3.1.9: Objections to Intuitionism

Intuitionism offers a way around the Open Question Argument and the Naturalistic Fallacy, consequently it has a number of modern proponents (e.g. Ralph Wedgewood). However, objections to a basic Intuitionism are not particularly difficult to conceive of.

Firstly, Intuitionism might be thought to struggle when explaining moral disagreement. If moral truths are self-evident and can be intuited, then why do even self-professed intuitionists such as Moore and Ross have radically different ethical views (Moore is a teleologist, whereas Ross intuits proto-Kantian moral truths).

In response, Ross has suggested that we need a certain moral maturity to our intuitive sense, just as our other faculties require maturity and tuning to properly pick up on features of the world. Indeed, Samuel Clarke (1675–1729) suggested that, amongst other things, stupidity may lead to our intuitions going astray and this may explain continuing moral disagreement. If only we were less daft, our intuitive moral sense might be more reliable!

In addition, on a related note, we may wonder how such intuitive moral judgments might be properly verified. If you support the Verification Principle — which you may be lucky enough to come across in a unit on Religious Language — then you believe that statements that cannot be empirically verified (tested against the world to determine their truth or falsity) or are true by definition are meaningless.

If moral judgments are intuitively supported judgments about non-natural properties, then it is not clear how we could verify whether it is Moore or Ross, to use two examples, who intuits goodness correctly. Certainly, we could not use empirical means to test for the presence of non-natural properties in the world. Thus, verificationists may suggest that moral statements — if Intuitionism is correct — would be meaningless in virtue of our inability to verify such statements.

Finally, returning to the theme of disagreement, we might posit evidence that our intuitions are so unreliable that they are better understood as irrational moral judgments expressing our own feelings or personal beliefs, rather than judgments giving voice to the existence of mind-independent, objective, non-natural moral properties.

Consider responses to the standard ethical dilemma of a trolley case. In one version, you can redirect a train to save five people tied to the track, but doing so will kill one person tied in the path of the redirected train. In a second case, you can save five people tied to the track by pushing one rather portly gentleman to his death in front of the train to stop its progress. Most responders favour saving five over one in the first case, but favour saving one over five in the second case. If our intuitions point so divergently when we make moral judgments, might we be better to assume our pre-rational intuitive responses are expressions of feelings or initial beliefs, rather than a reflection of objective truths?

Perhaps responses based on moral maturity or stupidity will apply here also, but this may be harder to hold when explaining one person’s own personal divergent intuitions about such cases rather than disagreement across a group of different people.

J. L. Mackie (1917–1981) also offers criticisms of Intuitionism, but these are explored in the next section as they feed into explanation of Mackie’s own Moral Error Theory. It is, as ever, for you to judge whether the intuitionist has any plausible defence of their theory against the criticisms suggested thus far.