Although moral relativists often appeal to cases of apparent moral disagreement between members of different communities to motivate their view, accounting for these exchanges as evincing genuine disagreements constitutes a challenge to the coherence of moral relativism. While many moral relativists acknowledge this problem, attempts to solve it so far have been wanting. In response, moral relativists either give up the claim that there can be moral disagreement between members of different communities or end up with a view on which (...) these disagreements have no “epistemic significance” because they are always faultless. This paper introduces an alternative strategy: accounting for disagreement in terms of “metalinguistic negotiation”. It argues that this strategy constitutes a better solution to the challenge disagreement poses for moral relativists because it leads to a nuanced understanding of the epistemic significance of moral disagreement between members of different communities. The upshot is a novel account of disagreement for moral relativists that has consequences for how moral relativism should be understood. (shrink)

In recent years an increasing number of psychologists have begun to explore the prevalence, causes and effects of ordinary people’s intuitions about moral realism. Many of these studies have lacked in construct validity, i.e., they have failed to measure moral realism. My aim in this paper accordingly is to motivate and guide methodological improvements. In analysis of prominent existing measures, I develop general recommendations for overcoming ten prima facie serious worries about research on folk moral realism. G1 and G2 require (...) studies’ answer choices to be as metaethically comprehensive as methodologically feasible. G3 and G4 prevent fallacious inferences from intuitions about related debates. G5 and G6 limit first-order moral and epistemic influences. G7 address studies’ instructions. And G8 and G9 suggest tests of important psychological presuppositions. (shrink)

Moral realists often assume that folk intuitions are predominantly realist, and they argue that this places the burden of proof on antirealists. More broadly, appeals to intuition in metaethics typically assume that folk judgments are generally consistent across individuals, such that they are at least predominantly something, if not realist. A substantial body of empirical work on moral objectivism has investigated these assumptions, but findings remain inconclusive due to methodological limitations. Objectivist judgments classify individuals into broad categories of realism and (...) antirealism, but they do not address more specific conflicts in the metaethical literature between different types of realism and antirealism, such as between nonnaturalism and divine command theory, or between noncognitivism and error theory. Further, the data currently show that the folk are objectivists about some moral claims but not others, raising questions that have not been addressed in previous studies about how much of the moral domain is judged to be objective, and about how endorsements of different types of realism and antirealism are distributed among different types of moral claims. Here, I present a new survey that addresses these limitations. The results challenge both of the empirical assumptions identified above, with important implications for metaethical methodology. (shrink)

The question of whether our conscious experience is rich or sparse remains an enduring controversy in philosophy. The “overflow” account argues that perceptual consciousness is far richer than cognitive access: when perceiving a complex scene, subjects see more than they can report. This paper draws on aphantasia to propose a new argument in favor of overflow. First, it shows that opponents of overflow explain subjects’ performance in a change detection paradigm by appealing to a type of “internal imagery.” Second, it (...) provides empirical evidence to demonstrate that aphantasics are incapable of generating this imagery. However, aphantasics perform equally well in this task; and so the no-overflow account fails to explain their performance. This means that proponents of this view are committed to an unsupported view of perception. (shrink)

We challenge an argument that aims to support Aesthetic Realism by claiming, first, that common sense is realist about aesthetic judgments because it considers that aesthetic judgments can be right or wrong, and, second, that becauseAesthetic Realism comes from and accounts for “folk aesthetics,” it is the best aesthetic theory available.We empirically evaluate this argument by probing whether ordinary people with no training whatsoever in the subtle debates of aesthetic philosophy consider their aesthetic judgments as right or wrong. Having shown (...) that the results do not support the main premise of the argument, we discuss the consequences for Aesthetic Realism and address possible objections to our study. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists have thought that people untutored in philosophy are moral realists. On this view, when people make moral judgments, they interpret their judgments as tracking universal, objective moral facts. But studies of folk metaethics have demonstrated that people have a mix of metaethical attitudes. Sometimes people think of their moral judgments as purely expressive, or as tracking subjective or relative moral facts, or perhaps no facts at all. This paper surveys the evidence for folk metaethical pluralism and (...) argues for an explanation of this mix of folk metaethical attitudes: without philosophical education, these attitudes are typically caused by factors that are insensitive to their truth. Moreover, unless they can be justified by other means, metaethical attitudes with this etiology are, as a result, irrational, and ought not be used as evidence for or against moral realism. (shrink)

