This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
Defenders of the view that evaluative attitudes are judgment-sensitive attitudes in Scanlon’s sense are not thereby committed to pressing the skeptic’s objection above. They may or may not find it tempting to do so. I find it quite generally difficult to tell whether philosophers who make heavy use of the notion of judgment-sensitivity think of sentiments as judgment-sensitive attitudes. Scanlon himself (1998, p. 20) expressly includes anger and fear as judgment-sensitive attitudes, but he may be thinking of them as standing attitudes rather than sentiments. He expressly excludes “mere feelings” such as hunger. I am not sure what he would make of whether the states I am talking about are judgment-sensitive.
For a more extensive discussion of sensibilities and their relationship to evaluative judgment, see D’Arms and Jacobson (2010).
On “following” in the relevant sense see Raz (2009).
See for instance McDowell (1998).
As it turns out the dish was a little disgusting, but I have a lingering suspicion that the problem may have been that it was served in a loose custard, so I will probably try it again if offered a different preparation.
One class of complications is as follows. Funniness is not the only value that generates reasons that bear on whether one will be amused (and likewise for all the sentimental values). For instance, the pitiable might bear in a given case. One possibility is that there are reasons to pity someone’s plight, and also reasons to be amused at it, and that as a psychological matter it is not possible to respond to both reasons. Amusement may be fitting, yet the reasons for pity may be stronger. So the regulation of V-relevant patterns of evaluation by V has to be set alongside other regulative activities that may affect one’s dispositions to F in other ways. Such regulation might rationally diminish amusement without being responsive to any reasons of fit against it. I am grateful to Gary Watson for pressing me for clarification on this point.
References
D’Arms, J. (2005). Two arguments for sentimentalism. Philosophical Issues, 15, 1–21.
D’Arms, J., & Jacobson, D. (2000). Sentiment and value. Ethics, 110, 722–748.
D’Arms, J., & Jacobson, D. (2005). Anthropocentric constraints on human value. Oxford Studies in Metaethics, 1(2005), 99–126.
D’Arms, J., & Jacobson, D. (2010). Demystifying sensibilities. In P. Goldie (Ed.), Oxford handbook of philosophy of emotion. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hieronymi, P. (2005). The wrong kind of reason. The Journal of Philosophy, 102(9), 437–457.
McDowell, J. (1998). Mind, value and reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Raz, J. (2009). Reasons: Practical and adaptive. In D. Sobel & S. Wall (Eds.), Reasons for action. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Scanlon, T. M. (1998). What we owe to each other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Smith, A. (2005). Responsibility for attitudes: Activity and passivity in mental life. Ethics, 115(2), 236–271.
Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this material were presented at University of Iceland, Syracuse, Tulane and the Pacific Division APA. I am grateful to audiences on those occasions, and especially to the APA commenters, Karen Jones and Gary Watson. I also want to thank Daniel Jacobson, Timothy Schroeder, and Sigrún Svavarsdóttir for very helpful comments and discussions. Work on this paper was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
D’Arms, J. Value and the regulation of the sentiments. Philos Stud 163, 3–13 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0071-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0071-9