On moral intuition
James Corben
Moral intuitions play a crucial part in our understanding of moral knowledge. While they should not be taken as infallible insights into objective moral knowledge, we can ‘ trust ’ them insofar as they make up part of our wider system of ethical evaluation, which John Rawls called ‘ reflective equilibrium ’ . 1 This thesis will be advanced by examining what exactly moral intuitions are, and by arguing that moral intuitions should essentially be considered in the same way as any other intuition, through an analogy with aesthetic intuitions. The concept of reflective equilibrium will then be explored, leading to the conclusion that we should be wary of moral intuitions on their own, but that they are vital for the process of reflective equilibrium. Whether that system actually corresponds to an objective ethical reality will not be explored, following Rawls ’ distinction between moral theory and moral philosophy. 2 Finally, traditional views of ethical intuitions will be discarded based on variations between ethical intuitions, an issue which, it will be argued, the reflective equilibrium account (rightly) ignores. In our discussion of moral intuitions, a handful of case examples will prove useful. I will not follow Kekes ’ argument that the best cases through which to explore our moral principles are everyday responses to moral situations rather than dramatic dilemmas. 3 While I agree that everyday moral judgements deserve much more importance than they are given, dramatic moral dilemmas, in my view, are how we come to unpick the fundamental conflicts within our moral worldviews. 1. You witness a mugging a little way down the street during your commute to work. The mugging does not become violent, and the perpetrator escapes with items belonging to the victim, running past you on their flight. 2. You watch a period TV show in which a character is unjustly denied a job based on their race. 3. At an art gallery, you are struck by a particularly beautiful work, causing you to stop and admire its aesthetic value. Kekes ’ attempted to classify what the fundamental characteristics of moral intuition were. The first, to him, was immediacy: that moral intuitions are immediate , ‘ gut ’ responses to situations we observe: when observing the mugging of example 1, we do not make a conscious choice to feel sympathy on the behalf of the victim: it occurs non-voluntarily and immediately. The second is that they are routine : they occur consistently whenever we observe a situations calling for ethical judgement: when watching a T.V. show, such as in example 2, we are constantly applying our values to the content to create judgements of approval or disapproval. But the characteristic which most differentiated moral intuitions from other forms of intuition was, for Kekes, that they act as imperatives. By this, he means
1 Rawls 1971. 2 Rawls 1974. 3 Kekes 1986.
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