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This paper has benefited from discussion with more philosophers than I can list here, but for comments on earlier versions I would particularly like to thank Alex Arnold, Paul Audi, Sven Bernecker, Isaac Choi, David Kaspar, Heather Logue, Artur Szutta, Mark Timmons, and anonymous referees who provided comments on the anonymized, semi-penultimate version.
Intuition is a mainstay of intellectual life. It triggers inquiry, guides thought, and undergirds judgment. Its focus may be as wide as a richly detailed narrative or as narrow as a single claim. It may be spontaneous or studied, vivid or faint, steadfast or fleeting. It may reflect confidence or hesitation, a wealth of evidence, or a mere glimmer of plausibility. But it does not rest on premises. Its basis is different. Intuition may lead thought in countless directions. Intellectual life without intuition would be impoverished, much as physical existence without perception would be barren. Intuition is a resource in all of philosophy, but perhaps nowhere more than in ethics. If its role in ethics is not essentially different from its role elsewhere in philosophy, moral thinking depends on it in ways that hold great interest in themselves and also provide a pathway to understanding philosophical reflection. Intuition figures centrally in much moral philosophy but most prominently in major ethical intuitionists such as Henry Sidgwick, G. E. Moore, and W. D. Ross. All three have been closely studied, but neither intuitionism in ethics nor intuition as a philosophical resource have so far received the kind of integrated treatment to be given here.
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The Revival of W. D. Ross
It may seem hyperbolic to speak of a revival of Ross, but although he was not forgotten by leading twentieth-century moral philosophers writing after he published The Right and the Good (1930), until the 1990s most of them considered him minor. This is partly because he wrote under the shadow of Moore,1but a more important element was the influence of philosophical naturalism. That worldview took many forms, but in ethical theory two main strands were influential for much of the past century. One was reductivist, the other eliminativist. A controlling naturalistic idea was that natural properties are the only properties we should countenance. Mill's utilitarianism could be conceived as meeting...