UC Santa Cruz

The overarching aim of this dissertation is to supplement Philipa Foot’s metaethical naturalism, called the theory of natural goodness, with a cognitivist account of affective sensibility. My account provides a receptive ground for moral judgment that appropriately anchors it in the world as a species of evaluation capable of motivating actions through elicited feelings that are necessarily connected to the conceptual structure of worldly situations. I first present and defend the fundamental tenets of the theory of natural goodness, specifically its aspirations toward securing the objective validity of moral judgment, but I then criticize Foot’s treatment of the theory as suffering from a blindspot which leaves her view incomplete and in need of modification. Foot takes as her theoretical point of departure a well founded criticism of non-cognitivism and the emotivist approach to grounding moral judgments in subjective, affective states of mind. Although I agree that a qualified criticism of non-cognitivism is in order on this front, in my view Foot responds to this aspect of the non-cognitivist thesis too strongly, such that she ends up making it seem as if there is absolutely no logical role for affective states of mind to play in a cognitivist theory such as her own. Effectively, the role of sensibility in its capacity to elicit “moody” responses to something in the world that inherently aim at the fulfillment of necessary and objective ends—this insight goes untreated in Foot’s view. As a variety of cognitivism, then, the upshot of my supplemental account of affective sensibility is that it respects the receptive component of moral judgment which non-cognitivism locates in subjective states of mind, while simultaneously preserving the objective import of moral judgments that render knowledge of moral value, as professed by the theory of natural goodness. Lastly, through a reading of Kant that connects his notion of disinterested pleasure in the third Critique to his larger theory of cognition, I argue that my cognitivist account of the affective grounds of moral judgment is plausible not only because we have reason to place empirical evaluations and their corresponding forms of knowledge on affective grounds, but rather because we have reason to place all empirical knowledge on affective grounds as a condition for the possibility of its normative, rule-like structure.