<S&S final>
SENTIMENTALISM AND SCIENTISM
Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson
Perhaps the central thesis of the bourgeoning empirical ethics movement is what we will
term pessimism about the role of reasons and reasoning in moral psychology. This is the claim that
the reasons people offer in support of their evaluative judgments are merely post hoc
rationalizations of conclusions driven by unthinking, “alarm-like” emotional response.1 Some
scientifically motivated pessimists conclude that most ordinary moral judgments must be
discarded in favor of claims that are not tainted by the influence of emotion. Others embrace the
vagaries of human sentiment by adopting forms of relativism that reduce moral judgments to
empirical facts about the psychology of individuals or the sociology of groups. Despite this stark
difference, however, the champions of empirical ethics are united in holding that the emotional
basis of morality systematically undermines its pretentions to rational justification.
We will argue that this pessimism is significantly overstated. There can be no doubt that
people often adopt views for reasons other than the evidence, and hold them without ample
justification. Yet any pessimism strong enough to call into question the possibility of moral
justification, or to motivate the rejection of any contingently human influence in ethics, will
inevitably neglect an important class of anthropocentric but nonetheless legitimate reasons.
1
We will focus here on Greene (2008a, 2008b), Haidt (2001), Haidt and Bjorklund (2008), Prinz (2007), Rozin et
al. (1986), and Singer (2005); but we take the pessimist thesis, and scientism more generally, to be widely accepted in
the increasingly influential empirical ethics movement.
Forthcoming in Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics,
Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 2
Moreover, no such strong pessimism is mandated by science. Although we grant summarily that
any account of ethics that renders it incompatible with science must yield skepticism, we deny
that empirical methods suffice to settle fundamental normative questions. Pessimists would either
reduce moral claims to empirical facts or reject them as systematically unjustified, but this
approach is not a deliverance of science but a dogma of scientism: the view that empirical
methods are adequate to all areas of knowledge, including knowledge of values and practical
reasons.
We contend to the contrary that an overtly anthropocentric theory in the sentimentalist
tradition can vindicate many ordinary moral claims, and reveal reasons that derive from deeply
seated human concerns, in an intellectually respectable manner. The specific view we favor,
rational sentimentalism, accepts most of the empirical claims motivating pessimism.2 As we
understand sentimentalism in general, the theory gives the emotions a constitutive role in
evaluative judgment, not just an important epistemological and motivational role in moral
psychology.3 Unlike some other forms of sentimentalism, though, our theory holds that the
emotions are amenable to correction and regulation by reason. Rational sentimentalism thus
conflicts with the relativistic forms of sentimentalism that some champions of empirical ethics
advocate, which uncritically accepts emotional responses, and judgments made on their basis,
without the possibility of rational correction. But it also opposes the other approach characteristic
2
But cf. Kahane (this volume) and Jacobson (2012) for some doubts about specific results. For the most part, though,
we will be calling into question the normative implications of findings we accept or grant ex hypothesi.
3
This definition is somewhat stipulative, as a diverse range of views have been called sentimentalist. Nonetheless, in
our taxonomy, theories that merely give the emotions an important role in evaluative judgment are not yet
sentimentalist.
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 3
of empirical ethics, which would purify ethics of everything contingently human, especially the
emotions.
The scientism implicit in much empirical ethics is evident in the following dilemma, put
forward by Peter Singer as a consequence of the pessimistic account of moral psychology, which
sees moral reasoning as the rationalization of emotional responses. Singer (2005: 351) writes:
In the light of the best scientific understanding of ethics, we face a choice. We can
take the view that our moral intuitions and judgments are and always will be
emotionally based intuitive responses, and reason can do no more than build the
best possible case for a decision already made on nonrational grounds. That
approach leads to a form of moral skepticism…Alternatively, we might attempt
the ambitious task of separating those moral judgments that we owe to our
evolutionary and cultural history, from those that have a rational basis.
Those who choose the skeptical horn of Singer’s dilemma by advocating relativism reject the
possibility that emotions can be assessed for their rational justification but think that morality
does not require it, whereas those who attempt to give ethics a purely rational basis deny that
emotionally based judgments are ever rationally justified.4 Although the champions of empirical
ethics differ as to which horn of the dilemma they find more congenial, they share this underlying
pessimism about most ordinary moral intuitions.
The advocates of empirical ethics thus agree that pessimism yields Singer’s dilemma but
differ in their response to it. Most of the movement’s psychologists accept emotionally-driven
intuitions as self-justifying, which leads them to some form of relativism. Jonathan Haidt and
4
There are other forms of justification possible, in terms of the advantageousness of emotions or their conformity
with cultural standards, but these are fundamentally different notions than rational justification.
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 4
Fredrik Bjorklund (2008) put forward a view they call social intuitionism, according to which all
ethical statements refer implicitly to the code embraced by the speaker’s culture.5 Although Jesse
Prinz (2007) also adopts a form of relativism, most of the movement’s philosophers either overtly
embrace skepticism or else follow Singer in aspiring to give a rational basis for morality that is
expressly denatured of anything specifically human. Joshua Greene (2008a, 2008b) develops this
hyper-rationalist approach most forcefully. According to Singer and the hyper-rationalists, any
attempt to defend commonplace moral intuitions and judgments leads inevitably to skepticism.
The trouble with ordinary intuitions is that they are products of contingent human evolutionary
and social history, tainted by the influence of emotion. By contrast, Haidt and the social
intuitionists embrace the influence of emotion by holding that moral intuitions can be given a
non-rational justification sufficient to vindicate ethical knowledge. However, these social
intuitionists embrace forms of relativism that the hyper-rationalists consider tantamount to
skepticism.6
Rational sentimentalism will serve as our example of the sort of theory that can navigate
Singer’s dilemma while avoiding both its horns. The theory preserves a role for reasons and
reasoning in moral judgment, vindicating ethics as essentially human but no less legitimate for this
anthropocentrism. Although we cannot hope to mount an adequate argument for rational
sentimentalism here, our more modest goals are significant enough. We will show that “the best
scientific understanding of ethics” does not support any pessimism strong enough to support
5
Although Haidt denies that his view is relativist, he does so only by adopting an idiosyncratic conception of
relativism. Prinz grants that his view is a form of relativism. Both views make moral justification into an essentially
psychological or sociological matter.
6
Nothing important hangs on how broadly we characterize skepticism, since the dilemma can be restated as between
relativism and hyper-rationalism.
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 5
Singer’s dilemma. We then use rational sentimentalism to illustrate both the falsity of that
dilemma and the extreme cost of its relativist and hyper-rationalist alternatives. The relativist
theories foreclose the possibility of rational criticism of sufficiently entrenched sentiments and
intuitions, just as Greene and Singer charge. But their hyper-rationalist alternative mistakenly
denies that the emotions illuminate genuine reasons for human agents. It thus neglects the
anthropocentric reasons arising from the symbolic and expressive aspects of action, which its
advocates characterize as magical thinking and irrational taboo. This contention is not science but
scientism—a theoretical prejudice that leads to significant moral errors.
1.
Singer’s Dilemma and the Case for Pessimism
The strongest evidence for pessimism comes from the well-documented human capacity
to confabulate: to invent and believe reasonable-sounding but false explanations of one’s own
behavior and choice.7 One commonly cited phenomenon arises from studies where incidental
disgust, introduced in experimental subjects through various artificial means—such as foul odors
and bitter tastes, filthy environments, and hypnosis—leads subjects to make harsh moral
judgments about mostly innocuous, and sometimes wholly innocent, behavior they read about
while disgusted.8 It should come as no surprise that people are led to exaggerate moral offenses
when disgusted or angry; the more noteworthy empirical result is that subjects primed with
incidental disgust sometimes produce rationales for their judgments based on features of the
vignettes that neither cause nor support their judgment. Advocates of the empirical ethics
7
In a classic paper, Nisbett and Wilson (1977) summarize an already lengthy literature on such confabulation. Haidt
(2008: 189) expressly recalls their work on causal explanation in advancing his own theory of moral judgment.
8
See esp. Wheatley and Haidt (2005).
