BigBallinStalin wrote:Crazyirishman wrote:BigBallinStalin wrote:Crazyirishman wrote:Moral intuitionism is another school that I have become interested in recently
uh, the morally right thing to do is whatever you feel like doing?
Not quite, this is more along the lines of what I was referring to
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_intuitionism#section_1Or The TLDR oversimplification: there are some things that are morally
objective, and that the problem arises with trying to define what the 'good'. Also one of the guys in those school pretty much came up with WWJD but then decided to abandon Christianity because he could not figure what Jesus would do.
Some use the term "ethical intuitionism" in moral philosophy to refer to the general position that we have some non-inferential moral knowledge (see Sinnott-Armstrong, 2006a & 2006b)--that is, basic moral knowledge that is not inferred from or based on any proposition.
That's a bold claim. If I understood that correctly, then here's a question:
If a girl grows up in the woods and is raised by wolves for 8 years, would she exhibit this non-inferential moral knowledge?
How would she know what is morally right if her only means of communication is limited to a wolf's?
Given those circumstances, then whatever her non-inferential moral knowledge may be, wouldn't an ethical intuitionist have to conclude the minimum amount of non-inferential moral knowledge can only be on par with such a girl's?
Okay so this is going to be a bit tough since Walter Sinnot-Armstrong wrote that only a few years ago and it wasn't covered in my ethics class, where we studied G.E. Moore's, W.D. Ross's , and H.A Prichard's takes on modern ethical theory in moral intuitionism, so I'm going to try and explain the guy I haven't read.
I guess the key word in that paragraph is
some non-inferential knowledge exists. Inferential knowledge is defined as "knowledge of things with which the knowing subject has no direct apprehension" or as I take it knowing something without realizing or being aware of it. So I guess the girl could theoretically exhibit the knowledge that she's not aware of, but she wouldn't notice it. To determine whether she knew what is morally right, I guess we would have to set up some type of morality test see if she is moral since we cannot simply ask her. A problem that could arise could tie a bit into moral relativism where she may hold the same moral values that we do, but she has a different belief in how to uphold those values. I hope this explains things a bit, when I made my original statement I was referring to the work of Ross and Moore and used the wiki article as a quick look up to provide a definition, which in hindsight was probably not well though out; I probably should have used the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy instead if they have an article on that. These two articles might explain what my original thoughts were:
Ross read 4. Ross's Distinctive Moral Framework: The Right and the Good
Moore read 3. Principia Ethica
