The Axiology of Moral Experience

Author(s): Robert Audi

Source: The Journal of Ethics , 1998, Vol. 2, No. 4, Intrinsic Value (1998), pp. 355-375
Published by: Springer

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25115592

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 ROBERT AUDI

THE AXIOLOGY OF MORAL EXPERIENCE

(Received 18 June 1998; accepted in revised form 22 June 1998)

ABSTRACT. This paper clarifies the nature of moral experience, examines its evidential
role in supporting moral judgments, and argues that moral experiences can be among the
things having intrinsic value. Moral experience is compared with aesthetic experience and
contrasted with its close relative, non-moral experience combined with moral beliefs. The
concluding sections explore the case for the organicity of intrinsic value and the kind of
role such value can play in grounding moral obligation.

KEY WORDS: emotion, evidence, experience, intrinsic value, moral judgment, obligation,
organicity, pluralism, reason for action

In epistemology, the central role of perceptual experience in grounding

knowledge and justification is widely recognized; in ethical theory, no
comparable role for perceptual experience or any moral counterpart of
it is generally acknowledged as a basis of moral justification or moral
knowledge. This is perhaps understandable since, in ethics, rule and virtue
theories have been historically dominant. For rule theorists, it is natural,
though not inevitable, to hold what might be called a subsumptivist view.
Given certain moral principles justified on an intuitive or theoretical basis
(or in both ways), moral knowledge and justification regarding particulars
are subsumptive: they are grounded in the application of a principle to an
action or person morally judged in the light of information gained through
ordinary perception or through some other apparently non-moral informa
tional source. For virtue theorists, a similar view is natural (though again
not inevitable), except that they regard cognition grounded in virtues of
character as both morally and epistemically more basic than the application
of any moral principle. In neither case is any distinctively moral experience
necessarily a basis of knowledge or justified belief regarding one's moral
obligations, nor a ground of such obligation in something like the way in
which sense experience is a ground of justified belief or (often) a basis on
which one ought to believe something whether or not one does.
Attributing an epistemic role to moral experience is, however, quite
consistent with plausible versions of both rule and virtue theories. So
is ascribing non-epistemic value to such experience. But before we can
clearly see either this kind of epistemic role or the non-epistemic value

?A The Journal of Ethics 2: 355-375, 1998.

? 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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 356 ROBERT AUDI

of moral experience it must be plain that there is such a thing as moral

experience. It is perhaps not obvious that the plausible candidates for moral
experience amount to more than experiences that are in some way morally
significant. My first task will be to indicate some ways in which certain
experiences are distinctively moral.

I. Some Varieties of Moral Experience

Moral emotion is what may first come to mind as a candidate for moral
experience. Consider aroused indignation, say, where one sees a lazy stu
dent copying from the examination paper of a conscientious peer. One not
only disapproves, one experiences the act with felt indignation and with
an awareness of it as, say, violating a moral rule. There are also non
occurrent emotions. To stay with the case of indignation, there is a kind
we can dispositionally have towards a wrong-doer when our minds are
entirely on other things. Moral guilt may be similarly dispositional. But
these dispositional instances of emotion are not elements in consciousness
and are hence not candidates to be experiences.
At least akin to emotion, but not a clear case of it, is moral anguish.
Imagine a juror reviewing the trial afterwards and suddenly realizing with
horror that the guilty verdict was wrong. This horrifying realization is an
experience that goes far beyond occurrently seeing an important truth. One
could see the truth without the sense of horror; and one might have an
experience phenomenally like that sense without believing the truth.1 The
kind of moral experience in question is at least in part an integration of
these experiential and cognitive elements. A moral experience, however,
need not be (as this one is) retrospective. A mere prospect can evoke such
experience: offered a large salary to work for a company that exploits the
elderly, one may feel revulsion at the thought of selling them services at
inflated profits. This kind of revulsion can be a moral experience.
A negative moral experience, moreover - roughly, one supporting or
entailing, or at least disposing one to feel, moral disapproval - need not be
emotional, even if it has the potential to evoke emotion. Consider a sense
of being treated unfairly in a competition; one might experience a sense of

1 The seeing in question could be considered a kind of moral perception. It would be

perception that (propositional perception). There is also perception of (e.g. of an object
or property). It, too, can be moral, as where one sees the injustice of a deed. The notion
of moral perception raises problems I cannot take time to address in this paper; but my
conception of moral experience makes room for some instances of it to be cases of moral
perception, and what is said about moral experience may help in understanding moral
perception.

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 THE AXIOLOGY OF MORAL EXPERIENCE 357

disapprobation, but - though there is no sharp distinction between moral!

emotion and non-emotional moral experiences - there could be too little
affect to make the experience one of moral emotion, as opposed to a case
of non-emotional disapprobation or dislike. One need not, for instance,
experience an aroused sense of injustice; one might coolly think that the
injustice was not malicious and that one would not have placed differently
in any case.2
So far, my examples of moral experiences are either emotional or nega
tive, but a moral experience need not be of either kind. An executor might
experience moral satisfaction at the thought of having justly settled an
estate. There is, to be sure, moral satisfaction of a purely cognitive kind,
for instance a kind centered on holding the judgment that one has done
justice. Here it is natural to speak of satisfaction that, as distinct from satis
faction in (or at or over). But there is also a kind of positive attitude which,
integrated with a feeling of having resolved such a problem, constitutes a
moral experience. This is a felt sense of just achievement.
If there are experiences of moral satisfaction in the thought of having
done justice in the past, there are surely moral experiences that center on
presently doing justice. If, in delivering a distribution to the beneficiaries,
one feels that one is being just, and one also has a felt sense of the moral
appropriateness of the distribution, we might have a case of an experience
of doing justice. The experience of making the distribution is suffused with
an aroused attitude of moral approval; the act "feels right." This experience
is possible whether or not the distribution is also judged to be just. In some
such cases that judgment could be a product rather than a ground of the
experience.
If, moreover, we think of Immanuel Kant's emphasis on acting from
duty, we can identify a different kind of moral experience, or at least a fur
ther element in some such experiences: something we might call the sense
of moral self-determination? Moral self-determination is an important ele
ment in moral autonomy; and the experience of that self-determination, for
instance in one's doing justice to a student, may - though it need not -
be accompanied by a sense of being moved by some moral consideration

2 Cf. William Tolhurst, "On the Epistemic Value of Moral Experience," The Southern
Journal of Philosophy XXIX (1990), p. 67, in which he construes all moral experience as
emotion. For a critique of this paper see Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, "Moral Experience and
Justification," The Southern Journal of Philosophy XXIX (1990), pp. 89-96.
3 At one point Kant says, "The moral disposition is necessarily connected with a con
sciousness of the determination of the will directly by a law ... It is a very sublime thing
in human nature to be determined to action directly by a pure law of reason ..." See
The Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1956), p. 121.

