Publication: An Expected Error: An Essay in Defence of Moral Emotionism
0
0
Issued Date
2022
Resource Type
Language
eng
File Type
application/pdf
ISSN
11221151
Rights Holder(s)
มหาวิทยาลัยศรีนครินทรวิโรฒ
Bibliographic Citation
Journal of Natural Fibers. Vol 19, No.9 (2022), p.3365-3377
Suggested Citation
Bartlett J.J. An Expected Error: An Essay in Defence of Moral Emotionism. Journal of Natural Fibers. Vol 19, No.9 (2022), p.3365-3377. doi:10.1007/s10516-020-09524-5 Retrieved from: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14740/9621
Author(s)
Abstract
This work draws an analogical defence of strong emotionism—the metaethical claim that moral properties and concepts consist in the propensity of actions to elicit emotional responses from divergent emotional perspectives. I offer a theory that is in line with that of Prinz (The emotional construction of morals. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007). I build an analogy between moral properties and what I call emotion-dispositional properties. These properties are picked out by predicates such as ‘annoying’, ‘frightening’ or ‘deplorable’ and appear to be uncontroversial and frequent cases of attribution error—the attributing of subjective emotional states as mind-independent properties. I present a linguistic analysis supporting the claim that moral properties and their related concepts are reducible to a subset of emotion-dispositional properties and concepts. This is grounded in the observation that utterances featuring moral predicates function linguistically and conceptually in analogous ways to emotion-dispositional predicates. It follows from this view that asserted moral utterances are truth-apt relative to ethical communities, but that speakers misconceive the extensions of predicates. I show how the framework of Cognitive Linguistics allows us to explain this error. Further analysis of moral and non-moral utterances exposes the deeper conceptual schemas structuring language through cognitive construal processes. An understanding of these processes, coupled with an emotionist elucidation of moral properties and concepts, makes the attribution error an expected upshot of the emotionist thesis, rather than an uncomfortable consequence. © 2020, Springer Nature B.V.