Moral Perception by Audi Robert

Author:Audi, Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

IV. THE RELIABILITY OF INTUITION

Intuition may be usefully compared with perception. Perception is widely considered to be (as I shall assume it is) a broadly reliable “faculty,” in roughly this sense (using seeing as our paradigm): if we see a thing, then if, visually and on the basis of our seeing it, it clearly seems to us to have a property, it usually does.5 Perception is also highly informative, in the sense that if (for instance) we see an object, there are certain things, often a great many, that we can visually know about it. Commonly, we can discern its coloration, something about its shape and texture, its location in relation to us, and more. Much could be said here, but my main concern is simply to explore whether ethical intuition, though not itself a kind of propositional perception, is grounded in a similar way and may, in a significant number of cases, be comparably reliable.6

We may immediately set aside the cases of plainly factive intuition in which one sees that some moral proposition holds and thereby has an intuitive moral belief, say that one person is being unfair to another in negatively evaluating the latter’s work. For (at least normally) if one sees that something is so, one knows it is, and it is uncontroversial that cognitions constituting knowledge are a reliable kind. Where propositional moral perception and moral intuition coincide in this way, the propositional object in question is true, however difficult it may be to identify the basis of the perception in a detailed informative way. This is a point that even skeptics may grant, though they may hasten to claim that in moral matters we either never in fact see that something is so or, at least, never know or justifiedly believe that we do. The cases of special interest here are those in which someone considers an act or person, whether actual or hypothetical, and forms a moral intuition about the person or act. Given the reliability and informativeness of perception, we have two counterpart questions about intuition: How reliable is moral intuition? And how informative is the basis on which it rests?

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