Forthcoming in Review of Philosophy and Psychology Anti-Realist Pluralism: A New Approach to Folk Metaethics (original) (raw)
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Anti-Realist Pluralism: A New Approach to Folk Metaethics
Many metaethicists agree that as ordinary people experience morality as a realm of objective truths, we have a prima facie reason to believe that it actually is such a realm. Recently, worries have been raised about the validity of the extant psychological research on this argument's empirical hypothesis. Our aim is to advance this research, taking these worries into account. First, we propose a new experimental design for measuring folk intuitions about moral objectivity that may serve as an inspiration for future studies. Then we report and discuss the results of a survey that was based on this design. In our study, most of our participants denied the existence of objective truths about most or all moral issues. In particular, many of them had the intuition that whether moral sentences are true depends both on their own moral beliefs and on the dominant moral beliefs within their culture ("anti-realist pluralism"). This finding suggests that the realist presumptive argument may have to be rejected and that instead anti-realism may have a presumption in its favor.
The Meta-Ethical Significance of Experiments about Folk Moral Objectivism
The meta ethical significance of experiments about folk moral objectivism, 2019
The meta-ethical commitments of folk respondents – specifically their commitment to the objectivity of moral claims – have recently become subject to empirical scrutiny. Experimental findings suggest that people are meta-ethical pluralists: there is both inter-and intrapersonal variation with regard to people's objectivist commitments. What meta-ethical implications, if any, do these findings have? I point out that current research does not directly address traditional meta-ethical questions: the methods used and distinctions drawn by experimenters do not perfectly match those of meta-ethicists. But I go on to argue that, in spite of this mismatch, the research findings should be of interest to moral philosophers, including meta-ethicists. Not only do these findings extend the field of moral psychology with new data and hypotheses, but they also provide tentative evidence that touches on the adequacy of theses in moral semantics and moral metaphysics. Specifically, they put pressure on arguments in support of moral realism.
The Empirical Study of Folk Metaethics
In this paper, I review recent attempts by experimental philosophers and psychologists to study folk metaethics empirically and discuss some of the difficulties that researchers face when trying to construct the right kind of research materials and interpreting the results that they obtain. At first glance, the findings obtained so far do not look good for the thesis that people are everywhere moral realists about every moral issue. However, because of difficulties in interpreting these results, I argue that better research is needed to move the debate forward.
How Different Kinds of Disagreement Impact Folk Metaethical Judgments
Although the empirical study of folk metaethical judgments is still in its infancy, a variety of interesting and significant results have been obtained. Goodwin and Darley (2008), for example, report that individuals tend to regard ethical statements as more objective than conventional or taste claims and almost as objective as scientific claims, although there is considerable variation in metaethical intuitions across individuals and across different ethical issues. Goodwin and Darley (2012) also report (i) that participants treat statements condemning ethical wrongdoing as more objective than statements enjoining good or morally exemplary actions, (ii) that perceived consensus regarding an ethical statement positively influences ratings of metaethical objectivity, and (iii) that moral objectivism is associated with greater discomfort with and more pejorative attributions toward those with whom individuals disagreed. Beebe and Sackris (under review) found that folk metaethical commitments vary across different life stages, with decreased objectivism during the college years. Sarkissian, Parks, Tien, Wright, and Knobe (2011) found that folk intuitions about metaethical objectivity vary as a function of cultural distance, with increased cultural distance between disagreeing parties leading to decreased attributions of metaethical objectivity. Wright, Grandjean, and McWhite (forthcoming) found that not only is there significant diversity among individuals with regard to the objectivity they attribute to ethical claims, there is also significant diversity of opinion with respect to whether individuals take certain issues such as abortion or anonymously donating money to charity to be ethical issues at all, despite the fact that philosophers overwhelmingly regard these issues as ethical. The present article reports a series of experiments designed to extend the empirical investigation of folk metaethical intuitions by examining how different kinds of ethical disagreement can impact attributions of objectivity to ethical claims. Study 1 reports a replication of Beebe and Sackris’ work on metaethical intuitions, in order to establish a baseline of comparison for Studies 2 through 4. In Study 2, societal disagreement about ethical issues was made salient to participants before they answered metaethical questions about the objectivity of ethical claims, and this was found to decrease attributions of objectivity to those claims. In Studies 3 and 4, the parties with whom participants were asked to consider having an ethical disagreement were made more concrete than in Studies 1 and 2, using either verbal descriptions or facial pictures. This manipulation was found to increase attributions of metaethical objectivity. In a final study, metaethical judgments were shown to vary with the moral valence of the actions performed by the disagreeing party—in other words, a Knobe effect for metaethical judgments was found. These studies aim to increase our understanding of the complexity of the folk metaethical landscape.
