SENTIMENTALISM, THE PERCEPTUAL ANALOGY, AND ARMCHAIR EVALUATIVE KNOWLEDGE
[*Previously titled: “Armchair Moral Knowledge and the Perceptual Analogy”*]
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Introduction
How do we learn about what is right or wrong, good or bad? One historically popular view is what I call
sentimental perceptualism. At a first pass, sentimental perceptualism is the view that our knowledge of rightness
or wrongness, goodness or badness (henceforth, value) is rooted in affective experiences in much the way that
ordinary empirical knowledge is rooted in perceptual experiences.1 But sentimental perceptualism faces
challenges, one of the most serious of which I call the armchair challenge. The challenge is to explain how we
use perceptual-like, affective experiences to get evaluative knowledge by mere reflection. A preliminary way
to see the force of the challenge is to notice that evaluative and empirical inquiry seem asymmetrical in an
important respect; we apparently can get evaluative knowledge by mere reflection but apparently cannot get
empirical knowledge in the same way. The perceptual analogy at the heart of the theory appears to break
down in a puzzling fashion. The aim of this paper is to explain how sentimental perceptualists should answer
the armchair challenge.
Here is the plan. I begin with a more detailed description of sentimental perceptualism and the
armchair challenge. It turns out that the challenge for sentimental perceptualists is more serious than we
might initially have anticipated. Most value epistemologists who have attempted to explain reflective
evaluative knowledge presuppose that such knowledge is always of necessary truths. But, as I explain, affective
evaluative experiences ground knowledge of contingent truths if they ground any such knowledge. Sentimental
perceptualists thus require a theory which allows for reflective knowledge of evaluative contingencies. This
is a major constraint on the shape that a solution to the armchair challenge has to take.
Ultimately, I argue that the armchair challenge reduces to an independent, further challenge, the
content challenge, which I will describe in detail below.2 If perceptualists can answer the content challenge,
then they will have their answer to the armchair challenge. And this conditional is important, since I argue
we should be optimistic that the content challenge can be solved. By the end of the paper, then, we will have
a much better handle on some of the most important details of a plausible version of sentimental
perceptualism.
1
This view arguably traces back to Aristotle (see Moss [2013]). But sentimental perceptualism became especially
prominent during the 17th and 18th centuries (e.g., with the writings of the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis
Hutcheson). For contemporary proponents, see, among others, Johnston [2001], Oddie [2005], and Roberts [2013].
2
This second challenge is pressed by Schroeder [2008] and Schafer [2013].
1
1
Sentimental Perceptualism and Armchair Evaluative Knowledge
Sentimental perceptualism, as the label suggests, is a blend of sentimentalism and perceptualism. Let’s start
with the latter. Perceptualism is built around an analogy: just as an ordinary perceptual experience (e.g., of a
dog running) provides some basic justification for believing that the perceptual experience’s content is true,
so too does an evaluative experience (e.g., of an act being wrong) provide some basic justification for believing
that the evaluative experience’s content is true. Perceptualists assume that these experiences which are a
source of basic justification can also be a source of basic knowledge. This invites the question of what it is
for justification and knowledge to be basic. But I leave it open how best to answer this question, since answers
will vary and it ultimately isn’t important for answering the armchair challenge.3 The simple, non-technical
way of thinking about perceptualist value epistemologies is that there are value experiences which are our
ultimate source of data about value. This means that perceptualists can allow, say, that evaluative testimony
is a source of knowledge, but as perceptualists, they would qualify that testimony is a source of knowledge
because evalatuative experiences are.
The central issue which divides perceptualists concerns the nature of the relevant evaluative
experiences. Some appeal to intellectual experiences of value, whereby perceiving value is akin to perceiving
the truth of a mathematical proposition (see Huemer [2005]). But others appeal to affective (desiderative
and/or emotional) experiences of value. Here is Sabine Döring, discussing an agent’s negative emotional
response to a caretaker’s harsh punishment of a toddler:
In experiencing indignation at the harsh punishment of the toddler, it seems to you that the
punishment is in fact unjust: your occurrent emotional state puts forward your indignation’s
content as correct. This is in analogy to the content of a sense perception. In perceiving that
the cat is on the mat, it seems to you that the cat is actually there. [2007: 377]
Similar views are defended about desire. Graham Oddie, for instance, argues that in desiring we experience
the object of our desire as “needing to be pursued” [2005: 41]. And “the good just is that which needs to be
pursued” [2005: 41]. Thus desires are experiences of the good. He then goes on to build a sentimental
perceptualist epistemology around these desiderative experiences of value. But like other sentimental
perceptualists (and unlike his intellectual perceptualist cousins), he has nothing to say about the armchair
challenge, which I will now describe.
3
How best to think about basic justification – as well as related notions such as non-inferential justification and
immediate justification – is complicated (see Cowan [2015a]). But as we’ll see, the armchair challenge is a challenge to
capture a certain pretheoretical intuition about evaluative inquiry, not a challenge to show that such knowledge from
the armchair counts as basic on some inevitably controversial definition of ‘basic’.
2
Reflective, or “armchair,” evaluative inquiry, can be made familiar with some examples. Almost
anyone who has taken an introductory ethics course has thought about whether it would be right to flip a
switch to divert a runaway trolley onto a separate track, thereby saving the lives of five strangers but also killing
a single stranger who wouldn’t otherwise have been killed. This is a paradigmatic instance of armchair
evaluative reflection; there is no actual interaction with a runaway trolley. It is difficult to overstate just how
central reflective evaluative inquiry is, for we engage in it whenever we try to decide whether some possible
course of action would be good or bad, right or wrong. The perceptualist view is that we can learn evaluative
truths through reflection by having evaluative experiences in response to our suppositions and imaginings.
