Scenario 1 describes a person who wants to eat a car (perhaps some sort of craving) and does not want to eat a car (due to its unpleasantness and whatnot). The things that make them sad are reasons (per their stances) for them to abstain. The things about the car-eating that make others sad are reasons (per the others' stances) for them to abstain. Moral antirealism does not adjudicate what they ought to do or not do in this situation; "ought" in fact is relative to which stances we're bootstrapping as "owed." Anyone suggesting that moral antirealism simpliciter makes an evaluative call on the correct thing to do has assembled a strawman.
Same story with scenario 2. It's bad per some stances, good for others. Moral antirealism has nothing to say beyond this. Per some stances, it is a rational failing to continue to procrastinate. Per other stances, it is not a rational failing to continue to procrastinate.
Same story with scenario 3. They want it (perhaps some sort of craving), but they also don't want it (due to its joylessness and pain and whatnot). Moral antirealism does not assert, "When they do it, they are not being irrational." Moral antirealism says, "The propriety of what they do will be in part a function of stances that determine what propriety means."
Same story with scenario 4. There are different wants at play -- for a certain cookie, to avoid agony, etc. In no way does moral antirealism entail, "As long as they're informed about the relevant facts, they're not being irrational." Moral antirealism means "the number of moral propositions that are completely stance-independent is zero." All of these examples invoke all sorts of stances, either explicitly or implicitly.
Same story with scenario 5. On moral antirealism there are plenty of reasons to not do this. You mentioned a few of them: You leave behind a life of joy and fulfillment. Anyone can judge they're acting foolishly, where "foolishly" is in part a function of stances; moral antirealism does not mean "this is a judgment-free zone."
Same story with scenario 6. Moral antirealism neither condemns nor approves of this act. Moral antirealism just says that condemnation or approval of this act shall in part be a function of stances.
"This is all completely nuts!" Indeed. But that's because those "on antirealism, they're not being irrational" assertions are completely nuts. They imbue moral antirealism with normativity as if moral antirealism isn't just about stance-dependence, but is actively dictating stances and evaluative norms.
Under moral antirealism, things can be delicious, beautiful, horrifying, permitted, obligated, rational, irrational, goofy, foolish, wise, noble, heroic, evil, cowardly, reckless, careful, negligent, attendant, etc. Whether they are deemed so will always be, in part, a function of stances, that is, cares & concerns. Morality as independent of cares & concerns isn't true and never made any sense.
The argument is clever but he didn't connect the stand-independent reasons to stance-independent moral claims. Moral "anti-realists" don't technically have an epistemic standard. Now if he said it the opposite way, stance-independent moral claims imply stand-independent reasons, it'd be deductive but moral anti-realists deny the former so they'd have no reason to accept the latter.
Also diving into intuition as an epistemic standard would be great. I don't think anyone has formalized that.
Antirealism delivers the answer that's honest about where these judgments come from, including judgments about whether someone counts as "ideal."
But yeah, common moral language & thinking are a mess, so there are conflicting framings that are nonetheless in familiar use. "Philosophical intuition" is often just "familiar language," and much of moral language is reified (stance-truncated and made passive for depersonalization and brevity).
I’m also a moral realist, so I’m sympathetic to this conclusion. But I don’t think this is going to convince anyone to change their mind. The argument seems to boil down to “Because I say so.”
Take this example from the article: “A person is depressed and cuts themself. When they do it, they are fully informed about the long-term consequences. On anti-realism, they are not acting irrationally.”
Then we're told: “This is all completely nuts!”
But why is it nuts? Because you say so? If you believe that reducing suffering is a moral axiom, then sure that’s completely nuts. But if a moral anti-realist doesn’t subscribe to that axiom, then this won’t change their mind.
> Just as it appears to me that there’s a table in front of me, it appears to me that it’s wrong to torture babies. Just as I should think there’s a table absent a good reason to doubt it, I should think it’s wrong to torture babies.
Again, I agree with this conclusion. It’s bad to torture babies. But I don’t see how the argument here is anything other than “Because I say so.” If it appeared to Bentham that torturing babies is fine, then does that make it fine?
For a concrete example, torture (including torture of babies) was an important part of Comanche culture. The Bentham we know who grew up in Western culture says that sounds bad. But the Bentham who grew up Comanche might say the opposite. A critical theorist might say that moral values are socially constructed and the imposition of your values is inherently oppressive. The counter-argument from this pieces seems to be “It’s bad because I say so.”
Moral anti-realists who are also atheist (not all atheist are moral anti-realists) likely won’t be persuaded by this. In a theist perspective you can appeal to the doctrines of a deity. But without a deity, then you’re just saying, “Torturing babies is bad because I say so.”
Agreed, it’s not convincing. Saying murder is wrong is just a way of saying “boo murder.” And saying that the objective immorality of murder is stance independent is just a fancy way of saying “boo murder.”
Because we can "see" that it is so, in the same way we can "see" that if A=C and B=C then A=B. It's not arbitrary, but if your intuitions don't match mine (on either question) there isn't much I can do by way of argument to convince you. However, generally we recognize that if someone (having had the concept properly explained to him) doesn't recognize that A=B then he has something wrong with them: they're "nuts". Their rational intuitions are not working right. The same is true of moral facts; neither "It is wrong to destroy your body for no benefit" and "A=B" can be proven empirically.
>I don't think sentences have meaning outside of their usage.
That's where we disagree. I words communicate ideas, and that among other things ideas can be true or false. I assume you do as well, despite what you say. Is the idea "sentences don't have meaning outside their usage" a true idea, or a false one? And if it isn't true, why should I believe it?
I disagree. I think that greater cultural similarity would lead to the people that were transported feeling more emboldened to speak out against torturing people. Our two cultures being near-identical would in fact make this one glaring exception seem *more* provocative, not less. We'd also feel similar enough to the people of this near-identical culture that we'd think there's a decent chance of persuading them; that we share enough in common culturally that there's a real chance they'd consider our anti-torture arguments.
If we were transported to a culture wildly different from our own, then we'd probably feel some serious alienation in this new culture, and this culture's acceptance of torture would be just another part of that alienation.
I’ve got an argument about accounting for blameworthiness that I’ve found pretty persuasive. I’m not sure if it necessarily gets us to non-naturalism, but it does get us to categorical reasons and that seems to be one of the reasons various people reject the view. (The article is called “Cold Blood and Categoricity”)
However, this seems to be a shifting of the burden. I’m not seeing any strong reason to accept that what seems perfectly intelligible to me is “unintelligible”. From what I’ve seen, Lance simply claims he finds it unintelligible, which is (almost?) no reason for me to believe it.
I am not particularly convinced by Lance's trilemma either. I find the notion of irreducible normativity intelligible as well. However I am not sure why I would think that moral properties are properties of the world and not of the mind of agents, that's why I am interested in arguments for the view.
"That ice-cream is tasty is stance dependently true; it might be tasty to me but not to you, and a person who thinks it’s not tasty isn’t making an error."
I don't see the difference between this and moral judgments, and I'd wager that the proportion of people who don't think ice-cream is tasty is far smaller than the proportion that don't share moral presuppositions you regard as self evident. (I'm not attacking moral realism, at least in its more moderate forms, I'm attacking aesthetic nihilism).
It's not about the share of the population that believes something. Claims about taste can be stance-dependent even if every single actually existing person has the same tastes. It's just that the claims are made true by their tastes, and not some external, stance-independent factor.
I think the statement 'ice cream is tasty' actually means 'human beings find ice cream tasty' and this is roughly analogous to the way 'murder is bad', really means 'humans find murder bad'. It's true that there would be no meaning to statements about taste if beings that taste didn't exist, and it is also true that there would be no meaning to moral statements if acting being didn't exist.
Both moral statements and aesthetic statements describe something real and may be analyzed as true or false, and they are more similar to each other than either is to mathematical or scientific statements. I find it odd that moral realists sometimes explicitly distinguish moral discourse from aesthetic discourse, when, if anything, there appear to be fewer grounds for relativism in the latter than the former.
But "murder is bad," doesn't mean, "humans find murder bad." That's just assuming the non-realist position to be correct. Most people think murder would be be bad even if no one believed it was, so they clearly can't be using the sentence, "Murder is bad," to mean what you think it does. On the other hand, I think everyone agrees that if no one liked the taste of ice cream, it would make no sense to say that actually, ice cream tastes good and people are just mistaken.
If a praying mantis could think it wouldn't think murder was bad (unless it was an exceptionally edgy existentialist praying mantis willing to endorse the extinction of its species). Murder is bad for humans to do, given the nature of human beings, and ice cream is tasty, given the nature of human beings. People can use arguments for subjectivism in both cases, but they have an easier time doing it for murder than ice cream.
The real difference isn't that aesthetic realism is less plausible than moral realism, it's that the stakes are much lower for aesthetics. If someone insists that ice cream tastes bad and dog poop tastes good, you just don't eat their food, but if someone insists murder is good and happy marriages are bad, they are a danger to society and probably need to pre-emptively caged.
But even the position that murder could be good for praying mantises to do is a moral realist one, if it means anything at all. Moral realism doesn't hold that different things can't be right for different beings due to the nature of those beings - it just holds that what makes something right is stance-independent.
I think the statement 'ice-cream is tasty' is stance independent. If you are messed up or retarded or whatever and don't like ice cream, that doesn't change the fact that humans find ice-cream tasty. Yes, if humans had completely different taste buds, digestive systems, nutritional requirements etc. then ice cream would not be tasty, and if humans needed to bite their partner's head off to procreate, murder wouldn't be wrong.
I'm pro a moderate version of moral realism, but I think it's untenable to pair this with aesthetic anti-realism.
This argument seems to come down to reliance on intuition for moral knowledge. Intuition does not come from information gained from external reality; it comes from your embodied brain. I feel that slavery being wrong is obvious, because I have lived my whole life with a brain containing information that logically informs me of this conclusion.
But if you were to go back in time to converse with brilliant men like Plato or Marcus Aurelius about the morality of slavery, they would see that it was intuitively right, because their brains contain a different set of relevant information than does yours. None of your arguments would work with them because their intuition gives them a different answer than yours does.
But take some steel tools to modern stone tool-using people, demonstrate them, and they immediately want to use the steel tools. Steel is just better than stone.
This example is objective knowledge. It can be *used* (as an object) by anyone, to do things the user wants to do. That is, it can be validated through experience by people other than you.
Moral knowledge is subjective. If you share your subjective knowledge with someone who does not have it, they cannot use if they do not have access to internal resources similar to yours. This is why your effects to persuade Plato or Marcus that they are wrong about slavery would very likely fail to convince them, while they would easily see your Glock as superior to a short sword.
Let X be some behaviour -- it might be abortion, it might be slavery, whatever -- and we wish to determine whether X is objectively moral, objectively immoral or neither.
What experiment can we perform that gives different results depending on X's objective morality status? If there is no such experiment then I say that all statements of the form "X is objectively moral" or "X is objectively immoral" are meaningless and therefore not even wrong.
The best we can do is to conduct an opinion poll and say things like "Y% of people in society S think X is immoral".
Logical positivism was a philosophical movement that embraced what is known as the verification principle. This verification principle stated that only statements verifiable through science or logical proof are meaningful in terms of conveying truth or factual content. Your statements about moral realism reminded me of this self-defeating position. But I'm not sure you're endorsing it. Maybe your criticism is that you can't prove through experiments that there are different outcomes if moral realism is false or true.
I think that "torturing babies is wrong" is intuitively obvious to the vast majority of people, but there's a certain type of person that struggles to accept any idea that doesn't look like a logical proof. And things relying on intuition will tend to not look like a logical proof. Plus, people completely lacking empathy might struggle to intuitively grasp why torturing babies is wrong.
The counter-argument that "well, in some times and places, torturing babies was viewed as Ok" just proves that some times and places are better than others.
The reasons people would put forward for why slavery is wrong would be just as applicable to ancient Rome as they are to our modern world. If we find those reasons compelling in the here and now, then we should also find them compelling within the context of ancient Rome, even if the Romans of the time simply hadn't considered those arguments or dismissed them for economic reasons.
I find the analogy helpful to figure out what's wrong with moral realist arguments. Beauty and utterances related to it are well explained in a physicalist way, ie it's stored in brains, and came in there via unguided evolution. There is no need to posit an outside oracle of beauty. Morality is weirder as it can be more moved by argument, and there's more linguistic quirks, but still all the feelings and utterances are well explained in a normie physicalist way.
You go back in time around the year 1200. The future Genghis Khan is still Temujin, just a typical Mongolian. He's on bad times, having lost a major battle. But he gets a vision of his future conquests, and the spoils he will gain. Of course, this will involve truly horrific acts with an ungodly amount of rape and violence accompanying it. He doesn't care. Your task is to convince him that this is morally wrong and that he should not do it. Let's just assume he will be able to understand your arguments and has a good grasp on what makes one valid and sound. Also, you can't make religious arguments because with stuff like the afterlife, it's more obvious why someone would want to be a good person. No, you can only appeal to secular arguments. How do you do it? Is he irrational if he just disregards your argument, even if its a good one?
Here's a set of rules, we'll call it Evil Maximization:
- Hurt others as much as is possible;
- You should follow the tenets of Evil Maximization.
It doesn't seem to me like the existence of Evil Maximization is any different from the moral system we have, other than my very obvious preference for our moral system. If I could somehow prove that Evil Maximization was a non-physical "fact" like 3 being a prime number or Fisher's principle, I don't think anybody would then conclude that they should follow Evil Maximization.
(Also, the fact that the space has to be not-curved for the shortest distance between two points to be a line is EXTREMELY non-intuitive, to the point that two millennia of mathematicians tried to prove the parallel postulate, before people realized you could construct self-consistent geometries where it's not true.)
Your usage of "fact" seems to be loose and based on intuition, and I can't fathom one specific meaning of it that makes your whole argument sensible. It might help me understand what you mean when you say these are facts if you could engage in something like the zombie thought experiment with them. So: are moral facts necessary consequences of physical facts? If not, can you imagine an alternate universe that was physically identical to our own, but the moral facts were different or there were no moral facts? Would anything else need to be different about that universe? Do you agree with the truism that you can't derive an ought from an is? (Personally I don't like this formulation -- it's definitely the case that any argument with any moral premises and any factual conclusions is necessarily flawed but it seems to me that most good arguments for moral stances are contingent on some physical facts -- but it also seems to me that any valid argument for a moral conclusion necessarily contains at least implicitly at least one moral premise. Do you see this differently?)
I think a lot of the appeal of moral anti-realism comes from the fact that most people, even most realists, aren't utilitarians. Common views of morality really do base their account of right action on arbitrary things like deontic constraints, the personal virtue of the doer (independently of whether the thing done actually improves the world in any way), special obligations to particular people and groups, etc. These things are arbitrary in exactly the same way that all morality would be if anti-realism were true, and I think the anti-realists correctly intuit this fact. Where they err is in drawing the conclusion that all morality is arbitrary and is just socially or evolutionarily determined, rather than just these particular things. There's still a true core of welfarism and instrumental rationality, which (combined with the fact that there are no arbitrary reasons to prefer benefiting one person over another) yield utilitarianism.
I should clarify that I'm talking about objective, non-instrumental moral reasons here. I'm not talking about epistemic reasons for thinking that special obligations might exist (e.g., arguments in favor of special obligations), nor about instrumental reasons like, "I know my wife better than a stranger, so I know what will benefit her more than what will benefit a stranger," "I have a strong relationship with my wife, and that relationship is best supported by helping her as opposed to strangers," "Society functions better when people care for their loved ones," "I will be happier helping my wife because I love her," "I am in a better position to help my wife," etc. There are very strong instrumental reasons to benefit your wife over a stranger (including the ones I just listed), and there may be some non-moral reasons for doing so if such reasons exist (e.g., if there are self-interested reasons that weigh independently of moral reasons, though I'm skeptical of this). And there are also plenty of reasons why you would be more blameworthy if you failed to help your wife than if you failed to help a stranger (contrary to common conception, this is not incompatible with utilitarianism). But none of this changes the core fact that every person truly matters equally and that there is just as much non-instrumental moral reason to benefit each of them.
Do utilitarians care about non-instrumental reasons? Everything should aim at increasing utility, isn't that instrumental? I’m not sure how you are using the distinction. I read it as intrinsic, done for itself and not as a means to something else. But I thought everything was a means to utility for utilitarians.
And are moral and non-moral reasons always easy to distinguish? There are clear examples of each, but also a gray area.
If utilitarians didn't care about non-instrumental reasons, all utilities would be zero and the theory would not recommend any actions over others. This is not controversial among utilitarians - I don't think there's a single utilitarian in the world, nor has there been one in history, who doesn't believe in non-instrumental reasons. That would just be a completely incoherent view.
One of the biggest debates among utilitarians is the debate over which things are non-instrumentally valuable. Some think that it's only psychological states (hedonic utilitarianism), some think that it's whatever people non-instrumentally prefer (preference utilitarianism), and some think it's a variety of independent goods (objective list utilitarianism).
>People often object to relying on intuitions. But I’m curious how they get their foundational beliefs. One’s most basic beliefs always seem justified by the fact that they seem right.
C. S. Lewis wrote about this concept well in his essay "Why I am Not a Pacifist" (which can usually be found in the essay collection "The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses"; sadly, there isn't a good version online). When talking about moral reasoning he wrote:
"The most useful analogy here is that of Reason—by which I do not mean some separate faculty but, once more, the whole man judging, only judging this time not about good and evil, but about truth and falsehood. Now any concrete train of reasoning involves three elements: Firstly, there is the reception of facts to reason about. These facts are received either from our own senses, or from the report of other minds; that is, either experience or authority supplies us with our material. But each man's experience is so limited that the second source is the more usual; of every hundred facts upon which to reason, ninety-nine depend on authority. Secondly, there is the direct, simple act of the mind perceiving self-evident truth, as when we see that if A and B both equal C, then they equal each other. This act I call intuition. Thirdly, there is an art or skill of arranging the facts so as to yield a series of such intuitions which linked together produce a proof of the truth or falsehood of the proposition we are considering. Thus in a geometrical proof each step is seen by intuition, and to fail to see it is to be not a bad geometrician but an idiot. The skill comes in arranging the material into a series of intuitable "steps." Failure to do this does not mean idiocy, but only lack of ingenuity or invention. Failure to follow it need not mean idiocy, but either inattention or a defect of memory which forbids us to hold all the intuitions together.
"Now all correction of errors in reasoning is really correction of the first or the third element. The second, the intuitional element, cannot be corrected if it is wrong, nor supplied if it is lacking. You can give the man new facts. You can invent a simpler proof, that is, a simpler concatenation of intuitable truths. But when you come to an absolute inability to see any one of the self-evident steps out of which the proof is built, then you can do nothing. No doubt this absolute inability is much rarer than we suppose. Every teacher knows that people are constantly protesting that they "can't see" some self-evident inference, but the supposed inability is usually a refusal to see, resulting either from some passion which wants not to see the truth in question or else from sloth which does not want to think at all. But when the inability is real, argument is at an end. You cannot produce rational intuition by argument, because argument depends upon rational intuition. Proof rests upon the unprovable which has to be just "seen." Hence faulty intuition is incorrigible. It does not follow that it cannot be trained by practice in attention and in the mortification of disturbing passions, or corrupted by the opposite habits. But it is not amenable to correction by argument."
He then expanded on how our conscience, our moral sense, differs from our reason (though following essentially the same process):
"The main difference between Reason and Conscience is an alarming one. It is thus: that while the unarguable intuitions on which all depend are liable to be corrupted by passion when we are considering truth and falsehood, they are much more liable, they are almost certain to be corrupted when we are considering good and evil. For then we are concerned with some action to be here and now done or left undone by ourselves. And we should not be considering that action all unless we had some wish either to do or not to do it, so that in this sphere we are bribed from the very beginning. Hence the value of authority in checking, or even superseding, our own activity is much greater in this sphere than in that of Reason. Hence, too, human beings must be trained in obedience to the moral intuitions almost before they have them, and years before they are rational enough to discuss them, or they will be corrupted before the time for discussion arrives.
"These basic moral intuitions are the only element in Conscience which cannot be argued about; if there can be a difference of opinion which does not reveal one of the parties as a moral idiot, then it is not an intuition. They are the ultimate preferences of the will for love rather than hatred and happiness rather than misery. There are people so corrupted as to have lost even these, just as there are people who can't see the simplest proof, but in the main these can be said to be the voice of humanity as such. And they are unarguable. But here the trouble begins. People are constantly claiming this unarguable and unanswerable status for moral judgments which are not really intuitions at all but remote consequences or particular applications of them, eminently open to discussion since the consequences may be illogically drawn or the application falsely made."
It seems to me that you are saying "People think differently about things, therefore nobody's intuitions can be true, and observing our conscience or reason can teach us nothing of value." I disagree. People thinking differently about things doesn't mean there are not true or false things to think about: that there are not true intuitions or false intuitions. Namely, our internal experiences can be aligned with reality, or out of alignment with them. This is the case with our thoughts about physical objects (if I think there is a cat in the box, but in reality there is no cat in the box, then my thought is false), so it can also be the case with our moral intuitions. C. S. Lewis writes on this in his book "The Abolition of Man"
"Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.
...
"This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as 'the Tao'. Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself—just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind. And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it."
>When do you ever step outside your perspective and check whether reality aligns with your thoughts?
Regardless of whether anyone checks, it is still the case that a thought can be in alignment with reality or out of alignment with it. One man says there is a teapot orbiting the sun, another man says that there isn't. I cannot check to see which one is right, yet that doesn't change that fact that one of them *is* right.
Any thoughts on Haidt's moral intuitions theory? IMHO he presents a very strong case for moral intuitions having priority over reasons (the emotional dog wags the rational tale) and lays the groundwork for an evo-bio understanding of morality. Some people are afraid of the latter but I think that's because they wrongly associate it with right wing thinking. Haidt is as centrist as they become, and even, may God forgive me, "value neutral" in M. Weber's sense.
Scenario 1 describes a person who wants to eat a car (perhaps some sort of craving) and does not want to eat a car (due to its unpleasantness and whatnot). The things that make them sad are reasons (per their stances) for them to abstain. The things about the car-eating that make others sad are reasons (per the others' stances) for them to abstain. Moral antirealism does not adjudicate what they ought to do or not do in this situation; "ought" in fact is relative to which stances we're bootstrapping as "owed." Anyone suggesting that moral antirealism simpliciter makes an evaluative call on the correct thing to do has assembled a strawman.
Same story with scenario 2. It's bad per some stances, good for others. Moral antirealism has nothing to say beyond this. Per some stances, it is a rational failing to continue to procrastinate. Per other stances, it is not a rational failing to continue to procrastinate.
Same story with scenario 3. They want it (perhaps some sort of craving), but they also don't want it (due to its joylessness and pain and whatnot). Moral antirealism does not assert, "When they do it, they are not being irrational." Moral antirealism says, "The propriety of what they do will be in part a function of stances that determine what propriety means."
Same story with scenario 4. There are different wants at play -- for a certain cookie, to avoid agony, etc. In no way does moral antirealism entail, "As long as they're informed about the relevant facts, they're not being irrational." Moral antirealism means "the number of moral propositions that are completely stance-independent is zero." All of these examples invoke all sorts of stances, either explicitly or implicitly.
Same story with scenario 5. On moral antirealism there are plenty of reasons to not do this. You mentioned a few of them: You leave behind a life of joy and fulfillment. Anyone can judge they're acting foolishly, where "foolishly" is in part a function of stances; moral antirealism does not mean "this is a judgment-free zone."
Same story with scenario 6. Moral antirealism neither condemns nor approves of this act. Moral antirealism just says that condemnation or approval of this act shall in part be a function of stances.
"This is all completely nuts!" Indeed. But that's because those "on antirealism, they're not being irrational" assertions are completely nuts. They imbue moral antirealism with normativity as if moral antirealism isn't just about stance-dependence, but is actively dictating stances and evaluative norms.
Under moral antirealism, things can be delicious, beautiful, horrifying, permitted, obligated, rational, irrational, goofy, foolish, wise, noble, heroic, evil, cowardly, reckless, careful, negligent, attendant, etc. Whether they are deemed so will always be, in part, a function of stances, that is, cares & concerns. Morality as independent of cares & concerns isn't true and never made any sense.
The argument is clever but he didn't connect the stand-independent reasons to stance-independent moral claims. Moral "anti-realists" don't technically have an epistemic standard. Now if he said it the opposite way, stance-independent moral claims imply stand-independent reasons, it'd be deductive but moral anti-realists deny the former so they'd have no reason to accept the latter.
Also diving into intuition as an epistemic standard would be great. I don't think anyone has formalized that.
Antirealism delivers the answer that's honest about where these judgments come from, including judgments about whether someone counts as "ideal."
But yeah, common moral language & thinking are a mess, so there are conflicting framings that are nonetheless in familiar use. "Philosophical intuition" is often just "familiar language," and much of moral language is reified (stance-truncated and made passive for depersonalization and brevity).
I’m also a moral realist, so I’m sympathetic to this conclusion. But I don’t think this is going to convince anyone to change their mind. The argument seems to boil down to “Because I say so.”
Take this example from the article: “A person is depressed and cuts themself. When they do it, they are fully informed about the long-term consequences. On anti-realism, they are not acting irrationally.”
Then we're told: “This is all completely nuts!”
But why is it nuts? Because you say so? If you believe that reducing suffering is a moral axiom, then sure that’s completely nuts. But if a moral anti-realist doesn’t subscribe to that axiom, then this won’t change their mind.
> Just as it appears to me that there’s a table in front of me, it appears to me that it’s wrong to torture babies. Just as I should think there’s a table absent a good reason to doubt it, I should think it’s wrong to torture babies.
Again, I agree with this conclusion. It’s bad to torture babies. But I don’t see how the argument here is anything other than “Because I say so.” If it appeared to Bentham that torturing babies is fine, then does that make it fine?
For a concrete example, torture (including torture of babies) was an important part of Comanche culture. The Bentham we know who grew up in Western culture says that sounds bad. But the Bentham who grew up Comanche might say the opposite. A critical theorist might say that moral values are socially constructed and the imposition of your values is inherently oppressive. The counter-argument from this pieces seems to be “It’s bad because I say so.”
Moral anti-realists who are also atheist (not all atheist are moral anti-realists) likely won’t be persuaded by this. In a theist perspective you can appeal to the doctrines of a deity. But without a deity, then you’re just saying, “Torturing babies is bad because I say so.”
Agreed, it’s not convincing. Saying murder is wrong is just a way of saying “boo murder.” And saying that the objective immorality of murder is stance independent is just a fancy way of saying “boo murder.”
>But why is it nuts? Because you say so?
Because we can "see" that it is so, in the same way we can "see" that if A=C and B=C then A=B. It's not arbitrary, but if your intuitions don't match mine (on either question) there isn't much I can do by way of argument to convince you. However, generally we recognize that if someone (having had the concept properly explained to him) doesn't recognize that A=B then he has something wrong with them: they're "nuts". Their rational intuitions are not working right. The same is true of moral facts; neither "It is wrong to destroy your body for no benefit" and "A=B" can be proven empirically.
Do you believe it is true that if A=C and B=C than A=B? Can you conceive of a world where this is not true?
>I don't think sentences have meaning outside of their usage.
That's where we disagree. I words communicate ideas, and that among other things ideas can be true or false. I assume you do as well, despite what you say. Is the idea "sentences don't have meaning outside their usage" a true idea, or a false one? And if it isn't true, why should I believe it?
I disagree. I think that greater cultural similarity would lead to the people that were transported feeling more emboldened to speak out against torturing people. Our two cultures being near-identical would in fact make this one glaring exception seem *more* provocative, not less. We'd also feel similar enough to the people of this near-identical culture that we'd think there's a decent chance of persuading them; that we share enough in common culturally that there's a real chance they'd consider our anti-torture arguments.
If we were transported to a culture wildly different from our own, then we'd probably feel some serious alienation in this new culture, and this culture's acceptance of torture would be just another part of that alienation.
Could you address Lance Bush's devastating criticism of your metaethical position ?
Could you provide a link?
Muh trilemma
What's the problem with the trilemma ?
3rd option IMO. I'm a fan of "unintelligible" moral realism.
What would be your go to argument/reasoning for why you think non-reductive moral realism (as i call it) is true ?
I’ve got an argument about accounting for blameworthiness that I’ve found pretty persuasive. I’m not sure if it necessarily gets us to non-naturalism, but it does get us to categorical reasons and that seems to be one of the reasons various people reject the view. (The article is called “Cold Blood and Categoricity”)
However, this seems to be a shifting of the burden. I’m not seeing any strong reason to accept that what seems perfectly intelligible to me is “unintelligible”. From what I’ve seen, Lance simply claims he finds it unintelligible, which is (almost?) no reason for me to believe it.
Your thoughts?
I am not particularly convinced by Lance's trilemma either. I find the notion of irreducible normativity intelligible as well. However I am not sure why I would think that moral properties are properties of the world and not of the mind of agents, that's why I am interested in arguments for the view.
In short, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to be moved by Lance’s trilemma given that I think the third option is false-it is intelligible.
"That ice-cream is tasty is stance dependently true; it might be tasty to me but not to you, and a person who thinks it’s not tasty isn’t making an error."
I don't see the difference between this and moral judgments, and I'd wager that the proportion of people who don't think ice-cream is tasty is far smaller than the proportion that don't share moral presuppositions you regard as self evident. (I'm not attacking moral realism, at least in its more moderate forms, I'm attacking aesthetic nihilism).
It's not about the share of the population that believes something. Claims about taste can be stance-dependent even if every single actually existing person has the same tastes. It's just that the claims are made true by their tastes, and not some external, stance-independent factor.
I think the statement 'ice cream is tasty' actually means 'human beings find ice cream tasty' and this is roughly analogous to the way 'murder is bad', really means 'humans find murder bad'. It's true that there would be no meaning to statements about taste if beings that taste didn't exist, and it is also true that there would be no meaning to moral statements if acting being didn't exist.
Both moral statements and aesthetic statements describe something real and may be analyzed as true or false, and they are more similar to each other than either is to mathematical or scientific statements. I find it odd that moral realists sometimes explicitly distinguish moral discourse from aesthetic discourse, when, if anything, there appear to be fewer grounds for relativism in the latter than the former.
But "murder is bad," doesn't mean, "humans find murder bad." That's just assuming the non-realist position to be correct. Most people think murder would be be bad even if no one believed it was, so they clearly can't be using the sentence, "Murder is bad," to mean what you think it does. On the other hand, I think everyone agrees that if no one liked the taste of ice cream, it would make no sense to say that actually, ice cream tastes good and people are just mistaken.
If a praying mantis could think it wouldn't think murder was bad (unless it was an exceptionally edgy existentialist praying mantis willing to endorse the extinction of its species). Murder is bad for humans to do, given the nature of human beings, and ice cream is tasty, given the nature of human beings. People can use arguments for subjectivism in both cases, but they have an easier time doing it for murder than ice cream.
The real difference isn't that aesthetic realism is less plausible than moral realism, it's that the stakes are much lower for aesthetics. If someone insists that ice cream tastes bad and dog poop tastes good, you just don't eat their food, but if someone insists murder is good and happy marriages are bad, they are a danger to society and probably need to pre-emptively caged.
But even the position that murder could be good for praying mantises to do is a moral realist one, if it means anything at all. Moral realism doesn't hold that different things can't be right for different beings due to the nature of those beings - it just holds that what makes something right is stance-independent.
I think the statement 'ice-cream is tasty' is stance independent. If you are messed up or retarded or whatever and don't like ice cream, that doesn't change the fact that humans find ice-cream tasty. Yes, if humans had completely different taste buds, digestive systems, nutritional requirements etc. then ice cream would not be tasty, and if humans needed to bite their partner's head off to procreate, murder wouldn't be wrong.
I'm pro a moderate version of moral realism, but I think it's untenable to pair this with aesthetic anti-realism.
Why do you keep trotting out these horrible fucking arguments again and again holy shit
This argument seems to come down to reliance on intuition for moral knowledge. Intuition does not come from information gained from external reality; it comes from your embodied brain. I feel that slavery being wrong is obvious, because I have lived my whole life with a brain containing information that logically informs me of this conclusion.
But if you were to go back in time to converse with brilliant men like Plato or Marcus Aurelius about the morality of slavery, they would see that it was intuitively right, because their brains contain a different set of relevant information than does yours. None of your arguments would work with them because their intuition gives them a different answer than yours does.
But take some steel tools to modern stone tool-using people, demonstrate them, and they immediately want to use the steel tools. Steel is just better than stone.
This example is objective knowledge. It can be *used* (as an object) by anyone, to do things the user wants to do. That is, it can be validated through experience by people other than you.
Moral knowledge is subjective. If you share your subjective knowledge with someone who does not have it, they cannot use if they do not have access to internal resources similar to yours. This is why your effects to persuade Plato or Marcus that they are wrong about slavery would very likely fail to convince them, while they would easily see your Glock as superior to a short sword.
Let X be some behaviour -- it might be abortion, it might be slavery, whatever -- and we wish to determine whether X is objectively moral, objectively immoral or neither.
What experiment can we perform that gives different results depending on X's objective morality status? If there is no such experiment then I say that all statements of the form "X is objectively moral" or "X is objectively immoral" are meaningless and therefore not even wrong.
The best we can do is to conduct an opinion poll and say things like "Y% of people in society S think X is immoral".
Not to be That Guy but if you're interested in an answer to this question, I wrote a long post about it: https://bothsidesbrigade.substack.com/p/moral-realism-turns-ethics-into-a
Positivist? :v
What’s a positivist?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vienna-circle/#VerCriMetClaPer
What's a positivist, in simple plain English?
Logical positivism was a philosophical movement that embraced what is known as the verification principle. This verification principle stated that only statements verifiable through science or logical proof are meaningful in terms of conveying truth or factual content. Your statements about moral realism reminded me of this self-defeating position. But I'm not sure you're endorsing it. Maybe your criticism is that you can't prove through experiments that there are different outcomes if moral realism is false or true.
> Maybe your criticism is that you can't prove through experiments that there are different outcomes if moral realism is false or true.
Yes, that's my position.
I think that "torturing babies is wrong" is intuitively obvious to the vast majority of people, but there's a certain type of person that struggles to accept any idea that doesn't look like a logical proof. And things relying on intuition will tend to not look like a logical proof. Plus, people completely lacking empathy might struggle to intuitively grasp why torturing babies is wrong.
The counter-argument that "well, in some times and places, torturing babies was viewed as Ok" just proves that some times and places are better than others.
The reasons people would put forward for why slavery is wrong would be just as applicable to ancient Rome as they are to our modern world. If we find those reasons compelling in the here and now, then we should also find them compelling within the context of ancient Rome, even if the Romans of the time simply hadn't considered those arguments or dismissed them for economic reasons.
omg I recently commented on your old article. are you analogously an aesthetic realist?
Agnostic.
I find the analogy helpful to figure out what's wrong with moral realist arguments. Beauty and utterances related to it are well explained in a physicalist way, ie it's stored in brains, and came in there via unguided evolution. There is no need to posit an outside oracle of beauty. Morality is weirder as it can be more moved by argument, and there's more linguistic quirks, but still all the feelings and utterances are well explained in a normie physicalist way.
You go back in time around the year 1200. The future Genghis Khan is still Temujin, just a typical Mongolian. He's on bad times, having lost a major battle. But he gets a vision of his future conquests, and the spoils he will gain. Of course, this will involve truly horrific acts with an ungodly amount of rape and violence accompanying it. He doesn't care. Your task is to convince him that this is morally wrong and that he should not do it. Let's just assume he will be able to understand your arguments and has a good grasp on what makes one valid and sound. Also, you can't make religious arguments because with stuff like the afterlife, it's more obvious why someone would want to be a good person. No, you can only appeal to secular arguments. How do you do it? Is he irrational if he just disregards your argument, even if its a good one?
Here's a set of rules, we'll call it Evil Maximization:
- Hurt others as much as is possible;
- You should follow the tenets of Evil Maximization.
It doesn't seem to me like the existence of Evil Maximization is any different from the moral system we have, other than my very obvious preference for our moral system. If I could somehow prove that Evil Maximization was a non-physical "fact" like 3 being a prime number or Fisher's principle, I don't think anybody would then conclude that they should follow Evil Maximization.
(Also, the fact that the space has to be not-curved for the shortest distance between two points to be a line is EXTREMELY non-intuitive, to the point that two millennia of mathematicians tried to prove the parallel postulate, before people realized you could construct self-consistent geometries where it's not true.)
Does tenet 2 strike you as being “true”?
Does it strike you as being false?
This post is beyond retarded dude
Your usage of "fact" seems to be loose and based on intuition, and I can't fathom one specific meaning of it that makes your whole argument sensible. It might help me understand what you mean when you say these are facts if you could engage in something like the zombie thought experiment with them. So: are moral facts necessary consequences of physical facts? If not, can you imagine an alternate universe that was physically identical to our own, but the moral facts were different or there were no moral facts? Would anything else need to be different about that universe? Do you agree with the truism that you can't derive an ought from an is? (Personally I don't like this formulation -- it's definitely the case that any argument with any moral premises and any factual conclusions is necessarily flawed but it seems to me that most good arguments for moral stances are contingent on some physical facts -- but it also seems to me that any valid argument for a moral conclusion necessarily contains at least implicitly at least one moral premise. Do you see this differently?)
I think a lot of the appeal of moral anti-realism comes from the fact that most people, even most realists, aren't utilitarians. Common views of morality really do base their account of right action on arbitrary things like deontic constraints, the personal virtue of the doer (independently of whether the thing done actually improves the world in any way), special obligations to particular people and groups, etc. These things are arbitrary in exactly the same way that all morality would be if anti-realism were true, and I think the anti-realists correctly intuit this fact. Where they err is in drawing the conclusion that all morality is arbitrary and is just socially or evolutionarily determined, rather than just these particular things. There's still a true core of welfarism and instrumental rationality, which (combined with the fact that there are no arbitrary reasons to prefer benefiting one person over another) yield utilitarianism.
Don’t you mean, there are no *good* reasons to prefer benefiting one person over another? There are lots of arbitrary reasons.
Are you really so confident none of them are good, without qualification? I think I have a good reason for benefiting my wife over a stranger.
I should clarify that I'm talking about objective, non-instrumental moral reasons here. I'm not talking about epistemic reasons for thinking that special obligations might exist (e.g., arguments in favor of special obligations), nor about instrumental reasons like, "I know my wife better than a stranger, so I know what will benefit her more than what will benefit a stranger," "I have a strong relationship with my wife, and that relationship is best supported by helping her as opposed to strangers," "Society functions better when people care for their loved ones," "I will be happier helping my wife because I love her," "I am in a better position to help my wife," etc. There are very strong instrumental reasons to benefit your wife over a stranger (including the ones I just listed), and there may be some non-moral reasons for doing so if such reasons exist (e.g., if there are self-interested reasons that weigh independently of moral reasons, though I'm skeptical of this). And there are also plenty of reasons why you would be more blameworthy if you failed to help your wife than if you failed to help a stranger (contrary to common conception, this is not incompatible with utilitarianism). But none of this changes the core fact that every person truly matters equally and that there is just as much non-instrumental moral reason to benefit each of them.
Non-instrumental moral reasons?
Do utilitarians care about non-instrumental reasons? Everything should aim at increasing utility, isn't that instrumental? I’m not sure how you are using the distinction. I read it as intrinsic, done for itself and not as a means to something else. But I thought everything was a means to utility for utilitarians.
And are moral and non-moral reasons always easy to distinguish? There are clear examples of each, but also a gray area.
