ruby sparks said:
Personally, I would not necessarily trust my intuitions on at least some of those, if I am allowed time to reflect on it if I want to (which often isn't the case). The one I have bolded in your post, for instance. I know that I can quite easily be fooled or wrong about that, as regards what the particular colour is, as can you and people generally. I might even say I can be fooled or wrong about whether there is a colour (or whether something is just monochrome). I doubt I even know the full extent of the ways in which my intuitions about colour can be mistaken.
I think you're missing how minuscule the rate of errors is vs. the rate of success. Also, regarding color, sometimes you are mistaken at first, but in order to find out the color, you still rely on your color vision: you just take a look under more ordinary light conditions. You don't use a machine to measure it.
ruby sparks said:
I broadly accept the human intuition that "there is a particular colour fact" (even if I allow my intuition about what the colour is may be awry) but I am suspicious of the human intuition that "there is a particular moral fact", yes, and, even if I did agree that there is a moral fact about something in particular, I might still not trust my ability to know what it was (as with the colour).
Perhaps it's partly because saying there is a colour is something I take to be a statement about or describing a property of the world outside my head, which is not how I feel about morality. I do not think it exists in the world outside my head (except that I reckon it's probably in the heads of others too, but not in the exact same way, barring a remarkable coincidence that I have a doppelganger right down to neuron level).
Alright, so two points:
First, figuring out moral facts about actual behavior of people is often complicated by insufficient or erroneous information. For example, if you take a look at moral debates, at least in the vast majority of cases you will find that when there are moral disagreements, the people who disagree are giving different inputs to their respective moral senses, as they have different beliefs (or intuitive probabilistic assessments, more generally) about the nonmoral facts (i.e., described in nonmoral terms) relevant to moral assessments.
But being apparently more complicated does not seem to be strong evidence that there are no moral facts.
Second, why do you think morality does not exist outside people's head, in a relevant sense?
I mean, there is a sense in which morality only exists in the heads of people (or chimps, etc.), namely, people and some other species are moral agents, some are morally good, some are morally bad, etc. That sense, however, is not relevant to whether there is a fact of the matter. For example, there is a fact of the matter as to whether, say, McConnell believes that Jesus rose from the dead. Sure, it's a statement about McConnell's mind, but regardless of whether we can figure it out, there is a fact of the matter. Similarly, there is a fact of the matter as to whether he is a good or a bad person - or just morally mediocre -, and how much. Or at least, that would be the standard, default position. What I'm not sure about is why you think otherwise. I mean, sure, we are talking about people's minds, but we make statements of fact about people's mind all the time, e.g., we talk about whether they are Christians of one kind or another, or YECs, or Muslims, or Marxists, or have OCD, or are psychopaths, and so on. So, there are facts of the matters about things in people's heads, as there are facts of the matter about things that are not in people's heads.
Let me tell you this: long ago, I actually used to think something like that too - namely, that there was no fact of the matter, and/or was subjective. I was mistaken, iirc mostly as a result of a mistaken evaluation of the amount of disagreement (or 'divergence' I should perhaps say), and partly as a result of having a mistaken theory about the meaning of some expressions. Maybe if you tell me why you think that - contrary to ordinary intuitions - you are talking about something that it is only in your head (or similar in other people's heads), I might give a more targeted argument.
Third, if you are talking about moral
concepts like moral wrongness, permissibility, etc., you are correct that it is not
exactly the same in other people's heads, barring a remarkable coincidence that I have a doppelganger right down to neuron level (well, you do if the universe is large enough, but we may ignore that in this context). However,
the same is true of all other concepts. In other works, barring such remarkable coincidence, your concept of 'red' is not
exactly the same as mine, and neither is your concept of a cat, or a dog, or a even Marxist (e.g., how similar do a person's ideas have to be to Marx's to qualify? There are surely slight differences between competent English speakers, regardless of how well they understand Marx). That, however, is not a problem for our successful communication, or for there being facts of the matter about all of those things (and this is why I made some room for slight variations when I described species-wide traits). So, it doesn't look like it should be a problem for morality.
ruby sparks said:
I might disagree, I might say that it's reasonable not to just blithely trust our intuitions, even before any evidence to the contrary comes in, because of the knowledge from past experience that intuitions in the general sense can easily be awry.
I disagree with the disparaging term 'blithely' for a description of what it is essentially nearly all of human behavior - and proper behavior. I would say that it is not possible not to trust our intuitions all the time as part of our daily life, with the only exceptions of those (rare) times when we are questioning a specific intuition in a specific case. Again, you trust your intuitions
all the time, without even thinking about it, and it could not be otherwise. In fact, even when you engage in conscious reasoning, you are relying on a
massive background that is intuitive, from your memories from the stuff that just pops into your head to allow the continuation of your train of conscious thought.
ruby sparks said:
To me that's not an accurate way to put it. Even under a religious framework, people pick and choose components to construct their individual or subgroup morality. That is why there are so many religions, and sub-religions within religions, and disagreement within those sub-religions (denominations) and diferences between members of individual congregations. So people do seem to be using their moral sense, even if only cherry-picking (to suit) what goes into it as content, what becomes the content of their morality.
I said that they are not using their moral sense in some cases, sorry if I was not clear. But for example, generally (and barring perhaps some exceptions) Christians do not come to believe that, say, the Christian creator is morally good or that Jesus is morally good by looking at their actions, as described by the version of Christianity they are indoctrinated in. Rather, they accept that they/he is morally good - indeed morally perfect - on faith. Some Christians later use their moral sense to question whether some actions attributed to he/they actually happened, and/or to come up with interpretations of the Bible that would make he/they less evil. So, some do what you say, yes, but only after a failure to use an adequate tool to find moral truth.
ruby sparks said:
Well then, perhaps you should be careful to not be similarly religious about intuitions.
I am not religious about intuitions. I am just aware that we use intuitions all the time, to know pretty much almost everything we know, and only under that background conscious reasoning is possible - and even then, conscious reasoning is intertwined with intuitions. I am providing examples of that. Just try to see how you can reply to this post. You intuitively know that you have a computer, a mouse, a keyboard, etc., that we have had an exchange so far with certain content, and so on. It's nearly everything you do and know.
ruby sparks said:
I'm not sure why you think that listing the cases where our use of intuition seems to be reliable says anything about other cases.
Because I am hoping you will realize that:
1. All of the cases in which human intuition fails are a really
astronomically tiny proportion of those in which it succeeds.
2. You actually rely on intuition nearly always, and that is proper.
3. It would be improper to doubt an intuition without good evidence against it, given 1.
ruby sparks said:
For a 'gazillion' counter-examples, see: the history of marital (or even just personal) relationships. In other words, humans appear to endemically (and routinely) intuitively misunderstand each other, more or less all the time.
Not all the time, but a tiny fraction of the time. If the misunderstandings were as you describe it, humans would not succeed as a social species. We are an enormously successful social species, to a considerable extent due to our ability to understand each other. Moreover, when understanding fails, further use of our intuitions can solve the problem: clarification usually works (well, on line philosophy debates might be an exception
, but that is highly unusual behavior for humans).
ruby sparks said:
That's just your claim. How do you know morality is on a par with colour?
That is the wrong question to ask. Rather, unless there are good reasons to distrust an intuition, we should not. So, why do you think it isn't? (I asked this above, with more details).
ruby sparks said:
Perhaps in 'going about my daily business' I don't have time to query my intuitions and I often act on them, and a great deal of the time that seems to work out quite well, but it is also true that I know that my intuitions (in the general sense) can often be wrong, so if there's time to pause and consider, I might not be so trusting of my intuitions as I am initially and instinctively. And that may be more the case for certain things and not others, so the strength of my trust in my intuitions about one type of thing might not be the same as for another thing or type of thing.
'Often' is a relative term. It is a tiny proportion of cases. And sure, it's nice to pause and consider whether one of your intuitions is failing, but I will say this:
1. Most of the time, you do not have time to pause and consider.
2. Even more importantly, when you do pause and consider, you
are relying all the time on intuitions. You may be questioning one intuition or a few, using
many more instances of intuitions to do so, and without even realizing it. It would be proper to isolate a specific intuition, but again, the general, standard, default case is to trust them.
That said, you are correct that some specific intuitions are weaker than others. Also, you may have some evidence against them, even if weak. That gives reason for further consideration, but not for stop trusting its verdicts in general. You need more than that to warrant abandoning one of them.
ruby sparks said:
When I consider intuitions in general, when I have time to do that and am not rushing hither and thither through my day with little time for reflection, I think of them as 'things that could easily be wrong'.
When you have time for reflection, you are unconsciously trusting your intuitions. They are things that can go wrong, but not easily. At any rate, you do trust them in general all the time (even when you are reflecting), so singling out one of them - such as the moral sense - would not be proper without good evidence.
ruby sparks said:
When I consider my intuitions about free will, self and consciousness, I can see from copious amounts of science that my intuitions can easily be and very often are awry.
Again, not easily. If that were so (about self and consciousness at least) we would not even be able to ponder these matters. Moreover, even when you see that they go awry, so see that
only by relying on other, stronger intuitions, in addition to conscious reasoning.
ruby sparks said:
When it comes to my intuitions on morality, an additional problem is my thinking that morality is only in our heads.
I wouldn't say it's either a problem or an additional one. It's in our heads, but in a non-problematic sense (see above); if you think it's in our heads in a problematic sense, then I would ask why (more details above).
ruby sparks said:
Another additional one is that there is so much variety. Should I trust my intuitions, or yours, or his, or hers, or theirs?
Is there?
First, if there were so much variety, social coordination would be nearly impossible, given the results of moral disagreements. There are such disagreements, but they happen in a massive background of agreement.
Second, imagine Alice and Bob disagree about whether the traffic light was red, because he looked at the light 1 second before she did, so different colored light reached their eyes. You would not say that this indicates variety in color intuitions. What happens is that their visual apparatuses got different inputs, so different outputs do not provide evidence against shared intuitions. But now take a look at usual moral debates (e.g., read some of the threads here, in the Political Discussions forum). You will find in nearly all cases that
have different inputs. They disagree about whether the people whose behavior they are assessing believed this or that, had this or that intention, etc.
Third, in other cases, people are not using their moral sense. Rather, they are using an unwarranted procedure to get moral beliefs (e.g., faith that an omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect creator commands X, or whatever). Now, as you say, sometimes they also use their moral sense to pick and choose, but their assessments are contaminated by an untrustworthy source (a source we also know it is not to be trusted by its assertions on other matters, from the origin of the world to possessed pigs to multiplying bread, etc.).
So, generally (there are exceptions, arguably for psychopaths), you own moral intuitions should be okay. But you should be careful not to replace them by unwarranted sources (like 3), and also not to enter the wrong input, because if you do, you may very well get the wrong output, not due to a failure of your moral sense, but simply because you got the nonmoral facts wrong.
