Introduction
1 Detailed discussion of what constitutes naturalism and whether normative notions, such as obligation and intrinsic goodness, can be naturalized is provided in my “Can Normativity Be Naturalized?” in Ethical Naturalism: Current Debates, ed. Susana Nuccetelli and Gary Shea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 169–93.
2 How rationalism may be conceived is discussed, and the position defended, in my “Skepticism about the A Priori: Self-Evidence, Defeasibility, and Cogito Propositions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism, ed. John Greco (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 149–75; and how rationalism applies to moral knowledge is indicated in chaps. 1 and 2 of my The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
3 Here my concerns overlap those of Jonathan Haidt in his much-discussed work on social intuitionism, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist View of Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814–34, and related work by developmental psychologists who study ethics. For the latter, see, e.g., Darcia Narvaez and Daniel K. Lapsley, eds., Personality, Identity, and Character: Explorations in Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
CHAPTER 1: Perception: Sensory, Conceptual, and Cognitive Dimensions
1 Here and in discussing perception generally I draw on chap. 1 of my Epistemology, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010). I have, however, substituted ‘attributive’ for ‘objectual’ with the idea that the former is more intuitive and can serve the same function.
2 At least normally, seeing a thing to have a property F entails seeing its F-ness. If so, predicative seeing is also a case of simple seeing of a property, and predicative seeing might plausibly be viewed as a special case of referential factivity.
3 These examples suggest that seeing as is conceptual. But that does not follow, and I leave open that in some cases it is not. Non-transparency is necessary but not sufficient for the conceptual character of the position following ‘as’ in such locutions, and there may be ways of seeing x as F that, without conceptualization, simply require a determinate way of responding to something’s being F.
4 Seeing as may be cognitive rather than perspectival; but our subject is perceptual rather than intellective, seeing as, e.g. doxastic seeing as, in which the perceiver believes the object has the property it is seen as having. In part because seeing as does not meet the factivity standard applicable to attributive and propositional seeing, I will not discuss it in detail in relation to moral perception. The three factive cases are also more important for the epistemology of perception.
5 Doubtless there can be “blindsight,” understood as a “direct” cognitive response to visible properties unaccompanied by relevant visual experience. But a person incapable of visual experience could have that; even a mechanical robot could, if it could have knowledge at all. We need not call either kind of knowledge a case of seeing that something is so. Not all knowledge of the visible is visual knowledge. For a discussion of blindsight that contrasts with mine, especially in giving a lesser role—if any essential role—to conscious elements as conditions for genuine seeing, see Tyler Burge, Origins of Objectivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. 374–75 (his note 10 cites many recent scientific studies of blindsight).
6 Could a skeptic suspend judgment? The skeptic could well believe a second-order judgment to the effect that the proposition apparently seen to be true might be false. But this is not a counterexample, nor would we expect (non-suicidal) skeptics who see that a bus is bearing down on them to doubt the impending danger. It should be stressed that seeing x to be F has much in common with seeing that x is F and can explain much of the behavior explainable by the latter. But the former does not entail the latter, and their similarity does not show that propositional seeing does not entail believing the proposition in question.
7 We should also distinguish, as in the case of property content, perceptual propositional content from sensory propositional content. Macbeth’s hallucination of a dagger has the latter but not, in my terminology, the former. To be sure, he might have had a mixed experience: hallucinating a dagger while actually seeing the wall before which it seems to hover. Then his overall visual experience would have both kinds of propositional content. Detailed discussion of the content of visual experience (much of it consistent with the view taken here) is provided by Susanna Siegel in The Contents of Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
8 Arguably, all such propositions would be included if the person had sufficient conceptual sophistication to believe or be disposed to believe every proposition attributing to the perceptual object some property of it that appropriately figures in the perceptual experience.
9 Here one might think of the speckled hen problem. If I perceive such a creature, are all the speckles I in some sense see represented in my experience? Perhaps exactly 100 could be visually represented in my perceptual experience. It does not follow that I am even disposed to believe there are 100. There is much to say here, but we need not solve the problem. It is enough to note that anyone who posits propositional content of the kind described need not say either that the subject can know by introspection how many speckles there are or that the attempt to determine it will not change the number that are phenomenally “visible.”
10 For a case supporting the distinction in question, see my “Dispositional Beliefs and Dispositions to Believe,” Nous 28 (1994): 419–34. Concerning the relation between seeing and believing, consider the locutions ‘I could not believe my eyes’ and ‘I could hardly believe my eyes’. Both indicate how difficult it is to resist believing a proposition that comes to mind and seems to one (visually) to be true. Shakespeare’s Othello demanded the “ocular proof” of Desdemona’s infidelity. He surely must have thought that seeing is believing—or the surest kind of believing. (Unfortunately all he saw was an ostensibly incriminating handkerchief.)
11 The points made here are supported in my “Justifying Grounds, Justified Beliefs, and Rational Acceptance,” in Rationality and the Good: Critical Essays on the Ethics and Epistemology of Robert Audi, ed. Mark Timmons, John Greco, and Alfred R. Mele (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. 230–39, which replies to Timothy Williamson’s “On Being Justified in One’s Head,” 106–22. I might add here that how loose we can allow conceptualization to be depends on whether we are thinking of de dicto or only de re belief. My suggestion is that one need not even believe a rock to be slippery in order to respond to its slippery appearance by sidestepping it; but suppose explaining this response does require positing the agent’s believing it to be slippery. That entails property attribution, but does it require the agent’s conceptualizing slipperiness? I doubt that, but certainly the discriminative response in question is a likely stage in developing a concept of slipperiness, and some might consider the de re belief to require conceptualization of the property it ascribes.
