they are unable to act. For example, suppose a moral agent reads a
news article about a case of bullying. Although there is no opportunity to
take action against the individual case of bullying, the agent nonetheless
accurately perceives the moral character of the situation and condemns
it as morally wrong. Compared with a person who reads the same news
article yet fails to perceive anything morally wrong in the situation, it
seems intuitive that the moral agent who perceives the morally salient
features of the situation is a better person morally. Even when the
perception doesn’t lead to direct action in the moral situation, it is better
to perceive morally salient features than not to. This must mean that
the better position of accurate moral perception, as compared to a lack
of moral perception, can only come from moral perception itself, as it
precedes moral judgment and moral action.
To summarise the previously mentioned points; moral perception
is a phenomenon that occurs prior to and can act, to some extent,
independently of moral judgment and ethical principles. Moral judgment,
without a developed understanding of moral perception, often comes
into problems regarding the perceiving of morally salient features of
a situation and the perception of morally salient features as morally
significant. The main problem facing principle-based ethical theories is,
then, the resolution of these problems while maintaining the central role
of ethical principles. I will now attempt to address these points from the
standpoint of Kantianism, which, I believe, serves as a good template for
principle-based ethics in general.
The first points I will address are the supposed neglect of the perception
of moral features in a given situation, and the recognition of those moral
features as moral features. It is true that, for us to be able to invoke
an ethical principle, we must first recognise the moral nature of the
situation, but it does not follow that it is necessary for principle based
ethics to find some algorithm to be applied mechanically to determine
if a moral rule should be invoked (Baron, 2018, p.10). Kant recognises
that a moral person requires a ‘power of judgment sharpened by
experience’ (Kant, 2014, p.7) in order to understand where and when
moral principles should be invoked. Under the Kantian conception,
judgment contains a reflective section that exists when the ‘particular
is given but the universal has to be found for it’ (Kant, 1914, p.18). In
other words, judgment is reflective when faced with a particular situation,
but the universal moral law has not yet been invoked. It is judgment’s
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