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The argument against moral intuitions

 


Peter Baron, paraphrasing J.L. Mackie, offers an argument against the intuitionism that W.D. Ross and G.E. Moore (and I) share, in meta-ethics or (what is it seems to me the same) moral epistemology. 

The Baron/Mackie argument runs thus:


1. Objective moral values and the faculties that intuitionists posit to detect them are strikingly queer, or as Mackie put it, "utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else."

2. We should not believe in such a queer concept without very strong evidence.

Lemma: We should not believe in objective moral values or a moral sense without very strong evidence.

3. There is little or no evidence in favor of these queer things.

Conclusion: We should not believe in them.

Notice that the article proceeds as two syllogisms, with the conclusion of the first serving as one of the premises of the second. 

The whole thing seems to me to be a bit of evidential gerrymandering. It is strikingly odd, even queer, that bright highly-trained philosophers should offer such premises at all.  Though as a formal matter I will concede that if the three premises are all grated the conclusion follows.    

It seems to be for example, that the robust moral life of the human species, the arguments engaged in by virtually everyone who is not a member of a philosophy faculty and the way in which they are engaged, all constitute massive evidence of the existence of moral intuitions and thus strike at the heart of premise 3. 

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