Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Kauppinen reviews Audi's book on 'Moral Perception'

"In everyday parlance, we sometimes report having seen that an audience member's standing up to a sexist keynote speaker was morally good or having heard how a husband wronged his wife. In philosophy, the idea that we can literally perceive moral facts has not exactly been popular, but it has had its proponents.[1] In this volume, Robert Audi, who can lay claim to being the leading contemporary moral epistemologist in the intuitionist tradition, develops what is perhaps the most comprehensive defence of the possibility of moral perception to date.

What is moral perception? Suppose I see a teenager drowning a reluctant hamster. I may form the moral belief that the action is wrong straight away, without any conscious inference. This much is common ground between proponents of moral perception and sceptics about it. But where sceptics think that the quick belief is based on non-conscious inference or association or perhaps emotional response, those who believe in moral perception take it to be based on a distinct moral perceptual experience, which can justify the belief in the same way perception in general does."

Read the rest here


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