NOTIFICACIÓN Y CONFORMIDAD

As it is the case I am arguing that phronesis is simply a purposely- developed, advanced state of moral intuition, and so as to curtail any

unnecessary focus on the term as used here, I wanted to include a few notes on moral intuition. The only thing I need from my interlocutors is agreement that there are such things as moral intuitions, and therefore my primary argument isn’t hurt or helped by these discussions. Still, some notes on moral intuition might be useful.

Moral intuitions might be thought of as a subclass of intuitions, which may just be derived through the same process from which we intuit about non-moral facts. Hence, we can learn a lot about moral intuitions from existing work in the

epistemology on intuitions in general125_{, which is where we begin. Thereafter, we}

will apply these views to moral intuitions in particular, and see how they line up with current debates in metaethics.

Recent discussions about intuitions have focused mainly on 1) their nature and 2) their epistemic role. Regarding 1) we can divide the available views into those which treat intuitions as propositional attitudes i.e. mental states with propositional content, and those which do not. For the latter camp, intuitions might be reduced to feelings, or otherwise states which do not take propositions

as their object126_{. In which case, perhaps they might be immune to rational}

revision by propositional attitudes like belief. More commonly, however, authors opt for explanations of the former type. At which point, the question is: what kind of propositional attitudes are intuitions? Common ways to answer this include (a) thinking of intuitions as beliefs, (b) as dispositions to believe, or (c) as something

sui generis.

Motivating views of kind (a) is the thought that nothing obviously separates beliefs and intuitions: in both cases, a proposition is made to seem true to us. Hence, thinking of them as one and the same state is both sensible and

ontologically parsimonious. Against such a view, one might argue that when we

125 _{For example, Michael Huemer defends a particular view about the role of intuitions in moral theorizing and also writes on the} nature of intuitions in general, as a class of seemings (Huemer, 2005).

126 _{Strictly speaking, this would include intuitions which are considered de re: i.e. to be about objects, rather than propositions, but} certain views of propositional content can also take care of these.

are confronted with a logical paradox, for instance, we can find a premise intuitively true whilst disbelieving it. In which case, it looks like our intuitions and beliefs can, at least sometimes, come apart.

On the second kind of explanation (b), intuitions are a kind of disposition: i.e. a propositional attitude that moves us to believe its content. For such views to succeed, they need to explain how intuitions are to be considered separate from other kinds of propositional attitude. For instance: perceptual experiences

normally move us to believe their content too; so why do they not also count as dispositions of the same kind as intuitions? Disposing us to believe their content is better thought of as a feature that some propositional attitudes have, rather than being essential to the attitude in and of itself. This can be said, for instance, of intuitions as a sui generis class of propositional attitudes.

Popular among this third set of views (c) is the idea that intuitions are ‘seeming-states’, alongside perceptual experiences, memories, and so on. On the Phenomenal Conservatism: i.e. dogmatism view about seemings – see e.g. (Tucker, 2010) - intuitions can give us defeasible reason to believe their contents in the following sense: if a subject S has an intuition that P, then unless they

know of a defeater on P, they have justification to believe that P.

Which brings us to discussions of kind 2) on the epistemological role of intuitions. If intuitions can provide us with not just the disposition to, but moreover justification for believing their content, then, like perceptual experiences and memories, they can be epistemic sources that are assessable against the facts for their accuracy and reliability. As noted, however, this justification is defeasible such that, if we recognise good reason to disbelieve its content, a token intuition loses its epistemic clout.

Furthermore, this defeasibility can be made to generalise. There have been arguments made, particularly within Experimental Philosophy, to the effect that our intuitions are unreliable in general. These kind of arguments usually claim that our intuitions are oftentimes influenced by non-truth-tracking factors e.g. motivated by irrational desires. If successful, such arguments can undermine the idea that intuitions play an evidential or justificatory role in belief-formation.

In the context of moral intuitions, parallel arguments would claim that we ought not to give our moral intuitions too much evidential weight, if their sources turn out not to reliably track the truth. However, you are more likely to find people

questioning the source of the content of our moral judgements (Campbell, 2015). Such debates normally occur within Cognitivist views, according to which moral

judgements are truth-apt, because they are beliefs with propositional content127_.

What we want to know is whether these arguments can also undermine the epistemic standing of moral intuitions.

