Qiongda Yang

Recent empirical research on folk moral objectivism appears to bring nothing but bad news for traditional metaethics. Experimental philosophers and psychologists claim that their findings are incompatible with traditional metaethical theories and therefore provide reasons for developing non-traditional metaethical theories. In this paper, I argue that many traditional metaethical theories have the resources to show that they are not inconsistent with the findings of disagreement task studies. If this is correct, then these findings do not, by themselves, settle the choice between traditional and non-traditional metaethical theories. I then sketch how further empirical research might help distinguish between these competing theories. Finally, by distinguishing five different understandings of moral objectivity and explaining how they matter for traditional metaethics, I show that the significance of existing empirical findings depends on the relevant sense of objectivity and suggest what future research on folk moral objectivism should take into account.

Many traditional metaethicists think that laypeople believe morality is objective. This has led many experimental philosophers and psychologists to investigate laypeople’s beliefs about moral objectivity. In this literature on folk moral objectivism, it has been proposed that the construct validity of one of its survey-based methods, the disagreement task, could be improved by including dedicated options for error theory and non-cognitivism, the two main non-objectivist theories in traditional metaethics. In this paper, I argue that, if the aim of the disagreement task is understood as capturing laypeople’s implicit metaethical commitments, this proposal involves misunderstandings of traditional metaethics. Both error theory and non-cognitivism predict that laypeople would not select the dedicated options for these theories. In particular, error theory predicts that, if true, laypeople would select the option indicating a belief in moral objectivity, whereas non-cognitivism, by itself, either yields the same prediction or makes no prediction at all.