Doubts about Moral Perception

This chapter defends doubts about the existence of genuine moral perception, understood as the claim that at least some moral properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. The doubts are local: even if perceptual experiences generally can be cognitively penetrable and rich, standard examples of moral perception are better explained as habitual implicit inferences or transitions in thought. The chapter sketches a model on which the relevant transitions in thought can be psychologically immediate depending on how readily and reliably non-evaluative perceptual inputs, jointly with the subject’s background moral beliefs, training, and habituation, trigger the kinds of phenomenological responses that moral agents are disposed to have when they represent things as being morally a certain way. It is then argued that this rival account of moral experience explains at least as much as the moral perception hypothesis but is simpler and (at least by one relevant measure) more unified.