“Normativity and Non-Conceptual Content” (in progress)

What is the role (if any) of non-conceptual content in the formation of our richly conceptual perceptual experience? Developing an original interpretation of Wilfrid Sellars’ view, I argue that that non-conceptual sense impressions—in order to play a constitutive role in perceptual experience—must be normatively governed, albeit by teleological, not conceptual, norms. To make this claim, I draw not only on the relevant Sellarsian literature, but also the McDowell-Dreyfus debate, which I take to clarify important features of both rule-following and conceptual activity. The resulting notion of a minimal or proto-normativity enables a distinction between mere physical differential responsiveness and the non-conceptual practical engagement of evolutionarily-developed biological organisms—as well as an understanding of the non-conceptual content of perceptual takings as essentially constituted by their place in a system of engaged activities.

“The Role of Imagination in Moral Habituation” (in progress)

Aristotle famously argued that virtue is achieved through the repeated practice of virtuous actions. However, it is not clear just how practice of virtuous actions is supposed to make a person into a virtuous agent. Margaret Hampson (2019) has offered an interesting and promising answer to this question: that moral habituation comes through a kind of agential emulation, whereby the learner imaginatively takes up the perspective of a virtuous person, trying to see the world as that agent would. I argue here that this view runs afoul of concerns raised by Peter Goldie in his criticism of the possibility of empathy. Namely, that it is not possible to imagine ourselves to be another person, rather than to be ourselves in another person’s shoes, because the nature of our first-personal relationship with our own mental states cannot be accurately duplicated from the outside. This raises the possibility that Hampson’s empathetic moral learner is unable to sufficiently imitate the virtuous person, and that this understanding of moral habituation cannot provide a reliable path to virtue. Yet, given Aristotle’s argument that virtue and phronesis exist exclusively together in an agent, I suggest that an advocate of an agential emulation approach to moral habituation can fine-tune their account by attending to the role of deliberation in virtuous action. The explanatory contribution of an emulative approach thus turns on the ways in which imaginative emulation brings the virtuous person’s practical deliberation into view for the moral learner.