ABSTRACT
Humans have many kinds of responses that may be called “intuitions.” On a common understanding, an intuition is akin to a gut feeling, hunch or instinct, encountered frequently in both moral and non-moral contexts in everyday life. According to this picture, a moral intuition could be a response to a real-life situation in which one is directly involved, such as deciding when to break it to one’s mother that she has a terminal illness. However, the kind of moral intuitions most investigated and examined by moral philosophers and psychologists consist in compelling responses to hypothetical scenarios—for example, whether a doctor should sacrifice a healthy patient in order to save the lives of five other patients in an urgent organ donation (Foot 1967)—or to abstract moral principles—for example, the principle “It is wrong to lie.” Finally, philosophers are also interested in metaethical intuitions, which are concerned with the nature of morality. For instance, one commonly held intuition is that there are universally valid moral truths.
