ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1, January 201 8
ceptual knowledge. Sidgwick’s reason seems to rest on his ‘deductivist’ model of
moral knowledge. To justify a moral belief, we would have to introduce a general
moral rule and subsume the case in question under that rule. Defenders of moral per-
ception reject this assumption and often emphasize the Aristotelian point that there are
no codifiable moral rules that have anything approaching a universal scope and that
the idea that we need to find general rules to justify our particular beliefs or actions
shows an impoverished understanding of the richness and complexity of the moral
life.
Here is another case where the possibility of moral perception is quickly dismissed:
We don’t directly detect actual instances of right and wrong in our experi-
ence...Instead, we often conclude that particular acts are wrong in virtue of
some empirically detectable feature; for example, because it causes pain, in-
volves deceit, or violates an agreement (etc.). But it is unclear how we could
have empirical grounds for concluding that these features are wrong-makers
given that we do not observe the actual co-instantiation of these features and
wrongness. (Coons, 2010 p. 85)
Coons assumes that there is a sharp distinction between moral and non-moral proper-
ties and that while non-moral properties can be detected in experience, moral proper-
ties cannot. When he claims that pain, deceit, or being in violation of some agreement
are things that we can detect empirically, but that we cannot use the senses to judge
that any particular instantiation of these properties is a wrong-maker, he is implicitly
relying on the claim that ‘thick’ moral terms 1 can always be decomposed into a moral
and a non-moral component. We can perceive deceit, he says, but not the fact that this
particular deception makes our action wrong; and hence he must think deception--
even when wrong – can be identified independently of recognizing its wrongness.
Defenders of moral perception usually deny that it is possible to enact the decomposi-
tion that Coons requires. Putnam puts the point by saying that facts and values are en-
tangled: there is not a sharp distinction between non-moral concepts and moral ones.
For Putnam and others who deny the distinction, the state of mind we are in when we
judge, for instance, that some act is cowardly is not analyzable into (a) judging that it
involves giving into fear and (b) judging that this is wrong. 2 If such a decomposition
were possible, then it would be possible to pick out instances of cowardly acts without
sharing the evaluative standpoint which condemns them. But, according to this line of
thinking, that is not plausible. It seems, instead, that one grasps instances of cowardli-
ness in a more holistic and direct way.
Some defenders of moral perception are motivated by the inadequacy of other ac-
counts of moral knowledge. They doubt that there are self-evident moral truths, or that
reasoning from non-moral beliefs can lead to moral knowledge, or that coherence con-
siderations are sufficient for knowing what is right and wrong. Evaluation of these
last-man-standing arguments would require assessment of all the other ways people
have tried to account for moral knowledge and would, in addition, require some ar-
gument against moral skepticism. This paper will instead focus on arguments for mor-
al perception that start from reflection on the qualities needed to be a sensitive moral
thinker. The moral life, it is claimed, involves much more than reasoning from a priori
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