Morally serious critics of moral intuitions

Ratio

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 54-79

  Nelson, Mark ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 33646132842     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9329.00077     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), p. x
2. Also, William Lycan suggests plausibly that there is no reason that every capacity for cognition must be based in some modular perceptual organ. See William Lycan, 'Moral Facts and Moral Knowledge', Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. XXIV, Supp. (1986), pp. 79-94, especially p. 87, footnote 27
3. Unfortunately, lots of philosophers who should know better persist in characterising intuitionism thus. See, e.g., Adrian S. Piper, 'Seeing Things', Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. XXIX, Supp. (1990), p. 50
4. Alan Donagan, 'Is There a Credible Form of Utilitarianism?' in W. Frankena and J. Granrose, eds., Introductory Readings in Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974), pp. 165-171, at p. 166
5. H. A. Prichard, 'Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?' Moral Obligation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 1-17, at pp. 7-9
6. W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), pp. 29-30
7. J. Rawls, 'Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics', The Philosophical Review, Vol. LX (1950), pp. 177-197, at p. 56
8. Rawls, 'Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics', p. 60
9. Ronald Dworkin has suggested something like this. See his 'The Original Position' in Norman Daniels, ed., Reading Rawls (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), pp. 16-53
10. See Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), chs. 1-2
11. 'How Belief is Based on Inference', Journal of Philosophy, LXI (1964), pp. 353-360
12. 'The Inference to the Best Explanation', The Philosophical Review, LXXIV (1965), pp. 88-95
13. 'Is there a Single True Morality?' in D. Copp and D. Zimmerman, eds., Morality, Reason, and Truth (1985), pp. 27-48
14. see also J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) ch. 1
15. For an accessible discussion of the criteria for the evaluation of hypotheses, see W. Quine and J. Ullian, The Web of Belief (New York: Random House, 1978), ch. 6
16. Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality, p. 7
17. Harman, The Nature of Morality, p. 11
18. See Gilbert Harman, 'Moral Relativism Defended', The Philosophical Review, LXXIV (1985), pp. 3-22
19. and 'What is Moral Relativism?' in A. Goldman and J. Kim, eds., Values and Morals (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978)
20. For a lucid discussion of the morally 'unserious' implications of Harman's view, see Jorge Garcia, 'Relativism and Moral Divergence', Metaphilosophy, 19, 1988, pp. 264-281
21. See John McDowell, 'Values and Secondary Qualities' in G. Sayre-McCord, ed., Essays on Moral Realism (Ithaca: Cornell, 1988), pp. 166-180
22. Warren Quinn, 'Truth and Explanation in Ethics', Ethics, 96 (1986), pp. 524-544
23. Roderick Chisholm, 'The Problem of the Criterion' in The Foundations of Knowing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982, pp. 61-75)
24. and especially William Lycan, 'Moral Facts and Moral Knowledge', op cit. I note that, although McDowell's argument is useful to intuitionism, McDowell does not consider himself an intuitionist. Elsewhere, McDowell castigates 'the bogus epistemology of intuitionism' as 'a vague attempt to borrow the epistemological credentials of the idea of perception.'
25. See 'Projection and Truth in Ethics', The Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas, 1988, p. 9
26. See R. Boyd, 'How to Be a Moral Realist'; N. Sturgeon, 'Moral Explanations'
27. and G. Sayre-McCord, 'Moral Theory and Explanatory Impotence'; reprinted in G. Sayre-McCord, ed., Essays on Moral Realism (Ithaca: Cornell, 1988), pp. 181-228, 229-255, and 282-300, respectively
28. Kant, The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. viii
29. Alan Gewirth, 'Individual Rights and Political-Military Obligations' in Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justifications and Applications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 234-255, at p. 246
30. Hare himself obviously perceives this similarity, describing his own system as based on 'the formal logical properties of the moral words, the understanding of which we owe above all to Kant. . . .' See R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 4
31. In his later works, Hare indicates that rational, logico-linguistic considerations are not always enough to help us decide what to do in concrete situations. In the area of what Hare calls 'morals', we sometimes also need to consider certain empirical facts about human preferences. See Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point, pp. 5, 40
32. Richard Hare, 'The Argument from Received Opinion' in Essays on Philosophical Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 117-135, at p. 122
