The Importance of Moral Psychology in the Real World

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

A lot of research is done today using online survey platforms where people are paid small amounts of money to fill out surveys and they'll often sign up for a website. I have almost never in the past few years directly interacted face-to-face with a research participant. Do people of different genders actually have different personalities? We've all heard that men are from Mars and women are from Venus but we've also heard that men and women are actually no different from each other at their core. Is one of them accurate or are they both just sensationalized nonsense? To try to answer these questions the team at clearerthinking.org analyzed enormous amounts of data ran 15 separate studies and have now published their

Read the full transcript here.

What is metaethics? Is moral objectivism the same thing as moral realism? When philosophers examine sentences like "Murder is wrong", are they generally more interested in (1) the role that the language is playing in a social interaction (e.g., that it's an imperative or that it expresses an emotion) or (2) the concepts themselves and their relations? Could it be the case that all moral statements are false? What do we know about how people actually use moral language in everyday life? Or do people even have any idea what they're doing when they use moral language? We're familiar with the idea that cultures vary in how they emphasize and value moral concepts; but are there cultures that have radically different moral concepts than our own (i.e., cultures that might not even have the concepts of modesty or honor in the first place, or that might have moral concepts that have never occurred to us)? Are there cultures that have have no moral concepts at all? What does it really mean to say that someone "should" do something? What is the use of intuition in philosophy? Where is philosophy going wrong today?

Lance S. Bush is a PhD student in social psychology at Cornell University. Most of his research focuses on moral psychology, metaethics, and methodological issues in experimental philosophy. He is also interested in psychological factors relevant to effective altruism and existential risk, particularly cognitive biases, reputational concerns, and other psychological phenomena that inhibit altruism and concern for the distant future. Email him at lancesbush@gmail.com or learn more about him at LanceSBush.com.

Further reading: