How to Measure Moral Realism

Moral realists believe that there are objective moral truths. Discussions about this view have traditionally mainly focused on the philosophical issue of its correctness. However, moral realism may also be approached from a psychological perspective. One may study what, if anything, people think about this matter. Results of such investigations do not only promise to enhance our understanding of (meta-)normative cognition; they may also have significant philosophical and practical implications. In the last 15 years empirical psychologists have become increasingly interested in the content, causes and effects of intuitions about moral realism. The main problem with studies of this kind is that they have largely lacked in construct validity. Researchers have assumed appropriate definitions of moral realism and anti-realism, but they have then failed to properly operationalize these definitions. Hence, they did not (fully or exclusively) measure those intuitions that subjects have about the existence of objective moral truths. In this project I attempt to clarify and advance the methods of research on folk moral realism. Moreover, based on the results of these investigations, I will also conduct substantive psychological and philosophical research. The project involves three parts. In analysis of existing studies, I first develop general guidelines for measuring intuitions about the existence of objective moral truths. Then I suggest a new experimental design meant to best satisfy these guidelines. Finally, I apply this design to two populations whose metaethical intuitions have so far not been explored, namely Austrians and academic philosophers, and explore my findings metaethical implications. The project will run for fifteen months and will mainly be realized at the College of Charleston (US), under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Jennifer Wright. It focuses on a currently much-debated topic, is highly innovative, based on extensive preliminary work, supervised by a leading expert in the field, and involves cooperation with many of the most renowned researchers on folk moral realism. There is thus strong reason to believe that the project will make an important contribution to our understanding of morality.

In this project I investigated how lay persons think about the objectivity of morality. I found that this idea is mostly denied. In particular, with regard to most moral issues most people (at least in the US) appear to be relativists. They have the intuition that what is morally right, wrong, good, bad, etc. depends on their own moral beliefs or on the dominant moral beliefs within their culture. Previous studies in this area have sometimes failed to fully or exclusively measure participants' intuitions about moral objectivity. I therefore began by developing general guidelines for how to conduct research of this kind. Then I suggested a methodology meant to satisfy these guidelines as far as possible. This methodology involves tasks that, among others, ask participants to interpret cases of moral disagreement, to compare morality to certain non-moral domains, and to choose among several metaphors for morality. Finally, this novel methodology was applied to US participants in online surveys. Most of my research involved collaborations; first and foremost, with College of Charleston psychology professor Jen Wright; and also with Lieuwe Zijlstra, Jacob Dijkstra and Johannes Wagner. Additional (provisional) findings have lent further support to the claim that lay persons dominantly deny moral objectivity. For example, we found that with regard to most moral issues most people prefer non-objectivist interpretations of the ideas of moral progress, moral knowledge and moral error; and that they associate morality with non-objectivity on an unconscious level as well. The findings of this project have a number of important implications. Considering psychology, they offer what seems to be a more accurate understanding of people's intuitions about moral objectivity (challenging some previous results), and have prompted and guided the development of more valid measures of these intuitions. I also believe that the findings are philosophically relevant. Most importantly, people's widespread moral relativism undermines an important argument in favor of moral objectivism. It thereby supports the view that morality is in fact determined by what individuals or cultures think about it (or is non-objective in some other sense). Finally, the project may have practical implications as well. In further research Prof. Wright and I found that intuitions in favor of moral objectivity come along with heightened intolerance for those who hold divergent moral views. This is important for understanding (and maybe even solving) moral conflicts. I also investigated the implications of my research for the ethics of accidents with self-driving cars, suggesting that such cars should be programmed in a way that is sensitive to different cultures' moral beliefs.