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The Emotional Construction of Morals
By JESSE PRINZ
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2007. XII + 334 pp. £25.00
Summary
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The Emotional Construction of Morals is a book about moral judgements – the kinds of mental states we might express by sentences such as, ‘It's bad to flash your neighbors’, or ‘You ought not eat your pets’. There are three basic questions that get addressed: what are the psychological states that constitute such judgements? What kinds of properties do such judgements refer to? And, where do these judgements come from? The first question concerns moral psychology, the second metaethics and the third is best construed as belonging to a domain that has been neglected in analytic value theory: the genealogy of morals. These are all separate branches of ethics, but they are interconnected. The thesis of the book is that moral judgements are emotional attitudes that refer to response-dependent properties, and that these responses have been shaped by cultural history. I call the view Constructive Sentimentalism. The first half of
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1. Moral psychology (Chapters 1–3) |
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2. Metaethics (Chapters 3–5) |
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3. Genealogy and normative ethics (Chapters 6–8) |
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