In Defense of Epistemic Perceptualism

Epistemic perceptualism is the view that emotions provide immediate prima facie justification for evaluative beliefs. I defend this view against recent criticism by Michael Brady. I address two of his arguments in particular: what I have termed the Proxy and Symmetry Arguments. According to the former, emotions are only proxy reasons. They can stand in for genuine reasons, but they lack justificatory force of their own. This objection fails, I argue, because it assumes that proxy reasons can always be rendered epistemically superfluous in light of other reasons. I show that this is not always true, and in particular that it is not true of emotions. Far from being superfluous, emotions appear to play an important epistemic role: to independently verify the veracity of our evaluative judgments. Finally, I show that the Symmetry Argument is sound only if Brady’s account of proxy reasons is generally correct.