Sentiment and Value* Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson

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ARTICLES

When Hume wrote that ‘‘Morality...ismore properly felt than judged of,’’ he was getting at something true and important but potentially misleading.1 Humean sentimentalists need not, and we think should not, be seen as ratifying the edicts of whatever moral feelings one happens to have. Sentimentalism is not an epistemological doctrine; instead, the fundamental claim is metaethical. As Hume puts it, ‘‘The ﬁnal sen- tence...which pronounces characters or actions amiable or odious, praiseworthy or blameable...depends on some internal sense or feeling which nature has made universal in the whole species.’’ 2 The claim is that evaluation, and in particular moral evaluation, is somehow grounded in human sentiment. ‘‘But in order to pave the way for such a sentiment,’’ Hume continues, ‘‘and give a proper discernment of its object, it is often necessary...that much reasoning should precede, that nice distinctions be made, just conclusions drawn, distant comparisons formed, complicated relations examined, and general facts ﬁxed and as- certained.’’ 3 Hence, philosophers who take inspiration from Hume must allow reasoning, as well as feeling, to play a role in evaluative judgment. The central challenge for sentimentalism is to preserve the idea that values are somehow grounded in the sentiments, while at the same time making sense of the rational aspects of evaluation. We will not explore Hume’s own view of these matters in any detail, nor will we defend sentimentalism in ethics against rival metaethical

* This article, which is equally the work of both authors, has beneﬁted greatly from comments by Elizabeth Anderson, David Copp, John Doris, Daniel Farrell, Allan Gibbard, Bennett Helm, William Taschek, several anonymous referees, and the editors of this jour- nal. Our work on this project has been supported in part by grants from the National En- dowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, for which we are most grateful. 1. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Niddich, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 470. 2. David Hume, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Niddich, 3d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 172–73. 3. Ibid., p. 173.

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D’Arms and Jacobson Sentiment and Value 723 views. Instead, we propose to investigate what sentimentalists must do to meet this challenge. Whatever its ultimate prospects, the sentimentalist approach to ethics has attracted much philosophical attention recently, for two main reasons. First, it accords with the powerful and increasingly pervasive view that values depend in some way on the existence of beings to whom things matter.4 Perhaps, then, human values depend on human valuing, which is inextricably tied to affect, sentiment, and emotion.5 The second reason to look to the sentiments emerges from the debate over internalism, the view that there must be some internal (i.e., semantic or conceptual) connection between an agent’s judgment that an object is good, or an action right, and his tendency to choose or do it. While many philosophers are attracted to some kind of internalism, just what sort of internalist constraint is viable remains one of the most significant outstanding problems in ethical theory.6 The simplest way to secure internalism is to analyze evaluative judgments as expressions of desire, motive, or some other conative (as opposed to cognitive) state. But this strategy is challenged by what might be called the ‘‘rationalism’’ of evaluative thought and discourse. Value judgments are governed by norms of justification; they are advanced and defended with reasons, and we routinely assess them for correctness. It is unclear, though, how a purely conative state can be rationally justified in the relevant way. (Of course, it’s easy to see how there can be strategic reasons to have or to forgo a desire.) The sentiments promise to help make sense of internalism because they play a relatively straightforward motivational role, while being governed by norms which allow us to criticize and perhaps even to correct them. We distinguish between justified

4. This thought is, in itself, no concession to skepticism about value. Even such avow- edly nonskeptical moral philosophers as Korsgaard, Nagel, and Railton hold something to this effect, though their views vary considerably in detail. See Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Peter Railton, ‘‘Moral Realism,’’ Philosophical Review 95 (1987): 163–207. 5. Our principal term here is ‘sentiment’, which we will use broadly to refer to any occurrent, object-directed, affect-laden mental state. Moods are affective states—that is, states that feel a certain way—which are not sentiments, since they lack objects. Emotions are paradigm cases of sentiments, but we want to restrict the term ‘emotion’ to a central class of such mental states found across cultures and epochs: Hume’s ‘‘common sentiments of mankind.’’ 6. Indeed, even our formulation is contentious, since internalism can be offered as a thesis about evaluative properties rather than judgments. See Stephen Darwall, ‘‘Rea- sons, Motives, and the Demands of Morality: An Introduction,’’ Moral Discourse and Practice, ed. Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Many philosophers would deny internalism about morality, as Hume did, and hold that it’s possible for a ‘‘sensible knave’’ to know right from wrong yet not to care about doing right. But it is much less plausible to deny all internalist constraints on the concept of self-interest or on an agent’s reasons for acting. See Railton, ‘‘Moral Realism,’’ for a view that is externalist about morality but internalist, in a subtle and powerful way, about self- interest.

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724 Ethics July 2000 and unjustified fears, for instance; and fear is surely motivating—it tends to issue in ‘‘fight or flight’’ behavior.7 Despite these attractions, however, we think the sentimentalist approach has yet to fulfill its promise. In what follows, we will first briefly survey some of the simpler forms of sentimentalism and explore the problems they confront. Then we will turn our attention to the contemporary debate between more sophisticated and powerful descendants of these theories put forward by Simon Blackburn, Allan Gibbard, John Mc- Dowell, and David Wiggins.8 While Blackburn and Gibbard identify their theories as ‘‘noncognitivist,’’ McDowell and Wiggins call their views ‘‘cognitivist’’ or even ‘‘anti-noncognitivist.’’ But we will deliberately downplay their metaphysical and semantic disputes so as to bring out the point that these theories are all heirs to the sentimentalist legacy. Indeed, they are sufficiently similar that a single and decisive problem infects them all, we will argue, though they are the best sentimentalist theories yet put forward. The task of this article is to articulate the problem and to show that none of these neosentimentalists have developed the resources necessary for its solution. Though we cannot develop our positive program here, we will conclude by pointing in the direction we think sentimentalism must take if values are to be informatively explicated through the sentiments. I. BEYOND SIMPLE SENTIMENTALISM The most direct form of sentimentalism would identify, in some way or other, the judgment that an action X is wrong with disapproval of X (and would similarly identify rightness with approval).9 Two standard objections to such views are immediately apparent. The first is an objection to simple subjectivism, the theory that ‘‘X is wrong’’ just means ‘‘I disapprove of X.’’ Simple subjectivism seems unable to account for disagreement. On this view, when I claim some act is wrong which you claim to

7. Behavior must be understood broadly, so as to include more than deliberate action. Thus, simply the impulse to ﬂee, or a ‘‘cold sweat,’’ can be taken as evidence of the constellation of motives involved in fear. 8. See Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), Essays in Quasi-Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and Ruling Passions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); John McDowell, ‘‘Values and Secondary Qualities,’’ and ‘‘Projection and Truth in Ethics,’’ in Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton, eds.; and David Wig- gins, ‘‘A Sensible Subjectivism?’’ in ibid. Another contemporary philosopher in this tradition is Elizabeth Anderson, whose rational attitude theory is also a form of sophisticated sentimentalism. Since Anderson’s theory is driven by normative, more than metaethical, considerations, we will not take it up here, but a similar argument can be made against her view. See Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1993). 9. Alternatively, the theory can identify the judgment that an object Y is good (or bad) with desire for (or aversion to) Y. The same criticisms tell against this proposal, muta- tis mutandis.

D’Arms and Jacobson Sentiment and Value 725 be right, we are each simply reporting on our own mental states. If we are sincere, I disapprove of X, and you approve of it. Our claims are equally correct, since they refer to our own states of mind, and that is the end of it. This problem is averted by simple expressivism (or emotivism), on which to sincerely avow that ‘‘X is wrong’’ is to express, rather than to describe, one’s state of mind—which is again taken to be that of disapproval. Our disagreement is thus glossed as a disagreement in attitude. When we go on to argue about X, we can be understood as trying to influence each other’s attitudes: to persuade one another.10 The second problem cuts against any theory that identifies negative evaluation with disapproval, though, whether subjectivist or expressivist. If all negative evaluations are to be understood as expressions of simple attitudes of disapproval, then the theory will be unable to distinguish between the concepts wrong, bad, ugly, shameful, disgusting, and so forth, but surely these concepts are importantly different. Let’s suppose that this problem can be dealt with satisfactorily. After all, sentimentalists such as Hume tend to speak of particular kinds of pleasure or approbation (and their negative analogues), and there are various emotions at our disposal, each of which might be identified with a specific form of evaluation. Even so, there is a decisive flaw in the simple versions of both subjectivism and expressivism. One need not actually be feeling a sentiment in order to make the judgment associated with it, and one can reject the judgment even while feeling the sentiment.11 Furthermore, evaluation cannot be equated even with relatively stable dispositions to feel particular sentiments. It will help to illustrate this last point with a couple of examples. Consider the concept shameful and its associated emotional response, shame. We can imagine a self- aware anorexic who finds herself feeling ashamed of how fat she is, against her better judgment. She is ashamed of her body, but she does not judge it to be shameful. Now imagine a disaffected sloth who has grown lazy, sedentary, and obese. Suppose, though, that he nevertheless judges it desirable to have a healthy body weight and shameful how far

