Sentimentalism versus Cognitivism

Abstract

Abstract Although the cogntivist theory of emotion faces familiar and compelling objections, moral philosophers retain a default tendency to define emotions in terms of response-independent evaluative thoughts. Philippa Foot’s argument against sentimentalism presupposes a cognitivist theory of emotions. This chapter responds to Foot’s argument and explains the incompatibility between cognitivism and sentimentalism. It argues that the evaluative content of emotions is response-dependent, and that cognitivist taxonomies of emotion obscure that content in ways that lead to significant errors. Bernard Williams’s discussion of agent-regret displays some of these mistakes, due to his implicit adoption of cogntivist methodology. The impulse to embrace cognitivism is understandable, however, because it offers a tidy explanation of how emotions can be fitting or unfitting. Sentimentalism requires an alternative account.