The easiest way to see how the armchair challenge arises is to notice an apparent asymmetry between
armchair evaluative and armchair empirical reflection.4 Although we can think about empirical questions
from the armchair (e.g., what would happen if I pushed my laptop off the table?) and such reflection can help
us to learn empirical propositions, such armchair inquiry is typically understood to be epistemically
subordinate to actual empirical inquiry. The ultimate arbiter for empirical questions is what we observe in
the world. But there does not always seem to be the same kind of asymmetry in the evaluative case. The
evaluative experiences that we have in response to our perceptions and beliefs about the world – our online
evaluative experiences – do not seem to be privileged (or at least not always privileged) over the evaluative
experiences that we have in response to suppositions and imaginings – our offline evaluative experiences. This
is just the perceptualist’s way of framing the traditional idea that we can obtain evaluative knowledge by mere
reflection.5 One intuitive way push this thought, as Sarah McGrath [2010] observes, is that while we rely on
actual experiments to figure out the nature of the empirical world, evaluative inquiry only seems to require
thought experiments.
The question, then, is whether perceptualists can develop their theory in a way that respects the
intuition that online evaluative experiences are not always privileged over offline experiences when it comes
to grounding evaluative knowledge. Or, more simply, the question is whether perceptualists can develop a
theory which respects the idea that we can get evaluative knowledge simply by thinking.6 Crucially, the
4
My aim here is to identify a familiar assumption about empirical inquiry which helps us to see the force of the
armchair challenge; the asymmetry is in no way essential to the challenge.
5
Richard Swinburne [2015: 620] articulates the core idea as follows: “When examples of particular situations (e.g., the
trolley problem) are adduced in order to persuade us that some general moral principle is or is not true, it is quite
irrelevant whether the examples are examples of an actual event or of an imagined event. What matters is what it
would be right to conclude about which actions in that situation would be good or bad; whether or not the situation
actually occurred is irrelevant.”
6
I don’t take myself to have said anything definitive against an empiricist model, according to which our online
evaluative experiences are always privileged over our offline experiences. But this should be a fallback. If they can,
perceptualists should respect the intuition that we can get evaluative knowledge by mere reflection.
3
challenge is about knowledge rather than mere justification. Some perceptualists (e.g., Michael Huemer [2005]
writing in defense of intellectual perceptualism) focus primarily on justification, but it is arguably much easier
to make sense of justification from the armchair. Suppose, following Huemer [2005], we accept the principle
that if it seems to you that P, then you are defeasibly justified in believing that P. On this kind of picture,
there is no deep puzzle about reflective evaluative justification, so long as we have evaluative experiences from
the armchair.
But forming a belief on the basis of an accurate experience is certainly not enough for knowledge, since
the experience may be only accidentally correct. For example, if due to a brain lesion a person hallucinates a
red apple and believes (justifiably) on the basis of that experience that there really is a red apple, then it would
not follow that the person knows that there is a red apple, for it is an accident that they got it right (Armstrong
[1973]). What is required for a perceptual experience to be non-accidentally correct? The most common idea
is that perceptual knowledge requires (among other things) a causal connection between the experience and
what the experience is about. But perceptualists in value epistemology seemingly cannot take advantage of
anything like this idea, for when we reflect, we are not in causal contact with any evaluative properties.
2
Deepening the Challenge for Sentimental Perceptualism
The challenge confronting sentimental perceptualists is ultimately more perplexing than we might initially
realize. This is because affective experiences are suited for providing us with knowledge of contingent evaluative
truths, if they’re suited for providing us with any evaluative knowledge.
To begin, we need to distinguish contingent and necessary evaluative propositions. The necessities
are those which are true in all metaphysically possible worlds. Traditionally, these are the evaluative
propositions ethicists quest after. For example, we may wonder whether it is necessarily true that we ought
to act so as to maximize (net) pleasure. But much of our everyday evaluative knowledge is of
contingencies. Here are some examples: (1) Bert was right to help the elderly man cross the street, (2) If
Lindsey borrows Ronald’s carving knife, it would be best for her to return it when next she sees
him. Regarding (1), the proposition is contingent because (for example) the elderly man could have been
planning to poison his neighbor’s friendly but noisy dog, in which case it wouldn’t have been right for Bert
to help. Or, more simply, the man might never have been walking across the street. And regarding (2), it is
possible that if Lindsey borrows Ronald’s carving knife it wouldn’t be best for her to return it when next she
sees him, if, say Ronald’s partner has just broken up with him on the phone and Ronald is threatening
suicide. Contingent evaluative truths are those which are not true across all metaphysically possible
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worlds. Notoriously, it is very difficult (many would say impossible) to make sense of how we could know a
contingent proposition (evaluative or otherwise) by mere reflection.
What I will now suggest is that affective experiences are suited for providing us with knowledge of
evaluative contingencies, if they’re suited for providing any such knowledge. I will illustrate with an example.
Suppose that Jacqueline is walking down the uncrowded corridors of a sports stadium. To her surprise, her
favorite athlete walks past. He doesn’t initially make eye-contact with her, but the large athlete does manage
to step firmly onto her foot, offering in response no more than an apathetic glance. Jacqueline is likely to be
angry about his lack of concern. According to Aristotle, anger represents a slight, or wronging (see Rhetoric
1378b). For the sake of discussion, let’s work with his model.
The precise content of Jacqueline’s anger will vary depending on the perceptions and beliefs which
trigger it. One possibility is that it involves a representation of the athlete as wronging her by uncaringly
stomping on her foot. It may also be that she experiences the athlete as wronging her by stomping on her
foot, without also experiencing the stomping as uncaring. There are presumably other possible ways the
content of her anger might be filled-out. But in most of these cases, the anger will respond to contents (as
given by her perceptions and beliefs) which do not guarantee that she is wronged. For example, all stompings
aren’t wrongings, since some stompers take care not to step on others but do so accidentally. And even some
uncaring stompings might not constitute wrongings, since uncaring stompers could be delirious from head
injuries.7
Now turn to a case in which Jacqueline’s anger (or offline analogue of anger) responds to a
hypothetical version of the same case. 8 Because the emotion is a response to suppositions and/or imaginings,
rather than beliefs and/or perceptions, the truth she represents would be better captured in counterfactual
terms, e.g., If the athlete stomps uncaringly on my foot, then he would wrong me.9 This truth is contingent,
for there are worlds in which the antecedent is true but the consequent false. The key observations I want to
make are these: (i) Jacqueline’s anger, under many natural specifications of the case, involves an accurate
representation of an evaluative contingency, and (ii) Such responses are, at least for all we can tell, the product
of her well-functioning anger-system. But then this indicates that the emotion will often provide knowledge
of evaluative contingencies, if it provides any such knowledge, since it is precisely our well-functioning,
accurate evaluative representations that we would expect to play the foundational role in generating
7
See Ellsworth [1994] and Brady [2013] on why our emotions would have evolved to respond to conditions which
indicate, but do not guarantee, the presence of a relevant evaluative property.
8
Philosophers of mind debate about whether offline emotional responses are the same mental state as their online
counterparts. See Doggett and Egan [2012].
9
Another possibility is that the offline anger cues us in to a generality: normally, uncaring stompings are wrongings (cf.
Wedgwood [2007]). This is still a contingency since what is normal varies across worlds.
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knowledge within a sentimental perceptualist theory. While I focused on a case involving a particular
emotion, similar examples can easily be constructed for other emotions as well as desires.
Sentimental perceptualists thus face an important constraint in trying to solve the armchair
challenge, one which may seem insurmountable: they should aim to explain how we can learn about
evaluative contingencies just by thinking. 10
3
Killing Two Birds with One Stone
How should sentimental perceptualists answer the armchair challenge? In this section, I propose an answer
on their behalf.11 Crucial to keep in mind is the form the solution takes. I argue that if sentimental
perceptualists can explain how affect came to represent value (the content challenge), they will have an answer
to the armchair challenge, one which allows for direct knowledge of evaluative contingencies. And, moreover,
we should be cautiously optimistic that the content challenge can be answered. In this section, I begin with
an explanation of the content challenge, and then turn to how to solve it. I close by illustrating how the
solution to the content challenge provides an answer to the armchair challenge.
3.1
The content challenge
A pressing question for sentimental perceptualists is to explain how affective experiences have come to be
about value (assuming that value is something which is independent of affect). Karl Schafer raises the
challenge for sentimental perceptualist models of desire, in particular. He argues [2013: 268 – 69] that “the
most serious problem for any account that accepts [that desires have evaluative content] is the problem of
explaining how and why it is that desires involve perceptions with a normative or evaluative
content.” Unfortunately, as Schafer points out, proponents of the view have hardly even acknowledged the
problem. Mark Schroeder raises the same issue, focusing in particular on Sergio Tenenbaum’s brand of
sentimental perceptualism, labeled in what follows as the scholastic view. Schroeder [2008: 127] asks, “[I]f the
good is independent of desire, as the scholastic view claims…then how does it get to be about it?” He then
helpfully expands on his question:
10
Kripke [1980] famously argues that we can have contingent a priori knowledge that the standard meter stick is onemeter long, but this doesn’t provide a useful model for sentimental perceptualists. For one, the knowledge in Kripke’s
case is grounded in our understanding of ‘meter’, and sentimental perceptualists aren’t trying to explain semantic
evaluative knowledge (cf. McKeever and Ridge [2006]).
11
There are other challenges and/or questions we might raise for sentimental perceptualists, e.g., about whether affect
is generally reliable enough to ground evaluative knowledge. Although I cannot deal with such additional issues here,
see my [removed for review].
6
Compare the question of how your greenish perceptual experiences get to be about green,
rather than about some other thing, such as orange or square. There is a great disagreement
in the theory of content determination about just how this happens. But there is widespread
agreement that it doesn’t happen simply by magic. Your perceptual state has to somehow
latch on to green. [2008: 127 – 28]
In what follows, I sketch what I think is the best kind of answer sentimental perceptualists can give to the
content challenge, which, as we shall see, lays the foundation for an answer to the armchair challenge.
3.2
How to answer the content challenge
A natural assumption I will make is that sentimental perceptualists should stick close to their perceptual
analogy, modeling their content determination story on that of ordinary perception. Theories of perceptual
content determination typically fall into one or more of the following camps: (i) informational/covariational,
(ii) causal, and (iii) teleological.12 I will suggest that by adopting a simple, straightforward understanding of
each of these notions, we are led to an attractive theory which incorporates all three. And as I will explain,
perceptualists can assume this account of content determination in addressing the content challenge, even if
it turns that it is not quite correct.
As a starting point, many theorists have thought the notion of information important for perceptual
content determination.13 When a mental state carries information about something, this intuitively helps us
to understand, at least to an extent, how the mental state could come to be about that something. For
example, that perceptual representations of objects as square carry information about squareness seems
explanatory of how such representations came to be about squareness. But what exactly is the information
relation? A traditional way of cashing out what it is for one thing (mental state or otherwise) to carry
information about another is in terms of covariation.14 One thing, A, carries information about another
thing, B, just in case A statistically co-varies, even weakly, with B. More concretely, smoke carries information
about fire, because where there is smoke, there is (often) fire. Sentimental perceptualists would do well to
accept an information requirement for perceptual content determination. Although not universally accepted,
the sentimental perceptualist should not want her response to the content challenge to turn on the hope that
information is not important for content determination.15 (Furthermore, the absence of an information
12
There are also inferential role theories, but these are typically used to explain the content of beliefs rather than
perceptual states.
