"But our view is that this story about affective friction, especially when it becomes entangled in social dynamics driven by harsh negative social maintenance and polarization, can make people prone to resist new norms even when the new norm is neutral or a step in the direction of progress."
I think this claim makes sense if you think more norms need to get a fairer shake (here and now), and doesn't work otherwise. I think it'd be useful to think about more examples morally-tinged norms and clearly non-morally-ringed norms
1a. Eating non-vegan food is bad (21st century Seattle, coded left-wing)
1b. Eating non-vegetarian food is bad (21st century India, coded right-wing)
2. Drinking alcohol is bad (10th century Middle East)
3. Drinking alcohol is bad (19th Century America)
3. Eating non-kosher food is bad
4. You must say grace before meals
5. You must not express doubts about the divinity of X
A. Saying words like "bae" is lit
B. You should assume that a retweet implies approval
Depending on your temperament, political outlook, and where or when you live, you could think that people are too easily distracted by new fads, including moral fads, or that your account is correct and people are resistant to new moral norms for bad reasons. I think this is definitely contingent, and I'd guess that which way you go would correlate with how open you are to new experiences.
And I want to acknowledge that you acknowledge that not all new norms are good etc. But I think looking what you are kind of saying is that people resist new norms more than they should. What I'm saying is that
(1) People sometimes are not resistant/skeptical enough of new norms
(2) So there is a trade-off here
Along the same lines as what I claimed on twitter when we talked before https://x.com/guerzhoy/status/1807862333437366465 , I think the argument basically depends on assumptions about the distribution of the goodness/badness of new norms and the distribution of the psychologies of the people promoting them
I worked in Germany 2 months this summer. I was aware of the dour reputation of Germans and I have several German friends in Canada. However, i was astonished when I encountered the dour social behavior regularly (e.g. one word responses to questions, no time for chit chat). I found it quite rude and was quietly angry on a few occasions such as hotel check ins. But I became accustomed and eventually found it refreshing and often hilarious (I asked for assistance at Frankfurt train station from employee and received an ever so slight finger point to the tv screen - no need for words). That is, once I accepted this social behavior and removed any moral association. Upon return to North America I viewed casual idle chatter as a time waster.
Something that seems to have changed over the last 10ish years is the severity of the punishment for violating norms. The article gives the example of people sharing expressions of discomfort when Larry asks about porn preferences. Larry committed a major norm violation but the punishment was mild. It seems to me that, especially in the company of younger people, the list of cultural rules seems to grow by the day and the severity of the punishment for violating them is magnified.
The new norms that condemn ethnic jokes, missing support for Palestine and comments about gender that were everyday speech just a few short years ago have become oppressive and often result in the offender being excluded from polite society rather than just raised eyebrows. Perhaps the new rules do represent cultural process but they come too fast and are penalised too severely to have the desired effect and result instead in votes for iniquitous political candidates who promise to reverse the new rules.
Please, please, please—I would implore the authors to make any kind of reasonable argument in defense of moral realism.
I’m not sure that the above point is super relevant to the topic of this post—after all, one can effectively study the psychology of normative shifts whether or not one is a moral realist—but personally, I don’t think that there is anything more dangerous than people who appeal to any kind of authority (scientific authority, religious authority, etc.) in the pursuit of achieving a monistic, totalizing moral vision (i.e. a moral vision that does not allow for moral and axiological pluralism).
Please, convince me that your “moral realism” is not just the mind projection fallacy. Please, in other words, convince me that “moral realism” is not just a way of saying that you are so uncritically committed to your own personal moral preferences that you’ve failed to recognize them as preferences at all and, instead, see them as “true.”
(Note: I’m being a little heated here because it seriously gets under my skin when scientists seem to commit the mind-projection fallacy and/or are axiologically uncritical, but I’m genuinely curious about how the authors would respond to this and genuinely open to hearing a reasonable defense of moral realism. I have a strong prior that there is no reasonable defense of moral realism, but I’d love to be shown how that prior may be wrong or be in need of updating.)
I think they were just being good academics. This is clearly not a meta ethics paper about the metaphysics of morality, nor is moral realism an assumption necessary for them to make their points. Why would they waste space on this debate? I mean, I obviously care about this matter but this is not the place or time.
(For the record there are plenty of reasonable arguments for moral realism, are you familiar with the literature and just unconvinced by them?)
Yes, I agree that this is not a metaethics paper, and yes, I agree that this point is not the most relevant thing in the world. As I said in my comment:
> “I’m not sure that the above point is super relevant to the topic of this post—after all, one can effectively study the psychology of normative shifts whether or not one is a moral realist … “
That said, if you can’t see why the ontological and epistemological views about morality of two psychologists that study morality are at least somewhat relevant to what they study, then I don’t know what to tell you …
Yes, I’m familiar with the some—but not all—of the literature. But please, feel free to give me or point me in the direction of a good argument for moral realism.
What I meant when I said it wasn't relevant is that the thesis they argue for does not depend on the truth of moral realism. So it is, in this sense, completely irrelevant. Of course, both debates share the subject of morality. But if one must address every moral question everytime they write on the subject, academic moral philosophy and psychology would be doomed. I think it is very understandable that they didn't venture into arguments in favor of moral realism, a view that has close to zero impact on whether the argued-for-view is true.
Regarding good arguments for moral realism, I myself am not a traditional moral realist, but I do think there are compeling arguments in the literature: for instance, David Enoch's argument from deliberative indispensability is one to check out (Also it is important to remember that moral realism is just the more intuitive, commonsense view, and you need a good reason to reject it. So sometimes a good argument for MR is just a good rejection of an argument against it, since the view already has such a strong initial plausibility).
Damn. I just wrote a very long reply, which I accidentally deleted. Such is life. I’ll try to sum up my points quickly:
1. I never criticized the authors for not defending moral realism in the essay itself. I don’t think that they should have. Nevertheless, they should be asked to defend moral realism, since I think it’s an indefensible position and is obviously relevant to what they study.
2. I read a little bit about Enoch’s deliberative indispensability argument, and I am probably misunderstanding it, but it appears to me (given my limited knowledge of it) to be a defense of moral realism’s instrumental value. But the instrumental value, even “indispensability,” of treating moral claims as “true,” does nothing to make any particular moral claim truer than any other. In other words, one could believe that moral realism is instrumentally indispensable without being a moral realist. (And for the record, I have serious problems with calling moral realism deliberatively “indispensable.” I deliberative about morality all the time without taking any of my moral intuitions to be “true,” and I would argue that I deliberate more effectively about morality than most people because I don’t mistake my or anyone else’s moral claims as anything but preferences, affective states, and so on.)
3. I’m probably misunderstanding Enoch’s argument, so feel free to correct me and/or defend Enoch’s claims in terms that are more accurate to the case he’s actually making for moral realism. I’m interested in learning more about it, especially since I’m assuming that I’m misunderstanding it and criticizing it unfairly.
4. I mostly agree that moral realism is commonsensical and intuitive. (I actually believe that deontological moral claims are commonsensical and intuitive, but since most deontologists are also moral realists, I’m just splitting hairs.) But that is no reason for a scientist to be a moral realist, especially when this view is so relevant to what they study. Would you argue that an economist should believe the sunk-cost fallacy just because it’s commonsensical and intuitive? Would you argue that a cosmologist should believe that the sun revolves around the earth just because it’s commonsensical and intuitive? If not, then why should a moral psychologist believe in moral realism just because it’s commonsensical and intuitive?
5. Given that the “truth” of deontological moral claims cannot be investigated scientifically/ empirically, I would hope that a scientist/ empiricist would default to an anti-realist position when studying morality.
6. I am a realist about “hypothetical” moral claims (in the Kantian sense of the hypothetical imperative). But it would take me too long to elaborate that thought here, and being a “hypothetical moral realist” is probably just a contradiction in terms anyway …
Wow I have also just written a long response and accidentally deleted it. Ok I'll try to be quick:
Regarding Enoch's argument, you should see it more as the idea that the indispensability justifies belief in the normative reasons. Like the fact that we cannot deliberate without assuming some normative reasons plus the fact that deliberating is nonoptional for us is evidence that normative reasons exist. It's an inference to the best explanation, the idea is that normative reasons existing is the best explanation of why we need to assume them while deliberating — not much different from when physicists infer the existence of eletrons or whatever because they best explain the phenomena.
Regarding 4, I also don't think people should be moral realist just because it is intuitive. I myself am not. But initial plausibility is pretty good, it is a consideration in favor of the view, for sure. Naturally, competing considerations can overturn this support.
Regarding 5, I don't see why you think this. If the truth cannot be investigated by science, why assume Anti-realism? Their falsity also cannot be investigated by science. It would be better to be agnostic about morality, then. But either way, I don't see why they should leave their belief outside of the assumptions simply because science cannot investigate the matter. I mean, chemistry cannot investigate some aspects of physics that chemists need to assume. Maybe the difference here is that moral realism is controversial among experts, but a close look at physics would reveal a bunch of controversies there too. Anyway, I agree with you that their mention of moral realism was somewhat unnecessary, as all it did was make the notion of moral progress clearer.
I know they said as much themselves, but there’s little difference between Westra and Kelly’s take and Paul’s. Why don’t the former want to use “moral”?
The crux: what makes us react strongly to new norms?
Paul: Whether they involve morality, as in, judgements about whether you’re a good or bad person.
Westra and Kelly: whether and the extent to which they involve praise (you did good!) or blame (you did bad!)