In epistemology, an intuition can be the source of a belief or judgement. In metaethics, a moral judgement could be either based on a moral intuition

(whether directly or otherwise) or, indeed, could actually look much like what we have described an intuition as so far, the first family of views includes those on which intuitions indirectly inform our moral beliefs by being part of the deliberation process used to reach a judgement (Broome, 2013). On the other hand, a moral judgement might be made by perceptively reading of an ethical situation which, in the good cases at least, requires no interim deliberation (McDowell, 1994). In the latter case, ‘moral judgements’ look closer to our epistemological notion of

intuitions: as a basis for further belief. So some debunking arguments against Moral Realism, i.e. arguments which undermine the truth-tracking reliably of our moral judgements, can also undermine the justificatory role of our moral

intuitions, when the target states appear to overlap. Such debunking arguments seek to argue that our moral beliefs are not truth-tracking in the way that other beliefs can be i.e. by accurately reflecting objective facts. For instance, Street has

argued that the content of our moral attitudes is shaped by Darwinian forces128

(Street, 2005). If Street is right, the apparent reliability of moral intuitions is a result of evolutionary adaptation, rather than a learned cognitive capacity for rightly recognising objective moral facts.

On an opposing view, we can acquire and sharpen our moral intuition - which, when all goes well, will pick up on objective moral facts - not necessarily as part of human nature, but as something closely tied to the kind of moral upbringing we have had (McDowell, 1994). In which case, we can still be Moral Realists, but without thinking of moral facts as natural facts. The tension between McDowell and Street’s views of moral intuition stems from a wider debate,

normally played out between ‘Naturalists’ and ‘Non-Naturalists’, about whether morality should be reduced to, or wholly separated from the natural sciences (or,

127 _{The Moral Realist further claims that such beliefs will sometimes be true.} 128 _{Which, Street argues, opens the door for Moral Anti-Realism (Street, 2005).}

indeed, something in-between). However, this is not the only kind of metaethical debate that produces opposing views of what moral intuitions are, where they come from, and what role they can play in our moral reasoning.

Different notions of moral intuitions also crop up in other Metaethical debates. For example; between Particularists and Generalists. According to Moral Particularism, what counts as morally right varies between different ethical situations, and so we need to comprehend both the non-moral features of a situation and have an intuitive grasp of their moral significance - e.g. in

(McDowell, 2009). Accounts which are Generalist, on the other hand, think of moral principles as universal, whereby the way in which they apply does not vary between contexts. In which case, it looks like our moral intuitions need only read

the moral facts of the situation129_{. What we have here is a dispute over which}

facts inform the content of moral intuitions.

Different views can also arise with respect to what role we think intuitions play in our moral reasoning. As mentioned earlier, we might think that having an intuitive grasp of what a situation morally demands is something like a learned perceptual capacity, and is decisively our way of judging right from wrong

(McDowell, 1994). On the other hand, we might see moral intuitions as one factor amongst others that helps us to reach a moral judgement through deliberation

(Broome, 2013, Ross, 1930). On this second kind of view, our moral intuitions can help us adjudicate between apparently conflicting moral principles, for instance, in order to decide which gets priority.

As discussed earlier, not everyone thinks of intuitions as propositional attitudes. Likewise, not everyone thinks that moral judgements – which we might sometimes think of as moral intuitions – have propositional content. For the Non- Cognitivist, moral judgements can be content-less expressions of intuitions, or indeed themselves be content-less intuitions. In which case, as for intuitions in general, we might describe moral intuitions as feelings towards an object or scenario which are in no way truth-apt (historically, see Emotivism in (Ayer, 1936) (Stevenson, 1944). On such theories, we can do away with the idea that moral intuitions have a rational basis (e.g. as they could when they were informed by our moral education), let alone thinking that they can serve as an evidential basis

129 _{Although one could argue that a grasp of the non-moral facts will also play a role in coming to understand why e.g. stealing is} wrong in general (Campbell, 2015).

for further belief about what the right kind of action in a given ethical situation would be.

Moral Intuitions (qua moral versions of what epistemologists think of as intuitions) are variously treated as the basis of moral beliefs, kinds of moral judgements themselves, or one factor amongst many in weighing up different epistemic sources during moral deliberation. For the large part, moral intuitions (and intuitions in general) are treated as attitudes with propositional content; in which case, it remains to be explained how are intuitions different to beliefs, if both make their propositional content seem true to us. We also still have no conclusion as to how much evidential weight we should give our intuitions: even if they are apparently reliable, do they really track the truth?

Nonetheless, we can have an optimistic picture on which intuitions are what others would call moral judgements, reached not through a process of deliberation, but by having a honed perceptual capacity to recognise the moral facts of a given situation. This is the kind of picture of moral intuitions that

McDowell paints, for example (McDowell, 1994). It looks fine to combine this kind of view with one on which intuitions are a kind of seeming with propositional content, especially as such views also liken intuitions to perceptual experiences. Perhaps, then, we can have immediate justification for believing the content of our moral intuitions until we see a good reason to think otherwise: e.g. if we find out that something went wrong with our moral upbringing, at which point we can work to reshape our values in order to better recognise the objective moral facts.

Appendix III