Response to Gil Sanders of Thomistic Thinker (Part 1)

1.o Introduction

Gil Sanders appeared as a guest on Philosophy for the People on 7/25/2022. You can see that video here (it's quite long, at ~2.5 hours).

I posted a few comments raising objections from an antirealist perspective to both Gil's remarks and the host's (Patrick). This prompted both Gil and Patrick to write blog posts in reply. I discuss Patrick's in a previous post.

First, I should say that I greatly appreciate the fact that both Gil and Patrick found my comments sufficiently worth engaging that it prompted them to write blog posts. Constantly arguing about moral realism is kind of my thing, so I am happy to get the opportunity to do so.

That being said, I have many critical remarks about Gil's position. This isn't in any way intended to reflect criticism of Gil. Rather, I am simply engaging with the positions as I see them, and am addressing the shortcomings with the arguments and ideas that have been presented. Hopefully, despite the numerous objections that I raise, they will be taken in the spirit they're intended: as the views of an antirealist that wants to criticize antirealism, not the people espousing it.

2.0 The moral datum

Gil begins by stating the following:

First, he replies by claiming I “never provided any empirical evidence that all or nearly all people experience morality in a way consistent with moral realism.” But this is precisely what the moral datum does!

Gil claims that the moral datum provides empirical evidence that people experience morality a particular way...but he doesn't present any evidence. He just claims the moral datum does this. Then we're given an example that has nothing to do with people's moral experiences. Not once in this entire post do we receive anything amounting to substantive evidence about people's moral experiences.

Instead, Gil appears to simply make assertions about what he thinks other people think, and declare that "datum."

Why should we think any of these assertions are true? What entitles Gil to claim most people experience morality in realist terms? Pointing out that most people share some other experience does not show that they also do so with respect to moral realism. I address this in the next section.

3.0 Plausibility siphoning

For example, suppose I said nearly all human being have experiences in a way consistent with real consciousness. It would be strange to reply, “But you never provided empirical evidence of this!

This is very strange. The comparison seems to be trying to make a point like this:

(1) Asking for empirical evidence that most people are moral realists or have realist phenomenology is really strange.

(2) It's strange in the way it'd be strange to ask for evidence of something that's so obvious that it isn't the sort of thing we need evidence for. Queue an example you presume I'd agree with.

(3) Since I'd agree we don't need empirical evidence for the other example, for some reason I'm supposed to agree in the case of the thing we are disputing.

This ... doesn't work. Gil is just helping himself to the presumption that it's obvious that most people have realist phenomenology, which is the very thing I'm challenging. I don't agree with Gil that it's obvious. "It's obvious" is thus not one of the shared facts we both agree on that he can appeal to. Comparing it to something we would agree on doesn't help.

This is a common strategy I see people use in debates. I'll call it plausibility siphoning. It works like this.

Alex: I deny X.

Sam: Okay, but X is like Y, and it would be absurd to deny Y, so why would you deny X?

If Alex goes on to try to deny X, Sam can continue to insist that this is like denying Y. This strategy can be effective when it creates the impression that Alex's position amounts to denying Y, where Y is presented as something so obvious nobody could reasonably deny it. For instance, Sam might say:

Sam: Denying X is like denying trees exist. It would be absurd to deny trees exist. So your position is absurd.

The force of Sam's argument rests entirely on the degree to which it's in fact the case that denying X is "like denying trees exist." Yet if what's under dispute is whether X is true, but not e.g., the existence of trees, it's inappropriate for Sam to insist that denying X is like denying the existence of trees. This can give an audience the misleading impression that X is just as plausible as the claim that trees exist, even if Sam has done nothing to demonstrate that this is the case.

Rather, the rhetorical force of the comparison is derived entirely by surreptitiously substituting the plausibility of Y (in this case, the existence of trees) for X, making it seem as though to deny X is as unreasonable as denying Y, without Sam having to do any work to demonstrate any good reasons to think denying X is like denying Y.

This is why I call this plausibility siphoning: The plausibility of X illicitly propped up by a kind of epistemic legerdemain that prompts an audience to conflate the plausibility of X with the plausibility of Y. X "siphons off" the plausibility of Y in the minds of an audience, illicitly benefiting from the presumptive plausibility of Y due to the person linking the two simply declaring that the plausibility of one is comparable to the other. In other words, an audience might react by thinking, "Wow, Y really is extremely plausible, so it makes no sense for this person to deny X..." as though X's plausibility is increased artificially by Sam associating the two in the audience's mind. It's a bit like guilt by association: Y has a kind of "plausibility halo" that can partially encompass X by Sam associating the two, giving the false impression that X is more plausible than it is.