33. See, for example, Hare's remark that, 'Offences against the thesis of universalisability are logical, not moral. If a person says "I ought to act in a certain way, but nobody else ought to act in that way in relevantly similar circumstances," then on my thesis he is abusing the word "ought"; he is implicitly contradicting himself Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 32
34. See Hare's endorsement of Simon Blackburn's anti-realist campaign in 'Supervenience', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp., 58 (1984)
35. reprinted in Essays in Ethical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 66-81, especially p. 66
36. In recent years, Hare has been reluctant even to call himself a 'non-cognitivist', and has admitted that moral judgments can be 'true' or 'false'. See 'Ontology in Ethics', reprinted in Hare, Essays in Ethical Theory, pp. 82-98, especially p. 96
37. Robert Audi is one of the few who has noticed this. See his 'Ethical Reflectionism', Monist, 76 (1993), pp. 295-315, esp. p. 309: 'The method of reflection is also neutral with respect to non-cognitivism. Non-cognitivism takes the objects of reflection to be in crucial cases non-propositional, but it allows for moral justification of the attitudes that one expresses in making moral judgments. This justification is potentially grounded in reflection in a way analogous to the grounding that other theories take to justify moral judgments construed as true or false.'
38. For a discussion of unconscious inference, see Gilbert Harman, Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), especially ch. 11
39. Hare, Moral Thinking, p. 40
40. R. M. Hare, 'Rawls' Theory of Justice' reprinted in N. Daniels, ed., Reading Rawls (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), pp. 81-107
41. For a fuller discussion of this issue, see my 'Intuitionism and Subjectivism', Metaphilosophy, 22, nos. 1 & 2 (1991), pp. 115-121
42. Elsewhere, Gewirth questions appeals to intuition for similar reasons: 'How do we determine which particular moral judgments are correct in the first place: They all have competitors stemming from different moral principles, so that to uphold some as exclusively correct would, in the absence of further principled argument, reflect one's conditioning or prejudices rather than any independent correctness.' See Alan Gewirth, Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 8
43. See K. Nielsen, 'Our Considered Judgments', Ratio, XIX (1979), pp. 39-46
44. See F. Engels, 'On Morality', reprinted in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. R. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 725-727; see especially p. 726
45. For a theological explanation, see Emil Brunner, Man in Prevolt (London: Lutterworth, 1949), p. 162
46. for a political explanation, see R. Miller, 'Rawls and Marxism' Philosophy and Public Affairs, IV (1974), pp. 167-180; see especially, p. 170
47. See P. Singer, 'Sidgwick and Reflective Equilibrium', Monist, 58 (1974), pp. 490-517, at p. 516
48. See Nancy Davis, 'Contemporary Deontology' in P. Singer, ed., A Companion to Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 212, for a similar claim
49. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981)
50. especially ch. 2, and James D. Wallace, Virtues and Vices (Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 95
51. Peter Geach, God and the Soul (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 122
52. Nicomachean Ethics (Bk I, ch. 4, 15-20), from Richard McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 937
53. George Berkeley, Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, edited, with other writings, by Geoffrey Warnock (Glasgow: Fontana, 1962) pt. I., § 31, p. 79
54. From R. Brandt, A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 20
55. A. MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 254. MacIntyre goes on to claim, 'That they sometimes disagree about what it is we all know already only makes them less boring at the cost of making them even less convincing.'
56. John Haldane, 'Intuitions and the Value of a Person', Journal of Applied Philosophy, 14, (1997), pp. 83-86, at p. 85
57. Some scientific realists are also sceptics. See Robert Almeder, Blind Realism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992)
58. See Mark Nelson, 'Is it Always Fallacious to Derive Values from Facts?' in Argumentation, 9 (1995), pp. 553-562
59. See also Jorge Garcia, 'Are "is" to "ought" Deductions Fallacious? On a Humean Formal Argument' pp. 543-552 in the same volume
60. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 42. Kripke makes this remark in the context of a discussion of modal intuitions, which raise problems similar to those raised by moral intuitions
61. The introduction to this essay draws on material previously published in my essays 'Intuitionism and Conservatism', Metaphilosophy, 21, no. 3 (1990)