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Moral Intuition and Methods in Normative Political Theory Moral Intuition and Methods in Normative Political Theory Sebastian Johansen Conte Master’s thesis, Department of Political Science UNIVERSITY OF OSLO May, 2017 II Moral Intuition and Methods in Normative Political Theory SEBASTIAN JOHANSEN CONTE III © Sebastian Johansen Conte 2017 Moral Intuition and Methods in Normative Political Theory Sebastian Johansen Conte http://www.duo.uio.no/ Print: CopyCat Word count: 48669 IV Abstract The subject matter of this thesis is methods in normative political theory (and moral philosophy more generally) and moral intuitions. I am concerned with two set of questions, where the former set is implied by the latter. First, I aim to clarify the concept of intuition. Intuition may be studied philosophically and empirically. With the emergence of experimental philosophy it has become common to inform the philosophical debate with findings from empirical studies. Therefore, I ask the following questions: Are those who approach the question of what intuitions are philosophically and those who approach it empirically studying the same phenomenon when they study intuitions? (For simplicity I refer to the members of the latter group as psychologists.) And if yes, do they differ with regard to how they understand this phenomenon? I argue that philosophers and psychologists agree on where intuitions are to be found, but not on how to understand the phenomenon. The second set of questions is the following: How do Rawls, Kamm, and Singer’s methods differ in their view on the justificatory role of intuition? And what kinds of intuitions, if any, have a justificatory role? I argue that Rawls, Singer, and Kamm differ in their view on what kind of intuitions are relevant for the process of justifying moral theories, and that they differ in their view of what kind of process is necessary for making intuitions ultima facie justified. Moreover, I argue that the methods imply different models for justification. V VI Acknowledgements There are many who have provided help and advice in the process of writing this thesis and that I owe a great debt of gratitude to. First, I want to thank my supervisor, Raino Malnes, for helping me shape this thesis, and not least for helping me shape my thoughts on the issues I discuss in it. If it had not been for him, this thesis could have ended up with the title All Sebastian read the last year attending the MA-program in political science. A mishmash of different issues that it is hard to see how they relate to each other. That thesis would probably be even longer than this thesis and quite painful to read. I would also like to thank Robert Huseby and the other participants in the design seminar in political theory for comments on an earlier sketch, thus helping me shape the purpose of this thesis. Special thanks to Kim Angell who first introduced me to the subject. My discussions with Kim have helped me achieve a better understanding of many of the issues I discuss in this thesis. I will also thank my fellow students. These two years would not have been the same without them. Finally, I want to thank Inés for her patience and steadfast support. Oslo, May 2017. VII VIII Table of Contents 1 Introduction: purpose and central questions ....................................................................... 1 2 Three methods: Rawls, Kamm, and Singer ........................................................................ 7 2.1 Rawls: The method of reflective equilibrium .............................................................. 9 2.1.1 Considered judgments ........................................................................................ 10 2.1.2 Justification ........................................................................................................ 12 2.1.3 Wide and narrow reflective equilibrium ............................................................ 19 2.1.4 Summary of the method of reflective equilibrium ............................................. 22 2.2 Kamm and Singer’s methods ..................................................................................... 22 3 What are intuitions? ......................................................................................................... 28 3.1 Philosophy and intuitions .......................................................................................... 31 3.2 Psychology and intuitions .......................................................................................... 43 3.3 The practical approach and complementary roles ..................................................... 51 3.4 The theoretical approach and the intuition/reasoning distinction .............................. 55 4 Different kinds of intuition ............................................................................................... 65 4.1 Confidence ................................................................................................................. 65 4.2 Commonality: among laymen, experts, or both? ....................................................... 66 4.3 Practical or theoretical? ............................................................................................. 70 4.4 Robustness ................................................................................................................. 72 4.5 Genuine or non-genuine? ........................................................................................... 76 4.6 A taxonomy of intuitions ........................................................................................... 78 5 Different methods and the justificatory role of intuitions ................................................ 84 5.1 Rawls and considered judgments .............................................................................. 85 5.2 Singer and intuitions .................................................................................................. 87 5.3 Kamm and intuitions ................................................................................................. 90 5.4 The justificatory role of intuition ............................................................................... 98 6 Discussion and concluding remarks ............................................................................... 105 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 110 Table 1: A preliminary tabular representation of the three methodological positions ............. 27 Table 2: A taxonomy of intuitions ........................................................................................... 79 Table 3: A tabular representation of the three methodological positions .............................. 104 IX X 1 Introduction: purpose and central questions Contemporary normative political theory addresses questions such as “How ought we to organize our society?” Such questions are normative, and thus call for answers, often formulated as principles or theories, whose content is evaluative. John Rawls is often considered a pioneer in this discipline (List & Valentini 2016: 526). In his famous work A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1999), he set the stage for a comprehensive and ongoing debate about what justice is. But how do we proceed when we are supposed to answer questions such as “What is justice?” And what sources of evidence can we look to when we assess these questions? Let us take the latter question first. Oftentimes, the answer to this question involves some reliance upon intuitions. While intuitions seemingly have played an important role in philosophy, and therefore normative political theory and moral philosophy in general, some have worried there has not been enough attention paid to the practice of relying on intuitions, or, to be more precise, the intuitions we have in specific cases (or thought experiments, as they sometimes are referred to). Jonathan Weinberg (2016: 287-288), for example, expresses this worry: Disturbingly, one can find little to no explicit manualization of proper intuitive practice in print. In other disciplines, important methods are frequently the subjects of manuals, textbooks, and so on, and graduate programs in those disciplines may require one or more courses in methodology to provide the requisite training in the nuts-and-bolts of those research tools. In our own field of philosophy, we can contrast the fairly complete absence of any codified, trainable procedures of intuition deployment and their corresponding absence from our explicit training, with the existence of numerous textbooks in various formal methods, and the nearly universal requirement of at least one graduate 1 course in logic across PhD-granting programs in the English-speaking philosophical world. There are two underlying issues we can discern from what Weinberg writes. First, we need to know what evidential status intuitions have. Second, if intuitions are to be given evidential weight, we need to know what the proper way of eliciting them is in order to ensure they are reliable or relevant for testing theories’ external validity. Despite the worries of Weinberg, methodological issues concerning the intuitive practice are widely discussed. The first issue in particular has been given growing attention with the emergence of experimental philosophy (Alfano & Loeb 2016; Liao 2016a: 2; Pust 2016 section 4). The projects of experimental philosophy involve considering the epistemic status of intuition in light of empirical evidence. Sometimes the implications of
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