Sentimentalism : a Humean analysis of moral belief
In this thesis, I investigate the nature of moral belief and judgment. Moral beliefs come out as dispositional sentiments of sanction; that is moral judgments express dispositions to experience something like compunction, guilt, remorse or shame (in the first-person) and blame, resentment, indignation or outrage (in the second- and third-person). This analysis constitutes one particular dispositional theory of value typically captured by a biconditional of the following form: X is P [if and only if] X is such as to produce a P response in subjects S Many moral philosophers, cognitivists and non-cognitivists, have adapted the general form of the biconditional for their purposes. The content of moral belief and judgment may be said to be dependent on psychological capacities of a various kind: interests, preferences (Hare), desires, second-order desires (Lewis), motivations, responses (Wiggins), attitudes (Blackburn) or plain dispositions. Common to most of these proposals is that the specific value-making states of mind remain underdefined. Attitudes, for example, are often merely characterized as what they are not supposed to be: standardly conceived beliefs with genuine truth-conditions (modelled, say, on
Kretschmer, Fritz Martin
Philosophy
Sentimentalism : a Humean analysis of moral belief. In this thesis, I investigate the nature of moral belief and judgment. Moral beliefs come out as dispositional sentiments of sanction; that is moral judgments express dispositions to experience something like compunction, guilt, remorse or shame (in the first-person) and blame, resentment, indignation or outrage (in the second- and third-person). This analysis constitutes one particular dispositional theory of value typically captured by a biconditional of the following form: X is P [if and only if] X is such as to produce a P response in subjects S Many moral philosophers, cognitivists and non-cognitivists, have adapted the general form of the biconditional for their purposes. The content of moral belief and judgment may be said to be dependent on psychological capacities of a various kind: interests, preferences (Hare), desires, second-order desires (Lewis), motivations, responses (Wiggins), attitudes (Blackburn) or plain dispositions. Common to most of these proposals is that the specific value-making states of mind remain underdefined. Attitudes, for example, are often merely characterized as what they are not supposed to be: standardly conceived beliefs with genuine truth-conditions (modelled, say, on
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