Abstract
Defenders of moral perception have famously argued that seeing value is relevantly similar to seeing colour. Some critics think, however, that the analogy between colour-seeing and value-seeing breaks down in several crucial respects. Defenders of moral perception, these critics say, have not succeeded in providing examples of non-moral perception that are relevantly analogous to cases of moral perception. Therefore, it can be doubted whether there is such a thing as moral perception at all. I argue that, although the analogy between colour perception and moral perception does indeed break down in several crucial respects, that conclusion does not weaken the case of defenders of moral perception, because better analogies are available. If defenders of moral perception seek to draw support from an analogy, then seeing emotion will protect them better against criticisms than will seeing colour.
De Mesel Benjamin. 2016. Seeing Color, Seeing Emotion, Seeing Moral Value. The Journal of Value Inquiry 50: 539–555. Published by Springer. See https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10790-015-9535-4.
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Notes
- 1.
Sean McKeever and Michael Ridge rightly note that ‘the cases in which we apparently can “just see” the moral status of certain actions tend to be ones in which the moral verdict is not particularly controversial. The perceptual model is less plausible for cases involving more controversy and complexity. I may be able to “just see” that killing a small child for fun is wrong but unable to “just see” whether abortion near the end of the second trimester would be wrong in a case of pregnancy due to rape where the child would suffer from a serious form of mental retardation and where the father opposes aborting the child’ (McKeever and Ridge 2006: 78) .
- 2.
Moral perception can come in a variety of forms. For an overview, see Wisnewski (2015: 134). Jeremy Wisnewski points at the ‘difference between acknowledging that a situation raises a moral issue and seeing how one ought to act within a situation where such an issue is raised’, and adds that ‘some might regard the sort of moral perception picked out by the first use (perceiving moral relevance) as common and plausible, but regard the second sense of moral perception (perceiving what one ought to do) as problematic’ (Wisnewski 2015: 137). Peter Goldie (2007) distinguishes between perception of thick evaluative facts (such as seeing what is the kind thing to do) and perception of thin evaluative facts (such as seeing what is the right thing to do), and argues that moral perception is more plausible in the first case than in the second. In this chapter, I try to provide an answer to critics of the colour analogy who ask for examples of non-moral perception that are relevantly analogous to cases of moral perception. Thus, it suffices to point out that at least some cases of seeing moral value (not necessarily all of them) are relevantly analogous to at least some cases of seeing emotion, and I have chosen my examples with this goal in mind. One could, of course, try to defend an analogy between cases of all the varieties of moral perception and cases of emotion perception, but that project is much larger than mine.
- 3.
Strictly speaking, McDowell compares the perception of values to the perception of secondary qualities. But, as Peter Railton remarks, ‘color has been the natural stand-in for “secondary quality” in most philosophical discussions of the analogy’ (Railton 1998: 143).
- 4.
Avner Baz rightly remarks that there is ‘no reason to suppose that Wittgenstein ever came as far as to form an idea of how his remarks on aspects, or some selection of them, may fall together to form some sort of a unified whole’ (Baz 2011: 697). For an overview of different kinds and cases of aspect perception , see Schroeder (2010: 353) and Hausen and ter Hark (2013: 88–92). The difference between seeing aspects and seeing as (if there is one) is a controversial topic that will not concern us here.
- 5.
While the analogy between moral perception and emotion perception is not itself totally original (see Audi 2013: 41, 58) , the Wittgenstein angle is (as far as I know ).
- 6.
McDowell is a dispositionalist about colour. For an interesting overview of how different colour theories may lead to different views on moral perception , see D’Arms and Jacobson (2006). They show how McDowell can be criticized not by criticizing the analogy (which is my focus), but by accepting the analogy and adopting a different colour theory which, if colours and values are analogous, then leads to a different theory about moral perception. Elizabeth Tropman (2010) argues, for example, that intuitionists can accept the colour analogy, although they do not believe that values are essentially dependent on human subjectivity , because they can defend the view that colours are not essentially dependent on human subjectivity either.
- 7.
- 8.
Simon Blackburn sees the colour analogy as ‘the nub of the matter’ (Blackburn 1985: 17) and Crispin Wright claims that moral realists rely on the comparison (Wright 1988: 1). According to Elizabeth Tropman, sensibility theory is ‘motivated, in large part’, by the analogy, and she remarks that ‘the comparison fails alone to do all the work that McDowell sets out for it’ (Tropman 2010: 31). Robert Audi remarks that ‘some philosophers have developed an extensive analogy between moral properties and secondary qualities or indeed treated the former as a subcase of the latter’ (Audi 2013: 49, my italics).
