Passions and Emotions: NOMOS LIII

2. Sentimentalism without Relativism

19 2 SENTIMENTALISM WITHOUT RELATIVISM MICHAEL L. FRAZER We are now in the midst of an exciting multidisciplinary revival of work on the moral sentiments. As recently as 1989, a commentator could reasonably write that he knew “of no living author who has thought to call herself a sentimentalist.”1 The very existence of the present volume is a testament to just how much times have changed. Scholars across philosophy, political science, law, and psychology are now rediscovering that eighteenth-century sentimentalists such as David Hume and Adam Smith were correct to emphasize the centrality of passion and emotion to moral judgment . This work has profound repercussions for how we think about virtually all major questions in ethics, politics, and the law, among other fields. But the sentimentalist theory that moral judgments contain emotions actually has very few important substantive moral implications. It may sound strange to say that a moral theory may be deeply important without having many important substantive moral implications . By a substantive moral implication of a theory, I mean a concrete, normative conclusion that one must draw from the theory directly on pain of logical contradiction. No further research is necessary, no additional premises need to be posited; anyone who affirms a theory but denies its implications is rationally inconsistent . There are thus many ways that a moral theory can have profound repercussions without having many important substantive moral implications. For one thing, it may have such implications 20 Michael L. Frazer when combined with other theories—but these are implications of a conjunction of theories, not of any single theory. Taken by itself , a moral theory may also have methodological rather than substantive implications; it may suggest how we should conduct future moral inquiries, rather than what we must conclude. More generally , a theory may be a conversation starter, rather than a conversation stopper, suggesting what new questions we should investigate and what new possibilities we should consider, without establishing any new and important conclusions that we must believe. Moral sentimentalism (or just “sentimentalism,” as I will call it) is important in all of these ways. This essay focuses on what Jesse Prinz and many others have taken to be the most important substantive moral implication of sentimentalism. Sentimentalism is thought to imply moral relativism .2 Prinz defends this common view by arguing that, once the truth of sentimentalism is established, we must face the fact that “there may be moral conflicts that have no rational resolution.”3 I think that Prinz is right here; no one can consistently affirm sentimentalism while denying that there may be moral conflicts that have no rational resolution. But I don’t think that anything much further follows from this implication—certainly nothing of particular importance for normative ethics, politics, or law, and most certainly not moral relativism. After all, even if our moral conflicts are not capable of rational resolution, they may nonetheless be resolvable through nonrational means. It is my hope that they can be resolved in this way—and my conviction that they should be— that leads me to oppose relativism as both a philosophical theory and a practical approach to ethics and politics. Yet, both Prinz and I are sentimentalists, and our conceptions of what sentimentalism involves are essentially the same. So how is it possible for two consistent defenders of sentimentalism to differ on so much else? It might be thought that some of the room for disagreement comes from the ambiguity of sentimentalism itself. While this is not the primary source of the dispute at hand, I do think that there are some ambiguities in the formulation of sentimentalism that need to be addressed. I accept Prinz’s “constitution model” of sentimentalism, which maintains that moral judgments contain emotions, rather than simply being judgments about emotions as under many so-called Sentimentalism without Relativism 21 neo- (or, really, quasi-) sentimentalist theories today.4 But, even once one accepts the constitution model, important ambiguities remain. The claim that moral judgments contain emotions can be understood as an empirical generalization, a conceptual necessity, or a normative precept. I actually think sentimentalism is probably true in all three of these ways. But philosophers can feel free to embrace one or two while rejecting the other(s). First, consider descriptive, empirical sentimentalism: the claim that, as a matter of psychological fact, most of our moral judgments can be observed to contain emotions most of the...