Many philosophers in the field of meta-ethics believe that rational degrees of confidence in moral judgments should have a probabilistic structure, in the same way as do rational degrees of belief. The current paper examines this position, termed “moral Bayesianism,” from an empirical point of view. To this end, we assessed the extent to which degrees of moral judgments obey the third axiom of the probability calculus, ifP(A∩B)=0thenP(A∪B)=P(A)+P(B), known as finite additivity, as compared to degrees of beliefs on the one (...) hand and degrees of desires on the other. Results generally converged to show that degrees of moral judgment are more similar to degrees of belief than to degrees of desire in this respect. This supports the adoption of a Bayesian approach to the study of moral judgments. To further support moral Bayesianism, we also demonstrated its predictive power. Finally, we discuss the relevancy of our results to the meta-ethical debate between moral cognitivists and moral non-cognitivists. (shrink)

While Richard Joyce’s moral skepticism might seem to be an extreme metaethical view, it is actually far more moderate than it might first appear. By articulating four challenges facing his approach to moral skepticism, I argue that Joyce’s moderation is, in fact, a theoretical liability. First, the fact that Joyce is not skeptical about normativity in general makes it possible to develop close approximations to morality, lending support to moderate moral revisionism over moral error theory. Second, Joyce relies on strong, (...) contentious conceptual and empirical claims in support of his views. Third, Joyce’s evolutionary debunking argument threatens to backfire, generalizing to all normative judgments. Finally, Joyce fails to offer an adequate account of the normativity of desire. Each of these four challenges can be either sidestepped or embraced by radicalizing and defending a global form of normative skepticism. There are thus several ways in which global normative skepticism appears to be in a more robust dialectical position than Joyce’s moral skepticism. Furthermore, I argue, Joyce’s arguments against global normative skepticism are unconvincing. While this discussion is framed in terms of Joyce’s work, its arguments will apply to other moral skeptics who are not also global normative skeptics. The result is an invitation for Joyce and other moral skeptics to leave these problems behind and join the radical camp. (shrink)

One influential positive argument for moral realism is the Explanatory Indispensability Argument. A crucial premise of this argument is the explanatory relevance of moral properties. On this premise, moral properties, such as wrongness, rightness, courage, and cowardice, are explanatorily indispensable to some empirical phenomena. Although there has been a lively debate on this premise, one crucial challenge to this thesis, what I call the Scientific Standard Challenge, has not been properly discussed. After explaining this challenge and a related concern, I (...) argue that in response to this central challenge, the proponents of the argument should take what I call the localist turn to defend the explanatory indispensability of moral properties. The localist turn encourages the defenders of moral explanations to be more sensitive to the nature of each moral explanation. For instance, some moral explanations are explanations of social matters, so the standards they need to meet are provided by relevant branches of the social sciences. On the other hand, some other moral explanations are about our psychology, so the theoretical standards those explanations need to meet should come from psychology. I illustrate how this localist project can be conducted in the case of the moral explanation that appeals to injustice. I argue that the field of comparative politics provides the theoretical standards moral explanations of institutional change need to meet. I shall then illustrate how a sophisticated moral explanation can meet those theoretical standards and how this moral explanation can be strong evidence of injustice’s explanatory indispensability. (shrink)

We consider the evolutionary scheme of morality proposed by Tomasello to defend the idea that the ability to orient the learning of offspring using signs of approval/disapproval could be a decisive and necessary step in the evolution of human morality. Those basic forms of intentional evaluative feedback, something we have called assessor teaching, allow parents to transmit their accumulated experience to their children, both about the behaviors that should be learned as well as how they should be copied. The rationale (...) underlying this process is as follows: if a behavior is approved, then it is good; if it is disapproved, then it is bad. The evaluative guidance on how to behave most probably spread among peers in situations of mutual benefit, such as cooperative child rearing. We argue that our hominin ancestors provided with this capacity for assessor teaching were ideally positioned to develop the two specifically human levels of morality proposed by Tomasello: the morality of fairness and the morality of justice. Assessor teaching could have facilitated the genesis of rudimentary codes of behavior tied with the need to agree about how to behave to succeed in joint cooperative activities. Moreover, learning through assessor teaching provides a plausible explanation for the origin of the objectivist and prescriptive dimensions of human morality. First, we emphasize that individuals feel that they evaluate the behavior of others objectively to guide their learning, and, second, we underline the imperative intention that any moral manifestation possesses. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that moral objectivism is supported by stable features of moral discourse and thinking. When engaged in moral reasoning and discourse, people behave ‘as if’ objectivism were correct, and the seemingly most straightforward way of making sense of this is to assume that objectivism is correct; this is how we think that such behavior is explained in paradigmatically objectivist domains. By comparison, relativist, error-theoretic or non-cognitivist accounts of this behavior seem contrived and ad hoc. After explaining why this (...) argument should be taken seriously (recent arguments notwithstanding), I argue that it is nevertheless undermined by considerations of moral disagreement. Even if the metaphysical, epistemic and semantic commitments of objectivism provide little or no evidence against it, and even if the alternative explanations of ‘objectivist’ traits of moral discourse and thinking are speculative or contrived, objectivism is itself incapable of making straightforward sense of these traits. Deep and widespread moral disagreement or, rather, the mere appearance of such disagreement, strongly suggests that the explanations operative in paradigmatically objective discourse fail to carry over to the moral case. Since objectivism, no less than relativism, non-cognitivism and error-theories, needs non-trivial explanations of why we behave ‘as if’ objectivism were correct, such behavior does not presently provide reason to accept objectivism. (shrink)

