Are emotions necessary and sufficient for moral judgement (and what would it tell us)?

ABSTRACT

The eighteenth century debate between moral rationalists and moral sentimentalists has seen a striking renaissance in the past decades, not least because of research into the nature of moral judgement conducted by empirical scientists such as social and developmental psychologists and neuroscientists. A claim that is often made in the current discussion is that the evidence made available by such empirical investigations refutes rationalist conceptions of moral judgement and vindicates the views of Hume or other moral sentimentalists. For example, Jesse Prinz and Hanno Sauer have recently argued that the available data demonstrates that emotions are both necessary and sufficient for moral judgement and that the best or the only way to make sense of these findings is to conclude that moral judgements are constituted by emotions. The aim of this paper is to thoroughly examine this argument and the underlying empirical evidence and to show that there is currently no compelling evidence for the truth of either the necessity or the sufficiency thesis and that, even if both theses were true, they would fail to provide a sound basis for a plausible sentimentalist constitution claim.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychopaths
• acquired sociopaths
• frontotemporal dementia
• moral dumbfounding
• disgust
• the moral/conventional distinction

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented to audiences at the University of Konstanz and the University of Cologne. I would like to express my gratitude for the feedback received on these occasions. Also, I am greatly indebted to Philipp Hübl as well as to two anonymous referees for Philosophical Explorations for several helpful suggestions on how to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note, however, that this term can be found in Prinz’s earlier work as well (see, for example, Prinz 2007, 13).

2 My following account is based on Turiel’s own summary of his findings in Turiel (1978b, 32–34).

3 For a philosophical approach which draws heavily on the distinction, see Nichols (2004).

4 This view is developed and defended in Eggers (2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Eggers

Daniel Eggers is Professor for History of Philosophy at the University of Regensburg. His current historical research focuses on the rationalism/sentimentalism debate of the eighteenth century. He is the author of The language of desire. Expressivism and the psychology of moral judgement (2021).