If utilitarians didn't care about non-instrumental reasons, all utilities would be zero and the theory would not recommend any actions over others. This is not controversial among utilitarians - I don't think there's a single utilitarian in the world, nor has there been one in history, who doesn't believe in non-instrumental reasons. That would just be a completely incoherent view.
One of the biggest debates among utilitarians is the debate over which things are non-instrumentally valuable. Some think that it's only psychological states (hedonic utilitarianism), some think that it's whatever people non-instrumentally prefer (preference utilitarianism), and some think it's a variety of independent goods (objective list utilitarianism).
>People often object to relying on intuitions. But I’m curious how they get their foundational beliefs. One’s most basic beliefs always seem justified by the fact that they seem right.
C. S. Lewis wrote about this concept well in his essay "Why I am Not a Pacifist" (which can usually be found in the essay collection "The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses"; sadly, there isn't a good version online). When talking about moral reasoning he wrote:
"The most useful analogy here is that of Reason—by which I do not mean some separate faculty but, once more, the whole man judging, only judging this time not about good and evil, but about truth and falsehood. Now any concrete train of reasoning involves three elements: Firstly, there is the reception of facts to reason about. These facts are received either from our own senses, or from the report of other minds; that is, either experience or authority supplies us with our material. But each man's experience is so limited that the second source is the more usual; of every hundred facts upon which to reason, ninety-nine depend on authority. Secondly, there is the direct, simple act of the mind perceiving self-evident truth, as when we see that if A and B both equal C, then they equal each other. This act I call intuition. Thirdly, there is an art or skill of arranging the facts so as to yield a series of such intuitions which linked together produce a proof of the truth or falsehood of the proposition we are considering. Thus in a geometrical proof each step is seen by intuition, and to fail to see it is to be not a bad geometrician but an idiot. The skill comes in arranging the material into a series of intuitable "steps." Failure to do this does not mean idiocy, but only lack of ingenuity or invention. Failure to follow it need not mean idiocy, but either inattention or a defect of memory which forbids us to hold all the intuitions together.
"Now all correction of errors in reasoning is really correction of the first or the third element. The second, the intuitional element, cannot be corrected if it is wrong, nor supplied if it is lacking. You can give the man new facts. You can invent a simpler proof, that is, a simpler concatenation of intuitable truths. But when you come to an absolute inability to see any one of the self-evident steps out of which the proof is built, then you can do nothing. No doubt this absolute inability is much rarer than we suppose. Every teacher knows that people are constantly protesting that they "can't see" some self-evident inference, but the supposed inability is usually a refusal to see, resulting either from some passion which wants not to see the truth in question or else from sloth which does not want to think at all. But when the inability is real, argument is at an end. You cannot produce rational intuition by argument, because argument depends upon rational intuition. Proof rests upon the unprovable which has to be just "seen." Hence faulty intuition is incorrigible. It does not follow that it cannot be trained by practice in attention and in the mortification of disturbing passions, or corrupted by the opposite habits. But it is not amenable to correction by argument."
I wrote a post a while back expanding on Lewis ideas on this subject: https://substack.com/home/post/p-146694841
He then expanded on how our conscience, our moral sense, differs from our reason (though following essentially the same process):
"The main difference between Reason and Conscience is an alarming one. It is thus: that while the unarguable intuitions on which all depend are liable to be corrupted by passion when we are considering truth and falsehood, they are much more liable, they are almost certain to be corrupted when we are considering good and evil. For then we are concerned with some action to be here and now done or left undone by ourselves. And we should not be considering that action all unless we had some wish either to do or not to do it, so that in this sphere we are bribed from the very beginning. Hence the value of authority in checking, or even superseding, our own activity is much greater in this sphere than in that of Reason. Hence, too, human beings must be trained in obedience to the moral intuitions almost before they have them, and years before they are rational enough to discuss them, or they will be corrupted before the time for discussion arrives.
"These basic moral intuitions are the only element in Conscience which cannot be argued about; if there can be a difference of opinion which does not reveal one of the parties as a moral idiot, then it is not an intuition. They are the ultimate preferences of the will for love rather than hatred and happiness rather than misery. There are people so corrupted as to have lost even these, just as there are people who can't see the simplest proof, but in the main these can be said to be the voice of humanity as such. And they are unarguable. But here the trouble begins. People are constantly claiming this unarguable and unanswerable status for moral judgments which are not really intuitions at all but remote consequences or particular applications of them, eminently open to discussion since the consequences may be illogically drawn or the application falsely made."
It seems to me that you are saying "People think differently about things, therefore nobody's intuitions can be true, and observing our conscience or reason can teach us nothing of value." I disagree. People thinking differently about things doesn't mean there are not true or false things to think about: that there are not true intuitions or false intuitions. Namely, our internal experiences can be aligned with reality, or out of alignment with them. This is the case with our thoughts about physical objects (if I think there is a cat in the box, but in reality there is no cat in the box, then my thought is false), so it can also be the case with our moral intuitions. C. S. Lewis writes on this in his book "The Abolition of Man"
"Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.
...
"This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as 'the Tao'. Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself—just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind. And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it."
>When do you ever step outside your perspective and check whether reality aligns with your thoughts?
Regardless of whether anyone checks, it is still the case that a thought can be in alignment with reality or out of alignment with it. One man says there is a teapot orbiting the sun, another man says that there isn't. I cannot check to see which one is right, yet that doesn't change that fact that one of them *is* right.
Any thoughts on Haidt's moral intuitions theory? IMHO he presents a very strong case for moral intuitions having priority over reasons (the emotional dog wags the rational tale) and lays the groundwork for an evo-bio understanding of morality. Some people are afraid of the latter but I think that's because they wrongly associate it with right wing thinking. Haidt is as centrist as they become, and even, may God forgive me, "value neutral" in M. Weber's sense.
Some typos in this post but they're interesting so I'm leaving them intact