Intuitionism

Moral realists, then, tend to be cognitivists, but they do not have to be cognitivists. The reason is that even if moral beliefs can be true and justified, whether that is sufficient for knowledge will depend on your view of knowledge.

But the best-known recent realist position is that of the English philosopher G. E. Moore. Moore combined moral realism on the content issue with cognitivism in his moral epistemology. His par­ticular form of cognitivism is called intuitionism. An intuitionist in ethics holds that we have a faculty that allows us to perceive moral qualities, just as we have the faculty of vision that allows us to see colors. That faculty is called moral intuition. For the intuitionist, then, we justify our moral beliefs in the way we justify all our beliefs: by evidence and reasoning from it.

In his book Principia Ethica Moore took as the basic moral con­cept not rightness or duty but goodness. According to Moore, an action is one's duty “if it will cause more good to exist in the universe than any other possible kind of alternative.” The central problem of moral epistemology for Moore is to discover how we can know which of the possible consequences of our actions are good.

Moore held that goodness is what he called an “unanalyzable” property. It is unanalyzable because you cannot explain what “good” means in terms of any other concepts.

But are all P things really good?

(That is why this argument is called the “open question argu­ment”: Moore says it is always open to us to ask about any such P whether it was really good.)

The fact that “good” was in this sense unanalyzable was one of the reasons why Moore thought there was a strong similarity between seeing something was yellow and seeing it was good. For even if a physicist were to tell us that

is yellow

and

emits or reflects light in wavelength W

were coextensive predicates, so that something was yellow if and only if it emitted or reflected light of that wavelength, we could still understand the question

But are all things that emit in wavelength W really yellow?

To understand what “yellow” means, you need to know more than the wavelength of light that causes yellow sensations. You need to know what it is like to have a yellow sensation, and no definition in words can tell you that.

Goodness, then, for Moore, is a property of people, things, and events that we cannot define in terms of any other notions.

It is not entirely clear what Moore meant by this term, but he cer­tainly thought of natural properties as being the sorts of properties, like yellowness, that could be studied by natural scientists. Not sur­prisingly, many people have taken the distinction between natural and non-natural properties to be another way of making the distinc­tion between facts and values. Certainly, at least one thing that Moore held to follow from the non-naturalness of goodness was that you could not derive a claim that something was good from state­ments about its possessing other natural properties, such as color or shape or even the capacity to give people pleasure. In other words, one thing he meant by saying that goodness was non-natural was that, just as you cannot derive an ought from an is, so you cannot identify good with any natural property. Moore said that any attempt to identify a natural and a non-natural property committed the nat­uralistic fallacy; this term is now often used to refer to any attempt to derive an “ought” from an “is.”

The hedonists held that, once we knew something gave people pleasure, we could infer that it was good. Their moral epistemology, then, required us to be able to tell what would give pleasure. Hedonists think we find out about goodness indirectly, by finding what gives pleasure. But, according to Moore, we know what is good directly by moral intuition, just as we know what is yellow by vision: and that, for Moore, is all there is to moral epistemology.

This may seem to be an attractive position.

One difference comes out when we remember that moral beliefs are fundamentally action-guiding. This means that we need to decide on the moral properties of actions before we carry them out. The fact that Anne experiences the rightness of an action A can hardly be supposed to cause her perception of its rightness and her consequent decision to do A, for A cannot cause anything until it exists. In general, in fact, since moral beliefs are action-guiding, we need to have a clear grasp of the properties actions would have if we carried them out, before we decide what to do.

The intuitionist can argue, however, that what we learn from experience is that actions with certain properties are right, and that we judge that an action is right because we have grounds for think­ing it will have those properties. Thus, the intuitionist might say, experience shows us that causing people pain is wrong. Our moral faculty allows us to recognize, through experience, the wrongness of such actions. This judgment is confirmed every time we carry out an action, A, intended to avoid causing pain, and discover, through moral intuition, that A is right.

But there are serious problems with this view of moral experi­ence. First of all, as I have already mentioned, the way we actually make our moral decisions is to reflect on the outcomes of the actions that are within our power. In trying to decide whether I should go to the meeting or let my godchild down, I think about her disap­pointment, her loss of confidence in my promises, and the fact that I shall be weakening her understanding of the importance of keep­ing one's word. The fact that these consequences would—if they were likely to occur—be relevant reasons for not letting her down is something I learn not by experiencing her disappointment or loss of confidence but by imagining them.

But talk of perception of other possible worlds is at best a metaphor. Perception is a causal process, in which things in the world interact with our sense organs to give rise to beliefs. For something to be perceived it must actually exist: and the only things that actually exist are things in the actual world. If talk of a faculty of moral intuition is to be taken seriously, we have to suppose that we really can intuit the moral properties of actual objects by exer­cising the faculty. Simply put, you can't interact with a merely pos­sible event; you can interact only with an actual one.

There are two major objections to this view of moral intuition. One is a straight rejection of the idea of moral perception, because it comes without a proper account of how moral perception would work. Moore claims that seeing that something is good is like seeing that it is yellow. But there are lots of ways in which this is simply false. Unlike yellowness, for example, goodness is not something we can just recognize again once we have experienced an instance of it. I can't tell a French-speaker what “good” means simply by showing that person a few good deeds. In the perception of a yellow thing— to give another difference—the yellowness causes us to have certain experiences that are the basis for judgment; things can “look yel­low.” But it is doubtful that my judgment that someone is a good person is simply caused by my sensing his or her goodness; it is doubtful too that there is any particular experience that is produced in us by good acts and good people. An intuitionist, who speaks of moral perception, owes us an explanation of these significant epis­temological differences.

The second objection to Moore's view of moral intuition has been well put by another British philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre.

Moore's account leaves it entirely unexplained and inexplicable why some­thing's being good should ever furnish us with a reason for action. The analogy with yellow is as much a difficulty for his thesis at this point as it is an aid to him elsewhere. One can imagine a connoisseur with a special taste for yellow objects to whom something's being yellow would furnish him with a reason for acquiring it; but something's being “good” can hardly furnish a reason for action only to those with a connoisseur's interest in goodness. Any account of good that is to be adequate must connect it intimately with action, and explain why to call something good is always to provide a reason for acting in respect of it in one way rather than another.

MacIntyre's point is that Moore cannot explain why the moral “ought” is categorical. For the imagined moral connoisseur is some­one who happens to have wants and desires that turn her desire to do good into a hypothetical imperative.

If you want to be good, you ought to do this

would certainly appeal to the connoisseur as a reason to act. But it would not be a recognizably moral reason, since the imperative here is hypothetical.

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