Sterling on Conscience and Moral Intuition: The Primary-Source Record v1.1
Sterling on Conscience and Moral Intuition: The Primary-Source Record v1.1
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
The Source
Between 29 September and 20 October 2014, the International Stoic Forum ran a fifty-eight-message thread under the subject line “A Dissertation upon the Nature of Virtue,” opened with a link to Joseph Butler’s dissertation of that title. Sterling posted three times: 6 October (Yahoo message 36137), 10 October (36146), and 14 October (36167). The three posts form one continuous argument, driven forward by objections from Steve Marquis and one question from a participant posting as Richard.
The record below reproduces the substance of each post in sequence, with the surrounding dialectic identified. All three were retrieved in full from the Gmail archive of the forum.
I. 6 October 2014 — The Definition of the Good
Marquis had asked whether the good can be defined at all, invoking Robert Pirsig’s Quality as a cautionary case: a good knowable only by intuition, indefinable in language or logic, and therefore — as Marquis put it — leaving one person’s beliefs as sound as anyone else’s, with nothing open to examination by shared evidence or reason.
Sterling’s reply separates three requests that the question conflates: a definition of “good”; a list of the things that are good; and a formula or method for determining of each thing whether it is good.
On the first, he reports the Stoic definition as roughly that which contributes to eudaimonia, and adds the claim that carries the philosophical weight:
They think that this account of “good” is accepted by all major philosophical movements. So, on their view, when the Epicurean says that pleasure is good and the Stoic denies it, they are talking about the same thing (“Good” and “pleasure”) and so their statements are directly contradictory. If the Epicurean meant something different by “good”, then there would be no disagreement between them.
On the second, since virtue is necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia, only virtuous actions are good — and Sterling marks this explicitly as a statement of fact rather than of definition, with the consequence that the dispute with the Epicureans is a strictly factual matter.
On the third, his answer is that trivially there is such a formula and practically there is not. One sorts everything into acts of virtue and everything else; the difficulty is that no procedure tells you which actions belong in the first bin. Here he invokes Aristotle on the different precision available in ethics and in mathematics, and offers the generalship analogy: a great general obeys strategic principles but follows no rule of the form “always attack the enemy’s left flank.” Grant abandoned his supply line at Vicksburg and fought to reopen it at Chattanooga; in each case he would agree that other things equal one preserves a supply line, and in each case he could say why the rule gave way or did not.
A great general is able to see why a rule that is sometimes very strong is in this particular case not as weighty.
The same holds for virtue. One pursues preferred indifferents in most cases, but situations arise where the right thing is to kill or to inflict pain, and no flow chart survives ten billion situations with differing details. So the Stoics do not attempt one. They describe the virtues, identify the role-duties, and mark which things are preferred and dispreferred.
This does not make virtue indescribable. The virtuous action is the one reason identifies as best, all things considered, and the virtuous person can say why, in this situation, it was right to do x. Sterling closes with the specification:
Virtuous action requires that one have the correct ends (especially that one doesn’t confuse the objects of one’s desires with “good” things) and takes the correct means to those ends. Most clever-but-not-wise people are the people who are good at the latter but not the former. They take rational means to their ends, but have false views about what ends are objectively correct.
Corpus Note — Dave Kelly
Three things in this post are load-bearing. First, the shared-definition claim is what makes moral disagreement genuine disagreement rather than equivocation; without it, the Stoic and the Epicurean are describing different subjects and neither refutes the other. This is the Correspondence Theory commitment operating at the level of the terms themselves. Second, marking “only virtue is good” as fact rather than definition is Moral Realism stated in a single sentence. Third, the denial of a decision procedure is not a concession to indeterminacy: the rejected item is the algorithm, not the objectivity. Reason identifies the best action; what it does not do is identify it by formula.
II. 10 October 2014 — The Distinction Sterling Says He Must Always Draw
The most substantial of the three posts, and the single most direct archival statement of the intuitionist and foundationalist commitments in the record. Sterling divides it into two parts.
A. He agrees with Butler that in at least 99.9% of decisions we know exactly what we ought to do, and reports that in almost every case where someone has described a moral dilemma, he has found a person who knows what to do, very much wants to do something else, and is trying to rationalize a solution.
He then draws a consequence about the Stoic texts themselves:
As I have pointed out many times, the Stoics virtually never attempt to lay out how a virtuous person would reason their way to a solution of a moral problem. Many moral philosophers spend a large portion of their work laying out such decision procedures...but it is not to be found in the Stoics.
The absence has two roots: we know what to do 99.9% of the time, and the rare cases requiring thought are each a unique combination of factors admitting no general advice. What the Stoics concentrate on instead is the elimination of the passions that lead us astray, after which we will see what to do.
B. The second part opens with the distinction:
Every time the issue of “intuition” and moral knowledge comes us, I feel the need to make a crucial distinction. We must distinguish between intuition about fundamental moral principles and intuition about what to do in particular situations.
On the first kind, he holds that intuition about fundamental moral principles is a necessary part of any coherent moral philosophy, and notes his own minority position — adding, characteristically, that he is in the minority on most things in philosophy, including his belief in Stoicism. The only verification available for an intuition of this sort is to consult the apparent intuitions of others, with particular attention to cross-cultural and cross-generational similarity.
The reason no other verification is available is the regress, which he states in full. If I assert A and offer B and C as reasons, this makes sense only if B and C are more basic or more obvious than A — one cannot offer as proof propositions more doubtful than the thing to be proved. Ask why B, and the same constraint applies to D and E. Therefore:
At some point, as a matter of logic, we must arrive at some propositions which are so basic or so certain that no other propositions can be offered as evidence for believing them.
Then the inversion that gives the post its force:
This doesn’t mean that these propositions are somehow “less well grounded”--quite the opposite! All other propositions in this field, since they rely on these foundational principles, are less well grounded. The fact that I have evidence for proposition A doesn’t mean that I have more justification for believing it than I have for the propositions which are the evidence.
The most fundamental principles in any subject — ethics, logic, or another — must therefore be known without further evidence: self-evident, or intuitive. His example is that health is a preferred indifferent, which he takes to be self-evident, and for or against which he cannot imagine what evidence would even be brought, apart from indirect evidence about who else finds it self-evident.
On the second kind, intuitions about particular cases are different. They are generally reliable but subject to rational appraisal. When a friend needs help moving boxes, it seems obvious that one ought to help — and here an argument can be constructed, either from preferred indifferents (one ought ceteris paribus to maximize them; pain is dispreferred; one person moving heavy boxes suffers more than two) or from role-duties (one has a role-duty to help one’s friends). He grants that in some cases arguments will show that a person is merely mimicking his cultural upbringing and that no duty exists at all.
His policy on such intuitions:
I treat it is “innocent until proven guilty”--I trust the intuition unless I am given reasons for doubting it, but I acknowledge that it is possible in principle to give such reasons.
Indeed, he holds, an argument can always in principle be given to defend any true intuition about a particular case. Fundamental moral principles are a different kettle of fish: the only arguments ever available for those are indirect.
Corpus Note — Dave Kelly
This post is the primary-source anchor for two commitments at once. The regress argument and its inversion are Foundationalism in Sterling’s own words and under his own hand, dated. The account of self-evidence, the health example, and the innocent-until-proven-guilty policy are Ethical Intuitionism, likewise.
Two features deserve marking. First, the two-tier structure means intuitionism in this system is not a licence for unexamined conviction: particular-case intuitions are defeasible and always in principle defensible by argument, and only the foundational tier is beyond direct proof. Second, the inversion — foundational propositions are better grounded than what rests on them, not worse — is what distinguishes Sterling’s foundationalism from the caricature of foundationalism as an evasion, which is precisely the charge Marquis brings nine days later.
III. 14 October 2014 — Conscience Against Culture
The occasion is a question from Richard, who had quoted Marquis’s claim that Butler is describing accepted traditional notions of right and wrong — cultural norms assumed to be objective — and asked how one could tell whether Butler describes a natural conscience or a cultural one.
Sterling grants Marquis something at the outset: when we develop correct character, the pronouncements of conscience will be correct. He then makes two points against the cultural reading.
1. Conscience cannot be wholly subsequent to virtue.
I don’t think that it is possible to develop correct character without antecedently having some clear moral notions. You can call these notions “intuitions” or “God’s writings on our hearts” or “pronouncements of conscience” or what have you, but without direct insight into moral truths we will remain at sea. We cannot shape our characters correctly without a vision of which direction in which to proceed.
The supporting evidence is that perceptions of moral truth appear in the non-virtuous. Sterling cites Himmler’s speech to an assembly of SS officers at the outset of the Final Solution, telling them they would feel hesitant to execute Jewish women and children and must overcome that hesitation for the greater long-term good — which Sterling reads as an admission that conscience told Himmler not to do it, while he took his reasoning to show a better answer.
