1 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science +Business Media Dordrecht. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com”. 1 23 Author's personal copy Phenom Cogn Sci DOI 10.1007/s11097-013-9321-3 The case for moral perception J. Jeremy Wisnewski # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 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. Keywords Moral phenomenology . Moral perception Introduction Aristotle thought the idea of moral perception was central to moral philosophy: “[Phronesis] is of the ultimate particular, of which there is not scientific knowledge but perception—not sensory perception, but like the perception whereby we perceive that the triangle is the ultimate particular in geometry” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1142a27–29).1 Aristotle saw moral perception as an inherent human capacity, but one which had to be developed. To see, Aristotle recognized, was not the same as to see with understanding, and seeing with understanding was that at which intellectual and moral development aimed. Moral development consisted in coming to acquire a perceptual ability—namely, to discern the morally salient features of a given situation, to deliberate where necessary, and then to respond in a morally appropriate way. At the core of every truly moral action, on the Aristotelian view, is a kind of seeing. Many, if not most, philosophers no longer find Aristotle's view intuitive. Such a view, it is routinely remarked, is simply metaphorical. Of course, one cannot literally perceive morally, whether this is understood as perceiving the rightness or wrongness 1 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. J. J. Wisnewski (*) Philosophy Department, Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY 13820, USA e-mail: wisnewskij@hartwick.edu Author's personal copy J.J. Wisnewski of action, or moral properties, or the good, or something else besides. Indeed, the idea that we might literally see that something is immoral, or that something is required, is seldom given any kind of serious consideration.2, 3 My aim in what follows will be to meet several objections to the idea of moral perception head on and to show that the idea of literal moral perception cannot be so easily dismissed. I will suggest one possible model for a particular kind of moral perception—namely, emotional perception. I do not presuppose, in what follows, that all perception has a unitary form. There may be several kinds of literal perception. In presenting this model, I have three primary aims: (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. The varieties of moral experience Some have argued that if there is not some qualitative distinction in perception when it is moral perception, then we have no reason to think that such perception exists (SinnotArmstrong 2008). Walter Sinnot-Armstrong claims, for example, that “In general, there cannot be a useful phenomenology of anything that lacks a certain kind of unity” (88). He goes on to argue, citing Schweder's anthropological work on divergent moral systems (among other things), that moral experience lacks just such a unity: “various areas of morality feel very different” (89). Likewise, Don Loeb claims that our moral experience “is not as uniform as th[e] expression [‘moral experience’] suggests” (472). He offers, by way of example, the usual appeal to “both cross-cultural and intra-cultural differences.” Both Sinnot-Armstrong and Loeb go on to claim that, given the putative variability of moral experience, we have little reason to think either that there is a unique moral signature to some class of experiences or that such experiences support some form of moral realism.4 Sinnot-Armstrong goes so far as to say that “When I introspect on a variety of cases, it is hard for me to find anything interesting that is common or peculiar to these moral experiences” (89). He goes on to claim that “neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and Schweder's anthropology all support the variety that introspective phenomenology finds among the areas of morality” (89).5 Even the claim, often made in the moral perception literature, that our moral experience seems to involve objective pretensions has come under attack. Indeed, Loeb's primary target in “The Argument from Moral Experience” is the view that moral experience has the character of an experience of something putatively objective. Loeb contends that 2 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. 3 There are, of course, exceptions. See Blum (1994), Watkins and Jolley (2002), Wisnewski and Jacoby (2006), McBrayer (2010), and McBrayer (2009). 4 On variability, see Loeb (2007), Gill (2008), and Sinnot-Armstrong (2008), cited above. 5 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. Author's personal copy The case for moral perception certain features of common moral experience do suggest that we experience morality as something that is not objective. For example, just as we talk about moral beliefs, we often talk about moral feelings and attitudes as well, and in other contexts these words typically signify something other than beliefs. In fact, people often say things that seem quite incompatible with objectivism, such as that in ethics “it's all relative,” or that what it is right for a person to do depends on that person's decisions. We cannot dismiss such statements as the product of confusion merely because they appear to conflict with views we think widely held. (473)6 Even if we reject the arguments of Loeb and Sinnot-Armstrong, there is yet another hurdle—arguably more difficult—that any defense of moral perception must face. J.L. Mackie was among the first of contemporary philosophers to reject the idea of moral perception on the grounds that we lack any particular sensory organ capable of discerning moral properties.7 For a great many philosophers, this view amounts to the final word on the question of moral perception. These challenges to the idea of moral perception are fundamental—but they can be met. To investigate moral perception, we'll need to be able to say something about what makes moral experience what it is, and we'll need to say something about how it works. Finally, we'll need to offer some account of why different persons seem to have different moral perceptions. I hope to accomplish all of these goals in what follows. Phenomenology and introspection Is there something it's like to have moral perception? Loeb, Sinnot-Armstrong, and others think that answering such a question will involve introspection—that we need merely to think about the experience's “feel” to determine whether or not there is some quale to the experience. These philosophers thus read the question “What's it like to have a moral perception?” as equivalent to the question “Can I introspectively determine a kind of experiential ‘feel’ that uniquely picks out moral perception and not other kinds of perception?” After having inspected their internal mental states, such philosophers conclude (or some of them do, at any rate) that there's nothing interesting there for our consideration. As often happens, results track method. Starting with an extraordinarily impoverished version of phenomenology, philosophers like Loeb and Armstrong find moral experience itself impoverished. Replying to such arguments will require, first, clearing away some of the methodological obstacles that stand in the way of exploring the structure of moral experience. The notion of phenomenology as introspection is too limited to adequately raise questions about the phenomenological character of moral experience. First, the approach presupposes a certain picture of how experiences are accessible to us—through reflective introspection—a picture that is deeply suspicious for various reasons. Second, it seems to presuppose that our access to such qualia is sufficient in identifying it. As I hope is obvious, there is a version of Meno's paradox here that is 6 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). 