Signal to noise

Abstract

This thesis has three aims. First: making a general case for why and how we ought to limit the reliance on intuitions in ethical theory. Second: addressing this general question through the lens of the more specific debate surrounding the justifiability of utilitarian intuition-deployment practices. Third: contributing to greater terminological precision in the general vocabulary around intuitions. The thesis pursues the first aim through an examination of historical cases in which an excessive trust in moral intuitions led people astray, arguing for viewing our more-abstract and highly general intuitions as more trustworthy in light of being less given to the kind of “undergeneralization” often recognized as misguided in retrospect. The second aim is pursued simultaneously with the third aim, by analyzing, naming and categorizing various moral intuitions in order to point out relevant differences between those intuitions that utilitarians often distrust and the ones they nonetheless rely on. I eventually conclude that the utilitarian practice of distrusting many moral intuitions while still relying on a few, intuitively compelling notions as their grounding premises is not arbitrary or unmotivated, but rather justifiable in light of the differing methodological and epistemic characteristics displayed by the former and latter intuition-classes.