The normativity of perception and the perception of normativity

Imagine holding a cone of mint chocolate chip ice cream on a hot day. As you eye the ice cream, you see that it’s melting. If you don’t act quickly, you’ll wind up with sticky hands. Now pause this scene and ask yourself, ‘What should I do?’ The answer seems obvious: you should lick the melting ice cream. To say why this answer seems so reasonable, we need to say something about the normativity of perception. Perception, after all, is what tells you that the ice cream is melting. But we might also say something about the perception of normativity. Perception might also tell you that the ice cream calls for a lick. According to this latter story, perception doesn’t just tell you what to believe, it tells you what to do. I defend a version of this story in my dissertation. Ultimately I argue that charged experience is a source of immediate justification for normative beliefs. Such experiences are characterized by a feeling of being called to respond. The melting ice cream, for example, calls for a lick. Drawing upon phenomenological analyses of such cases, I argue that felt calls are reflected in the contents of charged experiences. Charged experiences have normative contents; they present certain considerations as reasons to respond in specific ways. According to this story, the belief that you should lick the melting ice cream is reasonable because charged experience tells you that you have reason to do so. Charged experience is thus a form of normative perception.