13
See, for instance, Dretske [1995], Burge [2010], and Neander [2012] and [2013].
14
See Burge [2010]. Neander [2012] defines information in terms of causation rather than covariation. Information
in her sense will eventually be part of my account, too.
15
Papineau [1984] and Millikan [1984] deny that information is necessary. I should note, however, that what they
deny, strictly speaking, is that information figures into the analysis of perceptual representation. I’m not concerned
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relation would make sentimental perceptualism a non-starter for explaining evaluative knowledge, never mind
the content or armchair challenges.)
But it is widely agreed that we need more than a (simple) information relation to explain perceptual
content. The reason for this is that perception is about a much narrower range of things than perception
carries information about: perceivers do not perceptually represent everything their perceptions covary
with. One ingredient that is natural to add, although it isn’t enough to complete the picture on its own (or
so I would argue), is causation. Causal and covariational requirements can be joined together in an attractive
way. Here’s how. Covariational relations often have an underlying explanation. In many cases, the
underlying explanation will identify a causal relation between the two things (objects, properties, etc.) that
covary. Thus a popular view says that perceptions stand in causal-tracking relations with what they are
about. That causal-tracking relations would be important for perception is very intuitive; it helps us to see
how a mental state latches on to external objects and properties. Sentimental perceptualists should accept that
causation, in addition to mere covariation, is important for perceptual content determination. Adding in
this requirement ensures that the account of content determination will have broader appeal.
Unfortunately, causation and covariation do not seem sufficient for explaining perceptual content. I
will (once again) use vision to illustrate. Visual perceptual experiences are about distal (environmental)
particulars, properties, and relations; but such representations are immediately triggered by proximal
stimulations, most notably light arrays of varying intensity that are registered on the retina. Visual perceptions
of a certain type covary with certain proximal stimulations and are also caused by them. However, a perceiver
doesn’t represent the proximal stimulation; what gets represented (at least in the case of vision) is almost
always something about how the world is external to the perceiver. So if we want to understand why an
observer represents, say, solidity, rather than the light arrays on the retina that cause the representation of
solidity, we need more than causation and covariation.
One natural way to fill the gap is to build a teleological component into the account of content
determination. Why, we might ask, is a perceptual state about solidity rather than light arrays on the
retina? It’s because the perception, or underlying perceptual system, has the biological function of detecting
solidity but does not have the function of detecting light arrays on the retina. (Or, if we think that perceptions
do have the biological function of detecting such proximal stimulations, then, following Karen Neander
[2012], we can add a qualification: our perceptual systems have the function of producing such perceptions
(“solidity perceptions”) in response to certain light arrays because that is a means of producing the perceptions
here with giving any reductive analysis, which I doubt can even be done; my concern is with explaining how states with
certain representational content came to be.
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in response to what is solid and not vice-versa.) The functional relation helps secure the latch between a
perceptual state and what it is about. According to the account I favor, a perceptual state’s content gets fixed
by what it has the biological function of standing in causal-covariational relations to. I suggest, then, that
sentimental perceptualists can give a reasonable answer to their content challenge by arguing that (some
sufficient range of) affect has the biological function of standing in causal-covariational relations with value.16
By taking on board a fairly demanding theory of content determination – one which incorporates
biological function, covariation, and causation – the sentimental perceptualist puts herself in a good
dialectical position for answering the content challenge, assuming she can argue that (some) affect stands in
such relations with value. First, it may be that some weaker account of content determination turns out to be
correct. Karen Neander, for instance, thinks that biological function and causation are enough; strictly
speaking, we do not need covariation. If she’s right, then sentimental perceptualists will have defended a bit
more than is necessary to answer the content challenge, but will still have answered the challenge. But what
if the true account isn’t entailed by the theory I have assumed? Christopher Peacocke, for instance, defends
what he calls the action-answerability account of content determination. This approach says that “the correct
attribution of representational content to perceptual states is constitutively answerable to the range of
properties of actual and counterfactually possible actions of their subject that those perceptual states are
capable of explaining (in combination with other states).”17 This is a kind of covariation approach, but what
I say above doesn’t directly speak to it, since I say nothing about action-explanations. That said, Peacocke
would agree (or so it seems to me) that if desires or emotions have the biological function of tracking value,
then that would be evidence that the value figures into the content of the relevant experience.18
3.3
Answering the content challenge
3.3.1
Causation and covariation
Is it plausible to maintain that affect has the biological function of standing in causal-covariational relations
with value? Let’s focus first on causation and covariation, setting aside biological functions for the
moment. Graham Oddie has shown that there is a good case to be made that affective experiences can be
16
For views roughly along these lines, see Neander [2013], Prinz [2007], and Burge [2010]. Burge in particular appeals
to bio-functions not in order to reduce content, as some others do, but merely to explain how perceptual experiences
end up with certain content. Sentimental perceptualists can do something similar.
17
Peacocke [2014: 477 – 78]. On this approach, the explanation for why an animal represents the shape and color of
some fruit appeals to the fact that the animal’s behavior is counterfactually sensitive to the presence of such fruit; all
else equal, it eats all and only fruit of that shape and color.
18
Peacocke [2014: 477] asks, “Is biological function not merely evidentially or epistemically relevant to the
determination of content, but constitutively involved as a matter of the very nature of perceptual representation
itself?” The assumption – which seems to me correct – is that biological function is at least evidential.
