## 1. Subject Matter and Methodology



There is a very narrow conception of the sorts of mental states and
events that could be the subject matter of phenomenological inquiry,
namely, "feeling" mental states and events, including, as
paradigm cases, types of physical and psychological pain. Because this
is not how the subject matter is understood by those working on moral
phenomenology, we put this narrow sense aside.



According to a much broader conception of its subject matter,
phenomenology as a field of inquiry is focused on the experiential
aspects of all types of experience that are accessible to first-person
inquiry, including, for example, all forms of sensory experience,
emotional experience, and so on. According to the tradition associated
with analytic philosophy of mind, the type of first-person inquiry in
question is introspection (see the entry on
 introspection).
 Moral phenomenology, done in this tradition, then, focuses on the
experiential aspects of various types of *moral* experience
that are accessible to introspection. As a field of inquiry, its
central aim is to accurately describe those aspects of moral
experience that may be investigated by the use of introspection. As
such, it is largely an empirically grounded inquiry into the
experiential aspects of types of moral experience.



According to the tradition derived from Husserl,
 Phenomenology[1]
 is focused on essential structures of the intentionality--the
directedness to an object--proper to various kinds of experience.
Moral phenomenology, understood in this sense, (1) focuses on what is
essential to the first-personal, intentional directedness of moral
experiences, (2) aims to articulate the essences of types of moral
experience, and (3) employs a distinctive *a priori*
methodology.



These two conceptions of moral phenomenology as fields of inquiry
differ somewhat in their aims and methodology, although they share a
common subject matter. Let us begin with what they share in
common.


### 1.1 Varieties of moral experience



Here we wish to propose in a somewhat preliminary way a general
taxonomy of types of moral experience--a taxonomy that is
intended to cover the territory well enough and is useful for thinking
about the subject matter of moral phenomenology.



*Moral perception* includes moral experiences that crucially
involve the use of one's perceptual faculties, ocular and
auditory being the most obvious. An example of visual moral perception
is seeing someone gleefully torture a helpless animal and experiencing
that action as morally wrong. Hearing someone utter a deliberately
insulting remark and recognizing it as such is an example of a moral
experience grounded in auditory perception. Understood more narrowly
(and quite literally) moral perception, as understood by its
defenders, involves (what appears to one as) an instantiated moral
property (i.e., an instance of a moral property possessed by an object
of moral evaluation) being presented in one's perceptual
experience, as when one's visual perceptual experience presents
the injustice of a perceived action (see, for example, Audi
 2013).[2]
 Moral perception, so understood, is to be distinguished (at least
*prima facie*) from spontaneous, perceptually grounded moral
belief as when one sees someone slap a small child triggering the
belief that the slapping was morally wrong. Arguably, the content of
one's visual experience need not include the presentation of the
property wrongness. (For further discussion of this issue, see
 section 2.1.)



*Moral emotions*, both positive (e.g., gratitude, respect,
admiration) and negative (e.g., shame, guilt, indignation) are mental
states of moral significance that often have, when occurrent, a
robust, arguably complex, phenomenal character. In the empirical
literature, for example, one finds experimental studies of the
differences in people's experiences of envy compared to
 jealousy,[3]
 of guilt compared to
 shame,[4]
 as well as studies of people's experiences of gratitude, of
generosity, of disrespect, and other emotions. Note that if, as many
theoreticians of emotion suppose, moral judgments are embedded in
these emotions (or some instances of them), then the phenomenology of
moral emotion will overlap with the phenomenology of moral judgment.
For theorists who liken the emotions to perception, the phenomenology
of moral emotion will overlap with the phenomenology of moral
perception. Of course, for many theorists, the phenomenology of moral
emotion will intersect both moral perception and moral judgment.



*Moral judgment* is understood as occurrent experiences of
thinking a moral proposition, whether it is about oneself, including
one's actions, past, present, or in prospect, or about
one's character, past, present, or future, or whether it is
about the actions or character of others, or whether it is about the
structures and behaviors of institutions. Within this category, many
further divisions of phenomenological significance are called for. On
phenomenological grounds, Maurice Mandelbaum (1955) distinguished what
he referred to as "direct" from "removed"
moral judgments--intended to capture the difference in the
phenomenologies of perspective between first and third-person moral
judgment. He also found reason on phenomenological grounds to
distinguish judgments of obligation (and deontic judgments generally)
from judgments of value. One might also suppose that spontaneous moral
judgments (intuitions) typically have a different experiential aspect
to them compared to moral judgments that are the deliverances of moral
 deliberation.[5]



*Moral deliberation* includes formulating moral propositions
and considering their plausibility (e.g., mulling them over, thinking
about reasons for and against), typically aimed at reaching a moral
verdict about some issue. This category focuses on the conscious
process often leading up to forming a moral judgment or leading up to
a decision to act based on one's deliberations--both
typical products of this process.



*Moral agency* involves exercising one's capacity to act,
including the experience of making moral decisions (an exercise of
will), as well as experiences of planning, trying, striving, and
acting in ways that have moral significance. Julia Annas (2008)
discusses the experiences of a virtuous agent that she describes in
terms of the sort of "flow" experience that is extensively
explored in the work of Csikszentmihalyi (1990). Hubert and Stuart
Dreyfus discuss what they call "ethical comportment", a
developed skill-like capacity in which an agent who has reached the
requisite level of moral expertise can see "intuitively what to
do without applying rules and making judgments at all" (1990:
 243).[6]



Notice two things about this taxonomy. First, these categories of
moral experience are porous, as indicated in what we have noted about
the possible involvement of moral judgment in experiencing moral
emotions. Moral deliberation most often includes moral judgments that
one may or may not bring to mind in mulling over some moral issue to
reach a verdict about that issue. Second, as indicated in the remarks
about moral judgment, there are more fine-grained distinctions one
might draw within and across the basic types of moral experience we
have just presented (e.g., direct vs. removed moral judgments) that
may be of phenomenological significance. The above taxonomy represents
only a rough guide to the most general types of moral experience. In
 section 3
 and
 4,
 we return to the work that has been done investigating some of these
species of moral experience as it bears on issues in metaethics and
normative ethics.


### 1.2 Methodology



The methodology of phenomenological inquiry is first-personal.
However, as noted at the outset of this section, the two
traditions--analytic and Phenomenological--differ
fundamentally. The former is an empirically grounded, *a
posteriori* philosophical science that proceeds by inductive and
abductive methods. It aims to achieve general, psychological truths
about the first-personal character of moral experiences. The latter is
an *a priori* philosophical science that proceeds via a
systematic consideration of the various parts and aspects of an
experience in order to identify which of them are essential to the
experience being the kind of experience it is. It achieves
(presumptively) necessary truths about the correlation between the
intentionally directed experience and its object just as experienced
(see below), including the first-personal character of its
experiential dimension and the structural components of the object and
its significance for the subject. Let us consider these differences in
more detail.



Phenomenological inquiry in the analytic tradition relies on
introspection as the basis for observing aspects of one's moral
experience, which can then be used for making psychological
generalizations about such experience. Here, it is important to
distinguish two uses of introspectionist methodology. One use is
direct: one attends to some aspect of one's ongoing experience
in order to describe what one observes. By turning one's
attention inward, as it were, one can attend to the pain in
one's thumb and describe it as, say, dull or sharp. Likewise, by
attending to one's occurrent emotional experience, one can
immediately determine that one is experiencing anger directed toward
some wrongful behavior one just witnessed.



However, this use of introspection is of limited value when it comes
to addressing certain philosophical controversies. One such
controversy in the philosophy of perception is whether visual
perceptual experiences have "rich contents". According to
a rich content view, visual experiences can and often do present the
instantiation in perceptual awareness not just of lower-level physical
properties such as colors, shapes, illumination, and motion, but also
such experiences can and typically do also present the instantiation
of higher-level properties including, for instance, properties that
categorize objects (cars, cacti, clouds), actions (starting a car,
planting a cactus, pointing to a cloud) and causal relations. But as
Susanna Siegel (2011: chap. 3), a defender of the rich content view,
points out, the controversy over this view cannot be settled by the
direct use of introspection; one cannot reliably tell just by
attending carefully to one's visual experience whether its
perceptual contents are rich. But this does not mean that
introspection is of no use. Rather, it figures importantly in
phenomenal contrast arguments. There is a variety of such arguments
that differ importantly in their probative power that need not concern
us
 here.[7]
 Generally speaking, such arguments draw a conclusion about the
phenomenal character of a certain type of experience, by appealing to
a phenomenal difference of some sort between two experiences being
compared. For example, in defending the claim that visual experiences
present one with object kinds, Siegel contrasts one's visual
experience of pine trees, situated among other trees in a forest,
before acquiring the disposition to easily recognize pine trees, with
one's visual experience of the forest after acquiring the
disposition. Siegel points to a "feeling of familiarity"
in one's overall phenomenology in the second experience that is
salient to introspection. This introspectable difference figures in a
premise in an abductive argument (i.e., inference to the best
explanation) for the claim that one's visual experience after
gaining the appropriate recognitional disposition includes the
presentation of pine tree, an instance supporting the rich content
view, which then generalizes to a wide range of visual experiences.
Introspection plays an ineliminable role in phenomenal contrast
arguments. However, at least as employed by Siegel in defending the
rich content view, its use is to reveal something reliably detectable
about one's contrasting experiences, which can then provide the
basis for an argument to a conclusion about phenomenal character.



