You are only allowed to treat the content of your intuition as evidence if the intuition stays after you have exposed it to cognitive psychotherapy; in some cases you have to reject it even if it does indeed stay.
It is of note that even if utilitarianism has proved to be superior to deontology and the libertarian moral rights theory in the area of killing, we are not allowed to say that it has been finally vindicated; it has to face other challenges in other areas, in particular in situations of distributive justice.
Global governance need not take a democratic form.
It is obvious, I think, that national democracy withers. This has to do with globalisation.
My conjecture is that most people will refuse to let go, even when their lives have become boring (at least in comparisons with possible lives lived by new generations). If this happens, there will eventually be no room for new generations. A kind of collective irrationality will lead to a bleak life for the last generation that decides to stay around. Unless we put and end to the human race (through global warming, for example), before this happens, individual egoism will block the path to a better world.
Being a moral realist I see normative ethics as a search of the truth about our obligations and a search of explanation; the idea is that moral principles can help us to a moral explanation of our particular obligations.
I am now a decided non-naturalist realist. And today we may even speak of a trend towards non-naturalist moral realism.
It is of note that for a long time moral nihilism was a kind of unquestioned default position in analytic moral philosophy.
I wanted to know what it means to know something, whether we can know at all, and, if so, how.
I was conscripted to military service, and my gut feeling was to refuse to serve. I did not want to kill other people. This seemed to me wrong, if not in principle, so at least in practice.
The kind of values for which I was supposed to kill, such as democracy and national independence, were better served, I thought, through non-violent action.
How could it be that I had a legal obligation to kill people I did not know, and who did certainly not consent to it, while my father's doctor could not help my father to die when my farther asked for it? My consternation brought me to moral philosophy and a life-long search for an answer to the question when and why we should, and when we shouldn't, kill.
Actually, I defend the right to free abortion.
I am indeed a moral realist.
I believe that one basic question, what we ought to do, period (the moral question), is a genuine one. There exists a true answer to it, which is independent of our thought and conceptualisation.
It is true (independently of our conceptualisation) that it is wrong to inflict pain on a sentient creature for no reason (she doesn't deserve it, I haven't promised to do it, it is not helpful to this creature or to anyone else if I do it, and so forth). But if this is a truth, existing independently of our conceptualisation, then at least one moral fact (this one) exists and moral realism is true. We have to accept this, I submit, unless we can find strong reasons to think otherwise.
Moral nihilism comes with a price we can now see.
We should not accept moral nihilism unless we find strong arguments to do so.
Are there any good arguments in defence of moral nihilism? I think not.
The possibility to go on indefinitely with our lives may become a reality and it will present us with a temptation.
There comes a time where next to everyone will resort to techniques that enhance cognitive, mental including emotive, physical, and other capacities. When this has happened, if not before, the ban on doping in sport will have been lifted.
I want to think that there are better ways of obviating murder than to resort to capital punishment, but I realise that this may be wishful thinking on my part.
People in different cultures think very differently about abortion. Abortion is not seen as a moral problem for example in Sweden or Russia, but it is seen as a difficult moral problem in China and in the USA.
The best explanation why people agree is that they have converged on true answers.
Even where people in different cultures agree they may all have gone wrong.