He records scepticism that terrorists possess a conscience telling them their acts are right; in his stated and limited experience such figures argue as Himmler did, from religious, political, or social beliefs, not from direct moral insight.
This is why Butler allows superstition as a source of wrongdoing: false general beliefs generating false moral deductions. If one forms the non-intuitive belief that Jews are sub-human and are plotting to destroy higher culture, extermination follows as a deduction. If one forms the belief that God wants his enemies destroyed, terror follows as a deduction. Sterling’s verdict:
These aren’t pronouncements of conscience, they are products of deduction from non-moral premises.
He adds that where the agent expects reward, Butler’s second distorting factor — partiality — enters, which he identifies as the traditional Stoic doctrine that incorrect desires lead us to act unvirtuously in the attempt to benefit ourselves.
The conclusion of the first point:
In any case, I think that if conscience if thought of as something subsequent to the development of good character, that only means that we must accept the existence of something very much like conscience that is antecedent to it.
2. Conscience conflicts with culture.
Some pre-Civil War Southerners opposed slavery on moral grounds while their society accepted it. Sterling notes that very few defenders of slavery argued from conscience; they argued that blacks were sub-human, or at any rate sub-white, and therefore could not be treated as political equals. Those who spoke on conscientious grounds were virtually unanimous in opposition — and he holds the same true of opponents of Nazism.
The generalisation follows: distinguish fundamental moral beliefs from beliefs about what to do in some situation, and the fundamental beliefs prove remarkably cross-cultural. Culturally specific moral beliefs arise when those fundamentals combine with non-moral premises, which are far more culturally diverse.
His worked case is the moral status of homosexuality. Cultures holding it immoral typically hold (a) religious views on which God condemns it, and (b) the non-moral view that it is freely chosen rather than genetically determined. Cultures accepting it typically deny both. What appears to be a culturally based difference in moral belief is in reality a culturally based difference in non-moral belief, generating divergent derivative moral deductions. Convince someone of the first society that a and b are false and he will likely stop rejecting it; convince someone of the second that a and b are true and he will start opposing it.
The shared moral principles Sterling takes almost everyone to hold:
c) If a morally perfect God condemns an action, then one ought not perform the action, and d) If someone cannot control something, then they cannot be morally condemned for doing it.
Opponents take c to apply via a and d to be irrelevant via b; those who accept take d to apply via not-b and c not to apply via not-a.
Conscience or intuition or whatever you want to call it provides them with the same moral principles, and so it’s a matter of what non-moral principles you add to them.
Corpus Note — Dave Kelly
The argument here is a disaggregation argument, and it is the corpus’s standing answer to the appeal from cross-cultural variation. Apparent moral diversity is decomposed into invariant moral principles plus variable non-moral belief; the variation is relocated out of the moral tier entirely.
The Himmler case does separate work: it is offered not as a moral judgement on Himmler but as evidence that the faculty operates prior to and independently of virtue, which is what the objection from character-formation requires. The Stoic connection Sterling draws — partiality as the mechanism by which incorrect desire distorts action — ties the whole to the standing account of the passions rather than leaving conscience as a free-floating faculty.
IV. The Standing Objection
Marquis’s replies are not part of the primary-source record of Sterling’s position, but the record is incomplete without noting what the three posts were written against.
Marquis accepts the necessity of first premises for deduction and denies that they must be asserted as universally true; validity plus pragmatic test, he holds, does the needed work without unprovable claims. Convergence across cultures he reads as descriptive rather than normative — convention proven in practice, not episteme. On 19 October he names the position: this is foundationalism, and if we cannot justify something we simply label it a self-evident truth and carry on, which he characterises as a convenient way to avoid criticism and shore up beliefs already held. Convergence he explains by social evolution — honesty is pragmatically better over the long haul, so most cultures count it a virtue — and Himmler’s need to counter his officers’ existing values he reads as evidence that the Final Solution ran against what traditionally worked, not against moral reality. He closes by offering a menu of alternatives and settling on a combination of weak foundationalism and what he calls dynamic intuition.
Corpus Note — Dave Kelly
The two positions do not meet on the evidence; they meet on what the evidence would have to be evidence of. Both men agree that convergence exists. Sterling reads it as indirect confirmation of a faculty apprehending moral facts; Marquis reads it as the trace of what has worked. The dispute is not settled within the thread, and the corpus does not claim that it was. What the thread establishes is that Sterling’s foundationalism was stated with the regress argument attached and the self-evidence claim defended, and was not — as the standing objection alleges — a label applied where justification ran out.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
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