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Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Moral intuitions: Are philosophers experts?

Kevin Tobia, Wesley Buckwalter, and Stephen Stich
Philosophical Psychology, 26(5): 629-638.

Abstract

Recently psychologists and experimental philosophers have reported findings showing that in some cases ordinary people’s moral intuitions are affected by factors of dubious relevance to the truth of the content of the intuition. Some defend the use of intuition as evidence in ethics  by arguing that philosophers are the experts in this area, and philosophers’ moral intuitions are  both different from those of ordinary people and more reliable. We conducted two experiments indicating that philosophers and non-philosophers do indeed sometimes have different moral intuitions, but challenging the notion that philosophers have better or more reliable intuitions.

The article is here.