Commentators have shown a steady interest in the role of feeling in Kant’s moral and practical philosophy over the last few decades. Much attention has been given to the notion of ‘moral feeling’ in general, as well as to what Kant calls the ‘feeling of respect’ for the moral law. My focus in this essay is on the role of feeling in practical judgment. My claim in what follows is that the act of (...) judging in the practical domain—i.e., determining what one ought to do, or what action one ought to perform, in a specific case—crucially involves feeling. Put more simply: I argue that practical judgment has an essentially affective dimension. The upshot of the account I will give is that it provides us with a richer and more complex account of moral feeling than has previously been appreciated in the literature. While it is recognized that feeling plays a certain role in moral motivation, what I hope to demonstrate here is that feeling is involved much earlier in the exercise of moral agency. Far from entering only at the point at which we are trying to muster the strength of will to carry out what we know we ought to do, feeling is present the moment we begin to deliberate about what it is that we ought to do. (shrink)

This paper argues that contrary to what is often thought, virtue for Kant is not just a matter of strength of will; it has an essential affective dimension. To support this claim, I show that certain affective dispositions, namely moral feelings and desires, are virtuous in the sense that they are constitutive of virtue at the affective level. There is thus an intrinsic connection between an agent’s practice of virtue and the cultivation of her affective dispositions.

My aim in this paper is to discuss Kant’s engagement with what is arguably the core feature of Hutcheson’s moral sense theory, namely the idea that the moral sense is the foundation of moral judgement. In section one I give an account of Hutcheson’s conception of the moral sense. This sense is a perceptive faculty that explains our ability both to feel a particular kind of pleasure upon perceiving benevolence, and to appraise such benevolence as morally (...) good on the basis of this feeling. Section two summarizes Kant’s discussion of the moral sense during his pre-Critical period. Kant’s appraisal of the concept changes during this time and culminates in the 1769/70 rejection of the moral sense as the foundation of moral judgement. In section three I turn to the main reason why Kant rejects the moral sense as the foundation of moral judgement, namely because it is incapable of issuing sufficiently universal and necessary judgements of moral good and evil. I argue that underlying Kant’s rejection of the moral sense is the fact that he understands the faculty not as a “sense” proper, but as a “feeling” according to his technical understanding of these terms. In the fourth section I conclude by briefly evaluating what my analysis says about Kant’s engagement with Hutcheson. I suggest that while Kant never accepted the existence of a moral sense, Hutcheson’s position was a view with which Kant often contrasted his own, and as such it played an important role in the development and expression of Kant’s mature moral philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to resolve the Frierson-Grenberg debate on the nature of Kant’s account of moral motivation that took place in the third issue of Con-textos Kantianos. In their respective interpretations, Frierson and Grenberg fail to accommodate the a priori status of moral feeling when incorporating it into Kant’s moral motivational structure. In response, I provide a novel transcendental interpretation – one that takes the a priori moral feeling both as an incentive (...) of morality and as that which conditions the possibility of morality in human agents. I argue that Kant developed the notion of moral feeling solely in order to resolve the problem of motivational skepticism concerning the moral law. Since this problem occurs as a part of Kant’s search for the supreme principle of morality, the notion of moral feeling becomes a part of both Kant’s moral motivational structure and his argument to justify the moral law. (shrink)

"What is the significance of our gut feelings? Can they disclose our deep selves or point to a shared human nature? The phenomenon of perpetrator disgust provides a uniquely insightful perspective by which to consider such questions. Across time and cultures, some individuals exhibit signs of distress while committing atrocities. They experience nausea, convulse, and vomit. Do such bodily responses reflect a moral judgment, a deep-seated injunction against atrocity? What conclusions can we draw about the relationship of our gut (...) feelings to human nature and moral frameworks? Drawing on a broad range of historical examples as well as the latest scholarship from the philosophical and scientific study of emotions, this book explores the relationship of cognition and emotion through the lens of perpetrator disgust. Considering a range of interpretations of this phenomenon, it becomes evident that gut feelings do not carry a straightforward and transparent intentionality in themselves, nor do they motivate any core, specific response; they are templates that can embody a broad range of values and morals. Using this core insight, the book proposes a contextual understanding of emotions, by which an agent's environment shapes their available hermeneutic equipment-concepts, categories, names-that individuals rely on to make sense of their emotions and navigate the world"--. (shrink)

