Intuition and EmotionAuthor(s): Jonathan DancySource: Ethics, Vol. 124, No. 4 (July 2014), pp. 787-812Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/675879 .Accessed: 10/07/2014 16:16

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethics.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Intuition and Emotion*

Jonathan Dancy

mora

to have ethical knowledge we must be more than cognitive beings.that there is nothing that corresponds to the intuitionist conception ofmoral judgment as the exercise of a purely rational capacity. The more

* I am grateful to the editor of Ethics for the original invitation to participate in theworkshop that has led to this symposium and to two referees for unusually helpful criti-cisms and suggestions.This does not, however, affect the validity of our ethical judgmentsbut only the possibility of our making them. A. C. Ewing, The Moral-ity of Punishment, 194

The topic of this symposium is the impact of recent empirical researchon the notion of an intuition, more specifically on the notion of a moralintuition and thereby, as I take it, on the intuitionist tradition in ethics.It has been suggested that this empirical work gives us reason to believesition has been emphasized very much by the opponents of ratio-nalism in ethics, and it is indeed important to realize that in orderEthics 201l psychology.

All ethical judgments seem to presuppose at any rate these threefactors: a some empirical knowledge of the particular situation orobject: b some more or less incomplete analysis of it: c the pre-vious or simultaneous occurrence in the person judging of somedesire or emotion relative to something good. The third presuppo-I start with a brief look at what the classic British intuitionists Ewing, Broad,Ross had to say about the relation between judgment and emotion. I then lookat some more recent work in the intuitionist tradition and try to develop aconception of moral emotion as a form of practical seeming, suggesting thatsome moral intuitions are exactly that sort of emotion. My general theme is thatthe standard contrast between intuition and emotion is a mistake and that in-tuitionism can happily accommodate the results of recent work in empirical787

124 ( July 2014): 7878124 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/2014/12404-0006$10.00

This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

rationalist one is, the less willing one will be to allow that the moral emo-tions are anything other than a threat or stumbling block; any confir-mation they provide of the products of judgment is irrelevant, and anyinterference with the austere process of judgment is to be deplored. Butthe experimental results have led some to suppose that the phenomenonthat the intuitionists call moral judgment is in fact a function of the

788 Ethics July 2014emotions, overladen with confabulation. Moral stances are not adoptedin response to reasons; where reasons are cited, this is in an attempt tomake cognitive sense of something that has no cognitive origin.

I start with a brief look at what the classic British intuitionists Ewing,Broad, Ross had to say about the relation between judgment and emo-tion. I then look at some more recent work in the intuitionist traditionand try to develop a conception of at least some moral emotion as aform of practical seeming on the model of a familiar sort of perceptualseeming, suggesting that some moral intuitions may be exactly that sortof emotion. I then try to show that this conception of moral emotion isone that intuitionism can perfectly well accommodate. My general themeis that the standard contrast between intuition and emotion is a mistake.

I. THE HISTORY OF ETHICAL INTUITIONISM

Though the classic intuitionism of the first half of the last century is gen-erally thought of as a form of rationalism, we find that most of its lead-ing proponents were perfectly willing to allow some essential connec-tion between emotion and moral judgment. The epigraph to this essay isan example of such willingness. It is especially striking because Ewingwas, at this early stage in his work The Morality of Punishment is an ex-panded version of his doctoral thesis, much more rationalist than helater became.1 The passage continues, interestingly, In passing we maynote that the emotion of desire need not necessarily be relative to thespecific object of the cognition, e.g., it is true that I could not judge aparticular lie wrong except on authority without having at some timefelt an aversion either to a lie as such or to some bad effects of a kindsimilar to those which I expect to follow from the lie, but I may do sowithout feeling aversion to the particular lie in question at the time Ithink about it.2 One year after Ewing published The Morality of Punish-ment, Broads Five Types of Ethical Theory appeared, and in it we read:

1. See A. C. Ewing, The Morality of Punishment London: Macmillan, 1929. Ewingslater view was that moral judgments have reference primarily to some kind of practicalattitude which they express, though they do not merely express this attitude, but claimthat it is objectively justified or required. This remark is in the second appendix to hisEthics London: English Universities Press, Teach Yourself Books, 1953, 182.

2. Ewing, Morality of Punishment, 194.This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Let us now take Non-Naturalistic theories. Here the emotion orfeeling is never part of the content of an ethical judgment, in thesense that we are asserting that such and such an emotion or feel-ing would be experienced by such and such people. But it might

indiwe minterconncomin eawhat

to awthatthe cthey

3268, a

45

Dancy Intuition and Emotion 789cated in the preceding chapter . . . though I cannot agree that whatean in all or any of these cases by X is good is X is an object ofest to some one, I am inclined to think that the only thread thatects our application of the word in all these sensesi.e. the onlymon fact that is present whenever we use the term goodis thatch case the judger has some feeling of approval or interest towardshe calls good.5

These various quotations show that these intuitionists were happyard a significant role to the emotions, though it has to be admittedthe way in which they all move without any sense of strain betweenoncepts of desire, feeling, attitude, and emotion seems to show thattended to lump all these things together as relevantly similar in the

. C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1930,nd cf. 10810.. W. D. Ross, Foundations of Ethics Oxford: Clarendon, 1939, 255.. W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good Oxford: Clarendon, 1930, 90.be the case that the presence of certain kinds of emotion or feel-ing is a necessary condition for recognising the presence of ethicalcharacteristics, and thus indirectly a necessary condition for mak-ing ethical judgments. The occurrence of sensations, e.g., is a nec-essary condition of our getting the notions of colours and shapes,and therefore is a necessary condition for making judgments suchas this is red and that is round. Yet these judgments are notsimply assertions about our sensations. Similarly, it might be thatwe could not have got the notions of right, good, etc., and thereforecould not make such judgments as this is right or that is good,unless we had felt certain emotions in certain situations. And yetthose judgments might not be merely assertions about our emo-tions and feelings.3

Ross concurred: what we express when we call an object good is our at-titude towards it, but what we mean is something about the object itselfand not about our attitude towards it. When we call an object good weare commending it, but to commend it is not to say that we are com-mending it, but to say that it has a certain character.4 Ross speaks hereof attitude rather than of emotion or of feeling, but it is clear from thesurrounding discussion that by attitude he means to include desire andfeeling. For otherwise the attitude expressed might simply be that theobject is good, as one might say that ones attitude towards a candidateis that she is a good candidate. He went even further in this direction inhis earlier book: Now when I consider the variety of meanings of goodThis content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

way they are to be contrasted with judgment. It is judgment on one sideand all these other things on the other.

It is not clear, however, whether any of these thinkers were really will-ing to go much further than to allow the emotions feelings, attitudes as

790 Ethics July 2014a necessary precondition for moral judgment, or, in Ewings case, for thepossession of moral concepts in the first place. Nor do they make it clearwhat it was that persuaded them to make some sort of room in theirstory for something other than judgment, belief and knowledge. Here Iexcept Ross, who in his first book was trying to accommodate what lit-tle truth he saw in the views of R. B. Perry. And it is equally unclear thatthey would have accepted a motivational state as an intuition. One of theachievements of recent intuitionists, however, has been to stress the prac-tical nature of moral cognition, in such a way as to avoid any worries de-riving from the so-called Humean theory of motivation, which has it thatno state can be both cognitive and motivational. Ross and Prichard were,admittedly, committed to this sort of Humeanism.6 But with the rejectionof Humean philosophy of mind, recent intuitionism can allow itself aricher conception of intuition, one that allows us to think of an intuitionas intrinsically motivational, and so not purely cognitive. So conceived,intuitionism ceases to be a form of pure cognitivism, and attacks on it assuch lose their focus. I will try to develop this idea in what follows.

