Can we trust our Moral Intuitions?

[Spongebob]

vulcanlogician

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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.

It wasn't just slavery, as you probably already know.  The part that seems so alien to me is that a happy, comfortable life was simply not part of their way of thinking.  Depending on your class, such as being a soldier, you could be expected to embrace the hard life of war and an honorable death as the greatest objective in life.

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.

Good reference because this is where it gets wonky.  What tool can explain Abraham Lincoln and others like him?  Lincoln grew up of meager means in Kentucky.  His family didn't own slaves but he was exposed to them and grew to despise the practice despite living among a culture that considered it acceptable.  He was said to have always despised slavery.  His family attended a Baptist church that opposed slavery and this could have been the source of his moral attitude, but then where did the church get this from?  Perhaps the minister was from a part of the country that opposed slavery; I've never read anything to explain this.  I feel that logic and reason could easily account for the determination that slavery is an abominable practice except for the fact that even long after the enlightenment we still have the slave trade going strong.