Perceptual Grounds, Ethical Disagreement, and Moral Intuitions
THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS OUTLINE a theory of perception and explain how that theory enables us to explicate moral perception. I have resisted the temptation to subsume moral perception entirely under the ordinary perception of observable natural properties, but I have brought out important respects in which it is similar to that. Moral perception has, for instance, a causal element. It also exhibits some of the phenomenal elements and the discriminative dependence on its object that go with its causal structure. These characteristics are manifested in different ways in different people and may also be colored by elements of culture and upbringing. One person’s moral perception may be another’s mere behavioral observation. Our normative standards may also influence what we perceive and certainly what we perceptually believe. The bereaved mother and the terrorist will see very different things in a car bombing; the priest and the pimp will see very different things in the offer of money to a desperately poor woman. They may, to be sure, have the same basic perceptions, say of color and shape, voice and movement. But the mother and the priest have moral perceptions that the terrorist and the pimp lack. This makes a great difference in what, overall, they see.
If, however, moral perception rests on non-moral perception in the way I have indicated, why is there apparently more disparity in judgment in the moral realm than for ordinary non-moral perception? Chapter 3 briefly described how rational disagreement is possible in ethics, but it left much to be determined in explaining how such disagreement is possible even where moral perception is brought to bear in settling it. I pointed out that not all moral knowledge is perceptual and that not all moral perception produces moral knowledge—it may not even produce moral belief. We should also bear in mind that even in the natural sciences there is much disagreement and that studies of testimonial evidence in criminal matters show that there is considerable disparity in perceptual judgment even among observers of the same scene. But there remains much to say about how rational disagreement is possible in ethics. In addressing this matter, I will consider not only disagreements regarding perceptible moral properties, but disagreements involving moral intuitions and other kinds of moral cognitions. This inquiry is particularly appropriate given that one of my overall aims in this book is to explain how objectivity in ethics is possible and how an intuitionist moral theory can account for rational disagreement without undermining a commitment to the possibility of genuine moral knowledge.
I. DOES MORAL DISAGREEMENT UNDERMINE JUSTIFICATION IN ETHICS?
There are many disagreements on moral questions, and in some cases all of the disputants are rational regarding the subject under discussion. Does this show that we are rarely if ever justified in holding a moral judgment, at least when we realize that some comparably informed rational person rejects that judgment?
In understanding disagreements of any kind, it is essential to ascertain whether the disputants differ regarding the same proposition. Sometimes a person rejects what another says without seeing just what that is, perhaps because the language used seems threatening, as where one can tell that one is being accused of something but does not see exactly what it is. We could call this kind of disagreement illocutionary, since the disagreement is focused on the other’s speech act (the “illocution”) and not its content.1 Illocutionary disagreement may seem to be only a pragmatic phenomenon rather than a substantive difference on the truth-value of some proposition. But this is not all we need to see here. We should distinguish several kinds of disagreement that are important in ethics as elsewhere.
Three Kinds of Disagreement
Suppose a colleague says something indefinite, for instance that my students are unhappy with their assignments. I may reject this description not because I disbelieve the vague claim, which I may simply not accept, without believing it to be false, but because I can think of several propositions that might explain what the speaker has in mind, and I disbelieve each of those. One interpretation might be that the assignments are too hard, another that they are too frequent, still another that they are uninteresting. Call this indefinite disagreement (the first kind of disagreement that concerns me). It is indefinite because the speaker is not clearly committed to any of the specific propositions I disbelieve, nor need I take the speaker to be asserting one of those. We disagree on the vague claim, and there is something more specific on which we differ or would differ if we considered it; but I do not ascribe to my colleague belief of any specific claims. Our disagreement is thus substantive (and not merely verbal), though it is not specific. I reject the assertive speech act—which is why the disagreement may be called illocutionary—but not some particular proposition asserted. It is as if I said, if only to myself: I don’t know exactly what you have in mind regarding my students, but the things that come to mind are all propositions I reject.
This example brings us to our main concern here: content-specific disagreement, which is the most common kind. This takes two main forms and contrasts with the illocutionary kind, which is indefinite and is a matter of rejecting what is said rather than of believing any specific proposition. Content-specific disagreement is focal, and it occurs when one person affirms something and the other rejects it or at least suspends judgment on it. This need not, however, be propositional disagreement, which is probably the most important kind of content-specific disagreement. This kind occurs where the disagreement is over a proposition, which (in cases of such disagreement) I take to be a truth-valued element accessible to more than one mind. But, as is evident from our discussion of the modes of perception and its different kinds of content, content-specific disagreement may be attributional—a matter of attributive beliefs and their differing predications—rather than propositional. Let me illustrate this third kind of disagreement.
Suppose we each see a moving shape in the woods ahead and you say, ‘It’s dangerous—let’s not go in there’, whereas I say, ‘It’s not dangerous’. It may be that neither of us has done any more than predicate different properties of the thing we both see but do not recognize, thereby differing in our attributive beliefs. You might believe it to be large and lumbering toward us, while I believe it to be stationary. We might also believe different propositions that are tied to our different points of view and so can be identified only by their believer. You might believe that the shape is like that of a bear you saw in a zoo, whereas I may believe that the shape has stubs like those of a tree trunk I have seen that was shorn of its branches. These propositions are not expressed by either of us and are not what we disagree on, even if they are part of the source of our disagreement about danger. Still, we may understand each other to ascribe different properties to whatever it is, and that suffices for content-specific disagreement. For a moral example, consider observation of an interview. One of us, struck by diction and body language, may believe the interviewer to be unethical; the other, struck by the animation of the discussion, may believe the interviewer to be simply vigorous and might then be indisposed to make any negative moral judgment on it.
To be sure, even if we disagree regarding an object of discussion only in our ascriptions of properties to it, we are in a position to arrive at propositional disagreement as well. We may nonetheless agree that we differ regarding the properties of what we are both willing to describe as the tall shape we see out there. Moreover, it may be that we can rarely settle an attributive disagreement without formulating propositions and seeking agreement on them; but here I am explaining what constitutes disagreement. How disagreement arises and how it is settled are different though closely related matters.2
Now consider the moral case of the priest and the amoral case of the pimp. The priest sees a woman who, in desperation, may turn to prostitution as demeaned and treated merely as a means. The pimp, by contrast, may see her amorally, as needing to make the best living she can. The cognitive difference here is due to perspectival disparity. Each observer has a different perspective from which an indefinite range of propositions will seem true. Each will be disposed to dispute some of the ones accepted by the other, but the perspectival disparity is largely a matter of the categories (in some sense) in which they see the woman. It will tend to produce definite contentual disagreement of both kinds.
The pimp may, to be sure, have certain moral concepts and a good sense of the base properties for them, but may also be amoral in one sense: he may have no moral commitments regarding the woman or anyone else and no motivation to act on any moral propositions he may happen to believe. Even if he is not amoral in this sense, he may lack the morally important notions of violation of a person and of treating a person merely as a means. Moreover, supposing he does have these notions, he may not apply them by all the same criteria as the priest, or may simply be insensitive to the evidences that indicate their application. This is in part a matter of moral education. Similarly, just as some people may not have the concept of electricity or, more commonly, do not know, or are not sensitive to, all the main evidences of its presence, the same may hold for wrongdoing.
Epistemic Peers as Idealized Disputants
One might accept all this and still note that rational persons can disagree in moral matters even when they do have essentially the same relevant concepts and are focusing on the same proposition. Executives may disagree on what bonus is merited by a good employee; legislators may disagree over whether polygamy should be legal; parents may disagree on what punishment is deserved by a wayward adolescent. These truths are important for understanding ethics, but again we must disambiguate: disagreement over prima facie moral appraisal is very different from disagreement over final (on balance) appraisal. We find disagreement among rational persons over whether, say, assisted suicide is wrong on balance; but few if any rational persons disagree over whether killing people is prima facie wrong, i.e. (roughly) wrong-making and on balance wrong unless there is an opposing consideration, such as self-defense, of at least equal moral weight. There is a great deal to say about the nature and resolution of moral disagreement, and I have elsewhere examined it.3 Here I will simply summarize some ways in which, without skepticism, we can explain rational moral disagreement among what are called epistemic peers.
Consider a possible case of rational disagreement between two people—epistemic peers—who occupy, on the matter at issue (say an attribution of injustice), positions of epistemic parity. Roughly, this is to say that on this matter they are (a) equally rational and equally thoughtful and (b) have considered the same relevant evidence equally conscientiously.4 By contrast with most descriptions of epistemic parity with respect to a proposition, this one explicitly requires that the relevant parties consider the evidence and do so equally conscientiously. If we require only sharing the same relevant evidence and having the same epistemic virtues (or being equally rational in the matter, which is a similar condition), nothing follows about how fully these virtues are expressed, and it is thus possible that, for instance, despite equal epistemic ability and equal possession of evidence, the parties have devoted very different amounts of time or effort or both to appraising the proposition.5 In that case—exhibiting a kind of epistemic asymmetry—disagreement may be readily resolved by an equally conscientious consideration of the relevant evidence. Particularly where we are concerned with the whole range of significant cognitive disparities, it is important that parity be understood to have a non-dispositional element—for our purposes, actually considering relevant evidence in relation to the proposition in question. This element provides a way to account for important disparities that might not be evident in a peer disagreement in which no consideration, or only differentially conscientious consideration, of the relevant evidence occurs.
Let me illustrate. If I believe that a colleague with whom I disagree satisfies (a) and (b), this may prevent me from concluding that I am clearly right. It should prevent dogmatism about my own correctness. The possibility that (a) and (b) are jointly realizable in rational moral disagreement should be granted, but it should be stressed that—as skeptics might be the first to emphasize—it is very hard to be justified in believing that someone else satisfies (a) or (b) or, especially, both. The breadth, complexity, and quantity of evidence needed about the other person are great, and error in assessing that evidence is difficult to avoid.6 It may also be difficult to determine precisely what factors, among the many that may figure in a disagreement, are relevant to it. Evidence is constituted by facts and other elements that are relevant to indefinitely many propositions about which people may disagree, and the scope of its relevance is not written on its face. In practice, we may be at most rarely justified in believing anyone to be an epistemic peer on a given point at issue. This applies especially to ascriptions of epistemic parity regarding complex moral issues.
Non-evidential Sources of Disagreement
There is at least one other relevant set of variables. One variable is potentially influential background theories a disputant may hold, such as skeptical ones or ethical theories with myriad implications for the kinds of cases in dispute. Another variable is beliefs that bear on the matter in question or may simply influence a person on it, including “background beliefs” such as prejudicial beliefs that may not surface in the discussion or in the reflections of either party, say that highly educated people are more reliable in moral matters. Beliefs need not even be conscious to influence other cognitions, and the same holds for pro and con attitudes.
Still another variable is difference between disputants in conceptions, especially normative ones, that may affect assessment of an issue without even coming to consciousness. Consider the effects of reading philosophical ethics, say in Aristotle or Confucius in the virtue ethics tradition, Kant or Ross in the deontological tradition, or Bentham and Mill in the utilitarian tradition. We are also influenced by ethically significant novels, such as those of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Two people can be equally rational and consider the same evidence for a proposition, p, but differ in the background cognitions and conceptions they bring to the assessment of that evidence. Such background elements may include religious convictions or theoretical commitments, say to Calvinism, skepticism, or epistemological coherentism. One could include such background factors in “total evidence,” but I use ‘evidence’ more specifically (the influence of background factors on a belief may in any event be only causal rather than justificatory, in which case they are not functioning as evidence for the belief).
Still other factors must be taken into account to achieve a good understanding of rational disagreement. In addition to the difficulty—especially in complex cases—of acquiring justification for believing someone else (a) to have considered the same relevant evidence, (b) to have done so equally conscientiously, (c) to be equally rational in the matter, and (d) to be free of background cognitions that reduce the person’s overall justification regarding p, there are at least three further factors. One is that someone else’s disbelieving p is itself a reason, for a person who rationally believes p, to doubt that the other is correct in denying p or is a full-scale epistemic peer in the matter.7 The second is that we are better positioned to make a critical appraisal of our own evidence and of our responses to it than of anyone else’s evidence or responses to that evidence.8 Other things equal, then, we are better justified in our assessment of our own basis for believing p and of our response to that basis than in our assessment of the basis of anyone else’s believing it or of anyone else’s response to that basis. Even when I justifiedly believe someone else has the same relevant evidence and has considered it equally conscientiously and as freely of biasing background cognitions, I may still not be justified in believing that a contrary belief of the other person’s is based on the evidence. Possessing evidence is one thing; properly responding to it is another. Justified beliefs must be based on evidence adequately supporting their content; otherwise they are not an adequate response to the evidence but merely “in line” with it. Thus, a contrary belief that is not based on our common evidence is (other things equal) a lesser threat to my belief than one that is.
The third factor is that, as we check and recheck our own grounds for a justified belief that p and our responses to them, we tend to increase our justification for believing p, at least where we retain that belief (but possibly even if, say from a skeptical disposition, we do not retain it). Insofar as we are self-critical and have justified self-trust, as some of us do, our retention of a belief after such scrutiny tends to be confirmatory. The belief survives a kind of test. Thus, the very exercise of critically seeking to establish the epistemic parity of a disputant may give one a justificatory advantage in the dispute. Perhaps we may conclude that other things equal, making a rational conscientious attempt to establish the epistemic parity of a disputant tends to favor the conscientious inquirer, at least where one retains a disputed belief.
Is Rational Disagreement a Crippling Problem for Intuitionism?
These points about rational disagreement are quite general, but they have a particular relevance for ethical intuitionism and the related theory of moral perception presented in this book. Both posit moral knowledge not based on premises. In doing so, they may appear to free at least many intuitive judgments of the need for evidential grounds. But they do not. Moreover, intuitive moral judgments may have just the kinds of evidential grounds we have seen in the case of moral perception; and even though intuitions are non-inferential, they may—again like moral perceptual beliefs—be defended by inferences when a need for justification arises. Being held on a non-inferential basis does not preclude being defensible on an inferential basis.
