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Moral phenomenology: Foundational issues

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Abstract

In this paper, I address the what, the how, and the why of moral phenomenology. I consider first the question What is moral phenomenology?, secondly the question How to pursue moral phenomenology?, and thirdly the question Why pursue moral phenomenology? My treatment of these questions is preliminary and tentative, and is meant not so much to settle them as to point in their answers’ direction.

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Notes

  1. For a recent treatment of (1), see Drummond 2002; for one of (2), see Horgan and Timmons 2005.

  2. This comes through most clearly in Husserl 1931. But the program itself is set out already in Husserl 1913.

  3. It is, of course, a highly controversial matter just what Husserl’s program was. I provide my own take on it, which is bound to differ greatly from other interpretations. For an interpretation similar in spirit to my own, see Sokolowski 2000.

  4. I work here with the widespread assumption that perception outstrips sensation. Certainly the perceptual appearance of an object affects our conception of it. Plausibly, objects also have cognitive appearances – appearances they present to our cognitive faculties. Indeed, there may well be a sense in which objects present to us purely intellectual appearances. Presumably, “intuitions” – as commonly appealed to in philosophical practice – are such.

  5. One natural thought might be that the relation between a set of appearances and the object whose appearances they are is the relation of a disposition to its categorical basis. Permanent possibilities of appearance are, after all, dispositional properties, and plausibly, the object itself, or perhaps its essential, individuating properties, are the categorical basis or bases of permanent possibilities of appearance.

  6. Perhaps this is not true in every sense of “appears”; but plausibly there is one sense in which it is. In any case, although Husserl himself maintained that knowledge of appearances is infallible, for the purposes of First Philosophy, the weaker claim that it is significantly more secure than other knowledge should suffice.

  7. This characterizes only the early parts of Scheler’s career.

  8. Conversely, all emotional experiences are at some level a valuing or preferring, and all refer back to a primordial kind of love.

  9. From lower to higher, they are: bodily, sensible values; instrumental values of need and usefulness; values of life; mental values, such as are associated with beauty and goodness; and values related to all that is divine or holy.

  10. But see also Sokolowski 1985.

  11. For a much more detailed discussion of Mandelbaum’s work in this area, see Horgan and Timmons 2005, 2006a.

  12. In putting things this way, I do not wish to commit to the view that science and phenomenology are incompatible, or that phenomenology is at odds with solid science. I only wish to insist that without phenomenology, science gives us an incomplete picture of the realm of facts. Whether phenomenology is a non-scientific add-on, or merely a complement to science as it has been practiced to date, is orthogonal.

  13. The two questions are clearly related, in that answers to one constrain answers to the other, but I will not concern myself here with just how they are.

  14. For example, on the side of normative ethics, one view is that what we ought to morally require of people must be constrained by what we can reasonably expect them to be psychologically capable of doing. This leads normative ethics quite straightforwardly into moral psychology. On the meta-ethical side, many have held that what it is for something to be good is partly a matter of who takes it to be good and under what circumstances. This again leads to the psychology of moral agents. These are just two examples of avenues that lead into moral psychology. There are others.

  15. For a thorough discussion of these and other fundamental questions regarding moral phenomenology, see Horgan and Timmons 2005.

  16. For a relevant discussion, see Horgan and Timmons 2006b.

  17. We may sincerely deny that our judgments have an objectivistic phenomenology, and it may be commonsensical to do so, but if the judgment does instantiate the relevant property, then the claim is true.

  18. Here, and in the remainder of this subsection, I use the unlovely word “phenomenality” to denote the subject matter of “phenomenology,” i.e., the phenomenon or domain of phenomena that a phenomenological investigation targets. This is important to keep the distinction between subject and subject matter clear. In the remainder of the paper, I drop this practice and use “phenomenology” ambiguously to cover both subject and subject matter, trusting that context can do the disambiguation work for me.

  19. Sociologically, this seems to have to do with the traditional focus of philosophy of mind on the mind–body problem. If our main question is whether phenomenal consciousness is physically reducible, then in considering this question we ought to look at the most straightforward and unproblematic types of phenomenality, such as the reddish character of a visual experience or the painful character of a toothache. But my sense is that exclusive focus on these types of phenomenologically overwhelming experience has led some philosophers to expect that any phenomenality be similarly overwhelming. When then an unimpressive phenomenality is contemplated, the temptation is to deny its existence.

