Folk Moral Relativism

It has often been suggested that people's ordinary understanding of morality involves a belief in objective moral truths and a rejection of moral relativism. The results of six studies call this claim into question. Participants did offer apparently objectivist moral intuitions when considering...

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Published inMind & language Vol. 26; no. 4; pp. 482 - 505
Main Authors SARKISSIAN, HAGOP, PARK, JOHN, TIEN, DAVID, WRIGHT, JENNIFER COLE, KNOBE, JOSHUA
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.09.2011
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Summary:It has often been suggested that people's ordinary understanding of morality involves a belief in objective moral truths and a rejection of moral relativism. The results of six studies call this claim into question. Participants did offer apparently objectivist moral intuitions when considering individuals from their own culture, but they offered increasingly relativist intuitions considering individuals from increasingly different cultures or ways of life. The authors hypothesize that people do not have a fixed commitment to moral objectivism but instead tend to adopt different views depending on the degree to which they consider radically different perspectives on moral questions.
Bibliography:ArticleID:MILA1428
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istex:AAC4426BA2811E995DE72A322C5A6B2365257C31
We are most grateful to Brad Cokelet, Jamie Dreier, Gilbert Harman, Eric Mandelbaum, Shaun Nichols, Jonas Olson, Mark Phelan, Jonathan Phillips, Ángel Pinillos, Jesse Prinz and David Wong for helpful discussions and comments on this paper.
ISSN:0268-1064
1468-0017
DOI:10.1111/j.1468-0017.2011.01428.x