ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1, January 201 8
Jennifer Wright:
Mature moral agents know, perhaps implicitly, to what they should attend in
order to locate the morally relevant facts and features and then form appropri-
ate moral responses. Although the mature moral agent is confronted with the
same situation as other moral agents, often what she sees (hears, etc.) and
judges on the basis of her refined moral perception is very different. So, it is
only to be expected that she may see that an action is cruel or unjust while
others, such as the moral novice, may not. (Wright 2008 p. 17)
Wright explicitly compares mature moral agency to expertise in other realms: just as
the chess master can see the superiority of some particular position and can move ac-
cordingly or the mountain man can see subtle features of the landscape and can
choose the right path, the mature moral agent can see, for instance, that the current
topic of conversation is embarrassing to one of the discussants and can alter the dis-
cussion accordingly. That much is unobjectionable. But notice how, in the passage
quoted, Wright begins by claiming that mature moral agents know how to locate the
morally relevant facts and ends by claiming that the mature moral agents see cruelty
or injustice.
One may defend the authors above by claiming that the distinction between moral and
non-moral properties is not sharp, and that therefore there isn’t anything wrong with
slipping from the claim that mature and sensitive moral agents can perceive discom-
fort to the claim that they can perceive cruelty to the claim that they can perceive in-
justice, badness or wrongness.
There are two responses to this attempted defense. The first is to grant that there is not
a sharp distinction, and to claim that even so it is a mistake to reason from the claim
that we can perceive morally relevant properties to the claim that we can perceive the
moral properties themselves. Consider, for instance, the difference between seeing
that there are 3 books on a shelf and seeing that there are 300 books on a shelf. It is
clear to me that I can see the 3 books on the shelf, but ‘seeing’ the 300 requires, for
most people, counting them up. There may be no sharp distinction between those
numbers of books that I can see directly and those that I cannot see directly, but that
doesn’t mean it is right to reason from the claim that I can see 3 to the claim that I can
see 300.
The second response is to simply make the distinction between moral and non-moral
properties sharp. In one popular formulation, moral properties are ‘reason implying.’
To judge that some action is wrong, for instance, implies that there is a decisive rea-
son against doing it. To judge that some state of affairs is good implies that there is
some reason to bring it about. ‘Wrong’ and ‘good’ and other terms can also be taken
in a non-moral sense, to mean roughly ‘what others judge to be wrong’ or ‘what oth-
ers judge to be good.’ Terms like ‘cruel’ or ‘unjust’ also have both moral and non-
moral senses, depending on whether or not ascription of the property implies the ex-
istence of reasons. Once the distinction is sharped in this way, we can say that the au-
thors above are reasoning from the claim that one can perceive cruelty in the non-
moral sense to the claim that one can perceive cruelty in the moral sense. But just be-
cause I can see the features of a situation that might imply the existence of reasons,
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