RIVISTA INTERNAZIONALE DI FILOSOFIA E PSICOLOGIA
DOI: 10.4453/rifp.2015.0003
ISSN 2039-4667; E-ISSN 2239-2629
Vol. 6 (2015), n. 1, pp. 24-36
Studi
Naturalism and the Normative Domain.
Accounting for Normativity with the Help of 18th
Century Empathy-Sentimentalism
Karsten R. Stueber
Ricevuto: 9 marzo 2015; accettato il 13 aprile 2015
█ Abstract Moral sentimentalism has seen a tremendous rise in popularity in recent years within contemporary meta-ethical theory, since it promises to delineate the normative domain in a naturalistically unobjectionable manner. After showing that both Michael Slote and Jesse Prinz’s sentimentalist positions fall
short of fulfilling this promise, this essay argues that contemporary sentimentalists are advised to take
their clues from Adam Smith rather than David Hume. While Hume was absolutely right in emphasizing
the importance of empathy in the moral context, his official description of the mechanisms of empathy as
articulated in the Treatise falls fundamentally short for this purpose. Adam Smith’s conception of empathy, a conception that in fact is closer to some of Hume’ remarks in the Enquiry rather than the Treatise,
as essentially involving perspective taking and his appeal to the impartial spectator perspective prove to
be more fertile. Only in this manner do sentimentalists have any hope of accounting for the intersubjective normative and obligatory dimension of moral judgments.
KEYWORDS: Moral Sentimentalism; Empathy; Adam Smith; David Hume; Michael Slote; Jesse Prinz
█ Riassunto Naturalismo e dominio normativo. Rendere conto della normatività con l’aiuto delle teorie
dell’empatia e del sentimentalismo del XVIII secolo – Negli ultimi anni il sentimentalismo morale ha conosciuto un incredibile incremento di popolarità nel dibattito meta-etico contemporaneo, poiché promette
di delineare il dominio del normativo secondo una prospettiva inequivocabilmente naturalistica. Dopo
aver mostrato come le posizioni sentimentaliste di Michael Slote e Jesse Prinz non siano in grado di mantenere questa promessa, in questo lavoro si afferma che i sostenitori contemporanei del sentimentalismo
dovrebbero trarre ispirazione da Adam Smith piuttosto che da David Hume. Se Hume aveva assolutamente ragione nel sottolineare l’importanza dell’empatia in ambito morale, la sua descrizione ufficiale dei
meccanismi dell’empatia, così come viene presentata nel Treatise, in fin dei conti non si mostra all’altezza
di questo compito. La concezione dell’empatia di Adam Smith, che nei fatti è più vicina ad alcuni tratti
dello Hume dell’Enquiry piuttosto che a quello del Treatise, implicando fondamentalmente l’assunzione di
prospettiva e richiamando la prospettiva dello spettatore disinteressato, dimostra di essere più feconda.
Solo così i teorici del sentimentalismo possono sperare di render conto del carattere necessitante e intersoggettivamente normativo dei giudizi morali.
PAROLE CHIAVE: Sentimentalismo morale; Empatia; Adam Smith; David Hume; Michael Slote; Jesse
Prinz
K.R. Stueber - Department of Philosophy, College of the Holy Cross, P.O. Box 137A, Worcester, MA 01610
(USA). E-mail: kstueber@holycross.edu ()
Creative Commons - Attribuzione - 4.0 Internazionale
Naturalism and the Normative Domain
█ Introduction
SINCE THE VERY START OF Western philosophy, certainly ever since the Socratic questioning so aptly illustrated in Plato’s dialogues,
philosophers have had a very hard time to account for the reality of normativity and the
objectivity of our normative discourse.
From the time of the scientific revolution,
this task has been made much harder
through the inevitable march of the natural
sciences to epistemic predominance and the
associated ontological disenchantment with
notions of preordained teleological structures, Platonic ideas, or normative facts. And
yet a world devoid of normativity seems to
be a world that is completely different from
the world that agents, who have to make up
their minds of how to act, encounter in very
specific circumstances. Normativity always
seems to reassert itself from the deliberative
first-person perspective where we have to
choose between alternative courses of actions
and where we have to justify our choices to
ourselves and to others. From this perspective, the world does seem to put demands on
us, and there do seem to be ways of acting
that are objectively right or wrong.
In some sense the above considerations
express a typical philosophical conundrum.
On the one hand we can’t fully dismiss the
reality of normativity in light of the inescapability of the first person perspective. On the
other hand, as good philosophical naturalists
who are disposed to believe in the ontological
primacy of the explanatory scientific point of
view, it seems we can do so only with a guilty
conscience. We have, therefore, either to
show that and explain why the first person
perspective is illusory or we have to provide a
better philosophical account that makes sense of the reality of norms vis a vis the natural
world as it is revealed from the third person
scientific perspective.
For that very reason, moral sentimentalism that traces its philosophical lineage back
to David Hume has seen a tremendous rise in
popularity in recent years within contempo-
25
rary meta-ethical theory. Moral sentimentalism promises to delineate the normative domain in a naturalistically unobjectionable manner by basing an account of moral judgment
and moral agency on a plausible moral psychology, that is, a psychologically realistic account
of the motivations of human agents that is
backed by the results of empirical research in
the psychological sciences including neuroscience, developmental and social psychology.
By viewing moral judgments as being in
some sense grounded on human sentiments
and emotions – and particularly empathy, the
focus of this essay – rather than reason, sentimentalism seems to be also able to account
for the motivational pull that is inherent in or
internal to the making and accepting of specific moral judgments. In judging it to be bad
to steal one is in some sense also motivated
not to steal; a motivation that might be too
weak to determine a course of action, but a
motivation nonetheless.
This essay tries to motivate the following
claim in a programmatic manner: That in order
to properly conceive of moral sentimentalism
contemporary philosophers are advised to take
theirs clues from Adam Smith in his Theory of
Moral Sentiments rather than to follow David
Hume in order to account for normativity in a
naturalistically plausible manner.1 In order to
do this it is not sufficient to focus on the motivational aspect of our normative judgments.
Most importantly, a philosophical explication
of moral judgment has first and foremost to account for what I would like to call its intersubjective normative dimension.
In judging stealing to be bad I am not
merely providing myself with a motivational
pep talk. I am also addressing and at times
criticizing other agents. Moreover I regard
my critical appraisal of their behavior in the
context of morally judging it as an appraisal
that addresses the other person not merely
from an external perspective to which the
agent has sworn absolutely no allegiance. In
morally blaming or praising another person I
address him or her according to standards
and from a perspective to which all persons
26
qua human agents are implicitly committed.
It is exactly for this reason, or so I will argue, that we need to take the 18th century notion of sympathy and what we now call empathy as having central importance for properly conceiving of the perspective moral
judgment.2 In that respect I think Hume was
absolutely right. But as I will also show, we
should not be following Hume in his official
understanding of the mechanisms of empathy
as articulated in the Treatise. Rather, Adam
Smith’s conception of sympathy as essentially
involving perspective taking and his appeal to
the impartial spectator perspective proves to
be more fertile for these purposes, a conception that in fact is closer to some of Hume’ remarks in the Enquiry rather than the Treatise.
I will proceed in the following manner. In
the next section, I will briefly discuss the
shortcomings of positions articulated by contemporary moral sentimentalists who claim
to be inspired by Hume focusing mainly on
Michael Slote and, to a lesser extent, on Jesse
Prinz, who in his account of moral judgment
follows Hume in his emphasis on the emotions but regards empathy as unimportant in
this context. Yet while I think that Hume is
quite correct in emphasizing the importance
of empathy for morality, I tend to think Hume’s official account of the mechanisms of
sympathy/empathy in the Treatise falls short.
Nevertheless, Hume suggests that we are able
to overcome our more individualized perspective that limits our natural ability to
sympathize or empathize with others by conversing with mankind, that is by basically
being forced to leave our more limited perspective and take the perspective of another.
It is also in this manner that we are able to
access a more generalized stance and that we
recognize each other’s common humanity.
Hume however never explains why we
should be normatively committed to «some
general unalterable standard»3 that we encounter in such conversations nor does his
conception of sympathy or empathy officially
acknowledge the fact that such conversations
require imaginative perspective taking.
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As I will argue in the third section of this
essay, we should therefore turn our attention
to Adam Smith whose position on moral
judgment can be seen as fully developing
what remains merely implicit in Hume’s Enquiry. Most importantly, it allows us to understand the impartial spectator perspective as the
court of appeal implicit in our attempt to
makes sense and to warrant other persons’ and
our reasons for acting in the continuous and
mutual attempt to reenact those reasons by taking each other’s perspective. It also enables us
to think of the impartial spectator perspective
in a dialogical manner and to appropriately and
realistically conceive of moral discourse as an
open-ended and on-going process involving a
multiplicity of perspectives rather than as a static perspective of an in some sense ideal and
almost God-like point of view.
In this manner we can conceive of the
universality of the moral perspective exactly
at the right level; that is, without falling prey
to the “empty formalism” critique that has
been legitimately voiced against a Kantian
conception of moral universality.
█ Contemporary sentimentalism (Michael
Slote and a little bit of Jesse Prinz)
At the center of Slote’s moral sentimentalism lies his analysis of how empathy causes
us to morally approve or disapprove another
person’s actions.4 To understand the exact
scope and motivation of Slote’s specific conception of moral sentimentalism it is best to
briefly contrast his position with Hume’s
sympathy based account of the feeling of moral approbation and disapprobation and his
account of moral judgment, in explicit contrast to which Slote articulates his own position.5
Roughly, for Hume, feelings of moral approbation and disapprobation of character
traits and actions arise because we are able to
feel pleasure or pain based on psychological
mechanisms of sympathy when reflecting on
the benefits which a person’s character traits
and actions provide to himself and others
Naturalism and the Normative Domain
even if we have no personal connection to
him. Yet for Hume those natural feelings of
approbations can serve as the foundation of
our moral judgments only if we have made
sure that we have “corrected” for the natural
– and from the moral point of view merely
contingent – limitations in our ability to be
“mirrors to one another”.6
Some such natural limitations, mentioned
by Hume, consists in what we nowadays refer
to as the “here and now” bias, or the fact that
«sympathy with persons remote from us [is]
much fainter than with person near and contiguous».7 The distance Hume is talking
about should however not merely be understood in a spatial sense. Rather the nature of a
personal relationship, whether or not we regard others as friends or foes, affects the
stance towards another person and affects the
manner in which our disposition towards
sympathy manifests itself in various circumstances. Hume suggests that we can overcome
those limitations «by fixing on some steady
and general points of view»8 so that our capacity for sympathy enables us to «touch a
string, to which all mankind have accord and
symphony».9
At this stage, it is not so important to understand how Hume exactly conceives of the
mechanisms of sympathy/empathy nor is it
of great interest of how exactly he understands the notion of a general point of view
(he also does not seem to say very much
about it). In this section we are interested in
Hume only as a useful foil for the sentimentalist position that Slote develops.
Slote distinguishes himself from Hume
explicitly in two respects: First, Slote is to a
much lesser degree concerned about the natural and contingent limitations of our empathic capacities than Hume and Smith. Indeed
he embraces a certain partiality towards the
here and now as being of the essence of our
ordinary moral understanding and certain
commonsensical judgment according to
which we have a greater moral obligation to
help the people who are in some sense close
to us than people that are further away from
27
us.10 Second, following Smith rather than
Hume, moral evaluation has primarily to do
with the evaluation of agents in light of their
motivation for action.
More specifically, Slote suggests thinking
of moral approval as being constituted by a
spectator’s empathy with an agent’s empathy
or empathic concern towards other people in
that such “empathy with empathy” will create a feeling of warmth in the spectator and
subsequent moral approval of the agent’s action. Moral disapproval, on the other hand, is
constituted by a feeling of chill due to the
spectator’s recognition that there is no agential empathy towards others.11
As I have elaborated elsewhere in greater
detail,12 I am rather skeptical about the empirical plausibility of the psychological mechanisms that Slote postulates in order to make
sense of his account of moral approval and
judgment.13 It is also not clear why a feeling
of warmth towards the agent is leading me to
morally approve and thus to be also motivated to do that action. A feeling of warmth
towards an agent does not necessarily lead us
to imitate his actions even though it might
lead us to seek his company and so on. Similarly, why does noticing the lack of agential
empathy lead us to a feeling of chill, rather
than feeling nothing or being indifferent towards the agent whom we observe?
More importantly for our purposes, even
if we grant Slote his psychological account of
how moral judgment supposedly come about,
his account would be unable to explicate
what I have called the intersubjective normative dimension of moral judgments, that is, of
how another person’s moral judgment makes
a moral demand on us.14 In criticizing
another person from a moral point of view
we do not intend to criticize him or her from
an arbitrary third-person perspective to
which the agent himself has sworn no allegiance such as when we would criticize a soccer
player according to the rules of baseball.
Since a soccer player does not subscribe to
the rules of baseball such critique is not legitimate even if it is expressed in an emotional ri-
28
gorous manner, that is, in the manner that diehard Red Sox or Yankees fan tend to express
their emotions. Rather in morally blaming and
praising an agent we assume that we address
him or her according to standards that all human beings qua moral agent should abide by.
Blaming an agent from a moral point of
view presupposes that we address him in a
manner that he himself should take seriously
by the standards that he himself subscribes
to. Pointing out that he was morally wrong is
supposed to provide him with categorical
reasons to correct his behavior. These are
reasons that have to do with the fact that he
is a member of the human race and not
merely with the fact that he belongs to a particular group.
If I understand Slote correctly, moral
blame from a third person point of view is
effective through a process of «empathic
contagion or osmosis»15 in that the person
blamed feels the chill expressed in moral
blame and is set back on the moral path in
that manner. I tend to agree with Slote that
Hume indeed talks about the effects of sympathy/empathy in this manner. Moreover
Hume and Smith are both right in pointing
out that human beings as social animals are
very much interested in the good opinion
and sympathy of others and that we have a
desire to be praised. In short, we all like to be
liked. But if that is all that there is to say
about the manner in which moral judgments
work, then moral judgments are nothing more than a glorified form of peer pressure. The
only reason for listening to the moral exhortations of your peers would be the following
hypothetical imperative: In order to get along with members of a group you have to
synchronize your actions and emotional reactions with them.
Notice however that the above problem
has nothing to do with the fact that Slote
follows Hume in seeing empathy as being
foundational for our moral judgments. Jesse
Prinz, who is otherwise an avowed sentimentalist in all things moral, strongly disagrees
with Humean sentimentalism in arguing that
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empathy, understood as the vicarious sharing
of another person’s emotion, is neither necessary nor sufficient for moral judgment, moral
development, and moral conduct and that it
also «should not play an integral role in morality».16
In making this argument Prinz focuses on
what he calls the “dark side” of natural and
uncorrected empathy, that is, its rather biased and limited scope, while dismissing any
attempt to correct for such biases with the
help of the impartial spectator perspective
rather quickly and dismissively.17 Alternatively, Prinz suggests that emotions like anger, disgust, guilt, and shame more appropriately track the domain of moral judgment
and that the empirical evidence strongly supports the claim that these emotions, rather
than empathy, are responsible and are essential for our moral development and moral
conduct. Yet, if Prinz is correct, why should
we take such sentiments expressed in moral
statements to be something that we should
normatively care about, beside the fact that
we want to get along with our peers?
