Justifying Moral Pluralism

Abstract

Abstract The term ‘ethical intuitionism’ is one which has acquired a variety of uses over the course of its history. Two are salient for my purposes here. On the one hand, it has been used to denote a moral theory which holds roughly that there is an irreducible plurality of moral principles, a view which I shall term ‘moral pluralism’ or simply ‘pluralism’. On the other, it has been used to denote a theory in moral epistemology, a type of foundationalist theory which holds that all immediately justified moral beliefs are self-evident, a view which I will term ‘epistemic intuitionism’, or simply ‘intuitionism’. The fortunes of these two doctrines have been strikingly dissimilar. Moral pluralism has been attractive to many philosophers, capturing as it appears to do the structure of our normative moral views; epistemic intuitionism, on the other hand, has been widely rejected. Yet both doctrines were held together by self-styled intuitionists, such as W D. Ross, seeming to form an indissoluble whole in their thought; and the attractions of Ross’s pluralism have consequently been somewhat occluded by the distrust felt towards his intuitionism.