Even academics strawman moral relativism

1.0 Twitter Oxford University Press Tuesday

“Twitter Tuesdays” are my longest running series on this blog. In these posts, I usually critique tweets (and on rare occasions have something positive to say about them). The most common critiques focus on bad arguments for moral realism or against moral antirealism. One might dismiss the relevance of criticizing tweets: “who cares what a bunch of random shitposters have to say about Super Serious™ philosophical topics”, after all. This objection might have some merit, since one certainly shouldn’t judge the fruits of a field by what an uninformed person vomits out on social media. However:

1. Usually the tweets I focus on reflect recurring patterns of thought in popular discourse. Even if academics have matters sorted in the literature, popular misunderstandings can still have significant negative consequences. 

For example, even though evolutionary biologists have very good explanations for how natural selection works, how life on earth evolved, and so on, there is an endless fusillade of misinformed remarks about evolution. Improving public understanding of science is a worthwhile cause: it increases the pool of potential future scientists, enhances public support for scientific efforts, influences educational and other policies, and can ultimately lead to more funding for scientific research. Through such circuitous paths, popular understanding of science contributes to improving the quality of science. Why should it be any different for public perceptions of philosophy?

2. Often the tweets I focus on are from academics, so they directly reflect views within the field.

I have seen some professional philosophers characterize relativism this way, but I haven’t started to systematically document such instances in print. Usually the bad objections, misleading framings, and general bad takes on moral relativism and antirealism more generally appear in podcasts, YouTube clips, TikTok, and the like. However, a colleague recently provided me with an example of an author presenting relativism in a way that repeats many of common tropes and bad objections I’ve covered on this blog previously. The offending source is this book, by Lewis Vaughn:

I have no particular gripe with this author or the book. I’m not familiar with the author, and the book may be magnificent in literally every other respect than its coverage of relativism. Unfortunately, Vaughn’s coverage of relativism is whatever the opposite of magnificent is. Maleficent? My only focus will be on the characterization of moral relativism. Alright, let’s get into it!

2.1 Presumption of folk realism

The commonsense view of morality and moral standards is this: There are moral norms or principles that are valid or true for everyone. This claim is known as moral objectivism. (Vaughn, p. 13)

Here we have the claim that moral realism is “the” commonsense view. 

It’s not at all clear what this even means. What exactly is a “commonsense” view? Is it the view all reasonable people hold? The view most people typically hold? If so, which people? For any given philosophical issue, is there only one commonsense view, or can there be more than one? The use of the would indicate there’s only supposed to be one. Is this an empirical claim about how people think? If so, when was it established that this is the commonsense view? Based on what evidence? If not, what sort of claim is it?

If this is intended to be an empirical claim about how people typically think, i.e., “most people think that moral realism is true,” why should we believe this is true? Philosophers often make this claim, but rarely provide substantive empirical evidence that it’s true. The reason for this is simple: they don’t have substantive empirical evidence that it’s true. It’s something philosophers have just asserted, for decades, without ever actually doing the work to show it’s true. As I’ve argued on this blog many times, the empirical evidence at present does not support the contention that most people are moral realists.

Note that this is a remark that appears in an academic text from Oxford University Press from a professional philosopher. It’s not a tweet. Academics really do make exactly the sorts of claims people make online; indeed, that people make such claims online, and often do so with considerable confidence, is likely because such remarks are often made by academics. This is important: the dubious claims moral realists make online aren’t just popular misconceptions; they’re entrenched in academia as well.