It is often assumed that the best explanation of why we should be moral must involve a substantive account of what there is reason to do and how this is related to what morality requires and recommends. In this paper I argue to the contrary that the best explanation of why we should be moral is neutral about the content of morality, and does not invoke an independent substantive account of what there is practical reason to do. I (...) contend that an act’s deontic status as recommended or required by morality is best understood as its being fitting for us to feel obligated to perform it, which essentially involves motivation to perform it. I argue, moreover, that our having reason to do something is a matter of its being fitting for us to be motivated to do it. Since an act’s being favored by morality conceptually entails the fittingness of our being motivated to perform it, and the fittingness of this motivation conceptually entails that there is reason to perform it, it is actually a conceptual truth that there are reasons to do what morality requires and recommends, whatever that turns out to be. I contend, finally, that this kind of account best explains why, although moral considerations are not always overriding, we necessarily have conclusive reasons to do what morality requires. I argue that an act counts as morally required only if the reasons to feel obligated to perform it are conclusive, which entails that it is unfitting to fail to be most strongly motivated to perform it. This, together with my account of the connection between fitting motives and practical reasons, entails that whatever considerations are weighty enough to make the act morally required are conclusive reasons to perform it. I believe that this conceptual account of reasons to be moral is important, because it removes the explanation of why we should be moral as a desideratum on normative ethical theories, which may significantly decrease the attractions of some and increase the attractions of others. (shrink)

Despite the widespread use of the notion of moral intuition, its psychological features remain a matter of debate and it is unclear why the capacity to experience moral intuitions evolved in humans. We first survey standard accounts of moral intuition, pointing out their interesting and problematic aspects. Drawing lessons from this analysis, we propose a novel account of moral intuitions which captures their phenomenological, mechanistic, and evolutionary features. Moral intuitions are composed of two elements: an (...) evaluative mental state and a feeling of rightness (FOR). We illustrate the phenomenology of the FOR with examples of non-moral and moral cases, and provide a biological and mechanistic account: the emergence of human reasoning capacities created a need for the co-evolution of a psychological system producing the feeling of rightness (the FORs). This system is triggered when we experience conflicting evaluations. The FORs renders evaluations resulting from rational deliberation less compelling than the evaluations produced by simple evolved systems. It thus facilitates optimal decision-making, preventing excessive interference by rational deliberation. Our account sheds light on why moral intuitions are so frequently experienced and why they are so compelling and resistant to argument. In addition, the account fuels interesting speculations about common metaethical intuitions. (shrink)

In this article I offer a critical commentary on Jeanine Grenberg’s claim that, by the time of the second Critique, Kant was committed to the view that we only access the moral law’s validity through the feeling of respect. The issue turns on how we understand Kant’s assertion that our consciousness of the moral law is a ‘fact of reason’. Grenberg argues that all facts must be forced, and anything forced must be felt. I defend an alternative (...) interpretation, according to which the fact of reason refers to the actuality of our moral consciousness. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on the question of whether moral feelings are necessary to the making of moral judgments. This is an important question and the answer one gives has more interesting implications than one might initially expect. I will argue that an experientialist account of moral concepts, on which moral judgments are beliefs about objective facts represented by moral feelings, provides the best naturalistic answer to the question. To make my point, I anchor my arguments (...) in a series of comparisons between the experientialist account and its rivals, and how they handle metaethical puzzles to do with the moral status of psychopaths, moral twin earth, the nature of moral motivation, and issues of integrity and moral improvement. (shrink)

In line with familiar portrayals of Kant's ethics, interpreters of his philosophy of education focus essentially on its intellectual dimension: the notions of moral catechism, ethical gymnastics and ethical ascetics, to name but a few. By doing so, they usually emphasise Kant's negative stance towards the role of feelings in moral education. Yet there seem to be noteworthy exceptions: Kant writes that the inclinations to be honoured and loved are to be preserved as far as possible. This statement (...) is not only at odds with Kant's general claim that education should not encourage feelings, but more importantly, it encourages a feeling that is in many ways paradigmatically un-Kantian. How are we to understand the fact that of all feelings, the love of honour should be preserved? To answer this question, I begin by clarifying the reasons behind Kant's negative stance towards feelings in moral education. I then turn to his account of the feeling of love of honour. After distinguishing between its good and its bad forms, I consider two ways of making sense of the positive role Kant assigns to it. The first, modest reading will suggest that the feeling of love of honour is morally useful because it has two functions: an epistemic one, and a motivational one. The second, more ambitious reading will suggest that the feeling of love of honour enables the child to experience her inner worth as bearer of value. (shrink)

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant remarks that the feeling of the dynamically sublime is actually conditioned and that its foundation is the moral feeling, which he addressed in the Critique of Practical Reason. In order to elucidate those transient yet significant remarks, this paper confronts the analytic of the dynamically sublime from the third Critique with the analytic of the moral feeling from the second Critique. By uncovering an architectonic, constitutive and (...) structural kinship between the two feelings, the paper contributes to the reconsideration of the relation between Kant’s aesthetics and his ethics. (shrink)

Much of the philosophical attention directed to pride focuses on the normative puzzle of determining how pride can be both a central vice and a central virtue. But there is another puzzle, a descriptive puzzle, of determining how the emotion of pride and the character trait of pride relate to each other. A solution is offered to the descriptive puzzle that builds upon the accounts of Hume and Gabriele Taylor, but avoids the pitfalls of those accounts. In particular, the emotion (...) and the trait correspond to two employments of personal ideals: personal ideals as standards of self-assessment and personal ideals as practical guides in one’s deliberation and related activities. This account, in turn, provides a framework for solving the normative puzzle. (shrink)

