Moral Aspect Perception and Moral Disagreement

Moral disagreements, especially those that are polarising and deeply entrenched, often seem immune to rational resolution. In such cases, could the language of perception or vision provide a promising alternative for moral philosophy? This paper will explore what it means to take seriously the everyday notion that people engaged in a moral disagreement 'see things differently'.

I suggest that Wittgenstein's account of aspect-perception can help illuminate the experience of perceiving different aspects, or being unable to perceive particular aspects, of a morally-contested situation, because for Wittgenstein perceiving aspects is fundamentally related to how we experience the meaning of particular words or concepts. To investigate moral aspect perception is thus to examine: 1) whether people sometimes disagree because they are simply unable to grasp what I term the 'concept-world' of another person, despite speaking the same language and using the same key terms; and 2) how the task of moral philosophy may be one of imparting new vision rather than new arguments.