This article is a response to this blog post from Hilarius Bookbinder. I recommend reading that first.

1.0 Look at my magic beans!

I produced this dialog some time ago to illustrate a problem I sometimes see with critics of illusionism, but I think it generalizes to the way people conduct themselves in many other philosophical exchanges. For those who don’t want to follow a link, here’s a summary: A person carrying a handful of beans approaches another person. They inform this other person that they are holding magical beans. The other person agrees that they are holding beans but denies that the beans are magical. This results in an argument where the person claiming to have magical beans insists that to deny they are holding magical beans is to deny they are holding beans at all, but, since they are clearly holding beans, any denial that they are holding magical beans is absurd.

I call this the magic beans fallacy, and it illustrates a common mistake philosophers and people in online arguments fall victim to: they presume that their account of a phenomenon, or some property or feature they consider important to that phenomenon, is so constitutive of it that to deny their account or to deny that the phenomenon possesses the property in question is to deny the phenomenon outright. Moral realists do this when they insist that if you reject moral realism, then you must think morality “isn’t real.” Non-eliminativists about phenomenal consciousness do this when they insist that to deny phenomenal consciousness is to deny we are conscious or have experiences or perceptions. Proponents of libertarian free will do this when they insist compatibilists are changing the subject or don’t really believe in free will. This list could be expanded to include many other positions, and perhaps examples you are familiar with readily come to mind.

One of my goals in this post is to highlight a possible instance of the magic beans fallacy. However, this is a secondary goal. My primary goal is to critique the notion of “intuition” as it is used among academic philosophers. Roughly, I think philosophers have tended to land somewhere along a continuum with respect to use of the term “intuition”: on one end, “intuitions” are a type of mental state that are the output of a psychologically distinct faculty, though there is little evidence for such a faculty, while on the other, intuition is just another name for a mundane cluster of existing psychological processes the existence of which is uncontroversial. The former conception does a lot of philosophical work, but it is reasonable to question whether such intuitions exist, while the latter conception does little or no philosophical evidential work, yet the existence of such intuitions isn’t in question.

Mundane conceptions of intuition are not without legitimate uses in philosophy. Reporting one’s own psychological states and inviting one’s audience to proceed with an argument if they share them is an entirely reasonable thing to do. Mundane uses of intuition can also be helpful for identifying internal inconsistencies in one’s views to better achieve reflective equilibrium. What I am denying is that there is any special type of mental state that serves as a substantive source of evidence in the way some philosophers maintain. This is not because I think such mental states exist, but can’t play the epistemic role philosophers want them to; rather, I am denying intuitions of this kind are real at all. This notion of intuition is a pseudopsychological one invented by empirically uninformed philosophers that has little if any basis in contemporary cognitive psychology.

By equivocating along this continuum, philosophers have masked the dubious, pseudoscientific nature of many of their practices. The notion of an “intuition” is a psychological notion, and as such falls within the purview of science. And yet philosophers have mostly been reluctant to submit the notion to psychology for review. If you claim people have intuitions you’re making an empirical claim about human psychology. It is your responsibility to ensure such claims are clear and testable and that the phenomena in question actually exist.

There are some critics of the unfettered use of intuitions in philosophy, but they typically concede too much to philosophers, or are philosophers themselves that want to maintain many of the field’s conventional practices. They typically grant that intuitions are real, but question their epistemic status. While they are on the right track, they don’t go far enough.

The insularity of the field has fostered an uncritical and dogmatic acceptance of “intuition” that has little justification and even less basis in the reality of human cognition. “Intuition” is, at best, an unhelpful term for what would be better classified as judgments, hunches, heuristics, and dispositions, and at worst a confused, pseudoscientific notion invented by a field with inscrutable and dubious methods.

Philosophers don’t appear to agree on what intuitions are, how they work, what their epistemic status is, whether they share any distinct phenomenology and if so what it is, which psychological processes are involved in intuitive judgments, which issues are matters of intuition or not, how many kinds of intuitions there are and what distinguishes these kinds from one another, whether they only concern the a priori, which kinds of intuitions philosophers are interested in or should care about (e.g., pretheoretical, reflective, and so on), how intuitions relate to dispositions and belief (some accounts hold that they are dispositions or beliefs, though it’s unclear what distinguishes these dispositions/beliefs from others), and so on.

This isn’t a case of a handful of conflicting accounts. There are numerous, distinct dimensions along which accounts of intuitions could vary from one another, these differences are often qualitatively significant (pretheoretical and reflective intuitions are very different), and for which there is little if any consensus. There are so many combinations of these potential qualities that there may be about as many accounts of intuitions as there are philosophers who’ve considered the matter. At the same time, few of these conceptions of intuition have been subjected to sustained empirical investigation to determine whether the relevant kinds of mental states are real, much less what psychological and neural processes are involved in them.

When “intuition” is investigated, the notion in question is often a somewhat orthogonal, psychological conception of “intuition” that doesn’t capture the distinct features attributed to philosophical intuitions. Conversely, such research often presumes that whatever outputs the researcher is obtaining from participants is an “intuition” of the relevant kind, with little or no effort to operationalize the notion of an intuition itself, much less doing so on the basis of any well-established psychological theory. As such, even research on philosophical “intuitions” is often presumptuous. Far from establishing that intuitions are a distinct type of psychological state, such research misleadingly reinforces the impression philosophical intuitions are a real and distinct phenomenon by recapitulating the same unsubstantiated assumptions found in non-empirical philosophy.

2.0 Bookbinder’s Defense of Intuitions

In spite of this, philosophers are quick to defend the centrality of intuition to philosophical method. Hilarius Bookbinder exemplifies this trend in an aptly titled post, “A defense of philosophical intuitions” which you can find here. I recommend reading that before proceeding, since this article is a response.

The main problem is that Bookbinder doesn’t offer much of a defense. Instead, Bookbinder begins by listing a bunch of psychological processes which have been established via empirical inquiry, e.g., memory and perception, then simply asserting that in addition to sensations, emotions, and so on, we also have a faculty of intuition. This is a bit like arguing that Bigfoot exists by listing off animals that do exist, like bears and goats and ostriches, then simply saying “and Bigfoot is another of these animals.” It is no exaggeration to say that this is about the level of evidence Bookbinder provides for the psychological reality of “intuitions.” I call this the Trojan List Fallacy.

The Trojan List works by presenting a claim or position alongside a host of other claims or positions an audience is expected to accept or find credible, thereby leeching credibility from the association. Here’s how this fallacy works:

1. Provide a list of uncontroversial claims or examples that an audience is expected to accept

2. Include the notion you want people to accept (typically at or near the end of the list) then claim or imply that it is just another example of things in the same category

3. Acceptance of the preceding items on the list may lull readers into a state of acceptance, and allow the acceptance of previous items on the list to bleed over into acceptance of your proposed idea

I think Bookbinder does that in this article. We’re treated to a menagerie of mental faculties and their associated dysfunctions, then we arrive at intuition, whereupon Bookbinder simply declares that it’s another mental faculty we have. For instance, Bookbinder first mentions memory and pairs it with Alzheimer’s, then mentions emotions and alexithymia, mental imagery and aphantasia, and so on. Yet, whereas every other faculty mentioned along with the dysfunctions associated with it has been established by empirical evidence, no similar evidence demonstrates the existence of any particular mental faculty of intuition, much less a subpopulation that suffers from an impairment in this faculty. It appears that we’re just supposed to grant that this faculty exists. It is also worth flagging, now, that for Bookbinder’s analogy to work, intuition must be a single faculty, since otherwise his eventual accusation that I lack the faculty in question wouldn’t make much sense, but we’ll get to that.

Rather than provide empirical evidence for a faculty of intuition he simply asserts:

Intuitions are another kind of mental faculty.

Bookbinder later suggests that we evolved to have intuitions and speculates on how moral intuitions could have evolved, though he oddly focuses on distinct mechanisms associated with a subset of intuitions, which is in tension with his suggestion that I lack the faculty of intuition (more on this later). However, explaining how something evolved presupposes its existence. What Bookbinder doesn’t do is present any evidence that intuitions are a real psychological phenomenon. It’s simply taken for granted.

Presumably, then, Bookbinder’s defense isn’t intended to defend the existence of intuitions, but to instead defend their philosophical importance. But Bookbinder also doesn’t do much to defend the importance of intuitions. Either way, a defense is moot if the sort of intuitions Bookbinder believes in aren’t real.

But the situation is worse than this. Bookbinder doesn’t offer a sufficiently clear account of what an intuition is such that the concept can be operationalized and tested in the first place. This, coupled with a direct, misguided, and condescending critique of me personally, results in an article that is in many ways confused and mistaken.

Bookbinder claims that his defense of intuitions is about metaphilosophy. It is, but it is also psychology. He is, after all, defending a mental faculty, and it would make no sense to claim his conception of intuition isn’t deeply embedded in considerations about human psychology given the close association between the “faculty” of intuition and all the psychological faculties Bookbinder associates it with. If claims about the existence and operation of a putative mental faculty aren’t the subject matter of psychology, it’s not clear what would be.

That metaphilosophy so readily blurs into psychology should give philosophers critical of approaches like mine pause; opposition to psychological entanglement with the field is bizarre and a little ironic, given that their supposed primary tool is a psychological faculty. It’s a bit like carpenters sneering at saws and screwdrivers. And just like carpentry, psychology has standards. Bookbinder’s account of intuitions is very far from meeting those standards.

3.0 Blind from Birth

Let’s start with the possible instance of the magic beans fallacy. Bookbinder quotes me, and sandwiches this quote between a handful of critical remarks:

Intuitions are another kind of mental faculty. Evidently some people do not have them, like Lance S. Bush, who writes,

“The use of the term “intuition” serves only to obscure matters in philosophy. Philosophers should collectively agree to stop using the term. I haven’t been the best at explaining what the problem is, but I don’t think I’ve butchered it, either. Nevertheless I’ve been discouraged and annoyed at the resistance. Why are people so fucking taken in by talk of intuitions? It’s like everyone slapped on one of those brain slugs from Futurama.”

Bush is a man, blind from birth, angrily denying that others have a power he lacks and cannot imagine.

(The remark he is quoting can be found here).

For some reason Bookbinder takes the quoted remarks to indicate that I don’t have intuitions. I never claim in the quote to not have intuitions, and nothing I say in that passage suggests that I’d agree that I “don’t have intuitions.” Presumably Bookbinder takes my skepticism about intuition-talk to suggest I personally don’t have them. This is not my position. I think use of the term intuition is so varied and inconsistent that we are better off not using the term and that we should instead employ more precise terminology to more carefully delineate which concepts we are employing in the appropriate contexts. I am also skeptical of certain conceptions of intuitions, and that insofar as one believes we have intuitions that fit these mistaken accounts, I believe nobody has intuitions of that kind. In that respect, there are conceptions of intuitions I think I don’t have, but I also think they’re intuitions nobody has. I just didn’t say that in this quote.

It’s ironic that the particular remark Bookbinder quotes doesn’t even include any denial there are intuitions. It just objects to talk of intuitions. Suggesting we not use a particular term in no way entails that one doesn’t think the phenomena to which the term may refer don’t exist, so my remark is even consistent with thinking we have exactly the kind of mental faculty Bookbinder claims we have but simply objecting to calling that faculty “intuition.” I think we probably don’t have such a faculty, but that’s a separate matter from whether I think we should continue using the term “intuition” or treat intuitions as an important source of evidence in philosophy (even if we had them).

My remark is also orthogonal to whether I’d agree with the statement “I have intuitions.” The only way to answer this question is to know what a person has in mind by “intuition.” And I do think we have some of the things that philosophers describe as “intuitions.” It’s just that, even if we had sui generis faculties, dispositions to believe, and so on, we’re not obligated to refer to any of these in particular (or all of them, collectively) as “intuitions.” At least part of my objection to how we use the term is that it is used in too many inconsistent and underspecified ways, making it unclear what anyone is even saying they have when they report having an intuition. For comparison, if people used the term “papple” to refer to apples and pears, and people were constantly mixing them up, you could object to use of the term “papple” without thereby denying that apples or pears exist.

It’s not as though we ever had any obligation to use the term intuition in any of the ways philosophers use it. The term “intuition” was already coopted from ordinary language, where many if not all of its typical usages don’t even correspond (at least in any very clean and unambiguous way) to various philosophical conceptions of intuitions. Philosophers could have just opted for some other term or terms to refer to the various phenomena they posited. Sui generis intuitions could’ve been called something distinctive, like verinoesis or veriception while they could have referred to dispositions to believe as “dispositions to believe.” Then, when philosophers reported having intuitions, they could very clearly say things like:

I am disposed to believe that the external world exists.

I vericeive that the external world exists.

Such disambiguation would make what philosophers were doing clearer, entirely independent of whether or not we do or don’t have any particular mental faculty like veriception. Given this, Bookbinder’s choice of that particular quote is a poor one, because it doesn’t even support the accusation directed at me, and there are other instances where I have expressed skepticism about intuitions in a seemingly general sense (though I have always only denied specific, narrow conceptions of what intuitions are). I also don’t deny that I have “intuitions” in many of the ways such terms are used in ordinary language, e.g., hunches or system one processes. I only deny a narrow, distinctive conception of intuitions such as those outlined here.

Some philosophical accounts of intuition might map onto ordinary usages, but much of ordinary usage construes intuition as “gut feelings,” subconscious pattern recognition, or even a kind of quasi-paranormal capacity to pick up on certain truths on the basis of the vibes given off in a particular situation. Philosophical use of the term thus either doesn’t even comport with its ordinary uses or, at best, picks out and refines one or another narrow, distinctive usages featured in ordinary discourse. Some philosophers even explicitly acknowledge that they aren’t using the term in its ordinary senses:

When philosophers talk of intuition — especially on the subject of justified beliefs — they seldom mean anything like the common usages of the term. If you look up synonyms for intuition on the internet you’ll find words like hunch, instinct, and natural inclination. But this is a far cry from what philosophers are referring to — they’re not suggesting that hunches, instinct and/or natural inclinations can be an adequate basis for the forming of beliefs. (Talis Per Se, 2025)

Instead, they are characterized as:

[...] an intellectual striking or intellectual presentation-a type of mental experience.

This is one of the conceptions of intuitions that I deny, not because I think nothing psychologically in the vicinity of what’s reported as an intuition is going on, but because I disagree with the characteristics attributed to these experiences. For instance, as Stan and I argue here, Bengson (2015) characterizes intuitions as having the property of being:

Rationally assenting — in that they make the forming of such beliefs fitting, justifiable, and reasonable. (this is our quote, which summarizes p. 723)

Am I somehow obligated to consider the judgments philosophers call intuitions “Rationally assenting” and thereby justified, reasonable, or fitting by definition? That would be absurd. It would mean that intuitions are granted a particular degree of epistemic status by definitional fiat and not by any arguments or evidence establishing that they had this characteristic. Justification cannot be obtained via stipulation or definition.

Does Bookbinder think I’m required to regard intuitions as justified or reasonable on purely analytic grounds (to be clear: Bookbinder doesn’t attribute this quality to me; I’m making a more general point about the appropriateness of rejecting phenomena when one bakes objectionable features into its definition)? I should hope not. Yet this is among the few characterizations of intuitions I’m actually denying anyone has. What I am not denying, necessarily, is that anyone has what Stan and I call “ambituitions”: mental states that exhibit many of the characteristics of the sorts of intuitions Bengson describes but without the additional feature of being “rationally assenting.” I think something like ambituitions may be real, however as I’ll outline later I believe they are a learned behavior rather than a natural feature of human cognition, and they lack the qualities that would make them a substantive source of evidence. In short, I deny that there are intuitions when intuitions are characterized in particular ways but I do not deny them when they are characterized in other ways.

Bookbinder doesn’t appear to distinguish the underdeveloped and poorly described “mental faculty” characterized in his own article from a panoply of other potential characterizations of intuitions, at least some of which I would not deny having. Note that if Bookbinder were to suggest that I, in virtue of denying some particular account of intuition such as Bookbinder’s own, thereby lack the faculty, he would presumably be implying that everyone that rejected Bookbinder’s distinctive conception of intuitions somehow doesn’t have intuitions. This would be ridiculous, and it would be as ridiculous as, e.g., a compatibilist insisting that a libertarian doesn’t believe in free will because their account differs from the compatibilist. What makes this more absurd is that it doesn’t follow from skepticism that one has intuitions that one therefore doesn’t have them. Why not suppose I do have intuitions, but mistakenly believe I don’t? Once again, none of my remarks provide any good evidence that I specifically and personally lack intuitions, while other people supposedly have them.

This also isn’t a claim about my personal phenomenology or lack thereof. If by “intuition” you mean a sui generis faculty for discerning a priori truths via a quasi-sensory capacity to “see” the truth, then I deny we have that ability. But I’m not merely claiming that I, personally, don’t have such an ability; I’m claiming that nobody has this ability. It’s a claim about what human psychology is generally capable of. I deny intuitions of this kind for much the same reason I deny people have telepathy. Imagine this exchange:

Lance: I don’t believe in psychic powers.

Alleged psychic: I see. So, you admit you lack the special power to read minds and see the future like the rest of us! How unfortunate for you.

Lance: No, I’m claiming nobody has psychic powers.

Alleged psychic: Again, it’s unfortunate you don’t have them, but the rest of us know that we have such powers because we use them all the time.

This is roughly equivalent to what I take Bookbinder to be doing. Bookbinder’s inability to distinguish what I reject from what I don’t suggests more about Bookbinder’s own lack of imagination and inability to conceive of other philosophical points of view than it suggests psychological deficiencies on my part.

Neither Bookbinder nor the entire field of philosophy has offered much in the way of empirical evidence that they “have intuitions.” In fact, it’s much worse than this: there’s no clear way to operationalize the term such that it could even be subject to the kind of empirical work that could reveal whether we have or don’t have intuitions, because philosophers can’t even agree on what intuitions are supposed to be, and are typically too disinterested or oblivious to what it would take to demonstrate that a particular type of psychological phenomenon is real to even make any serious attempt to corroborate such claims.

Instead, they seem to take the existence of intuitions for granted. The presumption that we have intuitions is based almost entirely off appeals to the personal phenomenology of philosophers and to established practice, i.e., intuition-talk is so prevalent among philosophers that of course we have intuitions. Tradition and private, subjective experiences are not great ways to determine that a particular type of psychological faculty exists. If they were, we’d have to acknowledge a faculty of prophecy, a faculty of clairvoyance, a divine reception faculty for hearing God, and a host of other faculties associated with religion and the paranormal to accommodate the many traditions and private experiences people around the world have reported. Incidentally, claims of these kinds are far more widespread and historically prevalent than appeals to philosophical intuitions, which you can readily confirm here, here or for international data in Hoogeveen et al. (2024). Millions of people have reported paranormal experiences since as long as recorded history has existed. Conversely, philosophical intuitions have been reported by a comparatively tiny fraction of the world’s population. In fact, contemporary descriptions of intuitions are recent, so projecting them onto historical descriptions of intuition may be anachronistic. We can readily distinguish between the belief that one is having a telepathic or clairvoyant experience without having to acknowledge that such mental states are real. Why, then, is it such a stretch to suppose that a small, relatively homogenous handful of academics who are all inducted into reading the same books, taking the same courses, and engaging in the same dialectical norms and practices might be confused or mistaken about certain features of their psychology?

While appeals to intuition or something intuition-like have been around in (at least Western) philosophy for a while now, it’s worth noting that philosophers have always been extremely small, insular minorities whose thinking and interests are unrepresentative of the populations they come from, that intuition-talk of the sort characteristic of contemporary analytic philosophy is culturally parochial, confined as it is to a narrow and unrepresentative bandwidth of professions, cultures, and languages, and that its explicit centrality and frequency of the explicit use of the notion of an intuition is an extremely recent phenomenon that only arose in analytic philosophy (an even more narrowly Anglophone practice, in particular) in the past few decades. And yet somehow Bookbinder thinks this faculty evolved. If it did, then presumably we should see ubiquitous, rudimentary use of philosophical intuition outside analytic philosophy. I await evidence of this, and am curious what studies confirming such intuitions would look like (this is sarcasm; I predict no evidence will be forthcoming because philosophical intuitions are not a feature of our evolved psychology).

In the meantime, why not propose that precognition or the ability to see ghosts, evolved, too? Perhaps the mental faculty of “spectroception” evolved to allow us to see and interact with ghosts. After all, Pew found that 18% of Americans claim to have seen a ghost and 29% claim to have interacted with the dead (perhaps the latter is a second mental faculty, necrophony). I’d expect seeing ghosts to be even more prominent historically and in less secular societies, so this is likely an underestimate of the global human average. The true amount is likely a very large proportion of people and is probably far more than the number of people who are remotely familiar with philosophical intuitions. Why not take these abilities as serious candidates for mental faculties? Is it because of the total lack of empirical evidence that such faculties exist? Funny, then: there’s a similar lack of evidence for the existence of philosophical intuitions, the content of which are even less clear than paranormal powers.

Maybe Bookbinder and analytic philosophers in general are satisfied with such low standards, but I am not. Once philosophers posit the existence of psychological faculties they have stepped into the realm of psychology, where claims should meet standards of scientific rigor. Bookbinder’s claim that we have a faculty of intuition follows a long list of other psychological faculties, all of which have been confirmed by substantial amounts of empirical evidence. Is there a similarly robust body of empirical evidence supporting the existence of Bookbinder’s proposed faculty?

No. There are more serious attempts to establish the existence of paranormal powers than there are serious attempts to establish the existence of “intuition” as a distinct psychological faculty. If we’re to take intuition seriously, its proponents are going to have to put more effort into grounding their claims in contemporary cognitive science than proponents of literal paranormal abilities.

Of course, if “intuition” is just a careless term for the mundane psychological faculties we already have, then “intuitions” immediately graduate from pseudoscience to mundane reality. As I said, whether we have “intuitions” or not depends on one’s account of intuitions. Some accounts may put forward dubious theses about human psychology or claim to transcend empirical claims about human cognition altogether. Others may make testable claims we could confirm that establish intuitions as a distinct phenomenon. Still others may reduce intuition-talk to mundane, preexisting psychological states which everyone, including myself, could readily accept as real.

For instance, in contrast to intuition as a sui generis “power” to “see” truth, if “intuition” is instead construed as a disposition to believe propositions that results from introspectively unavailable processes such that one cannot articulate any explicit inferential path by which one formed the disposition then I do have intuitions, and suspect virtually everyone else does, too. “Intuition” also has various mundane and acceptable uses outside philosophy. For instance, it is commonly used in the context of dual-process models of cognition that emphasize a distinction between fast, non-inferential, heuristic judgments and slower, deliberative judgments (see Evans, 2008 for review). I do think we make fast, heuristic judgments, so in that sense I endorse the existence of intuition without any issue.

If Bookbinder was inclined to say that anyone who reports not having the kinds of intuitions Bookbinder thinks there are “doesn’t have intuitions”, then I’m in good company. Even if most philosophers believe we have intuitions, they don’t agree about what intuitions are. This is because there are many conceptions of what intuitions are. If anyone believes there are intuitions that fit some other description but not Bookbinder’s, then any my-definition-or-nothing framing of the dispute would mean anyone who didn’t think of intuitions the way Bookbinder does “doesn’t have intuitions.” I don’t know if Bookbinder is making this mistake (the magic beans fallacy) or just making some other mistake instead (such as not understanding what my position is).

There’s a good chance many, perhaps even most philosophers would not endorse the kinds of intuitions I claim don’t exist. There is a whole metaphilosophical literature concerning what intuitions are and what (if any) role they play or should play in philosophy (e.g., Bealer, 1998; Bengson, 2013; 2015; Cappelen, 2012; Cohnitz & Häggqvist, 2009; Moffett, 2025; Nado, 2016; Williamson, 2004). Philosophers take a variety of different stances on these issues (if they think about them enough to take a stance), and it’s not at all clear they all think of intuitions in the way Bookbinder does. Does Bookbinder think anyone who characterizes intuitions in ways that differ from the conception of intuitions I reject is likewise “blind from birth”? If anyone suggests intuitions are something else are they likewise victims of congenital cognitive deficits? If so, it would apparently be impossible to even disagree about what intuitions are without thereby revealing one’s mental deficiencies.

I’m skeptical Bookbinder would insist on something like this, so this may be a case of just not understanding my position. But if Bookbinder thinks that denying his specific conception of intuitions is an outright denial of intuitions, then Bookbinder is making a significant error. If Bookbinder doesn’t think this, then it’s probably not accurate to say I don’t have intuitions. It’s lose-lose then, for Bookbinder: a serious error has occurred, it’s just a matter of what that error was.

Nothing in my remark suggests I can’t imagine what having a faculty of intuition would be like, either. Yet Bookbinder takes a couple other swipes at me: that I’m “angrily” denying others have something I “can’t imagine.” Note that these remarks are completely made up. Bookbinder is in no position to judge whether I’m angry about this particular issue, nor that I can’t imagine it. These are just personal digs at me, made without provocation or justification. There certainly are things that anger me in philosophy, but my personal lack of intuitions isn’t among them, any more than I am angry that I don’t have telepathy.

What role could such remarks serve? One possibility is that it is a way to try to discredit me by depicting my skepticism as rooted in emotion rather than sober reasoning. This is then coupled with my alleged inability to even imagine having this power, suggesting a kind of slack-jawed incredulity. How would Bookbinder know whether I could imagine such a thing? I read a lot of fiction and play a lot of fantasy video games. If I can imagine magic missiles, dragons, and psionics, I think I could imagine a scholarly discipline whose practitioners believe they have a mysterious power to “see” truth and have some rough idea what that would be like. The claim that I can’t imagine having intuitions is baseless. It’s just an insult. Of the two of us, I’d wager that it’s considerably more likely Bookbinder struggles to imagine other points of view such as mine, given how badly Bookbinder has mangled my views.

If you’re going to make a directed personal attack, at least make it accurate, and at least use a quote that does a better job supporting the accusation. I have stated that I don’t have intuitions on several occasions, where this should be understood to mean I don’t have the kind of sui generis notion philosophers such as Bealer (1998) endorse, not that I don’t have “intuitions” under one of many other descriptions, but I didn’t say anything like that here. Why not use one of those remarks? It would still be misleading, but at least it would appear to support Bookbinder’s insults.

There is also a question of the context in which I made the argument, which further illustrates how poor of a choice that remark was. Here is a link to the remark I made, and what it was a response to:

Note what Nathan was starting to say (the quote cuts off and isn’t available anymore), and what I was responding to: use of the term “intuition.” Even if we had “intuitions” that fit Bookbinder’s description, this is entirely consistent with objecting to use of the term. At least part of the problem with the use of the term is that philosophers don’t use it consistently within the discipline, it has a number of technical uses outside the discipline (see e.g., here), and it has a variety of colloquial or non-technical uses that philosophers are at pains to explicitly distance themselves from.

In “How ‘intuition’ exploded,” Andow (2015) shows that use of the term “intuition” exploded, not just within philosophy, but outside of it as well, where presumably many of its uses differ from those used by philosophers. Unless the practices of every discipline have radically changed in the past few decades, this suggests part of what’s going on is a linguistic phenomenon (though it’s worth noting Andow believes use of the term may have pragmatic benefits and that we should be hesitant to abandon its use; see Andow, 2017).

All this is to say that the term is used inconsistently across numerous disciplines and in everyday discourse to such an extent that it’s hard to know what anyone means when they use the term. This varied usage justifies concerns about using the term “intuition” in a way that is entirely independent of whether there are any phenomena that fit specific accounts of intuition. This objection didn’t originate with me. Nado (2016) calls it the “argument from unclear application”, and explains why people are drawn to this position:

Doubts about the very concept of intuition are rather easy to sympathize with— one merely needs to consider the bewildering variety of attempts to define it. For some, an intuition is a sui generis propositional attitude with a distinctive phenomenology; for others it is an inclination to assent to a proposition on the basis of understanding or competence; for yet others it is an empirical and theory laden judgment which occurs in the absence of conscious reflection (see for instance Bealer 1998; Sosa 1998; Devitt 2006). These examples could be greatly multiplied. It’s difficult to isolate a single feature of intuition that elicits unanimous agreement—some philosophers deny that intuition has a special phenomenology, some deny that the justification it generates is a priori, and some even deny that it is immediate or unreflective. (p. 783)

Note the point of such an objection: that the term “intuition” fails to reliably refer to anything in particular. Such an objection is not the claim that no phenomena meet any particular description, but instead the objection centers on the failure to isolate any particular account as privileged in its use of the term over others, such that we can confidently maintain that “intuitions” are such-and-such.

It is, first and foremost, a critique of our use of the term, and whether it reliably captures any particular phenomenon, which is consistent with there being a whole host of phenomena that are real but that aren’t the exclusive reference of the term and are sufficiently different from one another that use of the term would be ambiguous, unclear, and reliably mislead people.

Declaring that a term’s usages are so varied and inconsistent that it’s defective and shouldn’t be used is a practical question about how we use words, not a question of what does or doesn’t exist independent of our usage of the term. Now consider that in light of what I said:

Nathan puts it perfectly here. The use of the term “intuition” serves only to obscure matters in philosophy. Philosophers should collectively agree to stop using the term.

I am explicitly objecting to use of the term, not to the existence of any particular phenomenon. If Bookbinder isn’t committing the magic beans fallacy, my next best guess is that Bookbinder is mistaken or confused about my views. Maybe it’s a bit of both. Either way, my skepticism about intuition talk is not without precedent. Timothy Williamson (2004) characterizes intuitions as mundane and continuous with our ordinary psychological practices in a way I find unobjectionable:

What are called ‘intuitions’ in philosophy are just applications of our ordinary capacities for judgement. (p. 109)

If Williamson is right, then we don’t have any distinctive faculty of intuition; we just have ordinary judgments and some people have started to call some of them “intuitions.” Nado (2016) also references Williamson’s view of intuitions when discussing the argument from unclear application:

The term ‘intuition’, he claims, can apparently be applied to nearly any kind of judgment— Williamson argues that states we’re willing to term ‘intuitions’ need not be a priori, need not have special phenomenology, need not even be non-inferential. He concludes that ‘‘philosophers might be better off not using the word ‘intuition’ and its cognates. Their main current function is not to answer questions about the nature of the evidence but to fudge them, by appearing to provide answers without really doing so[.]” (Williamson, 2007, p. 220, as quoted in Nado, p. 783)

Is Williamson tacitly conceding that he doesn’t have “real” intuitions? Is he a victim of whatever neurological disorder I supposedly have, that renders us both blind to a priori truth? If so, this “blindness” doesn’t appear to be much of an impediment to being a successful philosopher.

These are rhetorical questions. Pending compelling evidence to the contrary, there’s no good reason to think Williamson is “blind from birth” any more than I allegedly am. Williamson and I simply don’t buy into particular accounts of what intuitions are. This does not entail that we have congenital cognitive disorders that deprive us of a “power” that Bookbinder has. But perhaps only a few philosophers possess the power of intuition. I don’t know about you, but I wonder whether it’s a mighty morphin power or just a regular one.

Any other philosophers who endorse some other conception of intuition than Bookbinder or who are skeptical of the use of the term would also be potential victims of intuition-blindness. If so, then this “blindness” may be an epidemic. For instance, Van Inwagen is another eminent philosopher who apparently wasn’t chosen by Zordon, since he proposes that intuitions could simply be:

[…] in some cases, the tendencies that make certain beliefs attractive to us, that ‘move’ us in the direction of accepting certain propositions without taking us all the way to acceptance. (1997, p. 309, as quoted in Pust, 2024)

If this is what Bookbinder means by “intuition,” then of course I have intuitions. I do think we have ordinary capacities for judgment, and I do think we have dispositions to believe things. Notably, neither of these abilities requires spandex or helmets. But what does Bookbinder mean by “intuition”?

4.0 Bookbinder’s underdescribed definition

Bookbinder characterizes intuitions as follows:

Rational intuitions are a spontaneous, rapid psychological assessment of truth and prompting to judgment about a priori propositions.

He also provides several examples of intuitions:

• 5+7=12

• It is wrong to torture puppies for fun.

• If you know something, then you believe it.

• Nothing can be both true and false at the same time in the same way.

• Cycling implies cyclists.

• Everything obligatory is also permissible.

• Impossible things never happen.