We report the results of two studies that examine folk metaethical judgments about the objectivity of morality. We found that participants attributed almost as much objectivity to ethical statements as they did to statements of physical fact and significantly more objectivity to ethical statements than to statements about preferences or tastes. In both studies, younger participants attributed less objectivity to ethical statements than older participants. Females were observed to attribute slightly less objectivity to ethical statements than males, and we found (...) important interactions between attributions of objectivity and other factors, such as how strong participants’ moral opinions were and how much disagreement about the issue they perceived to exist within society. We believe our results have significant implications for debates about the nature of folk morality and about the nature of morality in general. (shrink)

Moral psychologists have recently turned their attention to the study of folk metaethical beliefs. We report the results of a cross-cultural study using Chinese, Polish and Ecuadorian participants that seeks to advance this line of investigation. Individuals in all three demographic groups were observed to attribute objectivity to ethical statements in very similar patterns. Differences in participants’ strength of opinion about an issue, the level of societal agreement or disagreement about an issue, and participants’ age were found to significantly affect (...) their inclination to view the truth of an ethical statement as a matter of objective fact. Implications for theorizing about folk morality are discussed. (shrink)

Recent work in folk metaethics finds a correlation between perceived consensus about a moral claim and meta-ethical judgments about whether the claim is universally or only relatively true. We argue that consensus can provide evidence for meta-normative claims, such as whether a claim is universally true. We then report several experiments indicating that people use consensus to make inferences about whether a claim is universally true. This suggests that people's beliefs about relativism and universalism are partly guided by evidence-based reasoning. (...) In a final study, we show that the rejection of universalism does not generate a simple subjectivism but is associated with a more moderate relativism on which highly atypical positions are regarded as mistaken. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy of aesthetics has explored to what extent ordinary people are committed to aesthetic realism. Extant work has focused on attitudes to normativism – a key commitment of realist positions in aesthetics – the claim that aesthetic judgments/statements have correctness conditions, invariant between subjects, such that there is a fact of the matter in cases of aesthetic disagreement. The emerging picture is that ordinary people strongly and almost universally reject normativism and thus there is no strong realist tendency in (...) ordinary people’s thinking about the aesthetic. This has been taken to dissolve the traditional puzzle in aesthetics of how to best account for the fact that (a) aesthetic judgments seem intersubjectively valid, while (b) aesthetic experience seems subjective. This paper presents studies which further enrich our understanding of ordinary thinking about the aesthetic: ordinary thinking about the aesthetic may not be so vehement in its rejection of normativism; and where previous results suggested that, in many cultures, the dominant trend is to reject correctness conditions for aesthetic judgments, the current results suggest participants think aesthetic judgments have correctness conditions (albeit perhaps very finely relativized to specific circumstances of judgment). (shrink)

This chapter has two sections, each focusing on a distinct way in which ethical disagreement and variations in ethical judgment matter for theories of ethical thought and talk. In the first section, we look at how the variation poses problems for both cognitivist and non-cognitivist ways of specifying the nature of ethical judgments. In the second, we look at how disagreement phenomena have been taken to undermine cognitivist accounts, but also at how the seeming variation in cognitive and non-cognitive contents (...) between parties of deep ethical disagreement challenges both cognitivist and non-cognitivist accounts of disagreement itself. (shrink)

An actor's mental states—whether she acted knowingly and with bad intentions—typically play an important role in evaluating the extent to which an action is wrong and in determining appropriate levels of punishment. In four experiments, we find that this role for knowledge and intent is significantly weaker when evaluating transgressions of conventional rules as opposed to moral rules. We also find that this attenuated role for knowledge and intent is partly due to the fact that conventional rules are judged to (...) be more arbitrary than moral rules; whereas moral transgressions are associated with actions that are intrinsically wrong, conventional transgressions are associated with actions that are only contingently wrong. Finally, we find that it is the perpetrator's belief about the arbitrary or non-arbitrary basis of the rule—not the reality—that drives this differential effect of knowledge and intent across types of transgressions. (shrink)

The basis of property rights is a central problem in political philosophy. The core philosophical dispute concerns whether property rights are natural facts, independent of human conventions. In this article, we examine adult judgments on this issue. We find evidence that familiar property norms regarding external objects (e.g., fish and strawberries) are treated as conventional on standard measures of authority dependence and context relativism. Previous work on the moral/conventional distinction indicates that people treat property rights as moral rather than conventional (...) (e.g., Dahl & Waltzer, 2020; Nucci & Turiel, 1993; Tisak & Turiel, 1984). However, these studies explicitly assume that one person owns property that another steals. Study 1 explores judgments of authority dependence regarding ownership in cases that explicitly appeal to stealing and prior ownership as compared to cases that omit such explicit appeals. We find that participants tend to treat ownership as authority dependent when explicit appeals to stealing are absent, but not when the explicit appeals are present. Study 2 examines intuitions about authority dependence of ownership violations as compared to canonical conventional and harm-based moral violations. We find that ownership violations are treated as more authority dependent than harm-based moral violations. This all suggests that some central property norms are treated as conventional. However, we also find that the conventionality of property norms is restricted in several ways. In study 3, we find that people do not treat norms of self-ownership as conventional. Other people cannot take your hair or skin cells even if the teacher says it's okay. Study 4 uses a measure of context relativism to examine the conventionality of ownership norms, comparing different possible norms of ownership. We find that participants regard takings that are violations in their own culture as permissible in other cultures; however, only some foreign norms are deemed acceptable. In study 5 we find another limitation – participants think it's impermissible to take resources from someone based on a new property norm that is retrospectively imposed. Finally, in study 6 we explore whether some takings might be judged to be morally (non-conventionally) wrong as a function of scarcity. We find that when asked about another culture that allows taking, participants tend to say that taking a food item from the person who caught it is permissible when the food is plentiful, but not when the food is scarce. (shrink)

In metaethics, empirical approaches are not just complementary to, but continuous with, traditional approaches to the subject. This chapter addresses traditional and empirical approaches to metaethics. It discusses how empirical approaches have been brought to bear on some central metaethical questions. The chapter illustrates not just the diversity of topics within metaethics itself but also the diversity of empirical methods and approaches that philosophers and psychologists working on these topics are using. The debate between internalists and externalists is a debate (...) concerning the psychology of moral judgment, but also a debate about our concept of moral judgment. As such, it has implications for other metaethical debates. Antirealists such as relativists and noncognitivists often defend internalism, and argue that their views are best equipped to explain the link between moral judgment and motivation. (shrink)

To what extent, and on what grounds, can we ethically evaluate art from a generative context that is at some significant distance from our present reception context – at enough distance, at least, so that the two contexts differ, in important ways, in aspects of their moral outlooks? This paper has four aims. The modest task of the paper is to show that this question is much more difficult than has been recognised. The somewhat more ambitious goal is a methodological (...) intervention: it is to highlight the need for interdisciplinary research that illuminates the socio-historical specificities of remote generative contexts in a way that allows us to see the relevant ways in which the moral outlooks overlap with ours (or do not). In relation, the third aim of the paper is to argue, with reference to Bernard Williams’s ‘relativism of distance’, that there are some cases in which the moral outlooks of a work’s generative and reception contexts differ so significantly that the warrant for our moral judgments of remote artworks is attenuated – if it exists at all. Finally, we try to demonstrate how the sort of interdisciplinary collaboration we’re advocating might inform our moral judgments of art – more specifically, in a way that invites a degree of quietude or uncertainty about remote artworks that are deeply morally troubling in our present reception context. We do this with reference to the paintings of Titian and the music composed for and sung by the castrati. (shrink)

Experimental moral philosophy began to emerge as a methodology inthe last decade of the twentieth century, a branch of the largerexperimental philosophy approach. From the beginning,it has been embroiled in controversy on a number of fronts. Somedoubt that it is philosophy at all. Others acknowledge that it isphilosophy but think that it has produced modest results at best andconfusion at worst. Still others think it represents an important advance., Before the research program can be evaluated, we should have someconception of (...) its scope. But controversy surrounds questionsabout its boundaries as well. Uncontroversially, the distinctionbetween experimental and non-experimental philosophy is not identicalto the distinction between a posteriori and a prioriphilosophy. Experimental evidence is a proper subset of empiricalevidence, which is itself a subset of a posteriorievidence. Can any more be said?, L1: A child raised in a particular linguistic community almostinevitably ends up speaking an idiolect of the local language despitelack of sufficient explicit instruction, lack of extensive negativefeedback for mistakes, and grammatical mistakes by caretakers., character, moral | cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism, moral | emotion | ethics: virtue | intuition | moral anti-realism | moral psychology: empirical approaches | moral realism | moral relativism | well-being, Copyright © 2014 byMark Alfano Don Loeb, View this site from another server:. (shrink)