The kind of empathy that is communicated through expressions like “I feel your pain” or “I share your sadness” is important, but peculiar. For it seems to require something perplexing and elusive: sharing another’s experience. It’s not clear how this is possible. We each experience the world from our own point of view, which no one else occupies. It’s also unclear exactly why it is so important that we share others' pains. If you are in pain, then why should it (...) matter, and be a good thing, that I am also in the same pain? Our goal in this paper is to address these questions. Specifically, our goal is to clarify how empathy, in the regimented sense of sharing another’s pain, is possible and why it is important. Central to our account is the concept of being acquainted with—that is, directly aware of—pain. When I feel my own pain, and am acquainted with it, I want the pain to stop, and I’m moved—sometimes compelled—to stop it. My acquaintance with the pain is what reveals that it is no good, to be gotten rid of, and to be avoided in the future. Acquaintance also appears to be implicated in our understanding of, and motivation to relieve, others’ pains. When I say “I feel your pain” I express an awareness of your pain, a direct appreciation of its noxious qualities, and, as with my own pain, an understanding of why it ought to be eased. Explaining how empathy is both possible and important therefore involves clarifying the nature of acquaintance: its limits, epistemic role, and motivational significance. What our analysis reveals is that agents have both epistemic and moral reasons to share other people’s pain because pain-sharing is the source of a species of character-building knowledge that we have no other way of accessing except through direct acquaintance with pain. (shrink)

Philosophers generally agree that gratitude, the called-for response to benevolence, includes positive feelings. In this paper, I argue against this view. The grateful beneficiary will have certain feelings, but in some contexts, those feelings will be profoundly negative. Philosophers overlook this fact because they tend to consider only cases of gratitude in which the benefactor’s sacrifice is minimal, and in which the benefactor fares well after performing an act of benevolence. When we consider cases in which a benefactor suffers severely, (...) we see the feelings associated with gratitude can be negative, and even quite painful. I conclude with a discussion of the implications negative feelings of gratitude have for the normative question of when gratitude is owed, and for the descriptive claim in positive psychology that gratitude enhances wellbeing. (shrink)

It is generally assumed that emotion concepts are purely descriptive. However, recent investigations suggest that the concept of happiness includes information about the morality of the agent's life. In this study, we argue that normative influences on emotion concepts are not restricted to happiness and are not about moral norms. In a series of studies, we show that emotion attribution is influenced by whether the agent's psychological and bodily states fit the situation in which they are experienced. People consider (...) that emotions are not just about feeling in certain ways, but also about feeling the right way. (shrink)

This article deals with the feeling of strangeness in the human being. When it comes to being human, it is traditionally understood as beings containing reasons and emotions. Thus, to better understand the feeling of the foreigner, its context is analyzed on the perspective of humean moral sentimentalism and on the intertwining, proposed by Husserl, between the intellectual and affective spheres. From these philosophers one can see the convergence between the intellectual and affective spheres, as well as (...) between reason and emotion. Therefore, contemporary emotional theories bring an explanatory gain for understanding the feeling of the foreigner in the face of new environments and cultures, as both cognitive and non-cognitive elements are perceived. Therefore, Goldie and Husserl contribute to the analysis of the foreigner's feeling of strangeness in its various peculiarities. (shrink)

Despite Kant’s lasting influence on philosophical accounts of moral motivation, many details of his own position remain elusive. In the Critique of Practical Reason, for example, Kant argues that our recognition of the moral law’s authority must elicit both painful and pleasurable feelings in us. On reflection, however, it is unclear how these effects could motivate us to act from duty. As a result, Kant’s theory of moral sensibility comes under a skeptical threat: the possibility of a (...) morally motivating feeling seems incoherent. My aim in this paper is to reconstruct Kant’s theory in a way that overcomes this threat. By way of conclusion, I show how my reconstruction brings a new perspective to a long-standing dispute over intellectualist and affectivist views of moral motivation. (shrink)

Moral abolitionists claim that morality ought to be abolished. According to one of their most prominent arguments, this is because making moral judgments renders people significantly less tolerant toward anyone who holds divergent views. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that morality’s tolerance-decreasing effect only occurs if people are realists about moral issues, i.e., they interpret these issues as objectively grounded. We found support for this hypothesis (Studies 1 and 2). Yet, it also turned out that (...) the intolerance associated with realism is mediated by moral conviction and perceived consensus. People tend to feel more strongly about those moral issues they ground objectively and, in doing so, are more prone to display the vice of moral smugness toward those who disagree with them. The remedy for this that has been recommended is humility which we found (Study 3) is indeed related to reduced intolerance, in part by predicting a reduction in realism, but also in part through a direct connection to intolerance. These results put pressure on abolitionists’ “argument from intolerance.”. (shrink)

