Against intuitionism

If moral obligation is real, it can be demonstrated taking no moral claim for granted

This ended up a long one, sorry.

The prevailing methodology in contemporary analytic ethics (and almost all analytic philosophy, really) is that of reflective equilibrium. That term was invented by Rawls, and later stretched well beyond beyond its proper circumstances of use.¹ The idea is that we look at intuitions about particular cases (say, ethical thought experiments) and try to come up with a general theory that gives verdicts on these cases, with the theory and particular intuitions mutually influencing each other. An intuition is commonly defined as an “intellectual seeming”—so if I say I have an intuition that pulling the switch in the Trolley Problem is wrong, that’s to say that when I consider the case, that action seems wrong to me. If I have a weak intuition and an otherwise super attractive theory says it’s wrong, I might say my initial judgment was wrong. If I have one or several very strong intuitions that the theory contradicts, then I reject the theory, unless the theory has other features that outweigh those defects. Once you’re in a position where the virtues of your theory and your intuitions are in balance, so that you don’t revise your theory or your verdicts anymore, you are said to be in reflective equilibrium, though this is a state we can only approach by Reading the Literature and Publishing More Literature.

A natural worry for those new to the Love of Wisdom is that it seems plausible that our intuitions (especially our moral intuitions) are systematically biased, and if that’s true, then upon reaching reflective equilibrium we should expect to end up with a false theory. The Lovers of Wisdom, in my experience, usually do not rebut this worry directly; rather, the most common defense of reflective equilibrium as a methodology I hear is that we don’t have any other way of proceeding. If I say moral obligations have to be proven taking nothing for granted², the most common response I get is “I don’t see how that’s possible.” I speculate that this is generally said by people who have not spent a large amount of time investigating the possibility of such an endeavor. In response, I can only say what Fichte said: “It is quite unnecessary to discuss arguments and counterarguments with such a person. He is best refuted by providing an actual answer to the question, and then nothing remains for him to do but to examine our attempt and to indicate where and why it does not appear to him sufficient.”³

Taking nothing for granted does indeed force us to confront a seemingly impossible task (though not without the help of our superiors). But if the concept of moral obligation requires that we confront this task, then we have no choice but to do things the hard way, and declare moral obligation a fiction if it indeed turns out to be impossible.

Many people, today, claim there are moral obligations because the balance of intuitions speaks in favor of (or at least does not contradict) their existence. My claim for today is simply that it is not compatible with the concept of moral obligation that our judgments of it ineliminably rely on intuition. If the task is impossible, then there is no moral obligation. I make the same argument as I did on the podcast episode with the intelligent and relatively morally upright Amos Wollen and Matthew Adelstein.⁴

I am not “against intuition” in general. I am against intuition as the ultimate justification for moral principles. I believe the philosopher should use intuitions in exactly the same ways the mathematician does. For the mathematician, intuition is indispensable: it is needed to know what lines of inquiry are worth putting effort into, making guesses as to what is true so that you know what to try to prove, and looking for flaws in others’ proofs. But mathematicians do not publish papers where their ultimate justification is that their claim achieves the best balance of intuitions; insofar as they might explicitly rely on such, they recognize their understanding as defective, and continue looking for an actual proof. Likewise, in ethical philosophy, we need intuitions for the same reasons: if the Categorical Imperative turns out to imply it’s immoral to wear a green shirt on a Tuesday, I need to go back and check my work; if I find myself having to choose whether to kill one man to harvest his organs and save five, I will refrain from doing so because it is intuitively wrong, as I do not yet have an Ethical Theory of Everything. But as long as I am relying on intuition, my judgments are merely provisional, and I need to continue the search for actual justifications for them.

§1 What is moral obligation?

Nothing can be proven without a characterization of our terms. If my arguments work just as well if you replace the phrase “moral obligation” with something else, then my arguments don’t work. Generally, how to characterize the notion of moral obligation is itself a matter of controversy, so philosophers’ characterization of it is basically “the concept at play in what we uncontroversially consider to be judgments of moral obligation,” from which intuitionism is a natural way to proceed.