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 358 ROBERT AUDI

understood as such.4 To be sure, one can have this sense when one is not
in fact so moved. In such a case one might or might not be deceived about
one's motivation. But there is no reason to believe we are always deceived
in having this sense. As Kant saw, particularly when duty prevails over
conflicting inclination, we can be aware of the determinative force of the
winning elements within us. That experience can be broadly moral. When
it is moral, it can yield moral satisfaction, cognitive or experiential.5
One might be willing to grant that the examples just given are morally
significant, yet deny that they represent moral experiences. It is not unnat
ural to think that what we have in each case is an occurrent emotion or other
kind of experience, combined with (and perhaps grounded in) at least one
belief with moral content, where the moral element in the compound is
carried by the belief. In appraising this reductivist line - roughly the view
that what I call moral experience is simply non-moral emotion, or other
non-moral experience, combined with or based on a moral belief, I want
to begin with the emotional experiences.
Might felt (moral) indignation simply consist of anger over the thing
(or with the person) in question, grounded in a suitable belief to the effect
that it is wrong? One might consider this a kind of moral experience (and
a variant of my case of the horrified juror might be of this sort - a sinking
experience grounded largely on a belief). Moreover, it is true that in my
example some morally significant cognition - at least a conceptualization
of the object in question in a morally relevant way - is required and that,
affectively, the indignation is (as usual) close to anger. But would we
really have indignation (at least of the rich kind I am describing) if there
were no moral element in the emotion? Surely indignation does not differ
from non-moral anger only in its cause (or even ground). The object of
the indignation is the person's deed as (say) immoral. An aspect of the

4 A related phenomenon, which also seems in at least some forms to be a case of moral
experience, is what Maurice Mandelbaum called a demand. He had in mind a sense of
what one (morally) must do, say upon realizing one has promised to A. He said of such
demands, "It is my contention that the basis of the reflexive demand which an agent feels
when he is confronted by what appears to him to be a moral situation is his apprehension
of a fittingness between a specific envisioned action and the situation in which he finds
himself... The relation of being fitting or unfitting is ... indefinable, but I have attempted
to indicate its meaning ostensively ..." See The Phenomenology of Moral Experience
(Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1955), p. 69. I should add that for him 'moral experience'
is broader than it is for me, since it apparently covers any experience with moral content,
such as reflecting on what one (morally) ought to do.
5 It is an interesting question whether a sufficiently empathic person can have moral
experiences by virtue of a far-reaching awareness of such experiences in someone else.
Such second-hand moral experiences are possible, but there is no need to assume the point
for the purposes of this paper.

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 THE AXIOLOGY OF MORAL EXPERIENCE 359

indignation, then, is itself moral: the thought of the deed as (say) unjust,
or a focus on some morally criticizable aspect of the offense, is an element
in the indignation, not (or not only) a ground of it, as it may be in the case
of anger. One's motivational inclinations are also different from what they
would be with non-moral anger; they are guided by one's moral standards
in a way the motivation essential to such anger need not be.
To be sure, a belief that something is wrong may be an element in some
cases of indignation. Such a belief may also trigger indignation. But not all
indignation is doxastic in this way. Indignation may ground beliefs as well
as arise from them; and (for reasons that will emerge shortly) it may con
tain elements that incline one to form beliefs that arise only upon reflection
or some other occasion to articulate the basis of one's experience.
For the non-emotional cases of moral experience, such as moral satis
faction, the reductive approach seems less plausible. For instance, the core
of moral satisfaction is a sense of moral fittingness, or at least of moral ade
quacy, in some person or conduct; and a sense of moral self-determination
is above all an awareness of what appears to one as the production (or
sustenance) of one's conduct by a certain kind of ground, where the kind
is broadly moral. This awareness entails being disposed to believe one's
conduct is produced by a moral consideration or element, but does not
entail actually believing this. Granted, if there is no emotion here, the
experience may seem thin; but there is no need for a proponent of the
importance of moral experience to posit a dominating coloration of one's
whole consciousness, or any specific sensations. It is enough that there
is something distinctively moral in one's consciousness at the time and
that it be experienced in an appropriate way. There may or may not be
an assenting entertainment of an appropriate moral proposition, but in any
case the experience goes beyond this kind of intellectual consciousness.
This condition seems to be met by all the representative examples I have
constructed: in each, there is a distinctively moral integration of cognitive
and experiential elements.
It may seem that some of our examples involve no more than a keen
awareness of an intuited moral proposition, say that someone is cheating a
friend. It is true that such an awareness can serve as the central cognitive
element in a moral experience. But a keen awareness of an intuited proposi
tion (or one believed on virtually any other basis) may be purely cognitive.
To be sure, if the awareness is combined with felt conviction, that may
give it an affective element. But even if, say, the felt certainty of a moral
proposition is a kind of affective experience, it is not the sort of experience
that chiefly concerns me. This is because here the moral element in the
experience derives entirely from the content of the relevant belief, and

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 360 ROBERT AUDI

because the kind of experiential element in question - felt conviction - can

accompany any belief, regardless of its subject matter.6 Moreover, far from
reducing to a keen awareness of intuited propositions, moral experience
may be a ground of such intuitions in the first place. We may intuitively
judge that a deed is wrong because our experience of it is one of moral
revulsion; the intuition may be a product, not a cause, of the revulsion.
Thus, even if some intuitions are constituents in moral experience,
others seem to be grounded in moral experiences that are not themselves
based on any intuition. In these cases it appears that the experience may
itself have evidential value. More controversially, perhaps, I believe it may
also have intrinsic value. These points bring us to the problems addressed
in Sections II and HI: what sorts of value moral experiences might have.
I am particularly interested in its evidential and intrinsic values. In both
cases, I should add, much of what I say would hold with minor changes
even if the reductive view turns out to be true.

II. The Evidential Value of Moral Experience

Moral experiences can have instrumental value in promoting moral

behavior.7 They can, for instance, lead people to live up to moral standards
better than they would if they were guided only by moral judgments never
accompanied by moral experiences, such as moral emotions supporting
those judgments. Moral revulsion at an unethical prospect can prevent
one's realizing it; moral satisfaction in doing justice may strengthen one's
inclination to do it again and to promote similar conduct in others. Any of
these instrumental kinds of moral value can contribute, in turn, to human
happiness. And moral experience can have heuristic value too (which
appears to be a broadly instrumental kind). Even if one can be misled by,
say, feelings of indignation over the wrong thing, indignation can some
times lead one to discover a moral or other truth. If well-grounded, it can
lead to a moral realization one might have missed; if misplaced, it can

6 A further point is that by itself a feeling of certainly has no evidential value; one can
rely on such certainty as an indication of justification or truth only if one is certain on good
grounds or at least has independent grounds to trust one's certainty. By contrast, moral
experiences may in themselves have significant evidential and even moral value, as noted
below.
7 I am here taking instrumental value in a weak, causal or at least contributory sense:
roughly, to say X has instrumental value is to say that there is something else to which
it contributes, causally or otherwise. There is, however, a use of 'instrumental value' in
which its instantiation may entail that there is something of intrinsic value. For detailed
discussion of kinds of instrumental value and a case for such an entailment, see Earl Conee,
"Instrumental Value and Intrinsic Value," Philosophia 11 (1982), pp. 345-359.

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 THE AXIOLOGY OF MORAL EXPERIENCE 361

lead to self-criticism that reveals what the moral facts really are. In general
terms, moral experience, especially when emotional, commonly motivates
us to think and act concerning moral matters.
Can there, however, be evidential value in moral experiences? May one,
for instance, take one's indignation or sense of justice or of injustice as
evidential grounds for moral judgments, or are such experiences instead
dependent on moral judgments in a way that precludes their having any
independent evidential weight?
It is essential here to distinguish between a constitutive dependence
and an evidential dependence. It might be argued that we cannot be indig
nant over an action without judging it to be wrong, because the judgment
is either part of the indignation or an essential ground of it. In either
case, indignation would be impossible without moral judgment. I doubt
that indignation requires holding, as opposed to being disposed to hold, a
negative moral judgment. Indignation may (as suggested in Section I) be
produced by one's feeling, say, offended, and a moral judgment may arise
only after the felt offense (a case, one might argue, of moral judgment
being partly based on a moral perception, which in turn produces a moral
emotion). Perhaps indignation can be justified only if one has justifica
tion for a related moral judgment - this would be a kind of justificatory
dependence - but that kind of dependence does not entail actually holding
the judgment. The justification may reside in grounds one has - such
as a perception of objectionable conduct - that are not expressed in any
proposition one believes.
Suppose, however, that indignation does require holding a moral judg
ment, even initially. An experience of indignation might still constitute or
essentially contain evidence for some negative appraisal, say that the act
is wrong. The experience's being partly constituted by a judgment does
not prevent some aspect of it, say the strong negative feelings aroused by
the thought of the sordid details of the deed, from serving as evidence for
that judgment or at least for some closely related judgment. Here is one
possibility: perhaps, in morally mature agents at least, a negative moral
judgment of an action in the kind of experiential circumstance imagined
does not tend to produce indignation unless there is genuine evidence that
the action is wrong. This might be so because we have a moral faculty or -
in perhaps less tendentious terms, a moral sensibility - that independently
responds to the action in context and blocks the occurrence of indignation
unless it finds an indication of moral wrong. I do not claim that indignation
generally works this way. The point is that even if moral emotion - or any
kind of moral experience - constitutively depends on moral judgment, it

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 362 ROBERT AUDI

may have evidential value that is not entirely dependent on the judgment
in question.
We should not assume, however, that there is such a constitutive
dependence. Granting that sometimes one subsumes an action, such as
intentionally deceiving someone, under a moral generalization and thereby
judges (and knows) it is wrong, and one is, on that ground, indignant over
it, might there not also be cases in which we experience revulsion (or
indignation) over something, such as the way an employer speaks to an
employee, and thereby judge (and know) the behavior is wrong? Suppose
the revulsion is grounded in sensing a rude and domineering condescen
sion (again, a possible case of moral perception). This perception is both a
likely psychological basis for the judgment that the employer is wronging
the employee and a prima facie ground for its truth. Just as such a judg
ment need not be what produces the experience of revulsion, it need not
justify the revulsion one experiences; both the causal and the justificatory
relations may run the other way.
An aesthetic analogy may help. When we look at a painting or read
a poem, are there not aesthetic experiences, such as being attracted to an
artistic design or being moved by a metaphor, that at least partly ground
any appraisal we make on the basis of the viewing or reading? An artwork
that produces no distinctively aesthetic experiences when properly contem
plated is on that very ground deficient; and the kind of experience we have
in contemplating an artwork is at least a major element in our evidence for
its appraisal. Moral experience plays a similar evidential role, and one kind
of intuitive moral judgment - a kind that for intuitionists and other moral
theorists plays an epistemically basic role in ethics - is often not only a
cognitive moral appraisal but also a response to a moral experience.8
One way to explain the relation between moral and aesthetic experi
ences and the judgments they evoke is to say that in morally and aestheti
cally mature people, the judgments are a natural response to experience of
a suitable subset of the properties on which the relevant moral or aesthetic
property supervenes.9 Thus, the employer's wrongdoing is grounded in the

8 I think this holds for W D. Ross's intuitionism, at least insofar as applied to singular
moral judgments, and it might also hold for at least many of John Rawls's "considered
moral judgments." Discussion of this aspect of both positions is given in my "Intuitionism,
Pluralism, and the Foundations of Ethics," in my Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). On considered moral judgments
see also John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).
Cf. T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
forthcoming), esp. Chapt. 1.
9 If the technical term "supervenes" is objectionable, we could simply speak of a basis
relation. I have tried to clarify the relevant kind of supervenience (as an asymmetrical

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 THE AXIOLOGY OF MORAL EXPERIENCE 363

rude, domineering condescension exhibited toward employees. If percep

tion of this behavior pattern leads to an experience of indignation and that,
in turn, produces (or even contains) a moral judgment, the judgment is
normally well-grounded.
This is not to deny that the negative moral judgment could be based on
perceiving the wrongful conduct in a way that does not yield a moral expe
rience. But there seem to be cases in which moral experience does yield
moral judgment, just as there are cases in which the latter yields the former.
Moreover, emotions and feelings and other experiential responses some
times run ahead of judgments, and deeper. One of the significant ways in
which people differ is in the balance of the experiential and the intellectual
in the causal and evidential grounding of their moral judgments.
There may seem to be an important difference between moral and aes
thetic cases of the kinds in question. It is arguable - and highly plausible
from a subsumptivist point of view - that even if an action or anything
else appropriately appraisable from the moral point of view "left us cold,"
we could justifiedly and truly assess it morally, say as right or wrong or
obligatory, whereas the evidential dependence of judgment on experience
is far more significant in the aesthetic case.
It is one thing to say that moral appraisal is not always based on
moral experience and another to say it never is. Indeed, even if, given
our present moral practice, no case in which one has justification for
holding a singular moral judgment strictly entails grounding of that jus
tification in one's moral experience, it may still be true that our having
justification for moral judgment in general is dependent on our sometimes
having justificatory moral experience. Individual moral judgments may
not epistemically depend on moral experience, but the practice of moral
judgment may. I want to consider two forms of the suggested experiential
dependence view. In a sociocultural version it says that a social practice
of moral judgment cannot yield justified moral judgments unless certain
participating individuals have achieved justification for moral judgments
from their moral experience, so that they can (among other things) testi
monially justify others in certain such judgments; in its individual version
it says that such judgments are justified only if the person making them
has a background of moral experience appropriate for grounding those
judgments, say experiences of being done injustice or of undertaking and
fulfilling moral obligation. If either form of the experiential-dependence
relation of dependence) in Chapt. 5 of Moral Knowledge. An interesting comparison is
to Mandelbaum's "principle of the primacy of the facts": "7b be valid, the predication
of a moral quality must arise as a direct response to the apprehension of the non-moral
properties which the object which is praised or blamed actually possesses" (op. cit.,
p. 245).

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 364 ROBERT AUDI

view is sound, then the aesthetic analogy may largely hold after all: we
can surely make reasonable aesthetic judgments of paintings that leave us
cold, but it is doubtful that we could do so if paintings in general left all of
us cold. If there is an experiential dependence in the moral case, it may be
less extensive, but some analogy would remain.10
The main general point here may be this. If we were not the kinds of
beings that can have moral experience - that can, for instance, be indignant
or can experience a sense of injustice - then the justification of our moral
judgments would be much thinner than it is, rather as we could at best make
much less richly justified aesthetic judgments if no artwork ever moved us
in the way appropriate to such creations. This point may seem to beg the
question against rationalism, but it does not. For one thing, it does not
imply that knowledge of moral principles is empirical, and rationalism
leaves room for knowledge of singular moral judgments to be empirical,
even if it is often in some sense "intuitive." The point also leaves room
for the intuitive induction that Ross took to be essential to acquiring moral
knowledge.11 Even if all moral experience were emotional, its evidential
role would not preclude a priori knowledge of universal moral proposi
tions, such as Rossian principles of prima facie duty. Moral experience
might be a ladder to understanding moral principles, but not their epistemic
or ontic foundation (or at least not their only foundation), just as counting
on one's fingers might be a ladder to understanding elementary arithmetic
truths, but not their epistemic or ontic foundation (or at least not their only
one).
I suggest, then, that rationalists as well as empiricists (and indeed nat
ural law theorists in either camp) can accommodate a significant evidential
role for moral experience in grounding knowledge and justified belief of
both singular moral judgments and general moral principles. Rationalists

10 The comparison to testimonially based knowledge is instructive: I can know some

thing wholly on the basis of testimony even if the attester also knows it wholly on that basis,
so long as at some point in the relevant testimonial chain someone knows it at least partly
in some more basic way, say on the basis of perception. Explanation and defense of this
idea is given in my "The Place of Testimony in the Fabric of Knowledge and Justification,"
American Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1997), pp. 404-422.
11 Ross's conception of intuitive induction is briefly treated in my "Intuitionism, Plu
ralism, and the Foundations of Ethics," cited above. It is an interesting question whether
Kant's injunction against deriving morality from examples can be accommodated to the
Rossian picture. Kant's main point seems to be that moral principles are not empirically
based, and in intuitive induction, experience is a route to understanding moral concepts.
But it is not the ground of the truth of moral principles or (as where a proposition is
justified wholly by sense experience) the only basis for accepting them. See Immanuel
Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (London: Routledge,
1991), Sect. 408.

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 THE AXIOLOGY OF MORAL EXPERIENCE 365

as well as empiricists can also point to the survival value of moral experi
ence conceived as both an evidential and a causal basis of moral judgment.
On the plausible assumption that moral behavior conduces to our survival,
the more readily judgments that can produce or guide it are elicited in our
experience, and the better they are supported by good grounds, the greater
the likelihood (other things being equal) that we should survive.