If I understand him correctly, Prinz embraces this implication.18 From that perspective, moral debate is nothing more than a rhetorically embellished strategy of imposing one’s
own values, an expression of our Nietzschean
will to power. On this account, the fight about
slavery in American history was nothing more
than, as the South has always argued, an attempt to impose Northern and arbitrary sensibilities on the way of life cherished in the South.
Yet that certainly cannot be right, in regarding slavery as morally wrong we judge it
to be so regardless of whether my peers approve of it or not. We also do not regard the
issue to be solved through a declaration that
we go our separate ways, and that we form
our separate communities. The point I am
making does not depend on the possibility of
ever reaching a moral consensus on specific
issue. Rather a philosophical account of moral judgment should at least be able to explicate the possibility of a stance from which I
could sensibly claim to address another per-
Naturalism and the Normative Domain
son in the above manner.
That is, contemporary sentimentalism
should allow us to understand how it is that
my recognition of the moral disapproval by
the other person is more than a person expressing a chill or other sentiment. As far as I
am concerned such chills do not have to be taken seriously from a normative point of view.
Additionally, there is a serious gap in Prinz’s
sentimentalism in that he also owes us a psychological and causal account of how it is that I
am sensitive to such emotions in the first place.
And it is exactly for this reason fruitful to
look back more closely at 18th century conceptions of sympathy/empathy in Hume and particularly Smith who thought that questions like
these can only be answered in light of our empathic capacities involving also our capacity for
perspective taking and the impartial spectator
perspective.
█ Hume and Smith on sympathy: Towards a
dialogical conception of empathy and the
perspective of the impartial spectator
As we already saw in the last section, for
Hume, empathy is important in enabling moral judgment because it allows us to track
morally significant features of a situation,
that is the pleasure that others feel due to the
benefits that actions and character traits provide them with. I think that Slote, following
Adam Smith, is right to reject this quasiutilitarian foundation for moral judgment.
But this is not my major concern here. I am
more interested in investigating whether
Hume provides us with an adequate conception of the mechanisms of empathy in order
to make progress toward addressing the diagnosed shortcomings of contemporary sentimentalism.
I think Hume’s official conception in the
Treatise is inadequate in this regard but that
we should view some of his remarks in the
Enquiry as pointing in the right direction, a
direction that Adam Smith has developed
more fully in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Hume describes the mechanism of sympa-
29
thy/empathy in the following manner.
When an affection is infus’d by sympathy
it is at first known only by its effects, and
by those external signs in the countenance
and conversation, which convey an idea
of it. The idea is presently converted into
an impression and acquires such a degree
of force and vivacity, as to become the
very passion itself, and produce an equal
emotion, as any original affection.19
Tis indeed evident, that when we sympathize with the passions and sentiments of
others, these movements appear at first in
our mind as mere ideas, and are conceiv’d
to belong to another person, as we conceive any other matter of fact […] No passion of another discovers itself immediately to the mind. We are only sensible to
its causes or effects. From these we infer
the passion: and consequently these give
rise to our sympathy.20
Despite a certain vagueness in the
description of the exact mechanism involved
here, if I understand him correctly, Hume
conceives of sympathy as a causal process
that is mediated essentially by a folk psychological theory. That is, he provides an account of sympathy/empathy that is very close to how theory theorists understand our
empathic capacities.
According to this line of thought we vicariously share the emotions of another by
first theoretically determining the emotions
that he feels, we infer it from evidence given
by his facial expressions or from knowledge
of what might have caused such an emotion
in a particular situation. Sharing the feeling
of another person is thus not necessary for
knowing what the other person feels, and it is
exactly in this respect that a theory theory
account of affective empathy differs from an
account offered by simulation theorists.
For the simulation theorist, our recognition of what the other person feels is mediated
by sharing his or her feeling whereas for the
30
theory theorist a cognitive judgment about
what the other person feels is prior to sharing
the feeling. For theory theorists, we share
feelings because of secondary causal mechanisms, maybe by being reminded of our own
past sad experiences that are linked in some
way to our concept of sadness and so on.21
Similarly, Hume insists that the process of
enlivening an abstract idea of an emotion with
a vivid impression of that very same emotion
is always mediated and enabled by our impression of the self, which always accompanies
or is part of, even if only implicitly, of any
conscious phenomena in our mind. In this
sense it is «always intimately present with
us».22 Yet for Hume the known limitations of
empathy, its bias toward the “here and now,”
does not have to do with whether or not we
actually have had a certain experience. Rather,
it has to do with a perceived similarity or
“semblance” between ourselves and the other
person whom we empathize with.