II. RECENT WORK IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTUITION

Henry Sidgwick distinguished three questions about moral intuitions,the question of existence, the question of validity, and the question oforigin.7 The question of existence is the psychological question whetheranyone ever has a moral intuition. The question of validity is the ques-tion whether all such intuitions are true. The question of origin is a psy-chogonical question of how our faculty of moral intuition was devel-oped or from what it was derived.

Our answer to the question of existence will be affected, of course, bywhat we think a moral intuition would be if anyone had one. Sidgwicksanswer to this leaves it open whether all such intuitions are true; in facthe insists that the question of existence and the question of validityshould be kept severely separate. He says that a moral intuition is ajudgment or apparent perception that an act is in itself right or good,and he claims that one can only answer the question of existence, thatis, the question whether such judgments or apparent perceptions oc-

6. This is not true of the Prichard who wrote Does Moral Philosophy Rest on aMistake? Mind 21 1912: 2137, but he seems to have changed his mind later.

7. H. Sidgwick,Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. London: Macmillan, 1907, bk. 3, chap. 1, at211.This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

cur, by direct introspection or reflection. He does not suppose that an-swering the question is therefore easy, even though each of us is an-swering it primarily for him or her self. He allows that people are oftenliable to confound with moral intuitions other states or acts of mindessentially different from themblind impulses to certain kinds of ac-

Dancy Intuition and Emotion 791tion or vague preferences for them or conclusions from rapid and half-unconscious processes of reasoning, or current opinions to which fa-miliarity has given an illusory air of self-evidence.8 This list of thingsthat can be confused with intuitions is interesting, since it is not clearwhy it should be hard to see some difference between a judgment orapparent perception and a blind impulse or vague preference. Perhapsthis tells us something about what Sidgwick means by a judgment. How-ever that may be, it seems that not all judgments that an act is in itselfright or good are intuitions. Perhaps the or in judgment or apparentperception is not functioning as a disjunction. Further, as is now wellknown, that intuitions are not the result of reasoning does not mean thatone cannot be led to have an intuition by a process of rational consider-ation.

On this account of intuitions in general and moral intuitions inparticular, one can allow that an intuition is occurring without allow-ing that it is truethat things are as the person doing the intuiting isthereby taking them to be. In fact Sidgwick himself supposes that allintuitions may turn out to have some element of error, and he ends upannouncing that almost all intuitions are less than true. Luckily theredo remain some true intuitions, though scholars are divided as to theirexact number.9

Following Sidgwicks lead, we should start by asking what sort ofevent or state an intuition is, if there are any. As I said, Sidgwick thinks ofintuitions as judgments which may be false or apparent perceptionswhich may not be veridical perceptions. But he also says that they canbe confused with blind impulses. This at least raises the question whetherhe is right to think of them as judgments. And recent work on intui-tions elsewhere, especially onphilosophical intuitions as opposed tomoralones, pushes that question further. This work understands philosophicalintuitions as intellectual seemings. These are to be understood as anal-ogous to perceptual seemings, which are taken as the model for otherseemings. Perceptual seemings have interesting properties. In all this Ifollow recent work by John Bengson.10 Perceptual seemings are con-

8. Ibid., 21112.9. For discussion of the exact number see, e.g., A. Skelton, Sidgwicks Philosophical

Intuitions, Ethica & Politica/Ethics & Politics 10 2008: 185209.10. This work was first presented in Bengsons doctoral dissertation at the University

of Texas at Austin. The main points can be found in John Bengson, The IntellectualGiven, Mind forthcoming.This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

792 Ethics July 2014scious, contentful, nonfactive, representational, and presentational. It isin being presentational that they differ from belief or judgment. Andqua presentational states, they are baseless, gradable, fundamentally non-voluntary, and compelling, and they tend to make assent seem appropri-ate. In the next couple of paragraphs I run through these various prop-erties, crucially those of being presentational and baseless.

I dont see any mystery in the idea that perceptual seemings areconscious states which have a content, which are not factive, and whichrepresent things as being one way rather than another. Not all states witha content are representational in this sense; fear and hope spring tomind. So having a content is one thing and being representational isanother. Belief, of course, has a content and is representational. But itis not presentational, in the sense that Bengson gives to that term. Con-sider the difference between merely believing that the two lines on theboard are unequal in length and looking at the Muller-Lyer picture. Inlooking at the picture, the unequalness of the two lines is presented toone, thrust upon one, as it were. In believing that they are unequal, oneis in no such state. There is a similar difference between feeling that thewater is cold and believing that it is cold. The belief represents the wateras being cold but does not present things that way. The difference be-tween presentation and representation can be brought out by consid-ering the phenomenon of blindsight. The blindsighted person, in beinga blindseer, is in a state which represents things as being a certain way inhis surroundings, but things are not presented to him as being that way,as they are for the sighted person. Blindseers are often surprised by theirown successes. And belief is like blindsight in being representationalbut not presentational. In believing, of course, one takes things to bethus and so; but that they are so, what one believes, is not presented toone as being so. The content of belief, as it stands, is neutral, just as arethe representations to which the blindseer is subject; he just learns totrust them, as it were, but they do not impose their content on him.

This distinction between representation and presentation wouldbear further examination, but I will take it here that it is soundenough, andpass on to the further properties of presentational states, on Bengsonsaccount. Presentational states are baseless, in the sense that they are notconsciously formed on the basis of other mental states. They are grad-able in various respects, being more or less clear, vivid, forceful, and soon. They are fundamentally nonvoluntary, being things that just hap-pen to us, come upon us unasked. Here again they are unlike belief,which is in many cases much more a matter of decision pace Hume, ofcourse. And they are also states which one cannot simply decide not tohave, as one can with a belief in the light of new evidence, perhaps;think of the Muller-Lyer illusion again. This aspect of involuntariness ishowever different from the compelling nature of these states, which of-This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ten more or less force one to assent. It would take a very persuasivecounternarrative to get me to accept that the tree that I seem to see out-side the window is not really there. Further, presentational states are

Dancy Intuition and Emotion 793persistent, since they have a habit of surviving ones recognition thatthey are misleadingwhich some of them are, of course. Even thoughone knows perfectly well that the two lines are equal, they still presentthemselves as unequal, and there is nothing one can do about that. Andpresentational states make assent seem appropriate.

Finally, Bengson argues that some presentational states are trans-lucent, in the following sense: a state in which it is presented to one thatp is translucent in that respect if there is no other content q such thatit seems to one that p is presented to one as being so in virtue of qsbeing presented as being so. This is obviously the presentational versionof directness, which in the case of belief or judgment is noninferential-ity. Not all presentational states are translucent in this sense. I can seethat the gas tank is empty by seeing that the gauge reads E; this can beunderstood as nested presentation. But every time there is nested pre-sentation, there will be unnested presentation.