Moral philosophers have defended anger as an important part of our moral lives. In spite of these defenses, skeptics have nonetheless argued that it would be better all things considered to get over anger to the extent that we can. They will often point to moral exemplars like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Gandhi to show both (a) that we can successfully overcome our feelings of anger and (b) that we would be morally better off doing so. (...) In this chapter, I argue against this aspiration. Those who advocate for such an aspiration fail to recognize that getting over anger would require us to radically reshape our moral psychology. I argue that feelings of anger are more central to our moral emotional lives than skeptics realize and that they cannot be removed without altering other valuable moral commitments. (shrink)

Throughout her work, Audre Lorde maintains that her self-preservation in the face of oppression depends on acting from the recognition and valorization of her feelings as a deep source of knowledge. This claim, taken as a portrayal of agency, poses challenges to standard positions in ethics, epistemology, and moral psychology. This article examines the oppositional agency articulated by Lorde’s thought, locating feeling, poetry, and the power she calls “the erotic” within her avowed project of self-preservation. It then explores (...) the implications of taking seriously Lorde’s account, particularly for theorists examining ethics and epistemology under nonideal social conditions. For situations of sexual intimacy, for example, Lorde’s account unsettles prevailing assumptions about the role of consent in responsibility between sexual partners. I argue that obligations to solicit consent and respect refusal are not sufficient to acknowledge the value of agency in intimate encounters when agency is oppositional in the way Lorde describes. (shrink)

A familiar feature of moral life is the distinctive anxiety that we feel in the face of a moral dilemma or moral conflict. Situations like these require us to take stands on controversial issues. But because we are unsure that we will make the correct decision, anxiety ensues. Despite the pervasiveness of this phenomenon, surprisingly little work has been done either to characterize this “ moral anxiety” or to explain the role that it plays in our (...) moral lives. This paper aims to address this deficiency by developing an empirically informed account of what moral anxiety is and what it does. (shrink)

Some stories of moral exemplars motivate us to emulate their admirable attitudes and behaviors, but why do some exemplars motivate us more than others? We systematically studied how motivation to emulate is influenced by the similarity between a reader and an exemplar in social or cultural background (Relatability) and how personally costly or demanding the exemplar’s actions are (Attainability). Study 1 found that university students reported more inspiration and related feelings after reading true stories about the good deeds of (...) a recent fellow alum, compared to a famous moral exemplar from decades past. Study 2A developed a battery of short moral exemplar stories that more systematically varied Relatability and Attainability, along with a set of non-moral exemplar stories for comparison. Studies 2B and 2C examined the path from the story type to relatively low stakes altruism (donating to charity and intentions to volunteer) through perceived attainability and relatability, as well as elevation and pleasantness. Together, our studies suggest that it is primarily the relatability of the moral exemplars, not the attainability of their actions, that inspires more prosocial motivation, at least regarding acts that help others at a relatively low cost to oneself. (shrink)

In this paper, my aim is to reconstruct, through the material presented in the handschrifter Nachlaß, Kant`s criticism to Hutcheson and to the doctrine of moral feeling in the 1770s in the so called silent decade. As we can note, this criticism generally is addressed to the fact that the doctrine of moral feeling is lacking an objective ground on which can be established a categorical conception of ethics. Moreover, I argue that in this context Kant (...) already demonstrates, from his critical position in the Reflexionen and Vorlesungen, the general lines of his mature conception on moral feeling as something strictly linked to our awareness of the law. (shrink)

The relationship between the phenomenology of imagination and the phenomenology of memory is an interestingly complicated one. On the one hand, there seem to be important similarities between the two, and there are even occasions in which we mistake an imagining for a memory or vice versa. On the other hand, there seem to be important differences between the two, and we can typically tell them apart. This paper explores various attempts to delineate a phenomenological marker differentiating imagination and memory, (...) with a special focus on two proposed markers that have generated considerable philosophical discussion: the feeling of pastness and the feeling of familiarity. As we will find, neither of them proves to be up to the task at hand. However, by way of a deeper exploration of the feeling of familiarity, we are able to tease out some important morals for efforts to differentiate imagination and memory on phenomenological grounds and, more generally, for efforts to engage in a descriptive phenomenological enterprise. (shrink)

According to rationalist conceptions of moral agency, the constitutive capacities of moral agency are rational capacities. So understood, rationalists are often thought to have a problem with feeling. For example, many believe that rationalists must reject the attractive Aristotelian thought that moral activity is by nature pleasant. I disagree. It is easy to go wrong here because it is easy to assume that pleasure is empirical rather than rational and so extrinsic rather than intrinsic to (...) class='Hi'>moral agency, rationalistically conceived. Drawing on underappreciated elements of Kant’s moral psychology, I sketch an alternative form of rationalism, according to which moral activity is by nature pleasant because at least some pleasures are by nature rational. (shrink)

