Moral Perception and the Looks Objection: An Empirical Approach

According to moral perceptualism, perceptual experience is attuned to morally relevant features of our environment. Such a view could play a role in theories of moral psychology, phenomenology, and/or epistemology. On perhaps the strongest reading, contentful moral perception (CMP), typical human agents can literally represent moral properties as part of the contents of their perceptual experience. The most trenchant objection to CMP is known as the Looks Objection. According to the Looks Objection, moral properties are not perceptible because they lack any distinctive ‘look', a feature which is said to be necessary for perceptibility. In this paper, we respond to the Looks Objection. However, our aim is to go beyond ‘playing defense’ in the way proponents of moral perception have standardly done. We aim to develop a positive, empirically supported argument that evaluative and structural properties of social events are perceptually represented, and that this provides a model of how contentful moral perception can work. We hope that this positive development not only shows why the Looks Objection relies on a mistaken conception of perceptual phenomenology but also accounts for how contentful moral perception is empirically plausible.