Thinking together not only binds us, but also allows us to explore unknown, perhaps unknowable, territory with joy, curiosity and confidence. Through asking children what they in some sense already know through their intuitive knowledge and putting thinking itself into question, we can help them become more aware of themselves as thinking beings. And as thinking beings children can learn the skills they’re taught in school, but not at the expense of their own thinking. With their thinking intact, (...) they can skillfully apply what they learn in school to the world in which they live. (shrink)

The compass we use to navigate life needs to be cultivated from an early age. My sense is that the arts, including Plato’s dialogues cultivate our navigational sense. It does not tell us rationally what is good or what is bad. It is not that simple. Remember, the stars we sail by, are not fixed, either. So we need to develop a sense for what may be right or not in any particular situation. We may have a general sense, but (...) need to learn how to apply this general sense to specific situations, which are unique. In every new situation we have to figure out what is the right thing to do. And this may be different for different people as well. Too often we look for a one-fits-all solution, including our moral sense of right and wrong. And this is where we so often end up resorting to a violent “solution,” just to end it all. While we may have acquired so many technological advancements in our modern world, on the level of understanding how to navigate the world we may have regressed even, now that we can increasingly rely of highly technically advanced weapons. Again, violence seems to bear the only “solution.” -/- Yet, with our compass intact, we might be better able to recognize the red flags when we see them in real life and not find ways to rationalize, justify or ignore the reality right before our eyes. When we recognize them early, they can be handled so much easier and better. Molehills are less difficult than mountains. And to get rid of a mountain, you may just have to blow it up, using violence... (shrink)

When visual attention is directed away from a stimulus, neural processing is weak and strength and precision of sensory data decreases. From a computational perspective, in such situations observers should give more weight to prior expectations in order to behave optimally during a discrimination task. Here we test a signal detection theoretic model that counter-intuitively predicts subjects will do just the opposite in a discrimination task with two stimuli, one attended and one unattended: when subjects are probed to discriminate the (...) unattended stimulus, they rely less on prior information about the probed stimulus’ identity. The model is in part inspired by recent findings that attention reduces trial-by-trial variability of the neuronal population response and that they use a common criterion for attended and unattended trials. In five different visual discrimination experiments, when attention was directed away from the target stimulus, subjects did not adjust their response bias in reaction to a change in stimulus presentation frequency despite being fully informed and despite the presence of performance feedback and monetary and social incentives. This indicates that subjects did not rely more on the priors under conditions of inattention as would be predicted by a Bayes-optimal observer model. These results inform and constrain future models of Bayesian inference in the human brain. (shrink)

This paper explores the notion that children have a knowledge of the world of their own – an intuitive knowledge. Being fully immersed in the world as adults are, they too have a knowledge of the world. In contrast to adults, who have developed a cognitive knowledge of the world, children still depend on their intuitive knowledge. Children certainly have a strong grasp of the world they live in; it’s just not dependent on (...) cognitive knowledge. In my paper I compare and contrast Kohlberg and Lipman’s views on children’s ability to be natural philosophers. To be immersed in the world, brings to mind Martin Buber’s idea that we are born in relation, the a priori of relation, which only later develops into the essential relation as we develop the consciousness of our individual separateness. This a priori relation, then, forms the basis for children’s intuitive knowledge, and which is expressed through the language of imagination. And certainly, imagination is not devoid of any kind of reason. In focusing strictly on children’s cognitive development and ignoring their inborn relation with the world, we essentially rob them of their foothold in the world, their inner authority needed for self-regulated thinking. We create a world where children grow up dependent on authority, status, trends and fads. This can lead to what we’ve observed in the famous Milgram study. Philosophy with children encourages children to speak from their own place, in a form of parrhesia, if you will, and to discuss together with others the complexities of ideas. It honors their inborn relation with the world, their statements and aids in the process of developing their cognitive knowledge out of their intuitive grasp of the world. In respecting their inborn relation, philosophy with children allows children to grow up as full human beings, not just as smart and educated “disembodied creatures.” Children speak from the logic of experience (Foucault). Through the process of putting thinking itself into question, children become aware of themselves as thinking beings. It is what Bohm refers to as the “proprioception of thought,” the ability to “observe thought.” Philosophers, I argue, are experts in not knowing. In practicing the art of philosophy, the art of not knowing, we need each other to think together to explore deeper concepts. This binds us and allows us to explore the unknown with joy, curiosity and confidence. In an example from my own experience, I show that children not only intuitively touch on complex philosophical ideas; students are wrestling with ideas about how to understand the world, which is where philosophy began as well. How can we be surprised when children decide computer games are more interesting than life itself, if we have essentially robbed them of the desire to “get dirty,” and engage this world filled with wonder. We have created a world too boring and act surprised when children are bored. The world isn’t boring and in “doing” philosophy with children we keep the fascination with this place we call earth alive. (shrink)

How do Humans Think? How should we think? Almost all of philosophy and a great deal else depends in large part on the answers that we provide to such questions. Yet they are almost impossible to deal with in isolation; notions about nature of thought are almost bound to connect with metaphysical notions about where ideas come from, with notions about appropriate arenas for certainty, doubt, and belief, and hence with moral and religious ideas. The Western tradition of thinking (...) about thinking takes shape with Socrates; among the other important strands covered in this book are Descartes’ recipe for discovering truth through systematic doubt, Hume’s notion that all our ideas are copies of sense impressions, Wollstonecraft’s introduction of the perspective of gender into such questions, and Wittgenstein’s claim that much of the traditional terrain of Western philosophy should be thought of as the proper domain only of linguistic assertion, possessing no content beyond the words. With each philosopher and school of thought dealt with, Govier shows how ideas about thinking connect to the other elements of the particular philosophy, and brings to life the social and intellectual context that the ideas spring from. Socrates’ Children is thus not only an investigation of notions of thinking and knowing in Western culture; it is a selective general history of much of Western philosophy, from a unique and fascinating perspective. (shrink)

In the thirteenth-century Bibles moralisées there appears a new iconographical type in which God the Father, and figures depicted in moralising illustrations, are shown with a compass. This article argues that these images throw light on the medieval concept of reason and its role in the Divine Economy. In these French Capetian Bibles, the compass is the symbol of divine or human reason, depending on the context where it occurs. When depicted in the scene of Creation in the frontispieces, the (...) compass is the instrument of Christ-Logos as Divine Reason, used to impose God’s rational order on formless matter, but also to initiate the Divine Economy. The compass is depicted again, in the same sense, at the beginning of the New Testament, as a ‘dynamic sign’ which links the start of God’s plan for humankind salvation during Creation with the re-enactment of the Divine Economy through the Incarnation. When a compass occurs elsewhere, in a moralised image for a biblical story which takes place in the earthly realm, the instrument becomes the tool used by human reason to discern between good and evil. The analysis which leads to this interpretation is borne out by an examination of related themes in the Bibles moralisées: those of the sleep of mortal reason, and of the endurance of Divine Reason as a guide to true knowledge. (shrink)

Could a computer be programmed to make moral judgments about cases of intentional harm and unreasonable risk that match those judgments people already make intuitively? If the human moral sense is an unconscious computational mechanism of some sort, as many cognitive scientists have suggested, then the answer should be yes. So too if the search for reflective equilibrium is a sound enterprise, since achieving this state of affairs requires demarcating a set of considered judgments, stating them as explanandum (...) sentences, and formulating a set of algorithms from which they can be derived. The same is true for theories that emphasize the role of emotions or heuristics in moral cognition, since they ultimately depend on intuitive appraisals of the stimulus that accomplish essentially the same tasks. Drawing on deontic logic, action theory, moral philosophy, and the common law of tort, particularly Terry's five-variable calculus of risk, I outline a formal model of moral grammar and intuitive jurisprudence along the foregoing lines, which defines the abstract properties of the relevant mapping and demonstrates their descriptive adequacy with respect to a range of common moral intuitions, which experimental studies have suggested may be universal or nearly so. Framing effects, protected values, and implications for the neuroscience of moral intuition are also discussed. (shrink)

There is nothing more humbling to one’s inner moral compass than to realize that you do not initially know what is right or wrong! I found myself in just such a situation after reading the above case. Much has been written, both in the professional literature and the popular media, about the “Ashley Treatment” since Gunther and Diekema published their article in 2006. It is unclear if others in the United States or around the world have, to any significant (...) degree, adopted growth attenuation therapy and/or surgical intervention for children with severe neurological compromise, but the case quoted above suggests that hospital ethics committees may also be struggling with these decisions. An informal survey of pediatric endocrinologists, mentioned in a recent article on the topic, claims that many physicians are facing this dilemma as well. (shrink)

