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Introduction

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Notes

There are ethically significant behaviours

A paradigm example is food sharing. Humans do this in a way that has no counterpart in other species.[1]

More generally, behaviours which have ethical significance include caring for another, cooperating with her, sanctioning her for something she does or fails to do, shunning her, enslaving her, and so on.

Humans are unusual among apes in the degree to which they cooperate with non-kin, even to the extent of being cooperative breeders.[2] They appear to have been doing this since well before the advent of farming.[3]

Humans appear to have ethical knowledge

Many people feel more confident about some propositions than others. For example, I am more confident that Aristotle was a philosopher than that Aristotle was partly responible for Alexander the Great’s death.

This is true for some ethical propositions too. Speaking for myself, I am more confident that it is wrong to kill people than that it is wrong to kill insects.

This is an indication that we do not just have ethical abilities. We also appear to have knowledge of ethical propositions in whatever sense we have knowledge of ordinary, non-ethical propositions. And, quite plausibly, ethical knowledge is an enabler for many of our ethical abilities

What are the sources of ethical knowledge?

There is a view in ethics called ‘Intuitionism’ whose key tennet is that ‘moral intutions [are] basic sources of evidence’ (Stratton-Lake, 2020, p. footnote~1). This remains a minority view.

Of wider interest, even some philosophers who do not explicitly endorse intuitionism agree that intuitions are indispensable for ethical knowledge. For instance:

‘Our intuitions about cases provide us with evidence for and against rival moral claims—and it is difficult to imagine giving them no weight whatsoever.’ (Kagan, 2001, p. 2)

‘When I have an intuition it seems to me that something is the case, and so I am defeasibly justified in believing that things are as they appear to me to be. That fact [...] opens the door to the possibility of moral knowledge.’ (Kagan, 2023, p. 167)[4]

Intuitions in philosophy are also essential for reflective equilibrium (Rawls, 1999). Several ethicists regard ‘the method of reflective equilibrium, or a process very similar to it, is the best or most fruitful method of moral inquiry [and] the one that seems most likely to lead to justified moral beliefs’ (McMahan, 2013, p. 111). If we discover that intuitions are too unreliable to be a source of knowledge, this may lead to an objection to the method of reflective equilibrium. Such an objection, if successful, would be a major challenge to much contemporary ethics.

What are intuitions?

On this course, a person’s intuitions are the claims they take to be true independently of whether those claims are justified inferentially. And a person’s moral intuitions are simply those of their intuitions that concern ethical matters.

Not everyone adopts this terminological stipulation. According to Sinnott-Armstrong, Young, & Cushman (2010, p. 256): ‘When we refer to moral intuitions, we mean strong, stable, immediate moral beliefs.’ For many purposes such differences are not critical. But note that philosophers sometimes use the term ‘intuition’ in ways that differ drastically. To illustrate, Bedke (2008) offers two ways of characterising what philosophers call intuitions:

’intuitions are understandings of self-evident propositions, where such understanding alone is sufficient for justification’ and ‘intuitions are sui generis seeming states [...] which are like [..] seemings based on sensory experience [...] in the way they justify’ (Bedke, 2008, p. 253).[5]

Neither of these is a moral intuition for the purposes of this course. (One could coherently maintain that moral intuitions exist in our sense while denying that there are any intuitions in Bedke’s sense.)

Conclusions so far

At least some humans appear to have ethical knowledge.

Intuitions are necessary for ethical knowledge.

Glossary

moral intuition : According to this lecturer, a person’s intuitions are the claims they take to be true independently of whether those claims are justified inferentially. And a person’s moral intuitions are simply those of their intuitions that concern ethical matters.
According to Sinnott-Armstrong et al. (2010, p. 256), moral intuitions are ‘strong, stable, immediate moral beliefs.’

References

Apicella, C. L., Marlowe, F. W., Fowler, J. H., & Christakis, N. A. (2012). Social networks and cooperation in hunter-gatherers. Nature, 481(7382), 497–501. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10736
Audi, R. (2015). Intuition and Its Place in Ethics. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 1(1), 57–77. http://0-dx.doi.org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1017/apa.2014.29
Bedke, M. S. (2008). Ethical Intuitions: What They Are, What They Are Not, and How They Justify. American Philosophical Quarterly, 45(3), 253–269.
Hill, K. R., Walker, R. S., Božičević, M., Eder, J., Headland, T., Hewlett, B., … Wood, B. (2011). Co-Residence Patterns in Hunter-Gatherer Societies Show Unique Human Social Structure. Science, 331(6022), 1286–1289. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1199071
Hrdy, S. B. (2011). Mothers and others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press.
Kagan, S. (2001). Thinking about Cases. In E. F. Paul, J. Miller Fred D., & J. Paul (Eds.), Moral Knowledge (Vol. 18, pp. 44–63). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511550133.003
Kagan, S. (2023). Answering Moral Skepticism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Kaplan, H., & Gurven, M. (2005). The Natural History of Human Food Sharing and Cooperation: A Review and a New Multi-Individual Approach to the Negotiation of Norms. In H. Gintis, S. Bowles, R. Boyd, & E. Fehr (Eds.), Moral Sentiments and Material Interests (pp. 75–114). The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/4771.003.0007
McMahan, J. (2013). Moral Intuition. In H. LaFollette & I. Persson (Eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory (pp. 103–120). Oxford: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1111/b.9780631201199.1999.00007.x
Rawls, J. (1999). A Theory of Justice (Revised edition). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Sinnott-Armstrong, W., Young, L., & Cushman, F. (2010). Moral intuitions. In J. M. Doris, M. P. R. Group, & others (Eds.), The moral psychology handbook (pp. 246–272). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stratton-Lake, P. (2020). Intuitionism in Ethics. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/intuitionism-ethics/

Endnotes

  1. See Kaplan & Gurven (2005, p. 75): ‘the patterning and complexity of food sharing among humans is truly unique.’ Note that these authors argue that ‘persistent imbalances in amounts given and received between families suggest that strict reciprocal altruism cannot account for all food sharing between families’ (Kaplan & Gurven, 2005, p. 86) ↩︎

  2. See Hrdy (2011, p. 67): ’hominin infants must have been reared differently from any other ape. By possibly as early as 1.8 million years ago, hominin youngsters were being cared for and provisioned by a range of individuals in addition to their mothers’ ↩︎

  3. Hill et al. (2011, p. 1289) argue that ‘our foraging ancestors evolved a novel social structure that emphasized [...] co-residence with many unrelated individuals.’ This conclusion is based on their observation that, across 32 contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, ‘bands are mainly composed of individuals either distantly related by kinship and/or marriage or unrelated altogether. [...] primary kin generally make up less than 10% of a residential band’ (Hill et al., 2011, p. 1288). See further Apicella, Marlowe, Fowler, & Christakis (2012). ↩︎

  4. For another example, see Audi (2015, p. 57): ‘Intuition is a resource in all of philosophy, but perhaps nowhere more than in ethics.’ Audi argues that ‘Episodic intuitions [...] can serve as data [...] ... beliefs that derive from them receive prima facie justification.’ (Audi, 2015, p. 65) ↩︎

  5. As you would expect, other philosophers offer terminological stipulations about intuitions which are incompatible with Bedke’s. See, for instance, Audi (2015, p. 65): ‘some intuitions have non-self-evident propositions as objects, for example, my intuition that I should protect the wandering toddler even with its apparent mother in view.’ ↩︎