Dimensions of Moral Intuitions – Metaethics, Epistemology and Moral Psychology

Abstract

In everyday life we are permanently confronted with moral problems. But we are also faced with many difficulties and many different forms of how to come to a moral judgment. Modern moral psychology, as an interdisciplinary approach, tries to shed light on moral decision-making processes. Within philosophy it has been discussed since Hume’s sentimentalist approach to ethics what kind of moral judgment is the more convincing one – a judgment that relies on emotions or a judgment that reies on rational thinking. This debate nowadays heats up again as empirical data enters the philosophical realm. Psychologists, sociologists, neuroscientists and biologists deliver studies that seem to support the conviction that moral decision making actually does not have much to do with rational considerations – instead, it seems to be an intuitive process that depends on emotions instead of deliberation. In doing so, many researchers opt for a dual process theory that relies on implicit as well as explicit structures of reasoning. However, in many cases they reduce the explicit paths in their work. I will argue that this is due to the fact that different kinds of explanation levels are not kept apart thoroughly. I will start my considerations on the merits and problems of the recent developments in moral psychology from the epistemological point of view and distinguish this from a psychological and a normative understanding. In the light of these considerations I will show what kind of problems can occur through an analysis of Haidt’s social intuitionism and draw some conclusions on how we could elaborate a dual process theory that is theoretically informed as well as empirically supported.