An aside: Bengsons views are in the main a development of thoseof George Bealer, whose work in this area has been seminal. But Bealerrestricts intuitions to the presentation of what he calls necessary truthsin concrete cases. And he supposes that we have intuitions in only fourdomains: the conceptual, the logical, the mathematical, and the modal.He also asks himself how an intuition can be corroborated, or how anentire faculty can be vindicated as a source of evidence. His answer tothis last question is that there are three criteria, the three Cs: consistency,corroboration, and confirmation. The consistency test asks whether oneintuition is consistent with other intuitions. The corroboration test askswhether the intuitions of each person are corroborated by those of others.The confirmation test asks whether the intuitions tested can be con-firmed by experience or proof, I suppose, in mathematical and logicalcases.11 Now it seems to me that Bealers three Cs may be perfectly ap-propriate for the intellectual or philosophical intuitions that he is con-cerned with, but not be appropriate for intuitions in other areas, shouldthere be such. This need not surprise us; Bealer offers these criteria with-out considering the possibility of intuitions in areas to which they may beless suited. So the epistemology he develops for the intuitions that inter-est him is not one that need be accepted by the friends of intuition inother areas and certainly does nothing to show that intuitions that failby his epistemological criteria fail tout court. This leaves it open to moral

11. For all these points, see, e.g., G. Bealer, On the Possibility of Philosophical Knowl-edge, Nous 30 1996: 134.This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

794 Ethics July 2014intuitionists to develop an alternative epistemology for the intuitions thatinterest them.

III. INTUITIONS AND MORAL INTUITIONS

So now let us ask whether, on Bengsons account of what intuitions are, itis plausible to say that we have moral intuitions. We should take this as aquestion of existence, in Sidgwicks sense, not as a question of validity.Do we have conscious, contentful, nonfactive, representational, and pre-sentational states with moral content concerning particular cases? My-self, I see every reason to say that we do, and no reason to say that wedont. No doubt these moral intuitions do not suit Bealers pronounce-ments about the subject matter of intuitionsnecessary truths in con-crete cases, in the conceptual, mathematical, logical, andmodal domains.But that doesnt much worry me so long as there are states with moralcontent that fit the general account of presentational states. One mightalso doubt that moral intuitions, or the faculty of moral intuition in gen-eral, will stand up to the three Cs. There is of course widespread diver-gence of moral intuition, the corroboration of one persons intuitionsby those of his friends and neighbors doesnt seem to add much, and wehave yet to give a good sense to the question whether moral intuitions canbe tested by experience. But these epistemological worries seem more di-rected to the question of validity than to the question of existence. Asyet we are not doing epistemology but the philosophy of the mindthemoral mind. The epistemology can come later.

Taking it, then, that moral intuitions do occur, we should investigatetheir nature. We have already distinguished judgments from seemingsand decided that intuitions are seemings; so perhaps the first question iswhether moral intuitions are intellectual seemings or perceptual seem-ings. If they are either of these, we have already dealt with them. If theyare not, might they be some other sort of seeming? We should start byadmitting that some moral intuitions are intellectual seemings. Perhapsit just strikes me that Caesar was wrong to cross the Rubicon; this lookslike an intellectual seeming with a moral content. But perhaps othermoral intuitions are seemings of a different sort. Could there perhapsbe such a thing as a practical seeming? And could somemoral intuitions,or some moral seemings, be a subclass of such practical seemings? Itseems tome to be worth trying to work out what things would be like if theanswer to these questions is yes. Here I am influenced by Sidgwickssuggestion that it is easy to confuse some intuitions with what he calledblind impulses to certain kinds of action. If there are going to bepractical seemings, they are going to have a motivational aspect; perhapswe should already be thinking of them as motivational states and assuch easily confused with blind impulses, though they may be motivationalThis content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Dancy Intuition and Emotion 795without being impulses. If they are impulses, the difference between amoral intuition and a blind impulse will lie in the fact that moral intui-tions are not blind, not in their not being impulses. If they are not blindimpulses, what might they be? We are thinking of our intuitions, whetherintellectual or practical, as presentational states in Bengsons sense. Soperhaps what distinguishes these motivational presentations is what theypresent. Here an attractive possibility suggests itself, that these motiva-tional presentations are presentations of reasons; they present a con-sideration as a reason. To present a consideration as a reason is to pre-sent it as calling for, or favoring, a response of a certain sort.

Obviously we need to distinguish between presenting a considera-tion as being so and presenting its being so as a reason for responding inone way rather than another. A consideration that one already acceptsmay present itself as a reason; and a consideration that itself is not pre-sented in the special sense that I have been using here, but merely rep-resented, may yet be presented as a reason, as favoring such and such aresponse. Such presentations, being motivational, need not be thoughtof as inert cognitive states; they may be cognitive, but they are still ertin the sense that their presence makes the sort of difference to ones dis-positions to act that is traditionally awarded only to desire. Practical moralintuitions of this sort will be practical seemings, assent to which can beaction rather than belief. And even before we get to action, to accept thatthe reasons are as they seem to be will be to go with, or consent to, amotivational flow that already exists.

If practical seemings are presentations of reasons as reasons, thiswill give us something of a distinction between intellectual and practicalseemings. For intellectual seemings are presentations of matters of factthat do not ordinarily present those facts as reasons, even though thosefacts may be reasons and be recognized as such. Of course it remainspossible that some intellectual seemings present facts and at the sametime present them as reasons for belief. But the possibility of this sort ofdual presentation is not a difficulty, since a practical seeming may do thesame. And I do not find the possibility disconcerting. We can perfectlywell distinguish between reasons for belief and reasons for action, emo-tion, and other practical responses; intellectual seemings that presentfacts as reasons, if there are any such, are still intellectual rather thanpractical because they present the facts as reasons for belief.

Now all this is rather opaque and needs considerable further de-velopment, a little of which will be provided later. But before that, havinggot so far, I want to suggest a further move in the same direction. I havespoken of presentations of reasons as practical seemings, and one mightbe forgiven for thinking that these supposed practical seemings are anunfamiliar and unnecessary addition to our psychological repertoire. Inthis light, we might look for some already acknowledged aspect of thatThis content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

repertoire that could play this unfamiliar role, and one answer to thisquestion is worth considering, which is: Yes, the emotions or certainemotions could do that.12 It is worth, therefore, considering the sugges-tionseembeenit opnot

796 Ethics July 2014are some moral intuitions that are not emotions, being intellectual seem-ings. As another example of the latter in addition to the one about Cae-sar above one might offer intuitions of mere permissibility. The absenceof a reason against action is not itself motivational, and for this reason Iwould take intuitions of permissibility to be intellectual rather than prac-tical seemings. Still, for the moment I simply announce, or more cau-tiously hypothesize, that some emotions are practical seemings, assent towhich can be action. As such, they are intuitions, and the moral ones aremoral intuitions.

I now turn to consider whether the picture that has been emergingis available to ethical intuitionists. It may seem that even if the picturehas its own attractions, ethical intuitionism is by its nature unable to ab-sorb them and call them its own. To determine whether this is so, I turnto examine how flexible intuitionism can be or become, while remainingrecognizably within the intuitionist tradition.

