Questions for Discussion

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Questions for Discussion

Please have these in mind these while reading the text.

What does Kagan claim about the role of intuition in gaining moral knowledge? Is his claim correct?

Is Kagan right about the parallel between physical and moral intuitions?

What is the relation between Kagan’s position and Rawls’ notion of reflective equilibrium?

Given Kagan’s position, what are the limits of moral knowledge?

Background

What are intuitions?

Kagan (2023, p. 164) writes, ‘I can easily imagine someone wanting a fuller account of what exactly an intuition is. I find that a difficult thing to provide.’ Kagan goes on to hint that an intuition is an ‘appearance’ that is ‘produced, or at least apparently produced, by reason’ (Kagan, 2023, p. 164). He also asserts that intuitions are not beliefs on the grounds that ‘One needn’t accept one’s intuitions’ Kagan (2023, p. 165).

Kagan’s view seems to me close to one Bedke (2008, p. 253) considers—‘intuitions are sui generis seeming states [...] which are like [..] seemings based on sensory experience [...] in the way they justify.’ (Bedke also offers the idea that ’intuitions are understandings of self-evident propositions, where such understanding alone is sufficient for justification.’)

Other philosophers offer inconsistent stipulations about intuition. To illustrate, according to Sinnott-Armstrong, Young, & Cushman (2010, p. 256): ‘When we refer to moral intuitions, we mean strong, stable, immediate moral beliefs.’

Background on physical intuitions

Non-experts have incorrect physical intuitions. To illustrate, they will reliably judge that a projectile exiting a spiral tube will subsequently follow a spiral trajectory (McCloskey, Caramazza, & Green, 1980). Why?

Sometimes when adult humans observe a moving object that disappears, they will misremember the location of its disappearance in way that reflects its momentum; this effect is called representational momentum (Freyd & Finke, 1984; Hubbard, 2010).

The trajectories implied by representational momentum reveal that the effect reflects impetus mechanics rather than Newtonian principles (Freyd & Jones, 1994; Kozhevnikov & Hegarty, 2001; Hubbard, Blessum, & Ruppel, 2001; Hubbard, 2013). And these trajectories are independent of subjects' scientific knowledge (Freyd & Jones, 1994; Kozhevnikov & Hegarty, 2001). Representational momentum therefore reflects judgement-independent expectations about objects’ movements which track momentum in accordance with a principle of impetus.^[1]

We might therefore conjecture that physical intuitions are based on impetus mechanics. This would explain the spiral trajectory judgements observed by (McCloskey et al., 1980).

Why is this significant? Impetus mechanics makes computing trajectories and other physical quantities relatively fast (compared to Newtonian mechanics).^[2] Impetus mechanics is also reliable within a limited but useful range of situations—those in which objects move horizontally rather than vertically, gravity is unchanging, and so on. So impetus mechanics was all humans needed for nearly all of the last few hundred thousand years. Only recent technological changes expose the limits of physical intuitions.

Conclusion: physical intuitions are reliable enough to be a source of knowledge—but only within limits. Their reliability is limited to situations that were frequent and significant in human experience over evolutionary timescales.

Glossary

reflective equilibrium : A method that is supposed to provide justification for claims. The idea is to gather considered judgements about particular situations and attempt to identify principles which from which those judgements could be inferred, and then to adjust the judgements and principles so that they cohere. The canonical statement is Rawls (1999) (but Rawls, 1951 is a useful earlier statement). Authoritative secondary sources are Knight (2023) and Scanlon (2002).

representational momentum : Sometimes when adult humans observe a moving object that disappears, they will misremember the location of its disappearance in way that reflects its momentum (Freyd & Finke, 1984; Hubbard, 2010). There are several competing models of representational momentum and related phenomena involving misremembered location (Hubbard, 2010).

References

Bedke, M. S. (2008). Ethical Intuitions: What They Are, What They Are Not, and How They Justify. American Philosophical Quarterly, 45(3), 253–269.

