Abstract
This paper defends a moderate intuitionism by extending a version of that view previously put forward and responding to some significant objections to it that have been posed in recent years. The notion of intuition is clarified, and various kinds of intuition are distinguished and interconnected. These include doxastic intuitions and intuitive seemings. The concept of inference is also clarified. In that light, the possibility of non-inferential intuitive justification is explained in relation to both singular moral judgments, which intuitionists do not take to be self-evident, and basic moral principles, which they typically do take to be self-evident in a sense explicated in the paper. This explanation is accomplished in part by drawing some analogies between moral and perceptual judgments in the light of a developmental conception of knowledge. The final section of the paper presents a partial account of rational disagreement and indicates how the kind of intuitionist view defended can allow for rational disagreement between apparent epistemic peers.
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Rawls (1971) says that “any ethical theory is bound to depend on intuition to some degree at many points” (p. 40), and that “there is nothing irrational in the appeal to intuitions to settle questions of priority” (p. 41). His later discussion of “considered judgments” and their role in reflective equilibrium (pp. 47–48) indicates nothing inconsistent with taking those to be a kind of intuition. They are certainly not represented as premise-dependent. Cf. Tim Mulgen’s (2006, p. 2) view that “One primary purpose of a moral theory is to unify and make sense of our considered judgements or intuitions… A decisive intuition represents a judgement any acceptable moral theory must accommodate”.
This characterization can probably include all major intuitionists if we distinguish irreducibility from underivability. Sidgwick (1907, p. 96), e.g., may have regarded the kinds of principles I call Rossian as derivable (even if not rigorously deducible) from his overall utilitarian formula; but derivability does not entail reducibility, and I do not think he considered them reducible to formulas expressible wholly in utilitarian terms. Indeed, in a general characterization of intuitionism he calls it “the view of ethics which regards as the practically ultimate end of moral actions their conformity to certain rules or dictates of Duty”, using the plural. Moreover, his own view affirms more than one ethical axiom; see, e.g., Sidgwick (1907), p. 382. I leave aside the question whether strong particularists should count as intuitionists if they countenance non-inferential knowledge of singular but not general moral propositions. If they do not countenance such knowledge of some ethical generalities, I prefer to speak of their being particularistic intuituvists. For distinctions among various forms of ethical particularism and criticism of some, see Audi (2006a).
These last two principles are introduced and clarified in Ch 5 of Audi (2004).
Most of these notions are discussed in Audi (2004), e.g. pp. 32–39, 48, and 208 note 37. But it contains little explicit treatment of intuitive seemings, and the distinction (too complex to treat in the space available in this paper) between property and conceptual intuitions is not noted.
See, e.g., Bealer (1998), Sosa (1998), and Huemer (2005). Sosa’s notion may allow that both beliefs and seemings can count as intuitions (see, e.g., 258–59); but for Huemer intuitions are a distinct type of propositional attitude, evidenced when someone admits that p is intuitive (e.g., seems to be true), but denies believing it.
Intuitive seemings might include such property (de re) intuitions as occur when something seems to have a property where there is no proposition in question. This might occur where one person is seen as more sincere than another, though one has not conceptualized the difference in any particular way, say as providing an advantage in leadership.
Tolhurst (1998).
See, e.g., Huemer (2005), who calls “an intuition that p a state of its seeming to one that p” (p. 102).
For a brief account of how the relevant understanding underlies justification and knowledge, see my Audi (2007b).
Audi (1999) contains a more detailed account of self-evidence than (Audi 2004), and some extensions of both treatments are made in Audi (2008). I should add here that we might also speak of full understanding to avoid the suggestion that adequacy implies sufficiency only for some specific purpose. Neither term is ideal, but “full” may suggest maximality, which is also inappropriate.
There has been much controversy over whether the notion of the analytic is adequately clear for purposes of philosophical analysis. In Ch. 4 of Audi (2003) I defend the view (e.g., against objections by Quine) that the notion is adequately clear for such modest use as I make of it here.
This idea is developed in Audi (1998) and in Ch 2 of Audi (2004) (which also acknowledges the complexity of the concept of promising—a complication I ignore in this paper). In criticizing the 1998 paper, Kappel (2002) omits discussion of this line of argument and takes my main support for the self-evidence of Rossian principles to be that (as I put it then) “their truth and non-inferential justifiability best explains the high degree of consensus among civilized people in wide segments of their everyday practice.” But this point is made directly after I distinguished between agreement in reasons and agreement on them, stressing the importance of the former. He apparently conflates the two under the broad term ‘practical agreement’ (p. 396) and argues that my point does not show that the principles in question are self-evident. I have not claimed that by itself it does. I can, however, accept his statement that it is “difficult to see that the claim that we are justified in accepting at least some of our non-inferentially believed propositions has any role to play in the explanation of practical judgment” (p. 397). My point was not that our being justified does the explaining; the crucial element is the truth and non-inferential justifiability of the principles. This element is to be seen in the light of understanding as the ground of justification and as reflecting truth (in ways the present paper makes clearer).
