Maria Waggoner

When one fails to have an accurate moral percept, a defect in character is often invoked. Little attention has been given to a certain kind of inaccurate moral percept – namely moral illusions – and what this would mean for virtue. This paper aims to show that moral illusions may in fact be a manifestation of virtue. By examining how an optimal perceptual system can give rise to perceptual illusions, a similar argument is made when it comes to moral perception: an optimal moral perceptual system, or that which a virtuous person would have, plausibly operates by using stored probabilistic information and can likewise give rise to moral illusions. Lastly, in light of this, I consider how we are to proceed. First, I argue that we should rethink our conception of the ideal virtuous person. Second, I suggest alternative moral resources which a virtuous person could use to navigate cases of moral illusions.

There has been near unanimous agreement that faith requires having some sort of positive attitude towards the object of faith. This thesis has recently been called into question by the lone wolf, Malcolm & Scott (2021), who propose a substitute property of true grit. This paper argues that substituting the element of grit leaves an explanatory gap when it comes to explaining why one has faith; a conative attitude must underride one’s grit. Yet, it seems to me that a positive conative attitude towards the proposition in question is not required. The present account proposes that there are some cases of propositional faith where the object one’s conative attitude is not the proposition itself, but a person or group that one loves, belongs to, or identifies with. Lastly, it’s argued that a negative conative attitude, rather than strictly positive, can also explain grit and its role within propositional faith.

Moral understanding has typically been defined as grasping the explanation, q, for some proposition, p, where p states that some action is morally right (or wrong). This article deals with an underdiscussed point within the literature on moral understanding: the degree of moral understanding one has deepens with the more moral reasons that one grasps, whereby these reasons not only consist of those that speak in favor of an action’s moral permissibility but also those speaking against. I argue for a surprising and important implication of this: having a deep degree of moral understanding can make it harder to carry out the right action. Furthermore, I propose that we should think of our pursuit of moral understanding in an analogous way as to how some have thought of scientific understanding: There may be good reasons to fail to appreciate all of the actual moral reasons that in fact exist; sometimes we should seek a surfaced-level moral understanding instead of something deeper. Just as idealizations used within science – which can involve deviations from the truth – can help us achieve scientific understanding, so too we might restrict the moral reasons that we seek to grasp in pursuit of moral understanding.

In this chapter, we recount some of the most pressing objections to character scepticism, pointing out their limitations and, when appropriate, incorporating their suggestions. From here, we consider what empirically informed moral improvement might look like by turning to the skill analogy. While the skill analogy provides a realistic rubric for becoming a better person, many of the questions concerning the details of how moral improvement might take place remain unanswered. When developing expertise in domains like chess and morality, a wide range of factors will likely be important and it is unlikely than any one individual factor will be especially important. Given this, for any account of moral improvement, our optimism should be bounded: the effect of any particular intervention is likely to be limited, in both magnitude and domain. Lastly, we consider how character scepticism has reshaped the way we think about moral responsibility, whether this is cashed out in reasons-responsiveness or self-expression accounts. While both views face challenges, by distinguishing the possession of the responsibility-making feature from failures to manifest that property in behaviour, we gain a certain degree of wiggle room that allows us to accommodate empirical findings while holding on to notions of responsibility. This chapter highlights that the ‘person-situationism debate’ has expanded far beyond its beginnings, giving way to new accounts of moral improvement and moral responsibility.

Important empirically informed proposals of virtue cultivation invoke techniques of goal pursuit. This paper argues that these techniques are effective in changing behavior due to the attention narrowing they bring about, and further show that such attention narrowing can threaten the appropriate exercise of phronetic-related capacities. When these phronetic-related capacities are threatened, two derivative problems arise: (1) One can end up acting in morally inappropriate ways, and (2) Even in cases where one performs the morally appropriate action, one nonetheless can fail to notice and appreciate features of moral value. In light of these concerns, such techniques of goal pursuit – at least, by themselves – serve the most good for those who are merely trying to avoid vice, rather than cultivate virtue. And so, I suggest that such accounts of virtue cultivation are incomplete. I then go on to argue that these undesirable effects of attention narrowing brought about by these goal pursuit techniques may be ameliorated by also engaging in certain indirect modifications of cognition, particularly those which broaden attention. The suggestion, then, is that attention narrowing techniques of goal pursuit, along with attention broadening modifications, might best facilitate virtue cultivation when employed together. While the particulars of how we might best go about this are currently unclear, this paper ends by looking at empirical research on Open Monitoring Meditation as providing a hopeful option that might be further investigated.