A hard look at moral perception

Philosophical Studies 172 (8):2055-2072 (2015)
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Abstract

This paper concerns what I take to be the primary epistemological motivation for defending moral perception. Offering a plausible account of how we gain moral knowledge is one of the central challenges of metaethics. It seems moral perception might help us meet this challenge. The possibility that we know about the instantiation of moral properties in something like the way we know that there is a bus passing in front of us raises the alluring prospect of subsuming moral epistemology under the comfortable umbrella of perceptual or, more broadly, empirical knowledge. The good news on this front is that various combinations of metaethical positions and theories of perception arguably have the potential to vindicate moral perception. The bad news, I’ll argue, is that moral perception would be dependent for its epistemic merit on background knowledge of bridge principles linking moral and non-moral properties. Thus, in order to defend a purely perceptual moral epistemology, one would have to argue that knowledge of those principles is likewise perceptual. I further argue it is not.

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David Faraci
Durham University

Citations of this work

Attentional Moral Perception.Jonna Vance & Preston J. Werner - 2022 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 19 (5):501-525.
On experiencing moral properties.Indrek Reiland - 2021 - Synthese 198 (1):315-325.
Moral perception.Preston J. Werner - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (1):e12640.
The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil.Silvia Caprioglio Panizza - 2022 - New York, NY, USA: Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory.

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References found in this work

Knowledge and its limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Principia ethica.George Edward Moore - 1903 - Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications. Edited by Thomas Baldwin.
The meaning of 'meaning'.Hilary Putnam - 1975 - Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7:131-193.
Moral realism: a defence.Russ Shafer-Landau - 2003 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The Contents of Visual Experience.Susanna Siegel - 2010 - , US: Oxford University Press USA.

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