Moral Sentimentalism

RESUMEN: El artículo presenta y contrasta el papel central de la simpatía en las teorías morales de Hume y Smith a lo largo de cinco puntos: 1) la simpatía como «fuente principal de las distinciones morales» y como contrapunto al egoísmo, 2) el papel auxiliar de la razón, 3) el mecanismo imaginativo que sustenta la simpatía, 4) el sesgo de parcialidad que la caracteriza y, por ello mismo, 5) la necesidad de corrección reconocida por Hume con «el punto de vista estable y general» y por Smith con «el espectador imparcial». Por último, revisa la noción de «simpatía» de ambos autores a la luz de algunas aportaciones psicológicas contemporáneas en torno a la «empatía», valorando la contribución de Smith como gran teórico de la adopción de perspectiva imaginativa en todas sus variantes.

This paper explores the moral philosophy underlying the constitutional doctrine of popular sovereignty.  In particular, it focuses on the Scottish sentimentalism that informed James Wilson’s understanding of that doctrine.  Wilson, a transplanted Scotsman, was perhaps the nation’s preeminent lawyer in the middle 1780s.  He was one of the most important delegates to the Constitutional Convention, one of the nation’s first law professors, and served as Associate Justice on the first Supreme Court.  In these capacities, he developed the most sophisticated and coherent account of popular sovereignty among the founding generation.  My initial effort is to enrich our understanding of Wilson’s account by revealing its roots in moral sentimentalism.

With these roots established, I am able to offer a historically contextualized normative account of popular sovereignty.  I identify two justifications: (1) “free and independent” citizens provide the most reliable epistemological connection to natural law; and (2) the purpose of government is to provide citizens the necessary freedom to make autonomous moral judgments.  With these justifications in place, I am able to offer two suggestions on how the structure of popular sovereignty can guide our modern constitutional constructions: (1) The federal government—not the states—should remain the primary and presumptive guardian of individual rights; and (2) we should identify sovereignty, not privacy, as the common theme underlying both textual and unenumerated rights.  To that end, the judicial inquiry should focus on whether we can justify a particular intrusion into moral agency in terms of some greater benefit to moral autonomy writ large.

Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1999. Considers the concept of sympathy from ancient Greece to the early 19th century, with special attention to its employment as an explanatory principle in physics and medicine and its shift into the world of psychology and morality in the early modern period. Considers figures such as Aristotle, Plotinus, Porta, Paracelsus, Porta, Boerhaave, Willis, Whytt, Lévesque de Pouilly, Shaftesbury, Hume, Smith, (Samuel Jackson) Pratt, and many others.

Bernard Williams' critic to utilitarianism allows us to analyze the most controversial aspects of this ethical theory. After a brief sketch of the main ideas of utilitarianism, we are going to show some of the main problems of that philosophy. The critical line we are going to follow is the one proposed by Bernard Williams, and other important objections to utilitarianism are not going to be discussed. One aspect of Williams' critic we are going to focus particularly on is the concept of moral integrity, starting from two examples that Williams make to analyze the main aspects of utilitarian doctrine. We will conclude that most of the arguments that utilitarianist thinkers see as a strength of their theory are actually its greatest limits.

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Do the facts of evolution generate an epistemic challenge to moral realism? Some think so, and many “evolutionary debunking arguments” have been discussed in the recent literature. But they are all murky right where it counts most: exactly which epistemic principle is meant to take us from evolutionary considerations to the skeptical conclusion? Here, I will identify several distinct species of evolutionary debunking argument in the literature, each one of which relies on a distinct epistemic principle. Drawing on recent work in epistemology, I will show that most of these initially plausible principles are false, collapsing the arguments that rely on them. And we will see that each argument threatens only one popular view of moral psychology: a “Representationalist” view on which our moral judgments rely crucially on a mental intermediary—e.g. a sentiment, gut feeling, or affect-laden intuition—delivered by our evolved moral faculty. In the end, only one evolutionary debunking argument remains potent: an “Argument from Symmetry” that I will introduce to the literature. But we will see that it should worry only all naturalists, pressuring them into a trilemma: give up moral realism, accept a rationalism that is incongruous with naturalism, or give up naturalism. Non-naturalists are free and clear.

