, que quizás incluyo en algún futuro pedido (está disponible online el capítulo 5, Moral Knowledge). Esboza así su aproximación a la ética:
Sensible moral reasoning begins with concrete, specific cases. For example: It would be wrong for me to walk over to Robin right now and punch him. From there, we can start to generalize. It would probably be wrong for me to walk over and punch any of the people in this room. At the same time, we can note exceptions. If Robin had consented to box me, then punching him would be OK. In fact, it would probably be wrong not to try to punch him, because I'd be cheating you, the audience.
La aproximación intuitiva de Caplan conduce, en su caso, a conclusiones liberales, fundamentalmente anarco-capitalistas. ¿No es paradójico que las intuiciones éticas le lleven a rechazar, con frecuencia, la ética convencional de la gente? En opinión de Caplan, tienes que mostrar que determinadas concepciones éticas plausibles entran en conflicto con otras concepciones, aún más plausibles.
Un ejemplo:
Empirically (...) standard tests of race and gender discrimination find little evidence that discrimination reduces wages. Either employers don't have much bargaining power, or they rarely bother to use it for discriminatory ends.
In any case, even if one side has lots more bargaining power than the other, it is counter-intuitive to claim that a coercive response is justified. Suppose A and B be are dating. A has an equally good outside option. B can't bear to live without A. A therefore has some bargaining power - vastly more than most employers, in fact. Yet almost everyone thinks it would be wrong to force A to stay with B.
En conclusión:
Intuitionism is better than the competition at handling disagreement. How so? Unlike most other moral theories, intuitionism doesn't pretend to derive ordinary ethical judgments from some Overarching Indisputable Principle. So when intuitionists disagree about X, they usually try to argue about X, instead of searching for flaws in an obscurantist seventeen-step "proof" that X is wrong. So while I'm not confident that I can change Justin's mind about employment discrimination, I do think that my chance is a lot better than it would be if we shared some other meta-ethics.
