Rescuing Ethical Intuitionism from Disagreements [revised version] (original) (raw)
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Moral Intuitionism and Disagreement
Synthese, 2014
According to moral intuitionism, at least some moral seeming states are justification-conferring. The primary defense of this view currently comes from advocates of the standard account, who take the justification-conferring power of a moral seeming to be determined by its phenomenological credentials alone. However, the standard account is vulnerable to a problem. In brief, the standard account implies that moral knowledge is seriously undermined by those commonplace moral disagreements in which both agents have equally good phenomenological credentials supporting their disputed moral beliefs. However, it is implausible to think that commonplace disagreement seriously undermines moral knowledge, and thus it is implausible to think that the standard account of moral intuitionism is true.
A Critique of Ethical Intuitionism as the Foundation of Knowledge
2016
Scholars claim that there are different sources of knowledge. These sources have come to be thought of as foundations for knowledge. Cognitivists are not united on the foundation of knowledge but they agree that knowledge is possible as against the skeptics. Intuitionism is a cognitive theory which states that knowledge is attainable through the mental faculty of intuition. Our concern in this paper centres on what might be called ethical intuitionism. Although there are variants of this theory, intuitionists believe that there are objective moral facts which are self-evident or known through intuition. In this form, it has been classified as ethical non-naturalism because it does not depend on empirical verification of its principles or truths. We shall argue that there are serious objections to ethical intuitionism. Moreover, we shall show that ethical intuitionism does not take cognizance of important findings in psychology and biology regarding human dispositions which are capab...
2016
Works Read……………………………………………………………………………………...51 to which they satisfy these properties, regardless of a person's psychological framework. The validity of logical axioms, for instance, is not compromised by a person's inaptitude in recognizing that validity. Rather, axioms are intrinsically valid, independent of one's attitude to them. The monistic perception of the world that naturalism embraces creates another perplexing problem with the ethical theory: it does not seem particularly moral. Naturalists argue that people should behave in ways that satisfy certain natural criteria. Yet, it is unclear where this moral imperative comes from. For example, if good is defined as pleasure, it is unclear how the Audi, Robert. The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value.
Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, 2012
The notion of 'intuition' is usually contrasted with rational thought, thus motivating a differentiation between two kinds of processes that are supposed to characterize human thinking, i.e. rational and 'intuitive' (immediate and non-argumentative) forms of judgment. Recently, the notion of intuition has also played a leading role in cognitive studies on morality with the rise of so-called social intuitionism, according to which people's moral stances are culturally driven intuitions -i.e. they are quick, involuntary and automatic responses driven by culturally and socially acquired principles (see e.g.
Challenges to Audi's ethical intuitionism
Ethical theory and moral practice, 1999
Robert Audi's ethical intuitionism deals effectively with standard epistemological problems facing the intuitionist. This is primarily because the notion of self-evidence employed by Audi commits to very little. Importantly, according to Audi we might understand a self-evident moral proposition and yet not believe it, and we might accept a self-evident proposition because it is self-evident, and yet fail to see that it is self-evident. I argue that these and similar features give rise to certain challenges to Audi's intuitionism. It becomes harder to argue that there are any self-evident propositions at all, or more than just a few such propositions. It is questionable whether all moral propositions that we take an interest in are evidentially connected to self-evident propositions. It is difficult to understand what could guide the sort conceptual revision that is likely to take place in our moral theorising. It is hard to account for the epistemic value of the sort of systematicity usually praised in moral theorising. Finally, it is difficult to see what difference the truth of Audi's ethical intuitionism would make to the way in which we (fail to) handle moral disagreement.
2020
While intuitions have always played an important role in philosophy, more recent developments have called into question their reliability and, consequentially, their use in moral inquiry. Hence, my goal in this paper is to answer three questions: (1) whether we can use intuitions in moral inquiry, (2) how we can figure out which of our intuitions are reliable, and (3) how we can utilize our intuitions to find moral knowledge.
Moral Intuitions, Reliability, and Disagreement. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy.
There is an ancient, yet still lively, debate in moral epistemology about the epistemic significance of disagreement. One of the important questions in that debate is whether, and to what extent, the prevalence and persistence of disagreement between our moral intuitions cause problems for those who seek to rely on intuitions in order to make moral decisions, issue moral judgments and craft moral theories. Meanwhile, in general epistemology, there is a relatively young, and very lively, debate about the epistemic significance of disagreement. A central question in that debate concerns peer disagreement: When I am confronted with an epistemic peer with whom I disagree, how should my confidence in my beliefs change (if at all)? The disagreement debate in moral epistemology has not been brought into much contact with the disagreement debate in general epistemology (though McGrath [2007] is an important exception). A purpose of this paper is to increase the area of contact between these two debates. In Section 1, I try to clarify the question I want to ask in this paper – this is the question whether we have any reasons to believe what I shall call “anti- intuitivism.” In Section 2, I argue that anti-intuitivism cannot be supported solely by investigating the mechanisms that produce our intuitions. In Section 3, I discuss an anti-intuitivist argument from disagreement which relies on the so-called “Equal Weight View.” In Section 4, I pause to clarify the notion of epistemic parity and to explain how it ought to be understood in the epistemology of moral intuition. In Section 5, I return to the anti-intuitivist argument from disagreement and explain how an apparently vulnerable premise of that argument may be quite resilient. In Section 6, I introduce a novel objection against the Equal Weight View in order to show how I think we can successfully resist the anti-intuitivist argument from disagreement.