by their being sentimental in nature. Motivational
internalism is thus true of moral appearances, as Kriegel holds for
moral alief.



One important contrast with Kriegel is that for Kauppinen, moral
appearances are not themselves judgments, but explain and potentially
justify moral beliefs. Moral appearances are thus taken to be in this
respect parallel to perceptual appearances - non-doxastic states
that attract assent to their propositional contents
 (see Section 5.1).
 (Graham Oddie (2005) defends a view according to which
*desires* constitute appearances of value, and play a similar
epistemic role.) Since appearances often cause moral beliefs, the two
kinds of thought often co-occur. But moral beliefs can be arrived at
and held independently of moral appearances. This accounts for the
force of motivational externalist objections and the possibility of
amoralism (though on Kauppinen's view, fully competent moral
agents are motivationally and deliberatively sensitive to beliefs with
such contents). Since the beliefs expressed by moral judgments are
ordinary descriptive ones, there is no need for a separate moral
semantics. Pluralist views thus split the difference between
non-cognitivist and cognitivist sentimentalism: each is, broadly
speaking, true of one important kind of moral thought (in contrast to
hybrid views, according to which *each* thought has both
non-cognitive and cognitive elements).


## 4. Metaphysical Sentimentalism



It is an appealing thought that moral (and other evaluative) facts and
properties are not just brutely out there independently of human
thought and sensibility. Take the evaluative property of being funny.
How could something be funny, if no human being was ever amused by it?
How could something be outrageous if it failed to generate any outrage
when known about, even in those who care about the victim? For
sentimentalists, value, including moral value, is
*anthropocentric* (D'Arms and Jacobson 2006).



Sentimentalists agree with error theorists that *sui generis,*
non-natural moral facts would be queer, and that mind-independent
natural facts are unfit for the role of moral facts. Non-cognitivist
judgment sentimentalists treat moral facts as *projections* of
moral attitudes. Although there is excellent reason to think Hume
wasn't a projectivist, he gave one of the classic formulations
in saying that taste



> 
> 
> has a productive faculty, and gilding and staining all natural
> objects, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises in a manner a new
> creation. (1751: 88)
> 
> 
> 



We take a sentimental response in ourselves, say envy, and attribute
to the worldly object a feature it doesn't really have, such as
being enviable.



Error theorists treat this projection as much the same as the
attribution of agency to planets in some cultures: a predictable false
belief. Contemporary expressivists, in contrast, believe that
attribution of moral facts and properties serves a purpose. It enables
us to express our commitments in a way that provides a focal point for
disagreement and debate. As discussed above, on deflationary views of
truth and facts, it is a first-order question whether some attribution
is in error or not (Blackburn 1998).



Most interestingly for moral metaphysics, many cognitivist judgment
sentimentalists think that moral judgments refer to moral and
evaluative facts that are metaphysically determined by some sort of
sentimental responses. According to such views, moral properties are
*response-dependent* in one way or another. For more, see the
 Response-Dependence Supplement.


### 4.1 Subjectivism and Relativism



The simplest way to link moral properties with our emotional or
conative responses would be to say that what makes something wrong is
that it is disapproved of, or bad that it is not desired. No one holds
a view this elementary, since it entails that an undetected murder
isn't morally wrong, for example. It also leaves undetermined
whose disapproval is at issue - what if one person disapproves
of an action but someone else approves? What I'll call Simple
Dispositionalist Subjectivism improves on it by indexing moral
properties to subjects and referring to *dispositions* to cause
responses rather than actual responses. What makes something
wrong-for-Mary, for example, is that Mary would disapprove of it, were
she aware of it. A related relativist proposal is that something is
wrong-for-Mary if and only if Mary accepts a normative standard or
framework that prohibits it (Harman 1975).



Thus, according to Jesse Prinz,



> 
> 
> An action has the property of being morally wrong (right) just in case
> there is an observer who has a sentiment of disapprobation
> (approbation) toward it. (Prinz 2007: 92)
> 
> 
> 



(Recall that for Prinz a sentiment is a *disposition* to feel
various emotions, so wrongness doesn't hang on someone actually
having a negative reaction to something.) But this claim is highly
implausible, given that wrongness is unindexed. It is true of almost
anything that someone will disapprove of it, and someone else will
approve of it. Thus, female genital cutting, for example, is
simultaneously *both* (absolutely) right and wrong. This is a
steep theoretical cost.



Simple Dispositionalist Subjectivism seems to entail that if we were
to begin to approve of slavery, slavery would come to be morally right
- it would be true that we would respond to it positively when
encountering it, say. But surely the correct description of such a
scenario would not be that slavery has become right, but that we have
become worse people (Broad 1944/5: 151). I call this the *Missing
Rigidity Problem*. The *Missing Fallibility Problem*, in
turn, is that a simple subjectivist view seems to leave insufficient
room for *mistakes* about value. If what's right is
determined by what I approve, I can only be mistaken about
what's right if I'm mistaken about what I in fact approve.
But it is very implausible that the remedy for moral mistakes is
better introspection.


### 4.2 Ideal Dispositionalism



Paralleling the case of moral judgment, problems with Simple
Subjectivism motivate a move to Ideal Dispositionalism. According to
this type of view, the extension of moral or evaluative properties is
determined by the sentimental responses of idealized subjects of some
sort, or responses under idealized conditions. Consequently, the
Missing Fallibility Problem is handily skirted: we can no doubt be
mistaken about what an ideal observer would approve.



