Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral JudgmentSentimental Rules is an ambitious and highly interdisciplinary work, which proposes and defends a new theory about the nature and evolution of moral judgment. In it, philosopher Shaun Nichols develops the theory that emotions play a critical role in both the psychological and the cultural underpinnings of basic moral judgment. Nichols argues that our norms prohibiting the harming of others are fundamentally associated with our emotional responses to those harms, and that such 'sentimental rules' enjoy an advantage in cultural evolution, which partly explains the success of certain moral norms. This has sweeping and exciting implications for philosophical ethics. Nichols builds on an explosion of recent intriguing experimental work in psychology on our capacity for moral judgment and shows how this empirical work has broad import for enduring philosophical problems. The result is an account that illuminates fundamental questions about the character of moral emotions and the role of sentiment and reason in how we make our moral judgments. This work should appeal widely across philosophy and the other disciplines that comprise cognitive science. |
Contents
Toward a Psychological Account of Moral Judgment | 3 |
The Varied Emotional Responses to Suffering in Others | 30 |
3 Is It Irrational to Be Amoral? How Psychopaths Threaten Moral Rationalism | 65 |
4 Philosophical Sentimentalism | 83 |
5 Sentiment Reason and Motivation | 97 |
6 A Fragment of the Genealogy of Norms | 118 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
account of moral affect-backed norms affective mechanism affective response affective system altruistic motivation amoralist argue argument authority contingent autism autistic children Batson Blair chapter child cognitive comfort objects commonsense objectivism conceptual rationalism conventional normative conventional violations core disgust core moral judgment cross-cultural cultural fitness deficit developmental Developmental Psychology disgusting violations distress cues emotional contagion emotional responses emotivism empathy error theory ethics etiquette evidence evolutionary explain guilt harm norms human Hume Humean kind maintain ment metaethics mindreading moral cognition moral evolution moral facts moral judg moral norms moral objectivists moral objectivity moral rationalism moral realism moral reasoning moral violations moral/conventional distinction moral/conventional task morally wrong negative affect neosentimentalism neosentimentalist Nichols nonconventional nonobjectivists normative theory norms prohibiting personal distress perspective taking perspective-taking account philosophical plausible psychology psychopaths rationalist reactive distress response dependent response to suffering role Sentimental Rules account social Stich subjects suggests tion University Press young children