7 Mackie (1990). Author's personal copy J.J. Wisnewski too quickly glossed, if not downright ignored. There can be elements of experience that are not immediately available to conscious experience and that can only come to conscious awareness through practice and training. One such example is echolocation; another is proprioception—but these are a drop in the proverbial bucket. We all echolocate.8 Moreover, we can be trained to develop this capacity. Likewise, we all utilize proprioceptive awareness, in addition to visual (and other) systems, in our consciousness of our bodily positions.9 But we cannot, without some training and practice, pick out the quality of the proprioception or the echolocation, likely because we habitually think of our knowledge of bodily position as visual knowledge and our navigation as visual navigation. It is only in structured settings (like in experimental contexts) that we can experience these things separately. Because our experience is deeply unified, in other words, we can have difficulty isolating particular qualia in particular experiences, especially if our only manner of “looking” for these qualia involves armchair introspection. An even deeper problem with this approach, of course, is that reflective introspection involves interpreting what is not usually so interpreted. The experience of fear, for example, has a particular structure, but the structure is not given as propositional knowledge. It must be formulated. Our formulations for articulating the structure of an experience, however, are usually (if not always) linked up to familiar ways of categorizing and conceptualizing the world around us. We tend to employ our dominant paradigms,10 familiar metaphors,11 and, in general, aim to assimilate what we introspect to what we already believe.12 This means that even our introspection can be colored by theoretical commitments that make it difficult to trust our own judgments about the structure of our experience. It is thus insufficient to simply introspect, taking at face value what one finds there. The idea that this is an objection to phenomenology, however, stems from a misconception of the methods of a proper phenomenological analysis.13 While we might begin with reflection on experience, the suggestion that this accesses some “inner state” already presupposes a certain picture of what an experience is, as well as how it can be accessed. Moreover, this metaphor (of “inner”) seems to rule out a dominant theme in much phenomenology: namely, that experience is essentially embodied and that this embodiment cannot be made sense of apart from an environment. This same theme has emerged as its own literature in Anglo-American philosophy and cognitive science: experience and perception is best understood on the model of enaction—engagement with the world. In an important respect, then, experience isn't “in the head,” but rather in the robust, purposive interaction of an 8 See, e.g., Stroffregen and Pittenger (1995) and Schwitzgebel and Gordon (2000). See, e.g., Graziano (1999). For an illuminating philosophical discussion of such cases, see Merleau-Ponty (2002). 10 Kuhn (1996). 11 Lakoff and Johnson (1999, 2003). 12 There is ample psychological literature to back this up. The phenomenon is usually referred to as “confirmation bias.” 13 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. 9 Author's personal copy The case for moral perception embodied intelligence with its environment.14 To try to get at the nature of an experience without looking at the environment, as well as the purposive activity, of an embodied being (in other words, to simply look “in the head” through some kind of introspection) is to set up failure: experiences aren't “in the head,” and so one cannot hope to find the nature of experience there either. This is sometimes captured in cute remarks to the effect that my experience is never an experience of a brain state of, say, a building; it is an experience of a building. My experience is never the experience of the mental state of seeing a snake; my experience is of a snake. This is perhaps a semantic issue, but it is important all the same. If I read experience as experience of a mental state, I seem to miss crucial features of actual experience: the mental state of experiencing a poisonous snake is not particularly dangerous or frightening; the experience of the snake, however, is.15 The crucial point to make about phenomenology here is that attentiveness to experience will require attentiveness to the environment in which we are situated and the purposive activities in which we are involved. It is through such attentiveness, and only through such attentiveness, that we will ever be able to capture the structure and qualities of experience. Certainly, in some cases, the “feeling” of an experience will matter a great deal, but it does not follow that this “feeling” will capture or constitute the moral perception in question. To do that, we will also need to pay close attention to the directedness of the emotion (if it stands in the right relation to an environment) and the purposive activity of the agents involved (activity that need not be reflective or even conscious). An example will assuredly help here. When I experience a failure in the construction of a bookcase, my experience is already prestructured by a certain purposive activity. At the level of conscious awareness, I experience planning the bookcase, assembling the materials, and so on. At the level of embodiment, I experience, albeit unreflectively, absorption in the use of hammer and nails, level, and other tools. The use of such tools, as well as my overall purposes (to build the bookcase, to hit the nail, to hold the hammer, etc.), connects me to an environment in an essential way: if we remove the environment, we can no longer capture the experience. Likewise, if we remove our pre-reflective purposive activity (swinging the hammer, steadying the nail, etc.), we will miss essential features of the structure of this experience. I do not, after all, merely experience reflectively planning the bookcase and then experience it as existing. There is a wide range of motor intentionality that characterizes my bringing about the bookcase from the plans I have drawn. This experience, moreover, cannot be reduced to conscious plan execution. I never have the experience of planning how tightly I will hold the hammer or how much force I must use to lift a nail from its box. These purposes are given pre-reflectively, even preconsciously, and yet are all the same constitutive of my experience. All of this background is required to make sense of the experience of failure to execute my plans. Simply introspecting at the moment of failure will thus not capture the experience. A failure, in such a case, involves the experience of some of those things that 14 See, for example, Noe (2004), Clark (1997, 2011), Rowlands (2010), and Chemero (2009). As John Drummond has put the point in “Moral phenomenology and moral intentionality,” phenomenality requires intentionality. (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 7, 2008). 