Ethical Intuitionism

by Michael Huemer

A defence of ethical intuitionism where (i) there are objective moral truths; (ii) we know these through an immediate, intellectual awareness, or 'intuition'; and (iii) knowing them gives us reasons to act independent of our desires. The author rebuts the major objections to this theory and shows the difficulties in alternative theories of ethics.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

309 pages, Paperback

First published September 4, 2005

Reviews

[Amora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superb book on moral realism. Simply put, the thesis of ethical intuitionism is that some moral truths are known without inference. This thesis relies on the principle that’s reasonable to assume things are as they appear except when we have counter-evidence. Huemer excellently defends this thesis (and the principle it relies on) against a number of objections. Huemer also points out that alternatives to moral realism, such as non-cognitivism and subjectivism, fail on the grounds of extremely implausibility. Huemer is easily my favorite proponent of ethical intuitionism out there in philosophy.

[Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are a few great things about this book:

1. As noted before, the approachibility is nearly flawless. Heumer explains everything in an extremely understanding way. The only iffy part was when he went into the Humean objections. Although, he made them bearable and seemingly did a good job at knocking them down.

2. It fights off the laziness group of morality; the relativists and nihilists. The ones who claim morality is subjective or do not exist because they seem too lazy to actually search for objectivity or just deny a priori truths.

3. It makes a seemingly spooky concept of philosophy and makes it into a very reasonable concept. I used to think the same that many do, intuitionism is a worthless concept based on nothing but mere whims. However, Huemer makes, for the first time that I've seen, an intuition have something to back it up.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Although I may not be convinced, it at least gives me something to think about. Many of his arguments are very well put. The one that stands out to me a lot is how morality trumps prudence and prudence trumps desire. What impressed me with this conclusion is simple and something I ought to have thought of before. The reason why prudence trumps desire is because it already takes desire into account. The reason why morality trumps prudence and desire is because it already takes into account both prudence and desire.

This book may not change your mind on anything, and he admits that people's biases will probably not change, but it at the very least gives you something to think about.

[Rachael · Rating 5 out of 5]

The nice thing about this book is its approachability. Huemer has a talent for explaining complex concepts in a clear and concise manner- something that is wanting in a lot of philosophy books. His argument is that there are object evaluative facts (moral facts) which we know about through intuition. Huemer does an admirable job of defending this unpopular theory against other metaethical theories.

[J.M. Simmons · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's difficult to present complex topics in a way that is easy for readers to approach without taking forever to make your point. So, whether you agree with his argument, he obviously made a strong effort to be clear and concise, and that is appreciated.

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally, a philosopher with the courage to argue in favor, with remarkable clarity, of the obvious. Ignore Huemer at your intellectual peril.

[Matt Berkowitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty readable for a philosophy book—other than the starred sections that he deems skippable for those who don’t want to get too deep into nitty-gritty objections.

Huemer does an excellent job of explaining the main meta-ethical positions: non-cognitivism, subjectivism, nihilism, naturalism, and intuitionism—the first three being forms of moral anti-realism and the last two being forms of moral realism.

He starts by arguing pretty decisively against the various anti-realist positions, starting with non-cognitivism, specifically emotivism and prescriptivism. “X is wrong” is said by emotivists to mean something like “boo on x!”, and by prescriptivists to mean something like “don’t do x!” But this seems to contradict the way people use language. Persuasively, Huemer presents linguistic evidence to refute non-cognitivism, summarizing his argument in a syllogism:

“1. Each of the following sentences makes sense

I am questioning the act's rightness
It is true that pleasure is good.
I hope I did the right thing.
Is abortion wrong?
Do the right thing.
If pleasure is good, then chocolate is good.
Something is good.

2. None of those sentences would make sense if non-cognitivism were true [because non-cognitivism says that ethical sentences either express emotions or declarations].

3. Therefore, non-cognitivism is false.”

Seems right to me.

