2025 Theses Doctoral

The Shape of Moral Understanding: Practical Reasoning Informed by Perception and Language

Chambers, Drew

In this dissertation, I provide a novel account of moral understanding that demonstrates why moral understanding, properly construed, entails more than just a subject’s understanding that some moral reason q is why p.

On my view, moral understanding implicates a practical reasoning that entails, alongside deliberative thought, the theoretical thought involved in accurate comprehension of our circumstances and appropriate sensitivity toward the moral features of the world. The upshot of this view is that moral understanding implicates our perception of the world, the concepts we have to make sense of it, the language we have to express those concepts, and a general grasp of how everything fits together.

On that basis, I’m able to explore the second prong of my project: the significance of my account to moral inquiry and moral education. Methodologically, my dissertation employs philosophical analysis. I conduct conceptual analysis, as well as interpretive (also called hermeneutical or exegetical) analysis of philosophical texts. Over the course of nine chapters, I conclude that it is gestalts—as concepts, as our sense of the good life, as our world, as objects in the world—that constitute the shape of our moral understanding.