Abstract

In the history of moral philosophy, from Plato, to Aristotle, I. Kant, J. Stuart Mill, and more recently including rationalists like J. Habermas, J. Rawls, R. M. Hare and C. Korsgaard, several attempts have been made to show that reason is the best guide to our moral actions and judgements. On the other hand, some philosophers like D. Hume, A. Smith, A. J. Ayer, P. F. Strawson, and S. Blackburn have taught that morality must be a task of our moral sentiments. I think it is more plausible to accept that both of our capacities must be considered in moral decision-making, because there are important new data from psychology, the cognitive sciences and neurosciences that provide evidence for  the importance of emotions in our decisions, not just rationality. Moral laws, moral values and moral sentiments might all give us good reasons to act morally. This is the reason, why I  support the view that moral philosophy accounts fail to offer a good way to treat ethical issues when they do not also consider the importance of emotions. From this point of view, I intend to show here that one form of intuitionism can help us to answer the question about moral knowledge and to grasp the way in which we decide. I argue that this form of intuitionism should be able to help us to deal with moral dilemmas. In the first section of this article, I consider the definitions of moral dilemmas, then, in the second, third, and fourth sections I explain three forms of intuitionism – the rationalist (D. Ross), the empiricist (R. Audi), and the reflexive (C. Gowans)­ – and finally in the last section I point out a new way of thinking about our intuitions. I will call this form naturalistic intuitionism. Moral naturalism is the assumption that our decisions or judgements are partially determined by a natural process and  natural properties  of the world. In this sense I assume that some of our emotional capacities (like  the ability to feel disgust, outrage, indignation, regret, shame, etc), or cognitive capacities (e.g. rationality, cognition) are hardwired into our psychology. This means that social moral rules are learned  from childhood, although given by evolution. Hence, they can be taken as natural in the sense that they are the product both of the social world and of the biological constitution of the human being.

Keywords: Moral Intuitionism, moral dilemmas, moral rationalism, moral sentimentalism, ethics.