This week’s Twitter Tuesday is yet another bit of positive news. Here is a great thread from the Experimental Philosophy twitter account, which states:
Philosophers keep claiming that the ordinary, intuitive view is that there are objective facts about this or that domain (color, aesthetics, religion, etc.)
And experimental studies keep finding, over and over again, that these claims are not true true
One of my main complaints over the past couple years has been that
Philosophers routinely claim that most nonphilosophers are moral realists, or that moral realism is “the commonsense view”
Such claims are empirical
There is little empirical evidence to support these claims, and the preponderance of evidence, at present, provides substantial cause for doubt (including my own research)
Philosophers nevertheless persist in making such claims, either because they have not encountered the empirical literature or are not persuaded by it
For instance, just three days ago, Huemer stated the following in a blog post:
Most philosophers agree that moral realism is the common sense view. It seems to have been the view of the great majority of ethicists in history, and ethicists are presumably the experts on the subject, if anyone is.
Even if philosophers were the experts on whether moral realism is true, they are not the experts on what the common sense view is.
However, my own background and training is in psychology, and primary dissertation research was not on whether moral realism is true or not, but on the empirical question of whether nonphilosophers are moral realists. If anyone is an expert on the question of whether moral realism is “the commonsense view,” it would be people with my training, research experience, and background, not armchair philosophers.
Are philosophers going to defer to those of us with expertise on the matter? So far, I see little indication of this. In any case, I have a personal aversion to deferring to experts uncritically, especially on philosophical matters. I don’t want them to defer to my judgments on the matter. I want them to read our work, conduct their own research, or otherwise take the fact that claims about how nonphilosophers think are empirical questions, and those questions are not best addressed by facile appeals to personal experiences.
Anyway, back to the tweet thread. It provides a flash tour with graphs of various topics about which people have, at best, mixed views: color, aesthetics, religious views, and morality. There are likely more.
A few points about this. First, the claim that most people are not realists about an issue should not be mistaken for the claim that they are antirealists about the issue.
This is important to stress: I do not think most people are philosophical antirealists about aesthetics or morality or color or much else. Rather, I think the reason we’re seeing mixed patterns in so much of the data is that we are trying to fit a square philosophical peg to a round folk psychological hole: ordinary people simply don’t think in accordance with the categories and distinctions that animate contemporary analytic philosophy, and, as such, they simply have no views on these topics one way or another, and the way they speak and think doesn’t comport to many of the categories and accounts that philosophers defend. My delve into metaethics led to just this suspected generalization, and I think we’re starting to see signs this in the experimental philosophical literature.
Here’s what I find troubling:
Why did it take so damn long?
Why did philosophers spend decades going around saying “the ordinary person means this” or “the commonsense view is that,” or “most people believe such-and-such” without doing something so bafflingly, obviously, breathtaking simply as just asking those people in a systematic way?
According to this site, the first census was conducted in 3800 BCE. If this is accurate, then it had occurred to people to just gather data on a given population half a millennium before the Bronze Age!
With all the modern resources available to them, it never occurred to philosophers to just conduct studies to find out? That we’re only starting to find out now that all these claims philosophers make about “the commonsense view” are just wrong would be more exciting if it were so profoundly embarrassing.
I have lost my patience with the kinds of rejoinders philosophers are inclined to give. The worst of these would be the insistence that the claims in question aren’t empirical to begin with. There is a technical term for such claims: bullshit. Claims about what nonphilosophers think are empirical questions. This shouldn’t be a serious matter of dispute. The next worse defense of their practices is that philosophers have the relevant conceptual or linguistic expertise to make judgments about how nonphilosophers think by appealing to their own knowledge and experience, including not only how they think, but their memories and anecdotal experiences of people they’ve engaged with. This is almost worse than insisting the claims in question aren’t empirical to begin with. Perhaps, in some ways, it is worse. At least if you deny the questions are empirical, the problem is that you’re mistaken at a more fundamental level. In this case, granting that the question is empirical, why would you rely on terrible methods? If the claims in question are genuinely matters of human psychology, armchair judgments and anecdotes just aren’t going to fly. A philosopher may insist:
“In virtue of my competence in English and my expert judgments about what is or isn’t intuitive, I am in a position to make reliable judgments about how most nonphilosophers think, and can therefore determine what the commonsense view is without conducting or consulting empirical studies.
