Search Results

The epistemic status of moral discourse turns in part on the explanation of divergent moral beliefs. Whether differences of moral opinion there are best explained by a failure accurately to represent specifically moral features of actions and characters, or whether they are better explained by cognitively blameless differences of preference and desire, not only matters to the cognitive claims of moral discourse. The answer to this question should also shed light on the phenomenology of moral experience and the epistemology of moral judgement. Crispin Wright's arguments suggest that an inferential account of moral belief can only be avoided by positing some anomalous faculty of moral perception. This chapter argues that the genesis of moral experience is one in which cognition and affect are jointly implicated, but that their cooperation does nothing to undermine the thought that moral discourse is, for the most part, both conceptually autonomous and genuinely representational. The concepts of moral reasons, rational conflict, moral competence, imagination, and basic moral judgements are also discussed.

The analogy between experience of value and experience of secondary qualities raises as many questions as it answers. This chapter suggests that moral experience, like much perceptual experience, is ‘aspectual’; that is, it presents us with organised, complex wholes which can only with difficulty (if at all) be dissected into their component parts. It also explores whether there is any arena of perceptual experience that can sustain an analogy with moral experience, while yet respecting the judgement-dependence of moral concepts. Moral values themselves are quite unlike physical objects; after all, it was largely their remoteness from the objects of the physical sciences that motivated the analogy with secondary qualities in the first place. A very apt analogy is to be found in the perception of pictures. This chapter ends by considering three difficulties associated with the secondary-quality model: the non-sensory character of moral experience, the rational relations of moral properties to the natural ones on which they supervene, and the contestability of moral judgements.

Genuine moral judgements might be only available to someone possessed of moral competence, and moral competence requires, at a minimum, that one be susceptible to a specific kind of moral experience — the experience of others' concerns and interests as valuable. That experience, in turn, requires that one be able to conceive of others' purposes as from their subjective point of view, a conception which features some of the affective and motivational phenomenology which they themselves enjoy. This chapter examines subjectivity and its relationship to idiosyncracy, how imagination contributes to one's ability to conceive adequately of others' perspectival experiences including their sentiments, and how the subjective imagination contributes to one's other-person ascriptions of experience.

This chapter discusses pedagogical uses of Durkheim that serve to make sense of obligation by enabling students to see how these and related moral concepts are based on, and express, actual moral feelings and bear on actual moral experience. The chapter looks at a course taught by this bookʇs author to a multidisciplinary audience, including students interested in political philosophy, sociological theory, and political theory. The discussion centres on a four-week section of the course devoted to Durkheim, which focused on readings from Pickering's Sociology of Religion. The course readings also included substantial material from selections in Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

It is now clear that works of literary art can inform moral judgements, contributing to their justifiability and their truth. This chapter suggests how certain features of metaphor can be extended to explain the positive epistemic value of fiction and its special contributions to the epistemic credentials of moral experience. Moral judgements are truth-apt, where ‘truth’ is construed in minimalist terms. Moral properties are a species of response-dependent ones (where a response-dependent property is just one satisfying a response-dependent concept). Unlike secondary qualities, however, they are not sensible simples and nor are they objects of any distinctive perceptual faculty. While the subjective imagination provides a degree of access to the phenomenological features of others' experience, it is not a necessary condition for the possession of concepts of experience and other ‘experience-dependent’ concepts.

This chapter explores Murdoch’s views attacking principle based ethics and argues that, while her concerns point to genuine problems for some principle based approaches, particularism is the wrong lesson to take away from these concerns. When Murdoch rejects theory, she is really rejecting a kind of methodology that approaches ethical issues and problems in an antiseptic and streamlined way. For her, the antidote to this form of theorizing was ‘experience.’ However, ‘experience’ doesn’t require actually living through moral problems oneself. Rather, it simply requires the agent to carefully reflect on a variety of moral issues, but consider those moral issues in a full, rich, context rather than via stripped down implausible scenarios.

Ethics and aesthetics may not be one, but the historical association of their ascendants, morality and art, is an intimate and long-standing one. Like most long associations, theirs has featured a certain ambivalence, and has been marked as much by episodes of hostility and misunderstanding as by mutual support. This chapter looks at one dimension of this relationship, namely, the way in which literary art influences moral experience, and thereby informs moral judgement. It argues that the so-called ‘ethical criticism’ of art need not be motivated by an a priori commitment to the ‘supremacy of moral values’; its validity and interest need not rest solely on an unquestioned subordination of the aesthetic to the ethical. Engagement with literary art can influence one's moral experience and thereby inform his/her moral judgements. This chapter also discusses the views of Leo Tolstoy and Plato regarding art and morality.

This chapter argues that the natural law is not a superior set of axioms, principles, or statutes that, for whatever reason, are not, or may not be, actually part of the law of the particular jurisdiction, but against which, nonetheless, a subordinate law may be tested and perhaps found wanting. It uses the word ‘natural’ to refer to what is intrinsic to a given situation or circumstance or to a practice or set of practices, that is, to the nature of the case. When discussing natural law, ‘the case’ is the human condition. Natural law refers primarily to the moral experience of being human, or, to put it another way, to the responsibility intrinsic to being human. The chapter places this account in the historical context of natural law discourse and suggests that St Thomas Aquinas's view is similar to the view expressed here.

