Jesse Prinz in The Emotional Construction of Morals presents and defends constructive sentimentalism. The book is divided into two parts, one on emotions and morality, and the other on moral relativism. It can be highly recommended to anyone with an interest in moral psychology, metaethics or the evolution of morality, and will be particularly appreciated by those who favour an empirically informed, interdisciplinary approach to addressing philosophical questions.
Chapter 1 presents emotionism, the view that emotions are essential to morality (p. 13). Prinz is an emotionist. On Prinz's favoured version of emotionism, the essential connection between emotion and morality is a dispositional one: to make a moral judgement is to have a ‘sentiment’ (p. 84), an emotional disposition. In support of this view, he argues that emotions co-occur with moral judgements, influence moral judgements and are important – indeed, necessary – in acquiring the capacity to make moral judgements. Prinz's argument integrates studies from psychology and neuroscience with more traditional philosophical intuition pumps and thought experiments. His strategy is to show that emotionism either predicts the reported results while competing views do not or that, where other views also predict the results, emotionism better explains the results. The breadth of research on display here is impressive, as is the philosophical ingenuity.
At times, though, it is not clear that the studies cited in fact support emotionism. For example, Prinz cites studies on emotional reactions to claims about the uselessness of the elderly, and to descriptions of social rule violations, as evidence that emotions co-occur with moral judgements (and thus as support for emotionism). But it is not obvious that subjects in those studies are making moral judgements at all. Perhaps they are; it's a tempting inference. Or, perhaps not. Of course, a few loose links won't break Prinz's case, but the more general and important issue here is the need for care when recruiting empirical work in support of philosophical views. Prinz is not as careful as one could wish in this respect.
Regarding the philosophical aspect of Prinz's case in this chapter, his ‘Moral Mary’ thought experiment (p. 38) warrants special mention. Prinz's Mary is an analogue of Frank Jackson's famous character. Instead of knowing the neuroscience of colour experience without having ever seen red, though, Prinz's Mary knows the masterworks of normative ethical theory but has no emotional reaction to wrongs-by-Kantian-lights, wrongs-by-Mill's-lights, and so on. Prinz claims that it is only once Mary comes to feel guilty or outraged about wrongs-by-Kantian-lights (etc.) that we would attribute to her ‘moral attitudes’ about those actions (p. 41), and that this is support for the claim that emotions are necessary for making moral judgements (and hence support for emotionism). This seems to get the cart before the horse, though. To say that Mary feels guilty rather than just more nebulously bad, or outraged rather than merely angry, we must have already decided she is moralizing. Prinz may be right that ‘we attribute moral attitudes to Mary once she has emotional attitudes’ (p. 41), but not just any emotional attitudes will do; they must be moral emotional attitudes. And at this point, we've not heard the moral/non-moral emotion distinction. That is coming up in the next chapter, to be sure, but the structure of the book here leaves the reader hanging.
Chapter 2 contrasts cognitive theories of emotion – on which emotions essentially involve thoughts or judgements (p. 50) – with non-cognitive theories. Prinz supplies a very useful survey, covering contemporary and historical work. He argues against cognitive theories, again skilfully bringing psychological and neuroscientific evidence to bear, this time to suggest that cognitive states are neither necessary nor sufficient for being in an emotional state. He favours a non-cognitivist view, ‘embodied appraisal theory’ (pp. 65, 68), on which emotions are feelings of patterns of bodily responses but also have representational content as a result of functioning reliably to detect features of the world. Prinz notes that individual experience and/or cultural influence can tune the same patterns of bodily response to different eliciting conditions, thus creating new emotions from basic, innate ones. (This is important to the discussion of relativism later in the book.) This is all interesting material. Prinz's discussion is nuanced, insightful and well worth reading. But the crux of the chapter is the distinction between non-moral and moral emotions, and here it is unsatisfying.
Prinz says that moral emotions ‘promote or detect conduct that violates or conforms to a moral rule’ (p. 68). Moral anger, for example, is anger in response to injustice or rights-violation. The obvious question here is what makes a rule a moral rule, and Prinz has an answer: moral rules are rules with particularly strong emotional backing. ‘People come to regard moral rules as different from conventional rules by assigning emotional significance to moral rules’ (p. 35); moral rules are those the violation of which is associated with ‘strong negative emotions’ (p. 37). Now, however, it looks like there is nothing more to moral emotions than strength of emotion. And, one might think, it is possible to experience incandescent fury, or benthic despondence, without thereby moralizing about whatever has triggered the extreme emotion. Of course, whether this is so is precisely what is disputed by cognitivists and non-cognitivists about moral emotion. Still, Prinz says that there are undoubtedly moves to be made by the emotionist should a cognitive account of emotion prove true. And, given this is likely to be a major point of disagreement between Prinz and many of his readers, it would have been good to get more (indeed, any) detail about those moves (perhaps in space made by cutting some of the detail elsewhere).
