Transcendental Argument and the Underpinnings of Moral Discourse

Abstract

Intuitionist ethics has seemed to some philosophers to be dogmatic. This is particularly so insofar as it claims self-evidence as a status of its major normative principles. After all, one might think, there should be no questioning of what is self-evident, and one should be able to state it, if not categorically, then with no need for explanation to anyone who understands it. I have long opposed this stereotype of the self-evident and, correspondingly, of intuitionism, as dogmatic. But particularly because such major twentieth-century intuitionists as G. E. Moore and W. D. Ross considered the self-evident neither in need of proof nor provable, these stereotypes have proved to be quite resilient.