12 In places Thomas Reid seems to take visual perception to entail belief regarding the object. He says, e.g., in his Inquiry into the Principles of Common Sense, “the perception of an object implies both a conception of its form and a belief of its present existence.” See Ronald E. Beanblossom and Keith Lehrer, eds., Thomas Reid: Inquiry and Essays (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), 84. He also says, “My belief is carried along by perception, as irresistibly as my body by the earth” (85). Whether he was committed to taking propositional, as opposed to attributive, belief to be entailed by perception in such cases is not clear.
13 For valuable discussion of perceptual representation different from, but in some ways supportive of, mine, see Justin P. McBrayer, “A Limited Defense of Moral Perception,” Philosophical Studies 149, no. 3 (2010): 305–20. He plausibly replies to the charge that moral perception is not causal in “Moral Perception and the Causal Objection,” Ratio 23, no. 3 (2010): 201–307.
14 The most intuitive account of such seeing (an account which I take Bishop Berkeley, in his Principles of Human Knowledge, to have relied on for his phenomenalism) is that we see objects in virtue of seeing their properties. We can grant the perspectival character of seeing, however, without taking the object seen to be a construct out of the perceptually accessible properties.
15 I refer to a visual appearance; we don’t see—in the sense of ‘regard’—the rim as elliptical in the cognitive sense implying we would attribute ellipticality to it.
16 The position articulated here is a clarification of the one expressed in my “Moral Perception and Moral Knowledge,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 84 (2010): 79–97, which contains earlier versions of much that is in Chapters 1 and 2. A still earlier version of the position, which contrasts it with the sense-datum view, is expressed and defended in more detail in my Epistemology, chap. 2. I should add that the property is higher-order not because it is a property of a property but because the property of sensing elliptically conceptually “contains” a reference to the less complex, first-order property of being elliptical. My view does not imply that nothing is “given” in perception, but this is not the place to examine the “myth of the given.” For recent discussions of that, see Mark Eli Kalderon, “Before the Law,” Philosophical Issues 21 (2011): 219–44, and Martine Nida-Rumelin, “Phenomenal Presence and Perceptual Awareness: A Subjectivist Account of Perceptual Openness to the World,” Philosophical Issues 21 (2011): 352–83.
17 Not all phenomenal properties are sensory, even where that term extends to inner sense, as where inner sense yields a dull pain above the eyes. Imaging—seeing in the mind’s eye—and inner speaking are also phenomenal.
18 A sketch of the associated account of the a priori and references to alternative views is provided in my “Skepticism about the A Priori.” For a related exploration of the epistemic role of visual experience in yielding a priori knowledge, see Marcus Giaquinto, Visual Thinking in Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
19 One might wonder how the causative property could fail to be observable; but the causative token need not be observable, as opposed to intimately connected with an observable property as, e.g., tokening light-ray reflection is intimately connected (but not identical) with having a color.
20 The property might be relational: I can see a distant plane when I misperceive its color and shape but I see its approximate location (a relational property) and its relation to me produces a suitable phenomenal responsiveness to changes in it, say a sense of its moving eastward when it does. I must here ignore these and other complications.
CHAPTER 2: Moral Perception: Causal, Phenomenological, and Epistemological Elements
1 As suggested in the text, I assume here that there are moral properties. If my position in this book is plausible, that in itself provides reason to favor cognitivism in ethics. Perceptual beliefs are paradigms of cognition.
2 Compare, however, Mark Wynn’s characterization of “the perception of value.” See esp. chap. 3 of Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). He seems to agree with John McDowell that “we should think of values as ‘in the world’ … on McDowell’s account, it is by way of our affective responses that we come to recognize these values” (9). The reference is to McDowell’s “Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following,” in Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, ed. S. Holtzmann and C. Leich (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). Cf. the passages Wynn quotes from Quentin Smith and Friedrich Schleiermacher (64 and 66). For more detailed discussion of the perceptibility of value, see Robert C. Roberts, The Heart of the Virtues: Emotion’s Role in the Moral Life, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
3 I do not assume that there are any properties not grounded in others, but only that the way moral properties are grounded in descriptive ones is different from the way the property of intentionally moving one’s hand is grounded in, say, intentional elements such as desires. Even if the difference is not one of modality, whether conceptual or ontic, there is an epistemic difference (clarified in the text) and that is the more important one for this book.
4 That moral properties are consequential is a view elaborated in G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903) and W. D. Ross’s The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), reprinted in 2002, with an extensive introduction by Philip Stratton-Lake, by Hackett Pub. Co. (Indianapolis, IN, 1988), (esp. chap. 2). It is developed further in chap. 2 of The Good in the Right.
5 Cf. Locke’s idea that the mind at birth is a “tabula rasa”—a blank tablet waiting for the hands of experience, especially perceptual experience, to inscribe on it the information experience supplies. Again, it is easy to see how a natural metaphor can cause one to tend to conceive perceptual representation cartographically.
6 Compare Jonathan Dancy: “[T]hough we can discern reasons across the board, our ability to do it is not sensory; it is not sensibility that issues in the recognition of reasons (though sensibility may be required along the way); it is rather our capacity to judge … We might, I suppose, conceive judgement in general as a response to recognized reasons….” See Ethics without Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 144. This seems consistent with my view; and if recognizing reasons can be accomplished by discriminating base properties for a moral property central in a judgment, then if, as I hold, some cases of recognition are integrated with a certain phenomenology and an understanding of the relevant moral concepts, my view of moral perception (simple and propositional) accommodates the conception of certain (prima facie) moral judgments sketched here.
7 More is said later in this and other chapters to explain why many moral attributions can be non-inferential.
8 If perceptions are, as I suggest, experiential, it is natural to conceive moral perceptions as moral experiences. Self-perceptions may be included here, but of course not all self-perceptions of morally significant phenomena, such as acting from a sense of moral obligation, are moral perceptions, nor are moral perceptions the only kind of moral experience. In “The Axiology of Moral Experience” (Journal of Ethics 2 [1998]: 355–75) I have provided an account of moral experience that supports my theory of moral perception and my view (in Chapter 5) of the relation between the moral and aesthetic perception.
9 For discussion of the sense in which perception is information processing, Fred Dretske’s Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981) is a good source. Processing information is more than its mere reception; see Burge, Origins of Objectivity, e.g. 299–301, for discussion of both notions and points concerning Dretske’s view.
10 The view proposed is consistent with my ethical intuitionism developed in The Good in the Right and elsewhere; and this paragraph indicates how to meet an objection by Sarah McGrath to the idea that there is intuitive knowledge (not all of which, to be sure, is perceptual) of particular moral facts. See her “Moral Knowledge by Perception,” Philosophical Perspectives 18 (2004): 209–29, esp. 223.
11 For related work developing a partial phenomenology of moral perception, see Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons, “What Does Phenomenology Tell Us about Moral Objectivity?” Social Theory and Policy (2008): 267–300. They also explore phenomenological aspects of fittingness.
12 Why these kinds of knowledge should be considered non-inferential is explained in some detail in chaps. 3 and 7 of my Epistemology.
13 Here and in many other places it will be evident that I am taking moral perceptions to arouse or have some other important connection with motivation and behavioral tendencies. My view can take account of many points about perception made by Alva Nöe in his wide-ranging Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), but I do not accept all the elements in his “enactive” theory of perception, e.g. that “for perceptual sensation to constitute experience—that is, for it to have genuine representational content—the perceiver must possess and make use of sensorimotor knowledge” (17). Perhaps, however, this requirement is less stringent than one might think: a page earlier he says, “The enactive view insists that mere feeling is not sufficient for perceptual experience (i.e., for experience with world-representing content)” (16). I agree that it is insufficient; and for me the ‘i.e.’ suggests that in determining what counts as perception, kind of content may be more important than the sensorimotor condition and may at least qualify what that condition requires.
14 For a detailed critical discussion of the secondary quality view, see Elizabeth Tropman, “Intuitionism and the Secondary Quality Analogy in Ethics,” Journal of Value Inquiry 44 (2010): 31–45. For a contrasting sympathetic presentation of the analogy, see Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, “Sensibility Theory and Projectivism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, ed. David Copp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 186–218.
CHAPTER 3: Perception as a Direct Source of Moral Knowledge
1 The Good in the Right addresses the role of inference in moral epistemology; and in Practical Reasoning and Ethical Decision (London: Routledge, 2006), esp. chaps. 4–6, I provide an account of the nature of inference and its relation to belief formation.
2 This is argued in detail in Epistemology, esp. chaps. 13–14.
3 The point that seeing something to have a property does not entail a propositional belief that it has that property is still more plausible given that (as suggested in Chapter 1) seeing a thing to have a property does not even require believing it to have that property and thereby conceptualizing it as, say, a spruce; it apparently requires only a non-doxastic kind of discrimination of the property, whereas believing that a thing has the property requires conceptualizing the property.
4 For critical discussion of Nicholas Sturgeon’s “Cornell Realist” attempt to naturalize moral properties, originally presented in “Moral Explanations,” in Morality, Reason, and Truth, ed. David Copp and David Zimmerman (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985), see my “Ethical Naturalism and the Explanatory Power of Moral Concepts,” in Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Steven Wagner and Richard Warner (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 95–115. That paper argues that naturalizing moral explanations is possible without naturalizing moral properties and that some of the work those explanations do is non-causal.
5 Space does not permit comparing this view with moral sense theories, but I take those to be best understood as naturalizing moral properties and making them response-dependent; I do neither. For a version of this view usefully contrasting with mine, see Michael Smith, “Objectivity and Moral Realism: On the Significance of the Phenomenology of Moral Experience,” in Michael Smith, Ethics and the A Priori (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). A related theory developed more closely in relation to empirical psychology is the “construct sentimentalism” of Jesse Prinz in The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), which is examined in “Prinz’s Subjectivist Moral Realism,” a detailed critique by David Copp (Nous 45, no. 3 [2011]: 577–94). An informative discussion of sensibility accounts of moral judgments, with an examination of an anti-realist version, is provided by D’Arms and Jacobson, “Sensibility Theory and Projectivism.”