Next up is subjectivism, including individual subjectivism (“x is right” = “I approve of x”), cultural relativism (“x is right” = “society approves of x”), and divine command theory (“x is right” = “God approves of x”). Huemer goes into the countless problems with each of these. If an individual or group were to change their attitudes, then would seemingly awful things then somehow become moral? As Huemer summarizes, each form of subjectivism entails a statement of the form:

“If (I/society/God) were to approve of torturing and killing children for the fun of it, then it would be right to torture and kill children for the fun of it.”

Closely related is the implication of moral infallibility for the individual/society/God. If I/society/God approves of something, then it is correct. Additionally troubling is how moral disagreement should then be resolved under such a framework. On individual subjectivism, A could only disagree with B that “x is wrong” if A doubted B’s reported moral opinion. Similarly, on cultural relativism, people would only be disagreeing about what society’s attitudes in fact are—ditto about God’s commands on divine command theory (and atheists could not have moral views).

Nihilists simply claim there are no moral facts, implying that murder is not wrong, the Holocaust was not bad, and so forth. As Huemer laments, it’s difficult to know how to seriously respond to such claims, given that they sound prima facie absurd and contradict how almost everyone lives their life.

That brings us to naturalism, which holds that i) moral properties are reducible (which means it’s possible to explain what’s right/wrong without using evaluative expressions) and that ii) moral truths can be discovered through observation. There are two approaches to i), analytic reductionists (who say that expressions with no evaluate terms are synonymous with moral wrongness), and synthetic reductionists (who say that some expressions explain what it is to be wrong).

Huemer uses G.E. Moore’s work to argue against analytic reductionism as follows. “If two expressions have the same meaning, then it should be possible to substitute one expression for the other in any sentence, without changing the meaning of the sentence. Moore noticed that for any non-evaluative expression it was possible to formulate a meaningful statement or question containing the word 'good' in which, intuitively, one cannot substitute the non-evaluative expression for 'good'”. For example, a reductionist would say “x is good = x promotes pleasure”. Moore would then ask, “Is pleasure good?”, for which the reductionist would interpret to mean “Does pleasure promote pleasure?”. I don’t find this particularly convincing, but to explain why, let’s jump to synthetic reductionism, which grants the point about equivalencies. Huemer also argues against synthetic reductionists: He uses the example of whether “water = H2O” indicates two identical things or two distinct things. “What is the chemical formula of water?” vs “What is the chemical formula for H2O?” don’t mean the same thing, in Huemer’s Moorean view. But I think it’s still intelligible to ask “Is water H2O?”, since there was a time when the chemical formula was not known. The question can then probe at whether a perfect (or close) identity exists between the two terms—or, in the case of “moral” vs “good”, whether what’s moral is what promotes good. I think these are intelligible things to ask, referencing Huemer’s linguistic evidence that he used to refute non-cognitivism.

This all paves the way for Huemer’s defense of his own brand of intuitionism, which claims that basic principles of good, bad, right, and wrong are self-evident such that “suffering is bad”, the principle of transitivity (if A > B and B > C, then A > C), and “no person is blameworthy for an action they did not perform”. Huemer contends that “[w]e are justified in believing these propositions for the same reason that we are justified in believing observations of the external world: namely, because they seem to be the case and we have no serious grounds for doubting them.” He invokes the principle of Phenomenal Conservatism, which says simply that if it seems that x is true, then we are justified in believing x is true, absent any stronger reason to believe x is not true.

I’m basically on board with some form of intuitionism as playing a role in determining what is moral (in the same way we must rely on intuition to determine what is true of the physical world). My main issue with intuitionism is that it’s not much of a guide to anything. It does not establish a rigorous framework for thinking more robustly analytically about what is moral. Naturalism does provide this, since it ties morality to some overarching definition and evaluates actions based on their effect on how well they serve this definitional goal. In my conception, morality is about well-being, broadly defined, and so actions can be judged as more or less moral depending on their total effects on well-being. Intuition of course is required for guiding us to find actions that “seem” to promote well-being, but I don’t think intuition is enough.

