As we know, some important schools of thought consider human intuition as the main, most powerful, and most grounded fount of moral understanding. As Appiah observes, this raises the issue of “The Evidence of Self-Evidence.” Such schools of thought are subject, of course, to key questions: Where does intuition come from? How does it arise? Why (for what purpose) do humans have intuition and its enabling mechanisms in the first place?

Today, these questions can all be addressed, of course. And, they encompass others. For example: What is the linked path between nature’s foundational dynamics and our evolved intuitions? Indeed, understanding this pathway sheds light on the very relationship between “is” and “ought” and, when combined with our reasoning abilities, builds a stereoscopic picture (to use Appiah’s term) that can encompass both explanation and justification. Put another way, we can look beneath intuition, to its roots, and put intuition into its deeper and broader context.

On page 79, Appiah writes, “The point is that the standard reflective-equilibrium approach is going to help us deal with conflicting intuitions only if we have some independent ideas about the shape of ethical theory as well.” I completely agree. And, these “independent ideas about the shape of ethical theory” can be gained in the way discussed above and in earlier posts.

On page 119, Appiah hits a nail on the head: “In ethics as in optics, we need stereoscopy to see the world in all its dimensions.” But, I would add, we don’t need just any-old stereoscopy. If you imagine a pair of glasses, the two lenses share in common the frame and are linked via the nose-bridge. And in important senses, they view the same scene but from different (though ultimately related) perspectives.

Such a stereoscopic view not only encompasses both explanation and justification: It can do so within a grounded context and can link (and find the common ground between) the two.

The view I mention also sheds much light on the trolley cases, the question of invariance, and other matters explored in the final 40 pages of the chapter. And, it fits with and supports Appiah’s discussion of heuristics.

I hope this post is helpful. Thanks again to both Appiah and Matthew.

If talk about ‘heuristics’ is supposed to gesture at such an alternative, I fail to see what it is. To the extent to which the empirical examples Appiah cites are supposed to show that moral intuitions are unreliable, it seems they show this by (implicit) reliance on further moral intuitions (even if very simple and obvious ones). The Asian flu example may be an exception, since it only appeals to a conceptual claim about supervenience, but on itself it shows very little anyway.

The notion of heuristics is borrowed from work on the psychology of everday probabilistic thinking, but there it at least has a clear sense. We can see, for example, why evolution would select capacities that track certain empirical truths only in certain limited contexts. But it’s very unclear how it’s supposed to apply in the normative domain. It’s not plausible that evolution selects dispositions to, e.g., follow certain rules of thumb that maximise utility only in certain contexts. But if these heuristics weren’t selected by evolution, nor by an secret utilitarian cabal, where exactly are they supposed to come from?

I was wondering what people make of Appiah’s grouping the philosophers you mention (Reid, Whewell, Sidgwick, Ross, Rawls, Jackson) as all relying on intuition when it is far from clear that they all mean the same thing – or even vaguely similar things – by ‘intuition’.

Also, many of them reject ‘common-sense philosophy’ (as did the ordinary language philosophers which Appiah mistakenly associates with common-sense philosophy at the start of the chapter), not all of them appeal to faculties, and the meaning of the term ‘intuition’ has changed drastically over the centuries, in both ordinary and technical parlance.

As Mathew’s analysis demonstrates, Rawls’ reflective equilibrium, for example, is not dissimilar to the Quinean pragmatism/coherentism that Appiah appears to endorse in Ch. 1.

Is it helpful to lump all these poeple together? Do they all share some common belief that I’ve missed or is it simply that they happen to use similar terms to denote different kinds of beliefs and methodologies?