Moral Perception, Thick Concepts and Perspectivalism

Bergqvist, ADR (2018) Moral Perception, Thick Concepts and Perspectivalism. In: Evaluative Perception. Mind Association Occasional Series . Oxford University Press, pp. 258-281. ISBN 9780198786054

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Abstract

This essay examines the implications of Iris Murdoch’s distinctive conception of value experience for the possibility of value objectivism and what is sometimes called the ‘absolute conception’, which is implicit in many contemporary debates about thick evaluative concepts. I argue for a robust realist reading of the claim that the salient concepts of an individual's life-world can be revelatory of value without appeal either to Platonism or value-constitutivism. I then distinguish two readings of the concept of 'non-perspectival value', an epistemic and a non-epistemic one, and argue that commitment to the thesis that value is in some sense always “value for us” does not as such rule out value's being non-perspectival in the sense of existing independently of any actual worldviews or perspectives in the non-epistemic sense. What is needed instead is a separate argument that speaks to the practicality of thick moral concepts as action-guiding concepts.