Christine Clavien – A Novel Account of the Evolution of Moral Intuitions

Existing accounts of moral intuitions usually highlight that intuitions are quickly produced below the level of conscious inference. In this talk, I’ll further argue that there is one important identifying feature of moral intuitions: they come along with a “feeling of rightness”, that is, the conviction that one’s personal evaluation is right and should be universally held. With help of a series of examples, I’ll make you experience this feeling of rightness. I’ll then argue that this feeling is triggered when we are exposed to internal conflicting evaluations. On this basis, I’ll propose a mechanistic and evolutionary explanation of the feeling of rightness. In brief, the emergence of human reasoning capacities created a need for the co-evolution of a psychological system (the feeling of rightness system) triggered when we experience conflicting evaluations. The biological function of this system is to render evaluations resulting from rational deliberation less compelling than the evaluations produced by simple evolved systems. It thus facilitates optimal decision-making, preventing excessive interference by rational deliberation. This account sheds light on why moral intuitions are so frequently experienced and why they are so compelling and resistant to rational arguments.