Turning for a moment to moral experience, one controversy (which we
discuss below in
 section 2),
 is whether certain types of moral perceptual experience purport to
present instantiated moral properties. If so, and if one takes such
experience to bear on philosophical disputes over moral metaphysics,
then one can appeal to such experiences as providing presumptive
evidence for some form of moral realism. Suppose, though, that one
cannot reliably tell by directly introspecting one's moral
experiences whether they have such realist purport. One might then
hope to provide evidence that such experiences do have such purport by
employing a phenomenal contrast argument.



Of course, there are important questions about the nature and
reliability of introspectionist methodology. (We refer readers to the
entries on introspection and on self-knowledge for relevant
discussions.) The important points for present purposes are these.
First, the *role* introspection plays in addressing
philosophical disputes may vary, the basic division being between
direct methods and the method that employs phenomenal contrast
arguments. Second, the uses of introspection in the analytic tradition
are intended to yield empirically grounded psychological claims about
the phenomenal character of moral experiences, employing, inductive
and abductive methods. As we have already noted, this empirically
grounded methodology and its aims differ sharply from the methods and
aims one finds in the Phenomenological tradition to which we now
turn.



The methodology of Phenomenology as initiated by Husserl involves
three key aspects: (1) a specification of the main theme for
phenomenological reflection, namely, intentionality (the feature of
experience whereby it is directed upon an object); (2) a description
aimed at revealing the necessary constituents of the correlation
between intentionally directed experiences and their objects just as
experienced, that is, in their significance for the subject , and (3)
a methodology involving imaginative variation, governed by a
whole-part logic, of the parts and aspects of the correlation.



The specification of the main theme of phenomenology as intentionality
is a result of exercising the "phenomenological reduction"
(Husserl 1913: SSSS30-84). Without entering into the
various debates about the possibility, extent, and significance of the
reduction--all of which are disputed--the minimal sense of
the reduction common to Phenomenologists is the suspension of
one's participation in the belief in the existence of the world
(and the objects therein), a belief characteristic of our
straightforward, everyday experience of the world. Husserl (1913:
SS31) also uses the term "bracketing" in speaking of
the reduction, and this provides a useful metaphor. Just as absolute
two, represented as [2], is the number two without a positive or
negative index, the reduced experience--say, [perceiving the
table]--is the experience along with its object as meant, as
significant for us in a particular manner, without the index of
existence or non-existence. Some Phenomenologists (e.g., Scheler
1913/1916) reject the deployment of the reduction because they wish to
preserve a strong realism regarding the existence of values, and they
believe the reduction commits one to a form of metaphysical
idealism.



Alternatively and more generally, we can say the reduction focuses
attention upon the object intended in experience simply as
experienced. Either formulation captures the correlation of experience
and its object. The reduction, in other words, is a reflective turn
that leads our attention away from the object as given in everyday
experience back (*re-ducere*) to the correlation--what we
call the "intentional correlation"--between the
experience intending the object and the object just in the manner it
is experienced. It leads our attention back to the experiences in
which objects have meaning for us. At the same time, the reduction
reveals the correlational inseparability of the phenomenal content
proper to the experiential, subjective side of the correlation and the
intentional content proper to the objective side of the
 correlation.[8]



The second and third aspects of the Phenomenological method are joined
in the idea of descriptive analysis carried out in terms of a
whole-part logic that (1) identifies the parts or aspects of the
experience, its object, and the correlation itself, and (2)
imaginatively varies the whole by thinking away different parts or
aspects of the whole to determine which of them *must* be
present for the experience or object to remain the kind of experience
or object that it is. Stated more formally, imaginative variation
systematically varies the whole under consideration (*W*) by
trying to imagine it first without part *A*, then without part
*B*, then without part *C*, and so forth. If *W*
can be imagined without part *A* and still be considered a
*W*, then *A* is a "piece" that does not
belong necessarily and universally to *W*s. If, by contrast,
*W* cannot be imagined without part *B*, then *B*
is a "moment" of *W* and belongs necessarily and
universally to *W*s. The existence of any *W* entails
the presence of *B* (Husserl 1900-1901 [2001:
2:5-7]). The deployment of this methodology yields *a
priori* truths regarding the necessary and universal features of
the intentionality proper to different kinds of experiences.



The inability to imagine the separate existence of a moment is not
merely a psychological limitation of the human imagination. It is
instead a rational inability to separate specific logical (conceptual)
contents from one another. The necessity of moments supplementing and
complementing one another in the formation of a whole arises out of a
necessity in the nature of the things themselves, a necessity in the
sense of the moments themselves (Husserl 1900-1901 [2001:
2:11]). Consider, for example, the moral emotion of guilt: guilt
involves distressing feelings about something one has done and knows
or thinks to be wrong. If one tries to think away the feelings of
distress, one would not recognize the emotion as guilt, and if one
tries to think away the knowledge or thought that what one did was
wrong, one would again not recognize the emotion as guilt. Feelings of
distress and the recognition of wrongdoing are moments of--that
is, essential to--guilt.



The majority of Phenomenologists do not engage in the kind of detailed
methodological reflections that Husserl did. However, virtually all
Phenomenologists employ something like the minimal notion of the
phenomenological turn to the intentional correlation as the whole that
is under investigation and seek to identify the essential constituents
of experience and its objects as experienced. Moreover, virtually all
Phenomenologists utilize an analysis of whole-part relations, even if
they do not use the terms, in order to discover essential features of
the correlation itself, as well as of its experiential and objective
moments. Since the whole under investigation is not a psychological
subject--that is, a particular worldly subject--but any
possible subject, and since the method discloses necessary and
universal structures that make the experiences the kind of experience
they are, the result is an *a priori* Phenomenology.


## 2. Moral Phenomenology and Metaethics



Metaethics addresses second-order questions about morality, including
metaphysical, epistemological, and semantic questions (see the entry
on
 metaethics).
 Phenomenological questions about moral experience significantly
impact views on these topics. If, for instance, some form of moral
experience has as an aspect of its presentational
 content[9]
 putatively instantiated moral properties (e.g., wrongness) or
relations (e.g., fittingness), this would be some evidence in favor of
a realist moral
 metaphysics.[10]
 Also, such experiences would arguably provide an experiential basis
for justified moral belief and perhaps moral knowledge. And, if moral
experience presents such properties and relations as aspects of their
content, this would invite a moral semantics according to which
judgments in which a moral property or relation is predicated of some
item of moral evaluation are truth-apt. Such issues bear on the
question of whether ethics is or can be an "objective"
enterprise.



In the remainder of this section, we review some of the debates
concerning the bearing of moral phenomenology on metaethical issues.
We organize our review according to what we identified earlier as
major types of moral experience, beginning with moral perception.


### 2.1 Moral perception



Moral perception has recently become a major topic of interest among
analytic philosophers and, in this sub-section, we will confine our
remarks to how it has been discussed in such circles. In the following
sub-sections, we focus primarily on the Phenomenological
tradition.



