A couple of very general suggestions to aid the reader—I’ve only read the summary. Given the length of the post, could you add a line or two to your summary to say what conclusion you’re arguing for? Reading the summary, I get what the topic is, but not what your take is. It would also be good if you could orientate the reader as to where this fits in the literature, e.g. what the consensus in the field is and whether you are agreeing with it.
I’m mostly not trying to argue for any particular conclusion—more trying to summarize and relay the existing work. I was deliberately trying to avoid emphasising my idiosyncratic take because I didn’t want readers to have to separate personal speculation from reportage. (I would have thought the “survey and systematic(ish) review” in the title help to set that expectation. Are those terms more ambiguous than I understand them to be?)
As far as consensus in the literature, there doesn’t seem to be much of one. I think consensus is/will be especially hard because of the variety of researchers involved—philosophers, psychologists, etc. You can see the lack of consensus reflected in the wide variety of angles in “Indirect evidence” and “Responses”.
Okay, that makes more sense. You could have a systematic review which unambiguously pointed in one conclusion, you perhaps you should add something like you’ve already said, i.e. that you’re just trying to report the finding without drawing an overall conclusion (although I don’t know why someone would avoid drawing an overall conclusion if they thought there was one). And again, it would be helpful to add that there doesn’t seem to be a consensus on this point (and possibly that it ‘falls between the gaps’ of various disciplines).
Meta: This post attempts to summarize the interdisciplinary work on the (un)reliability of moral judgements. As that work contains many different perspectives with no grand synthesis and no clear winner (at present), this post is unable to offer a single, neat conclusion to take away. Instead, this post is worth reading if the (un)reliability of moral judgements seems important to you and you’d like to understand what the current state of investigation is.
A couple of very general suggestions to aid the reader—I’ve only read the summary. Given the length of the post, could you add a line or two to your summary to say what conclusion you’re arguing for? Reading the summary, I get what the topic is, but not what your take is. It would also be good if you could orientate the reader as to where this fits in the literature, e.g. what the consensus in the field is and whether you are agreeing with it.
I’m mostly not trying to argue for any particular conclusion—more trying to summarize and relay the existing work. I was deliberately trying to avoid emphasising my idiosyncratic take because I didn’t want readers to have to separate personal speculation from reportage. (I would have thought the “survey and systematic(ish) review” in the title help to set that expectation. Are those terms more ambiguous than I understand them to be?)
As far as consensus in the literature, there doesn’t seem to be much of one. I think consensus is/will be especially hard because of the variety of researchers involved—philosophers, psychologists, etc. You can see the lack of consensus reflected in the wide variety of angles in “Indirect evidence” and “Responses”.
Does that all make sense?
Okay, that makes more sense. You could have a systematic review which unambiguously pointed in one conclusion, you perhaps you should add something like you’ve already said, i.e. that you’re just trying to report the finding without drawing an overall conclusion (although I don’t know why someone would avoid drawing an overall conclusion if they thought there was one). And again, it would be helpful to add that there doesn’t seem to be a consensus on this point (and possibly that it ‘falls between the gaps’ of various disciplines).
Okay, thanks. I added a section to the summary: