Metaethics and emotions research: A response to Prinz

Abstract

Prinz claims that empirical work on emotions and moral judgment can help us resolve longstanding metaethical disputes in favor of simple sentimentalism. I argue that the empirical evidence he marshals does not have the metaethical implications he claims: the studies purporting to show that having an emotion is sufficient for making a moral judgment are tendentiously described. We are entitled to ascribe competence with moral concepts to experimental subjects only if we suppose that they would withdraw their moral judgment on learning that they were fully explained by hypnotically induced disgust. Genuine moral judgments must be reason-responsive. To capture the reason-responsiveness of moral judgment, we must turn to either neosentimentalism or to a nonsentimentalist metaethics, either of which is fully compatible with the empirical evidence Prinz cites.