That would be true for private moralities. But for public moralities it is unworkable, given that those intuitions are subjective and idiosyncratic. Whether a particular intuition is moral, or even useful or worthy of consideration, is always an open question.Good_Egg wrote: ↑May 31st, 2022, 7:43 pmYou know how in education policy, the emphasis on measurable targets can act to distort the aims of education so that it becomes all about what's easiest to measure?
It just struck me that there's a risk of the same phenomenon here. That a philosopher's notion of morality becomes all about what's easiest to rationalise.
Of course, that cuts both ways. What's easiest to formulate as a Commandment can similarly distort a complex reality.
But I think the point is that it's not enough to put together a nice coherent theory and stick the label "morality" on it. That in order for your rational theory to be an ethic it actually has to deal with the content of moral intuitions.
Intuitions are judgments or conclusions drawn subconsciously and appear in consciousness as feelings, or beliefs. They are generally formed from information gained through experience, information of which the person was not consciously aware at the time. They can also reflect conditioning occurring in childhood when the child is not yet able to analyze and evaluate what he is being told, when he accepts everything prima facie. Sometimes intuitions are accurate --- some police detectives, for example, can often intuitively sense when a witness is lying, though they could probably not explain just why they think so. It will be because after interviewing many witnesses to many crimes, their brains pick up many clues, most of which they did not consciously note at the time. But intuitions are not reliable prima facie; they need to be validated with evidence or argument.
Yes; moral rules, like all other rules, are a means to an end, as are all actions. The only "end in itself" is satisfaction, of some interest or desire, which may include obeying the commands of some intuitive imperative. The aim of moral rules, public or private, is to bring about that satisfaction. The rules of private moralities aim to satisfy the interests or desires of an individual. But since interests and desires differ enormously from individual to individual, the rules of a public morality must allow all individuals in a social setting to satisfy their interests and desires only to the extent they can do so without inflicting losses or injuries on other moral agents. Within that constraint they're free to indulge their desires and follow their intuitions.This is an ends-justifies-the means argument, which depends on conceiving of moral rules as a means to some end, in order to justify breaking them whenever we think we can see a better route to that end.There is a moral obligation to obey as law only when the law itself is morally defensible --- i.e., it is consistent with a sound, rational moral theory. But moral rules, like laws, can sometimes be broken, because no rule can anticipate all the consequences of of every act embraced by the rule. So sometimes the rule must be set aside and the decision based directly on the goal those rules aim to further.
Whereas acting morally is supposed to be an end in itself; it's not something we do in order to achieve something else.
The moral intuitions of 300 million --- or even 100 --- people can never be made consistent.Nor is it a nice piece of reasoning divorced from moral sense. It's both together reinforcing each other. Moral intuitions made rationally consistent, with reason sanding off the rough edges where a rogue sense of rightness is unsupported by the rest of the structure, and filling in the gaps where moral feeling is lacking but we reason our way to an unfelt imperative that is necessary for coherence.