For Hume these limitations can however
be overcome when we converse with mankind since in such conversations we are
forced out of our more limited point of view
and made to encounter and adopt other persons’ points of view. It is exactly in this manner that Hume suggests that we are able to
adopt a more common point of view and
recognize «some general and unalterable
standard» that are more appropriate for moral judgment.23
Nevertheless such appeal to a common
standard should not be understood as implying that empathy ceases to be involved in
our moral approval. Rather it should be seen
mainly as a corrective mechanism of our
fundamentally empathic reaction to others
without which no approbation or disapprobation would take place.
There is by now quite an extensive literature addressing the question about whether
or not Hume did change his view from the
Treatise to the Enquiry regarding his associationist account of empathy and whether he
even regarded empathy still as central for
moral judgments in the later work. I do not
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intend to engage with this literature and have, for exegetical reasons, become quite persuaded that he probably did not change his
point of view in this regard.24 Nevertheless I
do think that Hume definitely should have
given up on his account or should have at
least extensively modified it, since in my opinion it falls short both for explanatory and
normative reasons.
First, his preferred mechanism of empathy
cannot be regarded as the sole mechanisms for
the variety of empathy related phenomena
that even Hume admits. It certainly cannot be
thought of as being responsible for primitive
cases of emotional contagion (that even small
infants are subject to). More importantly
however, if this is indeed the primary mechanism for affective empathy, we have to wonder why empathy would be biased and limited
in the manner that Hume explains it. If a theoretical judgment is primarily activating the
mechanism that leads me to vicariously share
an emotion with another person, why does it
matter that the person is close to me, or that I
directly see him in front of me?
After all, the primary cause of the enlivening processes would be my idea of the emotion that the other person has. Once I have
grasped the nature of that emotion on an
abstract and theoretical level, it seems that it
would be more plausible to suggest that I can
and will enliven that idea as long as I have
experienced similar emotions before rather
than whether or not I am similar to the other
person. It seems to be rather inexplicable that
this mechanism would not be activated if we
are told that another person far away is in a
dire situations, is gravely ill, and so on.
Moreover, why should it matter in what
sensory modality the information about the
other persons is presented to me whether or
not I feel with him? Why does it matter whether the information is presented in the «indifferent and uninteresting stile» of Suetonius or comes from «the masterly pencil of Tacitus»?25
Finally, from the perspective of Hume’s
favorite account of the mechanisms of em-
Naturalism and the Normative Domain
pathy it seems to be difficult to explicate the
normative relevance of a more common perspective that we encounter in the conversation with mankind, that is, why should we regard that perspective as normatively more
compelling than our more limited perspective based on our natural empathic capacities?
Just to be told that such more common
perspective is what we mean by the moral
perspective seems to be begging the question
in the philosophical context of trying to account for the nature of that perspective and
its normative relevance for the evaluation of
our behavior and that of other people. Regardless of how Hume himself thought about
the mechanisms of empathy, some of his remarks about conversing with mankind in the
Enquiry certainly point beyond them. What
they suggest is that we should regard the
capacity of imaginative perspective taking as
being central for our empathic abilities and
that we should regard it as a capacity that
matures in the continuous and mutual attempt of making sense of each other by taking each other’s point of view.
To converse with each other, rather than
merely talking to each other, is characterized
by such perspective taking and it is in such
conversations that a common point of view is
revealed. And I think that it is exactly in this
respect that Adam Smith takes up Hume’s
suggestions by providing a simulative account of sympathy, that is by directly conceiving our ability to vicariously share other
person’s thoughts and feelings in terms of
our ability to put ourselves in his or her shoes, by imagining ourselves to be in the other
person’s situation, «by changing places in
fancy», and by our ability to look at a situation from his or her point of view.
Accordingly, Smith emphasizes the fact
that the fellow feeling of sympathy «does not
arise so much from the view of the passion,
as from the situation which excites it».26
In taking the perspective of the other person we are thus primarily taking up a perspective on a particular environment and are
in this manner able to make sense of another
31
person’s thoughts and feelings. In being oriented towards a certain environment we are
however not merely looking at features of the
situation that causes a certain mental state in
the other agents. Rather in taking the perspective of another person we treat him as a
rational agents for whom aspects of the situation provide reasons for acting and for feeling a certain due to his outlook on the world,
including his beliefs, desires, values and social and cultural commitments.
Otherwise it would not be really clear why
Smith would regard perspective taking as the
essential mechanism for sympathy, as knowledge of merely causal relation between
events (even between features of the world
and internal mental states) are best thought
of as being provided by theoretical knowledge. Smithean sympathy is thus very much
like what I have called reenactive empathy
required for understanding another person’s
thoughts as his reasons for acting.27
As is well known, Smith ties our ability to
reenact the thoughts and feelings of another
person (and to make sense of his thoughts
and feelings in this manner) to our approval
of those feelings and thoughts. For simplicity
sake I will focus mainly on the question of
the propriety of another person’s sentiments
and actions and not their merit or demerit.
If upon bringing the case home to our
own breast […] we find that the sentiments which it gives occasion to coincide
and tally with our own, we necessarily approve of them […] if otherwise, we necessarily disapprove of them.28
At the end of the last section, we however
were concerned with how to account for the
intersubjective normative dimension of moral judgments.29 That is, why should I normatively be concerned whether or not somebody else can reenact my feelings in looking at
my situation in the manner that Smith has
suggested?