IV. CONTEMPORARY ETHICAL INTUITIONISM

As I see it, we should not try to construct a list of necessary and sufficientconditions for intuitionism, either by distillation from the views of thegreat intuitionists of the past or by simple reflection on what is the bestway to construct a view that is overall recognizably similar to theirs. Themost constructive way of proceeding is to offer a list of marks of in-tuitionism. The idea here is that not all intuitionists need meet all themarks but that all meet a fair number of them. Of course there will besome people who are especially hard to map; this seems entirely pre-dictable.

Mark 1: Intuitionists are realists, asserting that there are facts of thematter in ethics as elsewhere.

Mark 2: Intuitionists are cognitivists, asserting that moral judgmentis a cognitive state. If challenged, they would probably say that this

12. Thanks to a referee here.that the emotions, or some emotions, are themselves such practicalings, presentations of reasons. Could some moral emotions havemoral intuitions all along? In raising this possibility, I want to leaveen whether there are some moral emotions that are not intuitions,being the presentations of reasons, and as before whether thereThis content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ThispactSo Isophmetatuitiandhereaccewas dmorthesidesuch

thirdfacu

Dancy Intuition and Emotion 797lot more could be said about this.

Mark 6: Intuitionists think that at any rate some of these normativefacts are self-evident and known a priori.

Mark 7: Intuitionists think that the right is independent of thegood.

symposium is mainly concerned with the question what is the im-of recent experimental results on ethical intuitionism of this sort.will not be attempting here to defend intuitionism against philo-ical worries that are grounded in persistent disagreement, or inphysical disquiet about the nonnatural, or in the way in which in-onism conceives of moral judgment as both practical and cognitive,so on. These are all serious problems, but they do not concern us. Nor, officially, are we concerned with those worries that stem frompting that our moral faculty always assuming we have such a thingeveloped under conditions which render it incapable of the sort ofal judgment required of us in modern conditionsjudgment aboutappropriate way of responding to terrible conditions on the otherof the globe, for instance. Or rather, it is capable of generatingjudgments, but it does so with an inbuilt bias.On this point, again, it is interesting to remember Sidgwick. Hisquestion, the psychogonical question of the origin of our moral

lty, was raised because there was at the time a tendency to argue thatis a straight consequence of the first Mark, since belief is the appro-priate attitude to a fact.

Mark 3: Intuitionists are pluralists in the theory of the right; they aresuspicious of artificially architectonic theories, and especially of theidea of a Supreme Ethical Principle; they assert several equipollentprinciples if they deal in principles at all, and if they dont, theyassert that there are many distinct ways of getting to be right orwrong.

Mark 4: Intuitionists are nonnaturalists, asserting that the facts at is-sue are nonnatural facts, not merely that they can be properly char-acterized using nonnatural concepts.

Mark 5: Intuitionists are metaphysical quietists, showing little in-terest in the metaphysical issues that are so often pressed againstthem, in virtue of Mark 4. Those who press those issues can benaturalists, on one side, and Kantians on the other; the Kantians aredriven by the thought that the normative needs a very special ex-planationsomething for which the intuitionists see no need. AThis content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

if our moral faculty can be shown to be derived or developed out ofother pre-existing elements of mind or consciousness, a reason is therebygiven for distrusting it.13 Sidgwick denied that there is any such impli-cation, but he also allowed that it may be possible to prove that someethictheysimppactcal in

ThecernreasotheywiththatJohnrem

This

798 Ethics July 2014flowering of the intuitionistic tradition, he has himself been pretty scath-ing about the epistemological inadequacies of intuitionism. Here aresome relevant quotations.

The perceptual model is no more than a model: perception, strictlyso called, does not mirror the role of reason in evaluative thinking,which seems to require us to regard the apprehension of value asan intellectual rather than a merely sensory matter. But if we are totake account of this, while preserving the models picture of valuesas brutely and objectively there, it seems that we need to postulatea facultyintuitionabout which all that can be said is that itmakes us aware of objective rational connections: the model itselfensures that there is nothing helpful to say about how such a fac-ulty might work, or why its deliverances might deserve to count asknowledge.14

This appearance reflects an assumption that, at the metaphysicallevel, there are just two options: projectivism and the unattractiveintuitionistic realism that populates reality with mysterious extra fea-tures and merely goes through the motions of supplying an episte-mology for our supposed access to them.15

13. Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, 21213.14. J. McDowell, Values and Secondary Qualities, in Mind, Value, and Reality Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, at 13233.15. J. McDowell, Projectivism and Truth in Ethics, inMind, Value, and Reality, at 157.al beliefs have been caused in such a way as to make it probable thatare wholly or partially erroneous. This worry too is one that I willly ignore for present purposes. My concern here is only with the im-of recent experimental results, not with the wider fortunes of ethi-tuitionism.But we have not yet seen the full story about ethical intuitionism.intuitionists do think that there are moral facts that can be dis-ed by the developed intellect. They do think that there are moralns, there is moral reasoning, and there is moral judgment. Butdo not now tend to contrast the cognitive and the recognitionalthe motivational; the aim is now to make sense of a moral responseis recognitional and motivational at once. This is what was meant byMcDowells insistence that the world is not motivationally inerta

ark that applies in spades to the moral world.There is a second aspect of McDowells work that is relevant here.is that, though he is generally thought of as a leader in the latestThis content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The assimilation to the senses gives this intuitionistic position thesuperficial appearance of offering an epistemology of our access toevaluative truth, but there is no substance behind this appearance.16

When he wrote these passages, intuitionism for McDowell was a bad

as a capacity to infer, or to grasp logical connections between proposi-tionclearHereanimimmforewhat

11

humarecen

Dancy Intuition and Emotion 7997. Personal communication with the author.8. There is significant similarity between McDowells views on the relation betweenn and animal motivation and action and those to be found in Christine Korsgaardst work; see her Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity Oxford: Oxford Uni-flow which we can go with or decide not to go with. To accept a deliver-ance of this motivational capacity is to accept a consideration as a rea-son, which in some cases may simply be to act accordingly. There wouldbe a sort of practical yes involved. Animals are most of them, at leastincapable of this sort of standing back from the promptings of intui-tive motivation, and deciding which ones to accept and which not.18 Mc-

16. Ibid., 154.s; it is the capacity to respond to reasons. The point becomes mucher in McDowells recent work on action, as yet mostly unpublished.he raises the question what distinguishes human motivation fromal motivation. The answer is that we are like the animals in havingediate motivational responses to the unfolding of circumstances be-us. But unlike the animals, we are capable of accepting or rejectingone might therefore think of as motivational proposals. There is athing. It could give no account of our access to the supposed facts aboutvalue, and the same applied to facts about reasons supposed rationalconnections. But still he himself clearly thought that there are factsabout reasons and that we have rational access to those facts. So how is itsupposed to work? I asked him this question some years ago, and this wasthe reply:

It is the immediacy of the supposed cognition, not its object, thatmakes the epistemology a mere pretence. There is nothing wrongwith objective, and so knowable, rational connections so long as youdont suppose they simply impress themselves on some supposedquasi-perceptual faculty. The idea of being on to objective rationalconnections is all right if you put it in a context in which you talkabout acquired capacities to reason.17

It is this remark about acquired capacities that is the real point here. ButI wonder if it is right to think of these capacities exclusively as acquiredcapacities to reason. The important point here is that the capacitiesinvolved in our responses to objective rational connections that is, toreasons are ones that can be developed by a process of education oracculturation. Such a capacity to reason need not be understood merelyThis content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Dowell suggests that rational agency of the sort that we enjoy comes withthis ability to distance oneself from these promptings; in doing so, we arein a position to reject those promptings as illusory rather than as merelyoutweighed by others.