10. The theory given in A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover Press, 1936), is the closest thing to pure emotivism. Stevenson adds an outward-looking prescrip- tion to others to feel similarly, which is needed to get anything like dispute. See Charles Stevenson, ‘‘The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms,’’ Mind 46 (1937): 14 –31. Consider that the ‘‘yea’’ and ‘‘boo’’ of fans of rival sports teams are precisely not intended to inﬂu- ence or persuade dissenters, nor must I think you are getting something wrong in your disappointment over my team’s ultimate triumph. (What could that be—the sheer good- ness of my side prevailing? It seems far more plausible to think that you are right: your team’s pitiful effort really is the way your disappointment presents it to you as being, namely, bad for your side.) This is disagreement in attitude without real dispute. 11. Both common sense and the best theories of the emotions are agreed that such disparity between a bout of emotion and one’s considered judgment is quite possible. See Patricia Greenspan, Emotions and Reason: An Inquiry into Emotional Justiﬁcation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988); and Gibbard, Wise Choices.

726 Ethics July 2000 he deviates from this ideal. Yet he cannot be bothered to eat well or ex- ercise. After a period of being ashamed of himself, he has become disaffected and can no longer even muster shame at his weight, though he still judges it to be shameful. The self-aware anorexic and the disaffected sloth demonstrate that it is neither necessary nor sufficient that one be in (or even prone to) the relevant emotional state in order to make the associated evaluative judgment. While these examples might seem psychologically far-fetched, their very possibility suffices to undermine both emotivism and simple subjectivism. Furthermore, the crucial phenomenon is not a philosopher’s fiction but a familiar psychological fact. We have all found ourselves, on some occasion, in the grip of an emotion that we deem to be mistaken—for instance, afraid when we know that there is little or nothing to be afraid of. And we have all sometimes been disaffected when we think we should be moved. The anorexic and the sloth are anomalous because they are described as being systematically in such states, and indeed it is much less plausible that this kind of dissonance between one’s emotions and evaluations can be long sustained. Similar phenomena are present in color vision. There too we can make sense both of local anomalies (such as bad lighting) and standing failures of sensitivity (color blindness). These problems can be avoided if we take color terms to refer to properties that are dispositional, in this sense: an object is red, for example, iff it is such as to look red to normal observers under standard conditions—where this can be given an empirical gloss.12 One might be similarly inclined to try a dispositional account of value. Then for some X to be F (shameful, dangerous, funny, enviable, etc.) would be for normal observers under standard conditions to feel F (shame, fear, amusement, envy) at X. While there are familiar difficulties with specifying these conditions, we can prescind from this worry, because no such account could succeed in any case. The crucial point is this: neither our own dispositions, corrected for occasional anomalies, nor the dispositions of a majority, however large, can capture the normative aspect of these judgments. A particularly compelling open-question argument can be made against any dispositional account, even of those evaluative responses that philosophers are most inclined to view dispositionally, such as disgust. There are, of course, notorious difficulties with G. E. Moore’s version of the open-question argument. Still, it is widely agreed that such arguments display something important about evaluative concepts in particular.13 Thus Peter Railton, for in-

12. There are disputes even about the dispositional account of color, but most sides accept the truth of the biconditional; the dispute is over whether a more substantive analysis of color terms is needed or can be given. See Paul Boghossian and David Velleman, ‘‘Colour as a Secondary Quality,’’ Mind 98 (1989): 81–103. 13. See Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton, ‘‘Toward Fin de Sie`cle Ethics,’’ in Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton, eds., pp. 3– 47.

D’Arms and Jacobson Sentiment and Value 727 stance, who argues that the open-question argument cannot be deployed directly against recent naturalistic accounts, such as his own, which do not purport to express analytic truths, nevertheless grants that ‘‘a significant critical function may still be served by pressing Moorean questions against such interpretations.’’ 14 The useful role that the open-question argument continues to play is to invite one to consider, about a proffered analysis of some evaluative concept (even an overtly reforming analysis), whether it preserves the normative force of the concept it attempts to explicate. The central normative role of concepts like shameful, funny, and enviable is to govern the associated sentiments, but a dispositional account of these concepts would prevent them from playing that role in the wide range of cases in which one wants to contest popular opinion. Consider, for instance, the heretical view that the quintessential American delicacy, the Big Mac, is in fact disgusting. A dispositionalist might try pointing out just how many billions of them have been sold worldwide, but that would be to no avail. The heretic does not doubt that most people love them; it’s just that this fact fails to move her. Evidently, most people’s taste is abominable. Just look at the thing, she might add, all fatty and processed in its cardboard box, dripping with ‘‘special sauce.’’ If you don’t see what is disgusting about that, so much the worse for you. You might find the heretic’s attitude elitist or otherwise misguided, but surely it is not incoherent—and it would be a mistake to adopt an account of disgust that renders it unavailable. It’s not just that this claim (that the Big Mac is disgusting, even though normal tasters don’t find it so) makes sense as matters actually stand in natural language. The reforming dispositionalist need not deny that. The point is that the dispositionalist proposal fails to capture a crucial aspect—arguably the crucial aspect—of the concept: we use terms like ‘disgusting’ to do such things as criticize, persuade, or simply express disdain for others, and most generally to guide feelings—our own and other people’s.15 So dispositionalism is an intolerably revisionist proposal. Whatever is at issue between you and the heretic concerns how to feel about Big Macs, and this cannot be settled by appeal to whose responses are more normal. The normal isn’t normative, as one might put the point.16 One can find suggestions in Hume’s ‘‘Of the Standard of Taste’’ of

14. Peter Railton, ‘‘Naturalism and Prescriptivity,’’ Social Philosophy and Policy 7 (1989): 151–74, p. 158. 15. It may be that there are two distinct senses of ‘disgusting’, one normative (in the way we’re suggesting) and the other dispositional. The latter is most frequently used rela- tionally, as in: ‘‘Yak cheese is disgusting to most Westerners, but it’s a staple of the Tibetan diet.’’ Take our remarks above, then, as being concerned with the first, and most distinctively evaluative, sense. 16. Of course, the reactions and opinions of others are likely to influence our own, and it seems to us only reasonable to remain generally open to such influence. But this is a far cry from embracing dispositionalism.

728 Ethics July 2000 a theory that meets this incisive objection to dispositionalism.17 As the eighteenth-century notion of taste suggests, Hume approached aesthetic judgment on the model of the gustatory. He held that the verdicts of the delicate judge can serve as the requisite normative standard—where delicacy is understood empirically as the ability to discriminate and identify finely.18 Following Hume’s lead, one might appeal to the responses of a delicate judge more generally in order to determine what things are genuinely F. Yet even this more sophisticated attempt to understand the normative via the empirical will not work. The idea of delicacy, and of the health or deformity of organs of perception, grows increasingly problematic as we move from the gustatory to the aesthetic to the ethical. Moreover, one can doubt the authority even of the most delicate response when that notion is defined empirically: extreme delicacy can seem overrefined, fussy, or even decadent, and one can sensibly think that the overly delicate judge may be unable to see the forest for the trees. Consider the fable of the princess and the pea, in which the prince searched for a lady so sensitive that she could discern a single pea under a stack of feather beds.19 Never mind that this is a dubious way to pick a princess; the point is that the most delicate lady did not find the feather beds comfortable, despite the tiny imperfection—rather, she could not sleep. It might be tempting to insist that the truly delicate judge will be only slightly disturbed by small imperfections, but that would be to give up on the empirical purport of the standard—since this suggestion presupposes that we have an independent handle on a defect’s impor- tance—in favor of something like an ideal observer account. None of this undermines the claim that to take X to be F is to hold that an ideal judge would have the F response to X. The trouble is that this formulation seems to build in its epistemic authority, and it therefore smacks of tautology. Moreover, if the appeal to the responses of an ideal judge contributes anything distinctive, it is the misleading suggestion that deliberation about the F requires us to turn our reflections upon ourselves—to ask whether we are sufficiently ideal that our reactions reliably track the F. This is misleading because our thoughts about whether something is truly dangerous, for instance, more typically focus

17. David Hume, ‘‘Of the Standard of Taste,’’ in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987). 18. This is a simpliﬁed account of Hume’s view. His theory of taste is sufﬁciently sophisticated to take account of the corrupting effects of prejudice and to allow for certain ‘‘blameless’’ disagreements that cannot be reconciled, among other complications. We hope that our debt to Hume, as a founder of sentimentalism, is evident, despite our convic- tion that his account cannot succeed as it stands. For two disparate but fruitful ways of developing Hume’s theory, see David Wiggins; and Peter Railton, ‘‘Aesthetic Value, Moral Value, and the Ambitions of Naturalism,’’ in Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. Jarrold Levinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 19. Our thanks to David Hills for pointing out the relevance of the fable and the challenge it provides for Hume’s account of delicacy.

