I've been binging on your lectures, professor. You have a lot of passion and depth, I really appreciate the scope that you touch upon in these courses. Was totally bamboozled to see one uploaded just 20 minutes ago! I hope I can afford to go to school again soon. You really inspire me.
My approach to listing the intuitive prima facie duties is to find a more general principle that includes all the exceptions and conditions possible without having to explicitly specify them. When I've come up with is this (in order of precedence and importance): 0. Defend yourself 1. Do not do unto others not relevantly different from you what you would not have them do unto you. 2. Do unto those you care about what they would have done to them. 3. Don't make your community (construed as largely as possible) worse off. 4. Try to make your community better off.
You mentioned a few moral rules held by the Ancient Egyptians that were contrary to those of our era. Did Ross say anything about any of these rules having inherent value? As I see it, the Egyptians can intuit laziness as a rule, whereas we can intuit the need to improve ourselves. Doesn't that make value arbitrary? The list of prima facie principles would be temporary, and would only apply to the group of people that created them. If our intuitions come about in an intellectual, or even a perceptual manner, wouldn't at least some of the rules have to have inherent value? If we're reasoning or perceiving these intuitions, either us or the Egyptians would have to be wrong, correct? Maybe that's stepping into a different conversation, but I'm curious to know if inherent value was something Ross addressed. Thank you so much for all of the uploads!
If we are talking about Plato's republic, then we'll find that Socrates (who is the protagonist) arrives at his principles by taking observations from daily life about which things/actions seem to work best in order to maintain a society and then he will reverse-infer the virtues of the people upholding those moral acts. (Example: A soldier who protects the city, but isn't unnecessarily cruel, will be brave (which is a virtue)). Good deeds are reflections of well-ordered souls. Souls are well-ordered only if they harbour good virtues such as bravery, honesty etc. But he'll also argue that environment is important in shaping good souls. (A soldier should be subjected to both, music and gymnastics. If he only experiences music, he'll become too soft. If he only experiences gymnastics, he will become too cruel. By experiencing both, he'll be balanced and brave.) Plato's claim is that philosophers know best how good virtues can get inferred into souls. If they ruled society, they would, by their sheer wisdom, create an order which would in turn create the best souls and by those means would reinforce the whole scheme until society is perfect. It seems quite far from moral intuitionism which presupposes we already know what is right and wrong. I don't know if I truly gave the text justice. If Wikipedia is a reliable source, the book, which is a groundwork of virtue ethics, has it all, from communism to fascism, from deontology to teleology, and even some psychology. Only intuitionism seems to lack, quite substantially even so. EDIT: I only read a quarter of the book (maybe more).
I think so, sort of. In reading the Nichomachean Ethics (which I haven't finished I'll be honest, although it's not my fault I got a concussion), you'll quickly notice that although Aristotle does some abstract reasoning to arrive at the fact that humans have an ultimate end and what properties an end has to have to work as an ultimate end, he mostly goes about figuring out what that ultimate end is and what kind of lifestyle optimizes for it by observing the world around him and thinking intuitively about how people work. Likewise, when he comes up with the list of virtues, he does it by observing others and thinking about himself and the things he thinks are good and useful about people. On top of that, there's the Golden Mean, which doesn't have an objective conclusion for every single virtue, but instead varies on context and situation and person, and must be learned through wisdom gained by experience of intuition and intuitive rating of outcomes. So yeah, it seems like it is.
