What, if anything, can justify relying on intuitions as evidence in moral and political philosophy?

On a common view of the methodology of normative moral and political theory, these disciplines rely on intuitions as evidence for constructing and testing theories. Why think intuitions, a specific type of mental phenomenon, give access to the subject matter of these disciplines? Why think that we can learn about the normative (whatever this is) through our intuitions? Conspicuously, methodological and introductory texts that present and advocate this view (e.g. the relevant chapters in Leopold and Stears 2008; Blau 2017) may address some familiar objections to intuitions, but have little positive to say about why this method actually does what it is supposed to in the first place. In this paper, I examine the justifications for using intuitions as evidence in normative theory that I find or can reconstruct from the contemporary literature on intuition-driven methodology in moral and political philosophy. Specifically, I identify and examine the following eight rationales: 1) default reliability; 2) no other relevant source of normative evidence; 3) a capacity for moral judgements; 4) the analogy to perceptions; 5) coherentist justification; 6) systematization of our normative commitments; 7) third-factor evolutionary explanations and 8) the only alternative to scepticism. I argue that most of these either fail outright, or fail to justify relying on intuitions specifically, rather than just any source of propositional content that may be available. The few that do not clearly fail in one of these two ways (6, 7 and 8) either provide very weak rationales in favour of intuitions (8), or rely on strong assumptions that will not be widely shared (6 and 7). Moreover, if one relies on 6) or 7) to rescue intuitions, one should recognize that this will have revisionary implications for how intuitions are used in normative reasoning. I argue that this has three implications. First, there can be no business as usual for intuition-driven normative moral and political philosophy. The practice must be abandoned, or revised. Second, if this is all there is to be said for using intuitions in normative theory, this practice either requires quite specific and strong assumptions, or rests on very weak foundations. Introductory and methodological texts should make this clearer. Third, this may not be all that can be said for intuitions in normative theory: the argument so frequently overlaps with discussions in metaethics that I argue that its main upshot is that the methodology of moral and political philosophy needs to take a metaethical turn. It is extremely plausible that what the normative is matters for how we can have access to it. The good news is that this holds out the promise of placing the methodology of moral and political theory on firmer ground. It also means that intuitions may or may not have a role to play in normative theory, depending on the metaethical position one adopts.