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Philosophy Cafe | Moral Rationalism and Moral Sentimentalism

Held on the 7th May 2019

at 6pm to
7:30pm


Add to Calendar 2019-05-07 18:00:00 2019-05-07 19:30:00 Australia/Sydney Philosophy Cafe | Moral Rationalism and Moral Sentimentalism


Moral Rationalism versus Moral Sentimentalism

What is the source and motivation of moral judgement and action, reason or emotion?


Moral Rationalism: we (should) consult our reason when making moral judgements, and reason alone is sufficient to prompt moral action (emotion is not required, and may even get in the way).

Moral Sentimentalism: we (should) consult our emotions when making moral judgements, and emotion is sufficient to prompt moral action (reason is not required).

Moral Rationalism: Consider “the view that the substance of morality, usually in the form of general moral principles, can be known a priori. The view is defended by Kant … but it goes back at least to Plato. Both Plato and Kant thought that a priori moral knowledge could have an impact on what we do quite independently of any desire that we happen to have. This motivational view is also ordinarily associated with moral rationalism. … moral knowledge consists in a belief that is capable of rationally producing a distinct desire.” (Michael Smith, CDP: 587)

Let us look at how some people have highlighted worries with rationalism

“[Michael] Stocker asks us to imagine someone visiting a sick friend in the hospital who insists, to his friend and to himself, that his visit is motivated by a sense of duty rather than any feeling or concern for his friend. Stocker points out that most of us find such a person morally unattractive, but Kantian and other forms of rationalism have a difficult time accommodating that intuition because of their typical insistence on the moral merit of acting from a sense of duty (conscientiously) and on the relative or absolute lack of moral merit in actions done from (mere) feelings like benevolence and love.” (Michael Slote OHET)

“Similarly, Bernard Williams describes a hypothetical case where a man who sees that both his wife and some stranger are in danger of drowning has to decide whom to save. If, in order to justify saving his wife, the man first checks or thinks he has to check to see whether morality accords him and others a permission to favour one’s wife over strangers then, according to Williams, he “has one thought too many.” Once again, we would morally approve of him more if, without consulting moral principles, he saves his wife out of a feeling of concern for her.” (Michael Slote, OHET).

Moral sentimentalism: moral judgments essential involve feelings or emotions. But a worry people have about sentimentalism is that sentiment (emotion) varies across human populations, so if you embrace sentimentalism, what (if anything) makes moral judgments ‘right’? Or does sentimentalism simply lead to relativism or subjectivism? And, if moral sentimentalism is correct, what are the moral emotions?

Expressivism: “the view that ethical statements are not descriptions of the world at all: rather, they
serve to express the attitudes of the speaker toward the world. On this view, if we sometimes say
things like “it is true that destroying rainforests is wrong,” the phrase “it is true that” serves only to
give emphasis to the force of the attitude expressed.” (John O’Neill, ACTEP:163)

Sources: Smith (1999) ‘Moral Rationalism’ in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Slote (2006) ‘Moral Sentimentalism and Moral Psychology’ in The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory; and O’Neill (2001) ‘Meta-ethics’ in A Companion to Environmental Philosophy.