We could put these two thoughts together, add the idea that some

800 Ethics July 2014practical seemings are emotions, and emerge with the following com-plex and perhaps exaggerated picture, which I take to be fully com-patible with the intuitionist conception of moral judgment.

Creatures without emotions would not be able to develop moralconcepts.19 And this applies not just to a species but also to the individ-ual member of that species. Though some moral thought is purely cog-nitive/intellectual as in our thoughts about Caesars mistakes, for in-stance, it is the practical aspect of moral thought that is central. Takethis away and what remains is an empty huska set of distinctions whoseimportance must remain opaque. Similarly, someone whose exposure toreasons involves no cases in which reasons are thrust at them, presentedto them, would be someone for whom facts about reasons would havea peculiar form of indirect relevance to their choices. Luckily most hu-mans are born capable of a wide variety of emotional response. Luckily,also, this capacity is capable of being altered or developed in training.Children who are properly brought up become moral agents as a resultof the training they receive. The others become immoral agents, I sup-pose. In that training, their patterns of emotional response are alteredexpanded in some directions, redirected or contracted in others. Theemotions remain, for them, as the most rapid and direct of their waysof responding to the situations they encounter day by day. As a child de-velops into a fully functioning moral adult, she learns the extent to whichshe can and cannot trust her own emotional responses. And the train-ing process does not stop when one leaves home, as it were. One can trainoneself. Some things that our parents taught us to be disgusted by mayseem, on later reflection, not to be so disgusting after all. This does notnecessarily mean that we cease to be disgusted, though it might havethat effect. Sometimes the disgust remains, but the moral disapprovalthat it tended to evoke is silenced and replaced with acceptance. In othercases one just comes to feel differently about the matter. In the particularcase, where we are considering how to respond to the situation before us,we will normally be experiencing various complex motivations or emo-tions. Our cognitive capacities can accept or reject those motivated-

versity Press, 2009, esp. chap. 6 and 21213. I also note considerable affinities to some ofthe views expressed by Peter Railton in his contribution to this symposium.

19. I dont argue for this strong claim, and perhaps it cannot be defended. My point israther that even this claim is available to intuitionists. Broad, for instance, made the claimin the remarks quoted in Sec. I above. If one thinks it too strong, one can weaken it.This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

nesses, deciding that some are and others are not, responses to genuinereasons. In this way the emotions stand, or can be made to stand, beforethe court of reason.

Dancy Intuition and Emotion 801Of course this is by no means an infallible process. No doubt weare all less than fully competent judges in the court of reason. The ideaof someone who is perfectly competent in that way is an ideal. Andgiven the many ways in which emotional, or motivational responses canbe triggered, it is quite easy for them to be affected by features that aremorally irrelevant. The work of judgment, or of reason, is to correct thissort of distortion so far as is possible.

The general picture here is of a cognitive system sitting on top ofa motivational one, capable of influencing it in some ways but not inall. The motivational system is not mere motivationthat would be theblind impulse of which Sidgwick spoke. Not even the animals are re-stricted to blind impulse. The sort of motivation we are talking about isa presentation of some consideration as a reason, and in that sense isalready cognitive. Korsgaard speaks of such states as presenting an ob-ject or a situation as to be avoided or to be pursued, to be done, orto be eschewed.20 The cognitive system may endorse such a presen-tation, accepting what is presented as a reason to avoid or pursue, or itmay reject it as what Korsgaard would call a mere incentive.

V. ATTEMPTED CLARIFICATIONS

We need to be clear as possible about what wemean by speaking of a stateas motivational. I am thinking of a motivational state as a state whoseonset is or includes21 a change in ones motivationsa change, that is,in how one is motivated to respond to ones surroundings. Emotions aremotivational states with normally a cognitive content. I can be angrythat you didnt come home when you said you would. I can also be angrywith you for not coming home when you said you would. In these twoexamples, the content is nonnormative, but in other examples the con-tent will be normative, as where I am angry that you have treated me soinappropriately. Either way, the attitude I use this unfortunate term asthe generic term for any state with a content is motivational; that is, mybecoming angry that p, or with you for V-ing, is or includes a change inmy motivations. The content in these cases of anger may be presentedor merely represented; either way, the account I am offering maintainsthat in the emotion that content is presented as a reason. So these casesare best described as a motivational response to a presentation or rep-

20. Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 110.21. This is a fudge phrase intended to duck the very difficult issue of the relation

between cognition, motivation, and affect in emotion.This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

resentation, because the state of affairs presented or represented is notmotivational, even though it is what motivates, for what motivates one inanger is not the anger that one feels, but what one is angry about. I mayknow that p and be motivated by that fact that is, by the fact that p, butwhen I become angry that p my motivation changes though what mo-

802 Ethics July 2014tivates me does not. I am now tempted to respond to what is angeringme in a way that I would probably not have responded before I becameangry.

In the debate about moral motivation, motivational internalism,which is the view that moral judgment necessarily motivates, is usuallychallenged by appeal to the listless, or those suffering from accidie. Theseare people who supposedly make the moral judgment but fail to be ap-propriately motivated. Could this same challenge be raised to my sug-gestion that presentations of reasons necessarily motivate? I dont thinkso. The victim of accidie may know that he has reasons, but these reasonsare not presented to him as such; they are only represented to him. Hehas the right belief, but belief is not enough, since it is merely repre-sentational.

Some people might wish to think of a belief with normative con-tent, such as the belief that those lads are treating that cat wrongly, as amotivational state, doing so on the grounds that one can bemotivated bythat belief; the idea here is not that the belief is a necessarily motivatingstate, as desire is standardly supposed to be, but that it is capable of mo-tivating in its own right, rather than merely piggybacking on some suit-able desire.22 In my terms, this is a form of non-Humean psychologism.23

Others would take this belief as a nonmotivational state because it isa belief with a normative content; to say this would be to adhere to abroadly Humean form of psychologism. Participants in this debate con-ceive of motivation as a relation between mental states, an agent, and atype of response. As a nonpsychologist,24 I think of motivation as a re-lation between a state of affairs real or supposed, an agent and a type ofresponse. I would for instance say that one can perfectly well be moti-vated by the fact that those kids are treating that cat wrongly. Of courseto be so motivated one must believe or at least take it that they are do-ing that, but still what motivates is the thing believed, not ones believingit. But no matter how one resolves these complex issues, such a belief isnot itself a motivational state in the sense that I am giving to this phrase,because coming to believe that those kids are treating that cat wrongly

22. This is how I described the situation in Jonathan Dancy, Moral Reasons Oxford:Blackwell, 1993, chap. 2.2.

23. For these distinctions, see Jonathan Dancy, Practical Reality Oxford: Clarendon,2004, chap. 1.

24. Ibid., chaps. 45.This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

does not consist in a change in the agents motivation. Desire, by con-trast, is a motivational state, because desire is not what motivates, it is

Dancy Intuition and Emotion 803ones being motivated; a fortiori, therefore, acquiring a desire involves achange of motivation.

