Ethical Intuitionism and the Problem of Dogmatism

Abstract

In this paper, we try to confront Robert Audis moral epistemology, namely his intuitionism, based on the concept of a self-evident moral proposition, with two main problems: disagreement and dogmatism within moral discourse. Although Audi can meet those classical objections in his theory, we think that some problems remain. We proceed – after an introduction – in five sections in order to pursue this end. After a short introductory section, we first reconstruct the classical intuitionist moral epistemology (Sect. 6.2). We then discuss the dogmatism and the disagreement objection and, in doing so, introduce Audi’s own version of a moral epistemology (Sect. 6.3.1). After having proposed that the disagreement objection concerns an explanatory problem (Sect. 6.3.2), we discuss a second version, namely disagreement as a problem of rationality (Sect. 6.4). In the fourth section we present a third version, disagreement as a problem of moral discourse, understood as an intersubjective enterprise (Sect. 6.5). In the fifth section we propose a solution to disagreement situations of this kind (Sect. 6.6).