I thought this post was great and really enjoyed it! My only major objection (besides wanting to stick up for virtue ethics as a powerful first-order theory, but I should just write a post about it myself sometime instead of derailing here) is that I don't think the contrast you make between the process of observation and experimentation in the empirical sciences and the process of reflexive equilibrium in ethics is actually a meaningful or important one. I think they're actually the same kind of general process, and that reflective moral reasoning should be seen as a form of abstract science in and of itself. I wrote a post about this a while ago if you're interested: https://bothsidesbrigade.substack.com/p/moral-realism-turns-ethics-into-a But otherwise, I look forward to seeing more posts!
Thanks for the feedback! And yeah, I did consider that I might've been too harsh on ol' virtue ethics--I do think it has value even if I find it frustrating as a first-order theory. Imo I see ethics as a lot closer to math than science, but I think it does share some overlap with each. Will check out your blog when I get a chance!
Great post! Fwiw, I do think there are a couple kinds of moral facts that can be studied empirically: 1. You can study which moral intuitions are biological and which are learned, what the allele frequency is for the biological ones, and what the historical roots are for the learned ones. This might help guide thinking about which intuitions to distrust. 2. You can study game theory, which (IMO) is pretty evidently where most of these intuitions (both biological and learned) come from.
Thank you! And yeah the game theory aspect is one I definitely want to mine further—though I tend to think of that as more of a theoretical analysis akin to math rather than an empirical one?
As for the biological / psychological aspects, this is an area where I’m frankly just not as knowledgeable as I’d like to be. I agree in principle, but I have a lot of reading to do…
Game theory can be thought of as category theory for social interactions. So it's theoretical in the sense that you have to construct valid/useful categories, but very empirical in the sense that instances of each type can be observed in the wild and in the historical record, and if you construct a valid/useful category (or set thereof) then you can also run large-N computer simulations. (Everything is computer, even morality maybe.)
(1) Could you perhaps say a bit more about what you take "intuitions" to be? Many people discussing philosophy use this term, and while some people question whether intuitions are reliable, I question whether there even are any such thing as intuitions. I study moral philosophy and psychology, but as far as I can tell, I don't and never had had philosophical intuitions at all, where these are understood to be a distinct type of psychological process.
(2) Regarding intuitions about moral realism: I'm not sure where you stand on the matter, but I don't think most people have the intuition (or are disposed to think, speak, act like, and so on) that moral realism is true. I think moral realism is only popular among distinct subpopulations. I don't know the best way to frame this as a question, but I suppose when I see a lot of intuition talk I wonder about whose intuitions the person is referring to: their own, or people's in general, or what?
Re: 1) I kind of gesture towards this issue of defining intuitions towards the end of section III before I jump into the actual list, but yes, I am using the word rather loosely to mean any strongly-held beliefs about ethics, whether they come in the form of some sort of brute intuition (e.g., torture "strikes me" as wrong), a more considered judgment based on ethics classes, or even political beliefs that overlap strongly with ethical issues.
I take it you mostly find the first kind to be especially alien? The Humean reductionist account--which you might be more sympathetic to--would ascribe many of them to a pure emotional response. For instance, my gf was watching the documentary on the OceanGate disaster, and the actions of the CEO did strike me as horrific--they induced a feeling of horror. Same goes for serial killers, con-men, and the like. I think my gut reaction to those things is something along the lines of "That's horrible. I can't believe a person would do that. It's wrong and unethical, and nobody should ever do something like that."
I imagine that someone like you would find the first half of that reasonable ("That's horrible"), but you'd object to the last sentence ("It's wrong and unethical...") as being more of a rationalization (?) rather than a true intuition? To me, I don't see the latter as all that different from my "intuition" about how water should settle in a container or how fast an object will fall (the source of these intuitions might be different, but the sensation is similar). And when I consider toy cases like the Trolley problem, I think I have a similar "intuition" that tells me "yeah, X is wrong" or "Y is right".
Where I am willing to differ a bit from some philosophers (particularly the consequentialists) is that I do take the blameworthiness of an action to be one of the primary drivers of that intuition. So if I try and trace the origin of an intuition that "X is wrong", often it seems to stem, at least in part, from instinctive notions of "I would feel guilty if I did that" or "I would blame someone or think less of someone who did that". But I'm not super up-to-date on the nuances of moral psychology and whether this is the case for others (I've read some of Haidt's stuff over a decade ago, but haven't kept tabs in a while).
Re: 2) As for intuitions about moral realism: while I fully admit that this list is just *my own* intuitions, and I am certainly a more hardcore moral realist than most, I do think that people generally believe that they mean something concrete and objective when they say "murder is wrong". For starters, truly religious people definitely believe in moral realism. And even non-religious people seem to believe and argue that racism is wrong, that infanticide is wrong, that genocide and rape are wrong, etc.
I don't think they think these things are advocated as purely matters of taste or vibes--and in my experience, most people don't talk about these subjects the way they talk about movies or music. Namely, if people truly believed that nothing is objectively morally wrong, then I don't think people would talk about punishment the same way (i.e., what punishment someone "deserves"). Idk though, it's certainly worth more reflection, and I do think that moral nihilism is quite popular among W.E.I.R.D. upper-middle class highly-educated types, but it tends to come with it a lot of cognitive dissonance that I would (boldly) claim is due to the received nihilism being in massive tension with an underlying moral realism that they can't quite give up.
