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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
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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).
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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).
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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).
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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.
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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
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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. I must leave this for exploration elsewhere.40 For now, I have hopefully
at least made the case that examining such a possibility will not be the merely
indulgent activity of someone who takes a metaphor too literally.
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40
See Wisnewski (forthcoming).
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