6 Readers who notice that most of my examples of moral perception are of wrongs rather than “rights” may wonder why. Arguably, the institution of morality is more strongly oriented toward preventing wrongs than toward producing right actions. It is also arguable that our being more sensitive to what violates obligations than to their fulfillments has fitness value. Pursuing these important (and compatible) hypotheses is beyond the scope of this book.
7 I am not taking a constitution relation to be an identity relation; hence, even if being morally obligated to A is equivalent to (say) the proposition that A-ing is a promise keeping, a truth telling, a rendering of aid, or … the property of obligatoriness is simply that disjunctive property (if there are disjunctive properties). But there is surely a sense in which a particular act, such as wronging a friend by lying, is at least partly constituted by that lie.
8 Note that when x is a constitutive as opposed to instrumental means to y, y is not possible without x. Smiling is not possible without the facial movements that constitute it, but telling a joke may or may not be a means to producing smiles. To be sure, the constitutive means can have more than one cause, as can smiling itself; an artificial smile, caused by stimulating the facial muscles through brain manipulation, is still a smile. But the relation between the constitutive means and what it constitutes is not contingent.
9 Note that I say, “if there happens to be a level that is basic for us”; I leave open that there is none, though in any given case of perception there cannot be an infinity of levels and so there must be a level basic on that occasion. This indicates my response to Jonathan Dancy, who, reacting to my point that moral properties are not observable in the sense that they are phenomenally representable, expressed doubt that “there is something elementary in all perception, so that, for instance, the mechanic’s basic awareness cannot be of the defective functioning of the water pump.” See “Moral Perception,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume, 84 (2010): 111 (this is a commentary on my “Moral Perception and Moral Knowledge”). I agree that a mechanic can simply hear the defectiveness of a water pump. But I doubt this is a basic perception. The mechanic surely hears the defectiveness in the way one normally recognizes a face—not by drawing an inference from an ascription of some telltale property but by responding to, say, a scraping at a certain pitch and loudness, an origin near the radiator, a contrast with the normal sounds, and so forth. Granted, we could evolve so that certain complex patterns are not in this way “decomposable”—perhaps some are not. This is a contingent matter on which my theory of perception is neutral.
10 That the relation between the base properties and the moral ones consequential on them is necessary and a priori is argued in chaps. 1 and 2 of The Good in the Right and “Skepticism about the A Priori,” but the main points in this book do not depend on that strong view.
11 My reliabilism here concerns conditions for knowledge, not perception: it leaves open whether we can perceive something only given a “reliable” connection between its having, in the circumstances, the relevant properties and our perceptually responding to it (though this connection cannot be, in a certain way, accidental).
12 This paragraph indicates some of the reasons why my theory of moral perception should not be conceived as a “perceptual account of moral knowledge” in general, as seems to be suggested by Carla Bagnoli in “Moral Perception and Knowledge by Principles,” in The New Intuitionism, ed. Jill Graper Hernandez (London: Continuum, 2011), 101–3. Knowledge of moral principles and subsumptive knowledge of singular moral propositions are not perceptual, though at least the latter may epistemically depend on perception. It is an interesting question whether, for classical utilitarianism, there can be perceptual moral knowledge. Consider wrongness. This is suboptimality with respect to consequences for hedonic (or other non-moral) consequences. It is not clear how this property could be perceptible—which is of course not to say there can be no other way to know its presence.
CHAPTER 4: Perceptual Grounds, Ethical Disagreement, and Moral Intuitions
1 For the notion of an illocutionary act, see J. L. Austin’s influential How To Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) and (among the many discussions since then) William P. Alston, Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
2 There are still other cases of disagreement, and indeed disagreement as considered here (and in the epistemological literature) is a special case of cognitive disparity. This notion and related ones are discussed in detail in my “Cognitive Disparities: Dimensions of Intellectual Diversity and the Resolution of Disagreements,” forthcoming from Oxford University Press in a collection edited by David Christensen and Jennifer Lackey. An example is difference in degree of conviction. If one person barely believes p (or simply accepts it, as with a well-confirmed but disputed scientific hypothesis, without actually believing it) and another says, with great conviction ‘Surely p’, this may occasion illocutionary disagreement and may lead to content-specific disagreement as the two, in discussing the matter, develop different higher-order beliefs, say through differing ascriptions of probabilities.
3 In, e.g., “The Ethics of Belief and the Morality of Action: Intellectual Responsibility and Rational Disagreement,” Philosophy 86 (2011): 5–29.
4 Roger Crisp, in “Intuitionism and Disagreement,” in Timmons, Greco, and Mele, Rationality and the Good, 31–39, forcefully raises this kind of problem, and I have responded in the same volume, 204–8. I have discussed disagreement further in “The Ethics of Belief and the Morality of Action.” Crisp has also developed his position; see “Reasonable Disagreement: Sidgwick’s Principle and Audi’s Intuitionism,” in Hernandez, The New Intuitionism, 151–68. Further discussion of Sidgwick’s principle is provided by Ralph Wedgwood, “The Moral Evil Demons,” in Disagreement, ed. Richard Feldman and Ted A. Warfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010), 216–46.
