Moral Perception

by Robert Audi

We can see a theft, hear a lie, and feel a stabbing. These are morally important perceptions. But are they also moral perceptions --distinctively moral responses? In this book, Robert Audi develops an original account of moral perceptions, shows how they figure in human experience, and argues that they provide moral knowledge. He offers a theory of perception as an informative representational relation to objects and events. He describes the experiential elements in perception, illustrates moral perception in relation to everyday observations, and explains how moral perception justifies moral judgments and contributes to objectivity in ethics.


Moral perception does not occur in isolation. Intuition and emotion may facilitate it, influence it, and be elicited by it. Audi explores the nature and variety of intuitions and their relation to both moral perception and emotion, providing the broadest and most refined statement to date of his widely discussed intuitionist view in ethics. He also distinguishes several kinds of moral disagreement and assesses the challenge it poses for ethical objectivism.


Philosophically argued but interdisciplinary in scope and interest, Moral Perception advances our understanding of central problems in ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, and the theory of the emotions.

Genres: Philosophy

200 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Joshua Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a little longer to finish this then I would've liked, largely because I was distracted with some other stuff. The book is actually a relatively quick read for something that does cover a lot of conceptual ground, weighing in at a tiny 170 pages. Audi does a great job at covering the material he's interested in, and setting up his conceptual baggage quickly and concisely so he doesn't have to backtrack and fix problems. It is interesting that this book is the product of a lecture, since often those sorts of books can wind up being weird and tangential; Audi is incredibly well organized.

He is also a terrific philosophical writer. One of the things that many philosophers struggle with is clearly delineating their concepts and making them unambiguous in a short period of time. Audi does a good job at moving through some fairly difficult theory, and laying it out in a way that is accessible and allows him to push through his central arguments at the same time. He also includes some thoughts on general philosophical problems that are not tightly associated with his central theme, and then ties them into his programme and the idea in the book in a way which gives you a good feel for his views as a philosopher (which is useful for me, as someone who wasn't very familiar with Audi going in) as well as feeding some genuinely novel ideas that are a part of the big picture in philosophy and some of its subdisciplines.

The one area where the book is lacking is in a scientific discussion of perception. There are some issues with the way that Audi talks about the mainstream literature in mind and epistemology, especially how it deals with giving an account of color; he strays through some of the various theories, but because he avoids the scientific discussion that is important to philosophers in epistemology and mind, we wind up with something of a confusing account. Also, while Audi gives one of the best accounts of dispositional externalism (which is one of the most commonly misarticulated notions and poorly understood notions in epistemology) in the book, he actually reverts back into a naïve and weird misreading of it later, which is too bad since the sophisticated reading he provides (pp. 45-49) to advance his view of how moral knowledge works can do a lot of heavy lifting.

Overall, I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is seriously interested in ethics; it has everything that an account of ethics should, and in a very accessible and very short passage. This is one of the books that I'll likely come back to when I want to talk about how social cognition plays into ethics, as Audi gives us a good foundation for how to talk about moral properties in terms of our experience of the world. (I especially recommend the book to those who think that Hume's Guillotine is devastating to ethics, since Audi gives a fairly good response and really gets at the central issues in the realist/anti-realist discussion. Whether you think that Audi's arguments are ultimately successful or not (and I have mixed feelings on that count) they are well presented and engaging.

[Ray A.]

My interest in the topic is the relation between moral perception and spiritual transformation, especially in the area of 12-Step recovery. Though I will give it another read, I found the first extremely difficult, mainly because of the abstract nature of the material. More down-to-earth examples from everyday life would have helped.