ABSTRACT
If moral experience is a basic representational activity, alongside perceptual and aesthetic perception, the usual picture of Reid – standing with Clarke and Price as a moral rationalist, against Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume as sentimentalists – gets blurry.3 If sentimentalists part with rationalists over the moral faculty’s response to affect or reason, Reid has no stake in the fight. The moral faculty is neither affective nor rational, according to Reid, but representational: perceptual, moral, and aesthetic experiences are partly constituted by – but not reducible to – felt, affective elements, and none is a product of reasons or rationality, though each is reason-giving.
