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550 BURKARD
beliefs in general. In this paper, I speak only of moral beliefs, but nothing in the presented
arguments hinges on this difference.
Instead of pursuing the metaphysical implications that certain debunking arguments purportedly
have, this paper focuses on the relevance of such arguments for the epistemic justification
of moral beliefs regardless of the metaphysical framework. More specifically, I propose
various ways to respond to debunking arguments from an intuitionist perspective on moral
justification. I argue that a plausible form of intuitionism can successfully assimilate convincing
debunking arguments. It can and should do so irrespective of whether the position is
spelt out in a realist or an anti-realist manner.
I begin by briefly sketching a minimal intuitionist position and the sceptical consequences
entailed in the rejection thereof (section 2). Secondly, I characterise the nature of debunking
arguments in more detail and explain to what extent such arguments can challenge all nonsceptical
positions about moral justification (section 3). Thirdly, I discuss what I call the local
form of debunking arguments. These are arguments that question the putative justification of
specific moral beliefs or subsets thereof. I show that one way of responding to these arguments
is to use them constructively in an account of trustworthy intuitions (section 4). In the
final section, I sketch an intuitionist response to global debunking arguments, whose aim is
to debunk morality as a whole (section 5).
2. A Minimal Form of Moral Intuitionism and the Sceptical
Alternative
The central tenet of the form of moral intuitionism that I want to defend against debunking
arguments is this: When searching for justified answers to moral questions, we may, and indeed
have to, provisionally rely on at least some moral beliefs for which we have no inferential
justification (i.e., beliefs that are either not (positively) justified or justified noninferentially).
And, somewhat more precisely: Those beliefs are not acquired through sense
perception, memory, introspection or testimony alone. 3 We can call these moral judgments
‘moral intuitions’. Crucially, this minimal intuitionist position is compatible with many
metaethical views, including forms of realism and anti-realism, naturalism and nonnaturalism,
as well as moderate variants of coherentist and foundationalist theories of justification.
4
The intuitionist claim that we have to rely on moral intuitions when engaging in moral
inquiry rests on two assumptions. First, it is based on the hardly controversial conviction that
we need to start somewhere if we are to form any justified beliefs at all. Those starting points
could be immediately justified beliefs, as in conceptions that take the contents of moral
intuitions to be self-evident (cf. Audi 2004 and Ross 1930/2002 for prominent versions of
this view). But the starting points can also simply be what we currently believe. So proponents
of moderate forms of coherentism share this first assumption, insofar as they use notions like
the ‘permissive justification’ or ‘initial tenability’ of beliefs (cf. Sayre-McCord 2007 and Elgin
2005 respectively for versions of coherentism using these terms).
3
The following discussion of intuitionism and debunking arguments focuses on moral intuitions as a
type of belief. However, the discussion could easily be reformulated so that it also applies to nondoxastic
accounts of intuitions, according to which undefeated intuitions are seemings, i.e. non-doxastic
mental states, which give us some justification to believe their propositional content (cf. Huemer 2005:
5.1 und Huemer 2008).
4
Cf. DePaul 2006 and Nelson 1999 for similar positions on intuitions in moral inquiry. Intuitionism is
often defined more narrowly though, namely as being committed to foundationalism about justification
or knowledge (cf. e.g. Crisp 2006: 71-73 and Sinnott-Armstrong 2006: 185, 190). See Burkard 2012 for a
more detailed presentation and defence of the minimal form of intuitionism briefly outlined here.