Now imagine if personality psychologists made an analogous claim:
“In virtue of my competence in understanding human psychology and the fact that I myself have a personality and am good at reflecting on and thinking about my personality, and, in addition, the fact that I know other people and have a good sense of what their personalities are, I can determine what the nature of human personality is like without conducting or consulting empirical studies.”
Forget the Big Five. Forget comprehensive validation procedures. Forget predictive validity. To hell with factor analysis. You don’t need any of that if you’re a personality psychologist. You have a personality! Your friends have personalities! Your students have personalities! What more do you need?
Personality psychologists would be laughed out of the room if they developed models of human psychology based on their intuitions and experiences. It is no less ridiculous when philosophers do it. So when Huemer says that most philosophers agree moral realism is the commonsense view, who cares? I certainly don’t. Whether or not they have the expertise Huemer goes on to attribute to them, they don’t have expertise on what the commonsense view is.
Experimental philosophy has allowed itself to be relegated to a minor, auxiliary role in the history of philosophy. This is regrettable. Experimental philosophy can and should take its place as a rightful and essential element of many aspects of philosophy, and experimental philosophers should put more active pressure on armchair philosophers to be more cautious about claims that veer into empirical territory if those philosophers are unwilling or unable to conduct or engage with the appropriate empirical findings.
2.0 Responding to Dominik’s reaction to the thread
Now on to some of the responses to the thread.
Dominik showed up and, as usual, made several remarks that strike me as either misguided or false:
This is so bad. 1) the majority position in the philosophy of colour is indeed dispositionalism, 2) very few philosophers claim that most laypeople are aesthetic realists, 3) the overall x-phi literature massively favours moral realism. and all-around terrible thread.
First, Dominik may be right about one thing: it may not be so common for philosophers to suppose that ordinary people are aesthetic realists; this might also be true for color as well. Yet even if that’s the case, I’m puzzled as to whether that serves as any sort of objection to the original post, or especially the claim that the post is “so bad.”
Note that the original post merely stated that
Philosophers keep claiming that the ordinary, intuitive view is that there are objective facts about this or that domain (color, aesthetics, religion, etc.)
Nothing about this remark suggests that a majority of philosophers think this way. Consider, then, Dominik’s remarks:
the majority position in the philosophy of colour is indeed dispositionalism
Let’s suppose that’s the case (and I have no reason to think it isn’t). So what? That’s consistent with the claim that philosophers keep claiming people are color realists. Now, do philosophers keep claiming that? I don’t know. The remark is a bit vague. It’d be unsurprising if at least one philosopher has made such a claim, and it’d be surprising if nearly all philosophers (at least those opining on color realism) made such claims. Presumably this remark is intended to convey that it is fairly common. Whether it is or isn’t, even if most philosophers were dispositionalists, this (a) wouldn’t be relevant to whether many philosophers weren’t and (b) even if most philosophers think the correct account of colors is dispositional, it’s still possible the folk theory isn’t dispositionalist; so saying most philosophers are dispositionalists doesn’t really show that they think most people aren’t, though it’d admittedly be a bit weird if they did think this. So, let’s just grant for the sake of argument both that most philosophers aren’t color realists and that they don’t think most nonphilosophers are. It’s still not clear that either of these facts would show that philosophers don’t “keep claiming” people are color realists. Perhaps they don’t, but Dominik hasn’t presented any compelling considerations to show that they don’t.
