Abstract
This paper offers a qualified defense of a historically popular view that I call sentimental perceptualism. At a first pass, sentimental perceptualism says that emotions play a role in grounding evaluative knowledge analogous to the role perceptions play in grounding empirical knowledge. Recently, András Szigeti and Michael Brady have independently developed an important set of objections to this theory. The objections have a common structure: they begin by conceding that emotions have some important epistemic role to play, but then go on to argue that understanding how emotions play that role means that there must be some alternative, emotion-independent route to obtaining knowledge of value. If there has to be such an emotion-independent route, then the perceptual analogy breaks down in a significant way. In this paper, I argue that the right ways for sentimental perceptualists to respond to each of these objections are revealed by thinking through how analogous objections applied to perception and the empirical domain would be answered. Although Szigeti's and Brady's objections should not persuade sentimental perceptualists to give up their view, the objections do put important constraints on what a form of the view has to be like in order to do exciting metaethical work.
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Notes
Readers who think that some empirical knowledge is had in a way that is epistemically independent of perception may substitute ‘perceptual’ for ‘empirical’ in the formulation of sentimental perceptualism.
Kauppinen prefers to talk of intuition rather than perception, but his view still counts as a brand of sentimental perceptualism on my taxonomy.
Kauppinen (2013) is a sentimental perceptualist who denies that emotions supply us knowledge of conceptual evaluative truths. He points out that this can help explain why some intuitions about value seem not to be emotional in character.
The claim that Stoics were against emotion requires qualification (Sorabji 2000). Seneca, for instance, thought that the wise could cultivate special emotions (or something like emotions) to replace the emotions of unenlightened folk.
Szigeti’s target is the view that emotions are the foundation of our evaluative knowledge and he does not assume proponents of that view make any analogy with perceptual experience. But my argument is that Szigeti’s opponents can respond by making the analogy and by developing it in the ways that I outline.
Brady (2013) develops other objections to sentimental perceptualism. I am only concerned here with so-called shrewd rationalist objections.
I do not claim that sentimental perceptualists need to say that emotions are literally perceptual. There may still be important disanalogies. To get a sense for some of the ways in which emotions might be thought analogous to perceptions, see Salmela (2011).
Szigeti borrows talk of substitution from Kahneman and Frederick (2002).
I take it Szigeti assumes that if the basic emotions are heuristics, then this somehow guarantees, or makes it probable, that non-basic emotions are, too. There’s no need to speculate about the matter here.
We might prefer to speak of correctness/incorrectness here.
What does it mean for a principle to be supported by emotion or perception? The idea is that the principle is a generalization from past emotional/perceptual experiences: when we consistently experience some object (e.g., an act-type, a natural kind) as having some property, we often form the justified, general belief that objects of that sort possess the property in question (e.g., looking out for the safety of others is good, strawberries are red); and we often use those general beliefs to correct future experiences which suggest otherwise.
One may wonder whether background conditions override is really distinct from background principle override, since presumably the sentimental perceptualist thinks our beliefs about when emotions are reliable is emotion-backed (just as it is with perception). What makes them distinct is that principles about ideal conditions make explicit reference to emotions and not (just) to values.
For discussion of various hypotheses about how altruism might emerge, see Nichols (2004).
Szigeti in fact only says that we would not be able to rely on the occurrent emotional response. But I take him to mean something stronger than this, namely that we would not be able to rely on emotions. Only the stronger claim makes trouble for sentimental perceptualism.
The point I make here is independent of whether we think Döring has gotten outrage’s evaluative content correct.
Szigeti (2013: 851) seems to treat perception as a heuristic, too.
Brady quotes in the passage above from D’arms and Jacobson (2003: 138).
Ben-Ze’ev (2000: 170 – 71) develops a similar line of thought.
As a matter of fact, the proximal stimulations, or lower-level perceptual representations, that trigger a perceptual experience are almost always compatible with the representation’s being inaccurate. This is the so-called underdetermination problem for perception (Burge 2010).
What if the emotion does not dissipate? Here I refer the reader back to my response to the argument from recalcitrance.
Brady (2013: 158 – 191) has much to say about the “virtuous regulation of attention” that indicates he would ultimately agree.
Visual attentional phenomena occur at a very basic level. Carrasco notes, “Initially, there was a great deal of interest in categorizing mechanisms of vision as pre-attentive or attentive. The interest in that distinction has waned as many studies have shown that attention actually affects tasks that were once considered pre-attentive, such as contrast discrimination, texture segmentation and acuity” (1485).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Mark Schroeder and two anonymous referees for very valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper.
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Milona, M. Taking the Perceptual Analogy Seriously. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 19, 897–915 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9716-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9716-7