Speaker
Description
What kind of endorsement is involved in a judgment that an emotion is an “appropriate” response to what it is about? In answering this question, Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson (2000) warned moral philosophers not to conflate two distinct forms of endorsement or assessment: the moral propriety of an emotion on the one hand, and its fittingness (representational accuracy) on the other hand. They argued that anyone who infers directly from claims about the moral appropriateness of an emotion to conclusions about the representational accuracy of that emotion would be committing “the moralistic fallacy”: he is failing to see that a moral reason for or against feeling an emotion is irrelevant—that it is “the wrong kind of reason”—to determining its fit. For example, one might infer that because it would be morally wrong to be amused by a racist or a sexist joke, that the joke is therefore not funny. It is clear that there is something amiss in this example.
My aim in this paper is to examine whether Smith commits the moralistic fallacy. Smith argues that “the precise or distinct measure by which this fitness or propriety of affection can be ascertained or judged of” can only be found in “the sympathetic feelings of the impartial and well-informed spectator” (TMS VII.ii.1.49). The interchangeability of “fitness” and “propriety” might suggest that Smith did commit the moralistic fallacy: he infers directly from claims about the moral appropriateness of an emotion to conclusions about the representational accuracy of that emotion. Indeed, on the one hand, Smith presents the impartial spectator as the standpoint that makes the objects of their sentiments of approval and disapproval merit that approval or disapproval. The appropriateness here is distinctly moral in the sense that the impartial spectator (a) makes us realize that our perspective is “but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it” (TMS II.ii.2.1 & III.3.4), and (b) allows us to correct our perception both of our own interests and of the interests of others, since we come to view all interests but “from the place and with the eyes of a third person, who has no particular connexion with either [us or others], and who judges with impartiality between us” (TMS III.3.3). On the other hand, Smith repeatedly talks of feelings being “suitable to their objects,” The worry is that Smith believed that feelings are “suitable to their objects” precisely because of their moral appropriateness, thus committing the moralistic fallacy.
I build on a suggestion made by Vida Yao (2023) and argue that Smith can avoid the moralistic fallacy by showing that the appropriateness inherent to the impartial spectator is partly constituted by emotional accuracy: to judge something as appropriate is, among other things, for one’s emotions to be accurately responsive to the relevant features of the situation. In other words, the person who adopts the standpoint of the impartial spectator and acts in morally appropriate ways is the person who has accurate emotions. Thus, there is no conflation of moral and epistemic assessment, as the assessment is moral and epistemic. In order for this account to work, I argue that Smith’s moral theory must be viewed as somewhat similar to an Aristotelian virtue theory, for the Aristotelian can avail himself of a broader understanding of ethics, in which a virtuous person is appropriately related, and emotionally attuned, to goodness in all of its forms. I show that there is a way to understand Smith’s moral theory in these terms through a version of the doctrine of the mean, which is endorsed by Smith (VII.ii.1.12). I build on Broadie (2010) and argue that, in the context of attempting to attain mutual sympathy (TMS I.i.2.1-6), the process of seeking a mean between undesirable extremes starts to take shape: a compromise is reached between the spectator and the person principally concerned by which each modifies the intensity of his own sentiment in the direction of the intensity of the sentiment that the other has. I further argue that the structure of this sympathetic process is ultimately incorporated into the standpoint of the impartial spectator.
| Organization | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
|---|
