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Sentiment and Value* Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson Name /C1335/C1335_CH03 08/16/00 06:05AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 722 # 1 ARTICLES Sentiment and Value* Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson When Hume wrote that ‘‘Morality...ismore properly felt than judged of,’’ he was getting at something true and important but potentially mis- leading.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 ob- ject, 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 val- ues 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. Ethics 110 ( July 2000): 722–748 ᭧ 2000 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/2000/11004-0003 $02.00 722 This content downloaded from 128.103.149.052 on May 25, 2017 11:06:04 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Name /C1335/C1335_CH03 08/16/00 06:05AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 723 # 2 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., seman- tic or conceptual) connection between an agent’s judgment that an ob- ject 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 judg- ments as expressions of desire, motive, or some other conative (as op- posed 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 criti- cize 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. This content downloaded from 128.103.149.052 on May 25, 2017 11:06:04 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Name /C1335/C1335_CH03 08/16/00 06:05AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 724 # 3 724 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 ap- proach 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 contem- porary 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 ‘‘cog- nitivist’’ 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 for- ward. The task of this article is to articulate the problem and to show that none of these neosentimentalists have developed the resources neces- sary for its solution. Though we cannot develop our positive program here, we will conclude by pointing in the direction we think sentimen- talism 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 objec- tions to such views are immediately apparent. The first is an objection to simple subjectivism, the theory that ‘‘X is wrong’’ just means ‘‘I disap- prove of X.’’ Simple subjectivism seems unable to account for disagree- ment. 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 ac- tion. 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 tradi- tion 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.
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