In everyday moral experience, we judge ourselves for our emotional responses. Most of the philosophical literature on recalcitrant emotions focuses on (a) whether and how they are possible or (b) whether and how they are irrational. My interest here is in the ways we blame ourselves for recalcitrant emotions. I aim to show that it is harder than it looks to explain self-blame for recalcitrant emotions. I argue recalcitrance alone does not give us a reason to feel any particular (...) way about our emotions and it is not sufficient grounds for self-blame. (shrink)

Authenticity is often defined as the extent to which people feel that they know and express their true selves. Research in the psychological sciences suggests that people view true selves as more morally good than bad and that this “virtuous” true self may be a central component of authenticity. In fact, there may be reasons to suspect that authenticity serves as a cue that one’s behaviors are virtuous, and feelings of authenticity may help sustain virtuous actions. However, in previous research, (...) operationalizations of virtue may not clearly capture virtue as virtue theorists might recognize it. The possibility that feelings of authenticity keep people oriented toward virtuous activities is compatible with theorizing, but the precise ways that it might do so has not received direct conceptual or empirical scrutiny. We propose an interdisciplinary hypothesis of how feelings of authenticity could function to serve as a feedback mechanism for virtuous behavior. Feelings of authenticity could play a role in sustaining motivation to engage in virtuous activity insofar as the experience of subjective authenticity encourages one to approach that activity or environment in the future. Furthermore, virtuous behavior incorporates a few key elements that are predictive of experiencing subjective authenticity. We review emerging research that offers initial support for the idea that authenticity may guide sustained and virtuous civic action and develop a theoretical framework that positions authenticity as integral to sustained virtuous behavior. (shrink)

Kyle Fritz and Daniel Miller’s reply to my article helpfully clarifies their position and our main points of disagreement. Their view is that those who blame hypocritically lack the right to blame for a violation of some moral norm N in virtue of having an unfair disposition to blame others, but not themselves, for violations of N. This view raises two key questions. First, are there instances of hypocritical blame that do not involve an unfair differential blaming disposition? Second, (...) if the answer to the first question is Yes, do hypocritical blamers of this kind lack the right to blame? In this paper, I argue that the answer to the first question is Yes. Given this, Fritz and Miller’s account faces serious problems regardless of whether the answer to the second question is Yes or No. (shrink)

What, if anything, can justify public shaming? Philosophers who have written on this topic have pointed out the role of public shaming in enforcing valuable social norms. In this paper, I defend an alternate, supplementary justification for public shaming: as a form of moral self-defence. Moral self-defence is the defence of one’s moral standing – being recognized as an equal in the eyes of oneself and others – rather than the defence of one’s physical body or rights. (...) Agents can engage in moral self-defence by publicly criticizing, blaming, or expressing other negative feelings towards wrongdoers, which sometimes constitutes contributions to public shaming. (shrink)

Drawing on Frederick Douglass’s arguments about racial pride, I develop and defend an account of feeling racial pride that centers on resisting racialized oppression. Such pride is racially ecumenical in that it does not imply partiality towards one’s own racial group. I argue that it can both accurately represent its intentional object and be intrinsically and extrinsically valuable to experience. It follows, I argue, that there is, under certain conditions, a morally unproblematic, and plausibly valuable, kind of racial pride (...) available to white people, though one that could hardly differ more from what is generally meant by “white pride.”. (shrink)

How should we make sense of praise and blame and other such reactions towards collective agents like governments, universities, or corporations? Collective agents can be appropriate targets for our moral feelings and judgements because they can maintain and express moral positions of their own. Moral agency requires being capable of recognising moral considerations and reasons. It also necessitates the ability to react reflexively to moral matters, i.e. to take into account new moral concerns when (...) they arise. While members of a collective agent are capable of this, the collective frames the thinking of the individual moral agents within it and affects their options in myriad ways. The moral positions thus formed and expressed belong to the collective. Crucially, unlike marginal moral agents, collective agents as moral actors can be held fully responsible for their acts and omissions. (shrink)

We live at a time when many aspects of our educational culture are declared to be in crisis. Increasingly, the STEM movement dominates initiatives at the same time that there is less agreement about what constitutes a Humanities or liberal arts education. Relatively broad consensus indicates that it should make students somehow “better”. Within the field of pre-college normative ethics surveys, a survey of textbooks shows that most agree on what a course like this should look like. In evaluating the (...) effects of an ethics curriculum, however, most show diffidence to claim moral transformation in their students. At least part of this problem seems to stem from mainstream philosophy’s longtime bias against and misunderstanding of emotions. A closer look at emotions and how they might be educated offers a very different picture how a successful ethics curriculum could look. A typical ethics curriculum of any level presumes that a course neutral in regards to which, if any, of the normative ethical theories covered is true. However, any such course begins with a host of implied values that might not necessarily be shared with the students. If it’s the case, as contemporary moral psychology suggests that at the very least, our rational minds inform our behavior and moral judgments far less than we might have thought, then a course in normative ethics needs to engage emotions far more effectively. Martha Nussbaum’s recent work Political Emotions suggests some important ways that desirable emotions like civic love and undesirable emotions like disgust might relate to a curriculum. With the right approach, perhaps we can begin to claim that a moral philosophy course might make someone more moral. (shrink)

