[tylerhou]

Professional philosophers understand that many arguments rely on intuition. But they need intuition to create basic premises. Otherwise, if you have no "axioms" in your system of logic, you cannot derive any sentences.

Also, moral philosophy deals with what is right and what is wrong. These are inherently fuzzy notions and they likely require some level of intuitive reasoning. ("It is clearly wrong to kill an innocent person.") I would be extremely surprised if someone could formally define what is right and wrong in a way that captures human intuition.

It's also not worth debating philosophy with people who will argue that $10 is not clearly worth less than a finger. (And if you don't believe that, then we can consider the case with two fingers, or three, or a whole hand, etc.).

[throwaway101223]

> It's also not worth debating philosophy with people who will argue that $10 is not clearly worth less than a finger.

Some of these arguments feel like the equivalent of spending billions to create a state of the art fighter plane and not realizing they forgot to put an engine inside of it.

It’s not $10 vs. “a finger,” it’s $10 vs. the finger of someone who goes about using their fingers to threaten people to give them money. If the difference isn’t immediately obvious, I think it’s time to step back from complex frameworks and take a look at failures with common intuition.

[tylerhou]

The point is, to a utilitarian, it’s a finger, because part of the setup is that the “mugger” won’t use their finger for bad things in the future.

Maybe not part of this specific dialogue, where the mugger repeatedly asks for rhetorical reasons. But in a case where there is only a single instance of a mugging, the assumption is that the mugger will only mug once.