15 Author's personal copy J.J. Wisnewski were only pre-reflectively available before the failure. When I reach for nails only to find an empty box, I experience an absence that is made possible only by a prior taking for granted that is best understood as somatic: my hand reaches for the nail unreflectively, and it is only because of this that there is any surprise at finding the nail absent. The same is true of breaking the hammer, ruining the wood I am using, and so on. To ask about moral perception is thus to inquire about the world (in the phenomenological sense) in which an agent operates. To simply inquire about the “feeling” of an experience outside of the intentionality and world imbeddedness of the experience is to mistake phenomenology for the investigation of feelings. Once we have rejected this picture of the method of phenomenology, the prospects for a fruitful phenomenology of morality become much greater. So much, then, for methodology. But what, exactly, are we looking for when we investigate moral perception? Varieties of moral perception, again It has very often been a criticism of moral perception that it can come in a variety of forms.16 The underlying thought is that, without some unifying feature to pinpoint in moral perception, we have no reason to think that there is such a thing. Consider some of the range of what we might count as moral perception and experience. 1. A “loving gaze,” to use Iris Murdoch's phrase, in which we perceive (and attend to) the needs of those we encounter in a direct and unmediated manner.17 In this general category, we might also include the sympathetic response of a person who perceives the distress of another human being. 2. The shock of seeing an immoral act being committed (hoodlums lighting a cat on fire, to use Gilbert Harman's famous example18). 3. The cognition that a situation requires moral deliberation (we perceive morally salient features in a particular situation—this kind of moral perception has been elaborated by Lawrence Blum19). 4. The experience of respect for a person, or even of the moral law (as in Kant).20 5. The perception of a moral demand, where we experience something like a “tug” to perform certain kinds of actions. 6. The experience of the violation of a moral rule or principle, where this is neither particularly shocking nor the cause of an immediate response. These modes of moral perception need not be thought of along modular lines. They may well overlap in many cases or even turn out to be identical in some instances. Nevertheless, this rough collection of experience serves to show the range of different experiences that have been used to characterize moral perception. Are there any unifying features of all of these experiences? Is there a phenomenological signature that comes to the surface after appropriate analysis? The answer 16 Mackie (1990), Loeb (2008), Sinnot-Armstrong (2008), Gill (2008), all cited above. See Murdoch (2001). 18 Harman (1977). 19 See Blum (1994). 20 See, for example, Drummond (2006). 17 Author's personal copy The case for moral perception to these questions is hotly contested, and I cannot hope to resolve this debate here. It is worth noting, however, that there are some plausible candidates for similarity that may well do the job of identifying what is unique to moral phenomenology in all its varieties. Mandelbaum's The Phenomenology of Moral Experience is the locus classicus for one such candidate: namely, fittingness. On Mandelbaum's view, moral phenomenology involves the experience of a certain response, or emotion, or course of action, as being the one that fits a particular situation. More specifically, moral experience involves what Mandelbaum calls a “felt demand.” One perceives some response (e.g.) as fitting a particular situation and, moreover, as demanded by the circumstances. Moral experience, then, involves an agent understanding her world as calling for responses in particular circumstances. As Mandelbaum says, “the relation of being fitting [or unfitting] obtains between an action and its environment,” (61). “Environment,” Mandelbaum goes on to explain, refers to “the initial conditions which call forth our action” (61)—which instigate what he calls the “felt demand” of the situation. Of course, the fact that something is experienced as fitting a particular situation is insufficient for moral perception and experience. As Mandelbaum acknowledges, one can likewise experience a step in a logical proof as “fitting,” or a move in a game of chess, or a flower in a garden. None of these are moral perceptions, though they nevertheless involve the experience of the fitting—and in some cases, even the “tug” of a demand. In addition to fittingness, moral perception also involves, Mandelbaum claims, a recognition of fittingness as third personal—as coming from somewhere other than one's own subjectivity. I'll refer to those experience of fittingness with a third-personal quality as “heterochthonous”—as originating independent of one's particular agency—of the desires and interests an agent has at a particular time. By contrast, autochthonous fittingness is the experience of fittingness where said fittingness does originate from the particular goals, desires, and tasks that I am currently carrying out (it is “homegrown” fittingness, if you like). The experience of heterochthonous fittingness involves experiencing some action, emotion, or belief as demanded (or called for) by a particular situation independently of what our particular desires might call for. Seeing a chess move as fitting is thus autochthonous fittingness—it depends on particular facts about our current desires and interests. If I see a move as allowing me to checkmate my opponent, the move may or may not be perceived as “fitting” the context: if I am teaching my daughter how to play the game, for example, the move that is most fitting may well be to forego the immediate mate so that she can continue to experiment with the dynamics of the game. Similar analyses, I assert, will be available for musical movements, the rules of etiquette,21 and even for aesthetic judgments of certain kinds.22 On Mandelbaum's view, then, what makes a moral perception distinct from other forms of perception is the experience of fittingness or lack of fittingness as heterochthonous. If we accept the view that moral perception involves heterochthonous fittingness—among other things—then the objection that there is nothing unique to 21 Horgan and Timmons (2008) use etiquette as a counterexample to Mandelbaum's view. Obviously, I do not think the counterexample works. 