✶ Moral Intuitions without a Moral Realm - Development, Reification, and the Affective Genealogy of Value

Michael Huemer's ethical intuitionism applies phenomenal conservatism to morality: if an act seems wrong, that appearance provides initial justification unless defeated. This paper argues that the developmental history, distribution, and causal sensitivity of what are conventionally called moral appearances provide such a defeater against the further inference to irreducible, stance-independent moral facts. A “moral experience” is real in the same thin sense as a “magical experience”: a psychological episode occurred, but neither its inherited classification nor its apparent object is thereby established. Mature intuitions are not psychologically primitive data. Caregivers, sanctions, authority, language, institutions, inherited narratives, and reflection organize attraction, aversion, empathy, dominance, and salience into rapid judgments. Habituation conceals this history, so a constructed response returns to consciousness as an immediate demand apparently located in the act itself—a reified facade. The resulting center-edge pattern is diagnostic: convergence is strongest where shared vulnerability and coordination pressures converge; disagreement grows where affective priorities, cultural formation, perceived agency, and background commitments diverge. Magical and spiritual interpretation supplies a comparison. In many settings, training and authority made spirits, curses, and divine intentions part of the experience through which illness, dreams, voices, and coincidence were understood. Ordinary explanations later accounted for both many events and their felt supernatural character. The argument is comparative and undercutting, not a genetic inference from natural origin to falsity. It distinguishes a first-order verdict, its felt authority, its perceived objectivity, and an explicit non-natural interpretation; evidence about one is not automatically evidence about all four. Source variation matters when it predicts one or more of these outputs, lacks an independently supported truth-link, and leaves the realist without a prospective way to distinguish tracking from distortion. The distribution, replacement, and reification arguments supply evidence about sources; the undercutting argument supplies the bridge to the epistemic conclusion. The strongest conclusion therefore concerns Huemer-style non-natural intuitionism. Naturalist realists may accept the genealogy while identifying moral facts with natural relations; that view needs separate semantic and normative arguments. More broadly, explanatory economy favors a human-centered non-realism when an added non-natural truth-link makes no discriminable contribution. The model retains prohibitions, criticism, negotiation, and institutional constraint by describing the harms, interests, conflicts, and purposes actually at stake.