For comparison, suppose that ~45% of philosophers endorsed the claim that most nonphilosophers are moral realists, and routinely expressed this claim. Although this wouldn’t compromise the majority of philosophers, it would still be true the that philosophers were routinely claiming most people were moral realists. In short, the original post never claimed that a majority of philosophers made such claims, only that they “keep” doing so. This remark is not quantified and in no way implies a majority do so.
Next, Dominik says:
very few philosophers claim that most laypeople are aesthetic realists,
Again, even supposing this was true, it may show only that it’s not that common for them to make such claims. The original post never claimed otherwise, even if such a claim is more consistent with the original post than otherwise. Yet consider, for instance, the claims of illusionists and eliminativists about phenomenal consciousness. Such views are a minority position in philosophy, yet they are a notable minority because of the supposed audacity (or a absurdity) of the claim. Now suppose someone said:
Philosophers keep claiming that phenomenal consciousness doesn’t exist. But this is absurd…
This claim is very much like the original post in structure. Yet would this serve as a reasonable objection to that post?
This remark is so bad. Most philosophers don’t deny phenomenal consciousness.
No. It would not. Because the point of the original remark is to point out that some significant and noteworthy subset of philosophers make these claims. It does not require that a majority do so for the claim to worth making (and to be worth supporting or rebutting).
This illustrates how Dominik’s objections are, so far, both a bit odd: they seem to support the claim that the original post is “so bad” but don’t seem to me to do much to support that claim.
Finally, we have this claim:
3) the overall x-phi literature massively favours moral realism
No, it doesn’t. I am a specialist in the psychology of metaethics, I did my dissertation on this topic, and I spent the past decade studying exactly this question. As far as I know, Dominik has not. And, as I argue in my work, the empirical evidence does not massively favor moral realism. I want to make clear what, exactly, I did in my dissertation. What I did was gather and read every paper I could find in the literature that addressed whether nonphilosophers were moral realists, and I conducted a systematic methodological critique of every major paper and paradigm I could find. This resulted in a monstrous supplemental section comprising several hundred pages of systematic evaluation of the methods used in these studies. I didn’t merely conduct a literature review. I immersed myself in these papers for years. I also conducted many studies of my own evaluating the validity of the methods used in these studies. I won’t rehash my conclusions yet again, but here’s the tl;dr:
Every study that attempts to estimate what proportion of people are moral realists relies on invalid methods
We do not have enough cross-cultural data to make informed generalizations about what most of the world’s population thinks now, and we certainly don’t have enough to make claims about what people thought in the past
I gathered extensive data in support of the invalidity of existing studies; that is, I have a lot of data that shows that participants do not interpret questions about metaethics as researchers intend
I argue that the best explanation for the present state of the literature is that most nonphilosophers are neither realists nor antirealists, but have no determinate metaethical positions at all
Even if you reject (4), there is no sensible reading of the empirical literature that would justify the notion that most people are moral realists. I have no idea how Dominik arrived at that conclusion. What studies does Dominik think show this? I’d be very curious to know, yet I’ve never seen Dominik actually discuss this literature. At best, my own reading of the literature is that we simply don’t know whether people are moral realists or antirealists. But as I’ve argued elsewhere, the most rigorous empirical studies support, if anything, that most people in the United States are probably moral antirealists. I don’t endorse that conclusion, but the notion that the literature overwhelmingly supports moral realism is…strange. It may be based on a superficial or outdated reading of some of the early literature (e.g., Goodwin & Darley, 2008) or more recent work, e.g., Ziljstra (2023), and while both of these are fascinating papers with cool paradigms, neither of these papers actually provides strong evidence that most people are moral realists. What we don’t have is some kind of robust, consistent, well-validated, established body of findings in the psychology of metaethics. What we have is about a decade of paradigms that have provided messy, nearly uninterpretable data using paradigms that are demonstrably flawed in numerous ways.
Anyway, I have already addressed these claims extensively. I have specifically refuted this same claim from Dominik previously, which you can see here and here. I have also addressed the claims that most people are moral realists here and here. Just to give you an idea, these are some of the results of what I am confident can readily be argued to be the most careful and rigorous study addressing whether nonphilosophers are moral realists:
Pölzler & Wright, 2020, p. 75.
Note that Pölzler and Wright have been at the forefront of identifying methodological shortcomings of earlier paradigms and doing their best to correct for them, and the results you see here aggregated across seven different paradigms. Even if earlier studies showed higher rates of realism (which they did), it’s more than a little puzzling that, as methods have improved, rates of moral antirealist responses have improved.
But this is all moot: I don’t think these participants are moral antirealists, myself. And that’s because if you put the work into evaluating how these studies work, and how people think about them, you will, I believe, come away with a striking degree of pessimism about whether we’re really measuring folk metaethical views in the first place.
Of course, I could just be cherry-picking! I readily acknowledge that this particular study finds a very high rate of antirealism compared to most other studies. Which is why I encourage you to go read my posts about this, where I explain both why this study is better than most other studies and why most of those studies don’t provide good evidence that most people are moral realists, either.
Nevertheless, Dominik could be correct. Maybe Dominik is aware of studies I overlooked, or has an insightful reading of the literature I hadn’t considered. I’d be open to the possibility, despite my admittedly immense skepticism. As such, I’d like to extend to Dominik a formal invitation to appear on my channel to discuss the empirical literature on the psychology of metaethics, and Dominik is welcome to explain why the data supports the conclusion that most people are moral realists. My impression is that Dominik doesn’t like me, and probably wouldn’t want to talk to me. In that case, I encourage Dominik to make some public statement somewhere describing why the empirical evidence supports the claim that most people are moral realists.
3.0 Acting “as though” moral realism is true
A couple comments center on the notion that we should be concerned with whether people act “as if” moral realism were true, such as this one:
These results aren't surprising, but a better question: is ordinary *behavior* more in line with the view that there are objective facts in these domains? If ordinary views are inconsistent with ordinary behavior, that casts doubt on the value of self-reports of such views.
Along with this one:
One worry about this: when people say that, for example, moral realism is intuitive, they don’t typically mean that the average person will say morality is objective. What they mean is that most people act as though it is objective when engaged in moral activity.
How would people act differently if they were moral realists rather than antirealists? I suspect there’d be no, or virtually no significant differences in their behavior. The sorts of things people do in everyday moral situations, e.g., judge others, deliberate, reason, express emotions, argue, and so on, are all consistent with both moral realism and moral antirealism.
There’s no straightforward behavioral profile that best fits with moral realism rather than antirealism beyond the most obvious and straightforward aspects of being a moral realist, and by this I mean saying things like “I am a moral realist” and “there are objective moral truths.” But, e.g., judging others, engaging in moral deliberation, arguing about what’s morally right or wrong, and so on, are all equally consistent with antirealism (indeed, I think most or all of these behaviors make as much or more sense as an antirealist). Without additional details, though, I simply don’t know what proponents of these claims have in mind.
4.0 Other remarks
Some respondents question whether philosophers are making these sorts of claims. I must express some sympathy with these concerns. I don’t recall any instances of philosophers claiming people are realists about color or aesthetics, though perhaps some have. Even so, they do often say people are moral realists, a fact which I’ve documented myself.
It would be helpful if the original post included references to or examples of people making such claims, though it’s often hard to do that on the fly.
References
Goodwin, G. P., & Darley, J. M. (2008). The psychology of meta-ethics: Exploring objectivism. Cognition, 106(3), 1339-1366.
Pölzler, T., & Wright, J. C. (2020). Anti-realist pluralism: A new approach to folk metaethics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11, 53-82.
Zijlstra, L. (2023). The Psychology of Metaethics: Evidence For and Against Folk Moral Objectivism. In H. Viciana, A. Gaitán, & F. Aguiar (Eds.), Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy (pp. 83-103). New York, NY: Routledge.