Back to: Philosophy: Justice & Ethics
Where do moral judgments come from? Psychology suggests that fast, emotional intuition usually fires first, and reasoning often arrives later, sometimes as a lawyer defending a verdict already reached. That’s humbling, but it doesn’t make reasoning pointless. Intuitions are data; reasoning is quality control. Some intuitions encode deep wisdom; others encode bias, self-interest, or the prejudices of our upbringing. The job is telling which is which.
Philosophers’ standard method for this is reflective equilibrium: move back and forth between your judgments about particular cases and your general principles, adjusting each against the other until they cohere. If your principle says ‘maximize lives saved’ but your judgment screams that pushing the man off the bridge is wrong, either the principle needs refining or the judgment needs revising, and you have to decide which, honestly.
Two practical tests will recur throughout this course. The consistency test: am I treating like cases alike, or carving out convenient exceptions for myself and my side? The publicity test: could I openly state the principle I’m acting on, or does it only work in the dark? These two questions alone, asked sincerely, will upgrade almost anyone’s everyday ethics.