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 6
movement have been impressed by these studies of incidental emotion and confabulation, and
both Haidt and Greene cite them in support of pessimism. It is clear why a pessimist might take
this phenomenon as corroborating evidence. In these cases, people are unaware of a factor that
influences their moral judgments but has no justificatory force; moreover, the irrelevant feature
distorting moral judgment is an emotional response.
It is much less clear why the data on incidental emotions should be taken to show
anything general about ordinary moral and evaluative judgments. In the first place, such incidental
disgust must be contrasted with any integral disgust caused by the objects of the judgment: things
that are disgusting, at least by the lights of the person affected. While incidental disgust taints the
moral judgments it affects, integral disgust can be sensitive to features of the object evaluated: its
disgustingness. Indeed, it is difficult to see how we can be sensitive to such sentimental values as
the disgusting, the funny, and the shameful except through the emotions.9 Although cases of
incidental emotion do occur in the wild, as it were, not just in laboratory settings, these cases are
atypical. The more standard cases of emotional influence on judgment involve integral emotions:
people are disgusted by something they deem disgusting, or angry over some putative outrage.
These cases lack the problematic features associated with incidental emotions. The fact that one is
disgusted by the prospect of cleaning a public toilet surely does not count against one’s judgment
that the task is indeed disgusting. By contrast, incidental emotions can only taint judgment,
whether they are primed in a psychological study or induced by some natural cause. If
hypnotically induced disgust leads subjects gratuitously to suspect that a character in a scenario is
9
The contributions of integral guilt and anger to moral judgment involve more complex matters, some of which we
will speak to shortly. In any case, advocates of empirical ethics typically want to indict the influence of emotion not
just on judgments of right and wrong but evaluative judgment in general.
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 7
“up to no good” (Wheatley and Haidt 2005), for instance, we can confidently expect that their
judgments would change, were they given the same prompt while not under hypnotic suggestion,
so as to correct this distorting influence.
What is more, some of the empirical work on incidental emotions is not merely
compatible with rational sentimentalism but lends support to it by highlighting ways in which
reasoning mediates emotional influence. Even in experimental circumstances, which reveal
immediate responses rather than longer term conclusions, people do not trust judgments made
under the influence of incidental emotions. For instance, it turns out that when subjects know
beforehand that they will have to justify their judgments about how much punishment is deserved,
the effects of incidental anger are significantly reduced (Lerner et al. 1998).10 This suggests that
people are capable of regulating the influence of emotional responses on their evaluative
judgments. Although the confabulation data are striking and worrisome, the fact that people
confabulate in circumstances where their judgments are being unwittingly driven by incidental
emotions does not show that emotional influence is always suspect. Here and elsewhere, the
evidence for pessimism seizes on something true and important but exaggerates its implications
and ubiquity. Even if it is granted that incidental disgust obscures moral judgment, this is less
significant than it seems, in light of the evidence about regulation; and it does nothing to show
that disgust cannot reveal reasons to avoid disgusting things in particular.
10
Similarly, Schwarz and Clore (1983) found that mood effects due to fair and foul weather influenced people’s
judgments of life satisfaction; but when respondents’ attention was drawn to the weather, no mood effects on
judgment were observed. Schnall et al. (2008: 1106) take this finding to show that “rather than being obligatory,
affective influences on judgment can often be eliminated by making salient an irrelevant but plausible cause for the
feelings.” It seems that when people recognize the presence of a factor that obscures judgment, such as a mood effect
caused by the weather, they correct for it.
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 8
Much of the most frequently cited evidence for pessimism displays a similar tendency to
overstatement. Haidt (2000) and his collaborators report finding that some experimental subjects
stuck doggedly to their evaluative judgments about putatively “offensive yet harmless” actions
despite being unable to articulate reasons for those judgments. Eventually they fall back on the
claim that some type of action is just wrong, or wrong for inexplicable reasons. Haidt refers to
such cases as moral dumbfounding, because people maintain condemnatory judgments—which he
hypothesizes are driven by strong emotional responses, such as disgust at scenarios involving
incest and cannibalism—without any supporting reasons. Dumbfounding thus seems like the
quintessential case for pessimism. Haidt and others impressed with dumbfounding suggest that
the phenomenon illustrates something about ordinary cases where people are not dumbfounded:
that evaluative judgment simply recapitulates emotional response. Thus Haidt (2005) compares
the role of reasoning in moral judgment to the spin of a presidential press secretary whose job is to
tell credible lies that make the president look as good as possible. The difference between the
ordinary case, where people support their moral judgments with reasons, and the dumbfounding
cases amounts merely to the difference between a competent and an incompetent press secretary.
Both lie by nature and job description—it’s just that when you are dumbfounded, reason has
failed at its task of constructing bogus rationalizations of your judgments.
But the evidence of dumbfounding does not offer much support for this general
pessimism. In the first place, the experimental evidence is quite weak. The paper giving the
experimental findings has never been published; its results are barely statistically significant, and it
uses a small and unrepresentative sample. The more interesting point concerns how dubious are
the premises of the experiment. The experimenters assume a narrow conception of what can
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 9
count as a good reason to condemn actions, limited almost entirely to harm. Even so, although
Haidt (2000: 7) claims that the moral intuition scenarios were “carefully written to be harmless”
and, hence, that it is “extremely difficult to find strong arguments” to justify censorious judgments,
this is not the case. There are good and obvious harm-based reasons that support these judgments
about which subjects were supposedly dumbfounded. Even so, one might think that the existence
of good reasons does not change the fact that the subjects were unable to come up with them. But
this claim is undermined by the experimental protocol, in which a “devil’s advocate” gave dubious
counterarguments to those who offered reasons in support of their judgments. Moreover, since
there were good reasons available in these scenarios, notwithstanding Haidt’s claims to the
contrary, the experiment cannot discriminate between dumbfounding and inarticulateness. The
subjects may have been responsive to reasons they could not articulate.11
None of this is to deny that people sometimes confabulate, especially in cases where they
are forced to choose between identical items—where there are no grounds for choice—and in
other unusual circumstances (such as hypnosis and split-brain patients). But although
confabulation happens in various contexts, many of which have nothing to do with value
judgment, in a host of mundane cases it seems we do act for reasons and know the reasons on
which we act. Sometimes a person eats because he is hungry; that fact both explains why he ate
and justifies it (by his own lights). Even when people confabulate a false causal story, sometimes
they are nonetheless sensitive to evidence that they cannot articulate.12
11
12
These criticisms are developed in more detail in Jacobson (2012).
For instance, in Maier’s (1931) famous hanging cord task experiment, subjects were unwittingly clued in to the
solution to the task by the experimenter “accidentally” knocking into one of the cords, setting it in motion. Although
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 10
In the evaluative domain, however, Haidt (2001) and other leading figures in empirical
ethics go so far as to doubt whether we ever reason our way to moral judgment. Influential work
by Haidt (2008: 187) and his collaborators advances the view that the “great majority” of our
evaluative judgments are not sensitive to reasons but are mere rationalizations: bogus justifications
for decisions already made on non-rational grounds, specifically on the basis of emotional
responses. Greene (2008) argues that justifications offered for the moral judgments characteristic
of commonsense morality are similarly confabulated, though he thinks that certain other
judgments are immune to this charge. And Singer too rejects the vast majority of moral judgments
while holding out hope that ethics may yet be given an adequately rational basis.
The strongest argument from pessimism to Singer’s dilemma comes from Greene. In his
view, only direct appeals to the consequences of action, and more specifically to harm and benefit,
offer legitimate grounds for ethical judgment. He calls such considerations ‘consequentialist’
despite acknowledging that this is an idiosyncratic use of the term, since many of the theories
philosophers deem consequentialist are not nearly so restrictive.13 We will follow his usage here by
referring to this narrow range of considerations as consequentialist reasons, but nothing in our
argument will tell against the best forms of consequentialist theories, which can endorse reasons
that count as non-consequentialist in Greene’s sense. This exclusive focus is central to his view, as
Greene (2008: 40) explicitly requires that the concepts appealed to by such reasons are
they could not identify how they solved the problem but offered confabulated stories picking up on adventitious
details, nevertheless they were demonstrably responsive to evidence—the hint—given to them by the experimenters.
13
Greene adopts a narrow welfarist theory of value, which excludes the sort of considerations that moved
philosophers away from utilitarian axiology. Moreover, his conception ignores indirect and otherwise sophisticated
forms of the theory. It is widely recognized that consequentialist theories are not limited to adducing such
“consequentialist” reasons, and they are well advised not to so limit themselves.
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 11
“inherently neutral representations”: empirical concepts. While others are less explicit about this,
we will see that (early) Haidt and Paul Rozin also tacitly presuppose that the only good reasons
for moral judgments—and indeed for evaluative judgments and rational choice more generally—
must be grounded in facts about the number of lives saved, or about harm and benefit construed
narrowly so as to be empirical concepts.
Greene’s argument for pessimism about all moral reasoning that appeals to anything but
these consequentialist reasons has two stages. First, he claims that all non-consequentialist
reasons put forward in support of moral judgment are mere rationalizations. By this he means that
the rationales offered for these verdicts, which appeal to considerations such as justice or cruelty,
do not really explain the agent’s judgments. The true explanation is that they recapitulate the
agent’s strong and decisive (“alarm-like”) emotional responses. Next, Greene (2008: 72) offers
what we will call the argument from coincidence against all such judgments. In short: it would be an
unlikely coincidence for those emotions, shaped as they are by evolutionary and cultural forces, to
correspond to an “independent, rationally discoverable moral truth”—that is, a moral truth
independent of anything contingently human.
The rationalization charge seems, on its face, to be tantamount to the psychological claim
that the rationale an agent offers in support of his judgment does not really explain why he so
judges. In order for a consideration to be an agent’s reason for acting, it must seem to him to count
in favor of the action, and thereby contribute to causing him to act. When people confabulate,
their expressed rationale does not cause them to act and so cannot be their reason for acting.
Hence confabulated rationales are merely rationalizations of whatever actually caused the
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 12
judgment. But the charge of rationalization, as it figures in Greene’s argument against nonconsequentialist reasons, turns out to be more complex than it initially appears.
Greene illustrates rationalization by imagining a character, Alice, who sincerely but
misguidedly explains her preferences among the men she dates by citing their various good and
bad features such as intelligence, humor, and self-absorption. In fact her preferences are simpler;
she is attracted only to tall men. As Greene (2008: 67) tells the story: “Alice, of course, believes
that her romantic judgments are based on a variety of complicated factors. But, if the numbers are
to be believed, she basically has a height fetish, and all her talk about wit and charm and kindness
is mere rationalization.” Alice’s putative reasons are confabulated, because they do not actually
explain her date choices. Greene holds that people who make moral judgments based on nonconsequentialist reasons similarly fail to grasp the true explanation of their judgments, namely
their emotional responses. But there are two distinct features of Alice, which Greene does not
differentiate. First, the rationales she offers for her choices—such as wit and charm and
kindness—are not really her reasons. Second, it seems tacitly implied that were Alice made aware
that height perfectly predicts her preferences among dates, she would disavow it as a reason. She
would not endorse her actual criterion. Thus the Alice example involves both confabulation (of
her putative reasons) and alienation (from her genuine reasons).
Consider by contrast Greene’s most developed and realistic example of supposed
rationalization in moral judgment: his argument against retributivism. According to Greene’s
(2008: 50) official characterization of the view, to engage in retributive punishment is “to give
wrongdoers what they deserve based on what they have done, regardless of whether such
retribution will prevent future wrongdoing.” This fairly characterizes two core retributivist
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 13
doctrines, both of which concern desert. The worse the transgression and the fewer mitigating
circumstances, the more punishment is deserved; and the fact that someone deserves punishment
counts as a reason—though not always as sufficient reason—to punish him. These two claims
constitute what we will call core retributivism, which is the most defensible form of the view.
Greene’s argument commits him to rejecting this modest version, because it too offers nonconsequentialist reasons based in desert.
Note that core retributivism does not entail the Kantian claim that it is intrinsically good
for the wicked to suffer, much less that we should always give people what they deserve regardless
of the cost—let the heavens fall, as it were. Surely even deserved punishment should be foregone
when it would be catastrophically costly to punish. Desert is one consideration in favor of
punishment but it can be overridden by other considerations, including sufficiently weighty
consequentialist reasons. We will consider only core retributivism here, not either Kantian
addition. This core of retributivism is especially important for our purposes, because it manifests
the fundamental concern and action tendency of anger: it is sensitive to slights and wrongs, and it
motivates retaliation or retribution. In defending core retributivism—which we will refer to
simply as retributivism in what follows—we are in a sense (to be elaborated) defending the
rational significance of the human propensity to anger.
Greene’s discussion of retributivism purports to show that those who put forward abstract
theories of desert or rights, in order to justify punishing wrongdoers, are guilty of rationalization.
The retributivist supposedly offers a confabulated story about judgments that are really made
because he is angry, and anger motivates him to retaliate. But this argument seems to misconstrue
the role of anger in moral judgment, in two related respects. It posits too simple and direct a
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 14
connection between sentiment and value, and it runs together two distinct points about
confabulation: it is unconscious and unendorsed.
First, the account is too simple. The relationship between anger and moral judgment is
not as direct as Greene implies. Surely one need not have a bout of anger on every occasion when
one judges that punishment is justified.14 Most obviously, one can believe that wrongdoing
deserves punishment without focusing upon any particular case, much less getting angry about it.
People also seem capable of making such judgments dispassionately even about particular cases,
especially (but not exclusively) when the wrong does not affect their interests and lacks
sympathetic victims. Thus individual retributivist judgments are not inevitably rationalizations of
alarm-like emotional responses. It is more plausible that anger contributes indirectly to
retributivist intuitions, in that people develop standards of wrongness and come to the conclusion
that wrongdoing deserves punishment partly through their sentiments: specifically the disposition
to anger. While this suggestion does not support Greene’s charge of rationalization, it is worth
elaborating briefly as an example of how rational sentimentalism offers an alternative conception
of the contribution of emotion to evaluative judgment, which does not entail pessimism.
It may well be that some of the plausibility of retributivism to humans arises from our
predilection to embrace the internal logic of anger, which involves taking the transgressions that
anger us to provide reasons to retaliate. But it is crucial to recognize how the critical assessment of
our emotions, as well as consistency pressure on norms for when emotions are fitting, make a
complementary contribution to a defensible retributivism. Because people are capable of such
14
This is of course an empirical claim, but it seems to us obviously true, and Greene offers no evidence against it.
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 15
critical assessment, they do not simply conclude that whatever angers them deserves punishment.
For instance, when you realize reflectively that the harm I caused you was unintentional and
unforeseeable, you can recognize that it does not merit your anger. Then even if you have a
lingering impulse to retaliate, given by your anger, you should conclude that it is unjustified and
ought to be resisted. An equally important point is that while one’s bouts of anger contribute to
the plausibility of the idea that transgressions deserve punishment, one’s ability to reason
abstractly can lead to the realization that one’s similar transgressions against others are similarly
blameworthy. This conclusion is not generated by anger at oneself. It is rather an application of
consistency pressure that helps refine anger and its characteristic motivation in ways that are more
sensitive to reasons. This is not to say that our emotional responses are always so sensitive, or that
a more modest form of pessimism focusing on specific human biases should be discounted. But it
would be hasty to deny that transgressors deserve punishment simply because that intuition
echoes the internal logic of anger.
The second problem with Greene’s claim that retributivism is a rationalization of anger is
even more significant for present purposes. It stems from its conflation of confabulation with
alienation, both of which, one imagines, are present in the case of Alice. The role of anger in
retributive thinking does not undermine retributivism unless one denies that anger—which is to
say, integral rather than incidental anger—can be sensitive to good reasons to punish. (Recall
again that they need not be sufficient reasons.) This is exactly what is at issue. When you are
outraged at some heinous crime, in which the wrongdoer gratuitously harmed an innocent person,
your anger purports to be responsive to considerations about what has been done that justify the
claim that the criminal deserves punishment. Then although you recognize that your anger at
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 16
wrongdoing motivates you to “give wrongdoers the punishment they deserve based on what they
have done,” you will likely endorse this tendency.
Compare this to Alice’s case, supposing that she were to come to realize that her
overwhelming attraction to tall men fully determined her dating choices. But now imagine that on
reflection she endorsed these choices rather than being alienated from them: she decides that
attractiveness is all that matters to her, that her sole criterion is height, and that she is fine with it.
