Moral realism is widely held due to its alignment with common-sense moral discourse
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Literature in metaethics notes that ordinary moral experience is frequently invoked as a prima facie justification for moral realism, though empirical researchers continue to debate the exact nature and prevalence of these folk intuitions.
Many metaethicists agree that as ordinary people experience morality as a realm of objective truths, we have a prima facie reason to believe that it actually is such a realm. Recently, worries have been raised about the validity of the extant psychological research on this argument's empirical hypothesis. Our aim is to advance this research, taking these worries into account. First, we propose a new experimental design for measuring folk intuitions about moral objectivity that may serve as an inspiration for future studies. Then we report and discuss the results of a survey that was based on this design. In our study, most of our participants denied the existence of objective truths about most or all moral issues. In particular, many of them had the intuition that whether moral sentences are true depends both on their own moral beliefs and on the dominant moral beliefs within their culture ("anti-realist pluralism"). This finding suggests that the realist presumptive argument may have to be rejected and that instead anti-realism may have a presumption in its favor.
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 (fully or exclusively) 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 <i>prima facie</i> 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.
in common such that realism either is , or is not, defensible about them. By all accounts, moral realism ... mind-independence, moral realism travels with the burden of making sense of the semantics of moral terms in a ... appearances. More is at stake than just capturing moral discourse . At stake is making sense of our thinking ...
We typically assume that the standard for what is beautiful lies in the eye of the beholder. Yet this is not the case when we consider morality; what we deem morally good is not usually a matter of opinion.
We typically assume that the standard for what is beautiful lies in the eye of the beholder. Yet this is not the case when we consider morality; what we deem morally good is not usually a matter of opinion. Such thoughts push us toward being realists about moral properties, but a cogent theory of moral realism has long been an elusive philosophical goal. Paul Bloomfield here offers a rigorous defense of moral realism, developing an ontology for morality that models the property of being morally good on the property of being physically healthy. The model is assembled systematically; it first presents the metaphysics of healthiness and goodness, then explains our epistemic access to properties such as these, adds a complementary analysis of the semantics and syntax of moral discourse, and fi
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