Prinz's Research On The Essentialism Of Moral Emotions

Jesse Prinz is a famous American meta-ethicist,inheritor and developer of emotivism.In his book The Emotional Construction of Morals,published in 2007,he first puts forward the term emotionism,which is used to generalize any theory that advocates the essential relationship between emotion and morality to some extent,and takes this term as the standard to examine the mainstream ethical school in history,and finally puts forward the typical theory of strong emotionism theory:sensibility theory.This paper is divided into four parts.In the first chapter,the background and type of the emotionism proposed by Prinz are illustrated.In his view,no one can deny the involvement of emotion in moral judgment,and the difference lies in the degree of emphasis placed on the importance of emotion.The second chapter,another important basis of sensibility theory:embodied appraisal theory.Different from previous emotivists,Prinz deeply analyzes the two types and representative theories of emotion before expounding the sensibility theory,and then proposes the embodied appraisal theory with the advantages of non-cognitivism and James-Lang theory.Then,on this basis,he distinguishes the moral emotion and the moral emotions,basic emotion and derived emotion,thus further expands the CAD model(CAD model proposed by Rozin,Shweder and others,is one of the most outstanding achievements in the study of moral psychology in recent years.This theory corresponds moral contempt,anger,and disgust to three moral systems,respectively)and points out that moral sentiments are an important part of sensibility theory.Chapter three discusses the questions and responses to the sensibility theory.After laying a solid foundation for the sensibility theory,Prinz defends it from seven aspects,including expressivism and color analogy and so on,among which the most important objection comes from objectivity and relativism.He insists on the existence of moral facts,that is,according to the sensibility theory,moral judgment,although subjective,corresponds to a certain fact and has an influence on people's behavior;and firmly denies that relativism is a sinister and harmful theory.The fourth chapter evaluates the theory based on the development status of contemporary western meta-ethics.Although embodied appraisal theory advocated by Prinz is controversial in the details,it is intuitive and has a strong attraction,which provides the possibility for emotivism to come back to life in the 21 st century.