Conclusion

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Audi
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Perception ◽  
Moral Property ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Natural Properties ◽  
Necessary Truth ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Perceptual Capacity

This concluding chapter explains how the theory of moral perception takes full account of the causal element in perception but does not require naturalizing moral properties. However, the theory does require that moral properties have a base in the natural world. They are anchored in the natural world in a way that makes possible moral knowledge and the ethical objectivity that goes with it. The bridge from their naturalistic base to moral judgment often has the intelligibility of the self-evident, and under some conditions it has the reliability of necessary truth. Seeing that an act or a person has a moral property may itself be a manifestation of an intuitive perceptual capacity that has considerable discriminative subtlety regarding descriptive natural properties.

Moral Perception: Causal, Phenomenological, and Epistemological Elements

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Audi
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Belief ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Moral Perception ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Do So

This chapter analyzes how perception is a kind of experiential information-bearing relation between the perceiver and the object perceived. It argues that even if moral properties are not themselves causal, they can be perceptible. But the dependence of moral perception on non-moral perception does not imply an inferential dependence of all moral belief or moral judgment on non-moral belief or judgment. This kind of grounding explains how a moral belief arising in perception can constitute perceptual knowledge and can do so on grounds that are publicly accessible and, though not a guarantee of it, a basis for ethical agreement. The chapter also shows how perceptual moral knowledge is connected not only with other moral knowledge but also with intuition and emotion.

Moral Naturalism and Nonnaturalism

Philosophy ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Crisp
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Natural Properties ◽  
The Past ◽  
Moral Naturalism ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Natural Will ◽  
Naturalistic Account

Understood broadly, the debate between naturalists and nonnaturalists in ethics concerns the question of how morality, and in particular moral value, is related to the natural world. In contemporary philosophy, this is usually seen as primarily a metaphysical issue, though in the past the term “nonnaturalism” was sometimes applied to intuitionist positions in epistemology. Moral naturalists can be divided into two categories, realist and nonrealist. Realist naturalists believe that moral properties are a subset of natural properties, or are in some sense identical with or constituted by such properties. Nonrealist naturalists believe that although we can speak of moral properties, those properties are not themselves real in the way that natural properties are: their attribution may be the result of, say, our expressing certain attitudes we have, rather than our detecting certain properties “out there” in the world. This nonrealist view can still be described as a form of moral naturalism, since it seeks a naturalistic account of morality. However the metaphysical debate is understood, some account of what it is for a property to be natural will be required. This debate continues, but one position, influenced by G. E. Moore, identifies the natural properties in some way with those properties that feature in scientific explanations, or that are in some sense reducible to or constructible from such properties. That of course raises the question of what counts as a science. The term “naturalism” is also often used to refer to theories, usually neo-Aristotelian, according to which value is bound up with human nature.

Moral Perception Defended

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Audi
Keyword(s):  
Perception And Action ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Moral Perception ◽  
Cognitive Penetration ◽  
Aesthetic Perception ◽  
Natural Properties ◽  
Moral Sensibility ◽  
Structural Analogy ◽  
Moral Properties

This chapter extends Robert Audi's theory of moral perception and answers some objections from the literature. It distinguishes the perceptible from the perceptual; develops a structural analogy between perception and action; explains how moral perception can be causal; clarifies respects in which moral perception is representational; and indicates how it can ground moral knowledge. The presentational character of moral perception is described, particularly the phenomenological integration between moral sensibility and non-moral perception of the natural properties that ground moral properties. The question whether moral perception is inferential is approached by clarifying the notion of inference and pursuing an analogy between moral perception and perception of emotion. Aesthetic perception is also considered as instructively analogous to moral perception. The final sections explore cognitive penetration in relation to moral perception, conceptual and developmental aspects of moral perception, and the latitude Audi’s account of it allows in the epistemology and ontology of ethics.

The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Lerner
Keyword(s):  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Moral Property ◽  
Moral Inquiry ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
State Of Affairs

People engage in pure moral inquiry whenever they inquire into the moral features of some act, agent, or state of affairs without inquiring into the non-moral features of that act, agent, or state of affairs. The first section of this chapter argues that ordinary people act rationally when they engage in pure moral inquiry, and so any adequate view in metaethics ought to be able to explain this fact. The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation is to provide such an explanation. The remaining sections of the chapter argue that each of the standard views in metaethics has trouble providing such an explanation. A metaethical view can provide such an explanation only if it meets two constraints: it allows ordinary moral inquirers to know the essences of moral properties, and the essence of each moral property makes it rational to care for its own sake whether that property is instantiated.

