3/ Criticism of Intuitionism

The fragility of intuition as a mode of knowledge is widely remarked upon. Intuitionists claim to have a feeling that something holds value. Yet as Bouglé notes, what lies behind this feeling may, in fact, be mere fantasy ¹.

Sentiment can degrade into fancy or even caprice, as Bentham argued when he grouped all so-called sources of value (intuition, God, right reason, moral sense) under the labels of 'principle of sympathy or antipathy' or 'principle of caprice'. On these accounts, something is held to be right simply because its advocate asserts that it is. This is what he terms ipse-dixitism: the bare assertion that something is right is taken to suffice. Unfortunately, since everyone's whims conflict, ipse-dixitism inevitably produces cacophony ².
A particularly persuasive argument against intuitionism is that linguistic analysis reveals no real difference between 'intuitively knowing' that something exists and merely 'believing' that it does ³.

For my part, I believe intuitionism cannot solve the problem of values, since it offers only a method for finding an answer without providing the answer itself.

This admittedly obscure claim may be clarified as follows. Suppose we are asked an empirical question—'Does a dropped object fall to the ground?'—and we reply, 'We will determine this through visual observation'. We have not yet answered the question; we have merely indicated a means, technique, or method for doing so. The answer remains unknown until the observation is actually carried out.

Now suppose we ask: does morality have value? An intuitionist might claim to intuit that it has great value. What the intuitionist has in fact shown us is the method they used to discern what in morality makes it valuable: intuition, or immediate contact with the thing. We still need to understand the mysterious element that this supposed intuition has discovered in morality—the element that would endow it with value. In other words, almost everything remains unexplained. Someone who stops at this point resembles a person who, when asked 'How tall is your son?', simply replies, 'You need to measure him with a tape measure'. They have identified a method for answering the question but have not provided the answer itself. What we want is a concrete answer: 'He is five feet four inches'.

We may thank the intuitionist for identifying intuition as the method through which they discovered that thing X has value; but we must still ask: 'What exactly has your intuition revealed in thing X that makes it valuable?'

The intuitionist would likely respond: 'It is quality Y, found in X, that gives it value.'
This leads to two conclusions:

— Such an answer is equivalent to 'X has value because of Y', which shows that intuitionism, for all its claim to rest on immediate insight, actually operates through argumentative discourse and mediation. In other words, if intuitionism is to offer a genuine solution to the problem of values rather than merely pointing to a method, it must transform itself into a rational, reason-mediated discourse.

— This answer relies on the qualitative method (the attempt to establish a thing's value by identifying a quality within it), which we have already shown to be flawed, since it generates an infinite regress of having to prove the value of each successive quality.

We may therefore conclude that intuitionism provides only a method for approaching the problem of values, not an answer to it, and that this method is inadequate, amounting to nothing more than a restatement of the qualitative method.
This demonstrates that the epistemological question of axiology's method as a science is distinct from the axiological question of what has value: even if the latter were resolved, the former would remain entirely open.

Intuitionism is merely one of the many forms that axiological objectivism has adopted. It is time to turn our attention to another: formal axiology.

1. The Evolution of Values: Studies in Sociology with Special Applications to Teaching, ch. 1
2. Dictionnaire d'éthique et de philosophie morale, "Bentham" article
3. Ibid., "Hare" article