Question Session 02

There are no question sessions this year, but some of the notes from previous years are still relevant. These are included here.

Notes

Direct Insight: Hannah’s Question

Hannah asks, What 'direct insight' are other philosophers claiming to have into moral properties?

This question is about Sinnott-Armstrong, Young, & Cushman (2010, p. 268)’s rejection of direct insight.

Those authors mention Stratton-Lake (2002). I’m unsure exactly what they have in mind here as that’s an edited collection with 12 chapters, but the introduction highlights something called epistemological intuitionism:

‘Epistemological intuitionism is the view that certain moral propositions are self-evident—that is, can be know solely on the basis of an adequate understanding of them—and thus can be known directly by intuition’ (Stratton-Lake, 2002, p. 2).

As this book is not easily available (although you can ask the library to scan a chapter for you), I suggest considering Audi (2015), which contains the following claims:

‘Intuition is a resource in all of philosophy, but perhaps nowhere more than in ethics‘ (p. 57).

‘Episodic intuitions [...] can serve as data [...] ... beliefs that derive from them receive prima facie justification’ (p. 65).

‘self-evident propositions are truths meeting two conditions: (1) in virtue of adequately understanding them, one has justification for believing them [...]; and (2) believing them on the basis of adequately understanding them entails knowing them’ (p. 65).

Paul Theo suggested a further way of thinking about ‘direct insight’ (thank you!):

‘I think the other dominant way to justify direct insight (besides self-evidence views) would be the seeming state theory of intuition, which draws analogies between sense perception and moral intuition, and claims that both share a prima facie positive epistemic status.’ See Pust (2019, p. §1.3).

Although I don’t propose to consider such views in these lectures, you could reasonably consider them as part of your work for the course.

Defending Consequentialism: Jagoda’s Second Question

Jagoda asks how accepting the hypothesis that the Affect Heuristic explains moral intuitions could be part of a defence of consequentialism. (This relates to Why Is the Affect Heuristic Significant?.)

Baldouin offers a quote that is relevant to this question:

‘Critics often argue that consequentialism can’t be accurate, because it implies moral judgments that are counter-intuitive, such as that we are morally permitted to punish an innocent person in the well-known example where this is necessary to stop riots and prevent deaths. With the heuristic model in hand, consequentialists can respond that the target attribute is having the best consequences, and any intuitions to the contrary result from substituting a heuristic attribute’ (Sinnott-Armstrong et al., 2010, p. 269).

As Baldouin notes, the suggestion is that the hypothesis about the Affect Heuristic can play a role in responding to some objections to consequentialism. As far as I know, neither Sinnott-Armstrong et al. (2010) nor others are suggesting that there is a role for this hypothesis in establishing, positively, that consequentialism is true.

Glossary

References

Endnotes