¹ In Section III below, we discuss the subject matter and method of phenomenology in general, and in Section V, we say more about the subject matter and method of moral phenomenology.

² Nor have they spent much time grappling with questions about the scope, unity, and distinctiveness of moral phenomenology. One major exception is Mandelbaum, Maurice, The Phenomenology of Moral Experience (Glencoe, IL: The New Press, 1955)Google Scholar. More recently, we ourselves have broached such questions in Horgan, Terry and Timmons, Mark, “Moral Phenomenology and Moral Theory,” Philosophical Issues 15 (2005): 56–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and in “Prolegomena to a Future Phenomenology of Morals,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7, edited by Kriegel, Uriah (2008)Google Scholar.

³ By “introspectively accessible elements” we mean elements that are readily introspectively accessible by people with ordinary introspective acuity—as distinct, for instance, from elements that are introspectively accessible only by people with unusually powerful and accurate introspective skill.

⁴ We also believe, although we will not argue for this here, that moral experiences in fact do not carry ontological objective purport. But even if we happen to be wrong about this, we still could be right about the Neutrality thesis. The truth of the Neutrality thesis would be enough to undercut the argument from phenomenological introspection, even if that argument's conclusion happens to be correct.

⁵ Horgan, Terry and Timmons, Mark, “Nondescriptivist Cognitivism: Outline of a New Metaethic,” Philosophical Papers 29 (2000): 121–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Cognitivist Expressivism,” in Horgan, Terry and Timmons, Mark, eds., Metaethics after Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The construal of moral phenomenology that we will explore below is not ontologically objectivist; nevertheless, it does recognize and accommodate phenomenological features of direct moral judgment that count intuitively as objective. See Section X below.

⁶ Of course, if cognitivist expressivism cannot accommodate the phenomenological data, and if no other metaethical view that rejects ontological objectivism can do so either, this does not yet guarantee that the argument goes through. For it might be that the phenomenological data can be accommodated by some form of metaethical rationalism that denies ontological moral objectivism.

⁷ Some moral realists prefer to characterize realism (including moral realism) in terms of “stance-independence” rather than in terms of “mind-independence.” See Shafer-Landau, Russ, Moral Realism: A Defense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 15–16Google Scholar. Whether this way of characterizing realism allows for a response-dependent account of secondary qualities to count as realist will depend on how one understands the notion of stance.

⁸ This is how McDowell, John, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” in Honderich, Ted, ed., Morality and Objectivity (London: Routledge, 1985), 170Google Scholar, characterizes a kind of objectivity characteristic of secondary qualities (understood as response-dependent) that he contrasts with a stronger kind that does not recognize response-dependent properties as being objective. See also Dancy, Jonathan, “Two Conceptions of Moral Realism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 60 (1985): 167–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ For more discussion of these two conceptions, see Timmons, Mark, “Objectivity in Moral Discourse,” in Brown, Keith, ed., The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2d ed. (Oxford: Elsevier, 2006), 9:5–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Firth, Roderick, “Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 12 (1952): 317–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Smith, Michael, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Kant, Immanuel, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Akademie volume IV, 1985), 389Google Scholar, in Kant, , Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Gregor, Mary J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 44–45Google Scholar.

¹² Mackie, J. L., Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977)Google Scholar, chap. 1.

¹³ Note that if one claims both (1) that moral properties are analogous to primary qualities in being human-response independent and (2) that moral properties are intrinsically reason-providing, then one seems committed to the rationalist claim that recognition of moral properties provides all rational agents with reasons. This seems to be why Mackie believed that moral thought and discourse presuppose both ontological and rationalist conceptions of objectivity.

¹⁴ This seems to be the view that Smith is advocating in Smith, Michael, “Objectivity and Moral Realism: On the Significance of the Phenomenology of Moral Experience,” reprinted in Smith, Michael, ed., Ethics and the A Priori (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ The idea that certain forms of discourse, including mathematics, logic, and ethics, can be objective—that claims in these areas can be objectively true—without there having to be a realm of objects and properties that make them true is one main theme of Hilary Putnam's Hermes Lectures, published as Part I of Putnam, Hilary, Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)Google Scholar. See esp. Lecture 3, “Objectivity without Objects.”

¹⁶ Hare, R. M., “Objective Prescriptions,” Philosophy 35 (1993): 1–17Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Perhaps an objective moral property can be constructed from the components that Hare posits. But it is enough for present purposes to note, as we do, that embracing rationalist objectivism but denying ontological objectivism is, prima facie, a metaethical option.

¹⁸ Korsgaard, Christine M., The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Charles Siewert, for instance, in his “Who's Afraid of Phenomenological Disputes?” Southern Journal of Philosophy 45 (2007), understands phenomenology as primarily methodological.