D’Arms and Jacobson Sentiment and Value 729 on features of the object itself (such as its claws and fangs) or on features of ours other than our discriminatory capacities (such as our tender ﬂesh).20 The appeal to a vacuous notion of an ideal judge is perhaps better understood as an attempt to capture the following crucial point, on which all the contemporary heirs to sentimentalism are agreed: to make an evaluative judgment is not to have but to endorse a sentiment.

II. THE CONFLATION PROBLEM The great underlying agreement between the neosentimentalists, which is obscured by their metaethical dispute, is that they are all committed to what we will call the ‘‘response dependency thesis’’ (RDT).21 The crucial idea, which we take to be the deﬁning characteristic of neosentimentalism, is that an important set of evaluative concepts (or terms or properties) is best understood as invoking a normative assessment of the appropriateness (or merit or rationality) of some associated emotional response. Hence, RDT: to think that X has some evaluative property F is to think it appropriate to feel F in response to X. For the neosentimentalists, to think a sentiment appropriate in the relevant sense is a normative judgment, of a type yet to be explicated, in favor of feeling it. Or, rather, it is a consideration in favor of feeling it in certain contexts. To think the tiger fearsome is to think fear at it appropriate, but only when the tiger is nearby and on the loose—not, for instance, while you sit reading this article. Similarly, some act of lying may be wrong, but it is appropriate to feel guilty about it only if it was your lie (or you were otherwise responsible for it). We will assume these qualiﬁ- cations throughout. In this article we propose to circumvent the thorny and familiar issues concerning whether evaluative judgments are, as they appear to be, property ascribing and truth apt. We thus present RDT as a doctrine to which all the neosentimentalists are committed, though we recognize that they will understand it differently. Cognitivists will treat the ‘‘thoughts’’ that X has an evaluative property F and that it is appropriate to feel F at X as beliefs with the same content, whereas noncognitivists will treat these thoughts as some other, noncognitive state of mind. And cognitivists can take the talk of evaluative properties literally, while noncognitivists may regard it as shorthand for a more metaphysically circum- spect notion—such as the judgment that the term ‘F’ is warrantedly as- sertable about X. But, having offered their differing interpretations of these key terms, both parties accept that RDT properly characterizes the

20. This point is most clearly made in Blackburn, Ruling Passions, esp. chap. 8. 21. Although ‘‘response dependence’’ is sometimes associated with forms of dispositionalism, we will use the term in the overtly normative sense suggested by the neosentimentalist program.

730 Ethics July 2000 way in which the response-dependent evaluative concepts we have been discussing depend upon human emotions. Support for our ecumenical methodology can be drawn from the fact that it has grown increasingly difficult to see what is at issue in the realism debate. Traditionally, noncognitivists denied that value judgments are apt for truth, and cognitivists held that evaluative properties were features of the world independent of human capacities and sensibilities. But this is no longer true. The neosentimentalists all agree that values are not absolute or intrinsic properties, but rather are subjective and anthropocentric. ‘‘Values are not brutely there,’’ even McDowell, the anti-noncognitivist, allows ‘‘— not there independent of our sensibility.’’ 22 Moreover, philosophers such as Blackburn see little reason for noncognitivists to forgo property talk and are even willing to speak of the truth of evaluative claims.23 All grant, too, that the phenomenology of valuing is such that sentiments purport to be sensitivities to features of the world—that is, to evaluative properties. Hence, we agree with Mc- Dowell that the only way to understand our responses as they do and must seem to us, whatever our metaethics, is to be prepared ‘‘to attrib- ute, to at least some possible objects of the responses, properties that would validate the responses.’’ 24 This is precisely why Blackburn and Gib- bard are prepared to speak of the fearsome and the funny when engag- ing in first-order ethical discourse, though they insist—as McDowell and Wiggins themselves admit—that these are not intrinsic properties of the world, independent of our sensibilities.25 We will therefore help ourselves in what follows to talk of ‘‘ascribing evaluative properties’’ and of the ‘‘correctness and incorrectness’’ of responses, but the reader should bear in mind that such talk can be given different interpretations. Our stance of metaethical neutrality is motivated largely by the con- viction that the similarities between cognitivist and noncognitivist forms of neosentimentalism are more significant than their differences. In- deed, the ferociousness of the semantic and metaphysical dispute has obscured a crucial issue. Though all of these philosophers accept some version of RDT, none of them has yet sufficiently distinguished the par-

22. McDowell, ‘‘Values and Secondary Qualities,’’ p. 208. See also Wiggins, p. 197. 23. The noncognitivists’ appropriation of ordinary normative locutions makes even stating the difference between these views difﬁcult. Perhaps the best way is to distinguish between ‘‘factualists’’ and ‘‘nonfactualists,’’ but it will then be contentious whether even the cognitivist sentimentalists count as factualists. See Peter Railton, ‘‘Nonfactualism about Normative Discourse,’’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 961– 68. 24. McDowell, ‘‘Values and Secondary Qualities,’’ p. 207. 25. A sentimentalist must be able to insist, however, that it isn’t merely our thinking wanton cruelty to be wrong which makes it so. It would be cruel even if we didn’t realize it. The worry that sentimentalists are not entitled to say such things about the independence of evaluative properties can be pressed against the cognitivists and noncognitivists alike. Both defend themselves against such worries through some fancy philosophical footwork, of which an unregenerate realist (or antirealist) would be suspicious.

D’Arms and Jacobson Sentiment and Value 731 ticular species of appropriateness of response that is relevant to property ascription—to whether some X is F. This task is crucial to the success of any sentimentalist theory, whatever its metaethical stance. Consider a wickedly clever joke told at the expense of a socially marginalized person or group. Someone sympathetic to the butt of such a joke might well think it inappropriate to be amused because the joke is cruel or offensive. But does this mean the joke isn’t funny? To think so would be to assume the truth of comic moralism, the thesis that if it is wrong to be amused by a joke, then the joke cannot be funny. We will not argue against comic moralism here, though we think it quite dubious.26 It will suffice to note that this is a substantive and controversial normative position, whose truth now seems to be presupposed. Even those inclined to accept comic moralism should be worried by this, since it is a cost of a metaethical theory that it rules out coherent normative views, and it is dangerous for any philosophical theory to rest on an implicit and controversial premise. Worse yet, this is not an isolated problem; other examples can be adduced which make similar troubles for the extant versions of sentimentalism. For instance, imagine that you have a rich and generous but touchy friend, who is extremely sensitive about his friends’ attitudes toward his wealth. If he suspects you of envying his possessions, he will curtail his largesse. That is a good reason not to envy him, if there is any chance whatsoever that you will betray your attitude in action or nondeliberate behavior, but surely it does not speak to whether his possessions are enviable. Another reason you might think it inappropriate to envy him would be based on moral qualms about being pained at a friend’s good fortune, but this too seems irrelevant to the ascription of the F property.27 While such good strategic and moral reasons can count in favor of (or against) feeling some sentiment, they seem like the wrong kind of endorsement or criticism of it. The trouble is that to call a response ‘appropriate’ is vague praise. This is not merely a quibble about how well certain philosophers have chosen or defined their terms. Whatever one’s preferred normative locution, the point remains that only certain good reasons for or against having a response bear on the associated evaluative judgment.28 Until these reasons are identified, there is nothing to stop

26. For an argument against comic moralism, see Daniel Jacobson, ‘‘In Praise of Im- moral Art,’’ Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155–99. 27. For an argument that such moral considerations about whether to feel an emotion F at some object X are systematically irrelevant to whether X is F, see Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, ‘‘The Moralistic Fallacy: On the ‘Appropriateness’ of Emotion,’’ Phi- losophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (2000): 65–90. 28. While it would admittedly be odd to say that ‘‘envy isn’t appropriate’’ on grounds of expedience (as opposed to propriety), it would be quite natural to conclude that ‘‘envy isn’t rational,’’ and ‘rational’ is Gibbard’s preferred normative term in RDT. Similar problems will arise for all the normative terms used by the sentimentalists under consideration here.