Bookbinder further describes intuition as a “mental faculty” and claims that we “evolved to have them.” Allegedly, I don’t have intuitions. But do I have the faculty Bookbinder describes? I don’t know, because I don’t think the description is sufficiently clear for me to judge one way or another. Whether anyone has intuitions of the sort Bookbinder describes will turn on details that Bookbinder doesn’t specify. For instance, if Bookbinder maintains that a non-negotiable feature of the faculty is that it is a single, functionally specialized system for dealing with all and only a priori issues, but it turns out the cognitive organization of human minds isn’t structured this way, but instead handles different judgments via different processes, then nobody has “intuitions” of the relevant sort, including Bookbinder. His use of the term “mental faculty” is singular, which suggests a single dedicated faculty. But Bookbinder simply isn’t clear about this, since later speculation about the evolution of moral intuitions points to two different mechanisms, each of which appears related only to moral intuitions. If Bookbinder maintains that intuition is facilitated by a single, dedicated faculty, then his account is on extremely shaky footing, as there’s little evidence to suggest such a thing. If, instead, “intuition” captures a range of processes, this exposes it to being a superfluous and unhelpful term that doesn’t pick out anything in particular. Worse, the brief description Bookbinder gives is likely to obscure underlying differences between the various processes that fall under the umbrella of “intuition.” If so, this raises questions about the suitability of the term, and, in any case, whether it makes sense to refer to a disparate array of processes as “intuitions” in the first place. Either way, the situation isn’t going to look hopeful for Bookbinder.

This underspecificity is one of the main reasons I am so critical of philosophical talk of intuition in the first place. Bookbinder’s own article is a Dark Specter of precisely what the problem is: philosophers engage in a kind of naïve armchair psychology but do not appear to take the challenges of identifying the actual functions and processes involved in human judgment, the importance of doing so, and how they might be relevant to philosophical methods and theorizing, anywhere near as seriously as they should. Before presenting a more general critique of Bookbinder’s account of intuition, I want to first provide my own reaction to each of the examples of intuitions that Bookbinder provides.

5.0 A case of the mundane

After presenting these examples Bookbinder adds:

Once you understood the meanings of those sentences, did you say to yourself, “I dunno… I’m going to need an argument here”? Edgelords aside, I’m going to say no. You didn’t. You read those sentences and immediately agreed, or, minimally, were strongly tempted to agree. That’s rational intuition in action.

There is some mild poisoning the well here. Bookbinder poses a question, then, instead of considering that answers may vary, simply declares what people’s answers are. He also preemptively declares anyone who questions these arguments an “Edgelord.” This is not a great way to make your case, but that isn’t my main concern with this remark. My main concern is that Bookbinder doesn’t argue or present any reasons to believe that, even if one does respond to these statements by agreeing or being tempted to agree, that they are all the product of “rational intuition.” These are presumably prototypical examples of what Bookbinder considers “rational intuitions,” yet it’s not clear to me, at least, that they share much in common and, to the extent that they do, it’s unclear why I’d think my judgment about any of these statements requires anything I’d be inclined to think of as “intuition.” Another curious feature of Bookbinder’s account is the omission of any reference to distinct phenomenology. Philosophers often claim intuitions have a distinct phenomenology, so Bookbinder not mentioning this is either an omission or another way in which his account differs from other accounts of intuition.

I also think the set of examples Bookbinder provides can be readily accounted for by other means, so there is no need to posit a faculty of intuition to account for (at least my own, and, I suspect, most other people’s) reaction to any of them. To illustrate this point, I will report my own reaction to each of Bookbinder’s examples. Consider your own reaction as well. Our reactions may differ, and that shouldn’t be surprising, since I don’t think human cognition is that homogenous, despite its similarities.

Let’s begin with the math equation:

5+7=12

I don’t have any distinct phenomenology in response to this that feels similar to my reaction to the other scenarios. Instead, my reaction to this is that it seems like something I remember in virtue of understanding basic math rules. It’s a bit like recalling the rules of a game. Granted, in this case, the game corresponds to features of everyday life: I can picture five and seven apples, putting them all in a bag, and know that there’d be twelve apples in the bag. Does this require a faculty of intuition? I don’t see why we should think it would. What if this is just an instance of recall or unconscious inference? If we can explain all the relevant psychological details by pointing to established psychological phenomena, there may be no good reason to propose intuition as an explanation. Furthermore, it’s not clear why whatever faculty I use to make this judgment is the same as the faculty used to make the rest of the judgments on the list. It very likely isn’t. Existing evidence on the cognitive processes involved in mathematical cognition already shows that they involve a range of different faculties, many of which do not overlap with linguistic and other forms of judgment that appear on Bookbinder’s list (Gaber & Schlimm, 2015). These dissociations are linked to distinct neurophysiological processes that have been explicitly recognized as distinct from those associated with language cognition:

How does the brain represent and manipulate abstract mathematical concepts? Recent evidence suggests that mathematical processing relies on specific brain areas and dissociates from language.

[…] the mere presence, within a sentence, of elementary logical operators such as quantifiers or negation did not suffice to activate math-responsive areas. Instead, quantifiers and negation impacted on activity in right angular gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus, respectively. Overall, these results support the existence of a distinct, non-linguistic cortical network for mathematical knowledge in the human brain. (Amalric & Dehaene, 2019, p. 19)

Findings like these put constraints on the respects in which there could be a “faculty of intuition” associated with both mathematical and non-mathematical judgment, since it suggests that this “faculty” would, at the very least, involve dissociable cognitive systems with distinct neurophysiological and likely functional profiles that operate semi-independently of one another.

Next, we have a moral claim:

It is wrong to torture puppies for fun.

Due to my familiarity with moral philosophy and its overuse of recycled over-the-top moral violations, at least part of my reaction to this is to recognize its role in philosophical contexts. But were I to assess this, it expresses a remark I’d readily agree with on largely expressive or subjective grounds. It doesn’t strike me as “true,” in any further sense, and is not at all like my reaction to 5+7=12. And were I in particular philosophical contexts (e.g., arguing with moral realists), I certainly would expect an argument for this, if they were to suggest this should be interpreted as a claim about what is stance-independently true.

If you know something, then you believe it.

This looks like it’s asking me to think about the relation between use of the term “know” and “believe.” This seems a bit like linguistic recall, though it might involve a bit of theorizing about what I predict people would say or think. For the most part, though, my reaction to this is, again, recall: I just remember that “knowledge” is standardly used to refer to a certain subset of beliefs that meet higher epistemic standards than many other beliefs at the very least (and would be called “justified” in philosophical parlance). So again, not much of a “rational intuition” here so much as a cautious recognition that remarks like this play a certain role in philosophy where “knowledge” is conventionally defined to entail belief. There’s no special phenomenology, and I see no particular reason to call these judgments “intuitions.”

Nothing can be both true and false at the same time in the same way.

This isn’t a phrase people typically use in everyday conversations. Instead, I’ve only seen it arise in philosophical contexts as a somewhat clumsy way of asserting that contradictions aren’t possible with a canned phrase “at the same time in the same way” to suppress pedants who come up with annoying pseudo-exceptions that describe different situations, concepts, or uses of a term. It’s a kind of anticipatory dialectical prophylactic to ensure one’s interlocutor that they mean a genuinely conflicting set of truth claims. This is just something one learns is an implication of certain standard forms of logic. No particular intuitions from me. This doesn’t feel any more intuitive (if intuition is supposed to feel a certain way) than someone saying “bishops move diagonally.” And I don’t think I need special faculties for learning rules.

Cycling implies cyclists.

This just seems to be prompting me to think about associated word meanings. If cycling is taking place this does imply the existence of someone or something doing the cycling. Why think of this as an intuition? Why do I need intuitions to understand the relations between words? For comparison, if I hear a knock at the door, this implies the existence of a knocker. Does this inference require a special mental faculty? Or is the faculty only applicable to relations between words?

Everything obligatory is also permissible.

This is a funny one: I don’t necessarily agree with this. This statement would be true in the context of specific, rigid ways of defining these terms that one might find in normative ethics: the class of actions that is “obligatory” is that set of actions one must perform, while permissible actions are actions one may perform and are not prohibited. Thus, one might maintain that, by definition, the class of actions one must perform certainly includes those actions one is permitted to perform, though this doesn’t apply in reverse: not all permissible actions are obligatory.

Again, though, all judging this to be true requires is knowing that we are speaking of these terms in a philosophical context where these meanings are stipulated, and one simply needs to know how the terms are standardly used in these contexts. This doesn’t require “rational intuition” any more than recalling the rules in Magic: The Gathering. For example, consider this statement

If one player attacks another player with a creature, and the defending player controls only tapped creatures, the defending player is unable to block the attacking creature.

Is this statement true? Yes, it is. But judging that it’s true simply involves knowing the rules of MTG. Remembering things gets the job done just fine. Just so, I remember that the terms “obligatory” and “permissible” are used in this restrictive sense in certain discourses. In ordinary language, I don’t even think this is true. Why? Because in ordinary language, “permissible” may mean that the action is allowed but not required, which would mean that all obligations aren’t permissible, since “permissible” would carry the pragmatic implication “not obligatory.” If you went and surveyed nonphilosophers about these terms, I bet you’d get mixed results. People wouldn’t have some special a priori intuition where they “figure out” or “recognize” that this statement is true. Instead, one learns that it is true given certain stipulations in specific contexts, and then one recalls this relation when speaking in those contexts. Once again, intuition is no more required for this than it would be required to know the rules of chess or bingo.

Impossible things never happen.

This is much the same as the previous sentence. If “impossible” is understood in a formal philosophical context to mean “something that cannot occur/be true,” then this is like saying “Things that cannot happen cannot happen” which is trivially true. Does it require “rational intuition” to judge this to be the case? It’s not clear to me that it does, nor is it clear how a judgment of this kind involves the same process, phenomenology, or any other features in common with the other sentences here, aside from them all involving, once one nails down what’s being asserted, something like knowledge, memory, or recognition of learned rules and patterns.

Incidentally, in ordinary discourse “impossible” is routinely used in contexts where the thing in question isn’t technically impossible at all, it’s just very hard. Think of a phrase like:

Mark did the impossible and overcame his fear.

Some of the sentences Bookbinder uses have fairly fixed meanings by design, such that there aren’t many plausible real-world contexts where their meaning would deviate (e.g., “5+7=12”), thereby allowing their truth to be fairly fixed in most contexts, whereas others derive their obvious truth from the phrase in question being understood in a distinctive, fairly narrow philosophical context where one distills the allegedly distinctive semantic content from the pragmatic features the utterance might have in everyday contexts. In both cases, whether the statement is true or not doesn’t turn on or require the use of a special faculty for “seeing” or “recognizing” the truth. It simply involves knowing the meanings of the terms in relation to one another in the relevant context.

I worry that Bookbinder and some other philosophers may think more is at play in our judgments in these cases. Perhaps, for instance, some philosophers believe there are certain logical relations between various concepts, and that we need a distinctive faculty or power for “seeing” these relations and making the appropriate inferences. But even if we had this ability, it’s not obvious to me that it would be operative in all the cases Bookbinder presents. Before reaching for the operation of such a faculty, we may wish to first rule out the role other processes may play in facilitating the appropriate judgment in a given context, such as memory and unconscious inference. In the examples Bookbinder provides, I suspect these probably do most or even all of the work for all of the examples provided. If nothing else, it is more parsimonious to rely on existing psychological processes to account for our judgment than positing new psychological phenomena.

And while the notion of “intuition” appears in ordinary language, the distinctive way Bookbinder and some other philosophers seem to use it may or may not be a feature of ordinary thought. I suspect, instead, that the use of the term “intuition” as Bookbinder employs it does not capture a natural way to speak or think. Instead, I believe that whatever phenomenology and psychological processes are involved in intuition are either an amalgamation of existing mundane processes or, at best, a novel but epistemically irrelevant learned behavior largely distinctive to academic philosophy.

In the examples Bookbinder provides, for instance, I believe these statements are only true in virtue of the meaning of the relations of the terms, which is either fairly straightforwardly presupposed in most contexts even for nonspecialists (e.g., 5+7=12), or involves a distinctive, learned process of recognizing certain rigid ways terms are used within a particular mode of discourse: namely, the discourse of contemporary analytic philosophy, where the meanings of the terms are by implication of their use in the relevant contexts intended to represent prototypical truth claims. But whereas Bookbinder or others may see one’s judgment of these statements as true to involve the substantive deployment of a faculty of “rational intuition,” what I see, instead, is a parochial, learned behavior among a highly idiosyncratic group of thinkers that is roughly similar to making grammaticality judgments or the rules of games.

I think philosophers more or less learn to engage in a kind of dialectical game, internalize the rules of that game, and then proceed to play the game. Once they’ve become accustomed to playing that game, they internalize the learned behavioral patterns associated with it, and the outputs of their judgments now feel special: distinctive to the game. As one becomes more and more accustomed to a certain routinized process, one gradually shunts explicit stepwise reasoning into the unconscious, where unconscious processes do the work. Speed chess players have learned the rules so well they don’t have to consciously think through everything to make a snap decision. Athletes don’t have to reason through how to move; they just move, going on autopilot and letting their mind and body work together to achieve their goals. Just so, the social conditioning, training, and iterative prompting within philosophical contexts makes judging philosophical topics in the appropriate contexts second nature. I believe philosophers have mistaken these experiences for a special faculty, intuition, when in reality all they’re doing is activating a learned schema.

Compare, for instance, to people who engage in glossolalia or who believe they are channeling spirits or communing with supernatural beings. One prompts the schema, then the associated body of distinctive experiences unfold. The people speaking in tongues or communing with spirits certainly believe their experiences are genuinely prompted by external forces, but they’re probably not. They’ve internalized a suite of learned processes that prompt them to react and to experience the world in the same way. I am proposing that similar processes have given rise to philosophical appeals to “intuition”: such appeals either refer to utterly mundane psychological phenomena like beliefs, judgments, or dispositions, or to learned, pseudopsychological states that will never be vindicated by a mature cognitive science any more than seeing auras will. This pseudopsychology is facilitated by the shared use of the term “intuition,” which allows these dubious practices to hide amidst mundane psychological phenomena like infected members of a herd huddling amongst their brethren in the hopes the lions won’t spot their weakness.

This underspecificity and obscurantism conceals the extent to which “intuitions” may be the output of different psychological processes. Recall the set of examples Bookbinder provides. How can we be sure judgments in all of these cases rely on the same psychological processes? And how do we know that the process in question is intuition as opposed to some other process, such as memory, mundane judgments of linguistic competence, or distinct psychological faculties associated with moral judgment (in the case of the example of torture)? What, exactly, do all of these judgments have in common? What makes them intuitions? Presumably, they’re all supposed to be a priori judgments. Well then, do we have a distinct psychological faculty specifically for dealing with a priori judgments? What if a person regards some or all of the judgments in question not to be a priori matters? What if they’re right? Is the content of human psychology to be settled by philosophical disputes? That seems odd.

What about cases where philosophers use “intuition” to refer to unambiguously empirical judgments? Are they using the term incorrectly? How was this established? And when they do make judgments on such matters, do they then draw on some other process or do they rely on the same process, anyway? Does the system address all a priori judgments, no matter how mundane? Are philosophical intuitions distinct from mundane a priori judgments about the conventional meanings of words or basic math?

To address these questions we’d need to have a clearer conception of what Bookbinder takes intuition to be so that it could be adequately subject to operationalization, then we’d need to gather the appropriate data. This simply hasn’t been done, and so, at best, Bookbinder’s account is speculative armchair psychology.

This is all too common for philosophers. They often make claims about human psychology: what we believe, how we think, what we experience, and so on, but appear disinterested or even hostile towards requests to deepen such claims with evidence about their scope, causes, and variability. Instead, they seem content to make declarations from the armchair with little to no substantive engagement with empirical data, or any appreciation for how much work it actually takes to make the sorts of claims that Bookbinder makes about vision, memory, proprioception. The number of publications on e.g., visual perception is so vast it may not be feasible to read articles at a rate faster than they’re produced. This is how the reality of human thinking actually is. Messy, unpredictable, complicated, and vast, where progress is challenging and made by fits and starts in the lab and under the microscope. What Bookbinder offers us in this article is vague, speculative, and underdeveloped. It’s not even half-baked. It’s just a pile of flour.

Perhaps Bookbinder has a wealth of empirical data supporting this account and just isn’t inclined to present it. I am betting this isn’t the case. Bookbinder appears to me to both eschew empirical approaches and to have a degree of misguided contempt for people like me who are often seen as empirically demanding. Consider the skeptic described at the outset of the article:

Skepticus: Do you have a full psychological analysis of each of these concepts along with the truth conditions for their correct application? No? Well, I guess they are just made-up armchair fantasies invented by empirically-resistant philosophers. Get back to me when you learn some social science and how to run SPSS. Until then I don’t want to hear this nonsense about you reading sentences and understanding them.

This is a caricature. What is a “full psychological analysis” exactly? While I certainly demand a lot, why is it unreasonable to do so? Did researchers content themselves with armchair descriptions of perception or memory and stop there, mocking anyone who asked questions about how these processes worked? No, they did not. And we make new discoveries all the time. Discovering human anatomy, physiology, and behavior is what eventually yielded insights into and allows us to partition the distinct features of memory: working memory, episodic memory, semantic memory, and so on.

At the same time, I wouldn’t demand all this detail merely to establish the existence of a phenomenon. I don’t think it takes much empirical evidence to show that visual perception or memory are real. It takes a lot of effort simply to document how exactly they work. It wouldn’t be hard to establish the mere existence of vision or hearing. So it shouldn’t be difficult to simply establish the existence of philosophical intuitions, if they are real. But neither Bookbinder nor anyone else has managed to do even that. They don’t even appear to be attempting to do so, or making any serious effort at all to treat psychological claims with the seriousness every other “mental faculty” Bookbinder lists has been treated by actual researchers who take their subject matters seriously.

For instance, the evidence for visual perception and memory is so vast that it’d be absurd to question whether they exist. The same cannot be said for “intuition.” Again: intuition is not defined by Bookbinder or anyone else in a way sufficiently clear to be sure what empirical data corroborating its existence or nonexistence would look like. And this is a serious problem. In the case of vision and memory, we can readily specify the counterfactuals in which these capacities did not exist; we can easily say that if they did exist, we’d expect one set of observations, and if they didn’t, we’d expect another set of observations.

Conversely, what would human psychology look like if someone did have intuitions vs. if they didn’t? It’s not at all clear, because the notion of an intuition is so woefully underspecified it’s not clear what would even constitute evidence of their existence. If, for instance, it would be a change only in phenomenology but not underlying process, then the absence of intuitions may have little functional difference. If it’s a change in process, great: which process or processes? Who knows! Because philosophers typically don’t bother to treat the subject matter the way psychologists have treated memory, visual perception, and other psychological phenomena. So, not only is the bar much lower than Bookbinder supposes, but the notion of an intuition is also so poorly developed among philosophers that it couldn’t even meet that very low bar of minimal clear operationalization.

And it’s difficult to stress just how low of a bar it is. I and any reasonable skeptic don’t demand the same level of evidence to establish that something exists as we do to establish the precise details of how, exactly, it works. Some minimal evidence of the functional role it plays in such a way that it is demonstrably distinct from other phenomena is all we’d really need. For comparison: evidence of a previously undocumented organism requires a far lower bar than comprehensive evidence of its biology, reproductive process, metabolism, behaviors, and so on. Confirmation that it isn’t some other animal will require enough detail to distinguish it from others, but we wouldn’t need to know everything about it merely to know it is a new species.

All we want of Bookbinder is the comparatively far lower bar of simply providing adequate evidence that intuitions of the relevant kind exist at all, and yet I don’t think Bookbinder can meet even this modest and reasonable request, and certainly doesn’t in this article.

This skeptic is also depicted as demanding “the truth conditions for their correct application.” I’m an empiricist and my view of concepts is heavily influenced both by contemporary views of language and cognition and by Wittgenstein. Many of us would be the least likely to demand the “correct application” of the “truth conditions” of a concept. This sounds like conceptual analysis, which skeptics like myself tend to regard as yet more of the misguided notions characteristic of analytic philosophy that we reject. Unless Bookbinder means this in a very modest sense, in which case it’s not clear why this would be unreasonable for a skeptic to request.

Some of what Bookbinder says is accurate enough, though.

Well, I guess they are just made-up armchair fantasies invented by empirically-resistant philosophers.

Yes. That’s exactly what it is. I think what Bookbinder articulates here is probably a “made-up armchair fantasy invented by empirically-resistant philosophers.” This, at least, is spot-on. I don’t know how much Bookbinder knows about social science, though, but this:

Get back to me when you learn some social science and how to run SPSS.

…is starting to look a bit dated. I’d bet some people are still using SPSS but not anyone I know. Most of the researchers I know use R. The last part of the remark is interesting, too:

Until then I don’t want to hear this nonsense about you reading sentences and understanding them.

What I find strange about this is the suggestion that opposition to intuition somehow involves opposition to the notion that someone can read sentences and understand them. And that just isn’t the case. Of course I think people can read sentences and understand them. It’s just that I would never describe this ability as something involving “intuition.” Instead, it involves an existing array of cognitive processes, such as orthographic processing and more generally memory, attention, perception, cognitive control, the ability to make inferences and predict what will come next, and so on. At no point in a description of how people understand written language do we ever need “intuitions” to make sense of anything. It might help, but that’s something you’d need to make a case for and isn’t something you’re entitled to just help yourself to without any substantive engagement with the actual empirical study of language cognition. And again, if such use overlaps with existing terminology, then the notion of “intuition” is redundant.

If it doesn’t, and some special process is involved that would be usefully labeled as an intuition, then great: then it’s going to take just as much empirical work to establish this as it has for researchers to establish all the other aspects of language cognition… which is to say, it would require actual evidence, and not made-up armchair fantasies invented by empirically-resistant philosophers. Ham-fistedly jamming your own pseudopsychological terminology into the mix when it is explanatorily superfluous and doesn’t yield any special insights or predictions or figure into any defensible model of human cognition isn’t going to fly.

Granted, people began using the term “intuition” to refer to speaker judgments about grammaticality and other aspects of language, but it’s not clear this represents a distinct faculty or feature of cognition, or that its historical usage matches Bookbinder’s use, nor is it clear that whatever is involved in such judgments is the same faculty used to make judgments in mathematics, moral philosophy, metaphysics, or modality. It’s also not clear the emergence of and use of this term in linguistics or psychology is identical to use of the term among philosophers. Nothing is clear, because Bookbinder’s characterization of intuition is obscure and underdeveloped and exhibits none of the features we’d expect of a well-developed psychological concept. It looks exactly like what one would expect non-psychologists to do if they didn’t care about clarity, rigor, or precision, and just wanted to make things up from the armchair.

But philosophers are not entitled to simply make up features of human psychology and then insist they’re real without doing any of the actual work psychologists put into distinguishing the various processes involved in human cognition. Note the hypocrisy and inconsistency that characterizes the way philosophers have handled the notion of intuition: philosophers pride themselves on drawing conceptual distinctions that people outside philosophy often dismiss as pedantic or irrelevant, yet when philosophers enter the realm of psychology with the notion of “intuitions” and “mental faculties,” they exhibit none of the same concern for rigor or conceptual clarity. Instead, we get weak, underdeveloped definitions, handwaving dismissals of concerns, and in Bookbinder’s case openly contemptuous well-poisoning against skeptics. Much of what Bookbinder is doing in this “metaphilosophical” defense of intuitions arguably isn’t even philosophy, it’s just very bad psychology, posturing, and rhetoric.

Regarding this latter point, the “skepticus” presented by Bookbinder also serves to poison the well against posts like this one. If Bookbinder can preemptively caricature us as demanding, as if this were a bad thing and as if such demands were excessive or unreasonable, it can give the impression that anyone who then raises such concerns fits the established stereotype of a grumpy skeptical grinch who’s just an overly-demanding stick in the mud. But that’s not at all what I or other skeptics are actually doing.

We’re not making unfair and asymmetrically excessive demands for Bookbinder’s notion of intuition. Quite the contrary: we’re asking Bookbinder to meet the minimum standards for establishing that the phenomenon in question is real at all. Which, again, is a far lower bar than demanding a “complete” psychological analysis. I think memory exists. Do you think I believe we have a “complete” analysis of it? Because I don’t, and even if one existed (it doesn’t), I’m not a specialist and wouldn’t know what it was. I’m not skeptical of memory in spite of this. Why? Because I’m not such a moron that I think we need a “complete” account of something merely to believe it exists. Alzheimer’s exists, and we can’t even figure out what causes it or how to get rid of it. The same could be said for many aspects of human psychology. But the evidential demands for establishing the mere existence of a phenomenon are far lower than those for establishing a “complete” understanding of it.

No, it isn’t a complete understanding that we want. Instead, we want two things. First, we want the concept to be sufficiently clear that it can be operationalized. This is the process of identifying those measures and observations that would serve as evidence of or against the hypothesized phenomenon. In other words, we first want the claim to be testable. Second, we want sufficient empirical evidence to establish that the phenomenon exists. If the conception is defined in terms of its functions or processes, then we need evidence of them. If it is hypothesized as distinct from other, existing processes, then we need a description of how it is distinct, and what empirical evidence would serve as evidence of the hypothesized phenomenon but not alternative hypotheses that involve different processes.

If it is defined in terms of its phenomenology, that may do to establish people have intuitions that at least fit that description, but it won’t tell us much about their nature, and much of the relevant work would still need to be done. After all, people report having phenomenology associated with clairvoyance and telepathy, but this fact alone is insufficient to establish that either phenomenon is real. If intuitions were merely a kind of subjective experience, independent of the processes or functions that gave rise to them, that’d be fine: I’d readily acknowledge at least some people (philosophers and people exposed to philosophy, if nobody else) have intuitions, but then we won’t know whether intuitions can do any of the philosophical work they’re put to. And that’s an important point: it’s one thing to show intuitions exist in some form; it’s another to show that the form in which they exist sustains their particular uses among philosophers. The latter would require more work than establishing mere existence. And, of course, few people are actually working to address such questions and those who do are largely ignored by academic philosophers, who apparently don’t care very much about the tools they use to do philosophy.

To put all of this in simple terms, all skeptics are demanding is that your concept be testable and then pass those tests. This is a very low bar relative to a “complete” psychological analysis. But it is still a bar many philosophers seem reluctant to even attempt to meet. Why? Because it’s still, all things considered, a high bar to meet for at least some phenomena. Take Bookbinder’s proposed notion of intuitions. Along with the many questions I’ve already posed, there are many more that we could pose:

1. What exactly is a “mental faculty”? Is it a single psychological system with a distinct functional and neurological profile, or does the “faculty” encompass a heterogeneous range of distinct processes? This is a bit like asking whether the outputs of a person’s smartphone are produced by one app, or multiple apps.

2. If this “faculty” evolved, how did it evolve? If it’s heterogeneous (i.e., if “intuitions” involve two or more distinct psychological processes), then each of the distinct processes involved would’ve been subject to unique selective pressures, would play a unique adaptive role, and may function differently than other processes. Conversely, if it’s a single system, what selective pressures gave rise to the system, what is it an adaptation for, and how do we know? Evolutionary psychological explanations are notoriously hard to support with evidence (which isn’t to say it can’t be done, but has Bookbinder or anyone else done the work? I’d be happy to take bets that the answer is “No.”) If it’s a heterogeneous set of processes, which adaptive pressures gave rise to each of the relevant subsystems that comprise intuition? And how do we know which one is in operation at any given time? And for the faculty as a whole or for each of the individual faculties, is it currently being employed for the purposes of meeting that adaptive challenge or is it operating for some other purpose? Do all of the different processes have the same epistemic status? How can claims that intuitions are reliable or ought to be trusted be sustained if different processes prompting a given intuition have a different epistemic/evidential status than other processes?

3. Is there compelling evidence that this faculty is universal or emerges early in development? Is there evidence that it is innate? Does it require enculturation or training to use? If so, what kind of cultural input or training is required, and how did we determine this? Which studies have established when and how it arises, how it develops, and what inputs are needed for it to operate normally?

4. What does it mean for the intuitions to be “rational”? Does Bookbinder mean this in the sense that Bealer (1999) does, i.e., an a priori intuition? If so, is the point to distinguish such intuitions from non-a priori intuitions like “When you remove the bricks from the foundation of a building, it will collapse”? If so, then are rational intuitions the product of one mental faculty, while non-rational intuitions are the product of one or more other mental faculties? How do we know they’re the product of different mental faculties rather than the same one?

5. Must they only be about a priori propositions? Does this include both synthetic and analytic claims? If so, and if this distinction is upheld, then are they both produced by the same faculty or different faculties? Does intuition presuppose a stance on the analytic-synthetic distinction (or the lack thereof)? If not, then does this conception of intuitions presuppose synthetic a priori truths or the legitimacy of the distinction? If so, then do all the philosophers who deny the distinction or take skeptical stances towards certain strains of the a priori also not have intuitions? Or do they have intuitions but just mistakenly think they don’t? How do our metaphilosophical commitments interact with whether we have intuitions and what kinds of intuitions we have? And if such beliefs do suggest one lacks intuitions, then given the prevalence of such skepticism among philosophers, why am I being singled out as some kind of mentally deficient person?

6. Must intuitions be spontaneous? What does that mean, exactly? This doesn’t seem consistent with how much philosophy is done, since people are often prompted to respond to cases and this often doesn’t involve a spontaneous response. And if intuitions must be spontaneous, then are responses to e.g., Mary’s Room or the trolley problem not intuitions if they aren’t spontaneous? In other words, suppose you posed the trolley problem to two people. One responds right away. Another pauses a bit before responding, suggesting some type of cognition has gone on, thereby rendering their response non-spontaneous. Is the first response an intuition but the second one isn’t? Is the second person permanently barred from having an intuition if they stick to this non-intuitive judgment when responding to the case? If these non-spontaneous judgments aren’t intuitions, what are they, and what is their evidential status compared to intuitions? Do people only have intuitions the first time they respond to a thought experiment or case? Once they know how they responded the first time, are subsequent reactions still intuitions or are they a new type of psychological state? If they’re still intuitions, then how can they be since they’re not spontaneous anymore? If they aren’t intuitions, then are philosophers supposed to catalog and track their initial response to every philosophical question prompting an intuitive reaction? What if they forget what their initial reaction was? I don’t recall how I responded to Mary’s Room the first time; that was decades ago. Whatever response I give is no longer spontaneous, so is self-knowledge of our intuitions beholden to the efficacy of our memory? Should we trust older philosophers less given how long it’s been since their initial exposure to a thought experiment? If you have an intuitive response to a certain category of cases, but become habituated to them, can you still have an intuition about similar cases, or does exposure to similar cases undermine the spontaneity of judgments in other cases? For instance, if you are already familiar with many instances of the trolley problem, can you still have an intuitive response to the organ harvest thought experiment, or is your familiarity with related sacrificial dilemmas and your internalized responses to them sufficient to render similar scenarios ones in which the cognitive processes involved no longer involve spontaneity and are thus not intuitions? And if so, does this mean philosophers are barred from having intuitions about variants of cases they’re familiar with? If not, why not? If so, this raises questions about whether and when philosophers are actually having intuitions when presented with new scenarios. If these scenarios are very similar to familiar cases, then the cognitive mechanisms involved may draw on those associations, leading them to make inferences motivated by e.g., consistency or recall. This may not even be introspectively accessible. Which brings up another worry:

7. Can a philosopher know when they’re having an intuition vs. when some other type of non-intuitive process has prompted a judgment? If not, this is a problem. If it is, how can they know? Based on what standards or criteria? In other words, if one is presented with variants of familiar thought experiments, such that one’s familiarity likely plays a role in their response, is their response still “spontaneous” or does it not count as spontaneous? After all, it may draw on mechanisms associated with memory and familiarity. If so, do people only have intuitions when presented with sufficiently novel scenarios or questions? If not, why not? If so, how do we know when a scenario is sufficiently different from one’s past encounters with similar questions? Note, too, that while semantic memory may be quite robust, episodic memory that tracks one’s prior experiences with e.g., thought experiments will often be extremely limited, such that one won’t recall, so we may lack much of the knowledge needed to know how familiar we ourselves are. In this case, how do we know whether our reactions are intuitions or non-intuitive responses drawing on unconscious familiarity? Note that the latter won’t be introspectively accessible, and so the processes may differ even if the phenomenology remains largely the same (or at least, it’s unclear why this isn’t a possibility). If so, this may make phenomenology an unreliable guide in determining whether one is having an intuition.

8. Do intuitions have to be rapid? If someone takes a while to respond to the trolley problem, is their judgment no longer an intuition? Do people who struggle or hesitate before giving a response to Mary’s Room or a Gettier case not have an intuition about it, but instead have something else? What are these non-rapid judgments if they aren’t intuitions? How rapid do they have to be? How do we determine how rapid they have to be?

