In “The psychology of meta-ethics: Exploring objectivity” Geoffrey Goodwin and John Darley try to shed some light on the nature of our ethical beliefs. Their research is interested not in what people do in fact believe, but what people think about their own beliefs (hence the “meta”-ethics). From the abstract:
How do lay individuals think about the objectivity of their ethical beliefs? Do they regard them as factual and objective, or as more subjective and opinion-based, and what might predict such differences?
Very generally, ethical positions fall into two camps. Ethical objectivists think their ethical beliefs “express true facts about the world,” wheras ethical subjectivists think their ethical beliefs are mind-dependent, and “express nothing more than facts about human psychology.”
Do your actual beliefs and what you believe about these beliefs make sense together?
Summary of the major findings
1. Our meta-ethical positions are usually inconsistent. “Just as participants do not make judgements as ethical philosohpers would have, ordinary individuals do not reason as logicians.” In other words, what we judge to be right or wrong, and what we think about these judgments, often have some element of internal inconsistency.
2. We treat our ethical beliefs almost as objectively as scientific or factual beliefs, and much more than social conventions or tastes. People tend to believe that their ethical beliefs are as objectively true as gravity.
3. The grounding of our ethical systems predicts how objective we claim our ethical beliefs to be. The most religious participants (those with the strongest belief that morality required the existence of a God) had the most robustly objective grounding for their ethics. Surprisingly, also strongly grounded were those with pragmatic groundings (e.g. “it’s good because it will improve society as a whole,” as opposed to “it’s good because it is a moral imperative”).
Some additional important notes
1. Their data was not sufficient to support (or deny) claims that our ethical groundings (e.g. religion) give rise to the level of our objectivism, though there was some correlation.
2. The variance in the amount of ‘objectiveness’, based on the different ethical groundings, was fairly low.
3. A question they did not pursue was whether meta-ethical differences in objectivism are associated with different ethical beliefs, behaviors, or practices. Philosophers have long noted that there is no logical connection between meta-ethics and practical ethics (I think there is likely a psychological connection).
In short, they were surprised by some of their findings, but unfortunately could not draw any sweeping conclusions.
Still, some good food for thought!
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Geoffrey P. Goodwin, John M. Darley. The psychology of meta-ethics: Exploring objectivism. Cognition 106 (2008). 1339-1366
