“This book defends the most illuminating and novel theory of moral perception to date. In making a case for objectivity in ethics, Robert Audi insightfully explores the relations between moral perception, intuition, emotion, and imagination. His clear and engaging style, and his use of many examples to explain and illuminate the key distinctions and ideas, makes the book accessible to students, while its substantial contribution to ethical theory makes it a must-read for experts.”–Mark Timmons, University of Arizona

“I don’t know of any other work in recent years that has examined moral perception so thoroughly or with such epistemological sophistication. Audi’s book makes an important contribution to the unduly neglected field of moral epistemology, and it should interest a broad philosophical audience.”–Noah Lemos, College of William and Mary

Robert Audi is John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. His books include Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character, Moral Value and Human Diversity, The Good in the Right (Princeton), and Practical Reasoning and Ethical Decision.

Moral Perception

By Robert Audi

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15648-4

Contents

Preface…………………………………………………………………………………….viiAcknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………..xiINTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………..1PART ONE Perception and Moral Knowledge……………………………………………………….5CHAPTER 1 Perception: Sensory, Conceptual, and Cognitive Dimensions………………………………7CHAPTER 2 Moral Perception: Causal, Phenomenological, and Epistemological Elements…………………30CHAPTER 3 Perception as a Direct Source of Moral Knowledge………………………………………51PART TWO Ethical Intuition, Emotional Sensibility, and Moral Judgment…………………………….67CHAPTER 4 Perceptual Grounds, Ethical Disagreement, and Moral Intuitions………………………….69CHAPTER 5 Moral Perception, Aesthetic Perception, and Intuitive Judgment………………………….103CHAPTER 6 Emotion and Intuition as Sources of Moral Judgment…………………………………….121CHAPTER 7 The Place of Emotion and Moral Intuition in Normative Ethics……………………………143CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………….170Index………………………………………………………………………………………175

Chapter One

Perception: Sensory, Conceptual, and Cognitive Dimensions

Perception is central in epistemology, and the concept of perception is among the most important in philosophy. No one doubts that perception is essential for human knowledge, and we trust its deliverances. If there is dispute about whether someone pointed a laser beam at an airplane in flight, honest testimony that one saw the act normally settles the dispute. It is even common for people to go so far as to say that seeing is believing. The prominence of this adage indicates the importance that visual perception is taken to have for grounding belief and knowledge. The sense of touch is also highly trusted. If I feel my wallet in my pocket as I move through a crowd, I am confident that it is in fact there. Indeed, tactile perception may have even greater psychological authority than any of the other senses. If, looking at my wallet in my hand, I suddenly ceased to see it but could feel it in my grip, I would likely fault my vision rather than my sense of touch. Whatever we might conclude about the relative power that different modes of perception have over cognition, the clear and steadfast deliverances of visual perception—which is the main kind of perception considered here—are not easily overridden.

If the psychological authority of perception—chiefly its power to compel belief under varying conditions—is not in general contested, its epistemic authority—chiefly its power to yield knowledge and justified belief—is often taken to be limited to certain realms and to hold for descriptive rather than normative propositions. Paradigms of the former are propositions ascribing observable properties, such as color and shape, to macroscopic objects. Related to these propositions are those ascribing to objects of scientific concern properties of the kinds needed for explanations in the natural sciences. Paradigms of normative propositions are those ascribing obligations to persons, wrongness to actions, or intrinsic goodness or badness to states of affairs.

There are many people, in and outside philosophy, who, taking descriptive propositions to exhaust what is perceptually knowable, think that perception does not yield moral knowledge. Commonly, such moral skeptics believe that perception bears on settling moral disagreements only when they turn on differences over “facts” such as those observable in the scientific study of behavior. Assessment of this skeptical view about the status of ethics requires both an account of perception and an understanding of the nature and basis of perceptual moral judgments. The former topic will be central in this chapter, the latter in the next.

I. Major Kinds of Perception

The term ‘perception’ is quite abstract and presents a challenge to philosophical analysis. But there is no controversy about whether paradigms of perception include certain experiences in the five ordinary sensory modes: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. We should not, however, consider this list of perceptual modes exhaustive. For one thing, it omits proprioception, for instance certain kinds of direct awareness of bodily processes, which, like an awareness of tensing muscles, might be considered a kind of inner perception. There are also significant differences among the perceptual modes on the list; but at least in philosophy, seeing is the favorite paradigm of perception. My aim will be to make points about perception that have wide application, but it will simplify discussion to use mainly visual examples and some auditory cases involving reception of speech acts.

In addition to perceptual seeing, there is seeing in the intellective, apprehensional sense. Seeing that realism in ethics is controversial is an important element in understanding philosophical discussions, but it is not perceptual seeing. Similarly, seeing an American flag displayed daily on a residential porch might be viewed, and in that sense seen, as an indication of a political position, but, unlike seeing a stick half-sunk in water as bent, this is not perceptual seeing as. As these cases illustrates, one liability of focusing on seeing is conflating perceptual with intellective seeing. If the distinction is not sharp, it is clear enough to enable us to distinguish intellectual moral seeing (such as seeing that we ought not to cheat others) from the moral perceptions that concern me. Another case of seeing is “seeing in the mind’s eye,” a kind of imaginational seeing. That is best treated as an instance of visual imagination, which is morally significant in ways described in Chapters 6 and 7. It is possible even given blindness. It is not perceptual.

It will help to begin with three main cases of perceptual seeing: (1) seeing an object, such as a log in a fireplace; (2) seeing an object to have a property, say seeing a log to be smoldering; and (3) seeing that some “observational” proposition holds, for instance that a face is tanned. I call these simple perception, attributive perception, and propositional perception. All three manifest the veridicality—the factivity—of perception.

Let me illustrate. First, if I see a face, there is in fact a face that I see; this illustrates referential factivity. The point is not that perception itself makes a reference, though a rationale for saying so is plain in such cases; but in specifying what someone perceived we must make a reference, and it will be to something real. Second—to proceed to a different way of ascribing a perception—if I see a face to be bearded, there is a face that I in fact see and it is bearded. This illustrates both referential and attributive factivity—predicative factivity, in a terminology I take to be roughly equivalent. There must be something I perceive and, if I see it to be bearded (and so I implicitly attribute—or at least my perceptual system implicitly attributes—beardedness to it), then it is bearded. Third, suppose I see that that face is bearded. Then this proposition is true. This case illustrates propositional factivity: in effect, I see the truth of a proposition (loosely, I see that a proposition is true). Normally, I also know the proposition in question to be true.

These points about perception are apparently conceptual. Reflection will show that someone’s using perceptual language in a way that presupposes their falsehood would be strong prima facie evidence of misunderstanding perceptual concepts. What, then, of someone said to “see ghosts?” Such special uses of ‘see’ normally indicate ascriptions of visual experience without an external object and may be set aside here. When people are said to see ghosts, it is normally presupposed that this is not genuinely perceiving them but is, or is akin to, hallucinating them.

Very commonly, we not only see things but also see them as something definite. One usually sees a ship not as a mere hulk—as one might if one were next to it in a rowboat looking at just one side—but as a many-faceted conveyance with a base and superstructure. Conceptually, seeing as is two-dimensional: there is the thing seen, for instance a spruce, and the set of properties it is seen as having, say being windblown. Seeing as is a hybrid notion. This is because, at least in perceptual cases (the kind that concern us), seeing as is veridical and referential as to the object that is seen—here it is like simple seeing—but neither necessarily veridical nor referentially transparent as to what is, as it were, visually predicated. In the first, referential dimension, then, it is like simple seeing; in the second, attributive dimension, it differs both from simple seeing and from attributive seeing, which is veridical in the predicative dimension. Consider a child’s seeing a stuffed hound as a lion. This entails that there is a stuffed hound seen, but not that a lion is seen. The as-phrase may be followed by a term for something merely imagined.

Seeing as, moreover, is also not transparent; i.e., it may fail to apply even if we substitute a true description for one indicating the aspect of the object the perceiver focuses on. Someone who sees a tabletop as circular need not see it as having the shape of a figure whose circumference is pi times its diameter, even though these terms necessarily designate the same things. The position of the expression following ‘as’, then, is neither necessarily factive (as shown by the stuffed hound case) nor referentially transparent (as indicated by the table case).

Much more could be said about simple, attributive, and propositional perception, but the points I have made enable us to proceed to other aspects of perception and then, in Chapter 2, to the nature and status of moral perception.

II. The Phenomenology and Content of Perception

For both epistemological and metaphysical reasons, it is important to examine the phenomenology of perception. We may plausibly assume that perception is experiential. To see (or otherwise perceive) entails having an experience, and the experience is distinctively qualitative. To illustrate the phenomenal sense, there is something it is like to see a yellow grapefruit and something it is like to feel its surface. Here ‘like’ has its phenomenal sense, not its comparative sense. A child can know what it is like to feel the surface of a grapefruit even if, before this occasion, the child has never felt anything else with a similar surface. Knowing what something is like, in the phenomenal sense, is a matter of the content of consciousness understood as object(s) of awareness; it does not require knowing what something else is like and knowing the former to share some property with the latter.

The Representational Element in Perception

Perception is not only experiential but also in some sense “representational.” if it is indeed factive in the way illustrated—implying certain truths—a natural assumption would be that it represents its object: the thing that is (e.g.) seen and (normally) seen to have, and in that way represented as having, some property. The perceiver may also see that the object has a property. But seeing that something is so entails believing that it is so, and simple perception, at least—just perceiving an object—apparently does not entail having any belief about the object.

