Emotions as prima facie justifications: An epistemological analysis of guilt in relation to eating meat

• Main Author: Abad, Ella Isabel R.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: Meat industry and trade; Emotions; Guilt; Epistemology; Philosophy
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdb_philo/7; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=etdb_philo
• Institution: De La Salle University

Is the experience of guilt enough to give me at least immediate justification for the corresponding moral beliefs that I have formed through guilt? Our emotions are claimed to have an epistemic role to play when we form our moral beliefs. For this reason, such an epistemic role entails that emotions can be sources of prima facie justification for our moral beliefs. However, the same emotion is susceptible to objections. These objections argue that guilt necessitates other reasons which regard the moral emotion as epistemically inaccurate and redundant. Because of this, the experience of guilt does not confer immediate justification. In this paper, I argue against these objections such that I claim that guilt can be a source of prima facie justification for moral beliefs. In support of this, I use J. Adam Carter’s reliabilist framework that focuses on the agent’s emotional competence. Carter’s Emotional Competence View values the epistemic disposition of the agent in forming the corresponding beliefs. In application of my response to the objections and my use of the Emotional Competence View, I further extend my claim to the moral belief, eating meat is wrong, under the light of the Meat Paradox.