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‘the central phenomena are moral emotions and intuitions.’

(Haidt, 2008, p. 65)

Q: What do adult humans compute that enables their moral intuitions to track moral attributes (such as wrongness)?

Hypothesis:

They rely on the ‘affect heuristic’: ‘if thinking about an act [...] makes you feel bad [...], then judge that it is morally wrong’.

Implication 1: ‘if moral intuitions result from heuristics, [... philosophers] must stop claiming direct insight into moral properties’

(Sinnott-Armstrong et al., 2010, p. 268).

Implication 2: Should we trust moral intuitions? ‘Just as non-moral heuristics lack reliability in unusual situations, so do moral intuitions’ (Sinnott-Armstrong et al., 2010, p. 268)

(Sinnott-Armstrong et al., 2010, p. 268).

-- relevance: defending consequentialism

‘Critics often argue that consequentialism can’t be accurate, because it implies moral judgments that are counter-intuitive, such as that we are morally permitted to punish an innocent person in the well-known example where this is necessary to stop riots and prevent deaths. With the heuristic model in hand, consequentialists can respond that the target attribute is having the best consequences, and any intuitions to the contrary result from substituting a heuristic attribute.’
(Sinnott-Armstrong et al., 2010, p. 269).

‘ethical philosophers intuit the deontological canons of morality by consulting the emotive centers of their own hypothalamic-limbic system ... Only by interpreting the activity of the emotive centers as a biological adaptation can the meaning of the canons be deciphered’

(Wilson, 1975, p. 563 quoted in Haidt, 2008, p. 68).

But is the Hypothesis true?