Moral Emotions, Principles, and the Locus of Perception (original) (raw)
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Moral Emotions, Principles, and the Locus of Moral Perception
2006
I vindicate the thrust of the particularist posi tion in moral deliberation. to this purpose, I fo cus on some elements that seem to play a crucial role in first-person moral deliberation and argue that they cannot be incorporated into a more sophisticated system of moral principles. More specifically, I emphasize some peculiarities of moral perception in the light of which I defend the irreducible deliberative relevance of a cer tain phenomenon, namely: the phenomenon of an agent morally coming across a particular situation. Following on from bernard Williams, I talk of an agent’s character as a factor that con tributes to fixing what situations an agent comes morally across. A crucial point, in the debate, will be how an agent confronts the normatively loaded features of his own character when he is engaged in first-person deliberation.
IMPARTIAL MORALITY AND PRACTICAL DELIBERATION AS FIRST-PERSONAL
Metaphilosophy, 2018
Bernard Williams has famously questioned whether impartial morality, and here his primary targets are contemporary versions of Utilitarianism and Kantianism, ‘can allow for the importance of individual character and personal relations in moral experience’. Underlying Williams’s position is a distinction he draws between factual and practical deliberation. While factual deliberation is about the world and brings in a standpoint that is impartial, practical deliberation is, he claims, radically first-personal; it ‘involves an I that [is] intimately the I of my desires’. While it may be thought that Williams’s claim here implies an unpalatable Humean subjectivism, I argue that this does not follow: That one can hold that first-person practical deliberation is directed by both the ‘I of my desires’ and by the world. To defend this possibility I draw on Peter Winch’s famous argument against the universalizability of moral judgments and an example from D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, arguing that in practical deliberations it is possible to discover value in the world, but that what is revealed about the world here depends constitutively on the first-person deliberations and decisions of particular agents.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
In this paper, I defend the view that we can literally perceive the morally right and wrong, or something near enough. In defending this claim, I will try to meet three primary objectives: 1) to clarify how an investigation into moral phenomenology should proceed, 2) to respond to a number of misconceptions and objections that are most frequently raised against the very idea of moral perception, and 3) to provide a model for how some moral perception can be seen as literal perception. Because I take ‘moral perception’ to pick out a family of different experiences, I will limit myself (for the most part) to a discussion of the moral relevance of the emotions.
Emotion, perception and the self in moral epistemology
In this paper, I argue against a perceptual model of moral epistemology. We should not reject the claim that there is a sense in which, on some occasions, emotions may be said to be perceptions of values or reasons. But going further than this, and taking perception as a model for moral epistemology is unhelpful and unilluminating. By focusing on the importance of the dispositions and structures of the self to moral knowledge, I bring out important disanalogies between moral epistemology and typical cases of perceptual expertise. As a result, how we gain, or fail to gain, moral knowledge should not be understood in terms of the operation of a perceptual capacity.
First-Person Morality and the Role of Conscience
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2016
I build on Baker's insight concerning the relationship between having a robust firstperson perspective and being a moral agent in order to show the defects of some recent projects of naturalisation of morality. i argue that morality depends upon having conscience, and is an inherently first-personal experience. I then move on to criticise Baker's too neat distinction between a rudimentary and a robust first-person perspective, and suggest that Baker excessively downplays the role of embodiment in her account of what it is for the same first-person perspective to be instantiated across time.
The psychological foundations of everyday morality and moral expertise
2005
the common image of the moral agent is one who makes decisions. Moral decisions are the product of vast calculation. Principles are discerned, judgments are formed, rules of application are weighed. The requirements of duty, the probative force of outcomes and consequences, and the adjudication of competing claims are all fairly transparent to the rational, deliberative agent who engages in extensive cognitive effort in order to resolve dilemmas, make choices, and justify actions. Indeed, the costly investment of cognitive resources into moral deliberation is thought to underlie the very notion of moral autonomy. Moral freedom is grounded in the rational capacity to discern options, make decisions, and enact intentions.
Emotion and deliberative reasoning in moral judgment
According to an influential dual-process model, a moral judgment is the outcome of a rapid, affect-laden process and a slower, deliberative process. If these outputs conflict, decision time is increased in order to resolve the conflict. Violations of deontological principles pro-scribing the use of personal force to inflict intentional harm are presumed to elicit negative affect which biases judgments early in the decision-making process.This model was tested in three experiments. Moral dilemmas were classified using (a) decision time and consensus as measures of system conflict and (b) the aforementioned deontological criteria. In Experiment 1, decision time was either unlimited or reduced.The dilemmas asked whether it was appropriate to take a morally questionable action to produce a " greater good " outcome. Limiting decision time reduced the proportion of utilitarian (" yes ") decisions, but contrary to the model's predictions, (a) vignettes that involved more deontological violations logged faster decision times, and (b) violation of deontological principles was not predictive of decisional conflict profiles. Experiment 2 ruled out the possibility that time pressure simply makes people more like to say " no. " Participants made a first decision under time constraints and a second decision under no time constraints. One group was asked whether it was appropriate to take the morally questionable action while a second group was asked whether it was appropriate to refuse to take the action. The results repli-cated that of Experiment 1 regardless of whether " yes " or " no " constituted a utilitarian decision. In Experiment 3, participants rated the pleasantness of positive visual stimuli prior to making a decision. Contrary to the model's predictions, the number of deonto-logical decisions increased in the positive affect rating group compared to a group that engaged in a cognitive task or a control group that engaged in neither task. These results are consistent with the view that early moral judgments are influenced by affect. But they are inconsistent with the view that (a) violation of deontological principles are predictive of differences in early, affect-based judgment or that (b) engaging in tasks that are inconsistent with the negative emotional responses elicited by such violations diminishes their impact.