Prinz ends this chapter by reiterating the distinction between emotions and sentiments, the latter being dispositions to feel emotions, and defines moral sentiments as dispositions to feel moral emotions (p. 85). Moral sentiments are the subject of the next chapter.
Chapter 3 presents and begins the defence of Prinz's own specific version of emotionism: ‘constructive sentimentalism’ (p. 167). The book from halfway through this chapter onwards is an extended defence of constructive sentimentalism. Prinz first situates his view with respect to other versions of emotionism, before citing several advantages of it and then going on to address a litany of potential objections. Chapter 4 focuses on an objection concerning the supposed objectivity of morality, while the whole second part of the book explores and defends the relativist implications of Prinz's view.
Constructive sentimentalism has a metaphysical and an epistemic component. The metaphysical part runs: ‘An action has the property of being morally wrong (right) just in case there is an observer who has a sentiment of disapprobation (approbation) toward it’ (p. 92). Constructive sentimentalism is thus a kind of sensibility theory, on which moral properties are response-dependent properties. The epistemic part says: ‘The standard concept WRONG (RIGHT) is a detector for the property of wrongness (rightness) that comprises a sentiment that disposes its possessor to experience emotions in the disapprobation (approbation) range’ (p. 94). Prinz draws on the detailed discussion of moral emotions in chapter 3 to specify the relevant emotional ranges. There is not space here to engage with, or even report, all the details of Prinz's discussion, so I'll limit myself to a couple of remarks, one about a claimed advantage of constructive sentimentalism, and another about Prinz's response to a particular objection, the objection concerning objectivity, which first arises in chapter 3 and is the focus of chapter 4.
One claimed advantage of constructive sentimentalism is that it is compatible with, and indeed explains the truth of, motivation internalism, the view that moral judgements are ‘intrinsically motivating’ (p. 18). Moral judgements essentially involve emotions, and emotions are motivation states, hence, moral judgements motivate. Leaving aside the question of whether motivational internalism is true (Prinz does defend it, pp. 42–7), constructive sentimentalism does not support it in the way Prinz claims. Recall, Prinz states his view in terms of sentiments, which are dispositions to have emotions, rather than directly in terms of emotions. He does this to deal with the fact that moral judgements are not always accompanied by emotions (p. 19). But this means that it is possible on his view to have moral judgements that do not motivate, in those cases when the emotional disposition is not manifested. So, moral judgements are not intrinsically motivating on the constructive sentimentalist view. That view may well explain why moral judgements ‘tend’ to motivate, and that is a version of internalism Prinz considers (p. 18), but the slippage between different versions of the internalist thesis, and corresponding lack of clarity about the virtues of constructive sentimentalism, provides another example of Prinz not being as careful as could be hoped.
One objection to constructive sentimentalism addressed in chapter 3 is a Euthyphro-like dilemma (pp. 118–20): is an action wrong because we disapprove of it, or do we disapprove of it because it's wrong? Prinz's response is to deny the intuition that morality doesn't depend on us, and so to blunt the first horn enough for the comfort of the constructive sentimentalist. It is easy, he says, to prompt the intuition that morality does depend on us. This issue – is morality in some sense objective? – is the focus of chapter 4. Prinz surveys several senses of objectivity, maps these onto prominent objectivist ethical theories, and argues that either morality is not objective in the relevant sense, or it is but such objectivity is compatible with constructive sentimentalism. This is a very useful discussion for anyone interested in the debate about moral objectivity. Prinz's articulation of different senses of objectivity is careful, his criticisms of objectivist moral theories cogent. On the question whether folk morality really is committed to some sort of moral objectivity, though, the case here is a bit thin. Prinz sets himself up in opposition to John Mackie, who thinks a commitment to objectivity is built into folk morality. And he cites a couple of studies – one by Dan Kelly and colleagues, another by Shaun Nichols – that he interprets as giving evidence that the folk are not objectivists about morality. There has been a good deal of work since the publication of Prinz's book on the folk psychology of metaethics. The jury is still out on the question of folk moral objectivism. Those working on this issue could fruitfully read Prinz's discussion. There remains plenty of scope for productive interplay between the philosophy and the psychology in this area.
Chapter 5 marks the transition to part II of the book, but that is really of a piece with the first part, as it continues the defence of constructive sentimentalism, now against the objection that the view implies moral relativism, which is both false and pernicious. As was the case in previous chapters, this one opens with a useful survey of the relevant terrain. This chapter is probably the hardest going, technically, of the book, but repays careful attention.
One point of confusion, however, concerns Prinz's move from the subjectivist constructive sentimentalism laid out in chapter 3, to the claim that moral judgements are relative to ‘culture’ (p. 179). Prinz says he prefers to think of morality as ‘intersubjective’ (p. 185) and he claims that ‘conformity across groups (and hence group values) has a kind of priority over individual values, insofar as a given individual is likely to have acquired values from a social collective’ (p. 186). But, while cultural influences strongly shape individuals’ sentiments, and while cultural transmission might explain why individuals from the same culture tend to have similar moral sentiments (pp. 184–5), this doesn't mean moral truth is relative to culture rather than to individuals. And indeed, it is still individuals who feature crucially in Prinz's statements of his metaethical views. He says ‘an action is right or wrong if there is a moral sentiment toward it’ (p. 175), where the moral sentiment is had by an individual and he says the truth of moral claims depends on the sentiments of ‘the speaker’ (p. 180). The prominence of culture in Prinz's discussion is thus rather misleading, since he is not really defending cultural relativism after all.