How should knowledge be analyzed? Compositionally, as having constituents like belief and justification, or as an atomic concept? In making arguments for or against these perspectives, epistemologists have begun to use experimental evidence from developmental psychology and developmental linguistics. If we were to conclude that knowledge were developmentally prior to belief, then we might have a good basis to claim that belief is not a constituent of knowledge. In this review, I present a broad range of developmental (...) evidence from the past decade and discuss some of the implications it has for the proper analysis of knowledge. The orthodox perspective from the developmental literature was one where children fail to understand belief and knowledge concepts until later in childhood, with typical asymmetries in belief attribution and knowledge attribution. But what emerges from both a discussion of newer findings and a contextualization of older findings is a picture of development whereby core competence with belief and knowledge concepts emerges much earlier than previously thought that apparent failures in later childhood may be explained by other aspects of development than conceptual development and that there is no clear evidence that knowledge attributions emerge earlier than belief attributions. (shrink)

Atkinson's method is to uncover the traits necessary for a person's being qualified to examine moral issues in a capable and competent manner. In the process he also discovers features which hinder a person being a competent thinker about moral questions. The reader is guided through this search by engaging Socrates as he appears in Plato's dialogues, not merely as a historical figure, but as an interlocutor. This path proceeds without begging any questions; its argument begins with no (...) assumptions about which moral beliefs might be true, which false, or even if moral truth exists. On the contrary, the book begins only with the supposition that there might be moral truth. And yet, by following Socrates on the attempt to ascertain its existence, the reader is brought into the realm of moral knowledge and becomes acquainted with the ideal of a genuine seeker of moral truth, an ideal which can be embraced as a guidepost to becoming a better and more fulfilled human being. --Publisher description. (shrink)

In the last decade, the study of moral heuristics has gained in importance. I argue that we can consider speciesism as a moral heuristic: an intuitive rule of thumb that substitutes a target attribute (that is difficult to detect, e.g. “having rationality”) for a heuristic attribute (that is easier to detect, e.g. “looking like a human being”). This speciesism heuristic misfires when applied to some atypical humans such as the mentally disabled, giving them rights although they lack (...) rationality. But I argue that it is not necessarily irrational or inconsistent to hold on to this heuristic rule, because we have to take time and knowledge constraints, uncertainty aversion and emotional costs into account. However, this “heuristic defense” of speciesism uses a target attribute (rationality) that has implications of disrespect towards some atypical humans. Therefore, based on notions of impartiality and compassion, I argue for a morally better target attribute: sentience (“having a sense of well-being”). “Being a vertebrate” is suitable as a corresponding heuristic attribute because it is easy to detect and has a strong correlation with the target attribute of sentience. (shrink)

The idea that intuition plays a basic role in moral knowledge and moral philosophy probably began in the eighteenth century. British philosophers such as Anthony Shaftsbury, Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, and later David Hume talk about a “moral sense” that they place in John Locke’s theory of knowledge in terms of Lockean reflexive perceptions, while Richard Price seeks a faculty by which we obtain our ideas of right and wrong. In the twentieth century intuitionism in (...) moral philosophy was revived by the works of G. E. Moore, H. A. Prichard, and W. D. Ross. These philosophers reject Kantian deontological ethics and utilitarianism insisting that intuition is the only source of moral knowledge. Recently, there is a renewed interest in intuition by philosophers doing meta-philosophy by reflecting on what philosophers do, and why they disagree. In this essay we plan to take some of this recent literature on intuition and apply it to moral philosophy. We will proceed by defining a conception of intuition, answering some skeptical challenges, delimiting its target, and arguing that intuition is often a source of moral knowledge. (shrink)

This dissertation offers an interpretation of moral knowledge and moral education in Plato's Protagoras. The dialogue develops the deeply antagonistic views of Protagoras and Socrates about these and related topics. I examine their competing views about several important questions, including: What is moral wisdom, and how is it related to the other parts of virtue? Can arete be taught, and if not, how else might it be acquired? Is the good reducible to natural human desires, or (...) does it in some way transcend the natural world? The dissertation includes a detailed analysis of all sections of the dialogue, as well as of relevant sections of the Theaetetus. In the Introduction and Conclusion I also compare Protagoras' and Socrates' views to those of other moral philosophers. ;I argue that for Protagoras, arete is the ability to plan well and to exert control over external circumstances in order to promote one's own survival and pleasure. Moral reasoning is a techne, a tool for maximizing human desires. An analysis of the Great Speech shows that Protagoras is an ethical naturalist: the good is survival. Justice and shame are valuable in that they promote this end. Socratic dialectic reveals that, for Protagoras, wisdom has priority over any virtues with which it conflicts. Socrates' analysis of hedonism elicits Protagoras' assumption that pleasure is the good, an assumption inconsistent with Protagoras' view that courage is a virtue. ;Socrates, by contrast, is not an ethical naturalist; the good is not an object of the natural world. Moral knowledge is not technical, for it requires self-knowledge. While arete depends upon moral knowledge, our knowledge is always incomplete: we may progress towards excellence, but can never fully attain it. The human soul has an openness to the good, but we must articulate and test our intuitions through conversation with others. Moral teaching, understood as the simple transmission of knowledge, is impossible, but moral learning through philosophical exploration of moral intuitions and their limits is possible. Philosophy, so understood, better preserves ordinary moral experience than does Sophistry. (shrink)

