Pölzler Thomas
Department of Philosophy, University of Graz, Attemsgasse 25/II, 8010 Graz, Austria.
Rev Philos Psychol. 2017;8(2):455-476. doi: 10.1007/s13164-016-0300-9. Epub 2016 Mar 1.
Moral realists believe that there are objective moral truths. According to one of the most prominent arguments in favour of this view, ordinary people experience morality as realist-seeming, and we have therefore prima facie reason to believe that realism is true. Some proponents of this argument have claimed that the hypothesis that ordinary people experience morality as realist-seeming is supported by psychological research on folk metaethics. While most recent research has been thought to contradict this claim, four prominent earlier studies (by Goodwin and Darley, Wainryb et al., Nichols, and Nichols and Folds-Bennett) indeed seem to suggest a tendency towards realism. My aim in this paper is to provide a detailed internal critique of these four studies. I argue that, once interpreted properly, all of them turn out in line with recent research. They suggest that most ordinary people experience morality as "pluralist-" rather than realist-seeming, i.e., that ordinary people have the intuition that realism is true with regard to some moral issues, but variants of anti-realism are true with regard to others. This result means that moral realism may be less well justified than commonly assumed.
道德实在论者认为存在客观的道德真理。根据支持这一观点的最著名论证之一，普通人体验到道德似乎是实在论的，因此我们初步有理由相信实在论是正确的。该论证的一些支持者声称，普通人体验到道德似乎是实在论的这一假设得到了关于民间元伦理学的心理学研究的支持。虽然最近的大多数研究被认为与这一说法相矛盾，但四项著名的早期研究（古德温和达利、温赖布等人、尼科尔斯以及尼科尔斯和福尔兹 - 贝内特的研究）确实似乎表明存在一种实在论倾向。本文的目的是对这四项研究进行详细的内部批评。我认为，一旦得到恰当解释，它们都与最近的研究一致。它们表明，大多数普通人体验到道德是“多元主义的”而非实在论的，也就是说，普通人直觉到在某些道德问题上实在论是正确的，但在其他问题上反实在论的变体是正确的。这一结果意味着道德实在论的合理性可能比通常认为的要低。
