Moral Intuition in Philosophy and Psychology

Abstract

Ethicists often appeal to moral intuitions in defending a theory. In this practice, the contents of intuitions are taken to support moral beliefs in a way that is often compared to the way the contents of perception support empirical beliefs. Philosophers have defended a variety of positions about the nature of such states. Intuitionists believe intuitions are either self-evident beliefs or intellectual appearances, while Coherentists think of them as considered judgments that need to be balanced against each other in a process of reflective equilibrium. Intuition skeptics reject either kind of justificatory role. Such skepticism has recently received support from psychological studies of moral intuition. In contrast to philosophers, psychologists typically think of intuitions as snap judgments that result from automatic, nonconscious, and often affective processing. Some argue that they are likely to be responsive to morally irrelevant factors. Yet even if this is true of snap judgments, it is not clear what follows for the epistemic standing of the kind of states that philosophers talk about. The aim of this chapter is to clarify the various philosophical and psychological conceptions of moral intuition in order to bring them in closer contact and help researchers in different disciplines to avoid talking past each other. In the final section, a sentimentalist account of moral intuition that may offer some hope of reconciling the philosophical and psychological approaches is quickly sketched.