Now that I think about it, I find it odd to suggest that just because people are theists and theism entails moral realism that most people are moral realists. People believe all sorts of mathematical truths but fail to have beliefs about more complicated mathematical truths that are entailed by those they accept. People’s beliefs can be inconsistent or incomplete. It’s not crazy to think that’s happening here… I mean, hell, tons of Christians don’t even hold orthodox beliefs about the trinity, and unlike moral realism, that’s in the creeds
I have a blog post coming out that addresses this claim. Andrew has made it several times. There is no good reason to think that if someone is a theist they're likely to be a moral realist.
If I recall correctly, theism and realism are strongly correlated in the philpapers results. But I don’t know that we should extrapolate from that to lay theists broadly. Seems super questionable to me
I believe about 15% endorsed moral antirealism. 26% of philosophers in general did, so make of that what you will. In any case, why rely on tenuous, speculative correlations between theism and endorsement of realism when you could just directly empirically evaluate whether people are moral realists?
And it turns out...the empirical evidence does not support such a contention. It might in the future. Much of the research has been on college students, people on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and WEIRD populations, which may be more disposed towards giving antirealist responses, or may be less theistic, or demonstrate other demographic variation relative to the rest of the world.
But if that's the case (and I suspect it is!), we still lack robust cross-cultural empirical data that would support the claim that most people are moral realists.
The bottom line is: this is an empirical question. Philosophers are welcome to engage in all the armchair speculation they want about how people speak, think, or act, but (a) good psychological data should trump such speculation and (b) none of us are obliged to take them seriously if they dismiss this data and insist that their speculations be taken at face value.
Now that I think about it, I find it odd to suggest that just because people are theists and theism entails moral realism that most people are moral realists. People believe all sorts of mathematical truths but fail to have beliefs about more complicated mathematical truths that are entailed by those they accept. People’s beliefs can be inconsistent or incomplete. It’s not crazy to think that’s happening here… I mean, hell, tons of Christians don’t even hold orthodox beliefs about the trinity, and unlike moral realism, that’s in the creeds
I have a blog post coming out that addresses this claim. Andrew has made it several times. There is no good reason to think that if someone is a theist they're likely to be a moral realist.
If I recall correctly, theism and realism are strongly correlated in the philpapers results. But I don’t know that we should extrapolate from that to lay theists broadly. Seems super questionable to me
I believe about 15% endorsed moral antirealism. 26% of philosophers in general did, so make of that what you will. In any case, why rely on tenuous, speculative correlations between theism and endorsement of realism when you could just directly empirically evaluate whether people are moral realists?
And it turns out...the empirical evidence does not support such a contention. It might in the future. Much of the research has been on college students, people on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and WEIRD populations, which may be more disposed towards giving antirealist responses, or may be less theistic, or demonstrate other demographic variation relative to the rest of the world.
But if that's the case (and I suspect it is!), we still lack robust cross-cultural empirical data that would support the claim that most people are moral realists.
The bottom line is: this is an empirical question. Philosophers are welcome to engage in all the armchair speculation they want about how people speak, think, or act, but (a) good psychological data should trump such speculation and (b) none of us are obliged to take them seriously if they dismiss this data and insist that their speculations be taken at face value.