> Most anti-realists agree that if there are irrational desires, moral realism is true. This is true because morality is about what we have impartial reason to do, and impartiality is clearly coherent, so as long as there are desire independent reasons to do certain things and care about other things, moral realism is true.
I haven't read the Parfit book you cite, but this seems incomplete: some desires are irrational because they make it more difficult to do things that you desire more. For instance, if you want just about anything in life, also desiring to kill yourself would be irrational, both because having that desire makes it more likely that you'll act on it, & because (for most humans) having that desire is unpleasant, which is also undesirable. Or, to take a less extreme example, if you want to remain healthy, it is irrational to also want to eat lots of unhealthy food. However, if we exclude this exception, this argument seems correct.
> Here are a bunch of desires that aren’t irrational if anti-realism is true,
Most of these hypotheticals are desires that a human is very unlikely to have (e.g., wanting to eat a car, being indifferent to any amount of pain felt on Tuesdays), but that doesn't mean that it's impossible for any sort of mind to have these desires & be rational in pursuing them. (Likewise, destroying the Earth to turn it into paperclips is obviously irrational to a human, but that doesn't mean that a badly designed AI couldn't have desires that would make this action rational for it.) 4 & 7 are just illustrations of the fact that, for someone who discounts the future highly, acting rationally in the present often makes it harder to get what one will want in the future.
The criticism of noncognitivism you describe seems correct. However, if you think "that moral values are too odd to be part of the fabric of reality" (as I do, since as far as I know there is no evidence that morality is "part of the fabric of reality"), then the only possible conclusion is that there is no morality independent of people's conceptions of morality. Since people do not agree on morality, different people's or societies' ideas of morality must vary; therefore, to say that something is moral or immoral makes sense only within a particular moral worldview. Given this context, most of your supposed counterexamples to subjectivism seem reasonable; e.g., Nazi Germany acted morally by its standards but immorally by our standards. The only exceptions are "Some societal practices are immoral" (most societies have some practices that are immoral by their own standards; e.g., scams & racial stereotyping in modern American society) & "when I say “we should be utilitarians,” and Kant says “we shouldn’t be utilitarians,” we’re not actually disagreeing" (since these quotes clearly refer to objective & not subjective morality).
Is there a way of changing the commenting methods on your posts? It looks like you want to discontinue our exchange but in large part that could be because there's no good way of quoting people (at least that I'm aware of) to make for a clean and orderly discussion. But I'd like to have a written exchange, since that provides a different medium for conveying our ideas than just speaking.
Personally, for instance, I'm still very curious what you take the implications of moral relativism to be. I don't think relativism has *any* troubling implications, so I don't think people could be appropriately dissuaded from relativism by its alleged "implications."
If you really don't want to have this exchange here...which is a bit weird (since what else is a comment section for?) that's your prerogative, but if so, as you suggest, let's do another video chat. Either way I'd like these exchanges to made available to others!
//Most anti-realists agree that if there are irrational desires, moral realism is true.//
Maybe. This seems like an empirical question. Do you mean most philosophers who identify as moral antirealists, most lay antirealists, or something else?
In any case, I do not agree that if there are irrational desires that moral realism is true.
//This is true because morality is about what we have impartial reason to do//
I disagree. I do not think it’s true that morality is about what we have impartial reason to do. It is well within the purview of a moral theory that it permit or even obligate us to act in ways that are partial, e.g., one may be licensed to exercise a personal prerogative (see e.g., G. A. Cohen, who defends a finite personal prerogative to act in one’s own self-interest, which morally permits partial behavior), or ethical egoism, or moral standards whereby one has an obligation to act partially in one’s self-interest or in the interests of particular individuals or groups over other particular individuals or groups.
//Here are a bunch of desires that aren’t irrational if anti-realism is true//
Before denying whether any of these desires are “irrational,” I’d first have to know what you mean by “irrational.”
Before knowing what you mean, I am not in a position to affirm or deny this. Instead, I’d simply say I have no determinate position pending adequate clarification of what you mean.
//Very intuitive! //
What does this mean? Every one of these scenarios is underdescribed. It’s not that I find them “intuitive,” but that they are neither “intuitive” nor “unintuitive.” They lack the kind of information I’d use to judge whether the desire in question is “irrational” or not.
For instance, suppose I asked you this:
“Is it irrational to jump out of a plane?”
There’s not enough information. A person could be jumping out of a plane without a parachute because they mistakenly believe they can fly. Or a person could be jumping out of a plane with a parachute because they are skydiving. In the former case, the action may be “irrational,” while in the latter it may not be.
Whether I would consider a desire “rational” or not is going to turn on whether the desire is instrumental or non-instrumental. If it’s non-instrumental, then I think it’s a category mistake to label any of these desires “irrational,” for the same reason it makes no sense to tell someone whose favorite color is blue that they’re being irrational: one’s non-instrumental desires are just psychological facts about the agent that are no more subject to evaluation as “rational” or not as their age or hair color. If it’s instrumental, then whether it’s “rational” or not would depend on a variety of considerations, such as whether its conducive to their non-instrumental desires. If e.g., eating a car was conducive to someone’s non-instrumental desires, then why would it be irrational to eat a car? What’s irrational about simply wanting to eat a car? What would it even mean for it to be “irrational”?
//And then we come to moral problems. Moral anti-realism will either be subjectivism (according to which moral facts are true in virtue of what some people think of them, either the speaker or society), error theory (according to which moral claims are semantically intended to be realist, but all moral claims are false), and non-cognitivism, according to which moral claims don’t have a truth value.//
These are not the only options. That’s a claim Huemer made in one of his books, but it’s not true.
Don Loeb endorses moral incoherentism; I endorse a non-semantic generalized antirealism which denies the existence of stance-independent moral facts but isn’t committed to any particular account of the meaning of ordinary terms; this position is coupled with moral quietism and metaethical indeterminacy/variability, which are explicitly expressed in such a way that they involve a rejection of conventional uniform and determinate accounts of the meaning of ordinary moral claims. See here:
Gill, M. B. (2009). Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics. Philosophical studies, 145(2), 215-234.
Gill, M. B. (2008). Metaethical variability, incoherence, and error. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology: The cognitive science of morality (Vol. 2) (pp. 387-402). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Loeb, D. (2008). Moral incoherentism: How to pull a metaphysical rabbit out of a semantic hat. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology: The cognitive science of morality (Vol. 2) (pp. 355-386). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
These may not be common positions, but a position does not have to be common to represent a legitimate alternative. Incoherentism, the IV thesis, and moral quietism (my view) are all legitimate alternatives to the conventional three metaethical positions.
//(a) Evaluative statements take the form of declarative sentences, rather than, say, imperatives, questions, or interjections. //
Imperatives in English are often expressed in declarative form. For instance, if a teenager is caught trying to sneak out of the house, their mother or father may say:
“You will not go to that party.”
This is phrased as a declarative sentence, yet it is best understood (and the parent might confirm this) to be an imperative, not a declarative sentence. Declarative sentences can borrow the rhetorical force of a declarative sentence as a form of emphasis. Sentences that appear declarative can and are used for non-declarative purposes.
Whether or not, and how often, people use moral claims without intending to express a propositional claim is an empirical question, and not one that can be settled by a priori reasoning. Philosophers, Huemer included, who do not engage with or conduct the proper empirical research are simply not employing the appropriate methods for determining what people mean when they say things like “Murder is wrong.” This is a question to be settled by psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, etc., or philosophers competent in the use of the appropriate empirical methods.
> Most anti-realists agree that if there are irrational desires, moral realism is true. This is true because morality is about what we have impartial reason to do, and impartiality is clearly coherent, so as long as there are desire independent reasons to do certain things and care about other things, moral realism is true.
I haven't read the Parfit book you cite, but this seems incomplete: some desires are irrational because they make it more difficult to do things that you desire more. For instance, if you want just about anything in life, also desiring to kill yourself would be irrational, both because having that desire makes it more likely that you'll act on it, & because (for most humans) having that desire is unpleasant, which is also undesirable. Or, to take a less extreme example, if you want to remain healthy, it is irrational to also want to eat lots of unhealthy food. However, if we exclude this exception, this argument seems correct.
> Here are a bunch of desires that aren’t irrational if anti-realism is true,
Most of these hypotheticals are desires that a human is very unlikely to have (e.g., wanting to eat a car, being indifferent to any amount of pain felt on Tuesdays), but that doesn't mean that it's impossible for any sort of mind to have these desires & be rational in pursuing them. (Likewise, destroying the Earth to turn it into paperclips is obviously irrational to a human, but that doesn't mean that a badly designed AI couldn't have desires that would make this action rational for it.) 4 & 7 are just illustrations of the fact that, for someone who discounts the future highly, acting rationally in the present often makes it harder to get what one will want in the future.
The criticism of noncognitivism you describe seems correct. However, if you think "that moral values are too odd to be part of the fabric of reality" (as I do, since as far as I know there is no evidence that morality is "part of the fabric of reality"), then the only possible conclusion is that there is no morality independent of people's conceptions of morality. Since people do not agree on morality, different people's or societies' ideas of morality must vary; therefore, to say that something is moral or immoral makes sense only within a particular moral worldview. Given this context, most of your supposed counterexamples to subjectivism seem reasonable; e.g., Nazi Germany acted morally by its standards but immorally by our standards. The only exceptions are "Some societal practices are immoral" (most societies have some practices that are immoral by their own standards; e.g., scams & racial stereotyping in modern American society) & "when I say “we should be utilitarians,” and Kant says “we shouldn’t be utilitarians,” we’re not actually disagreeing" (since these quotes clearly refer to objective & not subjective morality).
Is there a way of changing the commenting methods on your posts? It looks like you want to discontinue our exchange but in large part that could be because there's no good way of quoting people (at least that I'm aware of) to make for a clean and orderly discussion. But I'd like to have a written exchange, since that provides a different medium for conveying our ideas than just speaking.
Personally, for instance, I'm still very curious what you take the implications of moral relativism to be. I don't think relativism has *any* troubling implications, so I don't think people could be appropriately dissuaded from relativism by its alleged "implications."
If you really don't want to have this exchange here...which is a bit weird (since what else is a comment section for?) that's your prerogative, but if so, as you suggest, let's do another video chat. Either way I'd like these exchanges to made available to others!
Part 1:
//Most anti-realists agree that if there are irrational desires, moral realism is true.//
Maybe. This seems like an empirical question. Do you mean most philosophers who identify as moral antirealists, most lay antirealists, or something else?
In any case, I do not agree that if there are irrational desires that moral realism is true.
//This is true because morality is about what we have impartial reason to do//
I disagree. I do not think it’s true that morality is about what we have impartial reason to do. It is well within the purview of a moral theory that it permit or even obligate us to act in ways that are partial, e.g., one may be licensed to exercise a personal prerogative (see e.g., G. A. Cohen, who defends a finite personal prerogative to act in one’s own self-interest, which morally permits partial behavior), or ethical egoism, or moral standards whereby one has an obligation to act partially in one’s self-interest or in the interests of particular individuals or groups over other particular individuals or groups.
//Here are a bunch of desires that aren’t irrational if anti-realism is true//
Before denying whether any of these desires are “irrational,” I’d first have to know what you mean by “irrational.”
Before knowing what you mean, I am not in a position to affirm or deny this. Instead, I’d simply say I have no determinate position pending adequate clarification of what you mean.
//Very intuitive! //
What does this mean? Every one of these scenarios is underdescribed. It’s not that I find them “intuitive,” but that they are neither “intuitive” nor “unintuitive.” They lack the kind of information I’d use to judge whether the desire in question is “irrational” or not.
For instance, suppose I asked you this:
“Is it irrational to jump out of a plane?”
There’s not enough information. A person could be jumping out of a plane without a parachute because they mistakenly believe they can fly. Or a person could be jumping out of a plane with a parachute because they are skydiving. In the former case, the action may be “irrational,” while in the latter it may not be.
Whether I would consider a desire “rational” or not is going to turn on whether the desire is instrumental or non-instrumental. If it’s non-instrumental, then I think it’s a category mistake to label any of these desires “irrational,” for the same reason it makes no sense to tell someone whose favorite color is blue that they’re being irrational: one’s non-instrumental desires are just psychological facts about the agent that are no more subject to evaluation as “rational” or not as their age or hair color. If it’s instrumental, then whether it’s “rational” or not would depend on a variety of considerations, such as whether its conducive to their non-instrumental desires. If e.g., eating a car was conducive to someone’s non-instrumental desires, then why would it be irrational to eat a car? What’s irrational about simply wanting to eat a car? What would it even mean for it to be “irrational”?
//And then we come to moral problems. Moral anti-realism will either be subjectivism (according to which moral facts are true in virtue of what some people think of them, either the speaker or society), error theory (according to which moral claims are semantically intended to be realist, but all moral claims are false), and non-cognitivism, according to which moral claims don’t have a truth value.//
These are not the only options. That’s a claim Huemer made in one of his books, but it’s not true.
Don Loeb endorses moral incoherentism; I endorse a non-semantic generalized antirealism which denies the existence of stance-independent moral facts but isn’t committed to any particular account of the meaning of ordinary terms; this position is coupled with moral quietism and metaethical indeterminacy/variability, which are explicitly expressed in such a way that they involve a rejection of conventional uniform and determinate accounts of the meaning of ordinary moral claims. See here:
Gill, M. B. (2009). Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics. Philosophical studies, 145(2), 215-234.
Gill, M. B. (2008). Metaethical variability, incoherence, and error. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology: The cognitive science of morality (Vol. 2) (pp. 387-402). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Loeb, D. (2008). Moral incoherentism: How to pull a metaphysical rabbit out of a semantic hat. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology: The cognitive science of morality (Vol. 2) (pp. 355-386). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
These may not be common positions, but a position does not have to be common to represent a legitimate alternative. Incoherentism, the IV thesis, and moral quietism (my view) are all legitimate alternatives to the conventional three metaethical positions.
//(a) Evaluative statements take the form of declarative sentences, rather than, say, imperatives, questions, or interjections. //
Imperatives in English are often expressed in declarative form. For instance, if a teenager is caught trying to sneak out of the house, their mother or father may say:
“You will not go to that party.”
This is phrased as a declarative sentence, yet it is best understood (and the parent might confirm this) to be an imperative, not a declarative sentence. Declarative sentences can borrow the rhetorical force of a declarative sentence as a form of emphasis. Sentences that appear declarative can and are used for non-declarative purposes.
Whether or not, and how often, people use moral claims without intending to express a propositional claim is an empirical question, and not one that can be settled by a priori reasoning. Philosophers, Huemer included, who do not engage with or conduct the proper empirical research are simply not employing the appropriate methods for determining what people mean when they say things like “Murder is wrong.” This is a question to be settled by psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, etc., or philosophers competent in the use of the appropriate empirical methods.