T&F PROOFS NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION 5 Mandelbaum on moral phenomenology and moral realism

In his overlooked 1955 book, The Phenomenology of Moral Experience, Maurice Mandelbaum presented a nuanced moral phenomenology, on the basis of which he defended a kind of moral objectivism, specifically moral realism, against the sorts of non-objectivist views in ethics that were popular in analytic philosophy in the 1940s and early 1950s. A central feature of Mandelbaum's moral phenom-enology is the claim that moral experiences of obligation and value involve the " apprehension " of an action or character trait, or other item of evaluation as being " fittingly " or " unfittingly " related to the relevant situation under consideration. Mandelbaum describes these relations of fittingness and unfittingness as " inhering " in the situation one confronts and thus provide (according to Mandelbaum) phenomenological evidence in favor of what we will call an ontological objectivist or realist interpretation of such experiences. According to moral realism, moral judgments are beliefs that purport to represent a realm of " objectively existing " moral facts. We call the argument that goes from facts about moral phenomenology to a metaphysical conclusion about the existence and nature of moral facts " the argument from introspective phenomenology ". In what follows we have two primary aims. First, because Mandelbaum's phenomenological ethics is not widely known, we will spend the first part of the chapter setting forth some of the main elements of his phenomenological description of moral experience. But we will do so with particular attention paid those aspects of his view that provide putative evidence for moral realism. Then, in the second part of the chapter, we proceed to examine the argument from introspective phenomenology. We agree with Mandelbaum that the phenomenology of moral experience (which we think he got more or less right) provides pro tanto evidence against such non-objectivist views of his day, including in particular, varieties of non-cognitivism. However, we claim that the essentials of Mandelbaum's moral phenomenology fits with a particular version of what are now called " expressivist " views about ethical thought and discourse; views that are descended from non-cognitivism, that stand opposed to moral realism, and that have been developed and defended by such contemporary philosophers as Allan Gibbard, Simon Blackburn, and we ourselves. 1 Such views were thus not among metaethical options when Mandelbaum wrote his 1955 book. Because our own version of expressivism – " cognitivist expressivism " – can fully accommodate