1.0 Introduction
Were most people in the past moral realists?
No. There is little reason to believe most people in the past were moral realists.
This may seem surprising. Weren’t most people in the past theists, or at least people who believed in supernatural forces? Presumably historical populations would have little qualms about believing in cosmic forces of good and evil, since they lacked the qualms and misgivings that contemporary philosophers tend to express, much of which seem motivated by commitments to naturalism and a general inclination towards sparse ontologies. And even in the absence of explicit religious induction, we might think that people are naturally disposed to be moral realists. Moral realism is intuitive, after all.
We might also suspect that moral antirealism is a recent historical phenomenon driven largely by the rise of modern science, contemporary philosophy, and recent social and historical changes. Such changes have radically challenged our preconceptions and ushered in an age of skepticism, relativism, and disbelief. Perhaps moral antirealism is just another element of our changing civilizational landscape.
Yet it would be a mistake to think that if people weren’t moral realists, then they must have been moral antirealists, unless one regards anyone who isn’t a realist as an antirealist by definition. Compare to common disputes about the meaning of theism and atheism. We may think of atheism as “lack of belief in God,” and in that respect, even human societies that never entertained the notion of a deity would be nominal atheists. Yet such people would not have an explicit stance on the existence of God. And in a certain sense, while it's true that they don't believe in God, and don’t speak and talk as if there were a God, they don’t deny the existence of God either. They have no position on the matter, one way or another.
Yet there are important differences between “God” as an example and moral realism. Societies without theism may lack any vocabulary for referencing Gods. But if a society employs moral or quasi-moral language, we might wonder what’s going on with such language. Surely that language commits people either to realism or antirealism about stance-independent moral facts, doesn’t it?
I don't think that it does. Consider the opening claim in this post: that it’s not the case that most people in the past “were moral realists.””
The notion that people “were moral realists” is ambiguous. What does it mean to be a moral realist? Do you have to explicitly endorse moral realism? Is it a formal proposition that one must recognize as such, such that there’s some lexical equivalent of “moral realism” that you assent to? Is it enough to merely believe that there are e.g., stance independent normative facts about what's right or wrong, even if you don’t have a term for this view?
2.0 Stances and commitments
There’s a distinction between our stances and our commitments.
Philosophical stances
We can think of a stance as an explicit philosophical belief, the kind of position we endorse when asked, that we may have a name for, such as “realism” (though we may not have a specific name), that we’ve entertained or deliberated about, and so on. For instance, I believe life on earth evolved via natural selection. I don’t merely speak this way, or exhibit some implicit commitment to this view.
Philosophical commitments
Yet we also speak in ways that implicitly commit us to a variety of presuppositions that we may not consciously endorse, or that could be described, third personally, in such a way that they seem to conform to a particular pattern that are captured by a particular description, without those commitments or descriptions necessarily mapping onto any particular set of mental states or explicit beliefs.
For comparison, think of the grammatical rules that govern our patterns of speech. We can readily form mutually intelligible sentences, and can readily spot when a sentence isn’t well-formed. Yet most speakers of a given language would be unable to articulate the formal rules driving their judgments. They have a kind of implicit expertise that cannot be formally stated as explicit beliefs or positions on the rules of their language. Such rules may regulate our speech patterns, even if a conscious, explicit commitment to those rules isn't readily available to us when doing so (though, of course, one could acquire knowledge of these rules by e.g., formal study of the language in question, and thereby come to have beliefs about these rules).
We might think of commitments in this way: Suppose researchers from another world, who had no prior knowledge of the culture or psychology of humans had access to a transcript that captured all of the linguistic practices of a linguistic community. However, they couldn’t conduct surveys or interviews or otherwise directly interact with or study members of that community or study their psychology. They were tasked with translating what members of this linguistic community were doing when they said things like “murder is wrong,” and “Alex is a terrible person.” They’d come up with an external account of the meaning of our terms based on their appraisal of our usage without presuming or directly inferring any specific facts about our beliefs, (though this gets a bit strange if people say things like “I believe murder is wrong.” That complicates this, but this is already an extraordinary oversimplification; the distinction I’m drawing attention to is one of convenience; reality is a lot messier).
