Psychopaths and Filthy Desks: Are Emotions Necessary and Sufficient for Moral Judgment?

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 15 (1):95-115 (2012)
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Abstract

Philosophical and empirical moral psychologists claim that emotions are both necessary and sufficient for moral judgment. The aim of this paper is to assess the evidence in favor of both claims and to show how a moderate rationalist position about moral judgment can be defended nonetheless. The experimental evidence for both the necessity- and the sufficiency-thesis concerning the connection between emotional reactions and moral judgment is presented. I argue that a rationalist about moral judgment can be happy to accept the necessity-thesis. My argument draws on the idea that emotions play the same role for moral judgment that perceptions play for ordinary judgments about the external world. I develop a rationalist interpretation of the sufficiency-thesis and show that it can successfully account for the available empirical evidence. The general idea is that the rationalist can accept the claim that emotional reactions are sufficient for moral judgment just in case a subject’s emotional reaction towards an action in question causes the judgment in a way that can be reflectively endorsed under conditions of full information and rationality. This idea is spelled out in some detail and it is argued that a moral agent is entitled to her endorsement if the way she arrives at her judgment reliably leads to correct moral beliefs, and that this reliability can be established if the subject’s emotional reaction picks up on the morally relevant aspects of the situation

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Hanno Sauer
Utrecht University

Citations of this work

The Limits of Emotion in Moral Judgment.Joshua May - 2018 - In Karen Jones & François Schroeter (eds.), The Many Moral Rationalisms. New York: Oxford Univerisity Press. pp. 286-306.
The mark of the moral: Beyond the sentimentalist turn.Frank Hindriks & Hanno Sauer - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (4):569-591.

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References found in this work

The moral problem.Michael Smith - 1994 - Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell.
Philosophical explanations.Robert Nozick - 1981 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Mind and World.John Henry McDowell - 1994 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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