#Stegmüller: Thomas Pölzler über "Moral Reality and the Empirical Sciences"

Thomas Pölzler works as an assistant professor at the University of Graz at the University of Graz and for a few very nice years we were allowed to share an office here. Today we meet here at the University of Graz again to talk about his book, Moral Reality and the Empirical Sciences, for which he received the Stegmutter Prize from the GAP. Thomas, what does Moral Reality mean here in the title? In my book I ask whether morality is a real phenomenon in a very special sense of the word. If we make a descriptive judgment, for example, if we say this window over there is right-angled, then there is usually something in reality that makes this judgment true or false, an objective fact, a fact that is independent of our thinking in a certain sense. But what about morality now? What about judgments about whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, beneficial or harmful? Is there such an external reality that corresponds to these judgments or not? The answers that philosophers have given to this question can be divided into two large categories. The moral realism on the one hand and the moral anti-realism on the other. Representatives of moral realism say, yes, there is such a thing. Answers to moral questions are no less thought-independent than answers to questions about whether something has a certain form or whether something has a certain length or a certain weight. Anti-realists, on the other hand, believe that morality is a subjective phenomenon. This would mean that moral judgments, for example, judge whether something tastes good or whether something is fashionable, or they claim that there is simply nothing like moral facts at all. In the book, you go into the question of how much insights from empirical sciences can be relevant for the debate on moral realism. Can you briefly explain how you came up with the question? Philosophy deals with phenomena such as knowledge, morality, beauty, God, consciousness, and so on. All of these phenomena are in a certain sense also objects of scientific research. I got the impression relatively early in my studies that these two approaches, the philosophical one on the one hand and the scientific one on the other, are possibly more closely related than is often accepted. In recent decades, such an approach, which is often referred to as naturalistic, has become increasingly popular in philosophy. One question that has not been discussed extensively and in detail for a long time in the background of this approach is exactly this question that I introduced earlier, the question of the reality of moral values. With my book, I wanted to fill this gap. So I was interested in the question of what empirical sciences can contribute to the clarification of the existence of objective moral facts. One way to approach scientific-based arguments in the discourse on moral realism is to completely reject them, i.e. to reject their relevance. How do you feel about these views? One of the main theses of my book says that these scientific-based arguments cannot be wiped off the table as a whole, not on the basis of such general introspection. To show this, I look at various of these introspections and try to disempower them. Some philosophers have, for example, rejected scientific-based arguments for moral realism or anti-realism because they believe that philosophical considerations for moral judgments have a logical precedent before scientific studies on these judgments. Before you can investigate whether these judgments are a product of evolution, how much disagreement there is about these judgments, or how philosophical laymen and laywomen interpret these judgments, you must already know what moral judgments are. But this is a question, says the introspection, about which only philosophy can give us an answer, not science. In my book, I then try to show that this introspection can in a certain way be helpful in understanding scientific-based arguments, but that it cannot disempower these arguments as a whole, namely because it builds on an inadequate understanding of how conceptual considerations on the one hand and empirical considerations on the other are related to each other. For example, I try to show that the meaning of moral expressions also depends on how these expressions are used within a community of speakers. But this is something that can also be empirically researched, which is why, in my opinion, science can also make a significant contribution to this issue. So after the principled conclusions do not convince you, you take a step further in the book and you try to analyze arguments that are relatively prominently presented in your research that rely on empirical insights. Can you give us an example of this way of working in the book? The arguments that I analyze in the book are all based on a certain empirical hypothesis. In the case of the argument from the moral experience, for example, the hypothesis is that morality seems to us to be an objective part of reality. In other words, we are all, in a certain sense, intuitive, moral realists. My discussion of this argument consists of two steps. In the first step, I try to clarify what is meant by the underlying empirical hypothesis. Which people does this hypothesis refer to, for example, and how much of the moral experience of these people should be realistically shaped so that the moral realism could be plausibly followed from this empirical hypothesis. The second step of the discussion is then to check how well this hypothesis is justified on a scientific basis at the present time. In the specific case of this argument from the moral experience, for example, I dealt in more detail with a certain kind of psychological studies. Studies that tested the meta-ethical convictions of philosophical laymen and laywomen. I came to the conclusion that these studies are not particularly valid. The results of the studies are often not sufficiently generalized to all possible people and to all possible parts of morality. And in some cases, at least, the studies did not measure exactly what they intended to measure. Namely, these convictions about the objectivity of moral values. Instead, they measured, for example, normative ethical convictions or epistemological convictions or convictions of a different kind, which, however, do not exactly agree with what it should actually be about. In a certain way, this is also the result I came to with regard to the other arguments that I analyzed in my book. Even if these arguments may seem philosophically promising, on the empirical level, in my opinion, there is still a lot of work to be done in relation to all of them. Thomas, in many discussions of your book, service character is valued, because you do not stop showing the weaknesses of the previous empirically-based arguments, but also make it clear how to make it better. Could you explain that briefly? The suggestions I make in the book are mostly about how to make scientific research on morality more valid or more philosophically relevant. Many of these suggestions are relatively general and sometimes a bit trivial. They concern, for example, the size and composition of samples or the formulation of experimental stimuli. However, I have also made some more concrete and somewhat more complex suggestions, among other things in relation to the psychological studies that I mentioned earlier. In these studies, for example, the term of moral truth was used. If test subjects have rejected the existence of moral truths, then this has been seen as an indicator that they are inclined towards moral realism. If they have rejected such truths, then within these studies they were classified as moral anti-realists or anti-realists. However, such a design only works if test subjects understand the expression of moral truth in a very specific sense, namely in the sense that moral truth requires an agreement with an objective moral reality. This is by no means a trivial assumption. In my book, I therefore propose to experimentally examine this assumption and also provide clues as to how one might be able to do this. The book was published in 2018 and was discussed by a relatively large number of philosophers. Is there anything that you would like to change in the book from today's point of view? On the whole, I am very happy with my book. It is partly based on my dissertation and is thus the end product of many years of hard work. However, there are a few little things that I consider a little different today than back then, and this is mainly due to the fact that in the years since the publication of the book, I have had the opportunity to contribute to scientific research on morality myself. And in this process, I have also learned a lot. So I would today, I think, formulate my skepticism of certain scientific studies a little weaker, since my interventions partly rely on empirical assumptions that would have to be experimentally examined. In addition, it seems to me that some of the suggestions that I make may not be 100% practical, because they would make studies too long or too complex. Thank you for the interesting conversation, Thomas. Once again, congratulations on the award of the Stegmüller Prize, and I'm looking forward to the next book. Thank you, Norbert.