Rational Sentimentalism develops a novel theory of the sentimental values. These values, which include the funny, the disgusting, and the shameful, are profoundly important because they set standards for emotional responses that are part of our shared human nature. Yet moral philosophers have neglected them relative to their prominent role in human mental life. The theory is sentimentalist because it holds that these values are emotion-dependent-contrary to some prominent accounts of the funny and the disgusting. Its rational aspect arises from its insistence that the shameful (for example) is not whatever elicits shame but what makes shame fitting. Shameful traits provide reasons to be ashamed that do not depend on whether one is disposed to be ashamed of them. Furthermore, these reasons to be ashamed transmit to reasons to act as shame dictates: to conceal. Sentimentalism requires a compatible theory of emotion and emotional fittingness. This book explicates a motivational theory of emotion that explains the peculiarities of emotional motivation as other theories cannot. It argues that a class of emotions are psychological kinds with a similar goal across cultures despite differences in their elicitors. It then develops an account of fittingness that helps to differentiate reasons of fit, which bear on the sentimental values, from other considerations for or against having an emotion. Significant and controversial conclusions emerge from this theory of rational sentimentalism. Sentimental values conflict with one another, and with morality, but nevertheless provide practical reasons that apply to humans-if not to all rational agents.

These nine original essays examine the moral and philosophical implications of developments in the science of ethics, the growing movement that seeks to use recent empirical findings to answer long-standing ethical questions. Efforts to make moral psychology a thoroughly empirical discipline have divided philosophers along methodological fault lines, isolating discussions that will profit more from intellectual exchange. This volume takes an even-handed approach, including essays from advocates of empirical ethics as well as those who are sceptical of some of its central claims. Some of these essays make novel use of empirical findings to develop philosophical research programs regarding such crucial moral phenomena as desire, emotion, and memory. Others bring new critical scrutiny to bear on some of the most influential proposals of the empirical ethics movement, including the claim that evolution undermines moral realism, the effort to recruit a dual-process model of the mind to support consequentialism against other moral theories, and the claim that ordinary evaluative judgments are seldom if ever sensitive to reasons, because moral reasoning is merely the post hoc rationalization of unthinking emotional response.