It is sometimes said that certain hard moral choices constitute tragic moral dilemmas in which no available course of action is justifiable, and so the agent is blameworthy whatever she chooses. This paper criticizes a certain approach to the debate about moral dilemmas and considers the metaethical implications of the criticisms. The approach in question has been taken by many advocates as well as opponents of moral dilemmas who believe that analyzing the emotional response of the agent is the key to the debate about moral dilemmas. The metaethical position this approach is most naturally associated with is sentimentalism. Sentimentalists claim that evaluation, and in particular moral evaluation, crucially depends on human sentiment. This paper is not concerned with the question whether moral dilemmas exist, but rather with emotion-based arguments used on both sides of the debate. The first aim of the paper is to show that emotion-based arguments by friends or foes of moral dilemmas cannot garner support from sentimentalism. The second aim is to show that this constitutes a serious problem for sentimentalism.

Empirical research into moral decision-making is often taken to have normative implications. For instance, in his recent book, Joshua Greene (2013) relies on empirical findings to establish utilitarianism as a superior normative ethical theory. Kantian ethics, and deontological ethics more generally, is a rival view that Greene attacks. At the heart of Greene's argument against deontology is the claim that deontological moral judgments are the product of certain emotions and not of reason. Deontological ethics is a mere rationalization of these emotions. Accordingly Greene maintains that deontology should be abandoned. This paper is a defense of deontological ethical theory. It argues that Greene's argument against deontology needs further support. Greene's empirical evidence is open to alternative interpretations. In particular, it is not clear that Greene's characterization of alarm-like emotions that are relative to culture and personal experience is empirically tenable. Moreover, it is implausible that such emotions produce specifically deontological judgments. A rival sentimentalist view, according to which all moral judgments are determined by emotion, is at least as plausible given the empirical evidence and independently supported by philosophical theory. I therefore call for an improvement of Greene's argument.

This paper explores the moral philosophy underlying the constitutional doctrine of popular sovereignty. In particular, it focuses on the Scottish sentimentalism that informed James Wilson’s understanding of that doctrine. Wilson, a transplanted Scotsman, was perhaps the nation’s preeminent lawyer in the middle 1780s. He was one of the most important delegates to the Constitutional Convention, one of the nation’s first law professors, and served as Associate Justice on the first Supreme Court. In these capacities, he developed the most sophisticated and coherent account of popular sovereignty among the founding generation. My initial effort is to enrich our understanding of Wilson’s account by revealing its roots in moral sentimentalism.With these roots established, I am able to offer a historically contextualized normative account of popular sovereignty. I identify two justifications: (1) “free and independent” citizens provide the most reliable epistemological connection to natural...

There is a tendency in contemporary (analytic) aesthetics to restrict the scope of things that can be beautiful or ugly, often claiming that many of the things that people ordinarily find beautiful or ugly are not the sorts of things that can be beautiful or ugly. I think that this peculiarly modern tendency is holding back progress in aesthetics, and robbing it of its potential contribution to other domains of enquiry. One view that has suffered neglect as a result of this tendency is the moral beauty view, whereby if a trait is a moral virtue, then it is a beautiful character trait and, conversely, if a trait is a moral vice, then it is an ugly character trait. Neglect of this view stems from an assumption to the effect that virtues and vices simply cannot beautiful or ugly. My aim in this paper is twofold. First, I develop an account of form, under which, I argue, possession of form suffices for an object's candidature for beauty and ugliness. Second, I argue that, under the foregoing proposal, the moral beauty view turns out to be a coherent position, and so should be taken seriously in both aesthetics and ethics.

Expanding on a short discussion in my Ph.D. dissertation, I argue in support of a 1934 paper by Ronald S. Crane that 18th century sentimentalism was unprecedented in its scope, even though inklings of sentimentalism have existed (more perhaps than Crane had allowed) throughout the history of western thought. Among the many historical figures considered are the Cambridge Platonists (notably Isaac Barrow), Hermann Boerhaave, Nahum Tate, Edward Young, Juan Luis Vives and David Hume.

