Against moral intuition as a foundation

Moral intuitions are widely treated as evidence in ethical theory. Rawls codified this in reflective equilibrium: we adjust principles and intuitions until they cohere. But I think this method has a serious problem that doesn't get enough attention.

The historical track record is terrible

Slavery, the subjugation of women, the exclusion of the disabled — these were all intuitive to moral communities with sincere reflective practices. The history of ethics is substantially a history of discovering that previously confident moral intuitions were wrong. This is sometimes used to argue that moral progress proves intuitions can be corrected by reasoning. But it cuts the other way too: if intuitions have been that badly wrong in the past, why trust them as foundational evidence now?

Evolutionary debunking

Sharon Street's evolutionary debunking argument applies here. Our evaluative attitudes were selected for reproductive fitness, not moral truth. There's no reason to think they track an independent moral reality. If moral realism is true, our intuitions might be correct by coincidence. But "correct by coincidence" isn't a foundation.

What to use instead

I don't have a clean answer. Contractualism grounds norms in what agents could reasonably agree to, which at least has a non-mysterious connection to human interests. Preference utilitarianism has problems but at least tries to ground value in something empirically accessible. Both still implicitly rely on some intuitions (about what counts as reasonable, about whose preferences matter), but they're more explicit about the role they're playing.

The honest position: moral epistemology is hard, intuitions are evidence but corrigible evidence, and anyone claiming certainty is fooling themselves.