ABSTRACT
One might expect that acquired perception is a kind of perceptual belief – not perception, strictly speaking. In addition, one might expect that aesthetic experience and moral experience are species of acquired perception. After all, an aesthetic property like beauty – and a moral property like wrongness – is a higher-order property, just the kind that may be experienced but surely cannot be sensed. Accordingly, James Van Cleve has argued that ‘most cases of acquired perception probably do not count as perception,’ an interpretation that I have contested (Van Cleve 2004; Copenhaver 2010). If acquired perception is not perception proper, and if aesthetic and moral experience belong to acquired perception, we can respond straightforwardly to Reid’s frequent statements that perceiving beauty or perceiving goodness is merely analogical. Our response is at homewith the taxonomy of themoral philosophers with whomReid is customarily counted – alongside Clarke and Price – as a rationalist. If moral experience is an intellectual achievement rather than a kind of sensitivity, it is clear how he may be counted among those who hold that reason, not affect, is the ground of morality.
