Revisiting Folk Moral Realism

Abstract

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.

The meta-ethical significance of experiments about folk moral objectivism

“…By now, the fact that people are pluralists with regard to their commitment to moral objectivity has been well established. Indeed, a good case can be made that the results of earlier studies which suggested that people are objectivists should be re-interpreted as supporting the view that people are meta-ethical pluralists (Pölzler, 2017a). This pluralism manifests itself in several dimensions:…”

“…Nonetheless, as I will argue in the present section, given the actual dialectic of the meta-ethical debate, such findings are not completely mute, so to speak. An influential type of argument which several meta-ethicists have advanced does purport to derive metaphysical conclusions on the basis of a claim about folk judgments: the so-called 'experiential' or 'presumptive' argument in support of moral realism (e.g., Brink, 1989;Shafer-Landau, 2003; for criticisms, see Kirchin, 2003;Loeb, 2007;Sinclair, 2012;Pölzler, 2017a). Since experiments about folk moral objectivism touch upon the adequacy of this claim about folk judgments, they also touch upon the adequacy of the presumptive argument in support of realism.…”

The Empirical Case for Folk Indexical Moral Relativism

“…In a number of studies, Wright and her collaborators (Wright, Grandjean, & McWhite, 2013;Wright, McWhite, & Grandjean, 2014) used slight variations of probes constructed by Goodwin and Darley (2008). However, in response to published criticisms of these measures (e.g., Beebe, 2015;Pölzler, 2017Pölzler, , 2018, Wright (2018) has more recently developed a new measure of folk moral objectivism, in which participants were asked to indicate which of the following options best represented a number of situations of moral disagreement between them and another person: 10 Goodwin and Darley (2008) observed some similar patterns in the composite scores they calculated using the tasks described above: participants were more likely to give what Goodwin and Darley consider to be objectivist responses when (i) they were responding to moral judgments than when responding to statements about social conventions or tastes, (ii) participants held stronger opinions about the moral issue in question, (iii) participants perceived there to be less societal disagreement about the issue, and (iv) the moral judgments concerned wrongdoing rather than good or morally exemplary actions.…”

Normative reasons: response-dependence and the problem of idealization

“…However, for normative discourse about reasons, it yet needs to be shown that response-dependence views eliminate the constitutive element of that practice. 18 In fact, there is evidence that metanormative beliefs of ordinary people are not clearly committed to robust realism; rather, they exhibit a pluralistic pattern (for a discussion, see Pölzler 2017). For instance, Sarkissian et al (2011) found that people's beliefs about the objectivity of moral facts are culturally bound and correlate with how open people are to alternative perspectives.…”