As noted earlier, the phenomenological issue concerning moral
perception is whether human beings can perceive instantiated moral
properties or relations, in the sense that such properties and
relations are presented in experience as part of the content of what
an individual *literally* sees or hears (to pick two sense
 modalities).[11]



To clarify the topic under consideration, three comments are in order.
First, our use of "moral perception" in this sub-section
is confined to modes of perception associated with the five senses
plus proprioception and excludes consideration of other mental
phenomena such as emotions which, on some accounts, are perceptual or
quasi-perceptual states. (Moral emotions are taken up in the following
sub-section.) Second, contemporary discussion of moral perception
centers on whether it is possible to perceive moral properties without
postulating a special moral sense for detecting moral
 properties.[12]
 Third, it is assumed (though by no means uncontroversial) that
perceptual experience has informational content understood as
providing accuracy conditions of one's perceptual experience,
analogous to truth conditions for beliefs (see the entry on the
 contents of perception).
 Thus, if I'm having a visual experience as of a red object
spatially located on the table in front of me, then my visual
experience includes as part of its content the presentation of the
property redness and is thus accurate in this regard just in case the
object I am looking at is red.



Turning now to moral perception, earlier we alluded to a now-famous
example from Gilbert Harman:



> 
> 
> If you round a corner and see a group of hoodlums pour gasoline on a
> cat and ignite it, you do not need to *conclude* that what they
> are doing is wrong; you do not need to figure anything out; you can
> *see* that it is wrong. (Harman 1977: 4)
> 
> 
> 



There are at least two ways to understand Harman's remark. One
may take it as the claim that the property of wrongness is part of the
presentational content of one's visual experience, alongside
one's visual experience of seeing the group of hoodlums pour
gasoline on a cat and igniting it. This understanding commits one to
what we will call the *thesis of moral perception* (MP, for
short) according to which at least some moral properties can figure in
the presentational contents of ordinary veridical perception. On this
view, it is possible to *see* the wrongness of what those kids
are doing. Moral perception is not restricted to visual perception,
but examples of such putative perception dominate the literature.



An alternative understanding of Harman's cat example is that one
does not perceive the wrongness in question, rather what one sees in
rounding the corner are the non-moral descriptive properties one
witnesses (e.g., the kids pouring gasoline) that spontaneously
triggers the response "that's wrong!" However, the
property of wrongness is not part of the content of one's visual
perception. On this interpretation, then, saying that one *sees
that* what those kids are doing is wrong should be understood as a
kind of intellectual seeing, i.e., a matter of intellectually (and, in
the example, spontaneously) apprehending the relation between what one
sees and the wrongness of the act--a mental act downstream (or at
least distinct) from one's visual experience.



In twentieth century analytic metaethics it was long accepted that
moral properties cannot be perceived, even if they are instantiated in
actions, persons, institutions, and other items of moral evaluation.
Thus, we find W. D. Ross remarking:



> 
> 
> Rightness is always a resultant attribute, an attribute that an act
> has because it has another. It is not an attribute that its subject is
> just directly perceived in experience to have, as I perceive a
> particular extended patch to be yellow, or a particular noise to be
> loud. (Ross 1939: 168)
> 
> 
> 



Suppose, following Ross, moral properties (assuming they are ever
instantiated) are higher-order resultant properties--properties
whose instantiation depends on descriptive base properties. In this
picture, it is in virtue of such descriptive properties as the
hoodlums intending to torture the cat and igniting it that what they
are doing instantiates the property of wrongness. Further, suppose
Ross is correct in claiming that moral properties, even if they are
sometimes instantiated, are not presented in visual experience (to
pick one sensory modality) as are low-level properties such as color
and sound. Might it still be true that one's visual experience
includes as part of its presentational content resultant moral
properties even if they aren't perceived in the way one
perceives color and sound? Recent work on perception gives the
defender of moral perception some reason to be optimistic.



In
 section 1.2
 on methodology, we mentioned the method of phenomenal contrast and
how it is used by some in defense of the rich content view of ordinary
visual perception. On this view, what is or can be presented in
ordinary visual experience is not restricted to lower-level properties
such as shape, color, illumination, and motion, but may include the
presentation of higher-level descriptive properties including object
kinds, causal relations, and actions. (Siegel's pine tree
example is often cited as an example of how the method is deployed in
defense of the rich content view.) This recent development in the
philosophy of perception has figured in some recent defenses of
 MP.[13]



The question in the context of recent developments in the philosophy
of perception, then, is whether this rich content view can be extended
to moral properties--higher-order *normative moral*
properties (and perhaps to normative and evaluative properties
generally). The matter is controversial, as one might expect. For
example, Preston Werner (2016) employs the contrast method
(*a la* Siegel) in defense of MP. He considers two
individuals witnessing the Harman cat incident and differing in their
overall resulting phenomenology because one of them (Pathos) lacks the
capacity for emotional empathic responses to cases like Harman's
cat that the other person (Norma) has. Werner then proceeds to argue
that from among the candidate explanations for the interpersonal
difference in the experiences of Pathos and Norma, the hypothesis that
the visual experience of Norma includes as part of its presentational
content the property of wrongness (presumably not present in the
visual experience of Pathos) best explains the phenomenological
difference in question. Werner's defense of MP is opposed by
Pekka Vayrynen (2018) who advances a two-pronged reply. First,
even if Norma's experience of witnessing the cat immolation
includes a presentation of the property of wrongness as part of the
content of her *overall* experience, Werner's argument
does not show that the property is an element of the presentational
content of her *visual* experience that is included as a part
of her overall experience, i.e., it doesn't show that she
*sees* the wrongness. Second, Vayrynen proposes a
competing hypothesis according to which Norma undergoes a spontaneous
inferential transition from non-moral perceptual input (together with
background beliefs with moral content, training, and habituation) to
her moral judgment about the hoodlums (this spontaneous response
lacking in Pathos). He then argues that this hypothesis is overall
simpler, more unified, and enjoys greater explanatory power compared
to the MP hypothesis. (For pertinent details, readers may consult the
articles by Werner and Vayrynen.) This particular dispute, we
note, is far from settled; questions may be raised about the alleged
superiority of Vayrynen's proposal over MP.



Further questions about moral perception loom large, including whether
so-called thick moral properties, e.g., honesty, are better candidates
for figuring in the presentational contents of perceptual experiences
than are "thin" moral properties like rightness and
wrongness. After all, concepts like honesty are at least partly
descriptive (making them "thick") and partly evaluative or
normative. For instance, knowingly witnessing someone's action
of interpersonal verbal communication as honest is (in part) to be
presented with specific descriptive information about the
action--that it was neither a lie nor in some way deceptive. As
such, the property of honesty is capable of being presented
auditorily. Insofar as honesty is a right-making property of actions,
experiencing the honesty with the understanding that it is
right-making, would seem to be a case of experiencing a moral
property; the moral property is presented in experience by way of its
descriptive content.



Another looming question is whether one would be able to perceive
moral properties were they non-natural properties. Robert Audi (2013),
for example, defends a non-naturalist view of moral properties as
being (in his terminology) "perceptible". (See Crow 2016
for a critical discussion of Audi and related views of moral
perception.) Finally, another question, fundamental to the debate over
the thesis of moral perception, is whether it is possible to determine
by introspectionist methodology alone (including the method of
contrast) whether at least some perceptual experiences include as part
of their content the presentation of moral properties--whether as
Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons put it, such experiences have
"realist purport". In a series of articles (2008b, 2010b,
2017, 2018a,b, 2019), they defend a "neutrality thesis"
according to which for a variety of types of moral experience it is
not possible to determine by introspectionist methodology
*alone* whether such experiences have realist purport. Their
point, if cogent, arguably generalizes to all types of moral
experience, including perceptual experience of the sort featured in
Harman's cat example, even if such experiences do have realist
purport.



In the remainder of this section, our central focus will be on the
Phenomenological tradition, with some mention of the work by analytic
philosophers.


### 2.2 Moral emotion



Some Phenomenologists approach the analysis of feelings and emotions
through the theory of value (axiology) [e.g., Edmund Husserl
(1908-9/1911/1914, 1920/1924, 1916-35), Nicolai Hartmann
(1926), Alexius Meinong (1917), Adolf Reinach (1912/1913), Max Scheler
(1913/1916), Edith Stein (1917), and Dietrich von Hildebrand (1916,
1922, 1953)]. (For additional information, see the entries on
 Edmund Husserl,
 phenomenology,
 the phenomenology of the Munich and Gottingen Circles,
 Nicolai Hartmann,
 Alexius Meinong,
 Adolf Reinach,
 Max Scheler,
 and
 Edith Stein.)
 For these Phenomenologists moral perception and moral emotion merge
in experiencing value properties in general and moral properties in
particular. They agree that only beings capable of feelings or
emotions can grasp values and the significance attaching to them.
Harman's cat example illustrates this. It is clear that we see
the cat and someone performing actions that seriously injure the
helpless animal. This is an ordinary perception of the features and
actions of worldly beings. We also "see" the wrongness of
these actions in the disgust or horror that we feel. This is what
axiological Phenomenologists mean when they claim that the value is
"perceived" by an intentional feeling or an emotion.



