The axiology of moral experience

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 2, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 355-375

  Audi, Robert ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA LINCOLN   (United States)

Author keywords

Emotion; Evidence; Experience; Intrinsic value; Moral judgment; Obligation; Organicity; Pluralism; Reason for action

Indexed keywords

EID: 0005037939     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1009799221540     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. The seeing in question could be considered a kind of moral perception. It would be perception that (propositional perception). There is also perception of (e.g. of an object or property). It, too, can be moral, as where one sees the injustice of a deed. The notion of moral perception raises problems I cannot take time to address in this paper; but my conception of moral experience makes room for some instances of it to be cases of moral perception, and what is said about moral experience may help in understanding moral perception.
2. Cf. William Tolhurst, "On the Epistemic Value of Moral Experience," The Southern Journal of Philosophy XXIX (1990), p. 67
3. in which he construes all moral experience as emotion. For a critique of this paper see Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, "Moral Experience and Justification," The Southern Journal of Philosophy XXIX (1990), pp. 89-96.
4. At one point Kant says, "The moral disposition is necessarily connected with a consciousness of the determination of the will directly by a law ⋯It is a very sublime thing in human nature to be determined to action directly by a pure law of reason ⋯"
5. See The Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. 121.
6. A related phenomenon, which also seems in at least some forms to be a case of moral experience, is what Maurice Mandelbaum called a demand. He had in mind a sense of what one (morally) must do, say upon realizing one has promised to A. He said of such demands, "It is my contention that the basis of the reflexive demand which an agent feels when he is confronted by what appears to him to be a moral situation is his apprehension of a fittingness between a specific envisioned action and the situation in which he finds himself ⋯The relation of being fitting or unfitting is ⋯indefinable, but I have attempted to indicate its meaning ostensively ⋯"
7. See The Phenomenology of Moral Experience (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1955), p. 69.
8. I should add that for him 'moral experience' is broader than it is for me, since it apparently covers any experience with moral content, such as reflecting on what one (morally) ought to do.
9. It is an interesting question whether a sufficiently empathic person can have moral experiences by virtue of a far-reaching awareness of such experiences in someone else. Such second-hand moral experiences are possible, but there is no need to assume the point for the purposes of this paper.
10. A further point is that by itself a feeling of certainly has no evidential value; one can rely on such certainty as an indication of justification or truth only if one is certain on good grounds or at least has independent grounds to trust one's certainty. By contrast, moral experiences may in themselves have significant evidential and even moral value, as noted below.
11. I am here taking instrumental value in a weak, causal or at least contributory sense: roughly, to say X has instrumental value is to say that there is something else to which it contributes, causally or otherwise. There is, however, a use of 'instrumental value' in which its instantiation may entail that there is something of intrinsic value. For detailed discussion of kinds of instrumental value and a case for such an entailment.
12. see Earl Conee, "Instrumental Value and Intrinsic Value," Philosophia 11 (1982), pp. 345-359.
13. I think this holds for W. D. Ross's intuitionism, at least insofar as applied to singular moral judgments, and it might also hold for at least many of John Rawls's "considered moral judgments." Discussion of this aspect of both positions is given in my "Intuitionism, Pluralism, and the Foundations of Ethics," in my Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). On considered moral judgments
14. see also John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).
15. Cf. T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, forthcoming), esp. Chapt. 1.
16. If the technical term "supervenes" is objectionable, we could simply speak of a basis relation. I have tried to clarify the relevant kind of supervenience (as an asymmetrical relation of dependence) in Chapt. 5 of Moral Knowledge. An interesting comparison is to Mandelbaum's "principle of the primacy of the facts": "To be valid, the predication of a moral quality must arise as a direct response to the apprehension of the non-moral properties which the object which is praised or blamed actually possesses" (op. cit., p. 245).
17. The comparison to testimonially based knowledge is instructive: I can know something wholly on the basis of testimony even if the attester also knows it wholly on that basis, so long as at some point in the relevant testimonial chain someone knows it at least partly in some more basic way, say on the basis of perception. Explanation and defense of this idea is given in my "The Place of Testimony in the Fabric of Knowledge and Justification," American Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1997), pp. 404-122.
18. Ross's conception of intuitive induction is briefly treated in my "Intuitionism, Pluralism, and the Foundations of Ethics," cited above. It is an interesting question whether Kant's injunction against deriving morality from examples can be accommodated to the Rossian picture. Kant's main point seems to be that moral principles are not empirically based, and in intuitive induction, experience is a route to understanding moral concepts. But it is not the ground of the truth of moral principles or (as where a proposition is justified wholly by sense experience) the only basis for accepting them.
19. See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (London: Routledge, 1991), Sect. 408.
20. That experiences can be plausibly conceived as the primary bearers of intrinsic value is argued in Chapt. 11 of Moral Knowledge. I note there that much of what needs to be said about intrinsic value can be articulated on a wider view, and this paper can also accommodate a wider ontology, for instance one in which intrinsic value is ascribed to non-experiences, e.g., beautiful paintings, such that promoting or preserving them provides a non-instrumental reason for action. I should also note that if intrinsic value is taken to belong to experiences, then when something is said to be intrinsically good, it can also be called a good experience.
