Why most people in the past were not moral realists (Part 2)

According to Mike Huemer, almost everyone in the past was a moral realist. This comment appeared in a recent online discussion, where Huemer stated the following:

It appears that the overwhelming majority of people throughout history were moral realists

I don’t think Huemer would be able to provide a compelling justification for this claim.

What specific historical information would lead Huemer to make this claim? What considerations does he have in mind when he says it appears that people were moral realists? I’d be curious to know, but unfortunately he does not elaborate.

It doesn’t appear that way to me. What would it look like for people to be moral realists or moral antirealists, in particular? Beyond saying that they believe or disbelieve in the existence of stance-independent moral facts (and I don’t know of anyone besides philosophers who speaks this way), it’s not clear what particular behaviors would indicate that someone is a moral realist or a moral antirealist in particular, or whether they’re either at all.

I’d like to put forward the hypothesis that, beyond such trivial differences as verbalizing one’s metaethical stance, there are no substantive behavioral differences that are entailed by a commitment to moral realism or antirealism, nor any particularly good reason to think that, in practice, a commitment to either position would be associated with (due to contingent features of human psychology) substantively distinct behavioral profiles. In other words, we should expect moral realists and antirealists to speak and act more less the same way as one another. Call this the behavioral irrelevance hypothesis about our metaethical beliefs and commitment. This is a notion I’ll develop on further in future posts. My point in referencing here is to draw attention to the claim that people “appearing” to be realists isn’t very helpful unless there is a good reason to believe that particular appearances are indicative of realism (again, beyond obvious examples like someone saying “I am a moral realist.”). I’m not sure there are any clear indicators of a commitment to moral realism or antirealism.

The proportion of people in the past (or the present, for that matter) that are moral realists is an empirical question. And there simply isn’t any compelling evidence that most people throughout history were moral realists. There isn’t even good evidence that the overwhelming majority of people throughout history had moral terms and concepts, or at least not ones that didn’t differ substantially from those familiar to people studying contemporary analytic moral philosophy. Consider what Machery (2018) says on the matter. Machery proposes a historicist view of morality according to which:

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)

Machery marshals both philosophical and empirical considerations to support this claim. I suspect Machery and others inclined towards similar views (e.g., Stich) are on the right track: the very notion of morality is a parochial cultural concept, not a direct product of evolution, nor a universal concept that we should expect alien civilizations to share with us. And if morality is a parochial cultural concept, it may very well have been absent, or taken so different a form it would be misleading to think of it as the same concept rather than some loose analog, we’d need a great deal of empirical evidence to begin to estimate the proportion of people who shared the notion of “morality” central to contemporary analytic philosophy. I don’t know what the results of this research would reveal, but I doubt Huemer does, either. And if people had no moral terms or concepts, it’s implausible that they could be moral realists, any more than someone could have a stance on whether Pluto is a planet if they have no concepts of planets.

As such, it’s strange for Huemer to claim that the overwhelming majority of people in the past were moral realists. As Machery’s proposal suggests, whether or not people even had moral concepts is itself an empirical question. So, too, is the question of whether people were moral realists, in particular. Philosophers may balk at this claim, insisting that such questions can be resolved via a priori analysis of terms and concepts. But even if that were the case (and I don’t think that it is), Huemer doesn’t have access to the terms and concepts of the overwhelming majority of people throughout history. Most of us simply don’t have enough familiarity with how people in the past spoke or thought to be very well-informed on the metaphysical presuppositions implicit in the way they speak and think. At best, Huemer and others could perhaps speak about the meaning of terms and concepts they are familiar with. And it’s not at all clear they’d be justified in extrapolating from the way they use words in a particular language in a particular cultural context to the way everyone, everywhere, throughout all of history spoke and thought.

Researchers are only now coming to grips with how poorly the vast majority of psychological research generalizes to the world’s populations. Why? Because almost all of that research is conducted among “WEIRD” populations, an acronym for “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.” Henrich and colleagues coined this term little more than a decade ago, and I encourage you to check out their paper on the topic (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). Their findings reveal that most psychological research has been conducted among WEIRD populations, but that such populations reliably anchor one or the other ends of distributions when comparing the psychology of people from WEIRD populations to the rest of the world. In other words, WEIRD populations aren’t just unrepresentative of the rest of the world’s populations, they’re one of the least representative populations.

