Abstract

One aim of philosophy is to challenge the half-truths constituting scientific and metaphysical first principles. As the American pragmatists suggested, most human purposes and activities do not require absolute precision or the adherence to eternal truths or laws. This is especially true when describing moral sensibility and formulating moral principles. ;The human organism and its environing world, I argue, are intimately, causally, and intentionally bound so that metaphysical speculation is both a description and explanation of the basic contours of experience. ;This dissertation aims to develop specific metaphysical hypotheses that will serve to illuminate the origin and development of moral sensibility and moral responsibility. In the first two chapters, Whiteheadian and post-Whiteheadian metaphysics is shown to capture the dynamics of primordial, pre-reflective experience, which is primarily a matter of feeling, emotion, and aesthetic intensity and harmony. ;This realm of primitive experience exerts significant influence on human moral sensibility, an influence that Kant, for example, does not properly acknowledge. The central argument I develop is that formalistic approaches to ethics "put the cart before the horse" by remaining too abstract and empty of content. ;The thesis that is developed in the final chapter is a contemporary version of virtue ethics based upon the metaphysical hypotheses that were established in the earlier chapters of this work. ;Recent works on virtue ethics can be improved in breadth and scope by taking seriously a metaphysical account of the primordial level of emotional and aesthetic experince, and socially defined personal identity and its relevance to the development of moral sensibility and moral responsibility. ;This dissertation explicates the aesthetic nature of primitive experience and how this realm is foundational for the moral development that arises at higher stages of cognitive experience. In short, aesthetic feelings without some moral reflection are blind, and rational moral theorizing without aesthetic content is empty. Aesthetic feeling is basic to the immediate form of experience, but the fact that an experience has an immediate mode of emotional intensity does not mean that it lacks a mode of reflective discrimination. The end result is that the aesthetic dimension and the moral dimension of experience are distinct but inextricably tied