Moral Knowledge

Here, I explain how we know what is good, bad, right, wrong, etc.*

[ *Based on: Ethical Intuitionism (Palgrave, 2005), chs. 5-6. ]

1. How Value Beliefs Are Justified

First, what is knowledge? Roughly, you know something if you believe it (strongly); and you’re right; and your belief is justified; and there are no additional facts that, if added to your beliefs, would result in your no longer being justified in believing it.

When someone asks “How do you know x?”, they’re usually asking how x is justified. So, how are evaluative beliefs justified?

I previously defended the principle of Phenomenal Conservatism (PC) in epistemology here, here, and here. I won’t repeat those arguments. The principle holds that one is justified in assuming things are the way they seem, unless and until one has specific grounds for doubting that. All justified beliefs are justified in this way; all valid forms of cognition are based on appearances of one sort or another. No one has ever identified any alternative (that isn’t obviously irrational).

There are several species of appearances, including sensory, mnemonic, introspective, and intellectual. Intellectual appearances are experiences in which something seems true to you when you think about it intellectually, as opposed to seeing with your eyes, or hearing with your ears, or remembering, or introspecting, etc.

Intellectual appearances divide into two further species: inferential appearances and initial appearances. Inferential appearances are mental states in which some conclusion seems true to you in light of some other information (premises) that you already believe or that already seems true to you. Initial intellectual appearances are mental states in which something seems true to you when considered on its own, rather than in light of other propositions that you already believe. These are called “intuitions” in contemporary epistemology.

Ethical intuitions are just intuitions about ethical propositions. Here are some propositions that people commonly have ethical intuitions about:

• In the Trolley Problem, it’s permissible to turn the Trolley.

• In the Organ Harvesting example, it’s wrong to kill the healthy patient.

• Other things being equal, one should prefer to cause less harm rather than more.

• If A is better than B, and B is better than C, then A is better than C.

Those all seem true (to most people) on their face. We are thereby justified in believing those things, unless and until we have specific grounds for doubting them.

2. Misunderstandings

Here are some dumb things that people think intuitionists believe:

• That intuition is infallible; no ethical intuition or any other intuition has ever been mistaken. (No, I don’t know anyone who has ever thought that.)

• That intuition is the end of the story in ethics: the correct ethical methodology is “have an intuition, and that’s it.” (No, intuition is the beginning of the story. We have to start from somewhere, and where we start is with how things initially seem to us.)

• Ethical intuition is a distinct cognitive faculty, completely separate from all other faculties, similar to vision, or hearing, etc. Like a sixth sense. (No, intuition is pervasive in intellectual life. “Ethical intuition” is just the application of intuition to the subject matter of ethics.)

The main reason people have had these misunderstandings is that critics have traditionally just made up what intuitionists believe, rather than actually reading intuitionist works. They might, e.g., take a single out-of-context quote from 300 years ago as the basis of their understanding of the theory and ignore major figures such as W.D. Ross, G.E. Moore, or Henry Sidgwick.

3. The Moorean Argument

G.E. Moore famously responded to arguments for skepticism in epistemology by saying that it would be more plausible to reject one of the skeptic’s premises than it would be to think that knowledge is really impossible. If you wind up with the conclusion, say, that I don’t know my own name, then that’s a reductio ad absurdum of your starting premises.

Similarly, if you wind up with the conclusion, say, that Hitler did nothing wrong, that’s a reductio ad absurdum of your starting premises, whatever they were. If you’re getting to that conclusion from a premise like “weird things don’t exist,” then it would be more rational to just admit that weird things exist than to embrace the intuitively absurd claim that Hitler did nothing wrong.

In other words, compare the following arguments:

(A)

1. Moral facts are weird.

2. Weird things don’t exist.

3. Therefore, Hitler did nothing wrong.

(Implicit premise: if Hitler did something wrong, that’s a moral fact.)

(B)

1. Moral facts are weird.

2. Hitler did something wrong.

3. Therefore, (at least some) weird things exist.

(C)

1. Weird things don’t exist.

2. Hitler did something wrong.

3. Therefore, moral facts are not weird (at least, not all of them).

Argument (A) is the least rational of the three, because it has the least initially plausible starting point. “Hitler did something wrong” is the most plausible of the three propositions in this example, so (B) and (C) are each more reasonable than (A).

4. Objections

Objection 1

We need reasons for trusting intuitions before we can be justified in forming ethical beliefs on the basis of intuitions.

Reply: This appears to be a general rejection of foundationalism. I’ve defended foundationalism here and here. If you always need reasons for trusting appearances, then you’re going to have an infinite regress or circularity problem, and you’re going to wind up in radical skepticism about everything.

Objection 2

We have no way of checking our intuitions to see if they’re true, and this is a problem.