These Phenomenologists also agree that intentional feelings or
emotions grasp value-objects independent of those feelings, in the
sense that neither a thing's being valuable nor the truth or
falsity of value attributions is reducible to or solely dependent upon
the intentional feeling. There are important differences, however, in
how Phenomenologists understand the relation between the
"mere" perceiving of material things and experiencing the
value property and how they understand the independence of the
value-object. These differences are tied to different understandings
of the German term
 *wertnehmen*,[14]
 which parallels *wahrnehmen*, to perceive. Focusing on the
aspect of "taking"--*nehmen*--common to
perceiving and valuing emphasizes their relation. A taking is a
single, unified experience having two distinguishable aspects, a
taking as true and a taking as valuable. The truth-taking and the
value-taking occur together even as they remain distinguishable.
Although their focus is on value in general, these Phenomenologists
agree that the emotions have moral relevance and that our choices are
in some manner rooted in the emotional disclosure of the value of both
the ends at which the agent aims and the actions conducive to those
ends. By extension, therefore, and despite differing accounts of the
experience of value, they also view themselves as moral realists (see
the entry on
 moral realism).



On one view--a "weak" or response-dependent value
realism--to perceive a value (*wertnehmen*) is for an
intentional feeling or
 emotion[15]
 to grasp an entity (e.g., a thing, state of affairs, action, event,
person, institution) as valued--or, as in the case of
Harman's cat example, disvalued. Someone's horror upon
seeing the boys burning the cat takes the burning of the cat by the
boys as dastardly. The (dis)value of the boys' action is
grounded in the particular, non-axiological features involved (the
boys' pouring gasoline on the cat and igniting the gasoline),
which, relative to the experiential history, interests, concerns, and
commitments (including moral) of the subject, are taken to be
(dis)valuable. Just as the perception of a thing *S* takes
**S* as *p** (the cat as having gasoline poured
on it and ignited by the group of boys), the feeling-apprehension or
emotional apprehension takes **Sp* as *v** (the
cat's being burned by the boys as horrible). The non-axiological
property *p* psychologically motivates the experience of the
emotion with its correlative value property, and *p* also
epistemically (and, *contra* Vayrynen 2018,
non-inferentially) justifies the value-attribution. And just as the
perceptual taking of **S* as *p** (the cat as
having gasoline poured on it and ignited by the group of boys)
includes the naive belief in the existence of *Sp* (has realist
purport), the feeling or emotional apprehension of *Sp as v*
(the cat's having been burned by the boys as horrible) includes
the naive belief in the existence of *Sp* along with its
value-attribute *v*. Feelings and emotions, in other words, are
a kind of axiological perception revelatory of value-properties.



The notion of taking something as valuable, on this view, entails that
a value is in the first instance just the object experienced as
valuable rather than the value-property alone or an abstract
value-object of some kind. Finally, since these takings are
pre-predicative, the term "value-perception" or
"value-taking" (*Wertnehmung*) further entails that
feelings and emotions as evaluative experiences need not involve
propositional content (although they can and, perhaps more often than
not, do). In other words, a belief or judgment (even a value judgment)
can provide the underlying basis for an (additional) experience of
value, in which case the feeling-apprehension or emotion takes
*[that *S* is *p*] as
 *v*.*[16]
 For more detailed discussion of this view, see Drummond 1995, 2013,
2017; Husserl 1908-9/1911/1914; Loidolt 2010, 2011, 2018; Melle
1991, 1992, 1997, 2007; Peucker 2011; Rinofner-Kreidl 2013; and
Vendrell Ferran 2008, 2013. For analyses along these lines of
particular moral emotions, see Drummond 2018a, 2020b; Heinamaa
2014, 2018; M. Kelly 2016a, 2016b, 2016c; Ozar 2009, 2010, 2018;
Rinofner-Kreidl 2014a, 2014b, 2018; and Vendrell Ferran 2018a.



A second view--a "strong" or response-independent
value realism--holds that intentional feelings directly apprehend
*a priori* values ontologically and epistemologically prior to
experiencing any particular object as a bearer of value (Scheler
1913/1916; Hartmann 1926; Mulligan 2010; Steinbock 2014, von
Hildebrand 1916). On this view, intentional feelings and emotions
separate. Intentional feelings apprehend the *a priori* value
itself; they provide access to the domain of values and to their
hierarchy, which--to use Scheler's example (1913/1916
[1973: 86-100])--ascends from sensory values (the agreeable
and the disagreeable) to vital values (e.g., the noble and the
vulgar), spiritual values (e.g., the beautiful and the ugly, the true
and the false), and, at the apex, the holy and the unholy. Values and
this hierarchy "flash before us" (Scheler 1913/1916 [1973:
68]) in loving and hating (the two basic feelings) and in preferring
and placing behind or after. Emotions, by contrast, do not reveal
value in the way intentional feelings do. They are the subject's
responses to the felt value. Von Hildebrand makes the point
clearly:



> 
> 
> I see a child mistreated on the street and a terrible outrage rises
> within me. I am outraged by the vulgarity and brutality of this
> behavior. The outrage is clearly [...] a response to these
> qualities with which I am *already* familiar (emphasis added).
> (von Hildebrand 1916 [1973: 137])
> 
> 
> 



The feeling-apprehension of the *a priori* (dis)value underlies
the grasp of an object as a good (or bad). The felt value is the
good-making characteristic of the object valued as good or the
bad-making characteristic of the object valued as bad. *Contra*
the "weak" view, however, the value itself does not depend
on the features of the object that is the bearer of the value. While
valued objects (goods), considered as objects of desire, are
empirical, variable, and subjective, the values themselves are not;
they are *a priori*, immutable, and objective ideals. The
perceptual experience of the bearer is only contingently related
to--that is, is the occasion for--the feeling-apprehension
of the value. Aspects of this view are analyzed and developed in
Barber 1993; Bartky 1997; Blosser 1987, 1995, 2005, 2012; Davis 2009,
2012; Frings 1996, 1997; E. Kelly 1977, 2011; Schneck 1987; Spader
2002; Steinbock 2007, 2013, 2014, 2016; and Vendrell Ferran 2018b.



The difference between the two views of moral emotion can be
characterized as follows: On the first view, being outraged at the
mistreatment of the child just is to see the treatment of the child
with its non-axiological features as vulgar and brutal. On the second
view, seeing the mistreatment of the child and feeling the disvalues
"vulgar" and "brutal", I respond with outrage
directed at the child's mistreatment.



Finally, in the analytic tradition, one also finds views featuring
affect (Johnston 2001), moral emotion (Doring 2003), desires
(Oddie 2005), and experiences of pain (Bain 2013) as modes of
experiential access to moral properties, and so in this respect such
views are allied with the Phenomenological work just surveyed.


### 2.3 Moral judgment



We have seen in the preceding section that Phenomenologists understand
a feeling's or moral emotion's apprehension of a value as
tied to the perception of an entity under a certain aspect or under a
certain description, for example, the boys' torturing the cat.
The moral emotion, in other words, apprehends the boys'
torturing the cat *as* wrong. The *as*--what
Phenomenologists often call the "hermeneutic
*as*"--demarcates the entity and the value-aspect
under which it is experienced. Focusing attention on the aspect or
description under which the object is experienced, the subject
recognizes it as a feature of the object or as belonging to the object
and, conversely, recognizes that the object *is* as described
or *has* the feature in question. In short, the *as*
points to an *is* or a *has*; seeing the torturing
*as* wrong points to the judgment that the torturing
*is* wrong. It is the attending to the aspect and the explicit
recognition of it as an aspect that produces the judgment affirming
the relation between the entity and the aspect. The judgment thus
introduces a new sense beyond what is contained in the moral emotion.
There is an affirmation of the distinction between and the unity of
the entity and its aspect, that is, an explicit affirmation of the
object's *being* a certain way and as having value on the
ground of its being that way (Husserl 1900-1901 [2001:
2:278-280, 286-289]). There is a shift from
*seeing* the boys' wrongfully torturing the cat (that is,
seeing their torturing the cat *as* wrong) to *seeing
that* the boys' torturing the cat *is* wrong. The
shift is from an attributive mode of experience to a predicative one.
(Husserl 1900-1901 [2001: 2:273]), and the boys torturing the
cat is now explicitly brought under the concept
"wrong".



