4.3 Social Intuitionists Reason, in Conversation

How easy it is to see your brother's faults, how hard to face your own. You winnow his in the wind like chaff, but yours you hide, like a cheat covering up an unlucky throw —Buddha Sages have long noted how difficult it is for people to find flaws in themselves or in their own ideas. We need others to do the hard work of critique because most of us find it far easier to see the " speck " in our neighbor's eye than the " plank " in our own (Mathew, 7:4–5). This psychological Great Truth is consistent with the social intuitionist model's (SIM's) claim that people rarely engage in good, unbiased, balanced moral reasoning on their own, but in conversation, where people can point out each other's flaws and give each other reasons, good reasoning often emerges from the dyad. This psychological Great Truth is also a superb justification for a volume such as this one, where a debate between authors and commentators can help the participants to see faults they could not find for themselves. Debates can often descend into warfare when each side uses its rhetorical powers only to craft defenses of its positions and attacks on all others. But when a debate begins with a mutual appreciation of the partners' virtues, and when criticisms are offered constructively and with nuance and moderation, the debate becomes spirited conversation , which is one of the joys of academic life. We are therefore quite fortunate that the editors have found for us two such spirited conversation partners. Narvaez and Jacobson both begin their commentaries by granting that volume) is largely correct in its two most basic descriptive claims: (1) moral judgments are influenced by intuitive processes to a greater degree than most previous theories acknowledged, and (2) moral judgment is a social