According to the quasi-perceptualist account of philosophical intuitions, they are intellectual appearances that are psychologically and epistemically analogous to perceptual appearances. Moral intuitions share the key characteristics of other intuitions, but can also have a distinctive phenomenology and motivational role. This paper develops the Humean claim that the shared and distinctive features of substantive moral intuitions are best explained by their being constituted by moral emotions. This is supported by an independently plausible non-Humean, quasi-perceptualist theory of emotion, according to which the phenomenal feel of emotions is crucial for their intentional content.

This paper explores the relationship between phenomenal properties and intentional properties. In recent years a number of philosophers have argued that intentional properties are sometimes necessitated by phenomenal properties, but have not explained why or how. Exceptions can be found in the work of Katalin Farkas and Farid Masrour, who develop versions of reductionism regarding phenomenally-necessitated intentionality (or ‘phenomenal intentionality’). I raise two objections to reductive theories of the sort they develop. Then I propose a version of primitivism regarding phenomenal intentionality. I argue that primitivism avoids the pitfalls of reductionism while promising broad explanatory payoffs.

According to the phenomenal intentionality research program, a state's intentional content is fixed by its phenomenal character. Defenders of this view have little to say about just how this grounding is accomplished. I argue that without a robust account of representation, the research program promises too little. Unfortunately, most of the well-developed accounts of representation—asymmetric dependence, teleosemantics, and the like—ground representation in external relations such as causation. Such accounts are inconsistent with the core of the phenomenal intentionality program. I argue that, however counterintuitive it may seem, the best prospect for explaining how phenomenal character represents is an appeal to resemblance.