2.1 The problem with plausibility siphoning

The problem with this kind of strategy is that Alex can just say "I deny that X is like Y." If Sam wants to insist that X is like Y, they'd have to present an argument or demonstrate that X is like Y. They're not entitled to just declare that it is by fiat.

I'm doing exactly what Alex is doing. I agree that if moral realist phenomenology were as obviously ubiquitous as some other phenomenon that you and I agree is ubiquitous, then it would be strange for me to demand empirical evidence. But that's precisely the problem: I don't think it's so obvious that people have moral realist phenomenology that we don't need evidence for in the way I don't think we need evidence for a variety of other things I think are obvious.

Claims about human psychology are empirical questions. They aren't resolved by declaring the answer to be obvious. Just because something seems obvious to you, doesn't mean it's true, and doesn't mean it's obvious (or ought to be obvious) to anyone else. And simply appealing to how things seem to be or how obvious you think they are isn't a publicly evaluable argument. The fact that you think something is obvious isn't, by itself, an especially good reason for me to think it's true.

3.0 Real consciousness

Incidentally, you chose an example that I ironically may also reject is true of ordinary people. So if we're examining your example, I’d first ask what you mean by “real” consciousness.

I endorse meta-illusionism and quietism about phenomenal consciousness, so there's a good chance I don’t think all human beings have experiences that are consistent with what you think real consciousness is (Mandik, 2016). Quite the contrary, I think the notion of qualia and the surrounding discussion in philosophy of mind (such as on e.g., the hard problem of consciousness) is a philosophical invention, not a feature of the way ordinary people think about or experience the world.

As such, if your conception of “real” consciousness implies the existence of qualia, I am, in fact, going to ask that you provide empirical evidence that ordinary people share philosophical notions of qualia.

There is empirical evidence on this, and so far it suggests that they don’t. See Díaz (2021), and Sytsma and Machery (2010; 2011). Here is the abstract from Sytsma and Machery’s 2010 paper:

“Do philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in the same way?

In this article, we argue that they do not and that the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness does not coincide with the folk conception. We first offer experimental support for the hypothesis that philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in markedly different ways. We then explore experimentally the folk conception, proposing that for the folk, subjective experience is closely linked to valence. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for a central issue in the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness.”

You are welcome to call a demand for empirical evidence strange, but “that’s strange” is no rebuttal. I would make the demand all the same.

Surely pointing out that we all exhibit certain behavior that reflects consciousnesses suffices to show this.

No, it doesn’t show this. You’d have to first offer a clear account of what you mean by consciousness, and explain how observed behavior is distinctly indicative of that account (rather than some other account of consciousness) before you could point to behavior as evidence of your particular account of consciousness. I don’t think anything about human behavior shows that people have phenomenal consciousness.

4.0 Do all people engage in moral reasoning, believe some moral statements are true, and believe there's real moral progress?

Similarly, showing we all exhibit certain moral behavior (e.g, engaging in moral reasoning, believing some moral statements that to be true, and believing there’s real moral progress) also suffices.

Maybe that would suffice, but Gil hasn’t presented any evidence for any of these claims. There’s already research on all of these topics, and the data suggests does not support any of these claims. Keep in mind that it Gil is making the very strong claim that all people exhibit these characteristics. I would accept "nearly all" as a victory for Gil, but even that condition can't be met. All we'd need to demonstrate is that a substantial subset of the world's population (a) doesn't engage in moral reasoning (b) doesn't think some moral statements are (stance-independently) true, or (c) doesn't believe there's moral progress.

Consider (b). Note that Gil's remark was ambiguous: “believing some moral statements to be true.” True in a stance-independent way, or a stance-dependent way? It’s no evidence of realism that people think some moral statements are true, if they don’t think they’re stance-independently true. People discussing moral realism frequently conflate normative claims ("X is wrong") with metaethical claims ("Facts about the moral status of X are stance-independent") or combine the two, which can result in ambiguity and quickly result in muddled discussions or open the door to confusion or inappropriate rhetorical moves ("X is stance-independently wrong" ... this is both a metaethical claim and a normative claim).