Owen Ware here develops and defends a novel interpretation of Fichte’s moral philosophy as an ethics of wholeness. While virtually forgotten for most of the twentieth century, Fichte’s System of Ethics is now recognized by scholars as a masterpiece in the history of post-Kantian thought and a key text for understanding the work of later German idealist thinkers. This book provides a careful examination of the intellectual context in which Fichte’s moral philosophy evolved and of the specific arguments (...) he offers in response to Kant and his immediate successors. A distinctive feature of this study is a focus on the foundational concepts of Fichte’s ethics—freedom, morality, feeling, conscience, community—and their connection to his innovative but largely misunderstood theory of drives. By way of conclusion, the book shows that what appears to be two conflicting commitments in Fichte’s ethics—a commitment to the feelings of one's conscience and a commitment to engage in open dialogue with others—are two aspects of his theory of moral perfection. The result is a sharp understanding of Fichte's System of Ethics as offering a compelling resolution to the personal and interpersonal dimensions of moral life. (shrink)

Moral obligation, according to one influential conception, is distinct among other moral concepts in at least two respects. First, obligation is linked with demands. If I am obligated to you to do X, then you can demand that I do X. Second, obligation is linked with blame and the rest of our accountability practices. If I am obligated to you to do X, failure to do so is blameworthy and you may hold me accountable for it. The puzzle (...) is the following: when it comes to our attitudes, in particular to our emotional responses, these two components seem to come apart. We do not appear to demand that others feel a given emotion. And yet, we do blame others (and ourselves) for feeling them. The challenge I take on in this paper is to sort out the moral status of emotions given these facts. (shrink)

Kant and the Feeling of Life positions Kant's concept of life as a guiding thread for understanding not only Kant's approach to aesthetics and teleology but the underlying unity of the Critique of Judgment itself. The "feeling of life," which Kant describes as affecting us in various ways--as animating, enlivening, and quickening the mind--lies at the heart of Kant's philosophical project, but it has remained understudied for a theme of such centrality. This volume brings together, for the first (...) time, essays focused on the topic of life in Kant's work, providing a wealth of perspectives and analyses ranging from the Critique of Judgment to Kant's early aesthetics, his social and political philosophy, his work connected to the body and health, and his moral theory. (shrink)

Recent work in neuroimaging suggests that some patients diagnosed as being in the persistent vegetative state are actually conscious. In this paper, we critically examine this new evidence. We argue that though it remains open to alternative interpretations, it strongly suggests the presence of consciousness in some patients. However, we argue that its ethical significance is less than many people seem to think. There are several different kinds of consciousness, and though all kinds of consciousness have some ethical significance, different (...) kinds underwrite different kinds of moral value. Demonstrating that patients have phenomenal consciousness — conscious states with some kind of qualitative feel to them — shows that they are moral patients, whose welfare must be taken into consideration. But only if they are subjects of a sophisticated kind of access consciousness — where access consciousness entails global availability of information to cognitive systems — are they persons, in the technical sense of the word employed by philosophers. In this sense, being a person is having the full moral status of ordinary human beings. We call for further research which might settle whether patients who manifest signs of consciousness possess the sophisticated kind of access consciousness required for personhood. (shrink)

In philosophy of mind, zombies are imaginary creatures that are exact physical duplicates of conscious subjects but for whom there is no first-personal experience. Zombies are meant to show that physicalism—the theory that the universe is made up entirely out of physical components—is false. In this paper, I apply the zombie thought experiment to the realm of morality to assess whether moral agency is something independent from sentience. Algorithms, I argue, are a kind of functional moral zombie, such (...) that thinking about the latter can help us better understand and regulate the former. I contend that the main reason why algorithms can be neither autonomous nor accountable is that they lack sentience. Moral zombies and algorithms are incoherent as moral agents because they lack the necessary moral understanding to be morally responsible. To understand what it means to inflict pain on someone, it is necessary to have experiential knowledge of pain. At most, for an algorithm that feels nothing, ‘values’ will be items on a list, possibly prioritised in a certain way according to a number that represents weightiness. But entities that do not feel cannot value, and beings that do not value cannot act for moral reasons. (shrink)

