Merleau-Ponty, Moral Perception, and Metaethical Internalism

Two of the most basic commitments of virtue ethics, both ancient and contemporary, are that virtue is knowledge and that this knowledge is a kind of moral sensitivity that is best understood on the model of perception. This view is vulnerable to two potentially very serious objections, both of which concern virtue ethics' commitment to metaethical internalism, which holds that judgments of the form "x is right" entail some kind of motivation to do x. I argue in this paper that we can find the resources to respond adequately to these objections in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception.