If we are going to try to make intuitionism work, we need to deal with the problem that sometimes our intuitions conflict (even within a single person). I guess it's fashionable to mention concepts like "reflective equilibrium" and then move on with life, but not many people appear to be really working on how to think about these things.
By the looks, Terry Hogan raises some interesting concerns about Bayesian epistemology:
I think you should suspend judgment because you seem to lack concepts that you have good evidence that other people seem to have. It's hard to believe that me, Michael Huemer, Richard Chappell, many of my smartest friends, Parfit, Enoch, etc would all hallucinate a non-existent concept that we're not even in possession of. It's hard to know how you're mistaken about some concept that you think you have.
I don't think I have good evidence that you and others have concepts I don't have.
I *don't* find it hard to believe that you're all conceptually confused. You share similar methods, education, training, enculturation, etc. Your thinking is not independent of one another, and if the problem is a foundational one, that you're all making the same mistake isn't surprising at all. For the same reason if there's a bug in a particular piece of software, if one person or 100 people use that software, they're all going to repeat the same bug. I also think that in forming a loose community you mutually reinforce one another's confidence and that this insulates you against objections.
Wait, if moral realism is true, doesn't it mean some philosopher one day will just pull a Moses and descend from the ivory tower bearing morality itself, that is, the correct moral positions to hold on every issue, and everyone will have to accept it, the way we are forced to accept the conclusions of science? And if that can't happen, then how can moral realism be true?
Compare this to politics. Even if everyone agreed on a moral framework, there would still be intractable political disagremeents about which policies are maximally conducive to the moral framework. Just because something is true doesn't mean it will one day be proved by a philosopher--I predict, for example, that various debates about the nature of consciousness, the best reply to skepticism, and even the question of whether moral realism is true at all will continue on endlessly.
Why would they be intractable? If something is real, that means you can take the measure of it (consciousness excepted), that is, you can know for a fact which policies are maximally conducive to the moral framework. Moral realism implies morality can be a science, so actually, I should revise my original comment into saying it will be a scientist who pulls the Moses, a moral scientist. Maybe the science of morality would be a science the way economics is a science, not the way physics is a science, but you get what I mean.
Sure philosophers will always debate everything to the death and beyond, but if something is real, there can be a science of it, and that means research can be done on it and conclusions that everyone is forced to accept can be reached.
There are lots of things that are real that you can't take a measure of. If you look at most ongoing philosophical disputes, they can't be solved by any straightforward empirical test. For example, take the claim that not only are there no married bachelors in the universe, but it's in principle impossible for there to be some. Do you think that can be empirically tested?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. There's a whole conundrum there about whether all truth can be grounded in empiricism. I'm not exactly an empiricist myself, so I can accept things like logic (your example) and mathematics being true in spite of not relying on evidence/measurements (but I don't know, I've heard people claim they can ground math in empirical observations).
But the central issue remains: if morality is real the way mathematics and logic are real, then there should be a morality out there which one has no choice but to accept, exactly like one has no choice but to accept mathematical/logical truths. There definitely are moral facts out there (e.g. factory farming is evil, great article btw), but definitely not all morality is as clear cut as that.
If morality is like math, I guess I can envision even a more formalized morality being messy like math, e.g. the answers being dependent on which axioms you pick.
It seems obvious that people have intuitions about what is right and what is wrong. It also seems obvious that people can have intuitions that are wrong, and come to conclusions that are incorrect without being emotionally passionate about it. I'm not really sure why anyone would attempt to argue that just because it is possible to be wrong, that therefore there is no such thing as being right. The other arguments against moral realism also seem rather silly. However, concluding from all of this that we can intuit moral truths, and then be sure that we got it right ourselves is not convincing. In the great span of human time on this planet, it was only a blink of an eye go that it was intuitively obvious that killing your enemies' children was a perfectly moral thing to do unless you wanted to take them as slaves. It was also intuitively obvious that the sun moved, and the earth did not. Advances in knowledge allow us to be certain that our ancestors were wrong about the latter, but there have been no advances to prove they were wrong about the former. Obviously, I prefer to live in a world where nobody is killing my children or taking them as slaves, but that is not a philosophical argument on my part.
It's not even clear we have that, or at least that there's a clear account of what it is that we have. I'm not even convinced moral judgments are a distinctive kind of judgment, or that there's any principled way to distinguish moral from nonmoral norms.
Which people have intuitions about that's right or wrong? And do you mean what's morally wrong? Doe everyone have intuitions about what's morally right or wrong? What exactly is an intuition about morality, as opposed to some other kind of intuition?
One of my central concerns with the way philosophers engage in moral philosophy is that they often seem to be making empirical claims, but rarely present any empirical data to support those claims. There isn't a compelling case that moral judgments are even a distinct kind of judgment, nor is it clear that on any uncontroversial account of morality that all societies even engage in moral judgment and discourse, or at least not of a form identical to distinctively Western/WEIRD conceptions of morality.
Are these questions for me? If so, I'd say that everyone intuits something about what is morally wrong, even if never beyond the "It's not fair!" of the preschooler.
Yes. Do you think moral intuitions are a distinct kind of intuition that differs from intuitions about, say, social conventions, or taste preferences? And do you think everyone has such intuitions, if so?
I despise having strangers ask me questions. It's rude and in the old days it was beaten out of children in elementary school.
Yes, of course I could answer them, but why would you even think that the process of intuiting things by thinking hard about them is somehow categorically different depending on the kind of thing you're thinking about?
If we are going to try to make intuitionism work, we need to deal with the problem that sometimes our intuitions conflict (even within a single person). I guess it's fashionable to mention concepts like "reflective equilibrium" and then move on with life, but not many people appear to be really working on how to think about these things.
By the looks, Terry Hogan raises some interesting concerns about Bayesian epistemology:
https://thorgan.faculty.arizona.edu/sites/thorgan.faculty.arizona.edu/files/Troubles%20for%20Bayesian%20%20Formal%20Epistemology.pdf
When our intuitions conflict, we should go with whatever is more obvious.
Bruh...
What if we disagree about what is more obvious? For instance, it's very obvious to me that moral realism is false. So should I be a moral antirealist?
I think you should suspend judgment because you seem to lack concepts that you have good evidence that other people seem to have. It's hard to believe that me, Michael Huemer, Richard Chappell, many of my smartest friends, Parfit, Enoch, etc would all hallucinate a non-existent concept that we're not even in possession of. It's hard to know how you're mistaken about some concept that you think you have.
I don't think I have good evidence that you and others have concepts I don't have.
I *don't* find it hard to believe that you're all conceptually confused. You share similar methods, education, training, enculturation, etc. Your thinking is not independent of one another, and if the problem is a foundational one, that you're all making the same mistake isn't surprising at all. For the same reason if there's a bug in a particular piece of software, if one person or 100 people use that software, they're all going to repeat the same bug. I also think that in forming a loose community you mutually reinforce one another's confidence and that this insulates you against objections.
Wait, if moral realism is true, doesn't it mean some philosopher one day will just pull a Moses and descend from the ivory tower bearing morality itself, that is, the correct moral positions to hold on every issue, and everyone will have to accept it, the way we are forced to accept the conclusions of science? And if that can't happen, then how can moral realism be true?
Compare this to politics. Even if everyone agreed on a moral framework, there would still be intractable political disagremeents about which policies are maximally conducive to the moral framework. Just because something is true doesn't mean it will one day be proved by a philosopher--I predict, for example, that various debates about the nature of consciousness, the best reply to skepticism, and even the question of whether moral realism is true at all will continue on endlessly.
Why would they be intractable? If something is real, that means you can take the measure of it (consciousness excepted), that is, you can know for a fact which policies are maximally conducive to the moral framework. Moral realism implies morality can be a science, so actually, I should revise my original comment into saying it will be a scientist who pulls the Moses, a moral scientist. Maybe the science of morality would be a science the way economics is a science, not the way physics is a science, but you get what I mean.
Sure philosophers will always debate everything to the death and beyond, but if something is real, there can be a science of it, and that means research can be done on it and conclusions that everyone is forced to accept can be reached.
There are lots of things that are real that you can't take a measure of. If you look at most ongoing philosophical disputes, they can't be solved by any straightforward empirical test. For example, take the claim that not only are there no married bachelors in the universe, but it's in principle impossible for there to be some. Do you think that can be empirically tested?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. There's a whole conundrum there about whether all truth can be grounded in empiricism. I'm not exactly an empiricist myself, so I can accept things like logic (your example) and mathematics being true in spite of not relying on evidence/measurements (but I don't know, I've heard people claim they can ground math in empirical observations).
But the central issue remains: if morality is real the way mathematics and logic are real, then there should be a morality out there which one has no choice but to accept, exactly like one has no choice but to accept mathematical/logical truths. There definitely are moral facts out there (e.g. factory farming is evil, great article btw), but definitely not all morality is as clear cut as that.
If morality is like math, I guess I can envision even a more formalized morality being messy like math, e.g. the answers being dependent on which axioms you pick.
It seems obvious that people have intuitions about what is right and what is wrong. It also seems obvious that people can have intuitions that are wrong, and come to conclusions that are incorrect without being emotionally passionate about it. I'm not really sure why anyone would attempt to argue that just because it is possible to be wrong, that therefore there is no such thing as being right. The other arguments against moral realism also seem rather silly. However, concluding from all of this that we can intuit moral truths, and then be sure that we got it right ourselves is not convincing. In the great span of human time on this planet, it was only a blink of an eye go that it was intuitively obvious that killing your enemies' children was a perfectly moral thing to do unless you wanted to take them as slaves. It was also intuitively obvious that the sun moved, and the earth did not. Advances in knowledge allow us to be certain that our ancestors were wrong about the latter, but there have been no advances to prove they were wrong about the former. Obviously, I prefer to live in a world where nobody is killing my children or taking them as slaves, but that is not a philosophical argument on my part.
I agree our moral intuitions are imperfect, but they're all we got.
It's not even clear we have that, or at least that there's a clear account of what it is that we have. I'm not even convinced moral judgments are a distinctive kind of judgment, or that there's any principled way to distinguish moral from nonmoral norms.
Which people have intuitions about that's right or wrong? And do you mean what's morally wrong? Doe everyone have intuitions about what's morally right or wrong? What exactly is an intuition about morality, as opposed to some other kind of intuition?
One of my central concerns with the way philosophers engage in moral philosophy is that they often seem to be making empirical claims, but rarely present any empirical data to support those claims. There isn't a compelling case that moral judgments are even a distinct kind of judgment, nor is it clear that on any uncontroversial account of morality that all societies even engage in moral judgment and discourse, or at least not of a form identical to distinctively Western/WEIRD conceptions of morality.
Are these questions for me? If so, I'd say that everyone intuits something about what is morally wrong, even if never beyond the "It's not fair!" of the preschooler.
Yes. Do you think moral intuitions are a distinct kind of intuition that differs from intuitions about, say, social conventions, or taste preferences? And do you think everyone has such intuitions, if so?
I can't even imagine what would inspire a person to ask such a question.
Do you have an answer to the questions?
I despise having strangers ask me questions. It's rude and in the old days it was beaten out of children in elementary school.
Yes, of course I could answer them, but why would you even think that the process of intuiting things by thinking hard about them is somehow categorically different depending on the kind of thing you're thinking about?