9. What is a “psychological assessment” of truth? Does this imply non-psychological assessments? What are those, and how do they differ from psychological assessments?

10. Do intuitions have to be judgments about whether something is true or not? Must they in all cases be direct assessments of the truth of propositions or can intuitions be direct judgments of whether something is e.g., good, more likely, different, and so on?

11. Must intuitions prompt judgments? If so, why? Can you have an intuition but not follow this with a judgment? What exactly is “prompting” a judgment? Does this mean causing a judgment?

12. Is any judgment of the relevant kind an intuition? Is knowing the definition of a word an instance of an intuition? If so, does linguistic competence in general employ intuition? Are all mathematical judgments intuitions? What delineates what is and isn’t an intuition?

13. Do these intuitions share any distinct phenomenology? Philosophers often indicate that intuitions have a distinct phenomenology, yet this is missing from Bookbinder’s account. For instance, are they associated with a “Eureka!” or “Aha!” experience? Is this a requirement? It’s puzzling Bookbinder doesn’t mention phenomenology, given how common a feature this is. Was this an oversight and Bookbinder does think distinct phenomenology is characteristic of intuitions? If so, then one may ask whether most people in fact have such phenomenology. If not, then is Bookbinder offering an idiosyncratic account of intuitions? If so, what are the implications of this idiosyncrasy?

14. How, for any given judgment, do we know when it is the output of the mental faculty of intuition instead of the output of some other faculty, such as memory? This is especially problematic if intuition doesn’t have any particular phenomenology. And if it does, what is that phenomenology and how did we determine that most people have it (aside from people with congenital cognitive deficits like me)?

Bookbinder’s definition is not good. It leaves many questions open and he does little to address any of these questions. Some of the proposed characteristics seem inconsistent with standard characterizations of intuitions (e.g., that intuitions must be rapid), take contestable stances on the nature of intuition (e.g., that they must concern the a priori), omit characteristics often taken to be central (e.g., shared phenomenology), or are simply unclear (“psychological”).

Note that for many of the other faculties Bookbinder lists in the article, most of these questions could be answered. We know memory doesn’t involve a single system or process but a set of interacting and somewhat distinct processes that serve different functions and operate differently from one another. We’ve catalogued these processes and have a decent understanding of how they work. We have an innate capacity for memory, it does emerge early in human development, it does appear in all cultures and populations, it is unambiguously present in nonhuman organisms and shows all the hallmarks of an old and well-established aspect of cognition, and its evolutionary origins are (for the most part) fairly reasonably well understood. It can be divided into various subtypes and these are, in turn, reasonably well-understood, such that there is no legitimate controversy about whether memory is real and whether there are different kinds of memory. Memory doesn’t suffer problems related to analytic/synthetic distinctions, it doesn’t have to be spontaneous or rapid, it doesn’t require any distinct phenomenology, it doesn’t draw on an ambiguous distinction between psychological/non-psychological forms, it doesn’t have to prompt judgments, it doesn’t have to be about whether something is true or not, and we can study the physiological factors associated with and that are indicative of memory using e.g., fMRI.

Thus, unlike Bookbinder’s account of “intuition,” memory suffers little if any of the vagueness or underspecificity of Bookbinder’s account, and our understanding of it settles virtually all of the questions I posed and that aren’t answered by Bookbinder’s account. The quality, breadth, and robustness of the evidence that constitutes our understanding of memory is orders of magnitude greater than our understanding of philosophical “intuition,” and the same could be said for many of the other mental faculties Bookbinder outlines.

5.1 “Mental faculties” and the single-capacity reading

By “mental faculty” does Bookbinder mean a single, distinct psychological system? The claim that it “evolved” suggests this, since this implies it is an adaptation that resulted from specific selection pressures our ancestors faced. This would be quite a surprise, since I wasn’t aware that, in addition to avoiding predators, venomous snakes, and extreme weather, our Pleistocene predecessors also faced challenges like assessing Gettier cases and evaluating the validity of syllogisms. I’m being a bit glib here, but there’s a serious question behind this: what selective pressures gave rise to this faculty of intuition? I don’t think evolutionary psychological hypotheses are necessarily untestable or that we can’t say anything about their plausibility, but it’s a tall order to show that the faculty of intuition evolved in response to a distinctive set of selective pressures despite its extreme generality.

If this “mental faculty” is a product of evolution, then is Bookbinder presupposing a degree of modularity? If we go, for instance, with a classical conception of a modular mind, we may wonder whether the “mental faculty” in question exhibits e.g., most or all of the characteristics outlined by Fodor (1983):

1. Domain specificity

2. Mandatory operation

3. Limited central accessibility

4. Fast processing

5. Informational encapsulation

6. ‘Shallow’ outputs

7. Fixed neural architecture

8. Characteristic and specific breakdown patterns

9. Characteristic ontogenetic pace and sequencing (Robbins & Drayson, 2025)

Which of these characteristics does Bookbinder’s “faculty” exhibit? Some of them? All of them? How do we know? How was this determined? What studies support these conclusions? Presumably, given the breadth of philosophical topics we make judgments about, the faculty is supposed to be relatively domain general (but perhaps its domain is a priori judgment as a whole?). If so, does it exhibit any other of these characteristics? Or is Bookbinder thinking of the faculty in some other way? If so, what way is that? What does Bookbinder even mean by a mental faculty? I don’t know if Bookbinder takes the faculty in question to be modular or not because there just isn’t any serious engagement with what an actual psychological profile of the putative account of a faculty of intuition would even look like for anyone to meaningfully evaluate the claim being made. However, Bookbinder references another article where he discusses the evolution of moral intuitions. In this article, Bookbinder proposes that moral intuitions are a product of at least two distinct selective pressures that give rise to conflicting moral intuitions. This suggests at least two distinct, conflicting processes involved in moral intuition, and these processes are presumably distinct from the processes involved in nonmoral intuitions. This implies either that there are multiple faculties of intuition or that “the” faculty of intuition somehow receives inputs from various distinct psychological processes, each with their own adaptive origins. This makes Bookbinder’s account murkier: in what sense is intuition a “mental faculty” if it’s the product of at least three (and probably more) distinct and conflicting psychological processes?

My concern about whether intuitions are the product of one or multiple capacities is reflected in the literature. Nado likewise draws attention to what she calls the “single-capacity” account, and contrasts it with more heterogeneous accounts. According to Nado (2016):

Perhaps the clearest example of the single-capacity characterization of intuition is found in the work of George Bealer. Bealer claims that intuition forms something like a natural mental kind—that it is a “sui generis, irreducible, natural (i.e., non-Cambridge-like) propositional attitude” (Bealer 1998, 213). Specifically, Bealer holds the view that intuition is a certain sort of intellectual seeming—a conscious episode in which, upon considering some proposition P, P simply seems as though it must be true. (p. 17)

Nado points out that such intuitions are typically unified at least in terms of shared phenomenology. As Nado continues: “[…] these intellectual seemings are generally identified by reference to their possession of some distinctive sort of phenomenology” (p. 798). Given this, it is interesting that Bookbinder makes no explicit mention of phenomenology. Is Bookbinder using an idiosyncratic account of intuition? Or is this a regrettable omission? Pust likewise claims that intuitions reflect “a distinct kind of mental state with their own ‘intellectual’ phenomenology” (Pust, 2000, p. 31, as quoted in Nado, 2014, p. 18). It’s worth noting that if Bookbinder is making such a claim, then it is an open empirical question whether such a phenomenon exists and whether it is generally present among nonphilosophers. There are still other seemingly single-capacity accounts discussed in Nado (2016), so see that for reference. The general point here is that philosophers have routinely spoken as if intuition was a natural kind, or the product of a single capacity or faculty, or similarly treat philosophical intuitions as fairly homogenous. As Nado concludes:

It does appear that many philosophers, either explicitly or implicitly, consistently or inconsistently, portray intuition as a fairly natural, unified type of mental state—and treat it as such during methodological debate. (p. 20)

I quote Nado here to substantiate the impression that philosophers often speak of intuition at the very least as if it were a single capacity, and Bookbinder is no exception to this. This exposes such accounts to a dilemma: If they do think of it as a single capacity, they shoulder a considerable empirical burden to demonstrate that such a capacity exists; it isn’t something they are entitled to presume exists in the absence of adequate evidence. If, instead, they acknowledge this way of speaking was sloppy and imprecise, then they can be challenged on two grounds. First, they will have conceded that they have, in fact, been sloppy and imprecise, and are thus not in a good position to express such contempt for critics like myself for drawing attention to their sloppiness. And second, if the category of intuition truly is heterogeneous, this opens the door to it being heterogeneous in a way that exposes it to precisely the kinds of challenges raised here, not the least of which is that what can be said of one subset of intuitions or the processes involved in those intuitions may or may not generalize to others, and this puts philosophers in a poor position to make bold and sweeping claims about the reliability or evidential status of intuitions as a general category. They will instead have to handle intuitions on a case-by-case basis, and, insofar as this holds true, teasing apart the empirical underpinnings of the processes that produce different intuitive outputs will become necessary…which is to say that it will be necessary for philosophers to actually take psychology seriously, which, if nothing else, is the main lesson I want to push in contrast to Bookbinder, who seems dismissive of and impatient with the notion that the empirical details matter.

The single-capacity account has very little going for it, and Bookbinder’s other article talking about the evolution of moral intuitions suggests a heterogeneous conception of intuition, so it’s likely that language suggesting a single faculty is just an imprecise and misleading way of speaking about intuition. If it’s not, anyone who does consider intuitions the product of a single faculty would be committed to a dubious and unsubstantiated view of human psychology. If they opt instead for heterogeneity, then they face another set of problems. I’ve already alluded to this problem but the same output (an “intuition”) may result from different processes for different people or in different circumstances, or the outputs on the list Bookbinder provides may be the result of different mental faculties with different evolutionary histories. Recall Bookbinder’s examples of intuitions:

• 5+7=12

• It is wrong to torture puppies for fun.

• If you know something, then you believe it.

• Nothing can be both true and false at the same time in the same way.

• Cycling implies cyclists.

• Everything obligatory is also permissible.

• Impossible things never happen.

Do all of these employ the same “mental faculty” in the way other cognitive processes, such as memory and visual perception do? Or are “rational” intuitions the output of different processes? Do we know, for instance, whether the same mental faculty is involved in judging that 5+7=12 and in moral judgments, modal judgments, and semantic judgments? If so, how do we know this? This isn’t something we could readily determine through introspection. Consider, for instance, these remarks from Siegler, Adolph, and Lemaire (1996):

One of the most striking characteristics of human cognition is its variability. Both children and adults often possess multiple strategies, rules, concepts, and theories that they use to think about a given phenomenon or solve a given type of problem. For example, in such diverse domains as arithmetic, spelling, serial recall, and moral reasoning, children know and use multiple strategies. Recent trial-by-trial analyses have shown that the variability is present even in domains that have given rise to classic stage theories. Thus, when 5-year-olds are presented number conservation problems, they not only judge on the basis of the relative lengths of the rows, as stated in Piaget’s theory and virtually all developmental psychology textbooks, but also sometimes rely on the type of transformation and other times rely on the results of counting […] (p. 79).

Mathematical “intuition” alone may involve a host of distinct psychological processes, and it’s not at all clear which (if any) would be appropriately considered an “intuition.” Has Bookbinder read about or engaged with the literature on math cognition at all? I don’t know, but it doesn’t come up in the article. At best, Bookbinder is oversimplifying the cognition of intuition. At worst, Bookbinder is unaware of actual efforts to understand how judgments in these domains work.

We’ve known for decades that people employ a variety of different strategies and concepts for making judgments on a variety of topics. Whether we use any particular strategy when making a judgment about math or morality or whatever else is an open empirical question; not one that can be established by introspection or declarative fiat. And these different strategies plausibly arise from different processes; there is no good reason to presume that the exact same mental faculty is involved in judgment across all the various domains of philosophy (i.e., that the same faculty is involved in the list of examples Bookbinder provides), that this faculty is involved in related nonmoral judgments in e.g., mathematics, and that the various strategies and concepts people employ can all be subsumed by a single system.

At the same time, insofar as we could potentially obtain evidence that some of the outputs of some of our judgments are the result of well-established and distinctive “mental faculties,” such as memory, this may raise serious questions about the plausibility of Bookbinder’s proposed mental faculty of intuition from the very outset. If, for instance, semantic judgments or simple mathematical judgments are often the result of recall, then the outputs in those cases would be associated with semantic memory (Kumar, 2021). It’s not plausible that the mental faculty of intuition is identical to the faculty of semantic memory. And this is just one example; there are other processes that could be involved in math judgments that wouldn’t reasonably be called “intuition.” Do we know in any particular case in which a philosopher makes a judgment about e.g., a Gettier case or a simple application of transitivity whether they are employing semantic memory or instead relying on a distinct mental faculty of “intuition”? How would we know this? At least one common feature of intuitions is that they are non-inferential. More generally, the processes that give rise to them occur outside conscious awareness. If anything unifies intuitions, it’s that their etiology isn’t introspectively available to us. As such, they are, practically by definition, the sorts of things for which we wouldn’t know which cognitive processes produce them merely by introspecting. We’d have to do actual cognitive scientific research. And if the outputs of our judgments may or may not be intuitions depending on the processes involved, this may make it impossible to tell via introspection whether one is having an intuition or not. At the very least, it may be difficult. Unless intuitions are unified by their phenomenology and not the processes that give rise to them; but this simply trades one problem for another and, notably, Bookbinder never emphasized unity on the basis of phenomenology anyway. Simply put, proponents of intuitions face a number of dilemmas that all result in problems: if they’re arguing for a single faculty, they need to present evidence for that.

If they’re not, they need to show what processes are or are not constitutive of “intuition” and to offer criteria for how we know when an intuition is or isn’t occurring. If their basis is phenomenology alone, they’ll have to provide evidence that this phenomenology is shared by themselves and others engaging in philosophy, and there will still be relevant empirical questions about the etiology of this phenomenology: is it an innate capacity that is present among laypeople? Or is it something one must learn by studying philosophy? If so, how is it learned? And do we know the learning process instills an epistemically legitimate practice in those who subsequently develop a capacity for having or recognizing their intuitions? If not, then the capacity to have intuitions may be real only in the epistemically useless and misguided sense that people can learn to do something when they claim to see auras or communicate with God, even though what they’re doing isn’t actually seeing auras or communicating with God, but is some sort of culturally acquired hallucination or self-imposed delusion.

5.2 The evolution of intuitions

One problem closely related to the notion of intuitions being a “mental faculty” is their alleged evolutionary origins. Bookbinder claims that moral intuitions are a product of evolution and links to an article he wrote where he discusses the evolutionary origins of moral intuitions. Here is the article. Bookbinder claims that we have two distinct and conflicting sets of moral intuitions that correspond to competing moral theories. On the one hand, agent-neutral moral theories maintain that all people have the same duties and aims, regardless of their personal priorities or relationships with other people. Conversely, agent-relative theories deny this, and instead hold that obligations can vary depending on one’s relationship towards others (e.g., if I make a promise to someone, this confers a unique obligation on me, but nobody else, to fulfil that promise).

According to Bookbinder, agent-relative moral intuitions are driven by kin selection, while agent-neutral moral intuitions are driven by reciprocal altruism. Bookbinder goes on to say:

How can we resolve this conflict between agent-neutral and agent-relative theories? There’s a good reason to think that in fact we can’t, and that the dispute is irresolvable. We have fundamentally competing instincts to (1) treat everyone equally and impartially, and (2) treat our family and tribe preferentially. These instincts arise from distinct evolutionary forces.

This is puzzling for a number of reasons. Recall that Bookbinder claims that we have a faculty of intuition. Bookbinder’s remarks here suggest that moral intuitions are the product of at least two distinct and even conflicting “instincts.” Recall that we’re supposed to have a “mental faculty” that enables us to engage in a “spontaneous, rapid psychological assessment of truth and prompting to judgment about a priori propositions.” What is the connection between kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and this alleged faculty?

Kin selection and reciprocal altruism are both present in nonhuman animals. Do these animals have moral intuitions? That seems unlikely, since it would mean animals engage in a process of spontaneous, rapid “psychological” assessment of truth that prompts judgment about a priori propositions. I don’t recall Steve Irwin ever describing an animal engaging in such behavior, but perhaps naturalists have just overlooked Pyrrhonian porpoises and skeptical skunks.

In any case, kin selection and reciprocal altruism both motivate altruistic behavior without the need for prompting “spontaneous, rapid psychological assessment of truth and prompting to judgment about a priori propositions.” Such an event is not needed for animals to feed their young, or protect their nest, or to develop symbiotic relationships, unless I’m to believe moral intuitions play an integral role in the symbiotic relationship between cleaner shrimp and fish or the tendency for bears to protect their cubs. This suggests that the evolutionary processes in question aren’t adequate to account, on their own, for “moral intuition.” More must be at work psychologically than “instincts” that cause certain types of adaptive behavior under certain conditions, since such phenomena don’t require moral intuitions to function. In other words, these processes simply don’t yield moral intuitions as their output, unless we think animals have moral intuitions (they don’t), or kin selection and reciprocal altruism are sufficient to cause moral intuitions, but only in humans (but there’s no reason to think this is the case). So how, exactly, does the output of the psychological processes associated with kin selection and reciprocal altruism prompt people to have moral intuitions? And what else is involved in causing people to have moral intuitions, since these processes are not sufficient by themselves for such intuitions to occur (since, again, if they were, then animals would have moral intuitions, which they don’t).

At best, then, Bookbinder has given us an inadequate account of moral intuition, even setting aside questions of whether this account is correct or accurately accounts for how moral cognition works in the first place. I couldn’t even judge whether it’s inaccurate or not because it’s so underdeveloped that there isn’t enough substance to evaluate in the first place.

Another problem is that the outputs of these processes yield at least two subcategories of moral intuition, which suggests that intuition is facilitated by at least three processes: whatever processes are involved in nonmoral intuitions, and the two sources of moral intuition described by Bookbinder. This would suggest that the “faculty” of intuition is not the result of a distinct psychological process with a single evolutionary history, but is instead a term that operates over a number of different processes with distinct evolutionary histories. If so, why call it a “faculty”? Most of the other faculties Bookbinder describes aren’t like this. And that’s fine, as far as it goes: the faculty in question need not be served by a single psychological process, but this then raises legitimate questions about what does warrant describing it as a “faculty.” What is it that makes intuition a “mental faculty” if it isn’t the use of a distinctive psychological process? Shared function? Phenomenology? Take the case of memory. All forms of memory have a similar function: the storage and retrieval of information for later use. What unifies the various processes that comprise “the” faculty of intuition?

It’s also worth noting how Bookbinder phrases this evolutionary commentary:

Where do these intuitions come from? That’s like asking “where do these perceptions come from?” Or “where do these emotions come from?” The obvious answer is that we evolved to have them. I give a thumbnail sketch of how moral intuitions could arise here.

It’s not clear intuition is like either of these. Both perception and emotion are well-integrated into identifiable features of our bodies (eyes, ears, etc.), nervous systems, and localized brain regions (e.g., the amygdala). They have clear and complete or close analogs in nonhuman animals. None of this can be said of intuitions. There are no distinct organs associated with them (e.g., eyes, ears), and no well-established brain regions associated with them (e.g., the occipital lobe in the case of vision). Note that one might argue certain regions of the brain have been associated with system 1/system 2 processing, but the characterization of intuition prominent within psychology is not identical to the one Bookbinder is using or that is in general use among philosophers, and in any case system 2 has been associated with “intuitions” as well; see e.g., Greene’s work on “utilitarian” responses to the footbridge dilemma, which I discuss in the next section.

Furthermore, while evolution can explain kin selection and reciprocal altruism, it is unclear what specific selective pressures led to the emergence of faculties of moral intuition associated with whatever psychological processes facilitate behavior linked to kin selection and reciprocal altruism. For comparison, empirical evidence that perception evolved would not, in and of itself, be sufficient to provide evidence of a special faculty of perceptual intuition. Whatever moral intuition is, it is something in addition to the mere “instinct” to engage in altruistic behavior prompted by kin selective or reciprocally altruistic forces, once again, because animals which don’t have moral intuitions engage in these behaviors.

In addition, even if we grant that both kin selection and reciprocal altruism played some role in the development of moral “intuitions,” Bookbinder offers nothing by way of concrete and specific explanation that moves us from the vague role both selective pressures may have played in prompting certain kinds of dispositions towards certain behaviors and judgments and the specific propensity to have spontaneous, rapid evaluation of the truth of certain moral claims.

Furthermore, such an account is so far from approaching anything like an adequate account of the nature of moral psychology that it is the empirical equivalent of saying illness is caused by “bacteria and viruses.” That’s a good start. But it tells us nothing about how or why they cause illness, and, of course, not all illnesses are caused by bacteria and viruses. Just so, much of moral psychology involves, e.g., the role of controlled vs. heuristic processing, the integration of affect, reputational and social concerns and navigating social hierarchies, the role of culture in shaping and refining intuitions, the role of rationalizing, argumentation, and persuasion, the process of moralization, the role both culture and innate features of cognition play in constraints in the process of moralization, the role distinct emotions play (e.g., disgust, outrage, anger, shame, guilt, etc.), and so on. Moral psychology is replete with a vast host of considerations which would likely interact with moral “intuitions,” if there were such things.

In short, Bookbinder’s claims are armchair hypotheses for which there is little compelling evidence in the first place. It’s unclear how kin selection or reciprocal altruism could produce a priori judgments as outputs, how either process did so exclusively in humans despite their presence in nonhuman animals, that kin selection and reciprocal altruism are proposed mechanisms of natural selection that tell us little directly about the cognitive architecture that they give rise to, that these processes can produce conflicting outputs so it’s not clear how they’re supposed to form the basis of a reliable mechanism of judgment, and that both, together, would at best only account for some but not other philosophical intuitions, which would make no sense if intuition were a single mental faculty.

While Bookbinder purports to offer us a thumbnail sketch, all we’ve really received is nail clippings. Again, if you want to understand the psychology of, e.g., moral judgment, along with any ostensible moral “intuitions” we might have, this will require real work, not lazy, handwavy remarks about kin selection. And once again, I draw attention to Bookbinder preemptively describing the “skepticus” as being overly-demanding as a way of anticipating objections like this and dismissing them. It is empirically resistant, it is handwaving, and it is exactly what I’d expect of a field that talks a big game about rigor and precision, but when it engages with other fields, its proponents often show little willingness for taking the topic as seriously as is called for. Again, I am not demanding that any claims about the evolution of moral intuitions be accompanied by a “complete” account of moral psychology. I don’t think what moral psychology as a subfield has produced is remotely close to “complete.” And that’s exactly the point: despite thousands of papers and decades of research, we’re not even close to a complete account. We’re barely scratching the surface. Bookbinder’s misguided, scoffing demand for a complete account is itself an indication of his own lack of awareness of just how far his and other philosophers’ accounts come: we’re not demanding a complete account. We’re demanding something far less grandiose than that, and Bookbinder and other philosophers still don’t even come close to that incredibly low bar. What I am demanding is that if you want to claim that it’s so “obvious” that moral intuitions are a product of evolution, that sustaining such a claim requires analogous standards of precision, clarity, rigor, and comprehensiveness for psychological claims that philosophers demand of philosophy. We’d need a good operationalization of what a moral intuition is, evidence that people have them, and evidence that the content of moral intuitions, in general, was shaped by the hypothesized selection pressures.

We’d need to operationalize what a moral intuition is, and then show that they’re not the product of other selective pressures. Note, too, that evolutionary explanations only explain why a particular behavior evolved; it does not directly tell us what specific, proximal mechanisms are associated with the behavior in question. As such, an evolutionary explanation will never, by itself, be adequate to account for some aspect of human cognition such as a so-called “moral intuition.” Evolutionary explanations only explain phenomena at a particular level of explanation: they account for the selective pressures that gave rise to a behavior. They do not explain the cognitive processes that produce the behavior. And, as noted above, the evolutionary origins of a mental process alone are insufficient to evaluate its epistemic status; we’d need to know more about the proximal mechanisms involved in a given output. If, for instance, intuitions associated with kin selection are, on reflection, influenced by what we ourselves would regard as biasing factors, but intuitions associated with reciprocal altruism aren’t, what we’d have is a selective epistemic debunking of some moral intuitions but not others.

Without knowing about the proximal details, we’d be unable to know which specific processes are involved in producing the “moral intuition” that it’s permissible to save one’s child at the expense of a hundred unrelated children and the “moral intuition” involved in judging that you should abide by a contract signed with strangers. Kin selection may be involved in a disposition to have the former “intuition” and reciprocal altruism the latter, but it also matters what is actually involved in having these “intuitions.” This is almost identical to the point Greene makes regarding deontological and utilitarian judgment: processes potentially matter. Lastly, the two pressures Bookbinder mentions actually produce conflicting intuitive outputs. Why would we call systems that produce conflicting outputs the same faculty rather than two different faculties?

In short, Bookbinder’s account barely scratches the surface of the nature of moral psychology. More generally, even if we could somehow tie kin selection and reciprocal altruism to moral intuitions, a task which Bookbinder hasn’t actually done, this would still leave much of what constitutes the alleged faculty of intuition underdescribed. Many philosophical intuitions have nothing to do with morality, and we’d be very far from an account of the evolutionary history of all the other matters we allegedly have intuitions about, the cognitive processes involved, and how all of what are likely highly disparate processes constitute a single “faculty” of intuition.

5.3 Must intuitions be spontaneous?

This is a rare case where the answer may be, for the most part, “yes.” But we should still pause for a moment to consider just what to make of the notion that intuitions are spontaneous. First, there is the question of what exactly this means. Roughly, this might be taken to capture the notion that intuitions aren’t the result of conscious reasoning or explicit inference and are not the result of some external stimulus prompting the response. One might think of an intuition as spontaneous insofar as there’s a degree of immediacy not in the sense of rapidity, but in the sense of an absence of an extended causal chain between the presentation of e.g., a thought experiment, question, or proposition, and one’s reaction to it. For instance, one might present the footbridge dilemma to a student, and the student may react without taking notes, pondering the matter, or proffering reasons, but instead with a reflexive “Absolutely not!” with little to no conscious thought in the interval between processing the question and reacting to it. Of course, I’m assuming that this is roughly what Bookbinder has in mind. If we were to treat “spontaneity” as a characteristic of the way a particular mental faculty operated, we’d need to offer an operational account of what did and didn’t count as a spontaneous response.

So, must intuitions be spontaneous? Let’s grant that they must be. This nevertheless puts some constraints on what does or doesn’t count as an intuition, and it is worth noting what it doesn’t tell us. That an intuition is spontaneous doesn’t necessarily tell us that it is e.g., noninferential, since inferential processes may happen outside conscious awareness. This is, instead, a component of the phenomenology or surface presentation of intuitions. This tells us something about the processes likely to be involved; namely, that intuitions don’t involve conscious, deliberate inferential processes. But it doesn’t tell us much about what is involved in the processes that produce intuitions aside from this.

Regarding constraints, consider the standard presentation of a case or thought experiment. If you’ve never presented the trolley problem, experience machine, or other scenario to a class, you may not have encountered many people who react this way, but one common reaction is to question elements of the thought experiment:

“Can I warn the people on the track?”

“How can we be sure the machine would actually work? Can my friends or family join me in the simulated world?”

Instructors presenting thought experiments are often barraged with clarificatory questions. However they opt to handle those questions, suppose students are mollified and then respond. Are their responses still spontaneous? How much reasoning has to go on, and what kinds of reasoning, to preserve the right kind of spontaneity for a response to be a proper intuition? If these responses aren’t spontaneous, then is the student’s response not an intuition? Apparently it wouldn’t be, by definition. So what is it, then? And if we’re to exclude as intuitions any response that was preceded by a question, then does this permanently bar any philosophers who, as an undergraduate, posed a question about the trolley problem from having an intuition on the matter? And what if one reads material about the trolley problem in advance, or listens to a lecture or presentation that prompts reflection or thought? Are their reactions no longer spontaneous?

Note that this is a problem regardless of what the answer is. If the answer is that, at that point, no, their responses are not intuitions, then this creates quite the conundrum for philosophers: it would mean that many common reactions to thought experiments or cases are not proper intuitions but some other, non-intuitive state. What is the epistemic status of these states, relative to intuitions? And once a person has questioned a thought experiment or sought clarification, are they forever barred from having an intuition on the matter? Can they have intuitions later? What about their reaction to similar cases for which they’re not familiar? These are all questions philosophers should be addressing if they want to take their own accounts of intuitions seriously. And while there are papers scattered about that address some of these questions, it is small, obscure literature that is not part of standardized education in analytic philosophy and not something most philosophers are familiar with.

Take, for instance, trolley problems. Many students encounter them years before they opt to become philosophers. How do we compare all the people that have genuine intuitions about trolley problems versus those who have pseudointuitions (or whatever we want to call non-spontaneous responses)? Is one more epistemically relevant than the other? If so, why? And how did we determine this? On the basis of our intuitions? But if we’ve thought about the matter and our responses aren’t spontaneous, then we don’t even have intuitions to appeal to in order to adjudicate whether intuitions or non-spontaneous pseudointuitions are the better of the two! Perhaps at this point the only way to settle the matter is to consult people who are still naïve enough to have actual intuitions. But as Kauppinen (2007) points out, untrained laypeople are likely to commit a host of errors such as sensitivity to pragmatic features of the question such that we can’t trust their responses, either! If philosophers really took all the features they attribute to intuitions seriously, they’d recognize they face serious problems with discerning which outputs are and are not actually the product of intuitions, and further face the problem that they themselves increasingly lose touch with intuitions the more they study philosophy. Are we to instead base much of philosophy on the foggy memories philosophers have of the intuitions they once had? If not, why not? If so, then I have some bad news for philosophers about what the data says about the efficacy of memory. Whereas memory is generally reliable, this is not always the case for all kinds of memory. When a person adheres to a political ideology, their views often change in accord with changes among those who share that ideology. Yet rather than having an accurate recollection of the changes in their past political positions, people tend to distort their memory of the past, such that they are convinced they held their current political attitudes all along (Grady et al., 2023). It’s an open empirical question whether and to what extent persuasion results in a change in belief or (instead or in addition) a change in memory (Nash et al., 2015). When one’s intellectual integrity, reputation, competence, and self-identity are involved, memory distortions may be more likely to occur. All of these factors are present in the philosophical positions philosophers take. Given this, I hypothesize that philosophical positions work in much the same way as political views: philosophers, I propose, distort their recollection of their past ways of thinking to better comport with their current philosophical positions, in a sort of “That’s what I thought all along!” effect.

Returning to just the matter of intuitions about cases similar to ones a person has already been exposed to, for instance, we face a serious problem. Consider this exercise where one reacts to increasingly absurd variants of the trolley problem, such as this one:

Once you’ve reacted to a dozen or more variants of the trolley problem, is your reaction to the next variant still spontaneous? If so, why? If not, why not? How similar would it have to be to familiar thought experiments to not be spontaneous? If judgments about similar cases are still spontaneous, this has some very weird and implausible implications about human psychology. If it isn’t, and if conscious reflection, theorizing, and so on strips one of a capacity for spontaneity in reaction to new cases that are similar to previous cases, then this would mean that professional philosophers are almost incapable of having new intuitions, unless and only unless the cases they were presented with were sufficiently novel. And yet philosophers routinely speak of their intuitive reactions to e.g., new variants of Gettier cases or trolley problems. Why should we take them at their word? Are their responses not heavily informed by prior theorizing and thus not spontaneous at all?

If one’s reactions to such cases would, at that point, not be spontaneous, it’s worth noting that senior philosophers have encountered so many thought experiments, cases, and propositions that solicited intuitive reactions that perhaps none of their reactions are especially spontaneous. This would suggest that more experienced philosophers put further and further temporal distance between themselves and any direct experience of having an intuition with time. Quite a strange state of affairs if the primary tool of philosophy is intuition. If, on the other hand, philosophers can continue to have intuitions in their dotage, one has to wonder: in what sense are any of their reactions genuinely spontaneous?

There’s a phenomenon in psychology known as practice effects. Here is a standard definition:

Practice effects are characteristic of serial neurocognitive assessments, including those used in clinical trials. They refer to changes in test performance attributed to increasing familiarity with and exposure to test instruments, paradigms, and items. (Goldberg et al., 2015)

As the authors in this and many other articles note, practice effects can have a significant effect on efforts to obtain robust data about participants in psychological research. This is because repeated exposure to stimuli, and the resulting familiarity that accompanies such exposure, alters the psychological processes associated with one’s engagement with the same stimuli. Think about, for instance, the experience of watching a movie with a plot twist a second time as opposed to the first time: does your way of experiencing and engaging with the movie differ? It absolutely does. Now imagine how you’d react to a movie on viewing it a dozen times, or a hundred times. It would be remarkable if you reacted the same way as the first time.

