What Lance is doing is no different from pointing out the confused nature of people talking about square circles or married bachelors. We understand all the individual words (“stance-independently,” “good,” “bad”), but they don’t amount to anything coherent when put together. Those putting these words together are consistently unable to furnish definitions that make sense of their combined phrasing. (They sometimes appeal to the notion of an unanalyzable concept, a bogus move that shows lack of awareness of the empirical literature on concept acquisition. All concepts ultimately bottom out in databases of associated observations.)
We all comprehend “good” (“bad”) as “(not) conforming to a stance: a standard, point of view, or goal.” Or we understand “(dis)value” as roughly “that which an agent tends to approach (or avoid). Moreover, we understand what it means for something to be “stance-independent” — for example, it is a stance-independent fact that the mass of the Earth is ~6 x10^24 kg.
What we deny is that these words (“stance-independently good/bad,” “stance-independent (dis)value”) make any sense when combined. The people combining them are deeply confused.
There is no coherent, noncircular, nonparochial definition of “value” that makes this combination of words coherent. “Value,” as used with maximal breadth by competent speakers of the language, quite clearly refers to a stanced tendency to approach or avoid something. We do tend to disvalue our own pain, but not in every context. And of course we disvalue our own suffering inasmuch as suffering simply is defined as a state an agent disvalues. However, our enemies might find value in our suffering, and disvalue in our happiness, and there is no credible case that they are somehow misunderstanding the concept of value. No one owns language. Words do not have meaning independent of how people use them. They are mouth-noises associated with databases of observations (again, see the literature on concept acquisition, esp. exemplar theory). For many words (“tree,” “table”), the consensus on these databases is quite high — high enough that if someone points at a tree and says “table,” we can make a credible case they are mistaken. But words like “good” and “value” lack such consensus. Their meaning is nowhere close to fixed. Usage of such words consistently points only to agents’ approach-avoid tendencies. In this regard these terms are much like common indexicals (“I,” “here,” “now”) which lack any fixed meaning but always indicate the standpoint of the speaker. Just so, words like “good” and “value” implicitly invoke a standard in the mind of the speaker, except when explicitly tied to some other standard (“X is good according to group Y or criterion Z”).
Lastly, Lance is a scholar who has extensively studied metaethics and specifically the psychology of metaethics, and he has published in this literature. He unquestionably knows more than you do about this topic. He probably knows as much as anyone except a comparably specialized scholar of significantly greater age. It is unbecoming of you to insinuate that he does not know the relevant subject matter. He is more than familiar with the philosophical papers, arguments, and major players in the field. What’s more, he is also familiar with the empirical psychological work that many of them — and you — appear to neglect. After all this study, it is his considered opinion — and he is not alone — that much of the philosophical discussion in metaethics rests on conceptual confusions. This does not mean he does not understand the literature. He understands the body of work. He simply — and correctly — points out that much of this work involves putting together words in superficially cogent ways that lack any deep coherence or meaning. Similar to “married bachelors” or “square circles,” the terms many philosophers use amount only to empty confusions.
Lance may have his own explanation of the source of these confusions, but I would hazard they are driven by motivated reasoning, hyperactive meaning-making (akin to pareidolia, creating meaning out of noise), and idiosyncratic training in a self-selected linguistic enclave.
“Bush has said repeatedly that he is deeply confused by moral language.”
This is not even close to what Lance Bush has said about moral language. What Lance *has* done is call into question the cogency of how you and other realists use moral language, often pointing to what he views as conceptual confusions (e.g. “stance-independent”), and asking for reality-facing explanations of what they might mean practically. Most often, moral realists pull what you just did and act as though, if he doesn’t “get it,” then he is just mentally defective—which may be a weak explanation that you find satisfying, but it is not an argument.
This kind of rhetoric is just gross; it’s your rephrasing and recasting of what Lance has *actually* said so that you can effectively express your own opinion (that Lance is an imbecile) and do so with some modicum of plausible deniability with your readers.
Bush has repeatedly said he doesn't understand what people mean by moral language. This seems like confusion about moral language. I don't even think Bush would disagree -- he'd just say the whole enterprise is confused.
As for the objectionable rhetoric claim, I don't think it was phrased particularly uncharitably. I don't think that Lance is an imbecile, nor did I claim as much. I think Lance is confused about morality, but I think lots of people are confused about lots of things -- even smart people.
I fully endorse Brian's remark. Your post here is way out of line, and frames my views in a highly misleading and uncharitable way. I cannot tell if you genuinely understand my views on this topic. Given how you frame what I think, it's so underspecified and ambiguous I cannot tell.
I'd be interested in seeing if you could steelman and reconstruct my metaethical position in a way I'd agree with. I doubt, if you successfully did so, that you'd come away with the unqualified impression that I am confused about moral language. To be honest, I'm not even sure what that means. Perhaps you could elaborate: what does it mean to say I'm confused by moral language? As an aside, I'd like to flag a worry here: if the person whose views you are trying to represent cannot even understand what views you're attributing to them, you have done a bad job of representing their views.
