PhD DISSERTATIONS OF NORTHWESTERN ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY CONSORTIUM – FINO Self-evidence in Ethics. From Intuitions to Emotions Fabio Mancini 2018 Examination Committee/Commissione di esame: prof. Carla Bagnoli prof. Sergio Filippo Magni prof. Fabrice Teroni The copyright of this Dissertation rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. End User Agreement This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No- Derivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nd/4.0/legalcode You are free to share, to copy, distribute and transmit the work under the following conditions: • Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). • Non-Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. • No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work, without proper citation and acknowledgement of the source. In case the dissertation would have found to infringe the polity of plagiarism it will be immediately expunged from the site of FINO Doctoral Consortium CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ......................................................................... 6 1. SELF-EVIDENCE AND INTUITIONISM 1.1 Framing the issue .............................................................. 11 1.2 What is ethical intuitionism............................................... 17 1.3 Intuitions and self-evidence in ethical intuitionism .......... 22 1.3.1 Sidgwick’s conditions on intuition and self-evidence.... 22 1.3.2 Moore, self-evidence and intrinsic good ........................ 27 1.3.3 Prichard, self-evidence and the error of philosophy ...... 33 1.3.4 W. D. Ross: self-evidence and actual duty..................... 36 1.4 The nature of self-evidence ............................................... 41 1.4.1What are self-evident propositions .................................. 45 1.4.2 Self-evidence and apriori in the moral domain .............. 47 1.5 Self-evidence and fallibility .............................................. 51 1.6 Reducing intuition to self-evidence................................... 55 1.7 Conclusion ......................................................................... 59 2. A STRONG TIE BETWEEN SELF-EVIDENCE AND INTUITIONS 2.1 Framing the issue .............................................................. 60 2.2 The authority of intuitions ................................................. 63 2.2.1 Intuitions and self-evidence ........................................... 70 2.3 Theories of intuitions ........................................................ 76 2.3.1 Intuitions as beliefs......................................................... 76 2.3.2 Intuitions as intellectual seemings.................................. 80 2.4 Understanding and knowing.............................................. 86 2.5 The double nature if intuitions .......................................... 89 2.6 Conclusion ......................................................................... 91 3. OBJECTIONS TO SELF-EVIDENCE IN ETHICS 3.1 Framing the issue .............................................................. 92 3.2 The objection of relativity ................................................. 93 3.3 The objection of disagreement .......................................... 96 3.4 The objection of moral motivation .................................. 103 3.4.1 Nowell-Smith, Mackie and moral motivation .............. 104 3 3.4.2 Constructivist objections: Rawls and Koorsgaard ....... 111 3.4.3 Darwall on intuitionism and motivation....................... 114 3.5 An emotivist argument against self-evidence ................. 121 4. SELF-EVIDENCE AND COMMON SENSE MORALITY 4.1Framing the issue ............................................................. 125 4.2 Sidgwick, common sense morality and self-evidence .... 130 4.3 Common sense as moral expert ....................................... 138 4.4 Dispositional intuitions and default reasonable beliefs ... 142 4.5 Entitlement and self-evident principles of morality ........ 145 4.6 Conclusion ....................................................................... 154 5. EMOTIONS AND THE APRIORI 5.1 Framing the issue ............................................................ 155 5.2Williams on emotions and understanding ........................ 164 5.3 Emotions and understanding self-evident propositions .. 167 5.4 Emotions and Knowledge ............................................... 174 5.4.1From intuitions to emotions .......................................... 175 5.4.1 Emotions and seemings ................................................ 183 5.5. Emotional entitlement and self-evident propositions ..... 189 5.6 Conclusion ....................................................................... 191 Concluding remarks ............................................................ 192 References ............................................................................ 195 4 Acknowledgements I would like to express my appreciation and gratitude to my supervisor, professor Luca Fonnesu. I would have neither started this project without his initial inputs, nor I would have finished it without the ideal combination of competence, trust and freedom which he has provided. I want to thank all the members of the Department of Humanities of University of Pavia. For insightful exchanges, I am grateful to professor Sergio Filippo Magni and to professor Tommaso Piazza. I have also benefited from fruitful discussions with my PhD colleagues - too many to be listed – and from the excellent collaboration of the offices of the Department of Humanities of University of Pavia. Last but not least, professor Carlo Penco, coordinator of the FINO-Consortium, has provided precious organizational support during the final phase of the course. I owe a special debt to professor Fabrice Teroni - I will be always grateful to him for insights and for the feedbacks -, to professor Julien Deonna and to all participants of the Thumos Seminar at the University of Geneva. I wish to thank Professor Robert Audi that I was lucky to meet both in Rome and in South Bend, Indiana, during my visit at the University of Notre Dame. My huge debt toward him is evident throughout the research. I am also very grateful to Professor Paolo Pagani, to Professor Carmelo Vigna and to all the members of the CISE seminars of the University of Venice, from whom I learned more than what they could imagine. During the second and the third year of my Ph.D. program, I had the incredible opportunity of taking part in the activities of the Swiss Centre interdisciplinaire of sciences affectives (CISA) as associate member. I learned a lot not only from philosophers but from scholars of more or less related fields as well. More personally, I am grateful to all my family, parents, in-laws and friends who have supported me during these years. I want to dedicate this work to my wife Flavia – only those whose partner has written a PhD-thesis know how much patience and support are needed - and to my son Bernardo – born during the final stages of the writing of the dissertation. Domodossola-Pavia, September 2018 5 Introduction “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. The opening lines of the United States Declaration of Independence, approved by the Congress on the 4th of July 1776, emphatically affirm that the spirt of the Declaration is based on self-evident truths. In an article published on 5 July 2016 in The Washington Post two hundred forty years later, John Inazu, professor of law at the Washington University in St. Louis, claims that we disagree today on these self-evident truths, as we did when the Declaration was approved. He contrasts the optimistic assertion of the Declaration with the current problems that the USA faces – that concern, for instance, the role of religion in the public life as much as the value of the life and of liberty – and that undermine the claim to an agreement on the underpinnings of the State. ‘How should we approach these challenges when we think about being a nation joined together by “self-evident” truths?’ wonders Inazu – ‘our lack of agreement about […] Equality, Liberty, and Happiness raises significant challenges for how we identify and prioritize our common interests and shared goals’. Following the article, we can conclude that the problem for those who appeal to self-evidence is that the existence of self-evident truths is not itself self-evident. The problem of self-evidence in ethics, a topic of much discussion in contemporary moral philosophy, is the issue with which I will deal in the present work. Specifically, I will analyze and discuss the relationship between self-evidence – to be understood as a property of propositions– and intuitions – to be understood as mental sates by which those propositions are apprehended. According to a long-standing philosophical tradition, intuitions are major routes to self-evidence. A great variety of articles and books has been published on the topic and the attention paid to intuitions and self- evidence, together and separately, has grown over the past few decades. Nonetheless, much work in this direction is still needed. The importance of the topic