The Status of Normative Intuitions

Abstract Part III of the book is devoted to epistemological issues. If there are objective normative truths, then how could we ever know them? How could we even have any rational or justified beliefs in normative propositions? This chapter argues that the idea that the ‘intentional is normative’ supports a new solution to these epistemological problems: it allows us to give a new account of where a thinker's so-called ‘normative intuitions’ come from, and why (and under what conditions) it is rational for the thinker to trust them. It is argued that this account is preferable both to the rival versions of intuitionism about normative beliefs, and to those epistemological accounts that are incompatible with intuitionism.