Exploring The Value of Practical Disorientation for Moral Life: Phenomenal Knowledge & Agential Humility

The central thesis of this article is that the potential of practical disorientation to bring about morally beneficial effects is grounded in the phenomenal' what it is like' (WIL)-knowledge of the vulnerability and fallibility of a person's agential capacities. With this, I hope to contribute to the ground-breaking work by Ami Harbin on the value of practical disorientation for moral life. I start with an elaboration of Harbin's understanding of practical disorientation as disrupting resolve that allows us to distinguish more sharply between practical disorientation and other resolve-disrupting phenomena such as doubt or ambivalence. I propose that we understand disorientations as the loss of one's decision-making framework, whereas these other phenomena can be explained as specific conflicts within a person's decision-making framework. Based on the elaborated understanding, I argue that the experience of the loss of one's decision-making framework acquaints a person with the WIL-knowledge of her agency as vulnerable and fallible. This phenomenal knowledge grounds disorientation's potential to bring about morally beneficial effects: without familiarity with the WIL-character of disorienting experiences, we are unable to make informed and accurate simulations of the psychological rich ways others may be affected by and respond to disorienting experiences. I conclude by qualifying the idea that disorientations bring about morally beneficial effects in two ways. First, not all disorienting experiences are on a par, which problematizes the generalization between different disorienting experiences. Second, in order for the morally beneficial effects to come about, a person needs to respond to the obtained WIL- knowledge with what I call agential humility: she needs to recognize her agency as vulnerable and fallible, thereby incorporating this into her working model of what it is like to be an agent.