Types of Intuition
Thomas Nagel,
London Review of Books,
May 28, 2021
People interested in ethics and artificial intelligence would do well to read this offering from Thomas Nagel, one of today's most important philosophers. In it, he questions the basis for arguing in favour of a particular moral stance based on intuition or gut feeling. It's true that we may have very strong feelings about the rightness or wrongness of an act, but after thousands of years of debate, these feelings haven't decided any of the core debates in ethics, for example, the divide between deontic and consequentialist approaches. He asks, ultimately, whether "we should come to view our attachment to rights and deontology as an unnecessarily cluttered moral outlook." Maybe. But, he says, "I believe something would be lost.
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