If even the statistical rigor and inferential statistics available to social scientists can’t even come close to overcoming these difficulties, why should we suppose that philosophical methods are any better? Whereas psychologists at least draw on large, representative samples of national populations, philosophers appeal, at best, to their anecdotal experiences and memories of how they people they’ve interacted with speak and think.

Worse, philosophers tend instead to appeal to how they are inclined to speak and think, or at least how they and their colleagues are inclined to speak and think. Psychology is already in a poor position to generalize to human psychology as a whole. Yet philosophers frequently engage in armchair speculation that amounts to psychological or psycholinguistic hypotheses about how the whole of humanity thinks as well, just like psychologists. Philosophers thus routinely engage in what amounts to armchair psychology. The only difference is that philosophers do very bad psychology: most of the time, they extrapolate from their psychology to everyone else. In other words, the claims philosophers make often amount to psychological studies with a sample size of one. Worse still, the participants in these studies (i.e., the philosophers making the claims) aren’t even blind to their own hypotheses. Indeed, they are often (if not typically) attached to those claims, and even stake their careers (often their entire careers) and even their professional credibility on defending their claims.

There is nothing wrong with beginning inquiry into how other people think by considering how you think about an issue. But a great deal of academic philosophy amounts to little more than reflecting on how one thinks, convincing oneself this must be how things are because it just seems so obvious, and then spending the rest of your career explaining away alternative ways of thinking. A great deal of contemporary philosophy is little more than the toxic fusion of motivated reasoning and a quasi-religious canon of scriptures bestowed on the current generations of philosopher-priests in the works of the apostle Plato, St. Aristotle, and cardinal Kant. Do philosophers not realize how utterly steeped in a shared set of traditions they are? And do they not realize that this serves as much to circumscribe the way they think as it does to free them of the alleged confines of the prephilosophical dogmas of their surrounding cultural milieu?

I don’t think they do. I suspect that contemporary academic philosophy draws mostly on a self-selected population of people enamored with the wonder and mystery promised by Plato’s quasi-mystical musings and the endless train of conceptual and linguistic refuse left in its wake. The whole enterprise carries the omnipresent scent of incense amidst empty pews.

Contemporary analytic philosophy is in many ways a pale proxy for Christianity, a pseudoreligious replacement for “seekers” with an intellectual inclination. No more faith in God? No problem, we’ve got a deal on the Metaphysics of Morals on aisle twelve.

Back to Huemer’s claim. In short: By claiming that the overwhelming majority of people have been moral realists, Huemer has made a bold empirical claim about psychology, linguistics, or both, that is probably not supported by available evidence. It would be difficult for a dedicated team of anthropologists and historians to adequately address this issue if they had decades to do so and millions of dollars in funding. Nevertheless, Huemer then says:

So if you think moral realism is counterintuitive, there’s something gone wrong there, probably with you. It doesn’t appear that something almost everyone has believed throughout history, including both ordinary people and the experts, it doesn’t seem like that could be counterintuitive.

There are two issues with this remark.

First, I don’t find realism counterintuitive. If Huemer thinks that something has “gone wrong,” with me, I invite him to explain what it is, and to provide arguments and evidence for whatever he suggests has gone wrong.

I’m often told that what’s gone wrong is my investment in some “theory” that’s distorted my thinking on the matter, something I picked up while reading philosophy. Yet as far as I can recall (which isn’t to say I am guaranteed to be correct), my immediate reaction to encountering moral antirealism was to find it obvious and intuitive, and to endorse it right away, before I ever began serious study of philosophy, or even metaethics, and those memories go back around 20 years, long before I ended up focusing on metaethics. Indeed, I began to focus on metaethics, and in particular, the psychology of metaethics, because I found claims by moral realists that moral realism is “intuitive” and that everyone is a moral realist so dubious. In other words, the general speculation about my intellectual trajectory seems to get things backwards: I study metaethics because I was disposed towards antirealism; I didn’t become disposed towards antirealism by studying metaethics. I don’t have any memory of finding moral realism “intuitive” or ever finding it to be a plausible position. This “you’re caught in the grip of a theory” proposal is little more than empty, handwaving speculation. I could just as readily suggest that realists endorse realism because they’re “caught in the grip of a theory.” Indeed, that is what I think. And at least I’m engaging with the empirical literature to support those claims.

Note Huemer’s language, as well. He doesn’t say “If you don’t find realism counterintuitive,” he says, “So if you think moral realism is counterintuitive.” What does this mean? It could just mean that one doesn’t find it intuitive. But it could also imply a more general claim about whether moral realism is or isn’t “counterintuitive,” in some more general respect. If so, I don’t think anything can be “counterintuitive” in this respect. A philosophical position can only be counterintuitive to someone. And whether someone finds something intuitive or not can (and does) vary from person to person, including among professional philosophers (and including with respect to moral realism).