Thanks for the response! Yes, it's mostly the first of these I'd take issue with. There's plenty of ways of cashing out "intuition" where I'd have no issue with them and would report having them myself. I just wish philosophers were more precise about what they were saying.
>>I imagine that someone like you would find the first half of that reasonable ("That's horrible"), but you'd object to the last sentence ("It's wrong and unethical...") as being more of a rationalization (?) rather than a true intuition?
I'm not sure, it would depend on what someone meant by that. I have no problem calling the things I disapprove of wrong or unethical. I just don't think there's any fancy metaphysics or anything conceptually deep about this. I just don't like certain things and want there to be less of them, and I use moral language to express this. As for what other people do: I'm not sure. I think we'd need to do a lot of research to find out.
I think your speculation about a driver of intuition is plausible. I'd predict the same. I suppose what concerns me is that philosophers just aren't very clear on what they mean by "intuition," and if there's lots of psychological stuff going on behind the hood, I want to pop open the hood and see what's going on. But many just seem disinterested in this, and I find that frustrating.
>>I do think that people generally believe that they mean something concrete and objective when they say "murder is wrong".
Why do you think that? (Aside, of course, from the reasons you go on to give). I suppose I'm wondering if there's more to it than this.
>> For starters, truly religious people definitely believe in moral realism.
I'm not sure that's true. While I think religious people in the orbit of philosophy tend to endorse moral realism, at least in online debate communities in English (since I'm part of these), I do not think most religious people, even very religious ones, are moral realists.
>>And even non-religious people seem to believe and argue that racism is wrong, that infanticide is wrong, that genocide and rape are wrong, etc.
These are normative positions. I think all of those things are wrong and I am a moral antirealist. Thinking things is wrong is consistent with antirealism. What we'd need to show is evidence that most people think these things are stance-independently wrong. And I don't think there's good evidence that people think this.
>>I don't think they think these things are advocated as purely matters of taste or vibes--and in my experience, most people don't talk about these subjects the way they talk about movies or music.
I think there's more overlap than you might expect (I just wrote a blog post arguing exactly this a few days ago), but I do think there is lots of nonoverlap; I just don't think it's best attributed to people being moral realists but antirealists about taste. Rather, I think there are other differences. For instance, most taste preferences are personal in scope: they concern one's own conduct, while moral preferences are often (but not always) universal in scope. That's a very, very big difference.
I could, in principle, have taste preferences that were universal in scope: I could prefer that everyone like the same food or music as me. I don't do this; but I think some people do, and judge others for having less sophisticated preferences. And I could have moral standards that are personal in scope: I might commit myself to always keeping promises or to never submitting to coercion, even if I don't think this is morally required of others; after all, people can and do develop personal "codes" they live but, that they have little or no interest in imposing on anyone else.
So I agree people don't talk about movies and music the same way they talk about morality, but I don't think those differences have much to do with people being realists about morality.
>>Namely, if people truly believed that nothing is objectively morally wrong, then I don't think people would talk about punishment the same way (i.e., what punishment someone "deserves").
Why? I'm a moral antirealist and I don't think you'd see many differences in how I talk about punishment. I don't think attitudes about punishment have much (if anything at all) to do with moral realism.
>>Idk though, it's certainly worth more reflection, and I do think that moral nihilism is quite popular among W.E.I.R.D. upper-middle class highly-educated types, but it tends to come with it a lot of cognitive dissonance that I would (boldly) claim is due to the received nihilism being in massive tension with an underlying moral realism that they can't quite give up.
I don't think there's much evidence people are nihilists or implicit realists. People who claim to be moral relativists often seem to conflate various non-metaethical distinctions with metaethics and don't seem to have a have a clear or coherent sense of what they're allegedly committed to.
>>Thinking things is wrong is consistent with antirealism. What we'd need to show is evidence that most people think these things are stance-independently wrong. And I don't think there's good evidence that people think this.
Hmmm, okay, I see what you mean. Good push. I think then I'd point to what I see as "most" people's base rejection of moral relativism--I don't think most people are willing to say something like "slavery was acceptable in the South because the people there thought it was okay". I'll admit that this does not perfectly answer your question though, since they can still use *their stance on the matter* to make the judgment even if the Southerners wouldn't have shared it. Tbh, I'm not sure how to precisely make the case one way or another because the distinction does get quite technical. I do think one method of approach would be via questions like "is it okay for a person to impose some moral beliefs on others?" that kind of naturally dig at a tension where people think that *some* of *their own* beliefs (e.g., no slavery) can be imposed on others, but not vice versa. The phrasing there would need to be delicate though given the baggage...
>>I think there's more overlap than you might expect (I just wrote a blog post arguing exactly this a few days ago), but I do think there is lots of nonoverlap; I just don't think it's best attributed to people being moral realists but antirealists about taste....[not going to quote the whole block here for the sake of brevity]
Interesting! I'll have to give that blog post a read. Per my comment above, I take the universal scope for some moral preferences to be prima facie evidence (though perhaps not conclusive) of some sort of moral realism belief--it seems a lot easier to account for a universal-scope preference as a belief about some stance-independent truth that you think people should *recognize* rather than a simple preference which also includes an additional meta-preference that everyone should *share* said preference. For example, if somebody does seriously think that everyone should share their taste in music, I find that they tend to talk about it in objective terms: e.g., "all EDM is garbage and objectively trash. how could anybody like this?"
