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Notes
The “(and probably because)” hedge in my reconstruction is based on Slote’s remark that he is trying “to show that all, or almost all, the moral distinctions we intuitively . . . want to make can be understood in terms of—or at least correlated with—distinctions of empathy” (ECE 4).
The first and second parenthetical hedges are my additions; the third is Slote’s and is to be found in the last paragraph on p. 15. Although they are important, hereafter I will usually suppress all three.
Confusingly, Slote talks about empathy at both levels as having, or coming along with, a “warm” or a “cold” feeling. So it is because of Bill’s warmth that he feels Chelsea’s dismay, and it is because of Hillary’s warmth that she feels warmed by Bill’s warmth toward Chelsea. Bill’s warmth toward Chelsea Slote calls “agential warmth”, and Hillary’s warmth toward Bill he calls “warmth directed at agents”—at least in such crucial passages as that on p. 61.
To make good on this claim, Slote must do something more to show that moral judgments refer to features of the world. Otherwise, there’s no reference to fix. Contrast: it may be an objective feature of the world—female peacocks—that elicits male peacocks’ response of bearing their tail feathers, but that response is not an utterance or judgment.
Here’s a worry Slote anticipates. Worry: the connection between moral goodness/rightness and (first-order) empathy is a priori, but the reference-fixing model seems to make the connection a posteriori (as is the connection between our experience of redness and the set of microscopic properties which cause it in us). Slote’s response: in this case, we can know a priori what causes the relevant reference-fixing experience (where the reference-fixing experience is second-order empathy, and the thing that causes it in us is first-order empathy). In other words, the reference-fixer is “thicker” (64), and this allows us to know a priori what right-making property (viz. first-order empathic concern) our term ‘right’ refers to. This is why he says his “new kind of reference-fixing” is only “semi-Kripkean”.
Thanks to Mark Timmons for helpful comments on a draft of this review.
References
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Slote M (2007) The Ethics of Care and Empathy. Routledge
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Sripada C, Stich S (2006) A framework for the psychology of norms. In: Carruthers P, Laurence S, Stich S (eds) The innate mind, volume 2: culture and cognition. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 280–301
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Quigley, J.G. Michael Slote, Moral Sentimentalism. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 14, 483–486 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-011-9272-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-011-9272-0