Philosophers are exposed to countless prompts for intuitions. It is incredibly unlikely that the psychological processes involved in a moral philosopher’s engagement with the trolley problem after thirty years are identical to the psychological processes involved in their initial exposure to that same problem. And yet philosophers still routinely speak of their intuitions about these cases. It is unlikely, if intuitions are spontaneous, that they actually still have intuitions about these cases. Instead, they have…what? A memory of what their intuitions once were? And as I alluded to earlier, memory is not necessarily very reliable.

If philosophers still believe they are having intuitive responses to these cases, this challenges the notion that intuitions are necessarily spontaneous. But perhaps philosophers are instead engaged in reporting a kind of pseudointuition, some sort of roleplaying where they speak as if they were experiencing the case prompting a reaction for the first time.

Philosophers may still find themselves disposed to react the same way to the footbridge dilemma or Mary’s Room as they did when they were an undergraduate, but the psychological processes involved in reporting their stance on the case for the thousandth time couldn’t plausibly be spontaneous unless Bookbinder and philosophers generally mean something profoundly idiosyncratic by “spontaneous” or if philosophers reliably suffer from an acute case of localized amnesia. Neither of these is very likely, so I suspect that philosophers continue to report having “intuitions” about cases long after they actually have intuitions about them, and instead treat the ossified recollection of their initial reactions as “intuitions” even when the genuine intuitions are mere ghosts located in a distant, faded past.

Might practice effects undermine the reliability of philosophical judgment? Might the psychological processes or faculties involved in latter-day reactions to what one once had intuitions about have a different epistemic status than one’s initial intuitions? We don’t know, because we have no substantive data on these questions, and we don’t have such data because academic philosophy tends to foster so much complacency, dismissiveness, and ignorance about its overlaps with psychology that few people are asking such questions and even fewer are bothering to try to answer them.

Despite its alleged reliance on intuition, philosophers generally don’t seem keen on exploring the implications of which faculties (whatever a “faculty” is) are involved in which judgments, under what circumstances, given this or that type of training or familiarity, and what the epistemic relevance of those changes and variations might be. It’s ridiculous. Imagine if carpenters had little interest in what wood was or how saws and nails worked. Imagine if astronomers had little interest in how to use telescopes. Imagine if doctors were bored and disinterested in anatomy and biology and were dismissive towards colleagues who suggested maybe if they wanted to cure illness, they should figure out how it worked. This is the equivalent of where contemporary analytic philosophy broadly stands in relation to intuitions. The general treatment of the very tool on which the entire discipline allegedly rests is utterly facile. It is treated as an afterthought to be dealt with in a grudging and cursory manner so they can get back to the real work of carving out yet another pointless position in a saturated landscape of empty formalization masquerading as serious contributions to human knowledge.

5.4 Must intuitions be rapid?

Another problem is that it’s unlikely philosophers would generally agree that intuitions must be rapid, even though this is prominently featured in Bookbinder’s definition. Take, for instance, Josh Greene’s work on the dual process model of moral cognition (Greene, 2007). According to this account, there are two distinct systems for generating moral judgments: a fast, less reflective, more automatic, heuristic-based system and a slower, more deliberative system. Greene’s work purports to show that deontological judgment is often associated with the former, more “intuitive” system, while the latter system is involved in utilitarian judgment. Some findings suggest people take longer to arrive at moral judgments when they make utilitarian decisions and that people lean more on deontological judgment when under cognitive load (Greene et al., 2008). Greene also claims that these systems are associated with activity in different regions of the brain, which would likewise support the contention that distinct cognitive processes are involved in deontological and utilitarian moral judgments (Greene, 2008; 2009).

I don’t endorse Greene’s dual process model. It might be correct in some or even all respects, but Greene’s account has faced heavy criticism (e.g., Berker, 2009; Bluhm, 2014; Kahane, 2012). It’s not clear utilitarian judgment is slower (Baron & Gürçay, 2017), there are questions about the neuroscientific data Greene presents (Kahane et al., 2012), and, perhaps most devastatingly, it’s not even clear people who choose the “utilitarian” response in sacrificial dilemmas are motivated by utilitarianism (Kahane et al., 2015). My point in highlighting this example is not because I think it’s correct, but because it shows what a serious effort to examine the processes involved in traditionally “philosophical” judgments looks like. At the same time, even if it’s incorrect, it shows that at least some prominent philosophers regard what are, by definition, slower and more deliberative processes as intuitions. After all, Greene and others presumably consider utilitarians to have contrary intuitions when they conclude that we should maximize utility, despite apparently relying on a system that isn’t rapid. It would be quite a surprise for philosophers to object to utilitarianism on the ground that the output of utilitarian judgments carry less epistemic weight because they’re the product of a cognitive system that isn’t rapid, and thus fails to meet the criteria for being an intuition in the first place.

Furthermore, if Greene’s model were correct, it would suggest at least some traditionally philosophical judgments central to the discipline, i.e., utilitarian judgments, are not the result of intuitions, since such judgments are not spontaneous or rapid. If philosophers take intuitions as evidence, then, we’d need to do additional work to figure out which cognitive systems any given judgment is an output of, so we can determine whether the judgment is an intuition and therefore enjoys the evidential status of intuitions, or not, in which case it doesn’t (even if it enjoys greater evidential status for being some other kind of mental state, whatever that might be). In other words, this is lose-lose. Either these judgments are treated as intuitions, in which case intuitions aren’t rapid and Bookbinder has given us a bad definition. Or they aren’t intuitions, in which case much of what philosophers say is confused, misguided, or inconsistent, and large swaths of what philosophers take to be intuitions aren’t. And somehow, nobody noticed this for decades. At the same time, it would also mean that philosophers would have to do empirical work to figure out whether a given philosophical judgment was the result of a rapid cognitive system or not, so they could determine whether it was an intuition, and thereby confer on it the appropriate epistemic standing that it has. And is all of this supposed to not be available via introspection? How is it, if utilitarian judgments aren’t intuitions, that no utilitarians ever noticed they weren’t having intuitions for the past few centuries? Why would it require Greene’s fMRI data to reveal that what we all thought were intuitions weren’t? This is a problem. If utilitarian judgments aren’t intuitions, then philosophy is dependent on psychology to determine which philosophical judgments are intuitions. If they are intuitions, then intuitions aren’t rapid and Bookbinder will have to revise the definition.

Mainstream analytic philosophers don’t seem quick to do this, and I doubt they’d ever get on board with doing so, even if this would make sense given the rest of their stated commitments. I suspect, instead, they prefer to just sloppily refer to a whole range of judgments and psychological states as “intuitions” and just be uncharacteristically imprecise about the cognitive processes associated with these “intuitions.” Philosophers, by and large, just don’t want to do the legwork of actually getting clear on the psychology behind what they do. I don’t think they have any obligation to do so (and the rest of us are likewise not obliged to take them very seriously when they don’t), but if they want to make claims about psychology, why not do so with the same rigor, care, and caution they take when it comes to doing philosophy itself?

Another important feature of Greene’s account is that if two types of moral judgments are the result of two different psychological systems (or “faculties”), then their epistemic status may differ. Greene also endeavors to show that the fast, intuitive “system 1” processes associated with deontological judgment are more vulnerable to biases than the slower, deliberative “system 2” processes associated with utilitarian judgment. If this were the case, it may asymmetrically undermine some moral judgments but not others (Greene, 2014). This would provide some indirect support for utilitarianism over deontology, in that the latter was largely the product of a distinctively compromised “mental faculty.” If we just blithely ignore the processes involved and declare every judgment in the vicinity of philosophy an “intuition” without concerning ourselves with the processes involved, we may potentially overlook possibilities like this.

This is why it’s important to get clear on what we’re talking about: knowing which judgments are the outputs of which process is relevant to their epistemic status. More generally, we’re just not able to simply declare that the various judgments on the list Bookbinder provides are the result of the same mental faculty, and that this mental faculty operates in the same way across all these distinct outputs.

As an analogy, consider your phone. Does every app on your phone do the same thing? No. Each operates in its own distinct way, can perform specific functions, and can’t perform others. Apps are specialized. It would make no sense to ignore these differences. Likewise, we can’t just know via introspection or by declaring it to be the case that all of our so-called philosophical intuitions are the result of the same faculty; after all, at least part of the reason we even construe such judgments as intuitions is that they’re non-inferential and the internal processes that give rise to them are inaccessible to us; that we don’t know what’s causing them is one of the few characteristics intuitions do convincingly share with one another. Instead, any given intuition involving, e.g., modal judgments, moral judgments, mathematical judgments, and so on may be the product of different faculties, which may have different evolutionary histories, be more or less influenced by distinct shared, innate mechanisms, more or less influenced by enculturation and individual experience, more or less vulnerable to biases, and so on.

It’s ridiculous to just declare that intuitions are all the output of the same faculty. Whether this is true is an empirical question, and neither Bookbinder nor anyone else has done anywhere near enough research to convincingly establish that philosophical judgments all fall within the scope of the same faculty, unless “faculty” is being used so loosely as to not be an especially meaningful descriptor in the first place, which would introduce its own set of problems for the account, not the least of which being that it renders the claim that I lack this “faculty” a lot more dubious: after all, claims about congenital blindness are far less plausible if the “faculty” in question isn’t innate, isn’t relatively autonomous or encapsulated in any way, and is instead a feature of general psychological processes, since I obviously possess those.

In other words, if intuitions are the product of a distinct faculty, then the claim that I have some congenital deficit whereby I lack such a faculty enjoys at least some modicum of plausibility; conversely, if it isn’t even a distinct faculty but is instead an umbrella term that operates over a host of existing faculties, then it isn’t even remotely plausible that such a “faculty” is itself innate or a product of evolution (it’s not even clear what that would mean; its components may be products of evolution but that’s not the same thing as saying the faculty itself is a product of evolution), and under such circumstances it would no longer make much sense to say I was born without “the” faculty. Which faculty? In other words, suppose philosophical “intuitions” are just a description of the outputs of judgment and reasoning that include a wide range of existing, conventional features of human psychology. If this is the case, then it makes little sense to suggest I lack such a “faculty,” since this would require me to have widespread, catastrophic cognitive deficits that would go far beyond a distinctive rejection of philosophical intuitions. I’d be profoundly brain damaged and probably unable to function normally in most contexts, much less academic contexts. I clearly don’t have such extensive deficits. While not quite a dilemma, the two most viable ways of characterizing a faculty of intuition are in tension: if it’s a single distinct faculty or draws on a narrow handful of systems or processes, then there’s little empirical evidence to suggest people possess such a thing, while if “intuitions” are instead the output of a range of existing, general processes then it’s extremely unlikely that I was born with deficits in all of these processes. This highlights a very serious problem for Bookbinder. The single faculty account isn’t plausible, but it’s the only account on which it would be defensible to claim I exhibited a deficit.

In other words, if the conception of a faculty is that of a specific cognitive module or system, it is vulnerable to the many problems of underdescription I’ve outlined, while if it isn’t, it is vulnerable to a different problem of underdescription and at the same time no longer describes a sufficiently autonomous and distinctive faculty for it to be plausible that I lack the “faculty” in question (after all, I explicitly maintain that I do have “intuitions” if they are understood to be continuous with our ordinary psychological capacities of judging and reasoning, in accord with Williamson’s description of intuitions). At the very least, either Bookbinder’s account is subject to my objections of underdescription, or Bookbinder is wrong that I don’t have a faculty of intuition, though it’s more likely that the real answer is “all of the above” and that Bookbinder has made just about every mistake I’ve proposed.

5.5 What is a psychological assessment?

Recall that Bookbinder also claims intuitions involve a “psychological assessment” of truth. What work is the term “psychological” doing here? I have no idea. My best guess is that this term is superfluous and that its inclusion is an oversight. If “psychological” is omitted from Bookbinder’s characterization it’s not clear to me that this makes a difference.

5.6 Must intuitions be judgments about what’s true or false?

Bookbinder also claims that intuitions involve assessment of truth. Must intuitions involve assessments of the truth of propositions? This seems like an oddly restrictive way of construing intuitions. Is it impossible to have the intuition that A would be better than B? Must the intuition be the intuition that the proposition “A is better than B” is true? People’s intuitions are often solicited in response to questions like these:

If a person committed a crime at exactly 3:02 PM yesterday, could they have done otherwise?

Does Smith have knowledge in this case?

Would it be wrong to push the man off the bridge?

What principles of justice would we devise behind a veil of ignorance?

In all of these cases, one can convert the question into an assessment of the truth or falsehood of one or more propositions (e.g., “Most people would endorse the difference principle”). But this isn’t typically how intuitions are presented to people. Instead, they’re presented in ways that don’t explicitly and specifically solicit judgments about the truth of propositions. When a person responds with:

“Yes”

Or

“We’d all endorse utilitarianism”

…note that these are not assessments of truth, or at least they’re not direct assessments of truth. Most of these cases could be presented as assessments of truth; my point is simply that they’re often not presented that way. So are they therefore not intuitions? If so, “intuition” is an extremely narrow and strange category, and we’d still need to account for what reactions to these cases are, if they’re not intuitions. If, instead, these are intuitions, then Bookbinder has mistakenly offered an overly narrow characterization of intuitions.

5.7 Must intuitions prompt judgments?

Bookbinder also claims that intuitions prompt “judgment about a priori propositions.” Must intuitions prompt judgment? What exactly does that mean? That intuitions cause judgments? If so…well, must they? Can one have an intuition and nevertheless not judge something to be true or false? Intuitions are often associated with or characterized as dispositions to believe propositions. A disposition may or may not entail the formation of a belief. Likewise, when intuitions are characterized as seemings, or are otherwise cashed out in terms of their experiential qualities, they likewise may not entail a judgment. But it’s not clear whether Bookbinder is implying that intuitions are causally linked to and often cause judgments, or whether they invariably cause judgments. I think the former is the more charitable and plausible interpretation, in which case this seems like a reasonable thing to say about intuitions: that they are not judgments but are causally linked to the formation of a judgment. This would be similar to how, e.g., the experience of seeing a tree tends to cause (but doesn’t necessarily cause) a belief that there is a tree.

It’s worth noting this characterization has the added implication of implying that intuitions are not, themselves, judgments. On the one hand, this adds greater specificity to the account. On the other, it distinguishes the account from any accounts which hold that intuitions are a kind of judgment.

5.8 Is Bookbinder’s definition too broad?

Bookbinder’s characterization of intuition is so broad that it seems to include just about any judgment about the meaning, concepts, or the relation between words. Maybe that isn’t a problem, but it may begin to stretch credulity that the “faculty” involved in a child recognizing and implementing grammatical rules is the same faculty involved in judging that it would still be wrong to torture people if everyone in society approved of torture, which is part of the same faculty that recognizes that 2+2=4 or that 7 is a prime number, which is in turn the output of the same faculty involved in judging that Mary learns something when she sees red. “Intuition,” as described, operates over a wide range of outputs, from mundane and simple judgments about the meanings of words to judgments about highly abstract and sophisticated counterfactuals. In what respect are all of these mental states the outputs of the same “mental faculty”? No other faculty on Bookbinder’s list is like this. Vision, nociception, memory, and so on are all functionally specialized and relatively narrow in their operative bandwidths. I’m not alone in raising such concerns. Note what Nado (2014) says about the way the term “intuition” is used among philosophers:

In this paper I will argue that this entire dialectic is somewhat misguided. The mental states which are generally assumed to fall under the category of ‘intuition’ likely comprise a highly heterogeneous group; from the point of view of psychology or of neuroscience, in fact, ‘intuitions’ appear to be generated by several fundamentally different sorts of mental processes. If this is correct, then the term ‘intuition’ may simply carve things too broadly. I will argue that it is a mistake to focus on the ‘reliability of intuition’; empirical evidence suggests that the reliability of one type of intuition may tell us next to nothing about the reliability of other types. Rather than debating the evidential status of intuition as a whole, philosophers interested in methodology would do well to focus their investigations much more narrowly. (p. 15, emphasis mine)

This does not mean Nado and I agree on the particulars. I favor a wholesale purge of the term from philosophy, while Nado adopts a more moderate perspective on the notion of intuitions. Nevertheless, while we part ways down the line, I enthusiastically endorse Nado’s efforts to draw attention to the (at least) somewhat misguided dialectic (we’d also differ in that I regard the dialectic as hopelessly and severely misguided).

5.9 Is Bookbinder’s definition too narrow?

Conversely, Bookbinder’s account of intuition may be too narrow for many of the reasons raised in other sections. Accounts of intuition often construe intuition as judgment or belief. However, one of the main limitations of Bookbinder’s account is that intuitions are characterized exclusively in terms of their role in a priori judgments. This is not how at least some other philosophers construe them. As Nado (2016) points out, Williamson (2007) claims that much of what philosophers treat as intuitions are “straightforwardly empirical,” or even “straightforwardly perceptual.” In fact, Nado continues, Williamson goes so far as to claim that intuition

[…] can apparently be applied to nearly any kind of judgment— Williamson argues that states we’re willing to term ‘intuitions’ need not be a priori, need not have special phenomenology, need not even be non-inferential. He concludes that ‘‘philosophers might be better off not using the word ‘intuition’ and its cognates. Their main current function is not to answer questions about the nature of the evidence but to fudge them, by appearing to provide answers without really doing so” (Nado, 2016, p. 783, Williamson, 2007, p. 220, as quoted in Nado, 2016)

We might dismiss Williamson’s characterization as simply mistaken (though it would be an empirical matter whether and to what extent Williamson is right about actual use of the term “intuition”), or Bookbinder or other proponents of narrower conceptions of intuitions may simply stipulate that what they mean by an intuition doesn’t include empirical judgments. However, this raises questions about the normative considerations relevant to such claims. We might be inclined to regard the actual way philosophers use the term ‘intuition’ to be relevant to making judgment calls about appropriate and inappropriate (on the grounds of being misleading) claims about what an “intuition” is. One can, of course, always declare that what one means by a term is such-and-such. I could, for instance, stipulate that what I mean by an “intuition” is a bowl of spaghetti. But that’s clearly not how anyone else uses the term and were I to adopt such idiosyncratic usage I would be rightly criticized.

Likewise, if Bookbinder’s account of intuitions is out of accord with use of the term among academic philosophers, then while Bookbinder may defensibly claim to have picked out a distinct and narrow use of the term that falls within the scope of standard (even if a minority) uses in the field, even while not representing many usages common to the field (which would put Bookbinder’s account on much firmer footing than intuitions-as-spaghetti), this would still play well into my objections. After all, if Bookbinder and some of Bookbinder’s colleagues opt to use the term in the narrow sense Bookbinder does, but many other philosophers don’t do so, and instead use “intuition” in a panoply of non-overlapping and even conflicting ways, as suggested by Williamson, this supports my objection to the use of the term on precisely those grounds that prompted the very quote from me that Bookbinder used as an example in the first place.

Recall that my objection was to use of the term intuition. If the term’s usage is so inconsistent among philosophers, what would it even mean to say one doesn’t have intuitions? What is it, exactly, that one doesn’t have? What I don’t think anyone has is a sui generis quasi-sensory capacity for “seeing” truth. What I certainly don’t think we lack is the ability to make empirical or sensory judgments, which explicitly falls within the scope of the use of the term “intuition,” according to Williamson. The sui generis capacity is magic. Empirical judgments are beans. I’m only skeptical about magic, not beans.

5.10 Do intuitions involve any distinct phenomenology?

One oddity with Bookbinder’s characterization is that there is no mention of any distinct phenomenology associated with intuitions. Some philosophers characterize intuitions as “intellectual seemings” or “appearances,” or otherwise allude to intuitions having a distinct phenomenological profile. Insofar as others might insist intuitions do have distinct phenomenology, Bookbinder’s account may be inconsistent with other conventional characteristics, or at least omit an important feature. This once again raises questions about the degree of overlap and non-overlap between Bookbinder’s and other characterizations of intuitions, and is yet further indication that characterizations vary to such an extent that it’s unclear if “intuitions” capture any distinct phenomenon and if so, what that phenomenon is.

If intuitions don’t have a distinct phenomenology, this raises another question. Bookbinder and those who offer similar accounts of “intuition” do not appear to base these claims on e.g., systematic, third-personal cognitive scientific evidence. Instead, such claims appear to be based primarily on armchair considerations. However, if intuitions don’t have a distinct phenomenology, how is one to know when one’s experiences are or are not intuitions? Their phenomenology would typically be one of the strongest signals, and in any case is often presented as one of the unifying features of intuition. If intuitions aren’t unified in this way, this raises questions about what does unify intuitions, and how people know when they’re having an intuition rather than some other mental state.

6.0 Insults & Accusations

In addition to a weak defense of intuition, Bookbinder’s insults also leave something to be desired. Recall what Bookbinder initially said about me: namely, that I don’t have intuitions and that I am:

a man, blind from birth, angrily denying that others have a power he lacks and cannot imagine.

Earlier in the article Bookbinder mentions various deficits associated with the dysfunction of the mental faculties in question. People can become blind or suffer from anosmia (the inability to smell). Their memory can be eroded by the advance of Alzheimer’s. They can have aphantasia and thereby suffer deficits or the total inability to employ mental imagery.

What’s notable about all of these examples is that we have empirical evidence of what the deficits are. We can empirically demonstrate their existence among individuals with the relevant conditions and in most cases, we can identify the etiologies of the various deficits, tracing their origins to their distinct physiological causes, including brain damage, developmental disorders, neuronal dysfunction, genetic abnormalities, and so on. No comparable body of evidence has established that I or anyone else suffers from a deficit in any analogous mental faculty for “intuition.”

With respect to the cognitive capacities we do have, there are various public means of corroborating the efficacy of the capacity in question. We can test people’s memory, visual perception, and so on. This is crucial in discerning when a person has a deficit: there is some functional ability they lack. And we can often (if not usually) identify distinct physiological differences between people who have the “power” in question and those who lack that power, or whose power is constrained or functioning abnormally. If someone is “blind from birth,” with respect to visual perception, we can demonstrate this. What demonstrations or evidence has Bookbinder offered to suggest that I, or anyone else, lack a “power” Bookbinder has? None.

What external methods do we have to corroborate the efficacy of philosophical intuitions? Yet again: none whatsoever. As such, intuitions are disanalogous to every one of the other mental faculties or “powers” Bookbinder describes in an extremely important way: we can confirm the existence and efficacy of these other faculties by means other than merely claiming to have the abilities in question.

If I lacked veriception or some other distinct “mental faculty,” great: there ought to be some physiologically detectable indicators of this. So what are they? Which parts of my brain aren’t working? What developmental abnormality do I and others who lack veriception suffer from? This is nothing like a demand for application conditions or a “full” analysis (whatever that is). No reasonable person would accept that we had proprioception or mental imagery without actual evidence that these are abilities we had, and part of that evidence comes from the deficits associated with those who lack these abilities. Evidence of visual perception is so overwhelming I don’t even need to bother providing evidence of it. If you’re reading this, there’s your evidence. Another compelling source of evidence is that we have these:

There is even a wealth of evidence confirming phenomena as comparatively obscure as aphantasia (lack of mental imagery), which was only named in 2015. See, for instance, Keogh and Pearson (2024) who report that:

In 2018 we published research showing that fifteen individuals who self-identified as having aphantasia also demonstrated a lack of sensory visual imagery when undergoing the binocular rivalry imagery paradigm, suggesting more than just a metacognitive difference. Here we update these findings with over fifty participants with aphantasia and show that there is evidence for a lack of sensory imagery in aphantasia. How the binocular rivalry paradigm scores relate to the vividness of visual imagery questionnaire (VVIQ) and how aphantasia can be confirmed is discussed.

Notably, this research is in its early days, but researchers don’t just sit on their hands complaining that a “skepticus” is demanding a “full” psychological analysis. They speculate about how else one might provide evidence that, e.g., some of those who self-report aphantasia may differ from others:

It could be interesting for future research to investigate whether these individuals who report having aphantasia, but prime binocular rivalry above 60%, likewise might also show evidence of visual imagery using other objective measures (e.g. pupillometry, skin conductance or even decoding in neuroimaging).

This is what identifying mental faculties looks like. One gives a clear account of what the faculty is, then devises methods of determining its function, in part by determining when the faculty isn’t functioning, and how we can confirm that this is the case. Note that in this case, some of the people who report aphantasia may lack conscious mental imagery yet still exhibit some of the functional indicators of having mental imagery, leading researchers to speculate that:

One interesting finding however is that approximately 12% of self-identified individuals with aphantasia had scores above 60% on the binocular rivalry priming paradigm, so it may be possible that these individuals have some form of ‘unconscious visual imagery’ that leads to priming or perhaps the differences reside in the metacognitive process of self-evaluation of imagery vividness.

Just as philosophers carve up the conceptual space into categories and subcategories, and take pride in drawing distinctions, however nitpicky, so, too, do psychologists reveal the contours of human thought by identifying potential distinctions and then presenting actual evidence for them. Is this too demanding? Would a person expecting empirical corroboration of the reality of aphantasia be making an unreasonable and excessive demand for a “full psychological analysis”? No. Researchers have expressed doubt about the reality of aphantasia precisely because it relies (like the alleged mental faculty of “intuition”) on self-report:

The field of aphantasia is still in its infancy and the veracity of self-reported aphantasia is still questioned by some due to the personal nature of visual imagery and heavy reliance on introspection and subjective reports (de Vito and Bartolomeo, 2016), although it is worth pointing out that this argument can apply to any internal experience that relies on self-report. With the rapid increase of online studies and a renewed interest in aphantasia, an important question keeps surfacing, how can we best identify or confirm aphantasia?

What the authors of this study offer is not a “full psychological analysis” of aphantasia, but enough evidence to significantly increase our confidence in the reality of the phenomenon. This is accompanied by the simultaneous acknowledgement that there’s a lot we don’t currently know, along with discussion about what we don’t know, and how we might find out about it. This is the kind of intellectual humility one might expect, or hope, from philosophers like Bookbinder, but that is notably absent. And it is also how responsible and serious people studying mental faculties approach the question. What they don’t do is:

• Assert without adequate evidence that the mental faculty in question exists

• Scoff at skeptics and caricature their perspectives

• Single out specific skeptics and insult them for doubting the existence of the faculty by suggesting (again, without evidence) that they suffer from cognitive deficits while dismissively describing them as angry, blind men flailing in futile fury at what they cannot imagine

• Deny in their comment section that they’re insulting the person in question and put them in timeout with a temporary ban when they raise objections, as Bookbinder did (and which resulted in deleting all of my comments)

Regarding this last point, Bookbinder was also clearly insulting me, and yet he denies this. When I commented on the post, Bookbinder eventually said:

If someone told me that I have aphantasia and I was unaware of it, I would not find it insulting, even if I might be astonished. You, however, relentlessly call everything you disagree with bullshit while insisting that others are bullies. This does not contribute to the conversation in a productive way. So I am banning you for a week to cool off.

Bookbinder presents himself as simply proposing the hypothesis that I have a philosophical analogue to aphantasia and indicates that I should not find the remark to be an insult but should instead find it “astonishing.” I’ve heard similar remarks from philosophers before. I’ve addressed them years ago (here) and of course acknowledge the possibility. It’s just that there’s no good reason for supposing I suffer from any sort of cognitive deficit of this kind. The kinds of cognitive deficits Bookbinder compares my alleged anoesia to involve localized and specific impairments, often associated with identifiable lesions or developmental abnormalities, or distinct functional impairments rather than global deficits. Since there’s no good evidence of a single faculty of intuition that is functionally distinct from other processes or localized in distinct regions of the brain, there’s no good reason to think one could exhibit a specific deficit of the relevant kind. Conversely, if intuitions are the product of a heterogeneous set of processes, there’d be no viable means by which one could exhibit a specific, localized deficit. As such, the accusation faces a dilemma: insofar as it is even remotely plausible as a serious hypothesis, it would saddle Bookbinder with a burden he’d be unlikely to meet, since it would heavily favor a single faculty account of intuition. Conversely, if intuition isn’t the result of one faculty but a heterogeneous range of processes that serve many distinct and non-overlapping functions, then the proposed analog to aphantasia is no longer plausible.

7.0 Conclusion

At the start of his essay, Bookbinder presents a cartoon skeptic that makes unreasonable demands. What I’ve shown is that reasonable skeptics don’t make excessive demands. We simply want claims of an alleged faculty of intuition to meet the same standard of evidence as everything else on Bookbinder’s list. Neither Bookbinder nor anyone else has yet to meet these modest standards. They don’t need to answer every question I posed in this essay; they only need to establish that the phenomenon in question exists. Yet they haven’t even managed to do that.

When confronted with these challenges, some philosophers decide to insult and denigrate their opposition, but others at least typically acknowledge doing so. Bookbinder denied this, claiming that he wouldn’t be insulted by his remarks but would instead be astonished at the suggestion that he might have the philosophical equivalent of agnosia. If Bookbinder merely intended to put forward a neutral hypothesis, there’d be no need to accompany this suggestion with antagonistic remarks. As Stan Patton put it:

The words were intended to be personally provocative & condescending, and he knew what he was doing.

I agree. It was just sneering and dismissive contempt masquerading as a psychological hypothesis. There was nothing astonishing about the suggestion. The only thing that astonishes me is how Bookbinder could fail so badly in two fields at once. Bookbinder’s defense of intuitions isn’t just bad philosophy, it’s bad psychology.

References

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Per Se

Justification Through Intuition

Dispelling Misconception…

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1.0 JPA on antirealism

Once again I’ll be responding to J. P. Andrew, this time on his updated blog post “Against Moral Anti-Realism.” In the post preceding this, JPA argued for the following:

In a previous essay, I argued that moral relativism ultimately collapses into a form of moral anti-realism. Once we deny that there exists any objective fact of the matter concerning right and wrong, the distinction between relativism and anti-realism breaks down.

As I noted there, this doesn’t make much sense. JPA defines realism as a view which holds that there are stance-independent moral facts, and relativism as the view that moral facts are stance-dependent (and thus not stance-independent) in that very post. As such, it is simply part of the stipulative definitions JPA uses that relativism is a form of antirealism. It doesn’t “collapse” into it. To say something “collapses” into something implies some kind of resistance to the categorization or pretense of non-membership. But if one lays out clear stipulative definitions there’s no legitimate basis for a relativist to reject being categorized as an antirealist. It’s a simple matter of definitions. In this post, JPA continues by raising a handful of objections towards noncognitivism and error theory. JPA presents nothing new or insightful here, just the standard textbook objections one might find in the introductory notes of an undergraduate lecture. Such objections are typically only the opening salvo in any serious discussion about these topics. As such, JPA does little to advance the case for realism and against antirealism and instead treats readers to a rather tepid set of objections.

2.0 Trivial objections

One of JPA’s first remarks continues his critical commentary on relativism:

The relativist may continue speaking as if moral claims are “true relative to a framework,” but if no framework is itself objectively correct, then morality loses any genuine claim to objectivity or authority.

This makes even less sense than the claim that relativism “collapses” into antirealism. The relativist isn’t merely continuing to speak “as if” moral claims are true relative to a framework; if relativism is true, such claims are true relative to a framework.

Generally speaking, relativists would not be speaking “as if” their claims were true relative to a framework; they just would be true relative to the frameworks in question. This isn’t the only weird thing about what JPA says. The “as if” makes no sense in light of the rest of the sentence. If I said that someone can do something “as if” X were the case, “but…” this pragmatically implies that one is going to show that X isn’t really the case. For example, suppose I said:

Alex may continue speaking as if he isn’t a liar, but he is in fact lying.

…Yet what JPA does in his remark doesn’t actually cancel the initial claim. Relativists who hold that moral claims are true relative to frameworks don’t think any frameworks are objectively correct, and don’t think that any particular framework has any “genuine claim to objectivity or authority.” That’s the whole point of the position. No framework is privileged over any other in some nonrelative way. JPA’s objection is not meaningfully different from saying something like this:

People who deny that there are objective and authoritative moral claims can continue speaking as if moral claims are not objective and authoritative, but if none of their moral claims are objective and authoritative, then morality is not objective or authoritative.

JPA is effectively arguing that a position which rejects objectivity loses any claim to objectivity. This is vacuous.