732 Ethics July 2000 sentimentalism from yielding systematically wrong answers to evaluative questions. The theory is thus vulnerable to what we will call the ‘‘conflation problem’’: it offers no resources to differentiate (and hence to preclude conflating) moral and prudential reasons for feeling a sentiment—such as that the joke was offensive or that you don’t want to fall from your friend’s good graces—from reasons bearing on whether X is F. Hence, until the relevant notion of appropriateness is specified, the theory is incomplete at best; indeed, taken strictly it is false, since on occasion an emotion F will be in some sense inappropriate despite the fact that its object X is F. In what follows, we will examine the work of the neosentimentalists in some detail and argue that, while all need to solve the conflation problem, none has yet provided the resources necessary to do so. III. EARNING TALK OF TRUTH Despite their long and contentious dispute, McDowell and Blackburn are in agreement on a number of points, beginning with their acceptance of some version of RDT. What it is for something to be fearsome is for fear of it to be appropriate; a joke is funny if and only if it is appropriate to be amused by it; and, in general, for an evaluative property F to be instantiated by X is for an associated response F to be appropri- ately held toward X. Sometimes their dispute is framed as a question of the ‘‘priority’’ between the property and its associated response. While Blackburn and Gibbard want to accord some kind of priority at least to such basic emotions as fear and amusement, McDowell and Wiggins ad- vocate a no-priority view on which response and property are equal part- ners. (Here too the dispute turns out to be rather more subtle than it first appears, but we can ignore some of the nuances for present purposes.)29 There are costs and benefits to each approach. For instance, in order to analyze wrongness in terms of the appropriateness of guilt and impartial anger without circularity, as Gibbard attempts to do, one needs an independent fix on these emotions. Hence, Gibbard’s account requires a compatible theory of the emotions as noncognitive states. Blackburn does not attempt to specify the ‘‘practical attitude’’ involved in judgments of wrongness and other forms of evaluation. The cost of Gibbard’s approach is that it is more vulnerable to falsification, whereas Blackburn’s strategy leaves many questions unan- swered—it is more secure but correspondingly less enlightening. The cost of the no-priority approach which Wiggins and McDowell favor is that it is admittedly circular, but they insist that their account is in-

29. In fact, McDowell and Wiggins grant the possibility of scientiﬁc, even evolution- ary stories of the type Blackburn and Gibbard suggest. And the cognitivists’ insistence that there is no ‘‘purely phenomenological’’ account of the sentiments is a bit of a red herring, since neither Blackburn nor Gibbard hold that the sentiments are mere feelings. They can both make use of the objects and causes of our responses in individuating them.

D’Arms and Jacobson Sentiment and Value 733 formative, and therefore not viciously circular, precisely in virtue of what Wiggins calls its ‘‘detour through the sentiments’’— that is, its sentimentalism.30 While these questions of the priority and independence of sentiment and value are significant, they are less important for our purposes than is another deep similarity between the theories. McDowell and Blackburn agree that, given the subjective basis of values in human responses, talk of the truth of evaluative judgment must be earned, rather than simply assumed. Some philosophers find the idea of earning talk of truth in these contexts to be obscure or even disrepu- table and would prefer to speak of earning the right to claim evaluative knowledge.31 Others frame the debate as being over the objectivity of judgments that are granted to be founded in subjective human responses.32 While we too harbor some skepticism about the usefulness of appealing to the notion of truth in this context, these are the terms in which McDowell and Blackburn cast the debate. Since our approach is neutral on this issue, we will leave terminological matters as they lie. More important for our purposes is the fact that the parties are substan- tially in agreement over what earning the talk of truth for evaluative judgment requires: ‘‘Earning the notion of truth...would be a matter of arguing that we do after all have at our disposal a conception of reasons for ethical thinking which is sufficiently rich and substantial to mark off rationally induced improvements in ethical stances from alterations induced by merely manipulative means.’’ 33 What this amounts to is the ability to rank sensibilities according to ‘‘whether there are better reasons for one sensibility’s responses than another’s.’’ 34 Blackburn too ad- mits the necessity of criticizing and improving ethical attitudes, even our own, but neither philosopher says much about how these critical reasons are to be found. What they do say on this subject illustrates their fundamental agreement that all such reasons will come from within ethics; that is, these reasons will themselves entail substantive ethical commitments. As we shall see, this suggestion is deeply problematic. When Blackburn asks how we might become aware that our own attitudes are defective, his answer is that we can identify such deplorable ten- dencies as hasty or ignorant judgment, the tendency to hold views out of fear or fantasy, and the effects of unexamined tradition and prejudice. ‘‘My attitudes,’’ he writes, ‘‘ought to be formed from qualities I admire— the proper use of knowledge, real capacity for sympathy, and so on. If they are not, and if the use of those capacities and the avoidance of the inferior

30. Wiggins, p. 189. 31. Williams offers a particularly clear and interesting argument that this dispute should be framed in terms of knowledge rather than truth. See Bernard Williams,Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). 32. See, e.g., Railton, ‘‘Aesthetic Value.’’ 33. McDowell, ‘‘Projection and Truth in Ethics,’’ p. 218. 34. Ibid., p. 220.

734 Ethics July 2000 determinants of opinion would lead me to change, then the resulting attitudes would not be only different, but better.’’ 35 We have no complaint with the thought that one can criticize one’s extant attitudes by consider- ing whether they have been determined by admirable or inferior qualities. Changes founded on these considerations would, at least by one’sown lights, constitute improvements—of a sort. Indeed, they may be ‘‘rationally induced improvements’’ in the sense that they are supported by good reasons. But this is not enough to avoid the conflation problem. It is insufficient to show that a change of sensibility is for the better or even that it is a rational improvement. Talk of truth demands that the deliverances of our new sensibility are more likely to be correct: that this improvement constitutes an increased sensitivity to the F. There are a variety of admirable and deplorable qualities which play a role in deter- mining our attitudes, and morally admirable qualities (kindness, charity, and love, say) are not guaranteed to issue in attitudes that are more sensitive to any given F property. An increase of sympathy might be a moral advance, for instance, yet constitute a decrease in sensitivity to the funny. Our refined sense of humor is morally better, even a rational improvement; but if this refinement is founded on the wrong kind of reason, it is not the kind of improvement that earns talk of truth. The conflation problem emerges here as the danger of an unearned assumption of moralism, which is encouraged by the failure to distinguish the different ways a sensibility might be admirable or deplorable. McDowell faces the same problem for somewhat different reasons. His preferred normative locution is ‘merit’; thus, in his formulation of sentimentalism, ‘‘a virtue (say) is conceived to be not merely such as to elicit the appropriate ‘attitude’ (as a colour is merely such as to cause the appropriate experiences), but rather such as to merit it.’’ 36 The term ‘merit’ does little to distinguish the proper sense of appropriate, though, and what little it does leads away from the target, inasmuch as that term suggests a notion of desert, one of the central moral concepts.37 Accord- ing to McDowell, the challenge is to give adequate reasons for preferring the deliverances of one sensibility over another. Without such reasons, we could not speak of improvement, but merely change, in attitude. And he goes on to add that, ‘‘When we try to meet this threat, there is no reason not to appeal to all the resources at our disposal, including all the ethical concepts that we can lay our hands on, so long as they survive critical scrutiny.’’ 38 What the conflation problem demonstrates, however,

35. Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-Realism, p. 79. 36. McDowell, ‘‘Values and Secondary Qualities,’’ p. 207; his emphasis. 37. Indeed, Gaut and Anderson seem to use the term this way, as is evident from their acceptance of comic moralism. But every locution, including our own talk of the ‘‘ﬁtting- ness’’ of emotion, has this semantic wobble to some degree, for the same (explicable) reasons. See Berys Gaut, ‘‘The Ethical Criticism of Art,’’ in Levinson, ed.; also see Anderson. 38. McDowell, ‘‘Projection and Truth in Ethics,’’ p. 221.

