Can ordinary moral talk really tell us whether morality is objective, or are surveys and “disagreement” questions mostly measuring pragmatics, ambiguity, and shifting interpretations?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Lance Bush is a lecturer at Cornell University in psychology., and his research focuses on moral psychology, metaethics, and methodological issues in experimental philosophy.
2. Interview Summary
In the interview, Lance discusses why empirically studying “folk” metaethical commitments matters for philosophical theorizing, especially because some moral realists appeal to a burden-of-proof move: if ordinary moral thought treats claims like “torturing babies for fun is wrong” as stance-independent, then anti-realists owe an explanation for departing from “common sense.” He also emphasizes that questions about what moral discourse is about can turn on what ordinary speakers mean, in the same way that “witches don’t exist” can shift truth-value depending on whether “witch” refers to demon-consorting sorceresses or (later) to mean old women—an idea he connects to Don Loeb’s discussion of how you can “pull a metaphysical rabbit out of a semantic hat.”
A central theme is that popular empirical approaches can badly mis-measure what people actually mean. He argues that many tidy semantic theses built into noncognitivism, error theory, and relativism lean on what Michael Gill calls the ‘uniformity and deterministic assumption’—roughly, that there’s a single, stable story about what “moral claims” mean across contexts—when real-world moral judgment is messier and heterogeneous. He then uses the “disagreement paradigm” to show how survey answers can be driven by pragmatic reinterpretation rather than deep metaethical commitment: to treat “Alex says X is wrong; Sam says X is not wrong; can both be correct?” as a realism/anti-realism probe, participants have to construe it as a bona fide moral disagreement, which is far from guaranteed. The most vivid illustration is the Julius Caesar “wine on his 21st birthday” case, where a large share of respondents say both parties “can be correct”—something that’s implausible if read as relativism about historical facts—so he proposes that ‘modal operator scope ambiguity’ and “epistemic” reinterpretations (could either one turn out to be right?) are doing the work.
He closes by separating two claims that are often run together: (i) what ordinary speakers mean can matter for whether a position really targets ordinary morality, but (ii) whether stance-independent moral facts exist doesn’t straightforwardly depend on how people talk—if everyone suddenly spoke like anti-realists, that wouldn’t by itself erase any stance-independent facts (if such facts exist). Along the way he flags recurring confusions, like mixing up appraiser vs. agent relativism, and mistaking a metaethical thesis about truth-relativity for a normative thesis about tolerance. Methodologically, he stresses that even good studies face generalizability problems because psychology heavily samples WEIRD populations, and he suggests that getting clearer on what people mean may require more philosophically rich methods—structured, ‘Socratic interviewing’–style probing and other hybrid approaches—while avoiding the ‘mind projection fallacy’ of assuming everyone shares the same moral phenomenology.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:37 - Relevance of folk psychology
07:44 - Semantic theses
20:46 - Empirical findings
29:07 - Issues with research
37:36 - Epistemic misinterpretation
46:45 - Modal misinterpretation
54:22 - Representativeness of samples
1:05:42 - Term usage
1:12:51 - Direct paradigms
1:19:27 - Other issues
1:28:11 - Background beliefs and misinterpretation
1:33:45 - Uncertainty and substitution
1:38:32 - Normative disagreement vs. metaethical disagreement
1:46:47 - Realism
1:52:24 - Language
2:00:27 - General usage and moral phenomenology
2:10:50 - Conclusion