This book has argued that moral obligations are best explained as God's commands. However, if God does not exist, someone might regard this argument as a reductio of moral realism, giving reasons to embrace an error theory. Hence to complete the argument reasons to accept moral realism and reject error theory must be provided. One argument for moral realism is linked to moral experience and the principle of credulity, which holds that experience generally provides prima facie evidence for the reality of what is experienced. Further arguments are provided by Thomas Reid, who tries to show that the first principles of morality are among the deliverances of “common sense.” David Enoch's work updates this type of argument by showing how a commitment to normative realism is presupposed by practical deliberation. Ultimately, moral realism without moral knowledge would be useless and even paradoxical, so the chapter ends with a defense of conscience and the claim that moral intuitions are a source of moral knowledge. A moderate intuitionism is argued to be compatible with evolutionary theory as an account of how moral knowledge is possible.

This chapter focuses on the implicit and explicit ways that individuals navigate moral dilemmas and produce gendered and racialized identities. Analysis centers on the performance of a play, “Natasia’s Story,” a dramatic rendering of “a mother like us” for an audience of staff, children, and volunteers. This play was collaboratively created, produced, and performed by young women at Palomitáy. Holding the words of characters (in various scenes) in tension with the situation (a theatrical performance) shows how the unspoken assumptions and embedded dialogues of characters and performers are entangled with institutional configurations of power. Attention to the micro-politics of interactions illuminates young women’s sense of themselves as daughters (as well as mothers) and the simultaneous negotiation of moral dilemmas and social hierarchies.

This chapter reflects on the broad implications of an ethnography of young mothers who are placed by the state into a residence run by an international humanitarian organization. It concludes by discussing the lives of young women once they leave Palomitáy, and argues that attention to moral experience and intimate involvement enables a deeper understanding of the entanglement of affective relationships and social, political, and economic inequality in individual lives. The chapter suggests that attention to young mothers challenges anthropological research on relatedness in the Andes. Highlighting youth as social agents who do the labor of care, even as they are positioned as vulnerable and in need of care, extends understanding of intimate arenas and state power and the emergence of moral experience in ordinary interactions.

Proponents of moral perception hold that some of our moral knowledge is perceptual knowledge. Discussions of whether moral perception is possible often seem to assume that there is some attractive alternative account of how we arrive at moral knowledge in those cases that are regarded as among the best candidates for cases of full-fledged moral perception. This chapter challenges that assumption by critically examining some alternative accounts of how we arrive at knowledge in the relevant class of cases, arguing that the more closely one examines these alternative accounts, the more implausible they seem as accounts of how we actually manage to arrive at moral knowledge. A modest version of moral perception is sketched, one that does not suffer from any similarly implausible commitments. There are some concluding reflections on why it matters whether some of our moral knowledge is perceptual.

Can a hermeneutical approach be helpful to environmental moral philosophy? And if so, what— if any— would be the limits of this environmental hermeneutics? In order to answer these questions, the authors first introduce and summarize Bernard Williams’ criticism of “ethical theory” that, according to the authors, also applies to environmental ethics. Second, the authors point out why the limits of moral philosophy bring us to hermeneutics, in particular to hermeneutical ethics. In conclusion, the authors ask what the limits of this hermeneutics are, especially in the framework of a hermeneutical ethics of the environment.

This chapter sketches Arthur Rich’s life and work, and situates his thought contextually. It indicates some of the lines of the development of Rich’s thought, up to the publication of the two volumes of Wirtschaftsethik. It then presents lineaments of Rich’s theological method as set out in Wirtschaftsethik, such as Rich’s understanding of what he calls ‘the basic ethical question’, the general human moral experience, his approach to Scripture, and his adoption of aspects of the thought of Max Weber and John Rawls. This chapter also notes ways in which Rich’s method is representative of other contributions to theological economic ethics, in order to suggest ways in which our reading of Rich has implications for wider trends in theological ethics. The chapter concludes with a brief survey of Rich’s conclusions.

Moral perplexities are not of a single type; they take a variety of forms. They need to be appreciated before trying to resolve them through ethical systems or theories. Ethics begins in curiosity about why we think and feel as we do and why we differ from others. Everyone is engaged in ethics, and everyone can learn to exercise the skills that will make for a meaningful moral life. Engaging in moral dialogue is a humanizing activity; it requires suspension of judgment and respectful exploration of our own values and those of others. Three obstacles to ethics are defined: moral arbitrariness, absolute certainty, and perfectionism. Four aims of ethics are explored: discovering and claiming the moral values that define us; identifying the values of others; achieving consonance between internal values and external actions; and solving problems. The final section considers whether and how ethics can be taught and learned.

Ethics can go wrong in a variety of ways, some of the experiences and the interpretive related to inept use of the skills described in chapters 2 and 3. Five errors are singled out for special consideration as commonplace in ethics. These are the trap of either/or thinking (a simplistic understanding of ethical choices), expecting too much from theory (overestimating the importance of theory and undervaluing the insights of practice), the desire for a unifying conception of ethics (the misguided search for foundations), restricting what experiences have moral weight (truncating the potential sources of moral discernment), and treating mysteries as moral problems (failing to acknowledge the limits of ethics).

W. R. Matthews found the moral argument (along with the teleological argument) the most persuasive of all the theistic arguments. He reflects upon the “moral evolution of mankind” and asks what it implies concerning the nature of the universe; he discusses the conscience and asks, “On what grounds can we justify that sense of obligation which is the characteristic property of moral experience?” He ponders the nature of the good and asks, “What is the place of the Good in the general structure of the universe?” He finds that in each case he is led to the theistic hypothesis.