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This Is a Repository Copy of Scepticism About Intuition This is a repository copy of Scepticism about Intuition. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/99015/ Version: Accepted Version Book Section: Lenman, J.W. (2015) Scepticism about Intuition. In: Chappell, S.G., (ed.) Intuition, Theory and Anti-Theory in Ethics. Mind Association Occasional series . Oxford University Press , pp. 24-39. ISBN 9780198713227 Reuse Unless indicated otherwise, fulltext items are protected by copyright with all rights reserved. The copyright exception in section 29 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 allows the making of a single copy solely for the purpose of non-commercial research or private study within the limits of fair dealing. The publisher or other rights-holder may allow further reproduction and re-use of this version - refer to the White Rose Research Online record for this item. Where records identify the publisher as the copyright holder, users can verify any specific terms of use on the publisher’s website. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ 1 Scepticism about Intuition1 Note. This is a late draft of the paper of the same title published in Sophie-Grace Chappell (ed): Intuition, Theory and Anti-Theory in Ethics (OUP, 2015) If quoting or citing please make check and make reference to the final published version. James Lenman Anyone who has ever tried to teach moral philosophy to a class of undergraduates knows how slippery talk of intuitions and intuitionism can be. Thus, as we all know, John Rawls in Political Liberalism defends what he calls political constructivism in opposition to a view that he characterizes as rational intuitionism and which he rejects.2 At the same time Rawls’ critics, most notably in this regard R. M. Hare3, have castigated him for his disreputable intuitionism. Sometimes intuitionism refers to a fully fledged metaethical doctrine, paradigmatically represented by G. E. Moore and W. D. Ross, of robust nonnaturalistic realism. This is the intuitionism Rawls and Hare agree in repudiating. Sometimes it means something more modest, a take on moral epistemology which accepts the inescapable reliance of our moral thought on appeal, at some level, to moral intuitions, where this more specifically methodological intuitionism does not, by itself, commit one to any more particular metaethical view and can be made compatible with naturalistic realism or expessivism no less than with Moore-Ross style nonnaturalism. The result is a rather complicated dictionary entry; small wonder some students get confused. Intuitionism in the stronger sense has taken plenty of beatings over the years but even in the more modest and methodological sense it has no shortage of detractors. Many more recent critics of the latter are either exponents or enthusiasts of the currently trend for “experimental ethics”. Thus Kwame Anthony Appiah devotes a chapter of his book Experiments in Ethics to describing and discussing what that chapter’s title calls “The Case Against Intuition”.4 Much of this paper be addressed to some aspects of that supposed case (though with no particular focus upon Appiah’s account of it). Rawls is the man who gave us the sophisticated version of methodological intuitionism that goes by the name of the method of reflective equilibrium.5 Of course he was not the originator of the idea but adapted it from a view Nelson Goodman had already articulated in discussing the methodology of mathematics and logic.6 Wherever we apply it we should be wary of understanding it in ways that accord an implausible level of authority to the raw and untutored gut reactions of the folk. The 1 I am grateful to audiences at the Edinburgh conference on Intuition, Theory and Anti-Theory in Ethcs and to the Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar for helpful questions. 2 Rawls 1993, lecture III. 3 Hare 1989. 4 Appiah 2008, chapter 3. 5 See esp. his 1972, §§4, 9 and 87. 6 Goodman 1965. 2 currency of reflective equilibrium is considered judgements and these are very different things from gut reactions, things that need be neither raw nor untutored.7 Fiddle here with a famous example.8 Suppose you know only one thing of me. You know: Lenman is a member of the Ramblers' Association. Now suppose you are asked to rank a bunch of propositions about me in order of probability in the light of this one thing you know. And suppose these propositions include: Lenman is a philosopher. And Lenman is a philosopher and he goes for regular country walks. Now the obvious relevance of the one thing you know to the latter proposition but not the former is liable to trick many of you into assigning it the higher probability of the two. Though perhaps not so many now that the experiment that uncovered