Intuitionism

Ethical intuitionism (or intuitionalism, also known as moral intuitionism) is the doctrine that ethical beliefs can be justified noninferentially through intuition. It designates those philosophical systems that consider intuition as our fundamental moral basis.

Intuition is both a psychological and a philosophical construct signifying knowledge or perceiving something without deductive or inductive reasoning. The knowledge or perception results from an amalgamation of cognition, affect, common sense, and ethical sense, all used to formulate moral rules for ethical decision making.

Moral intuition is characterized by some moral philosophers as a kind of apprehension of moral truth akin to mathematical knowledge, in which certain self-evident axioms are understood by mathematical intuition. For instance, one is justified in believing the proposition “Parallel lines never meet” by reflecting on and adequately ...