According to Westermarck’s widely accepted explanation of the incest taboo, cultural prohibitions on sibling sex are rooted in an evolved biological disposition to feel sexual aversion toward our childhood coresidents. Bernard Williams posed the “representation problem” for Westermarck’s theory: the content of the hypothesized instinct is different from the content of the incest taboo —thus the former cannot be causally responsible for the latter. Arthur Wolf posed the related “moralization problem”: the instinct concerns personal behavior whereas the prohibition concerns everyone. (...) This paper reviews possible ways of defending Westermarck’s theory from the representation and moralization problems, and concludes that the theory is untenable. A recent study purports to support Westermarck’s account by showing that unrelated children raised in the same peer groups on kibbutzim feel sexual aversion toward each other and morally oppose third-party intra-peer-group sex, but this study has been misinterpreted. I argue that the representation and moralization problems are general problems that could potentially undermine many popular evolutionary explanations of social/moral norms. The cultural evolution of morality is not tightly constrained by our biological endowment in the way some philosophers and evolutionary psychologists believe. (shrink)

When are morally good actions beautiful, when indeed they are? In this paper, it is argued that morally good actions are beautiful when they appear to express the deep or true self, and in turn tend to give rise to an emotion which is characterised by feelings of being moved, unity, inspiration, and meaningfulness, inter alia. In advancing the case for this claim, it is revealed that there are additional sources of well-formedness in play in the context of moral (...) beauty in addition to those that have tended to be focused on to date: one which is connected to imagining a deep location for the goodness concerned, and another which is connected to imagining that the goodness stems from capacities which are essential to the person. (shrink)

Most moral philosophers work under the assumption that ordinary folk morality is committed to objectivism—that ordinary folk view morality in absolute terms. This datum serves to constrain and shape philosophical metaethics, since those working in this field feel compelled to make sense of it. In this chapter, I discuss why philosophers take on this commitment. I also outline the relevant experimental research exploring whether, and to what extent, ordinary folk think of morality in absolute terms. Finally, I turn toward (...) a more general discussion of what implications this work may have for philosophical ethics. (shrink)

Organizations have neither a right to the vote nor a weighty right to life. We need not enfranchise Goldman Sachs. We should feel few scruples in dissolving Standard Oil. But they are not without rights altogether. We can owe it to them to keep our promises. We can owe them debts of gratitude. Thus, we can owe some things to organizations. But we cannot owe them everything we can owe to people. They seem to have a peculiar, fragmented moral (...) status. What explains this? Individualistic views explain this in terms of individualistic notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke any distinctive features of organizations. They just invoke the features of individual members of organizations. Collectivistic views, instead, explain this in terms of collective notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke the features of individual members of organizations. They just invoke the features of those organizations. We argue that neither approach works. Instead, one needs to synthesize the two approaches. Some individual interests, we think, are distinctively collective. We, as individuals, have a distinctive interest in playing a part in successful collective action. From this, so we argue, flows the apparently peculiar, fragmented moral status of organizations. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of US states have adopted laws that require pregnant women to have an ultrasound examination, and be shown images of their foetus, prior to undergoing a pregnancy termination. In this paper, I examine one of the basic presumptions of these laws: that seeing one’s foetus changes the ways in which one might act in regard to it, particularly in terms of the decision to terminate the pregnancy or not. I argue that mandatory ultrasound laws compel (...) women into a position of moral spectatorship and require them to recognise the foetus as a being for whom they are responsible, particularly through empathic responses to ultrasound images. The approach I propose extends the project of a bioethics of the image and highlights the need for a critical analysis of the political mobilization of empathy in discussions of abortion. (shrink)

Some films scare us; some make us cry; some thrill us. Some of the most interesting films, however, leave us suspended between feelings – both joyous and sad, or angry and serene. This paper attempts to explain how this can happen and why it is important. I look closely at one film that creates and exploits these conflicted responses. I argue that cases of conflict in film illuminate a pair of vexing questions about emotion in film: (1) To what extent (...) are emotional responses rational, or in need of rationalization?; and (2) What relationship is there between emotional response and value (moral, filmic, or otherwise)? Conflict, I argue, can be revealing, and can help us better understand emotional responses to narrative film1 in general. The paper is divided into four sections. First, I sketch a theory of emotional engagement that makes sense of the notion of a “conflicted emotional response” to a film. Second, I turn to a particular case of a film that produces this sort of conflict, Fritz Lang’s M (1931), and show that the conflict engendered by that film is both more significant and less unusual than it may appear. In the final two sections, I argue that there is no need to rationalize or make consistent such mixed emotional responses, and that there is real moral, aesthetic, and cognitive value to be had from such conflict. (shrink)

Empathic feelings seem to causally influence our moral judgments at least sometimes. But is empathy necessary for our ability to make moral judgments? And is it a good thing if our judgments are based on empathy? This chapter examines the contemporary debate on these issues.