Reply: If we’re allowed to use other intuitions, then we can easily check on particular intuitions. If we’re not allowed to do that, then we can’t.

It’s also true that we can’t check on sensory observation, if we’re not allowed to use other observations; we can’t check our memories, if we’re not allowed to use other memories; and we can’t check our reasoning, if we’re not allowed to use other reasoning.

Again, this is just an argument for universal, radical skepticism, disguised as a problem for ethics. (If your argument for moral skepticism is an argument for universal skepticism, then maybe you’re just trying to invent rationalizations for being a moral skeptic.)

Objection 3

If people are allowed to appeal to intuition, then anyone can claim any belief to be justified.

Reply: There are two readings of the objection:

a) Anyone can intuit any proposition at will. This is false.

b) Anyone can lie, pretending to intuit any proposition. This is true but irrelevant. Intuitionism is not objectionable merely because it fails to produce a technology to prevent lying.

A similar argument would be that if we accept observation by the five senses, then people can lie about what they observed; therefore, we should reject observation as a means of producing knowledge. That is similarly ridiculous.

Objection 4

Ethical intuition is weird because it is utterly different from how we know about everything else.

Reply:

1. We know many things by intellectual intuition. Non-ethical intuitions include, “The shortest path between 2 points is a straight line”, “Nothing can be completely red and completely green”, “Time is one-dimensional”, and many more examples. This is not, in fact, extremely different from how we know ethical truths.

2. How is “that’s weird” an argument? Is the implicit premise that nothing weird exists? Why should we believe that? Is weirdness even an objective property? If you don’t believe in things like good, bad, right, and wrong, it’s a little, uh, weird that you would believe in weirdness.

Objection 5

Moral facts aren’t objective, because people don’t agree about them.

Reply: This argument introduces what I call “the Idiot’s Veto”—the idea that anyone can veto any proposition from being an objective truth merely by rejecting it (including due to just not being smart enough to see the fact).

Obviously, this is not how objectivity works. You don’t have to agree with P for it to be objectively true.

Objection 6

But how can intuitionists explain ethical disagreement?

Reply: First, again, intuitionists do not claim that intuition is infallible. That was never our view. So it’s not really surprising that there is disagreement.

There is also widespread disagreement about many non-ethical matters. E.g.:

• Who shot JFK?

• Do gun control laws make us safer?

• Is global warming mainly man-made?

• Does God exist?

• If God exists, what does He want?

• Who is most likely to win the next Superbowl?

• Who is the smartest person in the office?

Nobody claims that, to explain how we can possibly disagree about such things, we have to hold that there aren’t any objective facts about those things, or that humans possess no way of knowing about such things. People have many flaws that can lead to disagreement about non-ethical questions; it would be amazing if those flaws did not also lead to ethical disagreement.

In the case of ethics, people have common biases deriving from self-interest, the perceived interests of their social group, wishful thinking, and their preferred self-image. People also commonly defer to cultural traditions and religion, which are unreliable sources of information. It is thus not at all puzzling that there is ethical disagreement.

Objection 7

Intuitionists have no way of resolving disagreements, and that’s bad.

Reply: This is a very puzzling objection. There is a lot of ethical disagreement, and some of it may well be unresolvable. It’s unfortunate if that’s the case, but it is not at all implausible or unlikely that that’s the case, so it is puzzling how this can be an objection to intuitionism. It sounds like a sort of wishful-thinking argument: if we accept intuitionism, then we’ll have to accept that something bad is true; we don’t want to accept that, so let’s reject intuitionism?

The objection is also puzzling because it is unclear what alternative view the objector could be advancing. What is the alternative view in metaethics that gives us a way of resolving all ethical disagreements? If there is no such alternative, then it is again puzzling how this can be an objection to intuitionism.

Lastly, however, note that intuitionists do not say that intuition is the end of the story of ethical theorizing. They say that it is the starting point for ethical theorizing. From that starting point, we reason to try to resolve tensions and contradictions in our intuitions, to identify which intuitions are likely to be biased, etc. For a sense of how we should try to make progress if ethical intuitionism is true, see: the entire contemporary ethics literature. What goes on in that literature is basically exactly what intuitionists would say you should do to try to resolve disagreements. To what extent ethicists will ultimately succeed remains to be seen.

. . .

A final note re: disagreement: Disagreement is very common in all areas of philosophy. So if the existence of disagreement makes you skeptical about ethics, then you should be skeptical about all of philosophy. In my experience, however, the moral skeptics are not general philosophical skeptics; rather, they place great confidence in their own philosophical judgments.

There is a lot of disagreement about metaethics, especially about anti-realism (most philosophers are moral realists), and most philosophers disagree with the argument from disagreement itself. So the argument from disagreement is self-refuting.