I also agree that research into how laypeople actually think about morality is probably a very important input into our moral thinking. I mentioned some reasons for this in this post for example. This project on descriptive population ethics also outlines the case for this kind of descriptive research. If we take moral uncertainty and epistemic modesty/outside-view thinking seriously, and if on the normative level we think respecting people’s moral beliefs is valuable either intrinsicaially or instrumentally, then this sort of research seems entirely vital.
I also agree that incorporating this data into our considered moral judgements requires a stage of theoretical normative reflection, not merely “naively deferring” to whatever people in aggregate actually believe and that we should probably go back and forth between these stages to bring our judgements into reflective equillibrium (or some such).
That said, it seems like what you are proposing is less a project and more an enormous research agenda spanning several fields of research, a lot of which is ongoing across multiple disciplines, though much of it is in its early stages. For example, there is much work in moral psychology, which tries to understand what people believe, and why, at different levels, (influential paradigms include Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, and Oliver Scott Curry’s (Morality as Cooperation / Moral Molecules theory), a whole new field of sociology of morality (see also here) , anthropology of morality is a whole long-standing field, and experimental philosophy has just started to seek to empirically examine how people think about morality too.
Unfortunately, I think our understanding of folk morality remains exceptionally unclear and in its very early stages. For example, despite a much touted “new synthesis” between different disciplines and approaches, there remains much distance between different approaches, to the extent that people in psychology, sociology and anthropology are barely investigating the same questions >90% of the time. Similarly, experimental philosophy of morality seems utterly crippled by validity issues (see my recent paper with Lance Bush here) . There is also, I have argued, a necessity to also gather qualitative data, in part due to the limitations with survey methodology for understanding people’s moral views, which experimental philosophy and most psychology have essentially not started to do at all.
I would also note that there already cross-cultural moral research on various questions, but this is usually limited to fairly narrow paradigms: for example, aside from those I mentioned above, the World Values Survey’s focus on Traditional/Secular-Rational and Survival/Self-expressive values; research on the trolley problem (which also dominates the rest of moral psychology), or the Schwartz Values Survey. So these lines of research doesn’t really give us insight into people’s moral thinking in different cultures as a whole.
I think the complexity and ambition involved in measuring folk morality becomes even clearer when we consider what is involved in studying specific moral issues. For example, see Jason Schukraft’s discussion of how we might investigate how much moral weight the folk ascribe to the experiences of animals of different species.
There are lots of other possible complications with cross-cultural moral research. For example, there is some anthropological evidence that the western concept of morality is idiosyncratic and does not overlap particularly neatly with other cultures, see here.
So I think, given this, the problem is not simply that it’s “too expensive”, as we might say of a really large survey, but that it would be a huge endeavour where we’re not even really clear about much of the relevant theory and categories. Also training a significant number of EA anthropologists, who are competent in ethnography and the relevant moral philosophy would be quite a logistical challenge.
---
That said I think there are plenty of more tractable research projects that one could do roughly within this area. For example, more large scale representative surveys examining people’s views and their predictors across a wider variety of issues relevant to effective altruism/prioritisation would be relatively easy to do with a budget of <$10,000, by existing EA researchers. This would also potentially contribute to understanding influences on the prioritisation of EAs, rather than just what non-EA things, which would also plausibly be valuable.
Thanks for writing this.
I also agree that research into how laypeople actually think about morality is probably a very important input into our moral thinking. I mentioned some reasons for this in this post for example. This project on descriptive population ethics also outlines the case for this kind of descriptive research. If we take moral uncertainty and epistemic modesty/outside-view thinking seriously, and if on the normative level we think respecting people’s moral beliefs is valuable either intrinsicaially or instrumentally, then this sort of research seems entirely vital.
I also agree that incorporating this data into our considered moral judgements requires a stage of theoretical normative reflection, not merely “naively deferring” to whatever people in aggregate actually believe and that we should probably go back and forth between these stages to bring our judgements into reflective equillibrium (or some such).
That said, it seems like what you are proposing is less a project and more an enormous research agenda spanning several fields of research, a lot of which is ongoing across multiple disciplines, though much of it is in its early stages. For example, there is much work in moral psychology, which tries to understand what people believe, and why, at different levels, (influential paradigms include Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, and Oliver Scott Curry’s (Morality as Cooperation / Moral Molecules theory), a whole new field of sociology of morality (see also here) , anthropology of morality is a whole long-standing field, and experimental philosophy has just started to seek to empirically examine how people think about morality too.
Unfortunately, I think our understanding of folk morality remains exceptionally unclear and in its very early stages. For example, despite a much touted “new synthesis” between different disciplines and approaches, there remains much distance between different approaches, to the extent that people in psychology, sociology and anthropology are barely investigating the same questions >90% of the time. Similarly, experimental philosophy of morality seems utterly crippled by validity issues (see my recent paper with Lance Bush here) . There is also, I have argued, a necessity to also gather qualitative data, in part due to the limitations with survey methodology for understanding people’s moral views, which experimental philosophy and most psychology have essentially not started to do at all.
I would also note that there already cross-cultural moral research on various questions, but this is usually limited to fairly narrow paradigms: for example, aside from those I mentioned above, the World Values Survey’s focus on Traditional/Secular-Rational and Survival/Self-expressive values; research on the trolley problem (which also dominates the rest of moral psychology), or the Schwartz Values Survey. So these lines of research doesn’t really give us insight into people’s moral thinking in different cultures as a whole.
I think the complexity and ambition involved in measuring folk morality becomes even clearer when we consider what is involved in studying specific moral issues. For example, see Jason Schukraft’s discussion of how we might investigate how much moral weight the folk ascribe to the experiences of animals of different species.
There are lots of other possible complications with cross-cultural moral research. For example, there is some anthropological evidence that the western concept of morality is idiosyncratic and does not overlap particularly neatly with other cultures, see here.
So I think, given this, the problem is not simply that it’s “too expensive”, as we might say of a really large survey, but that it would be a huge endeavour where we’re not even really clear about much of the relevant theory and categories. Also training a significant number of EA anthropologists, who are competent in ethnography and the relevant moral philosophy would be quite a logistical challenge.
---
That said I think there are plenty of more tractable research projects that one could do roughly within this area. For example, more large scale representative surveys examining people’s views and their predictors across a wider variety of issues relevant to effective altruism/prioritisation would be relatively easy to do with a budget of <$10,000, by existing EA researchers. This would also potentially contribute to understanding influences on the prioritisation of EAs, rather than just what non-EA things, which would also plausibly be valuable.
Strong upvoted. Thank you so much for providing further resources, extremely helpful, downloading them all on my Kindle now!