"But our view is that this story about affective friction, especially when it becomes entangled in social dynamics driven by harsh negative social maintenance and polarization, can make people prone to resist new norms even when the new norm is neutral or a step in the direction of progress."
I think this claim makes sense if you think more norms need to get a fairer shake (here and now), and doesn't work otherwise. I think it'd be useful to think about more examples morally-tinged norms and clearly non-morally-ringed norms
1a. Eating non-vegan food is bad (21st century Seattle, coded left-wing)
1b. Eating non-vegetarian food is bad (21st century India, coded right-wing)
2. Drinking alcohol is bad (10th century Middle East)
3. Drinking alcohol is bad (19th Century America)
3. Eating non-kosher food is bad
4. You must say grace before meals
5. You must not express doubts about the divinity of X
A. Saying words like "bae" is lit
B. You should assume that a retweet implies approval
C. Praise Vectron https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icTrzUuWlHI
Depending on your temperament, political outlook, and where or when you live, you could think that people are too easily distracted by new fads, including moral fads, or that your account is correct and people are resistant to new moral norms for bad reasons. I think this is definitely contingent, and I'd guess that which way you go would correlate with how open you are to new experiences.
And I want to acknowledge that you acknowledge that not all new norms are good etc. But I think looking what you are kind of saying is that people resist new norms more than they should. What I'm saying is that
(1) People sometimes are not resistant/skeptical enough of new norms
(2) So there is a trade-off here
Along the same lines as what I claimed on twitter when we talked before https://x.com/guerzhoy/status/1807862333437366465 , I think the argument basically depends on assumptions about the distribution of the goodness/badness of new norms and the distribution of the psychologies of the people promoting them
I worked in Germany 2 months this summer. I was aware of the dour reputation of Germans and I have several German friends in Canada. However, i was astonished when I encountered the dour social behavior regularly (e.g. one word responses to questions, no time for chit chat). I found it quite rude and was quietly angry on a few occasions such as hotel check ins. But I became accustomed and eventually found it refreshing and often hilarious (I asked for assistance at Frankfurt train station from employee and received an ever so slight finger point to the tv screen - no need for words). That is, once I accepted this social behavior and removed any moral association. Upon return to North America I viewed casual idle chatter as a time waster.
Something that seems to have changed over the last 10ish years is the severity of the punishment for violating norms. The article gives the example of people sharing expressions of discomfort when Larry asks about porn preferences. Larry committed a major norm violation but the punishment was mild. It seems to me that, especially in the company of younger people, the list of cultural rules seems to grow by the day and the severity of the punishment for violating them is magnified.
The new norms that condemn ethnic jokes, missing support for Palestine and comments about gender that were everyday speech just a few short years ago have become oppressive and often result in the offender being excluded from polite society rather than just raised eyebrows. Perhaps the new rules do represent cultural process but they come too fast and are penalised too severely to have the desired effect and result instead in votes for iniquitous political candidates who promise to reverse the new rules.
Please, please, please—I would implore the authors to make any kind of reasonable argument in defense of moral realism.
I’m not sure that the above point is super relevant to the topic of this post—after all, one can effectively study the psychology of normative shifts whether or not one is a moral realist—but personally, I don’t think that there is anything more dangerous than people who appeal to any kind of authority (scientific authority, religious authority, etc.) in the pursuit of achieving a monistic, totalizing moral vision (i.e. a moral vision that does not allow for moral and axiological pluralism).
Please, convince me that your “moral realism” is not just the mind projection fallacy. Please, in other words, convince me that “moral realism” is not just a way of saying that you are so uncritically committed to your own personal moral preferences that you’ve failed to recognize them as preferences at all and, instead, see them as “true.”
(Note: I’m being a little heated here because it seriously gets under my skin when scientists seem to commit the mind-projection fallacy and/or are axiologically uncritical, but I’m genuinely curious about how the authors would respond to this and genuinely open to hearing a reasonable defense of moral realism. I have a strong prior that there is no reasonable defense of moral realism, but I’d love to be shown how that prior may be wrong or be in need of updating.)
I think they were just being good academics. This is clearly not a meta ethics paper about the metaphysics of morality, nor is moral realism an assumption necessary for them to make their points. Why would they waste space on this debate? I mean, I obviously care about this matter but this is not the place or time.
(For the record there are plenty of reasonable arguments for moral realism, are you familiar with the literature and just unconvinced by them?)
Yes, I agree that this is not a metaethics paper, and yes, I agree that this point is not the most relevant thing in the world. As I said in my comment:
> “I’m not sure that the above point is super relevant to the topic of this post—after all, one can effectively study the psychology of normative shifts whether or not one is a moral realist … “
That said, if you can’t see why the ontological and epistemological views about morality of two psychologists that study morality are at least somewhat relevant to what they study, then I don’t know what to tell you …
Yes, I’m familiar with the some—but not all—of the literature. But please, feel free to give me or point me in the direction of a good argument for moral realism.
What I meant when I said it wasn't relevant is that the thesis they argue for does not depend on the truth of moral realism. So it is, in this sense, completely irrelevant. Of course, both debates share the subject of morality. But if one must address every moral question everytime they write on the subject, academic moral philosophy and psychology would be doomed. I think it is very understandable that they didn't venture into arguments in favor of moral realism, a view that has close to zero impact on whether the argued-for-view is true.
Regarding good arguments for moral realism, I myself am not a traditional moral realist, but I do think there are compeling arguments in the literature: for instance, David Enoch's argument from deliberative indispensability is one to check out (Also it is important to remember that moral realism is just the more intuitive, commonsense view, and you need a good reason to reject it. So sometimes a good argument for MR is just a good rejection of an argument against it, since the view already has such a strong initial plausibility).
Damn. I just wrote a very long reply, which I accidentally deleted. Such is life. I’ll try to sum up my points quickly:
1. I never criticized the authors for not defending moral realism in the essay itself. I don’t think that they should have. Nevertheless, they should be asked to defend moral realism, since I think it’s an indefensible position and is obviously relevant to what they study.
2. I read a little bit about Enoch’s deliberative indispensability argument, and I am probably misunderstanding it, but it appears to me (given my limited knowledge of it) to be a defense of moral realism’s instrumental value. But the instrumental value, even “indispensability,” of treating moral claims as “true,” does nothing to make any particular moral claim truer than any other. In other words, one could believe that moral realism is instrumentally indispensable without being a moral realist. (And for the record, I have serious problems with calling moral realism deliberatively “indispensable.” I deliberative about morality all the time without taking any of my moral intuitions to be “true,” and I would argue that I deliberate more effectively about morality than most people because I don’t mistake my or anyone else’s moral claims as anything but preferences, affective states, and so on.)
3. I’m probably misunderstanding Enoch’s argument, so feel free to correct me and/or defend Enoch’s claims in terms that are more accurate to the case he’s actually making for moral realism. I’m interested in learning more about it, especially since I’m assuming that I’m misunderstanding it and criticizing it unfairly.
4. I mostly agree that moral realism is commonsensical and intuitive. (I actually believe that deontological moral claims are commonsensical and intuitive, but since most deontologists are also moral realists, I’m just splitting hairs.) But that is no reason for a scientist to be a moral realist, especially when this view is so relevant to what they study. Would you argue that an economist should believe the sunk-cost fallacy just because it’s commonsensical and intuitive? Would you argue that a cosmologist should believe that the sun revolves around the earth just because it’s commonsensical and intuitive? If not, then why should a moral psychologist believe in moral realism just because it’s commonsensical and intuitive?
5. Given that the “truth” of deontological moral claims cannot be investigated scientifically/ empirically, I would hope that a scientist/ empiricist would default to an anti-realist position when studying morality.
6. I am a realist about “hypothetical” moral claims (in the Kantian sense of the hypothetical imperative). But it would take me too long to elaborate that thought here, and being a “hypothetical moral realist” is probably just a contradiction in terms anyway …
(Not that short a summary, haha.)
Wow I have also just written a long response and accidentally deleted it. Ok I'll try to be quick:
Regarding Enoch's argument, you should see it more as the idea that the indispensability justifies belief in the normative reasons. Like the fact that we cannot deliberate without assuming some normative reasons plus the fact that deliberating is nonoptional for us is evidence that normative reasons exist. It's an inference to the best explanation, the idea is that normative reasons existing is the best explanation of why we need to assume them while deliberating — not much different from when physicists infer the existence of eletrons or whatever because they best explain the phenomena.
Regarding 4, I also don't think people should be moral realist just because it is intuitive. I myself am not. But initial plausibility is pretty good, it is a consideration in favor of the view, for sure. Naturally, competing considerations can overturn this support.
Regarding 5, I don't see why you think this. If the truth cannot be investigated by science, why assume Anti-realism? Their falsity also cannot be investigated by science. It would be better to be agnostic about morality, then. But either way, I don't see why they should leave their belief outside of the assumptions simply because science cannot investigate the matter. I mean, chemistry cannot investigate some aspects of physics that chemists need to assume. Maybe the difference here is that moral realism is controversial among experts, but a close look at physics would reveal a bunch of controversies there too. Anyway, I agree with you that their mention of moral realism was somewhat unnecessary, as all it did was make the notion of moral progress clearer.
I know they said as much themselves, but there’s little difference between Westra and Kelly’s take and Paul’s. Why don’t the former want to use “moral”?
The crux: what makes us react strongly to new norms?
Paul: Whether they involve morality, as in, judgements about whether you’re a good or bad person.
Westra and Kelly: whether and the extent to which they involve praise (you did good!) or blame (you did bad!)
Am I missing something?