22 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. Author's personal copy J.J. Wisnewski moral experience has been met. Citing instances where we do not experience a moral claim made upon us as “fitting” does not show that there is no such thing as moral experience. In such a case, one might respond by saying that the case in question simply is not a case of moral perception in any robust sense. Such a response, however, would be susceptible to the charge of question begging. It would amount to defining moral perception into existence: whenever we experience heterochthonous fittingness, we are having moral perception. Any counterexample could be met by saying that the counterexample simply didn't meet the definition of moral perception, properly understood. At this point, all that would remain would be a philosophical standoff. There is another response, however, that is more satisfactory. When we hear claims like “it's relative,” these claims often involve a kind of rejection of an assertion of heterochthonous fittingness. In other words, to claim that a particular moral issue is relative is to state that any demanded response would not fit what the circumstances required. In a certain respect, then, claiming relativity, at least in some cases, is to demand that only a personal decision be judged to be a fitting response to the circumstances, and any movement beyond this is a movement toward an unfitting response. Some appeals to relativity, then, actually presuppose an account of fittingness rather than call it into question. Moreover, there is also some confusion, I think, in appealing to common claims like “It's all relative” as evidence against moral perception. First, moral claims may well be relative to a situation and also be objective. Any particularist theory, such as Aristotle's, would have it no other way. Likewise, the claim that “It's all relative” can be used both epistemologically and ontologically—referring to the difficulty of knowing what's right or to the alleged nonexistence of objective values. Finally, claims about relativity may not be assertions about morality at all—they may well be a covert speech–act designed to render any further conversation on a topic moot. In other words, the claim “it's all relative” may be a covert way of telling one's interlocutor to stop talking. The question still remains how we are to explain the divergence in the content of a moral perception even if moral perceptions of various kinds share a structure involving fittingness. If there is literal moral perception, I take it, any diversity of content within moral perceptions should be able to be accounted for in a way analogous to diversity in other forms of perception—visual, auditory, etc. Divergence of perception in standard cases can involve numerous factors, but two seem to stand out: different training of perceptual faculties can lead to divergence (as when particular groups do not learn to perceive particular discriminations of color, or sound), and, on the individual level, differences in physiology can lead to differences in perception (as in the case of the blind and deaf). As we'll see, I think differences in moral perception can be explained in the same way. It is an open question whether or not the account of moral perception as heterochthonous fittingness can adequately capture the variety of moral experience. I am sympathetic with this account, but must acknowledge that “fittingness,” when applied to the very different kinds of moral experience enumerated above, starts to seem too thin to do much good. The fact that Author's personal copy The case for moral perception we have a singular term that can apply to the array of experiences in question does not automatically make the use of the term elucidating. In fact, it may be far more profitable to explore the significant differences in kinds of moral perception than to continue the hunt for features shared by all such experiences. Again, I cannot decide this issue in the current context. I find it fruitful, nevertheless, to keep in mind the array of different kinds of moral experience as we narrow our focus to one particular kind of moral perception, acknowledging that what holds true in one type of moral perception may not hold true in all. Literal moral perception At this point, one might well object that the idea of heterochthonous fittingness doesn't provide a reason for thinking that moral perceptions are in fact literally perceptions. Moreover, one might object that the very notion of “moral perception” is ambiguous, as demonstrated by the diversity of examples considered above. In some instances, “moral perception” seems to pick out an ability to discern moral relevance; in others, it seems to pick out an immediate discernment of what one ought to do—and these things are by no means equivalent. There is a difference between acknowledging that a situation raises a moral issue and seeing how one ought to act within a situation where such an issue is raised. Indeed, some might regard the sort of moral perception picked out by the first use (perceiving moral relevance) as common and plausible, but regard the second sense of moral perception (perceiving what one ought to do) as problematic. On the other hand, some might regard both uses as simply metaphorical: why think that literal perception could involve either the perception of moral relevance or the perception of the morally appropriate action? I would like to make two responses. First, I contend that there are at least three models of (literal) perception that allow room for perceiving both what one ought to do and what is morally relevant. Second, I contend that the two sorts of moral perception disambiguated above are, in fact, (often) closely connected such that perceptions of the former sort (perceptions of moral relevance) give rise to perceptions of the latter sort (perceptions of what one ought to do). A common, orthodox view of perception runs as follows: “perception is a process whereby the brain, or a functionally dedicated subsystem of the brain, builds up representations of relevant features of the environment on the basis of information encoded by the sensory receptors” (Noe and Thompson 2002). Whether or not the orthodox view can accommodate literal moral perception hinges crucially on what information we take to be encoded in an environment. If one maintains that there are only sense data—colors, shapes, smells—there seems little reason to think that perception could be properly moral. If one maintains, however, that the environment also presents rich and varied perceptual content, including information about persons and their activities, or information about patterns (that is, relations among features within a perceptual environment), or if it presents facts, or if one maintains that information about Author's personal copy J.J. Wisnewski action possibilities is embedded in our perceptual environment, moral perception seems far less problematic. The “orthodox view” postulates that perception is an activity of the brain and that it involves representations. There are, of course, plausible models of perception that reject both of these claims. Many advocates of the enactivist approach deny that perception is “in” the brain (though, of course, no one denies that it involves the brain); the idea of perceptual affordances rejects the claim that all perceptions involve representations (some perceptions are direct and immediate). I do not think I need to take a stand on any of these issues in the current context. What is required is only that moral perception fits at least one plausible model of literal perception. I want to suggest that moral perception does better than that—it fits three.23 As I have indicated from the outset, my aim is not to defend one model of literal perception. I would like my account to remain as agnostic as possible on as many of the core issues of perception as possible. Doing this, I believe, allows my view the widest possible plausibility—it needn't be held hostage to core perceptual issues. Here are three models of literal perception that can accommodate moral perception. 