The more one begins to appreciate the relevance of psychological considerations (e.g. social desirability bias) to evaluating philosophical disputes, the more one can begin to appreciate that even the most a prioristic armchair philosophy cannot escape engagement with empirical considerations. I take it, given your interest in the dual process model of moral cognition, that this is something you may acknowledge in some domains, but I have yet to see you acknowledge in explicitly in metaethics.
Apply similar reasoning regarding social desirability bias to the moral realism/antirealism dispute: you get something surprisingly like my appeal to normative entanglement as one of the rhetorical framing devices that gives the misleading impression that moral realism is more appealing than it otherwise would be to many people, and that antirealism is less appealing that it otherwise would be to many people. Misleading framing can and does influence the way many people respond to philosophical questions, and social desirability is one among many other identifiable empirical factors relevant to how people respond to these sorts of questions.
This is one of the reasons why a direct appeal to one's linguistic competence in judging how nonphilosophers would respond to this or that philosophical question is not as easy as it might seem: any actual response is a behavioral and psychological event that must be understood to occur in contexts in which reputational and other social factors are in play. Judgments about how people would respond to questions are psychological hypotheses. And just as scientists can either do philosophy well, or ignore philosophy and do it poorly, so too are philosophers who wish to engage with claims about how nonphilosophers think or speak engaging in psychology, and they, too, can either explicitly engage with the empirical literature, or refuse to do so, and do very bad armchair psychology instead.
The more one begins to appreciate the relevance of psychological considerations (e.g. social desirability bias) to evaluating philosophical disputes, the more one can begin to appreciate that even the most a prioristic armchair philosophy cannot escape engagement with empirical considerations. I take it, given your interest in the dual process model of moral cognition, that this is something you may acknowledge in some domains, but I have yet to see you acknowledge in explicitly in metaethics.
Apply similar reasoning regarding social desirability bias to the moral realism/antirealism dispute: you get something surprisingly like my appeal to normative entanglement as one of the rhetorical framing devices that gives the misleading impression that moral realism is more appealing than it otherwise would be to many people, and that antirealism is less appealing that it otherwise would be to many people. Misleading framing can and does influence the way many people respond to philosophical questions, and social desirability is one among many other identifiable empirical factors relevant to how people respond to these sorts of questions.
This is one of the reasons why a direct appeal to one's linguistic competence in judging how nonphilosophers would respond to this or that philosophical question is not as easy as it might seem: any actual response is a behavioral and psychological event that must be understood to occur in contexts in which reputational and other social factors are in play. Judgments about how people would respond to questions are psychological hypotheses. And just as scientists can either do philosophy well, or ignore philosophy and do it poorly, so too are philosophers who wish to engage with claims about how nonphilosophers think or speak engaging in psychology, and they, too, can either explicitly engage with the empirical literature, or refuse to do so, and do very bad armchair psychology instead.
Bulldog: I believe in hedonism because I just feel like it’s right
Also bulldog: