ABSTRACT
Humans have many kinds of responses that may be called 'intuitions'. Moral intuitions are puzzling phenomena because they are very resistant even when we face good reasons for questioning them or discounting their force. This chapter presents an example that illustrates how moral intuitions can remain compelling even when we reflect on information that leads us to question their objectivity. The philosophical and psychological literature contains a variety of accounts of moral intuitions. The chapter provides a novel descriptive picture of moral intuitions within an evolutionary framework that avoids the major pitfalls encountered by other accounts of intuition. It presents an overview of how moral intuitions are understood in the literature in psychology and philosophy. Human cognition is a complex phenomenon composed of numerous task-specific systems and sub-systems organized in a web of interactions that are largely unknown. The chapter argues that moral intuitions are composed of a challenged moral evaluation reinforced by a feeling of rightness (FOR).
