Abstract
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.
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Notes
On a reading of the simile of the sun (made famous by Iris Murdoch), Plato advocated the same basic ability. See her The Sovereignty of the Good.
Mackie, to his credit, does offer serious consideration of this view (in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong), as well as actual arguments against the view. This is a rather exceptional case. Most simply cite the idea and run roughshod over the possibility that it might be more than metaphorical. See McGinn, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction, for example.
The variability and variety Sinnot-Armstrong is discussing is across all moral experience, not just instances of moral perception. Nevertheless, claims of variability about moral phenomenology are often cited as evidence against moral perception. For this reason, Sinnot-Armstrong is a useful representative of a common criticism, even though his target is broader.
Ironically, Loeb makes this claim after reprimanding other philosophers for being “willing to generalize about complex, subtle, and largely empirical matters like this based merely on their own experience and intuitions” (473).
Mackie (1990).
Kuhn (1996).
There is ample psychological literature to back this up. The phenomenon is usually referred to as “confirmation bias.”
It seems to be this kind of misconception that one finds in Loeb, Sinnot-Armstrong, Gill, Mackie, and others. Timmons and Horgan have offered a parallel criticism of Sinnot-Armstrong's claim that moral experience must “feel’” like something, but this does not appear to be a critique of introspection as a general methodology. See their “Prolegomena to a future phenomenology of morals” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 7, 2008.
As John Drummond has put the point in “Moral phenomenology and moral intentionality,” phenomenality requires intentionality. (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 7, 2008).
See Murdoch (2001).
Harman (1977).
See Blum (1994).
See, for example, Drummond (2006).
Horgan and Timmons (2008) use etiquette as a counterexample to Mandelbaum's view. Obviously, I do not think the counterexample works.
One can encounter art one finds truly disgusting, for example, but value it for its commentary on some phenomenon, despite one's visceral reaction to it.
In the following section, I will explore in detail the claim that emotional perception is both literal perception and moral perception. Because I will not examine the other models of perception in any significant detail, I regard the assertion that they can accommodate moral perception as a plausible conjecture, but a conjecture nonetheless.
The distinction is Robert Audi’s. See his Moral Perception (2013).
For a broad overview, see Gobet et al. (2001). For an interesting account of “perceptual chunking” in action, see Chase and Simon (1973). For a broader discussion of perceptual chunking and its connection to learning, see Hall (1991), as well as Goldstone (1998) (Goldstone calls the phenomenon “unitization” and distinguishes it from chunking, though the difference is unimportant in the current context).
Bach y Rita provides one very interesting example of this, discussed in, for example, Clark's Natural Born Cyborgs—namely, seeing with one's tongue.
In 1972 Paul Bach-y-Rita pioneered the use of TVSS (Tactile Visual Sensory Substitution). This was a device worn on the back but connected to a camera worn on the head. The back pack consisted of an array of blunt-ended ‘nails,’ each nail activated by a region of pixels in the course visual grid generated by [a] camera. A more recent descendent of this device uses a much smaller, electrical stimulatory grid, worn on the person’s tongue. Fitted with such devices, subjects report that at first they simply feel the stimulation of the bodily site (the back or the tongue). After extensive practice, in which they actively manipulate the camera while interacting with the world, they begin to experience coarse quai-visual sensations. After a time, they cease to notice the bodily stimulations and instead directly experience objects arrayed in space in front of the camera. If the camera input, for example, presents a rapidly approaching object [by presenting a rapidly expanding tactile grid]…the subject will instinctively duck, and in a way appropriate to the perceived threat. (Clark 2003, 125–126)
See, e.g., Goldstone, cited above.
One might reasonably ask what sort of practice is required to learn to see what a situation demands. I do not think there is a singular answer—different forms of practice and experience may give rise to different forms of enhanced perceptual experience. The tradition of Vipassana Meditation is, however, one promising mode of developing one's moral perceptual faculties, if only because it trains one to be able to direct one's attention away from immediate, self-referring interests. For further discussion, see Wisnewski (2013). Another plausible source of moral training is through acts of imaginative identification, such as those occasioned by certain works of literature. The capacity to see the suffering of others, for example, seems to be expanded by imagining such suffering in literary contexts. For one such example of this in the work of J.M. Coetzee, see Wisnewski (forthcoming).
See, for example, Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science.
Watkins and Jolley defend this diachronic conception of moral perception as well in Watkins and Jolley (2002). But, of course, so does Aristotle.
See Searle on the distinction between ontological and epistemological subjectivity and objectivity in Speech Acts and The Construction of Social Reality.
I am indebted to Jesse Prinz’s (2006) Gut Reactions for this example.
In listing these characteristics, I do not intend to provide the core elements of Mackie’s theory of perception. I am claiming, rather, that those who make the kinds of objections Mackie makes often presuppose a conception of perception with these features.
See Chappell (2008) for a useful discussion of the perception of pattern recognition.
I do not mean to suggest anywhere in my analysis that a simulationist view of sympathy is correct. I do not think we must first mirror in ourselves what others are feeling in order to sympathize with them. In fact, I think this view gets the phenomenology all wrong. Registering distress in the environment should not be equated with having the (mirrored) feeling of those we register in ourselves.
One example of seeing an appropriate response is given by Jacobson (2005), and developed somewhat by Goldie (2007). Jacobson never endorses the claim that there is literal moral perception, but Goldie does: in the most clear-cut cases, “alternative courses of action are no longer considered; one just sees the thing to do” (10).
See Brentano (2006).
See Scheler (2008).
The view that emotional perception is central to morality is defended by a number of other contemporary thinkers: Goldie (2007), Döring (2007), and DesAutels (2012), for example. In none of these cases is emotion presented as bodily perception of the world. In this respect and others, my account goes beyond those mentioned above.
See Wisnewski (forthcoming).
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Wisnewski, J.J. The case for moral perception. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 129–148 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9321-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9321-3