9
caused by values, even though he didn’t do so in an effort to answer the content challenge. Furthermore, his
argument, if successful, guarantees a covariation relation, too. It will be helpful to describe Oddie’s view in
some detail, then. In what follows, I focus on desires, but similar arguments could be marshaled for emotions.
Oddie argues that commensurateness is a useful test (though not an analysis) of causation.
Commensurateness is a matter of adequacy and dependency.19 Let’s start with the former. The notion of
adequacy captures the idea that a cause is sufficient in the circumstances for its effect. Suppose a father walks
into a clothing store with the intention to buy his son a shirt. He ultimately opts for the magenta-colored
shirt. The magenta color of the shirt is, let’s suppose, adequate for his deciding to buy it. Being magenta is a
determinate of the determinable, being colored; but the shirt’s being colored is not a cause of his buying it
because it is not in the relevant sense adequate. This is because his father would not buy his son a green,
yellow, or blue shirt, because he knows his (rather picky) son doesn’t like those colors. So being colored isn’t
enough, but being magenta is. Now turn to dependency. Dependency captures the idea that causes are
necessary in the circumstances for their effects. It turns out that the shirt’s magenta color does not cause the
father to buy it because he knows his son’s favorite color is purple and would thus would have bought him
any purple colored shirt. (Build into the case that there were numerous non-magenta purple shirts in the
store.) Oddie insists that adequacy and dependency together make up the idea that causes are commensurate
with their effects, i.e., that they are in the circumstances necessary and sufficient. In this case, it is the purple
color of the shirt, rather than, say, the shirt’s being colored (not adequate) or magenta (not dependent).
Values are often commensurate with desires, or so Oddie argues. To illustrate, consider a case
(similar to ones Oddie himself discusses) in which a mother arrives a bit early to pick her son up from school,
and upon arriving, observes a group of his classmates physically and verbally abusing him. She immediately
forms an aversion to the treatment of her son (i.e., a desire for him not to be so treated). Could it be that
the aversion is caused by a value which it represents? To consider this question, we need to have in mind a
working hypothesis regarding what value aversion is about. Oddie’s own view is that desires and aversions
are appearances of goodness and badness, respectively. The mother’s aversion to the treatment of her son,
on this picture, involves an appearance of the badness of the treatment of her son. More precisely, then, let’s
explore whether the mother’s aversion could be caused by the badness of his treatment.
It is entirely plausible, Oddie thinks, that the aversion is caused by badness, or by cruelty, which
according to Oddie, is a determinate of badness. This view shouldn’t be too surprising; in everyday discourse,
we often speak of bad or cruel behavior as triggering negative affective states such as aversion. (Well, ‘aversion’
19
See Oddie [2005: 191 – 95]. Oddie is adapting some ideas from Yablo [1992] on mental causation. Oddie and
Yablo actually use ‘contingent’ rather than ‘dependent’. I tweak their language in order to avoid confusion, since the
way in which I use ‘contingent’ elsewhere in this paper is different.
10
isn’t a terribly common word, but a person might say, “I’m upset because of how they’re treating her.”) To
begin, cruelty is adequate to the aversion. That the behavior is cruel is in the circumstances sufficient to
produce the aversion. But there are non-evaluative rivals that are also adequate. Consider the highly
determinate natural event, N, which includes all the specific natural events that comprise the scenario, e.g.,
the specific verbalizations the children use to taunt, the exact way in which they physically strike him, and so
on. Presumably N is also adequate to the aversion. However, the mother’s aversion won’t be dependent on
N. Had the children been cruel in some other way, the mother would still have experienced the treatment
as bad or cruel.20 Everything hinges on the precise details of the case, but Oddie insists that it will often turn
out in such cases – assuming commensurateness is a good test for causation – that cruelty functions as a cause
of our aversion.21
To flesh out Oddie’s picture a bit more, suppose that the aversive experience would also have arisen
had the kids not been cruel but rather callous: had the kids not actively bullied the boy but merely refused to
call for help after he twisted his ankle, then the mother’s aversive response to his treatment would still have
arisen. If this were the case, then arguably badness (or perhaps some other evaluative candidate more general
than cruelty or callousness but narrower than badness), would be the better candidate for cause.22 The idea
of commensurateness, then, allows us to make sense of how goodness and badness, as such, in addition to
determinate ways of being good or bad, could be causes.
3.3.2
Biological function
But even if values cause and covary with affective experiences, we still need to answer whether it is reasonable
to maintain that affect has the biological function of standing in causal-covariational relations with value. In
tackling this question, we should begin by reminding ourselves that it is a widely accepted view that some
20
A reader might wonder why Oddie’s opponent cannot just construct a disjunction of possible specific ways the
natural world could have been (which would include N among many other variations) so that the disjunction includes
all and only the specific ways the world could have been sufficient to produce the aversion. The claim would then be
that the aversion is dependent on this disjunctive property. Oddie is aware of this objection, and his reply is that the
grotesque disjunction would not really be a property and so cannot be a cause. This is the right response to the
objection, I believe. But a serious discussion of the matter would take us too far afield.
21
It is crucial not get distracted by the fact that the aversion could have arisen had the boy not been treated
cruelly/badly (e.g., if they very believably pretended to mistreat her son). The relevant counterfactual is this: had the
kids not at that time been cruel/bad to her son, the aversion would not have arisen. And this depends on what nearby
worlds are like.