D’Arms and Jacobson Sentiment and Value 735 is that we cannot bring just any ethical concept, no matter how well scru- tinized, to bear in meeting this threat. In fact, McDowell elsewhere acknowledges the point we are insisting upon here, though he makes very little of it. Moral reasons are often the wrong kind of reason to appeal to in support of the claim that a change of sensibility constitutes an improvement of the relevant kind: an increased sensitivity to the F. Thus, he writes that ‘‘much of what is ordi- narily appealed to in ranking objects of amusement is [irrelevant]... for instance much humour that one may deplore as being ‘in bad taste’ (usually on moralistic grounds) is not thereby shown not to be extremely funny.’’ 39 This is an important admission, for which credit is due, but it seems to be in tension with his advice that we appeal to all the ethical resources at our disposal in deciding when a response is merited. Per- haps, though, that advice was intended as applying only to moral, as opposed to broadly evaluative, judgments—we are unsure how to read Mc- Dowell on this point. This distinction might offer a principled basis on which to exclude irrelevant moral considerations from questions about the merit of comic or aesthetic responses.40 But even when we restrict our attention to moral responses, not all reasons for and against feeling them are pertinent to whether they are appropriate in the relevant sense. Certain moral assessments of outrage, for instance, such as that feeling it on an occasion will lead to a bad outcome or that it is intrinsically wrong to feel whatever the consequences (because one should turn the other cheek), are quite compatible with acknowledging that the response is appropriate in the relevant sense: that the object of one’s outrage really is outrageous. Ap- pealing to all the ethical resources at our disposal in assessing the appropriateness of outrage, then, will only lead us astray. To take another example, someone might not merit disdain—the third-person, reciprocal emotion to shame—if his cowardice is no fault of his own (being due to some severe childhood trauma, perhaps), but that doesn’t make his cowardice any less shameful.41 So, taken as it stands, McDowell’s neosenti-

39. Ibid., p. 224n; his emphasis. 40. However, this approach seems uncongenial to someone who takes talk of the virtues as seriously as does McDowell. If you hold the doctrine of the unity of the virtues, and that virtue always issues in right action, then it looks like you’re stuck saying that how the virtuous person would respond—presumably with disdain at morally obnoxious jokes, however viciously funny—is the appropriate way to feel. But then one must give up RDT. 41. Unless one holds shame to present its object—roughly, some ﬂaw or weakness in the affected agent—as something one is responsible for. While some philosophers are tempted to moralize such emotions as amusement, shame, and envy, we think this is a sys- tematic error with a common cause: the natural reluctance to endorse, in any way, an emotion one deems it wrong to feel. On shame, see Arnold Isenberg, ‘‘Natural Pride and Natu- ral Shame,’’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 10 (1949); and on envy, John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). On the notion of reciprocal emotions, see Gibbard, Wise Choices.

736 Ethics July 2000 mentalism, like Blackburn’s, lacks the resources to solve the conflation problem. Our complaint against Blackburn and McDowell is not that they must fall prey to the conflation of relevant and irrelevant reasons to feel, but that they do: their discussions of this issue make no progress toward fixing the requisite sense of ‘‘appropriate’’ in RDT. Moreover, some of their arguments seem to draw too broadly on such morally loaded no- tions as the admirable and the virtuous. If what they claim is taken literally, they are guilty of the conflation, and their theories are therefore false. While this would be an uncharitable conclusion, a more modest point is sufficiently telling: that, until they distinguish the relevant notion of appropriateness, neither philosopher has yet ‘‘earned the notion of truth’’— or, if you prefer, of knowledge or objectivity—for evaluative judgment. David Wiggins proposes to flesh out the crucial sense of appropriateness by appeal to the idea that F properties and their associated responses are ‘‘made for’’ each other. He offers a speculative account of the etiology of evaluative concepts and sentiments, which might be hoped to make progress on the problem at hand. On this picture, we begin by developing concepts which group things together as F precisely because they tend to elicit an F response from us: we call things that actually disgust us ‘disgusting’, things we’re ashamed of (or disdain in others) ‘shameful’, and so forth. Since these responses matter to us, we have a natural interest in discovering what occasions them. So we look for salient features of things that are F, which Wiggins calls the ‘‘marks’’ of such properties. We can then appeal to these marks, and not only to our actual responses, in normative discussion over what things are F. But the property allegedly retains an essential connection to the response. Indeed, when these practices are entrenched and sufficiently stable, Wig- gins says we can fix on a response and ‘‘argue about what the marks are of the property that the response itself is made for.’’ 42 We can examine shame, for instance, in order to decide which things are truly shameful. Thus we criticize and refine our collective views of what is shameful partly by appeal to the marks of the property (themselves identified by way of our reactions) and partly by appeal to the nature of our shared sentiments. Wiggins’s etiological story seems plausible, as far as it goes, but it still needs to be explained just how fixing on a given sentiment helps us to decide what things are F. He must point to something about emotions such as shame which we can use in deciding when they are and are not appropriate. This much seems true and important: the predication of F terms must go through our F responses. There is no way to specify what is funny, for instance, except by reference to amusement; that is just the

42. Wiggins, p. 198.

D’Arms and Jacobson Sentiment and Value 737 point of calling these response-dependent properties. But what sort of consideration about amusement can legitimately be appealed to in normative discourse over the funny? Until the relevant class of reasons is circumscribed, the conflation problem looms. Insofar as Wiggins has any new resources here, they derive from his claim that not only are these F properties made for our sentiments, our sentiments themselves can also be said to be made for the properties. So he might say, for instance, that the questions of whether it would be im- prudent or wrong to be amused can be distinguished from the question of whether the joke is funny, because they do not speak directly to what amusement is made for (and, in particular, to whether amusement is made for jokes like this). But to decide whether this is true, we need to know how to determine what a given sentiment is made for, and Wiggins is extremely vague and abstract on this point. His discussion suggests that he would explicate this talk by appealing to his speculative history of the social evolution of evaluative properties and responses: what a sentiment is made for depends upon the history of the evaluative practices of the people whose sentiment it is.43 Just how far one can sharpen a sentiment and, hence, the degree to which it can be said to be made for a property seems to us to vary considerably, depending on the sentiment in question.44 This much is clear: different cultures find different things funny, disgusting, shameful, and so on. Their differing histories of reflection and refinement, driven by social pressures imposed by the feelings and judgments of the community, inevitably establish disparate standards of the shameful. (Wiggins also writes of sentiments being ‘‘called for’’ in certain circumstances, and this locution too suggests an appeal to ac- cepted standards, which are presumably what call for F at X.)45 Were we to accept the sort of communitarian account which this etiological story suggests, it seems to follow that shame is made for and, hence, appro- priately felt toward just such things. But, although the standards of our community—and especially the feelings they engender—exert a pro- found influence upon us, one can sensibly reject them. If one’s community deems some trait shameful (one’s sexual preference, say), it will be difficult not to be ashamed of it, but surely one need not take such com-

43. Ibid., p. 195n. 44. The basic emotions, which have cross-cultural equivalents and about which evo- lutionary stories can most plausibly be told, are least amenable to this approach, whereas, if there are distinct responses associated with more culturally speciﬁc ‘‘thick’’ evaluative concepts (such as chivalrous and lewd), they might well be more deeply ‘‘made for’’ these properties. See Williams for a discussion of thick concepts; also see Allan Gibbard, ‘‘Mo- rality and Thick Concepts: I, Thick Concepts and Warrant for Feelings,’’ and Simon Black- burn, ‘‘Morality and Thick Concepts: II, Through Thick and Thin,’’ Proceedings of the Aristo- telian Society 66, suppl. (1992): 267–83, 285–99. We think there is more to say about these cases, but that must be the task of another day. 45. See David Wiggins, ‘‘Moral Cognitivism, Moral Relativism and Motivating Moral Beliefs,’’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 91 (1991): 61–85.

738 Ethics July 2000 munity standards to establish that it really is shameful. Perhaps this is a prejudice of the culture which is not to be acceded to but resisted. Wiggins seems to appreciate the force of this objection, since he observes that, in order for an evaluative concept to serve its central function in normative discourse, it must be ‘‘essentially contestable’’ what are its marks—whether, for instance, social class, wealth, and sexual preference are appropriate sources of shame and disdain (or, for that matter, of pride and admiration).46 Hence, even if culturally shaped F responses are made for F properties and are called for by prevailing standards toward things like X, community standards do not settle whether X is F. Indeed, the very notion of essential contestability seems to be that nothing settles such questions; rather, the function of these concepts requires that their application remains open to normative influence—the giving and taking of reasons. While we are deeply sympathetic to this idea, it seems to us that simply to adduce essential contestability without further explication and at such a high level of abstraction threatens to undermine the suggestion that we can understand the appropriateness of a sentiment by appeal to what it is made for—a suggestion that itself needed support. So we think Wiggins has not made any headway against the conflation problem after all. Again, we are not claiming that he cannot develop his account so as to deal with this problem, only that he has not yet done so. The problem, remember, is how to circumscribe the sense of ‘appropriate’ such that the dictum ‘‘to think X is F is to think F an appropriate response to X’’ is true. Until this is done, talk of the truth or objectivity of evaluative judgments, or of such judgments manifesting knowledge, is still unearned. IV. GIBBARD’S EMOTIONAL ‘‘WARRANT’’ Allan Gibbard offers an account of normative discourse which seeks to explicate essential contestability in more detail. This is a crucial contri- bution to the neosentimentalist program, since that program’s central insight—that to think something F is to endorse a sentiment by deeming it appropriate—entails some kind of essential contestability for F concepts. But even if these concepts are essentially contestable in their application, the conflation problem imposes limits on the kinds of reasons that can be adduced as relevant to what things are F. More than any other neosentimentalist, Gibbard seems to recognize the need to isolate the specific form of endorsement that will rule out those considerations irrelevant to property ascription. We will therefore focus our attention on Gibbard’s account, to which we are indebted. But we will argue that even Gibbard’s best developed theory does not adequately handle the conflation problem. Gibbard offers the term ‘rational’ as the linguistic device used to