3.0 Misleading modifiers and vacuous synonymy

I also want to flag this remark:

Even many people who continue speaking in strongly moral terms nevertheless hold — either explicitly or implicitly — that moral truths do not genuinely (stance-independently) exist.

I frequently criticize realists for using misleading modifiers like “genuine” or “really” in remarks like “Antirealists don’t think that anything is genuinely wrong.” JPA’s remarks hint at him treating “genuinely” as synonymous with “stance-independent,” which, if it is, reveals how utterly vacuous these objections are. For a realist to maintain that only realism maintains that there are “genuine” moral truths is to repeat a tautology: only the view according to which there are stance-independent moral truths holds that there are stance-independent moral truths. Once again, moral realists can’t help but object to antirealism on grounds that are vacuous and trivial. It genuinely seems as though the primary objection JPA and other realists have to moral antirealism amounts to saying something like:

The problem with moral antirealism is that it rejects realism.

4.0 JPA’s bad taxonomy

JPA goes on to say that antirealism comes in two forms:

Broadly speaking, however, moral anti-realism comes in two importantly different forms. The first denies that moral judgments are truth-apt. The second grants that moral judgments are truth-apt, but insists that all such judgments are false. The former position is generally called non-cognitivism or expressivism; the latter is commonly known as error theory or metaethical nihilism.

This is already false as per JPA’s own definitions. In JPA’s previous post he defines moral realism as the view that there are at least some stance-independent moral truths. He then says “relativists reject this stance-independence,” and instead hold that moral truths are “always indexed to some standpoint.” This unambiguously makes relativism a type of antirealism as per JPA’s own definitions. And since relativism grants that moral claims are truth-apt and holds that at least some moral claims are true, it can’t be one of these other forms of antirealism. So for JPA to say these are the only kinds of antirealism is to say something inconsistent with his own terminological distinctions.

In any case, it is false that these are the only three kinds of antirealism, anyway. There is also my quietist antirealism which holds that there are no stance-independent moral truths, but also denies that antirealism must commit itself to a uniform and determinate semantic thesis about the meaning of ordinary moral claims. Since I do not think ordinary moral claims have uniform and determinate semantic content of the relevant kind, I reject relativism, noncognitivism, and error theory. JPA is operating within an outdated, presumptuous, and misguided framework in which antirealism must be framed in a way that turns fundamentally on a specific semantic thesis about the meaning of moral claims. I reject this presumption, and as such reject the framework that has caused JPA to mistakenly depict antirealism as restricted in the way he claims. Since neither I nor anyone else is obligated to accept other people’s framings of a philosophical dispute, realists who continue to insist there are only two or three antirealist positions as JPA, Huemer, and others do are helping themselves to assumptions I and others are free to reject.

5.0 A non-objection to error theory

Most of the rest of JPA’s post goes on to raise objections to noncognitivism and error theory. Since I don’t endorse either position I’m not that motivated to defend either, and so I won’t. I’ll let proponents of those views do so.

However, I will offer some indirect defense of error theory by way of objecting to remarks JPA makes in his critique of it. According to JPA:

But the error theorist faces a serious problem: our actual moral practices appear profoundly realist in character. We do not merely express preferences when engaging in moral disagreement. We argue. We attempt to justify our positions. We distinguish between moral progress and moral decline. We condemn slavery, genocide, rape, torture, and cruelty not merely as actions they happen to dislike, but as actions which genuinely ought not to occur.

This is not a legitimate objection to error theory. JPA appears to be extremely confused about what proponents of error theory hold. First, JPA correctly characterizes standard error theory:

According to the error theorist, ordinary moral discourse systematically presupposes the existence of objective moral facts — but no such facts exist.

Given this characterization, how could JPA’s preceding remarks possibly pose a problem for error theory? What, exactly, is the problem? Error theory grants that “our actual moral practices appear profoundly realist in character.” Indeed, that’s part of the definition of error theory. Error theory is a conjunction of two theses, and we can quite literally use what JPA claims is a problem for error theory as one of the conjuncts, like this:

Error theory

Thesis 1: Our actual moral practices appear profoundly realist in character.

Thesis 2: There are no stance-independent moral truths, so realism is false, so our actual moral practices are systematically erroneous.

Not only is the first thesis not a problem for error theory, error theory requires it, because if it weren’t true, there wouldn’t be anything for the error theory to hold that we’re in error about.

JPA continues with a strange remark seemingly intended to support the preceding remark:

Indeed, many self-described anti-realists continue to engage in moral discourse in unmistakably realist terms. They speak of justice, oppression, rights, exploitation, dignity, and obligation as though these concepts track something more substantial than personal preference or social convention. In practice, anti-realism is psychologically unstable. One verbally denies objective morality while continuing to reason and deliberate as though objective moral standards exist.

How is this an objection to error theory? If some of those antirealists are not error theorists, then how would this be an issue for them? And if they are error theorists, at worst this would show that at least some error theorists are dishonest, hypocritical, or inconsistent. This wouldn’t be a good objection to error theory, any more than pointing out that some Christians are dishonest, hypocritical, or inconsistent is a good objection to Christianity (which it isn’t).

The last remark JPA makes in this section is this one:

As argued previously, relativism itself collapses into anti-realism. But anti-realism does not thereby escape the ordinary pressures of moral thought. The anti-realist still faces the problem of explaining why moral discourse so persistently presents itself as truth-apt, authoritative, and action-guiding.

Well, there’s a reason I reject error theory. The problem with error theory is that it mistakenly concedes that ordinary moral thought “persistently presents itself as truth-apt, authoritative, and action-guiding.” I don’t think that it does, and JPA hasn’t shown that it does.

6.0 Antirealist commitments

JPA makes another curious remark while raising objections to evolutionary debunking arguments:

Moreover, anti-realists themselves continue to rely upon apparently objective epistemic norms concerning evidence, rationality, coherence, and justification. They distinguish good arguments from bad ones. They criticize fallacious reasoning. They regard contradictions as defects in thought. But these norms themselves appear irreducibly normative. It is far from clear that one can coherently reject objective moral normativity while continuing to presuppose objective epistemic normativity.

Notice the term “apparently.” My impression is that JPA does something many other realists mistakenly do: they observe people using normative terms and concepts in moral, epistemic, and other normative domains, then presume, with little or no evidence or justification, that this somehow warrants the presumption that these practices are “apparently objective.” This is often based on the observation that antirealists, like everyone else, appear to care what others think, have normative standards, act on those standards, make judgments about what’s good or bad, right or wrong, better or worse, and so on, disagree with others, expect others to comply with these standards and are upset when they don’t, and so on. All of this is supposed to indicate a commitment to realism in the respective domain.

It doesn’t. Nothing about such practices is even slightly inconsistent with a commitment to normative antirealism. What JPA and others observe among antirealists is them engaging in first-order normative thought, action, and discourse. This “apparent” objectivity is a mirage JPA and others project onto these practices. Notice JPA’s examples:

They distinguish good arguments from bad ones.

People can distinguish good food from bad food. This does not require them to be gastronomic realists.

They criticize fallacious reasoning.

There are professional food critics. Do they have to be gastronomic realists? No. People criticize movies, music, dance moves, color schemes for weddings, shoe design, and all manner of aesthetic and taste judgments. Criticism doesn’t imply normative realism.

They regard contradictions as defects in thought.

Chefs regard overcooked pasta or poorly cut vegetables as defects in culinary practice. Once again, this has nothing to do with normative realism. Imagine the culinary analogue to JPA’s remarks:

Moreover, people are apparently gastronomic realists. They distinguish good food from bad food. They criticize poorly seasoned dishes. They regard overcooked food as a defect in preparation.

Every one of these practices is consistent with thinking that, ultimately, what makes food good or bad is a matter of subjective preference. Nevertheless, there is enough intersubjective overlap in shared human preferences for chefs to generally converge on a broad set of norms and standards related to food preparation, and this can readily account for their propensity to speak of an overcooked steak or a poorly made sauce. Absolutely nothing about such normative evaluations requires, presupposes, or even hints at normative realism in the culinary arts.

The same is true of every other normative domain. Antirealists don’t have to endorse epistemic realism to distinguish good and bad arguments, because they can judge arguments as good or bad relative to the same epistemic standards realists think are stance-independently true. They can criticize fallacious reasoning according to the same standards for what is or isn’t a fallacy as realists. And they can regard contradictions as defects relative to the same logical precepts as realists. In every case in which a realist holds that some epistemic standard is stance-independently true, an antirealist could judge something to be good, bad, fallacious, defective, or so on relative to that standard. As such, the mere observation that someone judges things to be good, bad, fallacious, defective, and so on is not good evidence that the person is a realist.

This applies to morality as well. First-order moral discourse is just as consistent with antirealism as it is with realism. Moral antirealists face no difficulties in making moral judgments, imposing their standards on others, caring about things, thinking things are moral or immoral, and so on. There is no good reason to think that the way people speak, think, or act fits better with moral realism than antirealism.

This remark is also quite strange:

But these norms themselves appear irreducibly normative.

Appear irreducibly normative to who? If JPA is making a claim about how they appear to nonphilosophers, how does he know how these things appear to people? How many people do they appear this way to, and how did JPA figure this out? The claim that they “appear” a certain way is frustratingly underspecified, but if it is intended to apply to people in general, then it is an empirical question, and there is little empirical evidence beyond anecdotes and personal testimony, neither of which is remotely adequate to establish claims about how things seem to people in general.

And what is it about them that appears irreducibly normative to JPA? The language of “appears” is often used to invoke intuitions, as in speaking of one’s “seemings” or “appearances.” Is JPA doing that here? If so, it would be quite strange, since what JPA is talking about here are empirical observations about other people’s states of mind, i.e., he’s talking about psychology. It’d be quite strange to have an intuition or appearance of the truth of an empirical hypothesis. It’s one thing to say, “it appears to me that there is a tree over there.” It’d be quite another to say “it appears to everyone that there’s a tree over there” or something similar. The former is a direct statement about one’s own phenomenology. Even if we grant that people have privileged access to how things seem to them, this does not mean they have any access to how things seem to others. The latter is an empirical claim. How things “appear” to us provides at best only limited purchase on such questions.

If some sort of phenomenological claim isn’t what JPA means by “appear,” it’s not clear what he does mean. If it is intended to be a more conventional empirical observation, then I’d disagree, since it doesn’t appear that way to me and I don’t think it appears that way to most people. Either way, I don’t grant that normative discourse in any domain “appears” irreducibly normative. Note that JPA also asserts this without evidence or elaboration. Once again, JPA continues the habit of making unsupported assertions rather than arguing.

The last part of this quote is also an interesting one:

It is far from clear that one can coherently reject objective moral normativity while continuing to presuppose objective epistemic normativity.

JPA has not shown that anyone presupposes objective epistemic normativity. Some might, and perhaps they’d run into problems. But this isn’t a problem for me. I don’t presuppose objective epistemic normativity. And despite explicitly rejecting objective epistemic normativity, I speak, talk, and act just like epistemic realists. This is because nothing about being an antirealist about epistemic normativity requires any change in one’s first-order epistemic practices. JPA’s claim that the way others speak about epistemic norms presupposes realism is wrong, or at best unsubstantiated.

7.0 Moral realism as the best explanation

As JPA proceeds to his conclusion, he makes several claims about what moral realism explains:

Moral realism explains why moral disagreement is substantive rather than merely expressive. It explains why moral deliberation aims at getting something right rather than merely reporting attitudes. It explains why we distinguish moral progress from mere social change. And it explains why certain forms of cruelty strike us not merely as distasteful, but as genuinely wrong.

None of these claims are impressive. Let’s take a look at each of them:

Moral realism explains why moral disagreement is substantive rather than merely expressive.

What does “substantive” even mean here? If it means stance-independent, then this would be silly, because it would amount to the claim that the view according to which there are stance-independent moral truths explains why moral disagreements are disputes about stance-independent moral truths. But error theorists agree with this, so they do just as good of a job of explaining ordinary moral practice as realists do. In fact, they offer the same explanation, since they share the same view of ordinary moral discourse as realists do. They just shift the battlefield over to metaphysics and epistemology rather than semantics. Furthermore, JPA hasn’t demonstrated that most moral disagreement involves disputes about stance-independent moral truths.

Conversely, if “substantive” doesn’t mean “stance-independent” or entail or strongly imply it, then it’s unclear why antirealist accounts aren’t able to explain these “substantive disagreements” as well or better than moral realism in the first place. As I’ve argued on my blog, antirealism does provide a better explanation of most moral disagreements. You can find that article here. Most real-world moral disputes involve efforts to jockey for desired outcomes. People who think abortion is morally wrong want there to be fewer abortions, while people in favor of abortion legality want abortions to be available. Even if people were concerned about whether abortion was stance-independently moral or immoral, they’re almost always also motivated by a desire to achieve certain outcomes. There are, in other words, two different kinds of disputes:

1. Disputes about what’s true

2. Disputes about what to do

Realists appear to believe that “substantive” disagreements only concern (1), and that antirealists struggle to explain disagreements because they don’t readily account for the way in which disputes seem to center on what’s true or false. But at the very least, nobody would typically bother arguing about what’s true or false in most real-world moral circumstances unless they also cared about what to do. Prochoice and prolife activists are not merely engaging in disputes out of an idle interest in the truth. They’re not engaged in a game of idle trivia. They have agendas and want to achieve specific outcomes, such as abortion bans or the retention of abortion clinics. As such, in almost every real-world case where people are arguing about a moral issue, even if they did care about what was stance-independently true, they also care about what to do. The converse does not hold. People who care about what to do do not necessarily care about what’s stance-independently true. Antirealists still want their own moral standards realized in the world, even though they do not think their moral standards are stance-independently true.

Consider this yourself. Suppose you were convinced moral realism were false. Would you give up on all your moral and political beliefs? Would you do nothing if you had the power to stop someone from torturing or enslaving people? I predict most people would still oppose these actions even if they abandoned belief in moral realism for the simple reason that they oppose these actions on entirely subjective grounds. They don’t want people to be tortured or enslaved. Subjective preferences about what we want people to do can readily account for why anyone in everyday life bothers to argue about moral issues. And moral realists, just like everyone else, do have subjective preferences.

I’ve given this example before, but people can and do engage in substantive disputes even when there is no presumption of a stance-independent normative truth in contention. When you negotiate the price of a car, you and the seller have conflicting goals: you want to pay less, they want to charge more. You disagree on the price. Does this imply there’s a stance-independent fact of the matter about the true price of the car? Should we be car price realists? No, of course not. The price is whatever you agree it is. Does this mean you’re not engaged in a “substantive” disagreement? Only if we unhelpfully cash out “substantive” as “stance-independent” or something that similarly trivializes JPA’s claim. If we don’t, then provided (1) disputes about car prices are substantive and (2) they don’t involve a shared presumption of car price realism, then this counterexample undermines JPA’s claim.

Perhaps JPA instead means that the disagreements in question are propositional. If so, this is consistent with other cognitivist antirealist accounts, such as standard forms of relativism as well as constructivism. So while realism can explain why moral claims are propositional (assuming this is true), so can antirealism. In order to rule out antirealist accounts, JPA can’t simply present realism as a way to explain ordinary language. The mere ability to explain something says little about the merits of a position. You have to show that it explains things better than competing positions. But JPA hasn’t done this. He goes on to claim that it does a better job, though:

Anti-realism cannot adequately account for these features of moral life. Indeed, one of the most revealing facts about anti-realism is that even anti-realists continue to reason, deliberate, criticize, and condemn in thoroughly realist terms.

This is not something JPA has established, and it’s not even clear it makes sense. JPA says that antirealists reason, deliberate, criticize, and condemn in “thoroughly realist terms,” but he hasn’t shown how any of the activities he describes are “thoroughly realist.” He seems to just assume that the mere act of reasoning, deliberation, criticizing, and condemning just is somehow “realist.” This isn’t true, or at best it isn’t something JPA has shown to be true.

My best guess as to what is going on here is that JPA presumes that engaging in normative moral reasoning, deliberation, criticism, and condemnation is somehow only consistent with moral realism. It isn’t, and it is trivially easy to show that it isn’t: people routinely reason, deliberate, and make normative and evaluative judgments in nonmoral domains for which there is no credible presumption of realism. There are entire videos dedicated to arguing about what the best items on the Taco Bell menu are. People will insist the quesarito “Is the GOAT” but the cheesy roll up is “mid.” In other words, they engage in substantive arguments about which menu items are good or bad. Are we unable to explain this without positing that people are implicitly committed to realism about fast food?

They appeal to justice, rights, dignity, exploitation, and obligation as though these concepts correspond to something objective.

JPA has provided no evidence of this. All he’s done is show that they appeal to these things. What he has not shown is that they appeal to them “as though” they correspond to something objective.

Realists often immediately and without any evidence presume that people speaking about normative moral issues are implicitly appealing to objective standards. This is most likely just projection. JPA and others are, I believe, systematically misinterpreting other people by presuming without evidence that those people secretly mean what realists think they mean.

Moreover, moral realism is often treated as the philosophically suspect position requiring extraordinary defense, while anti-realism is presented as the sober or intellectually sophisticated default. But this framing is backwards.

No arguments. Just assertions.

The existence of at least some moral truths is more obvious than many philosophical theses routinely treated as secure.

We once again have an unqualified claim about how things appear or what’s obvious. I can do that, too: Moral antirealism is the most obvious position in all of philosophy. As you can see, anyone can just declare something to be obvious. Such remarks have little worth. If it’s an empirical claim, JPA hasn’t provided evidence that it’s true. If it’s a self-report, it carries little weight, since none of the rest of us are obliged to care much about what seems obvious to JPA. If it’s an intersubjective appeal to readers, then JPA will be doing little more than preaching to a choir of unspecified size. JPA follows this claim with this remark:

That torturing children for amusement is wrong is more certain than the truth of physicalism, eliminative materialism, nominalism, or any number of fashionable metaphysical doctrines.

Notice how this is a normative moral claim, not a metaethical one. I’m a moral antirealist, and I am perfectly fine saying I am more certain that torturing children for amusement is wrong than I am of the truth of physicalism, eliminative materialism, nominalism, or any other fashionable metaphysical doctrines. This is especially easy because I don’t endorse any fashionable metaphysical doctrines, while I am very confident that torturing children is wrong because when I say this, it reflects my stance on the matter, and I am confident I know what my stance on the matter is. As such, it is trivially easy for me to affirm exactly what JPA says here, as a moral antirealist.

Moral realists often drop explicit metaethical language and shift towards making normative moral claims. This can give the false impression that antirealists would disagree. Yet this makes no sense. Let’s say you’re a cultural relativist, and you are certain your culture opposes recreational child torture. Wouldn’t you therefore be certain that it’s wrong? Or suppose you’re a constructivist and given your constructivist procedures it’s certainly the case that child torture is wrong. Finally, if you’re an individual subjectivist, provided you’re certain of your own values, then it would be trivial to affirm with certainty that child torture is wrong.

In fact, one common criticism of subjectivism is precisely that it implies infallibility about one’s moral standards, which is taken to be a problem with antirealism. It’s ironic that realists will reject certain forms of antirealism for implying infallibility, while others imply only realism provides us with “certainty” about our moral standards. The general point is that it is consistent with antirealism to be more certain of one’s normative moral standards than various metaphysical positions, and just as certain as realists are; it’s even consistent with antirealism to be infallible about the wrongness of child torture.

This is also a classic example of normative entanglement. JPA’s remarks make it sound like moral antirealists aren’t as committed to or opposed to child torture as moral realists are, even though this is not true. And this is achieved by dropping explicit metaethical language and only using normative language. Once metaethical language is introduced, the claim is a lot more contestable:

That torturing children for amusement is stance-independently wrong is more certain than the truth of physicalism, eliminative materialism, nominalism, or any number of fashionable metaphysical doctrines.

Once again, this is a toothless remark. It isn’t more certain to me. If JPA is simply providing us with a self-report that he is more certain of moral realism than these positions, why should anyone else care? I don’t care. JPA’s remarks only become more unsubstantiated:

Indeed, our knowledge of at least some moral truths possesses the same kind of immediacy and certainty characteristic of ordinary perceptual knowledge.

At this point, you could break out the bingo card and start checking off the same mistakes, made over and over and over:

• Unqualified claims about intuitions, seemings, appearances, knowledge, and so on. This time we’re told “our” knowledge has certain characteristics. Who is “our”? JPA doesn’t say.

• Unsubstantiated empirical claims. In this case, JPA implies that some unspecified proportion of people have certain kinds of experiences, namely, that “knowledge” of moral truths has a “kind of immediacy” similar to perceptual knowledge. There is no good evidence any significant number of people experience morality this way.

• Assertions without arguments. Here JPA helps himself to the claim that we have knowledge of moral truths.

Then we’re treated to a self-report:

I am more certain that cruelty is genuinely wrong than I am of any philosophical argument intended to convince me otherwise.

Why should anyone care how certain JPA is? And, of course, we’re once again treated to a misleading modifier: “genuinely.” If “genuine” = “stance-independent” why not say so? If it doesn’t, then why don’t realists clarify what it means?

My own view, therefore, is not merely that moral realism is defensible, but that it is overwhelmingly and commonsensically true.

What does it mean to be “overwhelmingly true”? And what does JPA mean “commonsensically”? Is that an empirical claim about how nonphilosophers think?

Attempts to deny this invariably collapse into incoherence or else quietly rely upon the very normative assumptions they officially reject.

JPA hasn’t demonstrated either of these claims. The latter doesn’t even make sense. Antirealists don’t reject normative assumptions; they only reject the metanormative claim of stance-independence.

Indeed, I suspect that future philosophers will increasingly regard moral anti-realism as one of the great intellectual dead ends of twentieth-century philosophy — a view sustained less by obvious plausibility than by a series of contingent ideological and metaphysical assumptions inherited from a particular intellectual moment.

Ironically, I probably don’t even endorse most of the ideological and metaphysical assumptions JPA has in mind.

I make the opposite prediction. There are no good arguments for moral realism, and JPA and other realists have almost nothing but their personal intuitions to appeal to. When the house of cards that is intuition-based approaches to philosophy inevitably collapses, so too will JPA’s worldview. Not just his take on moral realism, but the entire metaphilosophical foundation on which it rests.

Alongside other excessively reductive theories characteristic of the period, anti-realism belongs in the dustbin of philosophical history. Far from representing a triumph of intellectual sophistication, it stands instead as a cautionary example of abstract theory overriding both common sense and the structure of ordinary rational life.

These are melodramatic and unsubstantiated claims JPA has done almost nothing to support. Moral realism is not a commonsense position (if that means it’s a position people typically hold or something like that) and the structure of ordinary rational life has nothing to do with normative realism. Both of those claims are empirical claims about human psychology. To my knowledge, JPA isn’t a psychologist, hasn’t conducted any research on these questions, and doesn’t present much if any empirical evidence to support either claim.

8.0 Conclusion

This critique of antirealism was disappointing. JPA doesn’t present a sustained or rigorous set of objections to antirealism. Instead, we’re given the most basic, surface-level objections to noncognitivism and error theory. Substack has enthusiastic proponents of both views. Why not engage with them or their work? Instead, JPA offers only the most perfunctory commentary on each, as if he can’t be bothered to spend more than a few minutes dismissing them. At a certain point, one has to wonder why JPA even bothers writing about antirealism at all, especially on a platform optimized for engagement with others. JPA could produce richer and more compelling critiques of antirealism if he directly engaged with antirealists. Philosophical Convictions (Ed) would be a good choice for noncognitivism, while Matt Lutz would be a good choice for error theory.

This post expands on a handful of recent notes I posted. You can see these here and here. I got some interesting replies to these, so thank you everyone for engaging.

1.0 I mean what they mean

Philosophers should be challenged when pressed to explain what they mean by some term, and they respond with:

I mean what the term ordinarily means.

Some people may find this response satisfactory. I don’t. A natural response to this would be to ask “Alright, and what does the term ordinarily mean?” Yet they may decline to answer further, stating that they’ve already addressed the question.

This should be called “semantic punting.” Semantic punting occurs whenever a person offers an indirect account of what they mean by a given term, such that it remains a potentially open question what the term means. They effectively defer, or outsource their answer to a further, unresolved question.

Before proceeding, I want to emphasize that the relevant context here is a philosophical discussion, not an everyday discussion. It would be tedious, unhelpful, and in some cases a form of disingenuous filibustering for someone to start nagging you about what you mean by ordinary terms in most ordinary contexts. What I am definitely not proposing is an exchange like the following:

Alex: Excuse me, you’re blocking the entrance to the hospital. I need to get in. Could you please allow me through?

Sam: What do you mean by need to get in? Unless you can give me a clear account of what “need” means, I’m afraid I am just going to keep standing here playing Candy Crush.

Sam is being obnoxious in this exchange. I am not talking about situations like these. Instead, consider a context where the term a person is using is central to a philosophical account they have just articulated, and it is important in assessing the merits of that account to have a solid understanding of the term in question. Furthermore, suppose they presented this account at a lecture, and are expecting and even seeking challenges from the audience.

Now suppose this person is a pragmatist, and they explicitly state that they reject correspondence and deflationary conceptions of truth, and instead endorse “a pragmatic account of truth.” It would presumably be appropriate at this point to ask them about what they mean by “truth.” If, at this point, they said “I mean what people ordinarily mean,” I hope it is clear why, at least in this context, this wouldn’t be a very helpful response.

With that context in mind, I want to highlight some common strategies people employ when pressed on what they mean by a term, following their use of semantic punting.

2.0 Mischaracterize questions as overly demanding

Sometimes they’ll interpret this as a demand for a complete conceptual analysis, or as a request to provide the sufficient and necessary conditions for the concept. This is not necessarily what the person is asking. It’s convenient to interpret people this way so you can then scoff and act like the person is making an unreasonable or impossible demand, without any good evidence that they’ve done so. In other words, one strategy is to mischaracterize an interrogator’s request for a substantive response as an excessive demand for rigor, then leverage this to depict the interrogator as making unreasonable demands you don’t have to meet.

3.0 Leverage social norms to turn audiences against the interrogator

Another thing such non-answers do is allow the philosopher to claim that they gave you an answer, which can make resistance to further inquiry appear pushy or annoying. It plays on the social norms associated with asking and answering questions. If someone asks a question, and technically you’ve given an answer, you can then leverage this fact to insist you’ve discharged your responsibility, so further questioning is pushy or inappropriate. When people can evade giving a substantive answer by giving empty non-answers, audiences can turn against the interrogator if they keep pressing for a more substantive response.

This is rhetorically useful. If you can plausibly convince audiences that you’ve already given the annoying interrogator an answer, you can punt on answering in a way that doesn’t appear (at least to some people) as obviously evasive as it is. For comparison, imagine if you asked someone: “Did you bring the money for the tickets?” and they said “Maybe.” Would this satisfy you? No. And it would also be ridiculous for them to complain about any further questioning by insisting that they “already answered you.” But if a philosopher asks a question in a debate, and the other person gives a technical-sounding but hollow response, audiences can be duped into interpreting them as having addressed the question. Then if the interrogator gets frustrated or continues to press them, the problem is with the interrogator, not the person who answered the question. The person employing this strategy can also appeal to conversational norms to insist it’s now “their turn” to ask a question, and then change the subject or put the ball back in the interrogator’s court.

4.0 You already know

Another thing people might do is insist that you already know what it means so there’s no point in asking. This sometimes manifests outside of more professional settings as mockingly asking something like “You don’t know what [term] means?” with a tone of incredulity, as if when you ask them this question you’re tacitly implying you aren’t competent at the ordinary use of the term. This is not an implication of such a question. The question is intended to prompt the person being asked to tell you what they think (and the person asking could in principle disagree). It’s not a statement asked in a context where there is a pragmatic implication that the speaker is ignorant of some shared notion, e.g., “What time is it?” The whole “You don’t know what [term] means?!” move should be treated with abject contempt. It is one of the more insufferable rhetorical moves people employ in debates.

In ordinary language, we often take the meaning of terms to be established. In contrast, philosophical discussions often turn to discussions of what our terms mean, with a recognition that different people will have different accounts of the terms they’re using. As such, asking someone what they mean is an entirely appropriate thing to do in many contexts. The goal is to figure out that person’s account, position, or characterization of contested terms or concepts. It is entirely appropriate to ask them what they mean. Simply put, in these contexts, people are not asking “What does [term] mean?” in an ordinary register, which pragmatically implies ignorance of conventional usage. Instead, they are asking “What do you mean by this term?” This is a different question, in a different context. Misinterpreting the “what do you mean” question as a “what does the term mean” question is a lazy way to evade the burden of explaining yourself. People who conflate the two are either incompetent (at least to that extent) or being strategically obtuse.

5.0 You’re a liar!

Alternatively, people may accuse you of lying or pretending to not know what a term means. This is a cheap and objectionable way to shift the focus of the conversation from their inability to convey what they mean by a term to a personal accusation against you. Many people will take the bait on this (myself included) and allow the conversation to shift into a conversation about whether they’re lying or not.

6.0 Ordinary and philosophical discourse is not the same

In any case, a substantive answer is rarely forthcoming. Ordinary language is flexible and the meanings of terms vary across contexts. It’s not very helpful to tell someone that you mean what people ordinarily mean. More importantly, it’s usually not plausible that philosophers are using terms in their ordinary sense.

Philosophers often speak as though they still have intuitions about philosophical topics they’ve thought and spoken about for years. They don’t. They might lean on the claim that they’re simply remembering their previous intuitions, but there is at least some reason to be skeptical of this. Research in political psychology shows that when people change their minds about political issues, this is often accompanied by memory distortion where they come to sincerely believe they held their new views all along. People will insist:

“I always thought gay marriage was acceptable!”

…When they definitely didn’t. This kind of memory distortion is more common when you’re a partisan that wants to remain aligned with a particular ideology or community, or when your identity is personally invested in a given view.

To the extent that philosophers closely identify with their specific philosophical views and wish to affiliate with particular communities, it is reasonable to hypothesize a strong likelihood that they, too, would be vulnerable to similar forms of memory distortion that impair their capacity to accurately recall what their pretheoretical intuitions were. Indeed, insofar as philosophers become convinced that people have pretheoretical intuitions, it is easy to see how they’d tend to interpret their pretheoretical ways of thinking through their current theoretically informed lens, and impose a theoretical commitment on their pretheoretical ways of thinking even if this isn’t accurate.

Once they start using those terms in more abstract, theoretical contexts, they often fix the meanings of those terms in comparatively rigid ways that carry philosophical presuppositions and other theoretical commitments which they have not substantiated as features of the ordinary use of the term.

Another problem is whether they take the meaning of ordinary terms to be empirical or not. If they don’t, that’s going to be a problem for anyone whose philosophical positions reject non-empirical accounts of meaning. If it is empirical, why not do the empirical work to figure out what people think?

Now suppose a philosopher says empirical work is unnecessary, because it’s obvious what people think. This will rarely make sense in the contexts in which philosophers are talking about alleged “ordinary meaning” because precisely what is in dispute is what the ordinary terms mean. Take metaethics. Are ordinary moral claims propositional or not? Do they contain implicit indexicals or not? Neither of these questions is obvious on introspection, and nobody is obligated to agree with anyone that it is unless they present compelling arguments for why it is. And if it is so obvious, then they should be able to answer the initial question about what a term ordinarily means without hedging by engaging in semantic punting.

If you ask someone what they mean by some term in a philosophical context, and they respond that they mean what ordinary people mean, there are situations where you should not accept this as a satisfactory answer. Specifically, you should question them when there is reasonable doubt about whether the way the term is used in ordinary discourse can be used in the specific ways that philosopher is using the term in the theoretical contexts in which they’re using it.

7.0 An example

I’ve seen philosophers and nonprofessionals alike make these sorts of claims. Here’s an example from Huemer:

c) I am not introducing a special usage of “seems”. I am, by stipulation, using “seems” in the ordinary English sense (whatever that is, even if I am mistaken about the nature of seemings).

Well, what is the ordinary English sense, and how does Huemer know he’s using it in that sense? And is Huemer assuming the term has one ordinary sense? If there are multiple, then which one is he using? If there’s only one, how does he know that?

Even if we grant that it is difficult to articulate what a concept means verbally, but we are still competent users of the term and so our knowledge of their use is implicit, this still isn’t going to help Huemer very much. This is because our competence only applies to the appropriate domain of discourse. A competent English speaker is competent at using the ordinary English term in ordinary language contexts. Competence in these contexts doesn’t automatically transfer to other contexts. And yet Huemer employs the term in philosophical contexts that are decidedly not instances of ordinary discourse; they are highly theoretical and occur outside the context of the everyday circumstances in which people ordinarily employ the term “seems.” If one’s understanding of the term is rooted in one’s competence with it in ordinary contexts, then transplanting the term to some other context and using it there may not make any sense. The result is that one might be using the term in ways that, if one is genuinely committed to using it to mean what it does in the ordinary sense, result in positions that are inconsistent or incoherent, while if one isn’t using it in the ordinary sense, one would have to revise their initial claim that they’re stipulating in advance that they’re using it in that way.

