Even Encyclopedias Get It Wrong

Take a look at the Internet Encyclopedia Entry on moral relativism. It begins with the following remark:

In the view of most people throughout history, moral questions have objectively correct answers. There are obvious moral truths just as there are obvious facts about the world. Cowardice is a bad quality. A man should not have sex with his mother. Heroes deserve respect. Such statements would be viewed as obviously and objectively true, no more open to dispute than the claim that seawater is salty.

Whether most people throughout history had the view that “moral questions have objectively correct answers” is an empirical question. No citations are provided. No evidence is provided. This is simply asserted without any data to support this claim.

This is what I am talking about when I raise the objection that academic philosophers routinely make empirical claims for which there is no good evidence. As I have argued many times on this blog (such as here, here, and here) available empirical evidence does not support the contention that most people today are moral realists, much less that people throughout history did so.

This does not mean that the evidence we have indicates most people are moral antirealists; we simply have no good evidence one way or another. Some studies report fairly high rates of realism, most find that people have mixed (and possibly conflicting) metaethical standards, and some more recent studies, which attempt to correct for methodological shortcomings in earlier studies, find high rates of antirealism, such as this one from Pölzler and Wright (2020):

What we don’t have is a compelling body of empirical literature that convincingly supports the claim that most people are moral realists. We don’t have especially good data for virtually any population of nonphilosophers, much less cross-cultural data. We certainly don’t have historical data. Were Babylonians moral realists? Who knows. Were the Aztec moral realists? Who knows. We can speculate. But it is incredibly challenging to figure out if the people around us are moral realists. It’d be virtually hopeless to convincingly demonstrate that historical populations were moral realists.

For whatever reason, philosophers will make sweeping declarations about how everyone thinks in a completely shameless and bizarre way, as though they are entitled to presume to know how everyone thinks. They don’t. And these remarks aren’t just passing remarks made by a moral realists here and there. It is an entrenched presumption of analytic philosophy as a whole that most people are moral realists and that most people throughout history were moral realists.

For those who think this: why? Reach out to me and make your case. Why do you think this is true? This is an open invitation to post your own blog post in response, post a guest post here, appear on my YouTube channel, or make your own video. I don’t care all that much how you engage me on the matter, but what I’d like to know is why everyone is so damn convinced most people were and are moral realists.

References

Pölzler, T., & Wright, J. C. (2020). Anti-realist pluralism: A new approach to folk metaethics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11, 53-82.