One question about the phenomenology of moral judgment is whether
experiences of making a moral judgment have a phenomenal essence in
the sense that there is some phenomenal property (or properties) that
such experiences have in common and that serves to distinguish them
from experiences of making non-moral judgments. Mandelbaum, whose work
in ethics links the Phenomenological and analytic traditions, defended
this kind of essentialism. As noted earlier, he drew a
phenomenological distinction between "direct" moral
experiences of obligation and "removed" moral experiences.
The former type is where one judges that one is morally obligated to
either do or refrain from performing an action that is called for in
one's immediate circumstances. Mandelbaum describes this
phenomenon as involving a "reflexive felt demand"
emanating from one's immediate circumstances (rather than from
one's antecedent preferences) directed toward oneself and
grounded in one's sense of a particular response best fitting
the circumstances. Because the source of the felt demand is
one's circumstances and not one's preferences, judgments
grounded in this kind of demand are experienced as objective. Removed
moral judgments, by contrast, are of two sorts and include judgments
of obligation about one's past self and about others, as well as
judgments about the goodness and badness of character traits (virtues
and vices). Supposing that direct and removed kinds of moral
experience exhaust the realm of judgment-involving moral experiences,
the question is whether there is something essential to all such
experiences that unifies and distinguishes them from experiences
involving non-moral judgments.



Mandelbaum argued that



> 
> 
> all moral judgments are grounded in our apprehension of relations of
> fittingness or unfittingness between the responses of a human being
> and the demands which inhere in the situation by which he is
> faced.
> 
> 
> 



They constitute, as he says, a "single *genus*"
(1955: 181). He thus apparently thought that the realm of
judgment-involving moral experiences enjoys a phenomenological
signature--an essence. Of course, even if Mandelbaum is mistaken
about the entire range of judgment-involving moral experiences, it
might be true that, for example, direct moral experiences enjoy a
phenomenal essence. For recent discussions of Mandelbaum on this issue
of essence, see Horgan and Timmons 2005, 2008a; Gill 2008;
Sinnott-Armstrong 2008; and Glasgow 2013.



Mandelbaum considered his phenomenological approach to moral
theorizing crucial for uncovering universally correct moral norms
without begging questions for or against competing views about such
norms. His phenomenological description as of direct moral obligations
coming from one's external circumstances as opposed to being
experienced as grounded in one's desires and aversions, favored
some form of moral
 realism.[17]
 Mandelbaum also took his phenomenological inquiry to favor a
deontological normative ethical theory, about which we say more below
in
 section 3.


### 2.4 Moral deliberation



For the Phenomenological axiologists, deliberation bridges the
axiological and practical spheres. It begins in the evaluation of the
(apparent) goods we might pursue in action and of the (possible)
actions conducive to them. Most importantly, deliberation identifies
those ends that appear as ones to which an agent might commit herself
in order to give meaning and significance to her life as a whole.
Deliberation terminates in the choice to pursue particular ends and to
undertake particular actions in that pursuit. Deliberation involves
reflection and reason. The subject deliberatively determines which
end(s) she will pursue given her abilities, interests, and concerns as
well as which actions best conduce to the chosen ends given the
particulars of the situation in which she is to act.



Ricoeur (1950 [2007: 137ff.]) speaks of decision as having a
"history" and points to what he calls
"hesitation" as central to this history. From one point of
view, the capacity for choice manifests itself in hesitation, the
wavering between different possibilities for projects or for actions.
From another point of view, hesitation is an
"in-decision", as a "falling short of choice",
as a being-on-the-way to a choice, which, as of yet, is absent or
deferred. "Hesitation", Ricoeur says, "is a
perplexed willing seeking to orient itself" (1950 [2007: 138]).
The decision identifies one of these possibilities as *my*
project, as the possibility I will pursue in my voluntary,
self-motivated action that executes the decision. The decision
articulates a project, but the project is different from the voluntary
bodily action that realizes it. Although a decision can be separated
in time from the action, in which case it is the capability of acting
in conformity with the project that makes it an authentic decision, an
action can also be spontaneous. The spontaneous action, however, is
genuinely a voluntary action only insofar as the agent could have
projected it in a situation to which the action is suitable or with
which it is compatible. Put another way, the action is voluntary only
when the agent can recognize an implicit decision in it, a decision
with its history of hesitation that could be affirmed as the potential
project of the action in question.



Such descriptions are well suited to explicit deliberation concurrent
or continuous with the action, and they are well suited to means-ends
arguments about what to do. This view of deliberation was embedded in
a German law that led Adolf Reinach (1912/1913 [1989: 279]) to
identify some "remarkable antinomies" in our understanding
of deliberation, one of which is that meritorious actions count as
less meritorious when done without any deliberation or when done only
after long deliberation. If the agent takes no time to deliberate, the
agent acts impetuously; if the agent takes too much time in
deliberating, the agent is insufficiently attuned to what is right to
do in certain kinds of circumstances. However, if deliberation is
viewed less as an occurrent rational calculation, Reinach's
paradoxical conclusion can be avoided.



Not all actions are the result of explicit deliberation. There are
various ways reasons for action might be at work in action, ways that
might involve, say, views about the constituents of an end or views
about what conduces to an end. Moral agents inherit a set of views
that come to govern their actions without further deliberation. A
reflective moral agent strives toward confirming for herself these
inherited judgments, beliefs, and emotional attitudes regarding moral
goods and moral actions, and on this basis, she adopts, rejects, or
revises them. They thereby take on the character not merely of
passively accepted moral beliefs but of justified moral convictions,
and the agent realizes herself as a person having a particular set of
convictions for which the appropriate evidence has been secured and
which now defines her character. These convictions inform her
subsequent judgments, valuations, and volitions, disposing her to act
in determinate ways. Having over time already reflectively weighed the
value of competing goods and the rightness or wrongness of various
kinds of actions, a reflective agent, just as much as the agent who
passively accepts beliefs, need not form a means-end argument or
explicitly deliberate concurrently, but her awareness of her beliefs
and actions as justified differs from that of the passively accepting
agent.



Reasons of this kind dispose the agent to expect certain features in
certain kinds of situations, to pick out what is salient in those
situations, to have certain kinds of attitudes toward them, and to act
in typical ways. In the manner of Aristotle's brave soldier
(*Nicomachean Ethics* 1117a17-22), the agent just
recognizes the situation and knows what to do without further ado.
Hence, the claim that an action is considered less meritorious when
done without *occurrent* deliberation is false. Prior
reflection and evaluation yield the sense of a *specific*
action--that is, a certain *kind* of action--as
appropriate for the particular circumstances in which an agent finds
herself. It is the perceptual and emotional grasp of those
circumstances that further determines the agent's choice to
follow a particular course of action to achieve her
 ends.[18]



The phenomenology of moral deliberation has also been a basis for
arguing against certain metaethical views including non-cognitivism
and in favor of a realist moral metaphysics. For example, Jonathan
Dancy writes:



> 
> 
> In moral choice we struggle to find, not any answer that we can bring
> ourselves to accept, nor any answer that we can accept in consistency
> with previous answers, but the right answer. We present our search to
> ourselves as one governed by a criterion which does not lie in
> ourselves; our fear is that we may make the wrong choice, a fear not
> allayed by the thought that we might make that choice quite happily
> and/or consistently with previous choices. Why otherwise should moral
> choice be so dodgy? Why otherwise should I agonize about what is the
> right thing to do in the circumstances? Non-cognitivism leaves moral
> life too easy, and is inconsistent with the phenomenology. It distorts
> our sense of the authority that the action which we choose as right
> has over us. That authority is one to which our choice must conform,
> and cannot itself depend on our choice; our choice is a recognition of
> an authority which it could not itself create. (Dancy 1986:
> 172-173; see also Nagel 1986: 149 and Enoch 2011: 73-75
> for a similar argument)
> 
> 
> 



Views that attribute realist purport to the phenomenal character of
moral deliberation as well as to moral emotion, and moral judgment on
the basis of introspection alone are challenged by Horgan and Timmons
(2008b, 2019)


### 2.5 Moral agency



One Phenomenological view of the nature of moral agency derives from
Husserl (1908-9/1911/1914 [1988: 107]) who calls the (implicit
or explicit) volitional intention that initiates and governs an action
the *fiat*, the "let it be done". The transition
from the evaluation of the envisioned end as (apparently) good to the
*fiat* is mediated by desire. The envisioned good disclosed by
the feeling or emotional apprehension is taken as desirable, and the
*fiat* directs the agent to that desirable good as something to
be realized through a bodily performance. The *fiat*, in other
words, intends the envisioned good as realizable and is inseparable
from the action that realizes (or attempts to realize) it (Melle 1997:
180). At every moment of the action the volitional intention maintains
itself both as a partially unfulfilled intention that is at the same
time partially fulfilled (Melle 1997: 181), and the action ordered
toward the satisfaction of the desire continues just so long as the
*fiat* is operative.



