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  1. Moral Experience: Perception or Emotion?James Hutton - 2022 - Ethics 132 (3):570-597.
    One solution to the problem of moral knowledge is to claim that we can acquire it a posteriori through moral experience. But what is a moral experience? When we examine the most compelling putative cases, we find features which, I argue, are best explained by the hypothesis that moral experiences are emotions. To preempt an objection, I argue that putative cases of emotionless moral experience can be explained away. Finally, I allay the worry that emotions are an unsuitable basis for (...)
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  2. (1 other version)Unreliable emotions and ethical knowledge.James Hutton - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    How is ethical knowledge possible? One promising answer is Moral Empiricism: we can acquire ethical knowledge through emotional experiences. But Moral Empiricism faces a serious problem. Our emotions are unreliable guides to ethics, frequently failing to fit the ethical status of their objects, so the habit of basing ethical beliefs on one's emotions seems too unreliable to yield knowledge. I develop a new, virtue-epistemic solution to this problem, with practical implications for how we approach ethical decision-making. By exploiting a frequently (...)
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  3. Kant, Animal Minds, and Conceptualism.James Hutton - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (8):981-998.
    Kant holds that some nonhuman animals “are acquainted with” objects, despite lacking conceptual capacities. What does this tell us about his theory of human cognition? Numerous authors have argued that this is a significant point in favour of Nonconceptualism—the claim that, for Kant, sensible representations of objects do not depend on the understanding. Against this, I argue that Kant’s views about animal minds can readily be accommodated by a certain kind of Conceptualism. It remains viable to think that, for Kant, (...)
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  4. Emotion-enriched moral perception.James Hutton - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    This article provides a new account of how moral beliefs can be epistemically justified. I argue that we should take seriously the hypothesis that the human mind contains emotion-enriched moral perceptions, i.e. perceptual experiences as of moral properties, arising from cognitive penetration by emotions. Further, I argue that if this hypothesis is true, then such perceptual experiences can provide regress-stopping justification for moral beliefs. Emotion-enriched moral perceptions do exhibit a kind of epistemic dependence: they can only justify moral beliefs if (...)
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