Rational learners and metaethics: Universalism, relativism, and evidence from consensus

Abstract

Recent work in folk metaethics finds a correlation between perceived consensus about a moral claim and meta‐ethical judgments about whether the claim is universally or only relatively true. We argue that consensus can provide evidence for meta‐normative claims, such as whether a claim is universally true. We then report several experiments indicating that people use consensus to make inferences about whether a claim is universally true. This suggests that people's beliefs about relativism and universalism are partly guided by evidence‐based reasoning. In a final study, we show that the rejection of universalism does not generate a simple subjectivism but is associated with a more moderate relativism on which highly atypical positions are regarded as mistaken.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.