An Inquiry about the Relationship Between Moral Anti-Realism and Moral Leniency

In Gouiran and Cova (2024), the authors reported that they did not find a statistically signifi-cant relationship between moral leniency and moral relativism; however, they noted that they did not measure moral anti-realism beliefs. To address this gap in the literature, we conducted a correlational (N = 263) and an experimental study (N = 268) to investigate the relationship be-tween moral anti-realism and moral leniency. In the correlational study, moral anti-realism showed a positive correlation with moral leniency, whereas no relationship was found between leniency and moral relativism. In the experimental study, we replicated the finding of a signifi-cant positive correlation between anti‑realism and moral leniency and again observed no signif-icant correlation between relativism and leniency. Our meta‑ethical framing manipulation pro-vided no evidence of a causal link between anti‑realism and moral leniency. Another finding was that CRT scores were unrelated to moral leniency in both studies. Exploratory analyses re-vealed a moderate negative correlation between freewill beliefs and moral leniency in both studies; this finding might help to explore the nature of moral leniency.