I do agree that there definitely are some other moral preferences that are explicitly not like this--i.e., moral issues where people talk about them more like personal codes--which I think does make for an interesting question both empirically and theoretically to see if there are any common threads between the types of moral issues that behave this way vs. the ones that seem to be treated more like objective facts. Is it a confidence thing? A scope of harm thing? Is it some conflict between higher ideals like individual liberty and privacy vs. particular harms?
By the way, not sure if this has come up in your research, but my guess is that if you asked people to pick which phrasing best aligns with their position on murder, more people would choose "I believe that murder is wrong" over "I prefer that people do not murder". I take the former to be a more "morality as objective fact" framing owing to the use of "is", while the latter is more a "universal preference" framing.
>> I think then I'd point to what I see as "most" people's base rejection of moral relativism--I don't think most people are willing to say something like "slavery was acceptable in the South because the people there thought it was okay".
I agree, but this is only one specific form of relativism: agent cultural relativism. I don’t know any relativists that endorse this view, and I don’t endorse this view. More generally, I am not claiming that people endorse any form of moral antirealism, only that they don’t endorse moral realism. The position I defend in my dissertation is folk metaethical indeterminacy: most nonphilosophers have no position on these matters at all. This is a possibility few people consider. Even if we think it’s very likely many people would not endorse antirealist positions when presented with them, this does not automatically entail that they endorse realism.
>> I do think one method of approach would be via questions like "is it okay for a person to impose some moral beliefs on others?
I don’t. This is a normative question that is consistent with both moral realism and moral antirealism. I am a moral antirealist, and I am totally fine with imposing my moral standards on others, e.g., I am fine with imposing my opposition to genocide or slavery onto anyone, anywhere, and I don’t care at all whether they personally are okay with either.
>>Interesting! I'll have to give that blog post a read. Per my comment above, I take the universal scope for some moral preferences to be prima facie evidence (though perhaps not conclusive) of some sort of moral realism belief
I don’t see why this should be evidence of realism at all. I am a moral antirealist and I have lots of preferences regarding other people’s actions. Moral antirealism is *completely* consistent with absolutely no tension or difficulty at all with having preferences about other people’s actions.
>>it seems a lot easier to account for a universal-scope preference as a belief about some stance-independent truth that you think people should *recognize* rather than a simple preference which also includes an additional meta-preference that everyone should *share* said preference.
Again, I don’t think so. First, there’s a difference between me having a preference that e.g., nobody torture, which is not a meta-preference, and a meta-preference, e.g., that nobody has the preference to torture. I have both, but the former is not the latter. I don’t have to have preferences about other people’s preferences. I can just have a preference that people don’t do things I dislike. I don’t have to prefer that they have such preferences. Though I do, and I don’t see why this is an especially burdensome or complicated notion. So I don’t see why this:
“I prefer to live in a world where nobody wants to torture people for fun”
…is any more awkward a fit for describing opposition to torture than:
“I believe there are stance-independent moral facts that are true independent of what anyone thinks about them, that among these is a prohibition against torturing for fun, and this fact applies to everyone independent of their own goals and desires such that it gives them external reasons that count in favor of abstaining from such actions even if they want to perform them.”
If meta-preferences are a bridge too far, it’s not at all clear why positing technical and complicated metaphysical and conceptual notions associated with moral realism is any shorter a bridge. It seems to involve a lot more steps. For instance, if you’re a moral realist, you have to do extra work to show how this would be motivating. In my case, it’s a short step from “I don’t want people to torture people or want to torture people” to my judgments, actions, and so on that involve preventing torture. The realist has to suppose that there are stance-independent moral facts, that we have some kind of epistemic access to them (it takes more work to explain this than to account for my access to my own preferences), and that these either (a) are intrinsically motivating, a few many philosophers won’t defend or (b) aren’t intrinsically motivating but somehow are relevant to people’s motivations and behavior anyway.
If anything, I think the realist saddles themselves with a whole ton of explanatory work that we don’t have to deal with at all if we simply construe people as having preferences, including preferences about preferences. For what it’s worth, I actually would prefer to live in a world where more people enjoyed my favorite music, games, and hobbies. I don’t think meta-preferences are all that complicated or implausible to attribute to people.
>>For example, if somebody does seriously think that everyone should share their taste in music, I find that they tend to talk about it in objective terms: e.g., "all EDM is garbage and objectively trash. how could anybody like this?"
Ordinary people use the word “objective” in all sorts of ways that don’t necessarily reflect what philosophers mean by the term. I even have empirical data on this. I don’t think this tells us much, even if they do this. And, for what it’s worth, anecdotes aren’t especially strong data. People argue about movies, music, food, etc. all the time and I’d bet quite a bit many of them, even in the middle of arguing, would respond to someone asking them if they think these are entirely subjective matters with an emphatic “yes.” But anecdotes won’t settle the matter one way or another. We’d need data on this.
>>By the way, not sure if this has come up in your research, but my guess is that if you asked people to pick which phrasing best aligns with their position on murder, more people would choose "I believe that murder is wrong" over "I prefer that people do not murder".
