ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1 , January 2018
principles . Even someone possessed of all the true moral principles would need certain perceptual capacities to apply those principles and to see how all the morally relevant features of the situation balance off against each other . Additionally , when we think about the experiences of mature moral agents , they don ’ t seem to require much reasoning . The way they respond to morally loaded situations is fast and automatic – like an expert athlete or artist . A well developed perceptual capacity seems like a more reliable guide to what is right and wrong than our feeble and fallible reasoning abilities .
This position gets expressed by Tolstoy ’ s protagonist , Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin when , near the end of Anna Karenina , he reflects on how trusting the ‘ infallible judge in his soul ,’ has allowed him to manage his estate well , with sensitivity to fine distinctions that reason would have difficulty defending . He knew he must hire laborers as cheaply as possible ; but to hire men under bond , paying them in advance at less than the current rate of wages , was what he must not do , even though it was very profitable . Selling straw to the peasants in times of scarcity of provender was what he might do , even though he felt sorry for them ; but the tavern and the pothouse must be put down , though they were a source of income . Felling timber must be punished as severely as possible , but he could not exact forfeits for cattle being driven onto his fields ; and though it annoyed the keeper and made the peasants not afraid to graze their cattle on his land , he could not keep their cattle as a punishment ...
Reasoning had brought him to doubt , and prevented him from seeing what he ought to do and what he ought not . When he did not think , but simply lived [ and , we might add , looked ], he was continually aware of the presence of an infallible judge in his soul , determining which of two possible courses of action was the better and which was the worse , and as soon as he did not act rightly , he was at once aware of it .
Levin ’ s knowledge of how to manage his estate has a number of important features that suggest he is perceiving what he ought to do . His beliefs are trustworthy : It would be strange to say he was seeing what he ought to do if he rarely got it right . They are immediate in a phenomenal sense : Levin does not have the experience of concluding what he ought to do on the basis of other beliefs . Relatedly , his beliefs about how to manage his estate have a passivity characteristic of perception ; forming these judgements is easy or automatic . His knowledge is also immediate in a justificatory sense : He can ’ t give reasons for why he ought to act as he does – he just sees it . Finally , perhaps because the knowledge is immediate in these two senses , any reasoning Levin does attempt about these matters leads him into doubt and confusion .
Like Levin , many of us have the capacity to make these kinds of trustworthy immediate judgements about what we ought to do in some more or less circumscribed area of conduct . Our expertise might not be in managing country estates , but when it comes to areas where we have sufficient practice – moving about in some familiar social context , raising a child , or treating guests hospitably – we just know what to do in an easy and automatic way . Too much reasoning gets in the way . What separates those who act well in some such area from those who fail to act well does seem to be the exist-
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