Neo-sentimentalism and Disgust Joshua Gert “Neo-sentimentalism and Disgust,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 39, Nos. 3-4 (2005), pp. 345-352. Please cite published version. Hume famously failed to find vice when he inventoried the properties of the actions we describe as vicious. 1 Nor did he regard this as a deficiency in himself, but claimed instead that we, too, would seek it in vain until we turned our gaze inward, away from the action, and towards our own sentiments. This naturalizing of normative properties is salutary in the face of magical and metaphysical accounts of value. But even Hume had to add a number of features to his view before it could account at all plausibly for the apparent interpersonal objectivity of virtue and vice. Hume’s strategy was first to assert that all human beings share in the moral sentiments to some degree or other. 2 He then went on to claim that, despite some individual variability in fellow feeling, it is what is common to human beings that is seized on by the processes that are responsible for shaping public discourse. These two claims jointly explain why there is widespread agreement not only on what actions are virtuous and vicious, but even on how virtuous and vicious they are. 3 A number of contemporary philosophers follow Hume’s lead both in taking human responses to be central to any explanation of evaluative notions, and in moving away from the idea that idiosyncratic responses can do the whole job. One way of moving away from idiosyncratic responses might be statistical, so that what is vicious will be what virtually all people respond to in a certain way. Another way is to define normative properties in terms of the responses that are appropriate for any given human being. Let us call philosophers who favor this approach neo-sentimentalists. We can number David Wiggins, John McDowell, Simon Blackburn, Justin D’Arms and Dan Jacobson among their ranks. 4 On a view of this sort,