Although science can be said to have undermined her previous, confabulated rationales about wit
and kindness, it could not show her preferences (which violate no canon of rationality) to be
incorrect. Science has nothing to say on that score, although aesthetics allows us to criticize her
taste as failing to be sensitive to all of the attractive and unattractive qualities in her dates, to say
the least. Other normative disciplines provide grounds to criticize anyone who chooses dates
exclusively on the basis of their attractiveness—even with impeccable taste.
Greene aspires to undermine claims about desert, rights, and justice by making a
psychological claim that retributivists engage in rationalization, which purports to obviate the
need to give a substantive argument over the merits of the case for punishment. But this argument
fails, because anger does not always cause judgments of wrongness and, even when it does, people
often endorse their anger at heinous wrongdoing as being sensitive to genuine reasons to punish.
That is, they think that what the culprit did both explains their anger at him and justifies it, as well
as motivating and justifying his punishment. Although they may be mistaken, they are not like
Alice and, hence, not susceptible to any purely psychological argument that they are guilty of
rationalization. The Alice case gives illicit support to the rationalization argument by conflating
confabulation and alienation, thereby making it seem like because Alice confabulates, she must be
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 17
alienated from the true cause of her choices. In the case of anger at wrongdoing, however, there
may be no confabulation even if anger is implicated in the causal story. Moreover, the judgment
will likely be endorsed, notwithstanding the anger; if the agent is alienated from his anger,
thinking it unjustified, then he will not judge on its basis. (This was the lesson of the first
disanalogy between Alice and the retributivist.)
Since Greene’s argument cannot make good on its grandiose ambition to demonstrate
that retributivists are inevitably self-confuting, as Alice is tacitly assumed to be, his own theory of
punishment must be compared with retributivism on the merits. The so-called utilitarian theory
of punishment that Greene adopts offers an alternative to retributivism.15 It is not a conclusion of
any empirical argument, however, and hence—in the absence of any reason to think that
retributivists must be confused by their own lights—it is no more or less compatible with science.
Instead the argument has to be made on overtly normative grounds. Since we reject pessimism
and accept the possibility of rationally justifying normative claims, we think this possible. Indeed,
we think normative arguments—or at any rate, compelling normative claims that few will want to
deny—suffice to convict Alice of having bad taste in men, in addition to being highly imprudent
in her criteria for choosing romantic partners.
According to the theory of punishment Greene (2008: 70) endorses, considerations of
desert do not provide any reason to punish: “consequences are ultimately the only things that
should matter to decision makers,” he claims, when it comes to punishment or anything else. But
this is a very difficult position to defend. Its worst implication is that we should punish the innocent
15
“So-called” because the classical utilitarians did not, and modern consequentialists should not, adopt it.
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 18
whenever that would have the best consequences. In the philosophers’ standard toy case, lynching
an innocent will save two lives that would otherwise be lost in a riot. In Greene’s view, the only
legitimate consideration about this case is that the loss of two lives is worse than the loss of one.
Greene must reject the claim that it would be unjust to violate the rights of the innocent person by
lynching her—indeed, even that this injustice provides a reason not to do so—as these are just the
sort of non-consequentialist considerations he considers mere rationalization. This is not just the
familiar point that consequentialists cannot rule out any type of action, including lynching, a
priori. Perhaps catastrophic cases suffice to justify that that conclusion. The point is that even in
ordinary and realistic cases, Greene’s theory commits him to holding that someone’s innocence
does not provide any reason not to punish her.16
Retributivism avoids these consequences by recognizing desert as a source of practical
reasons, which renders it considerably more plausible than the purely forward-looking alternative.
We have already granted that some of this intuitive support comes from the human propensity to
anger. While critics of retributivism are on their most favorable ground with anger, an emotion
that many view with suspicion, it should be noted that when anger is directed against
acknowledged wrongdoing it tends to go by such honorifics as righteous indignation. In any case,
anger is hardly the only sentiment concerned with desert, which therefore conflicts with Greene’s
insistence that only consequentialist reasons can justify action. More attractive attitudes such as
16
The reader may be excused for suspecting that we must be reading Greene uncharitably here. In fact he embraces
this result, albeit in the highly unrealistic (and hence less horrific) trolley cases, where the bullet he has to bite can
seem more palatable. “As long as starving children get helped and people get shoved in front of speeding trolleys,
that’s all I care about,” Greene (2008: 117) writes, his rhetoric leavening with jocularity a position he is committed to
in all seriousness. Similarly, all his theory cares about is that one more life was saved by preventing the riot than was
lost by lynching the innocent.
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 19
sympathy and compassion also focus on the victims of unjust punishment and other undeserved
suffering. Gratitude, which motivates us to respond positively towards those who have been kind
to us, rather than bestowing our largesse wherever it would do a little more good, also manifests a
concern for desert. Thus the sentiments are shot through with concerns that people be treated in
ways that reflect their moral record. Furthermore, the very idea of merit, that achievement and
effort deserve reward, makes essential appeal to desert. Thus the human concern for desert, which
is central to anger’s internal logic, extends across a wide array of our attitudes and practices.
These sentiments and other evaluative attitudes cohere with the idea that desert matters,
as core retributivism claims and hyper-rationalism denies. Moreover, work in evolutionary
psychology and behavioral economics also strongly suggests that concern for desert pervades
human nature, for instance by making us keenly aware of cheating and committed to norms of
fairness.17 Whereas sentimentalist theories embrace the idea that some such deeply seated
psychological tendencies give rise to genuine reasons for humans, even if not for dispassionate
aliens, Greene holds that emotions are “garbage” that should be ignored. This is the principle
difference between an anthropocentric account of ethics and a scientistic view that is alienated
from human nature and sentiment.
To his credit, Greene confronts the fact that his view is unlivable for humans. He (2008:
76) writes:
How far can the empirical debunking of human moral nature go? If science tells me
that I love my children more than other children only because they share my genes,
17
See e.g. Cosmides (1989), Roth (1995).
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 20
should I feel uneasy about that?...It seems that one who is unwilling to act on human
tendencies that have amoral evolutionary causes is ultimately unwilling to be human.
We have no choice but to be human, of course, and hence for our deepest feelings to be in tension
with full impartiality, sensitive to considerations of desert, and so forth. So this is not a genuine
choice, and the hyper-rationalist does not offer a tenable alternative for how to live. Although
Greene admits that his hyper-rationalism is inhuman, he thinks that the only other option is to
embrace some form of relativism that cannot call our ethical intuitions into question. But that
follows only if Singer’s dilemma exhausts the theoretical options, which is precisely what we deny.
This debate over retributivism illustrates the general pattern of Greene’s argument from
coincidence, which motivates pessimism about all moral judgments not based on narrowly
consequentialist reasons—which is to say, any reason concerning rights, justice, desert, intention,
and the distinction between action and omission (among much else). Greene argues that
powerful emotional responses favor these conclusions, and he contends that it would be a
remarkable coincidence if our intuitions, which correspond to these evolved emotional responses,
just so happen to track moral reasons independent of human moral psychology. As he (2008: 72)
puts it, “it is unlikely that inclinations that evolved as evolutionary byproducts correspond to some
independent, rationally discoverable moral truth”; rather, it is much more plausible that when we
feel the pull of non-consequentialist intuitions, “we are merely gravitating toward our evolved
emotional inclinations.”
In the following section of the paper, we will show that rational sentimentalism offers a
theoretical option that answers Greene’s argument from coincidence. The route through the
dilemma that Singer and Greene neglect is that our emotional responses can be sensitive to
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 21
anthropocentric but nonetheless genuine reasons to act. There need be no cosmic coincidence
when our emotions get it right because, although our evaluative judgments then track the moral
truth, it is not an independent moral truth but one that is partly shaped by the contours of the
sentiments, corrected and augmented by reasoning. Hence Singer’s dilemma, according to which
science presents a forced choice between skepticism and hyper-rationalism, is a false dilemma—at
least, if rational sentimentalism is coherent and defensible.