Even if (as I doubt) a justified intuitive moral belief might not be defensible by finding plausible premises for it, inferences might be enlisted in its defense by way of clarifying it and rebutting criticism of it. This can apply even to self-evident propositions. As will shortly be explained (and is argued in other work),9 the claim that at least some basic moral principles are self-evident entails neither that comprehendingly believing them implies having indefeasible justification for them, nor that they cannot be justified inferentially. Given this and the other points in this section, I believe that intuitionists (among others) may retain their convictions in the face of rational disagreement provided certain critical standards are met. These standards seem satisfiable, under some conditions, for at least a good many reflective moral agents.
My account of rational disagreement is meant to show that moral knowledge is possible despite the skeptical concerns arising from the possibility of rational disagreement between epistemic peers. If my case is sound, it supports the possibility of moral knowledge—whether of prima facie moral obligations or of overall moral obligations.10 I am not ignoring the common kinds of disagreements in ethics, but these are not between people who are epistemic peers in the relevant matter. That point eliminates some of the difficulties that attempted resolution may face. Neither this point nor any made above imply that the possibility of moral perception makes resolving moral disagreements easy or that, by educating one’s perceptual sensibilities in ethics, one can become a moral expert.11 But even the existence of moral and other disagreements that are difficult to resolve does not support skepticism, nor does an objectivistic realism in ethics imply that there must be moral experts in ethics.
My points about rational disagreement apply not only to empirical moral judgments, say singular judgments appraising a specific person or act, but also to self-evident moral principles, such as the kind expressing general prima facie obligation to avoid killing, cheating, lying, and promise breaking.12 Many of the moral judgments whose status is in question are based on what I have called moral perception. These include many that are intuitive, but intuitive moral judgments also include many that are not perceptual in kind. It is time to consider the intuitive category, its relation to moral perception, and how that relation bears on rational retention of moral intuitions in the face of disagreement.
II. THE CONCEPT OF AN INTUITION
Disagreement occurs at all levels, including that of intuition, though of course one may hope that at least where intuitions are difficult to support by argument—rare though such cases may be—our disagreements in intuitions are either not common or not major for either practical or theoretical matters. How reasonable is such a hope?
This question cannot be answered unless we transcend a common stereotype of intuition which represents it as a “gut response,” a kind of automatic cognitive (and often affective) reaction, not mediated by reflection or assisted by inference. If we detach from our idea of intuition the suggestion of mere emotionality or mere personal preference, then this description may hold for some intuitions. Suppose someone said that believing is an action. My intuitive response to this claim has always been immediately negative. This does not make it a gut response, though perhaps it once was. In any case, just as, in a short moment, one can take in myriad details of a painting, one can quickly appreciate a conceptual classification (such as treating beliefs as actions) and place it in a wide context. Thus, even if gut responses typically are among those that come quickly, the rapidity of a response does not imply that it is a gut response—and certainly not a response that is unjustified or does not arise from a background of considerable understanding.
Rapidity of response is not characteristic of all intuitions, for some of the same reasons that indicate why it is not characteristic of all perceptions. Some intuitions emerge only upon reflection, and even some that do arise immediately on considering something are quickly replaced by other intuitions as consideration continues or passes into critical reflection. Imagine that you have to decide whether to cease life support for your terminally ill father, who has never addressed the matter. You will likely reflect on his values, his reactions to relevantly similar cases among relatives, and so on. You may need quite some time, even more than one sitting. When you feel you have a sufficiently informed picture of his values and of what is best for him—a picture sometimes obtained only by imagining a kind of narrative of his life—it may seem to you that you should not allow further life support. If this impression is an intuition, it is non-inferential; but as the example shows, that does not entail its being a gut response.
A cognition can be non-inferential, then, even when its basis contains rich information, perhaps including propositions that can be harnessed as premises to support it. Being non-inferential, moreover, does not entail that an intuition arises independently of inferences in the background, as where one infers facts about medical consequences from what one reads about the available treatments and only then intuitively sees what should be done. We may need ladders to ascend to a plateau, but from there we may be able to reach the summit by a direct path. The path may be long and laborious but may show us a wide view. Understanding a problem, comprehendingly reading a passage, and appreciatively viewing a painting may be similar. Intuition, like understanding, may also come slowly and only when we have taken a long and wide view.13
Five Notions Important for Understanding Intuition
An account of intuition should clarify at least five related notions. Let me characterize each briefly and in that light indicate how some of the notions figure in ethical intuitionism as I conceive it.
