Moral intuitions: Are philosophers experts?

TLDR

Psychologists and philosophers have shown that moral intuitions can be swayed by irrelevant factors, and some argue that philosophers, as experts, possess more reliable intuitions than ordinary people. The study altered pronouns and verbs in vignettes and questions to a third‑person perspective. Two experiments revealed that philosophers and non‑philosophers sometimes hold different moral intuitions, but did not support the claim that philosophers’ intuitions are superior or more reliable. Keywords: Actor‑Observer Bias, Expertise Defense, Intuition, acknowledgments to Rutgers Honors Program, Aresty Research Center, and anonymous reviewers.

Abstract

Abstract 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 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. Keywords: Actor-Observer BiasExpertise DefenseIntuition Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank the Rutgers Honors Program and the Aresty Research Center for funding this research. We are grateful to three anonymous reviewers who raised the objections addressed in section 6, and who drew our attention to a number of other issues that we have addressed elsewhere in this paper. Notes In both the vignette and questions the relevant pronouns and verbs were also modified to a third-person reading.