Transcendental Sentimentalism – An Introduction

Broadly construed, moral sentimentalism is the position that human emotions or sentiments play a crucial role in our best normative or descriptive accounts of moral value or judgements thereof. With this presentation, Aaron introduces and sketches a defense of a novel form of more sentimentalism he calls “Transcendental Sentimentalism.” According to transcendental sentimentalism, being in an emotional state about an object is a necessary condition of the possibility of a subject counting as having non-inferential evaluative knowledge about that object. In unpacking each component of this position, he argues that it is both distinct from and more explanatorily attractive than the other approaches to explaining the relationship between emotion and moral thought.

Aaron Franklin is a PhD candidate in philosophy. His research concerns the metaphysics of norms and the relationship between emotion and evaluative thought. In addition to writing his dissertation, Aaron works with the Center for Public Philosophy on a project examining the role that motivated reasoning plays in our public discourse.

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