21. This provides a completion for "A good what?" that should satisfy the semantic completeness demand of Peter Geach, plausibly defended by Judith Jarvis Thomson in "The Right and the Good," The Journal of Philosophy XCIV (1997), pp. 273-298.
22. Indeed, the experiential view does well here: experiences being what it is in virtue of which life is or is not worth living, they are the sorts of things that should be intrinsically good if anything is, since a source of basic reasons should directly connect with making life worth living.
23. The variety of pleasures has been emphasized by many philosophers, including Henry Sidgwick and, more recently, Richard B. Brandt. For critical discussion of how this pluralism is to be understood (and squared with the idea that pleasure has intrinsic value).
24. see Fred Feldman, "On the Intrinsic Value of Pleasures," Ethics 107 (1997), pp. 448-166.
25. Hedonism becomes wider still if everything pleasant or unpleasant is construed as a case of pleasure or pain, respectively. For clarification and defense of valuational hedonism, see Irwin Goldstein, "Hedonic Pluralism,"Philosophical Studies 48 (1985), pp. 49-55.
26. This is roughly what G. E. Moore suggested in Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912) when he said "[T]here is no characteristic whatever which belongs to all things that are intrinsically good and only to them - except the one that they all are intrinsically good and ought always to be preferred to nothing at all⋯" (pp. 152-153).
27. Cf. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986): "The objective badness of pain, for example, is ⋯just the fact that there is reason for anyone capable of viewing the world objectively to want it to stop" (p. 144).
28. I am presupposing, controversially, perhaps, that real moral indignation, as opposed to a feeling of moral indignation, is possible where such gross moral error occurs. There may be limits to how wrong-headed a cognitive basis indignation can have; but if such limits are crossed in the text, at least the same paragraph also precludes any moral credit's accruing to the terrorist from having a moral reaction.
29. Defenders include Franz Brentano, G. E. Moore, W. D. Ross, and Roderick M. Chisholm. For further defense, including discussion of some of the above.
30. see Noah Lemos, Intrinsic Value (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
31. and Fred Feldman, Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
32. For criticism of the view see Michael A. Zimmerman, "Virtual Intrinsic Value and the Principle of Organic Unities," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (forthcoming).
33. I am taking the principle broadly, so that something that has no intrinsic value (and on some views is perhaps not even a candidate to have it), such as a blank space in a painting, may have zero intrinsic value yet be relevant to the organically conceived value of a whole of which it is a part or aspect, such as the painting in question.
34. Three clarificatory comments are in order here. First, I am not taking the relevant kind of connectedness of the parts to be itself a part of the experience (or an aspect of it in the sense in which seeing a segment of a landscape is an aspect of seeing the whole landscape). Second, even if the connectedness is so construed, it is doubtful that it must have an intrinsic value in itself suitable to make the intrinsic value of the experience "additive." Third, one could also talk of the inherent value of the painting or other item in question, where a thing has inherent value provided that properly experiencing it (say, contemplating it) has intrinsic value; and the organicity idea may be easier to work out or at least to see for the former notion. Inherent value is discussed in Chapt. 11 of Moral Knowledge.
35. I here ignore the point that creating pleasure is a causal rather than an intrinsic property of the gift-giving; the examples will work similarly if we focus on the complex state of affairs, giving the gift to the recipient(s) in such a way that the latter pleasurably receive it at the moment one delivers it.
36. Jonathan Dancy's Moral Reasons (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993) defends a strong particularism.
37. I briefly appraise the position in "Moderate Intuitionism and the Episte- mology of Moral Judgment," Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, forthcoming.
38. A point well defended by Bernard Gert in Morality, 2nd. edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). He is, however, less disposed than I to countenance degrees of rationality.
39. W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), Chapt. 2.
40. He also said, however, that "The doctrine that morality is entirely social, that all duty consists in promoting the good of others, seems to me a profound mistake" (p. 153). I might add that although Ross countenances the goodness of (some) moral experience (at least on the assumption that performing actions and having feelings are sometimes experiences), he does not consider it intrinsic: "an action or a feeling is morally good by virtue of proceeding from a character of a certain kind" (p. 155). By contrast, a virtuous disposition is, for Ross, intrinsically good. See, e.g., p. 134.
41. As William K. Frankena put a similar view, "[W]e do not have any moral obligations ⋯to do anything that does not, directly or indirectly, have some connection with what makes somebody's life good or bad, better or worse ⋯Morality was made for man, not man for morality"
42. [see William K. Frankena, Ethics, 2nd edn. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1973), p. 44].
43. This point accounts for some of the data that Christine Korsgaard emphasizes in The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), but the point does not imply the constructivist metaethics she takes to go with them.
44. A view I develop and briefly defend in Chapt. 11 of Moral Knowledge.
45. The content of this paper has benefited much from a detailed and rigorous commentary by Earl Conee given at the Greensboro Symposium on Intrinsic Value in 1998 and from discussion with the participants. Discussions in an earlier session at Santa Clara University were also helpful, and for valuable comments on the text I thank Irwin Goldstein, Noah Lemos, Mark Timmons, William Tolhurst, and Michael Zimmerman.