Wherever you land in this discussion, Huemer does a very good job sketching out the different meta-ethical views in a refreshingly accessible way. A good read.

[Kramer Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Michael Huemer here presents a compelling, extremely readable argument in favour of moral realism and ethical intuitionism, and against the three most prominent moral anti-realist theories - subjectivism, non-cognitivism, error theory (or nihilism) - as well as moral naturalism. His main arguments against the anti-realist and moral naturalist positions essentially show how they cannot deal with the way we use moral terms, and are hence much less plausible than moral realism. I found Huemer's arguments very compelling, and after reading this as well as Enoch's Taking Morality Seriously, I find it hard to believe that we can adequately invoke morality without postulating some set of objective moral facts. (In fact, I wonder if we are able to even successfully deliberate or lead generally good lives without supposing, at least implicitly, that there are objective reasons for action.) Huemer's writing was very pleasant, and he explicated his arguments very clearly, although I did find some responses to particular philosophers quite challenging. Overall, a very enjoyable read.

[xabbler · Rating 4 out of 5]

It seems to me this conservatism was phenomenal

[Chris Pacia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished read this. While I think Huemer's logic is impeccable and I can't really disagree with any of his arguments, I somewhat find objective morality more unsettling now then before I read it. Even though we can plausibly use intuition as a source of moral knowledge, we're still left wondering where it comes from.
Unlike sensory perception where the computer I'm typing on (very likely) exists whether I perceive it or not and would exists (the raw materials at least) whether I or any other human ever existed, can that also be said about morality? Or is morality as we know of it, while objective, strictly a human phenomenon?
For example, suppose the Borg are out there and their moral intuitions tell them that NOT assimilating other races is morally wrong. That it is good to assimilate everyone they come in contact with. Could morality still be said to be "objective" in this sense given that two different intelligent species have different intuitions about morality? Would this refute ethical intuitionism and suggest some form of group subjectivism? Or would we still say morality is objective only objectively different per species?

[Jared Tobin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This important book defends what might be the only satisfying theory of meta-ethics. That is: that there exist moral truths (i.e. moral realism is true), that we have an innate mechanism for perceiving or intuiting these truths (i.e. ethical intuitionism is true), and that these intuitions are irreducible (i.e. ethical naturalism is false).

Huemer's prose is simple and lucid. He presents the salad of competing meta-ethical theories (subjectivism, non-cognitivism, nihilism, and naturalism) and argues persuasively that intuitionism is the only one that does not face serious problems. I suspect that one typically comes away from the book at least leaning towards the intuitionist position, if not having adopted it entirely.

Aside from being a fine review of meta-ethics in of itself, Ethical Intuitionism also acquaints the reader with some of the tools that Huemer uses to drive his powerful arguments elsewhere in his writing. Of note is the extremely undemanding Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism which, combined with one's own intuitions, provides exactly the minimum structure required to support and propel strong arguments around moral questions. Highly recommended.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pseudo math to support what "some say". And Huemer? He is there, somewhere, as the puppeteer of this show. Sadly, too dull to stay and figure out what he really wants to sell.

[N. N. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Current personal league table:

(1) ethical intuitionism
(2) subjectivism
(3) nihilism
(4) naturalist realism
(5) noncognitivism

[Matthew Adelstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Introduction
Huemer writes Ethical Intuitionism with the exasperated air of a biology teacher at a Christian school, who is having to explain, once again, why the fact that apes do not give birth to humans does not, in fact, mean that evolution is false. And there’s a reason for that: Heumer is defending the much-maligned doctrine of ethical intuitionism, according to which we come to know moral truths by intuitions—by their intellectual appearances. The same way that we can see with our intellects that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line (assuming space isn’t curved, you pedants!), there can’t be married bachelors, and that modus ponens is a valid rule of inference, we can see with our intellect that torture is wrong, pain is worse than pleasure generally, and that if A is better than B and B is better than C, then A will be better than C.

Why is Huemer frustrated? Well, because the doctrine of ethical intuitionism—which seems to be the way that most people do ethics most of the time—is generally not taken especially seriously, usually for utterly terrible reasons. And this was especially true when he was writing the book—it’s made something of a comeback in recent years. The arguments against it, and the objective morality he derives from it, are completely terrible, and yet most people dismiss it based on these confused criticisms.

Huemer’s favorite example of this is the argument from disagreement. People assert that the fact that there is moral disagreement shows that ethical intuitionism is false. But this is an utterly bizarre claim—people sometimes give conflicting reports about what they saw, but that doesn’t mean that you should never trust your vision. Disagreement proves that some way of knowing things is not infallible, but it doesn’t prove that it’s totally unreliable.

Huemer’s methodology for ethics is relatively straightforward and seems like the methodology that most people apply to most things: think hard and then believe whatever is most obvious. This seems like a good approach; if you have a conflict between two of your beliefs, you should believe whichever one is more plausible. If you discover that your belief that Bill Clinton was a good president conflicts with your belief that it’s wrong to bomb pharmacies—as a matter of fact, it does—then you should give up whichever is less obvious, namely, the belief that Clinton was good.

Huemer is arguing for moral realism in his book—the idea that there are some moral statements that are true that aren’t made true by anyone’s attitude. He also argues for moral non-reductionism—the idea that moral statements are not explicable purely in non-moral terms. His basic argument is pretty straightforward, all of the specific kinds of anti-realism have to say things that are really implausible. Take error theory—the view that all moral statements are false—as an example: the error theorist has to think that all of the following statements are false:

You shouldn’t torture innocent people absent a really good reason.

Pain is bad.

Being virtuous is generally better than being vicious.

If you see a baby on the street, you should not press a needle into its eye.

The holocaust was bad.

Serial killers do immoral things.

The Nazi Odilo Globocnik might be, as one historian claimed, "the vilest individual in the vilest organization ever known".

But these are all very obviously true. Because moral realists say that there are statements about morality that are true, and that aren’t made true by our attitudes, the anti-realist has to think that every specific moral proposition is either neither true nor false, false, or true but made true by someone’s attitude. But this isn’t believable. Take the sentence: it’s wrong to put little babies in the blender and turn it on.

That doesn’t seem neither true nor false. If it were neither true more false, you wouldn’t be able to say things like “because it’s wrong to put babies in the blender, if I did that it would be wrong,” any more than you can say “if, don’t put babies in the blenders, then I should don’t put babies in the blender.” You can’t have if sentences about things that are neither true nor false.

It also doesn’t seem false. It seems true that it’s wrong to torture babies. And it doesn’t seem like its wrongness is caused by anyone’s attitudes; if everyone approved of torturing babies, it would still be wrong. No one’s disapproval of torturing babies is what makes it wrong, instead the wrong-making feature is the fact that it inflicts lots of suffering on babies.

Huemer’s assault on non-cognitivism
Huemer’s second chapter is dedicated to non-cognitivism, the idea that moral sentences are neither true nor false. He argues that it’s just wrong as a semantic account. Moral sentences have various features that are only had by propositions, including:

Moral sentences take the form of declarative sentences—sentences of the form A is B. We say things like “torture is wrong,” but we don’t do this with non-propositions. We don’t say things like “go is for the dodgers.”

Moral properties can become abstract nouns—the word goodness exists, as does the word rightness. There is no analogous abstract noun for non-propositions—no one says “I am questioning the acts hurrayness,” the way they’d say “I am questioning the acts rightness.”

You can have sentences of the form “it is true that X,” where X is a moral statement. You can’t do this with things that are neither true nor false; no one says “it is true that go dodgers,” but you do say, “it is true that I exist.”

One can attach propositional attitude verbs to evaluative statements. One can say, “I hope that abortion is fine,” while they can’t say, “I hope that ouch!”

One can ask questions about moral properties, in a way one can’t do for things that are neither true nor false. You can say, “I wonder if abortion is okay,” while you can’t say, “I wonder if boo! redsocks.”