I agree, but I do not think this is good evidence of moral realism. This can be entirely and easily explained by pragmatics. The latter remark implies less opposition to murder than the former and would put one on the rhetorical backfoot. What one implies about one’s attitudes, commitments, and so on is an important part of language. Which person sounds more opposed to murder?
“I think murder is absolutely wrong and nobody should ever get away with it.”
“I have a personal preference that nobody murder.”
>>I am a moral antirealist, and I am totally fine with imposing my moral standards on others, e.g., I am fine with imposing my opposition to genocide or slavery onto anyone, anywhere, and I don’t care at all whether they personally are okay with either.
Are you fine with others imposing their moral standards on you?
____
As for the rest of what you said, I feel like we need to distinguish between:
1. Do laypeople talk about moral claims as if they are claims about some external, rigid facts? Or do they talk about them as if they are stance-dependent/personal preferences?
2. Do laypeople have a coherent or strongly-held view of what moral realism entails metaphysically?
3. Given #1 and #2, is there any meaningful sense in which laypeople have an intuition towards realism or anti-realism?
4. If the answer to #1 is that laypeople do seem to talk like moral realists, does that count as good evidence for moral realism being true?
5. If the answer to #2 is that they do not have a coherent view, is that good evidence that moral realism is false?
And ofc 6. Is moral realism true?
For 1), I do take the evidence to largely suggest that laypeople talk like moral realists. I agree that laypeople don’t use “objectivity” in the precise ways philosophers do, but I think the use of words like that surely has to point more towards moral realism as their rough underlying mental model than against it.
To clarify, when I said that “it seems a lot easier to account for a universal-scope preference…” I more meant that, at a linguistic level, the way that laypeople talk about (some) moral issues is very natural and expected if we imagine that those statements are attempting to be claims about external facts. For example: lots of ‘is’ statements, use of words like “objective”, attempts to justify claims to others, the accusation that those who disagree are defective rather than merely of a different persuasion, strong resistance to notions of “agree to disagree” and/or democratic dispute resolution, an insistence on imposing their norms on others even when the actions of those people don’t affect them. All of these are the sorts of behaviors you would expect to see if people thought moral facts have some stance-independent truth that they correctly recognize and which they believe others have failed to recognize. I would expect those same behaviors to be less common in a world where people thought morality was just a matter of preference. Sure, they might be universal scope preferences, and that helps make the likelihood gap less drastic, but I still take there to be a gap. And I think adding in universal scope + a meta-preference (which you are right to distinguish) does get a little clunky as a way of explaining the rhetorical behavior.
Note, this is not meant to be a claim about what is the more metaphysically simpler claim, just the linguistically simpler claim. The key distinction being that someone can talk about morality as if it’s a set of stance-independent facts, and they can even have a rough mental model of morality as a set of stance-independent facts, without them necessarily positing a specific metaphysical position on how they know said facts, how said facts could be motivating, etc. Those are definitely challenges that a philosopher needs to address, but we don’t have to suppose that laypeople have answers to those questions as a condition for them believing in moral realism or behaving/talking about morality as if moral realism were true.
And so for 2), I agree that most people don’t actually have any coherent moral metaphysics about what those external facts would “be” (with the exception of religious people—I’m still not sure how you can argue that people who think God’s word is the moral law don’t believe in moral realism. Is this a “God’s stance is still a stance” argument? If so, I’d still count that as moral realism tbh.)
For 3), because I don’t take 2) as a necessary condition for people having moral realist intuitions, I would tend to take 1) as the stronger evidence in favor here. I will grant that your “folk metaethical indeterminacy” account is plausible, though I do think even if it were broadly true, there would still be SOME nonphilosophers who would express some basic metaethical positions, even if those positions are not precise enough to delineate between stance-independence vs cultural-relativity. But perhaps more importantly, I don’t think that the question of whether laypeople have moral realist intuitions tells us much about the truth of moral realism vs antirealism.
Which brings us to 4) and 5), and here I think I agree with you that the answer to both of these is no.
For 6), this is ofc the tough one. And it’s only here that the metaphysical nature of moral facts would have to be sorted out. But yeah, that’s a much longer discussion.
Upon further reflection and perusing through your blog, I’ve realized I’m probably just rehashing arguments you’ve had elsewhere, so will probably just read up on some of your essays and maybe write up a more detailed essay of my own at some point. I will say that, overall, I am surprised by how strongly you commit to the idea that everyday moral language/discourse does *not* seem to imply a moral realist model. To me, the MUCH weaker link in moral realism is that the way we talk about something doesn’t actually constitute strong evidence that said thing exists and/or conforms to our language. But will need to read in more detail.
Also, as a heads up, I accidentally created two substack blogs and you were subscribed to the other one (which I have now deleted). So if you did want to follow me on here, subscribe to the other one! Would love to continue these (esp after I get more background on your views).
If we lived in a simulation where all our intended acts were inverted and resulted in bad consequences, then according to consequentialism, we would all be bad. According to intentionalism, this wouldn't matter. That's a ridiculous hypothetical, you say. Ok, well, in the real world, we all misperceive things and make mistakes which lead to harm. Harm being caused does not make an act immoral. Animals, for example, can cause harm, but animals are not moral agents capable of immorality. Morality only exists where intentionality is possible. Any consequentialist arguments around this?
