Philosophical Psychology, 2013 Vol. 26, No. 3, 461–475, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2012.673767 Critical review: The Emotional Construction of Morals Erick Ramirez Jesse Prinz’s The Emotional Construction of Morals is an ambitious and intriguing contribution to the debate about the nature and role of emotion within moral psychology. I review Prinz’s recent claims surrounding the nature of emotional concepts as ‘‘embodied representations of concern’’ and survey his later arguments meant to establish a form of cultural relativism. Although I suggest that other theories of emotional representation (i.e. prototype views) would better serve Prinz’s aims, the underlying meta-ethical relativism that results is well defended and represents a significant advance for constructivist Sentimentalists. Keywords: Emotion; Meta-Ethics; Moral Psychology; Sentimentalism 1. Introduction The late Robert Solomon is quoted on the back cover of Jesse Prinz’s last book on emotions, Gut reactions (2004), saying that it was ‘‘an exciting book, I couldn’t put it down, but I fought with it every inch of the way.’’ One might very well say the same about Prinz’s companion book, The emotional construction of morals. Prinz’s arguments are sophisticated, empirically informed, and his conclusions enticing. Still, I fought with it every inch of the way. Prinz’s latest project is at its heart an attempt to accommodate empirical data on the emotions with our intuitions about morality. Prinz tries to explain our folk notions, not just of emotion but also of our moral practices and, in giving us those explanations, draws intriguing conclusions about the nature of both. His project is audacious in that he wants to give an account of emotion and ethics that preserves many seemingly incompatible aspects of these folk Erick Ramirez is an Instructor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego Correspondence to: Erick Ramirez, Department of Philosophy—0119, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0119, USA. Email: [email protected] © 2013 Taylor & Francis 462 E. Ramirez concepts by showing that emotions, understood as perceptions of somatic states calibrated to ‘‘concerns,’’ are necessary and sufficient to account for moral judgments and moral values as we (the folk) understand them. In doing this, Prinz thinks that the resulting meta-ethical position, speaker relative Sentimentalism, is not only true but can accommodate intuitions about what moral judgments are, why we make them, and why they are justified. In what follows I address specific questions at only one critical juncture of Prinz’s arguments: his theory of emotion. I will also briefly touch upon his account of moral disagreement, and the meta-ethical relativism he ultimately endorses. Prinz argues that although relativism is thought to imply moral nihilism, his view has the resources to retain most of our moral beliefs. I question the strength of these arguments, especially his claims about relativism and tolerance. 2. What is an Emotion? One aspect of Prinz’s work that ought to be praised is his making his theory of emotion central to his normative theory. In other words, Prinz wants to make clear that if we’re going to be committed Sentimentalists—committed, that is, to the belief that our emotional responses are what separate the domain of the moral from the non-moral—it matters what our theory of the sentiments actually is. The content of morality, its scope, and its normative authority should crucially depend on the underlying theory of what sentiments are. Prinz focuses much of the early parts of his book on getting straight just what he thinks emotions are, their origins, and how they impact us. This turns us toward questions in the philosophy of mind, theories of concepts, and questions about motivational internalism. Prinz draws quite heavily on the Neo-Jamesian theory of emotion he developed in Gut reactions (2004), though not without important differences. Before addressing those differences, however, I want to pause to address Prinz’s arguments against cognitive theories of emotion, and raise questions not only about those arguments but about his own positive arguments in favor of non- cognitivism. Much as in Gut reactions, Prinz divides the wide-ranging theories of emotion along one dimension: whether propositional attitudes are a necessary feature of an emotional experience. The division then amounts to a debate between emotional cognitivists who argue that emotions necessarily involve propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, etc.), and non-cognitivists who deny this. Prinz is a non-cognitivist and amasses impressive support for thinking that any theory of emotion that requires propositional attitudes is false.1 For example, propositional attitudes are clearly not sufficient for having an emotional experience (e.g., I can judge that I’ve been wronged without feeling angry either at the moment of judgment or afterward), but Prinz’s arguments go farther than this. He argues that propositional attitudes