  20. Furthermore, if she succeeds, her success would already introduce a degree of thickness in perceptual phenomenality.

  21. See, most conspicuously, Siegel 2006, but also Kelly 2004 and Masrour 2008.

  22. The case is most thoroughly prosecuted in Pitt 2004, but see also Goldman 1993, Strawson 1994, Horgan and Tienson 2002, and Kriegel 2003.

  23. See Horgan et al. 2003, Siegel 2007, Bayne and Levy 2007.

  24. For relevant discussion, see Gill (this volume) and Sinnott-Armstrong (this volume) against the phenomenal commonality among all moral mental states and Horgan and Timmons (this volume) in favor. I am grateful to Mark Timmons for useful exchanges on this point.

  25. For relevant discussion, see Siewert Forthcoming.

  26. For a classical application of this method, or something very much like it, see Siegel 2006.

  27. This is because, presumably, phenomenal features lend themselves more straightforwardly to first-person knowability. It is arguable that only phenomenal features do, which would make the method stronger.

  28. Remember: the methods of contrast and knowability are not methods for settling phenomenological disputes, much less for forming methodological theses in the first place. They are merely methods for breaking a dialectical deadlock in the evaluation of competing phenomenological claims.

  29. Gill (this volume) suggests an ingenuous but completely different method for studying moral phenomenology, which we may call the historical method. Gill notes that harvesting phenomenological reports from laypersons in experimental setups gives us extensive data, but the layperson’s lack of conceptual sophistication may contaminate her reports. A philosopher’s attending closely to her experience may provide her with more faithful data, but these data are too selective to allow for reliable generalization. Gill suggests a close study of phenomenologically relevant pronouncements by central figures in the history of moral philosophy as a way to collect conceptually sophisticated data that nonetheless has intersubjective depth.

  30. Proponents of this sort of secondary quality account have tended to regard it as essentially realist (McDowell 1979). And indeed it is continuous with traditional realism in finding ethical facts in the external world. But to my mind there is a deeper sense in which the position – at least in some of its versions – is essentially anti-realist, namely, insofar as it finds the source of normativity inside ethical agents rather than outside them. Consider the judgment that apartheid is wrong. The wrongness of apartheid is to be identified, on the view under consideration, with the eliciting of a relevant negative response in relevant type of agent. But of course, apartheid elicits not only negative responses in some agents, but also positive responses in others. It elicits a negative response in the anti-racist, but a positive response in the White Supremacist. On one version of the secondary quality account, what makes apartheid wrong rather than right has to do mainly with the character of the agents in which it elicits those responses. It is something about the anti-racist that makes the eliciting of a negative response in her constitute wrongness. The White Supremacist must lack that ‘something’, for the eliciting of a negative response in the White Supremacist does not constitute wrongness (at least in the present context). In other words, it is some internal difference between the anti-racist and the White Supremacist that makes the eliciting of responses in the former but not in the latter constitute the instantiation of wrongness.

  31. The views on moral commitments only tend to lead to the views on moral metaphysics, in that there are exceptions to these rules. Some cognitivists are anti-realists (e.g., Mackie 1977), and some internalists are realists (Dancy 1993).

  32. The term “internalism” is in fact used in a bewildering variety of ways. But I use it just for the view stated in the text. For discussion of the different kinds of internalism, see Darwall 1992.

  33. This picture goes all the way back to Book 8 of Plato’s Republic, but it is particularly conspicuous in the contemporary “belief–desire theory,” according to which every mental state is a combination of beliefs and/or desires.

  34. See especially McDowell 1979, McNaughton 1988, Dancy 1993.

  35. I have already mentioned some proponents of the third combination. For a defense of the first combination, see Brink 1989. For a classic defense of the second one, see Hare 1952. There are no defenders of the coherent but utterly unmotivated combination of externalism and non-cognitivism.

  36. If it is akin to both, it ought to be treated as both cognitive and conative, the Humean theory of motivation notwithstanding.

  37. Horgan and Timmons (2006b) pursue in some detail the similarity of moral mental states to belief, and conclude that moral mental states have a cognitive phenomenology. At the same time, they maintain on independent grounds that such states have a conative phenomenology as well. (However, they do not infer a secondary quality account of the metaphysics of morals from that. They avoid that conclusion by embracing a deflationary account of truth conditions that severs the link between the truth-conditional content of cognitive states and putative worldly truthmakers (see especially Horgan and Timmons 2006a)).

