Giudizio morale e intuizione in Kant

In the research fields of artificial intelligence ethics and of the neuroscience of moral judgement, Kant’s metaethics is equated with a model of moral judgement based on inferential reasoning. On the contrary, Kant actually argues that common moral judgement is usually irreflective, that is, automatic and immediate. This does not imply that it is a special sense or feeling: according to Kant, people normally use a criterion of moral judgement of which they may not have a clear awareness, but which in its pure form – which philosophical analysis can identify – is intrinsically rational, i.e. translatable into concepts and expressible in purely formal terms. Kant does not equate human knowledge of moral law with intellectual intuition, to avoid mistaking immediacy for irrationality and moral knowledge for faith. Characteristic of the moral sphere is instead for Kant – with a double adherence to intuitionism and rationalism – an immediate knowledge that in the common moral judgement, may not include the awareness of the formal principle that is being used, but of which it is nevertheless always possible to provide a rational formulation.