Intuitionism, Old and New

Robert Audi (University of Notre Dame, Australian Catholic University)

This seminar (which will largely derive from *The Good in the Right*) will initially revisit W. D. Ross's *The Right and the Good*. I view Ross as easily one of the two most important intuitionists of the twentieth century, especially if comprehensiveness is taken into account. In normative ethics, for instance, he provided a more detailed account than G. E. Moore. There, and in moral epistemology, Ross was likely even more influential than Moore, though Moore had more influence in moral ontology. Ross is also more representative of ethical intuitionism as developed by Henry Sidgwick and earlier moral philosophers. Since the 1990s a new intuitionism has emerged. Compared with Ross's position, it is epistemologically both more moderate and more sophisticated, more accommodating to the role of emotion in moral thinking, more amenable to integration with other moral theories, more nuanced in its theory of value, and less inimical to philosophical naturalism. This seminar will briefly sketch some essentials of Ross's intuitionism; it will also address the developments made in intuitionist thinking since then; and, in that light, it will outline an integration between Rossian intuitionism and the elements in Kantian ethics that can be derived from an interpretation (not necessarily Kant's) of his famous Humanity Formulation of the Categorical Imperative.