Gil may object that he doesn't think the requisite evidence would need to be that people endorse stance-independent moral facts, specifically, just any moral facts. But if he made this move, it would be a mistake. Cultural relativists and individual subjectivists do believe there are moral facts, and I don't think Gil would want to insist evidence that people are cultural relativists or subjectivists to be evidence of his views. Presumably, they'd be evidence to the contrary. Technically speaking, people thinking that "some moral statements are true" would only indicate (1) cognitivism (2) an alethic stance that some moral claims are true. Yet (1) and (2) are compatible with antirealist positions, so someone believing just (1) and (2) would not necessarily serve as evidence exclusively of realism, since it could also serve as evidence for stance-dependent views of morality, which are antirealist. This is not hypothetical or idle speculation, since Pölzler and Wright's (2020) findings suggested most people endorsed cognitivism but rejected realism. I don't have to endorse these results to point out that that's one among many studies that conflict with Gil's presumptions about folk metaethics.

Now I'd like to go through each of his three claims separately.

4.1 There’s no good evidence everyone engages in moral reasoning

First, some societies don’t lexicalize moral terms and concepts, and don’t appear to share Western conceptions of morality. See Berniūnas (2020), Machery (2018), and Stich (2018). There is little evidence of a universal tendency to distinguish moral from nonmoral norms in the same way, or to even recognize Western conceptions of moral terms and concepts.

On the contrary, cross-cultural research suggests a far more diverse picture, with different populations conceptualizing moral norms in very different ways, or having fundamentally different normative frameworks. There isn’t even good evidence that moral judgment and reasoning relies on a distinctive set of psychological processes, or that it’s otherwise unified in such a way so as to represent a natural kind (Sinnott-Armstrong & Wheatley, 2012).

This supports Machery’s thesis that it is a cultural phenomenon, and not one shared by all of humanity. As Machery puts it:

“morality is a learned, culturally specific phenomenon; the distinction between moral judgment and other normative judgments is not a product of evolution, but it is rather a historical invention that reuses a motley of evolved processes and must be relearned by children generation after generation.“ (p. 259)

4.2 Research on folk metaethics does not suggest all or nearly all people are moral realists

The best available empirical evidence suggests most people reject moral realism: Davis (2021) and Pölzler and Wright’s (2020) studies find that antirealism is more common among tested populations than realism.

In fact, Pölzler and Wright found that a significant majority of participants reliably favored antirealist responses to questions about metaethics. See Figure 1

These results are hard to square with the notion that most people endorse moral realism, or have realist phenomenology. I'm not suggesting these results must be true, or that we should conclude most people in such studies are antirealists. Rather, I'm suggesting that when people try to evaluate how ordinary people think, they don't tend to find an overwhelming majority in favor of realism.

4.3 Empirical research does not indicate that all or nearly all people believe in moral progress

There’s no good evidence everyone believes in moral progress. Quite the contrary, consider this recent paper from West and Pizarro (2022) which suggests that many people believe society is in a state of moral decline:

“Across four studies (3 experimental, total n = 199; 1 archival, n = 186,000) we provide evidence that people hold the belief that the world is growing morally worse, and that this belief is consistent across generational, political, and religious lines. When asked directly about which aspects of society are getting better and which are getting worse, people are more likely to list the moral (compared to non-moral) aspects as getting worse (Studies 1-2). When provided with a list of items that are either moral or non-moral, people are more likely to report that moral (compared to non-moral) items are worsening (Study 3). Finally, when asked the question “What is the most important problem facing America today?” participants in a nationally representative survey (Heffington et al., 2019), disproportionately listed problems that fall within the moral domain (Study 4).”

Not only does Gil provide no evidence for any of his claims, I can cite numerous studies off the top of my head that suggest the exact opposite. Keep in mind here that the bar is very low:

(1) I am not trying to show that the studies reported here are all true

(2) I am not trying to show that any of these issues are settled against Gil

Rather, I am merely pointing out that Gil is not justified in claiming points (1) through (3) are true without engaging with the empirical literature. At present, that literature does not support his claims, and quite strongly suggests all of them are false. Maybe all these studies are flawed, and future evidence will vindicate (1) - (3). But that's irrelevant to my point. I'm not arguing (1) - (3) are false. I'm simply arguing they're not obviously true, and that Gil is not entitled to claim any as "datum."

5.0 More plausibility siphoning

Gil says:

Suppose someone told you, “There are some studies that show anti-realism about other minds is more common than realism about other minds!” You would think that the reasoning for such a conclusion is far more dubious and less obvious than your commonsense data.

Once again, Gil is employing plausibility siphoning. Even if I'd doubt the results of studies that suggested most ordinary people don't believe in other minds, it wouldn't follow that I should therefore also doubt studies that find most people reject moral realism.

The plausibility of folk moral realism does not depend on the plausibility of belief in other minds, so comparing the two doesn't serve any legitimate purpose other than , perhaps, to illustrate how implausible Gil thinks studies suggesting people aren't moral realists are. But this isn't any kind of argument or evidence; it's just another way of circling back to Gil's incredulity.