There are various ways in which context matters in ethics. Most clearly, the context in which an action is performed might determine whether the action is morally right: though it is often wrong not to keep a promise, it might be permissible in certain contexts. More radically, proponents of moral particularism (see particularism) have argued that a reason for an action in one context is not guaranteed to be a reason in a different context: whether it is a reason against (...) an act that it breaks a promise or inflicts pain might depend on the particulars of the situation. In moral epistemology, Timmons (1999: Ch. 5) argues that whether a moral judgment is epistemically responsible depends both on the basic moral outlook of the moral judge and on whether the context of judgment is one of engaged moral thinking, or one of distanced, skeptical reflection. In the former, the judge’s basic moral outlook can serve to justify the judgment; not so in the latter (see epistemology, moral). -/- Our focus here, however, will be on forms of metaethical, and more precisely semantic, contextualism in moral discourse and moral thinking. According to these forms of contextualism (henceforth “metaethical contextualism,” or just “contextualism”), the meaning or truth-conditions of a moral judgment depend not only on the properties of the act it concerns, but also on features of the context in which the judgment is made, such as the standards endorsed by the moral judge or the parties of the conversation. If metaethical contextualism is correct, it might be that when two persons judge that abortions must be banned, one person’s judgment might be true whereas the other person’s is false, because they accept different fundamental norms. This would undermine the idea that there are objectively correct answers to moral questions. -/- Metaethical contextualism is supported from three directions. First, what is expressed by terms such as “good” and “ought” seems to be context-dependent when used outside ethics, being dependent on a variety of interests and concerns. One might therefore expect similar context dependence when these terms are used to express moral judgments, assuming a corresponding variety of interests and concerns in moral contexts. Second, many have thought that deep moral disagree- ments suggest that the interests and concerns behind moral judgments do vary in this way. Finally, contextualism promises to make sense of what seems to be an intrinsic yet defeasible connection between moral judgments and moral motivation, by tying the meaning or truth-conditions of moral judgments closely to interests and concerns of moral judges. At the same time, contextualism faces two broad kinds of problems: to make sense of the seemingly categorical or objective preten- sions of moral claims, and to explain why the parties to deep moral disagreement often behave as if they were disagreeing about substantive issues rather than talking past each other. In the sections that follow, we look closer at both sources of support and problems for contextualism. (shrink)

Dworkin’s famous argument from legal disagreements poses a problem for legal positivism by undermining the idea that the law can be (just) the result of the practice and attitudes of norm-applying officials. In recent work, the chapter author argued that a hybrid contextualist theory paired with a dispositional theory of value—a hybrid dispositionalism, for short—offers the resources to respond to similar disagreement- based arguments in other evaluative and normative domains. This chapter claims that the theory the author advocates can extend (...) to legal statements and disputes, and shares some important features with Toh’s (2011) idea that legal statements express shared acceptance of norms. The chapter proposes that a contextualist semantics for legal statements paired with the pragmatic communication of implicatures that express shared acceptances of norms, achieves the same goal that Toh aims at. (shrink)

According to content-relativist theories of moral language, different speakers use the same moral sentences to say different things. Content-relativism faces a well-known problem of lost disagreement. Recently, numerous content-relativists (including the author) have proposed to solve this problem by appeal to various kinds of non-content-based, or broadly pragmatic, disagreement. This presents content-relativists with a new problem—of found agreement. Which (if any) of these newly identified kinds of conflict is correctly identified as the lost moral disagreement we were looking for? This (...) paper offers a critical comparison of different content-relativist proposals. It divides them into two broad categories, quasi-expressivist theories (QED) and metalinguistic theories (MLD). Objections to each are considered, and QED is tentatively found to be superior. (shrink)

Despite the widespread use of the notion of moral intuition, its psychological features remain a matter of debate and it is unclear why the capacity to experience moral intuitions evolved in humans. We first survey standard accounts of moral intuition, pointing out their interesting and problematic aspects. Drawing lessons from this analysis, we propose a novel account of moral intuitions which captures their phenomenological, mechanistic, and evolutionary features. Moral intuitions are composed of two elements: an evaluative mental state and a (...) feeling of rightness (FOR). We illustrate the phenomenology of the FOR with examples of non-moral and moral cases, and provide a biological and mechanistic account: the emergence of human reasoning capacities created a need for the co-evolution of a psychological system producing the feeling of rightness (the FORs). This system is triggered when we experience conflicting evaluations. The FORs renders evaluations resulting from rational deliberation less compelling than the evaluations produced by simple evolved systems. It thus facilitates optimal decision-making, preventing excessive interference by rational deliberation. Our account sheds light on why moral intuitions are so frequently experienced and why they are so compelling and resistant to argument. In addition, the account fuels interesting speculations about common metaethical intuitions. (shrink)

