This paper proposes a novel account of the conditions for moral virtue centered on an important but overlooked notion: appreciation. I begin by challenging an intellectualist tradition in the literature, which I call the Cognitive Requirement Thesis (CRT): that moral virtue requires the cognitive ability to explain why one’s action is right (Hursthouse 1999; Annas 2011; Hills 2009, 2015). Targeting Hills’s version in particular, I argue that CRT sets the cognitive bar too high, and propose instead the Moral Appreciation View: one is morally virtuous when and because one is able to appreciate the relevant moral features of a situation. By appreciation, I mean a distinctive kind of sensitivity manifested in three dimensions: (i) perceptual sensitivity: recognizing the presence of a morally relevant feature in a situation, (ii) normative sensitivity: capturing that feature’s normative significance, and (iii) affective sensitivity: being affectively moved and motivated in a way that is responsive to that feature. I further distinguish appreciation from knowledge and understanding, suggesting that it entails neither, and argue that it is necessary for virtue: an agent who appreciates the right-making features of situations is thereby disposed to perform right action in a reliable, non-lucky manner across a range of cases.
In this presentation I demonstrate how many of the problems with utilitarianism and rights-based theories of morality can be solved by a kind of consequentialism based on freedom. I show how this avoids happy torturers, resolves conflicts between rights, and applies better to all possible persons. I also demonstrate how freedom can be weighed sufficiently for consequentialist calculus to take place.
A number of philosophers analyse value in terms of fitting attitudes. On such views, very roughly, something is valuable just when it is a fitting object of certain favourable responses. However, these views face a problem about partiality. Suppose that either my friend or a stranger can be rescued from drowning, but not both, and that the two rescue outcomes are equal in intrinsic value. It still seems fitting for me to prefer my friend’s rescue. This creates a difficulty for fitting-attitude analyses: if the two outcomes are equal in value, why is it fitting for me to prefer one to the other?
The main aim of this paper is to offer a Brentanian solution to this problem. I argue that the difficulty arises because we fail to distinguish two different roles that preference can play. In one role, preference is a way of assessing which object is better. In another, it is a practical response involved in deciding what to do. Once this distinction is made, we can say that my friend’s rescue and the stranger’s rescue are equal in value, while also allowing that it is fitting for me to choose my friend’s rescue. This preserves the intuition that partiality can be fitting without implying that my friend’s rescue is intrinsically better.
