Actually, I defend the right to free abortion.

I have now come to the conclusion (roughly) that capital punishment is defensible, if it can be shown to have a deterrent effect on murder. In that case, a few executions save not only some people from being murdered but also some people from becoming murders.

It is of note that for a long time moral nihilism was a kind of unquestioned default position in analytic moral philosophy.

You are only allowed to treat the content of your intuition as evidence if the intuition stays after you have exposed it to cognitive psychotherapy; in some cases you have to reject it even if it does indeed stay.

It is hard to tell if capital punishment has such an effect. And even if, in some contexts it has (such as in the American South with a very high incidence of murder), this effect may very well go away if a decent welfare state was replaced for the existing social order.

Normative ethics, pursued as a free, systematic, and critical attempt to find moral truth, regardless of religious and other authorities, is a rather new adventure. Let's wait and see what will happen!

One way of submitting your moral intuitions in relation to some issue to cognitive therapy is to learn more about how people in other cultures think about it.