Ethics and Values / Unit 4 Ethics 177 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Second Defense: Revise Common Sense
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The idea
The second utilitarian defense accepts the revisionary verdicts: where settled intuition and the sums conflict, intuition may be inherited prejudice, not proof.
In practice
Settled intuition once defended slavery and denied women the vote. A theory that shocks common sense, the defense says, is sometimes correcting it.
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