Listen "Intuitively Rational"
Episode Synopsis
This scholarly text, "Intuitively Rational: How We Think and How We Should," critiques prevailing philosophical approaches to morality, particularly utilitarianism and its reliance on rationalistic frameworks, as seen in the work of Joshua Greene and Peter Singer. The authors challenge the validity of thought experiments like the trolley problem, arguing they often involve illegitimate stipulations and fail to account for real-world moral intuitions and contexts. They differentiate between types of moral claims, distinguishing between undeniable truths, general principles, and matters of opinion, and contend that some fundamental moral norms, like the wrongness of torture, do not require philosophical justification. The book further engages with Jonathan Haidt's Social Intuitionist Model, analyzing the interplay between emotion and reason, and ultimately advocates for a view where certain moral convictions are inherently rational, integrating insights from neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy to defend the significance of intuition and context in moral reasoning.
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