  38. In one way, phenomenology is inescapable for rigorous meta-ethics. Consider the traditional philosophical question of whether or not there are objective moral facts. When we say that slavery is wrong, are we describing an objective fact, or are we doing something very different? This is a meta-ethical question with a venerable history behind it. The phenomenological parallel would be this: Do we experience our moral judgments as purporting to describe objective facts? When we state that slavery is wrong, do we feel like we are stating an objective fact, or do we feel like we are doing something else altogether? Many philosophers have touched on this phenomenological question in the context of addressing the meta-ethical question. But the phenomenological question has rarely been given center stage in those discussions, and consequently the parameters for answering it have remained murky and implicit. The purpose of moral phenomenology is to thematize (in Husserlian jargon) such questions.

  39. There may be a further important element in the religious experience of gratitude that is not reproduced in this proposed replacement. It is a sense of depending on a greater force that triggers a humbling effect. The relevant kind of humbling experience is a pleasant, and in some way satisfying and even calming, feeling. The sense of being handled by something larger and manifold more powerful than oneself involves a feeling of partial and temporary relinquishing of responsibility for the course of one’s life. This sort of surrendering of responsibility often goes with a decrease in anxiety. Hence the calming effect. Unfortunately, this calming effect, and the experience of dependency that implies it, are not (constitutively) present in the kind of fortune-appreciation experience described above. But first, this experience of dependency is much less phenomenologically salient in gratitude than what is present in the experience described above, and second, there is no bar to inducing in oneself the sense of dependency independently and in isolation. For one is certainly hostage to the vicissitude of a nature, which are indeed blinder and to that extent more brutal than a God’s would be. It is not difficult to induce in oneself a feeling of awe at the universe’s grandeur, and appreciation for the multitude of natural factors that had to conspire to make our life possible. Such independent inducement may in fact be preferable, inasmuch as the feeling of surrendering responsibility for one’s own lot is arguably something one would want to induce in oneself in moderation, certainly much less frequently than the appreciation of fortune. So the religious dictum of inducing in oneself daily gratitude to God could be replaced in a secular lifestyle with the dictum of inducing in oneself daily the experience of appreciation of fortune by suspending one’s natural take-for-granted inclination, and often complement this with inducement of awe at the grandeur of nature.

  40. The phronimos not only avoids discriminating against people of other races, she also feels the wrongness of race-based discrimination. It is not as though she does harbor some racist feelings, but overcomes them in acting and believing in an anti-racist manner (although there may well be a degree of virtue involved in that as well). Rather, she does not feel the pull of racism to begin with.

  41. The relationship between consciousness and morality presumably bears on questions in political philosophy and philosophy of law as well. Here is one potential example. Following the 1886 US Supreme Court decision in Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, American law treats collectives and corporations as persons, wherefore they are granted the rights of persons, such as first amendment protection on free speech. Although well enshrined in American law, it is important to examine whether this position is philosophically defensible. The key question is what the distinguishing features of persons are, and whether collectives and corporations exhibit those features. A natural thought is that a person is essentially the kind of thing that can have, or undergo, conscious experiences. If this is the case, then it is rather implausible to maintain that collectives and corporations are persons, since no corporation has ever had a conscious experience. An alternative view, however, is that a person is essentially the kind of thing that can make decisions and act on them, and more generally function as an autonomous, self-propelled agent. On this view of persons, it is quite plausible that collectives and corporations qualify as persons (thus, we do say such things as “Microsoft decided to release its newest product in February,” thus ascribing decisions and actions to a corporation). It is crucial to determine, then, which of the two conceptions of persons – as essentially conscious and experiential beings or as essentially active and agentive beings – is the more compelling.

  42. Perhaps the best known neural studies are Greene’s (2005; see also Greene and Haidt 2002, Greene et al. 2001) and the best known behavioral ones are Knobe’s (2005, 2006). Greene conducted imaging studies in which he presented subjects with various trolley scenarios from the philosophical literature while examining patterns of brain activity as his subjects considered them. Knobe collected subjective reports about similarly revealing morally pregnant scenarios. For further relevant work, see Batson (this volume), Haidt (2001), and Miller (2001).

  43. For an early review of relevant evidence, see Farah 1995.

  44. In addition, the identification of neural correlates of specific types of consciousness always represents important progress toward the identification of neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) in general, that is, neural correlates of consciousness per se. To that extent, pursuing the project of identifying the neural correlates of moral consciousness would be instrumental in the larger pursuit of the NCC.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Rockefeller Foundation for very generous support in pursuit of this project, including both this paper and this entire special issue. For extremely useful comments on a previous draft, I am indebted to Mark Timmons, and for many enlightening conversations on moral phenomenology, to Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons.

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Correspondence to Uriah Kriegel.

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Kriegel, U. Moral phenomenology: Foundational issues. Phenom Cogn Sci 7, 1–19 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9057-z

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