Moral Perception and the Contents of Experience

Werner, Preston J.

doi:10.1163/17455243-4681063

Cited by 58 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…What we here call moral perception has been referred to as “Canonical Evaluative Perception” (Bergqvist & Cowan 2018 , p. 5) or “Contentful Moral Perception” (Werner 2020 , p. 5). Proponents include Audi 2013 , Cowan 2015 , and Werner 2016 . In the literature, we also find weaker accounts of moral perception such as the idea that moral properties are patterns and moral perception is pattern-recognition (Chappell 2008 ) or Sarah McGrath’s account according to which perceptual experiences do not have normative contents but can still immediately justify moral beliefs (McGrath 2018 ).…”

Section: Ethical Experiences: Phenomenological Distinctionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluative experiences: the epistemological significance of moral phenomenology

Berghofer

2021

Synthese

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Recently, a number of phenomenological approaches to experiential justification emerged according to which an experience's justificatory force is grounded in the experience’s distinctive phenomenology. The basic idea is that certain experiences exhibit a presentive phenomenology and that they are a source of immediate justification precisely by virtue of their presentive phenomenology. Such phenomenological approaches usually focus on perceptual experiences and mathematical intuitions. In this paper, I aim at a phenomenological approach to ethical experiences. I shall show that we need to make a distinction between evaluative experiences directed at concrete cases and ethical intuitions directed at general principles. The focus will be on evaluative experiences. I argue that evaluative experiences constitute a sui generis type of experience that gain their justificatory force by virtue of their presentive evaluative phenomenology. In Sect. 1, I introduce and motivate the phenomenological idea that certain experiences exhibit a justification-conferring phenomenology. In Sect. 4, I apply this idea to morally evaluative experiences. In Sect. 5, I suggest that certain epistemic intuitions should be considered epistemically evaluative experiences and I outline a strong parallelism between ethics and epistemology.

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Section: Ethical Experiences: Phenomenological Distinctionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluative experiences: the epistemological significance of moral phenomenology

Berghofer

2021

Synthese

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“…Cullison () appears to respond to the objection by endorsing a version of the McGrathian view discussed above. Werner () argues that moral properties do have a distinctive look, contra the objection. And McBrayer (), who has by far the most in depth discussion of this objection to date, considers a few different ways to flesh out the notion of “distinctive look” at work in the objection and argues that no reading of the claim results in a clearly sound argument.…”

Section: Arguments Against Moral Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Contentful theorists include McNaughton (), McBrayer (, ), Cowan (, ), and Werner (, ), and Lord (). Audi () appears to endorse both of the previous views.…”

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confidence: 99%

Moral perception

Werner

2020

Philosophy Compass

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Moral perceptualism is the theory that perception and perceptual experience is attuned to moral features in our environment. This idea has received renewed attention in the last 15-20 years, for its potential to do theoretical work in moral epistemology and moral psychology. In this paper, I review the main motivations and arguments for moral perceptualism, the variety of theories that go under the heading of "moral perception," and the three biggest challenges to moral perception. https://youtu.be/9cC_1ZYKq80

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“…For instance, some hold that we can know others' minds via perception (McDowell 1982;McNeill 2012;Cassam 2007) and some claim that we can know what is the morally right thing to do via perception (Audi 2013;Cuneo 2003;McBrayer 2010). It is not always clear whether such philosophers think of mental and moral properties as represented in perception, rather than in perceptual belief (though see Werner 2016;Brogaard 2016;Toribio 2018;and Newen 2017). But insofar as any philosopher would wish to articulate a fully perceptual epistemology of others' minds and moral knowledge, they would thereby require the truth of Liberalism.…”

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confidence: 99%

High-Level Perception and Multimodal Perception

Cavedon-Taylor¹

2021

Purpose and Procedure in Philosophy of Perception

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What is the correct procedure for determining the contents of perception? Philosophers tackling this question increasingly rely on empirically oriented procedures. This chapter argues that this strategy constitutes an improvement over the armchair methodology of phenomenal contrast arguments, but that there is a respect in which current empirical procedures remain limited: they are unimodal in nature, wrongly treating the senses as isolatable. The chapter thus has two aims: first, to motivate a reorientation of the admissible contents debate into a multimodal framework. The second is to explore whether experimental studies of multimodal perception support a so-called Liberal account of perception’s admissible contents. The chapter concludes that the McGurk effect and the ventriloquist effect are both explicable without the postulation of high-level content, but that at least one multimodal experimental paradigm may necessitate such content: the rubber hand illusion. One upshot is that Conservatives who claim that the Liberal view intolerably broadens the scope of perceptual illusions, particularly from the perspective of perceptual psychology, should pursue other arguments against that view.

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Moral Perception and the Contents of Experience

Cited by 58 publications

References 37 publications

Evaluative experiences: the epistemological significance of moral phenomenology

Evaluative experiences: the epistemological significance of moral phenomenology

Moral perception

High-Level Perception and Multimodal Perception

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