III. Moral Experience as a Locus of Intrinsic Value

Moral experience could have evidential value without ever having intrinsic
value; nor does its having intrinsic value follow from its sometimes being
of things having (positive or negative) intrinsic value, such as undeserved
suffering. But surely experiences are one kind of bearer of intrinsic value,12
and certainly some moral experiences seem non-instrumentally good or
bad. An experience of moral anguish is a terrible thing to go through; one
of moral satisfaction is a good thing. Must we construe the apparent value
here as extrinsic?
The clearest case of an intrinsic good is probably pleasure; pain is
probably the clearest case of an intrinsic evil. Many who countenance
irreducibly moral experiences may want to argue that if they have intrinsic
value at all, it is in virtue of their hedonic properties. What is bad about:
moral anguish, it may be asked, except its painfullness, and what is good
about moral satisfaction other than its pleasantness? But is moral anguish
necessarily painful? It is aversive, to be sure - intrinsically so, I think - but
must everyone it befalls be in pain? Unless we are quite generous about
what counts as pain, I do not see that everyone who is in moral anguish
must be in pain. There is a profound discomfort, an "Oh, my God!" feeling
of remorse, perhaps. If this must count as pain, so be it; but if so, it is a

12 That experiences can be plausibly conceived as the primary bearers of intrinsic value
is argued in Chapt. 11 of Moral Knowledge. I note there that much of what needs to be
said about intrinsic value can be articulated on a wider view, and this paper can also
accommodate a wider ontology, for instance one in which intrinsic value is ascribed to
non-experiences, e.g., beautiful paintings, such that promoting or preserving them provides
a non-instrumental reason for action. I should also note that if intrinsic value is taken to
belong to experiences, then when something is said to be intrinsically good, it can also
be called a good experience. This provides a completion for "A good whatV that should
satisfy the semantic completeness demand of Peter Geach, plausibly defended by Judith
Jarvis Thomson in "The Right and the Good," The Journal of Philosophy XCIV (1997),
pp. 273-298. Indeed, the experiential view does well here: experiences being what it is
in virtue of which life is or is not worth living, they are the sorts of things that should be
intrinsically good if anything is, since a source of basic reasons should directly connect
with making life worth living.

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 366 ROBERT AUDI

moral kind of pain. If hedonism can reach this far, it turns out to be even
more pluralistic than it must in any case owe to the uncontroversial variety
of pains and, especially, pleasures.13 Supposing, however, that there must
be a kind of pain here, it does not seem to exhaust the negative intrinsic
value of the experience.
Regarding the case of moral satisfaction, we need not deny that the
person would tend to be pleased with the action or state of affairs in ques
tion. But one can be pleased with a student's progress when one is mainly
glad to see any improvement at all and has yet to take any pleasure in any
aspect of the performance. Satisfaction, moreover, may be hard earned;
it can be more a sense of relief from the negative than of pleasure in the
positive. There is, to be sure, the veritable joy of release from a locked
room, but moral satisfaction need not be akin to that. Once again, a case
for hedonistic regimentation can be made; but if the case succeeds (and
my main points are neutral with respect to this), that may be as much an
indication of the elasticity of hedonism as it is of absorption of the value
of moral experience into a hedonistic axiology.
If, as I am inclined to do, we hold a more strongly pluralistic theory
of value and countenance intrinsic moral values as among the basic kinds,
one may naturally wonder what overarching positive conception of value
we may endorse. Developing such a conception is a very large task, but
let me suggest that a good focus is the idea of (intrinsically) rewarding
experience. Rewards, like pleasures, take their character chiefly from the
kinds of experiences that yield them; they are not types of sensations, such
as itches, that are highly similar in each case. One might think this forces us
to say that intrinsically rewarding experiences are simply those providing
basic reasons for action.14 But that seems an inadequate conception, even
if there is an equivalence between the two notions, i.e., even if (putting
it roughly) one has a basic {prima facie) reason to do something if and

13 The variety of pleasures has been emphasized by many philosophers, including Henry
Sidgwick and, more recently, Richard B. Brandt. For critical discussion of how this plu
ralism is to be understood (and squared with the idea that pleasure has intrinsic value),
see Fred Feldman, "On the Intrinsic Value of Pleasures," Ethics 107 (1997), pp. 448^166.
Hedonism becomes wider still if everything pleasant or unpleasant is construed as a case
of pleasure or pain, respectively. For clarification and defense of valuational hedonism, see
Irwin Goldstein, "Hedonic Pluralism," Philosophical Studies 48 (1985), pp. 49-55.
14 This is roughly what G. E. Moore suggested in Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1912) when he said "[T]here is no characteristic whatever which belongs to all things
that are intrinsically good and only to them - except the one that they all are intrinsically
good and ought always to be preferred to nothing at all..." (pp. 152-153). Cf. Thomas
Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986):
"The objective badness of pain, for example, is .. .just the fact that there is reason for
anyone capable of viewing the world objectively to want it to stop" (p. 144).

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 THE AXIOLOGY OF MORAL EXPERIENCE 367

only if one has at least some reason to believe that doing it would produce
or sustain something intrinsically rewarding (good) or prevent or reduce
something intrinsically "punishing" (bad). I offer no analysis of the notion
of a rewarding experience, but we can at least add to the conception of such
experience as providing basic reason for action certain (non-relational)
affective, attitudinal, and motivational elements. Rewarding experiences
are, for instance, a kind one tends to like. This point needs explication, but
for our purposes there is no need to go into further detail.
On any plausible account of what constitutes intrinsic value, something
that has it provides a basic (hence non-derivative) reason for action. To
say that pleasure is intrinsically good, for instance, is in part to say that
there is reason to produce or sustain it. Moreover, I take it as clear that it
is in virtue of its good-making qualities (or at least in virtue of what it is in
itself) that pleasure provides such reason. This is not to say that its being
good automatically motivates us to produce or sustain it; my point concerns
objective ("external") reasons, not motivating reasons. Not everyone coun
tenances the former, but I am aware of no one who thinks there is anything
of intrinsic value and does not countenance them. If moral experiences can
have intrinsic value, then they are a source of basic reasons for action. If
so, what kind of force do they have, and, specifically, what kind of role do
they play in determining our obligations? This second question is the main
concern of the next section.

