Sophie-Grace Chappell

She wrote against the systematic ambitions of contemporary moral philosophy to be capable to define "the whole and exclusive truth about the justification, explanation, evaluation, and prescription of moral beliefs, and to contain the materials for displacing or refuting most or all other systematic moral theories." Doing so, she coupled with the theories of Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre and Ludwig Wittgenstein.[2]

She theorized a new definition of the human personhood, ispired to the gender role theory. She criticized the traditional definition of a man and of a woman which was based on antenatal biological traits, arguing that the sexual forms of human individuals can be used to identify human animals, but not the human personhood.[3] This point of view affects the Aristotelian definition of the human being as a political animal, as well as the Christian notion of Natural moral law,[4] at least for its aspects which could be differentiated from a sexual perspective.

Chappell introduced a distinction between passive and immediate moral perceptions vs active and steb-by-step moral inferences, stating the human actions are mainly taken on the basis of ethical intuitions which are deprived of a logical justification or don't have it at the time in which they had been implemented. Like sense perceptions, the moral perceptions are vivid or subjectively perceived as being certain, whilst the moral inferences can be independent of their respective phenomenology or vividness.[5] Even some judgments can be assumed as moral perceptions because they are "obviously true", self-evident and more certain than any rational argument found pros or cons them. An example could be the following statement: "at least in nearly all conceivable cases, it is seriously wrong to torture, theft, rape and murder."[6] In such cases, rational arguments result unnecessary, if not unesuful.

In a 2005 paper on the Theaetetus, she found the definition of episteme in other five platonic dialogues, declaring the Plato's work had a positive result in the identification of the human possible knowledge with a judgment (in Greek: doxa) supported by a rational argument of justification (logos).[7] As shown previously, moral perceptions not always need a rational argument to be justified.

• Moral perception, in Philosophy, 83 (4):421-437 (2008)
• Ethics Beyond Moral Theory, in Philosophical Investigations, 32 (3):206-243 (2009)
• Varieties of Knowledge in Plato and Aristotle, in Topoi, 31: 175–190(2012)

• "The Open University, Philosophy, Faculty page".
• "Research profile on PhilPapers".