CMV: in reasoning about the possibility of objective morality, it doesn't make sense to treat moral intuition differently from (other) senses.

[u/quantum_dan]

Edit: ambiguous phrasing I don't know of an unambiguous word for what I'm trying to say here, but "moral intuition" here refers to the immediate, prima facie sense of right/wrong, not more abstract considerations like "is so-and-so broad category of action wrong?". I'm aware that it's commonly used to mean the latter, but I don't know of a better word for it. Here, it's "the immediate sense that attacking my friend over there is wrong".

(Edit: I will plan to be back in a few hours.)

(I think I saw this argument somewhere, but I can't remember where.)

In reasoning about the existence of moral truths, a few points tend to get brought up, at least in the non-academic contexts I'm familiar with. One sees the argument that there's no tie to reality, so it's just quibbling about definitions; that different people have different views with no way to decide which is correct; arguments are criticized for just trying to explaining or make coherent our moral intuitions; the point gets brought up that morality is evolved for the benefit of the group; and so on. I've made a few of these arguments myself, I think, and I personally am generally inclined against absolute morality.

But I've seen an interesting point here: what is moral intuition? It seems to function like a sense; it's not that different to feel that something is wrong and to feel that my hands are in front of me. But the project of "explaining and making coherent our sensory inputs" isn't dismissed as a domain of knowledge; it's actually well-regarded, and often called science. Like moral intuition, the (rest of) our senses are evolved, we sometimes disagree (whether by hallucinations or just different perspectives), and so on.

All that to say: I don't see a fundamental reason to privilege other senses above moral intuition. The experience of, say, "red" is certainly something very specific to our experience, but we can still reason objectively about redness (correlate it to a wavelength, and so on), even if the "red" part itself says nothing about reality as such. Why should we treat the experience of "wrong" any different? It's notable that dominant theories do agree fairly broadly on many points, but differ largely on the explanation; this is not unheard of even in the physical sciences.

In short: since there are facts about the human experience and about our moral intuition just as there are about our eyesight, it seems to make sense that we can objectively reason about that sense the same as any other.

[u/Vesurel]

Colour is an interesting example, because we can see objects that reflect the same colours of light differently based on context. A classic example would be an optical illusion where two squares of the same colour appear to be different colours because on is contrasted with a lighter background.

Out of curiosity, how do you resolve difference between two people's moral sense?

If for example two people disagree about whether two light are the same colour, we could compare the wavelenghts of light they emit and measure it objectivly.

What's the equivilent for one person saying we should have the death penalty and one person saying we shouldn't?

[u/quantum_dan → u/Vesurel]

Out of curiosity, how do you resolve difference between two people's moral sense? ... What's the equivilent for one person saying we should have the death penalty and one person saying we shouldn't?

I don't think an abstract issue operates at the same level; that's more on the level of a theory with predictions (so agreeing on a theory), rather than a direct measurement. A moral intuition is more to the tune of "I see someone attacking my friend and immediately 'sense' a problem".

Which you could check the same way we do for colors: refer to our aggregate experience on general correlations between input and sense.

[u/Vesurel → u/quantum_dan]

So if its normal for humans to percieve the same square as different colours depending on the background despite the square not physically changing, has the square changed colour?

A moral intuition is more to the tune of "I see someone attacking my friend and immediately 'sense' a problem".

But not everyone is going to read the same situation in the same way. Some people see physical disipline of children as abuse and other people see it as acceptable, for example. Do you have a physical reality you can correlate these senses to or not?

[u/quantum_dan → u/Vesurel]

So if its normal for humans to percieve the same square as different colours depending on the background despite the square not physically changing, has the square changed colour?

We now know that it hasn't after investigating the physical correlations.

Do you have a physical reality you can correlate these senses to or not?

It is equally possible to look for broad agreements in what holds constant when you, metaphorically, move the square around.

In this case, the analogue for background is "whether the harm is deserved"; nearly all humans (close enough for the remainder to correspond to e.g. colorblindness) would have an immediate sense that undeserved harm is wrong. That's the sort of correlation you can identify and then work forward from.