-
INTRODUCTION
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
What is ethical cognition like? That is, when we make (ethical) choices or exercise virtue of character, what kind of cognition is involved? In addition, what is the cognitive component of emotion like? That is, what kind of cognition is involved in our feelings of love, hate, pity, anger, kindness, envy, and so forth? A simple answer would be that both ethical and emotional cognition centrally involve cognition of value. When we exercise virtue of character , we choose what we appropriately cognize as valuable in some way: to give aid to someone, rather than hurting them; to be friendly to someone , rather than surly toward them; to prevent someone from engaging in actions that maim and destroy ourself or others. When we feel emotion —when we love or hate, when we pity someone or envy them—we are aware of the object of our emotion as valuable in some way: as beautiful or bad, as the subject of suffering or the bearer of positive qualities. In the early Enlightenment and again in the early twentieth century, this simple answer is rejected. The simple answer has it backward, some then say. Ethical choices or judgments do not involve cognition of value. Instead, value judgments are expressions of emotion. Moreover, emotions themselves are not cognitive—not shaped by how we perceive the world or what experiences we have had of it—but are brute and idiosyncratic . Later, ethics is understood as formalistic or rule-governed. The cognition involved in ethics, on this account, is merely the awareness of the applicability of a universal or a rule to a specific case. In recent years, a number of philosophers have rejected both emotivism and formalism. There is such a thing as ethical cognition, they say, and it is not merely awareness of the applicability of rules to cases. Instead, it involves a rich awareness of the particular features of complex, concrete situations and the perception of some among those features as 1 I N T R O D U C T I O N salient. Moreover, emotions, they say, are not brute but, instead, are intentional: they are forms of perception, types of rational orientation toward the world, ways of perceiving particular situations. Such views could be part of a move back to the simple answer just mentioned. For, once we have said that ethical awareness is awareness of salience, we still must ask what is meant by ‘salience’. In my view, the best way to spell out what is meant by salient particulars in the ethical realm is particulars that are conducive to or components of some value (or of something valuable). To be salient is to stand out, or even to leap out (as the etymology of the word suggests), to be prominent. To see particulars as salient is to see some of them as more important than others . But, important in what way? For a mathematician, mathematically interesting or unusual or important particulars stand out. For a lawyer, details having to do with liability or right are prominent. It is not enough to say that ethical cognition is cognition of salience. It must be a certain kind of salience. The simple answer looks promising again, with this in mind. What the person exercising virtue of character sees in a situation—what stands out for them or leaps to their mind—is some kind or kinds of value: which health plan will benefit the old, for example ; which government agency is unfair in the allocation of opportunities for development; which type of course requirement will most substantially increase students’ understanding of the diverse world in which they live. Similarly, I maintain, we must ask those who say that emotions are forms of perception, types of rational orientation to the world, or ways of perceiving particular situations, what the person feeling an emotion is perceiving or to what part or aspect of the world that person is rationally oriented. Here, too, we would want to include, but not stop at, the idea of awareness of particulars. One can have quite detailed knowledge of the particulars of a certain situation without that knowledge seeming to contribute at all to one’s having an emotional reaction to the situation . While, on the other hand, there is at least a common connection between awareness of the value qualities of a situation and certain emotional reactions to it: a detailed perception of decay often leads to a feeling of disgust or revulsion; watching a filmclip of a...