Political Philosophy Without Intuitions?

Lately, several scholars have questioned the common view that philosophers treat intuitions as evidence. That is, they have argued that this commonly held view—Centrality—is mistaken. Some of these scholars have focused on the philosophical practice and more specifically the practice of contemplating cases, sometimes referred to as the method of case. For example, Herman Cappelen and Max Deutsch have argued that philosophers do not use cases to elicit intuitions treated as evidence. Instead, they claim, philosophers argue for their claims about cases. We may call this argument, following Jennifer Nado, the argument from argumentation. There has been some resistance to the argument from argumentation. It has been objected that what Cappelen and Deutsch suggest are arguments for claims about cases, are not arguments but instructions to help the reader come to have the intuition that the writer has or explanation of the claim. The reply to this objection has been that this is possible, but that this is not enough to prove Centrality and that proponents of Centrality need to muster positive evidence. We may call this the positive evidence challenge. This paper contributes to the current debate on whether philosophers appeal to intuitions as evidence by expanding on the current literature in two ways. First, by investigating cases from another genre of philosophy—i.e., political philosophy—than what has been the main focus so far. The cases examined in this paper are cases from the Dworkin and Cohen’s debate on expensive tastes. Second, this paper responds to the challenge of providing positive evidence in support for Centrality—a challenge posed by Cappelen. It aims to do so by developing a set of diagnostics that may help us determine whether intuitions are performing an evidentiary role. The diagnostics applied in this inquiry is a combination of looking for intuition-terminology and Abduction. Abduction entails that a principle is revised to accommodate a claim about a case, or that when there are several principles on the table, the one that accommodates the more case verdicts is considered the most plausible. This latter diagnostic, then, should help us distinguish whether philosophers offer arguments for claim verdicts or explain them (in the latter case the direction of justification is the opposite of the former). Applying these diagnostics, I argue that the evidence suggests that intuitions are treated as evidence in Dworkin and Cohen’s debate on expensive tastes. Moreover, I argue that the argument from argumentation cannot accurately capture Dworkin and Cohen discussion of the cases. The view that they offer principles as explanations of case verdicts, however, can.