IV. Moral Value as a Ground of Moral Obligation

There are two kinds of determination relevant here: epistemic determina

tion of what our obligations are and ontic determination of what acts we
are obligated to perform. I have already suggested that moral experiences
have an evidential role with respect to our obligations (and so can help
epistemically in determining them), but there is more to say about that role.
In the light of what emerges, we can better address the ontological question
of how experiential moral value figures in grounding moral obligation.
It should be clear from the examples of moral experience given in
Section I that it need not be veridical: an experience of indignation may
occur where the supposedly wrongful act is perfectly in order. Such an
experience can occur even when the agent is justifiedly indignant and the
experience has moral value as an exercise of fine moral sensibility. In moral
matters, as in others, we are fallible even when quite competent. Still,
errant indignation can be justified in a way that warrants both believing
that the act in question is wrong and acting to rectify the apparent perpe
trator. The indignation may even ground a moral obligation to act so (i.e.,

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 368 ROBERT AUDI

to try to rectify a wrong). I might have such an obligation, in the sense that
relative to my rational grounds, I would be doing what I ought to do and
could be properly criticized morally if I did not. Granted, if I am mistaken
in thinking there has been wrongdoing, I may be criticized for that too
(depending in good part on whether I could have avoided the mistake); but
the criticisms are of different kinds.
Moral experience can be not only fallible but corrupted. Here moral
experience may fail to ground either moral obligation or justification for
moral judgment. A terrorist organization can have a kind of morality, but
a terrorist's apparently moral indignation at a member who cannot bring
himself to execute innocent people is not significant evidence of wrong
doing and does not generate any objective moral obligation to rectify the
"perpetrator" (I am assuming that genuine evidence and objective oblig
ation require a kind of grounding that is simply unavailable in such a
case). As to whether such experience has any intrinsic value, at least two
initially plausible lines are open to us: (a) to hold that it does not owing
to its immoral content, which is partly disapproval at refusing to execute
innocent people; and (b) to maintain that although, as a manifestation of
conscientiousness conceived as devotion to one's deeply held standards,
it does, the overall intrinsic value of the state of affairs, a corrupted ter
rorist's being conscientiously indignant over a failure to execute innocent
people, is negative.15 The second idea (which is the one I want to develop)
would be that the intrinsic moral disvalue of conscientious indignation with
that content outweighs its positive intrinsic value as a conscientious moral
experience. On one view, this is explained by appeal to the indignation's
ill-befitting the moral outrageousness of the thought that partly constitutes
it.
The second idea, which appeals to such notions as fittingness, is sup
ported by the view that intrinsic value is organic, in roughly the sense that
the intrinsic value of a complex state of affairs is not necessarily equal to
(and may exceed) the sum of the intrinsic values (if any) of its aspects or
(proper) parts. This organicity principle seems consonant with our experi
ence and (in this or similar forms) has been widely defended.16 One way

15 I am presupposing, controversially, perhaps, that real moral indignation, as opposed

to a feeling of moral indignation, is possible where such gross moral error occurs. There
may be limits to how wrong-headed a cognitive basis indignation can have; but if such
limits are crossed in the text, at least the same paragraph also precludes any moral credit's
accruing to the terrorist from having a moral reaction.
16 Defenders include Franz Brentano, G. E. Moore, W. D. Ross, and Roderick M.
Chisholm. For further defense, including discussion of some of the above, see Noah Lemos,
Intrinsic Value (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Fred
Feldman, Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge

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 THE AXIOLOGY OF MORAL EXPERIENCE 369

in which the idea is consonant with experience is in matching our sense

of how relations among things not themselves having (positive) intrinsic
value seem to add it to certain wholes. Consider contemplating parts of
a painting that, aesthetically, lack value and produce no value in viewing
any of them by itself. Thus, one might see this set of parts that make up
the painting (say, the four segments of the landscape it portrays) in a way
that prevents contemplating them from having intrinsic value. Nonethe
less, contemplating them together as mutually related in the painting - an
experience that has the individual viewings as its "parts" - can have great
intrinsic value. It is plausible to maintain that here the intrinsic value of
viewing each segmental aspect of the painting is nil, yet that of viewing
them together in relation to one another is great.
We have, then, an experience which, though its aspects or "parts" -
the visual experiences of the separate segments - have no intrinsic value,
has great intrinsic value overall. Much the same point can be seen in a
related example. Consider viewing the members of a family each enjoying
their consumption of a meal. Seeing each enjoy it may, unlike seeing the
aesthetically valueless segments of the landscape, have some value; but
just as viewing the latter in relation to one another may have much intrinsic
value, seeing the family enjoying the meal together as a family may have
greater intrinsic value than the sum of the intrinsic values of viewing their
separate prandial pleasures.17

V. Moral Value and Reasons for Action

There may be analogous data in the domain of basic reasons for action.
Consider a case in which I unexpectedly receive $100 and decide to give

University Press, 1996). For criticism of the view see Michael A. Zimmerman, "Virtual
Intrinsic Value and the Principle of Organic Unities," Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research (forthcoming). I am taking the principle broadly, so that something that has no
intrinsic value (and on some views is perhaps not even a candidate to have it), such as a
blank space in a painting, may have zero intrinsic value yet be relevant to the organically
conceived value of a whole of which it is a part or aspect, such as the painting in question.
17 Three clarificatory comments are in order here. First, I am not taking the relevant kind
of connectedness of the parts to be itself a part of the experience (or an aspect of it in the
sense in which seeing a segment of a landscape is an aspect of seeing the whole landscape).
Second, even if the connectedness is so construed, it is doubtful that it must have an
intrinsic value in itself suitable to make the intrinsic value of the experience "additive."
Third, one could also talk of the inherent value of the painting or other item in question,
where a thing has inherent value provided that properly experiencing it (say, contemplating
it) has intrinsic value; and the organicity idea may be easier to work out or at least to see
for the former notion. Inherent value is discussed in Chapt. 11 of Moral Knowledge.

