Epilogue

This final chapter briefly examines the fate of the Ciceronian tradition after the American founding. Philosophic movements arose to challenge the doctrines of natural law that formed one of the pillars of the tradition. At almost the same time, scholarly appreciation of Roman thought declined in favor of the Greeks. Yet, the impact of the tradition remains as salient as ever, forming the foundation of many contemporary institutions and values. The tension between voluntarist notions of legitimacy and moral objectivism continues to animate current discourse around liberal democracy. This chapter thus also considers the ways in which a better understanding of Cicero’s legacy might help us to make progress in those debates.

Implicit Metaethical Intuitions: Validating and Employing a New IAT Procedure

Philosophical arguments often assume that the folk tends towards moral objectivism. Although recent psychological studies have indicated that lay persons’ attitudes to morality are best characterized in terms of non-objectivism-leaning pluralism, it has been maintained that the folk may be committed to moral objectivism implicitly. Since the studies conducted so far almost exclusively assessed subjects’ metaethical attitudes via explicit cognitions, the strength of this rebuttal remains unclear. The current study attempts to test the folk’s implicit metaethical commitments. We present results of a newly developed Implicit Association Test (IAT) for metaethical attitudes which indicate that the folk generally tend towards moral non-objectivism on the implicit level as well. We discuss implications of this finding for the philosophical debate.

Folk Moral Objectivism: The Case of Harmful Actions

It is controversial whether ordinary people regard beliefs about the wrongness of harmful actions as objectively correct. Our deflationary hypothesis, consistent with much of the evidence, is that people are objectivists about harmful actions that are perceived to involve injustice: when two parties disagree about whether such an action is wrong, people think that only one party is correct (the party believing that the action is wrong). However, Sarkissian and colleagues claimed that this evidence is misleading, showing that when the two disagreeing parties are from radically different cultures or species, people tend to think that both parties are correct (a non-objectivist position). We argue that Sarkissian et al.'s studies have some methodological limitations. In particular, participants may have assumed that the exotic or alien party misunderstood the harmful action, and this assumption, rather than a genuinely non-objectivist stance, may have contributed to the increase in non-objectivist responses. Study 1 replicated Sarkissian et al.'s results with additional follow-up measures probing participants' assumptions about how the exotic or alien party understood the harmful action, which supported our suspicion that their results are inconclusive and therefore do not constitute reliable evidence against the deflationary hypothesis. Studies 2 and 3 modified Sarkissian et al.'s design to provide a clear-cut and reliable test of the deflationary hypothesis. In Study 2, we addressed potential issues with their design, including those concerning participants' assumptions about how the exotic or alien party understood the harmful action. In Study 3, we manipulated the alien party's capacity to understand the harmful action. With these changes to the design, high rates of objectivism emerged, consistent with the deflationary hypothesis. Studies 4a and 4b targeted the deflationary hypothesis more precisely by manipulating perceptions of injustice to see the effect on objectivist responding and by probing the more specific notion of objectivism entailed by our hypothesis. The results fully supported the deflationary hypothesis.

The problem of priority of principles in bioethics. Can the Kantian classification in perfect and imperfect duties help us?

Principlism has dominated contemporary Anglophone practical ethics often regarded as the most important methodological conception. Young biomedical scientists grow up learning to apply the “four principles”, an approach originally introduced in the USA by Beauchamp & Childress but soon accepted also in the UK with the support of Professor Raanan Gillon. The central idea of the method involves, first identifying the relevant among the four moral principle(s), (beneficence, non maleficence, respect for autonomy and justice) that is (are) connected with a specific moral dilemma. Then, one follows procedures of balancing, specification and deductive application, as a bridge between the moral dilemma and the four principles. Some attention is paid while balancing, to consequentialist considerations, and to other ethically significant concepts as the virtues and the emotions, but only incidentally. What is central in Beauchamp & Childress’s principlism is the adoption of normative insights of common morality, holding the position of a theoretical justification for the methodological reasoning which will determine the solution of a specific moral problem.The main ambition of the four principles approach and its main virtue is the clarity of the method and consequently the ability to become comprehensive and easily applied. There are certain problems though in applying the method. Here, we are going to investigate the problem of relative priority of principles, i.e. which principle overrides the other when two or more of them are in conflict, seeking help by the Kantian division, in perfect and imperfect duties. But we must first answer the question: Is the four principles approach, a method of moral objectivism as Beauchamp & Childress claim, or is it a method of moral relativism, as it is often argued by some of their critics? Only if our answer to the objectivity question is positive, can the main issue of priority be addressed, because an attempt at a determinate ordering wouldn’t mean anything in a relativist frame.

Objective Purport, Relational Confirmation, and the Presumption of Moral Objectivism

All else being equal, can an objective-seeming character of moral experience support a presumption in favor of some form of moral objectivism? Don Loeb (2007) has argued that even if we grant that moral experience appears to present us with a realm of objective moral facts—something he denies we have reason to do in the first place—the objective purport of moral experience cannot by itself provide even prima facie support for moral objectivism. In what follows, I contend against Loeb that granting the objective purport of ordinary moral experience is sufficient to shift a presumptive case in favor of moral objectivism, and this by constituting non-explanatory, relational confirmation that incrementally raises the prima facie probability that moral facts exist. More specifically, I appeal to a modest confirmational principle shared by Likelihoodists and Bayesians—namely, the Weak Law of Likelihood—in an effort to show that (i) at a minimum, granting the objective purport of moral experience establishes a middling scrutable probability for a sufficient but not necessary condition of moral objectivism being true, and that (ii) this moderate probability in turn constitutes evidence that makes it prima facie more probable than not that at least some form of moral objectivism is true.

Moral Objectivism in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Moral psychologists have recently turned their attention to the study of folk metaethical beliefs. We report the results of a cross-cultural study using Chinese, Polish, and Ecuadorian participants that seeks to advance this line of investigation. Individuals in all three demographic groups were observed to attribute objectivity to ethical statements in very similar patterns. Differences in participants’ strength of opinion about an issue, the level of societal agreement or disagreement about an issue, and participants’ age were found to significantly affect their inclination to view the truth of an ethical statement as a matter of objective fact. Implications for theorizing about folk morality are discussed.

Moral Objectivism Across the Lifespan

We report the results of two studies that examine folk metaethical judgments about the objectivity of morality. We found that participants attributed almost as much objectivity to ethical statements as they did to statements of physical fact and significantly more objectivity to ethical statements than to statements about preferences or tastes. In both studies, younger participants attributed less objectivity to ethical statements than older participants. Females were observed to attribute slightly less objectivity to ethical statements than males, and we found important interactions between attributions of objectivity and other factors, such as how strong participants’ moral opinions were and how much disagreement about the issue they perceived to exist within society. We believe our results have significant implications for debates about the nature of folk morality and about the nature of morality in general.

Moral Objectivism in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Moral psychologists have recently turned their attention to the study of folk metaethical beliefs. We report the results of a cross-cultural study using Chinese, Polish and Ecuadorian participants that seeks to advance this line of investigation. Individuals in all three demographic groups were observed to attribute objectivity to ethical statements in very similar patterns. Differences in participants’ strength of opinion about an issue, the level of societal agreement or disagreement about an issue, and participants’ age were found to significantly affect their inclination to view the truth of an ethical statement as a matter of objective fact. Implications for theorizing about folk morality are discussed.

Moral Objectivism Across the Lifespan

We report the results of two studies that examine folk metaethical judgments about the objectivity of morality. We found that participants attributed almost as much objectivity to ethical statements as they did to statements of physical fact and significantly more objectivity to ethical statements than to statements about preferences or tastes. In both studies, younger participants attributed less objectivity to ethical statements than older participants. Females were observed to attribute slightly less objectivity to ethical statements than males, and we found important interactions between attributions of objectivity and other factors, such as how strong participants’ moral opinions were and how much disagreement about the issue they perceived to exist within society. We believe our results have significant implications for debates about the nature of folk morality and about the nature of morality in general.

The Empirical Case for Folk Indexical Moral Relativism

Recent empirical work on folk moral objectivism has attempted to examine the extent to which folk morality presumes that moral judgments are objectively true or false. Some researchers report findings that they take to indicate folk commitment to objectivism (Nichols & Folds-Bennett, 2003; Wainryb et al., 2004; Goodwin & Darley, 2008, 2010, 2012), while others report findings that may reveal a more variable commitment to objectivism (Sarkissian, et al., 2011; Wright, Grandjean, & McWhite, 2013; Wright, McWhite, & Grandjean, 2014; Beebe, 2014; Beebe et al., 2015; Beebe & Sackris, 2016; Wright, 2018). However, the various probes that have been used to examine folk moral objectivism almost always fail to be good direct measures of objectivism. Some critics (Beebe, 2015; Pölzler, 2017, 2018) have suggested that the problems with existing probes are serious enough that they should be viewed as largely incapable of shedding any light on folk metaethical commitments. Building upon the work of Justin Khoo and Joshua Knobe (2018), I argue that many of the existing probes can be seen as good measures of the extent to which people think that the truth of one moral judgment excludes the possibility that a judgment made by a disagreeing party is also true and that the best explanation of the findings obtained using these measures is significant folk support for indexical moral relativism—the view that the content of moral judgments is context-sensitive. If my thesis is correct, most contemporary moral philosophers are deeply mistaken about the metaethical contours of folk morality in one very important respect.