How to Gauge Moral Intuitions? Prospects for a New Methodology

Abstract

Examining folk intuitions about philosophical questions lies at the core of experimental philosophy. This requires both a good account of what intuitions are and methods allowing to assess them. In the paper we propose to combine philosophical and psychological conceptualisations of intuitions by focusing on three of their features: immediacy, lack of inferential relations, and stability. Once this account of intuition is at hand, we move on to develop a methodology that can test all three characteristics without eliminating any of them. In the final part of the paper, we propose implementations of the new methodology as applied to the experimental investigation of the so-called overdemandingness objection to consequentialism.