22
But mightn’t the property being bad not be adequate to the aversion, since the kids could have been bad in ways
that wouldn’t have triggered the aversion? Strictly speaking, we should speak of badness within a certain range. But this
isn’t a surprising qualification. An object’s squareness can cause a visual representation as of its being square, but of
course, strictly speaking, what we normally mean is squareness within a certain range. (The square object needs to be
within a certain size range.)
11
types of affective experiences – joy, parental concern, fear, lust, disgust, anger, etc. – were selected
for. Psychologists standardly refer to this class of affective experiences as basic. Basic types of affect “have a
fixed set of neural and bodily expressed components, and a fixed feeling or motivational component that has
been selected for through longstanding interactions with ecologically valid stimuli.” 23 The key question,
though, is why they were selected for. Were they selected for (inter alia) because they help us to detect value
of some sort?
Some philosophers balk at the idea that affect (or any mental state) could have such a function. A
principal worry expressed by, among others, Blackburn [1988] and Street [2006], is that there is an apparently
competing hypothesis about the function of affect which is supposedly more scientifically respectable. The
basic thought is that it is far more plausible that affect was selected for because of how it caused us to behave
rather than because it allowed us to track, or detect, some evaluative property or relation. Blackburn is the
first philosopher that I am aware of to formulate an objection roughly along these lines24:
It is noteworthy that the account will insist upon the nonrepresentative, conative function
for the stance. The evolutionary success that attends some stances and not others is a matter
of the behavior to which they lead. In other words, it is the direct consequences of the
pressure on action that matter. Evolutionary success may attend the animal that helps those
that have helped it, but it would not attend an allegedly possible animal that thinks it ought
to help but does not. In the competition for survival, it is what the animal does that
matters. [1988: 363]
Blackburn seems to think that no mental state could have the function of detecting or representing value. The
objection that I wish to focus on says more precisely that no affective state could have the function of detecting
an evaluative property or relation; such experiences instead have the function of getting us to behave in ways
which typically promote our reproductive success.
The trouble with this line of objection is that it takes the hypothesis that affect has the function of
detecting value to be in competition with the hypothesis that it has the function of getting us to behave in
23
Jessica Tracy and Daniel Randles [2011: 398]. In a special issue on basic emotions in Emotion Review, each contributor
accepts this way of thinking about basic affect and also agrees that such affect exists. See Ekman and Cordaro [2011],
Izard [2011], Levenson [2011], and Panksepp and Watt [2011]. For some philosophers who accept a similar thesis, see
D’arms and Jacobson [2003], Prinz [2007], and Brady [2013].
24
Street formulates a similar objection, and does so in more detail. Her formulation is less ideal for our purposes,
however. She argues that certain patterns of evaluative judgment were selected for “not because they constituted
perceptions of independent evaluative truths, but rather because they forged adaptive links between our ancestors’
circumstances and their responses to those circumstances, getting them to act, feel, and believe in ways that turned out
to be reproductively advantageous” [2006: 127]. What makes this version of the objection non-ideal is not simply that
she puts it in terms of judgment rather than affect but that Street actually grants her opponent that we were selected to
have certain representations of value (albeit not ones we can assume are accurate). But my aim in addressing the
content challenge is to explain how such representations could have come about.
12
certain ways; but the sentimental perceptualist can insist that affect is best understood as having both sorts of
functions. The easiest way to see this is just to consider an example from ordinary perception.25 The ability
of many animals to detect predators is almost surely an adaption, but this ability would not have conferred
any advantage whatsoever were it not intimately linked to action.26 That is, the ability to perceptually detect
predators would not have been selected for unless it tended to trigger fight or flight responses (or at least not
unless it were linked up to action in some evolutionary advantageous way). So there are at least two functions
of a predator-response system: (i) to produce a perceptual state, S, in response to inputs which indicate the
presence of a predator, and (ii) to engage in fight or flight when S occurs. The sentimental perceptualist
insists that matters are much the same with affect and value. We have value-response systems with at least
two important kinds of functions: (i) to produce an affective state, A, in response to inputs which indicate
the presence of some value, V, and (ii) to engage in action of the relevant sort when A occurs.27
Even if the perceptual case provides a promising model for sentimental perceptualists, more needs
to be said in order to motivate that this model really extends to the case of affect and value. Street presses
those who defend the view that mental states of any sort have evolved to track evaluative properties or
relations to explain how it could ever make a difference for an organism’s reproductive success to reliably
track evaluative facts. What advantages could be conferred by perceiving, for instance, what really is good or
bad, right or wrong? In pressing this challenge, Street sets up a contrast with certain kinds of empirical
properties that we presumably have evolved to accurately detect through ordinary perception:
Surely, one might think, an organism who is aware of the truth in a given area, whether
evaluative or otherwise, will do better than one who isn't. But this line of thought falls apart
upon closer examination...[C]onsider truths about a creature's manifest surroundings - for
example, that there is a fire raging in front of it, or a predator rushing toward it: the fire
might burn it to a crisp; the predator might eat it up. But there are many other kinds of
truths such that it will confer either no advantage or even a disadvantage for a given kind of
creature to be able to grasp them. [2006: 130]
Street goes on to illustrate the sort of truth it would make no difference to grasp:
25
Artega [2015] makes this point in a recent reply to Street. The reply is really a very simple one, as I will illustrate.
The core of the response is simply to point out the typical kinds of descriptions which are offered by psychologists,
cognitive neuroscientists, and biologists for how perceptual capacities evolve (e.g., Comer and Leung’s [2004]
description of how cockroaches came to sense predators).
26
On the claim that the ability to perceive predators is a common kind of adaption, see the evidence compiled by
Burge [2010] and Artega [2015]. Both Burge and Artega also emphasize the important connections between
perception and action.
27
The appropriate sort of action will vary depending on the nature of V.
