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[Epistemic status: very uncertain about Part II; more convinced about Part III]

I.

This is the big question in the paper du jour, The Illusion Of Moral Decline, by Mastroianni and Gilbert (from here on: MG).

It goes like this: people say that morality is declining. We know this because one million polls have asked people \u201cdo you think morality is declining?\u201d and people always answer yes. MG go over these one million polls, do statistics to them, and find that people definitely think that morality is declining. People have thought this since at least 1949, when the first good polls were run - but realistically much longer.

This could be (they say) either because morality is actually declining, or because of a bias. They argue that morality is not actually declining. In support, they marshal many polls asking questions like \u201cDo you think most people are honest?\u201d or \u201cDo you think people treat you with respect?\u201d and find that the answers mostly stay the same. Might this be because of definition creep - eg might people define \u201chonest\u201d relative to expectations, and expectations lower as morality declines? In order to rule this out, MG look at various objective questions that they think bear on morality, like \u201chave you been mugged/assaulted recently?\u201d or \u201chave you donated blood in the past year?\u201d They find that all of these have also stayed the same. Therefore, both people\u2019s subjective impressions of morality, and more objective proxies for social morality, have stayed the same. Therefore, morality is not actually declining. Therefore there must be a bias.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/is-there-an-illusion-of-moral-decline

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