CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Hollinshead, Brylea |
|---|---|
| Title | Vision and Virtue: Defending a Murdochian Connection between Moral Perception and Right Action |
| Summary | Iris Murdoch rejects an action-based picture of ethics and defends her own vision-based approach, according to which virtuous motives and actions are entailed by having the right moral perception or epistemic grasp of reality. This raises the ‘problem of action’ - i.e. the questions of how right vision entails right motives to act, and how we can explain counterexamples where vision and action seemingly come apart. In this paper, I argue that by appealing to the emotions, the problem of action for a Murdochian vision-based account can be solved. This is because right vision is constituted by apt emotions, and emotions are evaluative perceptions or modes of “seeing-as” which are unified cognitive/conative states - they both represent the world and move us accordingly. An agent can know, or have a justified true belief about, the moral facts without being moved appropriately. However, unless they have the right emotions, they will fail to see the world rightly, and thus lack the enriched epistemic state of understanding or true vision which guarantees virtuous motives to act. |
| Supervisor | Cathy Mason |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/hollinshead_brylea.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University