Where have I repeatedly said I don't understand what people mean by moral language? And can you give some context to that? What "people" do you mean? Moral philosophers, or nonphilosophers? Can you provide quotes? Without context, this does not seem like an accurate representation of what I think.
Okay! Next article will be trying to write a post steelmanning anti-realism that you'd be sympathetic to! I take being confused by moral language to mean that you often don't understand what people mean by moral language. So, for example, you've frequently remarked that you don't understand what people mean by external normative reason.
That's a very weird interpretation of "moral language."
Almost nobody engaging in moral language uses terms like "external normative reason." This is technical philosophical jargon, and not something I'd typically describe as "moral language." The way your remarks were initially framed, it could be interpreted more broadly to imply that I am confused by actual, everyday instances in which people make moral claims like
"stealing is wrong."
In any case, claiming I'm confused by this language is still too underspecified to be an accurate depiction of my views.
It's not that I am confused by it, in the sense that it means something, but I don't get it. Rather, I hold a substantive philosophical view that phrases like "external normative reason" are meaningless, and that the people sincerely espousing them are, themselves, confused.
Thus, it would be more accurate to say that I think I am not confused, but that people who think that the notion of an "external normative reason" (whether they're a realist or an antirealist) are confused.
It is precisely in virtue of the fact that I think I am *not* confused that I find such phrases to be unintelligible: because they are unintelligible. It is, in fact, those people who think the unintelligible is intelligible who are confused.
Also, I'll note that you did not respond by providing any quotes or references from me. Are you intending to do so? I understand if it takes time to find some, but I am not especially fond of someone saying I've repeatedly said something if they're not going to provide references.
Okay, I edited it to clarify this. Does the new description in the first few paragraphs accurately represent your view? If not, I'd be happy to change it. Also, the article providing my best steelman of your views about morality is up.
I'm curious as to why you say morality can be *defined* as what a fully rational and impartial person would do. Couldn't a fully rational person act immorally? Couldn't a moral act be partial (e.g. caring more for one's own children)?
These are substantive questions about morality, and it seems odd to simply rule them out by definition.
I use impartiality in a narrow sense consistent with caring more about one's loved ones. It just has to be motivated by benevolence considerations, not by selfishness.
What Lance is doing is no different from pointing out the confused nature of people talking about square circles or married bachelors. We understand all the individual words (“stance-independently,” “good,” “bad”), but they don’t amount to anything coherent when put together. Those putting these words together are consistently unable to furnish definitions that make sense of their combined phrasing. (They sometimes appeal to the notion of an unanalyzable concept, a bogus move that shows lack of awareness of the empirical literature on concept acquisition. All concepts ultimately bottom out in databases of associated observations.)
We all comprehend “good” (“bad”) as “(not) conforming to a stance: a standard, point of view, or goal.” Or we understand “(dis)value” as roughly “that which an agent tends to approach (or avoid). Moreover, we understand what it means for something to be “stance-independent” — for example, it is a stance-independent fact that the mass of the Earth is ~6 x10^24 kg.
What we deny is that these words (“stance-independently good/bad,” “stance-independent (dis)value”) make any sense when combined. The people combining them are deeply confused.
There is no coherent, noncircular, nonparochial definition of “value” that makes this combination of words coherent. “Value,” as used with maximal breadth by competent speakers of the language, quite clearly refers to a stanced tendency to approach or avoid something. We do tend to disvalue our own pain, but not in every context. And of course we disvalue our own suffering inasmuch as suffering simply is defined as a state an agent disvalues. However, our enemies might find value in our suffering, and disvalue in our happiness, and there is no credible case that they are somehow misunderstanding the concept of value. No one owns language. Words do not have meaning independent of how people use them. They are mouth-noises associated with databases of observations (again, see the literature on concept acquisition, esp. exemplar theory). For many words (“tree,” “table”), the consensus on these databases is quite high — high enough that if someone points at a tree and says “table,” we can make a credible case they are mistaken. But words like “good” and “value” lack such consensus. Their meaning is nowhere close to fixed. Usage of such words consistently points only to agents’ approach-avoid tendencies. In this regard these terms are much like common indexicals (“I,” “here,” “now”) which lack any fixed meaning but always indicate the standpoint of the speaker. Just so, words like “good” and “value” implicitly invoke a standard in the mind of the speaker, except when explicitly tied to some other standard (“X is good according to group Y or criterion Z”).