Willing is founded on and inseparable from desire, but it is not
reducible to desire. Desiring is not willing insofar as it is not
constrained by practical modalities (e.g., possibility versus
impossibility) and it is not a determination to undertake an action. I
can wish for the impossible or for what is past (or both, as in
"I wish I did not have that second piece of pie at dinner last
night"), and I can desire some future good but not wish to do
what is required to obtain that good. Moreover, once one chooses to do
*A*, and nothing interferes, one does *A*. We do not
resist performing an action once we have willed it, but we do
regularly resist some desires (Husserl 1908-9/1911/1914 [1988:
103, 221-224]; Melle 1997: 179; see also Bratman 2012: 73). The
wishing that is relevant for the will and for action is a wishing for
what is practically possible, what is realizable in action. This
wishing takes the form of desire, and the volitional
intention--the *fiat*--determines us to act.



The progressive completion of a volitional intention that initiates
and controls a physical performance aimed at a desired end is a
voluntary action. On Ricoeur's view, the decision indicates a
present or future voluntary action which depends on me and which is
within my power. But, as seen above, Ricoeur's position adopts a
means-end conception of deliberation and action, and this masks an
important distinction introduced by Husserl between two kinds of
volition, namely, the distinction between action-will
[*Handlungswille*] and decision-will
[*Entschlusswille*]. Actions executing an action-will are
initiated by a *desire* for an end that is not explicitly
intended in the willing. They involve no prior choice and manifest
themselves in the very performance of the
 action.[19]
 We shall call these voluntary actions. Actions executing a
decision-will, that is a prior choice or intention, are initiated by a
*choice in the light of* an end that is explicitly intended in
the
 willing.[20]
 We shall call these chosen actions. Chosen actions differ from
voluntary actions, then, in that they not only *aim at* a
desired end but are explicitly undertaken *in the light of*
that end. I might eat a chocolate sundae because, as a matter of
desire, I like sundaes, but I might choose to snack on a piece of
fruit (rather than the sundae) *for the sake of* my health.
Eating the fruit is chosen *as conducive* to the end
(Sokolowski 1985: 11; Drummond 2020a). In chosen action the agent
wills that the action be done *as* conducing to an articulated
end, whereas in merely voluntary action the agent wills that the
*object of desire* be realized by acting. While the outcome of
a merely voluntary action aiming at a particular end and that of a
chosen action aiming at the same end might be the same, the
intentional structures of the two volitional experiences and the
actions undertaken to fulfill them differ.



Although the early Husserl inherited an idealized utilitarianism from
Franz Brentano, later in his career he favored a view that
"absolute loves" generate "absolute oughts"
(Husserl 1919-20 [2012: 146]; 1916-35 [2014:
391-392]). For example, a mother's love for her child
demands that she protect her child from harm even when sacrificing her
child is a lesser good for the aggregate and even when saving her
child leads to harm for others. The central idea is that an objective
value can become an "individual, subjective value of
love", i.e., that "the same value can be infinitely more
'significant' for one person than another" (Husserl
1919-20 [2012: 146n.]). Such absolute loves--we can also
think of them as commitments--unconditionally bind that subject
to honor those commitments regardless of what any purely objective,
consequentialist calculation might require (Husserl 1916-35
[2014: 391-392]). These commitments motivate an agent to adopt
an ethical life-project and to undertake the actions necessary to
realize that project, a project that is "the deepest ground of
[her] personal identity and individuality" (Melle 1991: 131;
2002:
 243-244).[21]
 This view is consistent with and an extension of "weak"
value-realism. The "absoluteness" of the imperative is
relative to the committed subject; the imperative, in Kantian terms,
is a hypothetical imperative binding only on those who satisfy the
condition of being so committed (Drummond 2018b: 141-42).



What we have called "strong" value realism, by contrast,
points to universal imperatives tied, for example, to the hierarchy of
values mentioned above: sensuous values; vital values; spiritual
values; and the values of the holy and unholy. This list notably
includes no moral values. Scheler distinguishes between the purely
ideal ought-to-be (the value) and the moral ought-to-do (Scheler
1913/1916 [1973: 203ff.], cf. Blosser 1987). Moral values, then,
attach to actions that realize the values named in the hierarchy.
Hartmann is committed to a similar view regarding imperatives. Ideal
values are experienced as demands, and the gravity of the violation of
a demand and the merit derived from fulfilling a demand are measured
by the value's strength and height. Hartmann acknowledges,
however, that these categorical demands are problematic. Personal and
universal values conflict in ways that can never be fully resolved. To
do what everyone should do in the same circumstances is, in effect, to
say an agent is replaceable by anyone, and this, for Hartmann, is to
deny the agent's individuality as a person (1926 [1963: 357]).
Appeals to universal principles depend upon a typicality among the
situations in which we are called upon to act, but any maxim of action
must be tied to a particular situation and to a particular agent in
that situation. Hence, on Hartmann's view, the universality of a
principle undercuts its applicability to a particular situation that,
owing to the uniqueness of persons and their interests and
commitments, is itself unique (Hartmann 1926 [1963: 358-360]).
Universal principles, in a paradoxical way, just insofar as they fail
to heed the individual personalities of agents, do not, and cannot,
offer moral guidance. This conclusion pushes back in the direction of
the Husserlian position on axiological approaches to the phenomenology
of action.



Not all Phenomenologists adopt the axiological approach to moral
theory. Heidegger (1927 [2010: 97]), for example, was dismissive of
then-prevalent theories of value, and he turns instead to freedom and
"authenticity" to characterize ethical subjectivity. By
"authenticity", he means a subject's taking
responsibility for and ownership over the choices she makes that give
meaning and value to her life. She thereby lifts herself out of the
moral complacency that characterizes agents who passively accept
traditional and cultural conceptions of what "one" does
(Loidolt 2018: 703-704). It is disputed whether Heidegger thus
commits himself to a "decisionism"--that is, the view
that a subject chooses who she will be without recourse to reasons or
evaluative standards (cf., e.g., Tugendhat 1979, Okrent 1999)--or
a "deep deliberation"--the view that the subject
chooses who she will be in a critical reflection on her own identity
(see Crowell 2007, 2013; Burch 2010).



If Heidegger is read in the direction of decisionism, however, he
foreshadows those Phenomenologists who offer a constructivist account
of value centered on the notion of freedom (e.g., Sartre 1943,
Beauvoir 1947, and Merleau-Ponty 1945; also see the entry on
constructivism in metaethics). They believe that values are created
("constituted" or "constructed") in the
exercise of human freedom. The Phenomenologists who take a
constructivist approach to value and who claim that values are created
in the exercise of human freedom adopt somewhat differing accounts of
freedom. The most radical view (e.g., Sartre 1943) claims that the
exercise of the freedom definitive of human beings constitutes the
reality of values in consciously and actively transcending the
agent's situation, and that this exercise lacks transcendent
values to justify it. Freedom, although itself unconstrained,
nevertheless in its exercise, encounters factical obstacles, including
most importantly the presence of other autonomous agents. A weaker
version (e.g., Beauvoir 1947) also places freedom and transcendence at
the center of her ethical life while recognizing the obstacles freedom
faces. The goal at which freedom aims "is not fixed once and for
all" but rather "is defined all along the road which leads
to it" (Beauvoir 1947 [1948: 153]). For Beauvoir, this
fundamental ambiguity characterizes human existence. Against the
stronger view, however, Beauvoir believes that the other's
freedom cannot be viewed simply as an obstacle to one's own
exercise of freedom. Rather, one's own freedom and the
realization of one's projects requires the cooperative freedom
of others.



A third constructivist alternative (see Merleau-Ponty 1945) frames the
ideas of freedom, transcendence, and ambiguity as analogous to
artistic expression. Freedom seeks to create value within the
limitations of a given situation. On this view, the significance and
value of things is not constituted in the free choices of agents, even
when unconscious and non-deliberated; instead persons are born into a
world already permeated with meaning, and freedom is exercised in this
context. Moral agents take the world as a task to be completed, a task
of instituting meaning and value wherever and whenever possible
through action. To create value consists in actively taking up our
situations of chance, making something out of contingency,
establishing communicative relationships, and creating and recreating
values by actively changing the world.



Yet other Phenomenologists adopt a deontic viewpoint and challenge the
axiological and constructivist approaches on the ground that values
are often experienced as prescriptions, norms, imperatives,
obligations, demands, and requirements. Since values are experienced
in relation to feelings and emotions, the objection goes, it would
seem that we are always free to value and choose otherwise, precisely
because our feelings, interests, and choices can vary. Because of
that, it is difficult to understand in what sense the values we
encounter can be thought to impose unconditional obligations.



One response would be to ascribe a strict necessity and universality
to at least some moral values such that anyone recognizing those
values would recognize the duty to realize the value in action.
Scheler (1913/1916 [1973: 203ff.]), for example, claims that insight
into the purely ideal ought-to-be (the value) serves as the basis for
willing and realizing the moral ought-to-do. But there is no clear
account in Scheler of the transition from the insight into ideal
value-possibilities to the experience of moral imperatives, and it is
not clear that the experience of obligation would arise were one not
to recognize the value. Von Hildebrand, by contrast, thinking that
Scheler's view entails that the spontaneous love of value
motivates action only hypothetically, insists that moral obligation
has categorical force. The "importance"
(*Bedeutsamkeit*) of an object enables it to awaken a
person's interest or motivate her action. Value is the kind of
importance that a thing has in itself (von Hildebrand 1916), and von
Hildebrand isolates a group of values that are good *per se*
apart from any relation to a subject's interests, needs, and
wants. In making this move, however, if he gains a ground of
obligation, he does so at the expense of divorcing these values and
their attendant demands on us from their importance *to the
agent* and thereby their character as motivating the subject to
act.



Similarly, the deontic Phenomenologists argue that, since the
constructivist believes that values are created in the exercise of
human autonomy, it is difficult to understand how an agent's
choices, while self-binding (at least for the moment), can legislate
universal obligations that an agent would experience as a duty.
Lacking the view of practical reason found, for example, in Kant,
constructivism cannot underwrite moral normativity, in particular, the
experience of universal obligation.



The deontic Phenomenologists seek to ground the notion of obligation
independently of any notion of value or volition. On their view, the
experience of obligation is prior to all acts of evaluation, all
choices, all projects, and all dictates of reason, and it reveals
itself in the experience of other persons (the Other). The deontic
view grounds ethics in intersubjectivity, adopting a
"second-person perspective" in which encountering the
"face" of the Other is the ground of obligation (Levinas
1961; 1974; Logstrup 1956; cf. Darwall 2006; see the entry on
 Emmanuel Levinas).
 The subject encounters an *ethical* transcendence in
encountering the face of the Other insofar as the face is expressive
(Levinas 1961 [1969: 51])--the "revelation" (1961
[1969: 73]) or "epiphany" (1961 [1969: 194])--of the
Other. My original ethical access to the Other disrupts my
subjectivity; the Other "speaks" to me and calls me out of
my subjectivity. The Other, in short, is encountered as a summons and
a command, and the only appropriate form of encountering the Other,
therefore, is to respond. Only to the extent that I acknowledge this
summons and command do I live in a world with the Other and thereby
become a person--a moral agent--myself. The Other and I
exist in an asymmetrical relation wherein the Other's ethical
superiority outweighs my egoism, unsettles my conscious
intentionality, and contests my freedom in such a way that I must
respond. On this view, moral agency begins with neither my feelings
and their correlative values nor my (constructive) freedom, but with
the recognition that my freedom is arbitrarily limited by my
responsibility to the Other. The experience of the Other is thus from
the beginning an experience of obligation.


## 3. Moral Phenomenology and Normative Ethics



While metaethics addresses second-order questions about morality,
normative ethics addresses first-order ethical questions about what to
do and how to be and divides into applied ethics and ethical (or
moral) theory. The former, also referred to as "practical
ethics", addresses questions about specific ethical issues
(e.g., abortion, capital punishment) and ethical issues that arise in
the professions (e.g., medical ethics, business ethics). Normative
ethical theory (ethical theory henceforth), by contrast, addresses
general questions about which *types* of actions are morally
right or wrong and what *kind* of person is morally good and
why. In this section, we focus primarily on the bearing of moral
phenomenology on ethical theory, in particular theories of right
conduct (obligation), organized around three "formal"
issues: (1) deontology vs. consequentialism about the structure of
ethical theory, (2) monism vs. pluralism about the number of
fundamental morally relevant factors that determine, e.g., whether an
action is right or wrong (an action's deontic status), and (3)
atomism vs. holism about the significance of morally relevant
descriptive features in explaining the instantiation of normative or
evaluative properties. We take these up in order, after which we
conclude with some remarks about other normative ethical issues that
have received attention from moral phenomenologists.


### 3.1 Deontology vs. consequentialism



John Rawls describes normative ethical theory as



> 
> 
> the study of substantive moral conceptions, that is, the study of how
> the basic moral notions of the right, the good, and moral worth may be
> arranged to form different moral structures. (1975: 286)
> 
> 
> 



Each of these basic notions corresponds to a branch of any complete
ethical theory: theory of right conduct (or obligation), theory of
value, and theory of moral worth (or virtue). A common way to
distinguish different ethical theories by their structure is in terms
of which of these three notions (and corresponding theories) is most
basic in relation to a theory of right conduct. Consequentialist
theories explain right conduct in terms of the value of consequences
associated with an action or with rules for action guidance; they
represent value-based theories (see the entry on
 consequentialism).
 Deontological theories are united in rejecting consequentialism and,
for instance, appealing to respect for persons as a basis for
explaining right conduct (see the entry on
 deontology).
 Virtue ethical theories take considerations of virtue (e.g., the
activities of a virtuous agent) as a basis for explaining right
conduct (see the entry on
 virtue ethics).
 Because virtue ethical theories of obligation have emerged relatively
recently, twentieth century debates in ethical theory were dominated
by debates between consequentialists (sometimes referred to as
teleological theories) and deontologists. How might phenomenological
inquiry be brought to bear on the dispute between these two types of
theory?



We have already touched on such debates in the previous section
(Brentano's teleological ideal utilitarianism opposed by
Levinas's non-teleological ethics). Mandelbaum defended a type
of deontological view, so-called perceptual intuitionism, according to
which in both direct and removed moral judgments of obligation, the
focus of one's judgment is on the fittingness (or unfittingness)
of the act in relation to the agent's circumstances, a relation
that one directly apprehends--a kind of intellectual perception.
Although perceptual intuitionism is a kind of deontological theory, in
arguing for this view on phenomenological grounds Mandelbaum attempted
to "resolve ... the conflict between utilitarianism and
deontology" (1955: 71). So, for instance, regarding direct moral
judgments of obligation focused on promoting good consequences,
Mandelbaum argues that as with felt obligations to keep a promise, or
express gratitude, whose grounds lie in one's past, a felt
obligation to bring about some good state of affairs rests upon
one's apprehension that an action one can perform is felt to be
a fitting response to the envisioned state of affairs in question,
indeed, that refraining from the action would be unfitting. He thus
concludes that there is no genuine phenomenological difference between
finding the ground of obligation in the envisioned end of action (its
consequences) and finding the ground of this same obligation in the
fittingness of the action to one's situation. In this way, he
claims, one can reconcile the phenomenology associated with
teleologically focused judgments of direct obligation with the
phenomenology of direct judgments of obligation whose experienced
ground is the fittingness of the action to one's situation. What
Mandelbaum attempts to thereby show is that the phenomenology of
judgments of obligation (both direct and removed) have a common
phenomenological character properly captured in his favored perceptual
intuitionism--a form of deontology--and thus on
phenomenological grounds his form of deontology is to be preferred
over versions of
 teleology.[22]



This is but one example of bringing phenomenological considerations to
bear on ethical theory. We have dwelt on Mandelbaum because of the
depth and subtlety of his phenomenological analysis which he brings to
bear on the issue of structure. However, increasingly, philosophers in
the analytic tradition have been more attentive to the relevance of
phenomenological considerations in defending ethical theories. For
instance, T. M. Scanlon defends a "contractualist" ethical
theory that he finds attractive partly because, "the account it
offers of moral motivation is phenomenologically more accurate than
any other I know of" (1998: 187). Specifically, Scanlon argues
that his contractualism fits with one's experience of the
priority and significance of moral reasons for action (compared to
nonmoral reasons for action) and does so in a way superior to
competing ethical theories.


