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Notes
Moral perception can come in a variety of forms. For an overview, see Jeremy J. Wisnewski, “The Case for Moral Perception,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (2015): 129–148. Wisnewski points at the “difference between acknowledging that a situation raises a moral issue and seeing how one ought to act within a situation where such an issue is raised,” and adds that “some might regard the sort of moral perception picked out by the first use (perceiving moral relevance) as common and plausible, but regard the second sense of moral perception (perceiving what one ought to do) as problematic” (p. 137). Peter Goldie distinguishes between perception of thick evaluative facts (such as seeing what is the kind thing to do) and perception of thin evaluative facts (such as seeing what is the right thing to do), and argues that moral perception is more plausible in the first case than in the second (“Seeing What is the Kind Thing to Do. Perception and Emotion in Morality,” Dialectica 61 (2007): 347–361). In this article, I try to provide an answer to critics of the color analogy who ask for examples of non-moral perception that are relevantly analogous to cases of moral perception. Thus, it suffices to point out that at least some cases of seeing moral value (not necessarily all of them) are relevantly analogous to at least some cases of seeing emotion, and I have chosen my examples with this goal in mind. One could, of course, try to defend an analogy between cases of all the varieties of moral perception and cases of emotion perception, but that project is different from mine, and I doubt whether it can be carried out within the limits of a single article.
See David Wiggins, “Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life,” in his Needs, Values, Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 87–137; Wiggins, “A Sensible Subjectivism?,” in Needs, Values, Truth, pp. 185–214; John McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” in his Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 131–150. Strictly speaking, McDowell compares the perception of values to the perception of secondary qualities. But, as Peter Railton rightly remarks, “color has been the natural stand-in for ‘secondary quality’ in most philosophical discussions of the analogy” (“Red, Bitter, Good,” in his Facts, Values and Norms. Essays Toward a Morality of Consequence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 131–147 (p. 143)).
See Simon Blackburn, “Errors and the Phenomenology of Value,” in Ted Honderich (ed.), Morality and Objectivity. A Tribute to J. L. Mackie (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 1–22; Crispin Wright, “Moral Values, Projection, and Secondary Qualities,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Supplementary Volume 62 (1988): 1–26.
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Volume 1 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980); Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Volume 2 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980); Wittgenstein, “Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment,” in Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 203–240.
Ibid., §227; Wittgenstein, Zettel (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), §225; Wittgenstein, Remarks Volume 2, §170. While the analogy between moral perception and emotion perception is not itself totally original (see Robert Audi, Moral Perception (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 41 and 58), the Wittgenstein angle is (as far as I know).
McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” p. 136.
McDowell is a dispositionalist about color. For an interesting overview of how different color theories may lead to different views on moral perception, see D’Arms and Jacobson, “Sensibility Theory and Projectivism,” in David Copp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 186–218. They show how McDowell can be criticized not by criticizing the analogy (which is my focus), but by accepting the analogy and adopting a different color theory which, if colors and values are analogous, then leads to a different theory about moral perception. Elizabeth Tropman argues, for example, that intuitionists can accept the color analogy, although they do not believe that values are essentially dependent on human subjectivity, because they can defend the view that colors are not essentially dependent on human subjectivity either (“Intuitionism and the Secondary-Quality Analogy in Ethics,” The Journal of Value Inquiry 44 (2010): 31–45).
McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” p. 134.
Wiggins, “Truth, Invention,” p. 108.
The immediacy of moral perception is emphasized by, among others, Charles Starkey, “On the Category of Moral Perception,” Social Theory and Practice 32 (2006): 75–96; Jeremy J. Wisnewski and Henry Jacoby, “Failures of Sight. An Argument for Moral Perception,” American Philosophical Quarterly 44 (2007): 229–244.
McDowell, “On the Reality of the Past,” in Christopher Hookway and Philip Pettit (eds.), Action and Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 127–144 (p. 129).
Blackburn, op. cit., p. 17.
Blackburn sees the color analogy as “the nub of the matter” (ibid., p. 17) and Wright claims that moral realists rely on the comparison (op. cit., p. 1).
D’Arms and Jacobson, op. cit., p. 212.
Simon Kirchin, Metaethics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 130–131.
Andrew Fisher and Simon Kirchin (eds.), Arguing About Metaethics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p. 220.
This is not to say that color perception is entirely passive, that there is no active element in it at all. After all, we have seen that it crucially depends on subjective responses, and responses are not just reactions. P. M. S. Hacker lists some passive and some active elements of perception in The Intellectual Powers. A Study of Human Nature (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 296–297.
Wittgenstein, “Philosophy of Psychology,” §256.
Wittgenstein, Remarks Volume 2, §83.
See Nicole Hausen and Michel ter Hark, “Aspect Seeing in Wittgenstein and in Psychology,” in Timothy P. Racine and Kathleen L. Slaney (eds.), A Wittgensteinian Perspective on the Use of Conceptual Analysis in Psychology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 87–109.
On the importance of the active element in seeing emotion, see Rowland Stout, “Seeing the Anger in Someone’s Face,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 84 (2010): 29–43 (pp. 39–40, 42).
See McDowell, “Are Moral Requirements?” and “Values and Secondary Qualities”; Wisnewski, “The Case for Moral Perception.”
