MORALITIES ARE A SIGN-LANGUAGE OF THE AFFECTS

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 237-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Leiter
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Affective Response ◽  
Affective Responses ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Sign Languages ◽  
The Subject

AbstractThis essay offers an interpretation and partial defense of Nietzsche's idea that moralities and moral judgments are “sign-languages” or “symptoms” of our affects, that is, of our emotions or feelings. According to Nietzsche, as I reconstruct his view, moral judgments result from the interaction of two kinds of affective responses: first, a “basic affect” of inclination toward or aversion from certain acts, and then a further affective response (the “meta-affect”) to that basic affect (that is, sometimes we can be either inclined towards or averted from our basic affects). I argue that Nietzsche views basic affects as noncognitive, that is, as identifiable solely by how they feel to the subject who experiences the affect. By contrast, I suggest that meta-affects (I focus on guilt and shame) sometimes incorporate a cognitive component like belief. After showing how this account of moral judgment comports with a reading of Nietzsche's moral philosophy that I have offered in previous work, I conclude by adducing philosophical and empirical psychological reasons for thinking that Nietzsche's account of moral judgment is correct.

Moralities are a Sign-Language of the Affects

2019 ◽  
pp. 67-83
Author(s):  
Brian Leiter
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Affective Responses ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Cognitive Component ◽  
The World ◽  
Rule Out

Nietzsche is a sentimentalist about moral judgment, in the manner of Hume and, in the German tradition, Herder: the best explanation of our moral judgments is in terms of our emotional or affective responses to states of affairs in the world, responses that are, themselves, explicable in terms of psychological facts about the judger. Nietzsche understands our basic emotional or affective responses as brute artifacts of our psychological constitution, though there is nothing in Nietzsche’s view to rule out the possibility that more complicated feelings (e.g. “guilt”) might not involve a cognitive component added to the non-cognitive one, even if that is explanatorily otiose. The chapter concludes with a consideration of empirical evidence in support of sentimentalism.

scholarly journals “An Erring Conscience is an Absurdity”: The Later Kant on Certainty, Moral Judgment and the Infallibility of Conscience

2019 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franz Knappik ◽  
Erasmus Mayr
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Second Order ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
On Certainty ◽  
First Order ◽  
Major Shift ◽  
Characteristic Features

Abstract This article explores Kant’s view, found in several passages in his late writings on moral philosophy, that the verdicts of conscience are infallible. We argue that Kant’s infallibility claim must be seen in the context of a major shift in Kant’s views on conscience that took place around 1790 and that has not yet been sufficiently appreciated in the literature. This shift led Kant to treat conscience as an exclusively second-order capacity which does not directly evaluate actions, but one’s first-order moral judgments and deliberation. On the basis of this novel interpretation, we develop a new defence of Kant’s infallibility claim that draws on Kant’s account of the characteristic features of specifically moral judgments.

Normative Ethics

Philosophy ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Normative Ethics ◽  
Feminist Ethics ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Moral Utterance ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Limiting Case ◽  
Intense Debate

Normative ethics is the branch of philosophy that theorizes the content of our moral judgments or, as a limiting case, denies that any such theories are possible (the position of the so-called anti-theorists). While meta-ethics focuses on foundational issues concerning the semantics of moral utterance and how our moral views fit more broadly into a general conception of reality, normative ethics focuses on the major theoretical approaches to the content of moral reflection. It is shaped by the historical inheritance of the tradition of moral philosophy in the West in its focus on deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics as the major forms of normative ethical theory. These standard theories have been more recently complemented by the new field of feminist ethics, and innovations in ethical theory have added hybrid theory and contractualism to the list. All of these views continue to be the subject of intense debate and further refinement.

scholarly journals Sociocultural and Linguistic Contexts of the Russian Sign Language Functioning in Krasnoyarsk Krai

2020 ◽  
pp. 296-303
Author(s):  
Liudmila V. Kulikova ◽  
Sofya A. Shatokhina
Keyword(s):  
Sign Language ◽  
Krasnoyarsk Krai ◽  
Sign Languages ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Language Functioning ◽  
System A ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject

The article contains an ethnographic description of the conditions governing the use of the regional sign language in Krasnoyarsk Krai within the modern sociolinguistic context. The subject of the discussion is the problem of the linguistic design of sign languages in general, including some features of Russian Sign Language. The study provides statistical information and legal norms for the use of this iconic communication system. A study of the current state of Russian Sign Language functioning in Krasnoyarsk Krai allows us to talk about a change in the status of this sign language, an increasing interest in issues related to its applied significance, and reinforces the need to develop new theoretical approaches to its institutionalization

Reconstructing Judgment: Emotion and Moral Judgment

Hypatia ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 61-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Agent ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
The Subject

A traditional association of judgment with “reason” has drawn upon and reinforced an opposition between reason and emotion. This, in turn, has led to a restricted view of the nature of moral judgment and of the subject as moral agent. The alternative, I suggest, is to abandon the traditional categories and to develop a new theory of judgment. I argue that the theory of judgment developed by Justus Buchler constitutes a robust alternative which does not prejudice the case against emotion. Drawing on this theory I then develop how to conceptualize the ways in which feeling and emotion can be (or be components of) moral judgments.