I thought this post was great and really enjoyed it! My only major objection (besides wanting to stick up for virtue ethics as a powerful first-order theory, but I should just write a post about it myself sometime instead of derailing here) is that I don't think the contrast you make between the process of observation and experimentation in the empirical sciences and the process of reflexive equilibrium in ethics is actually a meaningful or important one. I think they're actually the same kind of general process, and that reflective moral reasoning should be seen as a form of abstract science in and of itself. I wrote a post about this a while ago if you're interested: https://bothsidesbrigade.substack.com/p/moral-realism-turns-ethics-into-a But otherwise, I look forward to seeing more posts!
Thanks for the feedback! And yeah, I did consider that I might've been too harsh on ol' virtue ethics--I do think it has value even if I find it frustrating as a first-order theory. Imo I see ethics as a lot closer to math than science, but I think it does share some overlap with each. Will check out your blog when I get a chance!
Great post! Fwiw, I do think there are a couple kinds of moral facts that can be studied empirically: 1. You can study which moral intuitions are biological and which are learned, what the allele frequency is for the biological ones, and what the historical roots are for the learned ones. This might help guide thinking about which intuitions to distrust. 2. You can study game theory, which (IMO) is pretty evidently where most of these intuitions (both biological and learned) come from.
Thank you! And yeah the game theory aspect is one I definitely want to mine further—though I tend to think of that as more of a theoretical analysis akin to math rather than an empirical one?
As for the biological / psychological aspects, this is an area where I’m frankly just not as knowledgeable as I’d like to be. I agree in principle, but I have a lot of reading to do…
Game theory can be thought of as category theory for social interactions. So it's theoretical in the sense that you have to construct valid/useful categories, but very empirical in the sense that instances of each type can be observed in the wild and in the historical record, and if you construct a valid/useful category (or set thereof) then you can also run large-N computer simulations. (Everything is computer, even morality maybe.)
Congrats on your first post. A couple questions.
(1) Could you perhaps say a bit more about what you take "intuitions" to be? Many people discussing philosophy use this term, and while some people question whether intuitions are reliable, I question whether there even are any such thing as intuitions. I study moral philosophy and psychology, but as far as I can tell, I don't and never had had philosophical intuitions at all, where these are understood to be a distinct type of psychological process.
(2) Regarding intuitions about moral realism: I'm not sure where you stand on the matter, but I don't think most people have the intuition (or are disposed to think, speak, act like, and so on) that moral realism is true. I think moral realism is only popular among distinct subpopulations. I don't know the best way to frame this as a question, but I suppose when I see a lot of intuition talk I wonder about whose intuitions the person is referring to: their own, or people's in general, or what?
Thank you, Lance!
Re: 1) I kind of gesture towards this issue of defining intuitions towards the end of section III before I jump into the actual list, but yes, I am using the word rather loosely to mean any strongly-held beliefs about ethics, whether they come in the form of some sort of brute intuition (e.g., torture "strikes me" as wrong), a more considered judgment based on ethics classes, or even political beliefs that overlap strongly with ethical issues.
I take it you mostly find the first kind to be especially alien? The Humean reductionist account--which you might be more sympathetic to--would ascribe many of them to a pure emotional response. For instance, my gf was watching the documentary on the OceanGate disaster, and the actions of the CEO did strike me as horrific--they induced a feeling of horror. Same goes for serial killers, con-men, and the like. I think my gut reaction to those things is something along the lines of "That's horrible. I can't believe a person would do that. It's wrong and unethical, and nobody should ever do something like that."
I imagine that someone like you would find the first half of that reasonable ("That's horrible"), but you'd object to the last sentence ("It's wrong and unethical...") as being more of a rationalization (?) rather than a true intuition? To me, I don't see the latter as all that different from my "intuition" about how water should settle in a container or how fast an object will fall (the source of these intuitions might be different, but the sensation is similar). And when I consider toy cases like the Trolley problem, I think I have a similar "intuition" that tells me "yeah, X is wrong" or "Y is right".
Where I am willing to differ a bit from some philosophers (particularly the consequentialists) is that I do take the blameworthiness of an action to be one of the primary drivers of that intuition. So if I try and trace the origin of an intuition that "X is wrong", often it seems to stem, at least in part, from instinctive notions of "I would feel guilty if I did that" or "I would blame someone or think less of someone who did that". But I'm not super up-to-date on the nuances of moral psychology and whether this is the case for others (I've read some of Haidt's stuff over a decade ago, but haven't kept tabs in a while).
Re: 2) As for intuitions about moral realism: while I fully admit that this list is just *my own* intuitions, and I am certainly a more hardcore moral realist than most, I do think that people generally believe that they mean something concrete and objective when they say "murder is wrong". For starters, truly religious people definitely believe in moral realism. And even non-religious people seem to believe and argue that racism is wrong, that infanticide is wrong, that genocide and rape are wrong, etc.
I don't think they think these things are advocated as purely matters of taste or vibes--and in my experience, most people don't talk about these subjects the way they talk about movies or music. Namely, if people truly believed that nothing is objectively morally wrong, then I don't think people would talk about punishment the same way (i.e., what punishment someone "deserves"). Idk though, it's certainly worth more reflection, and I do think that moral nihilism is quite popular among W.E.I.R.D. upper-middle class highly-educated types, but it tends to come with it a lot of cognitive dissonance that I would (boldly) claim is due to the received nihilism being in massive tension with an underlying moral realism that they can't quite give up.
