I strongly agree with this piece. I also think that, when it comes to ethics specifically, it's easy for non-realists to dismiss realist intuitions as the product of socialization, cultural norms, or evolutionary pressures without ever considering that there may be equal and opposite influences pushing some people towards "intuitive" anti-realism. Lance is a very intelligent person and I respect the work he does, but I must admit that the few times I've engaged with him have been frustrating because he would slip into this very common attitude that realism and only realism was the culturally mandated, personally comforting position and that everyone just believes it for those reasons. But obviously, especially among secularists and materialists, there are also plenty of non-rational social influences that push people towards a sort of hyper-skepticism that sees any realist views as vaguely spooky and unacceptably "religious" or whatever. It can be frustrating to engage with non-realists because so many implicitly or explicitly have this mindset. It's like they can't imagine that anyone would ever be a non-realist for any reason other than pure, cold rationality - even though realism is decidedly uncool in a lot of these spaces and there's tons of pressure to give it up.
//Lance Bush seems to just not have the moral realist intuitions that lots of people seem to have. //
It’s interesting you say I don’t *seem* to. I have been explicit that I have no such “seemings.” Do you think I might have these seemings anyway? I grant that it’s possible, if so, but it’s strange that your remark hints at the possibility that you don’t take my word for it. I have more to say on this pending what you’d say in response. Note that if I cannot be trusted to be a reliable report about my own seemings, it’s not entirely clear why I should grant that you, or Huemer, or anyone else is. Skepticism about the contents of other people’s seemings is a two-way street.
A second concern is with the remark “that lots of people seem to have.” I’d be interested in hearing you elaborate on this. I don’t deny that lots of analytic philosophers and people who read analytic philosophy have these seemings (or should I say that they seem to have the seemings?). However, I do not think these populations comprise a large or representative body of human beings. So while the proportion of people who have these seemings may be large if we confine the population of interest to “people who study analytic philosophy” or something like that, this is not, itself, that large of a population relative to the world’s population. So “large” here is a bit underspecified. The amount who endorse such views may be large relative to some populations but very small relative to others.
//Now, as someone who does have them very strongly such that I think moral realism is blatantly obvious, it’s hard to take Lance’s position seriously.//
Note that to Christians who find God’s existence blatantly obvious, it’s hard to take atheism seriously. Obviousness isn’t a very impressive quality of a belief.
//But if one doesn’t have the intuitions, it’s hard to talk them into having them//
That’s plausible, but strikes me as an empirical question. And it may vary case-to-case. I don’t think there’s at least some evidence nonphilosophers don’t typically have qualia/hard problem of consciousness intuitions, but it may be fairly easy to talk them into having them.
//But here, I’ll argue that someone like Lance shouldn’t be that confident in anti-realism—if you just lack some requisite set of intuitions, then you should be near agnostic, rather than very confident that something doesn’t exist.//
This remark strikes me as a bit obscure. It seems to draw on a putative asymmetry, but I’m not entirely sure what you take our respective stances to be with respect to our position towards realism and antirealism. What do you take an intuition to be? And do you think you have intuitions in favor of realism, but I have no intuitions in favor of antirealism? I have some concerns here that I’ll abstain from expressing pending clarification on what you take our differences to be.
You also suggest I shouldn’t be confident if I “just” lack some requisite set of intuitions, but why should I put much stock in the intuitions of any particular group of people, such as you and other realists? What have you got going for you that should lend itself to agnosticism rather than skepticism? Presumably, there are a bunch of factors that are relevant to endorsing agnosticism or a skeptical stance towards some particular view. Among these are one’s assessment of factors relevant to the epistemic status of those reporting a particular set of intuitions. If it’s only a small, insular group of people that mostly interact with one another, or people only report the intuitions while on LSD, or if only people who join a particular cult claim to have the intuitions, these would strike me as reasons to be skeptical and to lean away from agnosticism. In the case of realists reporting realist intuitions, for me, what matters is why they are reporting those intuitions. I don’t know if I’m under any obligation to grant that the intuitions you and Huemer and others have are more reliable than the second process you describe; I’m also not sure my way of forming beliefs is strictly limited to the two processes you describe, nor whether my views exclusively fall into the latter category in the first place.
//In short, the first process of coming to beliefs is more reliable—and should consequently produce higher credences—than the second.//
When you say the “first process” do you mean these?:
“1. I have some strong intuition about the case that is incompatible with all the views except one.
2. I don’t have any especially strong intuitions, but I participate in the lengthy and drawn-out process of comparing the various views on offer to see which one is best.”
