ONLINE Gastvortrag von Prof. Christopher B. Kulp Ph.D. (Santa Clara University): „The Role and Reliability of Moral Intuitions” [Plakat]

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In the contemporary literature, there is not agreement on what moral intuitions are. I begin my talk by distinguishing between a doxastic and a non-doxastic interpretation of moral intuitions, and argue in favor of a doxastic interpretation—largely on the grounds of the benefits to be derived, theoretical and practical. I then discuss three salient (although not uncontroversial) roles for first-order moral intuitions:

Role 1: To serve as a test for moral theories.
Role 2: To provide a particularist grounding for moral judgment.
Role 3: To stop a vicious infinite regress of justified moral belief.

I argue that a doxastic interpretation of moral intuitions better serves these roles than a non-doxastic interpretation. I conclude the talk with a discussion of a variety of indicia regarding the reliability of moral intuitions, drawing on comparisons between moral and non-moral intuitions, and argue that in many contexts, moral intuitions are very reliable, sufficiently so that some rise to the level of qualifying as instances of first-order moral knowledge.

Christopher B. Kulp is professor of philosophy at Santa Clara University. His areas of philosophical research are epistemology, metaethics, and moral epistemology. His recent work is concentrated on completing a quadrilogy on metaethics and moral epistemology. His recent publications include Knowing Moral Truth: A Theory of Metaethics and Moral Knowledge (2017), Metaphysics of Morality (2019). He is currently writing the third book in the series, Varieties of Moral Knowledge, which makes a case for synthetic a priori first-order moral knowledge, develops and defends moral intuitionism, and argues for the knowability of non-natural moral properties.