Daniel Vanello

This volume brings together, for the first time, perspectives from philosophy and psychology to investigate the role of autobiographical memory in moral agency. Autobiographical memory is the ability to recollect events in one’s past as part of one’s personal history. Moral agency is the ability to make moral judgements, act morally, and have a conception of the good life. Although a number of philosophers and psychologists have drawn attention to the role of autobiographical memory in moral agency, there is no sustained project that brings together these different lines of inquiry into a unified research area. The aim of this volume is to answer this need by bringing together leading voices in research in autobiographical memory and moral agency from both philosophy and psychology to provide a unified framework for a new interdisciplinary research area. Key areas of research explored in this volume include temporal perspectives, moral identity, autobiographical narrative, joint reminiscing, the internalisation of moral value, attachments, and amnesia. Autobiographical Memory and Moral Agency will appeal to researchers and advanced students in philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, philosophy of education, developmental psychology, and educational psychology who are interested in the role of memory in moral psychology and moral development.

The aim of this introduction is to set out the four main areas of research on the relationship between autobiographical memory and moral agency that emerge from the collaborative effort of the contributors. The four research areas are temporal perspectives, autobiographical narratives, communicative interactions, and breakdowns and severe amnesia. There are deep interconnections not only between topics within each area but also between these areas. The aim in this introduction is to bring out some of these interconnections by spelling out some of the questions they raise.

The aim of this paper is to articulate the claim that moral witnesses generate a kind of understanding of the evil done during the relevant experienced events that those who did not experience the relevant events cannot generate. A challenge in articulating the claim that moral witnesses generate a kind of understanding of evil done during the relevant experienced events that those who did not experience the relevant events cannot generate is that it should explain why those who did not undergo the relevant type of experiences cannot generate the kind of understanding given voice to by moral witnesses in their testimony. This paper answers this challenge by articulating two claims. The first claim is meta-ethical and focuses on the nature of the kind of understanding of evil possessed by moral witnesses that is given voice to in their testimonies. The claim is that moral witnesses possess an understanding of the evil done that is partly constituted by an understanding of what it’s like to suffer harm caused by being the deliberate target of evil actions. The second claim is psychological and focuses on what is, I argue, a condition for moral witnesses to generate their understanding of evil. The claim is that moral witnesses generate their understanding of the evil they suffered by exercising their autobiographical recollection of the experienced events.

The aim of this article is to articulate and defend the intuition that the experience of being morally wronged affords one a distinctive understanding of the moral wrongness of what one experiences. In section 1, I clarify and motivate this claim. In section 2, I articulate the distinctive kind of understanding of moral wrongness that I argue is afforded to those who experience being morally wronged. In section 3, I spell out the epistemic ability that is acquired and exercised in the generation of the relevant understanding of moral wrongness. In section 4, I respond to the objection that understanding what it is like to be wronged in the relevant way does not provide one with an understanding that goes beyond the experience itself to the objective wrong-making features of the experienced event. In section 5, I articulate what I call the educational role of the experience of being wronged by showing how the epistemic ability afforded to those who have experienced being wronged in the relevant way can be used to develop morally relevant epistemic abilities in those who have not undergone the relevant experience. Section 6 concludes by drawing the implications of my account for the responsibility of acquiring an understanding of the relevant moral wrongs for those who do not undergo the relevant experiences.

Moral identity theorists argue that moral action is explained by the centrality of moral values to a person’s identity. Moral identity theorists refer to moral integration as both the process by which moral values become central to a person’s identity and the state an individual is in when a given moral value is central to their identity. While moral identity theorists appeal to autobiographical narratives to determine the state of moral integration in an individual, they have little to say about the role of autobiographical narratives in articulating the process of moral integration. The aim of this paper is to argue that appealing to autobiographical narratives supports the view that moral integration is a learning process the outcome of which is the acquisition of an understanding of moral concepts that is exercised in moral deliberation. Since moral identity theorists argue that moral integration is empirically correlated to a sustained commitment to moral action, the upshot of the argument of this paper is an account that elucidates the relationship between moral identity, moral action and moral deliberation.

Moral identity theory is one of the most popular theories of moral development. A central concept of moral identity theory is moral integration. Moral identity theorists refer to moral integration as the process by which moral values become central to a person's identity, thus developing one's moral identity. The problem is that there is still very little understanding of the psychological processes that constitute the process of moral integration. The aim of this paper is to offer an account of the role of autobiographical memory in moral identity development. Autobiographical memory refers to the ability to recollect events in one's past as part of one's personal history. I motivate the claim that the role of the development of autobiographical memory in moral integration should be conceived in relation to the emergence of psychological abilities that both develop and are exercised on a personal, conscious, and deliberative level.

The aim of this paper is to defend the view that we need to conceive our moral understanding as in part constituted by our affective and imaginative abilities suitably related. The core argument is that in order to be able to understand and explain the truth of a given moral proposition, we need to understand what the relevant moral concepts refer to, that is, we need to understand the semantic value of the relevant moral concepts. In the moral domain, I argue, this involves appealing to our affective and imaginative abilities suitably related. My account provides a genuinely new alternative to current accounts of moral understanding because it brings in both affect and the imagination central stage. Moreover, my account is a defense of the view that our moral understanding is a distinctive kind of understanding not reducible to non-moral kinds of understanding. The upshot of my argument is a new position in questions about the nature of moral understanding that focuses on the peculiarities of understanding in the moral domain.

The aim of this article is to offer a novel reconstruction of Sartre's theory of motivation. I argue for four related claims: (a) Sartre's theory of motivation revolves around the Schelerian‐inspired notion of affectivity and the peculiar way affectivity provides us access to evaluative properties of the objects in our environment; (b) according to Sartre, the structure of intentional action, and in particular the act of choice and commitment to projects, is inextricably linked with “affectivity”; (c) the inextricable link between intentional action and affectivity is to be analyzed in terms of the fundamental structure of consciousness as being self‐present, thus making the agent nonpositionally aware of her choices and commitments; (d) an agent is motivated to act when her affective disclosure of value is in part constituted by the awareness of her commitments to relevant projects.

A prominent number of contemporary theories of emotional experience—understood as occurrent, phenomenally conscious episodes of emotions with an affective character that are evaluatively directed towards particular objects or states of affairs—are motivated by the claim that phenomenally conscious affective experience, when appropriate, grants us epistemic access not merely to features of the experience but also to features of the object of experience, namely its value. I call this the claim of affect as a disclosure of value. The aim of this paper is to clarify the sort of assumptions about experience that we ought to avoid if we want to be able to argue that for the claim of affect as a disclosure of value. There are two core arguments in this paper. First, I argue that Mark Johnston’s account of affect as a disclosure of value, due to its naïve realist commitments, relapses into a position that is vulnerable to the same objection put forward by some naïve realists against intentionalist accounts of perceptual experience. Second, I argue that Michelle Montague’s account, due to its phenomenal intentionalist commitments, relapses into a position that is vulnerable to the same objections put forward against qualia theories of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. The upshot of the paper is that the core assumptions embedded in the three dominant models of experience—namely naïve realism, different versions of intentionalism, and qualia theory—are problematic as found in contemporary accounts of affect as a disclosure of value.

The aim of this paper is to defend, and in so doing clarify, the claim that the affective component of emotional experience plays an essential explanatory role in the acquisition of evaluative knowledge. In particular, it argues that the phenomenally conscious affective component of emotional experience provides the subject with the epistemic access to the semantic value of evaluative concepts. The core argument relies on a comparison with the role played by the phenomenal character of perceptual experience in the acquisition of knowledge of colours. The upshot is that it is a disanalogy with perceptual experience that explains the essential role of affective experience in acquiring evaluative knowledge, namely its motivational component.

The aim of this paper is to motivate and solve a puzzle regarding the intuition that just as in the absence of perceptual experience we lack an important kind of understanding of sensory properties like colour, in the absence of affective experience we lack an important kind of understanding of value. The puzzle consists in understanding how can a property pertaining to the experience of the subject i.e. the affective component of emotional experience, provide us with a distinctive epistemic access to, and therefore an understanding of, properties that are instantiated by objects distinct from the experience i.e. the evaluative property of the object of experience. I argue that solving the puzzle necessitates us to commit to a metaphysical view of value according to which affective experience and evaluative properties are related by explanatory circularity. The upshot of the paper is that affective experience provides us with the sort of understanding of value that motivates the generation of evaluative concepts.