A sample of 230 young adults can’t support claims about people today, and being unable to articulate a philosophy of ethics is normal. Most people can’t articulate a philosophy of science either. Inarticulacy isn’t inconsistency.

The sample point is fair: the study is illustrative rather than representative, and it should be read that way. The articulacy point is partly fair too; nobody expects a metaethics seminar from a twenty-year-old. But Smith’s finding was not that respondents lacked technical vocabulary. It was that many actively denied there was any fact of the matter about right and wrong, and then reacted to concrete evils as if there were. That gap between stated theory and moral reaction is the whole point: not that people cannot explain morality, but that what they say about it and how they respond to it come apart.