5 Consider, e.g., a not atypical characterization by Feldman and Warfield, Disagreement, meant to capture (as it surely does) a notion common in the literature: “[P]eers literally share all evidence and are equal relative to their abilities and dispositions relevant to interpreting that evidence” (2). Cf. Jennifer Lackey’s characterization in “Disagreement and Belief Dependence,” in Feldman and Warfield, Disagreement, 274. She presupposes in the context (as do many studies of peer disagreement) that consideration of the proposition by both parties has occurred and, often, has occurred over time and in a way that requires some thought regarding the relevant evidence.
6 Two points may help here. First, we may use (a) and (b) to characterize parity simpliciter: above all, we widen the scope to include all times and all issues both can consider. Second, though I am discussing only rational persons, the notion of parity would apply to people who are not rational—a complicated case I cannot consider here.
7 To be sure, unless it is rational for us to take ourselves to be rational in believing p (which is not to imply that we must in fact have any such higher-order belief), we may not rationally take ourselves to have a reason to consider the disputant incorrect in denying p. But that point is consistent with our simply having such a reason.
8 The reference to evidence here must be taken to designate mainly grounds of an internal kind, such as the “evidence of the senses.” For evidence conceived as publicly accessible supporting fact, I am not suggesting that any one person is necessarily in a better position than another to appraise it, though we may still have a kind of intrinsic advantage in appraising our response to it. But for assessing rationality the central concern is the person’s experience, memory impressions, reflections, and other internal elements.
9 In, e.g., “Self-Evidence,” Philosophical Perspectives 13 (1999): 205–28.
10 Strinctly, an overall obligation (an obligation on balance—“final” obligation) is also prima facie but is not merely so. Prima facie obligations are defeasible, but if not defeated they are final.
11 For discussion of what might constitute a moral expert, see Sarah McGrath, “Skepticism about Moral Expertise as a Puzzle for Moral Realism,” Journal of Philosophy 108, no. 3 (2011): 111–37. The kind of realism implicit in this book can account for the difficulties she poses for the view that moral expertise is possible. Note that expertise even in scientific matters is neither required for achieving scientific knowledge nor an attainment guaranteed simply by acquiring a scientific education.
12 As I have noted in many places, the self-evident may be withholdable, even disbelievable. This is important for explaining how competing theorists, such as moral “particularists,” can deny self-evident moral principles of the kind I defend in The Good in the Right. How this denial is consistent with rationality is explained in my “Intuition, Inference, and Rational Disagreement in Ethics,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11 (2008): 475–92.
13 After writing this I read a recent paper by Patricia Greenspan which makes the related point that “[E]motions can serve as rational barriers to discounting reasons.” See “Emotions and Moral Reasons,” in Morality and the Emotions, ed. Carla Bagnoli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 40. This holds for intuitions too; e.g., an intuition about a sick father might lead one both to recognize and to give adequate weight to reasons implicit in his values, some of which one might have difficulty articulating at the time one’s moral intuition takes shape. My account of the evidential value of emotion in Chapter 6 will show how, in the same non-inferential way, emotions can respond similarly to reasons, often in concert with intuition. But whether or not one articulates reasons, intuition may reflect discernment of their weight, much as we may take account of multiple elements in a poem or a painting as we intuitively interpret and judge it.
14 Cf. Ross’s remarks on intuitive induction in chap. 2 of The Right and the Good. Despite the term ‘induction’ he seems to allow for non-inferential formation of the relevant general belief arising from apprehending instances of one or more crucial properties figuring in the proposition believed.
15 One might think intuitions are constituted by “a subclass of inclinations to believe,” as argued by Joshua Erlenbaugh and Bernard Molyneux, “Intuitions as Inclinations to Believe,” Philosophical Studies 145 (2009): 89–109. It seems to me that an entailment here is the most that can be claimed, at least on the plausible assumption that we are speaking of (occurrent) phenomenal states and may take inclinations to believe as dispositional in nature.
16 Moore said of propositions about the good, for instance, that “when I call such propositions ‘Intuitions’ I mean merely to assert that they are incapable of proof.” See Principia Ethica, x). See also Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), for his use of ‘intuiteds’ to designate intuited propositions (this category is wider than Moore’s in that he intended to use ‘intuition’ as he here characterizes it for propositions that are not only true but also self-evident).
17 Most of these notions are discussed in The Good in the Right, e.g. 32–39, 48, and 208, note 37. But it contains little explicit treatment of intuitive seemings.
18 For detailed discussion of the ontological and other aspects of hallucination (as well as an account of the a priori that supports intuitionism), see chaps. 1, 2, 5, and 6 of Epistemology.
19 For Walter Sinnott-Armstrong moral intuitions are all doxastic: “I define ‘moral intuition’ as a strong immediate moral belief.” See “Framing Moral Intuitions,” in his Moral Psychology, vol. 2, The Cognitive Science of Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 47–76 (47). Cf. the view of Paul Thagard and Tracy Finn concerning what they consider representative moral intuitions: “The intuitions that killing and eating people is wrong and that aiding needy people is right are judgments of which we usually have conscious awareness” (emphasis mine). See “Conscience: What Is Moral Intuition?” in Bagnoli, Morality and the Emotions, 151. They conceive intuition as equivalent to (or at least entailing) judgment. I find this conception too narrow, though I agree that one can have an intuition dispositionally, as where it is stored in memory—and one can even have it in focal consciousness without being aware that one has it or aware of it under that description. An instructive related discussion of intuition, especially as connected with emotion, is Peter Railton’s “The Affective Dog and Its Rational Tale,” forthcoming in Ethics.