A Wittgensteinian Form of Moral Expressivism

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karsten Schoellner
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Emotional Response ◽  
Affective Response ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
The World ◽  
Peter Winch ◽  
Cora Diamond

AbstractThe notion of “attitude” is central to the reception of Wittgenstein in moral philosophy, in at least two different contexts: firstly, in connection with early Wittgenstein it has become standard to speak of ethics as an “attitude towards the world as a whole”; and secondly, and in connection with the later Wittgenstein, the notion of the “attitude towards a soul” - in contrast with the alleged opinion that someone has a soul - has been used to elucidate a sense of the moral significance of others, particularly in the writings of Peter Winch and Cora Diamond. Interestingly, within contemporary metaethics, the position that our moral judgments are expressions of attitude is labelled “moral expressivism”. In this paper I focus on Simon Blackburn’s version of moral expressivism. I argue that Blackburn’s position is motivated by the same concerns Wittgenstein expressed in his Lecture on Ethics. However, while Blackburn’s notion of “attitude” is ultimately an emotivist notion, denoting a binary affective response to the facts, the notion of “attitude” used in Wittgensteinian contexts is much subtler; while it often involves an emotional response, an attitude is primarily a way of conceiving the facts and in the context of his later work it is more firmly grounded in practices. I suggest finally that if we modify moral expressivism by adopting the Wittgensteinian notion of attitude, we are able to more capably answer some of the objections to standard moral expressivism and generate a more sophisticated and plausible view.

scholarly journals THE NATURE OF NORMATIVE MORAL JUDGMENTS

Adam alemi ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (86) ◽  
pp. 129-135
Author(s):  
Almira Omarova
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Second Order ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Philosophical Issue ◽  
First Order ◽  
Moral Statement ◽  
The Subject

Moral judgements have been a crucial subject-matter of a discussion in the domain of normativity. Many thinkers argue moral judgments are necessarily action-guiding, which prescribe what one ought to do and what ought to be the case. The moral statement “killing is wrong” is prescriptive and locates in the purview of first-order ethical questions. Moral realists widely accept that moral judgments represent propositions, therefore they are subject to truth and false conditions. Thus, moral conclusions can be derived logically from valid premises. How to derive the conclusion “killing is wrong”? How to justify the statement? What does “wrong” mean in this context? This kind of philosophical issue has been labeled as the second-order questions, which is in the purview of metaethics. This article is devoted to the subject of normativity and the nature of moral judgments advocated by metaethicists David Copp and Ralph Wedgwood. The purpose of this article is to outline the current debate on the nature of normative moral judgments. In conclusion, I shall agree with both Copp and Wedgwoodon two points. One, normative moral judgment can be subject to cognition. Two, there are true and false beliefs about particular moral facts which constitute the significant part of the reality we live in.

scholarly journals ON THE SUBJECT MATTER OF MORAL PSYCHOLOGY

Reflexio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-140
Author(s):  
I. V. Badiev
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Individual Variability ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Behavioral Component ◽  
Moral Functioning ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual

The article deals with the study of human moral functioning in the framework of neurobiological and psychological research. Presents the views of John. Green and John. Haidt about the nature of moral judgments. Studies of the neurobiological mechanism of moral judgment do not explain their individual variability. This question relates to the subject of psychological research. The psychological concepts of morality of L. Kohlberg and D. Forsythe are compared. It is argued that the concept of ethical positions of Foresight has an advantage, since it considers the individual variability of moral judgments from metaethical positions. The analysis of neurobiological and psychological approaches to morality concluded that they did not represent the behavioral component of moral functioning.

Framing Morality: How Antecedent-Focused Strategies Can Shape Moral Judgments

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Kappes ◽  
Jay Joseph Van Bavel
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Process Dissociation ◽  
Moral Decision Making ◽  
First Response ◽  
High Conflict

From moral philosophy to programming driverless cars, scholars have long been interested in how to shape moral decision-making. We examine how framing can impact moral judgments either by shaping which emotional reactions are evoked in a situation (antecedent-focused) or by changing how people respond to their emotional reactions (response-focused). In three experiments, we manipulated the framing of a moral decision-making task before participants judged a series of moral dilemmas. Participants encouraged to go “with their first” response beforehand favored emotion-driven judgments on high-conflict moral dilemmas. In contrast, participants who were instructed to give a “thoughtful” response beforehand or who did not receive instructions on how to approach the dilemmas favored reason-driven judgments. There was no difference in response-focused control during moral judgements. Process-dissociation confirmed that people instructed to go with their first response had stronger emotion-driven intuitions than other conditions. Our results suggest that task framing can alter moral intuitions.

Is Empathy Required for Making Moral Judgments?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Deigh
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Psychopathic Personality ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Psychological Profile ◽  
Main Thesis ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Additional Support

This essay is a study of the nature of moral judgment. Its main thesis is that moral judgment is a type of judgment defined by its content and not its psychological profile. The essay arrives at this thesis through a critical examination of Hume’s sentimentalism and the role of empathy in its account of moral judgment. The main objection to Hume’s account is its exclusion of people whom one can describe as making moral judgments though they have no motivation to act on them. Consideration of such people, particularly those with a psychopathic personality, argues for a distinction between different types of moral judgment in keeping with the essay’s main thesis. Additional support for the main thesis is then drawn from Piaget’s theory of moral judgment in children.

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