I am struggling with something (plz don't yell at me): the prevailing assumption that moral philosophers absolutely have to engage with empirical psych/cog sci.

On a personal level, I'm a humanist for a reason. I didn't get into this just to have people demand that I become a quasi-social scientist. I would have stayed a psych major if that's what I wanted.

On a methodological level, it matters to me to engage with moral questions as people live them and reflect on them. First-person thinking is central to that. So are normative claims.

The first thing people will say is: first-person is unreliable. On one hand, like, yeah, of course it is. On the other hand, it's also not inherently suspect. People can have clarity about their own biases, illusions, rationalizations. See the whole history of moral philosophy.

On the third hand (lol), no one thinks (I hope) that the studies are infallible. They can sometimes be like instant replay: precision of a certain kind can be distorting rather than clarifying. They operate on assumptions that can be questioned, etc.

And can we just level with ourselves that most of the time we just cherrypick studies that agree with what we want to argue and undermine our opponents? We ignore completely the very robust scholarly debates in that literature.

Or we just use the psych/cog sci lit as a glorified example. Or to a set up for a problem and then we abandon it. The point is: being a naturalist about moral stuff is a philosophical position. It's not a given.

It is my honest view that this push toward the empirical is driven by the idea that empirical things have a kind of authority. As though the studies are telling us The Answer and we can't ignore it. But that whole framing is up for debate.

Hand to God, most of the moral philosophers I know will say this if you push them. Or they're in the camp of philosophers who just like to pretend that they're scientists because...I don't know it helps them sleep at night? And those folks don't want to talk to me (haha).

On a bigger point, while I'm digging this hole: humanists, listen. We need to be able to distinguish ourselves somehow. What we do is different from what the social scientists are doing, isn't it?

If we just turn ourselves into junior sociologists or psychologists, what are we? Don't humanists have a distinct perspective? Isn't it OK that we're just doing something different?

I want to stress that I have no conclusion here. This is me struggling to make sense of something. Partly, I just don't want to be social scientist. But I also think the demand that I should be one is misguided.

Thanks for your thoughts, everyone! The notifications are overwhelming and I can't keep up, so sorry if I missed you.