Does Judaism Condone Violence? by Mittleman Alan

Author:Mittleman, Alan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

Intuitions of the Good, the Right, and the Holy

Intuitionism, as a modern moral philosophy, is associated with two early twentieth-century British philosophers, G. E. Moore and W. D. Ross.75 A word about Moore in order to put Ross, who is more important for our purposes, in context: Moore thought that goodness is a simple, unanalyzable, nonnatural property of which we have immediate (intuitive) awareness. The fact that we can question whether any natural candidate for good, such as pleasure, is truly good indicates that no natural good can be identified with goodness straight off.76 If the good and the pleasant were identical, then saying “pleasure is good” would mean the same as “pleasure is pleasant.” Insofar as it does not, Moore argues that goodness is not equivalent to any natural property or state of affairs. The question of what goodness is vis-à-vis natural properties will always remain open. For Moore, goodness is an intrinsic value not to be identified with any natural fact. It exists as a nonnatural fact, so to speak. It is not a Platonic form, subsisting independently in a metaphysical realm and then instantiating in objects or states of affairs. Moore eschews such a metaphysics. Goodness is a real property of things, much as texture is a property of material surfaces.77 Goodness has its own integrity, simplicity, and irreducibility. Moore is of help to realism but, obviously, not to a naturalistic realism. Nonetheless, the stress on intuition is illuminating.

Moore thought that we had intuitive, noninferential access to the good. He did not, however, think that we have such immediate awareness of the right—of what actions are duties or obligations. Goodness was more basic. Ross disagreed. For Ross, we know what our duties are, at least prima facie, in the same way that we know the axioms of arithmetic or geometry. The intuitive rightness of “promises are to be kept” or “one ought to have gratitude toward benefactors” is “just as much part of the fundamental nature of the universe (and, we may add, of any possible universe in which there were moral agents at all) as is the spatial or numerical structure expressed in the axioms of geometry or arithmetic.”78 For Moore, moral knowledge rests on intuitions of what is good and, for Ross, of what is right and wrong. These intuitions need to be developed in reflection, in careful assessment of our given moral situation or problem, and in judgment; they don’t ensure infallibility in any given case. (Indeed, duties often conflict. Competing obligations must be sorted out. We intuit basic moral principles, not individual moral judgments.79) To say, as Ross does, that basic duties are self-evident does not mean that they are obvious or indefeasible. It means that there is no more basic justification for a duty such as keeping one’s promises than the force of the duty itself. If one were a utilitarian, one would say that promise-keeping contributes more utility to the world than promise-breaking. We keep promises to maximize overall utility. Ross inveighs constantly against such a view.

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