The feeling of being offended, as a moral emotion, plays a key role in issues such as slurs, the offense principle, ethics of humor, etc. However, no adequate theory of offense has been developed in the literature, and it remains unclear what questions such a theory should answer. This paper attempts to fill the gap by performing two tasks. The first task is to clarify and summarize the questions of offense into two kinds, the descriptive questions (e.g., what (...) features differentiate offense from similar moral states like anger?) and the normative questions (e.g., what are the conditions for taking offense to be apt?). The second task is to answer these questions by developing what I call ‘the violated norm theory of offense’. According to this theory, feeling offended entails that the norm one endorses is judged to be violated by the offender. Appealing to the violated norm enables this theory to answer the descriptive questions (e.g., taking offense differs from anger because of features like not requiring victims and the difficulty of animal offense) and the normative questions of offense (e.g., taking offense is apt only if the violated norm is universalizable). (shrink)

Die Frage, wie das, was die Vernunft einsieht, dazu motivieren kann, dies auch zu tun, gehört zu den Grundfragen von Kants praktischer Philosophie. Die vorliegende Untersuchung erschließt Kants Antwort auf das Problem der moralischen Motivation innerhalb seiner Handlungstheorie und Moralphilosophie. Neben einer philosophiehistorischen und systematischen Einordnung liefert sie eine umfassende textnahe Analyse der kantischen Argumente, die auch werkgeschichtliche Aspekte berücksichtigt. Auf diese Weise entsteht ein reichhaltiges Bild der kantischen Theorie moralischer Motivation, die in Kants Konzept der Moralbegründung nicht nur verwurzelt (...) ist, sondern dieses auch unterstützt. So ist die Achtung vor dem Gesetz als Modus zu verstehen, in dem sich der Mensch die praktische Norm zu eigen macht. Moralische Gründe erweisen sich nach der hier vorgeschlagenen Interpretation als unbedingte, universal gültige Regeln, deren praktische Bedeutung als subjektive Handlungsgrundsätze und Motive erst durch Kants Theorie der moralisch-rationalen Sensibilität verständlich wird. Kants Ansatz ist damit nicht nur werkintern von Interesse, sondern liefert darüber hinaus einen inspirierenden Beitrag zu einer modernen Theorie praktischer Normativität. (shrink)

Necessity can be ascribed not only to propositions, but also to feelings. In the Critique of Judgment (KdU), Immanuel Kant argues that a feeling of beauty is the necessary satisfaction instantiated by the ‘free play’ of the cognitive faculties, which provides the grounds for a judgment of taste (KdU 5:196, 217-19). In contradistinction to the theoretical necessity of the Critique of Pure Reason and the moral necessity of the Critique of Practical Reason, the necessity assigned to a judgment (...) of taste is exemplary necessity (KdU 5:237). Necessity can also be assigned by employing the de re/de dicto distinction, namely, by ascribing entailments of what must necessarily hold to either a thing (de re) or to a proposition (de dicto). Although Kant does not use the distinction in any of the three Critiques, this omission has not prevented Kant scholars from applying the distinction in their analyses of the first two Critiques. In this paper, I examine the role that modality plays in Kant’s third Critique and I attempt to bring the de re/de dicto distinction to bear on Kant’s famous aesthetic theory. Ultimately, I perform a retrospective classification of the modality of taste by arguing that because a judgment of taste is not a statement about an objective fact, a judgment of ‘x is beautiful’ can only be read as de dicto necessary. (shrink)

In his early writings, Kant says that the solution to the puzzle of how morality can serve as a motivating force in human life is nothing less than the “philosophers’ stone.” In this dissertation I show that for years Kant searched for the philosophers’ stone in the concept of “respect” (Achtung), which he understood as the complex effect practical reason has on feeling. -/- I sketch the history of that search in Chapters 1-2. In Chapter 3 I show that (...) Kant’s analysis in Groundwork I is incomplete because it does not explain how respect functions as a feeling in motivating choice. In Chapter 4 I argue that Kant’s subsequent attempt to sidestep this explanation in Groundwork III is unsuccessful, and that his position remains open to a skeptical threat. The argument in the second Critique, which I reconstruct in Chapters 5-6, overcomes this threat, and in doing so explains how the feeling of respect is both painful and pleasurable. -/- In the course of defending these claims, I provide an alternative reading of the shift in Kant’s ethical project from the Groundwork of 1785 to the second Critique of 1788 Against a common view in the literature, I argue that the shift does not concern the direction of Kant’s deduction (from freedom to morality, or morality to freedom); rather, it concerns his view of human sensibility and the resources he thinks we have to make our practical self-understanding intelligible. In the second Critique, I argue, Kant develops a novel approach to moral feeling from the perspective of the human agent; and this in turn clears room in his ethics for a new kind of a priori knowledge—namely, knowledge of what the activity of practical reason must feel like. By way of conclusion, I offer a few reasons for why the form of Kant’s argument in the second Critique is still relevant today, as it shows why we can only address moral skepticism from a first-personal perspective. (shrink)