²⁰ There are various ways that one might widen somewhat the scope of phenomenal consciousness, while still regarding its scope as fairly restricted. For instance, one might hold that moods and/or emotions, in addition to sensations and sensory images, have distinctive phenomenal character.

²¹ Block, Ned, “On a Confusion about a Conception of Consciousness,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1995): 227–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² For a defense of this broader conception of the scope of phenomenal consciousness, see, e.g., Horgan, Terry and Tienson, John, “The Intentionality of Phenomenology and the Phenomenology of Intentionality,” in Chalmers, David, ed., Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 520–33Google Scholar; Horgan, Terry, Tienson, John, and Graham, George, “Phenomenal Intentionality and the Brain in a Vat,” in Schantz, Richard, ed., The Externalist Challenge (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 297–317CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kriegel, Uriah, “Consciousness as Sensory Quality and as Implicit Self-Awareness,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 2 (2003), 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pitt, David, “The Phenomenology of Cognition, or What Is It Like to Think That P?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (2004): 1–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Strawson, Galen, Mental Reality (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

²³ These intentionalist views bifurcate into two broad kinds: one kind maintains that all phenomenal character is sensory or sensory-imagistic (while insisting that phenomenal character is also inherently intentional); the other kind maintains that the scope of phenomenal consciousness is much broader, encompassing all (or virtually all) mental states that are conscious-as-opposed-to-unconscious. The former view is advocated, e.g., in Tye, Michael, Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dretske, Fred, Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995)Google Scholar. The latter view is advocated, e.g., in the texts mentioned in note 22 above.

²⁴ For some discussion of this matter, see Charles Siewert, “Who's Afraid of Phenomenological Disputes?”

²⁵ See, e.g., Siegel, Susanna, “Which Properties Are Represented in Perception?” in Szabo, T. Gendler and Hawthorne, John, eds., Perceptual Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, and Siegel, , “The Phenomenology of Efficacy,” Philosophical Topics 33 (2005): 265–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ Harman, Gilbert, The Nature of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 4Google Scholar.

²⁷ Note, however, that careful application of the introspective method—or of a mixed methodology that is partly phenomenological and partly abductive—might well be very relevant to such disputes. See, e.g., Siegel's mixed-method argumentation for the claim that causation is represented in visual-perceptual experience in Siegel, “Which Properties Are Represented in Perception?” and “The Phenomenology of Efficacy.”

²⁸ Chisholm, Roderick, “The Problem of the Speckled Hen,” Mind 51 (1942): 368–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ For more on this theme, see Horgan, Terry, “Agentive Phenomenology and the Limits of Introspection,” Psyche 13 (2007): 1–29Google Scholar.

³⁰ Our broad characterization of moral phenomenology allows for experiences (or elements of them) that give rise to moral judgments to be included within the purview of moral phenomenology. For example, my experiencing a certain contemplated action as being (in relation to certain elements of my circumstances) unfitting may result in my morally coming down on the matter and judging that the action is all-in unfitting and ought not to be done. (For more on the distinction between experiences of prima facie and of all-in unfittingness and fittingness, see note 56 below.) And, of course, our characterization allows for experiences that include (perhaps exclusively) the having or making of a moral judgment. (This particular point about the breadth of moral phenomenology is prompted by some remarks by Philip Pettit in conversation.)

³¹ The following point bears emphasis. If indeed not all aspects of mentality that belong to the subject matter of phenomenology are introspectively accessible (say, because some aspects of phenomenal character are not thus accessible but are present in experience nonetheless), then the distinctive phenomenological method (namely, introspection) will not suffice by itself to answer all pertinent questions about the subject matter. Other methods will need to be brought to bear too, over and above introspection.

³² Note that what we are here calling “theoretical” semantic issues are meant to be distinct from issues concerning the introspectively accessible content of intentional mental states.

³³ The case is pro tanto, rather than complete in itself, because one theoretical option is an error theory asserting both (1) that it is an introspectively accessible fact that direct moral experience carries ontological objective purport, and (2) that there are no in-the-world moral properties or facts—and, hence, (3) that direct moral experience is systematically nonveridical in its intentional content. Those who seek to defend moral realism by appeal to the argument from phenomenological introspection need to say something about the theoretical disadvantages of such an error theory, in comparison to moral realism.

³⁴ Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Dreyfus, Stuart E., “What Is Morality? A Phenomenological Account of the Development of Ethical Expertise,” in Rasmussen, David, ed., Universalism vs. Communitarianism: Contemporary Debates in Ethics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 237–64Google Scholar.

³⁵ This is not to deny that, in many cases, one's moral emotions “run ahead” of one's first-order moral judgments: in thinking about some past action of his, John begins to have feelings of guilt, and it is through his feelings of guilt that he comes to realize the wrongness of what he did. One way in which this might happen is described by Audi, Robert in “The Axiology of Moral Experience,” The Journal of Ethics 2 (1998): 355–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁶ Mandelbaum, The Phenomenology of Moral Experience, 127.

³⁷ Haidt, Jonathan, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108 (2001): 818CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

³⁸ Harman, The Nature of Morality, 4.

³⁹ Cases involving intuitive moral judgments are to be contrasted with cases of “ethical comportment” of the sort that the Dreyfus brothers discuss in “What Is Morality?” in which one spontaneously responds as a matter of reflex. The latter are cases of experiences that do not seem to involve having or making a moral judgment, not even a spontaneous judgment that generates spontaneous, unhesitating behavior.

⁴⁰ Strictly speaking, moral experiences might exhibit some common features that serve, in a weak sense, to unify them; however, it is possible that such common features do not serve to distinguish moral experiences from certain types of nonmoral normative experiences. For more on this, see Horgan and Timmons, “Moral Phenomenology and Moral Theory.” See also Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, “Is Moral Phenomenology Unified?” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴¹ “Levels” is our term, but it seems appropriate given Mandelbaum's talk of felt demand being “grounded in” one's apprehension of fittingness or unfittingness.

⁴² Mandelbaum, The Phenomenology of Moral Experience, 54.

⁴³ Ibid., 55.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 55–56.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 55.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 67–68.

⁴⁷ For more on this point, see Horgan and Timmons, “Prolegomena to a Future Phenomenology of Morals.” Interestingly, Chisholm, Roderick, “Practical Reason and the Logic of Requirement,” reprinted in Raz, Joseph, ed., Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 118–27Google Scholar, distinguishes two senses of fittingness, a strong and a weak sense, both of which he defines in terms of requiredness. (Chisholm mentions Mandelbaum.)

⁴⁸ See Horgan and Timmons, “Cognitivist Expressivism.” The view we describe does treat moral judgments as objective, in a specific sense to be described in Section X below. But the view is a form of expressivism, and thus it also treats moral judgments as being nondescriptive in their overall content. This precludes them from carrying ontological objective purport, because the latter is a species of descriptive content.

⁴⁹ Here, again, we emphasize that our thesis concerns what is introspectively accessible in order to distinguish what we are calling the Neutrality thesis from a stronger neutrality thesis according to which moral phenomenology itself is neutral with respect to ontological objective purport.

⁵⁰ According to an error theory, (1) affirmative moral judgments purport to represent objective moral facts, but (2) since there are no such facts, (3) affirmative moral judgments are erroneous (false).

⁵¹ Here we use the term “descriptive,” as applied to content talk, to include content that purports to attribute irreducibly normative properties to items of evaluation. On this usage, J. L. Mackie's claim that moral judgments purport to ascribe to actions the alleged normative property to-be-pursuedness counts as a construal according to which such judgments possess descriptive content.

⁵² Mackie, J. L., Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977)Google Scholar, chap. 1.

⁵³ On our view, the is in the case of is-belief is also in the attitude. The idea is that the descriptive content of a belief—of either an is-belief or an ought-belief—is most perspicuously expressed not by a declarative sentence but rather by a “that”-clause such as “that John takes out the trash” (or by a nominalized sentence such as “John's taking out the trash”). In English, an is-commitment is canonically expressed linguistically by asserting a complete sentence in the declarative mood—as in “John took out the trash.” An ought-commitment is canonically expressed by asserting a declarative-mood sentence whose predicative constituent comprises the modal auxiliary “ought” appended to an infinitival verb—as in “John ought to take out the trash.” On our account, however, the logical structure of is-beliefs and ought-beliefs is more perspicuously revealed via sentences employing a commitment-operator applied to a descriptive “that”-clause, thus: “It is the case that John takes out the trash”; “It ought to be the case that John takes out the trash.”

⁵⁴ Horgan and Timmons, “Nondescriptivist Cognitivism”; Horgan, Terry and Timmons, Mark, “Expressivism, Yes! Relativism, No!” in Shafer-Landau, Russ, ed., Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Horgan, Terry and Timmons, Mark, “Cognitivist Expressivism,” in Horgan, and Timmons, , eds., Metaethics after Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ This cake example is from Beardsley, Elizabeth L., “Moral Experience and Ethical Analysis,” The Philosophical Review 68 (1959), 519–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar (critical review of Mandelbaum's The Phenomenology of Moral Experience).