Much of the recent movement organized under the heading “Experimental Philosophy” has been concerned with the empirical study of responses to thought experiments drawn from the literature on philosophical analysis. I consider what bearing these studies have on the traditional projects in which thought experiments have been used in philosophy. This will help to answer the question what the relation is between Experimental Philosophy and philosophy, whether it is an “exciting new style of [philosophical] research”, “a new interdisciplinary field that (...) uses methods normally associated with psychology to investigate questions normally associated with philosophy” (Knobe et al. 2012), or whether its relation to philosophy consists, as some have suggested, in no more than the word ‘philosophy’ appearing in its title, or whether the truth lies somewhere in between these two views. I first distinguishes different strands in Experimental Philosophy, negative and positive x-phi, and x-phi pursuing philosophy as opposed to x-phi as cognitive science. Next I review some ways in which Experimental Philosophy has been criticized. Finally, I consider what would have to be true for Experimental Philosophy to have one or another sort of relevance to philosophy, whether the assumptions required are true, how we could know it, and the ideal limits of the usefulness Experimental Philosophy to philosophy. I conclude x-phi cannot in principle be a replacement for traditional first person approaches because it yields the wrong kind of knowledge and that it can nonetheless be a practical aid in conducting philosophical thought experiments. n. (shrink)

The fundamental issue dividing normative naturalists and non-naturalists concerns the nature of normativity. Non-naturalists hold that the normativity of moral properties and facts sets them apart from natural properties and facts in an important and deep way. As Derek Parfit explains matters, the normative naturalist distinguishes between normative concepts and the natural properties to which these concepts refer and also between normative propositions and the natural facts in virtue of which such propositions are true when they are true. This chapter (...) explains Parfit's Soft Naturalist's Dilemma. Parfit thinks that normative naturalism is "close to nihilism". According to normative naturalism, normative claims are intended to state facts. Naturalism denies that there are such facts, and yet Soft Naturalism claims that there nevertheless is reason to continue to have normative concepts and to use normative sentences. There is the 'eliminativist' strategy of arguing that in fact no property is normative since all normative properties are natural and no natural property is normative. (shrink)

This book provides a novel formulation and defence of moral error theory. It also provides a novel solution to the so-called now what question; viz., the question what we should do with our moral thought and talk after moral error theory. The novel formulation of moral error theory uses pragmatic presupposition rather than conceptual entailment to argue that moral judgments carry a non-negotiable commitment to categorical moral reasons. The new answer to the now what question is pragmatic presupposition substitutionism: we (...) should substitute our current moral judgments, which pragmatically presuppose the existence of categorical moral reasons with ‘schmoral’ judgments that pragmatically presuppose the existence of a specific class of prudential reasons. These are prudential reasons that, when we act on them, contribute to the satisfaction of what the author calls ‘the fundamental desire’; namely, the desire to live in a world with mutually beneficial cooperation. (shrink)

The burgeoning science of ethics has produced a trend toward pessimism. Ordinary moral thought and action, we’re told, are profoundly influenced by arbitrary factors and ultimately driven by unreasoned feelings. This book counters the current orthodoxy on its own terms by carefully engaging with the empirical literature. The resulting view, optimistic rationalism, shows the pervasive role played by reason, and ultimately defuses sweeping debunking arguments in ethics. The science does suggest that moral knowledge and virtue don’t come easily. However, despite (...) the heavy influence of automatic and unconscious processes that have been shaped by evolutionary pressures, we needn’t reject ordinary moral psychology as fundamentally flawed or in need of serious repair. Reason can be corrupted in ethics just as in other domains, but a special pessimism about morality in particular is unwarranted. Moral judgment and motivation are fundamentally rational enterprises not beholden to the passions. (shrink)

An examination of the tensions between different conceptions of objectivity and subjectivity, and impartiality and partiality, as they arise in epistemology, ethical theory, and metaethics. Resources from classical Chinese philosophy are leveraged throughout the work to showcase new alternative ways of resolving these tensions.

This book introduces readers to the major debates and positions related to moral realism, and defends a pluralistic version of moral realism.

