Abstract

Coherence accounts of justification in ethics will become more fashionable only as they become more concrete---but this shows no sign of happening soon. Despite widespread acceptance of Quinian insights in support of coherentism in other fields, coherentism in ethics is dogged by critics. Perhaps this is because practitioners of coherentist justification go on as ethicists have always gone on, which is to say they go every which way, both in the methods they employ, and in the normative conclusions they draw. If coherentism is a viable method in ethics, it should be possible to point to successful coherentist arguments, and also perhaps to explain to someone how to go about crafting such arguments for herself. ;As is a mantra by now, a coherent set of beliefs is more than a consistent set of beliefs: what more is needed is explained differently by different authors. I concentrate on the role of "spontaneously occurring" intuitions. There is little consensus on the extent to which intuitions should play a role in justification, and this is an important way in which coherentist methods remain underdeveloped. But there is a good reason why the issue is tangled: choosing which intuitions to trust involves committing to a view about moral realism. Since the moral realism debate is controversial, it is understandable that many hope the epistemological debate may be compartmentalized---no such luck, I'm afraid. ;I argue that coherentists cannot settle on a role for intuitions without specifying the goals of justification in moral inquiry. This in turn requires becoming embroiled in the moral realism/antirealism debate. I investigate the use of intuitions in coherentist justification from the standpoint of someone who holds that justification in ethics should track an evidence independent moral truth. I argue that of the three alternatives open to such a theorist---foundationalism, pure coherentism, and hybrid coherentism---the last alternative provides the best hope for success. My argument for this claim turns on the question of which account of justification best explains how intuitions are able to serve as "correctives" in the process of justifying a moral theory