Moral Intuitions

A person’s intuitions are the claims they take to be true independently of whether those claims are justified inferentially. And a person’s moral intuitions are those of their intuitions that concern ethical matters. Moral intuitions matter philosophically because they are widely held to be necessary, one way or another, for ethical knowledge. They also matter scientifically insofar as they underpin abilities to produce fast ethical responses.

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Notes

What are moral intuitions?

On this course, a person’s intuitions are the claims they take to be true independently of whether those claims are justified inferentially. And a person’s moral intuitions are simply those of their intuitions that concern ethical matters.

Not everyone adopts this terminological stipulation. According to Sinnott-Armstrong, Young, & Cushman (2010, p. 256): ‘When we refer to moral intuitions, we mean strong, stable, immediate moral beliefs.’ For many purposes such differences are not critical. But note that philosophers sometimes use the term ‘intuition’ in ways that differ drastically. To illustrate, Bedke (2008) offers two ways of characterising what philosophers call intuitions:

’intuitions are understandings of self-evident propositions, where such understanding alone is sufficient for justification’ and ‘intuitions are sui generis seeming states [...] which are like [..] seemings based on sensory experience [...] in the way they justify’ (Bedke, 2008, p. 253).^[1]

Neither of these is a moral intuition for the purposes of this course. (One could coherently maintain that moral intuitions exist in our sense while denying that there are any intuitions in Bedke’s sense.)

As well as moral intuitions, humans have linguistic intuitions and mathematical intuitions. Mathematical intuitions appear to be underpinned by relatively automatic processes which are independent of other mathematical abilities and may also be domain specific. It is possible that the same is true of moral intuitions. But note that we have not assumed this in our characterisation of them (this is a matter for discovery, not stipulation).

Why Are Moral Intuitions of Interest?

There are both philosophical and scientific reasons for interest in moral intuitions.

Philosophically, intuitions are key to a view in ethics called ‘Intuitionism’ whose key tennet is that ‘moral intutions [are] basic sources of evidence’ (Stratton-Lake, 2020, p. footnote~1). Although a minority view, moral intuitionism has recently gained some interesting proponents (Audi, 2015, for example).

Of wider interest, intuitions in philosophy are also essential for reflective equilibrium (Rawls, 1999). Many ethicists regard ‘the method of reflective equilibrium, or a process very similar to it, is the best or most fruitful method of moral inquiry [and] the one that seems most likely to lead to justified moral beliefs’ (McMahan, 2013, p. 111). Later in this course we will consider whether discoveries in moral psychology about intuitions are a good source of objections to the method of reflective equilibrium. This would be a major challenge to much contemporary ethics.

Scientifically, moral intuitions are interesting because of a fundamental feature of all cognition and action, namely speed–accuracy trade-offs. In general, the faster you must respond (or the less energy you can devote to responding), the less accurate you are likely to be (Heitz, 2014).^[2] Since humans, like all animals, often stand to gain more from responding faster, and since they have historically had limited resources of energy, it is often advantageous for them to trade away accuracy in order to gain speed. Moral intuitions are important because they enable faster responses.

Our Question

In the first part of the course, we will focus on a single question:

How, if at all, do emotions influence moral intutions?

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Endnotes