Cognitive intuition. This is the most common kind of intuition considered in ethical literature: it is intuition that p (a proposition), say that a friend deserves an apology for an offensive remark or, to take an ethical generalization as an example, that one should not accept a major gift from a former student whom one must again teach in the future. In the latter case, at least, the intuitive proposition could be subsumed under a moral rule, say one to the effect that we should not do things that produce risky conflicts of interest. But subsumability under a rule need not prevent a proposition from being the object of an intuition, any more than there need be one route, or only indirect routes, to a given destination. Moreover, some who would have the intuition might not accept any such rule—at least antecedently to reflecting on such concrete instances and generalizing from them.14
Objectual intuition. This is, roughly, direct apprehension of either (a) a concept, such as that of obligation, or (b) a property or relation, such as the property of being a promise, the property of being unjust, or the relation of entailment. As a kind of objectual knowledge, such intuitions are in a sense epistemic. They may also be considered cognitive, though not propositional, but I prefer to reserve the term ‘cognitive intuition’ for intuitions with propositional objects. In a sense to be explored below, objectual intuition may be conceived as a kind of intellectual perception.
Intuitiveness. This is a property primarily of propositions, but it is also predicated of claims, concepts, arguments, and other intellectual phenomena. Applied to a proposition, it is equivalent to the proposition’s being intuitive—having the property of evoking (under certain conditions) what might be called the sense of non-inferential credibility (this notion may be relativized, for instance to persons of a certain description or to a certain level of understanding needed for the intuitive sense to be manifested). That sense is roughly equivalent to the sense of a proposition’s (non-inferentially) seeming true—seeming true on the basis of its content, whether alone or viewed in the context in which the proposition is entertained or considered, where this impression of truth does not derive from any sense of the proposition’s being supported by a premise. This sense of its seeming true normally produces an inclination to believe it.15 (The normality qualification presupposes reference to a rational person who has at least a minimally adequate understanding of the proposition in question.)
Propositional intuition. This is intuition conceived as a proposition taken (by the person using the term) to be intuitively known or at least intuitively justifiably believed, say that what is colored is extended or (for some) that capital punishment is wrong. We can imagine someone saying to colleagues on a committee writing an ethics code for a corporation, ‘Let’s jot down the various intuitions about harassment that have been expressed and see if we can frame a definition for our code of ethics’. Here, intuitions are constituted by propositions, though in these contexts the term may be loosely used non-factively, implying only a presumption of truth. Hence, unlike cognitive intuitions, propositional intuitions are abstract, non-psychological elements and (on most but not all uses) include only truths.16
Apprehensional capacity. This is intuition as a rational capacity—facultative intuition, for short—a kind that is needed for philosophical reflection and manifested in relation to each of the other four cases. It is roughly a non-inferential capacity by whose exercise what is intuitively believed or known is believed or known. Ethical intuition, like logical intuition, is a special dimension of this capacity.
Intuitions with propositional objects (cognitive intuitions) will be my main concern. But the other notions will also be considered, and we gain clarity by distinguishing them from the former and connecting them with those in ways I shall shortly illustrate.17
The Analogy between Intuition and Perception
There is much to be learned from conceiving facultative intuition as analogous to the “faculty” of perception and, correspondingly, intuitions as analogous to perceptions. Take seeing as a paradigm of perception. Intuitive apprehension is analogous to seeing. First, it has objects, typically, or at least most importantly for our purposes, concepts and properties. (We need not here discuss what kinds of objects these are, but I assume they are both abstract and in some way connected with linguistic usage, and they are surely accessible through understanding that usage.) Second, in addition to simple apprehension—apprehension of—there is also apprehension to be (attributive apprehension), and apprehension as: aspectual apprehension. The former, apprehension simpliciter, is de re (roughly, of the thing that is its object) and apparently does not entail belief, as where a small child apprehends, in an elementary way, the wrongness of smashing a toy but does not have a propositional belief that this is wrong or (conceptually) see it as wrong. The child may have a sense, perhaps arising from seeing siblings scolded for similar things, that the act is to be avoided, a sense that is potentially motivating; but the child may still lack a concept of wrongness. Attributive and aspectual apprehension entail at least some degree of understanding of the property the object is apprehended to have, or as having, say the wrongness of smashing the toy, but I take conceptualization to be something more than the minimal degree of such understanding, which may be mainly a matter of discriminative responsiveness.
The third point here concerns the connection between an apprehension and an intuitive seeming. Given an apprehension of a type of act, as where we are considering what to do and we envisage various possible acts, it may also intuitively seem to us that (for instance) a kind of act in question is wrong. This is a propositional seeming. Fourth, we may, on the basis of this seeming, believe that such acts are wrong. Fifth, if this belief is true, then we intuitively see (apprehend) that the act is wrong. Such true doxastic intuition, a case of intuitive belief, would at least normally constitute intuitive knowledge. The same points hold for an apprehension of a concrete action, though apprehension implies not mere observation of the action but having at least a sense of certain of its properties, say its being a promise breaking or a truth telling in the face of temptation to lie.