If I find something counterintuitive, I don’t have to claim that it “is” counterintuitive in some more general sense, only that it is contrary to my intuitions, which involves no inferences how intuitive it may be to others. I suspect Huemer does have in mind a more general sense of “intuitiveness,” and thinks there are facts about what “is” intuitive and what “isn’t,” such that there's some kind of error people are making if they something intuitive that isn’t intuitive (or vice versa). This is speculation on my part. Hopefully Huemer could share his thoughts on the matter and clarify, and I apologize if any of this speculation is mistaken.

Yet I remain concerned. Does Huemer think that whichever intuition is in the majority enjoys significant priority? Are only people whose intuitions are in the majority justified in claiming that their positions are “intuitive”? What if the dominant position changes? If more people claim to find antirealism intuitive, can we then suggest that antirealism “is intuitive”? What would that mean, beyond saying “most people currently find it intuitive”? And what would the implications of such findings be?

The bigger problem with Huemer’s claim is that, to the extent that we do have empirical evidence, it does not support the claim that most people are moral realists, or at least not that they consistently endorse realist views about a majority of moral issues. Here are a few highlights of that research:

After correcting for some of the methodological shortcomings of earlier studies, and providing people with detailed instructions and training exercises to familiarize them with metaethical terms and concepts, Pölzler and Wright (2020) found that a majority of people consistently favored antirealist responses across a variety of distinct paradigms. See Figure 1:

(Imagine from Pölzler and Wright, 2020)

• Davis (2021) likewise found very high rates of antirealist responses. Noncognitivism was the most common response.

• Beebe (2015) pointed out that early versions of the disagreement paradigm (the main measure used to empirically assess folk metaethics) didn’t include a noncognitivist option. Once such an option was included, it was a common response (and was the modal response for three out of seven moral issues)

• Beebe and Sackris (2016) found that metaethical stances change over the lifespan, and likewise found high rates of antirealism.

• Beebe et al. (2015) replicated the finding that many people adopt antirealist stances towards particular moral issues in China, Poland, and Ecuador.

• Sarkissian et al. (2011) found that when you made cultural dissimilarities between two populations more explicit and distinct, people were more inclined to favor “antirealist” responses to versions of the disagreement paradigm.

These are just a handful of what now amount to dozens of similar studies. All of these studies find similar results: a significant proportion (often the majority) of participants favor antirealist responses to a variety of measures. Even studies which purport to provide evidence that most people are realists hardly establish that the “overwhelming majority” are. For instance, Zijlstra (2021) reports evidence that most people are realists, but was only able to reliably demonstrate a majority in favor of realist responses for two of three measures, and only 70% or less endorsed realism for those measures. Such findings could not establish that the overwhelming majority of people are moral realists.

Even if most people were moral realists, this would not, by itself, justify the claim that there’s something wrong with people who don’t find it intuitive. Huemer seems to imply antirealism is an extraordinarily rare notion. Yet available empirical evidence simply does not support this claim. This is not to say I uncritically endorse these findings. Far from it; most of my work centers on critiquing empirical research on folk metaethics (see e.g., Bush & Moss, 2020). Yet even if these studies have significant methodological flaws (and they do), this does not entitle realists to maintain that almost everyone is a realist. They’d still need compelling evidence for such claims, which I don’t think they have.

Along with my previous post, I believe these remarks are enough to raise serious doubts about the claim that most people throughout history were moral realists. Of course, I have not yet heard Huemer’s positive case for such a claim. If such a case is made, I’d be happy to return to it. If I’m correct, then I have so far only made a case that we’re not justified in believing most people throughout history were moral realists. This would not show that they weren’t moral realists, only that we aren’t in a position to know whether they were. The far greater challenge will be to make a case that people weren’t moral realists. This is a far more difficult and tenuous case to make. That case will be made over the course of subsequent posts.

References

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

Beebe J.R., Qiaoan R., Wysocki T. et al. (2015), “Moral Objectivism in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 15(3–4): 386–401.

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

Bush, L. S., & Moss, D. (2020). Misunderstanding metaethics: Difficulties measuring folk objectivism and relativism. Diametros 17(64): 6-21.

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

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.

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

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

Zijlstra, L. (2021). Are people implicitly moral objectivists?. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1-19.