For reasons of space, not all the differences between color education on one hand and moral and emotional education on the other can be commented upon in this article. Goldie provides an account of certain differences between learning a virtue and learning a skill, and this seems like an interesting way to capture a difference between color education and moral/emotional education. Learning to see moral value and emotion are, arguably, forms of (or close to) learning a virtue, while learning to see color is a form of (or close to) learning a skill. One of Goldie’s points is that (fictional) narratives have a more explicit and prominent role in learning a virtue than they have in learning a skill. See Goldie, op. cit., pp. 351–356.
Wittgenstein, “Philosophy of Psychology,” §168 and §216.
Ibid., §140, §144 and §235.
See Gordon Baker, “The Grammar of Aspects and Aspects of Grammar,” in his Wittgenstein’s Method. Neglected Aspects (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 279–293 (p. 281); Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 37. As I said, Wittgenstein provides many different examples of aspect perception. Not all aspect perception requires concepts or sophistication. See Baker, op. cit., p. 292, endnote 2.
Severin Schroeder, “A Tale of Two Problems. Wittgenstein’s Discussion of Aspect Perception,” in John Cottingham and P. M. S. Hacker (eds.), Mind, Method, and Morality. Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 352–371 (p. 360).
Audi, op. cit., p. 121.
Starkey, op. cit., p. 79.
Wright, op. cit., pp. 12–13.
Michael Watkins and Kelly Dean Jolley, “Pollyanna Realism. Moral Perception and Moral Properties,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 80 (2002): 75–85 (p. 77).
Wittgenstein, “Philosophy of Psychology,” §245.
Blackburn, op. cit., p. 14.
See Nigel Pleasants, “Institutional Wrongdoing and Moral Perception,” Journal of Social Philosophy 39 (2008): 96–115 (pp. 110, 113).
Schroeder, op. cit., p. 366.
Wittgenstein, “Philosophy of Psychology,” §220.
Baker, op. cit., p. 281.
Wright, op. cit., pp. 15–16.
Blackburn, op. cit., p. 14.
For a good discussion of the dispute, see Railton, op. cit.
What do we make of the idea of an appropriate color perceiver when confronted, for example, with the fact that women are better at discriminating among colors than men (see Israel Abramov et al., “Sex and Vision II. Color Appearance of Monochromatic Lights,” Biology of Sex Differences 3 (2012)), or with the fact that languages cut up the color spectrum in different ways?
Wright, op. cit., p. 16.
Ibid., p. 24.
D’Arms and Jacobson, op. cit., pp. 201–202.
Wright, op. cit., p. 24.
For a brief explanation why the circularity need not be vicious, see Wiggins, “A Sensible Subjectivism?,” pp. 187–189 and Fisher and Kirchin, op. cit., p. 218.
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §115.
There seems to be, for example, an interesting analogy between primary emotions and primary colors. Robert Plutchik, who developed the so-called “wheel of emotions,” suggesting eight primary emotions grouped on a positive or negative basis, writes that “primary emotions can be conceptualized in a fashion analogous to a color wheel – placing similar emotions together and opposites 180 degrees apart, like complementary colors. Other emotions are mixtures of the primary emotions, just as some colors are primary and others made by mixing the primary colors” (“The Nature of Emotions,” American Scientist 89 (2001): 344–350 (p. 349)).
It is important to note, however, that most of these difficulties are difficulties for the color analogy too, so that they do not in any way harm the conclusion that the aspect analogy is a better analogy than the color analogy. An example of such a difficulty is that moral perception is action-guiding in a way that aspect perception and color perception are not (see Wright, op. cit., p. 8). While it is up to subjects whether they care about the colors or aspects they perceive, it seems impossible to perceive wrongness and not care about it (see Blackburn, op. cit., p. 15). This, however, is not necessarily a problem, as Wright recognizes, because it can be argued that moral perception is the perception of a cause for concern, that that is what is specific about moral perception (see McDowell, “Are Moral Requirements?”; Starkey, op. cit., p. 86). Moreover, emotions seem much better placed as causes for concern than colors are. Another way to answer Wright and Blackburn on this point is suggested by Timothy Chappell, who argues that “in evolutionary terms, what is hard to explain is not the representation that motivates, but the representation that does not motivate. As a matter of the history of our species, the (original) point of perceptual capacities in a tough world must usually have been to mandate response rather than to get hold of information for its own sake” (“Moral Perception,” Philosophy 83 (2008): 421–437 (pp. 434–435).
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §122.
(1) Wittgenstein contrasts color disagreement with disagreement over the question of whether an expression of feeling is genuine or not (“Philosophy of Psychology,” §351–352). Seeing the genuineness of an expression of feeling is close to seeing emotion, but arguably already a form of moral perception (which is why I did not choose it as my leading example). So there may be interesting connections between disagreement about emotion and moral disagreement. (2) Wittgenstein asks whether there is such a thing as expert judgement about the genuineness of an expression of feeling (“Philosophy of Psychology,” §355). The link between expert judgment about emotion and expert judgment about moral issues has been touched upon in this article, but can be worked out further. (3) Another similarity is that between what Wittgenstein calls the dawning of an aspect and Wiggins’s repeated use of expressions such as “lighting up” with respect to moral values. See Wiggins, “Truth, Invention,” p. 137 and “A Sensible Subjectivism?” p. 207.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.
See Wisnewski, “The Case for Moral Perception.”
Wittgenstein, Remarks Volume 1, §1000.
Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 307.
Schroeder, op. cit., p. 364.
I am grateful to Nicole Hausen, Stefan Rummens, and an anonymous reviewer for comments on previous versions of this article.
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De Mesel, B. Seeing Color, Seeing Emotion, Seeing Moral Value. J Value Inquiry 50, 539–555 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-015-9535-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-015-9535-4