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when researchers took up these questions experimentally, they did not end up confirming the traditional view. They did not find that people overwhelmingly favoured objectivism. Instead, the results consistently point to a more complex picture. There seems to be a striking degree of conflict even in the intuitions of ordinary folks, with some people under some circumstances offering objectivist answers, while other people under other circumstances offer more relativist views. And that is not all. The experimental results seem to be giving us an ever deeper understanding of why it is that people are drawn in these different directions, what it is that makes some people move toward objectivism and others toward more relativist views.

consider a study by Adam Feltz and Edward Cokely. They were interested in the relationship between belief in moral relativism and the personality trait openness to experience. Accordingly, they conducted a study in which they measured both openness to experience and belief in moral relativism. To get at people’s degree of openness to experience, they used a standard measure designed by researchers in personality psychology. To get at people’s agreement with moral relativism, they told participants about two characters – John and Fred – who held opposite opinions about whether some given act was morally bad. Participants were then asked whether one of these two characters had to be wrong (the objectivist answer) or whether it could be that neither of them was wrong (the relativist answer). What they found was a quite surprising result. It just wasn’t the case that participants overwhelmingly favoured the objectivist answer. Instead, people’s answers were correlated with their personality traits. The higher a participant was in openness to experience, the more likely that participant was to give a relativist answer.

Geoffrey Goodwin and John Darley pursued a similar approach, this time looking at the relationship between people’s belief in moral relativism and their tendency to approach questions by considering a whole variety of possibilities. They proceeded by giving participants mathematical puzzles that could only be solved by looking at multiple different possibilities. Thus, participants who considered all these possibilities would tend to get these problems right, whereas those who failed to consider all the possibilities would tend to get the problems wrong. Now comes the surprising result: those participants who got these problems right were significantly more inclined to offer relativist answers than were those participants who got the problems wrong.

Shaun Nichols and Tricia Folds-Bennett looked at how people’s moral conceptions develop as they grow older. Research in developmental psychology has shown that as children grow up, they develop different understandings of the physical world, of numbers, of other people’s minds. So what about morality? Do people have a different understanding of morality when they are twenty years old than they do when they are only four years old? What the results revealed was a systematic developmental difference. Young children show a strong preference for objectivism, but as they grow older, they become more inclined to adopt relativist views. In other words, there appears to be a developmental shift toward increasing relativism as children mature. (In an exciting new twist on this approach, James Beebe and David Sackris have shown that this pattern eventually reverses, with middle-aged people showing less inclination toward relativism than college students do.)

People are more inclined to be relativists when they score highly in openness to experience, when they have an especially good ability to consider multiple possibilities, when they have matured past childhood (but not when they get to be middle-aged). Looking at these various effects, my collaborators and I thought that it might be possible to offer a single unifying account that explained them all. Specifically, our thought was that people might be drawn to relativism to the extent that they open their minds to alternative perspectives. There could be all sorts of different factors that lead people to open their minds in this way (personality traits, cognitive dispositions, age), but regardless of the instigating factor, researchers seemed always to be finding the same basic effect. The more people have a capacity to truly engage with other perspectives, the more they seem to turn toward moral relativism.

To really put this hypothesis to the test, Hagop Sarkissian, Jennifer Wright, John Park, David Tien and I teamed up to run a series of new studies. Our aim was to actually manipulate the degree to which people considered alternative perspectives. That is, we wanted to randomly assign people to different conditions in which they would end up thinking in different ways, so that we could then examine the impact of these different conditions on their intuitions about moral relativism.

The results of the study showed a systematic difference between conditions. In particular, as we moved toward more distant cultures, we found a steady shift toward more relativist answers – with people in the first condition tending to agree with the statement that at least one of them had to be wrong, people in the second being pretty evenly split between the two answers, and people in the third tending to reject the statement quite decisively.

If we learn that people’s ordinary practice is not an objectivist one – that it actually varies depending on the degree to which people take other perspectives into account – how can we then use this information to address the deeper philosophical issues about the true nature of morality? The answer here is in one way very complex and in another very simple. It is complex in that one can answer such questions only by making use of very sophisticated and subtle philosophical methods. Yet, at the same time, it is simple in that such methods have already been developed and are being continually refined and elaborated within the literature in analytic philosophy. The trick now is just to take these methods and apply them to working out the implications of an ordinary practice that actually exists.

there seems to me the potential danger of confusing various categories of moral discourse. For instance, are the “folks” studied in these cases actually relativist, or perhaps adherents to one of several versions of moral anti-realism? The two are definitely not the same, but I doubt that the subjects in question could tell the difference (and I wouldn’t expect them to, after all they are not philosophers).

why do we expect philosophers to learn from “folk morality” when we do not expect, say, physicists to learn from folk physics (which tends to be Aristotelian in nature), or statisticians from people’s understanding of probability theory (which is generally remarkably poor, as casino owners know very well)? Or even, while I’m at it, why not ask literary critics to discuss Shakespeare in light of what common folks think about the bard (making sure, perhaps, that they have at least read his works, and not just watched the movies)?

Hence, my other examples of stat (i.e., math) and literary criticism. I conceive of philosophy in general, and moral philosophy in particular, as more akin to a (science-informed, to be sure) mix between logic and criticism. Some moral philosophy consists in engaging an “if ... then” sort of scenario, akin to logical-mathematical thinking, where one begins with certain axioms and attempts to derive the consequences of such axioms. In other respects, moral philosophers exercise reflective criticism concerning those consequences as they might be relevant to practical problems.

For instance, we may write philosophically about abortion, and begin our discussion from a comparison of different conceptions of “person.” We might conclude that “if” one adopts conception X of what a person is, “then” abortion is justifiable under such and such conditions; while “if” one adopts conception Y of a person, “then” abortion is justifiable under a different set of conditions, or not justifiable at all. We could, of course, back up even further and engage in a discussion of what “personhood” is, thus moving from moral philosophy to metaphysics.

Nowhere in the above are we going to ask “folks” what they think a person is, or how they think their implicit conception of personhood informs their views on abortion. Of course people’s actual views on abortion are crucial — especially for public policy — and they are intrinsically interesting to social scientists. But they don’t seem to me to make much more contact with philosophy than the above mentioned popular opinions on Shakespeare make contact with serious literary criticism. And please, let’s not play the cheap card of “elitism,” unless we are willing to apply the label to just about any intellectual endeavor, in any discipline.

There is one area in which experimental philosophy can potentially contribute to philosophy proper (as opposed to social science). Once we have a more empirically grounded understanding of what people’s moral reasoning actually is, then we can analyze the likely consequences of that reasoning for a variety of societal issues. But now we would be doing something more akin to political than moral philosophy.

he argues that these revised theories coincide with a particular form of consequentialism, which is a theory in the same broad family as utilitarianism. If Parfit is right, there is much less disagreement between apparently conflicting moral theories than we all thought. The defenders of each of these theories are, in Parfit’s vivid phrase, “climbing the same mountain on different sides.”

Parfit’s real interest is in combating subjectivism and nihilism. Unless he can show that objectivism is true, he believes, nothing matters.

When Parfit does come to the question of “what matters,” his answer might seem surprisingly obvious. He tells us, for example, that what matters most now is that “we rich people give up some of our luxuries, ceasing to overheat the Earth’s atmosphere, and taking care of this planet in other ways, so that it continues to support intelligent life.” Many of us had already reached that conclusion. What we gain from Parfit’s work is the possibility of defending these and other moral claims as objective truths.

Suppose I concede to Prinz that reason cannot settle differences in moral values and sentiments. Difference of opinion doesn’t mean that there isn’t a true or rational answer. In fact, there are many reasons why our cognition, emotional reactions or previous values could be wrong or irrational — and why people would not pick up on their deficiencies. In his article, Prinz uses the case of sociopaths, who simply lack certain cognitive abilities. There are many reasons other than sociopathy why human beings can get things wrong, morally speaking, often and badly. It could be that people are unable to adopt a more objective morality because of their circumstances — from brain deficiencies to lack of access to relevant information. But, again, none of this amounts to an argument against the existence of objective morality.

As it turns out, Prinz’s conception of objective morality does not quite reflect the thinking of most people who believe in objective morality. He writes that: “Objectivism holds that there is one true morality binding upon all of us.” This is a particular strand of moral realism, but there are many. For instance, one can judge some moral precepts as better than others, yet remain open to the fact that there are probably many different ways to establish a good society. This is a pluralistic conception of objective morality which doesn’t assume one absolute moral truth. For all that has been said, Sam Harris’ idea of a moral landscape does help illustrate this concept. Thinking in terms of better and worse morality gets us out of relativism and into an objectivist approach. The important thing to note is that one need not go all the way to absolute objectivity to work toward a rational, non-arbitrary morality.

even Prinz admits that “Relativism does not entail that we should tolerate murderous tyranny. When someone threatens us or our way of life, we are strongly motivated to protect ourselves.” That is, there are such things as better and worse values: the worse ones kill us, the better ones don’t. This is a very broad criterion, but it is an objective standard. Prinz is arguing for a tighter moral relativism – a sort of stripped down objective morality that is constricted by nature, experience, and our (modest) reasoning abilities.

I proposed at the discussion that a more objective morality could be had with the help of a robust public discourse on the issues at hand. Prinz does not necessarily disagree. He wrote that “Many people have overlapping moral values, and one can settle debates by appeal to moral common ground.” But Prinz pointed out a couple of limitations on public discourse. For example, the agreements we reach on “moral common ground” are often exclusive of some, and abstract in content. Consider the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, a seemingly good example of global moral agreement. Yet, it was ratified by a small sample of 48 countries, and it is based on suspiciously Western sounding language. Everyone has a right to education and health care, but — Prinz pointed out during the discussion — what level of education and health care? Still, the U.N. declaration was passed 48-0 with just 8 abstentions (Belarus, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, USSR, Yugoslavia, South Africa and Saudi Arabia). It includes 30 articles of ethical standards agreed upon by 48 countries around the world. Such a document does give us more reason to think that public discourse can lead to significant agreement upon values.

Reason might not be able to arrive at moral truths, but it can push us to test and question the rationality of our values — a crucial part in the process that leads to the adoption of new, or modified values. The only way to reduce disputes about morality is to try to get people on the same page about their moral goals. Given the above, this will not be easy, and perhaps we shouldn’t be too optimistic in our ability to employ reason to figure things out. But reason is still the best, and even only, tool we can wield, and while it might not provide us with a truly objective morality, it’s enough to save us from complete moral relativism.