Abstract

Is the epistemology of moral intuitions compatible with admitting a role for emotion? I argue in this paper that moral intuitions and emotions can be partners without creating an epistemic threat. I start off by offering some empirical findings to weaken Singer’s (and Greene’s and Haidt’s) debunking argument against moral intuition, which treat emotions as a distorting factor. In the second part of the paper, I argue that the standard contrast between intuition and emotion is a mistake. Moral intuitions and emotions are not contestants if we construe moral intuition as non-doxastic intellectual seeming and emotion as a non-doxastic perceptual-like state. This will show that emotions support, rather than distort, the epistemic standing of moral intuitions.