Thanks for the response! Yes, it's mostly the first of these I'd take issue with. There's plenty of ways of cashing out "intuition" where I'd have no issue with them and would report having them myself. I just wish philosophers were more precise about what they were saying.
>>I imagine that someone like you would find the first half of that reasonable ("That's horrible"), but you'd object to the last sentence ("It's wrong and unethical...") as being more of a rationalization (?) rather than a true intuition?
I'm not sure, it would depend on what someone meant by that. I have no problem calling the things I disapprove of wrong or unethical. I just don't think there's any fancy metaphysics or anything conceptually deep about this. I just don't like certain things and want there to be less of them, and I use moral language to express this. As for what other people do: I'm not sure. I think we'd need to do a lot of research to find out.
I think your speculation about a driver of intuition is plausible. I'd predict the same. I suppose what concerns me is that philosophers just aren't very clear on what they mean by "intuition," and if there's lots of psychological stuff going on behind the hood, I want to pop open the hood and see what's going on. But many just seem disinterested in this, and I find that frustrating.
>>I do think that people generally believe that they mean something concrete and objective when they say "murder is wrong".
Why do you think that? (Aside, of course, from the reasons you go on to give). I suppose I'm wondering if there's more to it than this.
>> For starters, truly religious people definitely believe in moral realism.
I'm not sure that's true. While I think religious people in the orbit of philosophy tend to endorse moral realism, at least in online debate communities in English (since I'm part of these), I do not think most religious people, even very religious ones, are moral realists.
>>And even non-religious people seem to believe and argue that racism is wrong, that infanticide is wrong, that genocide and rape are wrong, etc.
These are normative positions. I think all of those things are wrong and I am a moral antirealist. Thinking things is wrong is consistent with antirealism. What we'd need to show is evidence that most people think these things are stance-independently wrong. And I don't think there's good evidence that people think this.
>>I don't think they think these things are advocated as purely matters of taste or vibes--and in my experience, most people don't talk about these subjects the way they talk about movies or music.
I think there's more overlap than you might expect (I just wrote a blog post arguing exactly this a few days ago), but I do think there is lots of nonoverlap; I just don't think it's best attributed to people being moral realists but antirealists about taste. Rather, I think there are other differences. For instance, most taste preferences are personal in scope: they concern one's own conduct, while moral preferences are often (but not always) universal in scope. That's a very, very big difference.
I could, in principle, have taste preferences that were universal in scope: I could prefer that everyone like the same food or music as me. I don't do this; but I think some people do, and judge others for having less sophisticated preferences. And I could have moral standards that are personal in scope: I might commit myself to always keeping promises or to never submitting to coercion, even if I don't think this is morally required of others; after all, people can and do develop personal "codes" they live but, that they have little or no interest in imposing on anyone else.
So I agree people don't talk about movies and music the same way they talk about morality, but I don't think those differences have much to do with people being realists about morality.
>>Namely, if people truly believed that nothing is objectively morally wrong, then I don't think people would talk about punishment the same way (i.e., what punishment someone "deserves").
Why? I'm a moral antirealist and I don't think you'd see many differences in how I talk about punishment. I don't think attitudes about punishment have much (if anything at all) to do with moral realism.
>>Idk though, it's certainly worth more reflection, and I do think that moral nihilism is quite popular among W.E.I.R.D. upper-middle class highly-educated types, but it tends to come with it a lot of cognitive dissonance that I would (boldly) claim is due to the received nihilism being in massive tension with an underlying moral realism that they can't quite give up.
I don't think there's much evidence people are nihilists or implicit realists. People who claim to be moral relativists often seem to conflate various non-metaethical distinctions with metaethics and don't seem to have a have a clear or coherent sense of what they're allegedly committed to.
>>Thinking things is wrong is consistent with antirealism. What we'd need to show is evidence that most people think these things are stance-independently wrong. And I don't think there's good evidence that people think this.
Hmmm, okay, I see what you mean. Good push. I think then I'd point to what I see as "most" people's base rejection of moral relativism--I don't think most people are willing to say something like "slavery was acceptable in the South because the people there thought it was okay". I'll admit that this does not perfectly answer your question though, since they can still use *their stance on the matter* to make the judgment even if the Southerners wouldn't have shared it. Tbh, I'm not sure how to precisely make the case one way or another because the distinction does get quite technical. I do think one method of approach would be via questions like "is it okay for a person to impose some moral beliefs on others?" that kind of naturally dig at a tension where people think that *some* of *their own* beliefs (e.g., no slavery) can be imposed on others, but not vice versa. The phrasing there would need to be delicate though given the baggage...
>>I think there's more overlap than you might expect (I just wrote a blog post arguing exactly this a few days ago), but I do think there is lots of nonoverlap; I just don't think it's best attributed to people being moral realists but antirealists about taste....[not going to quote the whole block here for the sake of brevity]
Interesting! I'll have to give that blog post a read. Per my comment above, I take the universal scope for some moral preferences to be prima facie evidence (though perhaps not conclusive) of some sort of moral realism belief--it seems a lot easier to account for a universal-scope preference as a belief about some stance-independent truth that you think people should *recognize* rather than a simple preference which also includes an additional meta-preference that everyone should *share* said preference. For example, if somebody does seriously think that everyone should share their taste in music, I find that they tend to talk about it in objective terms: e.g., "all EDM is garbage and objectively trash. how could anybody like this?"
