Moral Experience as Skilled Perception? An Aristotelian Objection

Moral realists believe that moral claims are truth-apt. The truth of moral claims can be known either in a non-empirical or in an empirical way. Those who claim that moral knowledge is non-empirical, presume that it is innate, self-evident or accessible to non-empirical intuition. Those who take moral knowledge to be empirical must then provide some account of ‘moral experience’ (McBrayer 2010, 306). But experientialists about moral knowledge face the objection of non-obviousness: “[…] if we were aware of them [sc. objective values], it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else” (Mackie 1977, 38). Truth-makers for claims about moral facts are no part of the world as it is disclosed to us in ordinary sense experience.

One way to counter the objection of non-obviousness is to point out that there are several non-moral properties that are not accessible to ordinary sense experience either: differences in the taste of wine, minimal deviations in the pitch of a musical instrument, the velocity of a baseball. However, such properties of the world are accessible to trained perceivers. In a similar way, moral properties may disclose themselves only to those who have acquired the skills necessary to perceive them.

But the account of experience provided by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics and expanded in medieval commentaries points to a profound problem in this analysis of moral experience as a skill: in order to maintain that we are still speaking about skilled perception, awareness of truth-makers for moral facts must be immediate, non-inferential, and ineffable. But at the same time, the notion of skilled perception seems to suggest that the person in question must to some extent be knowledgeable about the domain of the respective skill. Aristotle solves this problem by aligning experience with the intellectual virtues, most notably prudence. So experience (in the Aristotelian sense of the word) is not itself ‘moral’ experience. It is e. g. not action-guiding as such. But it is ‘morally relevant experience’, because it contributes to those intellectual capacities that are indispensable for moral action.

In book I, Aristotle states that young people should be excluded from the study of political philosophy, because they lack experience (1095a1-4). If young people do not know about ‘actions in life’ they are incapable of meaningful reflection of the polity as a whole. This suggests that conversely elder people are epistemically privileged regarding such discussions. In isolation, this passage may be read as saying that having experiences about actions somehow contributes to leading a virtuous life. But in book 2, Aristotle is explicit that experience, presumably experience of action, is aligned with the intellectual rather than the moral virtues (1103a15-16). Here, experience and the time required to make it is associated with teaching: intellectual virtues can be taught, because they do not depend on a proper emotional disposition of the student. Teaching in turn seems to be based on experiences which, as seen in book 1, require time. Aristotle explains this nexus in somewhat more detail in book 6 (1142a1-20). Young people can become capable geometricians or mathematicians, but they cannot obtain practical wisdom or prudence. While Aristotle emphasizes the variety of experience that is required for the acquisition of intellectual virtues in general, he now adds another feature: experience is a special requirement for practical wisdom, because the latter must be applied not only to universals gained through abstraction, but to particulars as well.

Finally, Aristotle makes clear that abilities that rely on experience are natural abilities. The growth of certain intellectual powers over time comes about naturally. This is also true for those who are gifted with practical wisdom: it was their experiences that provide them with 'the eye that sees aright' (1143b6-14) If we contrast Aristotle’s own position with the contemporary views on moral perception as a skill discussed above, we see that both the contemporary account and Aristotle agree that moral experience exists -- there is a special kind of awareness of ‘actions in life’ that has a distinct role to play in moral psychology. Both contemporaries and Aristotle assume that experience conveys a particular awareness of particulars that transcends our perception of them as instantiations of universals. And both subscribe to the view that moral experience is not just a construction, but that it uncovers aspects of the world that are relevant for moral action.

But neither Aristotle nor his medieval commentators believed that such ‘morally relevant experience’ is immediate, non-inferential, or ineffable. They side firmly with the notion of experience as a kind of incomplete and fallible proto-cognitive state that still allows us to call a person knowledgeable in a certain domain. And although Burley accords this kind of experience a role in moral learning, he shies away from explicitly aligning it with moral virtue: for him, as for Aristotle himself and Albert the Great, experience is a foundation of intellectual virtues rather than moral virtues. It contributes to those intellectual capacities that are indispensable for moral action without being action-guiding itself. The skilled perception of a given situation is in this model only a necessary, but not a sufficient condition of moral action.

To separate a prudential understanding of the world from helps us to resolve the dilemma faced by contemporary accounts of moral experience as a skill: the cognitive awareness of particulars that articulates itself in morally relevant experience allows us to understand the cognitive content of a moral intention to act. But a moral intention to act is not purely cognitive. An adequate emotional stance towards a given situation is required as well. In order to better understand the moral role of experience, we now would have to investigate how the morally relevant experiences we acquire naturally over the course of our lives interact with our emotional disposition to act. In Aristotelian terms, we would need a better understanding of the relation between prudence and moral virtue.

Literature

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (ed. Bywater), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894

Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle (ed. Barnes), Princeton: Princeton University Press,

Albert the Great, Ethicorum Lib. X (ed. Borgnet), Paris 1891 (Opera Omnia, vol. 7)

Walter Burley, Super Libros Ethicorum, Venice: Octavianus Scotus, 1521

John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: inventing right and wrong, London: Penguin, 1977

Justin P. McBrayer, “A limited defense of moral perception ”, Philosophical Studies, 149 (2010), 305-320.

[5] Vyacheslav Sukhachev

St. Petersburg State University, Russian Federation