We thus have, with intellectual perception as with sensory perception, simple, attributive, aspectual, and propositional perception: (1) apprehensions of the relevant object or kind of object, such as the act-type, lying; (2) apprehending the object to have a property, say seeing intimidating interviews to be unfair; (3) apprehensions of the object as something, for instance of a kind of act as wrong; and (4) apprehensions that the object is something, say, that intimidation is unfair. Simple and attributive apprehensions have the same kind of veridicality as perceptions of concrete objects: I assume that there really are objects of intellectual apprehension which may have properties we apparently apprehend in considering them. Aspectual apprehensions may or may not embody beliefs; but, as also holds with propositional apprehensions, when they do, they commonly represent knowledge.
Are there, as the perceptual analogy suggests, apprehensional counterparts of illusion and hallucination? Might someone mistakenly (illusorily) apprehend the property of redness as coming in precisely discrete shades in concert with its discrete wavelengths? This would be a misapprehension but could still be of red, somewhat as visually misperceiving a glass’s round rim as elliptical is, though an illusion, still seeing that rim. An analogue of hallucination is more difficult to delineate. Mere possibilia, such as mythological beasts like chimeras, are apprehensible; thus, if we assume that hallucinatory perceptions have no object at all, then to understand them we must focus on something like thinking of a round square.18 But how could one apprehend “round-squarely,” even granting that no false belief is implied? Perhaps someone could apprehend each element with a false sense of their unity. One could perhaps speak of a hypothetical object here, analogous to an object that might be posited for hallucinations, but this is not the place to develop the idea. It is enough that the analogy between intuition and perception is extensive. Let us now explore its application to justification.
Where something’s seeming to have a property is a kind of intellectual impression and not a belief, we may speak of an intuitive seeming. An intuitive seeming, like a sensory seeming of the kind that occurs when one views the rim of a glass from an angle, may generate a belief with the same content. But where there is no need to form a belief or to make a judgment, and especially where one’s concentration diminishes after the seeming arises, a seeming may remain just that. But commonly, you respond to reflections aimed at arriving at an answer to a question by forming a belief that is intuitive—this is a doxastic intuition.19 The propositional content of a doxastic intuition will typically seem true to its possessor upon being entertained, but no such seeming is a necessary prior to forming a doxastic intuition.
An intuitive seeming can evidentially support, and can causally produce or sustain, a doxastic intuition, but not every intuitive seeming does either of these things. A counterexample to one’s view may be like this. It may be felt as seeming to indicate a truth, but not evoke conviction, at least not immediately. The more we have invested, the more we tend to resist devaluation. Furthermore, not every doxastic intuition arises from or is based on an intuitive seeming, though it would be at best unusual to have an intuitive belief (as opposed to, say, an inferential belief), which is, for the person in question, perceptibly inconsistent with an intuitive seeming.
An intuitive seeming implies a felt inclination to believe; the inclination is characteristically based on a phenomenal sense of something’s having a property. It is analogous to a perceptual inclination to believe, as where seeing a property inclines one to believe something to the effect that the object in question has it. Beliefs that are perceptibly inconsistent with the truth of a person’s intuitive seeming would tend to create a sense of tension. That tension is a kind that a rational person tends to avoid and, if it should arise, to try to resolve. Resolution often occurs through giving up one or the other intuitive element, but such tensions may also lead to giving up a standing belief. (I will say more about this relationship in discussing moral intuitions.)
As already indicated, on any plausible conception of intuitions, they are non-inferential. This might appear to be obviously so for intuitive seemings, since they may appear to be the wrong kinds of elements to be premise-based. But perhaps sense can be made of one seeming’s being based on another in at least a quasi-inferential way, as where a person seems anxious on the basis of seeming to be preoccupied with possible failures in a plan you are jointly making. Should we say, then, that a non-doxastic seeming could be inferential at least where the premise is another seeming? This would be misleading. Where one such seeming is based on another of the same kind, we have a close analogy, not to one belief’s being inferentially based on another (a premise-belief), but rather to the relation that non-basic perception bears to basic perception.20 If someone’s seeming to me upset is based on the person’s seeming to me fidgety, I need not have an inferential belief or inferential seeming as a result and certainly need not have actually drawn an inference. Rather, the seeming fidgetiness is part of a pattern to which this seeming to be upset is a response.
The most important point about intuitions in relation to inference is that they are direct responses to something the person sees or otherwise senses or considers, not intellectual responses to a premise that, for the person in question, is in some sense prior to the intuited proposition. The complexity of the object, pattern, or even narrative, to which intuitions (including seemings) respond does not imply that they are inferential. Complexity in what one perceives or considers does not imply forming (or having) premise-beliefs regarding it.
