Rob Wiblin: belief

Transcript context

…Philosophers often overuse ethical intuitionism. Sometimes I’ll read a Philosophy and Public Affairs piece, and I’m always wishing they would write down axioms and argue for or against the axioms, but here’s one comparison they make, and then another. You read through the piece. There are 17 different comparisons, and you’re all supposed to think about them a particular way because these intuitions are supposed to be obvious to us all. Those intuitions evolved in a Darwinian sense, and we should be skeptical about a lot of them. If you’re trying to find what’s the intuition you should be least skeptical about, I would say it’s lives that are much richer or happier and full of these plural values to an extreme degree compared to other lives. Even there, we can’t be sure, but that seems a kind of ground rock. If you won’t accept that, I don’t know how there’s any discourse. But who should get the kidney, or different pieces on abortion or redistribution — all these results, they seem to me quite sociologically class-specific in a way the philosophers themselves are not willing to admit. Yeah. There’s this big trade-off in philosophy between having a simple theory, a parsimonious theory that only has a few pieces, and then being able to match the common-sense intuitions we have about every case or about every claim. I’m — in the field of philosophy, specifically — in favor of parsimony and against following common sense or having very complicated theories. In other domains, I think we need to use common sense and accept a loss of parsimony. Where do you fall on that spectrum? I’m a little closer to common sense than you are. It may not have much metaphysical standing, morally speaking, but the world is ruled by common sense. People behave in accord with common sense, so it’s probably counterproductive to stray too far from common sense. A good ethical theory which has to have a practical component — it should be in accord with a lot of common sense, but revise other parts of it. You need both, and if the theory is either too much just matching the intuitions or totally overturning all of them, I get suspicious. Again, this idea of “Revise at the margin.” It seems to me how we make progress in science, in business, so maybe it’s how we should try to make progress in ethics too. It has a pretty good track record.…

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