Lastly, Lance is a scholar who has extensively studied metaethics and specifically the psychology of metaethics, and he has published in this literature. He unquestionably knows more than you do about this topic. He probably knows as much as anyone except a comparably specialized scholar of significantly greater age. It is unbecoming of you to insinuate that he does not know the relevant subject matter. He is more than familiar with the philosophical papers, arguments, and major players in the field. What’s more, he is also familiar with the empirical psychological work that many of them — and you — appear to neglect. After all this study, it is his considered opinion — and he is not alone — that much of the philosophical discussion in metaethics rests on conceptual confusions. This does not mean he does not understand the literature. He understands the body of work. He simply — and correctly — points out that much of this work involves putting together words in superficially cogent ways that lack any deep coherence or meaning. Similar to “married bachelors” or “square circles,” the terms many philosophers use amount only to empty confusions.
Lance may have his own explanation of the source of these confusions, but I would hazard they are driven by motivated reasoning, hyperactive meaning-making (akin to pareidolia, creating meaning out of noise), and idiosyncratic training in a self-selected linguistic enclave.
“Bush has said repeatedly that he is deeply confused by moral language.”
This is not even close to what Lance Bush has said about moral language. What Lance *has* done is call into question the cogency of how you and other realists use moral language, often pointing to what he views as conceptual confusions (e.g. “stance-independent”), and asking for reality-facing explanations of what they might mean practically. Most often, moral realists pull what you just did and act as though, if he doesn’t “get it,” then he is just mentally defective—which may be a weak explanation that you find satisfying, but it is not an argument.
This kind of rhetoric is just gross; it’s your rephrasing and recasting of what Lance has *actually* said so that you can effectively express your own opinion (that Lance is an imbecile) and do so with some modicum of plausible deniability with your readers.
Bush has repeatedly said he doesn't understand what people mean by moral language. This seems like confusion about moral language. I don't even think Bush would disagree -- he'd just say the whole enterprise is confused.
As for the objectionable rhetoric claim, I don't think it was phrased particularly uncharitably. I don't think that Lance is an imbecile, nor did I claim as much. I think Lance is confused about morality, but I think lots of people are confused about lots of things -- even smart people.
I fully endorse Brian's remark. Your post here is way out of line, and frames my views in a highly misleading and uncharitable way. I cannot tell if you genuinely understand my views on this topic. Given how you frame what I think, it's so underspecified and ambiguous I cannot tell.
I'd be interested in seeing if you could steelman and reconstruct my metaethical position in a way I'd agree with. I doubt, if you successfully did so, that you'd come away with the unqualified impression that I am confused about moral language. To be honest, I'm not even sure what that means. Perhaps you could elaborate: what does it mean to say I'm confused by moral language? As an aside, I'd like to flag a worry here: if the person whose views you are trying to represent cannot even understand what views you're attributing to them, you have done a bad job of representing their views.
Where have I repeatedly said I don't understand what people mean by moral language? And can you give some context to that? What "people" do you mean? Moral philosophers, or nonphilosophers? Can you provide quotes? Without context, this does not seem like an accurate representation of what I think.
Okay! Next article will be trying to write a post steelmanning anti-realism that you'd be sympathetic to! I take being confused by moral language to mean that you often don't understand what people mean by moral language. So, for example, you've frequently remarked that you don't understand what people mean by external normative reason.
That's a very weird interpretation of "moral language."
Almost nobody engaging in moral language uses terms like "external normative reason." This is technical philosophical jargon, and not something I'd typically describe as "moral language." The way your remarks were initially framed, it could be interpreted more broadly to imply that I am confused by actual, everyday instances in which people make moral claims like
"stealing is wrong."
In any case, claiming I'm confused by this language is still too underspecified to be an accurate depiction of my views.
It's not that I am confused by it, in the sense that it means something, but I don't get it. Rather, I hold a substantive philosophical view that phrases like "external normative reason" are meaningless, and that the people sincerely espousing them are, themselves, confused.
Thus, it would be more accurate to say that I think I am not confused, but that people who think that the notion of an "external normative reason" (whether they're a realist or an antirealist) are confused.
It is precisely in virtue of the fact that I think I am *not* confused that I find such phrases to be unintelligible: because they are unintelligible. It is, in fact, those people who think the unintelligible is intelligible who are confused.
Also, I'll note that you did not respond by providing any quotes or references from me. Are you intending to do so? I understand if it takes time to find some, but I am not especially fond of someone saying I've repeatedly said something if they're not going to provide references.
Okay, I edited it to clarify this. Does the new description in the first few paragraphs accurately represent your view? If not, I'd be happy to change it. Also, the article providing my best steelman of your views about morality is up.
I'm curious as to why you say morality can be *defined* as what a fully rational and impartial person would do. Couldn't a fully rational person act immorally? Couldn't a moral act be partial (e.g. caring more for one's own children)?
These are substantive questions about morality, and it seems odd to simply rule them out by definition.
I use impartiality in a narrow sense consistent with caring more about one's loved ones. It just has to be motivated by benevolence considerations, not by selfishness.
We need a YouTube live-streamed debate :)