Ideal Dispositionalist views also avoid the Missing Rigidity Problem.
Depending on the details, it may suffice to idealize the subject of
the sentiments: maybe no impartial spectator would approve of slavery,
even if the majority of people were to have a pro-slavery sensibility.
In case the idealization process is path-dependent (so that the
outcome depends on the unidealized initial sentiments of the subject),
Ideal Dispositionalists may make a rigidification move (Wiggins 1987:
206). They can say that the starting point for idealization is
constituted by *actually* normal sentiments, which include a
strong desire not to be at the mercy of the good will of others, among
others. Thus, rigidified ideal observers would disapprove of slavery,
even if it became statistically normal to approve of it. Peter Railton
(2003) objects to rigidification, because for him what is
intrinsically good or bad for someone is *relational*,
dependent on the match between their responses and their objects, much
as sweetness and bitterness are. Changes in people's
sensibilities *would* change what's good (or sweet) for
them. Still, something like cruelty wouldn't become right even
if it were generally approved of, since for Railton, its wrongness
hangs on badness of its consequences rather than our disapproval of
it, and pain that people are averse to would still be bad for
them.



Ideal Dispositionalism comes in several varieties, which often
correspond to views about the content of moral judgment (Firth 1952;
Lewis 1989; Smith 1994). Even if they avoid problems with fallibility
and rigidity, there are a number of further challenges. Four will be
discussed here.



First, the Euthyphro Dilemma derives its name from the Platonic
dialogue in which Socrates argues against a version of Divine Command
theory. Applied to ideal dispositionalism, it can be presented as
follows:


1. A subjectivist theory defines the subject whose responses
determine the extension of evaluative properties either in evaluative
terms, whose application presupposes mind-independent evaluative
truths, or in non-evaluative terms.
2. If the subject is defined in evaluative terms, the theory
collapses into mind-independent realism: it presupposes the existence
of at least some mind-independent evaluative truths.
3. If the subject is defined in non-evaluative terms, her responses
will be morally arbitrary and lacking in authority to determine the
extension of evaluative properties.
4. So, a subjectivist theory is either self-defeating (because of
collapse into realism) or false (because of yielding arbitrary
extensions for moral properties).



It is clear that subjectivist accounts with any kind of reductive
ambition cannot embrace the first horn of the dilemma (see below for
non-reductivist accounts). So it is the second horn that they must
face. What exactly is the problem with it? According to Russ
Shafer-Landau, it is that



> 
> 
> it may be impossible to craft a set of [non-evaluative] constraints on
> attitude formation such that the emerging attitudes yield
> prescriptions that match up with our views about what constitutes
> paradigmatically moral and immoral behaviour (Shafer-Landau 2003:
> 41)
> 
> 
> 



The challenge is that ideal observers, when defined in non-evaluative
terms, might approve of bad things, like ethnic cleansing, which would
counterintuitively entail that ethnic cleansing would be morally
right. However, Shafer-Landau admits that there is no knock-down
argument to the effect that any idealization in non-evaluative terms
will yield counterintuitive results.



Perhaps the real challenge that the Euthyphro poses concerns the
*normative* *authority* of the responses of any kind of
subject defined in non-evaluative terms. One way to develop this
challenge may be called the *Missing Normativity Problem*. Many
believe that moral rightness or wrongness are *categorically
reason-giving* features of actions. Everyone, regardless of their
interests and desires, has a reason to refrain from morally wrong
behaviour. Suppose, then, that to be wrong is to be such as to be
disapproved of by any ideal observer. On a reductivist view, this is a
natural property of the action, specified in non-normative terms. The
challenge is: why would such a natural property be categorically
reason-giving? Why should people care about doing only things that
would not be disapproved of by a hypothetical spectator?



As Mark Johnston puts it,



> 
> 
> To say that something would be valued under condition *K* is
> not thereby to commend it, but only to make a descriptive remark about
> its relation to certain psychological conditions. (Johnston 1989: 157;
> cf. Blackburn 1993: 274)
> 
> 
> 



These challenges may be ways of spelling out the force of G. E.
Moore's (1903) famous Open Question Argument: since it makes
sense to grant that some *X* would be disapproved of by any
impartial, informed, but otherwise normal observer, but nevertheless
deny that *X* is morally wrong, there is reason to think that
being disapproved of by an ideal observer is not the same thing as
being morally wrong. To be sure, the Open Question Argument is
contentious, and there are a number of standard responses: perhaps the
identity of the properties is *a posteriori*, like that of
water and H2O (Brink 1989), or perhaps it is an unobvious
conceptual truth that we can read off the platitudes surrounding our
concepts (Smith 1994). (See the entry on
 moral naturalism.)



The third issue is the Indeterminacy Problem. Given a characterisation
of an ideal observer, is there really such a thing as an action that
would be approved of by *any* ideal observer, given divergence
in pre-idealization attitudes? (Brandt 1955: 408) If ideal observers
disagree, there is, according to the theory, no fact of the matter.
This problem derives from an essential feature of idealized
dispositional theories: the idealization begins from what people are
actually like, and the process may not guarantee convergence in the
relevant respects.



Finally, the Unmotivated Idealization Problem is that it is not
obvious that the move from actual responses or dispositions to ideal
dispositions has a rationale that is consistent with the core ideas of
response-dependence theory. David Enoch (2005) has recently made a
forceful case for this problem. He notes that if there are
response-independent facts, it makes good sense to privilege responses
of certain kind of subjects in certain conditions, because such
features of subjects and conditions are conducive to tracking the
response-independent facts. But that option is obviously closed for
the ideal dispositionalist.



