I’m not offering you a phony seventeen-step “proof that murder is normally wrong.” Instead, I begin with concrete, specific cases where morality is obvious, and reason from there. Bryan Caplan.
My debate with Bryan Caplan made me reflect again on our differing attitudes toward intuition. While we still differ, Bryan has greatly influenced my thinking.
For each of our beliefs, we can ask our mind to give our "reasons" for that belief. Our minds usually then offer reasons, though we usually don't know how much those reasons have to do with the actual causes of our belief. We can often test those reasons through criticism, increasing confidence when criticism is less effective than expected, and decreasing confidence when criticism is more effective than expected.
For some of our beliefs, our minds don't offer much in the way of reasons. We say these beliefs are more "intuitive." In a hostile debating context this response can seem suspicious; you might expect one side in a debate to refuse to offer reasons just when they had already tested those reasons against criticism, and found them wanting. That is, we might expect a debater to pretend he didn't have any reasons when he knew his reasons were bad.
But this doesn't obviously support much distrust of our own intuitive beliefs. Not only is our internal mind not obviously like a hostile debating context, but we must admit that our minds are built so that the vast majority of our thinking is unconscious. It is unreasonable to expect our minds to be able to tell us much in the way of reasons for most of our beliefs.
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