this irrational disposition is so famous. And of course you would be irrational given that, as a short tutorial in basic probability theory (think about it, draw some Venn diagrams) would quickly convince you if you needed convincing, a conjunction cannot be more probable than one of its conjuncts. But of course this is no objection to the method of reflective equilibrium but simply an exercise in it. For the only sorts of intuitions that carry much weight in this method are those that are stably survive critical scrutiny and this sort of non-rational intuition about probability does not. Not at least if we are to understand critical scrutiny, as we certainly should, as including, for example, short tutorials in basic probability theory, short tutorials in which again appeal is made to intuitions that we hope will be more robust. But my focus here is not with the status or authority of intuitions in maths or metaphysics, say, but simply in ethics. Here the issues seem urgent as reliance on intuitions, and in particular on specifically moral intuitions, seems so thoroughly inescapable that it can seem a short route from scepticism about intuition to a quite general scepticism about ethics in general. Some philosophers have thought we could derive the content of ethics and morality from certain very thin norms of rationality, in some cases perhaps simple consistency, as in Hare’s claim that the thing could be pulled off relying on nothing more than, as he famously put it, “logic and the facts”9. Given this confidence Hare could comfortably condemn methodological intuitionism as simple “argument from received opinion”. For the rest of us, who lack Hare’s 7 This point is emphasized is Kaupinnen 2007 (though Kaupinnen is concerned primarily with specifically linguistic intuitions). Cf. Lenman 2007, pp. 63-64. 8 Tversky and Kahneman 1983. Offered as a source of concern for reflective equilibrium accounts of justification in Stich 1990, section 1.2. 9 Hare 1981, pp. 6,101ff 3 confidence in the possibility of credible alternatives, it’s hard to see how, without some trust in what he called received opinion, we are to argue at all. The point is not always well taken. Thus Peter Singer in his paper “Ethics and Intuitions” attacks methodological intuitionism in favour of what he considers a “more reasoned” utilitarian approach to ethics. He then writes: It might be said that the response that I have called “more reasoned” is still based on an intuition, for example the intuition that five deaths are worse than one, or more fundamentally, the intuition that it is a bad thing if a person is killed. But if this is an intuition it is different from the intuitions to which Haidt and Greene [in writings Singer has been drawing on] refer. We have already noted Hume’s observation that “There is no such passion in human minds as the love of mankind, merely as such” and, as we have seen, there is good evolutionary reason for why this should be so. Thus the “intuition” that tells us that the death of one person is a lesser tragedy than the death of five is not like the intuitions that tell us [in the trolley problem] that we may throw the switch, but not push the stranger off the footbridge. It may be closer to the truth to say that it is a rational intuitions, something like the three “ethical axioms” or “intuitive propositions of real clearness and certainty” to which Henry Sidgwick appeals in his defense of utilitarianism in The Method of Ethics.10 One is reminded of the irregular verbs so beloved of Bernard Woolley in Yes Minister.11 He has gut reactions. You make unsupported appeals to intuitions. I reply only on ethical axioms of real clearness and certainty. Perhaps the thought is that the intuitions that ground Singer’s utilitarianism are just more intuitively compelling or more robust under critical scrutiny than the more deontological intuitions that make us so scrupulous about pushing fat men off bridges. But that again is not a critique of methodological intuitionism so much as an exercise in it, just as when the intuitions that support such basic mathematical facts as that a conjunction cannot be more likely than one of its conjuncts seem compelling and robust enough to outweigh any disposition we may have to make intuitive judgements that conflict with them.12 10 Singer 2005, pp. 350-351. For valuable critiques of what Singer says this paper see Sandberg and Juth 2011, Berker 2009 11 “I have an independent mind, you are an eccentric, he is round the twist.” (One of Us, Yes, Prime Minister, series 1, first broadcast 27th February, 1986); “I give confidential briefings, you leak, he's being charged under section 2A of the Official Secrets Act.” (Man Overboard, Yes, Prime Minister, series 2, first broadcast 3rd December, 1987).
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