Nothing changes if the belief is an agents belief about what shehas reason to do here, rather than about the rights and wrongs of otherpeoples behavior. She may believe that she has good reason not to walkaway, and for that reason stay put, without that belief being itself mo-tivational. Not all representations of reasons are motivational. But nowinstead of thinking about the belief that their behavior gives her goodreason to intervene, think instead about the presentation of which sucha belief might be an acceptance, the presentation of some considera-tion as a reason for her. This is the motivational state that I am sug-gesting a moral emotion could be. And it is this state that I am think-ing of as the prime case of a moral intuition. These intuitions presentsome feature of the situation to one as a reason for oneself to act.

I take it that the picture I have laid out in this section, which un-derstands some moral emotions as motivational presentations of rea-sons, is fully compatible with a traditional intuitionist conception ofmoral judgment as a rational faculty. The crucial point is that judgmentis, in this area, the product of a rational capacity to assess, accept, orreject certain presentations, in particular the sorts of practical presen-tation that I am thinking of as moral emotions. We know of courseandif we hadnt known, rafts of recent experiments would have told usthat the emotions are likely to be affected by circumstances in ways thatintrospection is not likely to reveal. Information about the often sur-prising ways in which this can work is certainly helpful, though knowl-edge of this sort in no way guarantees some sort of immunity to therelevant phenomena. But none of this means that a well-trained that is,well brought up moral agent is not in a position to trust her emotionsover a wide range of cases. We have to trust our emotions, and we cantrust them, just as we have to, and can, trust our judgment, in the knowl-edge that this trust will sometimes be betrayed. The recommended atti-tude for the competent moral agent is thus a sort of wary confidence.

VI. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND PHILOSOPHICALDISTINCTIONS

In interesting work, Joshua Greene has suggested that we have inheriteda moral faculty which evolved in conditions that fit it best to situations ofan up close and personal sort.25 And he ties this idea to a conception of

25. See, e.g., J. D. Greene, The Secret Joke of Kants Soul, inMoral Psychology, vol. 3,The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Disease, and Development, ed. W. Sinnott-ArmstrongThis content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

deontology as stressing the application of rules, as opposed to a con-sequentialist system that calculates consequences. The deontologicalsystem is designed for the up close and personal, in which it operatesquickly and efficiently, but it does not really deal in the calculation ofconsequences. The consequentialist system is slower, not surprisingly,and tends to kick in only when specially prompted as when people areexplicitly asked to consider the consequences of punishment or whenthe circumstances themselves demand it. Further, the deontological sys-tem is driven by automatic emotional responses, while the consequen-tialist system is calculative and cognitive/rational.

804 Ethics July 2014All of this is compatible with the picture I have adumbrated exceptin the way it contrasts rules with consequences. But as I see it, this contrastis a misconception.26 In Rosss hands, the battle between deontology andconsequentialism is a battle between monism and pluralism. Both sidesare talking about rules. The intuitionist, whom I am going to treat as theclassic deontologist, is distinguished by his insistence that in addition toa rule requiring us to maximize the good, there are other rules that arenot concerned withmaximising either the good or anything else.27 Theserules, taken together, are the principles of prima facie duty. Ross allowedseven sorts of prima facie duty. Duties of three of those sorts are notgrounded in consequences at all. These are the duties that concern prom-ise keeping and reparation duties grounded in previous acts of onesown, and those to do with gratitude duties grounded in previous actsof others. The other four justice, beneficence, nonmaleficence, andself-improvement are consequence-based, because in their different waysthey are concerned with goods which one is to maximize. So there arefour sorts of consequence-based prima facie duty, but of course none ofthese are consequentialist duties, because consequentialism is simply theview that all duties are consequence-based, and Rosss system is not con-sequentialist. It transpires, then, that Rosss form of intuitionism alreadyincludes the consequence-related duties, and that Greenes contrast be-tween a rule-based system and a consequence-based system does not fit;it depends on the unmotivated and false assumption that there are no

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007, 35117, and Cognitive Neuroscience and the Struc-ture of the Moral Mind, in The Innate Mind: Structure and Content, ed. P. Carruthers, S.Laurence, and S. Stich New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

26. I find the same misconceived contrast between rules and costs in S. Nichols, In-nateness and Moral Psychology, in The Innate Mind: Structure and Content, ed. P. Carruthers,S. Laurence, and S. Stich New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, 35369, at sec. 4.1.

27. Ross did allow that wherever one of the nonmaximizing rules applies, there will besome good to be created or some bad to be avoided; but he insisted that these goods andharms are not part of the grounds for the relevant prima facie duty; see The Right and theGood, 162.This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

rules about consequences, for which I see no justification, evolutionary orotherwise.

So we need to move away from Greenes contrast between rules andconsequences, but we can do so in a way that would still suit the idea that

Dancy Intuition and Emotion 805we have a rapid-response emotional system, if so desired. The result wouldbe an account which is structured more or less as Ross describes, thoughit is one under which the pronouncements of the rapid response systemstill require, and generally receive, the endorsement of reason. The lattertask takes more time, but not only because it gets itself involved in cal-culation of remote consequences. One striking aspect of Rosss accountis the way in which, having announced that we have prima facie dutiesof beneficence, he almost immediately accepts a maximizing version ofthese. He writes In the first place, it seems self-evident that if there arethings that are intrinsically good, it is prima facie a duty to bring theminto existence rather than not to do so, and to bring as much of theminto existence as possible.28 Against this, David Wiggins has suggestedthat there was available to Ross a nonmaximizing version of the principleof beneficence, one that restricted the operation of that principle to amore local sphere of influence.29 Wiggins suggested this restriction as theright way to forestall the standard tendency of maximizing consequen-tialist rules to expand to cover the entire ground of duty. But this neednot be our worry. We might instead be concerned to see the prima facieduty of beneficence as operating much as other such duties do those,perhaps, that have been held to be the product of moral evolution,rather than to think of it as coming from somewhere else entirely andstanding very much at odds with those rules. A localized version of theduty to do good, understanding it as the duty to help those around you,makes perfectly good sense. And it also makes the duty of beneficencemuch more analogous to the duty of nonmaleficence. This latter duty ismuch harder to understand in maximizing terms. The idea that I shoulddo as much harm-avoiding as possible is very peculiar, as if I should tryto get myself into as many situations as possible in which I am in a po-sition to harm someone and then sternly avoid doing so. The truth of thematter is more that if I find myself in a situation in which some course ofaction available to me would harm someone, then I have at least somemoral reason to avoid doing that action. Now this sort of principle of non-maleficence of course applies to the fat man on the bridge as much as toanyone else. It is an up close and personal matter, if you will. So our re-luctance to do that is both explained by the rules and a matter of avoid-

28. Ibid., 24.29. D. Wiggins, The Right and the Good and W. D. Rosss Criticism of Consequen-

tialism, Utilitas 10 1998: 26180.This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ing certain consequences, just as is our keenness to help the five peoplebelow. These complex and competing reactions are all applications ofan intuitionistic system, one that enjoins help and forbids harm.30

