Philosophical Sentimentalism

Abstract

AbstractAccording to the influential sentimentalist tradition in moral philosophy, moral judgment is grounded in affective response. On Allan Gibbard’s prominent contemporary version of this view, he maintains that to judge an action wrong is to judge that it would be appropriate to feel guilt on doing the action. In this chapter, evidence from developmental psychology is brought against this sentimentalist theory. The capacity for moral judgment emerges quite early, apparently well before the capacity to attribute guilt or other moral emotions. The evidence thus suggests that this capacity for moral judgment cannot be captured by accounts which identify the capacity for moral judgment with the capacity to judge that guilt is normatively appropriate.