Abstract:
This dissertation investigates the claim that much ethical living consists in spontaneous, non-deliberative ethical action, where this is to be understood as the idea that ethical appropriate behaviour, expressing the agency of ordinary people, need not, and mostly does not, involve reasoning, deliberating, decision-making and choosing what to do. Rather, much ethical living consists in direct, spontaneous and non-deliberative responses to situations as perceived by the agent. I call this the Non- Deliberative Thesis. In order to explain how and why some non-deliberative behaviour counts as ethically appropriate action, we need to first explain how and why it counts as action that is appropriate in some non-accidental or non-extrinsic sense. The aim of this dissertation is to articulate the necessary conditions that would need to be satisfied by non-deliberative behaviour in order to count as normatively appropriate action (and, thus, ethically evaluable behaviour) and to explain how some instances of nondeliberative behaviour satisfy these conditions (thus, qualifying as a potential candidate for ethically appropriate action). I proceed by initially appealing to the Aristotelian concept of phronesis, a suggestion inspired by the recent debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell. From this inquiry, I derive certain criteria that would need to be satisfied by an adequate account of the possibility of non-deliberatively appropriate action. Several explanatory strategies might satisfy these conditions. I offer an explanatory account that proposes this it can be best explained in terms of an intimate relationship that holds between perception and action. I call this my Perceptualist Hypothesis. I conclude my enquiry by demonstrating how responsive behaviour satisfies the necessary conditions for non-deliberatively appropriate action, as explained in terms of the Perceptualist Hypothesis, and thereby counts as proper candidate for ethical evaluation and attributions of moral responsibility.