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Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Moral intuition and cultural conditioning

I'm both a moral realist and a moral skeptic. That's because moral realism is a position on moral ontology whereas moral skepticism is a position on moral epistemology, so they're mutually consistent. I have a streak of moral skepticism because "moral intuition" is frequently a euphemism for cultural conditioning. If I were born at another time or place, my personal and social mores might be drastically different. And that's easy to document.

I don't think that's sufficient argument for moral or cultural relativism, but then, that's because I'm a Christian, so I have a standard of comparison. The challenge is how to differentiate culturally conditioning mores from intuitive objective norms. 

Orthodox Christians use biblical revelation to evaluate candidates for moral intuition, but some "progressive Christians" like Randal Rauser appeal to alleged moral intuition to evaluate revelation. Yet in that event, he has no independent criterion to distinguish moral intuition from social conditioning. 

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