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I'll just leave the comment I left on the philosophyetc blog.

Hi, Matthew here. I largely agree with your assessment of the debate. Huemer's intuitions strike me as similar to those who reject transitivity (Huemer accepts transitivity, for the record) because it requires they accept the repugnant conclusion, things about the utility monster, dust specks being worse than torture, Scanlon's counterexample about Jones being tortured, and lots of others. It feels like the intuitions appealed to are pretty shallow and stem from biases and heuristics.

Given that our intuitions are often wrong about moral issues--shown by the immense disagreement and the history of moral errors, we'd expect the correct view to diverge from our intuitions sometimes. However, it seems more surprising that the correct views would relate to deeper more fundamental logical principles, like transitivity, the notion that if a perfect being would hope for you to do x you should do x, avoidance of status quo bias, etc.

The rules of economics similarly are somewhat unintuitive. However, we should of course still accept them.

Of course, from Huemer's perspective it no doubt seems like we're hedging too much in the opposite direction, much like average utilitarians who are willing to bite the bullet on crazy things relating to bringing miserable people into existence as long as most existing people are marginally more miserable. When such disputes arise, there are a ways to try to try to settle it.

1) Look at the judgments of most people who have considered the issue. If 99% of people agreed with Huemer here after considering the issues in depth, that would give us some reason to defer to Huemer (and to the majority).

2) Look at which can be better combined into a coherent web. To the extent that we're disputing whether or not we should privilege the intuition about organ harvesting or the intuition about it being good to bring about states of affairs if a perfect being would hope for them to be brought about, analyzing which one better forms a coherent moral system seems to be good test. If one off judgments don't cohere, we shouldn't trust them as much.

3) We can analyze the issues more in depth. I think that after reflecting and seeing the strange things that have to be accepted by one who accepts the organ harvesting case, the balance of intuitions favor rejecting that intuition. Examples of such intuitions include

A) Sometimes, making perfectly moral beings in charge of deciding whether or not events occur makes the world worse.

B) Perfect beings should sometimes hope for us to act wrongly.

C) Perhaps one should even hope that they themselves act wrongly.

Etc.

4) We can try to employ debunking accounts of the intuitions. On this front too, utilitarianism seems to do better. Utilitarianism has debunking accounts relating to evolution (the research of people like Greene), heuristics (generally it's bad to kill people), viciousness intuitions (generally organ harvesting killers are vicious so we have the intuitions that it's vicious even if we have the most reason to do it), and the fact that the world would be much worse if lots of people did it, so the act is good only if there's no risk of getting caught and it will affect a few people.

The deontological account doesn't have such debunkings. The closest that they have is "utilitarians have weird idiosynchratic intuitions." Perhaps this is true, however, this would be double counting the evidence described under point 1. Additionally, while it seems like utilitarianism is crazy, when confronted with all the weird implications of rejecting it, the utilitarianism becomes harder to reject. Finally, we don't have good data about what most people who have considered the paradoxes of deontology have thought about the matter.

We can also do more holistic comparisons based on theoretical virtues, plausiblility of axioms, and historical track record. These seem to overall favor utilitarianism.

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