Is moral realism the common sense view? | Dr. Lance Bush

Are ordinary people moral realists? Dr. Lance Bush doesn't think so. He joins me today to discuss his reasons why.

OUTLINE

00:00 Intro
1:45 Experimental philosophy
3:11 Stances, commitments, and intuitions
13:09 Metaethics and folk metaethics
18:02 Moral realism and anti-realism
21:10 Disagreement paradigm
30:45 WEIRD populations
37:07 Confounds and validity
39:50 Tolerance confound
44:22 Normative confound
49:15 Epistemic confound / scope ambiguity
58:28 Open response data
1:04:32 Polzler & Wright 2020
1:20:08 Folk metaethical indeterminacy
1:27:45 Lance’s quantum mechanics study
1:41:14 Moral realism is the common sense view?
1:44:20 Lance’s closing comments
1:50:17 Conclusion

RESOURCES

THE USUAL...

[MajestyofReason]

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[goclbert]

When Lance brought up the quantum mechanics example I was thinking, "Man I feel like I've heard this before" and I remembered a particular comment on the discussion between Huemer and Loeb that I now realize was made by Dr. Lance Bush! To the point about ordinary language in everyday discussions, the linguist NJ Enfield has this book called "Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists" which covers the anthropological reality of language use and, I believe, compliments the conclusions drawn here.

[pbradgarrison]

The thing I like about Lance is that he is careful not to get caught up with the group think.

[lanceindependent]

Hi all. Happy to answer questions in the comments, so feel free to direct questions at me.

[esauponce]

This was ridiculously juicy in the philosophical and scientific sense. Lance is awesome. It's amazing and intimidating (not necessarily in a bad sense) to learn how much work is needed in order to do proper experimental philosophy and scientific research in general about deep topics and interacting with all kinds of people and cultures.

[collin]

Lance, my concern about studies that probe deeper into the question of metaethics, is that it confuses common people, by asking them something that might become more obscure the closer they look. Like if you ask, what is truth. Well it's whatever is true, or not false. Clarify that... People get confused when asked to provide answers for fundamental things that they perceive. When you start digging, then they're not so sure anymore. And since it's hard to stand by something you don't know how to explain, digging might have the result of making people anti realist as a safe answer to the question. It's hard to commit to a position(realism) that you become confused about through questioning. And a lot of times, the knowledge we have about things is more related to our application of them than it is about our metaphysical explanation of them. Have you thought about this concern?

[HeyHeyHarmonicaLuke]

I love the Caesar drinking wine on his 21st birthday example!! That will stick with me.

[andystewart]

Thanks guys! Great discussion. You both know I enjoy your videos. So it is very cool to have a video of you both chatting on this stuff together. Do it again sometime. Thanks again!

[christopherhazel]

You mention a sort of performative tolerance that could be embedded in answers that skew conclusions given their performative rather than factual content.

I'll note that this is a huge issue in political polls - some studies that ask political questions that have real-world factual components get asked in one group and in the other group they get asked where there is a financial reward for answering the factual parts accurately. You find that absent this incentive answers skew toward the "political" answer rather than the "factual" answer suggesting that people often answer political questions "to make a point" rather than to answer factually about the world or their beliefs.

[thinkingchristian]

Sounds like an interesting conversation, excited to watch the whole thing :)

[drugin]

Joe, can you do a video with Michael Heumer talking about his argument for reincarnation and a soul. He is an atheist to my knowledge. Id want to see your objections to his arguments.

[andreasvox]

"Foundational study on non-philosophers shows that most people are not philosophers"

[popsbjd]

I think the gastronomic anti realism is a good analogy and the arguments over pineapple on pizza are heated. I also think of arguments over sports. Who is the better player: Messi or Ronaldo? Henry or Bergkamp? I'm not sure there is a fact of the matter about who is the best footballer but it doesn't stop people from insisting the other side is factually wrong.

[gabbiewolf]

1:29:13 I wonder if Dr. Lance is right that you don't stay in a philosophically indeterminate state about these low level philosophical questions indefinitely. I know that's been true for me about some philosophical issues, but for most of them it seems like I become more agnostic and more indeterminate about them the more I learn. For example watching this video and some recent conversations I've had have destroyed my faith that I can count on my internal non-evidential cognitive seemings about the intrinsic value of certain emotive states (or other similar things) to tell me that moral realism is true. And that's made me much more agnostic about moral realism. I think about a month ago my credences were something like 0.9 vs 0.1 for moral realism vs moral anti-realism but now my credences are something more like 0.55 vs 0.45

[tamjammy]

Cracking discussion and explanation of how research can be hard to interpret. One problem that I have as a "philosophical baby' is that I'm never really sure what people mean when they're discussing"morality". Are they talking about something that applies only to humans? This often seems to be the case as most, if not all, other any mals, are not normally counted as being moral agents, but then studies on our fellow primates for example seem to show that they possess some sense of "justice". And I assume that if we encountered an alien species with possibly greater intelligence, (whatever that means) than our own, they would probably have some sort of moral codes, however different from our own. Maybe it's just me but as a "relatively untrained philosopher" I find it hard to see how to answer questions about moral realism, without knowing whether the term "moral" is being used just in a human sense. If so that would appear to me to be ruling out gods but I know that many would claim that objective morality for example comes from god or gods. Maybe I'm just in over my head.... Anyway, thanks, both.

[tuav]

I might've missed it but does Lance Bush have any book recommendations if one wants to learn more about experimental philosophy but to also see the objections/criticisms that is launched at it?
One book that seems promising is: Moral Psychology by Valerie Tiberius, published by Routledge.

[frederikthorup]

From what i understand moral realism only entails the view that at least one moral claim is objectively true. In that case could people not quite easily be wrongfully found to be moral realists in the questionaires you were talking about? Since the moral issue they think is objectively true might not even be part of it. Or is moral realism more of a sliding scale?

[bengreen]

Dylan, Pentangle, Fairport Convention - these are the Folk.

[bengreen]

objective morality is like Quantum particles - Without thinking about it, it seems obviously real - but the closer you look at it the less real it seems.

[not_enough_space]

I had similar reservations when I saw Joshua Knobe's results for the lay person's idea of "the true self". Did they get the results they did because people already held such beliefs? Or because the survey worked to prompt such responses?