Are People Implicitly Moral Objectivists?

Abstract

In this paper I argue that there are at least two ways in which people can be moral objectivists, namely implicitly and explicitly. It is possible to explicitly deny being a moral objectivist while being implicitly committed to it. (Enoch, Shafer and Landau (eds), The Ethical Life: Fundamental Readings in Ethics and Moral Problems, 192–205, Oxford University Press, New York, 2014) presents three thought experiments to convince his reader that they are moral objectivists even if they explicitly think otherwise. As it happens, Enoch’s tests, which he uses as intuition pumps, provide excellent measures of implicit metaethical commitments. In this paper I use each of them as material for survey experiments to test whether people are implicit moral objectivists. Overall, results provide support for the idea that people are moral objectivists.