The latter suggestion raises a question I don’t know the answer to: is it legitimate for Huemer to stipulate that he’s using the term in its ordinary sense? It is one thing, in a theoretical context, to stipulate that all instances of a given term are intended to share the same specific meaning. But if meaning is determined in part by context and use, and you go around using a term in various ways outside that context and usage, it is not so clear that you can just stipulate what you mean.

In other words, suppose that the ordinary language term “seems” has a specific meaning, X. And suppose that it has this meaning in virtue of the conversational roles it plays in specific situations. These contexts partially determine what “seems” means, namely, that it means X, precisely because it is used to mean X in these contexts. Now suppose someone comes along and says that they are stipulating that when they use the term “seems” they mean whatever it is people mean in ordinary contexts. Naturally, in these contexts, it means X, because that’s how people use the term. But then suppose that the person who stipulated that they meant whatever ordinary people meant goes and uses the term in ways that are very different from how it is used in ordinary contexts. Well, if that’s the case, then they are not, in fact, using the term in the way it is ordinarily used.

Let me give an example. Suppose I say that by “giraffe” I mean whatever ordinary people mean when they use the term. And suppose ordinary people use the term to refer to this animal in ordinary discourse:

However, I opt to use the term outside ordinary discourse and instead use the term “giraffe” in a theoretical context. I start saying things like this:

“It is more giraffe to help people than hurt them.”

“The fundamental goal of ethics is to maximize the amount of giraffe that you do.”

…and so on. Well, I stipulated that I mean what ordinary people mean. So apparently I mean:

“It is more tall ruminant artiodactyl mammal of the Giraffidae family to help people than hurt them.”

“The fundamental goal of ethics is to maximize the amount of tall ruminant artiodactyl mammal of the Giraffidae family that you do.”

These sentences aren’t even grammatical. It is not likely anyone who made the original remarks would, on reflection, maintain that they’re committed to the latter set of claims. But this is the sort of risk you expose yourself to if you punt on the meaning of the terms, and insist you mean whatever ordinary people mean, when you apparently don’t know what they mean (and when it is even possible they don’t mean anything in particular).

Ordinary language terms don’t typically have fixed meanings that can be employed in the rigid, consistent, theoretical contexts Huemer and others employ these terms in the first place. I think Huemer and others are already operating on misguided preconceptions about the relation between ordinary language and philosophical discourse, and that these preconceptions undermine much of their philosophical work for the simple reason that if you build your philosophical views on unstable foundations, it compromises the integrity of everything that follows.

I very much doubt that ordinary talk of “seemings” could be readily regimented in a way that would vindicate how Huemer uses the term in philosophy. But I don’t know, because I don’t know what exactly ordinary people mean by the term. That’s an empirical question. Perhaps if the answer is an important one, philosophers should spend more time engaged in comparative linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and other fields that would enable them to get a better handle on ordinary thought and language.

This is a critical response to J. P. Andrew’s “The Myth of Moral Relativism.”

1.0 JPA on relativism

According to JPA,

Moral relativism is often presented as a kind of middle position between robust moral realism, on the one hand, and outright moral anti-realism, on the other. The relativist supposedly avoids the perceived dogmatism of realism while also avoiding the more radical implications of denying moral truth altogether. But this appearance is illusory. Once we examine the view carefully, moral relativism collapses into a form of anti-realism, according to which, ultimately, anything goes.

I don’t know anyone who claims that relativism occupies a middle ground. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people did, I’m just not so sure this is that common of a claim. What I find odd about this claim is that realism and antirealism are typically construed as mutually exhaustive: either your position is a realist one, or it isn’t. Things can get a bit murky with constructivist positions, but I rarely see anyone struggle to place relativism on one or the other side. As long as you’re clear about what you mean by “moral realism” and “moral relativism” it’s usually fairly easy to determine whether relativism is a form of antirealism. It’s more a matter of what labels we choose to use rather than a substantive philosophical issue. But, as we’ll see, JPA’s phrasing is a bit misleading and the real issue isn’t how to categorize relativism, but whether relativism carries the same allegedly “radical” implications of nonrelativistic antirealist accounts. He’s not clear, for instance, on what “outright” antirealism is, and in what respect relativism is supposed to occupy a middle ground. Middle position with respect to what?

2.0 How I construe relativism

The two most common characterizations of moral realism that I’ve seen are the claim that there are moral truths (without qualification) and the claim that there are stance-independent moral truths. Relativism would categorically be a form of moral realism according to the former, while if stance-independence is a requirement for realism whether a given form of relativism is a form of realism would turn on whether it relativized moral truths to stances or not. If it did, it’d be a form of antirealism, while if it didn’t, it would be a form of realism. There’s no mystery here. Relativism simply isn’t hard to place as either a form of realism or antirealism (including using JPA’s definitions, which don’t meaningfully differ from the one I’m using here).

Along with Richard Joyce, I treat moral relativism as the position that moral truths contain an indexical element, such that their truth can only be judged when indexed to one or another of different moral standards. In other words, statements like:

“Slavery is wrong.”

…contain an implicit indexical element that fixes their truth value:

"Slavery is wrong [according to my moral standards].”

“Slavery is wrong [according to my culture].”

In principle, this construal of relativism is consistent with moral realism because relativists could index moral standards to something other than stances. Someone could believe that whether a moral claim is true or false is indexed to certain fixed, stance-independent biological facts, such as one’s species, or that it’s determined by one’s astrological sign, e.g., the statement “Slavery is wrong” may be true if uttered by a Scorpio but false if uttered by a Gemini.

Is this ridiculous? Yes. Is it also technically possible? Yes, also. What this illustrates is that stance-independence and indexicality are conceptually distinct. Philosophers like their conceptual distinctions, so this is one they should happily acknowledge, even if it’s a bit weird.

In practice, most relativists are going to index moral standards to the stances of individuals or groups, making relativism a form of antirealism. On this view, relativism isn’t a middle ground between realism and antirealism. If realism requires stance-independence, these forms of relativism are antirealist by definition. If it doesn’t, they’re realist by definition. It’s the stance-dependence that disqualifies it as a form of realism, not relativism. But it’s also not a middle ground in any practically meaningful sense, because neither standard forms of relativism nor other forms of antirealism carry any substantively different implications in the first place. They’re all similarly mundane and non-radical.

3.0 JPA’s misleadingly non-trivial claims

Since JPA characterizes relativism as requiring stance-dependence by definition, and realism as requiring stance-independence by definition, then it follows, trivially, that relativism is a form of antirealism. It makes very little sense for JPA to claim that it “collapses” into antirealism. Given how JPA uses the terms, relativism just is a form of antirealism. What JPA is doing is a bit like claiming that bachelorhood “collapses” into being an unmarried man, where one stipulates that a “bachelor” is a “man who is not married.”

This is a common theme with JPA, who enjoys presenting deductive syllogisms on Twitter as compelling proofs of various philosophical theses. These posts almost invariably consist of trivial arguments whose premises repackage the conclusion in a fairly transparent way. Here are some examples:

Both of these arguments include premises that, if disambiguated, would either be false or effectively repackage the conclusion. The only way the first argument would work is if “It’s like something to be me” were construed as the claim that we have phenomenal states. And since illusionism just is the view that we mistakenly think we have phenomenal states, appealing to the existence of phenomenal states in the premise of an argument against illusionism makes about as much sense as appealing to the premise “God exists” in an argument against atheism.

Likewise, either the sense in which torturing babies for fun is “in-itself” wrong constitutes or entails that there are stance-independent facts, or the conditional in the second premise would be false. If it does carry such an entailment, then the first premise effectively states that there are stance-independent moral facts. And since moral realism is simply the view that there are stance-independent moral facts, the argument ends up amounting to an argument that is not meaningfully different from:

P1: God exists.
P2: If God exists, theism is true.
C: Theism is true.

Since theism just is the view that God exists, such an argument is completely vacuous. And yet JPA presents arguments of similar caliber as if they are anything other than an utterly vacuous set of statements. As a result of these kinds of posts, I’ve encountered at least a few people who assumed or remain convinced that JPA is engaged in some form of elaborate satire. I think the reality is that JPA is utterly serious, and thinks arguments like the ones he presents are substantive.

The same kind of vacuousness at least appears to apply to this post, as well. However, I think it only appears this way because JPA doesn’t express himself very clearly. As I said, JPA construes relativism as requiring stance-dependence:

Relativists reject this stance-independence. According to relativistic theories, moral truth is always indexed to some standpoint: an individual perspective, a cultural framework, or a historically contingent set of social norms.

I prefer my definition. Rather than carving up the conceptual landscape on the basis of arbitrary conjunctions of positions (indexicality + stance-dependence), I favor separating views in terms of the presence or absence of distinct, orthogonal features: some views are indexical and some aren’t, some are stance-independent and some aren’t, and so on. There’s no particularly good reason to specifically highlight relativism as a view that conjoins indexicality and stance-dependence when the former is adequate on its own. This renders categorization cleaner and less dependent on contingent historical convention. But that’s a bit of conceptual engineering on my part; I acknowledge there’s no fact of the matter about which labels, categories, or distinctions are “correct” or not.

So while I don’t like JPA’s definition, I don’t think it’s mistaken. Relativism, on this view, is a position according to which moral truths are indexed to stances. Furthermore, JPA defines realism as follows:

Moral realists hold, at minimum, that there exist at least some moral truths that are stance-independent: truths whose validity does not depend upon what any particular individual, culture, or society happens to believe about them (Shafer-Landau 2003).

This is puzzling. If realism holds that moral truths are stance-independent, and relativism doesn’t by definition, then what is JPA doing when he says this?

Once we examine the view carefully, moral relativism collapses into a form of anti-realism, according to which, ultimately, anything goes.

How does it “collapse” into a form of antirealism if it is a form of antirealism by definition? One might think he is claiming that it is the conjunction of antirealism and the notion that anything goes. But another remark indicates this isn’t so:

But once that move is made, the position collapses into anti-realism.

Also, the subtitle of the essay is

Why Moral Relativism Collapses Into Anti-Realism

JPA seems to take relativism’s place in metaethics as a substantive matter of philosophical dispute to be settled by argument, rather than a more mundane matter of its classification following automatically from the definitions and labels we choose to employ. Consider this remark:

The relativist supposedly avoids the perceived dogmatism of realism while also avoiding the more radical implications of denying moral truth altogether. But this appearance is illusory.

I think what JPA is trying to get at is something like this:

Realism holds that there are stance-independent moral truths. Antirealism denies this. Relativism is technically a form of antirealism, but it purports to possess features that allow it to avoid the “radical implications” of denying moral truth altogether, since it technically holds that there is a form of moral truth. Yet the kinds of moral truths it yields don’t matter, since it still has the same radical implications as forms of moral antirealism that deny all forms of moral truth.

I take it, then, that JPA isn’t actually asserting something trivial, but instead simply failed to express himself clearly. If so, fair enough. I do that myself at times. Having set aside the unclear and seemingly trivial way JPA construes his position, we’ll see if JPA can sustain the claim that relativism fails to avoid the allegedly radical implications of denying moral truth outright.

4.0 Does relativism have radical implications?

4.1 Global relativism

First, JPA discusses global relativism. Nothing about this section appears to demonstrate that metaethical relativism has any radical implications.

4.2 Comparison to preferences

Second, JPA compares moral claims to taste claims. He states:

When I say that murder is wrong, I do not mean merely that I personally dislike murder in the way that I dislike the texture of overcooked steamed vegetables. Rather, I mean that people genuinely ought not murder — that everyone has decisive reason not to engage in such behavior. Moral language purports to possess a kind of universality that ordinary taste judgments lack.

This is often true (though as I’ve argued previously, it’s not always true. See here). However, universality is consistent with preference claims, and is irrelevant to the question of whether moral claims are stance-independent or not. As such, it does not assist in establishing that the language in question commits one to realism.

JPA continues:

Indeed, our moral practices seem saturated with assumptions inconsistent with relativism. We speak of moral discovery, moral education, moral error, moral confusion, and moral progress. All of this strongly suggests that we ordinarily take morality to involve truths that transcend mere preference.

JPA provides no evidence our moral practice is saturated with such language, no evidence that such language entails or is best explained by assumptions that are inconsistent with relativism, and does not engage with how a relativist might account for such discourse. He certainly doesn’t provide any cross-cultural or cross-linguistic evidence that such practices are widespread or universal across languages or cultures.

I’ve noticed a tendency for philosophers to do this sort of thing. They make numerous assertions, including ones that a reasonable person might find contentious, but just breeze along without appreciating that there are many steps along the way to establishing one’s views that would benefit from a degree of support. While the philosopher works their way towards a syllogism whose premises are worthy of their attention, these contentious assumptions pile up like a roaring river of enthymemes. Something about analytic philosophy fosters a tendency to build dams of assertions to block them off, and woe unto those who have the audacity to ask what holds the river in abeyance. No, they want to direct your attention to the premises of their choosing.

This is why so often you’ll see a philosopher present some argument or other and demand that their interlocutors specify which premise they reject. Such efforts are often premature. There is a time and place for such demands, which is typically after one has resolved background issues (if nothing else for the sake of argument) and resolved any underspecificity. But philosophers are at times impatient, and skip over these steps, and simply want to make their point, a point that only has any merit conditional on a whole panoply of background assumptions that others are free to reject.

This is just a general observation, though, and it may or may not apply in this particular case. Either way, I don’t grant that any of what JPA describes is “inconsistent with relativism.” Every one of these forms of discourse (moral discovery, moral progress, etc.) is consistent with relativism, and it isn’t even an awkward fit.

I’ve made this point before, but it’s worth making again. Dr. Seuss’s "Green Eggs and Ham” is a popular children’s book in which the protagonist is confronted by Sam-I-Am, an annoying figure who repeatedly offers them green eggs and ham. The protagonist refuses many times over. Yet Sam-I-Am chases them and harasses them until they relent, and try it. It turns out they like it. This person discovers that they like green eggs and ham. This illustrates that an iconic part of American culture consists in teaching children that taste is often a matter of discovery. And it is. People often have to figure out what they’re into. They discover that they like horror movies. They learn that they don’t like cilantro, and so on. Nothing about stance-dependence in any way entails that one has full, immediate, or infallible introspective access to their desires, values, or whatever other factors are relevant to establishing one’s stance on a given matter. If we can teach this to children, it is remarkable that philosophers could so blithely presume that the notion of discovery is somehow inconsistent with a stance-dependent conception of a normative domain.

The same holds for other notions. One can become educated on different genres of music or the culinary arts. Does this mean music and gastronomy are saturated with assumptions inconsistent with relativism? No, it does not.

Can relativists make errors? Yes they can. One can be mistaken about the nonmoral facts. One can recognize that some of their values are inconsistent with more fundamental values, and abandon them. One can have false beliefs about the standards of their culture. And so on. The gastronomic comparisons again come quite easily. Even on the assumption that taste is subjective, one can make errors. I can think berries would work well in a sauce, but discover I was mistaken. An artist can mistakenly believe a new technique will yield more beautiful art, but turn out to be wrong. And so on.

Confusion and progress can likewise be accommodated by a relativistic view, and easily, at that. Has anyone ever been ambivalent about whether they liked a movie, unsure if they liked it? Felt conflicted or confused? They sure have. Has anyone ever been perplexed by a work of art, and spent some time wondering if they liked it or not? Has anyone ever tried a new food, and initially found it peculiar, confusing, and strange, and had to take a few more bites or sips to determine if they liked it? Indeed, they have. These are all common occurrences, and they all illustrate how matters of taste can prompt confusion.

Finally, progress. This one is one of the easiest to account for on a relativist view. People can set their own goals, and make progress on them. They can make progress relative to certain preferences or desires, as well. I can make progress on making pies more to my family’s liking, or make progress in a fitness program, or make progress on improving my art in a way I find aesthetically appealing. Nothing about progress entails, presupposes, or requires stance-independent normative or evaluative standards.

Every single one of the features JPA mentions as “inconsistent with relativism” can be easily accommodated by relativism. JPA is simply mistaken about this. And yet JPA ends by saying:

As Thomas Nagel observes, morality characteristically presents itself as aspiring to a kind of objectivity that reaches beyond individual desire or social convention (Nagel 1986).

Recall my earlier remark about philosophers just making assertions without supporting them. This is worse. Here, JPA invokes a philosopher who allegedly “observes” that something is the case. Such phrasing helps itself to the presumption that what one has “observed” is true. For comparison, if I say that Mike “observed” that there was a tree, this implies that it’s true that there was a tree. This is quite different from someone claiming that there was a tree. The latter phrasing suggests this may not be true. JPA is not arguing for anything here. Instead, he appeals to a famous philosopher who allegedly “observed“ that something was the case. We’re not obliged to grant that Nagel “observed” this.

Having said all this, don’t forget that our initial goal was to identify the allegedly radical implications of relativism. I still haven’t seen any radical implications. Where are they?

4.3 Individual and cultural relativism

JPA also points to the distinction between individual and cultural relativism. The former relativizes claims to individuals, the latter to cultures. JPA characterizes the distinction as follows:

Some relativists hold that morality is relative to individual belief. On this view, if I believe lying is wrong, then lying is wrong for me; if someone else believes lying is permissible, then lying is permissible for them.

Alert readers will notice a problem. JPA is characterizing both in terms of agent relativism. It’s becoming tedious to make these points, but let’s do it again.

Agent relativism holds that moral claims are true or false relative to the standards of the agent or the culture of the agent performing the action.

Appraiser relativism holds that moral claims are true or false relative to the standards of the agent or the culture of the agent evaluating an action.

Agent relativism carries the unpleasant implication that if another person thinks it’s good to torture babies (or this is considered good in their culture), then it is in fact good for that person to torture babies. Since this would require you to think it’s good for them to torture babies, this is supposed to shock and horrify you (as it rightly should). Agent relativism bad.

The problem is that this is just one form of relativism. Many of you will already be familiar with the SEP quote I’ve presented several times before:

Appraiser relativism suggests that we do or should make moral judgments on the basis of our own standards, while agent relativism implies that the relevant standards are those of the persons we are judging (of course, in some cases these may coincide). Appraiser relativism is the more common position, and it will usually be assumed in the discussion that follows. (Gowans, 2021)

I don’t know if the latter claim is true. I don’t think there’s any survey data on whether agent or appraiser relativism is more common. But it’s awfully conspicuous that so many critics of relativism focus only on agent relativism and don’t bring up the distinction. Instead, they treat “relativism” as if it is, by default, agent relativism. This is convenient for the critic, since it is easy to score a victory against agent relativism in the eyes of audiences by noting that agent relativism would commit you to thinking it’s good for some people to torture babies or commit genocide.

Appraiser relativism doesn’t carry this implication. And yet, for some reason, this is omitted from discussion by most critics of relativism. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to consider why this might be the case.

In any case, JPA continues with what’s allegedly so unacceptable about these forms of relativism:

But this position is extraordinarily difficult to reconcile with ordinary moral discourse. If morality simply reduces to whatever each person happens to believe, then genuine moral disagreement becomes impossible. Two people who appear to disagree morally would merely be reporting different psychological states.

This is either false or trivially true in a way that doesn’t help JPA. Note the use of the phrase genuine moral disagreement. I’ve noticed before how philosophers frequently lean on misleading modifiers that serve to conceal (with or without intent) that one is making a vacuous or highly dubious claim.

Just what is “genuine” moral disagreement? If it is disagreement about what the stance-independent moral facts are, then of course relativism can’t accommodate such disagreement. But this is just to say that if one presumes that everyday moral disagreements are disputes about what the stance-independent moral facts are, then any theory according to which it’s not the case that everyday moral disagreements are disputes about the stance-independent moral facts are is going to be false. This would amount to saying something like “According to relativism, not-P. But P is the case, so relativism cannot account for the fact that P.”

If, on the contrary, it’s not the case that “genuine” moral disagreement concerns disputes over stance-independent moral facts, then it’s no longer obvious relativism can’t account for it. After all, the whole reason it supposedly can’t account for it must have to do with the differences between relativism and realism. And in this case, the difference is that one rejects the existence of stance-independent moral facts and the other doesn’t.

In short: once one gets clear on what “genuine” moral disagreement is, it will either involve the question-begging presumption that ordinary moral discourse is non-relativist, or it won’t be inconsistent with relativism, so relativism could account for it. JPA loses either way.

I’ve also argued at length that philosophers typically rely on an impoverished and narrow conception of what “disagreement” consists in, which you can see here. This serves as a far more extensive rebuttal to JPA’s claim that relativism can’t account for disagreement. It can.

In that article, I emphasize that “disagreement” need not concern disputes about what the stance-independent facts are, but can instead include disputes resulting from conflicting goals or desires. Furthermore, it is the latter that will almost always predominate in ordinary discourse and interactions, because all intentional action is goal-directed. Conflicts about what’s stance-independently true would only occur in practice if people cared enough to dispute what was true. In practice, disputes about what’s true will tend to emerge in most practical, non-philosophical contexts when people are trying to achieve some outcome. Sometimes this outcome will involve shared goals but disparate perspectives on what’s true. Sometimes these outcomes will involve disparate goals but shared perspectives on what’s true. Both can and do result in conflict, and there is no legitimate reason to construe disagreement as exclusively centered on disputes about what’s true.

Either way, which factors drive everyday moral disputes is an empirical question, anyway, and it’s not like JPA presents any empirical evidence that ordinary moral disputes are exclusively concerned with stance-independent moral truth.

JPA points to yet another alleged problem with relativism:

More importantly, moral error would become impossible. If whatever I sincerely believe morally is thereby morally true for me, then I cannot be mistaken about morality any more than I can be mistaken about whether I currently enjoy the taste of coffee.

There are two issues with JPA’s claims. First, relativists are not obliged to believe, conditional on relativism, that moral error is impossible. JPA seems to be operating on the assumption that we have infallible access to the relevant desires, values, or beliefs that make our moral positions true. But relativists need not grant this (and I don’t grant it). As I’ve already pointed out, people can be wrong about their food preferences, even when those preferences are subjective. A person can think they don’t like green eggs and ham, and they can be wrong about this. There simply is no good reason to think we are infallible regarding our own preferences.

JPA’s comparison to whether you

[…] can be mistaken about whether I currently enjoy the taste of coffee.

…is highly misleading. This refers to an occurrent evaluative state, e.g., whether one’s current subjective experiences are good or bad. Relativists are not obliged to think that morally right and wrong action is fully determined by occurrent experiential states. Our own values can be opaque to us. Even if JPA disagrees with this, this is irrelevant. All this would mean is that if someone is both a relativist and if they are committed to a specific view about human psychology that JPA presumes is the case, then they would be committed to the impossibility of moral error. But this psychological thesis isn’t a feature of relativism itself; it’s an extraneous presumption JPA simply presumes is true and presumes the relativist is committed to. It isn’t something they’re committed to.

JPA commits a mistake I see many philosophers make. They’ll presume some view, P. Then they’ll take some target position they want to criticize, Q. The conjunction of P & Q carries some entailment, R, even though Q by itself does not entail R. Then they will criticize Q on the grounds that it would “entail R.” Strictly speaking, this is false. It would only entail R if P is also true. But since a proponent of Q is not obliged to endorse P, such critiques can never serve as an appropriate internal critique of a given view and the surrounding assumptions its proponent holds. Instead, such objections require substantive auxiliary assumptions that the proponent of Q may reject.

Furthermore, the objection that relativism entails that moral error isn’t possible might sound bad, but it has no force. Once again, such an objection is either trivially true and vacuous, or question beggingly presupposes the falsity of the very view it is supposed to serve as an objection to.

Here’s why. JPA and other critics of relativism are banking on the hope that you will balk at the notion that someone can’t make moral errors. This might sound absurd. But it only sounds absurd if you antecedently rejected the position in the first place, even if implicitly. I’ll unpack the argument to show why JPA’s objection doesn’t work.

Consider what would be required for it to be the case that “moral error is impossible.” First, it would require that moral claims reduce to claims about certain psychological states. Second, it would require that we have infallible access to those psychological states.

Well, if we did have infallible access to certain features of our psychology, and if moral claims consisted of reports about those states, then it trivially follows that error would be impossible. But all this would amount to is it being impossible for us to be wrong about something that JPA himself already grants that it’s impossible for us to be wrong about. In other words, JPA himself appears to believe we have infallible introspective access to the relevant features of our psychology. So infallibility isn’t the problem.

In other words, JPA’s argument faces a dilemma. If we are infallible with respect to the relevant truth-fixing features of moral claims, such that if relativism is true, then moral error is impossible, then this is only true insofar as JPA already grants that we’re infallible in the relevant respect. In other words, even if relativism were false, it would still be true on JPA’s own view that we’re infallible with respect to the relevant truth-fixing facts. The only difference is that the relativist takes these facts to be the moral facts, and JPA doesn’t. As such, the only way for JPA to deny that we’re infallible in the relevant respect is to deny morality is relative in the first place, which begs the question against relativism.

If, instead, we’re not infallible with respect to the relevant truth-fixing features of moral claims given relativism, then it’s not true that relativism entails that we can’t make moral errors.

Thus, there can be no substantive objection to relativism on the grounds that it entails we’re incapable of moral error. All such arguments will either beg the question against relativists or be false.

4.4 The alleged “instability” of relativism

JPA continues:

At this point, however, we arrive at what I take to be the even deeper problem. Moral relativism is frequently presented as a compromise position. The relativist supposedly avoids the perceived dogmatism of realism while still preserving a kind of truth within moral discourse. Moral claims are said to be “true relative to a framework,” “true for a culture,” or “true for an individual standpoint.” But it is not clear that this actually preserves moral objectivity in any robust sense at all.

This is an absurd objection. Earlier, JPA stated that:

[…] what unites realist positions is their commitment to genuine moral objectivity.

Relativists reject this stance-independence.

Given JPA’s own earlier characterizations, how could it possibly make any sense to object to relativism on the grounds that it fails to preserve moral objectivity when the position is literally defined in terms of its rejection of moral objectivity? This is an utterly vacuous objection.

His next remark doesn’t help:

Suppose that the moral status of an action depends entirely upon the norms accepted within a given society. Then there is no standpoint-independent fact concerning whether the action is really right or wrong. There are only facts about what various societies approve or disapprove of.

…Uh…yes. That’s what relativism is.

But once that move is made, the position collapses into anti-realism. The relativist may continue using the vocabulary of “truth,” but the relevant truths are no longer objective in the realist sense. They are indexed entirely to attitudes, frameworks, conventions, or perspectives. In other words, relativism does not so much preserve objectivity as relocate morality into human psychology and social practice.

JPA appears to be extremely confused. The position as described doesn’t “collapse” into antirealism. JPA has simply reiterated what the position is. What JPA is saying here isn’t meaningfully different from objecting to atheism on the grounds that if it were true, it would “collapse into the belief that God doesn’t exist.”

Thus, moral relativism is not a stable middle position between realism and anti-realism. It is, rather, a strategy for endorsing anti-realism about morality at the metaphysical level while retaining some of the surface-level grammar of moral realism.

This is not true. First, nothing about the surface-level grammar of ordinary moral language is realist to begin with. Moral realists may offer a semantic thesis about moral language, but realism is not and never has been a grammatical thesis, unless JPA is construing grammar in broader terms that include semantics. But if he were, that would make no sense, either, since relativism is defined partially in terms of its semantic thesis, which conflicts with the semantic thesis of realism. Thus, his position makes no sense on either a narrow or broad construal of the alleged surface-grammar of moral language.

That moral discourse frequently involves declarative sentences indicates only that the surface-level grammar of moral discourse appears to consist in propositional claims. But it is not part of the surface grammar that those claims involve appeals to stance-independent normative truths. This must be inferred just like relativism and is a feature of the semantics of moral claims. And relativism definitely does not share the same stance on the semantics of moral language.

The surface-grammar of ordinary moral discourse is and always has been neutral between realism and antirealist forms of relativism (at least in modern English). Both realism and relativism are cashed out in terms of semantic/pragmatic features of ordinary moral language, not their surface grammar.

As such, what JPA says here seems very confused. In short: relativism does not attempt to retain the “surface-level grammar of moral realism” because, however one construes this, it’s either (a) false that there even is any such thing or (b) it’s false that relativists share the same account of moral language.

JPA continues:

Indeed, many contemporary anti-realist theories operate in precisely this territory. Expressivists, constructivists, and various forms of “quasi-realism” frequently attempt to preserve substantial portions of ordinary moral discourse while rejecting robust stance-independent moral facts (Blackburn 1993; Gibbard 2003).

Yes. They do. But nothing about such attempts involves attempting to retain the “surface-level grammar of moral realism.” These are substantive accounts of the grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic features of ordinary moral language that purport to account for it without positing realism.

This is already a well-established feature of these accounts. It’s…kind of the whole point. And yet, for some bizarre reason, JPA is characterizing relativism as being metaphysically antirealist but not jettisoning ordinary moral language as some kind of revelation or naughty secret about the position.

4.5 The alleged “costs” of relativism

JPA goes on to say:

If morality is fundamentally relative to cultural consensus, then genuine cross-cultural moral criticism becomes impossible. One culture may disapprove of another culture’s practices, but neither culture could be objectively mistaken.

Once again, JPA employs the misleading modifier “genuine.” Once you disambiguate what JPA could mean by “genuine,” his objection will either be trivially true or it will be false.

Does “genuine” mean stance-independent, or is it an intensifier? If the former, then this is a trivial objection because it’s true by definition. The objection would amount to something like:

Views according to which there are no stance-independent moral facts cannot maintain that it is a stance-independent moral fact that the practices of other cultures are wrong.

This is not a serious objection to relativism. If, instead, “genuine” means something other than stance-independent, then it’s unclear why relativists would be incapable of “genuine” moral criticism.

JPA drives home the question-begging nature of his objection:

But this conclusion seems deeply implausible. It seems perfectly meaningful — and indeed morally important — to say that slavery was wrong, that genocidal regimes were wrong, or that human sacrifice was wrong even in societies where such practices enjoyed widespread acceptance.

In other words, JPA is rejecting cultural relativism on the grounds that cultural relativism conflicts with intuitions he has that are inconsistent with cultural relativism. Well, of course it does. So what? If JPA takes his intuitions to be dispositive, then he should reject cultural relativism. But this doesn’t give any of the rest of us any good reason to do so.

For some weird reason, he again repeats the point about progress:

Similarly, relativism appears unable to make sense of moral progress. Progress presupposes some standard toward which one moves. Without objective standards, there can certainly be moral change, but it is difficult to see how there could be moral improvement.

This is such a bad point to make. Nothing about the concept of progress analytically entails that progress is only possible with respect to stance-independent standards. I agree that progress “presupposes some standard toward which one moves.” And relativists have moral standards that they can move towards. For instance, if a relativist thinks you should maximize utility, they can make moral progress by donating to charity or becoming a vegan. While they can’t make progress towards adopting the correct stance-independent moral truths, nothing about the concept of progress requires that one be able to do so. Like many others, JPA simply presumes, without any argument, that progress only makes sense on a realist construal. But he presents no arguments or reasons for this presumption.

The problem becomes especially acute in the case of moral reformers. Many of the figures we now most admire — abolitionists, civil rights activists, dissidents resisting oppressive regimes — were individuals who stood in direct opposition to the moral consensus of their societies. Yet if CMR is true, then such individuals were, by definition, morally mistaken at the time they challenged prevailing norms.

This might be true for certain forms of agent relativism. But once again, it’s not true for appraiser relativism. On appraiser relativism, it would make no sense to speak of the actions of moral reformers as being “morally mistaken” simpliciter. One can only speak of them being morally mistaken relative to the standards of some evaluator. And it would turn out to be true that moral reformers were engaging in actions that were wrong relative to the standards of the societies they were in, but not wrong relative to your or my standards, or the standards of our culture. Appraiser relativism can easily account for moral progress and does not struggle to make sense of moral reformers. Like many other critics of moral relativism, JPA seems to focus exclusively on agent relativism and to completely ignore appraiser relativism, for, as far as I can tell, no apparent reason.

JPA ends with yet more bizarre remarks:

More importantly, once relativism abandons stance-independent moral truth, it increasingly begins to resemble a straightforward form of moral anti-realism

JPA defines relativism as a position according to which moral truth is stance-dependent. It makes no sense to refer to it as “abandoning” stance-independence.

5.0 Conclusion

JPA’s remarks suggest a poor understanding of metaethics and philosophical argumentation, as well as a notable lack of rigor or adequate engagement with the views he rejects. He presents trivial and vacuous arguments as if they are substantive, makes remarks that conflict with his own established definitions, fails to engage with the full range of relativist views he criticizes, fails to consider or engage with any potential rebuttals they might offer, appears to be confused about the relation between antirealist views, grammar, and semantics, and frequently proceeds by way of bare assertion, offering little or no support for a host of contestable assumptions.

And to top all of that off, JPA has blocked me and has blocked many others for, as far as I can tell, the crime of disagreeing a bit too loudly. An unwillingness to engage with one’s opposition greatly inhibits opportunities for growth and learning and contributes to an atmosphere of cloistered hostility and disdain fundamentally at odds with the way philosophy has made and will continue to make progress. Only by reaching across the aisle and engaging directly with our opposition—ideally on friendly terms that foster charity and understanding—can we most effectively settle philosophical disputes. This isn’t to say I oppose blocking people. I often do so when people are rude or violate certain rules of engagement I abide by (e.g., I block people who accuse me of lying or persist in avoiding questions). But I doubt JPA will read this, and if he does, I am even more confident he won’t reply. I’m afraid my remarks are more likely to echo into the abyss. I suppose that’s fitting for an antirealist.

(This was written quickly and without proofreading, so please let me know if you spot any errors).

1.0 A comment and a block

Christian Gonzalez recently posted a comment on my debate with David Enoch. Here is the comment in full:

this debate on moral realism basically comes down to whether you have any intuitions at all about irreducibly normative truths existing. if you don’t then there’s no way to get a hold on someone into the non-naturalist realist camp. but this makes me wonder what evidence would even be possible to give a radical empiricist that irreducible normative or moral truths exist. i suspect none is possible and that they’re “deliberatively out of reach”

which reminds me of this phenomenon i see happen with anti-realists whereby after spending enough time in the meta-ethics mines, their commitments to a reductionist, empiricist worldview force the realist intuitions out of them. but that’s not how most people start out. most people, without having their intuitions altered by huffing too much metaethics papers would say “yes killing jews is really wrong” in an irreducibly realist sense. if anti-realists continue to spread their message, i suspect the masses may be deliberatively out of reach in time

I left several comments. The central point of these comments was that Gonzalez was making an unsubstantiated empirical claim.

Unfortunately, Gonzalez has blocked me, so all of these comments were deleted. I don’t know why I was blocked since, to my knowledge, I was not rude in my responses, but simply critical. But it’s anyone’s prerogative to block whoever they want. However, Gonzalez made several remarks that are central to my primary criticisms of contemporary advocacy for moral realism, so I find it important to reiterate and add to my reactions to this comment here.

2.0 Are some antirealists deliberatively out of reach?

First, Gonzalez suggests that if you lack intuitions about irreducibly normative truths existing, there may be no way to get a hold of you. Gonzalez then asks:

but this makes me wonder what evidence would even be possible to give a radical empiricist that irreducible normative or moral truths exist. i suspect none is possible and that they’re “deliberatively out of reach”

I do think some of us are deliberatively out of reach, at least in a conditional way. If a person holds the correct position on a given matter and if they are reasoning well, then they shouldn’t be persuaded to hold a view to the contrary, unless something has gone wrong (i.e., unless they’re not reasoning well, which is inconsistent with the stipulation, anyway, so arguably this is tautologous). So one explanation for why some of us antirealists are deliberatively out of reach is that we’re reasoning well and have arrived at the truth. Gonzalez mocks me here:

What is there to mock? Let me illustrate why mocking this is silly with an example. Suppose that I am looking out of my window. I have good vision, I am well positioned to see what’s there, and I see that there’s…nothing. Now along comes a person who insists there is a tree in my yard. Suppose there is no tree. And suppose I am not insane, am not induced to hallucinate, continue to have well-functioning vision, and so on. Am I deliberatively out of reach with respect to being convinced there’s a tree there?

Yes, I am. And the reason I’m out of reach is because there’s no tree there. The only way for me to come to believe there is a tree there is if I were to make some kind of mistake. So one reason a person can be deliberatively out of reach is if they’re correct and are not making any mistakes.

But how one assesses this remark will turn in part on what’s meant by “evidence.” I wouldn’t demand empirical evidence for truths that are, by their very nature, not empirical. If “evidence” is construed more broadly, then I suppose it would turn on whatever epistemic framework could lead one to the true belief that there are irreducibly normative facts. I don’t know what that would look like, but that isn’t a problem for me, because I think this line of inquiry is premature. Before we can even consider what could serve as evidence for something, we’d first need a clear sense of what the thing is, such that we could assess what could or couldn’t serve as evidence for it in principle. Since I think the notion of irreducible normativity is meaningless, I don’t think it’s possible in principle for there to be any evidence for it, even broadly construed.

So to convince me, at least, one would first have to convince me that I’m mistaken about my more fundamental views about language, meaning, and metaphilosophy. I’d need to be convinced that, e.g., philosophical intuitions are real, that they are a reliable way of determining what’s true, and either that irreducible normativity is meaningful in the respects that I think it isn’t, or that my views about what constitutes meaningfulness are mistaken, and convince me to adopt an alternative view of meaning on which the concept in question is meaningful, then I’d need to somehow obtain, or “have” the concept.

That, at least, is a rough sketch of what would be needed to convince me. I can’t speak for other antirealists, but I am confident many of them think differently than I do so the same conditions wouldn’t apply.

3.0 Native antirealism

Gonzalez continues:

which reminds me of this phenomenon i see happen with anti-realists whereby after spending enough time in the meta-ethics mines, their commitments to a reductionist, empiricist worldview force the realist intuitions out of them.

This is an anecdotal claim, but I’ll take his word for it that he’s observed this at least once. I’ll also bracket my objections to the notion that people have “intuitions.” There are some construals of this claim on which I’d deny anyone has ever had intuitions, while on others I’d grant that they do. Let’s grant for the sake of argument that some acceptable conception of intuition is in play (even if this isn’t actually the case).

However, it’s still an empirical claim. Gonzalez is outlining a causal process and a mechanism where people move from one psychological state (having realist intuitions) to another state (not having realist intuitions) via the process of studying metaethics and possessing (or developing) a reductionist, empiricist worldview. And Gonzalez’s subsequent remarks strongly allude to extrapolating from this anecdote to more general claims about human psychology.

How often does the process Gonzalez describe happen? Who knows. But I am confident we can find at least one, and probably quite a few instances of this among contemporary philosophers or people who’ve studied philosophy. An important question, though, is how they obtained those realist intuitions in the first place. I don’t think we have good evidence most people had realist intuitions prior to studying philosophy. Instead, a more defensible trajectory is that studying philosophy first causes people to acquire realist intuitions, then, for some people, they lose them at some later point.

Speaking for myself, it’s possible I once had realist intuitions but I can no longer recall if I ever had them. As far as I recall having any explicit position at all, I’ve held an antirealist view. As far as I know, studying philosophy did not cause me to lose realist intuitions. If so, I would appear to be a native to antirealism.

4.0 Huffing too much metaethics

The important part of Gonzalez’s remarks follow from the previous comment. After stating that he has witnessed people lose their realist intuitions by studying metaethics, Gonzalez continues:

but that’s not how most people start out. most people, without having their intuitions altered by huffing too much metaethics papers would say “yes killing jews is really wrong” in an irreducibly realist sense.

This is an empirical claim about human psychology. Note two key phrases here:

• most people

• would say

Gonzalez has presented an empirical hypothesis about human behavior. Specifically, a statistical claim that more than fifty percent of the population in question (“people”) would say a certain thing, presumably under some counterfactual condition in which they were prompted with some kind of stimulus that one predicted would elicit the response. This latter presumption is based on the use of the term “would.”

Statistical claims about human behavior are not only empirical claims, they are paradigmatic empirical claims. What Gonzalez has said here could be used in a psychology textbook as an example of an empirical hypothesis.

And yet there is no good evidence this claim is true at all. There is a relatively new and growing literature in experimental metaethics that assesses whether nonphilosophers are moral realists, have realist intuitions, speak or think like realists, and so on. To my knowledge, there are no studies that directly assess whether people think morality is irreducibly normative. Nevertheless, we don’t require specific, directed studies to make informed judgments about what is or isn’t the case, empirically speaking (some people mistakenly think that in order to justify any empirical claim, you must have a specific study addressing that claim. This is absurd and not worth considering further).

Gonzalez, like many other realists, insists on making sweeping empirical claims, but is unable or unwilling to support those empirical claims by appealing to (or even gathering) empirical evidence.

When I criticize realists in this way, some will push back by appealing to the empirical literature. This is rare, but I do appreciate it when they do. This is not what Gonzalez did. Gonzalez posted a critical response to me, then while I was writing a response to it, he blocked me.

This is a common experience for me. Realists make empirical claims. I criticize them for doing so. And then, instead of acknowledging that they’re making empirical claims and either retracting those claims as unsubstantiating or substantiating those claims, they:

• Ignore me

• Deny the claims they’re making are empirical

Impressively, Gonzalez has opted to do both.

5.0 First they ignore you, then they deny their claims are empirical

I was in the middle of writing a response to this post when I was blocked, and this prompted me to write an article about this instead. This was a direct response to my original note where I made a shortened version of the some of the remarks above, most critically that Gonzalez’s claim about what “most people” would “say” is an empirical claim. Thus, this is clearly intended as a critical response to that claim. According to Gonzalez:

To think phenomenology submits to empirical study is to misunderstand the nature of perspectival knowledge. Self-reporting is a horrendous instrument for getting at what people actually experience, because most people don’t see their own experience clearly. Asking the masses about the structure of their own consciousness is asking for an unreliable account. There are things that talented meditators know about the structure of consciousness that lay people do not. And, crucially, there is no empirical analysis to know who is who. The general public can be, and in fact are, deluded about what they experience. Once one Sees a structural feature of consciousness for oneself (that we perceive normative reasons to act agnostic of our desires, for instance) its truth is self-evident, and one can be confident it holds universally for any consciousness similarly structured.

Can you prove this to other people? No! And that’s precisely the epistemic gap between first-person and third-person truths. Can you be wrong about what seems self-evident? Of course! And yet self-evident first-person truths about consciousness exist nonetheless. These are simply the cards we’re dealt when doing research into the nature of consciousness.

Gonzalez seems to reject my claim that he was making an empirical claim on the grounds that phenomenology isn’t subject to empirical scrutiny, and because self-report is a bad method for figuring out what people’s experiences are like.

This is confused in a number of ways.

First, facts about what people experience are psychological phenomena. If one wants to claim they’re somehow empirically inaccessible, they’re welcome to make a case for this, but this would be irrelevant. Christian made a claim about what most people would say. Not only is this an empirical question because it’s a statistical claim about human behavior, how is that not the sort of thing you’d study using self-report? It’s a claim about what people would say!

Setting aside that obvious and massive problem, even if this somehow wasn’t an empirical claim, but a claim about what they’d “experience” in some empirically inaccessible way, Gonzalez is going to face a serious problem: even if the content of any given person’s experience included elements that could not be empirically evaluated, statistical claims like “most people” have these experiences are still empirical claims that can only be assessed empirically. Here’s why.

Gonzalez draws a distinction between a kind of perspectival knowledge, which is a kind of first-person knowledge that isn’t amenable to the third-personal nature of scientific tools. The problem is that first-person knowledge of the sort Gonzalez describes only gives you access to your own experiences, it does not give you access to other people’s experiences. As such, even if you can obtain first-person knowledge, and even if it isn’t subject to empirical scrutiny, what you cannot do is obtain first-person knowledge of the content of other people’s first-person knowledge, which is exactly what you’d need to do to confirm that “most people” have the exact same experiences as you. If one insisted you could instead use third-personal knowledge to do so: great, then it’s an empirical claim. So Gonzalez faces a dilemma:

(1) If Gonzalez’s claim about what “most people” would “say” isn’t an empirical claim, then, because it’s a third-personal claim about the content of other people’s first-person experiences, it isn’t a claim that one can obtain knowledge about through first-personal means, and thus Gonzalez wouldn’t be able to justify this claim. In short, neither Gonzalez nor anyone else can obtain knowledge of other people’s first-personal experiences via exclusively their own first-personal experience

(2) This is, in fact, an empirical question, and either our empirical tools aren’t good enough to settle the matter (in which case Gonzalez wouldn’t be justified in making the claim in the first place), or they are, in which case Gonzalez has made an unsubstantiated empirical claim.

In short, Gonzalez makes a very serious conflation. Gonzalez mistakenly reacted to my critique as if I were claiming that first-person knowledge can be studied empirically. While I think it can be, this is irrelevant, because that wasn’t even what I was doing. What I was doing is saying that Gonzalez made a third-personal claim: a statistical claim about what most people would say.

I think Gonzalez may be very mixed up here, because I suspect they take what most people would say in these cases to reflect some kind of ineffable, first-person experience they have, and the content of which cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed empirically. But even if this is what Gonzalez was doing, then he’s simply entangled a bunch of first-person claims in a broader, third-personal empirical claim about the statistical regularities of the occurrences of certain first-person experiences. In other words, Gonzalez has nested first-person claims inside a third-person, empirical claim, then wants to treat the latter as inheriting the epistemic qualities of the former. But that’s not how things work.

For comparison, suppose there is a sui generis experience associated with tasting chocolate. And suppose the content of that experience cannot be assessed empirically. Okay. Fine. Then there’s a certain kind of knowledge, knowledge of what it’s like to taste chocolate, that cannot be studied empirically. But if one now wants to say that:

Most people would say that they have this specific experience when tasting chocolate, and are, in fact, experiencing it in this sui generis way

One is now mixing first-person claims with third-person empirical claims. Even if first-person knowledge could enable you to know what it’s like to taste chocolate, it cannot, by itself, provide you with knowledge that most people have the same experience when they taste chocolate, nor can first-person knowledge tell you anything about what they’d say.

First-person knowledge simply can’t tell you anything about other people’s experiences. So Christian could say that they have knowledge of P, and I could say I have knowledge of Q, and so on. This kind of ineffable, first-personal access to one’s own experience doesn’t and can’t justify population level claims about other people’s experiences.

In other words, if certain kinds of knowledge are fundamentally private, and hinge on one’s own personal experience, and if what Christian intended to say all along was that most people have the private experience of experiencing morality as “irreducibly realist,” this latter claim isn’t one that Christian or anyone else could possibly be justified in making by appealing to their own first person experience, for the simple reason that it’s a statistical claim about other people’s experiences. So even if we had private, ineffable experiences the content of which cannot itself be studied, any claims that most of us have a given kind of experience are themselves empirical claims. If Christian wants to insist such claims cannot be assessed empirically, either, that’s fine: then we can’t assess the truth of these claims at all, because they’re empirical claims and if empirical methods can’t settle the matter, nothing can. Introspection can’t tell you what other people’s experiences are like.

Furthermore, Christian, like many critics of empirical psychology, is under the mistaken impression that the only empirical tools available to us are self-report. This is false. One must have a profoundly impoverished understanding of psychology to think that we exclusively rely on self-report, or that this is the only method available for evaluating how people think. Christian continues:

Asking the masses about the structure of consciousness is like consulting a random pedestrian instead of a seasoned meditator. They can be, and in fact are, deluded about what they undergo. Once one Sees a structural feature of consciousness for oneself (that we perceive stance-independent normative reasons to act, for instance) its truth is self-evident, and one can be confident it holds universally for any consciousness similarly structured.

Again, the only methods available don’t involve merely asking about questions and awaiting self-report. And this latter claim is extremely dubious: people who have introspected on consciousness arrive at different conclusions on a regular basis; claims of the truth being self-evident are highly questionable and note that no arguments or reasons are given for thinking that they are; Christian simply asserts that this is the case.

6.0 Source???

Christian’s reaction to me exhibits a pattern I’m becoming too familiar with. Realists often do the following:

1. Make highly contestable empirical claims

2. Are unable or unwilling to furnish any empirical evidence for those claims

3. Make a bunch of excuses for why they don’t have to, e.g., because the claims in question are “obvious,” or, in this case, because they somehow aren’t empirical claims in the first place

4. Disengages from me when I press them on the point (in this case, by blocking me, and, consequently, deleting all of my comments)

Another thing many realists do is follow up on Step #4 by mocking me. Gonzalez opted to do this as well, with this unpleasant meme:

I’m unironically with the guy on the right.

Realists can’t have their cake and eat it, too. If you want to say most people are moral realists, or have realist phenomenology, or would say things that sound like they endorse or are committed to realism, you are doing psychology.

You can either acknowledge this, and try to do psychology well, or you can deny this, and continue to do bad psychology.

J.P. Andrew (hereafter JPA) has recently revived his blog Reflections on What Matters. Go check it out. JPA is a proponent of non-naturalist moral realism, so it should come as no surprise that I have something to say on the matter. In this post, I want to address an updated version of an earlier article from JPA, simply titled “Moral realism.” JPA begins with this remark:

In a previous essay, I argued that if we take seriously the idea that some things matter, we will find ourselves pushed toward a form of:

Value realism: there exist stance-independent evaluative truths — truths about what is valuable that obtain independently of anyone’s beliefs, preferences, desires, emotions, or attitudes.

Note the phrasing: both the notion that if we take certain things “seriously,” and in particular that “some things matter.” I am a moral antirealist. I take seriously the idea that some things matter. And yet this doesn’t push me towards value realism. This is because the notion that “some things matter” doesn’t specify the respect in which things matter. As an antirealist, I think things matter to people and relative to different stances. This is the only defensible sense in which I think anything can or does matter. And there’s nothing unserious about this.

JPA’s remarks are thus, from the very outset, a form of rhetoric. They serve a preemptive framing function where JPA can depict his own account as “serious” and antirealist accounts, by implication, as “unserious.” Now, JPA is perfectly entitled to think that the only “serious” sense in which things could matter is from a realist view, but such a position is itself a substantive theoretical commitment that cannot be held from a neutral point of view of the overall debate. The way JPA sets up the dispute, this perspective-contingent conception of taking things seriously is nonobvious and could readily give the impression to readers that antirealism is in some overarching sense “unserious.”

Shortly thereafter, JPA states:

If moral realism is true, then morality is not something invented by human beings, negotiated into existence by societies, or constructed out of our attitudes. Moral truths are not made true by the fact that we approve of them. Rather, morality presents itself as something to which we are answerable. The moral domain appears, at least pre-theoretically, to involve standards that we discover rather than create.

Notice this remark: “Rather, morality presents itself as something to which we are answerable.” On a technical note, this does not follow. It is possible both for moral realism to be true and for it to not “present” itself to us in any way at all, much less in a way “to which we are answerable.”

On a more general note, what would it even mean for us to be “answerable” if moral realism were true? Consider ways we might use the notion of being “answerable” in ordinary language. We might say that a person is only answerable to the law, or to the King, or their boss, or whatever. In these cases, such answerability involves the notion that one is subject to being held accountable by some authority or other. And such accountability only carries weight through practically relevant carrots and sticks: the police can haul you off to jail, the King can cut off your head, your boss can fire you, and so on.

When it comes to violating stance-independent moral obligations to which you are allegedly “answerable,” what, exactly, is the consequence of you violating them? Well, the “consequence” is that you have violated them.

…That’s it. Whereas the kind of practical answerability enforced by police and monarchs has practical relevance, the kind of “answerability” realists believe is somehow the more “serious” and perhaps even the only true or legitimate or fundamental type of answerability has no teeth. It’s as if one takes a notion, strips it of all practical relevance, and then declares it the actual or true form of the thing in question:

• Real horses have no shape, no mass, no extension in space, and no properties at all that could impinge on you or anyone else.

• Genuine pain has no phenomenology, no functional features, and no causal impact on anyone, ever, even in principle.

…and so on. The realist view of morality seems to strip morality of anything of substance, of the very things that would lead pragmatists like me to say it is real, and then declares the phantom residue real. If that’s what reality is, I’ll stick with the shadows on the wall.

JPA began by simply introducing the reader to moral realism, stating that if we “take morality seriously” we’d be pulled towards moral realism, defined as follows:

Moral Realism: there exist stance-independent moral truths — truths about what one morally ought and ought not to do that obtain independently of anyone’s beliefs, preferences, desires, emotions, or attitudes.

Yet JPA immediately follows this with remarks about how morality presents itself to us, before culminating in the claim that:

The moral domain appears, at least pre-theoretically, to involve standards that we discover rather than create.

JPA shifts from defining moral realism to specific claims about moral phenomenology, as if these were the same thing. What moral realism is, as a position, is conceptually distinct from the epistemic considerations (such as our phenomenology) that would cause us to endorse the view. JPA seems to conflate these. And he does so with no preamble, no argument, and no justification, and in a way that is frustratingly unclear. When JPA says “[…] morality presents itself…” he doesn’t specify who it presents itself to. JPA reiterates this remark again, stating:

I begin by examining the way morality presents itself in ordinary experience.

Note the phrase “ordinary experience.” This term should be a red flag. Philosophers will use phrases like this, then eschew any serious engagement with empirical psychology. What, exactly, is “ordinary experience?” To speak of experience in the ordinary sense is to imply generalizations about how people experience things. Generalizations of this kind are empirical hypotheses. The question then becomes how one operationalizes “ordinary experience.” As we will see, JPA does not present any empirical evidence that ordinary experience presents itself to people in the way he describes. It certainly doesn’t present itself this way to me. So, what does JPA mean? He doesn’t clarify. It might be one of the following:

• Morality presents itself this way to JPA, personally

• Morality presents itself this way to most people

• Morality presents itself this way to most reflective and competent people

• Morality presents itself this way to everyone

…or it could mean something else. Morality can’t just “present” itself simpliciter. Something can only present itself to someone. JPA and other realists routinely speak of things presenting, appearing, seeming, and so on without qualification and thus without clarification.

Good philosophy is clear and disambiguates precisely those claims most central to one’s position. It matters a great deal who morality presents itself to in this way. If it only presents itself this way to JPA or just a few philosophers, why should any of the rest of us care? If it presents itself to most other people, well, that should make us sit up in our chairs.

Furthermore, facts about what presents itself in a given way and to who are, of course, psychological claims. While I’m happy to grant a philosopher’s self-report about how things present themselves to that philosopher, philosophers are not entitled to make sweeping claims about how things present themselves to others unless they’re prepared to present appropriate empirical evidence to support those claims. The empirical details matter here, even if some philosophers deny that they do.

This failure to disambiguate often allows moral realists to make psychological claims while retaining plausible deniability that they are engaging in and making psychological hypotheses (though I would argue that it is implausible deniability). I suspect they want to avoid doing so because they’re unable or unwilling to substantiate these psychological claims, or lack an adequate understanding of what constitutes a psychological claim.

There are other problems with JPA’s remark. If JPA’s remarks are about how things appear to JPA, personally, it’s unclear if or to what extent anything could have appeared to JPA “pre-theoretically” or, if it did, how JPA would have knowledge of this fact. By the time philosophers are in a position to make remarks like this, what they personally thought pre-theoretically is in the past, often the quite distant past, and as such they must rely on memory. Memory is generally fairly reliable, but when it comes to philosophical views, it’s not so clear how reliable our memory is. It is quite common for people who change their mind on matters of central importance to insist, and to convince themselves, that “they thought that all along” even when they clearly didn’t. I doubt memory is a reliable guide to what we, personally, thought pretheoretically. If, on the other hand, JPA is making a claim about how things seem to others pre-theoretically, well, that’s an empirical claim, and JPA doesn’t present any empirical data to support such a claim.

Finally, the discover/create dichotomy is an imperfect fit for the realism/antirealism divide. Do people discover or create their food preferences? I don’t know about you, but when I try food for the first time, I don’t “create” whether I like it or not. I discover whether I like it or not. Does this mean taste is stance-independent? No, it does not. Some discoveries are discoveries about our tastes. Metaethicists should retire this dichotomy, because it is misleading.

In JPA’s next section, on moral experience, he continues to make vague and unsubstantiated empirical claims. After clarifying that moral realism is simply the position that “at least some moral judgments are true independent of what anyone happens to think about them,” JPA states:

If it is wrong to torture conscious beings merely for amusement, then it would remain wrong even if every human being on Earth came to approve of such behavior. If compassion is genuinely better than cruelty, then this is not merely a reflection of our contingent emotional dispositions or cultural practices. It is instead a truth about how one ought to relate to other conscious creatures.

And this, I think, captures the way morality ordinarily seems to us. We do not generally experience morality as a system of arbitrary conventions, akin to etiquette or fashion. We experience moral demands as possessing a peculiar authority. Morality seems to place genuine constraints upon us, such that it is up to us to conform ourselves to it, rather than up to morality to conform itself to us.

Notice the profoundly vague use of the term “us.” Who is “us”? It’s not me, since this is not how morality seems to me. So who is JPA referring to? JPA simply does not specify. This is standard for analytic moral realists, who seem to make empirical hypotheses but often refuse to be specific or to state them in a way that is clear enough to generate a testable hypothesis. JPA presents no arguments, evidence, or reasons to believe that this is how morality “seems to us.” This is simply asserted. This is likewise a common feature of the way many analytic moral realists present their views. They frequently make a host of unsubstantiated assertions.

Notice what JPA goes on to claim:

Yes, appearances can be misleading. But: if we abandon the principle that things are generally as they appear absent a defeater, skepticism threatens to spread very far indeed.

[…]

To deny this altogether is not merely to reject a philosophical theory: it is to radically reinterpret one of the central dimensions of human experience.

These attempts to suggest the rejection of realist seemings would usher in the threat of skepticism are premature. But notice, again, the remark at the end here: JPA claims that realist seemings are “one of the central dimensions of human experience.”

This is an unambiguous empirical claim. And yet again: no evidence, no arguments, no substantiation at all. What JPA has presented so far isn’t so much philosophy as it is bad psychology.

JPA’s subsequent objections to antirealism are not impressive. He states:

Still, anti-realist views face a persistent difficulty: namely, that they seem unable fully to capture the authority morality appears to possess.

Morality does not appear to me to possess authority. Are moral antirealists obligated to specifically account for why things seem a certain way to JPA and others to whom things seem this way? If so, then is the primary goal of moral antirealism to psychoanalyze realists?

What a strange claim from JPA. Suppose it seems to an unspecified group of people that the sky is purple. I look up at the sky and it seems blue to me. I conclude “The sky is not purple.” Is the problem with my position that it does not account for why the sky appears purple?

First, note again how weird such a question would be. Does not appear purple to who? The answer to that question matters. Second, if it’s the case that it seems like realism is true to some realists, and if realism is false, then any antirealist account that includes an account of the error in question will presumably require some kind of psychological hypothesis to account for the error. After all, the error in question isn’t an intellectual one. It isn’t a mistaken inference or deduction. It’s a phenomenological error. Given this, it seems that the only possible way to adequately critique realism by accounting for realist “seemings” is to engage in empirical psychology. And if that’s the case, then realists should certainly be interested in moral psychology, since it would be an integral component of any viable critique of realist “seemings.”

Let’s have a look at what else JPA says:

If moral judgments ultimately reduce to preferences, emotional reactions, social practices, or practical endorsements, then it is difficult to understand why morality should bind us in the robust way it seems to do.

The antirealist response to this is simple: it doesn’t seem this way (to at least some of us). Once again, is the defensibility of antirealism contingent on whether we can offer a psychological account of why JPA and other realists are having weird and mistaken experiences? And here we get one of the clearest articulations of a seemingly empirical claim:

Ordinary moral phenomenology does not merely register that one happens to dislike cruelty or approve of compassion. It presents certain actions as genuinely worthy of condemnation, admiration, guilt, resentment, praise, or blame.

Ordinary moral phenomenology. JPA keeps playing fast and loose with the claims in question. Whose experiences is he talking about? Once again, if they are the alleged experiences of ordinary people, the onus is on JPA and others to actually demonstrate that this is how ordinary people experience things. At present, there is no compelling or even particularly good evidence that ordinary people experience morality in the way JPA does. Maybe some do, but “ordinary” remains too vague to make quantitative inferences. Does he mean most? If so, why not say so?

JPA then makes this claim:

Moreover, moral anti-realism often proves unstable upon reflection. Many who officially endorse it nevertheless continue to speak and act as if at least some moral claims possess universal authority.

It isn’t unstable for me. JPA provides no evidence, or even any examples to substantiate this claim. So once again we’re treated to unsubstantiated and underdeveloped claims. What would constitute speaking or acting “as if” at least some moral claims possessed “universal authority”? Also, even if some moral antirealists acted this way, this wouldn’t show that the position itself is somehow inherently or inevitably unstable. It would only show that some people act or think in ways inconsistent with it. Without any further reason to believe this is an especially serious problem, this would not indict antirealism. It is consistent with just about any philosophical belief for the one who believes it to think or act in ways inconsistent with it. That this is possible and in some cases occurs in no way shows that the view is mistaken or unlivable or whatever. Is Christianity false or in serious trouble because Christians often think or act in ways inconsistent with their commitment to Christianity? I don’t think so. JPA goes on to make puzzling remarks that suggest he may misunderstand what is consistent with antirealism:

Tolerance, equality, justice, and human rights are frequently defended not merely as local preferences, but as norms that others genuinely ought to recognize.

I do genuinely think others ought to recognize all of these things! That’s entirely consistent with antirealism!

But once morality is reduced to cultural attitudes or individual preferences, it is difficult to explain why anyone outside those frameworks should be bound by them (or even care about them).

I don’t think people are “bound” by my preferences in some realist sense. I just want them to comply. I also think they’d usually be better off by their own lights if they did.

The rest of JPA’s remarks are dedicated to naturalism, the argument that morality is metaphysically weird, and theism. I don’t particularly care about any of these topics, so I’ll wrap things up here. Instead, I want to focus on more features of the alleged experience of morality JPA introduces in his conclusion:

Morality presents itself as objective, authoritative, and irreducibly normative.

JPA now adds the feature “irreducibly normative.” Once again, morality doesn’t present itself this way to me, and JPA provides no evidence that it presents itself this way to ordinary people or that it is a “central dimension of human experience.” JPA just piles on the unsubstantiated empirical claims.

My work and the work of others raises serious challenges to JPA’s claims, and much of his case for realism would be undermined if those claims turn out to be false. To my knowledge, JPA remains disinterested in engaging with this literature and dismissive towards me in particular. He also has a penchant for blocking antirealists who try to engage with him on Twitter, and disables comments on his Substack posts, so people aren’t able to engage with him there. This is unfortunate. I enjoy engaging with people who disagree with me, and I think JPA and I could learn and benefit from interacting with one another. Sadly, I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Either way, there is a single, common thread tying this post together: JPA makes a host of unsubstantiated empirical claims about human psychology. At present, the best available empirical evidence suggests these claims are probably not true, I have documented this evidence in detail, and I have addressed JPA’s claims to the contrary extensively on my blog already. JPA is, as always, welcome to reach out to have a conversation, and I’d be happy to discuss the empirical literature on this topic, clarify his claims about ordinary experience, and otherwise discuss matters that seem fundamental to our respective positions on metaethics. I don’t think those who agree with JPA, or those who agree with me, benefit from siloing ourselves away and not engaging with one another.

1.0 New Survey Reports Most Americans Reject Moral Realism

A recent survey purports to show that most people in the United States reject moral realism (Carneades, 2026). You can find the survey results here and a video discussing them here. I’m always excited to see this kind of research. My primary area of research is experimental metaethics, and specifically the question of whether nonphilosophers are moral realists. So a survey drawing on a nationally representative sample that specifically sought to evaluate whether people are moral realists or not is exactly the kind of study that interests me. I also appreciate that the designers of the survey included a range of metaethical positions, rather than presenting a false dichotomy between e.g., moral realism and moral relativism. As you can see from their findings, they report the following:

Realism 35.9%

Emotivism 43%

Cultural relativism 18.2%

Error theory 3.0%

Since I have dedicated much of my work to arguing against the presumption that most people are moral realists, it would be convenient to herald these findings as a clear and unambiguous indication that most people in the United States are moral antirealists. The report associated with these findings does appear to interpret in this way:

Nearly two-thirds (64%) of Americans reject moral realism, the claim that there is an objective truth about right and wrong. When given the choice between major metaethical theories, a plurality (43%) of Americans said that emotivism, (the view that statements about right and wrong merely express personal sentiments like “boo killing” or “yay charity”) best aligns with their beliefs. Nearly one in five Americans said that cultural relativism best describes their beliefs, with only 3% preferring error theory.

