1) The main way non-utilitarians avoid their theories having unintuitive implications is by refusing to put forward a theory in the first place. They are all moral particularists, and for vast ranges of cases, they have no idea what they think.
It is possible to formulate some deontological principles more explicitly, but I challenge anyone to do so in a way that doesn't have even more counter-intuitive implications than utilitarianism. For example, you can add penalties for doing harm vs. allowing harm, and extra weight on the welfare of people that are "close" to you. I think these will lead to their own very counterintuitive implications. Edit: I leave it to another day to try to back up that assertion.
2) Reflective equilibrium is a pretty vague term. Ideally, it can be made precise using ideas from formal epistemology. But how exactly that would work is a very hard and deep question. Some smart people like Richard Pettigrew work on formal epistemology, but it's still niche. Hopefully machine learning can help eventually.
Ultimately, our posterior beliefs may end up placing *partial* credence on multiple propositions that are mutually inconsistent. However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't go through the exercise of formulating theories and seeing what they imply, so that we can see which sets of mutually consistent propositions have the highest joint plausibility in some sense. I think moral anti-theorists like Amia Srinivasan have missed this point.
> I argue that, given evidence of the factors that tend to distort our intuitions, ethical intuitionists should disown a wide range of common moral intuitions, and that they should typically give preference to abstract, formal intuitions over more substantive ethical intuitions. In place of the common sense morality with which intuitionism has traditionally allied, the suggested approach may lead to a highly revisionary normative ethics.
[Admittedly only skimmed your article.]
Two points:
1) The main way non-utilitarians avoid their theories having unintuitive implications is by refusing to put forward a theory in the first place. They are all moral particularists, and for vast ranges of cases, they have no idea what they think.
It is possible to formulate some deontological principles more explicitly, but I challenge anyone to do so in a way that doesn't have even more counter-intuitive implications than utilitarianism. For example, you can add penalties for doing harm vs. allowing harm, and extra weight on the welfare of people that are "close" to you. I think these will lead to their own very counterintuitive implications. Edit: I leave it to another day to try to back up that assertion.
2) Reflective equilibrium is a pretty vague term. Ideally, it can be made precise using ideas from formal epistemology. But how exactly that would work is a very hard and deep question. Some smart people like Richard Pettigrew work on formal epistemology, but it's still niche. Hopefully machine learning can help eventually.
Ultimately, our posterior beliefs may end up placing *partial* credence on multiple propositions that are mutually inconsistent. However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't go through the exercise of formulating theories and seeing what they imply, so that we can see which sets of mutually consistent propositions have the highest joint plausibility in some sense. I think moral anti-theorists like Amia Srinivasan have missed this point.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/intuition-theory-and-anti-theory-in-ethics-9780198713227
This article by Michael Huemer may interest you.
> I argue that, given evidence of the factors that tend to distort our intuitions, ethical intuitionists should disown a wide range of common moral intuitions, and that they should typically give preference to abstract, formal intuitions over more substantive ethical intuitions. In place of the common sense morality with which intuitionism has traditionally allied, the suggested approach may lead to a highly revisionary normative ethics.
https://philarchive.org/rec/HUERI
I've read this but thanks so much anyways!