46. See Wiggins, ‘‘A Sensible Subjectivism?’’ esp. pp. 198, 212.

D’Arms and Jacobson Sentiment and Value 739 express endorsement. He therefore suggests that we ‘‘fix on the dictum ‘To call a thing rational is to endorse it’, and search for a sense of ‘endorse’ for which the dictum holds true.’’ 47 The sense he finds is one of ‘‘direct and flavorless endorsement,’’ which can be applied broadly to emotions, beliefs, desires, and actions. In each case, to call a thing rational is to think it ‘‘makes sense’’—which is to express one’s acceptance of norms that permit it.48 Norm acceptance is, for Gibbard, a distinctive and linguistically infused kind of motivational state. He offers several reasons for thinking such states deserve a place in human psychology, perhaps the most important of which focus on cases of weakness of the will.49 The clearest example is that of an akratic nut eater: ‘‘suppose I can’t get my- self to stop eating nuts at a party. What is happening? One commonsense description is this: I think it makes sense to stop eating the nuts—indeed that it doesn’t make sense to go on eating them—but I nevertheless go on eating them. In this case, it seems, I accept a norm that prescribes eating no more nuts, but go on eating them even so. . . .The motivation that stems from my accepting a norm is ‘overpowered’ by motivation of another kind: my appetite or craving for nuts.’’ 50 To endorse desisting, then, is not necessarily to stop eating the nuts. Rather, it is to be in a state that constitutively involves some motivation to stop eating them, which may or may not be effective, depending on how effectively the norms one accepts govern one’s conduct. To put the point in another familiar and problematic philosophical idiom: the actions (beliefs, desires, or emotions) one endorses as rational are the actions one will perform (or the beliefs, desires, or emotions one will adopt), insofar as they are under voluntary control. Gibbard motivates his suggestion that discourse about rationality serves to express endorsement, or states of norm acceptance, through open-question arguments against any substantive account of the meaning of ‘rational’.51 His central claim is that this account captures what is

47. Gibbard, Wise Choices, pp. 6 ff. 48. Gibbard uses ‘rational’ and ‘makes sense’ synonymously. As he notes, there is something unfortunate about each locution (or any other available in ordinary language). ‘Makes sense’ can be read empirically, as what we would expect or can explain. Gibbard is not concerned with this empirical ‘‘makes sense that,’’ but with the normative ‘‘makes sense to.’’ For simplicity’s sake, we will stick to ‘rational’ here, but the quotations from Gibbard use both locutions interchangeably. 49. Two of Gibbard’s three arguments concern weakness of will. The ﬁrst is given here, and the second takes up the Milgram experiment. The conclusion Gibbard correctly draws from the famous experiment is that most of the participants are more strongly in the grip of norms (about obedience) other than those they most strongly endorse (about not harming the innocent). Hence, they do what does not seem best to them, i.e., they continue to administer electric shocks to subjects under orders from the experimenter. Or so they think. 50. Gibbard, Wise Choices, p. 56. 51. Ibid., pp. 9–22; and Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton, ‘‘Toward Fin de Sie`cle Ethics.’’

740 Ethics July 2000 at issue in philosophical and everyday disputes over rationality: a core element of endorsement which all other accounts miss. Take, for instance, the instrumentalist view that rationality in action is a matter of efficient pursuit of one’s ends (understood simply as intrinsic preferences or desires), where these are not themselves subject to rational assessment.52 Some philosophers deny this instrumentalist position, holding instead that there are some ends it is rational or irrational to adopt, irrespective of one’s actual desires.53 Although a given action might be granted to promote some end of the agent’s, philosophers who reject instrumentalism will deny that this suffices to make the action rational; they think that if the end itself is irrational, then taking the means to that end will not be rational either. As Gibbard points out, if ‘rational act’ just means an act that is an efficient means to the satisfaction of the agent’s intrinsic preferences (or ends), then anyone who denies the instrumentalist claim would be linguistically incompetent or conceptually con- fused. His suggestion is that we can make better sense of the dispute over instrumentalism by interpreting the parties as expressing the acceptance of different norms and, hence, as endorsing different actions for some given circumstance. Instrumentalists endorse always taking the means to one’s ends, whereas noninstrumentalists do not endorse taking the means to every end—only to those ends they endorse as rational. The advantage of Gibbard’s proposal, as he sees it, is that it allows us to find the views of both parties intelligible, while giving us a way of understanding the controversy; it is over what actions to endorse, given that one has certain ends. Moreover, Gibbard thinks we can derive a theory of moral judgment from this norm-expressivist account of rationality. On Gibbard’s theory, narrowly moral judgments of right and wrong are tied to the rationality of what he identifies as the moral emotions: guilt and impartial anger. To think some action wrong is to think it rational for the agent to feel guilty, and others to resent him, for so acting.54 (It is a substantive question, which the theory leaves open, whether it is always rational to avoid wrongdoing—that is, to do something it would be rational to feel guilty about.) A similar pattern of analysis is applied to other F properties. Thus, Gibbard writes, ‘‘an act is shameful if it makes sense for the agent to feel ashamed for having done it, and for others to disdain him for having done it. An act is dangerous if it makes

52. Perhaps not all intrinsic desires, but we won’t worry about the many complications to this issue that don’t bear on the matter at hand. 53. Gibbard cites James Grifﬁn, Well-Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). See also Darwall; Korsgaard. 54. Strictly speaking, this is an account of the blameworthiness of an action, because unless the agent is responsible for his wrongdoing, guilt and anger at him are not rational. But, following Gibbard, we will ignore this complication here by assuming that the agent’s responsibility is not at issue.

D’Arms and Jacobson Sentiment and Value 741 sense for the agent to feel afraid on account of having done it.’’ 55 This commitment suffices to make Gibbard a neosentimentalist; hence RDT can be formulated in terms that he would accept, which is all that matters for our purposes. But Gibbard’s focus on direct and flavorless endorsement, expressed in judgments of rationality, prevents him from being able to solve the conflation problem either. So broad a form of endorsement cannot differentiate between reasons for feeling F toward X that are relevant to whether X is F and those that are not. Consider an example. Dennis is a graduate student in philosophy who is ashamed of his inability to articulate his views clearly—a sentiment we can all too easily recall. Moreover, he thinks this shame appropriate, in the relevant sense: it’s shameful to be such an inarticulate philosopher. Yet he realizes that philosophical discourse is a skill one improves with practice and that his shame inhibits him from speaking up in seminar, thus exacerbating the problem. Best not to be ashamed, then, if he can help it. Insofar as his emotions are under voluntary control (which, if he is like most of us, is not very far), he will not be ashamed of his Latin malapropisms and clumsy attempts at counterexample. So Dennis seems not to endorse feeling ashamed of his abilities; indeed, he apparently endorses not feeling shame.56 But he does not thereby deny that his inabilities are shameful. Hence, to think something shameful is not in fact equivalent to endorsing shame at it—that is, to thinking it rational to be ashamed. Gibbard recognizes and attempts to deal with this problem. He allows that someone might endorse a belief or emotion because it would be advantageous to have it. Furthermore, such strategic reasons, which seize on why it is in Dennis’s interests not to be ashamed, might be thought to show that his shame isn’t rational. This thought threatens to stick the theory with the conclusion that Dennis’s inabilities are not shameful on the spurious grounds that it would be bad for him to be ashamed of them. Contrary to this suggestion, though, Gibbard urges that the notion of rationality at work in questions of whether an emotion is rational is the same notion we apply to assessments of belief.57 The question of whether a belief is rational, he says, is the question of

55. Gibbard, Wise Choices, p. 51. 56. Dennis need not think this true of all the traits he deems shameful; such strategic considerations are most powerful speciﬁcally when it would be debilitating actually to be ashamed. By contrast, the cliche´d ‘‘98-pound weakling’’ who gets sand kicked in his face until he goes in for the weightlifting regimen is constructively motivated by his shame. Note, too, that to abjure endorsing shame at an admittedly shameful trait, on strategic or moral grounds, does not commit one to holding that others would be in any sense irrational to disdain you for this trait, even if (as Gibbard suggests, and we accept) one’s norms for the warrant of ﬁrst-person shame and third-person disdain must mesh. We are grateful to an anonymous editor for encouraging us to clarify these points. 57. Gibbard, Wise Choices, p. 36.