In the 1790s, when Jane Austen was beginning to write fiction, there was much debate over the value and function of the novel. Some argued that novels were dangerous to their readers, inciting violent emotional responses and corrupting the imagination (especially in women and children, who were believed to be more sensitive to such stimuli). Others, including some of the philosophers we will read this semester, saw potential in this literary form, arguing that novels could contribute to the moral and sentimental education of their readers. This course will examine the novels of Jane Austen as works of moral philosophy, asking both how these works of fiction can be considered such, and also what moral questions and views we can find in them. We will also be concerned with questions about the function of literature and other fictional forms more generally. With each novel, we will focus on a specific ethical theme treated in and by that novel: with Sense and Sensibility we'll focus on the role of the emotions in morality; with Mansfield Park we'll focus on questions about moral education and virtue; with Emma we'll focus on the difficulties of accurate discernment and judgment in moral matters; and with Persuasion we'll focus on the relation between the individual and society and the complications caused by differences in gender, class, and social status. Each novel will be paired with selections from authors who were near contemporaries of Austen's, including Samuel

Kate Manne’s recent book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny focuses on a topic not often addressed by philosophers: misogyny—and more broadly, patriarchy. In the book Manne describes patriarchy as ‘morally objectionable’ and invites her readers to either ‘draw the same conclusion’ or ‘find reasons on which to base a potentially fruitful disagreement’. This essay considers the arguments according to which patriarchy has been judged immoral by Manne and others. Feminist philosophers have commonly relied on one of two philosophical perspectives to argue against patriarchy: contractarianism and what I call distortionism. I examine both perspectives as they appear in Manne’s writings and also in the writings of Susan Dimock and Carol Gilligan. Both perspectives turn out to have significant weaknesses that undercut their ability to inform our judgment about the moral status of patriarchy. Although it seems reasonable to intuit that patriarchy is immoral, contra Manne we are not yet in a position to philosophically support this intuition.

This thesis argues that the nature of disability is, currently, fundamentally misunderstood. Current approaches to disability are nounal and seek to determine the locus of disability with the intention of better understanding the phenomenon of disability. In contrast, this thesis offers an adverbial perspective on disability and shows how disability is experienced as an increased and personally irremediable impediment to daily-living tasks or broader goals. This impediment is not a function of either biological individuality or the Social, but of a specific relation between the individual and their environment. The thesis delineates the Picture Theory of Disability — a mechanism for the evaluation of the experience of disability and a heuristic device for the proper interpretation of disability. The theory is born of Humean sentimentalism and elements of Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory of Language, and shows when, where, and how disability is experienced.

David Hume, a heavy-weight in moral philosophy, is noticeably absent from the contemporary theoretical debate in disability studies — a debate which now largely revolves around the various ‘relational accounts’ of disability. I argue that a close reading of the Treatise not only provides surprising support for these relational interpretations of disability, but also underpins the belief that physiological difference can be valuable to its possessor. Accordingly, this paper argues that Hume is non-trivially relevant to the contemporary discussion on the phenomenon of disability and that a deeper investigation of Hume’s work may lead to further advances in disability studies.

