At EAG Bay Area a few weeks ago, my friend Arden Berg and I were debating what percentage of Effective Altruists are moral realists—he thought it was low, while I thought it was high. Instead of just arguing, we decided to do a very informal survey.
We walked around and randomly asked ~50 people two questions:
- "Do you know what moral realism is?"
- If they didn’t, we explained that it’s the view that there are stance-independent moral facts, true regardless of anyone’s beliefs or desires.
- "Are you a moral realist?"
The results came out to roughly 2:1 anti-realist to realist (with more realists being unfamiliar with the term initially, though we didn’t track this precisely).
After a while, we started adding a third question to those that answered anti-realist (because we were interested):
- "If not moral realism, why care about EA?"
- If people didn’t immediately understand, we clarified with something like: “EA doesn’t give you as many warm fuzzies as other kinds of altruism do, so what’s your motivation?”
The approximate median answer was something like “I have a preference for it”—though there were other reasons as well.
Obviously, this was an informal poll in a specific (and potentially unrepresentative) environment, so it shouldn’t be taken too seriously. But it does provide some evidence that the numbers look something like this.
I'd love to hear critiques, questions, or about others doing a similar survey more rigorously (cough yearly CEA survey cough)!
Thanks for posting!
We did ask about this in the 2015 and 2017 EA Surveys. We've not repeated it since then due to limited space.
In both cases, respondents were primarily realist (50.9% in 2015, 42.5% in 2017).
Didn’t know that — thanks for sharing.