It could still be true, for all that, that the potentially maximizingduties do lend themselves to calculation and that the time taken to reacha view in appropriate cases is evidence of that calculation. But all this is to

806 Ethics July 2014be placed within the intuitionistic system rather than in addition to it.Greenes work on response times is interesting here. He finds many

cases where those who reach one answer tend to take longer about itthan those who reach the other. And his diagnosis of these differences isthat the quicker decisions, or at least the easier ones, are the product ofan intuitionistic approach, the slower ones being evidence of the sorts ofcalculation characteristic of consequentialism. I suggest a rather differ-ent reading. In the example about smothering ones baby, the people tobe saved are apparently villagers or fellow townspeople, and whetherpeople say it is right or say it is wrong to smother the baby to save thevillagers, they generally take a lot longer about it than they do witheasier decisions. But what if the people to be saved were ones othertwo children? Would there be some suggestion that in that case thedecision would be quicker because it would not be based on calculationof consequences? And if it took even longer, would this be because theconsequences are harder to calculate? Somehow I doubt it. Responsetimes tell us little about whether we are dealing with rules rather thanconsequences.

Greene tends to work with a contrast between 1 cases where thereis a strong negative emotional push on one side which is nonethelesscapable of being fought down by cognitive considerations that are to dowith consequences, 2 cases where the strong negative emotional pushthese pushes are always negative, it seems, being alarm-like31 winsstraight away, and finally 3 cases where the strong emotional push even-tually wins out over the consequences, but only with difficulty. I wouldthink there are also 4 cases where the strong push, though it exists, isdefeated by other strong emotional pushes on the other side as whenone has to choose which child to sacrifice. One would imagine that ineach of these last two cases, more time is taken. In cases of type 3 thereis evidence of significant cognitive activity, although seemingly on thelosing side. What about cases of type 4? Is it that this should not take

30. I note that Sidgwick made the same suggestion that the intuitive principle ofbenevolence has a restricted scope; see Methods of Ethics, bk. 3, chap. 4, and see also 382.

31. And yet these principles of prima facie duty are not all principles of the wrong; Idont see an opportunity to help others as a sort of alarm, a warning of potential wrong-doing.This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Dancy Intuition and Emotion 807too long because it is not cognitive, being a simple struggle of oneemotion against another? I would have supposed that where there is aconflict between two nonconsequential duties, this might take a greatdeal of sorting out. It would be interesting to see where that sorting outtakes place, that is, whether the parts of the brain where long-term plan-ning and so on take place become centrally involved. If that turned outto be so, we would have a general arrangement that is effectively whatwould be predicted by the intuitionism I characterized above.

My conclusions are that Greenes attempt to link experimental re-sults to a distinction between the application of rules quick and dirtyand the calculation of consequences hard, takes time is theoreticallymisconceived, as is the attempt to marry that distinction to the distinc-tion between intuitionism and consequentialism, and that there is noth-ing in his work on response times that is at all difficult for the intuition-ist to absorb.

VII. THE MORAL GRAMMAR PROGRAM

The inclusion in this symposium of a paper on the so-called LinguisticAnalogy, or the Moral Grammar Program, is interesting. If the sympo-sium as a whole is intended to be about the impact of experimentalphilosophy on traditional ethics, and in particular on the intuitionisticconception of moral judgment, it is not obvious what difference thesuccess of the Moral Grammar Program would make. Nor can that pro-gram make much claim to be part of experimental philosophy. Its maindatum is the convergence of judgment about the standard trolley cases,and the explanation that it offers for this lies in an initial implicit ac-ceptance of certain rewrite rules. That is, it is the implicit acceptanceof these rules that explains the convergence of judgment, even thoughthose doing the judging have no explicit knowledge of the rules thatgenerate the judgment. I suppose that this is experimental in a weaksense, since it starts from questionnaires, but it does nothing like mea-sure response times or examine the relative frequencies of firings of neu-rons.

Now everyone should agree that there is a good sense in whichmoral judgment requires one to parse the situation that faces one. Thisnotion of parsing is familiar to me from the years I spent studying Latinand Greek. But that sort of parsing was syntactic. It was important todistinguish subject, verb and object, to distinguish adjectives and ad-verbs and to work out which adjectives belonged to which nouns andwhich adverbs belonged to which verbs. This process was helped by se-mantical considerations; if one had not known the meanings of the var-ious terms in the sentence, ones task as a parser would have been muchThis content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

808 Ethics July 2014harder. The parsing of sentences in English seems to me to be mucheasier, since word order matters so much there. But maybe this is be-cause I am so much better at English.

Parsing a situation, as this notion is standardly intended, amountsto telling which aspects of the situation make what sort of difference tothe sort of response that is appropriate. This is a moral matter, becausethe sort of appropriateness we are dealing with is moral appropriate-ness. And I would view this sort of parsing as lying on the semantic sideof the syntactic/semantic distinction, because one is, as it were, deter-mining the moral significance of the presence of this or that feature.There are different roles that considerations can play. Some are straight-forward reasons for or against this or that way of responding; othersmay be playing a support role, enabling something else to be a reasonor making it a stronger reason than it would otherwise have been. Thecompetent moral judge needs to be aware even if only implicitly ofthe differences between these roles and able to tell which considerationis playing which role here.

In my view, none of this requires any sort of regularity. It is notrequired for the parsibility of situations that if a consideration is a reasonin one situation, it will be a reason in another, let alone in all others.There is, as one might put it, a semantic variability in the way in whichrepeatable features can contribute to making one response more ap-propriate than another. This sort of variability the sort of thing thatparticularists in ethics make somuch ofmakes life noticeably harder forthe parser, or judge, who cannot rely on how things were elsewhere to tellher how they are here unless, of course, it is already established that thetwo situations are relevantly similar.

Syntactic parsing is, however, very much a matter of regularities. If aterm is a verb, it is a verb wherever it appears; if it is an adjective, it isalways an adjective barring straightforward ambiguity, as where kick canbe either a noun or a verb. Of course parsing a sentence requires morethan knowing which terms are verbs, which nouns, which adjectives, andso on; it also requires knowing which nouns are qualified by which ad-jectives, something that is mainly revealed by word order in English,but in other ways in Latin and Greek. And this is not a matter of regu-larities. Still, when one has worked out which adjectives go with whichnouns, one still has to work out the meanings of the terms in that con-text. And as far as the enterprise of parsing goes, it is perfectly possiblethat an adjective can mean one thing when applied to one noun andanother when applied to another. The color words are a good exampleof this in English. White coffee is not white, it is a sort of cream color,and black coffee is not black, it is more dark brown. If one asks forbrown coffee, as I do sometimes, one gets funny looks. White skin is notwhite either. If I said that my coffee was the color of her face, I suspectThis content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

that this would not be taken as very complimentary, even though theyare both white in their own ways. And then there are white lies. Noneof this causes much problem for the competent parser.

