jesse@subcortex.com
Jesse Prinz’s The Emotional Construction of Morals is among the most sig-
nificant of illuminations of human morality to appear in recent years. This
embarrassment of riches presents the space-starved commentator with a
dilemma: survey the book’s extraordinary sweep, and slight the textured
argumentation, or engage a fraction of the argumentation, and slight the
sweep. I’ll fall on the second horn, and focus mostly on Chapter 7,
‘The Genealogy of Morals’. Like Prinz (215),1 I think that genealogical argu-
ments have not, despite their frequent appearance, received enough self-con-
scious discussion in ethical theorizing; I’ll try to extend Prinz’s amelioration
of this neglect, by making some recurring themes explicit. In so doing, I
indulge myself in a bit of therapy. I’ve always regarded genealogical argu-
ments with certain ambivalence: genealogies frequently make a beguiling first
impression, but just as often, when one gets to know them, their appeal turns
out to be superficial. In articulating the contrasting uses to which genealogi-
cal arguments might be put, I hope to distinguish uses that deliver real sub-
1 Except where otherwise noted, all parenthetical references are to Jesse J. Prinz (2007), The
Emotional Construction of Morals.
2 The Emotional Construction of Morals is the final instalment of Prinz’s remarkable
Humean trilogy (the predecessors are Prinz 2002, 2004).
3 For valuable discussion of Nietzsche on genealogy, see Leiter (2002: 165–92).
4 Genealogical arguments may have targets other than values, but I’ll stick to Prinz’s topic.
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5 As Prinz (295) is aware, genealogical arguments might be thought to impact the moral
sentiments out of which he constructs his sentimentalism, no less than other moral
responses. I suspect, however, that Prinz would consider this a characterization of,
rather than an objection to, his view. (In words I’ve heard attributed to Paul Grice,
‘that’s not an objection to the theory, that’s the theory’.) For Prinz (138–72) embraces
moral relativism, and can therefore happily allow that genealogy presses relativism about
the moral sentiments. To what extent such relativism lapses into full blown scepticism is a
delicate question for Prinz, as it is for other relativists, but space precludes my developing
his views on the topic.
6 This asymmetry is present in Prinz (234–43): the five versions of genealogical arguments
he focuses on in Chapter 7 are debunking.
book symposium | 707
7 I’ve here benefitted from discussion with Edouard Machery. A similar observation appears
applicable, as Jacob Beck has pointed out to me, to theoretical reasoning. Note that
evolutionary debunking arguments applied to theoretical reasoning may be self-defeating,
supposing such arguments are themselves evolutionary products.
708 | book symposium
aspires to more than the role of ‘suspicion generator’ without lapsing into
genetic fallacy.
Until now, I’ve been wondering about notions in the vicinity of the truth,
warrant, or authority of moral norms and judgements – the sort of issues that
arise in connection with justificational genealogies. But moral norms and
judgements can also have an evidential role: the fact that people hold this
norm or make that judgement might be thought to indicate that the moral
facts (if such facts there be) turn out one way rather than another, or that one
moral theory is more likely true than another. This notion is embodied in the
8 For some difficulties with Anscombe’s remarkably imperial edict on this case, see Doris
and Plakias (2007: 322–7).
9 The argument is disputed by Sturgeon (1985) and Pust (2001). For further discussion, see
Harman (1986) and Sturgeon (2006).
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microscopes and telescopes. Evidently, much turns on the details of the par-
ticular cultural story at issue. To take an example speculatively entertained
by Prinz (241–2), suppose one has opposed abortion because it is prohibited
by the Church, and then learns that ‘the abortion ban was actually intro-
duced as a deliberate tool in the campaign against women’s suffrage’, instead
of being based, as one had thought, in ‘an authoritative version of holy texts’.
Now if I’m right, nothing immediately follows about the moral rightness or
wrongness of the ban; the ban is not debunked by the genealogy. But suppose
one had always had a strong feeling that abortion is wrong, and took this as
arguments can have considerably more impact, when they involve the pro-
venance of evidence. Here, as elsewhere, we make more progress when we
consider individual arguments and their empirical suppositions in full and
messy detail, and we are fortunate to have Prinz’s admirable example of how
this difficult and necessary work can proceed. For this reason, among many
others, The Emotional Construction of Morals is an uncommonly rich and
probing contribution to ethical theory and moral psychology.11
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11 Warm thanks to Jacob Beck, Brian Leiter, Edouard Machery, Shaun Nichols, Jesse Prinz,
Valerie Tiberius, and – especially – Ric Otte for discussion of earlier drafts.
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