Normativity of Moral Intuitions in the Social Intuitionist Model
The aim of this paper is to answer the question of whether moral intuitions, understood in terms of Jonathan Haidt's Social Intuitionist Model (SIM), have any normative power. The conclusion is no. And there are many separate arguments in favor of it. Fir
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Abstract* The aim of this paper is to answer the question of whether moral intuitions, understood in terms of Jonathan Haidt's Social Intuitionist Model (SIM), have any normative power. The conclusion is no. And there are many separate arguments in favor of it. First, these moral intuitions cannot be objective, justifying reasons that are expected to arise in the course of making a ‘real’ moral judgment. Second, we do not even know if they actually represent the grounds for moral judgments. There are too few reasons to exclude the possibility that, when we make moral judgments, we unconsciously follow moral rules, which can be objective moral reasons. Furthermore, in Haidt's terms, moral intuitions are most probably heuristic by nature. But if they are, it is even more problematic for their normativity because they can lead to mistakes. There is also a lacuna in the research concerning problems with resolving moral dilemmas in which two strong moral intuitions are involved. Third, philosophers claim that there is some other kind of justified moral intuitions and psychologists often mistakenly mix together these two phenomena. In this paper, all of these arguments will be examined and they will serve to justify the lack of normativity of moral intuitions in the SIM.
* Maciej Juzaszek Department of Professional Ethics Jagiellonian University Krakow, Poland [email protected] The paper is a result of the research project ‘Justice in Health Care’ funded by Polish National Science Centre (number 2013/08/A/ HS1/00079).
© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2016 C. Brand (Ed.), Dual-Process Theories in Moral Psychology, DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-12053-5_3
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Maciej Juzaszek
Introduction
This paper is an attempt to answer the question of whether moral intuitions, understood in terms of the influential and enthusiastically debated Social Intuitionist Model (SIM), the psychological theory of Jonathan Haidt (2001), have any normative power; that is, whether or not we should form moral judgments on their basis. In the beginning I will present the main assumptions and statements of the SIM and the general problem of normativity. Then I will move on to present the interesting idea of the ‘real’ moral judgment delivered by Jeanette Kennett and Cordelia Fine (2009) and the conception of moral judgment based on normative objective reasons which do not include moral intuitions in terms of the SIM. Kenneth and Fine's theory is a convincing form of rejection of the arguments from contemporary moral psychology against ethical rationalism, which seems to me a legitimate position which is worth defending. After that, I will continue with three minor problems and attempt to identify some gaps in the research conducted within the SIM, which might justify the claim that moral intuitions are not normative. At the end, I will mention the difference between psychologists' and philosophers' ways of understanding moral intuitions. All these arguments will lead me to the conclusion that moral intuitions in terms of Haidt's theory are not t
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