I do agree that there definitely are some other moral preferences that are explicitly not like this--i.e., moral issues where people talk about them more like personal codes--which I think does make for an interesting question both empirically and theoretically to see if there are any common threads between the types of moral issues that behave this way vs. the ones that seem to be treated more like objective facts. Is it a confidence thing? A scope of harm thing? Is it some conflict between higher ideals like individual liberty and privacy vs. particular harms?
By the way, not sure if this has come up in your research, but my guess is that if you asked people to pick which phrasing best aligns with their position on murder, more people would choose "I believe that murder is wrong" over "I prefer that people do not murder". I take the former to be a more "morality as objective fact" framing owing to the use of "is", while the latter is more a "universal preference" framing.
>> I think then I'd point to what I see as "most" people's base rejection of moral relativism--I don't think most people are willing to say something like "slavery was acceptable in the South because the people there thought it was okay".
I agree, but this is only one specific form of relativism: agent cultural relativism. I don’t know any relativists that endorse this view, and I don’t endorse this view. More generally, I am not claiming that people endorse any form of moral antirealism, only that they don’t endorse moral realism. The position I defend in my dissertation is folk metaethical indeterminacy: most nonphilosophers have no position on these matters at all. This is a possibility few people consider. Even if we think it’s very likely many people would not endorse antirealist positions when presented with them, this does not automatically entail that they endorse realism.
>> I do think one method of approach would be via questions like "is it okay for a person to impose some moral beliefs on others?
I don’t. This is a normative question that is consistent with both moral realism and moral antirealism. I am a moral antirealist, and I am totally fine with imposing my moral standards on others, e.g., I am fine with imposing my opposition to genocide or slavery onto anyone, anywhere, and I don’t care at all whether they personally are okay with either.
>>Interesting! I'll have to give that blog post a read. Per my comment above, I take the universal scope for some moral preferences to be prima facie evidence (though perhaps not conclusive) of some sort of moral realism belief
I don’t see why this should be evidence of realism at all. I am a moral antirealist and I have lots of preferences regarding other people’s actions. Moral antirealism is *completely* consistent with absolutely no tension or difficulty at all with having preferences about other people’s actions.
>>it seems a lot easier to account for a universal-scope preference as a belief about some stance-independent truth that you think people should *recognize* rather than a simple preference which also includes an additional meta-preference that everyone should *share* said preference.
Again, I don’t think so. First, there’s a difference between me having a preference that e.g., nobody torture, which is not a meta-preference, and a meta-preference, e.g., that nobody has the preference to torture. I have both, but the former is not the latter. I don’t have to have preferences about other people’s preferences. I can just have a preference that people don’t do things I dislike. I don’t have to prefer that they have such preferences. Though I do, and I don’t see why this is an especially burdensome or complicated notion. So I don’t see why this:
“I prefer to live in a world where nobody wants to torture people for fun”
…is any more awkward a fit for describing opposition to torture than:
“I believe there are stance-independent moral facts that are true independent of what anyone thinks about them, that among these is a prohibition against torturing for fun, and this fact applies to everyone independent of their own goals and desires such that it gives them external reasons that count in favor of abstaining from such actions even if they want to perform them.”
If meta-preferences are a bridge too far, it’s not at all clear why positing technical and complicated metaphysical and conceptual notions associated with moral realism is any shorter a bridge. It seems to involve a lot more steps. For instance, if you’re a moral realist, you have to do extra work to show how this would be motivating. In my case, it’s a short step from “I don’t want people to torture people or want to torture people” to my judgments, actions, and so on that involve preventing torture. The realist has to suppose that there are stance-independent moral facts, that we have some kind of epistemic access to them (it takes more work to explain this than to account for my access to my own preferences), and that these either (a) are intrinsically motivating, a few many philosophers won’t defend or (b) aren’t intrinsically motivating but somehow are relevant to people’s motivations and behavior anyway.
If anything, I think the realist saddles themselves with a whole ton of explanatory work that we don’t have to deal with at all if we simply construe people as having preferences, including preferences about preferences. For what it’s worth, I actually would prefer to live in a world where more people enjoyed my favorite music, games, and hobbies. I don’t think meta-preferences are all that complicated or implausible to attribute to people.
>>For example, if somebody does seriously think that everyone should share their taste in music, I find that they tend to talk about it in objective terms: e.g., "all EDM is garbage and objectively trash. how could anybody like this?"
Ordinary people use the word “objective” in all sorts of ways that don’t necessarily reflect what philosophers mean by the term. I even have empirical data on this. I don’t think this tells us much, even if they do this. And, for what it’s worth, anecdotes aren’t especially strong data. People argue about movies, music, food, etc. all the time and I’d bet quite a bit many of them, even in the middle of arguing, would respond to someone asking them if they think these are entirely subjective matters with an emphatic “yes.” But anecdotes won’t settle the matter one way or another. We’d need data on this.
>>By the way, not sure if this has come up in your research, but my guess is that if you asked people to pick which phrasing best aligns with their position on murder, more people would choose "I believe that murder is wrong" over "I prefer that people do not murder".
I agree, but I do not think this is good evidence of moral realism. This can be entirely and easily explained by pragmatics. The latter remark implies less opposition to murder than the former and would put one on the rhetorical backfoot. What one implies about one’s attitudes, commitments, and so on is an important part of language. Which person sounds more opposed to murder?