I start in a different way, namely with a stipulative characterization of the concepts of moral obligation and permission. This is not a claim about how people empirically use the phrase “moral obligation,” nor is it a claim about the concept philosophers generally call “moral obligation.” It is for the reader to judge whether my characterization captures certain ordinary concepts, or whether the subject matter I stipulate to be mine is otherwise worth investigating. If I offered a theory of the foundations of mathematics, but then found out I was drastically mistaken in what people mean by “mathematics” and that it is actually the study of bath mats and yoga mats and such, that discovery would not undermine the correctness or importance of my claims about algebra and geometry.

Every human being faces the unavoidable question of what to do, and I take this question to be the proper subject-matter of ethical philosophy. Moreover, we do not simply do things, but we do things as a result of thinking about what to do. Sometimes, when I do something, I do not decide in a way that has implications for how I am to act if I find myself with different desires. When I decide to take a walk because it seems intrinsically desirable, I do not thereby commit myself to taking a walk even in cases where I find something else more desirable. Other times, I decide to do something in a way motivated independent of brute desire. When I decide not to steal, I am motivated in a way that commits me to not stealing whatever my desires may be, just as long as circumstances are relevantly similar.⁵

I hold that the question of what to do and the question of what I morally ought to do are the same. Moral judgments are ways of articulating my decisions for how to live, not merely my judgments regarding how I ought to live. When I judge that it is wrong to steal in such-and-such circumstances, I am articulating my decision not to steal should I find myself in those circumstances, a decision motivated in a way independent of my desires. In contrast, to articulate my decision to go on a walk, a decision which is dependent on the desires I happen to find myself with, I say going on a walk is morally permissible (and indeed my preferred option).⁶

But what if the above is not what actually characterize the concepts of moral obligation and permission as people generally use them? My answer: “I do not care; I stipulate my subject matter to be answering the question of what to do, which is in itself an important question which is unavoidable for any rational being. If people mean something else by their words, what I am doing would remain indispensable.” If you think I offer a poor account of language, then you can read this post and substitute "every use of “moral” with “moral*,” where “moral*” is characterized as above. Even if moral concepts referred to mind-independent properties as part of the fabric of the world as mass or quantity, we would still face the question of whether we ought* to perform actions that have that property. Even if moral concepts were projections of our emotions and sentiments, we would still face the question of whether we ought* to act as our sentiments recommend.

Generally, those who say that, if moral concepts are just properties like mass and quantity, then we have no reason to give them regard in our actions, they are met with the response that reasons are likewise a mere relations like fatherhood and relative size, so they are begging the question. It is popular among all sorts of views in contemporary philosophy to meet objections, not by addressing them, but by making them inarticulable. I have no choice but to simply break free of those chains, stipulate my subject-matter, and let the reader decide whether to join me in this investigation.

§2 How can be prove anything about what to do?

When I give the above account of moral obligation and permission, people often worry that it is an implication of it that people may act as they please. If there is no constraint from the world on what I “ought” to do—no worldly facts about what I simply ought to do, like how the actual mass of something determines what I ought to believe about its mass—then I might come to any conclusion I want about what to do.

When we wonder what to believe, we do not look for something outside of belief to tell us what to believe. Sure, the world has the final say as to whether the belief is true or false, but nothing tells me what to believe except for what I believe the world to be like. It is, rather, the nature of belief that constraints what I can rationally believe. Say that I come to the conclusion that Socrates is not a woman. Then, without getting any new evidence, I wonder whether to also conclude that Socrates is a woman. It is not some source external to my beliefs that tells me not to come to the latter conclusion. Rather, in judging that Socrates is not a woman, I have already settled on not judging Socrates to be a woman. I can take my decision back by revising my previous belief, but insofar as I do not do that, my belief all by itself provides sufficient grounds for what other beliefs to form.

Likewise, if we want universal moral constraints on how to act, I do not think we need to look for something outside of action to get such constraints. The nature of deliberation about how to act already provides those constraints without having to look for any so-called “moral” truths that are not mere claims about what to do. We can see how this works in the case of instrumental reasoning, i.e. reasoning about how to take the means to your ends. If I decide to become more healthy, and taking a run a few times a week is the only/best way to do that, I don’t need to discover that running has some property called “rationality” before doing it. In deciding to become healthy, I already decided to take the means to that end, and I realize (based on the empirical facts of the case) that taking a run a few times a week is part of what I already decided to do. Now, if I really don’t want to run, I might abandon being healthy as my end. But insofar as I do not abandon my end, running is the thing to do, and that follows just from my other conclusions about what to do (along with some empirical facts, but not facts about what is “rational” if “rational” is thought of as a worldly property like mass and quantity).

That’s a case of internal commitment: commitment to a conclusion (whether a belief or an action) just in virtue of what the agent already accepts. Ultimately, I agree with Kant’s view that all commitment is internal commitment, including our moral obligations (though showing we are in fact committed to e.g. helping others when we can is not the topic of this post). Importantly, I claim (and will argue here) that if there are any moral obligations, we have to be internally committed to them; and until someone shows such a task to be possible, it remains that there could be universal constraints on how to act which are determined merely by the nature of thinking about how to act, and not any constraint external to one’s own thought about the same.

Here’s one cool result we can already get: that ought implies can. This is the famous claim that, if an agent is morally obligated to do something, then they have to be able to do it. For example, I am not obligated to donate a million dollars to the Shrimp Welfare Project, since doing such is not within my power. But since I do have some extra money, I might well be obligated to donate some money to them (and, in fact, I am so obligated).

Why does ought imply can? Simple: an agent cannot rationally settle on doing something they judge they cannot do.⁷ Specifically, if I judge I ought to do something, then I settle on doing it (with a desire-independent motivation, but that assumption is not needed here). But I cannot rationally settle on doing something that I take myself to be incapable of; capability just is the concept I take to apply to thinks that I can aptly think about whether to do. Therefore, if I make the judgment of obligation, I have to take myself to be able to do the obligatory thing.

The above is quite different from how the discussion is usually perceived. If, as is usual, moral obligation is treated as a free-floating concept, defined by nothing other than being the concept at play in paradigm judgments of moral obligation, then we have no standard to resort to than to appeal to common intuitions about the concept. So we get intuitively appealing but vague principles about the concept, like that it should be action-guiding, and then we can publish some papers about whether the principle captures this and other intuitions associated with the concept. This is, in my opinion, not the strategy you should follow if you intensely care about living the correct way.

§3 What do I call “intuitionism”?

What is intuitionism? Please do not forget the fact that here I am concerned with conclusions about what to do. I am not concerned with how we “know” some mind-independent moral facts to be the case, except insofar as they are merely answers to the question of what to do, so that a “moral fact” is not the kind of thing you can recognize but not act in accordance with unless you’re being logically inconsistent.

I am concerned with the ultimate practical justification for our actions. Say that I donate $10 to the Shrimp Welfare Project, taking it to be obligatory to do so (which it is). You may ask why I did that. I say, “It seems likely the shrimp suffer intense pain, and the money I have to spare would prevent a lot of them from experiencing that, so I am obligated donate.” You ask why I believe that principle. “Because if you can help someone at little cost who is very likely sentient and in dire need of help, you are obligated to.” You ask why I believe that. “Because you are obligated to value others’ wellbeing in addition to your own, at least in circumstances where the former massively outweighs the latter.”

For the Kantian, this line of questioning will eventually come to an end, starting with a claim of obligation supposedly provable from zero premises. For the intuitionist, the line of reasoning will come to an end with a claim of obligation that has no further proof. The classical intuitionists thought we could start with something that’s just obvious and self-evident. Samuel Clarke though that it was self-evident that some actions are fitting and some are unfitting, and that we should do the fitting ones and avoid the unfitting ones. Indeed, “nothing but the extremest stupidity of mind, corruption of manners, or perverseness of spirit, can possibly make any man entertain the least doubt concerning [these claims].”⁸ If someone with as stupid a mind, as corrupt manners, and as perverse a spirit as myself were to ask Clarke “Why do you do the things that are fitting?”, he would answer, “I have no further reason to do so, you buffoon.” Doing the fitting things is a conclusion Clarke came to with no further practical justification; he does not do fitting things for some further reason, nor can he show the stupid, corrupt, and perverse to be committed to be doing fitting things. In terms of the reasons for which he acts, Clarke differs from a sentimentalist only in that he takes his conclusions to have authority over those who are not motivated like him.