742 Ethics July 2000 whether it is warranted. This is a matter of evidence alone. Similarly, he suggests, we should understand the question of whether an emotion is rational not as a question of its advantageousness but of its warrant. Den- nis should be understood as deeming his shame disadvantageous but warranted. The judgment that it is a strategic mistake to feel some way, Gibbard writes, ‘‘is a different judgment from the one I want to pursue. The judgments I want us to consider are ones of warrant....Ireserve ‘rational’ and ‘makes sense’ for these uses.’’ 58 One question that immediately arises is what it could be to think an emotion warranted. In its common philosophical use, ‘‘warrant’’ is an epistemic notion concerning the evidential support of one’s beliefs, but what can it mean to ask whether one has evidence for shame or amusement? Gibbard tells us little about how to circumscribe considerations of warrant for an emotion. Moreover, since it is crucial to his noncognitivist project that emotions not be even partly constituted by beliefs, he cannot hold that an emotion is warranted whenever some constitutive belief would be warranted. But perhaps the relevant emotion concepts are rich enough to sustain this extension of the familiar epistemic notion of warrant. Indeed, much of the literature in the philosophy of emotion suggests that the emotions do possess something like an internal logic or structure. Furthermore, as Gibbard points out, emotions are surrounded by ‘‘epistemic lore’’ about when they are and are not appropriate. (For example, when we say ‘‘the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,’’ we are noticing that our sense of the worth of others’ possessions is systematically exaggerated. This homily is meant to explain, and to warn against, a tendency that causes us to be mistaken about the evidence for envy.) Gibbard’s suggestion thus helps to isolate the sense of emotional appropriateness relevant to property ascription by demonstrating that certain considerations seem to provide evidential, as opposed to strategic, grounds for feeling a given emotion. While we would need to look at each particular emotion more closely in order to determine the nature of its internal structure and, hence, what sort of evidence would warrant one in feeling it, we have perhaps already said enough to exclude considerations of the advantageousness of feeling an emotion as obviously irrelevant to whether the emotion is warranted. So we think Gibbard’s principal suggestion, that the sense of appropriateness relevant to property ascription is a matter of warrant, is an important advance for sentimentalism. But two crucial problems remain. The first is specifically directed at Gibbard’s theory, which we take to be the only sentimentalist account that makes real headway on the conflation problem. Though Gibbard has pointed to a way of restricting the relevant considerations, we will contend that his prior identification of

58. Ibid.

D’Arms and Jacobson Sentiment and Value 743 judgments of rationality with ‘‘flavorless endorsement’’ renders this insight unavailable to his theory. The second difficulty is more general. We will argue that, although the notion of warrant is on the right track, it is subject relative in a way that prevents it from capturing the sense of appropriateness needed for RDT. We shall develop these objections in turn. As we’ve seen, Gibbard writes that he intends to use ‘rational’ and ‘makes sense’ specifically as assessments of warrant, but in fact his theory seems to render this restriction unavailable. ‘Rational’ has already been stipulated to be a direct and flavorless form of endorsement—what we will call ‘‘thin endorsement.’’ According to Gibbard, ‘‘what it is rational to believe settles what to believe, and what is rational to feel about something settles what to feel.’’ 59 Therefore, he is not entitled to insist that only considerations of warrant bear on questions of the rationality of an attitude. To do so would be to render incoherent the perfectly sensible thought that, when the advantages of ignoring the evidence are great enough, one should not believe what is warranted. Similarly, the warranted feeling is not always what to feel, all things considered. This is the lesson to be drawn from Dennis: for him the bad consequences of being ashamed trump considerations of warrant. Gibbard does offer a way to describe cases of conflict between war- ranting and prudential reasons which is compatible with his use of ‘rational’ as a term of thin endorsement. Questions about the advantageousness of a belief or emotion, he suggests, can be understood as questions about whether it is rational to desire having this attitude. This allows him to say that it is rational for Dennis to be ashamed of his inability (shame is warranted), but it is also rational for him to want not to be ashamed (shame is undesirable). An analogous move is available in the case of belief. If you are impressed by Philo’s arguments in Hume’s Dialogues, you might conclude that it is not rational to believe in God (belief is unwarranted). But if you are also impressed by Pascal’s wager, you might conclude that it is rational to want to believe in God nonetheless (belief is desirable). ‘‘Rationally feeling or believing something is distinct from rationally wanting to feel or believe it,’’ Gibbard writes.60 It is rational to believe or feel in accordance with your evidence, but it may be rational to want to believe or feel otherwise. The distinction between endorsing a belief and endorsing the desire to believe is significant, but, so long as endorsement is taken to be thin, this does not solve the problem. Recall the dictum that ‘‘what it is rational to feel about something settles what to feel,’’ which is the up- shot of treating ‘rational’ as a thin term of endorsement. Now consider Dennis and his deliberation over what to feel. As Gibbard would have it, Dennis thinks shame rational but also thinks it rational to want not to be

59. Ibid., p. 49; emphasis added. 60. Ibid., p. 37.

744 Ethics July 2000 ashamed. Since to think something rational is to endorse it, this means that Dennis endorses feeling shame, and he endorses wanting not to be ashamed. But if this is really what Dennis endorses then, were his will effective (that is, if he felt what he endorsed feeling), he would feel counterproductive shame while vainly desiring not to feel it. This result seems deeply unacceptable. Someone who could effectively decide what to feel ought to be able to do better. Of course there can be situations in which it makes sense to endorse second-order attitudes that compete with first-order attitudes one also endorses, but this is not one of them. In this case it is more plausible to suppose that Dennis simply takes the strategic considerations in favor of avoiding shame to be more important than the evidential reasons for feeling it.61 After weighing all the reasons, Dennis endorses not feeling shame in this situation.62 Had he voluntary control over his emotions, he would not feel ashamed. But this is entirely compatible with his thinking his philosophical inabilities shameful and with thinking shame a warranted response. It follows from these considerations that to think an emotion warranted differs from a thin endorsement of it. Since Gibbard’s primary commitment is to the endorsing function of rationality talk, it also follows that he is not in a position to exploit the insight that considerations of warrant have a tie to property ascription which mere endorsement does not. One strategy for Gibbard, at this point, would be to abandon the claim that norm acceptance is thin endorsement—that is, that what it is rational to do, feel, or believe settles the question of what to do, feel, or believe. He might then attempt to show that there is a special kind of endorsement connected with thinking an attitude warranted and that this epistemically ‘‘flavored’’ type of endorsement is the crucial one for understanding normative judgment and norm acceptance.63 On this proposal, Dennis, in thinking the circumstance shameful, endorses shame in the limited sense of thinking it warranted, which is compatible with an all-in endorsement of not being ashamed. But even this friendly amend- ment will not allow Gibbard to solve the conflation problem, because the question of whether anyone is warranted in feeling F at X turns out to be different from the question of whether X is F.

61. To deny this is, in effect, to insist that evidential reasons always settle what to feel. This is a substantive normative position which norm expressivism is not intended to involve. It also happens to be a crazy normative position. The thought that a feeling is warranted may always count in favor of feeling it, but moral and prudential reasons not to feel it can count too and are sometimes more important. 62. Whether he endorses desiring to feel shame is a further question, presumably to be settled by consideration of the reasons for and against having this desire. Except in certain extraordinary circumstances, he would not endorse this desire either. 63. This may be the best interpretation of Gibbard’s account of judgments of rationality. It should be noted, though, that this view would require rethinking the arguments that Gibbard uses to motivate norm expressivism in the ﬁrst place. See appendix.