of any kind are not necessary in order to have an emotional experience. If propositional attitudes are Philosophical Psychology 463 neither necessary nor sufficient to account for genuine emotional experiences, then cognitivism is false. One criticism that Prinz makes early on is that cognitive theories seem too demanding to be a realistic account of emotional experience (p. 51). Cognitivists, Prinz argues, require us to make judgments/appraisals of our feelings, when in fact we often find ourselves in an emotional state without any mediation through prior judgments. In other words, although appraisals do at times seem to play a role in getting us to enter an emotional state (‘‘Is that man insulting me? Yes, he is. That makes me furious!’’), they don’t seem to accurately account for emotional experiences in which we first find ourselves feeling a certain way and only afterward determine the causal antecedents that put us in that state. As a first pass this doesn’t seem to attack cognitive theories that posit non-conscious judgemental states as essential to emotions. Solomon, in Thinking about feeling, for example, allows that: An emotion is rather a complex of judgments and, sometimes, quite sophisticated judgments, such as judgments of responsibility (in shame, anger, and embarrass- ment) or judgments of comparative status (as in contempt and resentment). Emotions as judgments are not necessarily (or usually) conscious or deliberative or even articulate, but we certainly can articulate, attend to, and deliberate regarding our emotions and emotion-judgments, and we do so whenever we think our way into an emotion, ‘‘work ourselves up’’ to anger, or jealousy, or love. (2004, p. 11) So, if the criticism here is simply that we don’t necessarily have a conscious judgment that is an essential component of emotion, then this criticism, by itself, misses its mark. Whatever states Solomon is referring to here as ‘‘not necessarily (or usually) conscious or deliberative or even articulate’’ seem compatible with Prinz’s argument that we don’t often find ourselves making judgments when we experience an emotion. However, Prinz isn’t yet done with his assault on cognitivism. Prinz’s argument against the necessity of propositional attitudes is a bit more complex than I have initially framed it. Prinz contends that how one conceives of thoughts is crucial to determining whether they are necessarily a part of an emotional experience. Thoughts, at a minimum, are defined by Prinz as ‘‘mental representations that contain concepts;’’ accordingly, he claims that ‘‘to say that emotions are necessarily cognitive is to say that one cannot have an emotion without possessing and tokening certain concepts’’ (pp. 56–57). This definition thus makes clearer why a theory like Solomon’s would still count as cognitive on Prinz’s account. However, having added this much, what reasons are we given to think that cognitivism, understood now as a theory of emotion that necessarily requires the tokening of concepts, is false? Prinz’s appeal is again to emotional immediacy. Emotions don’t seem, phenom- enally, to require judgments. Cognitivism, he claims, places emotions ‘‘too high up on the phylogenetic and ontogenetic scales’’ (p. 57), i.e., it denies emotions to nonhumans and very young children, which Prinz argues is a mistake. Appeals to emotional immediacy, again, leave untouched versions of cognitivism that posit non-conscious appraisals as essential to emotion; neither is the appeal, by 464 E. Ramirez itself, a very powerful argument against cognitivism in general. There needs to be some reason for thinking that emotional experience actually lacks cognition (not just that it seems so to us) and that our phenomenal experience with emotion is not only essentially non-cognitive but also that it should serve as arbiter in the debate between cognitivism and non-cognitivism.2 Solomon, to use a familiar foil, is all too happy to include animal emotions within his taxonomy despite his commitment to a form of cognitivism about emotions. The real meat in Prinz’s arguments against cognitivism comes from his extensive use of psychological data on emotion to support his conclusion that cognitivism is false. He argues that if experimental data can show that emotions can be elicited by bypassing cognition altogether, then we have good reason to conclude that cognitivism—at least a cognitivism that states that all emotions must always include propositional attitudes—is false. At best, if the data point in this direction, cognitivism would find a home in some ‘‘mixed theory’’ of emotion. How does Prinz propose to show this? Prinz appeals to studies that he believes show that emotions can be induced without judgments. Here he refers to studies purporting to support the facial feedback hypothesis, which simply states that moving one’s facial muscles into specific emotional configurations (smiles, frowns, and so on) can induce the emotions corresponding with their facial expressions—smiling tends to make us feel happy, frowning makes us feel sad, etc.