Moral Sensibilities PDF Download

"This dissertation combats principle-centric approaches to ethics, primarily by highlighting analogies between moral expertise and the kinds of practical expertise exhibited in sports, games, and the arts. Scientific research indicates that different forms of practical expertise are not rooted in universal methods, rules, or capacities for reasoning and deliberation. Instead, practical expertise arises from complex, interwoven neurological and bodily adaptations to a particular kind of context--it involves developing sui generis approaches, methods, and capacities that are tailored to specific environments, resources, and goals. Practical expertise within a domain is rooted in domain-specific capacities for immediate, unreflective recognition and discernment--I call these capacities practical sensibilities. These points about the nature of practical expertise should inform our understanding of moral intuition, thought, and theory. Moral intelligence does not come from knowing and applying a set of universal moral principles. It is rooted in moral sensibilities--i.e., capacities for immediately, unreflectively recognizing morally significant features and discerning appropriate responses. These sensibilities are developed through experience, and they are typically difficult or impossible to codify. Importantly, they are not universal in scope, but are context-specific, tailored to particular agents, social environments, and moral goals. This frustrates attempts to construct a comprehensive, systematic normative theory: there is no universal blue-print for moral expertise, since different contexts require different forms of expertise, which are rooted in different kinds of moral sensibilities. This does not mean that philosophical reflection in ethics is futile and pointless, however. Ethical theorizing can aspire, not to the kind of systematicity found in math or physical science, but to the kind of interpretative approach found paradigmatically in the humanities. Ethical reflection will, of course, involve making general claims, but our end goal need to be a comprehensive systematic theory; instead, we can aim to give illuminating but partial interpretations of moral phenomena that both draw upon and enrich our moral sensibilities, yielding general understandings that evolve flexibly in response to new contexts"--Pages vi-vii.