Moral Emotions, Principles, and the Locus of Moral Perception

I vindicate the thrust of the particularist position in moral deliberation. to this purpose, I focus on some elements that seem to play a crucial role in first-person moral deliberation and argue that they cannot be incorporated into a more sophisticated system of moral principles. More specifically, I emphasize some peculiarities of moral perception in the light of which I defend the irreducible deliberative relevance of a certain phenomenon, namely: the phenomenon of an agent morally coming across a particular situation. Following on from bernard Williams, I talk of an agent’s character as a factor that contributes to fixing what situations an agent comes morally across. A crucial point, in the debate, will be how an agent confronts the normatively loaded features of his own character when he is engaged in first-person deliberation.