1. The Rich Content View (explored by Susanna Siegel in The Contents of Visual Experience) (Siegel 2012) 2. The Enactive/Ecological Psychology Approach (as defended by Alva Noe, Anthony Chemero, and others) 3. The James–Lange Theory of Emotional Perception (as defended by, for example, Jesse Prinz 2006) I do not assume that all perception must fit one unitary model. Perhaps there is such an account of perception; perhaps there is not. I also do not assume that the three models above are incompatible with one another. Perhaps they are; perhaps they are not. Each of these models of literal perception, however, can accommodate moral perception in both senses of the phrase (as the perception of things of moral salience as well as the perception of what one ought to do). The Rich Content View states that “in some visual experiences, some properties other than spatial properties, color, shape, motion, and illumination are represented” (Siegel 2012) (7). These properties are perceptible, even if they are not perceptual.24 If one can literally see that a person is John Malkovich, or that an animal is a dog, or even that these marks on the page are words, then the rich content view is true. If the rich content view is true, there is no special difficulty in thinking that one might also see an action as morally good, or even see a situation as one in which a particular action would be morally good. Indeed, as I will suggest, seeing the former may well be a means to eventually see the latter. 23 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. 24 The distinction is Robert Audi’s. See his Moral Perception (2013). Author's personal copy The case for moral perception The enactive/ecological approach maintains that perception is direct and geared toward action, entailing that “all the information necessary for guiding adaptive behavior must be available in the environment to be perceived” (Chemero, 23). Perception is thus of “affordances… directly perceivable, environmental opportunities for action” (Chemero, 23). There is a good deal of empirical research to support the enactivist view, but it nevertheless remains contentious. If it is true, however, that we perceive both objects and situations in terms of action possibilities (stairs as climbable, stones as throwable, dangers as avoidable, etc.), there is no special difficulty in claiming that some of the action possibilities we perceive will be possibilities of moral action (perceiving a situation as calling for sympathetic response, aid, etc.). The James–Lange Theory of emotions maintains that emotional reactions are bodily perceptions of environmental information. If this is true of emotions generally, there is no special difficulty in claiming that the moral emotions (e.g., sympathy, love, etc.) are the result of a perceptual relationship with the environment. My aim in rehearsing these three models of perception is to vindicate the claim that literal moral perception can indeed be literal. Although I have not defended any of the above accounts of perception, each provides a viable avenue for research on specific kinds of moral perception (I do not assume there is one kind of moral perception any more than I assume that there is one kind of perception). If perception turns out to be correctly captured in any of the above models, then moral perception is by no means excluded. I will provide a much more detailed defense of moral perception as emotional perception below. Before doing so, however, I want to address the worry that the models of perception I am considering can only capture one sense of “moral perception”—namely, the perception of morally salient features of a situation. I want to suggest that making sense of perception requires understanding it developmentally. The perception of immediate sensory information gives rise to the perception of more complex properties and features of situations; the perception of simple properties gives rise to the perception of complex ones. Whatever one's account of perception, we should not ignore the diachronic and developmental elements of perceptual experience. Any model of perception will need to be able to explain how the perception of discrete, individual elements of a visual field can (and does) give rise to the immediate perception of higher-order patterns. A straightforward example of this pattern of perceptual development is learning to read: we move from perceiving individual letters to immediately perceiving words. The phenomenon, sometimes referred to as “perceptual chunking,” is in fact widespread and likely characteristic of much perceptual experience.25 Our perception of discrete “pieces” of a pattern is replaced by a direct perception of the higher-order pattern. It is this 25 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). Author's personal copy J.J. Wisnewski phenomenon that explains the improved perceptual capacities of anyone who trains her perception by repetition and (guided) practice.26 The relevance of this point to moral perception is obvious and immediate: through repeated exposure to situations that involve moral action, even when these situations initially involve deliberation and judgment, we can develop the ability to respond immediately to the situation we perceive. The situation is “unitized,” or “chunked,”27 and what once required cognitive effort becomes automatic and immediate. Seeing a person in distress for the first time is qualitatively different from seeing a person in distress for the thousandth time; seeing a person in a particular kind of distress that one is deeply familiar with is qualitatively different from seeing a person in a kind of distress one has no experience with. This is perhaps just another way of pointing out that repeated experience matters—that we learn—but what we learn to do is sometimes to perceive immediately the essential nature of particular situations, and this can involve an immediate recognition of the kind of action called for by the situation.28 Is the kind of action called for a “property” of the situation? I do not think there is any special difficulty in speaking this way, though some would prefer terms like “feature” over terms like “property.”29 Is it a property of a situation that, for example “It is raining”? If only objects can have properties, we will not want to say so. If, by contrast, properties can attach to situations and not just to objects, saying so seems innocuous enough. The kind of property in question, or course, is a higher-order one—akin to, for example, higher-order concepts like “being a football game,” “being a 3-part harmony,” “being a winter's day,” and “being a member of a species.” The point to emphasize, however, is that such higher-order properties are perceptually 26 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) 27 See, e.g., Goldstone, cited above. 28 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). 