Colloquium by Terence Cuneo on "How Intuition Produces Action"

Friday, 17th October, 17:00

JF 507

Terence Cuneo 

(Marsh Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy, University of Vermont, USA)

'How Intuition Produces Action’

Abstract 

This talk presents an intuitionist version of the Socratic Doctrine, expressed in the slogan “to know the good is to do the good.” Representing a challenge to the widespread assumption that only sentiments such as desires and emotions are intrinsically motivating, the view is designed to explain how moral judgments, conceived as realists and nonnaturalists recommend, can produce action—thereby answering an influential criticism of those theories. Our approach is inspired by an underappreciated aspect of what it’s like to be a practical agent: from the agent’s perspective, vivid presentations of what is practically significant often move one to act. How could this be? Our explanation specifies a type of intellectual state, practical intuition, whose contents include concepts with mastery conditions implicating a range of practical capacities. The occurrence of these intuitions in subjects who master those concepts leads them to perform morally valuable actions.