This is not incorrect, and one could plausibly take this idea and run with it. Hume is someone who does this in a fairly principled and fair way. For Hume “sentiment” is something akin to what I’ve called “way of being,” and yet a normativity obtains insofar as sentiment can be good or bad. For example, people with good sentiments will be morally virtuous and people with bad sentiments will be morally vicious. Let’s use Hume’s term “sentiment” and make use of it, but without trying to actually track his thought.
Even if sentiment is divorced from “Reason,” nevertheless insofar as a normative measure applies to sentiment it will still involve comparison, measure, and therefore small-‘r’ “reason.” Put more simply, everything which is normative involves intelligibility and “reason.” In Foot’s register this cashes out as the idea that we are able to predicate ‘good’ and ‘bad’ of normative realities, and such predications must themselves be intelligible and reason-apt. (It follows that all normative ethics must involve some form of reason even if they eschew particular forms of reason such as “moral deductivism,” and this is what Foot and Anscombe were wrestling with in a more general way.)
One way to work this out in a political register would be to take cultural relativism and make it non-relativistic by construing each culture as a sentiment-option and then allowing each culture to “compete” with the others. Whichever cultures are most appealing and persuasive “Win out” in the normative construal. But again, no approach to ethics which involves normativity can escape ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and the rational comparisons that attend those concepts, including this cultural approach. Arguments and persuasion—and therefore reason!—are inevitable in every ethical system that is normative, and ethics is by definition normative.
These are the truths which modern ethics struggles with:
- You can’t have ethics without the concepts ‘good’ and ‘bad’
- You can’t have ‘good’ and ‘bad’ without ‘true’ and ‘false’
- Early Anscombe accepted 1 but rejected 2
- Early/mid Foot accepted 2 but rejected 1
- Hume accepted 1 but rejected 2
- Kant rejected 1 and accepted 2
- Stevenson accepted 1 but rejected 2
- A number of TPFers reject both
Kant is interesting because he tries to refound ethics apart from inclination. He manages to think that ethics involves ‘true’ and ‘false’ but not ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Hume and early Anscombe were his opposite while sharing many of the same presuppositions.