ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1, January 201 8
involves her failing to perceive or appreciate some morally relevant aspects of reality.
The same pattern – of moving from claims about a capacity to perceive certain (mor-
ally relevant) non-moral features to claims about a capacity to perceive the moral fea-
tures themselves – recurs a number of times in the literature. Many recognize a differ-
ence in perceptual abilities between virtuous and vicious characters, or between moral
experts and moral novices, and then claim that the only (or best) way to explain the
difference is by differing capacities to perceive moral properties.
Werner (2014), for instance, gives a phenomenal contrast argument for the claim that
moral properties can be part of the contents of experience. Such arguments involve
imagining two very similar cases of perception that, intuitively, are phenomenally dis-
tinct. One argues that a certain property is perceptible via inference to the best expla-
nation of the phenomenal contrast. To illustrate the pattern of argument, Werner cites
an example involving the perception of the property being-a-pine-tree.
Suppose you have never seen a pine tree before and are hired to cut down all
the pine trees in a grove containing trees of many different sorts. Someone
points out to you which trees are pine trees. Some weeks pass, and your dis-
position to distinguish the pine trees from the others improves. Eventually,
you can spot the pine trees immediately: they become visually salient to
you...Gaining this recognitional disposition is reflected in a phenomenological
difference between the visual experiences had before and those had after the
recognitional disposition was fully developed. (Siegel 2010 p. 100)
Intuitively, what it’s like to see a pine tree when you are a novice is different from
what it’s like to see the pine tree after you’ve had some experience in the forest. To
argue that being-a-pine-tree is a property that we can perceive directly, you simply
claim that what best explains the phenomenal difference is that when you are experi-
enced, but not when you are a novice, the property being-a-pine-tree is part of the con-
tents of your perceptual experience.
Werner applies this pattern of argument to try to show that moral properties can be
part of the contents of our experiences. We are to imagine two individuals rounding a
corner and encountering Harman’s famous case of children burning a cat. 6 One of the
persons, it is stipulated, is an emotionally empathic dysfunctional individual (an
EEDI) called Pathos, who lacks a certain kind of affective empathy. The other is a
perfectly normal person called Norma. Intuitively, the two individuals will have dif-
ferent phenomenal experiences on observing the scene. What explains the difference?
Werner says it is the fact that Norma, but not Pathos, has the property being bad as
part of the contents of her experience.
But why should we think it is a moral property figuring in the contents of experience
that explains the phenomenal difference? Pathos will probably not represent the cat’s
pain in the same way as Norma. Even if he recognizes it in some sense, he will not
feel it in the same way. Nor will he represent the callousness of the children in the
same way as Norma. Aren’t those differences sufficient to explain the phenomenal
difference?
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