You can have complex arguments involving moral premises. You can say “if abortion is wrong, then God will punish people who get abortions.” This would be impossible if abortion being wrong was neither true nor false—one can’t have conditional claims about sentences that describe nothing about the world.

Non-cognitivists have various ways of trying to explain the fact that their theory, on its face, is obviously radically out of accords with how most people use language. In order to do so, they make their theory more like realism, wherein the moral statements are able to be true or false, but their truth doesn’t mean what it doesn’t in other domains. Huemer argues that none of these solutions can avoid the sixth problem I listed, and that they each run into other problems.

Finally, Huemer advances a pretty interesting argument against non-cognitivism: We are just introspectively aware that moral sentences are truth-apt—capable of being true or false. When you say sentences like “torture is wrong,” it feels like you are saying something is true or false. You’re not giving commands—when I say “Hitler shouldn’t have killed people,” I am not telling Hitler what to do. When I say, “pain is bad,” I’m not instructing pain on how it should behave. And it’s clearly not an emotion—I have no emotional attachment to the claim that if A is better than B and B is better than C then A is better than C or that tax fraud committed in 350 CE that ended up harming others was wrong. None of the accounts of non-cognitivism account for the conditions in which we make moral statements, which are often conditions of cool reflection rather than emotion, and which certainly don’t involve telling anyone what to do. Huemer notes:

our emotions about some things are stronger than about other things. If the core explanation for the correlation between moral judgment and emotion is that 'good' and 'bad' are just emotion-expressing terms, then what should we predict about how the strength of moral emotions should vary? It seems that the strength of the emotions associated with moral judgments should be roughly proportional to the perceived level of goodness or badness of a thing and to the confidence of one's moral judgment: the worse one takes a bad thing to be, and the more confident one is in one's judgment, the more strongly one should feel about it. Is this true? In some cases, yes: I feel more strongly about the wrongness of murder than I do about the wrongness of jaywalking. In other cases, no: I feel more strongly about someone's stealing my stereo (and this is a moral emotion, indignation) than I do about Emperor Nero's execution of Octavia in 62 A.D. Truth be told, I have little if any feeling about Octavia's murder. But Nero's execution of Octavia was far more wrong than the stealing of my stereo, and I am quite certain of that.

…

Third, we can distinguish between the degree of confidence of a moral judgment and the degree of rightness or wrongness that the moral judgment attributes. Imagine someone who thinks abortion is likely wrong but lacks confidence in that judgment. He sees that there are plausible arguments on the other side. However, he says, if abortion is wrong, it is very seriously wrong, since the only way it would be wrong would be by being akin to murder. Here, the perceived degree of wrongness is very high, but the confidence in the judgment is very low. On the emotivist theory, what could these two dimensions correspond to? On the emotivist theory, one simply experiences a feeling about abortion. This feeling could come in degrees of intensity-people can feel more or less strongly about something. But how could this give rise to our sense that there are two things here that come in degrees and that may have radically different degrees in a given case?

Skewering subjectivism
Huemer’s next chapter is on subjectivism. He rehashes the standard objections: individual subjectivism means that we’re morally infallible and that if I approved of torture and uttered the sentence “torture is great,” I’d be right. But that’s obviously false. His discussion of ideal observer theory is the most interesting.

The ideal observer theory says that morality is about what an ideal observer would judge. So if we say murder is wrong, that means that some ideal observer would disapprove of X. This ideal observer is supposed to have all relevant factual knowledge, be perfectly good at vivid imagining, and possess various other things that make one ideal. So he’s supposed to be sort of like me, but a tad bit better at vividly imagining scenarios, albeit probably less handsome. Note we cannot say that the observer is morally ideal, because the ideal observer theory is supposed to account for morality, so we can’t build morality into the ideal observer.

Now, one version of ideal observers says that something is wrong if all ideal observers would disapprove of it. But given that there’s nothing constraining their desires, there’s nothing that all ideal observers would agree upon. So this means nothing is wrong. A better thought is that the relevant ideal observer is the ideal version of the speaker: So if John says torture is wrong, that means “the ideal version of John would hate torture.” But this has a lot of problems.

First, there’s the problem of horrible desires. Suppose that Hitler, even after knowing what his victims experienced and being informed of all the relevant facts still supported killing them. On this account, when Hitler says “ze Jews should be killed,” that would be true. But that’s obviously false.

Second, there’s the problem of disagreement. If I say, “torture is wrong,” and that just means that my ideal self would disapprove of torture, someone whose ideal self could approve of torture could say “what you said is true, but torture isn’t wrong,” and this might be true! But this couldn’t be true. It can’t be true that when I say torture is wrong it’s true and when he says it isn’t, it’s not true.

Third, there’s the problem of fallibility. It seems like even non-morally ideal agents can be morally mistaken—if you know all the non-moral facts, you might still be wrong about the moral facts. But this means that the non-moral facts don’t settle the moral facts.

Fourth, there’s the problem of arbitrariness: why does the ideal observer want particular things? He can’t desire it because it’s good, because the ideal observer theory is supposed to account for goodness, not suppose it. But then what he wants has to be arbitrary—not based on things that are worth desiring. But arbitrary whims can’t ground morality.

Now, the ideal observer theorist can stipulate that he is kind, for example, meaning he’ll only like good things. But if you stipulate that ideal observers have to have particular kinds of desires because only a particular type of ideal observer counts, then that’s a kind of moral naturalism. If you think ideal observers only count if they value X, Y, and Z, then you’re just stipulating that morality is about valuing X, Y, and Z.

Reducing the prominence of ethical reductionism
Huemer’s chapter on ethical reductionism is, in my mind, the least convincing. While he replies to some of the ways that people might be moral naturalists, he does not reply to what is, in my mind, the most convincing version of moral naturalism. Ethical reductionists are those who believe in moral facts but think that they are just a kind of natural fact. Thus, when one says “torture is wrong,” that is just a statement about various natural facts. Perhaps it means something like “torture causes lots of severe pain.”

Huemer argues convincingly that many of the ways that people claim we can know the moral facts according to moral naturalism are wrong. For example, he claims that we cannot observe the moral properties. When people say that they see that something is wrong, they do not literally mean that its wrongness emits photons that they observe. So the moral facts can’t be used to explain what we see.

But I think the best version of moral naturalism relates to conceptual analysis, and Huemer doesn’t spend any time addressing that. On this account, when we say X is wrong, we’re referring to some hard-to-define natural property. We determine which things are right or wrong by reflecting on our moral intuitions, just like we determine what the word knowledge picks out by introspecting on our intuitions about which things we know. Now, while this means that moral claims aren’t discovered through empirical evidence, they’re discovered through empirical analysis. And while this is maybe sort of kind of analytic naturalism, it effortlessly avoids the traditional problems with analytic naturalism.

The most common issue—and the one Huemer addresses—with analytic naturalism is the open-question argument. You can wonder whether pleasure is good, but you can’t wonder whether pleasure is pleasure. Therefore, goodness can’t just mean pleasure. But you can coherently wonder whether some type of conceptual analysis is correct. We can, for example, coherently wonder whether knowledge is justified true belief. Therefore, conceptual analysis seems to just easily resolve all of Huemer’s objections to moral naturalism, except for one.

This last argument is sort of interesting, and I think it represents the fundamental reason to think ethical naturalism is false:

1. Value properties are radically different from natural properties.

2. If two things are radically different, then one is not reducible to the other.

3. So value properties are not reducible to natural properties.

If this argument sounds thin to you, it is probably because you accept one of the following two responses.

First, a reductionist might say that we cannot simply see the nature of a thing merely because we have a concept of it. We could not see, merely from our concept of water, that water was identical with H20. But my argument doesn't assume that we can see everything about the nature of those things we have concepts of; it only assumes that we can see some things about them, and that in the case of physical and psychological properties, we can see that they are not evaluative. To illustrate, suppose a philosopher proposes that the planet Neptune is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. I think we can see that that is false, simply by virtue of our concept of Neptune and our concept of symphonies. Neptune is an entirely different kind of thing from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. No further argument is needed. Indeed, if a person couldn’t see that Neptune is not a symphony, we would say he either had no idea what Neptune was, or had no idea what a symphony was. Second, a reductionist might say that the argument, if accepted, would also 'refute' the theory that Water =H20, for 'water' and 'H2 0' just seem very different on their face. Similarly, the argument would seem to refute the theory that sound consists of compression waves in the air, because 'sound' and 'compression waves' sem very different. But this is not so. On the face of it, water doesn1t seem to be H20; but it is not the case that water seems to not be H20. Our pre-scientific concept of water takes it to be a clear, odorless, tasteless, etc., liquid. We cannot, on the basis of this concept, discern anything about what its micro-structure might be like. We have no experience of just seeing that there are no tiny particles composing it, and so on. Nor do we have the sense that water is a different category of thing from H20; on the contrary, we see that they are the same category of thing, namely, physical substances.

This argument is, I think, convincing, and basically no one ever makes it. But I think it’s right!

The rest of the book
The rest of the book is pretty standard; Huemer replies to almost all of the major arguments for moral anti-realism. He points out that a lot of the arguments for moral anti-realism are just utterly unconvincing. For example, take the argument from queerness. This argument says that morality can’t exist because it would be too strange, utterly different from everything else in the universe.

Why is morality supposed to be weird? Well, the answer is that it’s different from other things. But so are a lot of things. Here is a nice list of things that Huemer gives that are radically different from other things

time

space numbers

propositions

substances properties

relationships

mental states

physical states aesthetic

properties

fields (e.g., the gravitational field)

the past dispositional properties

moral properties

For this argument to be convincing, one would have to think that things that are very different from other things probably don’t exist. But this is false. There are loads of things that are very different from other things. So we have no reason to think that unique

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of respondents are hailing Huemer as taking the obvious position that is somehow unpopular, against opponents whose views are so ludicrous that it isn't obvious why they were taken seriously for so long. Anyone who hears that story though should be struck by the fact that it is very convenient for Huemer. How could the situation have been so bad for so long? Huemer seems to realize this but he blames it on conformity, political correctness, cynicism, and scientism, which I think is far fetched.

The better explanation is that voluntarily or not, Huemer is misrepresenting his opponents. Some worse than others - his explanation of various kinds of "subjectivist" views I'd argue are worst, but synthetic naturalism and non-descriptivist anti-realism (Timmons) also get misrepresented. At points it seems like Huemer is doing it on purpose. His approach seems to be to "tell it like it is" about his opponents in a way that attends to what he thinks they feel on the inside, as part of a common sense response to them (this is particularly acute in his discussion of Timmons). That's all well-and-good when he represents their views correctly (it is easy to attack nihilism by saying 'obviously some things are bad and some are good', it is easy to look at how we talk and say emotivism is silly), but it doesn't work for the more sophisticated views, which is why he is forced to try to shove those views into some crude caricature of themselves.

The positive case presented by the book is divided on multiple dimensions that by now are very familiar to anyone who has read a book on moral realism - motivation, epistemology, metaphysics, etc. Understandably, Huemer's strength is the epistemology chapter, and I think he makes a very convincing case for intuitionism, although if you've already accepted that moral facts exist, I don't think his view is nearly as controversial as he makes it out to be. Some of the objections from anti-realists are misrepresented again, particularly relating to supervenience. However for the most part he does a good job of responding to the unsatisfactory objections to moral realism that have cropped up over the years.

If I were to recommend a book on moral realism by a moral realist, it would not be Huemer, it would probably be *Taking Morality Seriously* by Enoch or *Moral Realism: A Defence* by Shafer-Landau. Either I think makes a stronger case for moral realism. The main flaw of the book is misrepresentations of his opponents, the main positive feature of the book is his illuminating discussion of ethical intuitionism in the epistemology chapter and the corresponding principle of phenomenal conservatism he defends.

[Dio Mavroyannis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a tough read requires constant focus. Nevertheless if you have an interest in philosophy there is probably no other book you can walk away from with as clear conceptions about the subject matter discussed. His syllogism style of presenting arguments is off the charts.

Personally I had some mix of views found in this book and I can honestly say that this book was like a bucket of cold water, brushing away all the nonsense views I held. In fact I am converted from a kind of natural moral realist to a full blown ethical intuitionist, I see no other way to remain consistent with every day behavior.

[Adrián Sánchez · Rating 5 out of 5]

La pieza que me faltaba para una justificación sobre de dónde puede devenir un sistema ético riguroso, el libro sigue la misma estructura que ya se presentó en El Problema de la Autoridad Política, es decir, dividido en 2 partes, la primera, donde se enfrenta y refuta las teorías alternativas (dando por supuesto un breve paso sobre los conceptos a utilizar) y la segunda parte donde desarrolla el caso completo de la posición propuesta, es decir, el intuicionismo ético, así como las críticas que recibe, sus respectivas refutaciones y una conclusión bastante satisfactoria.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reread

[Jiho Burrows · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uhg, would have been way more favourable to this book of the last part of the book was first.

[Paul Sand · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]

[Playing catchup with my neglected book and movie blogging today.]

Last month I noticed that Econlog's Bryan Caplan called Michael Huemer his "favorite living philosopher." That's good enough for me! So I checked out Ethical Intuitionism from the library at the University Near Here, and read it in tiny doses over the loan period.

It's a serious philosophical work by an actual professional philosopher, so when I say I "read" it, what I mean is: I looked at just about every page, honest. Although Huemer is a very good writer, his argument is aimed at his peers, and it's about a topic that's been discussed for centuries. When he responds to the views of others in the field, it's like coming in late to a deep multi-person conversation, where you can only hear one guy, and you're not that familiar with the jargon. But that's the nature of this sort of work.

Huemer's project is to explain and defend an objective ethics based on values that are directly perceived by rational intuition. This is (then) a theory of metaethics; other competing metaethical theories are non-cognitivism, subjectivism, reductionism, nihilism, and naturalism. Huemer criticizes each of these alternate approaches. He then lays out his careful argument for intutionism, considering and rebutting the various objections raised by others.

I was won over! But I'm typically persuaded by any plausible philosophical argument, as long as it's not self-evidently superficial. (But to the extent that I've thought about ethics at all in the past, I've found myself coming down in the same general area as Huemer.)

I find myself distrusting natural language, with all its fuzziness and ambiguity, as being an appropriate tool for philosophical discussion. For example, one of Huemer's refutations detects a fallacy based on his opponent glossing over different ways words can be "misused". Huemer is convincing, but—as far as I know—there could be equivalent fallacies here. I'd never notice.

Michael Huemer's personal web page is here. It contains some good jokes, good advice, and some scary quotes from the Bible.

[Luke Simpson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first philosophy book I ever read cover to cover that I wasn't forced to read for a class.

It's an excellent book. If you have doubts about objective moral values, then you could do worse than to read it. Don't expect answers to specific moral questions. That's not what it is. It's meta-ethics, which means it supplies answers to metaphysical and epistemological questions about morality.

What does it mean for an action to be right or wrong?
How do we know whether an action is right or wrong?
When we say something is moral or immoral, are we making a statement about objective facts about the world or merely about our own attitudes towards that thing?

And so on.

Huemer makes the case for Ethical Intuitionism. That is, he argues that at least some moral facts are objective and that we can know at least some of those facts by relying on intuition. He also argues that at least some moral facts are not reducible to non-moral facts, but for most people (that is, people who aren't philosophy professors or students of philosophy) this won't be as important of a thesis as the other two.

The argumentation is compelling and persuasive. It helped me to form my views about morality into a much better thought out configuration. It had previously been haphazard and rough, but now it is robust and detailed.

[Christopher Simpson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tour de force defense of Ethical Intuitionism.