An underexplored aspect of moral experience is the experience of apprehending ("seeing") other people as mattering, grasping the significance of whether their interests are set back or enhanced. I refer to these as value-apprehensional (v-a) experiences. I argue (in Ch. 2), partly on the basis of data regarding moral cognition in psychopaths, that experiencing other people's value is one way that we attain adequate systematic comprehension of morality, understanding that others' welfare is the point behind rules against harming them. I then turn to a positive account (in Ch. 3) of what capacities we should expect to facilitate value-apprehensional experiences. I suggest we should look to the capacity to care emotionally about others: roughly, to feel emotions congruent with someone else's well-being, for her sake. I argue that this 'emotional caring' is better suited to explain value-apprehensional experience than other constructs, including empathy (which I understand as feeling what one takes another to be feeling). The broader hypothesis this raises is that emotional caring enables and improves our value-apprehensional abilities. To the extent that is true, I argue (in Ch. 4), we should (all else being equal) consider caring people to have more trustworthy moral intuitions than others, especially if they are not just competent, but skilled at caring about others. Emotions are, of course, biased in various ways, so I suggest attention-refocusing strategies for mitigating these biases. These are epitomized by an unaffiliated caring perspective, one removed from affiliation with any of a morally relevant situation's protagonists, but informed through emotional caring about the (weight of) the interests of each. Finally, I turn (in Ch. 5) to special value-apprehensional experiences that we have in intense, reciprocal relationships of caring with individuals who are special to us (I call these 'special others'). I argue that, if we accept that general v-a experiences reveal people's moral significance, we have even more reason to think that special v-a experiences reveal the special moral significance not only of the parties in the relationship, but of their participation in the relationship, for both their sakes. That is, there are moral reasons to devote caring attention to special others, even if we could otherwise do objectively more good (within reason). Emotional cares reveal not only values within everyone but reasons to devote ourselves to the individuals we care about. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2015. / November 11, 2014. / caring, emotions, moral epistemology, partiality, special relationships, understanding / Includes bibliographical references. / David McNaughton, Professor Directing Dissertation; Roy Baumeister, University Representative; Michael Bishop, Committee Member; Piers Rawling, Committee Member.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_253020 |
| Contributors | Quigley, James Gaston (authoraut), McNaughton, David (professor directing dissertation), Baumeister, Roy F. (university representative), Bishop, Michael A. (committee member), Rawling, J. Piers (committee member), Florida State University (degree granting institution), College of Arts and Sciences (degree granting college), Department of Philosophy (degree granting department) |
| Publisher | Florida State University, Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, text |
| Format | 1 online resource (132 pages), computer, application/pdf |
| Rights | This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). The copyright in theses and dissertations completed at Florida State University is held by the students who author them. |
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