13
Take, for instance, truths about the presence or absence of electromagnetic wavelengths of
the lowest frequencies. For most organisms, such truths are irrelevant to the undertakings
of survival and reproduction; hence having an ability to grasp them would confer no benefit.
[2006: 130]
Street thinks that affect-independent evaluative truths would be among the truths it would confer no
advantage to grasp. There are two important kinds of thoughts which might drive one to agree. First, as
Street points out, one could think that values are importantly different from, say, predators in that the latter
can cause things to happen whereas the former cannot. Second, even if we allow that values can enter into
causal relations, one might think that detecting them would be of no more evolutionary significance than, to
borrow Street’s example, detecting low frequency electromagnetic wavelengths. Such low frequency
wavelengths cause things to happen, to be sure, but it would confer us no advantage (and may even confer a
disadvantage) to have the ability to perceptually track them.
But sentimental perceptualists have a very reasonable response to this line of objection. The view
that values can enter in causal relations is, as we have seen, a reasonable one and also one that sentimental
perceptualists in particular ought to accept. The dialectically significant question, then, is whether values are
similar to predators and fires in that they predictably bear causal relations to outcomes which correlate with
what would promote or diminish our opportunities for reproductive success, or whether they are more like
low frequency electromagnetic wavelengths which (we can assume) do not predictably bear causal relations to
outcomes which so correlate. It seems to me that if value properties and relations stand in causal relations to
anything at all, then much of what they so relate to will be significant from an evolutionary perspective. Just
consider some schematic examples which illustrate the kinds of things we typically appeal to values in order
to explain: (i) the unreasonable verdict led to the riot, (ii) the good deed brought the community together, and
(iii) bad parenting is at the root of their depression. Such examples could easily be multiplied and fleshed
out. The key, however, is just that things like riots, social cohesion, and depression are obviously significant
from an evolutionary perspective and those are the sorts of things we often appeal to values to
explain.28 Sentimental perceptualists can thus lean on their perceptual analogy: just as the (empirical)
properties and relations we evolved to perceptually detect are causally networked and evolutionarily
significant, so too are the evaluative properties and relations we evolved to affectively detect.
The claim that affect has the function of detecting value is ultimately an empirical rather than
philosophical thesis. So the ideal situation for sentimental perceptualists would be if the standard view
among psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists were that we must appeal to value in describing the
28
The basic point that value properties and relations seem to be significant from an evolutionary perspective has been
observed by many philosophers. See, for instance, James [2009], Cowan [2015b], and Artega [2015].
14
function of affect. Unfortunately, there is no standard view about the matter, perhaps because scientists are
not terribly worried about the philosophical implications of the question and perhaps also because it can be
difficult to adjudicate between competing hypotheses about what a state has the function of detecting.29 That
said, many psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists have used broadly evaluative language in describing
the function of affect. In particular, many think that the way in which at least some basic affect promotes
reproductive success is by helping us to detect so-called core-relational themes, e.g., personal loss in the case of
sadness, danger in the case of fear, wrongings in the case of anger, and so on; and these themes are plausibly
understood in evaluative terms.30 To illustrate, consider the following description from Richard Lazarus:
I have proposed that each emotion involved a special, and different relational meaning,
which I referred to as core relational themes. For example, anger is the result of a demeaning
offense against me and mine, anxiety is facing uncertain, existential threat, sadness is having
experienced an irrevocable loss, pride is enhancement of one’s ego-identity by taking credit
for a valued object or achievement, and relief is a change of a negative condition for the
better. [2003: 126]31
More empirical work remains to be done before we can confidently conclude that evaluative notions will
appear in the most accurate descriptions of the biological function of emotions. And since different forms
of affect have different functions32, this work will be messy and piecemeal.
Nevertheless, the hypothesis that affect has the function of detecting value is a reasonable one worth
taking seriously. I have tried to speak to the unease or resistance that many philosophers have to this proposal
by making a series of observations about affect and value. I first observed that many psychologists and
cognitive neuroscientists agree that we have basic affective experiences which were selected for. I then briefly
defended the following two theses: (i) the hypothesis that affect has the function of detecting value is
compatible with the hypothesis that affect has the function of getting us to behave in ways which promote
our reproductive success, and (ii) values reliably stand in causal relations with much that is systematically
relevant to our reproductive success. If we combine these points about affect and value with the old
philosophical idea (defended by philosophers as diverse as Aristotle, Shaftesbury, and Oddie) that affective
29
One famous illustration of the difficulty is the question of whether a frog’s visual system has the function of
detecting flies or small, black moving objects (see Neander [2012]).
30
Lazarus [2003] describes the idea of a core-relational theme in detail. See Prinz [2007] for a defense of the claim that
emotions have the function of detecting such themes.
31
Similar language can be found in, for example, Arnold [1960] and Scherer [2001]. Many psychologists believe that
emotions involve appraisals, which are defined as representations of how something or other bears on well-being,
paradigmatically the well-being of the appraiser. In the case of basic emotions, the appraisals have the function of
responding to some class of considerations which bears on well-being. See Prinz [2007, Ch. 2] for detailed discussion.
32
See Nesse [1990] and Tracy [2014].
15
experiences play a crucial role in helping us to detect value, and are the basis for many of our evaluative
beliefs, then the hypothesis that affect has been selected to play this role becomes an eminently reasonable
empirical hypothesis.
Crucially, as you may already have noticed, this answer to the content challenge does not extend to
our armchair, or offline affective responses, unless we are willing to say that offline affective experiences never
fulfill their function, since they cannot be caused by the values that they represent. But we can extend the
story to the offline case given very minimal assumptions, as I will explain.
3.4
Extending the story to offline affect and answering the armchair challenge
Offline affect is incredibly similar to online affect, and the former plausibly gets its content by virtue of being
a simple extension of the latter. As I have already pointed out, online and offline affect respond to the same
contents, but they respond to contents which are represented in different ways. To illustrate, an affective
experience which is a response to content represented in perception counts as online; but if the experience
were a response to sensory imaginings with the same content, then it would be offline. Here, then, is the key
thought about how offline affect gets its content: offline affective experiences have the content that they do
because they have the function of tracking what would be the case evaluatively (which will often only be
contingently true); and they can have this function without standing in causal relations to value because they
are developmentally downstream from our online affective experiences, which do stand in causal relations
with value. According to this picture, there are not really two affective systems, the online and the offline;
there are just single sets of dispositions which trigger in response to contents which are represented both
online and offline.
It is worth making an observation in favor of the thesis that offline affect is developmentally
downstream in the right way, at least once we grant some background observations. The first observation
builds on the thought that online affective experiences have the biological function of standing in causalcovariational relations with value. If that is right, then for our ancestors it promoted reproductive success to
have such experiences. And if this observation about reproductive success is true, then it would presumably
also promote reproductive success to have offline experiences which track what would be the case
evaluatively. This would, for instance, allow us to better plan for the future. We would be able to learn what
would be best in advance, rather than having to wait for the future to come to us. Of course, this point about
promoting reproductive success does not entail that offline experiences have the function of tracking
value. But if we agree that online experiences do, it is natural to think that offline experiences also have that
function (presumably among other functions).
16
A key idea here which should be brought to the fore is that a core set of the dispositions to affectively
represent values in the imagination are native rather than learned. A standard way of thinking about
innateness, and the one I have in mind, is that innate characteristics are organized in advance of
experience. Innate characteristics need not be universal or unmalleable; the idea is that genetic structure
supplies, as Gary Marcus [2004] puts it, a first draft.33 We are prewired in certain ways, though it may be that
experience edits, or alters, that prewiring. It is often taken for granted that some “valuations” or “protoevaluative judgments” must be innate. Here is how Cosmides, Tooby, and Barrett make the point:
[T]here must be an irreducible core set of initial, evolved, architecture-derived contentspecific valuation assignment procedures, or the system could not get started. The debate
cannot sensibly be over the necessary existence of this core set. The real debate is over how
large the core set must be, and what the proper computational description of these valuation
procedures and their associated motivational circuitry is. [2005: 317]
Psychologists as diverse as Laurence Kohlberg and Jonathan Haidt have taken this innate structure to be
wholly, or at least in large part, affective.34
This theory of about the origins of offline affective evaluative content provides the resources for an
attractive answer to the armchair challenge. Remember, the difficulty is to explain how there can be nonaccidental connections between offline evaluative experiences and the evaluative truths that they represent;
and this explanation should respect the intuition that we can in many cases get evaluative knowledge by mere
reflection. The additional constraint for sentimental perceptualists (as opposed to, say, intellectual
perceptualists) is to make sense of how this knowledge can be of evaluative contingencies. Doing this is going
to require information from the world to somehow shape our offline dispositions. I have sketched a nonmysterious story about how this works. Affective dispositions, both online and offline, have evolved to
respond to sets of conditions which tend, in the actual world, to indicate the presence of value. Since we are
prewired for to respond affectively to certain contents, whether represented online or offline, we need not
rely on online experience to learn evaluative truths. Furthermore, because well-functioning affective
experiences do not typically respond to contents (as given in perceptions, beliefs, suppositions, imaginings,
and so on) which guarantee the presence of a corresponding value, the propositions that they help us to know
will typically not be necessary.
A major payoff of the strategy is that it allows sentimental perceptualists to adopt a causal explanation
of how we get evaluative knowledge from the armchair. Even though there aren’t causal relations between
33
34
Marcus’s understanding of innateness is also adopted by Haidt and Joseph [2007], among others.
Haidt and Joseph [2007: 374] compare their own view to that of Kohlberg (as well as Piaget before him).
17
offline affective experiences and the values they represent, causal relations between affect and value still play
a role in explaining how we evolved to have affective dispositions which can track value even offline. The
drawback of this strategy, however, is that it depends on empirical assumptions about the nature and origins
of affect; and all I can do in here is motivate some optimism that the assumptions are true. But value
epistemology is hard and rival theories have major costs. For example, many rationalist theories of reflective
evaluative knowledge (e.g., Huemer [2005]) involve a commitment to the synthetic a priori, which is
notoriously controversial. The advantages and disadvantages of the sentimental perceptualist model
proposed here deserve close evaluation alongside more familiar alternatives.
4
Conclusion
Perceptualists aim to demystify evaluative knowledge by analogizing it with perception. But, as I pointed out,
the analogy seems to come up short when we turn to reflective evaluative knowledge.35 This challenge is
especially acute for sentimental perceptualists, since affective experiences will often ground knowledge of
contingent evaluative truths if they ground any such knowledge. How could affect ground knowledge of
contingencies from the armchair? I argued for the following solution. Sentimental perceptualists should reduce
the armchair challenge to an independent, further challenge – the content challenge. If they solve the latter,
then they also receive a solution to the former. And as it turned out, there is evidence which motivates
optimism that the content challenge can be solved. Ultimately, the answer to the armchair challenge which
emerged is highly philosophically attractive: it preserves a kind of causal story of evaluative knowledge without
giving up the pretheoretical idea that we can often learn evaluative truths by way of mere reflection.
35
Perhaps you think that we can get (some) basic empirical knowledge from the armchair. I am sympathetic to this
possibility, although I do not explore it here.
18
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20