Yet the idea that anthropocentrism leads to skepticism, which both Singer and Greene
endorse, holds true of the forms of sentimentalism offered by their compatriots in the empirical
ethics movement. As Greene notes, some of his fellow pessimists—most notably Haidt and
Prinz—grant authority to emotions despite thinking that they cannot be given any rational
justification. These views advocate an anthropocentric approach to morality, which, as Greene
(2008: 74) puts it, settles for “a morality that is contingently human” rather than “deriving moral
truths from first principles.” This description of anthropocentrism is accurate enough and
describes our own view fairly. But Greene (2008: 74) also characterizes anthropocentrism in a
more tendentious manner: “Rather than standing by our moral intuitions on the assumption that
they can be justified by a rational theory,” he writes, “we might stand by them just because they are
ours.” He then rejects anthropocentrism on the grounds that it cannot criticize entrenched
intuitions but must accept them as justified. Although this characterization aptly describes the
relativist positions of Haidt and Prinz, which disavow the possibility of rational criticism of
accepted practices and entrenched feelings, it misconstrues those anthropocentric approaches
that are not relativist or otherwise skeptical.
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 22
Our contention that the hyper-rationalists set up a false dilemma thus rests on the claim
that anthropocentrism—and, more specifically, sentimentalism—need not be relativist. In the
following section we illustrate and defend the (commonplace) practice of appraising emotional
responses for their rational justification by describing a sentimentalist theory on which evaluative
judgments are not emotional reactions but assessments of the grounds for such reactions. Such
grounds can be better and worse, and they are not simply about the instrumental advantages of
responses or their congruence with societal responses. Hence commonplace evaluative judgments
are not justified merely by consensus, or by coherence with one’s own patterns of emotional
response, contrary to the claims of both forms of scientism championed by the empirical ethics
movement. The strong pessimism adopted by both relativists and hyper-rationalists depends on
their denial that ordinary evaluative judgments, grounded in the sentiments and other contingent
features of human nature, are amenable to rational criticism and justification.
2.
Sentimentalism without Relativism
The fundamental thesis of sentimentalism, as we understand it, is that evaluative concepts
or properties depend essentially upon the emotions. This definition is expansive enough to
include a variety of different theories, but not so broad as to include every ethical theory that gives
a central role to the emotions either in moral motivation or the phenomenology of value.
Sentimentalists claim that the emotions do not just detect values but partly serve to constitute
them—as the funny is not just detected by our amusement but shaped by the human sense of
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 23
humor.18 Consider by contrast a view that holds that values are primary qualities, independent of
human nature, and then explains the correlation between emotional response and evaluative
judgment by supposing that emotions track those independent values. Although this position
flatters the emotions where hyper-rationalism disparages them, it does not count as
sentimentalist. Such a view is particularly vulnerable to Greene’s argument from coincidence,
because it offers no explanation of why our emotional responses “just so happen” to track humanindependent moral facts.
Sentimentalism can circumvent the argument from coincidence, however, since it does
not claim that the values revealed in emotional responses are independent of human sentiments.
This dependence is the essence of sentimentalism, though different versions of the theory differ
crucially over how to understand it. Two of the simpler versions of sentimentalism, emotivism and
social intuitionism, are pessimistic about the possibility of rational justification in ethics.
Emotivism focuses on evaluative judgment, which it understands as the expression of emotional
states (along with an imperative to feel similarly). In this view, to judge something good or right is
to express one’s approval of it and to attempt to persuade others to take up a similar attitude. In
effect it is to say: “I approve of this; do so as well” (Stevenson 1937). Social intuitionism focuses
directly on values rather than value judgments, holding that the property of being valuable is
relative to a culture, and to be valuable (in some culture) is just to be approved of by the relevant
group. These simple forms of sentimentalism agree that approval and disapproval are not
amenable to rational justification.
18
This means that the incongruity theory of humor, for instance, which identifies the funny with the incongruous—
understood as an empirical concept rather than as response-dependent—is not sentimentalist, even if it regards
amusement as the source of human concern for humor and our main epistemological route to the funny.
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 24
We are not developing rational sentimentalism in any detail here, only broaching two of
its central commitments that are relevant to rebutting pessimism. First and most important for
present purposes, our view of the relation between sentiment and value is that value corresponds
not with whatever people actually feel but with what feelings are fitting, and value judgments are
not simply emotional responses but verdicts about what merits those responses. Thus value
judgments are not justified by facts about what people are disposed to feel; rather, their
defensibility hangs on the adequacy of the reasons supporting them. Precursors of this suggestion
can be found in the early sentimentalists, such as Hume and Adam Smith, and it is now widely
embraced by sentimentalists with very different views about the metaphysics of value (about
which we remain neutral here). For instance, David Wiggins (1998: 187) claims that: “x is
good/right/beautiful if and only if x is such as to make a certain sentiment of approbation
appropriate.” Contemporary expressivists, the intellectual heirs of emotivism, similarly suggest
that evaluative judgment should be identified not with emotions themselves but with higher-order
endorsements of such responses as appropriate (or fitting, merited, rational). As Allan Gibbard
(1990: 51) puts it: “An action is morally admirable, we can say, if on the part both of the agent and
of others it makes sense to feel moral approbation toward the agent for having done it.”
Second, rational sentimentalism adopts a version of anthropocentrism according to which
certain contingent human concerns provide reasons for action that we (humans) would not have
in the absence of those concerns. But the concerns in question must be both deeply ingrained in
human nature and widely supported by a network of motivational, affective, and cognitive sources
in human psychology. We utilized this idea in the argument for the significance of desert above,
and it will be further developed in the final section.
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 25
Were pessimism correct, the distinction between fitting and unfitting sentiments could
not be sustained, because emotions would only be amenable to empirical forms of assessment, for
instance as in conformity with the norms of an agent’s culture or as coherent with his overall
sensibility. Stevenson (1940: 138) anticipated this pessimistic thesis about the impossibility of
rational justification of evaluative judgment: “if any ethical dispute is not rooted in disagreement
in belief,” he claimed, “then no reasoned solution of any sort is possible.” Like emotivism, social
intuitionism turns moral reasoning into nothing more than persuasion.19 As we shall see, Haidt
embraces exactly this view of justification, and he does so in the context of a tellingly abhorrent
argument that illustrates the impoverishment of this view.
For social intuitionists and other relativists, the only sensible notion of moral justification
is that of conformity, whether to the culture or the individual’s sensibility. Haidt (2008: 216)
endorses a cultural relativism according to which: “A well-formed moral system is one that is
endorsed by the great majority of its members, even those who appear, from the outside, to be its
victims.” Although Prinz’s view is more complex, he ultimately holds a version of individual
relativism. As Prinz (2007: 177) describes it: “On the form of relativism that I have been
endorsing, a speaker [who] says ‘you ought to Φ’ expresses the fact that the speaker endorses
values that require Φ-ing,” where the values in question are fixed by the speaker’s sentiments.20
These relativist versions of sentimentalism coopt such normative notions as ought by replacing
them with something empirically tractable: conformity to one’s culture or one’s own actual
19
20
This point was initially brought out by Brandt (1950).
Although this sounds like expressivism, it is not. Prinz (2007: 177) explains that this claim is “true if and only if the
speaker has moral values that prescribe Φ-ing.” There are some adventitious complications to the view, but for a
similar statement put in terms of truth conditions, cf. (Prinz 2007: 179).
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 26
sentiments. But this undermines the normative force of these notions, since (for instance) the fact
that one’s culture endorses some moral norm does not justify accepting it.
The pessimism embraced by relativism and emotivism concedes the resources needed to
defend classically liberal ideals of rights and justice. And relativism in particular lends itself to the
defense of oppressive social practices that run counter to the progress of civilization towards
institutions that better promote human flourishing. This is most evident of social intuitionism,
which implies a moral equivalence between (viable) cultures. That tendency reflects a loss of
confidence in what we hold to be genuinely worthy and rationally defensible ideals of Western
culture: respect for individual rights and responsibilities, the goal of progress in human well-being,
and the struggle against unjust and oppressive social practices. A similar point applies to the
hyper-rationalism of Singer and Greene. Though that view is concerned with welfare, or at least
with pain and pleasure, it rejects considerations of justice and rights as mere rationalization. It
thus neglects the historical lesson that progress in human well-being is fostered by representative
government, rule of law, and the other institutions of a free society—all of which demand more
sophisticated forms of decision making than crude consequentialism. The rest of this section
illustrates the theoretical and moral deficiencies of relativism, while the final section displays a
wide range of genuine reasons that elude the scientistic approach characteristic of hyperrationalism.
