Q&A: Intuition — Following Your Book ‘Truth and Unstable’
Intuition — Following Your Book ‘Truth and Unstable’
Question
Have a good week. Thank God, this Sabbath I finished the book Truth and Unstable, an excellent book that really gives a good overview of fundamentalism, postmodernism, and the like.
After you survey postmodernism and fundamentalism, and show that truth is not equivalent to certainty, you write that there is a third possibility: using intuition in order to arrive at truth.
The problem here is intuition regarding values.
When you write that all human beings have the intuition that the sun will rise tomorrow, I can accept that. But when it comes to values, the matter is different. I think that if you go more deeply into “value intuition,” it is made up of education, culture, and society, and therefore it does not reflect the truth!
In the fascist countries of the middle of the twentieth century, dying for the chancellor or the emperor was considered a supreme value, and according to Japanese “intuition” the emperor had a status of holiness. By contrast, in Western countries values of equality and liberty were considered supreme values, and skepticism had high status. And both, at the same time, would claim that they were acting according to intuition that leads to truth.
From this, if we reach the conclusion that values and value intuition are directly influenced by culture and education, then we are back to the idea that no value is more correct than another—because “everyone has his own intuition”—and thus we return once again to postmodernism and the absence of truth.
I would be happy if you could answer this for me, and correct me if I misunderstood intuition in the book.
Have a good week!
Answer
In my opinion, value relativism is not quite as extreme as you wrote. Everyone agrees that it is forbidden to murder, steal, and harm others, and that helping others has value. Beyond that, fascist outlooks do sometimes arise, but after a short time they fade away.
I have no way to persuade a skeptic that there is moral truth. My claim is that if your feeling is that there is moral truth (that is, if you feel that someone who thinks differently from you is mistaken and acts wrongly), then there is no necessity to abandon that feeling (as some people argue).
Discussion on Answer
Just as the soft rules of inference themselves are also based on fundamental principles, so too in the ethical realm. Values are the fundamental principles, and the logical and softer arguments rely on them and derive conclusions from them. The difference between the fields is not in the rules of derivation but in the source of the axioms: in the factual realm these are observations or assumptions about the world (such as the principle of causality), and in the ethical realm these are moral insights (which are also a kind of observation, as I explain in the book and in the third part of the fourth notebook here on the site).
Hello Rabbi Michael,
From my reading of the book Truth and Unstable, a very similar question came to mind: regarding factual claims, you presented a systematic way to critique intuition—the “soft” rules of inference and the refutations of them. I did not really understand what methods of critique exist for moral claims. I would be happy if you could clarify the issue.
Thank you very much.