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Ethical Intuitionism: a Structural Critique

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Ethical Intuitionism: a Structural Critique J Value Inquiry (2016) 50:631–647 DOI 10.1007/s10790-016-9547-8 Ethical Intuitionism: A Structural Critique Danny Frederick1 Published online: 8 February 2016 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016 1 Introduction Recent years have seen attempts by many philosophers to rehabilitate, with some modifications, a traditional doctrine of ethical intuitionism (henceforward ‘‘intu- itionism’’). Contemporary intuitionists claim that moral knowledge consists of those propositions that are known by intellectual reflection (intuition), by moral observation or by moral emotion, or which are capable of being cogently inferred from propositions which are items of moral knowledge. Some intuitionists, such as Michael Huemer, admit only intuition (of particular or of general propositions) as a non-inferential source of moral knowledge; but others, such as Robert Audi, allow also moral observation and moral emotion. I offer a critique of contemporary intuitionist theories that depends upon their common structure: analysis of the abstract features of the approach show it to be an inadequate account of moral knowledge. I use Huemer and Audi as representative intuitionists. The differences between their views, and between their views and those of other intuitionists, are incidental at the level of generality of my argument. In section 2, I outline the contemporary intuitionist approach to moral knowledge. In sections 3, 4 and 5, I show that the problem of inter-cultural conflict undermines the claims that moral intuition, moral observation and moral emotion, respectively, are sources of non-inferential moral knowledge. I also explain the inadequacy of the intuitionist attempt to solve the problem by invoking bias or intellectual or moral failings. In section 6, I argue that the intuitionist attempt to solve the problem of conflict by attenuating the content of intuitive knowledge does not succeed. It also generates the further problem of explaining how insubstantial & Danny Frederick [email protected]; https://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick 1 Slate House, Hunstan Lane, Old Leake, Boston PE22 9RG, UK 123 632 D. Frederick moral premises can yield substantial moral knowledge. In section 7, I show that intuitionist appeals to analogies with mathematics and with empirical science are unsuccessful in solving that further problem. In section 8, I explain why Huemer’s defence of intuitionism by appeal to the principle of phenomenal conservatism fails. In section 9, I conclude. 2 Intuitionism The general account of moral knowledge offered by intuitionists is along the following lines (the deviations of some intuitionists from this general scheme are immaterial here). Let ‘‘p’’ stand for the expression of an evaluative proposition. If a person, A, knows that p, then, either the proposition represented by ‘‘p’’ can be inferred, cogently, from other knowledge of A,orA has intuitive knowledge that p. Intuitive knowledge is not dependent on inference from other beliefs: it is what seems true to a person independently of arguments for or against it. The sources of intuitive moral knowledge are intellectual reflection (intuition), or moral emotion, or observation of the moral properties of actions or of people. Intuitive moral knowledge is only prima facie justified: it may be overturned by conflicting moral knowledge which has stronger prima facie justification. Such conflicting moral knowledge is either intuitive or it is inferred, ultimately, from intuitive knowledge. The strength of prima facie justification depends upon how clearly the proposition seems true and how well it coheres with other intuitively known propositions, where a collection of propositions is more coherent the more it is systematic and unified and the greater the degree to which some propositions in the collection can explain others. Normally, an intuitive belief with which only a few people agree has weaker prima facie justification than a conflicting intuitive belief which nearly everyone shares. Moral intuitions, emotions or observations should be discounted if they are tainted by bias or by intellectual failings, such as confusion, inattention, distraction or cognitive impairment, or by moral failings, such as amorality or moral insensitivity. There are serious flaws in this account of moral knowledge. Only those which are most relevant here are explained in what follows. 3 Intuition An intuition is a state in which it seems that p, independently of inference, which results from reflection on, or an adequate understanding of, the proposition that p, and which, according to intuitionists, grounds intuitive knowledge that p (Huemer 2005, pp. 99–102, 124–25; Audi 2004, 45–54; 2013, pp. 83–100). It is sometimes objected that intuitions reflect prior beliefs, but according to Huemer: the view that intuitions are or are caused by beliefs fails to explain the origin of our moral beliefs. Undoubtedly some moral beliefs are accounted for by inference from other moral beliefs. But since no moral belief can be derived from wholly non-moral premises, we must start with some moral beliefs that 123 Ethical Intuitionism: A Structural Critique 633 are not inferred from any other beliefs. Where do these starting moral beliefs come from? Do we just adopt them entirely arbitrarily? No; this is not the phenomenology of moral belief. We adopt fundamental moral beliefs because they seem right to us; we don’t select them randomly (2005, p. 103). However, it seems that ‘‘this is not the phenomenology of moral belief’’ either. We do not adopt our starting moral beliefs because they seem right to us; we do not adopt them consciously at all. By the time a person is able to do anything so sophisticated as to consider whether to adopt a moral belief, she has spent years being inducted into a culture in which she has been trained to behave in ways that her immediate community deems acceptable, and to see things largely as her immediate community sees them, and she has been taught, in part by explicit instruction, an elaborate set of evaluative propositions. She has a panoply of moral beliefs that seem obvious to her, independently of any arguments, simply because they have been long induced in her via the varied processes of cultural transmission, often since before she can remember. She has not inferred those beliefs and she has not adopted them because they seem right. She finds that she simply has them. It is those beliefs that generate her initial intuitions, which are therefore cultural or sub-cultural artefacts. Her elders similarly inherited their starting moral views from their elders, though each generation makes modifications to the inherited fabric, which brings about cultural evolution. One might ask: how did our remote ancestors ever arrive at any moral views, if they could not have inferred them from their non-moral views? The answer seems to be that we evolved biologically as creatures with an inborn disposition to develop and use moral concepts (Pinker 2002, pp. 53, 168–69, 242–44), so we interpret the world in evaluative terms. Humans are creatures who expect the world to contain moral rules and who search for them, often mistaking evolved local regularities of behaviour for objective moral rules (Piaget 1929, chapter 7). Huemer objects (2005, pp. 103–104) that our intuitive judgements about real or imagined cases may run counter to previously held moral beliefs, such as act- utilitarianism. He concludes that our intuitions do not simply conform to our moral beliefs and that this gives intuition a role in adjudicating between rival moral theories. However, that reply is vitiated by a failure to distinguish two kinds of moral views. First, there are culturally inherited moral views, which generate our ethical intuitions, which are only in part articulated propositions, being in large part ways of seeing things that people learn from observing and imitating the behaviour of others, and which do not form an integrated system even within the same culture, but contain various internal conflicts (Hayek 1960, pp. 56–65). Second, there are articulated and systematic theories, such as act-utilitarianism, which are typically propounded by reformers who want to replace our culturally inherited views with something they take to be better. It is no surprise that our culturally inherited moral views generate intuitions at variance with the theories of reformers; and it would be pointless or invidious to test such theories against our intuitions. Many of our moral intuitions conflict with those of people from other cultures or sub-cultures, and these conflicting moral views are not always traceable to differences over factual matters (Doris and Stich 2005, pp. 129–37). For example, social-psychological research (Nisbett and Cohen 1996) has revealed that America’s 123 634 D. Frederick South differs from its North in having a strong honour culture which gives rise to people from the South having different moral intuitions to those of people from the North concerning whether violence is appropriate in some types of given (factually identical) situations. Such conflicting intuitions may seem to be equally clear to the people who hold them, though there does not appear to be any objective way of measuring that as yet; and they may also cohere equally well with the other propositions accepted by the respective people. The intuitions may also be widely shared within their respective cultural groups. Such conflicting intuitions appear to have equal strength of ‘‘prima facie justification’’ for their respective adherents, which undermines the intuitionist claim that intuitions ground moral knowledge. It is worth noticing that it is not the fact that moral intuitions are cultural artefacts that undermines their epistemic status. Scientific knowledge is a cultural artefact. Further, it is not the case that conflict between the intuitions of people from different cultures is sufficient to discredit the epistemic status of all the conflicting intuitions. What the conflict between the moral intuitions of people from different cultures does undermine is the claim that moral intuitions are sources of non-inferential moral knowledge.
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