Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

In this talk, I assess the plausibility of an attention-based version of moral perceptualism (AMP). According to this view, our perception of moral properties is characterized by perceptual attentional patterns that reflect a sensitivity to morally salient features. I argue, first, that the empirical evidence for AMP is better explained by cognitive rather than perceptual phenomena. Second, while I acknowledge the critical importance of attention in recognizing moral properties, I contend that we must broaden our explanatory scope to include the question of what drives this kind of attention. I propose an account of our (in)sensitivity to wrongness where the notion of salience structure of information, defined by the varying accessibility of both perceptual and cognitive representations, plays a central role in giving an answer to that question.