Moral intuitions are evolutionary bugs, not features we should trust
🏆 @hannahlind Wins!
The initial argument won the vote
6 total votes
Initial Argument
Moral intuitions are evolutionary bugs, not features we should trust
Our moral intuitions evolved for small-scale hunter-gatherer societies and systematically mislead us in modern contexts. Research shows people consistently make irrational moral judgments based on irrelevant factors like physical disgust, in-group loyalty, and temporal proximity. The trolley problem experiments demonstrate how arbitrary contextual details override consistent ethical reasoning. We condemn distant factory farming while eating meat, support harsh punishment for statistical crimes while ignoring systemic issues, and prioritize identifiable victims over statistical lives - even when the numbers clearly favor helping more people anonymously. Behavioral studies reveal that moral decision-making follows the same biased patterns as financial choices: we're loss-averse about moral 'purity,' we discount future moral consequences hyperbolically, and we're influenced by framing effects that have nothing to do with actual outcomes. Just as we've learned to use systematic approaches in medicine and engineering rather than trusting gut instincts, we should rely on consequentialist frameworks and empirical evidence for moral decisions. Effective altruism demonstrates how data-driven approaches can allocate resources to save more lives than intuition-based charity.
Counter-Argument
Intuitions contain wisdom that pure logic misses
While acknowledging that moral intuitions can mislead us, this argument overestimates the reliability of purely rational frameworks. Our evolved moral instincts often encode hard-won wisdom about human cooperation, trust, and social stability that consequentialist calculations miss. The trolley problem variations don't just reveal bias - they highlight legitimate moral distinctions between intended and unintended consequences that pure utilitarian math erases. Moreover, the comparison to medicine and engineering is flawed. Unlike physical systems, moral decisions operate in complex social contexts where community values, cultural meaning, and relational dynamics matter enormously. Effective altruism's focus on measurable outcomes, while valuable, risks reducing human flourishing to narrow metrics. A measured approach combines rational analysis with intuitive wisdom, recognizing that our moral instincts - refined through democratic deliberation and cultural learning - often capture important truths about human dignity and social cohesion that spreadsheet ethics cannot.