20 This is not to deny that one can draw an inference and arrive at a proposition that seems to one true, but (perhaps from a skeptical disposition) one does not believe. Nor should it be denied that one can both inferentially believe that p and find p intuitive. Finding a proposition intuitive does not require any particular route either to considering it or to believing it if one does; and inferring a proposition is consistent with either disbelieving it (as where one is deducing a contradiction to refute an opposing view) or, by contrast, with its seeming true to one without one’s accepting or believing it.
21 My “Self-Evidence” contains a more detailed account of this concept of self-evidence than The Good in the Right. I should add that we might also speak of full understanding to avoid the suggestion that adequacy implies sufficiency only for some specific purpose. Neither term is ideal, but “full” may suggest maximality, which is also inappropriate.
22 Obviousness is relative in a way self-evidence is not: what is self-evident, as my account makes clear, is justifiably believable by anyone who adequately understands it; but what is properly called obvious is understood to be readily seen to be true by a kind of person whose comprehensional level is presupposed in the context in which the obviousness is ascribed to a proposition. We may also speak of self-evidence for a person where this means not ‘believed by that person to be self-evident’ (as in some uses) but ‘self-evident and capable of being justifiedly believed by that person on the basis of adequately understanding it’. The latter—appropriately—makes understanding self-evident propositions, though not self-evidence, relative to persons.
23 That the self-evident is a priori should be obvious from my characterization of it as knowable on the basis of (adequately) understanding it. This holds of axioms as commonly understood, and that point helps to explain why it is plausible to take the self-evident as the base case of the a priori, underlying, e.g., provability. For an explication of this view, see chaps. 5 and 6 of my Epistemology.
24 Note that even a self-evident proposition may be a conclusion of reflection and that understanding it may involve inference. Consider this theorem: If p entails q, q entails r, and not-r, then not-p. Someone unfamiliar with formal logic may have to realize, by inferring it from p entails q and q entails r, that p entails r, in order to see (via the formal truth corresponding to modus tollens) the truth of the theorem. But that p entails r is entailed by the self-evident theorem; it is not a premise for that theorem but an implication of it, nor do we need a separate premise to see the truth of the theorem. In “Self-Evidence” (cited earlier) I call this an internal inference and explain how it differs from the external kind that indicates premise-dependent knowledge and justification.
25 The second stage is comprehensional; the third is active in a way the second makes possible, but it may occur only later when, e.g., there is an occasion to apply the concept.
26 In “Moral Judgment and Reasons for Action,” in my Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), I have defended this point in detail and noted much relevant literature.
27 That biological evolution is compatible with theism is perhaps obvious, and an explanation of its compatibility with various kinds of theism is provided in chap. 10 of my Rationality and Religious Commitment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011). For a brief treatment of how morality has apparently evolved in the history of our species, see Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). His discussion of loyalty (163–66), which he calls “a moral duty” (165), is representative. Also informative on this topic is Patricia Smith Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
28 Does the point violate “Hume’s law,” according to which one cannot deduce an ought from an is? I am not claiming that there are formally valid inferences of the kind in question, nor even that there are informally (“synthetically”) valid ones from descriptive propositions to ascriptions of overall (final) obligation. The a priori connection is between descriptive propositions and ascriptions of prima facie obligation. But prima facie obligation is important; it is certainly a moral status, and it should lead us to act in accord with it if there is no overriding set of factors. The epistemological point in question is defended in, e.g., chaps. 1 and 2 of The Good in the Right.
CHAPTER 5: Moral Perception, Aesthetic Perception, and Intuitive Judgment
1 Granted, historical properties are relevant to the value of aesthetic objects. But the value of an aesthetic object need not be, and certainly need not be exhausted by, aesthetic value. The beauty of a sculpture is not a matter of who shaped, textured, and colored it but of the shape, texture, and color it has. A perfect replica would be equivalent in beauty, grace, elegance, and so forth for other aesthetic properties.
2 For a detailed account of the determination relation in question, see Paul Audi, “Grounding: A Theory of the In Virtue Of Relation,” forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophy.
3 For an informative discussion of how aesthetic properties are related to other kinds and of the extent to which attribution of the former may be appropriately subsumptive, see Richard W. Miller, “Three Versions of Objectivity: Aesthetic, Moral, and Scientific,” in Aesthetics and Ethics, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 26–58. Peter Railton’s “Aesthetic Value, Moral Value, and the Ambitions of Naturalism” (in the same volume, 59–105) also bears on the basis of aesthetic properties. It is fruitfully compared with Sturgeon’s “Moral Explanations,” cited above.
4 Much more could be said about the ontology of artworks, but there is no reason to think we must settle for an ontology that undermines the possibility of aesthetic value that is analogous in the suggested way to moral value. Regarding the example of gratitude, if one thinks it represents etiquette rather than ethics, I would suggest that in any case the most important standards of etiquette may overlap ethical standards and may be sufficiently analogous to them for our purposes here.