Bengson, J., Cuneo, T., & Shafer-Landau, R. (2020). Trusting Moral Intuitions. Noûs, 54(4), 956–984. https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12291

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Cappelen, H. (2012). Philosophy Without Intuitions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cecchini, D. (2024). The Reliability Challenge to Moral Intuitions. Neuroethics, 17(2), 32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-024-09566-1

Descartes, R. (1998). The world and other writings. (S. Gaukroger, Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Freyd, J. J., & Finke, R. A. (1984). Representational momentum. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 10(1), 126–132. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.10.1.126

Freyd, J. J., & Jones, K. T. (1994). Representational momentum for a spiral path. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20(4), 968–976. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.20.4.968

Greene, J. D. (2014). Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality: Why Cognitive (Neuro)Science Matters for Ethics. Ethics, 124(4), 695–726. https://doi.org/10.1086/675875

Hrdy, S. B. (2011). Mothers and others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press.

Hubbard, T. L. (2005). Representational momentum and related displacements in spatial memory: A review of the findings. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 12(5), 822–851. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196775

Hubbard, T. L. (2010). Approaches to representational momentum: Theories and models. In R. Nijhawan & B. Khurana (Eds.), Space and time in perception and action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hubbard, T. L. (2013). Launching, Entraining, and Representational Momentum: Evidence Consistent with an Impetus Heuristic in Perception of Causality. Axiomathes, 23(4), 633–643. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-012-9186-z

Hubbard, T. L., Blessum, J. A., & Ruppel, S. E. (2001). Representational momentum and Michotte’s “launching effect” paradigm (1946/1963). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27(1), 294–301. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.27.1.294

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

Knight, C. (2023). Reflective Equilibrium. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/reflective-equilibrium/

Kozhevnikov, M., & Hegarty, M. (2001). Impetus beliefs as default heuristics: Dissociation between explicit and implicit knowledge about motion. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8(3), 439–453. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196179

McCloskey, M., Caramazza, A., & Green, B. (1980). Curvilinear Motion in the Absence of External Forces: Naive Beliefs about the Motion of Objects. Science, 210(4474), 1139–1141. https://doi.org/10.2307/1684819

McGrath, S. (2008). Moral disagreement and moral expertise. Oxford Studies in Metaethics, 3, 87–107.

Rawls, J. (1951). Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics. The Philosophical Review, 60(2), 177–197. https://doi.org/10.2307/2181696

Rawls, J. (1999). A Theory of Justice (Revised edition). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Rini, R. A. (2013). Making psychology normatively significant. The Journal of Ethics, 17(3), 257–274.

Scanlon, T. M. (2002). Rawls on justification. In S. Freeman (Ed.), The cambridge companion to rawls (pp. 139–167). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521651670.004

Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2008). Framing Moral Intuitions. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology: Intuition and diversity. The cognitive science of morality (Vol. 2, pp. 47–76). Cambridge: Cambridge 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.

Thomson, J. J. (1976). Killing, Letting Die, and The Trolley Problem. The Monist, 59(2), 204–217. https://doi.org/10.5840/monist197659224

Endnotes

Note that momentum is only one of several factors which may influence mistakes about the location at which a moving object disappears. See Hubbard (2005, p. \ 842): ‘The empirical evidence is clear that (1) displacement does not always correspond to predictions based on physical principles and (2) variables unrelated to physical principles (e.g., the presence of landmarks, target identity, or expectations regarding a change in target direction) can influence displacement. [...] information based on a naive understanding of physical principles or on subjective consequences of physical principles appears to be just one of many types of information that could potentially contribute to the displacement of any given target' ↩︎
See Kozhevnikov & Hegarty (2001, p. 450): To extrapolate objects’ motion on the basis of [e.g. Newtonian] physical principles, one should have assessed and evaluated the presence and magnitude of such imperceptible forces as friction and air resistance [...] This would require a time-consuming analysis that is not always possible. In order to have a survival advantage, the process of extrapolation should be fast and effortless, without much conscious deliberation. Impetus theory allows us to extrapolate objects’ motion quickly and without large demands on attentional resources.’ ↩︎