Extension of the Ethical Domain
Recent research on universal morality starts from the idea that our moral judgments are made of moral intuitions (immediate, non reflexive, reactions) and moral rationalizations (intellectual constructs built in order to produce socially acceptable justifications for our actions). They end up claiming that universal morality exists only at the intuitive level. In this paper, my aim is to show that this assumption is not grounded, by focusing on the problem of our intuitions concerning the extension of the ethical domain. In the present state of the debate, there are no good reasons to believe that these intuitions are universal. Even the dichotomy between moral intuitions and rationalizations, which grounds these empirical analyses of universal morality, might be questioned. My general conclusion is that moral universality is normative, not empirical.