Lance Bush

Most research in experimental metaethics suggests high levels of interpersonal and intrapersonal variation in support for moral realism and antirealism among nonphilosophers (i.e., people without significant training in philosophy). These findings challenge the assumption that nonphilosophers share a uniform commitment to moral realism. Recent evidence challenges the validity of these studies by demonstrating that many people do not interpret questions about metaethics as intended. Pölzler and Wright offer a potential solution: train participants to understand the relevant metaethical distinctions. They devised a set of paradigms that feature training exercises, comprehensive instructions, and detailed response options designed to mitigate unintended interpretations. I argue that their efforts were inadequate, and that the training required to ensure participants interpret stimuli as intended would need to be so extensive that it would effectively transform participants into novice philosophers. This leads to a dilemma: if training is unable to ensure adequate rates of intended interpretation, then it can’t resolve the threat to validity it was designed to address, while if it succeeds, participants will no longer represent nonphilosophers, which undermines the study’s external validity. Since research on other philosophical topics may likewise suffer from low rates of intended interpretations, e.g., free will and consciousness, this dilemma may have broader implications for experimental philosophy and psychology.

Prior work has established that laypeople do not consistently treat moral questions as being objectively true or as merely true relative to different perspectives. Rather, these metaethical judgments vary dramatically across moral issues and in response to different social influences. We offer a potential explanation by examining how objectivists and relativists are evaluated in different contexts. We provide evidence for a novel account of metaethical judgments as signaling tolerance or intolerance of disagreement. The social implications of signaling tolerance or intolerance in different contexts may motivate different metaethical judgments. Study 1 finds that relativists are perceived as more tolerant, empathic, having superior moral character, and as more desirable as social partners than objectivists. Study 2 replicates these findings with a within-participants design and also shows that objectivists are perceived as more morally serious than relativists. Study 3 examines evaluations of objectivists and relativists regarding concrete moral issues, finding these results vary across situations of moral agreement and disagreement. Study 4 finds that participants' metaethical stances likewise vary when responding in the way they think would make a person who agrees or disagrees with them evaluate them more positively. However, in Study 5, we find no effect on metaethical judgment of telling participants they will be evaluated by a person who agrees or disagrees with them, which suggests either a failure to induce reputational concerns or a more limited influence of reputational considerations on metaethical judgments, despite strong effects on social evaluation.

A growing body of psychological research seeks to understand how people's thinking comports with long-standing philosophical theories, such as whether they view ethical or aesthetic truths as subjective or objective. Yet such research can be critically undermined if it fails to accurately characterize the philosophical positions in question and fails to ensure that subjects understand them appropriately. We argue that a recent article by Rabb et al. (2020) fails to meet these demands and propose several constructive solutions for future research.

Recent research on the metaethical beliefs of ordinary people appears to show that they are metaethical pluralists that adopt different metaethical standards for different moral judgments. Yet the methods used to evaluate folk metaethical belief rely on the assumption that participants interpret what they are asked in metaethical terms. We argue that most participants do not interpret questions designed to elicit metaethical beliefs in metaethical terms, or at least not in the way researchers intend. As a result, existing methods are not reliable measures of metaethical belief. We end by discussing the implications of our account for the philosophical and practical implications of research on the psychology of metaethics.

Machery & Mallon [The moral psychology handbook (pp. 3–47). New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010] argue that existing evidence does not support the claim that moral cognition, understood as a specific form of normative cognition, is a product of evolution. Instead, they suggest that the evidence only supports the more modest claim that a general capacity for normative cognition evolved. They argue that if this is the case then the prospects for evolutionary debunking arguments are bleak. A debunking argument which relied on the fact that normative cognition in general evolved might threaten all areas of normative belief, including the epistemic norms upon which the argument relies. For the sake of argument, we accept their claim that specifically moral cognition did not evolve. However, we reject their contention that this critically undermines evolutionary debunking arguments of morality. A number of strategies are available to solve what we call the “containment problem,” or how to effectively debunk morality without thereby debunking normative cognition tout court. Furthermore, debunking arguments need not rely on the claim that normative cognition in general evolved. So long as at least some aspects of moral cognition have evolved, this may be sufficient to support an evolutionary debunking argument against many of our moral beliefs. Thus, even if Machery & Mallon are right that specifically moral cognition did not evolve, research in evolutionary psychology may have radical implications for moral philosophy.