The representationality of perception is confirmed by the functional dependence—a kind of discriminative dependence—of the phenomenal element in perception upon the object perceived. My perceptual experience depends on the perceived object and varies systematically with certain changes in that object. Normally, if the tree that I see is windblown, my visual impression varies with the waving of its branches; if I am perceptually conscious of my chair and it vibrates as a passing train rumbles by, I have a tactile sense of vibrations; in thickening smoke, my olfactory sensations intensify; and so forth. This does not imply that we see visible properties of objects by seeing corresponding phenomenal properties. The relation between seeing visible properties of an object and seeing the object itself is not instrumental, and the relevant point for the phenomenology of vision is that seeing the physical properties entails the perceiver’s instantiating, not seeing, certain of the phenomenal properties.

Given the representationality of perception and the typically rich information it provides to the perceiver, it has become common to speak of perceptual content. This terminology needs clarification. If you see a deer, is the perceived object the animal itself—which is in some way in the experience—the main content of your experience, or is that content simply a representation of the animal? Are the properties you see the animal to have the content of your experience? does the proposition that there is a deer in the field (if you see that there is one there) belong to that content? do all three of these elements taken together constitute that content?

Perhaps we might say that all the properties phenomenally represented in a perceptual experience constitute its content, given the intuitive sense in which the content of something is what is in it, and given that what is most clearly “in” an experience is the properties, such as color, shape, and sound, that one is sensorily (as opposed to intellectively) aware of. Not all of these properties, however, need belong to the object: a deer seen to be still, which it is, may also be seen as gray, which is it not. We could thus speak of veridical content, which is genuinely perceptual, and sensory content, which need not be or (as is typical with “veridical hallucination”) is accidentally so.

To achieve clarity here, we need names. Loosely speaking, we might call the perceived object the objectual content of the experience. This would be a kind of external content; but it is “in” the experience, if we conceive genuine perception as partly a relation to the external world. The object is one term in that relation. Thus, a prancing deer before me that fills my visual consciousness might be considered a kind of content of my perceptual experience. The deer might also be conceived as the object that fills my consciousness. Similarly, we might call the phenomenally represented properties—those properties one is in some way conscious of in the perceptual experience—the property content of the experience; and we might call the property-ascriptive propositions the perceiver normally can perceptually know on the basis of the perception its total propositional content.

The propositional content could be divided into at least two kinds. Call any propositions that are perceptually believed on the basis of the experience the doxastic propositional content of the experience and those propositions that the perceiver is disposed to believe (but does not in fact believe) on the basis of the phenomenal perceptual elements of the experience the implicit propositional content. These two categories together may or may not include all the propositions whose truth would make the experience, in respect of its phenomenal content, veridical, i.e., an objectively correct representation of some part of the world. If the experience represents two birds perched on a telephone wire before me, its propositional content includes the proposition that there are two birds on a telephone wire before me; if it represents a yellow dot in a blue patch, it includes the proposition that there is a yellow dot in a blue patch before me; and so forth. These three broad kinds of content, property content and the two propositional kinds, are not the only elements one might take as contents of perception, but they are major elements meriting that name. It will be the property content of moral perception that most concerns us.

“Seeing is believing”

This is a good place to examine the incalculably influential but rarely examined adage “Seeing is believing.” This is often taken to mean that if we perceptually see some object or event, we then believe that it exists; but it might also be thought to mean that if we see that something is so, we believe that it is. Achieving a good understanding of this adage is perhaps even more important for moral perception than for perception in general. Consider the paragraph you are reading. Do you believe that it is not in longhand or that it has more than four words? Well, you could see that these things are true before I asked. Must you not “believe your eyes?” Now, for every property clearly present in your visual field, you might be thought to believe that the object you see bears that property: say, being white, printed (rather than handwritten), appearing in a rectangular block, and having white margins. This idea regarding belief-formation might underlie, and might seem to support, the view that the content of a visual experience is manifested in beliefs of all the propositions ascribing the visually represented properties (at least all such propositions one can understand).

This idea inflates the doxastic content of the mind—what one believes—far beyond plausibility. You need not believe—before i mention the point—that this paragraph has more than four words, even if, in merely looking at it, you see many more than four. By virtue of seeing the full paragraph, you are, however, disposed to believe this. If the matter arises, as where someone has said that she thought the page in question had, as its paragraphs, only four-word short aphorisms, you are likely to believe that this paragraph has more. I contend that it is only under certain conditions that seeing entails (propositional) believing. Apparently, it is mainly where what is seen, or an aspect of it, has some significance for the perceiver that seeing a property of the thing produces the corresponding property-ascriptive belief. Seeing may not produce belief even when one has the relevant thing in view.

(Continues…)

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