audi

“[T]he prospects of a recognizable successor to the intuitionistic tradition began to seem much rosier”, says Dancy in his Moral Reasons (1993, ix). Having seen the central ideas of classic intuitionists, this is now the time to talk about a rebirth of moral intuitionism among new contemporary intuitionists. There are numerous analytic philosophers who have done a lot for this renewing especially of intuitionist’s epistemology.

For example, some contemporary moderate intuitionists such as Robert Audi , Jonathan Dancy , Brad Hooker , John McDowell , David McNaughton , Thomas Nagel , Derek Parfit , Joseph Raz , Tim Scanlon , Philip Startton-Lake and David Wiggins have developed and defended moral intuitionism from common criticisms; some of them focus on epistemology of intuitionism and some of them consider normative theory of intuitionism as well. They try to give a more plausible account and show that intuitionism in moderate ways has some insights and it is a plausible moral theory. In order to do so, they rehabilitate the ideas of non-inferentiality, fallibility and classical foundationalism (inferential justification) in a more tenable way. It is obvious that I do not have enough space to elaborate the works of all these intuitionists, here. So, in what follows the works of Audi on intuitionists’ epistemology as a most eminent contemporary moderate moral intuitionist is center of my attention.

It has been presented in the last chapter that the important feature of modest classic moral intuitionism is the idea that self-evident moral beliefs are not justified only by intuition; rather there are other equal ways of justifications for them. Moreover, some moral intuitions and basic moral beliefs are defeasible in a way that t...

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...n sufficient mental maturity. It is obvious that reflection and mental maturity are matter of degree and for further reflection sometimes even we need to draw an inference.

Moreover, recall that being a self-evident proposition does not mean that it is obvious to everyone. Some self-evident propositions may need lots of reflection for understanding them. However, there are some self-evident propositions that can be accepted easily without any effort. Also, some people cannot believe a self-evident proposition since they cannot understand it adequately; or some people cannot know a self-evident proposition because they believe it is based on inadequate understanding.

However, what can be said about the justification of self-evident propositions? To answer this question it would be a good idea to investigate more about the nature of self-evident proposition first.