29 See, for example, Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Author's personal copy The case for moral perception available and immediate, at least provided that one has had the proper prior experience and has acquired the ability to perceive the patterns and facts characteristic of things like football, harmony, winter, species membership, and, indeed, things like “being a situation that calls for response x.” There are a wide range of cases that admit of perceiving a situation as calling for some response. In the nonmoral sphere, we speak effortlessly of the chess player seeing, with immediacy, that the board calls for, say, protecting his king, or castling, or something else. Such perceptions emerge only after the proper exposure to situations of a similar sort. Once a person has had the requisite experiences, learning from them in the right way, the ability to judge that a certain response is called for gives way to the ability to perceive that this response is called for. It is in this respect that rather coarse-grained perceptual abilities can give rise to much more fine-grained ones.30 On the view I advocate, then, general perceptual abilities give rise to more specific perceptual abilities. There is no reason to call such developments of perceptual systems metaphorical, unless one insists that only those perceptual systems we are born with account for literal perception—a view that reduces to absurdity given the remarkable development of perceptual systems in the first years of life. Once we note that this development continues and that experience enables the immediate perceptual apprehension of patterns, facts, and action possibilities, there is no special difficulty in characterizing such perception as literal (as opposed to metaphorical). Emotional perception as literal moral perception J.L. Mackie argued that moral perception can be ruled out because it would involve a commitment to two implausible things: (1) moral properties discernible through some sensory system and (2) a dedicated sensory system capable of detecting these properties. The problem with the view can be captured in two central objections: namely, (1) that it relies on an overly simplistic view of perception and (2) it presupposes too narrow a view of what we should count as “objective.” This second objection is made in numerous places, perhaps most notably in John McDowell's deservedly famous reply to Mackie, “Values and Secondary Qualities.” Secondary qualities are qualities not adequately conceivable except in terms of certain subjective states and thus subjective themselves in the sense that that characterization defines. In the natural contrast, a primary quality would be objective in the sense that what it was for something to have it can be adequately understood otherwise than in terms of dispositions to give rise to subjective states. Now this contrast between subjective and objective is not a contrast between veridical and illusory experience. But it is easily confused with a different contrast, in which to call a putative object of awareness “objective” is to say that it is there to be experienced, as opposed to being a 30 Watkins and Jolley defend this diachronic conception of moral perception as well in Watkins and Jolley (2002). But, of course, so does Aristotle. Author's personal copy J.J. Wisnewski mere figment of the subjective state that purports to be an experience of it (McDowell 1988). The fact that some perception depends on us in no way shows that the perception is “subjective” in the epistemological sense of the term (as opposed to the ontological one).31 Many things depend on facts about us, but are none the less objective in the sense that they correspond to verifiable facts about the world, or at least about the way the world appears to us. Take, for example, the perception of distance. Obviously, my perception that an object is, say, 10 ft away from me depends on all sorts of facts about my perceptual capacities. It likewise depends crucially on a human construct: namely, a system of measurement.32 The fact that the construct is a precondition for the perception of distance in feet, however, in no way diminishes the objectivity of such a perception when it is correctly made. In fact, the ability to call the perception correct is itself made possible in virtue of human constructs and not undermined by it. (The same is true of perceptions of up and down, right and left, and much else). Rather than concentrating on this (well-known) response, I will turn my attention to an oversimplification of perception which, I believe, characterizes objections like the one Mackie raises. The picture of perception in question has the following characteristics33: (1) perception is regarded as always occurring through one of five recognized sense modalities (touch, taste, sight, hearing, smell); (2) properly speaking, what we perceive are just those qualities given through specific sense modalities—smells, colors, tastes, textures, and so on; and finally, (3) because we (strictly speaking) only perceive sensory data, what is perceptible can be meaningfully distinguished from those concepts which do not themselves derive immediately from sensory experience. On this view of perception, then, perception is basic, always occurs through dedicated sensory systems, is immediately available to those sensory modalities, and is prior to the use of concepts to describe our perceptions. In response to this view, I would like to defend claims that are at least in tension with these putative features of perception and perhaps entail their falsity. First, I maintain that perception can be trained. This is true in two distinct senses. We can train ourselves to be more conscious of perceptions already occurring (such as echolocation, for example). We can also train ourselves, through study and practice, to perceive things that we could not perceive before (such as mating behavior, chemical reactions, minor and major scales). While seeing such things may initially require judgments of various kinds, I maintain that once expertise is acquired, the perception of such things is immediate—that our perception lacks anything phenomenologically recognizable as judgment. Second, I maintain that perception can, and perhaps always does, involve the perception of complexes rather than simples. Perception can be of complex kinds. We perceive, for example, patterns,34 very often immediately. This occurs routinely, and 31 See Searle on the distinction between ontological and epistemological subjectivity and objectivity in Speech Acts and The Construction of Social Reality. 32 I am indebted to Jesse Prinz’s (2006) Gut Reactions for this example. 33 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. 34 See Chappell (2008) for a useful discussion of the perception of pattern recognition. Author's personal copy The case for moral perception without any phenomenological judgment, when we see the faces of those we know, or hear a familiar song, or when we walk toward a car that we perceive as our own. While we can analyze perception into “parts,” such analysis has limited utility, particularly given the fact that perception is activity-oriented and always occurs in particular structures. The idea that we perceive simples and then mentally reconstruct those simples into complex phenomena faces some stunning experimental obstacles: the phi phenomenon, as well as many standard visual illusions, depend on a Gestalt, and are unintelligible without one. Likewise, experimental cases of inattentional blindness seem to demonstrate that changes in the visual field often, surprisingly, do not result in changes in perception. One of Mackie's famous objections to moral perception is that we lack a sensory organ with which we might detect something called “moral properties.” Moreover, moral properties are meant to be identifiable features of objects, actions, or situations. Given that we cannot point to these features, Mackie argues, we lack reason to think such properties exist. In response, we can now claim the following: perception need not be of some “simple” moral property. Moral