⁵⁶ The moral experiences that we are here calling direct ought-judgment-involving moral experiences are all-in moral experiences of moral unfittingness. We also recognize moral experiences of unfittingness that are like all-in moral experiences except that one does not come to feel ought-committed; rather, one only experiences oneself as having a tendency to feel ought-committed. These are cases in which one would find oneself ought-committed if the relevant non-normative feature in question were the only feature one took to be a reason. In contrast to all-in experiences of unfittingness (or fittingness), such cases are those of prima facie unfittingness (or fittingness).

This distinction between two types of experiences of moral unfittingness bears on an example that Julia Driver described (in conversation) in which one comes across a pigeon lying on the ground (apparently hit by a car) that is in pain and obviously cannot be saved. One can walk away or crush its skull (thereby putting it out of its misery). One judges that it is morally best (and hence fitting) to crush the pigeon's skull, but in doing so one takes the act of crushing to be unfitting. In this case, putting the pigeon out of its misery is experienced as fitting, but the act of crushing is experienced as unfitting. Driver asked whether our model of moral experience, featuring as it does experiences of unfittingness and fittingness, can handle this case. Given what we have just said about the distinction between all-in experiences of moral unfittingness (and fittingness) and experiences of prima facie moral unfittingness, we can say of Driver's case that, on the one hand, given that the act in question is a crushing of a live animal's skull, one experiences the contemplated action as prima facie unfitting. On the other hand, given that the animal is suffering and cannot be saved, one experiences the act as prima facie fitting. On our picture, then, one has a tendency to feel ought-committed to crushing the skull, and an opposing tendency to feel ought-committed to refraining from crushing the skull. As in typical cases of conflicts of prima facie duties, one must determine which consideration is all-in or most fitting in the circumstances.

⁵⁷ In the formal language featured in Horgan and Timmons, “Cognitivist Expressivism,” judgments of the form I ought to do A (now) are rendered as O[A], where “O” expresses ought-commitment and “A” expresses a descriptive way-the-world-might-be content (e.g., that I take out the trash now). Likewise, is-commitments are rendered as I[A]. Thus, “O[A]” is the canonical way of expressing linguistically one's state of being ought-committed to a descriptive content, which is how cognitivist expressivism understands direct moral ought-judgments. As we have said, the idea is that the “ought” is in the attitude of the psychological state, not in the content toward which the attitude is directed. The formal language also generates constructions corresponding to a whole hierarchy of logically complex commitment-states—e.g., commitment-states of the type {I[] or O[]}, where such a commitment-state obtains with respect to a pair of descriptive contents expressable by “that”-clauses that would be inserted into the respective bracketed slots. To capture unfittingness judgments in such a formal language, a natural idea would be to augment the range of logically complex formal-language constructions to incorporate an adverbial operator that expresses the “reasonish-because” manner of judging. Judgments of the form, It would be unfitting for me not to take out the trash now because I've promised to do so, or equivalently, My promising to take out the trash at this time is a reason for why I ought to take it out now, can be rendered: R(I[B]){O[A]}, which expresses a logically complex commitment-state of being ought-committed to a certain non-moral-descriptive content (namely, that I take out the trash now) in a for-the-reason-that I promised to take it out manner. (More precisely, the manner is a for-the-reason-that-it-is-the-case [that I promised to take out the trash] manner.) That is to say, this is a commitment-state of the logical type R(I[]){O[]}, with respect to the pair of descriptive contents that I promised to take out trash and that I take out the trash now. (We assume here that one takes the reason to be an all-in reason for the ought-judgment.) Of course, this for-the-reason-that-I[] manner of becoming ought-committed is also a non-self-privileging manner, and so to capture this in our syntax, one might render the ought-operator thus: O_i[A], for “ought-impartial.” Thus, the full formal rendering of such an impartial, reasonish-because manner of being ought-committed would be this: R(I[B]){O_i[A]}. Again, such a logically complex commitment-state is not an is-commitment with respect to a putative descriptive content (namely, my having promised to take out the trash being a reason for my taking out the trash now). On the contrary: according to cognitivist expressivism, there is no such descriptive content, and there is no such is-commitment to such a putative content.

⁵⁸ This phrase is inspired by Putnam's phrase “realism with a small ‘r’.” See Putnam, Hilary, The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987), 17Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ See Horgan and Timmons, “Cognitivist Expressivism.”

⁶⁰ See note 54.

⁶¹ Questions about the theory-ladenness of moral experiences were raised in conversation by David Wong. Michael Gill, in his “Variability and Moral Phenomenology,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (2008), pressed this same worry. We reply to Gill in our “Prolegomena to a Future Phenomenology of Morals.”