With this preamble, I return to the Moral Grammar Program. Therelevance of this program to the sort of intuitionism that I would wish to

Thisbetwvanctionit tefeatuthertionipartgramits p

Dancy Intuition and Emotion 809to which people are said to parse trolley cases. There are three of these:i an effect that consists of the death of a person is bad; ii an effectthat consists of the negation of a bad effect is good; iii an effect that

32. The reference here is to B. Huebner, S. Dwyer, and M. D. Hauser, The Role ofEmotion in Moral Psychology, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13 2009: 16.

33. S. Dwyer, B. Huebner, and M. D. Hauser, The Linguistic Analogy: Motivations,Results, and Speculations, Topics in Cognitive Science 2 2010: 486510, at 495.although they are not part of our FM moral faculty narrowly con-strued.33

picture is perfectly consistent with the conception of the relationeen emotion and judgment that I outlined in Section V. The rele-e of the Moral Grammar Program to the fortunes of ethical intui-ism must then lie elsewhere, and I think the main thrust of it is thatnds to support a sort of atomism. It purports to show that certainres must make the samemoral difference wherever they appear: thate must be rules. And this is relevant because contemporary intui-sm, in the hands of John McDowell and David Wiggins, has stronglyicularistic tendencies. If so, the success of the Moral Grammar Pro-would at least undermine one significant aspect of intuitionism in

resent form.John Mikhail, for instance, offers various rewrite rules, accordingdefend does not lie in any challenge it makes to the intuitionist con-ception of moral judgment. Here I can do no better than quote from arecent article:

Huebner, Dwyer, and Hauser 200932 argue that currently avail-able data are both insufficient to demonstrate that emotion iscausally implicated in the production of moral judgments, and in-sufficient to establish that emotion is critically required for the de-velopment of the capacity for making moral judgments. This doesnot mean that emotion is unimportant to our moral psychology;nor does it mean that there are no important interfaces betweenmoral cognition and emotion. Indeed, one view consistent with LAthe Linguistic Analogy is that various emotional processes arelikely to be brought on line to motivate morally significant actions,antecedent to the computations required for making moral judg-ments. Thus, proponents of LA hypothesize that emotional repre-sentations play an important role in guiding moral performance,This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

consists of the negation of a good effect is bad.34 The idea is that thespeed and immediacy of our moral responses to various versions of thetrolley problem is evidence that we are operating with these three rules,which both explain and ground those responses.

It is worth noting that these rules concern the good and the bad

810 Ethics July 2014rather than the right and the wrong, though it is in terms of the latterthat questions about trolley cases are usually expressed; after all, noteveryone agrees that there is some straightforward relation between theright and the good. Leaving that aside, however, the question that in-terests me is whether these rewrite rules can be challenged, indeed mayeven be provably false. It might seem that the only substantial rule is thefirst one, and that the others should be conceived as formal transmuta-tions. The latter appearance is given by the use of the term negation whenprevention would seem more appropriate. So is it true that preventing agood is always bad? Here we hit a cluster of standard problems such asthat of the welfare of the wicked. The welfare of the wicked must consistin their getting some good that it would be better if they had not got;for it is only if what they are getting is a good that we feel it is inappro-priate to their wickedness. It may be good to prevent the wicked havingthat good. So preventing, or negating, that good can be good. Turningto the more substantial i, is it true that an effect that consists of thedeath of a person is always bad? This sounds to me like a piece of mis-placed piety. Are there no people who deserve to die, people whose deathis a matter for rejoicing muted rejoicing, perhaps? All in all, theserewrite rules seem to me to be highly contentious, or rather probablyfalse, and if the enterprise of moral grammar requires them, or some-thing like them, that is a considerable hostage to fortune. The worry isthat a moral grammar, though necessary for moral judgment, is only pos-sible at the cost of imposing on us some false beliefs. If that were the case,moral thought would be in trouble.

Against this, it might be said that there are two very considerablearguments in favor of the sort of atomism I am disputing, a Poverty ofthe Stimulus argument and a Productivity argument. These are what liebehind the Moral Grammar Program. Poverty of the Stimulus argu-ments start from the question how it is possible that every typical childgrowing up in typical conditions comes to have the capacity to achievecertain tasks. These tasks are, first, to draw and respect linguistic dis-tinctions and, second, to draw and respect moral distinctions. The point

34. J. Mikhail, Universal Moral Grammar: Theory, Evidence and the Future, Trendsin Cognitive Science 11 2007: 14352, at 148, and also Elements of Moral Cognition: RawlsLinguistic Analogy and the Cognitive Science of Moral and Legal Judgment New York: Cam-bridge University Press, 13744.This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

prestheir

Dancy Intuition and Emotion 811erating according to certain rules, some aspect of their performanceother than their self-description would remain unexplained. The for-mer suggestion is vulnerable to the fact that children are taught to thinkin terms of rules and principles by their parents. The latter suggestion re-mains a pious hope. There is also the worry that developedmoral thoughtis not necessarily a merely more complex version of however it is thatchildren think about moral issues. It may be that, though one needs to beinducted into such thought by means of comparatively simple prohibi-tions and requirements, the developed version does not work in that wayat all. We should not forget the Wittgensteinian point that the nature ofreal empirical justification. Any justification there might be wouldumably consist either in the way that children themselves describethinking, or in the theorists view that if the children are not op-is that in both cases the childs competence goes far beyond anythingthat can be explained by appeal to their limited and very varied expe-rience. Children must then bring to the task equipment that they can-not be said to have acquired in experience. They have a partly unlearntcompetence which fills the gap between the poverty of stimulus and arichness of developed ability. The basic Chomskian idea, in the linguisticdomain which is its home terrain, is that the ability of three-year-old chil-dren to distinguish between the role of the phrase the men expected tosee them in

1. The men expected to see them2. I wonder who the men expected to see them

cannot be explained by appeal to anything the children have learnedsince birth and must therefore be the product of a natural development,or simply innate.

The argument from Productivity is different. On the linguistic side,it is that since we are capable of producing and understanding com-pletely new sentences without delay or strain, our semantic and syntacticcompetences must already be enough to generate those achievements.This is where the argument for moral principles, or regularities, comesin. We cannot explain our ability to make moral judgments about newcases with the ease which we do display unless we come to those caseswith a battery of general truths which we apply to those cases and whichgenerate the conclusions we draw. This second argument is, I wouldsay, nonexperimental, or more simply a priori. As such it falls outside mypresent concerns.

One thing that worries me about the application of these two ar-guments to ethics is that it is often done without any challenge to theidea that morality is a sort of system, one structured by the role of prin-ciples. The terms system and principle appear all over the place, withoutanyThis content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

the ladder we have to climb to get to the balcony does not tell us verymuch about the nature of the balcony when we get there.

It seems to me therefore very contentious to suppose that consid-erations to do with the competence/performance distinction put pres-sure on us to allow that moral thought is systematic. And the same ap-plies to considerations to do with the poverty of the stimulus. The ideahere is that we are trying to explain how it is that all children developa capacity for moral thought, and an answer could be that all childrenhave an emotional equipment suitable for development into a moralsensibility. This perfectly plausible suggestion, which fits well with thepicture I gave in Section V above, allows that the capacity to draw moraldistinctions is itself cognitive, but maintains that it is developed in chil-dren as they learn which of their natural emotional responses are ap-propriate and which are not.

812 Ethics July 2014This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:16:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions