Sounding Like An Anti-Realist

Specifically, like Lance Bush

A Brief Introduction

In response to my last post responding to Lance Bush, Lance accused me of uncharitability and misrepresenting his view. This post will be my attempt to steelman Lance’s view — to see if I can write out a defense of moral realism that he’d be sympathetic to. The views expressed here are a steelman of a view I disagree with and do not represent my genuine views.

Defending Anti-Realism

There’s a relatively bizarre realist tradition that pervades many western universities. Their methodology is flawed, they assume everyone shares their relatively proprietary intuitions on the basis of no empirical evidence, and they’re ultimately the subject of deep philosophical confusion.

There are various forms of realism, some more bizarre than others. Take the moral naturalist tradition, according to which there are moral facts but they’re just natural facts. So, much like water is H2O, they think the moral facts just are some type of natural fact — for example, facts about what would maximize well-being.

Moral naturalism, unlike its stranger and more unintelligible counterparts, avoids falsification by only making trivial claims. Of course there are facts about what maximizes well-being. But what makes these distinctly moral facts? Why should I even care about this subset of natural facts rather than a different subset? It’s totally unclear.

The moral naturalists will just attach words like right, wrong, good, and bad to various natural properties and then insist that I care about them, even if I don’t care about them. They assume that everyone would strangely hold their desires, using moral language as a strange cudgel to insist that they have the real, good set of desires, and that the rest of us are defective.

And yet moral naturalism is less interesting than its non-naturalist counterpart. While moral naturalism is trivial, non-naturalism is far from trivial — it’s totally unintelligible.

The realists have a whole cadre of mutually reinforcing moral terms. Why would I care about what I should do? Well, because you have a reason to care about what you should do, they insist. But why should I care about reasons? What even are these distinctly moral reasons?

The non-naturalists can never answer this question. Instead, they use more confused realist terminology — terminology that’s totally alien to the average layperson — to describe the terminology. It’s as though they think their unintelligible terminology will be saved by more unintelligible terminology.

“You should respond to reasons because they count in favor of what they’re reasons for,” cries the realist. When asked what it means to count in favor, they’ll insist that something counts in favor of something else if it gives a reason for that other thing, seemingly totally unaware of the circularity.

Much like Christians claiming that god is three persons, each numerically distinct but qualitatively identical, and claiming that Jesus was simultaneously fully human and divine, the realists will insist that they’re speaking intelligibly. But realism doesn’t meet the outsider test for faith. If one doesn’t have these strange sets of intuitions, the realist language game is totally impenetrable. I’ve yet to hear a realist coherently explain what they mean by a reason without circularity.

The realists insist that appealing to these bizarre unintelligible concepts is the only way to make sense of morality. They’ll insist that the anti-realist cannot claim that things are really wrong! This, however, is badly confused — either equivocating or false.

When they say “really wrong” maybe they mean objectively, mind independently wrong. But then I don’t know what they mean by that. I also don’t know why their version of really wrong is any more realist than the anti-realists wrong.

The anti-realist can call things wrong. There are things that I don’t approve of, that I feel horrified by. Declaring that things are OBJECTIVELY wrong doesn’t add anything — it’s just a self-aggrandizing form of table pounding, insisting that the things that horrify you are somehow written into the fabric of reality.

The realists will insist strangely that we need those intuitions to make moral claims. But I make lots of moral claims. I’m totally happy to say that torturing babies is wrong — really wrong even. I just don’t think it’s an objective fact independent of my mind. I don’t even know what it would mean for the universe to have commands to do good and not do bad.

If the realist claims that only realism can explain our moral intuitions, it’s unclear whose moral intuitions need realism to explain. Certainly not mine. And the empirical evidence that most people are realists is shaky at best — there certainly isn’t decisive evidence that most people are realist. Thus, the realists are willing to invoke a bizarre, totally unintelligible concept not shared by most people to make correct the intuitions of a small group of anglophone philosophers.

This is incredibly metaphysically dubious. We know there are lots of philosophy fads — logical positivism was very popular despite being clearly false. Thus, to make sure that moral realism isn’t a fad, it’s worth seeing if common people have the cluster of intuitions — can they make sense of the nebulous counting in favor of relation? But realists seem interested only in table pounding — not in seeing if most people share their intuitions.

If you have a strange belief that doesn’t seem shared by most people, that’s almost totally unintelligible, that complicates your metaphysics, it’s hard to understand why you wouldn’t abandon that belief. And yet this seems to be the entire methodology of the moral realist — find a thing that seems plausible to you and then invoke bizarre, unintelligible metaphysical concepts to make your seemings true. Who cares if most people lack those seemings?

Let’s say there are moral facts. Why should I care about them. In general the reason I care about things is because I have a desire relating to them. I would care if my mother was harmed because I care about my mother. But why in the hell should I care if there are objective moral facts?

To see this, let’s imagine the objective moral facts commanded yelling at tables or setting oneself on fire. What if we had a moral fact detector that informed us that we should devote our life to doing these pointless tasks? Even if I objectively should in some spooky metaphysical sense do these things, why in the world would this motivate me? I don’t care about the non-natural moral facts, and you have no reason to either.

Given the poverty of their own theory, the realist will attack alternatives. They will claim that the various alternative moral views have their own problems. Huemer, for example, has claimed that one either has to be a non-cognitivist (one who thinks moral statements aren’t truth apt, so moral statements are like commands — shut the door! isn’t true or false), an error theorist (one who thinks all moral statements are systematically false but are intended to be realist), or a subjectivist (one who thinks moral statements depend on our attitudes). Yet this is plainly false — not just false, absurd.

One can think that various people use various moral words to mean various things. Thinking that there’s one single satisfying underlying account of how all people use moral language is bizarre. To figure out what people mean by moral terms, we need to do experimental tests. We can’t figure out the meaning of moral terms from the armchair, as the moral realists are want to do.

I’m a meta-ethical quietist. I think moral language lacks a single underlying meaning — some use moral language in a cognitivist way, others don’t, some talk like robust realists, others like subjectivists — and I don’t think we need a total account of how everyone uses moral language. Our moral language is so confused that it’s best not to dwell too much on what the moral terms really mean — especially when there’s obviously no precise fact about what they always mean.

The errors of the non-naturalist are too numerous to enumerate. Yet there are a few major themes. First, they invoke totally unintelligible concepts, strung together only by a web of circularity and vagueness. Second, they just assume everyone shares their intuitions, and then they invoke weird moral facts to explain the moral facts. They do this even though there’s no evidence that most people have the intuitions that they have. Realist professors often complain about the myriad of undergraduate subjectivists. Maybe we should invoke special subjectivist facts that make the right act depend objectively on our attitudes to explain their intuitions.

This route would be bizarre. If your intuitions aren’t universal or anywhere near universal, you can’t use them as data. And you can’t invoke gibberish concepts to save your strange, proprietary pre-theoretic intuitions. Then the third error of the realist is they assume that everyone would care about the moral facts. I don’t care and neither should you.

Historians will not be kind to the moral realist. We will one day view realist the way we currently view strange ancient religious traditions — a bizarre form of bending over backward to save intuitions that will one day seem bizarre. It’s a disgrace that so many philosophers are moral realists — it’s a sign of a deep rot in our philosophical methodology.

So let’s turn away from this nonsense. We oughtn’t invoke unintelligible magic to save strange proprietary intuitions.