The following example is intended both as a theoretical argument for the possibility of
moral reasoning and justification, against pessimism, and as a normative argument in defense of
the liberal ideals disparaged by social intuitionism, which if successful justifies certain patterns of
approval and disapproval against others. Both points can be illustrated with a case both Haidt and
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 27
Prinz discuss at some length, namely clitoridectomy—which gets called female circumcision by its
apologists and female genital mutilation by its critics. Although as critics we consider the
censorious term more apt, we will avoid prejudicing our case by choosing the most neutral term
available to prosecute this argument. Were Haidt’s cultural relativism correct, then the fact that a
great majority of the members of a culture (whatever that amounts to) support the practice,
including women, would suffice to make it part of a well-formed moral system.21 Indeed, since
Haidt (2008: 216) identifies being virtuous with being “fully enculturated,” it is not merely that
participation in this practice is virtuous; worse yet, opposition to it must count as vicious insofar as
it precludes enculturation.
The paradigm of moral argument offered by Haidt (2008: 191) comes from a debate over
clitoridectomy, in which he follows the misguided tendency of many social scientists to conflate
clitoridectomy with circumcision, which allows him to say, misleadingly, that the practice is
“common in many cultures.” He then quotes a passionate condemnation of ritualistic female
genital mutilation that he calls an argument—or rather seven arguments, one for each emotionally
loaded term—so as to treat the passage as paradigmatic not just of the case against clitoridectomy
but of moral argument in general. Haidt (2008: 192) asks the reader to “note that each argument
is really an attempt to frame the issue so as to push an emotional button, triggering seven different
flashes of intuition in the listener.” But one cherry-picked example makes no general case for
pessimism. Haidt’s description accurately describes his own attempt to frame the practice as just
another variety of genital alteration, however, in order to suggest that any distress you may have
21
It is unclear why Haidt gets to make even this caveat (about victims), except for the contingency that women are
not a minority group. When a minority is small enough that a “great majority” of the culture need not include it, then
their lack of consent must in Haidt’s view be considered morally irrelevant.
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 28
over it can only be prejudice. Despite the fact that there are compelling (and obvious) reasons to
draw a moral distinction between circumcision and clitoridectomy, Haidt cheats by choosing a
polemical statement as his paradigm of moral argumentation. In order to illustrate the
implications of these points, we first need to make clear the terms of the disagreement and the
burden of his argument.
If pessimism about moral reasoning were correct, our disagreement over the
permissibility of clitoridectomy could only be an effort to exert non-rational influence or an
anthropological dispute about how much agreement over the practice exists. But we can grant
Haidt the anthropology, for the sake of argument, without withdrawing our moral judgment. Let
us suppose then that Prinz (2007: 209) is correct when he claims, in his own apologia for
clitoridectomy, that in “most cultures where female circumcision is performed, women evidently
support and promote the practice.” We will stipulate that this is true about the case at hand, so as
to make the argument as difficult as possible for us critics and anti-relativists. Since we dispute that
widespread agreement suffices to make a practice permissible, we posit such agreement. But we
demand the same consideration in return. Since in their view it makes no difference how harmful
is the practice so long as it has the requisite support, they cannot shrink from the most heinous
cases, where—among many other oppressive features of the practice as it actually exists—it
grievously harms young girls without their consent (notwithstanding the views of other women).
Hence we will focus on these cases, where the practice is most harmful and yet sufficiently
accepted to count as right according to relativism.
Our dispute with Haidt over this case is not a matter of anthropological fact, and our
dispute with Prinz is not a matter of psychological fact. We are not denying that clitoridectomy
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 29
has widespread support in this culture, nor are we merely expressing our own disapproval of it. We
are rather claiming that there are conclusive reasons to disapprove of the practice, which exist
even if it is approved of by the majority in that culture. But our disapproval does not make it
wrong, even for us; it would be wrong even if we did not disapprove, in virtue of the good reasons
to disapprove of it. The clearest reasons are that the practice harms young women, without their
consent, in a manner that inhibits their flourishing. This has to be granted to be a powerful prima
facie argument against the practice, which could only be overcome by a very compelling
counterargument. Yet the counterarguments proffered by Haidt and Prinz—and the apologists
they cite approvingly—are lame, because they offer bad reasons in support of the permissibility of
the practice. Their analogies to male circumcision and body piercing are very weak, since those
practices are not seriously harmful (and the latter case is consensual). Whatever one thinks of
those practices, the strongest reasons to disapprove of clitoridectomy simply do not apply to
them.
Both Prinz and Haidt allow themselves to argue against the most favorable cases: not only
where the practice is supported by most women but also where it does not seriously harm women
by (for one thing) permanently precluding their ability to enjoy sex—even though this is the overt
goal of most extant forms of the practice. Moreover, the good reasons to disapprove of
clitoridectomy are deliberately obscured by its apologists. Consider their assimilation of the
practice with less objectionable practices that can also be framed as the alteration of an infant’s
genitals. Castration too counts as genital alteration, but that doesn’t place it on a par with
circumcision; we are confident that few men are indifferent between them. Hence there are strong
reasons to condemn clitoridectomy and only poor reasons to tolerate it under circumstances
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 30
where relativists must not merely tolerate but endorse the practice. While this argument adduces
reasons, it also vindicates moral reasoning as being more reputable than post hoc rationalization.
Anyone convinced by our argument against assimilating clitoridectomy with circumcision as
simply alternative forms of genital alteration, for instance, has come to grasp better reasons
through reasoning about the crucial disanalogies between these cases.
This argument has several implications for our discussion. First, the most fine-grained
conclusion is that clitoridectomy is wrong even where it is socially approved. That point suffices
to belie relativism. Second, there are good reasons to disapprove of the practice, and the
countermanding reasons offered in its favor are weak—they depend on faulty analogies and
rhetorical sleight of hand. This point shows that pessimism, which denies or minimizes the role of
reasons and reasoning in moral judgment, is vastly overstated. Both these arguments are
compatible with various ethical theories, since they invoke harm and flourishing; they are not
distinctively sentimentalist. The facts about human nature to which they appeal might, for all
we’ve said, be reducible to empirical concepts compatible with hyper-rationalism. The point at
hand is that because rational sentimentalism focuses on reasons to approve or disapprove of
actions and practices—not on empirical facts about approval—it too can justify moral
condemnation based on the good reasons to disapprove. Sentimentalism is thus compatible with
rational justification, even though the simplest forms of the theory eschew it in favor of pessimism.
This discussion of relativism reveals that Greene was correct to this extent: the form of
sentimentalism that his compatriots in the empirical ethics movement embrace is tantamount to
skepticism. But the problem lies with their relativism rather than with anthropocentrism. We do
not face a forced choice between an inhuman morality and an uncritical acceptance of moral
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 31
feelings and intuitions. Instead, one can recognize reasons that are neither revealed by science nor
in conflict with it. Since the reasons adduced by the previous example concern harm and
flourishing, however, a hyper-rationalist theory can claim to capture them as well. In the final
section of this paper, we argue that the scientism manifest in the aspiration of purifying ethics of
everything human misses a whole range of important reasons revealed by the sentiments.
3.
The Reasons that Elude Scientism
We have thus far argued that the scientistic approaches characteristic of the empirical
ethics movement are inadequate because they embrace too strong versions of pessimism and, as a
result, are left with untenable normative commitments. Since rational sentimentalism can
question entrenched moral intuitions, unlike relativist forms of sentimentalism, it need not
endorse oppressive cultural practices that enjoy widespread acceptance. And since it is not
committed to the narrow conception of reasons that hyper-rationalism can accommodate,
rational sentimentalism avoids having to accept whatever turns out to be optimific according to
the sole criterion of crude consequentialism. We now turn to illustrating some scientistic errors
that mar the work of eminent moral psychologists who disparage a whole class of good but
anthropocentric reasons, which they claim to be tainted by magical thinking and irrational taboo.
These reasons arise primarily from the symbolic and expressive aspects of action; they are a
particularly significant source of reasons to which the sentiments respond. Our aim is less to
vindicate any particular instance of these reasons than to show that, as a class, they are not
incompatible but discontinuous with science.