So far, the reason still seems to resemble a
case of peer pressure, that is, we do in fact
32
care because we want to live together and as
a matter of fact enjoy bathing in feelings that
are magnified by others. It is clear that for
Smith, as far as proper moral approval is
concerned, the approval is indexed to the ability of an impartial spectator to enter into the
mind and feelings of the agent while putting
himself in his place. Yet for our purposes
merely pointing to the perspective of the impartial spectator does not really answer the
normative question either. It indeed raises
two questions.
First why would I in fact care about the
approval of such an impartial spectator since
such a spectator seems to have merely an
imagined existence?
The enjoyment that I get from such approval seems to be similar to the enjoyment
that I get from merely imagining having a lot
of money. If you ask me, I prefer actually having a lot of money. But even more importantly why should we take the perspective
of the impartial spectator normatively seriously and regard it as a standard that we ourselves are committed to. Smith attempts to
answer the question by distinguishing
between two different desires, the desire for
praise and the desire for praiseworthiness.30
Whereas this might answer the question
of why we in fact care about an impartial
spectator, it does not really answer the question of why we should care about it. In order
to answer this question we need to be provided with a different line of argument that
would somehow ground the normative relevance of the impartial spectator perspective
and the desire for praiseworthiness and show
it to be the relevant standard to which we are
implicitly committed.
In the remaining part of this essay I will
try to suggest a way to answer these questions by providing a reconstruction of how one
can understand the standard of the impartial
spectator more precisely as arising out of our
everyday encounter with each other and our
everyday perspective taking of each other as
rational agents for whom aspects of the situations provide reasons for acting. Prima facie,
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such encounters do not necessarily lead to an
outright moral condemnation, but more to a
low-grade form of normative approval and
disapproval in the sense of “Yeah, that makes
sense to me” or “I just do not get you, why do
you do that”?
Such disapproval, I would however maintain, diminishes our self-conception as rational agents and it is exactly for this reason that
we are committed to being appropriately evaluated by referring to a court of appeal, suggesting that we have been misunderstood, in
that our perspective has not been appropriately taken into account.
For that purpose, I think it is useful to
consider more precisely of how we take the
perspective of another person and how exactly
Smith might have thought about it. Psychologists distinguish commonly between two types
of perspective taking, that is, between “selffocused” and “other-focused”31 or between
imagine-self and imagine-other32 role-taking.
Typically, in an imagine-self conditions
subjects are asked “to imagine how you yourself would feel if you were experiencing what
has happened to the person being interviewed and how this experience would affect
your life,” whereas in the imagine-other condition subjects are asked to try to imagine
how the person being interviewed feels about
what has happened and how it has affected
his or her life.
One way of thinking about the difference
is that in the imagine-other position I am
more sensitive to the differences between me
and the other person in terms of character
traits, financial situation and so on and make
sure that those differences do not interfere
with my ability to simulate his feelings and
thoughts in a certain kind of situation. To
think about a primitive example, if I am told
that a rich person’s car has been stolen I might
just imagine how I would feel if my car has been stolen. In the imagine- other condition I
would however try to imagine how owning
twenty cars and being rich might affect my relationship to one car and so on, that is I am
more careful about trying to quarantine my
Naturalism and the Normative Domain
own outlook that I know is different from the
other person’s point of view from the attempt
of putting myself in his situation.
As far as Smith is concerned, there is a
certain ambiguity in his writing. He talks
about «conceiving what we ourselves should
feel in the like situation», but also of entering into the situation of the other person
«as if we were in his body».33 I also approve
of another person’s opinion and argument by
asking myself whether it convinces me.34 In
order to counter the objection that sympathy/empathy is a selfish principle, Smith
however also declares that
when I condole with you for the loss of
your only son, in order to enter into your
grief, I do not consider what I, a person of
such a character and profession should
suffer, if I had a son, and if that son was
unfortunately to die; but I consider what I
should suffer I was really you; and I not
only change circumstances with you, but I
change persons and characters.35
All of this seems to suggest that Smith
thinks of perspective taking on the model of
other-focused perspective taking. Yet if we
take these quotes as Smith’s all things considered judgment about how to conceive of
perspective taking we have the following
problem: the more we think ourselves into
the situation of the other, or become the
other person, the less likely it seem that we
are able to disapprove of his sentiments. Just
think about trying to understand teenagers
for whom the opinion of their peers is their
all and nothing criterion for evaluating the
appropriateness of their actions. If we indeed
put ourselves in their shoes, quarantine our
normal rational capacities while reenacting
them, what is there not to like and understand about their silly behavior?
In everyday life there is a range of self and
other-focused perspective taking and I probably think that Smith was quite aware of
that fact. Yet if one reflects on the last case
(trying to make sense of teenagers), one also
33
realizes that self- and other-focused perspective taking can create normative tensions
between different perspectives that oneself is
able to occupy, that is ultimately through
perspective taking such tensions have become internal ones. For that very reason, such
tensions require a resolution addressing the
question of which assumptions manifested in
these different perspectives are more plausible or reasonable and so on.