perception may well involve the perception of various kinds of patterns. Moreover, the ability to recognize certain kinds of patterns may well be something that needs to be developed (much as the ability to see distinct kinds of flowers may well require training). For many kinds of perception, after all, inattentional blindness is the norm. Finally, there's no reason to think that the perception is limited to one sensory modality, particularly given that proprioception and visual perception usually work synergistically to provide information about the body and its relation to an environment. For one class of perceptions, though, I think we can go even further. As Jesse Prinz has forcefully argued, emotions themselves constitute a perceptual system. They provide information about the way an organism relates to its environment (Heidegger, Scheler, and others advocate a similar view, albeit from a very different point of view). An emotion, on Prinz's William Jamesinspired perceptual account, is an immediate bodily reaction to specific environmental cues—cues that our evolutionary history has linked up with particular kinds of adaptive reaction. When we detect a snake, our body reacts immediately as a way of representing the danger in the environment to us and to prepare us for response to the environment: our hearts beat more quickly, our muscles tense up, as if automatically preparing to run, and so on. The felt changes in the body are the emotions, but the emotions are anything but subjective: they represent (or misrepresent) features of our environment. In this respect, emotions are a form of bodily perception that can be appropriate or inappropriate. To flesh out this account somewhat, I turn to Prinz's text: perceptual states can be defined as states in dedicated input systems… A dedicated input system is a mental system that has the function of receiving information from the body or the world via some priorty class of transducers and internal representations. Dedicated input systems are perceptual modalities or senses. To count as perceptual, a mental state must exhibit a sense. Vision, audition, and olfaction are dedicated input systems. They each have their own Author's personal copy J.J. Wisnewski neural pathways and proprietary representations. If emotions are literally perceptual, they must reside in such a system (222) (Prinz 2006). The input system in question, for emotions, is the body. The body registers things like tickles, itches, thick smoke, and heat. The brain then registers these changes in the body (this is not the same as representing the said changes). Such registering of changes, on Prinz's view, is constitutive of emotions. (Although not all registering of bodily changes needs to result in any emotional state) On the perceptual view of emotions, “emotions are causal consequences of bodily changes. They are states that register bodily changes” (Prinz 2006) (58)—though they can be caused in other ways as well (through conditioning and education, for example). How exactly this works, of course, is not known—but there are empirical data that support the connection. Damasio, for example, “points to functional neuron-imaging studies that show activation in somatic brain centers during emotion induction” (Prinz 2006) (58). Given that changes in bodily states are the result of a registering of changes in one's environment, even when other sensory modalities are used, it follows that our own emotions are routinely (though not always) connected to things outside of our internal lives. Of course, one might object that the fact that emotions might not be connected to actual environmental cues is a reason to distrust the capacity of emotions to grant us cognitive access to the world. But all our input systems face the same objections: they occasionally get things wrong, even if they often get things more-or-less right. It would thus be hyperbolic to dismiss the senses (including the somatic sense) just because they have lied to us before. That emotions register changes in the body, and the body registers changes in the world, enable this account of emotions to meet the first requirement of a nonprojectivist view of the role of emotions in moral perception: emotions must pick out something in the world. The thing picked out, of course, must be regularly (even if not always) picked out, and it must be possible to misidentify the property picked out, if we are to make the claim that the emotions are not best understood as merely projected. The emotions of grief and fear illustrate both of these features well (as of course, they should, if the view is correct!). Fear represents (or, at any rate, is meant to represent) the presence of something that is dangerous. Whether or not a thing is dangerous, of course, depends on where I stand in relation to the thing, what properties I have, and what properties the thing has (i.e., “dangerous” is a relational property). As Prinz points out, however, “being dangerous does not depend on being represented as dangerous” (Prinz 2006) (63). A similar analysis applies to grief. Grief involves the experience of the loss of something of value. Like danger, loss is a relational property—but this makes it no less objective. Whether or not there is something that I have lost (or something that is dangerous) does not depend on my regarding the thing as lost (or dangerous). My experience of grief and fear, of course, need not result from an actual dangerous object, or the actual loss of something I value. I can experience either emotion inappropriately when the relational properties they register are not veridical. This means, quite bluntly, that I can have emotional states when I should not have them: my fear can be either warranted or unwarranted by what is registered in my environment (I might fear vampires, until I am led to see that there are no such things). Likewise, my grief can result from a merely apparent loss, rather than a real one, and I can be corrected in my response (for example, I might think that someone stole my favorite book, only to find it later). Author's personal copy The case for moral perception These cases show, I think, that there need not be anything mysterious about moral perception. Bodily perceptions register features in the environment, sometimes doing so through the utilization of other sense modalities (we hear the movements of a snake, or see something we perceive as valuable destroyed, or smell fire, etc.). Presumably, one can explain the origins of such perceptual systems through evolution, but this need not detract from their reality or moral importance. (Analogously, one can explain the emergence of science through evolution, but this need not mean anything in particular about its epistemological status). The emotions of sympathy and love, I think, are good candidates for moral perception—though of course, this is only one kind of moral perception. Being perceptually attentive to the suffering of others is arguably a precondition for a broad range of moral responses. While acting on such perception may well require judgment in many cases, it need not always. Much as one might retreat from the sight of a snake automatically, so too might one simply respond to the suffering one encounters, and do so without needing to engage in any higher-order cognition.35 Moreover, we should expect more immediate perceptual discernment of appropriate responses from those who have more experience in dealing with those in distress, provided they