Notably, Gil also states that such findings would be "more dubious and less obvious than your commonsense data."

Whose commonsense data? My experiences don't indicate that most people are moral realists. On the contrary, my commonsense data suggests it's false that most people are moral realists. Gil doesn't get to speak for what other people's experiences are. That's an empirical question.

6.0 Some studies

Gil states that:

he proceeds to refer to some studies that asserts moral anti-realism is more common than realism.

It’s not merely some studies. It's a bunch of them. Just to make a point, below I present a sample of such studies.

Note that they don’t all find majority antirealism, but they reliably find a significant subset of participants are antirealists. Almost no studies find that almost everyone is a realist, except for a few older, low-powered studies with children. The rest reliably find a substantial subset of antirealists, if not a majority. And just to be clear, it's not my position that most people are antirealists. My claim is only that it's not the case that the vast majority, much less all or nearly all people, are moral realists.

Ayars, A., & Nichols, S. (2020). Rational learners and metaethics: Universalism, relativism, and evidence from consensus. Mind & Language, 35(1), 67-89.

Beebe, J. R. (2015). The empirical study of folk metaethics. Etyka, 50, 11-28.

Beebe, J. R., & Sackris, D. (2016). Moral objectivism across the lifespan. Philosophical Psychology, 29(6), 912-929.

Beebe, J. R., Qiaoan, R., Wysocki, T., & Endara, M. A. (2015). Moral objectivism in cross-cultural perspective. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 15(3-4), 386-401.

Collier‐Spruel, L., Hawkins, A., Jayawickreme, E., Fleeson, W., & Furr, R. M. (2019). Relativism or tolerance? Defining, assessing, connecting, and distinguishing two moral personality features with prominent roles in modern societies. Journal of Personality, 87(6), 1170-1188.

Davis, T. (2021). Beyond objectivism: new methods for studying metaethical intuitions. Philosophical Psychology, 34(1), 125-153.

Feltz, A., & Cokely, E. T. (2008). The fragmented folk: more evidence of stable individual differences in moral judgments and folk intuitions. In B. C. Love, K. McRae, & V. M. Sloutsky (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1771-1776). Austin, TX: Cognitive science society.

Goodwin, G. P., & Darley, J. M. (2008). The psychology of meta-ethics: Exploring objectivism. Cognition, 106(3), 1339-1366.

Goodwin, G. P., & Darley, J. M. (2010). The perceived objectivity of ethical beliefs: Psychological findings and implications for public policy. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1(2), 161-188.

Goodwin, G. P., & Darley, J. M. (2012). Why are some moral beliefs perceived to be more objective than others?. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(1), 250-256.

Khoo, J., & Knobe, J. (2018). Moral disagreement and moral semantics. Noûs, 52(1), 109-143.

Nichols, S. (2004). After objectivity: An empirical study of moral judgment. Philosophical Psychology, 17(1), 3-26.

Pölzler, T., & Cole Wright, J. C. (2020a). An empirical argument against moral non-cognitivism. Inquiry, 1-29. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2020.1798280

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

Quintelier, K., De Smet, D., & Fessler, D. (2014). Agent versus appraiser moral relativism: an exploratory study. In H. Sarkissian & J. C. Wright (Eds.), Advances in experimental moral psychology (pp. 209-230). London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.

Sarkissian, H., Park, J., Tien, D., Wright, J. C., & Knobe, J. (2011). Folk moral relativism. Mind & Language, 26(4), 482-505.Wright, J. C. (2018). The fact and function of meta-ethical pluralism: Exploring the evidence. Oxford studies in experimental philosophy, 2, 119-150.

Theriault, J., Waytz, A., Heiphetz, L., & Young, L. (2017). Examining overlap in behavioral and neural representations of morals, facts, and preferences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(11), 1586-1605.

Theriault, J., Waytz, A., Heiphetz, L., & Young, L. (2020). Theory of Mind network activity is associated with metaethical judgment: An item analysis. Neuropsychologia, 143, 107475. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107475

Wright, J. C., Grandjean, P. T., & McWhite, C. B. (2013). The meta-ethical grounding of our moral beliefs: Evidence for meta-ethical pluralism. Philosophical Psychology, 26(3), 336-361.

Wright, J. C., McWhite, C. B., & Grandjean, P. T. (2014). The cognitive mechanisms of intolerance: Do our meta-ethical commitments matter?. In T. Lombrozo, J. Knobe, & S. Nichols (Eds.), Oxford studies in experimental philosophy (Vol. 1, pp. 28-61). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Yilmaz, O., Bahcekapili, H. G., Harma, M., & Sevi, B. (2020). Intergroup tolerance leads to subjective morality, which in turn is associated with (but does not lead to) reduced religiosity. Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 42(2), 232-243.