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 370 ROBERT AUDI

it away. I consider giving it to a friend in need, one to whose well-being

I have a deep commitment. I could also give it to a charity I respect (but
have no obligation to support) and thereby benefit several needy people.
Both deeds seem intrinsically good and thereby to provide reason for
my choosing them: the first expresses loyalty, partially lives up to a past
commitment, and creates non-moral goodness in the form of the friend's
resulting pleasure. The second creates non-moral goodness in the form of
the resulting pleasure for the charity's beneficiaries. Now suppose that the
non-moral value of each of the latter pleasures is equal to the non-moral
value of the pleasure of my friend; to this extent, at least, I have better
non-moral reason to do the second deed. It may still seem to me that I have
better overall reason to do the first; this can be so even if there are, say,
three beneficiaries in the second case. Why should it seem so?
There are at least two (compatible) ways to explain this apparent prefer
ability. First, we might say that I have better moral reason to express loyalty
and partially fulfill a commitment than simply to do a beneficent deed of
the kind in question, and that the weight of the former moral reason -
which is presumably grounded in the moral value of the state of affairs
it is a reason to realize - is (at least here) much greater than that of the
non-moral reasons for the charitable deed, that is, the reasons to produce
pleasure for three others (I make the simplifying assumption that I have no
moral reason to support the charity, but the example does not depend on
this). Here, then, the magnitude of a moral reason explains the preferability
of the first use of my money; it is at least weightier than the non-moral
reason I have to prefer the charitable donation. Second, we might say that
(a) the intrinsic value of the first deed far exceeds the sum of the values
of its "parts," construed as expressing loyalty, partially fulfilling a com
mitment, and creating the pleasure in question, and (b) even if the same
holds for the intrinsic value of the second deed (and even if it does have
some degree of moral value), its overall intrinsic value is not as great.18
In this case, the preferability is explained by the difference the intrinsic
(moral) value of the moral aspect of the first deed makes in its overall
intrinsic value conceived organically, and there is no implication that the
moral value by itself is greater than the intrinsic value of the alternative
action (or at least greater than the intrinsic value it has over and above the
non-moral intrinsic value of the first deed).

18 I here ignore the point that creating pleasure is a causal rather than an intrinsic prop
erty of the gift-giving; the examples will work similarly if we focus on the complex state
of affairs, giving the gift to the recipient(s) in such a way that the latter pleasurably receive
it at the moment one delivers it.

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 THE AXIOLOGY OF MORAL EXPERIENCE 371

A third example may sharpen the contrast between the two kinds of
deed. Suppose I had promised my needy friend $100 as soon as I could
pay it. Now the intrinsic (moral) value of the deed, keeping the promise,
even if I thereby create no non-moral value, can be greater than that of
breaking the promise and thereby creating much non-moral value for quite
a large number of people, each of whom is, we might suppose, eager for
a square meal (I will not assume starvation - arguably, in that case there
could perhaps be a competing moral claim on me, depending in part on my
relation to the charity).
Depending on the details, such cases become controversial, but we
sometimes reflectively think we have better reason to do a deed like the
former, prima facie obligatory one, than a competing one like the latter.
To be sure, there is grave danger that selfishness favoring those we care
about, or a kind of moral priggishness, will bias us here; but the point is
that our actual thinking about such matters (some of which seems rea
sonable) is prima facie consonant with the organicity principle applied
to intrinsic value, including moral value, as providing reason for action.
Our considered judgments certainly reflect an attribution of reason-giving
force to what appears to be moral intrinsic value, and we also sometimes
apparendy construe intrinsic value organically.
An alternative view to account for the appearance of the organicity
of intrinsic value would be that in different contexts the same kinds of
things can have different (intrinsic) values. The value of a whole, then, is
"additive," but the sum may be quite different from what it would be if the
parts had only the values they have in isolation or in some other context.
It is doubtful whether this view is consistent with countenancing intrinsic
value at all: intrinsic value, being the value a thing has in itself, cannot
vary in a thing because it is moved from context to context. What one
could say instead is that only complexes have intrinsic value and that this
is determined by adding the contextual values of the constituents in that
whole. This view is an analogue of a strong particularism about reasons
for action, on which even the positive or negative force of a consideration
cannot be determined apart from its context. It seems to be less plausible
than countenancing intrinsic value (and taking the intrinsic value of certain
wholes to be organic), if only because the view forces us to deny that even
pleasure and pain are intrinsically good and bad.19
Suppose, then, that moral experiences can have intrinsic value and that
anything having such value provides a basic reason for action. One impli

19 Jonathan Dancy's Moral Reasons (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993) defends a strong
particularism. I briefly appraise the position in "Moderate Intuitionism and the Episte
mology of Moral Judgment," Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, forthcoming.

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 372 ROBERT AUDI

cation of the organicity of intrinsic value is that the kind of basic reason in
question is prima facie and hence defeasible. For even if a part or aspect
of an experience, say pleasure, had much intrinsic value, the experience as
a whole might have negative value, as where pleasure is experienced by a
thoroughly malicious person in the contemplation of suffering by another
person. Any hedonic reason there is to produce such an experience is over
ridden by the overall negative intrinsic value of the experience. Moreover,
not only are there non-moral values that bear on action, there is also the
possibility of conflicting moral values, as where the moral satisfaction of
punishing a malicious offender would be morally good, yet the sense of
doing it without a fair trial would be morally bad. Here a high moral value
that an action would realize might fail to provide overriding reason for the
action because the overall moral value of performing that action would be
negative.
Still another possibility is that although there is moral value in the sense
of injustice evoked in one by observing a wrong to which punishment is
a fitting response, one has overall justification - say, from the testimony
of mistaken but highly credible friends - for believing that the act was
not wrong, and therefore to discount one's own negative reaction. Here
an epistemic ground for discounting an objective reason can make acting
on the latter unreasonable, overall. As in the case of ordinary perceptual
experience, we can be right without having a right to believe we are.
Given the great weight that moral reasons for action can have, one
might think that a moral reason for action, at least if one is justified in
believing one has it, is automatically overriding from the point of view
of rationality. Thus, insofar as one has moral reason, on balance, to A,
rationality would require that one A: one has best reason, overall, to do the
deed. This is not clear. Someone sufficiently unhappy in a marriage which
the other spouse does not want to dissolve might have a moral obligation to
stick it out though this is very detrimental to his or her own well-being, so
detrimental that friends call the person irrationally devoted to duty. One
can of course say that here a presupposition of the marital promise is
falsified, so that there is no longer even a moral obligation (at least not an
overall one). But although morality is sometimes permissive about letting
us limit self-sacrifice, it does not seem liberal enough to sanction every
case in which rationality pulls in another direction. If acting morally is
never irrational,20 perhaps it still need not be the most rational thing to do,
from the wider perspective of one's overall reasons for action.

20 A point well defended by Bernard Gert in Morality, 2nd. edn. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998). He is, however, less disposed than I to countenance degrees of
rationality.