### 3.2 Monism vs. pluralism



This distinction cuts across the deontology/consequentialism/virtue
ethics distinctions. A monistic moral theory of right action takes
there to be a single right-making feature of actions, while pluralist
views take there to be more than one. According to one sort of
hedonistic act utilitarian ethical theory, there is a single
fundamental descriptive property--an action's utility,
understood as the net balance of pleasure versus pain it would bring
about--that explains why some actions are wrong (they fail to
maximize utility) and others are not. This kind of monistic theory is
opposed by such pluralist theories as Ross's ethics of *prima
facie* duty, according to which there is a multiplicity of
*basic* right (and wrong)-making features; Ross identified
seven: fidelity, reparation, gratitude, justice, beneficence,
self-improvement, and non-maleficence. How might considerations of
moral phenomenology be brought to bear on this dispute?



One sort of phenomenological argument appeals to the difference
between experiences of regret and remorse. Assume (along with those
who marshal this argument) that it makes sense to regret finding
oneself in circumstances involving difficult moral choices, while it
makes sense to feel remorse about having acted wrongly. Suppose, then,
that in the past a co-worker had intervened to save your job from a
vindictive administrator who unjustly wanted you fired for personal
reasons not related to how well you did your job. Now, some years
later you both find yourselves in new positions. You are asked by a
supervisor your opinion of your co-worker's suitability for
their current position and your honest opinion is that they are not
suitable. On Ross's ethical theory, both the *prima
facie* duty of gratitude and the *prima facie* duty of
fidelity apply to this situation and one must choose which of them is
most stringent in these particular circumstances. Suppose you choose
to answer truthfully about your colleague's job performance.
Besides the regret you feel about finding yourself in this difficult
situation, on Ross's view, whichever choice you make, it is
fitting for you to feel some remorse for not having complied with the
*prima facie* duty of gratitude, which was in force when you
made your decision. By contrast, on a monist theory like hedonistic
utilitarianism where the only right-making feature of actions is their
utility, it is not fitting to feel remorse if being truthful in this
circumstance brings about a higher degree of utility than lying. In
choosing to truthfully express one's opinion, one does not leave
undone a duty that was in force, even if overridden. Thus, on a
monistic view, the conflict is only apparent, while on a pluralist
view it is genuine. The argument, then, is that a pluralist view
accommodates people's experiences of remorse (not mere regret)
in such circumstances, thus making sense of agonizing moral decisions
(as Michael Gill 2012 labels such cases) as they are normally
experienced (see also McNaughton 1988: chap. 13).



What Ross's theory takes for granted is that in any circumstance
where one might do something out of gratitude (and similarly for all
of the basic Rossian *prima facie* duties) the fact that the
act would be an expression of gratitude is always relevant in
assessing one's moral obligations, and always counts as a
favoring reason for expressing gratitude, even if in some
circumstances like the one just described, it is overridden. This
reveals a commitment to what is called "reasons atomism"
which is opposed by holistic conceptions of reasons, our next
topic.


### 3.3 Atomism vs. holism



According to an atomistic view, then, some morally relevant reasons
are invariant in their relevance and their valence. Opposed to this
view are holists who claim that whether a consideration like pleasure
is relevant and whether it counts in favor of an action depends on
what other factors may be present in some set of circumstances.
Holists claim that in some circumstances a factor that is normally
relevant is "silenced" and moreover even when relevant its
valence may be reversed! Although pleasure tends to have a positive
valence, the pleasure a bully would derive from bullying someone has a
negative valence, which contributes to the wrongness of the
bully's act.



Mandelbaum used the example from the previous section (his example) to
argue against Rossian atomism (although the atomism/holism terminology
had not yet been introduced as labels for the pertinent distinction).
As we explained, if Ross's atomistic view is correct, the fact
that one has a chance to express gratitude is a morally relevant
consideration that favors lying about your co-worker's
competence. In not acting on this consideration, one ought to feel
some remorse (having failed to comply with a *prima facie*
duty), remorse being a proper reaction to wrongness. However, if, upon
contemplating this scenario and projecting into it, one imagines
experiencing regret at being in this difficult situation, but not
remorse, this signifies that one takes considerations of gratitude to
be irrelevant in deciding what to do *in this case*. Mandelbaum
argues that "the essential aspect of the situation" (1955:
78) is that one has been asked a legitimate question, and the person
asking it is either unaware of one's personal tie with the
co-worker or expects one to put it aside in answering the question.
Viewed this way, considerations of gratitude are not relevant in the
situation one confronts. Mandelbaum further reports that he imagines
feeling regret at being in such a situation, but not remorse for
telling the truth.



Thus, while the experiential difference between regret, whose object
is one's circumstances, and remorse, whose object is one's
action (or omission), is used in defense of pluralism over monism
regarding the fundamental right- and wrong-making features of actions,
this same contrast has been marshaled in defense of holism over
atomism about the relevance and valence of such features.


### 3.4 Further issues



Two further issues in normative ethics that deserve mention, if only
briefly, are these.



Regarding three of the most prominent types of ethical
theory--consequentialism, deontology, and virtue
ethics--phenomenological considerations specific to each can help
illuminate them. Some versions of consequentialism hold that pleasure
and pain have positive and negative value respectively that figure in
determining the deontic status of actions. Since these experiences
arguably have a phenomenological element to them, one can expect
phenomenological analysis to help explain the value they do have.
Taking a Kantian view as a model of deontology with the emphasis on
respect for persons, the phenomenology of respect for persons will
bear importantly in fully illuminating this kind of theory (see
Drummond 2006, Kriegel 2018, Kriegel & Timmons 2021) And, we have
already noted work on the phenomenology of virtue (Annas 2008) that
can be brought to bear on virtue ethics. (These points are taken from
Kriegel 2019).



Moreover, as touched upon above in
 section 2.2
 and
 section 2.5,
 Phenomenologists go beyond mere description of the feelings or
emotions as apprehending value to bring their analyses to bear on
normative issues. While some, for example, Levinas, adopt a
straightforward deontic approach, others who adopt an axiological
approach also address the normative. Recall that for Scheler the
feeling-apprehension of the ideal, *a priori* value motivates
(in an unspecified manner) the awareness of a moral ought-to-do that
will instantiate the value. Hence, we can think of such thinkers as
deontologists. Others, however, who adopt a weaker version of value
realism move in the direction of virtue ethics and an aretaic, rather
than deontic, conception of "right" action.
Husserl's notion of "absolute loves" as generating
"absolute oughts" is a case in point. The mother's
absolute love generates an "ought" in the sense that the
mother feels she must do her "best" for the child.
It's the right action insofar as it is the best action available
rather than a deontic demand. Drummond (2006, 2010), while claiming
that respect imposes obligations upon an agent, nevertheless locates
respect within a eudaimonistic, virtue framework, and Irene McMullin
(2019) develops an account of the virtues that incorporates
first-person, second-person, and third-person perspectives.



Finally, phenomenological evidence has been brought to bear on the
various *roles* that morally relevant reasons for action might
play. Dwelling on the controversial category of the supererogatory,
Horgan and Timmons (2010a) argue that making sense of the
supererogatory as it is normally experienced requires recognizing that
in addition to such reasons playing requiring and justifying roles
(Gert 2004), we must recognize what they call a
"merit-conferring" role for reasons--reasons that
morally favor a course of action without *prima facie*
requiring it, let alone requiring it all-things-considered.


## Conclusion



There has been a growing tendency on the part of philosophers to put
aside the distinction between "Continental" and analytic
philosophy and to focus on problems of common concern. This
development is perhaps most evident in the philosophy of mind. See,
for example, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi's *The
Phenomenological Mind* (2012), which situates Phenomenology in
relation to the analytic philosophy of mind and the cognitive
sciences. Think, too, of the recent explosion in the study of the
emotions. We have mentioned a number of moral phenomenologists who
explore the emotions, and their work involves dialogue with others
working on the emotions who do not explore their moral dimension.
Drummond and Rinofner-Kreidl's (2018) collection on emotional
experiences, for example, has brought together Phenomenological and
analytic philosophers of mind. More important, if you look at the list
of references in the separate articles, almost all of them cite
authors from multiple traditions. Conversely, analytic philosophers of
mind are looking to Phenomenological thinkers and to new possibilities
for conceiving moral experience. The work outlined in this
contribution is an instance of these more inclusive approaches and
suggests an agenda for further research.