One of the most influential arguments in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science is Chomsky's argument from the poverty of the stimulus. In this response to an essay by Chandra Sripada, I defend an analogous argument from the poverty of the moral stimulus. I argue that Sripada's criticism of moral nativism appears to rest on the mistaken assumption that the learning target in moral cognition consists of a series of simple imperatives, such as "share your toys" or "don't (...) hit other children." In fact, the available evidence suggests that the moral competence of adults and even young children is considerably more complex and exhibits many characteristics of a well-developed legal code, including abstract theories of crime, tort, contract, and agency. Since the emergence of this knowledge cannot be explained by appeals to explicit instruction, or to any known processes of imitation, internalization, socialization and the like, there are grounds for concluding it may be innate. Simply put, to explain the development of intuitive jurisprudence in each individual, we must attribute unconscious knowledge and complex mental operations to her that go well beyond anything she has been taught. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 6, June 2022.

After decades of being met with suspicion or even disdain the epistemic role of intuitions – and specifically the school of ethical intuitionism – has seen a revival. This revival has been undertaken by both leading moral philosophers such as Jonathan Dancy and Robert Audi and moral psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene.See Jonathan Dancy, Ethics Without Principles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Robert Audi, The Good in the Right. A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value (Princeton: (...) Princeton University Press, 2003) and Joshua D. Greene and Jonathan Haidt, “How (and Where) Does Moral Judgment Work?,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6 (2002): 517–523.Dancy, for example, has argued that moral principles play no substantive role in moral thought and judgement. Since it has traditionally been assumed that our particular moral judgements are justified on the basis of the more general moral principles from which they are derived, Dancy’s moral epistemology takes a diffe. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of philosophical discussion about such concrete moral issues as just war, distribution of food aid, euthanasia, reverse discrimination, etc. Much of this discussion implicitly assumes that there are true and false positions on these issues, valid or invalid arguments for these positions, etc. Recent years have not witnessed, however, a proliferation of philosophical defenses of these assumptions. With the decline of metaethical discussions, these assumptions have remained just assumptions rather than the conclusions of (...) a philosophical argument. (shrink)

The Socratic Turn addresses the question of whether we can acquire genuine knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong. Reputedly, Socrates was the first philosopher to make the attempt. But Socrates was a materialistic natural scientist in his youth, and it was only much later in life--after he had rejected materialistic natural science--that he finally turned, around the age of forty, to the examination of ordinary moral and political opinions, or to moral-political philosophy so understood. Through (...) a consideration of Plato's account of Socrates' intellectual development, and with a view to relevant works of the pre-Socratics, Xenophon, Aristotle, Hesiod, Homer, and Aristophanes, Dustin Sebell reproduces the course of thought that carried Socrates from materialistic natural science to moral-political philosophy. By doing so, he seeks to recover an all but forgotten approach to the question of justice, one still worthy of being called scientific.--Book jacket. (shrink)

