Intuitions about moral relevance—Good news for moral intuitionism

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Abstract

Investigating the reliability of moral intuitions is not only one of the hot topics in moral psychology but also of high importance for philosophical questions. In a recent study, the influence of framing on people’s intuitions about the moral relevance of certain properties of moral scenarios was investigated to assess the validity of some crucial assumptions of moral intuitionism. While it was found that people’s intuitions about moral relevance were not affected by framing effects, the findings were not fully satisfying news for moral intuitionism since a worrisome proportion of participants disagreed with the purportedly self-evident moral relevance statements. In this paper, I propose a potential alternative explanation for the low agreement rate that would be less – or rather not at all – worrisome for moral intuitionism, namely that the problematic results might be due to experimental pragmatics. To test this hypothesis, I rerun two experiments with especially low agreement rates and applied some simple measures to block unintended pragmatic considerations. This resulted in significantly higher agreement rates with the purportedly self-evident moral relevance statements than in the original. Indeed, the agreement rates were at such a high level that the findings of my study provide good news for moral intuitionism.

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