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 32
The psychologist Paul Rozin and his collaborators (1986) claim that magical thinking
pervades modern Western culture, and Haidt (2001) argues similarly that cosmopolitans too
labor pervasively under irrational taboos. We do not suppose that Westerners are devoid of
superstition and belief in magic—that would be absurd. But the examples that Rozin and Haidt
use to demonstrate the ubiquity of magical thinking and taboo, and most importantly its influence
on ordinary moral judgment, show nothing of the kind. The actions and beliefs that they ignore or
disparage as irrational, and gratuitously attribute to supernatural beliefs, can in fact be supported
by good reasons. Although Rozin grants that there are other possible explanations of the data, he
rejects them. Since belief in the efficacy of magic “clearly occurs in traditional societies” where
those alternative explanations fail, he writes, “it seems uneconomical to invoke different accounts
for the subset of these behaviors that we have documented in American culture” (1986: 711). We
suggest to the contrary that interpretive charity is a bargain as compared to the cost of equating
the metaphysical assumptions of traditional (i.e. pre-scientific) societies with those of modern,
cosmopolitan ones. It is ironic that scientism would draw this equivalence, but this reflects an
ideological presupposition rather than following from the data.
What leads Rozin and Haidt to conclude that Western cultures remain in the grip of
irrational taboo? Haidt (2001: 817) offers a catalogue of what he deems harmless taboo-violation
tasks and scenarios, where he thinks people make condemnatory moral judgments and refuse to
perform supposedly innocuous actions without reason. These actions include, among other
things, eating one’s dead pet dog and cleaning the toilet with the national flag. In one of his tabooviolation tasks, called Soul, an experimenter offers the subject two dollars for signing an explicitly
non-binding “contract” that grants possession of the subject’s soul after death to the experimenter.
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 33
It should come as no surprise that some people turn down the money. In another experiment,
Roach, many people decline to drink a cup of juice into which a sterilized roach has been dipped,
despite having witnessed its sterilization. Since the “roached” juice—as Rozin charmingly calls
it—has no more germs than the regular variety, Rozin and Haidt conclude that there is no reason
not to drink it, merely a widespread but irrational aversion.
Rozin thinks that aversions like these manifest magical thinking. What he calls the first law
of sympathetic magic is the law of contagion: “things that once have been in contact with each
other may influence each other through transfer of some of their properties via an ‘essence’”
(Rozin et al. 1986: 703). Since this essence remains “in some form of nonphysical contact with its
source,” this allows for the possibility that action taken on a clipping of someone’s hair, for
instance, can affect that person—which, as Rozin (ibid.: 703) notes, “is the basis for a major form
of sorcery.” The second magical law is the law of similarity, according to which “things that
resemble one another share fundamental properties” that allow actions taken on the simulacrum
to affect the object it resembles (ibid.: 703). Thus a voodoo doll constructed to look roughly like
its intended victim, and which incorporates some sort of physical residue of him, utilizes both
these magical laws. People who perform voodoo rituals can reasonably be ascribed belief in these
principles of magic—beliefs they would avow in uninhibited discourse. But the Americans
surveyed and tested do not practice voodoo and, presumably, disavow any such belief. The magic
principles are ascribed to them nonetheless, because they behave in ways that Rozin and Haidt
find so irrational that their best explanation adverts to such magical thinking.
Consider some of the cases that drive them to this view. Rozin contends that it is irrational
to prefer putting a (new) rubber sink stopper in one’s mouth to doing the same with a rubber
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 34
mold fabricated to look like vomit. Similarly, he thinks there is no reason to be averse to eating
fudge shaped to resemble feces, or to be repelled by the prospect of wearing a lab coat used by
Joseph Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor.22 As long as the coat has been thoroughly cleaned,
what reason could you have to resist—unless you secretly think that Mengele’s essence has
somehow been non-physically imparted to the garment? That really would be magical thinking.
But although there is a science of disgust, and Rozin is perhaps its most eminent figure, there is no
science of the disgusting—the evaluative property of meriting disgust—and Rozin’s views about
that are not authoritative or even plausible. We can agree on all the (empirical) facts about these
artifacts and yet disagree about whether there is reason to be disgusted by them. Note that good
reasons to be disgusted are good reasons to be in a state that, by its nature, inclines one to avoid
intercourse with the objects of one’s disgust. While the weight of those reasons is open to debate,
even slightly compelling reasons are strong enough to justify refusing to perform acts that you
have no reason to do other than the request of some experimenter; we will take up this point in
more detail presently. But first we need to support the claim that there are reasons to be disgusted
by such things.
We have argued elsewhere (D’Arms and Jacobson 2005) that sentimental values such as
the disgusting (and the funny, the shameful, etc.) provide reasons to normal humans in part
because they embody psychologically deep and wide human concerns. Deep concerns are those
that are so firmly entrenched in human psychology that they would be either impossible or very
costly to extirpate; wide concerns are those that play various roles in the moral psychology of their
22
Rozin uses Hitler’s sweater as his example, but this emendation makes the same point more vividly.
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 35
possessor. When the object of a concern resonates throughout a person’s evaluative responses—
including emotions and other feelings, desires, intentions, plans and evaluative judgments—this is
indicative of its width. Greene’s example of his bias in favor of his own children is one case of a
deep and wide human concern; so too are the conviction that desert matters and the aversion to
disgusting things. According to rational sentimentalism, concerns that are both deep and wide in
human psychology ground anthropocentric reasons that people would not have were they
differently embodied. Our discussion here begins with reasons to be disgusted, and then turns to
some other deep and wide human concerns that manifest themselves in various feelings and
motives common to humanity.
In our view and according to common sense, the disgusting is partly a perceptual
property—which is to say that things can merit disgust in virtue of the way they look, taste, or
smell. Thus what Rozin explains by appeal to a magic law of similarity, according to which things
that resemble one another share fundamental properties with causal powers, can instead be
explained by the truism that things that look like excrement or vomit look disgusting. In these
simple perceptual cases, the genuine visual similarity to something disgusting suffices to render
things visually disgusting, which thereby justifies our aversion to the fudge and the rubber mold.
One need not believe in essences or magical causal powers to hold that things that look like that
are disgusting: they do not just cause but merit disgust. This explanation is simple but sufficient
for these perceptual cases, and it gets the right result on properly mundane grounds. We humans
care not only about what things are made of but about what they look (taste and smell) like—
which is the source of a wide range of aesthetic concerns. Rational agents need not care about
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 36
aesthetics, but that hardly undermines the concern for beauty and other aesthetic qualities, let
alone shows them to be magical or otherwise irrational.
The Roach case is somewhat more complicated, because it is not perceptual: roached
juice does not look or taste any different than ordinary juice. Rozin posits that his subjects are in
the grip of a magical law of contagion, according to which the roach passes on its essence to the
juice. We infer that he would not ascribe magical thinking to someone reluctant to drink if the
roach had not been sterilized; in that case, Rozin and Haidt imply that disgust would be justified.
But why should sterilization remove the disgustingness of having a roach dipped in your beverage?
The obvious answer is that disgust is about contamination. Its function is to serve as a fast and
frugal germ detector, which gets a false positive in this case. Rozin and Haidt implicitly assume
what might be called the germ theory of contamination, which holds that if something is not
germy (or otherwise toxic) then it is not disgusting. But it is extremely hard to accept the
implications of this theory, on which nothing hygienic is disgusting to look at, eat, “kiss,” and so
forth. A surfeit of obvious cases—including such things as vomit-shaped rubber molds, sterilized
excretions, and well-embalmed corpses—stand as a reductio to this theory.
Rational sentimentalism allows for the criticism of actual responses as unfitting, as we’ve
insisted, so it is open to these psychologists to argue that the predictable disgust response to
vermin and other common elicitors is mistaken whenever they are not germ-ridden. Yet such
widespread patterns of emotional response to objects like these require countermanding reasons
to overcome. And the reason on offer—the fact that the objects are not germy—is true but
unconvincing in light of the aesthetic points raised previously. Instead one should reject the
scientistic assumption that the evolutionary function of a mechanism like disgust determines
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 37
when we have reason to be disgusted. The germ theory of contamination cannot handle
perceptual cases, and it entails absurd conclusions about hygienic corpses and sterilized
excrement. Moreover, it cannot make sense of another broad class of concerns, of which
Mengele’s lab coat is an instance.
