Our Shared Moral Sensibility
We don’t need to agree on every moral judgment for there to be something shared in how we arrive at one.
When we call someone a good person, what do we expect another human being to understand? There is something shared in our intuitive sense of the good. Humans inherit a complex moral sensibility. We can recognize that shared human sensibility even if we disagree about whether goodness exists independently of us (the question of moral realism).
The same is true when we say someone was raised well. We may disagree about the person or about what their upbringing should have taught them. But the question itself is recognizable. We understand that there is something to judge.
And what we recognize is complex. Being good might involve kindness, honesty, courage, restraint, or loyalty. These qualities don’t always point in the same direction. You can be honest in a way that is cruel, or loyal in a way that excuses someone’s cruelty. Recognizing goodness involves some sense of how these things belong together, and when one has been carried too far.
This is what interests me about the moral intuitions we inherit. Their complexity doesn’t necessarily count against them. It may be part of what allows them to respond to the complexity of human life. We don’t need to agree on every judgment for there to be something shared in how we arrive at one.
Of course, saying that an intuition is inherited doesn’t establish that it is right. We can inherit prejudice as well as care. But that leaves a question: how do we recognize something in our inheritance as a prejudice worth overcoming? Perhaps we bring one part of our moral sensibility into conversation with another. Concern for someone we had excluded can make an old judgment harder to sustain.
Dialectic becomes a way of examining that complexity: putting an intuition into words, letting another person challenge it, and discovering whether we still recognize it as good once its consequences become clearer.