Enoch claims that there is no real alternative rationale that is not
ad hoc or that doesn't tacitly rely on response-independent
realism. For example, appealing to our actual justificatory practice,
in which we may privilege responses under full imaginative
acquaintance, for example, is not an option, since that practice is
itself best explained by the underlying assumption that there are
mind-independent moral facts (Enoch 2005: 774). However, Hume might
object that the rationale for stepping back from our actual
sentimental responses is avoiding "continual contradictions in
society and conversation" and other practical problems
 (see Section 2.2).
 If this is right, our actual justificatory practice and the
privileged place it gives to reflectively corrected responses thus has
an explanation and rationale that do not presuppose mind-independent
evaluative facts. In this vein, Kauppinen (2014b, 580) holds that
"An evaluative perspective is ideal or optimal when adopting it
most reliably avoids the practical problems caused by the uncorrected
attitudes". (See also Sobel 2009.)


### 4.3 Sensibility Theory and Neo-Sentimentalism



For sensibility theories, an evaluative property is not a disposition
to *cause* responses in us, but the property of
*meriting* a response from us. A sensibility theory version of
the response-dependence equation looks like this:



> 
> 
> *X* is *M* if and only if *X* *merits*
> *R* / any *virtuous* subject *S* would respond to
> *X* with *R* in *ideal* circumstances
> 
> 
> 



It is an obvious and familiar complaint against views of this type
that the analysis is *uninformative*. After all, normative
terms occur on both sides of the equation: the right-hand side refers
to *meriting* and *virtuous* subjects. There is no
attempt to reduce evaluative properties to non-evaluative ones.
Neither responses nor properties have metaphysical priority, but are
instead "siblings" (McDowell 1987). One argument in favour
of this is the claim that the relevant response cannot be identified
independently of the (concept of the) property (Wiggins 1987: 195).
Sensibility theorists nevertheless claim that the non-reductive
elucidation offers an advantage over primary quality views, according
to which moral properties have no essential relation to us (see Cuneo
2001 for a response).



Sensibility theories are a species of what is often called a Fitting
Attitudes (FA) Analysis of value (Rabinowicz and
Ronnow-Rasmussen 2004). The general form of an FA analysis is
the following:



> 
> 
> *X* is *E* if and only if, and because, *R* is an
> *appropriate* or *fitting* response to *X* /
> there is *sufficient reason* to respond to *X* with
> *R*.
> 
> 
> 



The 'because' indicates that the direction of metaphysical
explanation is from fittingness of attitudes to the property, and not
the other way: something is good because it is fitting to desire it,
and not fitting to desire because it is good. This rules out views on
which value and fitting attitudes go together, but claim that it is
value that makes the attitude fitting and not vice versa. Some
identify FA analyses with neo-sentimentalism, but this is a
theoretically unhelpful classification, since many forms of FA
analysis regard the appropriateness or fittingness of attitudes itself
as either a mind-independent normative fact that can be intellectually
intuited (such as Ewing 1948) or as a truth determined by what would
be rationally or reasonably accepted (such as Scanlon 1998). These FA
views thus significantly depart from the key motivations for
sentimentalism, and are better classified as FA variants of
non-naturalism and constructivism.



The specific features of sentimentalist FA analyses come out most
notably in the responses that sentimentalists can give to the
metaphysical echo of the Conflation Problem, namely the Wrong Kind of
Reasons problem. This is the problem that what makes a response
appropriate or gives sufficient reason for it may be something that
has nothing to do with the relevant value. If an evil demon threatens
to smite you unless you admire it for its threat, you may have
sufficient reason to admire the demon (Rabinowicz and
Ronnow-Rasmussen 2004). But that doesn't mean the demon
is admirable - quite the contrary. In the jargon, admiration is
not a *fitting* response to the demon, since it is appropriate
for the wrong kind of reason.



There are various proposals to distinguish between right and wrong
kinds of reasons for attitudes, not all of which are sentimentalist
(e.g., Parfit 2011). Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson (2000b)
present a distinctively sentimentalist alternative. Their piecemeal
solution appeals to *alethic* standards of correctness derived
from the content of the attitude in question. Assuming that an emotion
has a cognitive component that presents or construes things as being
in a certain way
 (see Section 5.1),
 it can be either accurate or inaccurate, depending on whether things
are that way. The right kind of reasons for or against the attitude
are those that bear on its accuracy. As they put it,



> 
> 
> An emotional episode presents its object as having certain evaluative
> features; it is unfitting ... when its object lacks those
> features. (2000b: 73)
> 
> 
> 



The example D'Arms and Jacobson use is envy. According to them,
it (broadly speaking) presents a rival in a negative light in virtue
of having a desirable possession. The right kind of reasons bearing on
whether a rival is enviable are thus those that have to do with what
she possesses and its desirability relative to what you have. If a
colleague gets a promotion you wanted, envy may be fitting in this
sense, and consequently, given a fitting attitudes account of
evaluative properties, the colleague will be enviable. This is the
case even if envy is morally or prudentially inappropriate - the
latter kind of reasons do not bear on the fittingness of envy.



An alternative development of the same sort of idea can be found in
Christine Tappolet's (2016) recent work. Tappolet holds that
instead of formulating fittingness in terms of reasons or normative
requirements of any kind, neo-sentimentalists can simply hold that,
say, Pierre is admirable, if and only if admiration is
*correct* in response to Pierre when contemplating him (2016:
87). Here correctness is a non-normative notion akin to truth:
emotions present things as being in a certain way, and they are
correct when things are indeed that way (see Section 5 for more
discussion). Tappolet contrasts this kind of *representational
neo-sentimentalism* with standard normative neo-sentimentalism.
The former, as such, has no reductive ambitions - it relates
value properties to correct responses, but doesn't claim that
Pierre is admirable *because* it is correct to admire him. If
anything, it is the other way around, which is why Tappolet thinks
that representational neo-sentimentalism is naturally paired with
realism about value (see also Oddie 2016). While normative
neo-sentimentalists take reasons for valuing to be provided by the
non-evaluative properties of the target (which leaves open the
possibility of reducing value to fitting attitudes), for Tappolet the
reasons for evaluative attitudes are provided by values themselves.
The outstanding question for the standard neo-sentimentalist strategy
is accounting for fittingness or reasons without assuming
response-independent values. Representational neo-sentimentalism, on
the other hand, leaves emotions in a primarily epistemic role -
as Tappolet has it, part of what it is to possess evaluative concepts
is to realize that they are canonically applied and justified on the
basis of emotional responses (2016: 99) (see again the discussion in
the next section).