So when we talk about whether people “were moral realists,” we can be asking about stances or commitments:
(1) Realist stance: Did people in the past explicitly endorse realism, i.e., did they believe there were stance independent moral facts?
(2) Realist commitments: Did people in the past speak in ways that would best be described as exhibiting an implicit commitment to moral realism, even if they did not consciously.
3.0 Did people in the past tend to have a moral realist stance?
With respect to (1), I’m not willing to presume people were moral realists without evidence. As such, we’d need a good analysis based on available historical records of what people thought about the existence of stance-independent moral facts. There may be attempts to explore this question, but I haven’t heard of them (and if you know of any, please let me know).
My suspicion is that what records we do have would present what is, at best, an unclear picture. People may have said things that look to us like endorsement of moral realism, but it’s hard to know since it may be difficult to glean what a person’s beliefs are from what they’ve said or how they’re described; the subtleties of philosophical positions may not be apparent given our lack of direct access to the perspective of people living in those societies, i.e., their worldview and they way the construe what they said and did. Critically, some societies don’t lexicalize moral terms, and there’s growing evidence that different societies conceive of “the moral domain” differently from one another, or conceive of normative categories in ways that don't fit conceptions of those distinctions typical of analytic philosophy (Berniūnas, 2020, Stich, 2018). It may be, as Machery (2018) suggests, that the concept of morality is a historical invention that arose in some societies, but not others. And even where present, different societies or subpopulations within societies may conceive of morality in substantively distinct ways (Levine et al., 2021).
As a result, when philosophers look on historical instances of codes of law, social norms, institutions that rewarded and punished people, and so on, they may project a culturally contingent parochial notion of “morality” on these events, imagining that the people engaging in these practices possessed a similarly Manichean notion of concept of right and wrong, good and bad that are distinctively moral in a sense that strikes us as sui generis and hard (if not impossible) to adequately express in a way that identifies moral language with some recognizably nonmoral set of concepts or phenomena.
In other words, philosophers engaged in contemporary analytic philosophy are so steeped in their own culture, that they impose their culturally parochial notion of “morality” onto the past, imagining that people in historical circumstances thought in what was essentially the same way that they do. Machery and Mallon (2010) allude to this diagnosis in their excellent disambiguation of the claim that “morality evolved”:
To evaluate this argument properly, it is important to keep in mind that the claim that morality is present in every culture is not just the assertion that one finds norms in every culture. Rather, it asserts that in every culture, one finds norms that possess the properties that distinguish moral norms from other kinds of norms according to the characterization used by a given evolutionary researcher.
[...]
But why should we believe that moral norms are present in all known cultures? Researchers often bluntly assert this claim (e.g. Dwyer, 2006: 237) or illustrate it with ancient or exotic codes of norms. Thus Joyce refers to the norms in the Egyptian Book of the Dead and in the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh (2006: 134—135). We find this casual use of the anthropological and historical literature problematic. The problem is not so much that these researchers have not examined a large number of cultures and historical periods to substantiate the claim that moral norms are ancient and pancultural. Rather, the problem is that because they fail to clearly distinguish norms from moral norms, the evidence they allude to merely supports the claim that norms are universal, but not the much more controversial claim that moral norms are universal. (pp. 30-31)
As their remarks illustrate, there is a profound inadequacy in the way researchers discuss ancient “moral” systems: they observe the presence of norms, then presume that these norms are “moral” norms, without being clear on what that would mean, and, if they are clear, on demonstrating that the cultures with the norms in question have distinctively moral norms.
