Moorean Moral Phenomenology

Inquiry into the what-it-is-likeness of concrete moral experience—moral phenomenology—has not generally been part of moral philosophy as practiced in the analytic tradition at least since G. E. Moore’s 1903 Principia Ethica.1 Although there FN:1 have been a few exceptions—including, most notably, Maurice Mandelbaum’s 1955 The Phenomenology of Moral Experience—and although analytic philosophers since Moore do sometimes appeal to considerations having to do with the what-it-is-likeness of concrete moral experience, nevertheless one finds almost nothing in this tradition that makes moral phenomenology an extended topic of inquiry.2 We maintain that this FN:2 should change—that an adequate ethical theory (including both normative ethics and metaethics) ought to be partially grounded on an adequate phenomenology of moral experience. However, even if Moore and post-Moorean analytic moral philosophy did not pay much attention to moral phenomenology, one should not conclude that the works of Moore and others are not of phenomenological significance; far from it. In particular,