The epistemic value of intuitive moral judgements

Abstract

In this article, I discuss whether intuitive moral judgements have epistemic value. Are they mere expressions of irrational feelings that should be disregarded or should they be taken seriously? In section 2, I discuss the view of some social psychologists that moral intuitions are, like other social intuitions, under certain conditions more reliable than conscious deliberative judgements. In sections 3 and 4, I examine whether intuitive moral judgements can be said not to need inferential justification. I outline a concept of moral intuition as a seeming whose seemingness resides in special, phenomenological features such as a felt veridicality, appropriateness, familiarity, or confidence, and whose justificatory force is influenced by the reliability of the belief-producing procedures and by a subject's competence in applying moral concepts. I argue that subjects can come to realise that the beliefs expressed in their intuitive judgements evoke a sense of non-inferential credibility. In section 5, I first discuss the contribution of moral expertise to the non-inferential credibility of a person's intuitions. Subsequently, I discuss whether Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is right in saying that we can never claim non-inferential justification for our intuitions because they are subject to all kinds of distorting influences.

Keywords:

• deliberative reasoning
• epistemology
• intuitive judgements
• intuitive thinking
• moral education
• moral expertise
• moral intuition
• seeming

Notes

I use the terms interchangeably.

I discuss (the critique on) Haidt's views in Musschenga (2008).

LeDoux (1996) reports the case of a woman who, though unable to recognise her doctors from one meeting to the next, was able to learn not to shake hands with a doctor who had previously pricked her with a tack concealed in his palm.

An anonymous referee asked whether this process of reflection is not a transition from one set of beliefs to another. If someone asks me, for example, whether I really think that mass murderers should get the death penalty, she does not ask for a justification. She wants to know whether this opinion is compatible with the person I am and want to be. She wants me to give a narrative explanation, not a justification.

What about thin concepts such as ‘good’ versus ‘bad’, ‘right’ versus ‘wrong’? In my view, moral judgements are based on principles. A principle states the reason why an action or state of affairs is good or bad, right or wrong. A principle is either the formal element of an already existing thick moral concept, or to the formal element that could be the formal element of such a notion. Here, I follow Kovesi (1967, 109 f.).

Shafer-Landau (2003, 301) also finds that a fully worked-out version of moral reliabilism requires a nuanced account of the processes that are genuinely reliable.

Dreyfus and Dreyfus use the terms maxims and aspects to differentiate this form of instruction from the one in the first stage, where strict rules were given as to how to respond to context-free features. Since maxims are phrased in terms of aspects they already presuppose experience in the skill domain (233).

This point is nicely formulated by Selinger and Crease (2002, 258): ‘We do not call people who are merely ambulatory or verbal “expert” walkers or talkers, but reserve the adjective for those who undergo special training, give professional advice, etc.’.

In Musschenga (2010), I argue in more detail that judgements in specialised domains such as health care require expertise that goes beyond the general moral competence of morally mature persons.

This is the description of the classic trolley problem:

A trolley is hurtling down the tracks. There are five innocent people on the track ahead of the trolley, and they will be killed if the trolley continues to go straight ahead. There is a spur of track leading off to the side. There is one innocent person on that spur. The brakes of the trolley have failed and there is a switch that can be activated to cause the trolley to go to the side track. You are an innocent bystander (i.e. not an employee of the railroad, etc.). You can throw the switch, saving five innocent people, which will result in the death of the one innocent person on the side track. What would you do?

And this is the footbridge variant:

A trolley threatens to kill five people. You are standing next to a large stranger on a footbridge spanning the tracks, in between the oncoming trolley and the hapless five. The only way to save them is to push the stranger over the bridge onto the tracks below. He will die if you do this, but his body will stop the trolley from reaching the others. Should you save the five others by pushing the stranger to his death? Contrary to the response to the trolley problem, most people say no.

See Smith (2010) for a critique of Sinnott-Armstrong's arguments against moral intuitionism.