Realists, realists, everywhere?

In Ethical Intuitionism, Huemer (2005) states that:

“Most who deny the existence of objective values will concede that, at least at first glance, it seems natural to suppose there are objective values. Nearly every society throughout history has taken the objectivity of values for granted. And as I’ve suggested, even members of our own cynical society appear to assume the objectivity of values in their ordinary thinking about particular moral questions.” (p. xxiv)

There are three claims here. I have some observations about each:

“Most who deny the existence of objective values will concede that, at least at first glance, it seems natural to suppose there are objective values.”

Philosophers often talk about “us,” or “we” or “people” without specifying who they’re referring to. Do most philosophers concede this? Most ordinary people? Most people to whom the question is posed? Most contemporary analytic philosophers familiar with metaethics who are currently capable of entertaining such questions, or all philosophers throughout history? I don’t know. Hopefully Huemer can clarify.

At any rate, my impression is that most contemporary analytic philosophers would probably agree that moral realism seems fairly natural. It’s a separate question, of course, whether they are correct.

“Nearly every society throughout history has taken the objectivity of values for granted.”

This is a very strong claim that would require extensive evidence from history and anthropology, and considerable knowledge of philosophy, to establish. I don’t think there is anywhere close to the sort of evidence we’d need to sustain such claims. Quite the contrary, Machery and Mallon 2010) argue, we don’t even have good empirical evidence that all societies throughout history have had distinctively moral concepts. It’s an open empirical question (and perhaps an unanswerable one) whether all societies thought of value as objective, and it may even be the case that some (perhaps many, perhaps even most) societies had no conception of distinctively moral values, or had very different conceptions than we do today.

“And as I’ve suggested, even members of our own cynical society appear to assume the objectivity of values in their ordinary thinking about particular moral questions”

They don’t appear to assume objectivity in their ordinary thinking to me. Our best available empirical evidence suggests that metaethical positions are explained to them, ordinary people tend to consistently reject the objectivity of moral values. See Pölzler & Wright (2020). While it may appear to some philosophers that ordinary people assume realism, it’s never seemed that way to me, and there’s little in the way of compelling empirical evidence to support such a claim.

Historically, moral realism has garnered greater appeal among philosophers due to the impression that most people, now and throughout history, have been moral realists, or have spoken and thought as though moral realism were true. Yet there is little evidence that this is true. More generally, philosophers should be more circumspect about presuming that everyone, everywhere thinks the way that they do, and to base such presumptions on very little in the way of actual evidence. If you think most people throughout history were moral realists, show us the evidence.

References

Huemer, M. (2008). Ethical intuitionism. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Machery, E., & Mallon, R. (2010). Evolution of morality. In J. M. Doris et al. (Eds.). The moral psychology handbook (pp. 3-47). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Pölzler, T., & Wright, J. C. (2020). Anti-realist pluralism: A new approach to folk metaethics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(1), 53-82.