Such an epistemological view is by definition committed to the existence of knowledge of moral truths; therefore, ethical intuitionism implies cognitivism.
This article's focus on foundationalism reflects the core commitments of contemporary self-identified ethical intuitionists.
[3][4] Sufficiently broadly defined, ethical intuitionism can be taken to encompass cognitivist forms of moral sense theory.
[6] Early intuitionists like John Balguy, Ralph Cudworth, and Samuel Clarke were principally concerned with defending moral objectivism against the theories of Thomas Hobbes.
[7] Later, their views would be revived and developed by Richard Price and pitted against the moral sense theory of Francis Hutcheson,[8] himself sometimes considered a sentimentalist intuitionist.
[13] The criteria for this type of knowledge include that they are expressed in clear terms, that the different principles are mutually consistent with each other and that there is expert consensus on them.
Moore, whose Principia Ethica (1903) argued famously that goodness was an indefinable, non-natural property of which we had intuitive awareness.
He holds that we can know moral truths through intuition, for example, that it is wrong to lie or that knowledge is intrinsically good.
[19] Intuitions involve a direct apprehension that is not mediated by inferences or deductions: they are self-evident and therefore not in need of any additional proof.
C. L. Stevenson's emotivism would prove especially attractive to Moorean intuitionists seeking to avoid ethical naturalism.
[24] In the later parts of the 20th century, intuitionism would have few adherents to speak of; in Bernard Williams' words: "This model of intuition in ethics has been demolished by a succession of critics, and the ruins of it that remain above ground are not impressive enough to invite much history of what happened to it.
His 2005 book The Good in the Right claims to update and strengthen Rossian intuitionism and to develop the epistemology of ethics.
Furthermore, authors writing on normative ethics often accept methodological intuitionism as they present allegedly obvious or intuitive examples or thought experiments as support for their theories.
Because it was not until Sidgwick that it was clear there were several distinct theses sharing the label "ethical intuitionism", the term has developed many different connotations.
[28][29] Furthermore, intuitionists are often understood to be essentially committed to the existence of a special psychological faculty that reliably produces true moral intuitions.
Robert Audi points out that in applied ethics, philosophers frequently appeal to intuitions to justify their claims, even though they do not call themselves intuitionists.
Some rationalist ethical intuitionists characterize moral "intuitions" as a species of belief[38] that are self-evident in that they are justified simply by virtue of one's understanding of the proposition believed.
Others characterize "intuitions" as a distinct kind of mental state, in which something seems to one to be the case (whether one believes it or not) as a result of intellectual reflection.
That is, an intuition that p is a state of its seeming to one that p that is not dependent on inference from other beliefs and that results from thinking about p, as opposed to perceiving, remembering, or introspecting.