5 Notice, however, that we cannot validate perceptual beliefs without relying on perception itself. This circularity problem has been examined by a number of epistemologists, notably William P. Alston. See his “Epistemic Circularity,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 46 (1986): 263–90.
6 Critical discussion of my view is provided by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong in “Reflections on Reflection in Robert Audi’s Moral Intuitionism,” in Timmons, Greco, and Mele, Rationality and the Good, 19–30 (with a response from me on 201–4). Other relevant papers are contained in his three-volume collection from MIT Press (2008). See also Michael R. DePaul, “Intuitions in Moral Inquiry,” in Copp, The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, 595–623. Sinnott-Armstrong raises further problems for intuitionism, though in this case concerning justification more than reliability, in “Framing Moral Intuitions,” cited earlier, and “An Empirical Challenge to Intuitionism,” in Hernandez, The New Intuitionism, 11–28. A valuable defense of evidential appeals to intuition (given criticism like Sinnott-Armstrong’s) is provided by Michael Huemer in “Revisionary Intuitionism,” Social Theory and Policy 25 (2008): 368–92.
7 I am assuming here a moderate generalism about grounds of moral obligations, on which certain kinds of properties, like killings, always imply prima facie wrongness. This is compatible with holism about overall obligation but not with strong particularism of the kind Jonathan Dancy has defended. I have addressed this controversy and defended my view in “Ethical Generality and Moral Judgment,” in Contemporary Debates in Ethical Theory, ed. James Dreier (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 285–304.
8 I have proposed a theory of intrinsic value in “Intrinsic Value and Reasons for Action,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 41, supplement (2003): 30–56. On the prospects for conceiving intrinsic value hedonistically, see Roger Crisp, Reasons and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Fred Feldman, “The Good Life: A Defense of Attitudinal Hedonism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2002): 604–28.
CHAPTER 6: Emotion and Intuition as Sources of Moral Judgment
1 Thagard and Finn, e.g., say, “Introspection supports the claim that moral intuitions are a kind of emotional consciousness” (“Conscience: What Is Moral Intuition?” 151), though they carefully avoid implying that either intuition or emotion is irrational: “[M]oral intuition, like emotional consciousness in general, is not just visceral, because our overall interpretation of a scene is colored by cognitive appraisal as well” (152). Although Mark Wynn does not explicitly identify emotion with feeling in the sense in which he associates the latter with intuition, he sympathetically (perhaps with full agreement) cites Schleiermacher’s view that “Intuition without feeling is nothing and has neither the proper origin nor the proper force; feeling without intuition is also nothing … they are originally one and unseparated” (quoted in Wynn, Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding, 66). Wynn’s quotation from Quentin Smith is a more recent indication of the association: “In this rejoicing I am experiencing a captivated intuition of the determinately appearing importance of global fulfillment.” See Smith’s The Felt Meaning of the World: A Metaphysics of Feeling (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1986), 64 in Wynn. For a wide-ranging treatment of emotion in relation to intuition, see Sabine Roeser, Moral Emotions and Intuitions (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
2 This is not to deny that a proposition can expresses a kind of cognitive norm important for the constitution and rationality of the emotion. Consider what Robert C. Roberts calls a “defining proposition” for an emotion; e.g., “Relief’s defining proposition is this: ‘It is important that X be in condition Y, though X was not, or might not have been, or was not known to me to be, in condition Y’.” See Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 279. For a recent statement of the tripartite conception, with detailed discussion of emotions in art, see Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. 244–52.
3 A great deal has been written on emotion, much of it confirming this tripartite conception (though our examples will illustrate cases in which at least the cognitive element may be, if not absent, then indefinite. Among the valuable book-length treatments are Robert M. Gordon, The Structure of Emotions: Investigations in Cognitive Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Robert C. Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology; and Linda Zagzebski, Divine Motivation Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). A recent short but wide-ranging treatment is Jon Elster’s Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. chap. 2, pp. 145–61. For him emotions “do not seem to form a natural kind” (146), which I find plausible. He goes on to list six features that are common and important, including triggering by beliefs (147). For reasons that will soon be apparent, I take many factors that evoke emotion to be pre-doxastic.
4 Cf. John Deigh’s view that any account of emotion must do justice to the fact that “emotions are common to both humans and beasts … [though] the set to which humans are liable is much greater than the set to which beasts are liable….” He illustrates: “[T]he terror of horses fleeing a burning stable, the rage of a bull after provocation by a tormentor, and the delight of a hound in finding and retrieving its quarry are all examples.” See his Emotions, Values, and the Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 18. On my view, these are not full-bloodedly emotions unless they embody beliefs. It is difficult to say whether animals might have the relevant kind of belief; certainly they may come close enough to have kinds of emotions at least very much like the same ones in human beings.
