What Is a Moral Intuition? Judgements That Arrive Before the Reasons

A moral intuition is a judgement that something is right or wrong which arrives without conscious reasoning and which the person holds with confidence they cannot immediately justify. The phenomenon is uncontroversial and the disagreement concerns its status. On one view such judgements are a form of perception of moral facts, comparable to seeing that something is red, and are therefore evidence that should be weighed. On another they are outputs of psychological processes shaped by upbringing, culture and evolutionary pressures, and carry no more authority about what is actually right than a preference does. Between those sit positions treating them as defeasible evidence, reliable enough to be a starting point and revisable in the light of argument, which is how most working ethicists actually proceed whatever they say about the theory.

Intuitions do specific work in moral argument and the uses are worth distinguishing:

• •As data, with a theory tested by whether its implications match what people confidently judge in clear cases
• •As counterexamples, where a theory implying something almost everyone rejects is thereby damaged
• •As starting points, from which a theory is constructed to systematise them
• •In thought experiments constructed specifically to isolate a variable and provoke a clean intuition
• •In reflective equilibrium, the process of adjusting principles and judgements against each other until they cohere
• •As the ultimate stopping point, since an argument must rest on something the parties accept without further argument

Empirical work has produced a serious challenge to treating intuitions as evidence. Judgements about structurally identical cases differ depending on how the case is described, on the order in which cases are presented, and on factors with no moral relevance whatever, which has been demonstrated repeatedly. Cross-cultural variation in judgements about specific cases is substantial. Psychological work has proposed that moral judgement is largely intuitive with reasoning arriving afterwards as justification, which if correct means the reasons people give are not the reasons they hold the view. And evolutionary accounts explain why particular intuitions would be widespread whether or not they track anything true, which is the debunking argument proper, since an explanation of why a belief is held that makes no reference to its truth undermines it as evidence. Defenders reply that comparable challenges apply to perception without making perception useless.

A small number of constructed scenarios have done an enormous amount of work in this area and their influence is worth examining. The trolley cases present a choice between acting to cause one death and allowing several, varied in ways that isolate particular features, and the reliable finding that people judge the variants differently while struggling to articulate a principle distinguishing them is the engine of a large literature. A case about a violinist attached to a person's circulation was constructed to separate the question of a right to life from a right to use another's body. Cases about experience machines, about swapped brains and about lifeboats each isolate one variable. The method has been criticised for producing intuitions about situations so far from experience that the judgements are unreliable, which is a reasonable objection to the more extravagant examples and not to all of them.

The practical position most philosophers occupy treats intuitions as genuine evidence with known unreliability, which is how evidence is usually treated. That implies discounting intuitions about cases known to trigger the documented distortions, including cases involving unfamiliar circumstances, disgust, in-group and out-group framing or very large numbers, all of which produce judgements that people themselves abandon on reflection. It implies weighting intuitions that survive consideration over immediate reactions. It implies taking the convergence of intuitions across different cultures and framings more seriously than any single one. And it implies that a theory conflicting with a strong widely shared intuition has a problem to answer, without that problem being automatically fatal, since occasionally a theory is right and the intuition is a prejudice, which is what happened with several judgements now regarded as obviously wrong.

Judgements arriving without conscious reasoning are uncontroversial and their status is not, with positions ranging from perception of moral facts to mere psychological output. They serve as data, as counterexamples and as the stopping point every argument needs. Structurally identical cases produce different judgements depending on description and order, which is the challenge, and defenders note the same applies to perception.