Reid on the moral sense

Abstract

Some interpret Reid's notion of a moral sense as merely analogical. Others understand it as a species of acquired perception. To understand Reid's account of the moral sense, we must draw from his theory of perception and his theory of aesthetic experience, each of which illuminate the nature and operation of the moral faculty. I argue that, on Reid's view, the moral faculty is neither affective nor rational, but representational. It is a discrete, basic, capacity for representing the real moral properties of humans and human conduct.

Keywords::

• Thomas Reid
• perception
• moral perception
• moral sense
• aesthetic perception

Notes

^1. I wish to thank the departments of philosophy at Williams College and Harvard University, at which earlier versions of this paper were presented. I thank Brian Copenhaver, Terence Cuneo, Esther Kroeker, Patrick Rysiew, and James Van Cleve for their comments. I thank my fellow participants at the New Essays on Reid workshop for their comments and conversation.

^2. There is a significant and growing literature on Reid's account of the moral faculty. Roeser (2010) collects several contributions to this literature, including: Kroeker (2010) and Broadie (2010). See also Cuneo (2003, 2006).

^3. For an extended treatment of the ways in which Reid ill-fits the rationalist-sentimentalist distinction, see Cuneo (2013).

^4. For extended treatments of Reid's theory of perception, see Copenhaver, (2004), Nichols, (2007) and Van Cleve, (2004).

^5. See Wolterstorff, (2004), and Van Cleve (2004).

^6. For an extended treatment of Reid's indebtedness to Berkeley, see Copenhaver (2013).

^7. On this point Reid begins to depart from Berkeley. Berkeley insists that original visual experience is in no way spatial – not even two-dimensional. Reid holds that visible figure and what he calls ‘real figure,’ are inter-derivable, while Berkeley holds that the features present in visual and haptic experience are heterogeneous and incommensurate.

^8. For an extended treatment of Reid's theory of acquired perception, see Copenhaver (2010).

^9. I intend this as a point concerning the general structure of original and acquired perception. Though there are cases of acquired perception in which sensations are signs, the general case is one in which the objects of original perception become signs in acquired perception.

^10. For an extended treatment of Reid's theory of aesthetic perception, see Copenhaver, forthcoming.

^11. Indeed, some current scholars read Reid as a subjectivist. See Manns (1998).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Copenhaver

Rebecca Copenhaver is Professor of Philosophy at Lewis & Clark College, where she has taught since 2001. Her research interests are in Early Modern Philosophy, Thomas Reid, and Philosophy of Mind. Her work has appeared in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Res Philosophica, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Quarterly, History of Philosophy Quarterly, The Journal of the History of Philosophy, The British Journal for the History of Philosophy, and The Oxford Handbook on British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century. She is co-author with Brian P. Copenhaver of From Kant to Croce: Modern Philosophy in Italy, 1800 – 1950 (University of Toronto Press, 2012). She is currently writing a book on Thomas Reid’s theory of mind.