Seeing the good
After reading ethical doctrine for a while, you might come to suspect that being a moral philosopher has to be completely exhausting. Not only because writing and reading doctrine is hard work, but since it appears that even in their downtime philosophers are constantly having to execute complex feats of moral calculation. Even worse, it seems that philosophers believe life is like this for everyone else too — like we are forever running into conclusions which need we stop and compare our choices from whichever moral principles we reflectively endorse. Just then, after performing these painstaking computations of wrong and right, duty and usefulness, can we act. It’s tiring just considering it.
The 20th century British philosopher Stephen Toulmin supposes a mundane situation in which he has made his friend’s book. The friend needs it back — should Toulmin give it to him? For Toulmin, answering this question will probably entail appeal to a collection of increasingly universal principles regarding the rightness of promise-keeping. Reading this passage, K.E. Løgstrup, a Danish philosopher of comparable vintage, found Toulmin’s flight to abstraction to be a repudiation of moral life as opposed to a description of it. To do the right thing in this situation, we do not need to understand more about the universalisability of maxims about keeping our word. We all will need to be aware of is our friend needs back his book.
Similarly, Bernard Williams imagines a person who chooses to save his estranged spouse instead of a stranger. Moral theory might insist we ought to act impartially, yet attempting to develop reasons to justify this guy’s decision to rescue his spouse would be to think”one thought too many”.
We can go even further. Sometimes actions are more morally praiseworthy the more thoughtless they are. We’d think more highly of someone who rushes into a burning building to rescue those indoors than someone who hesitates just long enough to double-check that this is in fact the correct thing to do.
One way to answer this is to analyze what is happening in our heads when we are engaged in moral action. Very little of it involves thinking through abstract principles. Most of the moment, we simply see what must be done. (That is true even if we do not then go ahead and do it.) We see the suffering in the face of an injured person, and we cease to aid them. We see a wallet fall quietly out of a person’s pocket and we call out immediately to frighten them. We do not deliberate, at least not consciously.
In recent years, there has been renewed attention to the concept that we perceive the important qualities of a circumstance, instead of working out them reflectively or by applying theories or principles. Unsurprisingly, this view is known as moral perceptualism. Equally unsurprising, it is rather contentious.
Moral perceptualism has a number of items going for it. Preston J. Werner has just identified at least three chief advantages: it fits how perceptions look important to forming ethical judgments, the function that sensitivity into the relevant qualities of a situation plays moral wisdom, and the manner by which we really experience many, though by no means all, of our ethical lives. As we are if we perceive other possessions (“It’s cold!”) .
The worrying thing is that to perceive something, it must, somehow, be out there in fact. If I feel that it’s cold, I am perceiving a true property of the planet, namely temperature. But what am I perceiving when I see that some thing is wrong? Some philosophers take properties such as”good” to be non-natural properties of this world; G.E. Moore is probably the most well-known modern example. Yet there is something troubling about the thought that properties like’great’ and’ought’ exist independently of our minds. I find it pretty and uplifting, you find it expressive and tacky. After fruitlessly trying to speak each other around to our way of seeing the paintingwe reluctantly concur that while we are looking at exactly the very same shapes and colours, these other possessions we’re attributing to the painting are not in the canvas, but in our heads. The suspicion is that moral properties like right and wrong might be like this also: not features of the planet , but of our responses to it. You may notice the passions, motives, and sufferings of those parties involved, however you cannot understand the wrongness of murder as a property of these things:”You never can find it, till you turn your reflection in your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this activity. It lies in yourself, not in the thing.”
Yet Hume, a bit like Toulmin, is to a certain extent dragging us away from our everyday moral experience instead of illuminating it. That experience, as we’ve seen, is one in which, more frequently than not, we make moral tests immediately, in a manner that feels much more like perception than inference. We might come to believe about reflection that those first judgments are wrong, or we may suddenly come to see things differently — but thenwe do that using non-moral senses too. (I see the Queen walking round my regional supermarket. I’m struck by the idea that the Queen is quite unlikely to be shopping here. I look again and see on closer inspection it’s not Elizabeth II catching some fish fingers out of the frozen food aisle, but a girl who appears comparable.)
But moral perception isn’t, contra Hume, simply a matter of sense disapproval of the things happening in front of us. It is also an issue of seeing details as relevant. You and I sit in class and pay attention as our teacher responds to some thing our fellow student has just said. You, but hear all the subtle, deniable, however willful barbs and humiliations, and also feel the stab as they’re delivered. You and I hear the very same sentences being spoken, but there are measurements of the situation that you’re attuned to while I remain unaware. Nor are you adding feelings of distaste to what is being said. To observe a humiliation happening is already to make an evaluative decision which, all else being equal, what is happening is incorrect. (Perhaps there are cases where humiliating somebody is justified by some wider context, but embarrassment per se conveys its badness on its surface.)
Philosophers prefer to think. We love to interrogate concepts and perform complicated logical analyses. So it’s clear that we frequently assume everyday experience to be more reflectively more straightforward than it truly is. However, the attractiveness of moral perceptualism indicates a lot of our life just isn’t like that. We do not walk around obsessively computing principles and maxims. We just see how items are. What we do next is the actual test.