I can point to a bunch of studies that generally suggest that it's not the case that everyone or almost everyone is a moral realist. I know of no similarly substantive empirical literature suggesting otherwise.

7.0 Zijlstra's (2021) implicit realism studies

Gil claims:

Some data (Zijlstra, 2021) seems to confirm realism is the majority, but others do not, so there’s really no scientific consensus to appeal to here.

Yes, this study does find realism in the majority. Yet you were not merely claiming that realism was a simple majority. Finding that 60-70% of people favored realism would still indicate 30-40% don't, which is more than enough for me to challenge the claim that all or most people are realists.

Let's have a look at Zijlstra's results. Of the three studies, Study 2 didn’t find a realist majority when Zijlstra modified the conditions, and in fact the effect flipped, which if anything would serve as evidence for majority folk antirealism.

Study 1 found that 63% of participants judged the Spinach scenario to be a joke, which doesn’t give us a precise estimate of the amount of realists we can glean from that, but it’s 63% or less. That’s barely a majority.

Study 3 found 70% in favor of realism.

However, all you’ve managed to do is find one study that found weak and inconsistent evidence that at best around two of the participants sampled may have favored realism. That is not evidence of all or most people being moral realists, it's evidence against the notion that all or most people are moral realists.

The best this study could reasonably hope to show is about a 2:1 ratio. That’s hardly an indication that almost everyone is a moral realist. It would suggest that antirealists comprise a substantial portion of the population. Having a two thirds majority doesn’t entitle you to declare your position the default position. And that’s very optimistic, since it would involve assuming the highest possible point estimate of the three studies was the most accurate. That’s probably not the case. What we have here is mixed, weak evidence that a simple majority may favor realism. Of course, this conflicts with all the studies that suggest otherwise, and I haven't even addressed the methodological shortcomings distinctive to this particular study.

Gil presented one study with a simple majority in favor of realism. But this study, and the literature as a whole simply does not support the claim that the vast majority of people are moral realists.

8.0 Common sense and common belief

Gil says:

In order for common sense to be common, it does not require common belief, only common experience (the datum) in virtue of our natures and our relation to the world.

So common sense only refers to our experiences, and not our beliefs? I'm not sure what the claim is, exactly. But if this is the claim, then I'd simply ask for empirical evidence that people's common experience favors realism. Note that of the three studies mentioned above in Zijlstra (2021), the only one that failed to find a majority in favor of realism was the phenomenology study, i.e. the very study that focused on our experience.

Gil says,

I do think that common belief naturally follows, but it does not necessarily follow.

I agree. But I don't take evidence of folk belief to be a perfect proxy for folk experience. If we have a bunch of evidence that, overall, favors widespread folk antirealist belief, and almost no evidence that folk experience favors realism, the evidence weighs against the claim of widespread realist experience. Not decisively, but again, it doesn't have to. So long as there's enough evidence, Gil isn't in a position to justifiably claim that it's obvious that all or nearly all people are realists or think about morality in the ways he's suggested.

References

Berniūnas, R. (2020). Mongolian yos surtakhuun and WEIRD “morality”. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 4(1), 59-71.

Davis, T. (2021). Beyond objectivism: New methods for studying metaethical intuitions. Philosophical Psychology, 34(1), 125-153.

Díaz, R. (2021). Do people think consciousness poses a hard problem?: Empirical evidence on the meta-problem of consciousness. Journal of consciousness studies, 28(3-4), 55-75.

Machery, E. (2018). Morality: A historical invention. In K. J. Gray & J. Graham (Eds.), Atlas of moral psychology (pp. 259-265). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Mandik, P. (2016). Meta-illusionism and qualia quietism. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11-12), 140-148.

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

Sinnott-Armstrong, W., & Wheatley, T. (2012). The disunity of morality and why it matters to philosophy. The Monist, 95(3), 355-377.

Stich, S. (2018). The moral domain. In K. Gray & J. Graham (Eds.), Atlas of moral psychology (pp. 547- 555). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Sytsma, J. M., & Machery, E. (2009). How to study folk intuitions about phenomenal consciousness. Philosophical psychology, 22(1), 21-35.

Sytsma, J., & Machery, E. (2010). Two conceptions of subjective experience. Philosophical studies, 151(2), 299-327.

West, B., & Pizarro, D. (2022, June 27). Belief in Persistent Moral Decline. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/9swjb