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

Afterword

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Long
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Modern Era

In the early modern world, exceptional bodies are linked to knowledge, not as the production of knowledge of the self through the scrutiny of those who have been ‘othered’, but as a means of inducing self-scrutiny and awareness of the limitations of human understanding. Exceptional beings and phenomena entice us to consider the world beyond that which is familiar to us and raise questions concerning our knowledge systems based on notions of what is natural or, in our modern era, normal. Rather than reacting with horror, disgust or pity, we can learn to respect the variety, mobility and resilience of the natural world in our contemplation of that which we see as exceptional.

Kohlberg’s Theory

2019 ◽  
pp. 91-110
Author(s):  
John C. Gibbs
Keyword(s):  
Moral Development ◽  
Life Span ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Cognitive Moral Development ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Moral Perception ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
American Psychology ◽  
Specific Stage

Given this cognitive-developmental concern with superficiality-to-depth in moral judgment or understanding, Kohlberg was particularly concerned to discover and articulate an age trend and possible sequence of developmental advances or stages that may be universal. Our critique of Kohlberg’s theory notes that, although his specific stage typology was misguided, he almost single-handedly put cognitive moral development on the map of American psychology. He encouraged attention to the continued development of moral judgment beyond the childhood years. Finally, he speculated from case studies of mature moral thinkers in existential crisis that there may be a deeper reality (“cosmic perspective”), one that underlies profound moral perception and can support the moral life. Building from Kohlberg’s and others’ contributions, we propose in this chapter a new view of life-span sociomoral development.

The Kantian Sublime and Greatness of Mind

2019 ◽  
pp. 197-214
Author(s):  
Emily Brady
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Other Regarding

This chapter explores Kant’s discussion of the sublime in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), in which the aesthetic subject becomes aware of a certain kind of greatness of mind. Kant’s scheme emphasizes respect for the moral capacities of the self as part of humanity, as well as admiration for greatness in the natural world. More broadly, his views show how ideas about greatness—if not magnanimity in the narrower sense—flow into philosophical approaches that lie beyond virtue ethics, moral thought, and human exceptionalism. The chapter argues that a comparative relation between self and sublime phenomena is central to understanding greatness of mind. Drawing out this comparative relation supports a deeper understanding of how both self-regarding and other-regarding attitudes feature within sublime experience, and just how this greatness might express itself within an aesthetic context.

scholarly journals Idyllic Self in Africa (2000), by Ken Taylor and in Boy (2010), by Taika Waititi: a literary-cinematographic dialogue

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. e45306
Author(s):  
Marcele Aires Franceschini
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Amorphous State ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Relationship

The idyllic approach of this article deals with the dialogue between two distinct artworks: poems from the book Africa (Taylor, 2000), emphasizing the poem ‘Waikiki’, by the Australian poet, journalist and filmmaker Ken Taylor; and the movie Boy (Curtis, Gardiner, & Michael, 2010), directed by the New Zealander film-director, actor and writer Taika Waititi. The poems and the movie are connected by synesthetic perceptions, mostly related to painting, colorizing and shaping that are displayed in the described scenarios. Hereby, these aspects were theoretically reviewed by the following authors: Rimbaud (1966), Kandinsky (1977), Ostrower (1977), Bachelard (1986, 2011), Cytowic (1993), Berger (2008), Lambert (2010), among others. The method of analysis includes the concepts in which the art producers uncovers the relationship between nature and the self, considering the fact that beyond poet and director, respectively Taylor and Waititi are also painters. Nature is widely open before their meditative eyes, therefore rather than outreaching the natural world with motionless expectations; both portray idyllic wonders related to individual/cultural scopes. As a result, from its amorphous state, words transmute themselves into landscapes, sensations, and forms. The aim was to follow the paths that image evocates in the description of each author, since they share contemplativeness, surrounded by consciousness, perceptions and freedom, all demanded during the creative process.

Relationality in the Thought of Mary Midgley

2020 ◽  
Vol 87 ◽  
pp. 235-248
Author(s):  
Gregory S. McElwain
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
The Self ◽  
Mary Midgley ◽  
Over 40 Years

AbstractFor over 40 years, Mary Midgley has been celebrated for the sensibility with which she approached some of the most challenging and pressing issues in philosophy. Her expansive corpus addresses such diverse topics as human nature, morality, animals and the environment, gender, science, and religion. While there are many threads that tie together this impressive plurality of topics, the thread of relationality unites much of Midgley's thought on human nature and morality. This paper explores Midgley's pursuit of a relational notion of the self and our connections to others, including animals and the natural world.

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