Majoritarian Philosophy
Bryan points us to this survey on thirty key philosophy questions. The survey offers four indicators to estimate philosophical truth:
Most popular opinion of anyone who responded to the survey.
Most popular of responding profs at “99 leading departments of philosophy.”
Most surprisingly popular in #2, which is a Bayesian Truth Serum indicator.
Most popular among responding profs specializing in the question’s topic area.
There’s lots of detail there I hope someone will analyze. This seems a great chance to exercise majoritarian epistemic principles.
As a first pass, I compared my opinions to indicator #2 and found I can comfortably accept the modal professional opinion on 25 of the 30 topics! For three of them I was moderately temped to disagree, choosing mental content: internalism, knowledge claims: invariantism, and epistemic justification: internalism. But on reflection I think I just tend to use the words “think”, “know” and “justify” differently; I’m not sure I substantively disagree.
On only 2 of 30 topics was I strongly tempted to disagree with professionals. Popular and specialist opinions agree with my choice aesthetic value: subjective, but professionals pick objective, and their opinion is surprisingly popular. So while I might have an excuse to hold my ground, I guess I can live with the idea that there might be substantial elements in common among the concepts of beauty that would evolve among a wide variety of intelligent species and their descendants. Could this be what objective beauty means?
Meta-ethics: moral anti-realism also tempted me strongly. But here all four truth indicators point toward moral realism. So I guess I should seriously consider changing my mind. Is it plausible that there is something substantial in common among the moral intuitions that would evolve in a wide range of intelligent species and their descendants? Am I agreeing if I accept that as moral reality, or does moral realism demand I believe something more?
Yes I’m still a contrarian in many ways, but I really do largely accept professional opinion in fields where I know and largely respect the professionals. These include physics, analytic philosophy, computer science, and micro-economics.
Robert, see Wikipedia article on Object of the Mind for possible examples.
In this case the reason we would evolve to project moral preferences is pretty obvious, but it's harder to see why we would evolve to project objects that don't exist or affect us.
I notice philosophers of biology are much more likely to be anti-realists.
Do you know of any good justifications for moral realism yourself?