This book defends the Humean Theory of Motivation, according to which desire drives all action and practical reasoning. -/- Desire motivates us to pursue its object. It makes thoughts of its object pleasant. It focuses attention on its object. Its effects are amplified by vivid representations of its object. These aspects of desire explain why motivation usually accompanies moral belief, how intentions shape our plans, how we exercise willpower, what human selves are, how action can express emotion, why we procrastinate, (...) and how we daydream. The Humean Theory also suggests a new account of moral judgment that upholds objectivity while understanding moral concepts in terms of our feelings. (shrink)

This book challenges the widespread assumption that the ethical life and society must be moral in any objective sense. In his previous works, Marks has rejected both the existence of such a morality and the need to maintain verbal, attitudinal, practical, and institutional remnants of belief in it. This book develops these ideas further, with emphasis on constructing a positive alternative. Calling it “desirism”, Marks illustrates what life and the world would be like if we lived in accordance with our (...) rational desires rather than the dictates of any actual or pretend morality, neither overlaying our desires with moral sanction nor attempting to override them with moral strictures. Hard Atheism and the Ethics of Desire also argues that atheism thereby becomes more plausible than the so-called New Atheism that attempts to give up God and yet retain morality. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there are at least two ways in which people can be moral objectivists, namely implicitly and explicitly. It is possible to explicitly deny being a moral objectivist while being implicitly committed to it. (Enoch, Shafer and Landau (eds), The Ethical Life: Fundamental Readings in Ethics and Moral Problems, 192–205, Oxford University Press, New York, 2014) presents three thought experiments to convince his reader that they are moral objectivists even if they explicitly think otherwise. As (...) it happens, Enoch’s tests, which he uses as intuition pumps, provide excellent measures of implicit metaethical commitments. In this paper I use each of them as material for survey experiments to test whether people are implicit moral objectivists. Overall, results provide support for the idea that people are moral objectivists. (shrink)

This paper argues against Boydian synthetic moral naturalism by way of a critical examination at metasemantic issues. I first show that the Boydian metasemantics delivers determinate but wrong reference, building on an analysis by Schroeter and Schroeter. I then propose a diagnosis which says that the problem occurs due to an overly simple way of understanding externalist metasemantics, and that a proper understanding requires us to pay heed to the higher-level constraints set by the speakers’ deferring pattern. That in turn (...) is restricted by what I call reference defeaters, which are essentially some central beliefs held by the speakers and are so called because they have the power to defeat reference of a term to certain things. Applying the notion to moral discourse, I argue that the entrenched is/ought distinction held by the ordinary speakers defeats the reference of the moral predicates to natural properties, that is, synthetic moral naturalism is not true. (shrink)

Philosophers have in recent years displayed an increasing interest in investigating folk metaethical beliefs using rigorous empirical methods. Taken together, these studies put significant pressure on many philosophical theories that depend on the truth of folk moral objectivism, the view that the folk see morality as objectively grounded. Frequently included among the target of criticism is Mackie’s error theory, or more specifically the conceptual claim thereof. Finding this criticism misplaced, Benjamin Fraser tries to exonerate error theory from such accusation by (...) distinguishing different senses of objectivity. In this paper, I show why Fraser’s strategy is not successful so that the pressure empirically brought upon classical error theory is genuine. However, I also argue that even on the new picture suggested by experimental studies, the folk still entertain erroneous beliefs, which, when coupled with plausible metasemantic assumptions and further empirical support, should warrant an error theory after all, though not in its classical form. (shrink)

Although lay notions in normative ethics have previously been investigated within the framework of the dual-process interpretation of the terror management theory (TMT), meta-ethical beliefs (subjective vs. objective morality) have not been previously investigated within the same framework. In the present research, we primed mortality salience, shown to impair reasoning performance in previous studies, to see whether it inhibits subjectivist moral judgments in three separate experiments. In Experiment 3, we also investigated whether impaired reasoning performance indeed mediates the effect of (...) mortality salience on subjectivism. The results of the three experiments consistently showed that people in the mortality salience group reported significantly less subjectivist responses than the control group, and impaired reasoning performance partially mediates it. Overall, the results are consistent with the dual-process interpretation of TMT and suggest that not only normative but also meta-ethical judgments can be explained by this model. (shrink)

Moral abolitionists claim that morality ought to be abolished. According to one of their most prominent arguments, this is because making moral judgments renders people significantly less tolerant toward anyone who holds divergent views. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that morality’s tolerance-decreasing effect only occurs if people are realists about moral issues, i.e., they interpret these issues as objectively grounded. We found support for this hypothesis (Studies 1 and 2). Yet, it also turned out that the intolerance associated (...) with realism is mediated by moral conviction and perceived consensus. People tend to feel more strongly about those moral issues they ground objectively and, in doing so, are more prone to display the vice of moral smugness toward those who disagree with them. The remedy for this that has been recommended is humility which we found (Study 3) is indeed related to reduced intolerance, in part by predicting a reduction in realism, but also in part through a direct connection to intolerance. These results put pressure on abolitionists’ “argument from intolerance.”. (shrink)

Meta-ethical pluralism gives us additional insight into how moral communities become cohesive and why this can be problematic – and in this way provides support for the worries raised by the target article. At the same time, it offers several reasons to be concerned about the proposed initiative, the most important of which is that it could seriously backfire.