Now, every analytic philosopher has had the desire for clean and exceptionless first principles beaten out of them; this is the first thing they do when you start grad school. So, contemporary intuitionists typically do not have some grand first principle that they deduce all other moral claims from. Rather, they practice the method of reflective equilibrium, described in the introduction. A principle being plausible is a reason to accept it, but you might have to revise it in light of other principles or intuitions about particular cases. They are coherentists with respect to their philosophical method: they don’t derive everything from a foundational first principle, rather they let any consideration influence any other consideration as seems fit. But in terms of their practical justifications for their actions—assuming they live in the way their theories say they “ought” to—the structure is ultimately like Clarke’s, just more complicated. Their justifications for action bottom out—“I didn’t lie, I avoid dishonesty for its own sake, and there were no other relevant considerations”—and reflective equilibrium is the method by which they figure out where things should bottom out. Still, their most general principles for action, like “All else equal, avoid dishonesty,” will not be ones they act on because they follow from some further decision about how to act, and they will not have any further argument for someone who says “I see you have a theory which optimally balances the theoretical virtues with people’s intuitions about cases, and it says dishonesty is wrong, all else equal. But please convince me to act in accordance with this theory.”

For the Lovers of Wisdom reading this, I must stress, I am not going to make a metaphysical or epistemological objection to intuitionism. My objection will be that no conclusion about how to act having the intuitionist’s justificatory structure counts as a judgment of moral obligation. I’ll grant that you may posit whatever properties you like; I’ll even grant that you can know what has those properties and what doesn’t. My concern is whether we can call a practical principle—one whose adoption has no further practical justification—obligatory.

Often, moral skeptics like to object to intuitionism on metaphysical or epistemological grounds. J.L. Mackie famously objected to the existence of “objective values” on the basis that they would be a weird sort of posit, unlike anything else that exists. He also argued that widespread moral disagreement is good empirical evidence that our judgments are not sensitive to objective values.⁹ Some argue that it’s implausible that we could have a faculty that is receptive to these strange, immaterial moral facts, or that evolution gives us reason to doubt that our intuitions would develop to track any such facts. I’m not making any of these arguments. I find them defective in that they do not address intuitionism in general; many intuitionists avoid positing strange properties and faculties. My concern, again, is whether any brute practical principle that has no further justification can count as a moral obligation, i.e. the principle cannot have authority over those who are not disposed to have similar first principles.

When the question of justification comes up, philosophers like to call it a worry about “answering the skeptic.” As if we’re worried about actually, empirically convincing a certain kind of person. Then, they frame the discussion this way, and argue that they don’t need to “answer the skeptic,” often by comparing the subject-matter to other cases where you can’t convince consistent skeptics (often claiming that, if we accept the challenge here, skepticism in general will follow), or by noting that just because a person is irrational for believing something doesn’t mean you can convince them they’re wrong.

I am not merely asking for more proof. Rather, I intend to provide a positive basis for ruling out intuitionist principles as genuinely obligatory. Anyway, let us continue.

§4 The argument

Ultimately, I think intuitionism is ruled out by a principle much like “ought implies can.” Indeed, this principle is a generalization of “ought implies can.” The claim is that you cannot be obligated by any principle that you cannot come to be rationally convinced of. In short, when it comes to moral principles, ought implies can rationally adopt.¹⁰

I’m not making an argument from disagreement in the usual sense, but it would be useful to use a hypothetical disagreement to illustrate my argument. Suppose that Bob and Alice are two philosophers who have achieved reflective equilibrium; you may even suppose that they are from different cultures and they have reached reflective equilibrium taking into account all the intuitions from those who share their culture, or perhaps they are from different planets, etc. The two philosophers are equal in their brilliance and the sincerity with which they engage with ethics. Anyway, they started with different intuitions, causing their equilibria to have contradictory verdicts in some cases. Say that Alice ends up a utilitarian and judges you are obligated to kill one to save five in the Trolley Problem, whereas Bob ends up a Rossian pluralist who thinks you are obligated to not pull the lever and save five.¹¹ Importantly, suppose also that intuitionism about ethics is correct, and that Alice the utilitarian in fact has the correct intuitions and thus ended up in the correct equilibrium, and that there is no way she could have come upon this knowledge independent of intuition.

Suppose Bob finds himself in a real-life trolley problem, just like in the textbooks. Being a man of principle, he refrains from pulling the lever (perhaps even despite his temptation to save the five, even though doing so seems intuitively wrong to him), letting five die by refusing to kill one person to prevent it. The question: assuming everything from the previous paragraph, including that Alice is right, has Bob done something he was obligated not to do? Did Bob make a mistake somewhere in thinking about how to act?

My answer: no. There very strongly seems to be a sense in which Bob could not have acted otherwise. Sure, that’s not literally true: it was entirely within his power to simply pull the lever, he wasn’t paralyzed by fear or anything. But if he had simply pulled the lever, something would have definitely gone wrong in his thinking about how to act, given that he has already sincerely taken into account all the possible reasons that are available to him. If his action really was wrong, then there should be some rational train of thought he could take to get that conclusion. But he can’t, simply because his psychology happens to be such that he has the wrong intuitions. Everything Bob did with the hand he was dealt (including the psychological properties he has which are beyond his control) seems to have gone perfectly; he seems to be a perfect practical deliberator. None of the stuff he supposedly did wrong is his fault, and morality is supposed to be about the stuff that’s your fault.

Bob cares a lot about knowing what he’s obligated to do, and wants to correct any misconceptions he may have. What could Alice say to him to help him achieve that goal? Well, by hypothesis, nothing, since they’ve both achieved reflective equilibrium. How could Bob ever get into Alice’s position, which he really wants to be able to do if it were to turn out that Alice is correct (which we are assuming she is). The only thing he could do is just arbitrarily decide to accept Alice’s conclusions, which definitely isn’t the right thing to do. “Think again, and form correct beliefs this time” isn’t an option available to him; the problem isn’t with his thinking, but rather circumstances beyond his control.

My analysis: because a judgment of obligation is a decision to act with a motivation that applies to every rational agent in the given circumstances, and because Alice’s motivations only apply to those who are similar to her in psychology, she does not make a judgment of obligation. In particular, her motivations to not apply to Bob. This is to say, when Alice decides to pull the lever (should she find herself in a Trolley Problem), she is not determining her will such that she would pull the lever conditional on being like Bob in psychology. Therefore, I conclude that the principle “One ought to pull the lever in the Trolley Problem” does not, in fact, have any authority over Bob; it is not a thing Bob is obligated to do. The difference between Alice and Bob is merely one of preference, and they are both acting correctly given their preferences, unless we assume there are intuition-independent constraints on correct conduct.

Put loosely: moral obligations only apply to those we can reasonably expect to be able to take them into account. Bob cannot be reasonably expected to take the supposed obligation to pull the lever into account. Thus, Alice’s judgment only applies to those similar to her in antecedently taking it to be better to pull the lever (or, perhaps, in having antecedent attitudes which commit one to pulling the lever once one is in reflective equilibrium). But a conclusion about what to do that one can only reach in virtue of one’s antecedent attitudes is a mere preference, not a judgment of obligation.

§5 Objections and Replies

Three objections to the above occur to me.

Objection I: When I was on his and Amos’ podcast, Matthew Adelstein replied to my argument by noting the distinction between the objective and subjective rightness or wrongness of an action. Say I see a man parched in the desert, so I pull out a bottle of clear liquid which I justifiedly believe to be water and give it to him. However, a mischievous stranger actually replaced the water with Everclear when I wasn’t looking, so when the man gulps it down it causes him to vomit and become even more parched. In this case, my action is objectively wrong, since it would have been preferable for me to not give him the bottle. But my action was subjectively right, since by my best evidence I was simply giving water to a suffering stranger, and so I am blameless. Matthew, if I construe his objection correctly, would say that Bob’s action of not pulling the lever above was subjectively right, but objectively wrong. Since his action was subjectively right, Bob has good character and is not culpable. And calling his action “objectively wrong” captures the idea that the correct moral theory applies to everyone, even if some are blameless for not following it.

Reply I: Insofar as this is the distinction between objective and subjective rightness, “moral obligation” refers to the latter.¹² Ethics is (as I have characterized it here) about what to do. What is proper to ethics are conclusions about what to do given certain empirical circumstances, or given what the agent justifiedly believes to be their empirical circumstances (the two are the same from the first-person perspective of practical deliberation). In the above case, I would act differently if I were made aware of some extra-ethical facts (namely, that the bottle has Everclear in it). In the case of Bob, he would have to learn some extra ineliminably ethical facts to act differently; but it is a property of ethical facts, I argued, that they should be accessible to everybody they have authority over.

Put briefly: my only concern here is how to live. I truly, sincerely want to come to correct conclusions about that. If the sense in which a certain moral theory is correct is that there just is a property it tracks that I might not be attuned to, no matter how clear and consistent and sincere my deliberation is, then this theory does not tell me how to live any more than predicating of my action any arbitrary property.¹³

Objection II: You say the sense in which Alice’s motives do not “apply” to Bob is that when she determines herself to pull the lever, she does not determine herself to do so conditional on being like Bob. But that way overgeneralizes. Say there is a serial killer who consciously rejects morality and then kills people. When you decide not to kill for moral reasons, your do not will yourself to not kill hypothetical on having his psychology, as by hypothesis he rejects your motivation.

Reply II: When I talk about deciding to do something hypothetical on finding yourself in certain circumstances, I mean the circumstances of the choice in question. Hypothetical on finding myself in the serial killer’s circumstances, I decide on the very same motives I have right now to reverse my decision to reject morality and thereafter not kill. Assuming Kantianism is correct, all the premises which motivate me not to kill (namely, all zero of them, zero premises being sufficient to prove the Moral Law) and the relevant rules of inference are accessible to him, and he simply chooses not to act consistently with them out of a desire for happiness.¹⁴ If Kantianism is incorrect, then my motivations do indeed not apply to him, because there would be no moral law, and it would be permissible for everyone to act as they please. In contrast, in the case of Alice and Bob, Alice relies on premises which are not accessible to Bob, meaning they cannot be a basis for rational judgments of obligation.

Objection III: I see your argument goes through assuming your definition of moral obligation, but now I question whether it captures what I should care about. It seems like your argument only goes through because of a cheap stipulation—of course if obligatory action is action whose motives apply to all rational agents, understanding “apply” the way you do, the rejection of intuitionism follows. You may as well have just said “obligatory action is action that all rational agents are committed to.”

Reply III: As I said, whether my conclusion seems significant given what I stipulated the subject matter to be is a question for the reader to decide. However, I do expect that, if I have made myself clear enough,¹⁵ then the reader will find my conclusion significant even given my stipulations. I think that if I have done my job and if the reader understands what I’ve been trying to say, they will no longer want to apply the phrase “objective moral obligations” to what the intuitionists talk about.

I will put it this way: the intuitionist is not capable of saying anything that the Humean is not.¹⁶ There’s a property intuitionists really like, they want to do actions with that property (sometimes they don’t, but they really hope that they can become strong enough do only do actions with that property). If you ask why they care about acting in a way that have that property, it’s because the actions have that property. If you ask whether people who don’t care about that property should act so as to satisfy it, they tell you “should” only applies to actions with the property, so the answer is “Yes, actions with the property have that property, trivially, no matter what anyone judges.” They talk exactly like a Humean would, if the Humean held that all normative terms refer to the supervenience base of things that their moral sentiments approve of (distinct from the base only in that it carries the presumption along with it that the property play a direct role in their practical deliberation), which is admittedly an objective and mind-independent property. I do not know what an intuitionist could say to distinguish themselves from such a Human, except their insistence that they are not Humeans.

I, in contrast, think there is an internal, qualitative distinction between action out of obligation and action out of mere preference: the former and the former alone is motivated in a way that is consistent and also accessible to all rational agents through their own reasoning, just in virtue of their being rational agents. This character explains why the non-philosopher is so drawn to moral relativism in the first place, because they cannot think of any reason to act as they think they should that could seem reasonable to someone from a sufficiently different culture. It’s why moral judgments seem intrinsically motivating. It’s why many people find it natural to conclude that moral obligation is not real (or at least not objective) if there’s no substantive answer to the question of why one ought to be moral.

Having written this, I worry that the differences between myself and the intuitionist are irresolvable. I’ve long concluded that nothing can be said to a consistent Humeanism to change their mind; all they can do is choose to abstract from their desires, do ethics the hard way, and conclude we’re all committed to the Moral Law. I have hope they they would do so if it could be shown that a moral law would indeed follow. The intuitionist seems to me to be a Humean suffering from the additional complication that they take the projection of their sentiments onto the world, call it an objective and mind-independent property, and then do not want to abstract from it because there’s no way to reason into recognizing as good what they call “good” from the outside.¹⁷

1. See Rawls, A Theory of Justice (A20/B18). He used this method not for a priori moral philosophy but rather for reasoning about how to accomplish a specific goal in specific empirical circumstances—namely, the problem of how to come up with the principles that govern a post-industrial society given the fact of reasonable pluralism. So restricted in scope, reflective equilibrium is a valid methodology, because “considered moral judgments about particular cases” are informed by more general moral conclusions outside the scope of political philosophy, as well as the contingent aims and limitations that define political philosophy.

2. From here on, when I talk about “taking nothing for granted,” I mean taking no moral claims for granted. I take no stand, here, on the ultimate source of descriptive judgments.

3. First Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre, §1: 424.

4. By “relatively” here I mean morally better than at least 99% of the general population, given that they are vegan and serious about the ethical implications of such. Due to the universality of Radical Evil I cannot omit qualification; only God can judge them by absolute standards.

5. The keen reader will have questions like “Couldn’t your desires be considered relevant circumstances?” and “Aren’t you tacitly already appealing to moral concepts in this characterization”? The answers are “no” and “no,” but to justify that I can only point you to what will hopefully be a published article in the future.

6. This is essentially the view of moral concepts given by Allan Gibbard in Thinking How to Live and Christine Korsgaard in “Realism and Constructivism in 20^th Century Moral Philosophy.” This way of distinguishing between obligation and permission is my own, though also similar to the proposal by Schwartz & Hom 2014.

7. In other words, I conclude that ought implies can because an agent who judges they ought to do something is committed to judging they can do it. Reasoning at the level of judgments and commitments is necessary here, since morality here is defined by what it means to make a moral judgment (namely, to come to a certain kind of conclusion about what to do).

8. See D.D. Raphael, British Moralists: Volume I, pp. 192-194.

9. See his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.

10. By the way, if anyone has ever seen this argument made (other than by Kant within the span of a single paragraph), please let me know. I have looked, though I’m not so Aware of the Literature that it couldn’t have flown under my radar. When I ask others, usually I only find versions of the arguments addressed in the previous couple of paragraphs.

11. I don’t know if this is Ross’ verdict, but suppose it is. Also, I did not base these characters off Matthew and Amos; these are literally the two most natural positions to pick.

12. The distinction Matthew refers to is a good and important one, but I wouldn’t want to call it “objective/subjective rightness.” I think there is space for the concept of non-culpable wrongdoing, but this should refer to incorrect conclusions one comes to in their deliberation, given the things they are aware of. A priori moral reasoning is hard, and we just screw up sometimes, so one can come to an incorrect moral conclusion without vicious motives. Likewise, when you make a mistake in mathematics, you do something internally irrational—you undertake reasoning that is not logically valid, though such mistakes are unavoidable. The difference between this and the distinction Matthew brought up is, I think, an important one. In the water/Everclear case, given my state of mind, I am not internally committed to not giving the man the bottle, since I am justifiedly confident that there is water in it. In the “mere mistake in reasoning” cases, I am still internally committed to a certain conclusion, and I made a mistake in figuring out what I am internally committed to. So I can admit that there is “subjective rightness” in the latter sense while still maintaining that, if there are moral obligations, every rational being is internally committed to them.

13. I made the story about two intuitionists, but were I a character, I would be one who sincerely does not see any reason that I ought to act as my intuitions say I should, except only as a provisional guide while my understanding is still defective. The argument would go through just the same.

14. So, structurally, he is like the one making a deductive mistake in math (see footnote 12), except in his case he is culpable for the error.

15. And I am not confident I have. Writing this, I can’t get rid of the nagging feeling that I’m referring to something deep while only managing to push around trivialities.

16. Hume held that reason is the “slave” of the passions, i.e. that there are no rational constraints on how to act, so it is rational to act as one pleases. Morality, for Hume, merely refers to the dictates of a subset of our emotions referred to as “moral sentiments.”

17. I thank Jack Thompson for his pushback on some points in this post, which casued me to recognize a crucial error in the second-last paragraph of §2, as well as a point in the same paragraph where clearer language was in order.