5 Here I depart from strong cognitive theories of emotion, those on which, as Roeser puts it, “emotions are judgments of value” (Moral Emotions and Intuitions, 202). Her view is, in part, that “emotions are states that are cognitive and affective … non-inferential, normative judgments. We can understand emotions as fulfilling the role of non-inferential judgments or intuitions … They bridge the is-ought gap and they let us make context-sensitive, holistic moral judgments. Paradigmatically, particular moral intuitions are emotions” (204). The judgmental view also encourages thinking of emotions as more behavioral than they are, at least insofar as judgments are made. But presumably a judgment can arise and be held without having been made, say in an episode of appraisal. Perhaps the judgment view is best understood as taking emotions to be held judgments, rather than judgings or their products. The truth-value problem and others remain, however. Further critical points bearing on the judgment view are made by Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology, e.g. 87–89.
6 Arguably, fearing that p is incompatible with believing that p, but the point might be pragmatic. If I believe p, it might be odd to say I fear that p, but must one stop fearing that the tornado will hit when one gains much evidence (and thereby believes) that it will? Perhaps in that case one passes into fearing its impact. In any case, anger illustrates the relevant point in the text: that an emotion can embody both kinds of belief. Anger with a man can be partly constituted by propositional belief that he did something nasty to his wife and believing him to be likely to continue the pattern.
7 An account of the difference between dispositional beliefs and related phenomena, with much analysis concerning the constitution belief itself, is given in my “Dispositional Beliefs and Dispositions to Believe,” cited in note 10 to Chapter 1.
8 Compare this with the strong view that “since moral judgments depend, at bottom, on how we respond emotionally to the world around us, the idea of a purely rational approach to morality is an oxymoron. To be sure, the idea of a purely emotional approach to morality would also be a contradiction in terms; to engage in moral deliberation is to step back from one’s immediate reaction and think critically about it.” See Gregory E. Kaebnick, “Reasons of the Heart: Emotion, Rationality, and the ‘Wisdom of Repugnance’,” The Hastings Center Report 38, no. 4 (2008): 36–45, 36. My position does not require dependence of all moral judgments on emotion, nor would I contrast the emotional with the rational in the way suggested here, but Kaebnick’s paper does provide useful examples of the way emotional responses may have evidential weight. For another contrast with Kaebnick’s view, see Catherine Z. Elgin, Considered Judgment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
9 There is much literature concerning how, from a neurobiological point of view, emotions might conduce to survival; see, e.g., Thagard and Finn, “Conscience: What Is Moral Intuition?”; Jorge Mall, Ricardo De Oliveira-Souza, and Roland Zahn, “Neuroscience and Morality: Moral Judgments, Sentiments, and Values,” in Narvaez and Lapsley, Personality, Identity, and Character, 106–35; and, for a developmental perspective, Darcia Narvaez, “Triune Ethics Theory and Moral Personality,” in Narvaez and Lapsley, Personality, Identity, and Character, 136–58.
CHAPTER 7: The Place of Emotion and Moral Intuition in Normative Ethics
1 See chap. 2 of The Right and the Good for Ross’s introduction and most influential discussion of these principles. In chap. 5 of The Good in the Right I discuss them further and introduce refinements and some revisions of Ross’s formulations.
2 Two clarifications will help. First, saying something true need not constitute being truthful; the statement may be intentionally misleading or accidentally made. Second, veracity—roughly honesty—may be mistakenly conceived as the disposition to communicate truth when a circumstance or question—say, ‘Do you believe p?’—makes that relevant. It is not quite equivalent to that and withholding truth even when asked one’s beliefs need not count against veracity. Some people should be put off or greeted with silence. Taciturnity does not imply dishonesty. What counts against veracity is chiefly lying, as well as certain kinds of deception. Some tendency to cooperate with certain inquirers may be a requirement of veracity as a virtue; but to explicate all that would require an excursion into the theory of veracity.
3 Cf. Ross: “I use ‘gratitude’ to mean returning of services” (The Right and the Good, 23). Even apart from not applying to the attitudinal use of the term, this suggests that gratitude requires reciprocity that goes beyond expression of appreciation. Reciprocity, especially in kind or at the same level, is only one way to manifest gratitude. For discussion of its scope, see chap. 5 of The Good in the Right.
4 These two prima facie obligations are introduced and discussed in some detail in chap. 5 of The Good in the Right.
5 The distinction between internal and external roles of emotions in supporting moral judgment may be clarified by considering the roles that—despite common interpretations of Kant—emotions can play in Kantian ethics. Here Carla Bagnoli’s “Emotions and the Categorical Authority of Moral Reasons” (in her Morality and the Emotions, 62–81), which explores Kant’s resources for taking account of emotions in ethics, is instructive. She treats respect, e.g., as the “emotional aspect of practical reason.” See esp. 75–78.
6 In chaps. 3–6 of The Architecture of Reason: The Structure and Substance of Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) I have extensively discussed what constitutes rational desire. Further analysis is provided in my “Prospects for a Naturalization of Practical Reason: Humean Instrumentalism and the Normative Authority of Desire,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10, no. 3 (2002): 235–63.
7 See esp. chap. 2 of John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. George Sher (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1979), 24–25, in which Mill says, “There exists no moral system in which there do not arise unequivocal cases of conflicting obligations … and there is no case of obligation in which some secondary principle is not involved” (25). What Mill calls secondary principles seem much like Ross’s principles of prima facie obligation. Mill would deny their self-evidence but would agree with Ross in affirming (though on utilitarian grounds) the prima facie obligations in question.
8 David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” reprinted in Criticism: The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment, ed. Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, and Gordon McKenzie (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1958), 446.