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Thesis Strong moral intuitions count as evidence, in the same way that perceptions count as evidence

Aoife Kilbride Fellow
· 6 replies
Meta-ethicsAnalyticIndianMedieval ChristianMimamsaJonathan HaidtPeter SingerW. D. Ross#debunking#intuitionism#moral-evidence#moral-intuition
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Where it stands

In my ethics seminar we were told that appealing to intuitions is unscientific: they are just gut feelings shaped by upbringing. I want to argue the opposite.

W. D. Ross, in The Right and the Good (1930), compared the considered moral convictions of thoughtful people to sense-perceptions in science. They are the data. Theories must answer to them, and a theory that conflicts with very many of them has a problem, not the data.

Here is my case.

  1. Perception can mislead, and we have well-known illusions. We do not conclude that perception is no evidence. We conclude that it is defeasible evidence: trustworthy until there is reason to doubt it in a particular case.
  2. The same should hold for strong, stable, widely shared moral intuitions, like the conviction that torturing a child for fun is wrong. They are defeasible, but they are evidence.
  3. Every argument against trusting intuitions has to start from premises that seem true, which is to say, from intuitions. A total scepticism about them undermines itself.

I am not defending every hunch. Intuitions formed in anger, or that conveniently favour the person having them, deserve suspicion. But the default should be trust, with the burden on the doubter.

I expect pushback from people who know the psychology better than I do.

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6 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Meera Kulkarni

    For Fellow

    The Indian epistemologists had exactly this argument, about cognition in general. The Mīmāṃsakas held that every cognition is intrinsically valid: it is to be trusted until a defeater shows up, either a contradicting cognition or a defect in its source. The Naiyāyikas held that validity has to be established from outside, by checking. Aoife is a Mīmāṃsaka about intuitions; Priya and Arvind are Naiyāyikas. Both sides have a good argument, and the Mīmāṃsā reply to the Naiyāyika is close to Aoife's point 3: the checking must itself be trusted, or the regress never ends.

    Helpful · 1
    1. Aoife Kilbride

      Fellow

      Meera's framing is exactly what I was groping for: I am arguing for intrinsic validity with defeaters. I concede to Priya and Arvind that some intuitions have specific defeaters, such as being sensitive to features like physical closeness that look morally irrelevant on reflection. That is a reason to discard those, not intuitions as a class. And Elif's last line is the one I will take to my seminar: fast is not the same as blind.

  2. Ikechukwu Anyanwu

    For Fellow

    Aquinas would put it in terms of first principles. The most basic precepts of practical reason are self-evident, known as a healthy mind knows the first principles of logic, and they are not reached by argument. Singer's debunking works, if it works, on the derived and particular judgements about trolleys and footbridges. It is much harder to debunk “do good and avoid evil”, and every theory, Singer's included, relies on something like it.

    Helpful · 2

Against the thesis 2

  1. Priya Raghavan

    Against Fellow

    The psychology is the problem, Aoife. Jonathan Haidt's work on what he called moral dumbfounding found people who condemned harmless taboo acts and kept condemning them after every reason they offered was knocked down. That looks less like perceiving a moral fact and more like an emotional reaction with reasons manufactured afterwards. Perception does not usually behave like that: when you show me the lines are equal, I stop believing they are unequal, even if they still look unequal.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Arvind Poojary

    Against Fellow

    And it is worse for the trolley-type intuitions philosophers actually rely on. Peter Singer has argued, drawing on Joshua Greene's brain-imaging studies, that many deontological intuitions are fast emotional responses tuned to up-close, personal harm, the kind our ancestors encountered, and that we have no reason to think they track moral truth in modern cases. Evidence should come from a process that tracks the truth. Evolved squeamishness does not obviously qualify.

Other replies

  1. Elif Yıldız

    Fellow

    Trying to be fair to both. Dumbfounding studies have had replication trouble and critics argue the participants often had reasons they could not articulate in the lab. Greene's original findings have also been revised. So the data against intuitions are less solid than the strongest critics claim. But the general picture, that much moral judgement is fast and affective, has held up. The question is whether fast and affective means unreliable. Perception is fast too.

    Helpful · 3