Abstract
Recently, a number of phenomenological approaches to experiential justification emerged according to which an experience's justificatory force is grounded in the experience’s distinctive phenomenology. The basic idea is that certain experiences exhibit a presentive phenomenology and that they are a source of immediate justification precisely by virtue of their presentive phenomenology. Such phenomenological approaches usually focus on perceptual experiences and mathematical intuitions. In this paper, I aim at a phenomenological approach to ethical experiences. I shall show that we need to make a distinction between evaluative experiences directed at concrete cases and ethical intuitions directed at general principles. The focus will be on evaluative experiences. I argue that evaluative experiences constitute a sui generis type of experience that gain their justificatory force by virtue of their presentive evaluative phenomenology. In Sect. 1, I introduce and motivate the phenomenological idea that certain experiences exhibit a justification-conferring phenomenology. In Sect. 4, I apply this idea to morally evaluative experiences. In Sect. 5, I suggest that certain epistemic intuitions should be considered epistemically evaluative experiences and I outline a strong parallelism between ethics and epistemology.
Highlights
It is uncontroversial that experiences have a phenomenal character or phenomenology
When I turn around and experience the chair, my perceptual experience presenting a red chair has justificatory force concerning the proposition that there is a red chair; it does not have justificatory force concerning the proposition that there is a black laptop in the room
What I suggest in this final section is that, analogously to moral experiences, epistemic experiences can be distinguished in epistemically evaluative experiences directed at concrete cases and epistemic intuitions directed at general principles
Summary
It is uncontroversial that experiences have a phenomenal character or phenomenology. An experience’s phenomenology denotes the what-it-is-like character to undergo the experience. What I call the phenomenological conception of experiential justification (PCEJ) is the claim that there is a straightforward relationship between an experience’s phenomenology and its justificatory force. A strong version of PCEJ reads as follows: An experience E provides immediate prima facie justification for believing a proposition p if and only if E has a justification-conferring phenomenology with respect to p This phenomenological approach seems to be the natural and commonsense approach to experiential justification, phenomenological approaches have not been popular in the analytic tradition. Detailed phenomenological descriptions of and phenomenological approaches to the kind of experiences that are relevant in (meta-)ethics are still largely missing in the contemporary analytic literature Such experiences include ethical intuitions, moral perceptions, and moral emotions. In the remainder of this section, I will briefly motivate the basic idea of the phenomenological conception: the claim that an experience’s justificatory force is grounded in its phenomenology
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