There simply isn’t very good evidence that all or most people living in the past were moral realists. We don’t even have good evidence that all or most people had distinctively moral concepts, since there isn’t even compelling evidence that a capacity for distinctively moral cognition is itself a universal feature of human psychology. And it would make very little sense to insist people were moral realists if they didn’t even have moral concepts.
4.0 Did people in the past tend to have moral realist commitments?
This is a bit trickier to answer, and would require addressing the kinds of arguments philosophers have typically appealed to when arguing for or against various semantic analyses of ordinary moral claims. It will at least suffice to say that we can at least say that one cannot appeal to the fact that people in particular linguistic communities speak in a particular way to infer that all people everywhere speak in the same way. And it’s hard to see how philosophers could engage in conceptual analysis of terms and concepts as they were used in languages those philosophers don’t speak, in cultural contexts that those philosophers were never part of and could never be a part of.
We may gain some insight into the metaethical commitments of historical populations by analyzing written records, but there are many limitations to such efforts. Most of these can be summed up by pointing out that many populations lack adequate and representative accounts of their everyday linguistic practices, and, even if we had access to them, we may lack the relevant cultural context to interpret them as members of that society would have interpreted them. Finally, there’s the omnipresent influence of our own cultural perspective, which could distort and bias our assessment of historical writings, motivating us to project our own notions of morality onto texts even when this isn’t an accurate appraisal of what was meant or described by the author. And, at any rate, philosophers can’t even reach a consensus when discussing the linguistic commitments of a single language (e.g., English). Why should we think they’d fare any better under the extraordinary constraints they’d face if they attempted to analyze how people in the past spoke and thought?
It’s hard to distinguish this alternative explanation from the presumption that people in the past had similar notions of morality, and were moral realists. Proponents of the notion that “morality” is a universal or nearly-universal concept, and that people in the past were moral realists, may take both such claims (that humanity thinks in moral terms, and that people’s default inclination is moral realism), but such claims typically consist of little more than uncritical assertions. I suspect people who make such claims are so familiar with speaking and thinking in moral terms, and regard morality as so central to their lives, that they presume everyone thinks and acts the way that they do.
5.0 Conclusion
So were most people throughout history moral realists? There is little empirical evidence most people in the past were moral realists. When people make such claims, I suspect they are projecting their own ways of thinking onto past societies, or appealing to evidence that fails to disambiguate evidence of norms from evidence of distinctively moral norms.
This does not mean that most people weren’t moral realists. Rather, I have sought merely to challenge the notion that it’s obvious that they were, or that we’re entitled to the assumption that they were. The onus is on those who claim most people throughout history were moral realists to provide adequate evidence for such claims. I don’t think they can, because I don’t think there is adequate evidence. I have not yet provided grounds for doubting that people are moral realists. This is a case I will build in subsequent entries. My goal here has been to pave the way for such an account by making it clear that it's not obvious people in the past were moral realists, and if moral realists think it is obvious (or even just true, or plausible), they'll need a better case for this than mere assertion or a superficial appeal to history.
In the next post on this topic, I address a recent claim by a philosopher who explicitly claims that, historically, most people were moral realists.
References
Berniūnas, R. (2020). Mongolian yos surtakhuun and WEIRD “morality”. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 4(1), 59-71.
Levine, S., Rottman, J., Davis, T., O'Neill, E., Stich, S., & Machery, E. (2021). Religious affiliation and conceptions of the moral domain. Social Cognition, 39(1), 139-165.
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.
Machery, E., & Mallon, R. (2010). Evolution of morality. In J. M. Doris & The Moral Psychology Research Group (Eds.). The moral psychology handbook (pp. 3-47). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Stich, S. (2018). The moral domain. In K. Gray & J. Graham (Eds.), Atlas of moral psychology (pp. 547- 555). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
How about in ancient Greek philosophy? Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Platonism were the most popular, and they were moral realists. Only unpopular philosophies such as Pyrrhonism, Cyrenaicism, and Protagoreanism were relativist.