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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents an inquiry into the ontological structures of moral experience. It is argued that a study of morality must find its vantage point in certain moods, which fundamentally attune human responsiveness to the force of moral experience.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to illuminate the complex phenomenon of morality, not by inquiring into the essence of the Good, examining moral principles or norms as such (i.e. casting morality in terms of spirit, pure reason, or social fact), nor by reducing morality to a logic of brute nature (i.e. casting morality in terms of biology or neurology), but by focusing phenomenologically on how 'the moral' is concretely experienced. Ethnographically informed by recent anthropological studies of morality, this paper works toward the hypothesis that moral experience is the experience of an overwhelming, yet empty force, which demands of us a response, without delineating the nature that response. In this sense, we might experience being called upon - seemingly out of nowhere - to care for our children, yet the demand in itself leaves us without directions as to how we should concretely act. How can we begin to grasp such an ephemeral force and our responsiveness to it? Inspired by Heidegger, this paper claims that an existential category of mood is quintessential to understanding the experience of being human and thereby also moral experience in particular. Thus, before this force within moral experience is analytically graspable, the existential conditions of our being in the grasp of moral experience must be disclosed - and hence, this paper argues, the question of moral experience becomes a question of mood. This finally opens perspectives for analyzing certain responsive moods (e.g. hopefulness, despair) and their attunement of human responsiveness to the bindingness of moral experience.