In this essay, I show the inadequacy of Michael Slote’s arguments for the impossibility of perfection and impracticality of moral self-cultivation. For this aim, first, I briefly introduce the development of his sentimentalist virtue theory, which has woven the notions of virtue, moral sentiment, and empathy, along with care ethics for several decades. This investigation tells us that his virtue theory has a merit to entrust the moral foundation to agents’ inner states and thus respect their subjectivity, unlike eudaimonism that relies on the Aristotelian “agent- focused” notions of virtue. To strengthen the merit of his agent-based virtue theory, Slote recently argues against the ideas of human perfection and moral self-cultivation, which would constitute the essence of ancient virtue ethical approaches, including Confucianism. Such ideal postulates for moral self-improvement, according to him, can be disproven not only by assuming the possible conflicts between contrasting virtues, in an agent which would debunk the possibility of perfection, but also by contemporary psychological researches about moral education that doubts the feasibility of voluntary self-shaping. Slote’s attempt, if successful, would deny the significance of self-regarding moral cultivation with an aspiration for perfection, central to ancient views of human flourishing. I argue, however, that his arguments are not well-founded enough to discredit such notions of perfection and cultivation in our moral practice. The impossibility of perfection is hardly vindicated merely with his critical evidence of an unavoidable conflict between the virtues of frankness and tactfulness, given Aristoteles’s emphasis of practical wisdom (phronesis) residing in such individual virtues. Moreover, his reference to psychological researches is also unable to substantiate the impracticality of moral self-cultivation because of their limitations as empirical studies mostly based on children’s temporary behaviors. Contra Slote’s anti-teleological views, I believe, holding such notions of human perfection and self -cultivation in our minds is much more beneficial than abandoning them for us to become a virtuous person, which is the practical goal of virtue ethics.

The opera libretto Comala (1774) by Ranieri Calzabigi has traditionally been regarded as one of the poet’s lesser creations. It has sometimes been dismissed as being too closely based on Melchiorre Cesarotti’s influential Italian translation from 1763 of the eponymous dramatic poem, which James Macpherson included in his 1762 collection of the songs of Ossian, adapted or translated from Gaelic oral poems. In the present article, however, the author argues that Calzabigi’s Comala was not only an independent adaptation but also a highly original attempt to translate the peculiar poetic and cultural features of the Ossianic world – its savagery, sublimity, melancholy, and psychological obscurity – into theatrical terms. In this experimental musical drama, Calzabigi depicts the mysterious death of the overstrung heroine as the culmination of a process of withdrawing physically from the other characters and ultimately from the stage itself, as a metaphor for her gradual withdrawal from l...

This article examines the wide-ranging Scottish poetic response to eighteenth-century slavery, particularly the use of sentiment as a literary strategy designed to provoke empathetic reactions from readers. The article covers the entirety of the eighteenth-century Scottish response, ending with Robert Burns's ambiguous poetic treatments of slavery. Because Scots were intimately involved at home and abroad in the discourse and practice of the slave trade, they were well-positioned to respond to its effects. Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, derived from the works of Smith, Francis Hutcheson, and Dugald Stewart, had laid the groundwork for literary works that stressed the importance of feelings in the individual’s response to the world. Observable phenomena became not just the source of sensory impressions but served to structure and relate experiences by means of empathetic sentimental responses. These responses could guide future actions by acting to promote the relief of suffering and dissipate the stimulus to the observer’s own pain. Based on the central premise of this model—‘ev’ry heart can feel’—much Scottish poetry from the eighteenth century sought to redress the sufferings of slaves by appealing to core emotions in its audience, producing as a result a body of political writing that powerfully imagined the painful experience of slavery.

This paper argues for the need to develop emotion in social robots to enable them to become artificial moral agents. The paper considers four dimensions of this issue: what, why, which, and how. The main thesis is that we need to build not just emotional intelligence, but also ersatz emotions, in autonomous social robots. Moral sentimentalism and moral functionalism are employed as the theoretical models. However, this paper argues that the popularly endorsed moral sentiment empathy is the wrong model to implement in social robots. In its stead, I propose the four moral sentiments (commiseration, shame/disgust, respect and deference, and the sense of right and wrong) in Confucian moral sentimentalism as our starting point for the top-down affective structure of robot design.

A discussion of Eugenio Lecaldano, “Saggi di storia e teoria dell’etica”.I criticize three key-ideas in Lecaldano's proposal of new sentimentalims, namely (i) the very definition of  sentimentalism, which falls short of providing a metaethics alternative to 'rationalist' metaethics making room for emotions; (ii) the very idea of secular ethics, which fails to characterize a family of ethical theories alternative to those the author clasiifies as religious kinds of ethics, (iii) the characterization of  deontological etics, which apperas to be more a strawman than a model of ethical theory corresponding faithful enough to doctrines actually argued by Kant and other so-called deontologists.

