This thread is for discussion of Reflective Equilibrium and the role of Intuition in ethics.
I don't have any way to read the article.

Reflective Equilibrium is defined as
The method of reflective equilibrium consists in working back and forth among our considered judgments (some say our "intuitions") about particular instances or cases, the principles or rules that we believe govern them, and the theoretical considerations that we believe bear on accepting these considered judgments, principles, or rules, revising any of these elements wherever necessary in order to achieve an acceptable coherence among them.

Personally, I don't see how consideration of a judgement could justify it. Hence, any argument which says 'since this considered judgement is true, that one must also be' is not a justification. It does not justify its premises, hence it is a failure of justificaiton.

We do not ridicule the role of intuition in ethics, but perhaps we should. We would surely ridicule anyone who says he knows science by consulting with his intuition. The problem with such intuitionist science is that our intuitions are systematically biased by our cultural and evolutionary heritage. For example, we struggle to comprehend the science of the very large (cosmology) and the very small (particle physics) because we have no evolutionary use for these concepts. In ethics, there is no reason to believe we are less biased. Rather, such an emotional topic as ethics seems like even more fertile ground for such irrationality.

I think that this objection holds true not just for pure intuitionism but also for reflective equilibrium. However, I think if proponents of reflective equilibrium took the idea of cognitive biases seriously, they would compensate for these biases by moving the point of equilibrium at which they settled. Then, their theory would become vaguely reasonable and less harmful.

Note that this discussion arose from It is a place for the discussion that arose in this thread:

RyanCarey wrote:There is a profound refutation of any role for intuition in ethics by Peter Singer here

Jesper Östman wrote:Singer's article opens the debate on an important topic, but it is far from a conclusive case. See for instance Tersman, Folke: The reliability of moral intuitions: A challenge from neuroscience
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/r ... .alexandra

Jesper, I don't have any way to access this paper, but I hope my response above shows my position adequately.

It is fundamentally impossible to start from anything besides intuition. I intuitively believe that whatever I see is probably true. I intuitively believe that things that worked a lot before are likely to continue working. Everything I know is based on things like that.

I'm a utilitarian because of essentially this sort of reasoning. Occam's razor works in a lot of things. It probably works in ethics. Logic works in a lot of things. It probably works in ethics. Basic intuition can fail spectacularly in both logic and physics. There will probably be times it will fail spectacularly in ethics.

It was a while ago since I read the papers and unfortunately I left them in Sweden (We need a paperless society, now!). I'll check if I can find a fulltext version of Folke's paper somehow.

But as far as I can recall the problem for Singer is to show how utilitarianism can avoid analogues of the arguments against its rivals. As Daniel points out, if we disregard "intuitions"/"considered judgments" it seems very hard to avoid skepticism, both generally and specifically in the case of morality.

The thing is that Singer's own solution to this problem involves appeal to intuitions. He takes there to be two different kinds of intuitions, "rational intuitions" and "ordinary intuitions". This approach seems if anything *more* based on brute intuition than the reflective equilibrium approach. So if you are generally critical of appeal to intuitions regarding ethics, you should also be critical of Singer's appeal to them.

Excerpt from Singer's paper:

"It might be said that the response that I have called ‘‘more
reasoned’’ is still based on an intuition, for example the intuition that
five deaths are worse than one, or more fundamentally, the intuition
that it is a bad thing if a person is killed. But if this is an intuition, it is
different from the intuitions to which Haidt and Greene refer. It does
not seem to be one that is the outcome of our evolutionary past. We
have already noted Hume’s observation that ‘‘there is no such
passion in human minds as the love of mankind, merely as such’’ and
as we have seen, there is a good evolutionary reason for why this
should be so."

Furthermore, I think his idea that our utilitarian motivations cannot have an evolutionary explanation is very problematic. First, this would make utilitarianism hostage to findings in evolutionary psychology; If such an explanation is found then we are left with nihilism. Second, prima facie it seems to me like a somewhat "anti-scientific" attitude to expect that our utilitarian motivations somehow cannot have an evolutionary explanation, it seems a bit similar to "God-of-the-gaps-reasoning". However, although that is how things seem to my prima facie I don't want to press the second point, since I can't really believe Singer would hold such a position.

Just a final point. I have the feeling that there may be a way to cross the is-ought gap and use empirical studies such as Greene's to argue for utilitarianism. But i believe defending such a claim will need a lot of work. What I see as the perhaps most promising way of doing this is actually using some version of the reflective equilibrium where you include not only moral "intuitions" but also perhaps "intuitions" about theoretical virtues, such as simplicity and some idea of paradigmatic bias.

I'm very gradually writing a hypertext essay on this forum that I want to lay out an epistemological justification of utilitarianism (I was originally hoping it would be multi-author, but that was optimistic in retrospect).

I think the segment on assumption applies here - I think 'assumption' is a superior basis for such things, partly because it's better defined than 'intuition' (which seems to mean several things, as evidenced by Jesper's first post in this thread) and partly because it removes the impossible requirement for justification.