have learned from the experience in question. Because perception is trained with and through experience, agents can move from perceiving that a sympathetic response is called for (and thus needing to deliberate about what to do) to perceiving immediately that x ought to be done.36 If Aristotle is correct in thinking that morality demands the correct emotional response to the situations we encounter and that our emotional responses must be trained to achieve this result, then it seems to me that the account so far given goes a fair distance in sorting out how moral perception might work and the importance it might have in the moral life. First, the perceptual account of emotions provides a model for how moral perception can be literally perception (it's bodily perception of the environment). Second, our account secures a place for the emotions in the moral life, acknowledging that the emotions can be appropriate or inappropriate and that it can take work to train one's emotional reactions. One can fail to see the suffering of others, or see it clearly enough, or even pay too much attention to such suffering where circumstances call for alternative actions. Likewise, the perception of suffering can eventually give rise to the immediate perceptual awareness that certain kinds of actions should be done in response to the suffering one sees. Our analysis provides room for those, like Brentano37 and Scheler,38 who regard emotions like love, hate, and sympathy as the central elements of moral experience.39 Finally, although the 35 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. 36 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). 37 See Brentano (2006). 38 See Scheler (2008). 39 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. Author's personal copy J.J. Wisnewski existence of perception does not entail moral realism, the analysis shows one way that several standard anti-realist and non-cognitivist challenges to ethics can begin to be addressed: if one's reason for rejecting moral objectivity is that we have no way of detecting moral properties, the account given here shows that this reason does not stand up to scrutiny. Taking stock We are now in a position to describe more fully what one kind of moral perception might be like and how it might work. Assuming that the perceptual theory of emotions is correct, the account might go as follows: Sympathy, as an emotion, registers changes in the environment. In this particular emotion, bodily perception with the help of other senses presumably would detect the needs and distress of others and would prepare the body for some kind of response. I assume that such a response has a deep evolutionary history and that its origin in evolution is no objection to claims about moral objectivity. The capacity to register distress among others in one's environment, moreover, can be developed in extraordinary ways, but can also atrophy. Famously, for example, military and torture training aims precisely to minimize the sympathetic response soldiers have to those they face in combat. This is accomplished through drills of various kinds that allow a person to face situations that would normally call for sympathy and react in ways that do not represent sympathetic response. Engaging in such activities with frequency and intensity, the sympathetic response can be, and very often is, defeated. Likewise, though, the sympathetic response can be developed and perhaps even overdeveloped. The experience of sympathy involves, among many other things, the experience of a certain kind of fitting response and one that does not depend on the sympathizer's individual desires as its motivating cause (i.e., the fittingness is heterochthonous). In other words, one sympathizes with someone in need because she is in need, not because one desires to act “sympathetically.” In cultivating one's sympathetic responses, one may well have to apply rules and principles of various kinds. For example, one may be accustomed to ignoring the suffering of homeless persons, despite (or because) one passes such persons daily en route to work. In attempting to develop one's capacities for sympathy, one might utilize a principle stating “Be mindful of those in need,” or something similar. Rules and principles, then, can facilitate moral development, but we should not mistake morality for possession and use of such principles. Indeed, once one's sympathetic response has been trained, the rules fall away as unnecessary: one sees distress when it occurs, and no rule is needed to remind one to do so. We can explain the divergence of moral perception in the same way that we explain the divergence in auditory and visual perception. Much as some kinds of non-Western music sound dissonant to Western listeners due to training and habituation, so too will some kinds of experience more easily register as morally salient for those habituated to see such things. I presume that, as in the case of auditory and visual perception, moral perception will also rest on a large class of shared perceptions despite differences: the capacity to perceive suffering, I hypothesize, is one such universal. If this view is correct, moreover, we should expect persons who find moral Author's personal copy The case for moral perception action difficult or even impossible to have a damaged or atrophied capacity to experience emotion. This is one plausible way of describing cases of sociopathy. The role of moral phenomenology in moral philosophy is to articulate and describe the various moral experiences we have, specifying the intentional objects of those experiences in a way that clarifies their structure. With the perceptual account of emotions in hand, such a phenomenology has a place to start—and has a way of responding to those who claim that there can be no such thing as “moral perception.” Unresolved problems Showing that there is a plausible model of literal moral perception does not show that the model is correct. All I have done in this paper is sketch some of the features of one such model. I have not attempted to examine every objection to the model or even every objection to the idea of moral perception. My aim, rather, has been to show that some of the standard objections—the ones most frequently made—can be met and hence that the idea of moral perception should not be so quickly and lightly dismissed. I have not claimed that the analysis of moral perception here establishes moral realism. On the contrary, I am inclined to accept the argument that an adequate account of moral perception cannot establish moral realism—but I accept it in the same way that I accept the claim that an adequate account of perception does not prove the existence of the external world. I suspect that there is nothing that would count as “proof” for someone who was infatuated with skepticism. Indeed, it may be part of skepticism's fascination that it represents a challenge that is near irrefutable. I have also not taken up a host of interesting questions about the phenomenology of sympathy or of moral perception in general. Although I have appealed to heterochthonous fittingness as one feature of moral perception, I remain unsatisfied with this singular feature. It is my additional contention that all moral perception likewise involves a certain way of experiencing the self—one in which our cognizance of our own agency, and our evaluation of its importance, recede into the background. 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