By founding morality on the particular sentiments of approbation and disapprobation, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith implied that the nature of moral judgment was far more intuitive and accessible than their rationalist predecessors and contemporaries would, or at least easily could, allow. And yet, these ‘Sentimentalists’ faced the longstanding belief that the human affective psyche is a veritable labyrinth – an obstacle to practical morality if not something literally brutish in us. The Scottish Sentimentalists thus implicitly tasked themselves with distinguishing and locating the particular sentiments of approbation and disapprobation in the human psyche. In this paper, I argue that this task led Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith to adopt a remarkable thesis when it came to the nature of the moral sentiments, namely, that the sentiments of moral approbation and disapprobation are peculiar – somehow radically unlike other sentiments.

The opera libretto Comala (1774) by Ranieri Calzabigi has
traditionally been regarded as one of the poet’s lesser creations.
It has sometimes been dismissed as being too closely based on
Melchiorre Cesarotti’s influential Italian translation from 1763
of the eponymous dramatic poem, which James Macpherson
included in his 1762 collection of the songs of Ossian, adapted
or translated from Gaelic oral poems. In the present article,
however, the author argues that Calzabigi’s Comala was not only
an independent adaptation but also a highly original attempt to
translate the peculiar poetic and cultural features of the Ossianic
world – its savagery, sublimity, melancholy, and psychological
obscurity – into theatrical terms. In this experimental musical
drama, Calzabigi depicts the mysterious death of the overstrung
heroine as the culmination of a process of withdrawing physically
from the other characters and ultimately from the stage
itself, as a metaphor for her gradual withdrawal from life and
reality. The article ends with a discussion of Pietro Morandi’s
setting of the libretto, performed in Senigallia in 1780, in which
Calzabigi’s dramatic choices are translated into music. Adhering
closely to the principles of Gluck’s and Calzabigi’s Viennese
operas, Morandi’s Comala is the first example of a »reform
opera« written specifically for Italy.

As universally known as the life of Robert Burns appears to be, the story of his involvement in numerous clubs and societies has remained surprisingly perfunctory and limited. However, any casual reader of Burns can attest to his genial sociability, an element of his character that he constantly satisfied during his life through joining or forming clubs of his own making. He was, to borrow a phrase, an eminently “clubbable” poet. Burns maintained his popular appeal in his club poetry and activity by adapting and transforming his persona from that of the “heaven-taught ploughman” to the bard, a poet who would speak for the nation through himself. More strongly than club poets before him, Burns tapped into the structures of feeling that shaped his culture and attempted to make sense of that culture by using and adapting the sentiment behind those structures. Despite its obscurity in his poetic oeuvre, Burns’s club poetry acted as a significant part of this nationalist project by representing the poet’s own bardic character as a source for national unification. In his club verse, Burns demonstrated a striking awareness of his role as a national bard; through self-representation, he offered his own popular character as a bard to members and citizens alike as an index for their shared national memory.

I draw on neurobiological evidence to defend the rationalist thesis that moral judgments are essentially dependent on reasoning, not emotions (conceived as distinct from inference). The neuroscience reveals that moral cognition arises from domain-general capacities in the brain for inferring, in particular, the consequences of an agent's action, the agent's intent, and the rules or norms relevant to the context. Although these capacities entangle inference and affect, blurring the reason/emotion dichotomy doesn't preferentially support sentimentalism. The argument requires careful consideration of the empirical evidence (from neuroimaging to psychopathology) and philosophical analysis of the commitments of rationalism versus sentimentalism in ethics.

In 1906, Henry Stephens Salt published a short collection of essays that presented several rhetorically powerful, if formally deficient arguments for the vegetarian position. By interpreting Salt as a moral sentimentalist with ties to Aristotelian virtue ethics, I propose that his aesthetic argument deserves contemporary consideration. First, I connect ethics and aesthetics with the Greek concepts of kalon and kalokagathia that depend equally on beauty and morality before presenting Salt’s assertion: slaughterhouses are disgusting, therefore they should not be promoted. I suggest three areas of development since Salt’s death that could be fruitfully plumbed to rebuild this assertion into a contemporary argument: (1) an updated analysis of factory farm conditions, (2) insights from moral psychologists on the adaptive socio­biological benefits of disgust as a source of cognitive information, and (3) hermeneutical considerations about the role of the audience that allow blameworthiness for slaughterhouse atrocities to be laid upon the meat­eater.

