How to Gauge Moral Intuitions? Prospects for a New Methodology

Abstract

The concept of moral intuitions reflects the idea that there are moral truths and that people arrive at these truths not primarily by a process of reflection and reasoning but rather by a more immediate process somewhat akin to perception.1 This is crucial from a philosophical point of view: Intuitions matter for a philosopher because they are taken to have evidential value. Alvin Goldman’s (2007, p. 2, italics in original) remark on Gettier’s challenge to the account of knowledge as justified true belief well illustrates the point: It wasn’t the mere publication of Gettier’s two examples, or what he said about them. It was the fact that almost everybody who read Gettier’s examples shared the intuition that these were not instances of knowing. Had their intuitions been different, there would have been no discovery. KeywordsMoral JudgmentMoral TheoryMoral BeliefMoral EmotionMoral IntuitionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.