Subsumptivism is closely related to what Quante and Vieth (2002) call deductivism. They also consider “principlism” and its relation to both strong and weak forms of intuitionism, and their case against strong forms of intuitionism and favoring a broadly Rossian form reflects some main points in this paper and is illustrated in relation to literature (and cases) in biomedical literature, particularly the work of Beauchamp and Childress. I would add that subsumptivism (and I assume their deductivism) is consistent with our having memorially direct knowledge of singular propositions or direct knowledge of them by testimony; the subsumptivist should be understood as holding only that the basic kind of knowledge of these propositions—the kind that is “original”—is grounded in generalizations. This would not be, then, basic knowledge—knowledge not based on other knowledge—or even basic moral knowledge, but the basic kind of moral knowledge of singular propositions.
Intuitive induction, described by Aristotle, is briefly explained in Audi (2004), pp. 62–3 and pp. 162–63.
The idea that we can have a de re grasp of relations and can take the relata (e.g. propositions) to stand in them without believing the proposition that they so stand—where this de dicto belief requires conceptualizing the relation—is illustrated and applied in Audi (1986a).
I have made no commitment to cognitive intuitions necessarily being justified, though I believe they at least very commonly are justified.
Sellars (1975) probably thought this.
The distinction between dispositional beliefs (the non-occurrent kind stored in memory and not in consciousness at the time in question) and dispositions to believe is explicated and defended in Audi (1994).
The non-inferential justification in question here is not “self-justification”—a notion that is misleading. Ground-dependence in fact entails the existence of something other than the cognition that justifies it.
The point that what is intuitively known may be knowable only through reflection though still known non-inferentially is defended and developed in my response to Sinnott-Armstrong (2007) in Audi (2007c). Cf. the misleading idea, common among twentieth-century intuitionists (as noted in The Good in the Right), that we “just see” the truth of self-evident and many other kinds of intuitive true propositions.
The notion of inference and related notions, such as inferential belief, are explicated in Audi (1986b), and esp. in Chs 4 and 8 of Audi (2006b). I should add that I assume that a belief that the premises support the conclusion may be taken to be a special (perhaps phenomenally thin) case of the sense of support in question. Unfortunately, Audi (2004) did not refer to Audi (1986b) or other works in which I have explicated the notion of justified belief and did not reproduce the account. It is understandable, then, that Shafer-Landau (2007) finds such an account needed.
I ignore one arguable exception: first-person propositions that only the believer can genuinely understand. As to the clear cases of propositional knowledge, in Audi (1995) I explain why memory beliefs should be considered non-inferential, and in Audi (1997) I make a case for treating testimony-based beliefs as also non-inferential (though they have an operational dependence, as opposed to a premise-dependence, on perception). Kappel (2002) seems unaware of such cases when he says, “For Audi, intuitively known propositions are simply non-inferentially known propositions” (p. 292).
Consequentiality entails a supervenience relation but is stronger. Supervenience is not a determination relation having explanatory power. The consequentiality relations central for the Rossian principles are apparently also, as mere supervenience relations need not be, both a priori and necessary.
I have defended this point and developed a critical response to skepticism in Ch 10 of Audi (2003).
In Kappel (2002) Kappel refers to the particularism of Dancy (1993) as a challenge to my view (though he does not strengthen it or endorse Dancy’s case). I have responded to Dancy’s case in Ch 2 of (Audi 2004) and, in more detail, in (Audi 2006a). For supporting treatments of the issue see Baldwin (2002) and Hooker and Little (2000).
The reference to evidence here must be taken to designate grounds of an internal kind, such as the “evidence of the senses.” For evidence conceived as publicly accessible supporting fact, I am not suggesting that any one person is necessarily in a better position than another to appraise it, though we may still have a kind of intrinsic advantage in appraising our response to it. But for assessing rationality the central concern is the person’s experience, memory impressions, reflections, and other internal elements.
It may be thought that noncognitivism avoids the problem of determining the scope of reason in ethical matters, as suggested by, e.g., Kappel (2002), p. 411. But any plausible noncognitivist view must provide an account of what constitutes a relevant (and indeed a good) reason for holding a non-cognitive pro or con moral judgment. How we might know or justifiedly believe such an account seems to me a problem in moral epistemology much akin to the kind I have been dealing with here.
An earlier version of much of this paper was presented at the 2007 meeting of Societas Ethica in Switzerland. The paper benefited from the discussion in that session and, in several different versions, from discussions at Dalhousie University, the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Ohio State University, San Jose State University, Simon Fraser University, and the Universities of California, Irvine, Notre Dame, Oxford, Rome, Siena, and Virginia. For helpful comments I also want to thank Sam Black, John Broome, Krister Bykvist, Roger Crisp, Brad Hooker, Jonas Olson, Derek Parfit, John Tasioulas, Evan Tiffany, Mark Timmons, Thomas Vinci, anonymous readers for the Journal and, especially, Carla Bagnoli and Christoph Lumer, who provided extensive commentaries at the presentation in Siena.
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Audi, R. Intuition, Inference, and Rational Disagreement in Ethics. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 11, 475–492 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-008-9123-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-008-9123-9