Are Intuitions Treated as Evidence? Cases from Political Philosophy*

It is a common view that philosophers treat intuitions as evidence for philosophical theories. Following Herman Cappelen, we may refer to this view as centrality.1 Advocates of centrality typically assume that claims about cases (henceforth, case verdicts) are treated as evidence for and against philosophical theories because of their intuitiveness. On the basis of their examination of prominent philosophers’ use of cases, however, critics of centrality, like Cappelen and Max Deutsch, claim that philosophers argue for case verdicts, and take that to suggest that advocates of centrality are mistaken in their assumption that the intuitiveness of the verdicts plays an epistemic role.2 I’ll refer to these critics as “intuition deniers.”3 The intuition deniers’ rejection of centrality has launched a considerable debate over the nature of the philosophical method and the role of intuitions in philosophical argument.

This article contributes to that debate by investigating cases from a genre of philosophy—political philosophy—that has not been the main focus so far. Within this branch (and within moral philosophy more generally), not only has it been claimed that intuitions are treated as evidence,4 but some claim that not doing so would leave the prospects of the discipline quite bleak.5 I respond to the challenge of providing positive evidence for centrality—a challenge posed by Cappelen6—by developing an analytical framework. This framework will also help develop a common response to the intuition deniers’ arguments: that they mistake abductive arguments—in which case verdicts function as premises that support a theoretical account—for arguments that support case verdicts.

I examine cases from two influential articles in which some of the first attempts to formulate different versions of luck egalitarianism were made: Ronald Dworkin’s “What Is Equality? Part 1” and Gerald A. Cohen’s “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice.”7 I argue that a close examination of these articles indicates that their authors do treat intuitions as evidence. Both Dworkin and Cohen treat case verdicts as starting points for abductive arguments and use intuition-terminology (“intuition,” “intuitively,” and cognate terms) to express or to refer to these verdicts. I argue that the conjunction of these two observations constitutes positive evidence that they treat intuitions as evidence.

Cohen and Dworkin are viewed as being among the most influential thinkers in the literature on justice, and their discussion of expensive tastes is viewed as one of the most important debates in 1980s and 1990s political philosophy. Many regard them as two of the principal luck egalitarian thinkers.8 Due to their influence and importance, examining these articles is interesting in and of itself. Moreover, I think the current inquiry is of general interest. If centrality is false, we would not expect to find that intuitions figure as central evidence in influential contributions. Moreover, the issue Dworkin and Cohen raise and discuss in the articles I examine—the role of responsibility—pertains to distributive ideals in general.9 Finally, I think that Dworkin’s and Cohen’s articles are representative of a common style of argument. Their arguments seem to share a structure with a large range of arguments in political philosophy more generally. Thus, the articles seem representative of common methods of argumentation in political philosophy.10

I proceed as follows. First, I provide some clarifying remarks on centrality and intuitions. Second, I provide a brief overview of the debate and present Cappelen’s challenge to provide positive evidence for centrality. Third, I develop an analytical framework in response to the challenge. Fourth, I apply the framework in an analysis of Dworkin’s and Cohen’s articles. Finally, I briefly consider some objections to the analysis and conclude.

Considering that centrality is an overly general claim to examine in a single article, I derive a narrower hypothesis from it, but first I will clarify how intuitions are understood in this study.

Based on examinations of philosophical practice, and the method of cases in particular, it has been argued that case verdicts are not supported by appeals to intuition.18 Instead, philosophers support such verdicts by arguing for them. Thus, the assumption is that a verdict being argued for is a good indication that the verdict’s intuitiveness is not treated as evidence for the verdict. I refer to this position as the “argument view.”

A common reply to the argument view is that the idea that arguments support verdicts is compatible with the intuitiveness of the verdicts being treated as evidence. For example, the arguments’ role could be to shore up the intuition.19 Another common response is that the intuition deniers fail to see that some of the arguments they identify are actually abductive arguments with intuitions as starting points.20 Thus, support goes in the opposite direction to what the intuition deniers assume: that is, from case verdict to theoretical account. I will refer to the second response as the “explanation view.”

One problem with the first response is that it only establishes the possibility that intuitions are treated as evidence. However, more than that is needed to defend centrality, according to the intuition deniers. If a philosopher invokes arguments in defense of a case verdict, they claim, the verdict is supported regardless of whether its intuitiveness is treated as evidence. Thus, one needs positive evidence that the verdict’s intuitiveness is doing any work.21 I will refer to this challenge as “the positive-evidence challenge.”

The second response also falls short of the positive-evidence challenge, according to the intuition deniers. At best, those who have defended the explanation view would have showed that a given argument can also be interpreted as abductive. In that case, one should assume that the support goes in both directions and, thus, that the case verdict does not carry any independent evidential weight. Moreover, case verdicts are not necessarily treated as starting points for such inferences because they are intuitive.22

As the discussion above demonstrated, friends of centrality need to confront the positive-evidence challenge to sustain their responses to the intuition deniers’ argument. It is useful to think of the positive-evidence challenge in terms of two hurdles. First, we need to demonstrate that case verdicts are treated as evidence. Second, we need to demonstrate that they are treated as evidence because they are intuitive.

In their articles, Dworkin and Cohen articulate accounts of the political ideal of equality—equality of resources (ER) and equal access to advantage (EAA), respectively—that are commonly labeled luck egalitarian. ER holds that resources should be distributed equally, whereas EAA holds that access to advantage should be distributed equally. These accounts are developed in response to a third account of equality, equality of welfare (EW), which holds that the proper currency of egalitarian theories is welfare. What Dworkin and Cohen find unsatisfactory about EW is that it does not take into account an agent’s responsibility. This is something they try to remedy when formulating their own theories. Their discussions of expensive tastes are critical to their argument and I will focus on them here.

I start by outlining Dworkin’s and Cohen’s discussion of expensive tastes, particularly the Louis case, in some detail, italicizing parts of the quotes that are important for the discussion to follow. This is necessary to provide the reader with the relevant passages for interpreting the arguments. I then illustrate the difficulty in determining whether case verdicts are argued for or treated as starting points for abductive arguments, which stress the need for the analytical framework I developed above. I then use that framework to analyze the articles and test my hypothesis.

In this section, I consider some objections to the diagnostics that I have applied—that is, abduction and intuition-terminology.

In this article, I have investigated a hypothesis derived from centrality: intuitions served as central evidence when Dworkin and Cohen first articulated and debated luck egalitarianism. To do this, I developed an analytical framework that overcomes the positive-evidence challenge. I have argued that if case verdicts are treated as starting points for abductive arguments, it suggests that they are treated as evidence. Therefore, the framework offers diagnostics for identifying whether case verdicts are so treated. Moreover, I have argued that if case verdicts treated as starting points for abductive arguments are referred to using intuition-terminology, that gives us reason to believe that the case verdicts are treated as evidence because they are intuitive. When examining Dworkin’s and Cohen’s discussion of expensive tastes, case verdicts are treated as starting points for abductive arguments and referred to using intuition-terminology.

One particularly important lesson from this study is that we need to examine how a philosopher treats the case verdicts she reaches and how these relate to the various theoretical accounts under consideration in order to properly assess whether that philosopher is arguing for a case verdict or arguing abductively. I think that insufficient attention has been paid to this point in previous studies.