| Moral judgment is a ubiquitous phenomenon. Most of us constantly determine the rightness or wrongness of the actions of ourselves and those around us. Most judgments of this sort seem to arise naturally and without much consideration, leaving us in a poor position to examine the causes of our own mental states. This dissertation investigates current work on such judgments.;In Chapter 1, I set up the debate by clarifying important distinctions, and I outline three currently popular accounts - emotion-based accounts proposed by Shaun Nichols (2004) and Jesse Prinz (2011), and the nativist "Linguistic Analogy" proposed by, among others, Susan Dwyer (2006), Mark Hauser (2006), and John Mikhail (2013). The aim of Chapters 2 and 3 is to undermine the assumption that prevailing views are the only plausible options, first by proposing new arguments against them and then by bolstering their competition. In Chapter 2, I argue that our ability to change our minds about moral matters poses an unanswered challenge to both Prinz's account and the Linguistic Analogy.;Chapter 3 attempts to undermine objections to reason-based views, objections from moral dumbfounding and from moral deficiencies in psychopaths. I explore ways in which reason-based views can accommodate both of these phenomena. The psychopath objection serves as a crucial source of support for Nichols' view, so undermining this objection also weakens the evidence for his own account. One upshot of Chapter 3 is that the moral dumbfounding objection fails if unconscious reasoning generates a moral judgment. In Chapter 4, I extend this lesson to develop a view of moral judgment that relies on unconscious concept application, which also escapes the dumbfounding worry. I claim that this process of concept application can be understood as a process of reasoning, but it need not be for the account to be successful.;Finally, in Chapter 5, I briefly explore the implications that this work has for debates in metaethics. I focus primarily on how my concepts-based account can bolster Michael Smith's (1994) argument for conceptual rationalism in metaethics. |
