Phenomenology of the Aftermath: Ethical Theory and the Intelligibility of Moral Experience (original) (raw)
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Evaluative Experiences: The Epistemological Significance of Moral Phenomenology
Recently, a number of phenomenological approaches to experiential justification emerged according to which an experience's justificatory force is grounded in the experience's distinctive phenomenology. The basic idea is that certain experiences exhibit a presentive phenomenology and that they are a source of immediate justification precisely by virtue of their presentive phenomenology. Such phenomenological approaches usually focus on perceptual experiences and mathematical intuitions. In this paper, I aim at a phenomenological approach to ethical experiences. I shall show that we need to make a distinction between evaluative experiences directed at concrete cases and ethical intuitions directed at general principles. The focus will be on evaluative experiences. I argue that evaluative experiences constitute a sui generis type of experience that gain their justificatory force by virtue of their presentive evaluative phenomenology. In section 1, I introduce and motivate the phenomenological idea that certain experiences exhibit a justification-conferring phenomenology. In section 4, I apply this idea to morally evaluative experiences. In section 5, I suggest that certain epistemic intuitions should be considered epistemically evaluative experiences and I outline a strong parallelism between ethics and epistemology.
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ABSTRACT. In recent times, comments have been made and arguments advanced in support of metaethical positions based on the 'phenomenology' of ethical experience in other words, the 'feel' that accompanies our ethical experiences. In this paper I cast doubt on ...
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The relation between moral phenomenology and moral theory is dealt with. The aims in the paper involve the following: clarifying the notion of moral phenomenology, especially the impact that it has on moral theory; interpreting the discussion between moral cognitivism and non-cognitivism in the light of moral phenomenology; presenting the most recent posi tion of cognitive expressivism concerning this debate; pointing out the main shortcomings of this theory, especially in respect to the purported objectivity of moral judgements. Cogni tive expressivism still leaves a gap between the immediate features of our internal moral psychology and their theoretical explanation, thereby losing much of its apparent phenome nological support. A proper understanding of the purported phenomenological objectivity is proposed along with its consequences for moral theory.
This paper critically discusses Charles Taylor’s ethical views in his little known paper “Ethics and Ontology” (2003) by confronting it with the moral phenomenology of Maurice Mandelbaum, as laid out in his (largely neglected) The Phenomenology of Moral Experience (1955). The aim of the paper is to explore the significance of Taylor’s views for the dispute between naturalists, non-naturalists, and quietists in contemporary metaethics. It is divided in six sections. In the first section, I examine Taylor’s critique of naturalism. I continue to discuss his moral phenomenology in more detail in the second and third sections, arguing that Taylor’s move from phenomenology to ontology is problematic. In the fourth section, I evaluate Taylor’s strategy by comparing it with Mandelbaum’s understanding of moral phenomenology, while also extending this comparison to the issue of how to locate the source of moral experience in the fifth section. Based on these discussions, I finally conclude in the sixth section that Taylor’s hermeneutical position, although ontologically incomplete and underdemonstrated, draws attention to a question to which current moral theory does not adequately respond.