Interestingly, Adam Smith can be seen to offer a kind of naturalistic
and sentimentalist account of fittingness in criticizing the
intuitionist FA analyses of his time:



> 
> 
> [T]here are some modern systems, according to which virtue consists in
> propriety; or in the suitableness of the affection from which we act,
> to the cause or object which excites it ... None of those systems
> either give, or even pretend to give, any precise or distinct measure
> by which this fitness or propriety of affection can be ascertained or
> judged of. That precise and distinct measure can be found nowhere but
> in the sympathetic feelings of the impartial and well-informed
> spectator. (TMS 346)
> 
> 
> 



A natural take on this is that Smith accepts the FA analysis that an
action is wrong if and only if it is fitting to resent the agent for
it, for example. But he then gives a distinctively sentimentalist cast
to what it is for something to be fitting. This normative fact
consists in the response being endorsed by an impartial and
well-informed spectator (Kauppinen 2014b).


## 5. Epistemic Sentimentalism



Epistemic sentimentalists hold that (some) emotions are sources of
moral knowledge or at least justification. Many of them believe the
stronger claim that emotional experiences are *necessary* for
coming to know basic moral truths, either because they are sources of
foundational justification or because justified moral beliefs must
cohere with certain emotional experiences. They thus reject both
intuitionist views, on which adequate understanding of self-evident
moral propositions suffices for justified belief (Audi 2013), and
rationalist accounts according to which pure practical reason can
yield moral knowledge. In the background are metaphysical and
explanatory arguments to the effect that moral truths aren't the
sort of relations or facts that reasoning can discover (see the
 Anti-Rationalism Supplement).
 Note that this is not to deny that we can reason *from* basic
moral truths to derivative ones, or that non-moral reasoning
can't play a role in moral knowledge. Nor need sentimentalists
claim that knowledge of formal moral truths, like the transitivity of
betterness, is grounded in emotions.



While epistemic sentimentalism has recently gained popularity,
it's good to bear in mind that its main claim is somewhat
counterintuitive. It is a common thought that emotions can lead us
astray in moral and prudential matters. We often come to realize
retrospectively that we misconceived of a situation as a result of
viewing it through the lens of jealousy, fear, or anger. It's
not just that emotions can lead us to act against our better judgment,
but they can result in false and unjustified evaluative beliefs.



Philosophers, too, have often seen emotions as epistemically
problematic. A very old thought that makes an appearance at least from
Plato onwards is that they are *disruptive* in preventing and
perverting rational consideration. To have this kind of effect,
emotions need not have any cognitive content - they could just
be mental or bodily disturbances.



More interesting criticisms of emotion do grant that they have
cognitive content, but maintain that they are nevertheless apt to
*mislead* us. Within the Western tradition, it is the Stoics
who are perhaps the most famous for condemning ordinary emotions for
this reason. In the background was their value theory, according to
which only virtue is good (and only vice bad), while worldly things
like illness or social success are indifferent (Long and Sedley 1987).
Since for them, our ordinary emotions from sadness to anger and love
are or involve judgments about the badness or goodness of worldly
things that are really indifferent, they are *false evaluative
judgments*, or impressions to assent to false judgments. A
structurally similar picture is offered by Buddhists, who see
especially negative emotions as arising from desires for and
attachments to things that are not of genuine worth (Flanagan
2016).



Given these concerns with disruption and misleading, it is fair to say
that epistemic sentimentalists have a presumption to overcome. The
next sections examine some attempts to do so. The third subsection
discusses the potential role of sentiments in epistemic contexts other
than basic justification, in particular in cases of moral
understanding and the possibility of acquiring moral knowledge by
testimony.


### 5.1 The Perceptual Model



Talk of a moral sense suggests an epistemic picture according to which
moral knowledge is similar to knowledge acquired by other senses. We
simply attend to something real or imagined, and immediately, without
any kind of reasoning, just know whether it's right or wrong,
just as we come to know the colour or shape of a car just by looking
at it. And it is no doubt often the case that belief in the presence
of the wrong-making natural properties (such as intentionally causing
excruciating pain to a whimpering dog) triggers an emotional reaction
in us. It is plausible, and supported by empirical data
 (see Section 2.1),
 that the emotional response often precedes and perhaps causes the
moral judgment. But is it a perception or something analogous?



In the case of ordinary perceptual experience, an object instantiates
an observable property, such as being red, and this causes us (in the
right way) to have a corresponding phenomenal representation of the
object, such as a visual experience of a red object in front of us
(Audi 2013). Many believe that this experience is not itself a belief:
I can believe that a stick in the water is straight while it
nevertheless perceptually appears to me that it is not straight.
However, ordinarily having a perceptual experience provides
justification for a corresponding belief, either because it presents
or represents things as being in a particular way (as epistemological
internalists think) or because it reliably informs us of them being
that way (as epistemological externalists think), or a combination of
these. Epistemologists debate whether justification requires only the
absence of defeaters or also some type of warrant to rule out
skeptical scenarios, and what needs to be added for a true belief to
amount to *knowledge*.



So is there such a thing as emotional moral perception? The answer
depends, in part, on the nature of emotions. On Hume's view, a
passion is "an original existence" which "contains
not any representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other
existence" (T 415). If this is the case, then emotional
experience cannot justify belief the same way contentful perceptual
experience does. However, most contemporary epistemic sentimentalists
reject Hume's theory of emotions. Instead, they subscribe to
some variety of a representational theory of emotions, motivated by
the thought that emotions can be assessed as appropriate or fitting or
even rational (de Sousa 1987). This suggests that emotions are
*about* something - that they have intentional
content.



One representational theory holds that emotions involve or consist in
a *judgment* that the target of the emotion (such as flying on
an airplane) has the property that is the *formal object* of
the emotion (such as being fearsome or dangerous in the case of fear)
(Kenny 1963; Lyons 1980). Sabine Roeser (2011) defends this type of
account in the moral case. According to her, moral emotions are
"at the same time both value judgments and affective
states" (Roeser 2011: 149). On her view, they constitute
intuitions just in the same sense as traditional intuitionists claim:
they are direct apprehensions of non-natural states of affairs. (This
is a clear case in which epistemic and metaphysical variants of
sentimentalism come apart.) Any view of this type faces the challenge
of explaining why our emotions would reliably track such non-natural
facts. The other worry is that value judgments in general are not
self-justifying, so it is not clear why judgments embedded in emotion
would justify further belief.



In any case, it is a well-known problem with judgmental theories of
emotion that emotions can be *recalcitrant*, that is, come
apart from our judgments. We can be worried in spite of judging that
everything is alright. Moreover, many think that children or animals
can have emotions without possessing evaluative concepts, and thus
without being capable of making evaluative judgments. Such
considerations lead many to regard emotions as being or containing or
being analogous to *perceptual experiences* (de Sousa 1987;
Tappolet 2000, 2011; Helm 2001; Prinz 2004, 2007; Zagzebski 2003;
Goldie 2007; Doring 2007; Wisnewski 2015). On this type of view,
emotions and perceptual experiences have many common features: they
are spontaneous (not under direct volitional control), informationally
encapsulated (that is, relatively independent from the subject's
beliefs and desires), have a characteristic phenomenology, and have
conceptual (and/or non-conceptual) content, thus representing or
construing the world as being in a certain way without involving
judgment or belief.



On perceptualist views, emotions are the closest thing we have to
acquaintance with value - for example, as Adam Pelser puts it,
"to experience something as funny just is to be amused by
it" (2014: 112). Just as colour-blind people may know on the
basis of testimony that an object is red without being acquainted with
its redness, a person who is incapable of awe may learn from others
that something is sublime while lacking an acquaintance with or direct
access to its sublimity (ibid.). Analogous claims have also been
defended about the nature of *desire*, which is held by many to
be a non-doxastic appearance of the good (Stampe 1987; Oddie 2005;
Tenenbaum 2007; Sinhababu 2017). Perceptualists tend to hold that the
distinctive feature of emotional perception is that the content is
evaluative, which in turn is often thought to explain the special
phenomenology. However, Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni (2015) have
recently argued that the evaluative character of emotions should be
understood in terms of bodily *attitudes* rather than
evaluative content (for criticism, see Mitchell forthcoming). (For
more on debates about the nature of emotion, see the
 entry on emotion.)



Given the perceptualist metaphysical claim about emotions, many have
argued for the following kind of epistemic thesis:



> 
> 
> Epistemic Emotional Perceptualism (EEP): Emotions are sources of
> immediate (non-inferential) prima facie (or defeasible) justification
> for evaluative propositions. (cf. Carter 2019)
> 
> 
> 



If Epistemic Emotional Perceptualism is true, emotions can play a
foundational role in moral epistemology - they (or their contents) can
potentially justify belief in moral propositions independently of the
contents of one's other beliefs, just as my perceptual
experience as of a black dog in front of me can potentially justify
belief in the corresponding proposition, regardless of what I believed
before (see e.g. Doring 2007, Pelser 2014). To be sure, it is
possible to hold a compromise position, according to which the
justification provided by emotions is sufficient to justify belief
only if it also coheres with one's other beliefs, as van Roojen
(2014) notes.



However, as Robert Cowan (2016) emphasizes, EEP isn't entailed
by perceptualism about emotion, since the metaphysical differences
between emotions and paradigm perceptual experiences might make for an
epistemic difference, as indeed many have argued. So it is worth
asking just why emotions would be sources of justification, even if
they are analogous to, or a distinct species of, perceptual
experience. Christine Tappolet argues that since prima facie
justification is such a minimal epistemic status, it is easy to
attain: "If you are afraid of a dog, it is surely something that
makes your belief that the dog is fearsome prima facie
justified." (Tappolet 2016: 40) However, if we are to be
justified in believing on the basis of emotional experience, whatever
justification they offer must be strong enough to suffice for belief.
Some principled explanation for this is needed. The simplest way would
be to hold that any appearance of things being in a certain way can
yield sufficient, if defeasible justification, as Michael
Huemer's (2001) *epistemic liberalism* has it. Insofar as
fear, for example, presents its target as being fearsome (or
dangerous), it would justify the corresponding evaluative belief in
the absence of defeaters (see Tucker (ed.) 2013).



While there is thus a plausible (if controversial) epistemic framework
that would account for EEP, there are a number of serious challenges
to it. After all, even proponents of the perceptualist account of
emotion grant that there are a number of notable differences between
emotions and sensory perceptual experiences (Tappolet 2016). Some of
these differences may be epistemically relevant. To begin with, there
seems to be an obvious difference in our everyday epistemic practice:
we don't typically ask for reasons for perceptual experiences,
but we do ask for reasons for emotions (Brady 2013). For example, if
you say you see a dog outside, I'm unlikely to ask
"Why?", while if you say you're afraid of the dog,
it makes perfect sense to ask the question. Conversely, if I ask you
why you think the bridge is dangerous, you're unlikely to say
"Because I'm afraid of it", while you might well
appealing to having seen the dog outside to justify your belief that
it is there. As Michael Brady puts it, unlike sensory perceptions,
emotions raise rather than silence justificatory demands (2013: 110).
What's more, he maintains, if an emotion like fear justified
belief about dangerousness, it would be objectionably self-justifying,
since danger merits fear, and "The very fact that I am afraid of
the dog cannot, by itself, be evidence that it is fitting or
appropriate to be afraid of the dog" (Brady 2010, 123).



How might epistemic perceptualists respond? One possibility is to
emphasize a salient difference between emotions and sense perceptions:
emotions have *cognitive bases* in the subject's
perceptions or beliefs (Deonna and Teroni 2012: 24-25). For
example, I'm not afraid of the dog in front of me unless I think
there's a dog in front of me, and believe that it may well hurt
me. My fear is grounded in part in those beliefs or perceptions. One
consequence is that the emotion itself is justified only if the
cognitive bases are justified (even if not necessarily true)
(Greenspan 1988). If so, emotional justification is *dependent*
(Pelser 2014, Cowan 2018). Initially, this might look like bad news
for EEP, since it appears to conflict with the thesis that emotions
provide immediate justification for evaluative propositions. But note
that while emotional justification may presuppose justification for
belief in *non-evaluative* propositions (such as those
concerning a dog's proneness to attack), there is a gap between
these inputs and the *evaluative* proposition that is the
content of the emotional experience itself according to perceptualism
(see Etcheverri 2019). I might be angry with you because I believe you
told somebody about my peculiar hobby, but the anger itself
doesn't present you as having talked about my hobby, but rather
your having wronged me. Even if it is as a matter of fact the case
that my being wronged in this situation consists in your having
revealed an embarrassing fact about me, it doesn't follow that
what justifies belief in the factual proposition suffices to justify
the belief in the moral proposition. For all that's been said
about epistemic dependence on cognitive bases, my anger might provide
*additional*, immediate justification for belief in the
wrongness of your act. As Robert Cowan puts it, "when the
cognitive base of an emotion is justified then emotions can justify
beliefs with evaluative content, independently of having further
justification for believing supporting evaluative propositions"
(2018: 229).



The upside of epistemic dependence, then, is that it allows epistemic
perceptualists to give a natural answer to the why-question
challenges. If you ask me why I think the wolf is dangerous or why I
think my friend's act was wrong, I'll cite the salient
non-evaluative feature that makes the situation dangerous or the act
wrong and thus justifies my emotion (as I see things), rather than the
fact that I respond to it with an emotion. Through the lens of my
emotion, so to speak, I regard this non-evaluative feature as
grounding an evaluative truth concerning the target - it will
seem so obvious to me that it's not worth mentioning that, say,
a dog's being poised to attack merits fear.



How about the self-justification challenge? Jonathan Mitchell (2017)
points out that in non-pathological cases, fear, for example, does
present its target as calling for fear - otherwise the emotion
isn't intelligible to the subject herself. Plausibly, Brady is
right that the evidence for dangerousness (meriting fear) isn't
the fact that I'm afraid, but the dog's posing a threat to
my interests. Nevertheless, my fear might make this fact's
reason-giving status *available* to me in the good case. The
fear still wouldn't be self-justifying, since the dog might not
in fact pose a threat.



The problems for perceptualism don't end with dependence on
cognitive basis, however. There is reason to believe that emotions
also depend on our *desires* or concerns (Roberts 2003).
I'm only sad when you break an old vase if I wanted to keep it,
or afraid of the growling wolf if I don't want to be eaten. When
it comes to belief or indeed perceptual experience, it's a
strike against justificatory standing if the state is influenced by a
desire - as Markie (2005) observes in criticizing epistemic
liberalism, if a rock seems like a gold nugget to you just because you
really want it to be a gold nugget, this seeming doesn't justify
belief in its being a gold nugget. So why isn't this sort of
cognitive penetrability a problem for EEP? A natural way to get around
the problem is to say that the desires or concerns underlying the
emotional appearance must themselves be correct or justified. The
problem with this suggestion is that one then needs a story of how
desires are correct or justified that doesn't itself appeal to
emotional experience, which doesn't seem compatible with
emotions playing a foundational epistemic role (see Helm 2001 for a
coherentist take).



Finally, while EEP tends to have an epistemological internalist
flavor, perceptual experience in general is of course linked to the
external world. In the case of sensory perception, causal links to the
objects of perception play a role in explaining the reliability, and
arguably the justificatory status, of perceptual experiences. Emotions
don't seem to be caused by the evaluative properties they
represent, however - though if we consider how we go from
proximal sensory stimulus to perception of objects, the difference
between ordinary perceptual experiences and emotions may not be so
large (Milona and Naar 2020). Causal relations may also explain why
perceptual experiences have the *contents* they do.



An alternative line is to say that what causes the emotion isn't
an evaluative feature of the object - rather, what we literally
perceive is the property that grounds the wrongness of the action,
such as the shooting of a peaceful demonstrator by a police officer,
and then respond to it with an emotional reaction, which construes the
action as wrong. Imagination would work as well. If so, perhaps it is
better to think of emotions as quasi-perceptual appearances that
constitute moral intuitions rather than perceptions (Kauppinen 2013).
This goes naturally with a view on which emotions (re)present their
targets as having certain evaluative properties in virtue of their
phenomenal character rather than etiology. The way an emotion feels is
not irrelevant to how it construes its object (cf. Goldie 2000 on
'feelings towards' an object). The feelings involved in
anger, for example, aren't directionless sensations, but have a
qualitative character in virtue of which anger presents its object as
offensive (Kriegel 2014).



What about reliability? Again, many believe that ordinary perceptual
experience justifies belief in part because it is generally reliable,
even if its phenomenal features are also relevant to justification. In
any case, moral *knowledge* requires more than justification
and truth - as it is common to say these days, a belief must be
*safe* (such that it could not easily have been the case that
the person would have formed a false belief using the same method) to
amount to knowledge (Sosa 1999, Williamson 2000). As noted earlier,
some epistemic sentimentalists, such as Tappolet (2011), are not
metaphysical sentimentalists, but rather realists about value. Those
who hold a view of this type may argue, as Adam Carter (2019) does,
that for emotional experiences to justify belief they must issue from
a *competence* or skill, roughly a disposition to get it right
when properly situated. Other epistemic perceptualists, such as Prinz
(2007) subscribe to sentimentalist metaphysics. It is open to them to
offer a *constitutive explanation* of the reliability of
emotions: since the evaluative facts are constitutively linked to
emotional responses, there is good reason to think emotional responses
track them, at least in suitable conditions.



To be sure, even if moral perception (or sentimental intuition) is
epistemically as good as sense perception, we know that in some
circumstances our senses are not reliable. But how do we know which
circumstances? This *calibration challenge* was already noted
by Hutcheson:



> 
> 
> But may there not be a right or wrong state of our moral sense, as
> there is in our other senses, according as they represent their
> objects to be as they really are, or represent them otherwise? So may
> not our moral sense approve that which is vicious, and disapprove
> virtue, as a sickly palate may dislike grateful food, or a vitiated
> sight misrepresent colours or dimensions? Must we not know therefore
> antecedently what is morally good or evil by our reason, before we can
> know that our moral sense is right? (Hutcheson 1728: 177)
> 
> 
> 



Hutcheson's response was to point out that even if moral sense
can mislead, it doesn't follow that *reason* is needed to
provide a standard for it, or that it's capable of doing so.
After all, it's not by reasoning that we fundamentally correct
mistakes of colour perception. Rather, we try to ascertain which
circumstances are conducive to properly functioning perception
(perhaps by way of an *a priori* inquiry) and then try to place
ourselves in such circumstances and look again. What the suitable
circumstances in the moral case are like depends on the nature of
moral facts. For relativists like Prinz (2007), the only thing that
matters is that our reactions genuinely reflect our sentiments towards
the action. For ideal dispositionalists, David Lewis offers a basic
recipe:



> 
> 
> To find out whether we would be disposed, under ideal conditions, to
> value it, put yourself in ideal conditions, if you can, making sure
> you can tell when you have succeeded in doing so. Then find out
> whether you value the thing in question, i.e., whether you desire to
> desire it. If you do, that confirms that it is a value. (Lewis 1989:
> 117)
> 
> 
> 



For Lewis himself, the ideal conditions for valuing are those of full
imaginative acquaintance with the object. For Hume and Smith, the
ideal conditions of moral judging involve occupying the 'common
point of view' or the perspective of an impartial and
well-informed spectator. As discussed in
 Section 2.2,
 they both believe that achieving this requires sympathizing (or
empathizing) with the feelings or reactive attitudes of those
immediately affected while controlling for predictable distortions.
Unless they are felt from the common point of view, our emotional
responses will not reliably track the response-dependent moral
facts.


### 5.2 Tracking Theories



Not all epistemic sentimentalists subscribe to the perceptualist
model. One alternative is provided by John Allman and Jim Woodward
(2008), who argue that moral intuitions (in the sense of immediate
judgments resulting from what psychologists call System 1) involving
emotional processing can reliably track moral facts after a suitable
kind of implicit learning. They draw on empirical work on the
development of *expertise*. In implicit learning, the learner,
such as a novice nurse, is repeatedly exposed to certain cues, (such
as babies manifesting different symptoms), makes certain decisions to
act (giving certain kind of treatment to the baby), and then receives
clear, independent feedback on whether the decisions were correct (the
symptoms either go away or get worse) (Kahneman and Klein 2009). As a
result, the learner may become an expert, who is able to respond
immediately and appropriately to situations without necessarily being
able to articulate why. Allman and Woodward's suggestion is that
a similar kind of training of our emotional responses is possible in
the moral case.



More recently, Peter Railton has also highlighted conceptions of the
affective system as "a flexible, experience-based
information-processing system quite capable of tracking statistical
dependencies and of guiding behavioral selection via the balancing of
costs, benefits, and risks" (2014, 833) Just as laboratory rats
have been found to develop action-guiding forward models that
implicitly represent expected values of their options, our feelings
can be attuned to possible rewards and punishments, and can be
expected to color our evaluative perception.



The core challenge for this type of view is that there is a difference
between training emotions to be responsive to potentially *morally
relevant* information, such as



> 
> 
> mental states of others and their likely behavior in interactive
> situations, as well as the likely consequences of such behaviour
> (Allman and Woodward 2008: 173),
> 
> 
> 



and training them to be responsive to *moral facts* themselves.
It is not clear whether there is any analogue to the unambiguous and
independent negative feedback that a nurse receives after giving the
wrong treatment in the case of making a mistaken moral judgment.
Railton suggests that empathy might play such a role, noting that
having a capacity to empathize and activating it *in situ*
"appear [...] to be important predictors of moral
sensitivity and behavior" (2014: 844), for example by inhibiting
violence. But while empathy can certainly give feedback about the
(anticipated) responses of others, it is one thing to learn that
others *as a matter of fact*, say, suffer because of or
disapprove of what I did, and quite another to learn that such
disapproval is *merited*. To attune affective responses to
moral facts, it seems that it is the latter kind of feedback we would
need.


### 5.3 Moral Understanding and Testimony



Whether or not emotions are a source of evaluative justification or
knowledge, they might play a role in a different epistemic good,
namely *moral understanding*, and, perhaps relatedly, help
explain why our moral epistemic practices are different from many
others. To begin with the latter, consider the following cases of
testimony (based on Callahan 2018):



> 
> 
> Nina wants to know whether the law permits deducting expenses incurred
> for charitable work when filing taxes. She asks a specialist, who
> tells her it's okay. Nina thus comes to believe the law permits
> deducting the expenses.
> 
> 
> 
> Aleksi wants to know whether it is, as a rule, morally wrong to
> mislead others by omitting unfavorable details. He asks a wise friend,
> who says it is. Aleksi thus comes to believe that it is as a rule
> morally wrong to lie by omission.
> 
> 
> 



Let's stipulate that both Nina and Aleksi come to know what they
wanted by testimony. (Set aside any general worries about testimonial
knowledge, and assume that in both cases they have sufficient reason
to trust the word of the person they're asking.) It seems to
many that while what Nina does is entirely unproblematic, there is
something off, if not outright wrong, with Aleksi's *moral
deference*. More generally, one commonly accepted qualification is
that moral deference is problematic when one forms a moral belief
solely on the basis of testimony, instead of, for example, reflecting
on the matter as a result of another's expressing an opinion.
Another common qualification is that problematic testimony concerns
pure moral content whose truth doesn't hang on empirical
assumptions. It is not problematic to change one's opinion about
an impure moral matter on the basis of testimony that concerns a
morally relevant empirical fact, as when someone comes to believe it
is wrong to eat fish on the basis of being informed that fish feel
pain (Fletcher 2016). In brief, it seems that you shouldn't
change your mind on a purely moral matter just because someone tells
you (even if you have no particular reason to doubt them).



But what, if anything, is wrong with moral deference? Guy Fletcher
argues that the link between sentiments and morality explains the
unease. First, he holds that "Moral sentiments are at least
difficult to form on the basis of pure, direct, testimony"
(Fletcher 2016: 60). This parallels other cases: I can't feel
admiration for a painting just because you tell me it's worth
admiring, for example. Second, as discussed in Section 2, there are
many metaethical views on which moral judgments either (partially or
wholly) consist in sentiments or link up with sentiments. If so,
testimony-based judgments are either impossible or defective. However,
Laura Frances Callahan (2018) points out that if one *did* form
moral sentiments purely on the basis of testimony, our sense that
something fishy is going on wouldn't go away. In fact, it would
be even more alarming if someone came to be passionate about some
moral matter just because somebody else said it was wrong!



A very different popular explanation of the problematic nature of
moral deference appeals to the notion of moral understanding: while we
can acquire moral *knowledge* by testimony, we will not (easily
or at all) acquire moral *understanding* that way, and moral
understanding is important for moral worth, or deserving credit for
one's action (Hills 2009). For Alison Hills (2016), moral
understanding is a form of "cognitive control", roughly
the ability to grasp and articulate why certain features make an
action (say) wrong, and consequently what would need to be different
for it to be right. Callahan (2018) argues that having the kind of
cognitive abilities that Hills highlights doesn't suffice for
moral worth, since possessing them is consistent with being motivated
by features that are not reasons for acting. On her alternative
sentimentalist account, moral understanding itself requires also
having fitting affective and motivational responses towards the
understood propositions and the relevant explanatory relationships
(Callahan 2018: 451-452). For example, understanding that a
practice is wrong because it's racist involves a disposition to
be angry or sad about it because it's racist (or about the
features that make it racist), and a willingness to abstain from or
intervene in the practice. The problem with deference, then, is that
it disincentivizes the sort of reflection and inquiry that would give
rise to such responses in addition to the relevant cognitive abilities
(Callahan 2018: 454-456; for a very different sentimentalist
take, see Howard 2018).



Finally, even those who don't believe that sentiments are
constitutive of moral understanding may believe that they help bring
it about. Thus, Brady (2013) argues that the positive epistemic role
of emotions in morality consists largely in their role in
*motivating* us to find out why some things are right or
wrong.


## 6. The Many Moral Sentimentalisms (Reprise)



It was noted at the beginning that there are many things one can be a
sentimentalist about. We are now in a position to make some
observations about relationships among them. First, *explanatory
sentimentalism* is clearly independent of the rest. It is
perfectly possible that emotions play some significant role in
explaining moral judgment, whatever such judgments or moral facts
consist in, and whether or not they're sources of moral
knowledge. To be sure, if some simple form of judgment sentimentalism
is true, emotions offer a kind of constitutive explanation of moral
judgments - if I'm angry with you, this explains why I
morally judge you've wronged me, because it constitutes my
judgment. And explanatory sentimentalism clearly has epistemic
implications. If emotions both explain our beliefs and justify them,
our moral verdicts are vindicated. If, in contrast, emotions explain
our beliefs but do *not* justify them - if explanatory
sentimentalism is true but epistemic sentimentalism is false -
we end up with a skeptical view.



Second, *judgment sentimentalism* has an evident kinship with
*metaphysical* sentimentalism. This is so especially for those
cognitivist versions according to which our judgments attribute
response-dependent properties, which are metaphysically linked to our
sentimental responses. But there are also contextualists for whom
moral judgments describe ordinary natural properties, and fitting
attitude theorists, for whom moral judgments are about the fittingness
of attitudes, where facts about fittingness may themselves be
non-natural truths.



Finally, *epistemic sentimentalism* is again in principle
independent of other varieties: we've seen that one can be a
mind-independent realist about moral properties while thinking that
some suitable emotions provide access to moral truths. But if moral
facts are constitutively related to our reactions and our judgments
are about such facts, we will have a good *a priori* reason to
think that beliefs based on suitable emotions would not easily mislead
us and may thus amount to knowledge. While different forms of
sentimentalism are separable from each other, they are thus mutually
supportive, if held together.