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David_Gerard comments on Thoughts on moral intuitions - LessWrong
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Moral intuitions (i.e, 'kneejerk reactions') are what fuels many people's opinions. Can we do better on LW? Meta-ethical systems (consequentialism, deontology) are often used as post-hoc rationalizations for said moral intuitions, but can we do better?
For these kind of problems I especially like Kant's approach -- can we come up with a rule that underlies our opinion on something, and would we be willing to follow that rule, even if it goes against our immediate intuitions in some other case? And the more specific a rule gets (ie., 'this only applies to green people', the clearer is the sign that we're doing some special pleading.
Doing this is, of course, a major project in philosophy. Many attempts have serious problems.
I can see that... one of the obvious problems that we can find some case where the meta-ethical systems go against our moral intuitions. This sometimes leads to attempt to make the meta-ethics incorporate this case (and then some more), but I feel it quickly becomes rather obvious that we cannot come up with any consistent system that also satisfies our intuitions. I'm a bit pessimistic philosophers will resolve this problem soon...
On a more happy note, I have found Kant's reasoning very useful for my own personal opinion-making, by constantly reminding me that if I find X about, say, genetically-modified food, nuclear energy etc., I really need to make my opinion in terms of a rule that doesn't include the particular case, and I try to think what this same rule would mean for other opinions I hold.
Reasoning about, e.g., mathematics or physics has the same problem, and yet in those fields we can still build the system on our intuitions while accepting that they're sometimes wrong.