1 Universidade Federal de Sergipe 2 Além disso, ainda que as chamadas virtudes naturais deem origem, sem a mediação de qualquer artifício, a sentimentos agradáveis de aprovação, não se vê, em Hume, qualquer tentativa real de explicação delas por meio de um moral sense. É verdade que a expressão aparece no título da Seção 2 da Parte 1 do Livro 3 do Tratado da Natureza Humana, mas, ao fim e ao cabo, o próprio texto não trata do problema em termos tais que seria possível estabelecer, no âmbito da teoria humiana, um sentido responsável pela percepção da moralidade.

Les émotions ont souvent été regardées de façon ambigüe par les philosophes. Elles ont parfois été dépréciées, notamment parce qu'on les soupçonne couramment de perturber le fonctionnement optimal de notre raison. Il nous arrive en effet de penser que nos émotions nous conduisent à agir bêtement, comme lorsque la colère nous pousse à crier sur notre entourage de façon excessive, ou lorsque la peur nous paralyse alors que l'on aimerait avoir la force de réagir face à la situation que nous rencontrons. D'un autre côté, certains auteurs ont également admis que les émotions jouaient un rôle crucial dans notre capacité à évaluer la valeur des objets et des personnes qui nous entourent. Même les émotions désagréables comme la tristesse, le dégoût, ou la peur semblent attirer notre attention sur des choses importantes pour nous. Il s'agira donc, dans cette entrée, de mettre en avant les différents rôles que les émotions sont susceptibles de jouer dans notre vie. La première section s'efforcera de distinguer le concept d'émotion d'autres notions voisines, comme les sentiments ou les passions, afin de cerner sa spécificité. La deuxième section s'attardera sur les rapports que les émotions entretiennent avec la raison.

The idea of moral enhancement has no clear meaning. This is because the idea of being moral has no clear meaning. There are numerous ways in which one might go astray, morally speaking, and each of these ways, in turn, fragments on further analysis. The concept of moral enhancement is as broad, messy and mottled as the reasons why people behave badly. This mottled character of moral failure calls into question the feasibility of (non-traditional) programs of moral enhancement.

In "Monkeys, Men, and Moral Responsibility: A Neo-Aristotelian Case for a Qualitative Distinction " , Paul Carron uses the tragic case of Travis the chimpanzee to test Frans de Waals' gradualism. If Travis is not to blame for anything simply because he is a chimp, then gradualism cannot be total: There must be a qualitative difference between chimps and humans that makes humans morally responsible and chimps not. Carron's neo-Aristotelian thesis is that chimps cannot emotionally regulate, whereas the emotional states from which humans act can be self-consciously developed in the cultivation of character. Carron takes this thesis to be a friendly amendment because it arises " from within the sentimentalist tradition itself broadly construed ". I question just how friendly it is, in part by appeal to the impressive list of what chimps and their close relatives can do. The deeper philosophical issues to be addressed include how to solve the problem of " ought implies can " for non-ideal agents, and how compatible de Waal's empiricism is with neo-Aristotelian idealism.

Понятие «моральное чувство» составляет один из основных фокусов морально-философских рассуждений Фрэнсиса Хатчесона, что хорошо видно в его раннем произведении – «Исследование о происхождении наших идей красоты и добродетели» (1725), на материале которого построена статья. Моральное чувство обосновывается Хатчесоном через противопоставление разуму, который представляется им как способностьюи, направленной на восприятие пользы, и социальным факторам принятия решений – обычаю, образованию, традиции, религии и т.д., которые по-своему тоже ориентируют человека в конечном счете только на пользу. Cпецификация Хатчесоном морального чувства как способности восприятия и оценки, не зависимой от соображений о частном благе и противопоставление морального чувства разуму, который ассоциируется с анализом средств, годных для достижения необходимых целей, позволяет рассматривать учение о моральном чувстве как один из примеров докантовского обоснования автономии моральной способности. Заслуга Хатчесона – в развернутом описании (произведенном с помощью различных теоретических средств) возможных внешних факторов, ограничивающих самостоятельность морального агента. Обоснование Хатчесоном самостоятельности личности в моральных мотивах и суждениях, ее независимости от внешних факторов и, соответственно, специфики морали демонстрирует один из способов концептуализации феномена морали, без чего невозможно проследить формирование философского понятия морали в Новое время.

