Which Moral Properties Are Eligible for Perceptual Awareness?

Abstract

Moral perception has made something of a comeback in recent work on moral epistemology. Many traditional objections to the view have been argued to fail upon closer inspection. But it remains an open question just how far moral perception might extend. In this paper, I provide the beginnings of an answer to this question by assessing the relationship between the metaphysical structure of different normative properties and a plausible constraint on which properties are eligible for perceptual awareness which I call the Counterfactual Strengthening Test. Along the way I consider and reject a few other possible constraints on perceptual awareness. I defend the view that moral perception is restricted to the perception of evaluative and pro tanto deontic properties. I conclude with a few gestures toward what this limitation on moral perception may mean for broader moral epistemology.

What Attentional Moral Perception Cannot Do but Emotions Can

“…Although it is advocated by a number of philosophers [10][11][12][13][14], CMP remains highly controversial. For this reason, Vance and Werner go looking for a more "lightweight" [1] (p. 506) model of moral perception, one which can nevertheless provide "all of the explanatory resources" [1] (p. 502) needed to elucidate the moral sensitivity of virtuous agents.…”

“…For an agent like this, the habit of basing moral beliefs on emotions is reliable, because her responsiveness to defeaters effectively filters out most of the unfitting emotions she experiences, meaning she forms few false emotion-based beliefs. Furthermore, if we assume a virtue-reliabilist account of knowledge, this is enough to establish that many of such an agent's emotion-based moral beliefs amount to noninferential moral knowledge 14 .…”