Abstract
Moral perception is typically understood as moral properties perception, i.e., the perceptual registration of moral properties such as wrongness or dignity. In this article, I defend a view of moral perception as a process that involves imaginative apprehension of reality. It is meant as an adjustment to the dominant view of moral perception as moral properties perception and as an addition to existing Murdochian approaches to moral perception. The view I present here builds on Iris Murdoch’s moral psychology and holds that moral perception is an imaginative exploration of the particularity of concrete objects of moral reality (e.g., persons, situations, and events), rather than a registration of moral properties. I argue that such imaginative apprehension includes direct and reflective uses of imagination and that this process grounds experiential moral knowledge that serves the ultimate role of moral perception: getting a better grip on concrete objects of moral reality.
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Notes
There is no standard terminology. (a) is also known as ‘moral perception’ or ‘moral perceptualism’ (Werner 2019: 1).
Hutton (2022: 583) suggests that Church (2013) might have come close having argued that “agents perceive moral properties by imagining different ways of proceeding from the current situation, under constraints provided by the moral principles they believe.” His central examples concern individuals that change their moral outlook after having a revelatory experience (e.g., Fred who gives up utilitarianism after being confronted by a fictional portrayal of slavery, an example from Werner 1983: 657–59). Hutton thinks Church’s account can’t explain cases as Fred’s as it concerns moral change that is provoked by experience, not by principle-based inference and concludes that linking imagination and moral perception is a dead end (Hutton 2022: 584). However, the analysis seems limited as it neglects other ways imaginings can have other contents. E.g., the imaginings of future possibilities of moral action that don’t have to be guided by principles (see, e.g., John Dewey’s (1922) concept of ‘dramatic rehearsal’ and ‘imaginings with moral contents’ reaching beyond moral properties (which I will discuss in the following sections).
‘Something other than oneself’ applies to more than just other human beings; Murdoch (2001: 83) suggested we find “self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees.”
Cordner (2016: 208; 213) suggests that Murdochian attention is not only receptiveness in the sense of “waiting-on, serving, answering to”, but that it “involves being present to another in a way that includes ‘letting oneself be seen or recognized’’’ as well. He agrees with Cavell (1969: 279) that “recognizing a person depends upon allowing oneself to be recognized by him” and Velleman (1999: 3) that “love disarms our emotional defenses; it makes us vulnerable to the other.” Murdoch’s (2001: 201) appraisal of the virtue of humility by which she concludes The Sovereignty of Good seems to confirm this interpretation; “The humble man, because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are.”
See Audi 2013 for the most explicit defense of supervenience in this context.
Several other authors have argued that perceptual experience can be penetrated by different sorts of cognitive states, e.g., moods, desires, beliefs, and concepts. See, e.g., Macpherson 2012; Siegel 2010, 2012; Stokes 2012. For accounts that explicitly argue for conceptual mediation of perception, see Brewer 1999, McDowell 1994. Panizza (2020: 283) regards the cognitive penetration argument as a confirmation of Murdoch’s view that perception is “not mediated but enriched by concepts.”
In Murdoch’s moral realism, the Good is a guiding ideal of which we have imperfect knowledge, which can be perfected by turning to concrete things in the world that function as ‘hints’ of the Good (see Panizza 2020: 280).
Nussbaum’s focus is the literature of Henry James (and The Golden Bowl in particular). She only refers once to Murdoch’s Sovereignty of Good without further explanation.
“We have another image of courage at forty from that which we had at twenty” (Murdoch 2001: 28).
An anonymous reviewer expressed the worry that Nussbaum’s comparison of the literary and the moral imagination might turn an ordinary capacity as perception into a literary achievement, which would clash with Murdoch’s examples of the virtuous peasant or mothers of large families by which she seems to support a virtuous, but unexamined life (Murdoch 2001: 2, 51–52). However, I think this distinction between Nussbaum and Murdoch is not correct. Nussbaum’s argument is not that we should aestheticize our lives, but that moral knowledge requires imaginative moral perception. She uses Adam and Maggie’s example because she believes that these experiences written down by Henry James come closer to our actual moral experiences than moral-philosophical works that emphasize abstract concepts and principles. In addition, I do not think Murdoch regards virtuous peasants or mothers of large families as unimaginative individuals, but as individuals that are virtuously engaged with the concrete objects of moral reality that surround them (e.g., the peasant’s crops or animals or the mother’s children). I.e., as individuals who are less susceptible to having their truth-affirming imaginings corrupted by egocentric phantasies.
How many of us have ever seen a cat being ignited?
Diamond’s article was meant as a reply to Nussbaum’s article. She retraces the concept of adventure from Nussbaum’s article and an earlier article on James’ The Golden Bowl (Nussbaum 1983: 44). James (1934: 149) meant that a “human, a personal ‘adventure’ is “a name we conveniently give, after the fact, to any passage, to any situation, that has added the sharp taste of uncertainty to a quickened sense of life. Therefore the thing is, all beautifully, a matter of interpretation and of the particular conditions.”
In the philosophy of perception, several arguments are offered for high-level properties figuring in perception. For defenders of philosophical liberalism, the view that perception includes complex properties as something being a pine tree or causation, see Bayne 2009, Siegel 2006. For criticism see, e.g., Byrne 2001, Carruthers and Veillet 2011.
Cowan (2015) provided a similar argument to defend moral properties perception.
Mylonaki distinguishes a Murdochian view of moral perception from what she calls object views (what I call accounts of moral properties perception here). Mylonaki (2019: 285) argues that, on a Murdochian view, moral perception is about “cognizing an individual reality (a reality graspable in historical and non universalizable concepts) and not an object (a reality graspable in universal terms).” We share the same idea that moral perception is not about registering a set of well-delineated moral facts but about getting a better grip on what I call concrete objects of moral reality or what she calls an ‘individual reality’. So when I use the term ‘object’, I simply refer to Murdoch’s (2001: 17) phrase of M being capable of “giving careful and just attention to an object that confronts her” (emphasis added). Chappell’s (2017: 284) notion of objectual knowledge should be understood in a similar way, as “knowledge of particular things.”
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Ratajczyk, Y. Moral Perception as Imaginative Apprehension. J Ethics (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09462-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09462-5