Moral Sentimentalism

Moral sentimentalism is the view that human sentiments—feelings, emotions, or other affective states—are fundamental to an account of moral evaluation, awareness, and motivation. According to sentimentalists, objects of moral evaluation—actions, motives, and character—are morally right or wrong (or virtuous or vicious) depending on whether we feel approval or disapproval toward them. (A weak form of sentimentalism maintains that the moral status of actions, motives, and character is determined in part by our sentiments but that other considerations are also relevant to fixing their moral status.) Many sentimentalists maintain that the moral evaluation of motives or character is prior to the moral evaluation of actions, but not all sentimentalists agree that this is the case. Sentimentalists do agree that our awareness of what morality requires is not primarily a matter of cognition—that is, a matter of knowing something—but is rather a matter of feeling something. These feelings of moral approval and disapproval, sentimentalists claim, are essential to moral motivation.

While all sentimentalists agree that moral evaluations depend on our sentiments, there is disagreement about the nature of this dependency relationship. The simplest form of sentimentalism maintains that to judge that a moral property applies to an object is just to feel the associated sentiment. A more sophisticated form of sentimentalism regards moral properties as [Page 1441]dispositional properties. In this approach, to judge that a moral property applies to an object is to say that the object tends to produce a certain sentiment in normal human observers under normal conditions. Some sentimentalists modify this dispositionalist account by appealing to the affective responses of a hypothetical, ideal (fully informed and impartial) observer; they claim that to attribute a moral property to an object is to hold that an ideal observer would have a certain affective response to the object. The leading contemporary forms of sentimentalism are varieties of second-order sentimentalism. According to this type of sentimentalism, to judge that a moral property applies to an object is to deem it appropriate to feel an associated sentiment toward that object. For example, one might claim that an act is morally wrong if, and only if, it is appropriate for the agent who performed the action to feel guilt for having done it and for other people to feel anger or resentment at the agent for having done it.

Sentimentalism is opposed to moral rationalism (or intellectualism)—the view that moral evaluation, knowledge, and motivation are grounded in reason, as opposed to sentiment. According to rationalists, reason determines the proper ends of action, and moral knowledge is a matter of rational cognition. Moreover, rationalists typically maintain that moral knowledge taken by itself is capable of providing sufficient motivation for action. Traditional forms of rationalism include intuitionism, which sees moral truths as indemonstrable, self-evident principles, and Kantian approaches, which see moral precepts as grounded in a general theory of practical reasoning.

While sentimentalists maintain that morality is fundamentally a matter of feeling, they typically allow that reason plays some role in morality. This role is normally limited to reasoning related to ascertaining and discerning facts, and means-end (instrumental) reasoning: The ultimate ends of action are fixed by moral sentiments, and reason identifies the best means for achieving these ends given the circumstances at hand. Similarly, while rationalists deny that sentiments define morality, they usually do not entirely deny feeling a role in morality. Rationalists see moral feeling as the product or result of our cognitive awareness of the moral status of an object, and such resultant feeling can help move us to pursue (or avoid) that object. Again, according to the sentimentalist, an action is right, a motive is virtuous, or a character is admirable because we feel approval toward it, whereas according to the rationalist, we feel approval because we rationally recognize that the act is right, the motive virtuous, or the character admirable.

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