An Expected Error: An Essay in Defence of Moral Emotionism
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ORIGINAL PAPER
An Expected Error: An Essay in Defence of Moral Emotionism Justin J. Bartlett1 Received: 1 July 2020 / Accepted: 12 October 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This work draws an analogical defence of strong emotionism—the metaethical claim that moral properties and concepts consist in the propensity of actions to elicit emotional responses from divergent emotional perspectives. I offer a theory that is in line with that of Prinz (The emotional construction of morals. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007). I build an analogy between moral properties and what I call emotion-dispositional properties. These properties are picked out by predicates such as ‘annoying’, ‘frightening’ or ‘deplorable’ and appear to be uncontroversial and frequent cases of attribution error—the attributing of subjective emotional states as mind-independent properties. I present a linguistic analysis supporting the claim that moral properties and their related concepts are reducible to a subset of emotiondispositional properties and concepts. This is grounded in the observation that utterances featuring moral predicates function linguistically and conceptually in analogous ways to emotion-dispositional predicates. It follows from this view that asserted moral utterances are truth-apt relative to ethical communities, but that speakers misconceive the extensions of predicates. I show how the framework of Cognitive Linguistics allows us to explain this error. Further analysis of moral and non-moral utterances exposes the deeper conceptual schemas structuring language through cognitive construal processes. An understanding of these processes, coupled with an emotionist elucidation of moral properties and concepts, makes the attribution error an expected upshot of the emotionist thesis, rather than an uncomfortable consequence. Keywords Metaethics Moral psychology Cognitive linguistics Emotion Moral concepts
& Justin J. Bartlett [email protected] 1
Srinakarinwirot University, Bangkok, Thailand
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Axiomathes
1 A Difficult Relationship Much has been said about the relationship between emotion and morality. Aside from the academic work of philosophers, psychologists and sociologists, the relationship between the two is even a well-established notion in folk intuition. Quotidian experience tells us that the transgressions of ethical rules and moral disagreements are often followed with emotionally charged reactions and outbursts, thus making the connection between the moral and the emotional particularly salient. But is the relationship between morality and emotion simply a reactionary one? Do moral properties give rise to emotional responses or do emotional responses give rise to moral properties? This question is not simply a case of chiasmus, a cheap rhetorical device. Its implications have great philosophical weight. Exactly how our emotions interact with, or constitute, morality is still a topic of fierce debate among philosophers and psychologists alike;
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