In addressing this issue one is implicitly
appealing to a perspective that one regards as
a neutral and thus impartial dimension
within which the conflict of opinions can be
resolved. And it is in this manner that I suggest that the impartial spectator perspective
that Smith refers to as a court of appeals is
revealed as an implicit commitment of agents
who negotiate their mutual intelligibility
through their ability of imaginative and empathic perspective taking. In conceiving of
empathy/sympathy as involving imaginative
perspective taking Smith is able to situate the
common standard, which according to Hume
reveals itself in the conversations with mankind, directly within our empathic practices
of intersubjective sense making. In this manner, Smith provides (or at least hints at) an
answer to the question of why we should
normatively care about such perspective or
common standard and why it is a perspective
that is not an external or arbitrarily imposed
perspective.
Certainly, one needs to say much more
about how exactly a perspective is constituted as an impartial one. Most importantly,
the fundamental question is whether moral
sentimentalism will have the resources to
provide such answers on purely sentimentalist grounds. At the end of this essay, I can only point in the direction for proceeding in order to satisfactorily address this question. It
needs to be emphasized that Smith’s impartial
spectator position is the perspective in which
each agent is treated as an equal interlocutor
and in which each persons’ (agents’ or victims’) individuality and humanity is taking
fully into account in light of the interlocutors’
Stueber
34
abilities to enter into their perspective and
share their feeling, thoughts and emotions
that constitutes their reasons for acting.
In this sense it is very much the perspective of proper moral judgment. In contrast to
Kant, the perspective of the impartial spectator is not only the perspective of moral
reason. More generally, it is the perspective
of practical reason wherein agents acting for
reasons discuss the validity and warrant of
their reasoning about and their reasons for
acting. That is, it is the perspective in which
the propriety of all actions, whether selfishly
or altruistically motivated, are evaluated and
the propriety of all character traits ranging
from mere prudential traits like frugality, industriousness, cleanliness, punctuality to genuinely moral ones such as honesty. That
perspective does contain an element of universality with which Kant in his moral philosophy was so concerned.
Yet it is a conception of universality that
is at the same time tied to the specificity of
an agent’s situation. It is exactly this type of
universality that rational agents acting for a
reason are implicitly committed to. More
specifically, what is at issue from the perspective of the impartial spectator perspective is
the question of whether an agent’s supposed
reasons for acting in that type of situation
can stand up to scrutiny and be declared a
good reason for acting. A positive answer to
that question is forthcoming if it is possible
for all potentially impartial spectators to
reenact another person’s reasons as their
reasons for acting.
Furthermore, while the perspective to the
impartial spectator perspective is, as the
above remarks have shown, in some sense an
a priori commitment, the question of whether impartiality has been realized in a particular judgment can be empirically challenged. It is in this very context that questions
about biases of our empathic capacities or
other shortcomings of our cognitive capacities are of central importance for the impartial spectator perspective. As Adam Smith
has in my opinion already emphasized, re-
flection on the nature of the impartial perspective and how various factor influence or
corrupt our moral sentiments has to be seen
as being an integral part of the impartial
spectator perspective itself. It is here that
considerations from empirical psychology
can prove to be helpful.
The impartial spectator perspective certainly lacks the noumenal clarity that Kant
has associated with moral reasoning and
judgment. On the other hand, in propagating
the universality of the perspective of the impartial spectator Smith avoids the common
complaint first articulated by Hegel that
Kantian moral philosophy and the universality associated with the perspective of the categorical imperative is merely an “empty
formalism” in that it does not allow us to derive any concrete moral norms. Seen in this
light, the fact that there might no guarantee
that a final and unanimous judgment about
the merit of an action will be ever had even
among impartial spectators may not be such
a bad thing.36 The conversation among impartial spectators is better understood as
being fallible and as an open-ended conversation. That just seems to be a fact of life, even
of the moral life.
█ Notes
1
This article should be understood as providing a
first step in this direction. It also does not claim
to provide a comprehensive survey or discussion
of contemporary sentimentalism in all of its variety. It is too vast a field to do so in one article. In
particular it will not discuss the position of rational sentimentalism, which is developed by Justin
D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson. See for example J.
D’ARMS, D. JACOBSON, Sentiment and Value, in:
«Ethics», vol. CX, n. 4, 2000, pp. 722-748. For a
more comprehensive discussion, see R. DEBES, K.
STUEBER (eds), Moral Sentimentalism, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge (forthcoming).
2
See K. STUEBER, Empathy, in: E.N. ZALTA (ed.),
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2008/e
ntries/empathy>
3
D. HUME, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of
Morals (1751), Hackett, Indianapolis 1983, p. 49.
Naturalism and the Normative Domain
4
See M. SLOTE, Moral Sentimentalism, Oxford
University Press, Oxford 2010.
5
For the following see particularly G. SAYREMCCORD, Hume and Smith on Sympathy, Approbation, and Moral Judgment, in: «Social Philosophy and Policy», vol. XXX, n. 1-2, 2013, pp. 208236; G. SAYRE-MCCORD, On Why Hume’s “General Point of View” isn’t Ideal – and Shouldn’t Be,
in: «Social Philosophy and Policy», vol. XI, n. 1,
1994, pp. 202-228.
6
D. HUME, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739),
Clarendon Press, Oxford 1978, p. 365.
7
D. HUME, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles
of Morals, cit., p. 49; see also D. HUME, A Treatise
of Human Nature, cit., 580-587.
8
D. HUME, A Treatise of Human Nature, cit., pp.
581-582.
9
D. HUME, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles
of Morals, cit., p. 75.
10
In this context, Slote only appeals to the notion of
a fully matured and well-developed empathy. However he does not sufficiently explicate that notion.
11
M. SLOTE, Moral Sentimentalism, cit., pp. 34-35.
12
K. STUEBER, Moral Approval and the Dimensions
of Empathy: Comments on Michael Slote’s Moral
Sentimentalism, in: «Analytic Philosophy», vol.
LII, n. 4, 2011, pp. 328-336.
13
J. D’ARMS, Empathy, Approval, and Disapproval
in Moral Sentimentalism, in: «Southern Journal of
Philosophy», vol. XLIX, Supplement, 2011, pp.
134-141.
14
These are specific issues that Stephen Darwall
addresses extensively in S. DARWALL, The Second
Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability, Harvard University Press, Cambridge
(MA) 2006.
15
M. SLOTE, Moral Sentimentalism, cit., p. 78.
16
J. PRINZ, Against Empathy, in: «Southern Journal of Philosophy», vol. XLIX, Supplement, 2011,
pp. 214-233, here p. 213.
17
In this respect see particularly Kauppinen’s astute
critique of Prinz’s objection towards empathy in A.
KAUPPINEN, Empathy, Emotion Regulation, and Moral Judgment, in: H. MAIBOM (ed.), Empathy and
Morality, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014, pp.
97-121. I wholeheartedly agree with Kauppinen that
any plausible sentimentalist account of moral judgment needs to appeal to empathy that is corrected
by an ideal or impartial spectator perspective or
what he calls “regulated empathy”. Yet Kauppinen
does not really say anything about why, according to
sentimentalism, we are normatively committed to
35
such an impartial perspective. Besides this article see
in this respect also R. DEBES, K. STUEBER (eds), Moral Sentimentalism, cit.
18
J. PRINZ, The Emotional Construction of Morals,
Oxford University Press, Oxford 2007, pp. 120-121.
19
D. HUME, A Treatise of Human Nature, cit., p. 317.
20
Ivi, p. 319 and 576.
21
See S. NICHOLS, S. STICH, A. LESLIE, D. KLEIN, Varieties of Off-Line Simulation, in: P. CARRUTHERS, P.
SMITH (eds.), Theories of Theories of Mind, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 39-74.
22
D. HUME, A Treatise of Human Nature, cit., p. 317.
23
D. HUME, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles
of Morals, cit., p. 49 and also p. 75.
24
See particularly R. DEBES, Humanity, Sympathy,
and the Puzzle of Hume’s Second Enquiry, in: «British Journal for the History of Philosophy», vol. XV,
n. 1, 2007, pp. 27-57; R. DEBES, Has Anything Changed? Hume’s Theory of Association and Sympathy after the Treatise, in: «British Journal for the History
of Philosophy», vol. XV, n. 2, 2007, pp. 313-338.
25
D. HUME, A Treatise of Human Nature, cit., p. 45.
26
A. SMITH, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759),
Liberty Classics, Indianapolis (IN) 1982, p. 6.
27
See K. STUEBER, Rediscovering Empathy: Agency,
Folk psychology, and the Human Sciences. The MIT
Press, Cambridge (MA) 2006; K. STUEBER, Reasons,
Generalizations, Empathy, and Narratives: The Epistemic Structure of Action Explanation, in: «History
and Theory», vol. XLVII, n. 1, 2008, pp. 31-43.
28
A. SMITH, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, cit.,
p. 13.
29
In this article I focus mainly on the question of
how to account for the intersubjective normative
dimension of moral judgments from the perspective of moral sentimentalism. I do not explicitly
focus on the question of how it is linked to motivation. Ultimately I tend to think that empathic
perspective taking can account for the motivational perspective, if we think of such reenactment
as reenacting reasons. Such perspective taking can
motivate in the same manner that my deliberation involving imagining hypothetical scenarios
can motivate me. This is a rather complicated
issue and needs further clarification especially in
light of Batson’s findings that empathy can motivate altruistic but amoral behavior. Batson distinguishes therefore strictly between moral and altruistic motivation. In this respect see C.D.
BATSON, Altruism in Humans, Oxford University
Press, Oxford 2011.
30
A. SMITH, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, cit.,
36
p. 114.
31
M. HOFFMAN, Empathy and Moral Development, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
2000, p. 54.
32
C.D. BATSON, S. EARLY, G. SALVARINI, Perspective Taking: Imagining How Another Feels Versus
Imagining How you Would Feel, in: «Personality
and Social Psychology Bulletin», vol. XXIII, n. 7,
Stueber
1997, pp. 751-758.
33
A. SMITH, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, cit., p. 3.
34
Ivi, p. 12.
35
Ivi, p. 317.
36
See C. GRISWOLD, Adam Smith and the Virtues
of Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge 1998.