Browsing by Subject "Moral perception."
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Item Appreciation : its nature and role in virtue ethical moral psychology and dialectical moral agency.(2013-09-16) Carson, Nathan Paul.; Roberts, Robert Campbell, 1942-; Philosophy.; Baylor University. Dept. of Philosophy.This dissertation is focused on appreciation and its role in virtue ethical psychology and moral agency. While appreciation is a central concept in aesthetics, I argue that it still needs to play a deeper and more precise role in virtue ethical discussions of moral understanding, experience, and agency. Overall, I contend that close examination of appreciation opens up a compelling dialectical picture of moral agency that is phenomenologically realistic, narratively unified, progressively unfolding and, ideally, marked by wholehearted engagement with morally significant features of reality. In chapter one I clarify the nature of appreciation, arguing (among other things) that appreciation does not always involve pleasure, sometimes displays minimal understanding, and is often an unfolding activity. Overall, I suggest that there are three broad, sometimes incompatible but often overlapping types of appreciation: (1) phenomenal-affective experience, (2) engaged evaluative understanding, and (3) the activity of evaluative attention. I argue that evaluative attention holds particular promise as a unitive principle for a dialectically unfolding conception of appreciative moral agency. In chapter two I import these distinctions into virtue ethics, and argue that through greater clarity and liberality about appreciation, we can identify one type that is fundamental to the moral life, clarify the types that express virtue, and better articulate the relationship between appreciation(s) and ethical wisdom. In chapter three I challenge Talbot Brewer’s Neo-Aristotelian view that virtuous activity appreciation involves full motivational harmony with the activity and supervening pleasure taken in it. A thorough critique of Brewer’s view, partly through cases of appreciative motivational conflict and emotional pain, opens us toward a more realistic and broadly applicable notion of unfolding appreciation as responsively plural, and closely allied with thoughtful evaluative attention. This conception of virtuous appreciating also suggests a new, concerned engagement understanding of wholehearted agency. Finally, in chapter four I examine Iris Murdoch’s notion of moral attention, and develop it as the appreciative activity of evaluative attention that unites developmental appreciative agency. Moving beyond Murdoch, I then articulate the basic elements of such dialectical appreciation as genuinely interactive, perennially unfinished, responsively plural, and a source of formal and personal unity.Item Emotion, evaluative perception, and epistemic goods.(2011-09-14) Pelser, Adam C.; Roberts, Robert Campbell, 1942-; Philosophy.; Baylor University. Dept. of Philosophy.In contrast to the widely held view that emotions are obstacles to ideal epistemic functioning, emotions, as evaluative perceptual states, can contribute in significant ways to our achievement of valuable epistemic goods including justified beliefs, understanding, and wisdom. That emotions are evaluative perceptual states – call this the perceptual thesis of emotion – is evidenced by the extent of the structural and functional parallels between emotions and sense perceptions. Emotions, like sense perceptions, can be both original and acquired and are distinct from the sensory inputs that give rise to them; they also resemble sense perceptions in being passive, intentional mental states with propositional content and they are sources of belief, while yet not themselves beliefs. Emotion also functions in parallel ways to sense perception with respect to the achievement of epistemic justification. Emotions, like their sense perceptual analogues, can and do function as justifying reasons or evidence for beliefs – call this the justificatory thesis of emotion. The justificatory thesis of emotion best explains plausible cases of justified beliefs formed on the basis of emotional experience, as well as the fact that we enjoy justification for evaluative beliefs bearing conceptual content indicative of emotional experience. Moreover, the justificatory thesis is not undermined by any of the strongest objections raised against it; namely, that emotions seem too unreliable to justify beliefs, that emotions themselves can be justified, and that we rarely cite emotions as our reasons for believing as we do. In another significant epistemic parallel between emotion and sense perception, emotional experience is necessary for the best and deepest human understanding of value just as sense perceptual experience is necessary for the best and deepest human understanding of the physical world. Emotion as evaluative perception is also essential to our achievement and actualization of wisdom. Wisdom is deep, appreciative ontological understanding of that which is good (i.e., the proper objects of wonder) and it essentially involves virtuous concerns and emotion-dispositions. Indeed, not only is our initial pursuit of wisdom often prompted by an emotional experience (e.g., wonder), wisdom is also partially constituted by and initially exemplified in virtuous emotional perceptions of value.