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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Rational Sentimentalism

Rational Sentimentalism

D'Arms, Justin
Jacobson, Daniel

Hardcover

Philosophy

ISBN10: 0199256403
ISBN13: 9780199256402
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: May 23 2023
Pages: 244
Weight: 1.20
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.47 Depth: 9.46
Language: English
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.

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