//Suppose that there are lots of really smart people who claim to have grasped some mathematical formula. You ask them to explain it, they try, but you find yourself unable to understand it. It seems unintelligible to you, and you’re not sure what intuitions they’re even supposed to be having. It just sounds like gibberish to you, and they explain their concepts in self-referential terms—you ask them to explain what a Morax Xephlorbinator is, and they make reference to a Slearax Zenzifrelator.//
How do you think I’d react to a situation like this? Do you think that if I encountered mathematicians that used concepts I couldn’t grasp that I’d think they weren’t saying anything meaningful?
//If we think of intuitions as intellectual appearances, as grasping something about apparent reality, then, just as if many people see a bear and some don’t, you’d expect there to be a bear, we should defer to the havers of intuitions over the people that don’t have them. //
The causal mechanisms behind why some people report having certain “appearances” and others don’t matter. Suppose much of the population is raised in a highly religious community. Most members of this community report having the intellectual seeming that God exists. Those outside the community are nonreligious. Very few report having the seeming that God exists. Should the members of the nonreligious community defer to the members of the religious community, and grant that given the reliability of intellectual seemings that God probably exists?
//The fact that you don’t grasp some particular thing about reality doesn’t give you any good reason to think that it isn’t true//
I don’t grant that you are grasping anything about reality. I think that I grasp reality as it is, and it doesn’t involve stance-independent moral facts any more than it involves pixies or unicorns.
//but the fact that you do grasp things does give you a good reason to believe they are true. //
There’s a big difference between reporting that one has the intellectual seeming that X and it being the case that “you do grasp things.” I’m not granting that you are grasping anything. It should come as no surprise to you that I think you *aren’t* grasping things and are instead mistaken.
//Just as you’d defer to have havers of mathematical intuitions, assuming they’re not crazy, so too should you in the moral case, and in various other philosophical cases.//
Is your view that if you don’t have intuitions about something that you should defer to those who do?
//And this doesn’t require thinking that these people are dumb or deficient. There are lots of things that all of us except Von Neumann can’t grasp. People have some intuitions that others don’t—so if people lack intuitions that you have, after suitable reflection, you shouldn’t give them weight.//
There are situations where some people genuinely understand reality as it is in ways others do not, and cannot. Perhaps some mathematicians or quantum physicists understand reality in ways you and I couldn’t fathom. But there are also people who are conceptually confused or mistaken, and as a result, believe they grasp reality as it is. Why should we think that you and other moral realists are in the former category, rather than the latter?
> Lance Bush seems to just not have the moral realist intuitions that lots of people seem to have.
Depending on what you mean by "moral realist intuitions", I'm not sure what evidence you have that "lots" of people seem to have these intuitions.
If by moral realist intuition, you just mean an intuition that compels one to judge that something is right/wrong, and that one would maintain this judgment independently of the attitudes of others, then I agree that many people have this intuition. But I take it that every anti-realist understands these intuitions as they can be expected on many forms of anti-realist. The fact that one's moral judgments persists in these cases is compatible with most anti-realist theories about the nature of moral judgments.
But if what you mean is some kind of intuition about attitude-independent, irreducibly normative reasons for action, then it's not clear what evidence is there that "lots" of people have these intuitions. For lay persons, it's not clear if they even have clear enough moral judgments to say that they obviously have intuitions of this kind (or of any particular kind). Even among philosophers, realists are split between non-naturalists and naturalists, with the latter usually rejecting the existence of attitude-independent, irreducibly normative reasons for action (AFAIK).
> Suppose that there are lots of really smart people who claim to have grasped some mathematical formula. You ask them to explain it, they try, but you find yourself unable to understand it. It seems unintelligible to you, and you’re not sure what intuitions they’re even supposed to be having. It just sounds like gibberish to you, and they explain their concepts in self-referential terms—you ask them to explain what a Morax Xephlorbinator is, and they make reference to a Slearax Zenzifrelator.
Do you have any real examples of this? There's been times where I've been presented with mathematical formulas, proofs, problems, etc. that were difficult to think about. But there's never been a time where I couldn't grasp the fundamental concepts. For example, I have no idea whether the [Twin Prime Conjecture](https://oeis.org/wiki/Twin_prime_conjecture) is true, but the problem itself is very simple to understand. I understand what a prime number is, I understand what a twin prime is, and I understand very easily what it would mean for there to be infinitely many twin primes. And if I were presented with a proof, I could probably understand it with enough effort. There certainly wouldn't just be some fundamental concepts that I couldn't grasp.