While we suppose it is possible that someone might not want to wear the coat because she
was worried about Mengele’s essence being transferred to her through some sort of non-physical
contact—as Rozin would have it—surely it is more likely that her aversion stems from a broader
human concern for the histories of people and things, which is reflected in a plethora of ordinary
phenomena. People collect autographs. The pen Lincoln used to sign the Emancipation
Proclamation has more value than an authentic pen of that era with no historical import. It is
awesome to stand in the Roman Forum or the Old City of Jerusalem and reflect on who must
have walked on the same flagstones. One of the crucial differences between an Old Master
painting and a forgery, however well executed, is that only the former was actually painted by
Vermeer. For someone with this very normal pattern of attitudes, who is appalled by Mengele’s
atrocities, the fact that this garment was his lab coat will seem a very good reason not to wear it.
Nothing about this pattern of concern requires the attribution of magical thinking to those who
care about such things.
Again, any evaluative attitude can be criticized, no matter how widespread, and it is open
to Rozin simply to insist that it makes no difference who wore this coat. Our argument appeals not
simply to a particular human concern, however, but to what we take to be a deep and wide pattern.
The examples above exhibit the degree to which an interest in the histories of people and things is
a wide human concern: it runs throughout human moral psychology, and is reaffirmed in various
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 38
attitudes toward agents and the objects with which they interact. These concerns are surely deep
as well: it would be very difficult, to say the least, to extirpate our interest in the past and its
relation to present day things. It is the psychological depth and width of these commitments—
and some others we will be raising in what follows—that allow them to figure in anthropocentric
justifications that do not rely on an appeal to mere conformity.
We grant of course that this suite of concerns is fundamentally human, and that a different
sort of rational creature need not care about them in the least. Indeed, not everyone sees the point
of autographs and memorabilia—though we doubt that many otherwise normal people are
completely immune to feelings about the genealogy of places and things. But the point of these
examples is to illustrate the existence of anthropocentric reasons which, though not binding on all
rational agents, are nonetheless genuine and in no way incompatible with science. The temptation
to deny their reality, and to attribute magical beliefs to people who are sensitive to such reasons, is
a symptom of scientism. It is also grossly uncharitable. Against this scientistic prejudice,
sentimentalists should insist that in order to be convicted of magical thinking, you have to believe
in magic—that is, you must have some false causal beliefs. Voodoo is genuinely incompatible with
science. The fact that you treasure a painting because it was made by your child, or that you do not
want anything to do with the lab coat of an infamous Nazi doctor, is not. Neither is the claim that
these genealogical facts give us reasons to be attracted or averse to such objects.
Haidt’s (2000: 6) notion that there is no reason not to engage in the taboo-violation tasks,
or to condemn the harmless but offensive actions, is similarly blind to another source of genuine
but anthropocentric reasons. Both these psychologists miss the expressive and symbolic features
of action, which provide another class of perfectly good reasons that elude scientism. Consider
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 39
Haidt’s (2000: 7) claim that there are no good reasons not to sign the faux contract in Soul,
because doing so is harmless. In some narrow sense of harm, this is true. But there are perfectly
good reasons to decline the offer nevertheless. In the first place, most people are justifiably
suspicious about signing documents at the behest of strangers with unknown motives. In an
environment full of dubious solicitations and outright scams, this attitude is well founded. Even if
the danger in this case seems minimal, the reward is vacuous: “Someone asked me to do it, for
reasons he didn’t explain” is a negligible reason, and that is enough to justify inaction. But there is
another type of reason at play in these examples, the neglect of which has deeper ramifications.
Merely to pretend to sell your soul to a manipulative experimenter is a symbolic act of
subjection, and the fact that the contract isn’t binding does not erase this symbolism. Haidt’s
failure to acknowledge the symbolic and expressive aspect of action, and its role in generating
reasons to act, is strangely myopic. Again the best diagnosis of this blindness is scientism. To be
sure, science has disabused us of certain forms of magical thinking involving symbolism. But the
actions that Haidt and Rozin consider mere taboo-violation can be much more charitably—and
insightfully—understood.
Imagine wiping your dirty shoes on a doormat illustrated with the picture of a beloved.
(This resembles one of Rozin’s cases, where he has people throw darts at various portraits.) That
action expresses contempt, regardless of one’s actual attitude or whether anyone else sees it. This
example could easily be made more graphic and obvious, but we will leave the elaboration to any
unconvinced reader’s imagination. Claims about the attitude an action expresses do not require
the belief that you are hurting the beloved, or even just hurting her feelings. The point is simply
that there are reasons not to do things that would express attitudes repugnant to you. Notice that
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 40
we are not claiming that these reasons are terribly important, let alone that they override any
countervailing reasons. If you offered us a roached glass of Chateau d’Yquem or made a decent
offer on the faux contract for our souls, we would surely accept—but juice is not appetizing
enough to outweigh the disgustingness of drinking traces of sterile bug, and a $2 offer is insulting.
Rozin and Haidt presuppose the scientistic position that there is no reason whatsoever to have
these aversions and attractions, or to care about symbolism of actions such as wiping one’s feet or
cleaning the toilet with something. This is not a scientific claim but a normative one, which
follows from an impoverished theory of reasons accepted without argument by some scientists
and philosophers, not from any discovery in empirical moral psychology.
Human beings are symbol-making creatures who imbue these symbols with meaning. Of
course, humans are also prone to engage in magical thinking and even to believe in magic, but
those tendencies involve holding false causal claims. No such factual error need be implicated in
our reluctance to debase a picture of a beloved or the symbol of a dearly held cause. To consider
all such tendencies to be mere prejudice and superstition—that is, taboo—is to alienate oneself
from a significant aspect of human life. Moral psychologists should be wary of coming to this
conclusion too quickly or without vivid awareness of what they thereby disparage or ignore.
Haidt’s scenarios of eating the family pet and cleaning the toilet with the flag suffer from this same
bizarre myopia about what can be counted as a good reason. If you love something, this ramifies
throughout your plans and attitudes, and you will not want to perform actions that express
indifference or contempt toward it. Admittedly this is symbolic, but there is nothing inherently
irrational about being attracted to good symbolism and averse to bad symbolism. On the contrary,
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 41
this deeply seated aspect of human nature seems, more plausibly, not to stand in need of further
justification.
We cannot aspire here to mount an adequate defense of the importance of the sentimental
values or to conclusively establish the rational significance of desert and the expressive aspects of
action. But we take our argument to have demonstrated that these claims are considerably more
plausible than the scientistic alternatives offered by our opponents. Moreover, we have shown that
the influential work in the empirical ethics movement we have canvassed offers no scientific basis
for rejecting our normative claims. Neither relativism nor the strictly forward-looking theory of
reasons that these authors favor is mandated by their experiments or hypotheses about the origins
of emotional intuitions. Hence these rival views must be contested on their normative merits. In
doing so, our strategy has been to remind readers how much of what matters to them would be
disallowed by the exaggerated pessimism about rational justification that these views have in
common. Just as sentimental values like the disgusting are supported by deep and wide patterns of
human concern, so too are concerns with genealogy, and with the expressive and symbolic
meanings of actions and objects. In the absence of compelling philosophical argument for such a
drastic revision of ordinary concerns and sympathies, there are good grounds to pursue an
alternative approach.
We have argued in this paper that science does not present us with a forced choice
between an uncritical relativism and an inhuman rationalism. An anthropocentric theory in the
sentimentalist tradition—which takes seriously the idea that widespread human concerns can
underwrite genuine values while allowing for critical purchase on actual emotional responses—
can navigate between the horns of Singer’s dilemma. The view we favor, rational sentimentalism,
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 42
avoids the dismal moral consequences of relativism (such as its apologia for oppressive social
practices) and hyper-rationalism (including its dismissal of rights and desert). It captures a wide
range of anthropocentric reasons that issue from the expressive aspects of action and are
registered by the emotions, but which are neglected or denied by the various forms of scientism.
Sentimentalism and Scientism / page 43
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