Misunderstanding Metaethics: Difficulties Measuring Folk Objectivism and Relativism
Diametros, 2020
Recent research on the metaethical beliefs of ordinary people appears to show that they are metaethical pluralists that adopt different metaethical standards for different moral judgments. Yet the methods used to evaluate folk metaethical belief rely on the assumption that participants interpret what they are asked in metaethical terms. We argue that most participants do not interpret questions designed to elicit metaethical beliefs in metaethical terms, or at least not in the way researchers intend. As a result, existing methods are not reliable measures of metaethical belief. We end by discussing the implications of our account for the philosophical and practical implications of research on the psychology of metaethics.
The Empirical Case for Folk Indexical Moral Relativism
Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, 2020
Recent empirical work on folk moral objectivism has attempted to examine the extent to which folk morality presumes that moral judgments are objectively true or false. Some researchers report findings that they take to indicate folk commitment to objectivism (Nichols & Folds-Bennett, 2003; Wainryb et al., 2004; Goodwin & Darley, 2008, 2010, 2012), while others report findings that may reveal a more variable commitment to objectivism (Sarkissian, et al., 2011; Wright, Grandjean, & McWhite, 2013; Wright, McWhite, & Grandjean, 2014; Beebe, 2014; Beebe et al., 2015; Beebe & Sackris, 2016; Wright, 2018). However, the various probes that have been used to examine folk moral objectivism almost always fail to be good direct measures of objectivism. Some critics (Beebe, 2015; Pölzler, 2017, 2018) have suggested that the problems with existing probes are serious enough that they should be viewed as largely incapable of shedding any light on folk metaethical commitments. Building upon the work of Justin Khoo and Joshua Knobe (2018), I argue that many of the existing probes can be seen as good measures of the extent to which people think that the truth of one moral judgment excludes the possibility that a judgment made by a disagreeing party is also true and that the best explanation of the findings obtained using these measures is significant folk support for indexical moral relativism—the view that the content of moral judgments is context-sensitive. If my thesis is correct, most contemporary moral philosophers are deeply mistaken about the metaethical contours of folk morality in one very important respect.
The irrationality of folk metaethics
Philosophical Psychology, 2021
Many philosophers and psychologists have thought that people untutored in philosophy are moral realists. On this view, when people make moral judgments, they interpret their judgments as tracking universal, objective moral facts. But studies of folk metaethics have demonstrated that people have a mix of metaethical attitudes. Sometimes people think of their moral judgments as purely expressive, or as tracking subjective or relative moral facts, or perhaps no facts at all. This paper surveys the evidence for folk metaethical pluralism and argues for an explanation of this mix of folk metaethical attitudes: without philosophical education, these attitudes are typically caused by factors that are insensitive to their truth. Moreover, unless they can be justified by other means, metaethical attitudes with this etiology are, as a result, irrational, and ought not be used as evidence for or against moral realism.
Empirical Research on Folk Moral Objectivism
Lay persons may have intuitions about morality’s objectivity. What do these intuitions look like? And what are their causes and consequences? In recent years an increasing number of scholars have begun to investigate these questions empirically. This article presents and assesses the resulting area of research as well as its potential philosophical implications. First, we introduce the methods of empirical research on folk moral objectivism. Second, we provide an overview of the findings that have so far been made. Third, we raise a number of methodological worries that cast doubt upon these findings. And fourth, we discuss ways in which lay persons’ intuitions about moral objectivity may bear on philosophical claims.
Moral realists believe that there are objective moral truths. According to one of the most prominent arguments in favour of this view, ordinary people experience morality as realist-seeming, and we have therefore prima facie reason to believe that realism is true. Some proponents of this argument have claimed that the hypothesis that ordinary people experience morality as realist-seeming is supported by psychological research on folk metaethics. While most recent research has been thought to contradict this claim, four prominent earlier studies (by Goodwin and Darley, Wainryb et al., Nichols, and Nichols and Folds-Bennett) indeed seem to suggest a tendency towards realism. My aim in this paper is to provide a detailed internal critique of these four studies. I argue that, once interpreted properly, all of them turn out in line with recent research. They suggest that most ordinary people experience morality as “pluralist-” rather than realist-seeming, i.e., that ordinary people have the intuition that realism is true with regard to some moral issues, but variants of anti-realism are true with regard to others. This result means that moral realism may be less well justified than commonly assumed. This article is available online at: https://static.uni-graz.at/fileadmin/\_Persoenliche\_Webseite/poelzler\_thomas/Thomas\_Poelzler\_-\_Revisiting\_Folk\_Moral\_Realism.pdf.
The Meta-Ethical Grounding of Our Moral Beliefs: Evidence for Meta-Ethical Pluralism
Recent scholarship (Goodwin & Darley, 2008) on the meta-ethical debate between objectivism and relativism has found people to be mixed: they are objectivists about some issues, but relativists about others. The studies discussed here sought to explore this further. Study 1 explored whether giving people the ability to identify moral issues for themselves would reveal them to be more globally objectivist. Study 2 explored people’s meta-ethical commitments more deeply, asking them to provide verbal explanations for their judgments. This revealed that while people think they are relativists, this may not always be the case. The explanations people gave were sometimes rated by outside (blind) coders as being objective, even when given a relativist response. Nonetheless, people remained meta-ethical pluralists. Why this might be is discussed.