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Moral Perception

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2008

Timothy Chappell
Affiliation:
The Open University

Abstract

I develop an account of moral perception which is able to deal well with familiar naturalistic non-realist complaints about ontological extravagance and ‘queerness’. I show how this account can also ground a cogent response to familiar objections presented by Simon Blackburn (about supervenience) and J.L. Mackie (about motivation). The familiar realist's problem about relativism, however, remains.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2008

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References

1 Diels, H. and Kranz, W., Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin: Weidmann, repr. 1974), 68 B117Google Scholar.

2 Dennett, Daniel, ‘Real Patterns’, Journal of Philosophy 88.1 (1991): 2751CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 An apparent example is described in Bryson, Bill, A Short History of Nearly Everything (London: Black Swan, 2004)Google Scholar, Chapter 3: the Australian amateur astronomer Robert Evans can look through a telescope at an array of thousands of stars, and see immediately when a new supernova has been added to the array.

4 Do I then take the adoption of what Dennett calls ‘the intentional stance’ to be a matter of pattern-recognition? At least in large part, yes I do, though the implications of what I say here for philosophy of mind are another story.

5 Cp. Jackson, Frank, ‘What Mary Didn't Know’, Journal of Philosophy 83.5: 291295CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 McNaughton, David, Moral Vision (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 57Google Scholar.

7 Mackie 1977: Mackie, J.L., Ethics: inventing right and wrong (London: Penguin), 38Google Scholar.

8 Blackburn, Simon, Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) p. 119Google Scholar. Zangwill, Nick, ‘Moral Supervenience’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy: Volume 20: Moral Concepts, ed. French, P., Uehling, T., and Wettstein, H., University of Notre Dame Press (1996)Google Scholar, argues that this is the best formulation of Blackburn's argument. Without going into the technicalities of Blackburn exegesis, I agree.

9 ‘At most’: containment is a good intuitive picture for and-elimination, but hardly for or-introduction.

10 See Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1951), I, 127Google Scholar.

11 See McDowell, John, ‘Virtue and Reason’, The Monist 62 (1979): 331–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 ‘Catching on’ to patterns is an uncodifiable business, and a number of philosophers, following McDowell, John (‘Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following’, in Holtzman, Steven and Leich, Christopher, eds., Wittgenstein: To Follow A Rule (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1981), pp. 141–62)Google Scholar, have been impressed by the idea that there might be an essential connection between uncodifiability and genuine (non-naturalistic) objectivity: that idea leads us naturally into moral particularism of one sort or another (see e.g. Dancy, Jonathan, Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)Google Scholar). The idea is interesting, though I cannot see the connection myself.

13 Harman, Gilbert, The Nature of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 9Google Scholar.

14 There is a third and a fourth sort of ambiguity in the formulations too, which for simplicity I leave out of the main discussion. ‘Intrinsically motivating property’ could mean a property that of itself (a) always or (b) sometimes (1) successfully motivates (or gives an overriding reason), or one that of itself (a) always or (b) sometimes (2) motivates at least to some extent (or gives at least some reason). Since (a1) is an implausibly strong combination of claims—how many powers are there anywhere that are always efficacious?—it is presumably the other three sorts of claims (a2, b1, b2) that are usually meant. Much scope for ambiguity and unclarity remains, however. Without suitable magnifying equipment, it is hard, for instance, to refute (a2) the claim that a property always has some effect, however tiny.

15 Thanks for comments to Alex Barber, Chris Belshaw, Sarah Broadie, Dan Hutto, Simon Kirchin, John Lippitt, Derek Matravers, Tim Mulgan, and Carolyn Price.