D’Arms and Jacobson Sentiment and Value 745 If we substitute ‘warrant’ for ‘appropriate’ in RDT, we get the following: To think X is F is to think it warranted to feel F in response to X. The trouble with this suggestion, in short, is that whether someone is warranted in feeling an emotion depends upon the evidence he has about the circumstance, but whether the circumstance is F may not depend on any such thing. Consider, for instance, Gibbard’s suggestion that an act is dangerous if it makes sense (i.e., is warranted) for the agent to feel afraid on account of having done it. Notice that a person might, without epistemic negligence, be in a dangerous circumstance while lacking the information needed to recognize the danger. Then, although he would not be warranted in being afraid, the situation is still dangerous—indeed, all the more so, in virtue of his ignorance. Simi- larly, the actor who unwittingly delivers his acceptance speech with his fly open, despite having checked his appearance in the mirror back- stage, isn’t warranted in being ashamed. But he still has something to be ashamed of. He can hardly defend himself against the disdain of his ri- vals by appealing to his ignorance. The crucial point is that the question of whether a circumstance (action, feature, etc.) is F and the question of whether the relevant agent is or would be warranted in feeling F in that circumstance systematically diverge in cases of misleading evidence. One can judge something to have an evaluative feature (e.g., that it’s fearsome, shameful, or funny) while denying that the persons whose reactions (of fear, shame, or amusement) are thereby deemed appropriate have available to them the evidence they would need to detect the feature and, hence, to have the response. So judgments that X is F are not judgments about the warrant of the relevant sentiments. In fairness to Gibbard, it should be said that his primary focus in providing a response-dependent account of ethical concepts is on wrong, not on such concepts as shameful, funny, or dangerous. And the judgment that an act is wrong is, arguably, sensitive to the agent’s evidence in a way that almost allows the warrant of guilt to capture the rightness or wrongness of the act. On some views, an agent’s (nonculpable) ignorance suffices to exonerate him of wrongdoing. This, at any rate, is true for one sense of ‘wrong’, which Gibbard calls the ‘‘subjective sense,’’ and it is this sense he attempts to analyze. Of course, some utilitarians dispute this claim, wanting to distinguish assessments of the agent (who is blameless) from assessments of the act (which they will insist is objectively wrong). But Gibbard claims that we have no use for this objective sense of wrongness, since the subjective sense satisfies all the purposes we have for such a notion. Yet, even if this is correct, the argument does not seem to apply to concepts such as dangerous and shameful, whose application is independent of the evidence available to the relevant agent. So, even if judgments of wrongness can be understood in terms of the warrant of guilt and resentment—about which we are skeptical on independent

746 Ethics July 2000 grounds—Gibbard’s approach does not offer a general strategy for explicating the connection between value and sentiment.64

V. CONCLUSION: ON THE NEED FOR A RATIONAL SENTIMENTALISM We began with a challenge for sentimentalism: to preserve the idea that values are somehow grounded in the sentiments, while at the same time making sense of the rational aspects of evaluation. This initial challenge posed a familiar puzzle about how states such as sentiments could be properly understood as subject to appraisal for their rationality at all. The conflation problem sharpens that challenge by showing that even more is needed. Sentimentalists must make sense of a specific form of rational appraisal which circumscribes just those reasons for feeling an emotion that are relevant to the evaluative judgments they seek to explicate. If our arguments here are sound, then the neosentimentalists have not yet developed the resources to solve this foundational problem. What is needed is a rational sentimentalism: this would be a version of the theory that handles the conflation problem by showing how to distinguish the relevant sense of ‘‘appropriateness’’ for the sentiments so as to make RDT true. To call a sentiment appropriate in this sense is to give it a specific and limited form of endorsement, which is neither a judgment of rightness, prudence, or warrant, nor an all-in endorsement of the sentiment as what to feel. We have a proposal about how this might be effected, but since considerations of space preclude our developing the theory here, we can offer only a gesture. The first step is to give a name to the requisite notion of appropriateness for the sentiments: we shall call it their ‘‘fittingness.’’ 65 In other words, we are stipulating that to judge F fitting is to endorse the response in the relevant way, which constitutes taking the circumstances to be genuinely F. Of course, this terminological stipulation can hardly be said to solve the conflation problem by itself. We think that in order to provide any substantive grounding for the distinction between reasons that are and are not relevant to the fittingness of an emotion, it is necessary to examine our actual emotions piecemeal, in order to articulate differences in how each emotion presents some feature of the world to us when we are in its grip. If so, then rational sentimentalism must take much more than a mere ‘‘detour through the sentiments,’’ in order to explicate the connection between sentiment and value. Moreover, we must take care to differentiate

64. See Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, ‘‘Expressivism, Morality, and the Emo- tions,’’ Ethics 104 (1994): 739– 63. 65. This terminology follows Richard Brandt, ‘‘Moral Valuation,’’ Ethics 56 (1946): 106 –21, an important and insightful paper which nevertheless fails to deal with the conﬂa- tion problem. The notion of emotional ﬁttingness is considered in more depth in D’Arms and Jacobson, ‘‘The Moralistic Fallacy’’; we hope to develop a theory of rational sentimentalism further in our subsequent work.

D’Arms and Jacobson Sentiment and Value 747 the essential characteristics of these responses from those that have only a ‘‘local and temporary prominence.’’ 66 This is the real task of developing such a theory, and it must be left for another day. The reader who is skeptical about the prospects for rational sentimentalism must be satisfied with a negative conclusion to this paper, which is nevertheless quite significant. This is that the neosentimentalist approach, which is one of the most flourishing contemporary research programs in metaethics, is fatally flawed. If it cannot solve the conflation problem, then sentimentalism is inadequate even to its most promising cases, the F properties linked directly and intimately to familiar emotions; hence, the theory must be rejected. Still, there is reason to be hopeful about the prospects for a theory of rational sentimentalism. At least with respect to the concepts we have focused on here, some kind of sentimentalism has a great deal of prima facie appeal. Of course, sentimentalism in ethics has typically been put forward not, in the first place, to explicate judgments of the shameful, funny, fearsome, and so forth (our F properties), but as an account of judgments of the good, the right, and the beautiful. Because moral philosophy has been particularly interested in giving an account of these latter, grander concepts, sentimentalism’s prospects have been thought to depend on its success in explicating them. Hence, the most familiar objections to sentimentalism focus on problems specific to the concepts right and good.67 But it is important to recognize that, whatever one holds about these concepts, other forms of evaluation have much more obvious and intimate relations to familiar human emotions. (Indeed, one of the virtues of neosentimentalism is the attention it pays to this expanded range of evaluation.) Response-dependent concepts such as these have at least as secure, if not as prestigious, a place in everyday evaluative thought and discourse as do their more noble relatives. And we think it hardly credible to suppose that they can be explicated without appeal to their associated sentiments. APPENDIX Gibbard’s arguments for the endorsing sense of ‘rational’ do not motivate a role for a distinctively epistemic form of endorsement. Nothing about the akratic nut eater, for instance, requires us to see that character

66. See P. F. Strawson, ‘‘Freedom and Resentment,’’ reprinted in Free Will, ed. Gary Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 80. 67. This is perhaps most obvious with respect to doubts about whether there is any such sentiment as moral disapprobation, and doubts about whether contingent, human responses could have the special sort of authority that morality has been thought to in- voke. But we think that worries about the circularity of response-dependent accounts, which some sentimentalists deny (as does Gibbard) and others admit but claim not to be vicious (like Wiggins), also have more bite when applied to accounts of good and right than to funny and shameful.

748 Ethics July 2000 as thinking any particular attitudes warranted: what was crucial there was simply that he endorses not eating the nuts but eats them anyway. These arguments capitalize on conﬂicts between (or within) motivational sys- tems; they are meant to show that there is a role for the mental state of endorsement (i.e., norm acceptance) which determines the will but does not always issue in action. But it is one thing to grant that there is some such mental state and another to suppose that the kinds of endorse- ments it issues in involve seeing things as warranted. This latter conclusion is the one Gibbard would need on the current proposal. And in some places he seems to accept it, saying at one point: ‘‘to appraise a voluntary action as rational, then, is to appraise the preferences that stand behind it as rational, and to appraise the intention it carries out as rational as a means to satisfying those preferences. Whether a voluntary action is rational, then, is a matter of the rationality of preferences and intentions’’ (Wise Choices, p. 39). But the claim that to judge an act rational involves an epistemically ﬂavored endorsement of the psychological states standing behind it renders the notion of rationality considerably less thin than it was initially supposed to be. In fact, this claim seems to be incompatible with Gib- bard’s account of the dispute over instrumentalism. After all, the instrumentalist denies that rational assessment of action is to be understood in terms of the warrant of one’s underlying attitudes (i.e., desires or preferences); rather, it is simply a matter of effective pursuit of one’s desires, where the desires themselves are not amenable to rational assessment. If he insists that to think an act rational is to endorse the preferences standing behind it, then Gibbard would seem to be saddling instrumentalism with an incompatible view about desire: not only are they all kosher, they are all evidentially upstanding. But if desires aren’t representational at all and, hence, are neither correct nor incorrect—a claim that seems to be close to the heart of Humean instrumentalism—then there is no appli- cable notion of evidence. In claiming that some action was rational, the instrumentalist would be stuck endorsing certain desires as warranted, even while he insists that the cornerstone of his theory of rationality in action is that desires themselves cannot be rationally assessed. This seems unacceptable.

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