Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

The most familiar use of moral intuitions is as starting points for a moral theory, involving many thorny issues that I will leave to one side for this paper.  Instead, I focus on cases where our explicitly held moral principles do not match our actual moral intuitions and subsequent actions.  I argue that using our moral intuitions as data for self-interpretation can help us to combat these undiscovered biases.  Aside from explicitly considered judgements, I include a broad range of phenomena, such as intuitive feelings, in my definition of moral intuition because we can use these phenomena as clues to reveal biases of which we are not consciously aware.  My aim is to connect our ethical reflection solidly to our actual practice by making self-knowledge a part of the process of reflection.  It is of little practical use to engage, say, in reflective equilibrium if one has an inaccurate picture of one’s self and is thus unable to live by the resultant moral theory.