ABSTRACT
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 phenomenology 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.”