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 THE AXIOLOGY OF MORAL EXPERIENCE 373

In cases of conflicts of prima facie moral duties, Ross appealed, as

Aristotle doubtless would have, to practical wisdom as a requirement for
determining a good resolution. One might plausibly do the same where
moral and non-moral considerations conflict. To favor the non-moral ones
might seem immoral, but I do not find that clear: perhaps it is non-moral.
The idea that moral reasons are always overriding is philosophical; com
mitment to it is not part of morality (as distinct from metaethics). Indeed,
morality demands that we serve certain non-moral values, for instance
that we promote the general physical well-being of others. If this included
one's own overall non-moral well-being, one could claim that what I have
called a conflict between moral and non-moral reasons is in fact a con
flict between different kinds of moral reasons. As Ross apparently saw,
however, it is far from clear that the duties of self-improvement include
promoting one's own pleasure,21 whereas plainly there are excellent non
moral reasons to do so. If, owing to self-interested or other reasons, there
can be a rational but immoral deed, moral standards might still require us,
as adherents to them, to consider it to be just that: immoral.
If morality contains no provision giving its standards priority over any
competing standards - or at least over those of rationality - might we make
the counterpart claim about any point of view, including that of rationality?
I think not, if this is the point of view of our overall reasons for action (and
for belief, which must be included if theoretical rationality is taken to be
in the scope of the question). What we ought, all things considered, to do
from this overall point of view - the point of view one appropriately takes
in advising people we deeply care about for their own sake - is something
we ought to do, period - in a sense of 'ought' implying that there is an
adequate answer to criticism from any admissible perspective.
By implication, then, the point of view of rationality presupposes that
any conflicting normative point of view is subordinate. This is not to say,
however, that the point of view of rationality implies that specific kinds
of considerations, say of self-interest or of personal well-being or even of
prudence, always take priority over (from the point of view of rationality)
moral considerations. There are theories of rationality that make those

21 W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930),
Chapt. 2. He also said, however, that "The doctrine that morality is entirely social, that all
duty consists in promoting the good of others, seems to me a profound mistake" (p. 153).
I might add that although Ross countenances the goodness of (some) moral experience
(at least on the assumption that performing actions and having feelings are sometimes
experiences), he does not consider it intrinsic: "an action or a feeling is morally good by
virtue of proceeding from a character of a certain kind" (p. 155). By contrast, a virtuous
disposition is, for Ross, intrinsically good. See, e.g., p. 134.

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 374 ROBERT AUDI

considerations paramount, but it is not clear that any of these theories is

correct.
The position suggested here is one that takes reasons for action to be
grounded, or at least groundable, in a plurality of elements having intrinsic
value, some moral, others not. Not only do the moral reasons not automat
ically prevail in every case of conflict with non-moral reasons; the point
of view of morality itself does not call for such invariable preponderance.
If, as it seems, intrinsic value is organic, then a reflective decision may be
called for even though we can frame rough generalities applicable to many
kinds of conflict cases and thus in general need not even ask whether,
say, keeping a solemn promise is more important than using the time in
question to pursue a hobby.
Where our guiding generalities, moral and other, do not make clear
what we ought to do, moral experience may play a double role. It may yield
varying degrees of evidence for one or another resolution of a conflict, as
where felt moral revulsion at a pleasant prospect is an indication that it is
morally objectionable and that we therefore have good reason to decide to
forego the pleasure it promises. Moral experience may also have intrinsic
value and thereby provide basic reasons for action. That doing something
would give those it affects a satisfying experience of being treated justly
is one reason to do it; that doing something else would leave one morally
anguished is one reason to abstain from it; that there is positive value in
the moral experience of acting from duty is one among other reasons to
cultivate the disposition to act in that way and deeply identify with one's
doing deeds that are so motivated.
Ontologically, the view I am proposing takes intrinsic value - strictly,
things, such as pleasure and moral satisfaction, having intrinsic value -
to constitute the most basic ground of moral obligation and indeed of
rational action in general.22 But it does not preclude the possibility of
non-value-based knowledge either of obligation in particular or of rational
action in general. There might be intuitive, non-inferential knowledge of
basic deontological moral principles of the kind Ross articulated, even if
knowledge of duties can also be based on an assessment of the relevant
values and how they can be promoted. The superstructure can be known
from its visible character; its foundations do not provide the only per
spective from which its character and strength can be determined. Those

22 As William K. Frankena put a similar view, "[W]e do not have any moral obligations
... to do anything that does not, directly or indirectly, have some connection with what
makes somebody's life good or bad, better or worse ... Morality was made for man, not
man for morality" [see William K. Frankena, Ethics, 2nd edn. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice
Hall, 1973), p. 44].

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 THE AXIOLOGY OF MORAL EXPERIENCE 375

foundations, if I have been right, include a plurality of elements of human

flourishing. Among these are moral experiences. Moral satisfaction is one
of the rewards mature people want in life; the sense of doing justice has
a value for which there is no substitute; the sense of acting from duty and
thereby transcending temptation is among the cherished expressions of our
autonomy.23 Far from being just a cognitive awareness or moral properties
or the bare thought of moral propositions, many of these experiences have
positive value in themselves, hence are the kinds of things worth real
izing for their own sake. Our dignity consists partly in our capacity for
such experiences.24 Morality is not just a means of promoting non-moral
value or a conventional structure that enables us to survive. Its experiential
manifestations are among the things that make human life worthwhile.25

Department of Philosophy
University of Nebraska
Lincoln, NE 68588-0321
USA

23 This point accounts for some of the data that Christine Korsgaard emphasizes in The
Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), but the point does
not imply the constructivist metaethics she takes to go with them.
24 A view I develop and briefly defend in Chapt. 11 of Moral Knowledge.
25 The content of this paper has benefited much from a detailed and rigorous commen
tary by Earl Conee given at the Greensboro Symposium on Intrinsic Value in 1998 and from
discussion with the participants. Discussions in an earlier session at Santa Clara University
were also helpful, and for valuable comments on the text I thank Irwin Goldstein, Noah
Lemos, Mark Timmons, William Tolhurst, and Michael Zimmerman.

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