The experience-dependence of intuitions - update 1
It seems plausible that people's moral intuitions are shaped by their experience. Suppose that two people's intuitions in some ways supervene over their experiences. This means that if their moral intuitions are different with regard to a certain action or person, then it must have been because their experiences were also different in some way. We would not expect that they could have experienced the very same things yet still have different moral intuitions. Yet what can we say of two people who have both been victims of attempted murder, yet one person is in favour of the death penalty and the other is not? Conversely, what can we say of two people who grew up in the same neighbourhood, have the same social standing and so on, yet one becomes a normal member of society and the other becomes Timothy McVeigh? And if the relationship between intuitions and experience is not one of supervenience, then what is it?
People's experiences do shape their intuitions, but different people's intuitions are shaped differently by the same experience. Supervenience is not going to be a part of any one narrow subgroup of nature, which is part of why it is so difficult to pin down. That is why I do not think that supervenience is really going to help us much as an empirical approach to ethics. I mean, it's good to list it as a paradigmatic assumption, but I don't think that it really helps us form reliable intuitions about right and wrong to investigate such issues either. But this, then, seems to be an objection to your reply about making observations about abortion. Different people could experience the same thing and yet have their intuitions shaped differently.
But what if everyone, for all practical purposes, has exactly the same experience? For example, nobody denies that the Holocaust was evil, and we all have similar experiences of this event through various photos, documentaries, stories and so on. Similarly, nobody denies that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 was evil, and we all saw the same footage about it.
A bunch of Arab kids were jumping up and down for joy at one of the primary schools because the World Trade Centre was destroyed. Similarly, people were dancing in the streets in many Middle Eastern countries. But, of course, their experiences will also have been shaped differently by their cultural backgrounds.
This is just it. There are obviously some ways in which some people have the same moral intuitions, and that at a cultural level at least, this process is reliable enough to produce a set of recognisable cultural mores that most people could be reasonably expected to obey. Not everybody in the same culture will have the same intuitions. But the reason why cultural relativism is such a popular belief these days is that the primary supervenient unit of ethics simply does appear to be culture. That is, if people have the same culture, then this is the greatest single predictor of whether they will have the same intuitions. Hence, one could speak of cultural supervenience, and also of cultural incommensurability.
But then what is involved with bridging the gap between two cultures? In many ways, this is probably impossible, in the sense that in the process of aligning people's intuitions, both the original cultures are thereby destroyed, producing a third culture, distinct from the original two.
But this is probably an indication that culture cannot be specified independently of a constitutive reliance on moral terms. A culture, among other things, presupposes a morality, and in achieving commensurability between two people, a culture becomes shared between them.
How, then, is commensurability achieved?
People's experiences do shape their intuitions, but different people's intuitions are shaped differently by the same experience. Supervenience is not going to be a part of any one narrow subgroup of nature, which is part of why it is so difficult to pin down. That is why I do not think that supervenience is really going to help us much as an empirical approach to ethics. I mean, it's good to list it as a paradigmatic assumption, but I don't think that it really helps us form reliable intuitions about right and wrong to investigate such issues either. But this, then, seems to be an objection to your reply about making observations about abortion. Different people could experience the same thing and yet have their intuitions shaped differently.
But what if everyone, for all practical purposes, has exactly the same experience? For example, nobody denies that the Holocaust was evil, and we all have similar experiences of this event through various photos, documentaries, stories and so on. Similarly, nobody denies that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 was evil, and we all saw the same footage about it.
A bunch of Arab kids were jumping up and down for joy at one of the primary schools because the World Trade Centre was destroyed. Similarly, people were dancing in the streets in many Middle Eastern countries. But, of course, their experiences will also have been shaped differently by their cultural backgrounds.
This is just it. There are obviously some ways in which some people have the same moral intuitions, and that at a cultural level at least, this process is reliable enough to produce a set of recognisable cultural mores that most people could be reasonably expected to obey. Not everybody in the same culture will have the same intuitions. But the reason why cultural relativism is such a popular belief these days is that the primary supervenient unit of ethics simply does appear to be culture. That is, if people have the same culture, then this is the greatest single predictor of whether they will have the same intuitions. Hence, one could speak of cultural supervenience, and also of cultural incommensurability.
But then what is involved with bridging the gap between two cultures? In many ways, this is probably impossible, in the sense that in the process of aligning people's intuitions, both the original cultures are thereby destroyed, producing a third culture, distinct from the original two.
But this is probably an indication that culture cannot be specified independently of a constitutive reliance on moral terms. A culture, among other things, presupposes a morality, and in achieving commensurability between two people, a culture becomes shared between them.
How, then, is commensurability achieved?
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