Toward Sociology of Metaethics: The Effects of Sociopsychological and Demographic Factors on Folk Moral Objectivism (in a Non‐Western Context)

Sociology Compass. 2026. Vol. 20. No. 3. Article e70178.

Bykov A., Mikhaleva V.

Experimental philosophers have been long addressing the problem of folk metaethics, that is, laypeople's ideas about the nature of moral judgments, focusing especially on the question of whether such judgments are believed to represent some objective truth. While the results of their experiments, mostly conducted on small Western samples, suggest that certain personal and social factors might affect people's perception of moral claims as more or less objective, there is a lack of such studies in more diverse and non‐Western cultural contexts. In this article, we examine the effects of several social and sociopsychological factors—such as age, gender, education, religiosity, political views, and moral foundations—on folk moral objectivism drawing on a large heterogeneous sample from Russia. Although some of our hypotheses found limited support, our overall results question the universality of the previous findings. We conclude by discussing the future of the sociology of metaethics as a distinctive research program in the context of our results.

Keywords: morality, metaethics, sociology of morality, experimental philosophy, moral objectivism

Publication based on the results of: The diversity of forms, effects and barriers to integration of modern Russian society in synchronic and diachronic dimensions (2025)