The concept of ‘Moral Sense’ is one of the main focuses in Francis Hutcheson’s moral philosophy. This is evident already in his early work, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), which is substantially analyzed in this paper. Hutcheson justified moral sense in its opposition to reason – a faculty aimed to utility and to social factors of decision making, like custom, education, tradition, religion, etc. Owing to Hutcheson’s specification of moral sense as a capacity of perception and judgment independent of concerns regarding private good and opposite to reason as a capacity for means analysis one can appreciate Hutcheson’s conception as a pre-Kantian attempt of justification of moral autonomy. Hutcheson is distinguished for explicit presentation (with particular theoretical means) the variety of external factors limiting the moral agent’s independence. By explication of person’s self-sufficiency in motivation and judgment, her independence of external determination and, hence, the specificity of morality, Hutcheson demonstrated a way, how the moral phenomenon may be conceptualized. Hutcheson’s moral philosophy provides a true basis for understanding the process of conceptualization of morality in Modern philosophy

People sometimes make moral judgments on the basis of brief emotional episodes. I follow the widely established practice of referring to such affective responses as intuitions (Haidt 2001, 2012; Bedke 2012, Copp 2012). Recently, a number of moral psychologists have argued that moral judgments are never more than emotion- or intuition-based pronouncements on what is right or wrong (Haidt 2001, Nichols 2004, Prinz 2007). A wide variety of empirical findings seem to support this claim. For example, some argue that arbitrary emotional responses or intuitions induced under hypnosis elicit moral judgments (Wheatly and Haidt 2005). Furthermore, intuitions function as the point of last resort in attempts to justify moral judgments (Haidt, Bjo¨rklund, and Murphy 2000). On the basis of such evidence, psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt (2001, 2012) and philosophers such as Shaun Nichols (2004) and Jesse Prinz (2007) defend what I call ‘Subjective Sentimentalism’, which consists of three claims about moral intuitions and the moral judgments they give rise to.1 The first claim is that moral intuitions are affective responses. The second is that moral intuitions cause but do not justify moral judgments. And the third is that the attempts people sometimes make to justify these judgments typically fail, because moral reasoning tends to be biased or confabulated.

investigation of the possibility of altruism to further examine how to motivate altruism. When the pursuit of the gratification of one's own desires generally has an immediate causal efficacy, how can one also be motivated to care for others and to act towards the well-being of others? A successful motivational theory of altruism must explain how altruism is possible under all these motivational interferences. The paper will begin with an exposition of Nagel's proposal, and see where it is insufficient with regard to this further issue. It will then introduce the views of Zhang Zai and Wang Fuzhi, and see which one could offer a better motivational theory of altruism. All three philosophers offer different insights on the role of human reason/reflection and human sentiments in moral motivation. The paper will end with a proposal for a socioethical moral program that incorporates both moral reason and moral sentiments as motivation.

In this paper, I develop an observation made in passing in my dissertation, namely that Hume used the term "extensive" in relation to sympathy in a different way in Books II and III of his Treatise of Human Nature. I argue that this has important implications for us as we attempt to understand his concept of sympathy. Contrary to what might seem the intuitive view, it is actually *weak* (*non*-extensive, in the Book II sense) sympathy that grounds our (Humean) moral psychology. In a concluding section, I show that this is a key distinction between Hume's sympathy and the sentimentalist sympathy of Adam Smith, David Fordyce, Lord Shaftesbury and others. I then argue that Hume's sympathy falls into an entirely different tradition of sympathy than the sentimentalist tradition into which he is often (wrongly and usually unthinkingly) assimilated.

