Can we trust our Moral Intuitions?

[Angrboda]

I feel the emotional entanglement is a bit quixotic. If moral propositions didn't have an emotional component, then they wouldn't be felt as imperatives compelling us to act or not act depending upon its valence. A proposition about homicide is just a neutral abstraction without some emotional sense of should or shouldn't attached to it. So, on the one hand, the entanglement with emotion presents epistemological difficulties, yet without the entanglement with emotion the intuition is no longer moral.

Does this mean that morality necessarily entails epistemological issues? Maybe.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, intuitions can be moral without being emotional - at least as far as objectivism contends. We can't be, though. We literally can't be emotionless. We can expect astronomers to feel some way about their observations, too.

[vulcanlogician]

I feel the emotional entanglement is a bit quixotic.  If moral propositions didn't have an emotional component, then they wouldn't be felt as imperatives compelling us to act or not act depending upon its valence.  A proposition about homicide is just a neutral abstraction without some emotional sense of should or shouldn't attached to it.  So, on the one hand, the entanglement with emotion presents epistemological difficulties, yet without the entanglement with emotion the intuition is no longer moral.

Does this mean that morality necessarily entails epistemological issues?  Maybe.

This is the line of criticism I pursued in my private thinking. Stich wants to present our moral intuitions as a cluster of "kluges" (a bunch of sociallity-related internal processes that were kind of crammed together by evolution to generate our moral sense). In a way, he is right about that. But as one of the attendees responded after the lecture: "The eye is a kluge."

Almost every product of evolution is a kluge of some sort. The eye allows us to perceive the world more or less accurately. Maybe not perfectly, but we can compensate for the eye's imperfections. I want to say we can do the same with our moral intuitions.

@DLJ

Working on a response. Gimmie some time.

[DLJ]

...
@DLJ

Working on a response. Gimmie some time.

No worries.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Almost every product of evolution is a kluge of some sort. The eye allows us to perceive the world more or less accurately. Maybe not perfectly, but we can compensate for the eye's imperfections. I want to say we can do the same with our moral intuitions.

Not just moral intuitions, but reason itself...

"Eventually the attempt to understand oneself in evolutionary, naturalistic terms must bottom out in something that is grasped as valid in itself - something without which the evolutionary understanding would not be possible. Thought moves us beyond appearance to something that we cannot regard merely as a biologically based disposition, whose reliability we can determine on other grounds. It is not enough to be able to think that if there are logical truths, natural selection might very well have given me the capacity to recognize them. That cannot be my ground for trusting my reason, because even that thought implicitly relies on reason in a prior way." - Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos

[Secular Elf]

My take on objective morality since exiting the church has been that there is none; all morality is subjective and subject to exactly the things you're talking about, culture, society, experience and so on.  This comes up often in debates with Christians about morality because they see god as the source of all morality and it is absolute and objective in their view despite the many variations in morality that humans have displayed, even within Christianity.  I'm less familiar with this notion of intuitive morality.

Great topic.  About 10 levels deeper than the usual fare on this forum.

This is indeed a great topic. I don't know a whole lot about moral philosophy, but my reading on the subjects of anthropology and sociology indicates that most humans are informed by their culture's mores and values as how they behave within their social structures and what their own personal moral code is usually informed by, largely influenced by religion. That is not to say that there is no variation, as there is where individuals sometimes modify the accepted codes of behavior and values to greater or lesser extent, or in a few cases, like we heatherns, reject them. T

[The Grand Nudger]

Massively informed by our society - descriptive relativism. The difference between descriptive relativism and metaethical relativism is that descriptive relativism says that this is what people do (and we certainly do). Metaethical relativism says that's what morality is. That what is right and wrong is determined by your society - not that your society holds common opinions with varying levels of assent which inform you.

I think that our ability to disagree with our cultural mores is a pretty good demonstration that even as descriptive relativism is undeniably true, metaethical relativism is demonstrably false. It's a pretty simple failure condition. All we need to do is point to some thing our society deems so and so, and genuinely disagree. We don't even have to get it right, just disagree. Easy peasy for people.

[vulcanlogician]

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

My general take is that, to avoid debilitating inner conflict, we have no choice BUT to trust our moral intuitions. 

To use a classic example, you find a wallet stuffed with cash in the street. Your moral intuition tells you to contact the owner and return the wallet. But what if the owner turns out to be a paedo who drugs and rapes children? What if he beats his wife? What if she won the money betting on dog fights?  Not trusting an intuitive morality seems as if it would lead to a paralysis of action, based on the gnawing doubt that any action you take might have immoral consequences or support a non-moral outcome that is beyond your control.

Just return the wallet.

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

"Just return the wallet" may be closer to moral deontology than moral intuition. Moral intuition would be your answer to the question "what if this money was dirty, or would be used for something terrible, should it be returned?" We seize druglords shit all the time, despite telling our children to just return the wallet. The heuristic works because it applies to most cases.

As for outcomes beyond our control, here again, we may have a moral intuition about that. Are we morally responsible for what we don't know and have no control over. Alot of people would say no. In that particular case, it's not so much that not trusting our moral intuitions would lead to paralysis as we have a moral intuition that absolves us of personal responsibility in those circumstances for whatever a person may do with the money, while maintaining a personal responsibility on our end, not to steal it.

Moral intuition should not be taken to mean our best guesses in uncertain situations or with limited information. The term was used to denote something that's contended to be a fact, but perhaps not a natural fact..and this again, is novel use of the term natural.