1.0 Folk realism & moral progress
According to Ben Watkins:
The intuition is that moral progress has been made and that we might morally regress. That intuition is part of common-sense morality. If we deny the objectivity of morality, we must give up that common-sense intuition. If we accept it, we must also accept objectivism.
Watkins appears to be making an empirical claim about the psychology of nonphilosophers. If he’s not, I am not sure what kind of claim he is making. If he is, there’s very little evidence that supports this claim.
When it comes to the notion of “moral progress,” realists sometimes maintain that one could only make sense of progress if the progress is made with respect to stance-independent moral truths. As a result, they insist, moral antirealists cannot make sense of the intuition people supposedly have that society has made moral progress. Watkins doesn’t explicitly make this claim, but if he did, he’d be mistaken.
I want to address two mistaken claims realists sometimes make (whether or not Watkins endorses one or both).
(1) Only moral realism can make sense of the notion of moral progress. Progress presupposes stance-independence.
(2) Ordinary people believe that there has been moral progress with respect to stance-independent moral truths.
2.0 Antirealism is consistent with progress
The first of these claims is mistaken. Nothing about the concept of progress requires or presupposes realism in any way. People make progress with respect to self-chosen goals or with respect to stance-dependent standards all the time. People make progress on their fitness goals, or at becoming better at singing for a metal band, or refining their skills as a serial killer. In none of these cases must we presume that there are stance-independent normative truths about what one’s fitness goals ought to be, or what kind of singing is good or bad, or what the best way to turn human skin into a lampshade might be. Progress can and simply does subsume any standard one can think of, no matter how arbitrary or repugnant. Progress simply refers to advancing towards some end or other.
Antirealists have no problem accounting for moral progress. Moral relativists can make progress relative to their own moral standards, or judge other societies as having made progress relative to the their own standards. Constructivist antirealists have the easiest time of it. An ideal observer theorist, for instance, can readily make sense of societies making progress: the closer they come to approximating the standards of an ideal observer, the more progress they’ve made. Given this, antirealism easily accommodates the notion of progress. Even those moral antirealists who’d deny moral progress has occurred can clarify that this doesn’t carry the implausible or objectionable implications realists may insist it does. Denying that there’s been moral progress, as an error theorist, for instance, does not entail that the error theorist doesn’t think it’s better that there’s less slavery or racism.
Given this, it simply wouldn’t follow that if ordinary people believe that there has been moral progress, then those people are or probably are moral realists. Instead, you’d have to show that they think the progress in question is progress with respect to better approaching the stance-independent moral truths.
Does existing empirical data support the conclusion that “the common-sense” view among laypeople is that there are stance-independent moral truths?
No. It does not, for reasons I’ve outlined in likely a dozen or more posts on this blog at this point. Here’s my most recent commentary on the matter in two parts: Part 1 and Part 2.
3.0 There’s no good evidence ordinary people believe in stance-independent moral progress
Watkins’s remarks suggest that nonphilosophers are moral realists because he states that:
If we deny the objectivity of morality, we must give up that common-sense intuition.
This seems to imply the common-sense intuition entails moral realism.
There is no good empirical evidence that there is a widespread “common-sense intuition” that there are stance-independent moral truths. There isn’t even good evidence people generally believe in moral progress.
Only one paper from Pölzler, Zijlstra, and Dijkstra (2024) directly addresses this question. However, it does not support Watkins’s claims. They report that:
Our results suggest that, neither abstractly nor concretely, people dominantly believe in the possibility of objective moral progress, knowledge and error. They attribute less objectivity to these phenomena than in the case of science and no more, or only slightly more, than in the cases of social conventions and personal preferences.
They conducted one study on nonphilosophers and a second on philosophy faculty and students. In the first study (on nonphilosophers) participants were asked whether moral progress, knowledge, and error are:
Objectively possible
Subjectively possible
Not possible at all
These questions were asked both in the abstract (with respect to morality in general) and with respect to specific moral issues, since previous research has shown that people tend to give different responses to philosophical questions framed in abstract vs. concrete terms. Participants were assigned to receive either only abstract or only concrete questions regarding their attitude regarding knowledge, progress, and error with respect to morality, social conventions, personal preferences, and science.
For those in the concrete condition, they were given three concrete statements in each nonmoral domain and nine statements in the moral domain for a total of 18 statements I’ll present only the questions on progress, but see the article for the full set of measures (it’s open access, so you won’t face a paywall):
PROGRESS:
Does it seem to you that, at least over long periods of time, progress can be or has been made with regard to the question of whether X (i.e., answers to this question cannot only change but become better)?
There can be or has been progress in the sense of (coming closer to) discovering the objective truth about this question.
There can be or has been progress but only from the perspective of particular cultures or individuals.
There cannot be progress.
Similar questions were asked for both the possibility of knowledge and error. Here are the concrete moral items:
MORALITY
Abortion is morally permissible.
