In most of his piece, by “aiming to be mediocre”, Schwitzgebel means that people’s behavior regresses to the actual moral middle of a reference class, even though they believe the moral middle is even lower.
This skirts close to a tautology. People’s average moral behavior equals people’s average moral behavior. The output that people’s moral processes actually produce is the observed distribution of moral behavior.
The “aiming” part of Schwitzgebel’s hypothesis that people aim for moral mediocrity gives it empirical content. It gets harder to pick out the empirical content when interpreting aim in the objective sense.
This is fair. I was trying to salvage his argument without running into the problems mentioned in the above comment, but if he means “aim” objectively, then its tautologically true that people aim to be morally average, and if he means “aim” subjectively, then it contradicts the claim that most people subjectively aim to be slightly above average (which is what he seems to say in the B+ section).
The options are: (1) his central claim is uninteresting (2) his central claim is wrong (3) I’m misunderstanding his central claim. And I normally would feel like I should play it safe and default to (3), but it’s probably (2).
This skirts close to a tautology. People’s average moral behavior equals people’s average moral behavior. The output that people’s moral processes actually produce is the observed distribution of moral behavior.
The “aiming” part of Schwitzgebel’s hypothesis that people aim for moral mediocrity gives it empirical content. It gets harder to pick out the empirical content when interpreting aim in the objective sense.
This is fair. I was trying to salvage his argument without running into the problems mentioned in the above comment, but if he means “aim” objectively, then its tautologically true that people aim to be morally average, and if he means “aim” subjectively, then it contradicts the claim that most people subjectively aim to be slightly above average (which is what he seems to say in the B+ section).
The options are: (1) his central claim is uninteresting (2) his central claim is wrong (3) I’m misunderstanding his central claim. And I normally would feel like I should play it safe and default to (3), but it’s probably (2).