- 9.
This is not to say that colour perception is entirely passive, that there is no active element in it at all. After all, we have seen that it crucially depends on subjective responses, and responses are not just reactions. P.M.S. Hacker lists some passive and some active elements of perception (Hacker 2013: 296–297).
- 10.
- 11.
For reasons of space, not all the differences between colour education on the one hand and moral and emotional education on the other can be commented upon in this chapter. Goldie provides an account of certain differences between learning a virtue and learning a skill, and this seems like an interesting way to capture a difference between colour education and moral/emotional education. Learning to see moral value and emotion are, arguably, forms of (or close to) learning a virtue, while learning to see colour is a form of (or close to) learning a skill. One of Goldie’s points is that (fictional) narratives have a more explicit and prominent role in learning a virtue than they have in learning a skill (Goldie 2007: 351–356).
- 12.
As I said, Wittgenstein provides many different examples of aspect perception . Not all aspect perception requires concepts or sophistication. See Baker (2004: 292, endnote 2).
- 13.
For a good discussion of the dispute, see Railton (1998) .
- 14.
What do we make of the idea of an appropriate colour perceiver when confronted, for example, with the fact that women are better at discriminating among colours than men (see Abramov et al. (2012)), or with the fact that languages cut up the colour spectrum in different ways?
- 15.
- 16.
There seems to be, for example, an interesting analogy between primary emotions and primary colours. Robert Plutchik , who developed the so-called ‘wheel of emotions’, suggesting eight primary emotions grouped on a positive or negative basis, writes that ‘primary emotions can be conceptualized in a fashion analogous to a color wheel – placing similar emotions together and opposites 180 degrees apart, like complementary colors. Other emotions are mixtures of the primary emotions, just as some colors are primary and others made by mixing the primary colors’ (Plutchik 2001: 349).
- 17.
It is important to note, however, that most of the difficulties for the aspect/emotion analogy are difficulties for the colour analogy too, so that they do not in any way harm the conclusion that the aspect analogy is a better analogy than the colour analogy. An example of such a difficulty is that moral perception is action-guiding in a way that aspect perception and colour perception are not (see Wright 1988: 8) . While it is up to subjects whether they care about the colours or aspects they perceive, it seems impossible to perceive wrongness and not care about it (see Blackburn 1985: 15) . This, however, is not necessarily a problem, as Wright recognizes, because it can be argued that moral perception is the perception of a cause for concern, that being the perception of a cause for concern is what is specific about moral perception (see McDowell 1998a; Starkey 2006: 86) . Moreover, emotions seem much better placed as causes for concern than colours are. Another way to answer Wright and Blackburn on this point is suggested by Timothy Chappell , who argues that ‘in evolutionary terms, what is hard to explain is not the representation that motivates, but the representation that does not motivate. As a matter of the history of our species, the (original) point of perceptual capacities in a tough world must usually have been to mandate response rather than to get hold of information for its own sake’ (Chappell 2008: 434–435).
- 18.
(1) Wittgenstein contrasts colour disagreement with disagreement over the question of whether an expression of feeling is genuine or not (Wittgenstein 2009b: §§351–352). Seeing the genuineness of an expression of feeling is close to seeing emotion, but arguably already a form of moral perception (which is why I did not choose it as my leading example). So there may be interesting connections between disagreement about emotion and moral disagreement. (2) Wittgenstein asks whether there is such a thing as expert judgment about the genuineness of an expression of feeling (Wittgenstein 2009b: §355). The link between expert judgment about emotion and expert judgment about moral issues has been touched upon in this chapter, but can be worked out further. (3) Another similarity is that between what Wittgenstein calls the dawning of an aspect and Wiggins’s repeated use of expressions such as ‘lighting up’ with respect to moral values. See Wiggins 1998a: 137 and 1998b: 207.
- 19.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.
- 20.
I am grateful to Nicole Hausen, Stefan Rummens and anonymous reviewers for comments on previous versions of this chapter.
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De Mesel, B. (2018). Seeing Colour, Seeing Emotion, Seeing Moral Value. In: The Later Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy. Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97619-8_6
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