“I think murder is absolutely wrong and nobody should ever get away with it.”
“I have a personal preference that nobody murder.”
Even if both people were committed moral antirealists, I’d bet the second person would be perceived as less opposed to murder than the former. I also have research related to this that you can find here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027724002701
>>I am a moral antirealist, and I am totally fine with imposing my moral standards on others, e.g., I am fine with imposing my opposition to genocide or slavery onto anyone, anywhere, and I don’t care at all whether they personally are okay with either.
Are you fine with others imposing their moral standards on you?
____
As for the rest of what you said, I feel like we need to distinguish between:
1. Do laypeople talk about moral claims as if they are claims about some external, rigid facts? Or do they talk about them as if they are stance-dependent/personal preferences?
2. Do laypeople have a coherent or strongly-held view of what moral realism entails metaphysically?
3. Given #1 and #2, is there any meaningful sense in which laypeople have an intuition towards realism or anti-realism?
4. If the answer to #1 is that laypeople do seem to talk like moral realists, does that count as good evidence for moral realism being true?
5. If the answer to #2 is that they do not have a coherent view, is that good evidence that moral realism is false?
And ofc 6. Is moral realism true?
For 1), I do take the evidence to largely suggest that laypeople talk like moral realists. I agree that laypeople don’t use “objectivity” in the precise ways philosophers do, but I think the use of words like that surely has to point more towards moral realism as their rough underlying mental model than against it.
To clarify, when I said that “it seems a lot easier to account for a universal-scope preference…” I more meant that, at a linguistic level, the way that laypeople talk about (some) moral issues is very natural and expected if we imagine that those statements are attempting to be claims about external facts. For example: lots of ‘is’ statements, use of words like “objective”, attempts to justify claims to others, the accusation that those who disagree are defective rather than merely of a different persuasion, strong resistance to notions of “agree to disagree” and/or democratic dispute resolution, an insistence on imposing their norms on others even when the actions of those people don’t affect them. All of these are the sorts of behaviors you would expect to see if people thought moral facts have some stance-independent truth that they correctly recognize and which they believe others have failed to recognize. I would expect those same behaviors to be less common in a world where people thought morality was just a matter of preference. Sure, they might be universal scope preferences, and that helps make the likelihood gap less drastic, but I still take there to be a gap. And I think adding in universal scope + a meta-preference (which you are right to distinguish) does get a little clunky as a way of explaining the rhetorical behavior.
Note, this is not meant to be a claim about what is the more metaphysically simpler claim, just the linguistically simpler claim. The key distinction being that someone can talk about morality as if it’s a set of stance-independent facts, and they can even have a rough mental model of morality as a set of stance-independent facts, without them necessarily positing a specific metaphysical position on how they know said facts, how said facts could be motivating, etc. Those are definitely challenges that a philosopher needs to address, but we don’t have to suppose that laypeople have answers to those questions as a condition for them believing in moral realism or behaving/talking about morality as if moral realism were true.
And so for 2), I agree that most people don’t actually have any coherent moral metaphysics about what those external facts would “be” (with the exception of religious people—I’m still not sure how you can argue that people who think God’s word is the moral law don’t believe in moral realism. Is this a “God’s stance is still a stance” argument? If so, I’d still count that as moral realism tbh.)
For 3), because I don’t take 2) as a necessary condition for people having moral realist intuitions, I would tend to take 1) as the stronger evidence in favor here. I will grant that your “folk metaethical indeterminacy” account is plausible, though I do think even if it were broadly true, there would still be SOME nonphilosophers who would express some basic metaethical positions, even if those positions are not precise enough to delineate between stance-independence vs cultural-relativity. But perhaps more importantly, I don’t think that the question of whether laypeople have moral realist intuitions tells us much about the truth of moral realism vs antirealism.
Which brings us to 4) and 5), and here I think I agree with you that the answer to both of these is no.
For 6), this is ofc the tough one. And it’s only here that the metaphysical nature of moral facts would have to be sorted out. But yeah, that’s a much longer discussion.
Upon further reflection and perusing through your blog, I’ve realized I’m probably just rehashing arguments you’ve had elsewhere, so will probably just read up on some of your essays and maybe write up a more detailed essay of my own at some point. I will say that, overall, I am surprised by how strongly you commit to the idea that everyday moral language/discourse does *not* seem to imply a moral realist model. To me, the MUCH weaker link in moral realism is that the way we talk about something doesn’t actually constitute strong evidence that said thing exists and/or conforms to our language. But will need to read in more detail.
Also, as a heads up, I accidentally created two substack blogs and you were subscribed to the other one (which I have now deleted). So if you did want to follow me on here, subscribe to the other one! Would love to continue these (esp after I get more background on your views).
If we lived in a simulation where all our intended acts were inverted and resulted in bad consequences, then according to consequentialism, we would all be bad. According to intentionalism, this wouldn't matter. That's a ridiculous hypothetical, you say. Ok, well, in the real world, we all misperceive things and make mistakes which lead to harm. Harm being caused does not make an act immoral. Animals, for example, can cause harm, but animals are not moral agents capable of immorality. Morality only exists where intentionality is possible. Any consequentialist arguments around this?
Before reading; there are ethical universals to the extent we share priorities:
https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/the-mandate-of-libertarian-fascist