. Reason, Imagination, and Moral Experience
. Reason, Imagination, and Moral Experience
The epistemic status of moral discourse turns in part on the explanation of divergent moral beliefs. Whether differences of moral opinion there are best explained by a failure accurately to represent specifically moral features of actions and characters, or whether they are better explained by cognitively blameless differences of preference and desire, not only matters to the cognitive claims of moral discourse. The answer to this question should also shed light on the phenomenology of moral experience and the epistemology of moral judgement. Crispin Wright's arguments suggest that an inferential account of moral belief can only be avoided by positing some anomalous faculty of moral perception. This chapter argues that the genesis of moral experience is one in which cognition and affect are jointly implicated, but that their cooperation does nothing to undermine the thought that moral discourse is, for the most part, both conceptually autonomous and genuinely representational. The concepts of moral reasons, rational conflict, moral competence, imagination, and basic moral judgements are also discussed.
Keywords: moral beliefs, moral discourse, moral experience, cognition, moral judgements, moral reasons, imagination, conflict, moral competence
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
