The wisdom of the pack

Abstract

This short article is a reply to Fine’s criticisms of Haidt’s social intuitionist model of moral judgment. After situating Haidt in the landscape of metaethical views, I examine Fine’s argument, against Haidt, that the processes which give rise to moral judgments are amenable to rational control: first-order moral judgments, which are automatic, can nevertheless deliberately be brought to reflect higher-order judgments. However, Haidt’s claims about the a rationality of moral judgments seem to apply equally well to these higher-order judgments; showing that we can exercise higher-order control over first-order judgments therefore does not show that our judgments are rational. I conclude by sketching an alternative strategy for vindicating the rationality of moral judgments: by viewing moral argument as a community-wide and distributed enterprise, in which knowledge is produced by debate and transferred to individuals via testimony.