Moral debate tends to be grounded in one of two ways. Either we appeal to some intuition (feeling) that we have (i.e. but killing people is wrong!), or we appeal to some standard of reason (i.e. if you think you've got an obligation to save a drowning child as you walk past, then you must also have an obligation to save people in foreign countries).

My aim in this post is fairly simple: To show that our intuitions are generally quite a bad guide to morality.

I think that there are two main demonstrations of this.

Firstly, look at history. At various stages people have had feelings which told them that black people were subhuman, that women were inferior to men, that keeping slaves is ok, that rape is a mans right, that we have a duty to let the poor die, and so on. And on. Our intuitions, lets face it, are largely the results of various cultural influences, and can't really be a very good guide to moral truth.

Secondly, look simply at todays moral debate. A similar point applies here. For people have very strong disagreements in their intuitions: some people think that abortion is obviously right, others think that its obviously wrong. Some people think that tax is obviously inherantly unjust, others think that its obviously far too low. And so on.

In contrast, debates based on reason are slightly less (they obviously don't avoid it altogether!) culturally contingent. Mill argued for womens rights. Plato argued that politics should not be driven by rhetoric. Aquinas managed to ask whether there was a difference between the intended consequences of an action and its foreseen consequences.

People who try to think of what principles are true, and then apply them to the issues seem to get slightly less temporally contingent answers than those who simply go with their gut reaction. So, similarly, perhaps we should be slightly less concerned with what makes us feel queasy, and slightly more concerned with what we can find some kind of rational justification for.

There's also a second, perhaps slightly more important factor which indicates that we should listen far more to logic and far less to our feelings. If you want to convince others (and we all do: thats what debate is for, and its also an integral part of morality that you want others to act in ways you approve of), you can't do it with your intuitions. The mere fact that I find euthanasia repulsive doesn't seem to give you a reason not to do it. On the other hand, we can (to some extent) convince each other with reason. Thats precisely why people start quoting facts at one-another in arguments: If I can show that market-liberalisation leads to a better quality of life for those in third world countries, it /does/ give you a reason to agree with me that market-liberalisation is a good idea.

So, almost all political debates are not going to be resolved by any kind of appeal to feelings - they'll be resolved by people finding indepedent reasons to adopt one position or another. Time to get cracking.

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The obvious objection to this is that 'rational argument' in the end depends on intuition too: those fundamental principles which we derive everything else from need to be chosen in some way, and 'all people are equal' only will get chosen over 'I'm better than everyone else' (for example) if we think that the former has more intuitive appeal.

Its a good objection.

To what extent it is true, I don't know - does 1+1 equal 2 only because its more appealing than saying that it equals 3? It seems not, as though the former is simply true, regardless of our feelings about it.

Regardless, even if it is true, my fundamental point remains. Fundamental theories are more resistant to random cultural influences that we should try to avoid. A little less groupthink can only be a good thing.