Abstract
According to moral sentimentalism, there are close connections between moral truths and moral emotions. Emotions largely form our moral attitudes. They contribute to our answerability to moral obligations. We take them as authoritative in guiding moral judgement. This role is difficult to understand if one accepts a full-blown moral realism, according to which moral truths are completely independent of our emotional response to them. Hence it is tempting to claim that moral truths depend on our emotional responses. I outline a problem for this view: we are adamant that, if our moral sentiments were different, things would be the same, morally speaking. Moral truth does not seem to counterfactually depend on moral sentiments. I show how this independence can be reconciled with the role of moral sentiments in guiding our moral outlook. I draw on Yablo’s distinction between response-dependent and response-enabled properties. I propose that moral truths are response-enabled: their supervenience base does not include anything about our emotions. Hence they do not counterfactually depend on changes in our emotional response. However, their factual supervenience base being naturally ineligible, it is ultimately our response that enables them to play their role as an independent moral compass.
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Notes
On moral sentimentalism cf. Kauppinen (2017).
There is empirical evidence that ‘moral judgement depends essentially on tacit affective processes.’(Gerrans and Kennett 2010, 586; in their critical review of this hypothesis, Gerrans and Kennett also give a survey of the literature). This evidence is compatible with some of the relevant processes not being tacit.
Of course, often our attitude towards external facts will not be that of a neutral observer. But our moral attitudes are significantly different from evaluating a situation by one’s personal preferences. In the latter case, independent truths do not put up a standard for our attitude.
One may even question that moral discourse is truth-apt, but this leads to Frege-Geach-style problems. I shall not pursue this option and assume that moral discourse is truth-apt.
On the view that moral properties are response-dependent cf. the supplement to Kauppinen (2017).
‘Under conditions C’ is read as: ‘if conditions C obtain’.
Things might be a bit more complicated. In a certain context, one may feel inclined to accept
If our taste were different, brownies would still be sweet in virtue of containing sugar.
If this is right, it shows that the status of sweet and the like as response-dependent is not always clear. Sometimes we may be driven towards what I call a response-enabled property, depending on which sort of constitutive relationship we focus on. Still the contrast to moral properties is striking. I shall largely ignore the subtleties and treat sweet as a response-dependent property.
There is a striking contrast between our rejection of (4) and our acceptance of the following indicative conditional, which is intuitively true:
If our moral sentiments about torturing people for fun are not in line with moral truth, torturing people for fun might not be wrong.
How does this contrast arise? I draw on the widely shared assumption that indicative conditionals are epistemic. They invite to consider the consequences of a hypothesis about what is actually the case. They force us to play through a revision of our beliefs by learning that our moral sentiments actually fail to track moral truth. The result is that the moral statements based on these sentiments might be false, among them TORT. In contrast, counterfactual conditionals usually do not invite to consider epistemic hypotheses about what is actually the case. They invite to consider possible situations which are taken to differ from the actual one. One upholds one’s belief that actually, moral sentiments track moral truth, and considers a different world where one’s feelings are different.
I dismiss the simple solution that our intuitions about counterfactuals like (4) are misguided; it would lead to an unattractive error theory.
There is a connection to the uncertainties about the status of properties like sweet outlined in footnote 7.
Oval partly overlaps with certain eligible mathematical concepts, but not perfectly. For instance, mathematically eligible cassini ovals comprise many (idealised) everyday oval shapes. But there are some cassini ovals no untutored person would call oval.
‘at w’ takes scope over the whole rest of the sentence.
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Dohrn, D. Moral Sentimentalism in Counterfactual Contexts: Moral Properties Are Response-Enabled. Philosophia 46, 69–82 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9913-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9913-1