ABSTRACT
Rational intuitionism is the philosophical position that results from taking ethical perception's analogy seriously. Rational intuitionism has insisted on the irreducibility of ethics: whether advanced in ancient Greece by Plato in reaction to the sophists' identification of value with pleasure and interest, or in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in response to the theological voluntarism of Jean Calvin or the secular voluntarism of Thomas Hobbes. It has also insisted on the irreducibility of ethics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by philosophers such as G. E. Moore in reply to attempts to reduce ethics to evolutionary biology, psychology, or economics. For the intuitionists, ethical convictions are made true or false by how they correspond to an objective order of ethical facts. Rational intuitionists are also struck by the apparent necessity of ethical truths, an aspect that marks an important contrast with truths concerning how things (happen to) stand in nature.