If there was actually some mathematical formula or theorem that involved fundamentally inexplicable concepts that were understood by a very specific set of people within a very specific field, then I would just assume those people were crazy in some way (even if they were otherwise really intelligent).
As a moral realist, I do think I can intuitively relate to anti-realism for one important reason: there are other domains (e.g. poetry, humor, attractiveness of humans) in which I have very strong commitment to statements that sure seem to express propositions, and for which subjectivism seems to be the strongest metanormative account. Because of these, it's easy for me to project how subjectivists think about moral rightness, in a way that I can't manage for other forms of anti-realism.
How did you become so confident that hedonistic utilitarianism is right? Did the intuition develop from being exposed to any particular readings you could direct me towards?
I'm not sure I understand the argument presented, it seems to be going beyond simply saying that reasonable people have beliefs that are correlated with the truth, therefore you shouldn't easily dismiss their moral beliefs. And say that the fact that you lack intuitions within the domain of interest is a reason to further doubt your beliefs. The problem with this is that myself and maybe other anti-realists, simply don't lack intuitions in the moral domain, and in my particular case I have very strong intuitions about say the implausibility of irreducible normativity or stomping on babies being bad or what have you. In the bear example, it wouldn't merely be that I have an intuition such that I feel I grasp why they are wrong, rather it would be more akin to me having an intuition about the impossibility/unlikeliness of the existence of the bear, or say even the existence of "not bear".
I should also add that their perhaps seems to be a class of intuitions that moral realists seem to lack, say intuitions regarding debunking arguments, that is for example it seems deeply obvious to me that beliefs about the permissibility of factory farming are a consequence of evolution, and yet such strong intuitions are not shared by some moral realists, does that entail that I ought to dismiss them due to their seeming lack of intuitions about the nature of evolution and its consequences? More broadly I think its hard in principle to demark between say "positive intuitions" and a lack of intuition. That is moral realists presuppose a moral reality that people can positively intuit, whereas I presuppose something akin to an evolved emotional gamut that people can positively intuit, both accounts might fit the pattern of evidence available, yet from each of our own framings it seems as if we have some positive intuition that the other doesn't.
I strongly agree with this piece. I also think that, when it comes to ethics specifically, it's easy for non-realists to dismiss realist intuitions as the product of socialization, cultural norms, or evolutionary pressures without ever considering that there may be equal and opposite influences pushing some people towards "intuitive" anti-realism. Lance is a very intelligent person and I respect the work he does, but I must admit that the few times I've engaged with him have been frustrating because he would slip into this very common attitude that realism and only realism was the culturally mandated, personally comforting position and that everyone just believes it for those reasons. But obviously, especially among secularists and materialists, there are also plenty of non-rational social influences that push people towards a sort of hyper-skepticism that sees any realist views as vaguely spooky and unacceptably "religious" or whatever. It can be frustrating to engage with non-realists because so many implicitly or explicitly have this mindset. It's like they can't imagine that anyone would ever be a non-realist for any reason other than pure, cold rationality - even though realism is decidedly uncool in a lot of these spaces and there's tons of pressure to give it up.
//Lance Bush seems to just not have the moral realist intuitions that lots of people seem to have. //
It’s interesting you say I don’t *seem* to. I have been explicit that I have no such “seemings.” Do you think I might have these seemings anyway? I grant that it’s possible, if so, but it’s strange that your remark hints at the possibility that you don’t take my word for it. I have more to say on this pending what you’d say in response. Note that if I cannot be trusted to be a reliable report about my own seemings, it’s not entirely clear why I should grant that you, or Huemer, or anyone else is. Skepticism about the contents of other people’s seemings is a two-way street.
A second concern is with the remark “that lots of people seem to have.” I’d be interested in hearing you elaborate on this. I don’t deny that lots of analytic philosophers and people who read analytic philosophy have these seemings (or should I say that they seem to have the seemings?). However, I do not think these populations comprise a large or representative body of human beings. So while the proportion of people who have these seemings may be large if we confine the population of interest to “people who study analytic philosophy” or something like that, this is not, itself, that large of a population relative to the world’s population. So “large” here is a bit underspecified. The amount who endorse such views may be large relative to some populations but very small relative to others.
//Now, as someone who does have them very strongly such that I think moral realism is blatantly obvious, it’s hard to take Lance’s position seriously.//
Note that to Christians who find God’s existence blatantly obvious, it’s hard to take atheism seriously. Obviousness isn’t a very impressive quality of a belief.
//But if one doesn’t have the intuitions, it’s hard to talk them into having them//
That’s plausible, but strikes me as an empirical question. And it may vary case-to-case. I don’t think there’s at least some evidence nonphilosophers don’t typically have qualia/hard problem of consciousness intuitions, but it may be fairly easy to talk them into having them.
//But here, I’ll argue that someone like Lance shouldn’t be that confident in anti-realism—if you just lack some requisite set of intuitions, then you should be near agnostic, rather than very confident that something doesn’t exist.//
This remark strikes me as a bit obscure. It seems to draw on a putative asymmetry, but I’m not entirely sure what you take our respective stances to be with respect to our position towards realism and antirealism. What do you take an intuition to be? And do you think you have intuitions in favor of realism, but I have no intuitions in favor of antirealism? I have some concerns here that I’ll abstain from expressing pending clarification on what you take our differences to be.
You also suggest I shouldn’t be confident if I “just” lack some requisite set of intuitions, but why should I put much stock in the intuitions of any particular group of people, such as you and other realists? What have you got going for you that should lend itself to agnosticism rather than skepticism? Presumably, there are a bunch of factors that are relevant to endorsing agnosticism or a skeptical stance towards some particular view. Among these are one’s assessment of factors relevant to the epistemic status of those reporting a particular set of intuitions. If it’s only a small, insular group of people that mostly interact with one another, or people only report the intuitions while on LSD, or if only people who join a particular cult claim to have the intuitions, these would strike me as reasons to be skeptical and to lean away from agnosticism. In the case of realists reporting realist intuitions, for me, what matters is why they are reporting those intuitions. I don’t know if I’m under any obligation to grant that the intuitions you and Huemer and others have are more reliable than the second process you describe; I’m also not sure my way of forming beliefs is strictly limited to the two processes you describe, nor whether my views exclusively fall into the latter category in the first place.
//In short, the first process of coming to beliefs is more reliable—and should consequently produce higher credences—than the second.//
When you say the “first process” do you mean these?:
“1. I have some strong intuition about the case that is incompatible with all the views except one.
2. I don’t have any especially strong intuitions, but I participate in the lengthy and drawn-out process of comparing the various views on offer to see which one is best.”
//Suppose that there are lots of really smart people who claim to have grasped some mathematical formula. You ask them to explain it, they try, but you find yourself unable to understand it. It seems unintelligible to you, and you’re not sure what intuitions they’re even supposed to be having. It just sounds like gibberish to you, and they explain their concepts in self-referential terms—you ask them to explain what a Morax Xephlorbinator is, and they make reference to a Slearax Zenzifrelator.//
How do you think I’d react to a situation like this? Do you think that if I encountered mathematicians that used concepts I couldn’t grasp that I’d think they weren’t saying anything meaningful?
//If we think of intuitions as intellectual appearances, as grasping something about apparent reality, then, just as if many people see a bear and some don’t, you’d expect there to be a bear, we should defer to the havers of intuitions over the people that don’t have them. //
The causal mechanisms behind why some people report having certain “appearances” and others don’t matter. Suppose much of the population is raised in a highly religious community. Most members of this community report having the intellectual seeming that God exists. Those outside the community are nonreligious. Very few report having the seeming that God exists. Should the members of the nonreligious community defer to the members of the religious community, and grant that given the reliability of intellectual seemings that God probably exists?
//The fact that you don’t grasp some particular thing about reality doesn’t give you any good reason to think that it isn’t true//
I don’t grant that you are grasping anything about reality. I think that I grasp reality as it is, and it doesn’t involve stance-independent moral facts any more than it involves pixies or unicorns.
//but the fact that you do grasp things does give you a good reason to believe they are true. //
There’s a big difference between reporting that one has the intellectual seeming that X and it being the case that “you do grasp things.” I’m not granting that you are grasping anything. It should come as no surprise to you that I think you *aren’t* grasping things and are instead mistaken.
//Just as you’d defer to have havers of mathematical intuitions, assuming they’re not crazy, so too should you in the moral case, and in various other philosophical cases.//
Is your view that if you don’t have intuitions about something that you should defer to those who do?
//And this doesn’t require thinking that these people are dumb or deficient. There are lots of things that all of us except Von Neumann can’t grasp. People have some intuitions that others don’t—so if people lack intuitions that you have, after suitable reflection, you shouldn’t give them weight.//
There are situations where some people genuinely understand reality as it is in ways others do not, and cannot. Perhaps some mathematicians or quantum physicists understand reality in ways you and I couldn’t fathom. But there are also people who are conceptually confused or mistaken, and as a result, believe they grasp reality as it is. Why should we think that you and other moral realists are in the former category, rather than the latter?
> Lance Bush seems to just not have the moral realist intuitions that lots of people seem to have.
Depending on what you mean by "moral realist intuitions", I'm not sure what evidence you have that "lots" of people seem to have these intuitions.
If by moral realist intuition, you just mean an intuition that compels one to judge that something is right/wrong, and that one would maintain this judgment independently of the attitudes of others, then I agree that many people have this intuition. But I take it that every anti-realist understands these intuitions as they can be expected on many forms of anti-realist. The fact that one's moral judgments persists in these cases is compatible with most anti-realist theories about the nature of moral judgments.
But if what you mean is some kind of intuition about attitude-independent, irreducibly normative reasons for action, then it's not clear what evidence is there that "lots" of people have these intuitions. For lay persons, it's not clear if they even have clear enough moral judgments to say that they obviously have intuitions of this kind (or of any particular kind). Even among philosophers, realists are split between non-naturalists and naturalists, with the latter usually rejecting the existence of attitude-independent, irreducibly normative reasons for action (AFAIK).
> Suppose that there are lots of really smart people who claim to have grasped some mathematical formula. You ask them to explain it, they try, but you find yourself unable to understand it. It seems unintelligible to you, and you’re not sure what intuitions they’re even supposed to be having. It just sounds like gibberish to you, and they explain their concepts in self-referential terms—you ask them to explain what a Morax Xephlorbinator is, and they make reference to a Slearax Zenzifrelator.
Do you have any real examples of this? There's been times where I've been presented with mathematical formulas, proofs, problems, etc. that were difficult to think about. But there's never been a time where I couldn't grasp the fundamental concepts. For example, I have no idea whether the [Twin Prime Conjecture](https://oeis.org/wiki/Twin_prime_conjecture) is true, but the problem itself is very simple to understand. I understand what a prime number is, I understand what a twin prime is, and I understand very easily what it would mean for there to be infinitely many twin primes. And if I were presented with a proof, I could probably understand it with enough effort. There certainly wouldn't just be some fundamental concepts that I couldn't grasp.
If there was actually some mathematical formula or theorem that involved fundamentally inexplicable concepts that were understood by a very specific set of people within a very specific field, then I would just assume those people were crazy in some way (even if they were otherwise really intelligent).
As a moral realist, I do think I can intuitively relate to anti-realism for one important reason: there are other domains (e.g. poetry, humor, attractiveness of humans) in which I have very strong commitment to statements that sure seem to express propositions, and for which subjectivism seems to be the strongest metanormative account. Because of these, it's easy for me to project how subjectivists think about moral rightness, in a way that I can't manage for other forms of anti-realism.
How is an intuition different from a feeling? I am not sure I understood the explanation.
How did you become so confident that hedonistic utilitarianism is right? Did the intuition develop from being exposed to any particular readings you could direct me towards?
I'm not sure I understand the argument presented, it seems to be going beyond simply saying that reasonable people have beliefs that are correlated with the truth, therefore you shouldn't easily dismiss their moral beliefs. And say that the fact that you lack intuitions within the domain of interest is a reason to further doubt your beliefs. The problem with this is that myself and maybe other anti-realists, simply don't lack intuitions in the moral domain, and in my particular case I have very strong intuitions about say the implausibility of irreducible normativity or stomping on babies being bad or what have you. In the bear example, it wouldn't merely be that I have an intuition such that I feel I grasp why they are wrong, rather it would be more akin to me having an intuition about the impossibility/unlikeliness of the existence of the bear, or say even the existence of "not bear".
I should also add that their perhaps seems to be a class of intuitions that moral realists seem to lack, say intuitions regarding debunking arguments, that is for example it seems deeply obvious to me that beliefs about the permissibility of factory farming are a consequence of evolution, and yet such strong intuitions are not shared by some moral realists, does that entail that I ought to dismiss them due to their seeming lack of intuitions about the nature of evolution and its consequences? More broadly I think its hard in principle to demark between say "positive intuitions" and a lack of intuition. That is moral realists presuppose a moral reality that people can positively intuit, whereas I presuppose something akin to an evolved emotional gamut that people can positively intuit, both accounts might fit the pattern of evidence available, yet from each of our own framings it seems as if we have some positive intuition that the other doesn't.