Prinz acknowledges something like this point (p. 183), but justifies his focus on culture by saying that evidence for descriptive moral relativism comes from observation of cross-cultural moral differences, and that descriptive moral relativism is a premise in the argument for metaethical moral relativism. However, descriptive moral relativism as Prinz defines it merely says ‘some people have fundamentally different moral values’ (p. 174), and it is not clear that we need a great deal of cross-cultural investigation to establish this. So, the material on cross-cultural moral diversity is vivid and fascinating, well researched and enthusiastically presented, and makes some genuinely useful contributions (like getting clearer on just what constitutes a cultural group, pp. 184–5), but seems ultimately tangential to the overall argument of the book.
Chapters 6 and 7 discuss genealogies of morality, cultural/historical in chapter 6, and evolutionary/biological in chapter 7. Prinz's aim is twofold: to show how values are created (and thus flesh out the ‘constructive’ part of constructive sentimentalism) and to defuse the worry that such genealogies support either pessimism or scepticism about morality.
I will mostly pass over chapter 6. To my mind, the most interesting part here is when Prinz discusses the cultural transmission of ideas (pp. 220–3). While he (probably sensibly) doesn't buy into memetics, he accepts that ‘we can make sense of why certain attitudes come about, why they stay, and why others tend to disappear’ (p. 223) partly by attending to their fitness effects, on individuals but also on groups. This sort of cultural group selection idea is relevant, but neglected, in the next chapter.
Chapter 7 presents and argues against evolutionary genealogies of morality. It opens with a clear and accessible presentation of relevant empirical work on the evolution of altruism. Things get tangled fairly swiftly thereafter. Prinz rejects ‘evolutionary ethics’ (p. 245), the view that some norms are the products of natural selection and are universal, immutable and privileged over culturally developed norms. Thus stated, evolutionary ethics packages together descriptive and prescriptive claims that many might want to keep separate. Prinz himself admits that he is not sure if anyone holds this view (p. 257). Still, he gives a good critique of the latter three claims, particularly when demonstrating cultural variation in supposed moral universals (pp. 274–86). His response to the first claim, though, is confused.
Prinz sets up his discussion by saying that ‘the capacity to moralize could be an evolved adaptation [or] a by-product of capacities that evolved for other purposes’ (p. 263). He argues for the by-product account by making the case that there is no psychological mechanism dedicated to making moral judgements – we instead use an array of other general-purpose capacities (p. 270) – and by emphasizing the role of learning in acquiring moral competence (pp. 9, 269). But, in presenting this as a reply to the claim that morality is the product of natural selection, Prinz is slipping between different senses of ‘innate’, specifically, a developmental sense and an adaptationist sense. The dispute between Prinz and the evolutionary ethicist is about the adaptationist sense. Prinz recognizes and uses this sense of innateness elsewhere, such as when talking about innate emotions (p. 61). The evidence Prinz offers is relevant to the developmental sense, though. Capacities can lack dedicated machinery but be adaptations nevertheless; the key concept here is exaptation. And adaptations can require environmental input, including learning, in order to develop, so it is false that ‘if morality were innate’ in the relevant sense then ‘instruction should be unnecessary’ (p. 269).
Moreover, and in a more constructive vein, there is reason to think Prinz should be amenable to a certain kind of adaptationist account, namely, a cultural group selectionist one. As noted above, Prinz is sympathetic in chapter 6 to cultural group selectionist explanations for the spread of certain ideas (p. 223). Elsewhere in the book, he explicitly offers an account of the function of morality: ‘morality emerges as a system of rules for getting people to function collectively in stable and productive ways’ (p. 185). And in chapter 7, he floats the idea that morality might serve to stabilize cooperation in large groups where the mere inclination to be nice might not suffice (p. 273). All of this suggests the possibility of a significant rapprochement between Prinz and his adaptationist ‘opponent’: both might agree on a cultural group selectionist explanation for the evolution of morality.
Chapter 8 addresses one final objection to relativism (and hence the constructive sentimentalism that implies it), namely, that it is incompatible with moral progress. Prinz deals ably if a bit breathlessly with this objection. The sense is very much that space is running out. If that is not true of the book, it is certainly true of this review in any case.
In The Emotional Construction of Morals Prinz offers a vivid presentation and an impressive synthesis of a wide range of empirical work in the service of defending a novel and interesting philosophical position. He is to be commended for so ably demonstrating the potential of an integrative and interdisciplinary approach to questions in moral philosophy.
