ABSTRACT
Rebecca Copenhaver* Department of Philosophy, Lewis & Clark College, 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, Portland,
OR, 97219-7899, USA (Received 18 October 2013; accepted 25 October 2013)
Some interpret Reid’s notion of a moral sense as merely analogical. Others understand it as a species of acquired perception. To understandReid’s account of themoral sense,wemust draw fromhis theoryof perception andhis theoryof aesthetic experience, each of which illuminate the nature and operation of the moral faculty. I argue that, onReid’s view, themoral faculty is neither affective nor rational, but representational. It is a discrete, basic, capacity for representing the real moral properties of humans and human conduct. Keywords: Thomas Reid; perception; moral perception; moral sense; aesthetic perception
. . . Men judgeof the primary and secondary qualities of body by their external senses, of beauty and deformity by their taste, and of virtue and vice by their moral faculty.
