Augean Intuitive Stables: Definition of Moral Intuition
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | Over the last 15 years, the term moral intuition has become prominent in empirically oriented study of morality. It’s one of the central concepts in moral psychology and empirically minded moral philosophy. However, its meaning is far from being clear – various researchers use it in various ways. The unfortunate consequence of this is a conceptual mess rivaling the proverbial Augean stables. The primary aim of this paper is to clarify this conceptual confusion through thinking carefully about what we really want from a good definition of moral intuition – i.e. to which questions we expect it to provide answers. The hope is that through this we can gain some clarity on what we are dealing with when we talk about moral intuitions. The secondary aim is to show through this analysis in what ways can a philosopher be useful for the project of empirical study of morality without need to get his hands dirty with data collection. As a starting point I will use the influential definition proposed by American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (2001; Haidt & Bjorklund, 2008) and compare it with other proposals that can be found in the literature (e.g. Gopnik & Schwitzgebel, 1998; Kagan, 2001; Sandberg & Juth, 2011; Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008; Stich & Buckwalter, 2011; Tersman, 2008; Zamzow & Nichols, 2009). I will show that it can be dissected into three basic components – three answers to three basic questions about the nature of moral intuitions. I will raise the question whether these three questions are sufficient to capture such a complex phenomenon and I will show that Haidt’s definition could be improved by incorporating one additional question. I will argue that these four question constitute the underlying structure of an ideal definition of moral intuition and that they should guide any attempt to explicate what moral intuition is. Therefore, in the final section, I will present my own attempt to define moral intuition on the basis of this template. |
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