Philosophical arguments often assume that the folk tends towards moral objectivism. Although recent psychological studies have indicated that lay persons’ attitudes to morality are best characterized in terms of non-objectivism-leaning pluralism, it has been maintained that the folk may be committed to moral objectivism _implicitly_. Since the studies conducted so far almost exclusively assessed subjects’ metaethical attitudes via explicit cognitions, the strength of this rebuttal remains unclear. The current study attempts to test the folk’s implicit metaethical commitments. We present results (...) of a newly developed Implicit Association Test (IAT) for metaethical attitudes which indicate that the folk generally tend towards moral non-objectivism on the implicit level as well. We discuss implications of this finding for the philosophical debate. (shrink)

Even if we know all relevant descriptive facts about an act, we can still be uncertain about its moral acceptability. Most literature on how to act under such normative uncertainty operates on moral realism, the metaethical view that there are objective moral facts. Lay people largely report anti-realist intuitions, which poses the question of how these intuitions affect their interpretation and handling of normative uncertainty. Results from two quasi-experimental studies (total N = 365) revealed that most people did not interpret (...) normative uncertainty as referring to objective moral facts but rather as uncertainty regarding one’s own view, uncertainty regarding the culturally accepted view or as the result of ambivalence. Especially the anti-realist majority of participants interpreted normative uncertainty different to how it is described in the literature on choice under normative uncertainty. Metaethical views were also associated with lay peoples’ choice of uncertainty reduction strategies and with assumptions about the intended aim of such strategies. The current findings suggest that empirical investigations of normative uncertainty might benefit from considering folk metaethical pluralism, as the lay public largely disagrees with the metaethical assumptions underlying the current discourse on choice under normative uncertainty. (shrink)

Stanford's goal is to explain the uniquely human tendency to externalize or objectify “distinctively moral” demands, norms, and obligations. I maintain that there is no clear phenomenon to explain. Stanford's account of which norms are distinctively moral relies on Turiel's problematic work. Stanford's justification of the claim that we “objectify” moral demands ignores recent studies indicating that often we do not.

Our research addressed an increase of unethical practices in professional settings identified in the literature, and this increase coincides with a shift in U.S. culture from principle-based ethics to one trending toward moral relativism. We discovered many programs lack comprehensiveness to deal with the complexities of culture in graduate education. The purpose of this instrumental case study was to explore and develop a conceptual framework for a comprehensive teaching model targeting graduate-level educators, administrators, and educational boards across disciplines. Data were (...) collected over 13 years from a doctoral professional ethics course at a private, faith-based university in South Texas. Using a Design Based Research process following Reeves’ (2006) guidelines, we developed a multi-disciplinary graduate theoretical teaching model for ethics: Comprehensive Professional Ethics Teaching Model (CPET model), grounded in our data analysis and findings. Recommendations include implementing and testing the efficacy of the CPET model in subsequent studies. (shrink)

A range of empirical findings is first used to more precisely characterize our distinctive tendency to objectify or externalize moral demands and obligations, and it is then argued that this salient feature of our moral cognition represents a profound puzzle for evolutionary approaches to human moral psychology that existing proposals do not help resolve. It is then proposed that such externalization facilitated a broader shift to a vastly more cooperative form of social life by establishing and maintaining a connection between (...) the extent to which an agent is herself motivated by a given moral norm and the extent to which she uses conformity to that same norm as a criterion in evaluating candidate partners in social interaction generally. This connection ensures the correlated interaction necessary to protect those prepared to adopt increasingly cooperative, altruistic, and other prosocial norms of interaction from exploitation, especially as such norms were applied in novel ways and/or to novel circumstances and as the rapid establishment of new norms allowed us to reap still greater rewards from hypercooperation. A wide range of empirical findings is then used to support this hypothesis, showing why the status we ascribe to moral demands and considerations exhibits the otherwise puzzling combination of objective and subjective elements that it does, as well as showing how the need to effectively advertise our externalization of particular moral commitments generates features of our social interaction so familiar that they rarely strike us as standing in need of any explanation in the first place. (shrink)