Also, moral philosophy deals with what is right and what is wrong. These are inherently fuzzy notions and they likely require some level of intuitive reasoning. ("It is clearly wrong to kill an innocent person.") I would be extremely surprised if someone could formally define what is right and wrong in a way that captures human intuition.
It's also not worth debating philosophy with people who will argue that $10 is not clearly worth less than a finger. (And if you don't believe that, then we can consider the case with two fingers, or three, or a whole hand, etc.).
Some of these arguments feel like the equivalent of spending billions to create a state of the art fighter plane and not realizing they forgot to put an engine inside of it.
It’s not $10 vs. “a finger,” it’s $10 vs. the finger of someone who goes about using their fingers to threaten people to give them money. If the difference isn’t immediately obvious, I think it’s time to step back from complex frameworks and take a look at failures with common intuition.
Lots of things in philosophy might have debatable rigor, but this in particular isn't one of them.
How is this clear? This is one of the things I find strange about academic philosophy. For all the claims about trying to get at a more rigorous understanding of knowledge, the foundation at the end of the day seems to just be human intuition. You read about something like the Chinese Room or Mary’s Room thought experiments, that seem to appeal to immediate human reactions. “We clearly wouldn’t say…” or “No one would think…”
It feels like an act of obfuscation. People realize the fragility of relying on human intuition, and react by trying to dress human intuition up with extreme complexities in order to trick themselves into thinking they’re not relying on human intuition just as much as everyone else.