This ascription of non-inferential directness to intuitions goes well with the paradigmatic status of intuitions whose objects are luminously self-evident axioms, though there are also clear cases of intuitions whose contents are not self-evident. Among those who use the notion of intuition discriminatingly, it is widely agreed that it is by intuition that we see the truth of such self-evident propositions as that if all human beings are mortal, and we are all human beings, then we are all mortal.
The Self-Evident and the Obvious
In part because the paradigms of self-evident propositions are both intuitive and obviously true, it is important to see that neither obviousness nor even intuitiveness is essential to them. Consider the proposition that the mother-in-law of a spouse of a person’s youngest sibling is that person’s own mother. This takes most people some time to see to be true, but it is evident in itself, without the need for a premise. It is thus not obvious (even for the same people who can see its truth and later come to find it self-evident and even obvious). That point is confirmed by how intuitive it seems to us once we see how it is true. A self-evident proposition, then, can be far from obvious yet seem obvious to us once we see its truth on the basis of an adequate understanding of it. The concept of self-evidence in question—and most appropriate in ethical theory—is this:
Self-evident propositions are truths such that (a) in virtue of adequately understanding them one has justification for believing them (which does not entail that all who adequately understand them do believe them), and (b) believing them on the basis of adequately understanding them entails knowing them.21
This account makes clear not only why a self-evident proposition need not be obvious but also why it may be withheld or even disbelieved by at least some people.22 For even when a self-evident proposition that is not obvious is considered by someone, it may not be psychologically compelling for that person, as are, for most normal adults, such simple analytic truths as that if x and y are of the same height and x is five feet tall, then y is also five feet tall. A psychologically compelling proposition is one such that adequately understanding it and simultaneously considering it entails believing it. The obvious self-evident truths are compelling. Such examples as my in-law case show, however, that we can fully comprehend a self-evident proposition and still need time to reflect on its content, say on the relationships it expresses, before we believe it. Clearly, then, not all self-evident truths are initially intuitive: intuitive on first comprehending consideration. I doubt that all of them must be capable of being intuitive at all. But if that is so, it is not inconsistent with anything I maintain. It would indeed help to explain the possibility of rational persons’ disagreeing even on certain self-evident propositions.
Return now to the case of the intuition, formed after much thought, that we should discontinue life support for the terminally ill patient. Not only is the object of this intuition not self-evident (which it could not be given that the self-evident is a priori);23 we must also grant that the belief in question represents the person’s conclusion in the matter. But how can a conclusion be non-inferential? There are at least two kinds of conclusions: conclusions of inference, which are premise-based, and conclusions of reflection, which are properly so called because they conclude or wrap up a matter on which one has reflected but are non-inferential. Conclusions of reflection may come only after much thinking or minute observation, but may be epistemically as direct as a master conductor’s concluding verdict, concerning a violinist playing in a mediocre way at an audition, that the violinist should not be engaged. The conductor may have to listen for several minutes, but the intuitive conclusion may be based on an overall response, not on such premises as that the violinist rushed through the delicate passage in the middle—there may indeed be no such premises in the judge’s mind. A piece played without “mistakes” is not thereby played well. A performance having only parts that are beautifully played, like a painting composed only of beautiful parts, may fail to be beautiful.24
III. INTUITIONS AS APPREHENSIONS
Some of our examples show that moral intuitions can have general propositions as their objects, for instance the proposition that there is a prima facie obligation not to kill people. There are also philosophical intuitions, say that believing is not a process. It is plausible to take such general and philosophical propositions to have as constituents (even if not their only constituents) the concepts they are in some sense about, at least in the sense that they reflect facts concerning those concepts. One kind of intuition is what I have called simple: apprehension of a concept, a property, or a relation, where these are viewed as abstract entities. Consider, for instance, poor logic students. We may say of them that they have trouble apprehending the concept of validity or have too few or misguided intuitions about specific entailments (an analogue of perceptual illusions, wherein there is contact with the object perceived but a false impression about it); and we may say, of good students in ethics, that they readily apprehend fittingness relations. Here the analogy is to simple perception but, with intuition, the objects—entailment and fittingness relations—are abstract.
If the analogy between intuitive apprehension and moral perception is as far-reaching as I suppose, then just as one can see the injustice of a deed or the goodness in a person, one may apprehend the concept of injustice or that of personal goodness. Indeed, might the perceptions of the corresponding properties be a normal route—perhaps the only ordinary route—to apprehension of the corresponding concepts?
Here is how that might be so. Apparently, from a conceptual and epistemological point of view, there is a progression—one that seems to correspond to normal human development—in which the first stage is sensory acquaintance (normally of a perceptual kind) with properties and an ability to discriminate some from others; the second is conceptualization of the properties in question, a stage that makes it possible to apprehend them in a conceptual way, which entails an appropriate grasp of their generality; and the third (which presupposes but need not come later than the second) is framing propositions in which the concepts figure—exercising the concepts, we might say—as where one has the thought that slapping other people is wrong.25 The process may be arrested at any stage, but it is commonly completed.
Where moral perceptions and, especially, moral intuitions are in question, it may seem that my account is too heavily cognitive and that motivation should be given a larger role in understanding moral intuition. Normal moral agents are, after all, motivated to avoid what they intuitively believe to be injustice and are motivated to seek, maintain, support, honor (or the like) what they intuitively believe to be good. I see no need to build motivation into the account of either moral perception or moral intuition, but I have made ample room for a strong if contingent connection between moral intuition and motivation to act accordingly. There may be a non-contingent connection between these in rational persons, or at least rational persons in whom there is a high degree of integration between cognition and motivation.26 Some moral intuitions and many moral perceptions—which have the phenomenal vividness that goes with perception and that need not belong to intuition—are no doubt motivating. This may have theological or evolutionary significance. By the grace of God or evolution, or both,27 we may be sensitive to at least some kinds of (intrinsically) good and (intrinsically) bad things, and naturally attracted to the former and averse to the latter. In many people, the moral experience of seeing an injustice tends to be unpleasant, and that of seeing the goodness of a beneficent nursing of a wound tends to be pleasant. But these aspects of our psychological and epistemic constitution are both largely an empirical matter and another topic.
If moral intuitions differ from moral perceptions in their phenomenal character and vividness, they may in many cases be analogous to perceptual beliefs in their “naturalness.” This holds especially where intuitions respond to paradigms of the kind important in moral education. Indeed, it may be that just as one cannot help forming certain beliefs upon having certain perceptions, say believing that a growling dog is running toward one if one hears and sees it doing this, so one cannot help having the intuition that someone is doing a wrong if one sees the person drop wet banana peels at the top of a stone staircase in a public square.
If, moreover, we reflect on some of the major stages in moral education, we encounter something that bears on the contrast between nominalistic empiricism and Platonistic rationalism: the ability to generalize, often acquired from observing a single paradigm. Consider a child who takes a model airplane from a friend without permission and is seen by its parents playing with it. Scolded with a stern utterance of ‘This is stealing! How would you like it if he took one of your cars?’ and ordered to return it to the friend, the child may, with little or no explanation of what stealing is, realize that one must not just take things from people and that returning the plane is required. The child may even see, or be disposed to realize upon thinking about the matter, that one cannot return the plane and take a model truck in its place, or return it and then, by way of replacement, take a toy from a different friend.
The generality of what is learned from experiencing a paradigmatic instance of a concept is commonly almost unlimited. The same child might, perhaps years later, recognize, as stealing, one student’s copying a line of poetry composed by another and handing it in as the student’s own. This would illustrate cross-categorial generalization from the material to the intellectual. Whatever the explanation of our capacity for generalization, it is a capacity that partly underlies the importance of both perception and intuition in recognizing instances of moral properties.
_______
If there is, as I have contended, both perceptual and intuitive knowledge in moral matters, and if the two kinds of knowledge are related as I have maintained they are, then not all our singular moral knowledge, or even all moral cognition regarding specific acts or particular persons, is an application of principles. Indeed, not all moral knowledge even depends on believing principles. Given that so many moral properties are commonly instantiated in virtue of perceptible base properties, and given our intuitive responsiveness to these base properties and to moral properties themselves, moral knowledge need not wait for inference from premises. It is often prior to inference. This priority does not entail that the kinds of beliefs in question are justified or that, when they are, they are indefeasibly so. Their justification may be defeated by a peer disagreement and certainly reduced by that. But neither of these outcomes is entailed by peer disagreement or where, as is far more common, we simply discover disagreement with someone whose judgment on the matter we respect.
This chapter and the previous one have shown that much moral knowledge rests on perception, on intuition regarding ethical questions about actual or envisaged action, or on intuitions concerning hypothetical cases that help us decide what is just or unjust, right or wrong, permissible or obligatory. I doubt that the categorical imperative or the principle of utility would seem plausible apart from confirmation by intuitive results of their application in concrete cases. In any case, everyday moral knowledge is commonly not derived from application of such master principles. In this respect, it seems to be like aesthetic knowledge. The comparison between moral and aesthetic knowledge and other aspects of the similarity between moral and aesthetic cognition is a main concern of the next chapter. It should be clear at this point, however, that in some important if elementary cases, moral knowledge is perceptual. It may certainly arise from perceptually grounded knowledge by a bridge from the descriptive to the normative—especially from a discernment of the descriptive properties that ground moral properties to the moral cognitions that the descriptive properties evidence. That bridge from the descriptive to the moral, and often from is to ought,28 has both the strength and the accessibility of the a priori, and, under different conditions, it can sustain both perceptual and intuitive moral knowledge.