I never implied that. It means that they have acquired values and beliefs, which at some level required choices to be made. Their "knee jerk" (unconscious) reactions are just that: unconscious.
I never denied that choices are made. However, I think that for most of us, values are cultivated rather than acquired. Everybody except psychopaths has the capacity to have aversion to suffering, for example, but people who are opposed to animal testing (for another example) have had that aversion cultivated and applied to a specific group.
If it's true that an aversion to suffering is genetically hardwired, then it is not a moral intuition, but an evolved instinct. Upon reflection of this feeling, people may attempt to justify it though individual moral reasoning or through an attempt to make it conform to the values of their culture. By the same process, they may attempt to justify actions that defy this feeling under certain circumstances, thereby creating moral intuitions that can either reinforce or cancel out an inherited instinct.
I can give you a related personal example that you may find interesting. Since early childhood while I was able to enjoy eating meat, I felt a growing conflict about killing animals in order to do so, that I experienced as a mild revolution, accompanied by troubling cannibalistic self image. As a young adult, I found myself progressively eating less red meat, until I noticed that I wasn't eating it at all. Within a year or two, I followed the same pattern with poultry. I still eat fish, although it bothers me, it's to a lesser extent.( I must feel a greater affinity to the warm blooded animals.)
People always ask me if I avoid meat for health reasons, but I deny that there is any nutritional benefit to my behavior and that, in fact, for the most part, the opposite is true.
Now here is the part that may shed light on the way I think:
People then ask me if I do it for religious or moral reasons and I have always denied having any moral beliefs that would cause this aversion to harming animals and that it was strictly a non-moral empathy for animals that I am fully capable of ignoring, without moral guilt, should it become necessary for me to kill animals.
For me, there has never been any confusion between natural drives and moral intuition, although I can see how it may confuse some people. I notice that some people, especially the religious, have a strong desire to believe that morality is somehow inherent to their God given instincts, as exemplified by their insistence that moral truth must come from the "heart" and that evil is the product of thinking for one's self. I regard materialism as another form of religion, that replaces God with evolution, that regards free will and rational morality as delusions which cause evil and that moral truth must come from the "heart" in the form of evolved instinct.
The question is not simple, but simplistic. You're showing the root of your confusion in that question, which is based on the implied assumption that a genetically hardwired reaction can be right, wrong, a concept or even based on a concept at all.
No no no no no no no! I am saying that a genetically hardwired reaction can be about what is right or wrong. That's a very important difference.
That it may or may not coincide with what's right or wrong is only further evidence that it is non-moral.
An inborn(genetically acquired) instinct manifests as a feeling or emotion, not a concept.
I'm not sure how you're defining "concept" here, but my position is:
a) that there are such things as moral emotions, that is emotions which cause us to make moral judgements (judgements about right and wrong)
1. If the feeling comes from an inborn drive, it's an instinct, but not a moral intuition.
2. If the feeling is a moral intuition, it is the
result of an unconscious moral judgment, not the cause of one.
b) those moral judgments which stem from the moral emotions are intuitive.
That's backwards, although sometimes inherited instinctive drives may cause someone to rationalise along these lines:
1. Something feels good/bad.
2. If it feels good/bad it must be right/wrong.
This type of moral reasoning results in the reinforcement of instinctive inherited drives with moral intuition.
c) moral emotions are evolved.
Only the capacity for moral intuition is an evolved trait. The moral intuition varies with one's values.
d) moral reasoning is not divorced from moral emotions, but does not always (or even usually) occur when moral judgements are made.
That true.
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