Le questioni riguardanti gli animali non umani stanno guadagnando un'attenzione crescente nell'attuale dibattito pubblico. Una prova di ciò è, ad esempio, il proliferare di siti e blog sul web a favore del vegetarianesimo o del veganesimo, o di quelli contro la sperimentazione animale o gli allevamenti intensivi. Non mancano poi le trasmissioni televisive dedicate a questo tema e, accanto ai movimenti animalisti, neanche i partiti politici possono più sottrarsi dal prevedere nei loro programmi agende specifiche per gli animali. Anche il mondo letterario sembra rivolgere un certo interesse a tale questione. Basti pensare a La vita degli animali di Coetzee , divenuto ormai un classico, o al successo di pubblico dei saggi di Safran E. Severini -Lettura critica di S. Pollo, Umani e animali: questioni di etica.

Forthcoming (Champion)

The object of this paper is not to study further Hutcheson’s reception, legacy, or influence in pre-revolutionary America. Rather, by using different texts from Hutcheson’s work, I intend to build a coherent account of Hutcheson’s theory of the right of resistance applied to colonies. I not only want to show that Hutcheson’s view of the colonies was a key issue in his political thought but also that his approach to this question is still relevant to thinking about the connection between morals and politics. His main ideas square well with some of those we might turn to today to consider the role of affections and moral sense in our moral judgments and the imperative to protect human rights. By proposing a reconstruction of Hutcheson’s arguments on this topic, this paper has two main objectives. First, it seeks to clarify one aspect of Hutcheson’s rich and complex theory of the right of resistance, that is, the colonies’ right to resist their mother countries. The focus is on his philosophical arguments and reconstructing what led him to this conclusion, early in the eighteenth century, that there was a legitimate right of resistance for colonies and that it was necessary to fix the material conditions of its practical realization. Second, it intends to highlight Hutcheson’s philosophical normative model for considering political action and practical ethics, by explaining the connection between morals and philosophy for the realization of the best action.

In this paper, I attempt to recover an 18th Century approach to moral theory that can be called Moral Taste Theory. Through an exploration of 18th Century sources I define the characteristics of moral taste theory and to distinguish it from its closest rival, moral sense theory. In general a moral taste theorist holds that moral judgments are analogous to aesthetic judgments while a moral sense theorist holds that moral judgments are analogous to physical sense perception. Francis Hutcheson was a paradigmatic moral sense theorist, but I argue that David Hume is best understood as a moral taste theorist. If we do not understand the concept of moral taste, we cannot understand 18th Century moral philosophy, and, more importantly, we will miss out on an important source of inspiration for 21st Century moral philosophy.

Концепция надлежащего (propriety) и ее значение в моральной философии Смита нередко утекают из-под аналитического внимания исследователей. Это связано не столько с невниманием исследователей, сколько с характером присутствия концепта «надлежащее» в «Теории нравственных чувств». Феномену надлежащего посвящена первая часть трактата, однако это понятие как будто бы спонтанно всплывает в рассмотрении морали, обнаруживаясь в ее различных характеристиках, то и дело сливаясь с семантически близкими понятиями, лексически проявляясь в родственных и этимологически близких словах, – да так и не становится само по себе предметом авторской рефлексии. В русском переводе этого понятия нет вовсе вследствие неточного (если не сказать, ошибочного), перевода словом «приличие» основного понятия смитовской этики. В результате такой подмены по-другому представали как содержание смитовской концепции морали, так и его место в истории моральной философии.

It is popular to hold that our primary epistemic access to specific response-dependent properties like the fearsome or admirable (or so-called ‘affective properties’) is constituted by the corresponding emotion. I argue that this view is incompatible with a widely held meta-ethical view, according to which affective properties have deontic force. More specifically, I argue that this view cannot accommodate for the requirement that deontic entities provide guidance. If affective properties are to guide the formation of the corresponding emotion, our primary access to them cannot be provided by that same emotion.