Children bring intuitive arithmetic knowledge to the classroom before formal instruction in mathematics begins. For example, children can use their number sense to add, subtract, compare ratios, and even perform scaling operations that increase or decrease a set of dots by a factor of 2 or 4. However, it is currently unknown whether children can engage in a true division operation before formal mathematical instruction. Here we examined the ability of 6- to 9-year-old children and college students to (...) perform symbolic and non-symbolic approximate division. Subjects were presented with non-symbolic or symbolic dividends ranging from 32 to 185, and non-symbolic divisors ranging from 2 to 8. Subjects compared their imagined quotient to a visible target quantity. Both children and adults were successful at the approximate division tasks in both dots and numeral formats. This was true even among the subset of children that could not recognize the division symbol or solve simple division equations, suggesting intuitive division ability precedes formal division instruction. For both children and adults, the ability to divide non-symbolically mediated the relation between Approximate Number System acuity and symbolic math performance, suggesting that the ability to calculate non-symbolically may be a mechanism of the relation between ANS acuity and symbolic math. Our findings highlight the intuitive arithmetic abilities children possess before formal math instruction. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public (...) domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In Just Freedom, Pettit presents a powerful new statement and defense of the traditional “republican” conception of liberty or freedom. And he claims that freedom can serve as an ecumenical value with broad appeal, which we can put at the basis of a distinctively republican theory of justice. That is, Pettit argues that this “conception of freedom as non-domination allows us to see all issues of justice as issues, ultimately, of what freedom demands.” It is not, however, clear that liberty (...) is the only value that Pettit (a) actually appeals to and (b) should be appealing to. He seems to be as much a defender of relational equality and legal dignity as he is a defender of liberty. And he must either (it seems) make the implausible claim that the basic requirements of justice only apply to able-minded adults, or else admit that justice at bottom consists in something wider than just securing liberty as non-domination for all able-minded adults. For by his own admission, Pettit’s theory of justice as republican freedom “ignores issues of justice in relation to children and the intellectually disabled.” It would be better to say, therefore, that the promotion of freedom as non-domination constitutes one, but not the only, requirement of justice. (shrink)

The relation between virtue and knowledge is at the heart of the Socratic view of human excellence, but it also points to a central puzzle of the Platonic dialogues: Can Socrates be serious in his claims that human excellence is constituted by one virtue, that vice is merely the result of ignorance, and that the correct response to crime is therefore not punishment but education? Or are these assertions mere rhetorical ploys by a notoriously complex thinker? Lorraine Smith Pangle (...) traces the argument for the primacy of virtue and the power of knowledge throughout the five dialogues that feature them most prominently—the _Apology, Gorgias, Protagoras, Meno,_ and _Laws_—and reveals the truth at the core of these seemingly strange claims. She argues that Socrates was more aware of the complex causes of human action and of the power of irrational passions than a cursory reading might suggest. Pangle’s perceptive analyses reveal that many of Socrates’s teachings in fact explore the factors that make it difficult for humans to be the rational creatures that he at first seems to claim. Also critical to Pangle’s reading is her emphasis on the political dimensions of the dialogues. Underlying many of the paradoxes, she shows, is a distinction between philosophic and civic virtue that is critical to understanding them. Ultimately, Pangle offers a radically unconventional way of reading Socrates’s views of human excellence: Virtue is not knowledge in any ordinary sense, but true virtue is nothing other than wisdom. (shrink)

In this paper, I scrutinize Mou Zongsan’s doctrine of Moral Metaphysics in which Mou fuses Kant’s architectonic of knowledge with Chinese philosophy. Through this doctrine, Mou contends that: 1) according to Chinese philosophy, humans do have access to intellectual intuition; 2) this possibility justifies the legitimacy and priority of Chinese philosophy. To examine Mou’s argument, I first present Mou’s reading of Kant’s conception of intellectual intuition; then, I elucidate the way in which Mou identifies intellectual intuition as the (...) intuitive knowledge in Confucianism; subsequently, I introduce Mou’s doctrine Moral Metaphysics and his critique of Kant and Heidegger; finally, I reflect on Mou’s readings of Kant by pinpointing issues in this interpretation. Nevertheless, this examination shall never negate Mou’s contribution to modernizing Chinese philosophy. (shrink)

In this book, the first systematic study of Socrates' reflections on self-knowledge, Christopher Moore examines the ancient precept 'Know yourself' and, drawing on Plato, Aristophanes, Xenophon, and others, reconstructs and reassesses the arguments about self-examination, personal ideals, and moral maturity at the heart of the Socratic project. What has been thought to be a purely epistemological or metaphysical inquiry turns out to be deeply ethical, intellectual, and social. Knowing yourself is more than attending to your beliefs, discerning the (...) structure of your soul, or recognizing your ignorance - it is constituting yourself as a self who can be guided by knowledge toward the good life. This is neither a wholly introspective nor a completely isolated pursuit: we know and constitute ourselves best through dialogue with friends and critics. This rich and original study will be of interest to researchers in the philosophy of Socrates, selfhood, and ancient thought. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that, all else being equal, theism is more probable than naturalism on the assumption that human beings are able to arrive at a body of moral knowledge that is largely accurate and complete. I put forth this thesis on grounds that, if naturalism is true, the explanation of the content of our moral intuitions terminates either in biological-evolutionary processes or in social conventions adopted for pragmatic reasons; that, if this is so, our (...) moral intuitions were selected for their utility, not their truth; and that, if our moral intuitions were so selected, they are probably false. I defend the argument against three objections: first, that the argument amounts to a generic skeptical challenge; second, that ethical naturalism explains how our moral intuitions could have been selected for their truth; and third, that there is a pre-established harmony between the utility of moral beliefs and their truth-values. (shrink)

Intuitions are funny things. Intuitions would seem to be these fluid, temporary mental states that we form minute by minute. On the face of it, they would seem to have no real value. But, when we ask whether a particular theory is true, we usually turn to our intuitions. This is nowhere more prevalent than in moral theorizing. When we attempt to show that a particular moral theory is mistaken, we usually present cases that yield counterintuitive results for (...) the theory. For example, take the famous Trolley Car example. Suppose a trolley car is traveling down a steep street and is heading straight for a child. Suppose further that you have the means to push a button that will divert the trolley car to a different track thereby missing the child. But, if you push the button to save the one child, you will kill five other children standing on the other track to which the trolley car will be diverted. So the choice is do not push the button and let one child die, or push the button, saving, the one child, but killing five other children. What do you do? Such cases are common in moral theorizing and our intuitions concerning what we would do in such cases are usually taken as evidence for or against a moral theory. In the trolley car case, a utilitarian would say, ceteris paribus, you should not push the button diverting the trolley car. Since an action is morally right if and only if it produces more net good (say, pleasure), diverting the trolley car would result in more pain in the world and hence be the wrong action. But how do our intuitions evidentially fit into the case? Since our goal is to have a moral theory that coincides with our intuitions about cases, if our intuitions fit with the theory, then we have prima facie evidence for the theory. If our intuitions do not fit, then we have prima facie evidence against the theory. Concerning the trolley car case, if our intuitions are that we should not push the button, thus letting the single child die, then our intuitions count as evidence for the correctness of utilitarian moral theory. If we do not share the intuitions of the utilitarians, then it is said to count as evidence against the correctness of utilitarian moral theory. Thus, it is our intuitions that carry the evidential burden. Since most agents take their intuitions to have significant evidential weight, cases (such as the Trolley Car case) usually indicate something problematic with the theory in question. Yet, there has been considerable interest lately in the status of such a practice. This interest has in part surrounded the issue of whether the cases themselves pose a problem for moral theorizing. Such cases are sometimes called intuition pumps. These thought experiment-style cases are usually taken to elicit intuitions that count for or against a moral theory. But many have claimed that the reliance upon such intuition pumps in moral theorizing is unjustified. In this paper I will investigate this claim. First, I lay out what I take to be the problem of intuition pumps. In particular, the problem will surround (1) there always being the possibility of constructing new cases that “pump” people’s intuitions to the other side of a moral debate and (2) there being systematic and patterned disagreement as to what the “correct” intuitive response for a given case is. Next, I give an account of the structure and evidence-conferring status of intuitions. Then, given this account, I illustrate how we can and why we should appeal to the intuitions of experts to solve the problem of intuition pumps. Thus, I hope to show that the problem of intuition pumps is not a problem for moral theorizing. That is, the use of intuition pump-style cases in moral theorizing is prima facie justified. (shrink)

“Philosophy as a way of life” has its roots in ancient ethics and has attracted renewed interest in recent decades. The aim in this paper is to construct a contemporized image of Socrates, consistent with the textual evidence. The account defers concern over analytical/theoretical inquiry into virtue, in favor of a neo-existentialist process of self-examination informed by the virtue of what is called “moral seriousness.” This process is modeled on Frankfurt’s hierarchical account of self-identification, and the paper suggests an (...) expansion of Frankfurt’s concept of a person to include “full” personhood, in which the apprehended “meaning” of one’s “whole life” is taken as a necessary condition for eudaimonia (meaning of life) and is characterized by phenomenological transcendence. In addition, the importance of the informed scrutiny of a community of philosophers to the self-examination process is discussed. (shrink)

On the face of it, some of our knowledge is of moral facts (for example, that this promise should not be broken in these circumstances), and some of it is of non-moral facts (for example, that the kettle has just boiled). But, some argue, there is reason to believe that we do not, after all, know any moral facts. For example, according to J. L. Mackie, if we had moral knowledge (‘‘if we were aware (...) of [objective values]’’), ‘‘it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else’’(1977,p.38).But wehavenosuchspecialfaculty.So,wehavenomoralknowledge. Following Mackie, let us distinguish two questions: Q1: Assuming that we have moral knowledge, how do we have it? Q2: Do we in fact have any moral knowledge? In response to the first question, I argue that if we have moral knowledge, we have some of it in the same way we have knowledge of our immediate environment: by perception. Many people think that this answer leads to moral skepticism, because they think that we obviously cannot have moral knowledge by perception. But I will argue that this is incorrect. The plan for the paper is as follows. In Sections 2–4, I work up to my answer to Q1 by considering rivals. In Section 5, I explain what marks my answer to Q1 as a distinctive view, and defend it. In Section 6, I briefly discuss how this answer to Q1 affects what we say in response to Q2. (shrink)

Influential theories on moral judgments propose that they rely either on emotions or on innate moral principles. In contrast, the mental model theory postulates that moral judgments rely on reasoning, either intuition or deliberation. The theory allows for the possibility that intuitions lead to utilitarian judgments. This paper reports two experiments involving fifth-grade children, adolescents, and adults; the results revealed that children reason intuitively to resolve moral dilemmas in which action and inaction lead to different outcomes. (...) In particular, the results showed female children to be more utilitarian than female adults in resolving classical moral dilemmas: they preferred an action that achieved a good outcome for a greater number of people. Within the mental model theory’s framework there is no reason to expect that females and males differ in their ability to reason, but at the moment the results for females cannot be generalized to males who were not properly represented in the adults groups of the two experiments. The result revealing that (female) children are more utilitarian than (female) adults, which is hard to explain via many current theories, was predicted by the mental model theory. (shrink)

One of the most venerable and enduring intuitions in epistemology concerns the relationship between true belief and knowledge. Famously articulated by Socrates, it holds that true belief does not suffice for knowledge. I discuss a matching intuition about ignorance according to which true belief does not suffice for the absence of ignorance. I argue that the latter intuition undercuts the New View of Ignorance and supports the Standard View of Ignorance.

Mon projet est de montrer qu'une meilleure compréhension de la position de Kant sur la valeur morale et sur le rôle de la compassion révèle que les objections soulevées par les théoriciens contemporains de la psychologie morale et par les féministes ne sont pas fondées, et que la position de Kant sur ces questions n'est pas du tout contre-intuitive. D'autres on dej´ soutenu que Kant accorde un rôle important á la compassion et que sa présence, pour lui, ne diminue (...) pas la valeur morale des actions, mais je soutiens, plus positivement, que la présence de la compassion, pour Kant, est la marque d'une personne qui a progressé vers I'idéal, inaccessible et pourtant nécessaire, de la vertu morale et que la personne idéale de Kant est quelqu'un qui agit par devoir et qui a développé un sens aigu de la compassion. (shrink)

This paper offers a genealogy of the ancient predecessors of Logic-Based Therapy. While LBT has an apparent affinity with Stoicism, I argue that LBT has a tripartite foundation in Socratic Rational Inquiry, Platonic philosophical psychology, and Aristotelean ethics. Secondly, I argue that LBT could help a client attain self-knowledge and “moral proprioception.” Given that LBT involves an examination of one’s belief system and a recognition of the subconscious faulty premises, it may implement a new, more adaptive understanding. By (...) targeting self-defeating habits of interpreting the world, LBT can give clients a new self-understanding that enables them to interact with others and avoid unfortunate life choices and ways of interacting with significant others. I offer a hypothetical case from fiction pointing to the way LBT could transform the character’s life. LBT may enrich other therapeutic modalities, such as psychoanalysis or psychiatry, but it achieves different goals. (shrink)

Sarah McGrath argues that moral perception has an advantage over its rivals in its ability to explain ordinary moral knowledge. I disagree. After clarifying what the moral perceptualist is and is not committed to, I argue that rival views are both more numerous and more plausible than McGrath suggests: specifically, I argue that inferentialism can be defended against McGrath’s objections; if her arguments against inferentialism succeed, we should accept a different rival that she neglects, intuitionism; and, (...) reductive epistemologists can appeal to non-naturalist commitments to avoid McGrath’s counterexamples. (shrink)

In the Protagoras, Socrates appears to affirm and defend a paradoxical doctrine: the unity of virtue. Plato scholars do not agree on how the doctrine should be understood. Some, following Vlastos (1972), take Socrates to hold that the virtues are biconditionally related, i.e. that anyone who has one of the virtues has them all. Others, following Penner (1973), take Socrates’ position to be that the names of the virtues all refer to the same thing, namely virtue. In this paper, I (...) argue that both of these interpretations are mistaken: the main thesis of the Protagoras is, very simply, that each of the virtues is a kind of knowledge or wisdom. (shrink)

Children are not simply molded by the environment; through constant inference and interpretation, they actively shape their own social world. This book is about that process. Elliot Turiel's work focuses on the development of moral judgment in children and adolescents and, more generally, on their evolving understanding of the conventions of social systems. His research suggests that social judgements are ordered, systematic, subtly discriminative, and related to behavior. His theory of the ways in which children generate social knowledge (...) through their social experiences will be of interest to a wide range of researchers and students in child development and education. (shrink)

Much recent attention has been paid to the Socratic elenchus, with considerable focus given to the structure of the elenchus and its desired benefits for both Socrates and his interlocutors. In this paper I focus on one of these benefits, namely the fostering of self-knowledge. I provide an examination of Socrates’ theory of self-knowledge and the way it is to be fostered through elenctic examination with an eye toward gaining afuller understanding of the foundations of our contemporary views. (...) Though many commentators routinely dismiss the Socratic view as overly intellectual, I maintain that “knowing what we know and don’t know” remains an important component of self-knowledge, even if it needs to be supplemented by an understanding of our more general psychological traits and capacities. Additionally, I argue that the Socratic focus on self-examination as a means to gaining self-knowledge remains a timely and important moral task. (shrink)

Seminal work in moral neuroscience by Joshua Greene and colleagues employed variants of the well-known trolley problems to identify two brain networks which compete with each other to determine moral judgments. Greene interprets the tension between these brain networks using a dual process account which pits deliberative reason against automatic emotion-driven intuitions: reason versus passion. Recent neuroscientific evidence suggests, however, that the critical tension that Greene identifies as playing a role in moral judgment is not so much (...) a tension between reason and passion, but a tension between distinct forms of deliberative reasoning: analytic versus empathetic. In this paper we present results from several new studies supporting this alternative hypothesis. (shrink)

This article is a discursive examination of children’s status as knowledgeable moral agents within the Swedish child welfare system and in the widely used assessment framework BBIC. Departing from Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice, three discursive positions of children’s moral status are identified: amoral, im/moral and dis/loyal. The findings show the undoubtedly moral child as largely missing and children’s agency as diminished, deviant or rendered ambiguous. Epistemic injustice applies particularly to disadvantaged children with difficult experiences who (...) run the risk of being othered, or positioned as reproducing or accommodating to the very same social problems they may be victimised by. (shrink)

Moral intuitionism, once an apparently moribund metaethical position, has seen a resurgence of interest of late. Robert Audi, a leading moral intuitionist, has argued that in order for a moral belief to qualify as intuitional, it must fulfill four criteria: it must be non-inferential, firmly held, comprehended, and pre-theoretical. This paper centers on the fourth and seemingly most problematic criterion: pre-theoreticality. The paper begins by stipulating the defensibility of the moral cognitivism upon which moral intuitionism (...) turns. Next, the paper develops the distinction between semantic and epistemic pre-theoreticality, and goes on to explore and reject the putative ubiquity of the theoreticality of first-order moral discourse: it argues that on a defensible understanding of theoryhood, both semantic and epistemic pre-theoretical moral belief is not only possible, but in fact frequently realized. The paper then briefly explores and rebuts objections to (epistemic) pre-theoreticality issuing from (i) the “Cornell Realists” and (ii) considerations of the epistemic relevance of the epistemic/valuational background of moral belief. The paper concludes that, so far as the pre-theoreticality criterion is concerned, moral intuitionism remains in the running as a viable thesis regarding foundationally justified first-order moral belief and knowledge. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I argue, counter‐intuitively, that under certain conditions many people are under some moral requirement to attempt to bring children into being . There is only rarely a strict obligation to have children, but more moderate, inclining moral considerations in favour of having children, have a place in our moral world. I begin by considering a large number of arguments in favour and against the possibility of an obligation to have children. Then I examine when the weight (...) of one set of arguments is greater. And I conclude by pointing out some general lessons from the discussion. (shrink)

Traditional approaches describe ethical decision-making of leaders as driven by conscious deliberation and analysis. Accordingly, existing approaches of ethically-oriented leader development usually focus on the promotion of deliberative ethical decision-making, based on normative knowledge and moral reasoning. Yet, a continually growing body of research indicates that a considerable part of moral functions involved in ethical decision-making is automatic and intuitive. In this article, we discuss the implications of this moral intuition approach for the domain of (...) ethically-oriented leader development. Specifically, we introduce a conceptual model and develop a set of theoretical propositions, suggesting that the moral intuition perspective significantly contributes to effective ethically-oriented leader development. The discussion examines theoretical implications and practical applications of the presented propositions and outlines directions for future research. (shrink)