It can also mean a powerful motivation or impulse. E.g., You may have an instinctive revulsion to socialistic sounding ideas and be instinctively draw to free market ideas and for someone else it could be just the reverse. That doesnt mean that you where each genetically destined to become that way. Once you develop learned instincts, they act much like inborn instincts, the difference being that they can be changed.
I would call those intuitions, not instincts.
I like that. People, including both of us, use "intuition" and "instinct" interchangeably, but intuition is better, as it's more specific, in that it refers to "programmable" instinct.
WordNet - Cite This Source
intuition
noun
1. instinctive knowing (without the use of rational processes)
2. an impression that something might be the case; "he had an intuition that something had gone wrong"
WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.
It's consistent with what I've been saying. Unconscious moral judgments are the logical result of one's chosen values.
That's not the argument of the paper. As I said, the argument of the paper is that most moral judgments were never chosen.
I think you mean that they were never consciously chosen. Regardless, at some point one's values, values being the standard by which moral intuition operates, are consciously chosen, even if only to choose to unconsciously absorb on faith, an uncritical adoption of popular societal values.
Again, you're failing to distinguish between behaviors that evolve genetically and behaviors that evolve culturally. You're also ignoring the role of the maverick individuals thoughts and actions, whether rational or not, in the evolution of culture.
By insisting that all moral judgments are chosen, you don't seem to be allowing any room for genetic evolution at all.
I think we've already agreed that there is a distinction to be made between hard wired instinct and intuition. Morality refers to a code of values that, at some level, is chosen. Genetic instinct refers to a code of values which are hard wired, that can, at most, be repressed, but never changed.