Physical punishment is morally wrong.
It is good to do unto others as you would have them do onto you.
A country with the death penalty is morally worse than a country without.
Eating factory-farmed meat is morally bad.
Siblings ought not to kiss each other on the mouth passionately.
Selling children on the internet is morally wrong.
Cleaning one’s bathroom with the American flag is morally impermissible.
Helping terminally ill patients end their lives is morally permissible.
Helpfully, they provide a table of results which displays the percentage of objectivity judgments for all conditions:
As you can see, morality wasn’t treated all that differently from social conventions or subjective preferences.
The second study found similar results even among a sample of philosophers, which is surprising given that the 2020 PhilPapers survey found that 62% of philosophers accepted or leaned towards moral realism.
Now, one might raise methodological concerns with this study. I probably would. I don’t know if the participants (at least the nonphilosophers) interpreted these questions as intended. But this is not going to vindicate Watkins’s claims, as it would simply trade one problem for another. This is because, at face value, these findings suggest that a majority of respondents aren’t implicit moral realists. If there are issues with the validity of these measures, this might instead suggest it’s difficult to ascertain whether nonphilosophers are moral realists or not, since there may be difficulties with inferring that they understand what’s philosophically at stake in these disputes. Either way, the onus is on people like Watkins to provide good reasons to think that moral realism is some sort of “common-sense” view and, hopefully, to clarify what that means.
There are other studies that relate moral realism and moral progress. Uttich, Tsai, and Lombrozo (2014) measured both belief in moral realism and belief in moral progress, but found mostly nonsignificant or small correlations between belief in moral progress and responses to measures of moral realism. These findings suggest that the link between a belief in moral progress and endorsement of moral realism is not very strong. However, it should be noted that they adapted the methods used by Goodwin and Darley (2008), which are unlikely to be valid. There are other studies that indirectly bear on this question, but I have yet to see any study that convincingly shows that people generally believe in moral progress and believe this because of, or alongside, a belief that such progress is due to acting in greater conformity with stance-independent moral truth.
In fact, there’s at least some evidence that people report that society has been in moral decline, so it’s not even clear people generally believe there’s been a great deal of moral progress. For example, Mastroianni and Gilbert (2023) report that:
In study 1, we searched the databases of major survey research providers (using search terms shown in the Supplementary Information) and found 177 survey items that asked representative samples of a total of 220,772 US Americans if and how they thought other people’s morality had changed over time (Supplementary Table 1). These items were administered over a 70-year span from 1949 to 2019 […] On 84.18% of the items, the majority of participants reported that morality had declined.
However, they also purport to show that:
[…] people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion.
The reality of what people believe, then, is messy. With respect to considering morality in the abstract, they appear to report belief in moral decline, but when asked more targeted questions, their responses appear inconsistent with this view. This makes it difficult to pin ordinary thought down as unambiguously disposed towards a belief in progress or decline. Instead, it’s a bit of a mess, with inconsistent reports emerging under different experimental contexts. Even if it could be argued that the kinds of concrete progress people report believing in would indicate that, in some deeper sense, they are committed to there having been moral progress, this is a far cry from showing that they believe in progress in any straightforward sense, much less that they think such progress has happened with respect to stance-independent moral truths.
I don’t take any of the preceding considerations to establish that most people are moral antirealists or that most people deny moral progress. Rather, I mention these studies to show that the literature doesn’t appear to clearly support Watkins. At first glance, it appears to run contrary to Watkins’s claims. While I could clench my fist in triumph and declare victory for antirealism, I think we should be far more cautious and circumspect about this literature. Evaluating how nonphilosophers think about metaethics is difficult, and this literature is relatively recent. We simply don’t know enough one way or another to make the sorts of confident claims Watkins has.
At best, the existing literature vaguely suggests that (a) it’s not the case that most people are moral realists and (b) people have mixed and complicated views about moral progress rather than unambiguously believing there’s been moral progress and that (c) the connection between moral realism and belief in moral progress among nonphilosophers is likely to be weak at best. Given this, it’s puzzling Watkins appears so confident about his claims when he’s presented little in the way of arguments, evidence, or reason in support of those claims.
References
Goodwin, G. P., & Darley, J. M. (2008). The psychology of meta-ethics: Exploring objectivism. Cognition, 106(3), 1339-1366.
Mastroianni, A. M., & Gilbert, D. T. (2023). The illusion of moral decline. Nature, 618(7966), 782-789.
Pölzler, T., Zijlstra, L., & Dijkstra, J. (2024). Moral progress, knowledge and error: Do people believe in moral objectivity?. Philosophical Psychology, 37(8), 2073-2109.
Uttich, K., Tsai, G., & Lombrozo, T. (2014). Exploring metaethical commitments: Moral objectivity and moral progress. In H. Sarkissian & J. C. Wright (Eds.), Advances in experimental moral psychology (pp. 188-208). London, UK: Bloomsbury.