Can we trust our Moral Intuitions?

[vulcanlogician]

You may want to withhold judgement of my capacity for this stuff; my confidence level is not so great.

Nah. I can tell you're good for a conversation about metaethics. You're able to stand back and look objectively at things and that's the major requirement for this discussion. An interest in the subject matter is also (pretty much) required. Otherwise, it's boring.

Logic and reason are the only filters that seem relevant, so why do emotions have to butt into the party?

I tend to agree with this assessment. I want to object to Stich's diagram in effect to say, "We can temporarily suppress or disregard the influence of emotions when we make moral judgments, and when we have accurate information (true premises) and are less influenced by emotion, our intuitions can work properly." Traditionally, philosophers have thought that all you need are correct beliefs, logic, and a good moral principle(s) to make accurate moral determinations. Stich is not only a philosopher, but a cognitive scientist. And he's using empirical findings in cognitive science to cast doubt on the aforementioned model (beliefs, logic, moral principle).

I'm a fan of Roman history and the prevailing consensus on morality or ethics of the Romans suggests that they had quite different values than modern people, to the extent that many of us wouldn't be able to relate.

Yep, and that plays right into Stich's point. Some Roman philosophers (like Seneca) thought deeply about ethics. And yet they ended up NOT being die-hard abolitionists. Why not? Stich would say that it boils down to proximal environmental cues. Slavery was a normal, everyday thing they had become accustomed to as a fact of life. Day after day. Slaves, slaves, slaves. Therefore, it didn't arouse their emotions to see a person in bondage.

Same goes for Northerners and Southerners. Northerners were not accustomed to seeing slaves day after day. Therefore, "slavery is okay" never made it into their norm box. But it DID make it into the norm box of Southerners. I would argue (contra Stich) that even Seneca realized there was something wrong with slavery. Even Southern slave owners knew they didn't want to be slaves. No intuition problem there, it seems.

I want to say that, in some ways, Stich is only reinforcing the notion that many philosophers have that emotion impairs moral judgment. His studies and causal links may be question begging. If moral reflection is something that you do to possibly decide against what you'd do without moral reflection, then "normal human behavior" is hardly a metric to use to determine the efficacy of moral reflection.

That being said, I think Stich would probably have a good reply to that objection, and many of his arguments are unphased by it.

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But before you can justify such a question about morality you must assume there is a right answer and therefore an objective morality that would be independent of what any sentient creature thought. And this is something that has never been demonstrated. I tend to agree that morality is subjective and dependent on the existence of sentient beings. What would morality even mean in a lifeless universe?

What would math mean in a lifeless universe? What would science mean? There would be no math or science in a lifeless universe. Remove all life from the universe and you wouldn't have things like math or science. That doesn't mean those enterprises aren't objective.

As it turns out, morality is often (if not always) concerned with the welfare of living beings. If you remove all living beings, then you remove the object for moral concern. Think about it like this: if you removed all gravitational bodies from the universe, would that mean there is no gravity? Gravity as we understand it currently has to do with distortion of spacetime as it interacts with massive objects. That property may be a property of space.

I see where you're coming from... just giving a counter argument.

In philosophy, most ethical theories strive to be objective. In hedonistic utilitarianism, you have an objective (even empirical) approach to what right and wrong are. The question is: is hedonism a correct moral theory? And how do you determine if it's correct or not? It's hard to come up with a moral theory that can survive rigorous scrutiny. But the reason I like to argue for moral objectivism is that the competing theories, moral nihilism and moral subjectivism, also begin to crack and fail when subjected to rigorous scrutiny.