I believe these claims are too confident, and that the measures used in the survey do not support such confident conclusions about the proportion of Americans who endorse or reject moral realism. To explain why I think this, I will present the question posed to survey respondents, then describe the many methodological shortcomings associated with the survey method they used. I did comment on YouTube expressing a willingness to offer critical feedback, which you can see here. I didn’t hear back, but that may not have been the best way to contact them.

2.0 Survey methods

According to the report on the survey:

The best attempt was made to make the statements succinctly represent the four positions, while still being accessible to a general audience without too much philosophical lingo. Of the statements, 1 corresponds to moral realism, 2 corresponds to emotivism, 3 corresponds to cultural relativism, and 4 corresponds to error theory.

Here was the question respondents were given:

When someone makes a statement about right and wrong (like “it is wrong to kill”) your view of that statement is best described as...

1. Moral statements are objectively true or false (i.e. “killing is wrong” can be true or false in the same way statements like “snow is white” can).

2. Moral statements express a person’s feelings about an action (i.e. that they don’t like killing).

3. Moral statements express cultural norms (i.e. that killing is wrong in their culture, but might be ok in other cultures)

4. All moral statements are false, because they fail to refer to anything real (saying “killing is wrong” is like saying “killing is bgike” it does not mean anything).

3.0 Problems with the survey

This may appear to be a straightforward method for assessing which metaethical position nonphilosophers endorse. However, as we will see, there are many shortcomings with this seemingly simple question. Let’s get into them.

3.1 Forced choice

A forced choice paradigm requires participants to select a response from a restricted range of options. This can introduce a number of methodological problems.

First, if the participant doesn’t endorse any of the positions listed, they have no way to express this. If they respond, whatever choice they make will inevitably reflect a position other than one they actually endorse. For instance, suppose you were given this survey question:

Which of the following fruits is your favorite fruit of all?

▢ Apple
▢ Banana

If neither of these is your favorite fruit, too bad. Most people will choose one anyway. This would then give the impression that almost everyone’s favorite fruit is an apple or a banana, even if this isn’t true. A person may prefer other fruit, or have no preferred fruit at all. Any person whose genuine position doesn’t correspond to one of these options must either not answer, or answer in a way that categorizes them incorrectly. If enough people are categorized incorrectly, you no longer have a valid measure.

This is a serious problem because people will tend to choose from the response options you give even if none of those options reflect their actual position. Why? There are several reasons. The very act of presenting people with a limited range of options frames a question in a way that makes it easier to choose from among those options than to even consider alternatives. It effectively gives people “cognitive tunnel vision,” focusing their thoughts on the options in question and reducing the likelihood or willingness to consider alternatives.

Second, people typically desire to be cooperative when engaging in research. The completion rate for this survey was 43.7%, which is pretty good, but it is less than half of those who received the survey. Ask yourself: who is more likely to be cooperative and wish to appease the authors of a survey by responding in accord with the categories on offer: those who opted to complete the survey, or those who didn’t? Presumably it’s the former. As such, not only are people generally motivated to be cooperative, studies that consist of voluntary respondents invariably self-select for that subset of the population most likely to be especially cooperative. And it is generally uncooperative to refuse to respond to a particular question.

And, in any case, if the data consists only of those who did complete the survey, one’s data may be discounted if they found themselves unable to answer the question because none of the options reflected their views, so not answering may lead one to be excluded from the dataset to begin with. If this is what those running this survey did, then by design the study would exclude anyone who did opt to not respond. This creates a sort of dilemma. Consider the survey question about apples and bananas. Now suppose many people prefer pineapple. Some of those people, out of a desire to be cooperative, may choose apples or bananas, even though neither is their favorite fruit. They are included in the study, but their responses are inaccurate. Others refuse to answer the question. They are subsequently excluded from the analysis, and so their answers effectively don’t count: the final count only includes those who did respond. As a result, researchers would no longer have a true estimate of what people’s favorite fruit is, because their survey, by design, only looks at a limited range of response options.

Another related problem is that when response options are limited, people may interpret the task and the response options in a way that would enable them to give an answer, but it is effectively an answer to a different question. Once again, consider this question:

Which of the following fruits is your favorite fruit of all?

▢ Apple
▢ Banana

If pineapple is your favorite fruit, but you are given a question like this, you may think:

Well, perhaps this is simply asking me which is my favorite of the two. And that’s bananas, so I guess I’ll go with that.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that if we suppose this is not what researchers are asking, then the participant’s response is effectively a response to a different question, yet researchers have no way to know this and will still interpret it as a response to the question they intended to ask, which once again leads to miscategorization. The participant’s response means something like “I prefer bananas over apples,” but the researchers will interpret, and report the response to be “bananas are my favorite fruit out of all fruit.” To relate back to the present survey, note the way they framed the question:

When someone makes a statement about right and wrong (like “it is wrong to kill”) your view of that statement is best described as… (emphasis mine)

This phrasing could be interpreted in a conventionally absolute way, i.e., which one of these is the best overall description of your views. But it could also be interpreted as something like: “of these options, which is the closest to what you think?” If it is interpreted in this way, then many respondents may choose a response that is the best of a bad lot, i.e., the best of the options available, even if it is not what they’d choose if given a wider range of response options or the open-ended ability to express their own views. For comparison, I could easily answer the question: “Between apples and bananas, which is the best?” Whereas it would make no sense to ask me which of the two was my favorite fruit “overall” since the answer is neither. How many participants chose one of the four options as a result of interpreting the question this way? Who knows? That’s a problem.

Finally, note that in addition to forcing participants to choose from a limited set of options, these choices are also categorical: a participant must express unequivocal endorsement of one, and only one position. What if participants feel ambivalent? Or vary in how confident they are? Or are drawn to two or more positions and endorse both to some degree? There is no way to express any of this using a multiple choice question. A great deal of potential information is lost when participants are unable to express mixed, ambivalent, or uncertain stances towards a given response option. Consider, for instance, how one of the most prominent findings in experimental metaethics is that when participants are given the chance to endorse realism and antirealism, they often vary in what kind of response they give depending on the concrete moral issue in question or the specific question that has been posed to them. Studies that prohibit the ability for participants to express mixed, ambivalent, or pluralistic attitudes presume in advance that such possibilities are off the table. This is already a problem. But by structuring questions in ways that prohibit the expression of such attitudes, they can give the misleading impression that the data suggests such attitudes aren’t present in the sample to begin with, thereby reinforcing the very preconceptions behind forced categoricity in the first place. The possibility of mixed, pluralistic, confused, incoherent, ambivalent, or otherwise non-categorical notions is already hinted at by studies (see e.g., Wright, Grandjean, & McWhite, 2013) and have been theorized since early in such research (e.g., Colebrook, 2021; Gill, 2008; 2009; Loeb, 2008). Ruling out even the possibility of detecting such possibilities by design is a mistake.

3.2 Lack of alternative positions

Another problem with the response options is that they do not exhaust the range of possible positions participants could take. Here, the only responses are: moral realism, emotivism, cultural relativism, and error theory. This range is fairly restrictive and somewhat arbitrary. It may reflect some of the more prominent traditions throughout the 20th century, but there’s no particularly good reason to think these are the only positions most participants would favor. For instance, the study omits individual subjectivism, constructivism, prescriptivism, and contemporary expressivist accounts, as well as pluralist accounts.

When participants are not presented with a broader range of possible response options, many will default to those options that are available and choose whichever one is closest. Restricting the range of response options thus can lead to miscategorization of people who would’ve chosen otherwise if it were an option. Previous research in experimental metaethics has shown that this probably already was occurring in early studies. When Beebe (2015) introduced noncognitivism as a response option, it was frequently chosen. Previous studies required participants to respond in ways that presupposed cognitivism. Subsequent studies have likewise often found high rates of noncognitivism when these response options were provided (see Davis, 2021). Would participants choose from among the list of alternative metaethical positions I’ve mentioned here? I suspect so. When Pölzler and Wright (2020) distinguished cultural relativism from individual subjectivism, this is what they found:

Individual subjectivism ranged from 7-47% across different measures. In three of the four paradigms it was a very prominent response: 19%, 28%, and 46% are by no means small proportions. It was the second most common response for the comparison and metaphor task and by far the most common for the disagreement task, and took up 25% of the total responses overall. Given this, I see little rationale for excluding it from the present survey. Take, for instance, this remark on the potential consequences of a restricted, closed range of options (i.e., the use of a forced choice paradigm) from Krosnick and Presser (2010). For context, a closed question is one that presents participants with a restricted range of response options, while an open question allows the participant to respond using their own words:

If the list of choices offered by a closed question omits objects that a significant number of respondents would have mentioned to an open form of the question, even the rank ordering of the objects can differ across versions of the question. Therefore, a closed categorical question can often be used only if its answer choices are comprehensive. In some cases, identifying these categories will require a large-scale pretest of an open version of the question. In such instances, it may be more practical simply to ask an open question than to do the necessary pretesting.

Researchers who want to get a handle on the metaethical positions of nonphilosophers should engage in considerable pretesting in advance to discover which positions emerge organically in the population.

3.3 Lack of subcategories/variants

The inclusion of emotivism as the only noncognitivist response option is also rather odd. Emotivism is the earliest, crudest form of noncognitivism out there. Does that make it the worst? By no means; I’m not antagonistic towards the view at all. But it is just one of several noncognitivist positions. Their response options not only fail to include whole categories of alternative positions, such as constructivism, but exclude subcategories and variants of existing positions that may have differential appeal were they more fleshed out. Subjectivism, mentioned in the previous section, arguably falls into this category, in that it reflects one form of relativism that indexes moral claims to individuals rather than cultures. Arguably, constructivism and both cultural relativism and individual relativism fall into the broader category of stance-dependent cognitivist accounts, which form a supercategory of antirealist accounts which maintain that moral claims are propositional and some are true in a way that depends on stance.

The survey in question only provides one example of noncognitivism/expressivism, emotivism, and only one form of stance-dependent cognitivism, cultural relativism. By excluding other forms of noncognitivism and stance-dependent cognitivism whole positions are left off the table for participants to consider. Realism, too, can be subdivided into naturalist and non-naturalist accounts. While one may simply wish to know whether people are realists or antirealists, the way realism is framed in the survey doesn’t distinguish between the two. If participants associate moral realism with religiosity or a more non-naturalist or supernatural conception of morality, they may be disinclined to select it merely due to a failure to consider the possibility of naturalist moral realism. Of course, it’s a separate question entirely whether and to what extent they interpret any of the stimuli as intended well enough to even consider this possibility, but in the absence of a fuller explanation of what possibilities are available, participants have little choice but to rely on assumptions about what the response options they’re given consist in or imply, and many people may spontaneously associate moral objectivism (or realism) with religious belief (this isn’t merely speculative; participants in my studies often do just this). Excluding naturalism as a response option could thus inflate the number of people who give antirealist responses.

Finally, the response options don’t distinguish agent and appraiser relativism. I discuss this distinction here. This is a serious problem because the two have quite different implications. The cultural relativism item’s wording (including the parenthetical) seems to refer to agent relativism, which would result in the omission of appraiser relativism as a potential stance participants could express.

The problem of excluding variants is an issue Pölzler and Wright (2020) sought to address in their research and, as their findings indicate, the overall picture of what metaethical position people favor is more distinct and robust when you include those options. More importantly, a broader range of options can mitigate the amount of miscategorization.

3.4 Crowding out of alternatives

Another problem with this study is that there is a substantial asymmetry in the response options: there is only one realist response option, and three antirealist response options. This asymmetry in response options could skew the overall pattern of responses towards a larger proportion of people who appear to favor antirealism rather than realism. There are simply more opportunities for subtle features of wording, random guess, confusion, or any other factors contributing to measure error to skew results towards antirealism. This is just one small way in which subtle features of design can skew results in a particular direction and, sure enough, this is consistent with antirealist responses comprising the majority of respondents.

3.5 Questionable use of examples & metaphors

Each response option also includes a parenthetical with examples/additional information. While this could enhance understanding of the respective response option, it may instead serve to mislead participants in ways that could lead them to choose or avoid choosing that response option for unintended reasons. Let’s have a look at each of the parentheticals:

When someone makes a statement about right and wrong (like “it is wrong to kill”) your view of that statement is best described as…

Objectivism

Moral statements are objectively true or false (i.e. “killing is wrong” can be true or false in the same way statements like “snow is white” can).

What, exactly, does it mean for killing to be wrong “in the same way” as a statement like “snow is white”? And how will participants interpret this comparison? As David Moss helpfully noted, the perception that snow is white is (at least to some extent) response-dependent, in that the appearance of snow depends on lighting conditions and other variables that could be perceived differently by different people and under different circumstances, unlike e.g., the chemical composition of water. It’s both unclear how they’d tend to interpret this and whether there’d be significant interpretative variation between participants. If they interpret this in unintended ways, this would invalidate their responses. And if there are significant variations in how participants interpret the question, then the results we get won’t be consistent from one participant to another. The net effect of the comparison might enhance intended interpretations, have little or no effect, or actively undermine them. It’s not clear why we should presume the parenthetical helped in this particular case. That is, itself, an empirical question.

Emotivism

Moral statements express a person’s feelings about an action (i.e. that they don’t like killing).

This may mislead participants. To express that you don’t like killing could be construed as a propositional claim rather than as an emotional expression, in which case this item may prompt at least some participants to conflate emotivism with individual subjectivism.

Another problem is to say that you “don’t like” killing may pragmatically imply a lack of stronger opposition. For comparison, imagine a man says:

I like my wife.

The social expectation is for this man to say he loves his wife. As such, for him to say he likes his wife will, in many contexts, pragmatically imply that he doesn’t love her. Likewise, some people may interpret the notion of merely saying you “don’t like” killing to fail to convey an appropriately robust attitude of repugnance and opposition.

Cultural relativism

Moral statements express cultural norms (i.e. that killing is wrong in their culture, but might be ok in other cultures)

This is ambiguous between a metaethical reading and a descriptive reading. Killing can be considered wrong in one culture but not another without the participant having to think it is in fact wrong relative to one set of standards but not wrong relative to another. Unintended descriptive interpretations were a common finding when I prompted participants to explain their answers to a variety of existing metaethics stimuli, or to offer their interpretations of what such stimuli meant. Descriptive readings remain an attractive unintended interpretation and may have influenced how some participants interpreted this particular response option.

Another common tendency among participants is to interpret categories of actions such as stealing or killing as right or wrong depending on the context, e.g., it may be okay to kill in self-defense but not to take someone’s wallet. The example provided here may facilitate or increase the rate at which participants interpreted this response option to indicate a potential sensitivity to context, which is orthogonal to the relativism/non-relativism distinction. This may have in turn inflated the tendency for participants to choose this response option, both because sensitivity to context is something many people may favor, and because it is comparatively more attractive than alternative response options that, by implication, would suggest comparative insensitivity to context (thanks to David Moss for emphasizing this possibility).

Another problem is that this item strongly implies agent relativism rather than appraiser relativism. Since agent relativism is often interpreted in such a way so as to indicate that one must regard societies with practices contrary to one’s moral standards as morally acceptable, it is often the far less appealing of the two forms of relativism. This could lead fewer participants to choose this option.

Finally, the specific use of killing may throw some people off, as participants may be disinclined to specifically choose a response option that would indicate that they are okay with killing, and if they think it’s not plausible some societies would be okay with killing, this may also discourage favoring this response option. More generally, if researchers provide examples of cultural variation in moral standards, choosing variation in whether killing is okay may not be the best option. Research shows that participants are more likely to favor antirealist or relativist responses for moral issues that are considered controversial or that plausibly vary within and across populations, e.g., abortion, whereas they are far less likely to favor such response options when the matter is one for which there is little controversy. And without context, it’s likely most people would be opposed to people or cultures that think “killing” without qualification is acceptable.

Error theory

All moral statements are false, because they fail to refer to anything real (saying “killing is wrong” is like saying “killing is bgike” it does not mean anything).

First, note the asymmetry between this item’s use of “all” and other items. This makes this item especially strong and definitive relative to the others. It also rules out any inclination participants may have towards some degree of pluralism or openness to alternative metaethical stances by default. This difference may have made this item especially unappealing, which could partially explain why it was chosen at an almost negligible rate (thanks to David Moss for making this point).

Error theory holds that moral claims contain an implicit commitment to the existence of stance-independent moral truth. But since there is no such truth, such claims fail to refer to a genuine phenomenon. For comparison, suppose a person believed that moral claims expressed God’s will, so statements of the form “X is wrong” meant something like “X is against God’s rules.” If so, then a statement like this:

Stealing is wrong.

…would mean something like:

Stealing is against God’s rules.

If God does not exist, then it’s not true that stealing is against God’s rules, and thus “Stealing is wrong” would be false. Just so, if moral claims like

Stealing is wrong.

…mean:

Stealing is stance-independently wrong.

…but nothing is stance-independently wrong because there are no stance-independent moral facts, then the statement “Stealing is wrong” would be false. It would not thereby be nonsensical. Yet the parenthetical included in this study implies that error theory holds that moral claims don’t mean anything, by comparing the notion of right and wrong to gibberish strings of nonsense letters. This is not an accurate characterization of error theory. Unfortunately, then, the parenthetical included with this item provides false and misleading information about what error theory would commit the respondent to. I don’t know if this influenced response rates, but it’s important when presenting a metaethical view to present that view accurately.

3.6 Use of technical terminology & ambiguous phrasing

Another problem with this survey is the use of technical terms or terms and language that may prompt unintended interpretations. The most serious of these is the use of the term “objective”. Objective is a polysemous term with a variety of distinct colloquial meanings. It can be understood to mean:

• Impartial judgment (“The judge was objective”)

• Focused on the facts, not relying on personal presumption (“The detective didn’t rely on hunches because they were objective in their work”)

• Capable of being measured by publicly evaluable standards (“They used an objective, 5-point scale to measure performance”)

• Absolute, or exceptionless (“It is objectively wrong to torture people, meaning that there is never any circumstance where it’d be acceptable”)

• Universal, or a moral rule that applies to everyone (“It is objectively wrong to commit murder, regardless of who you are or what culture you are from”)

…and there are likely other interpretations. The only way for this item to serve as a valid reflection of moral realism is if most participants specifically and exclusively interpreted it to mean something like “stance-independent.” Yet data shows that most participants don’t interpret use of the term “objective” this way. Instead, they consistently interpret “objective” in a variety of unintended ways. In fact, when I asked participants explicitly what it meant for morality to be objective or for specific moral claims to be objective, many interpreted this as the opposite of what objective meant, offering responses that indicated that “objective” meant something like relative or non-objective. Still others interpreted it in the various ways described above. What most didn’t do is interpret “objective” to mean something like “made true in a way independent of the goals or standards of individuals or cultures.” As such, the item used to reflect moral realism may not have been interpreted as intended by a substantial proportion (and perhaps even a majority) of respondents.

To a lesser extent, terms that may have fairly distinct meanings to philosophers familiar with the use of those terms in a metaethical context may be less clear to untrained survey respondents. What, exactly, is a “statement”? What does it mean to “express” a feeling or norm? While philosophers may share a common understanding of these terms, it’s not clear nonphilosophers do, or that, to the extent that they do, their understanding of these terms aligns with philosophical usage.

Finally, the error theory item includes the notion of a statement failing to refer. This is a technical notion that nonphilosophers may be unfamiliar with, both with respect to the terminology used to characterize this notion and the notion itself. There are additional complications with the error theory item I address below.

3.7 Lack of face validity in noncognitivist response option

One of the most serious problems with this survey is that the “emotivism” response option is not a face valid measure of emotivism. Here is how the item reads:

Moral statements express a person’s feelings about an action (i.e. that they don’t like killing).

The problem is that emotivism is the view that the primary or exclusive function of moral claims is to express emotions, and that, as such, they don’t also express propositional content. In other words, moral claims may appear superficially to express propositions because they take the form of a declarative sentence, but in fact they function only to express nonpropositional content, and, in particular, the emotions of the person who makes the moral claim. So someone who says:

Murder is wrong.

…is expressing an emotional state of opposition to murder, but is not expressing any claim that could be evaluated as true or false.

Yet the response option used to reflect emotivism doesn’t make any of this clear. Instead, it simply holds that moral claims express a person’s feelings about an action. This is, in fact, consistent with every other realist and antirealist position. Literally all of them. Consider moral realism. Moral realism is a cognitivist position, according to which moral claims assert propositions that can be evaluated as true or false. But this is not inconsistent with, nor does it preclude by implication, that moral claims don’t also express a person’s feelings about an action. A moral realist could intend to assert and interpret others to be asserting true moral claims when they say things like:

Murder is wrong!

…while simultaneously also taking those claims to pragmatically convey the speaker’s emotions as well. In fact, most moral realists probably do interpret one of the most common secondary functions of moral claims to convey a speaker’s emotions. It’s just that those emotions are conveyed alongside the propositional content of the statement. The exact same holds for error theorists and relativists, both of whom likewise can and in most cases probably do regard moral claims as capable of expressing nonpropositional emotive content alongside their respective semantic analyses of the moral statements in question. What distinguishes emotivism isn’t simply that it treats moral claims as expressing emotions, but, roughly, that the only express emotions.

Since this isn’t clear to participants, a disproportionate number of participants may have favored this response option because they considered it quite obvious that moral claims do typically express one’s feelings towards the action in question. Of course they do!

At the same time, people don’t interpret response options in isolation from one another. Instead, they interpret response options in relation to other response options. It is only natural to interpret the other response options, which don’t mention the expression of one’s feelings, as pragmatically implying that moral statements don’t express one’s feelings. And since this is rather implausible, many participants may have been drawn to this response option because it conveyed something that is clearly true about moral statements (i.e., that they express feelings), while other response options implied they didn’t.

It is important to note that when pointing out biases, those biases should account for the pattern in the data specifically in a way that accords with whether the bias should lead to an inflated or reduced rate of participants selecting a specific response option. Since I think this is one of the most serious shortcomings of this survey, and because it would lead to the prediction, if it is a serious problem, of a higher rate of emotivist responses, what do we find? Sure enough: an extremely high rate of people choosing emotivism of 43%, nearly half the participants. I suspect this high rate of “emotivism” is due in large part to this particular problem.

3.8 Error theory item is unclear and too technical

The error theory item also exhibits another problem. Note the wording of the item:

All moral statements are false, because they fail to refer to anything real [...]

What exactly does it mean to say that they fail to refer to anything “real”? The most standard form of error theory is one which holds that ordinary moral claims are committed to some form of stance-independence, objective prescriptivity, or some other implicit commitment to a metaphysical thesis. Error theorists then maintain that because the metaphysical thesis is false, the claims in question are systematically committed to those false presuppositions and are thus uniformly false. None of this is adequately conveyed by telling participants that moral statements fail to refer to “anything real.” The notion of “anything real” is too vague and underdescribed to sustain the distinctive features of error theory that make clear why the error theorist would think all moral claims are false. In fact, “anything” is so open-ended it may appear to many participants to be obviously false.

What error theorists specifically hold is that first-order moral claims involve a commitment to stance-independence, such that insofar as moral claims are intended to refer to stance-independent moral facts, and there are no such facts, the claims in question fail to refer to something that exists. What this does not mean is that error theorists think that moral claims don’t refer to anything real. Why? Because moral claims often include nonmoral, descriptive content. For instance, take the claim that “it is wrong to harm innocent people.” The only thing the error theorist denies is that this statement is true insofar as, and only to the extent that, it purports to refer to a stance-independent moral fact. However, the error theorist is not also obliged to deny that harm or suffering are real. Likewise, take thick moral concepts like “cruelty” or “courage.” These concepts include both normative and non-normative content. Even if one denies that the normative content, when distilled from these statements, fails to refer due to a commitment to stance-independence as a feature of the semantics of normative moral discourse, this doesn’t mean the descriptive aspects of the moral claim fail to refer to anything real: they do refer to real, descriptive features of people.

More generally, moral claims often involve multiple implicit presuppositions, which include both whatever implicit metaethical theses are involved in the claim (e.g., stance-independence), and any presumptive descriptive content, including any respect in which certain ontological considerations are a legitimate precondition for the claim in question. The notion that suffering is morally bad, for instance, presupposes the existence of minds and their capacity for suffering, and antirealists will generally agree these are real.

Since the statement doesn’t specify what, exactly, isn’t “real,” whoever employs this survey leaves interpretation of this remark at the mercy of whatever assumptions respondents to the survey make, which may or may not correspond to researcher intent (which is, presumably, an exclusive reference to moral claims exhibiting a commitment to stance-independence).

Note, by the way, that error theory in this form was devised specifically as a rejection of non-naturalist moral realism. If one took the semantics of ordinary moral discourse to involve a commitment to naturalist moral realism, standard forms of error theory wouldn’t apply. So are participants expected to somehow interpret “fail to refer to anything real” to specifically involve a rejection of non-natural metaphysical properties?

This seems like a tall order. And yet this is compounded by further issues with this response option. Participants must implicitly (or explicitly) recognize that error theory involves a two-step process: a commitment to both a semantic thesis about what ordinary moral claims mean and a metaphysical thesis predicated on this. This, too, is a tall order.

Finally, participants must recognize on some level that “All moral statements” specifically refers to all first-order moral statements, specifically. Nonphilosophers may not appreciate this distinction, and take “all” to include metaethical statements, or descriptive moral statements, or both a moral claim and the negation of that claim, which would make error theory absurd and nonsensical. More likely few if any of these distinctions would be salient, but even so it’s not likely they’d appreciate the notion of the systematic falsehood of a distinctive subset of “all” claims implicitly delineated by the notion of “all moral statements.”

3.9 Variation based on paradigm

Even if we set aside all of these issues, it would be too quick to move straight from the results of this one survey to any confident conclusions about what most Americans think. Pölzler and Wright’s (2020) survey also found a majority favored moral antirealism, but their participants tended to favor cultural relativism and individual subjectivism over noncognitivism. Notably, the specific antirealist position participants favored varied considerably across the paradigms they employed. For instance, 30% of the participants chose the noncognitivism response in one task, 23% in another, but only 3% in a third. That’s quite a wide range. Individual subjectivism exhibited an even greater cross-paradigm variation, with 7% favoring it according to one measure, but 47% according to another. One can look across the paradigms other researchers have employed (e.g., Beebe, 2015; Davis, 2021; Sarkissian et al., 2011; Zijlstra, 2023) and readily observe that rates of realists and antirealists, and the specific antirealist positions participants favor, vary considerably across different measures. Such wide variation should lead us to question whether any one of these studies in particular should be trusted as an accurate estimate of the true proportion of realists and antirealists within a given population.

4.0 Conclusion

Given the volume of methodological shortcomings with the methods used in this survey, I do not believe we should conclude with any significant level of confidence that most Americans reject moral realism.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to David Moss for commentary and suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.

References

Beebe, J. (2015). The empirical study of folk metaethics. Etyka, 50, 11-28.

Carneades (2026). National Survey of Philosophical Viewpoints | March 2026. Experimental Philosophy. https://www.carneades.org/post/national-survey-of-philosophical-viewpoints-march-2026

Colebrook, R. (2021). The irrationality of folk metaethics. Philosophical Psychology, 34(5), 684-720.

Davis, T. (2021). Beyond objectivism: New methods for studying metaethical intuitions. Philosophical Psychology, 34(1), 125-153.

Gill, M. B. (2008). Metaethical variability, incoherence, and error. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology: The cognitive science of morality (Vol. 2, pp. 387-402). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gill, M. B. (2009). Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics. Philosophical Studies, 145(2), 215-234.

Krosnick, J. A., & Presser, S. (2010). Question and questionnaire design. In P. V. Marsden & J. D. Wright (Eds.), Handbook of survey research (2nd ed., pp. 263-314). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Loeb, D. (2008). Moral incoherentism: How to pull a metaphysical rabbit out of a semantic hat. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology: The cognitive science of morality (Vol. 2, pp. 355-386). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Pölzler, T., & Wright, J. C. (2020). Anti-realist pluralism: A new approach to folk metaethics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(1), 53-82.

Sarkissian, H., Park, J., Tien, D., Wright, J. C., & Knobe, J. (2011). Folk moral relativism. Mind & Language, 26(4), 482-505.

Wright, J. C., Grandjean, P. T., & McWhite, C. B. (2013). The meta-ethical grounding of our moral beliefs: Evidence for meta-ethical pluralism. Philosophical Psychology, 26(3), 336-361.

Zijlstra, L. (2023). Are people implicitly moral objectivists?. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 14(1), 229-247.

1.0 The unintelligibility thesis

The philosophical position I defend which has generated the most ire is the unintelligibility thesis. This is the thesis that certain terms and concepts used in contemporary metaethics are not meaningful, specifically irreducibly normative reasons. An irreducibly normative reason is a normative reason that cannot be reduced to, redescribed, or in any other way understood in purely descriptive terms. It is normative simpliciter. I don’t think the claim that there are reasons of this kind is true or false. I think it is meaningless: there are no conceivable facts to which such a claim could correspond, even in principle. Those who claim to “have” the concept of irreducibly normative reasons are conceptually confused. They don’t have such a concept, because there isn’t a concept to have.

Many people take issue with this. Some see it as uncharitable or insulting. Still others find it so incredible I could believe irreducibly normative reasons are an unintelligible concept that they think I am lying or pretending to hold such a view. Others see it as absurd or obviously wrong. Still others maintain that my basis for such a claim is rooted in an appeal to incredulity, an informal fallacy whereby one maintains that, because they cannot imagine how something could be true, it must be false.

All of these claims are wrong, and my goal in this post is to explain why.

2.0 The UT is insulting/uncharitable

Some people claim that to suggest others are employing meaningless concepts is uncharitable. This charge makes little sense because the claim that the position is unintelligible is my claim, and isn’t itself an attempt to characterize the position or the arguments for the position as expressed by its proponents. While it’s possible my conclusions are based on an inaccurate presentation of the view, I have yet to see any reasonable case that I am mischaracterizing what proponents are saying, beyond not accepting claims I am entitled to reject at face value (specifically, the insistence that the claim is intelligible). Being charitable does not, after all, require accepting someone’s position or abstaining from having a position of one’s own that runs contrary to that position.

A related accusation is that it’s insulting to suggest serious professional philosophers could hold an unintelligible position. Even if this were true, it would be irrelevant as to whether I were correct. If the position is true, then however insulting people may find it, that is an unfortunate consequence of the truth. But I also deny there’s anything especially rude or insulting about the UT. Consider: is it insulting to consider a person’s position false? Presumably not. So let’s compare how insulting it is to suggest a term is unintelligible rather than false.

Suppose a group of people have all the knowledge, tools, and resources available to adequately solve a problem, but consistently fail to solve it, anyway. They keep arriving at false conclusions. We might conclude that these people were incompetent. How else would we explain their failure, if they have all the tools available to succeed? But suppose instead that these people had the wrong tools for the job. They were using the wrong methods, or were confused about some fundamental aspect of the task. As a result, they were unable to succeed because of this more foundational mistake. Once this foundational mistake was corrected, they solved the task with no problem and arrived at the correct conclusion. In this latter case, they aren’t incompetent; it’s just that one small mistake at the start can have cascading consequences or prevent a downstream solution.

This is comparable to charging a philosophical position with being false rather than unintelligible, respectively. My position is that philosophers have been inducted into a poor set of tools and methods for solving philosophical problems and that, as a result, they are consistently led astray. I do not think this is because they are stupid or incompetent. I think it’s natural to work within the constraints of a set of tools one is taught to use. Humans are cultural organisms, we specialize in specific tasks, and we typically learn and function best within the strictures of social institutions that support and maintain the cultural transmission of semi-codified bodies of knowledge that constitute bounded task categories, e.g., “hunting” or “building”. In other words, we are not totally freewheeling engines of innovation and thought; we are bounded agents whose knowledge is heavily embedded in social institutions. In our ancestral past, hunters would pass on their knowledge to successive generations. Boat makers, fletchers, builders, foragers, and so on would do the same. Bad ideas could be and were passed along with the good ideas, due to quirks in how cultural transmission operates. A person may incorporate an irrelevant step, or rituals may emerge, that serve no direct functional purpose but piggyback along the functional tasks we engage in.

I believe much of academic philosophy operates in a similar fashion. We don’t learn the best methods. We inherit the methods of our predecessors. Just as we absorb our culture’s languages, ethos, norms, standards, style, and so on, people within academic disciplines adopt the subculture and traditions of that discipline. For productive disciplines, this is mostly a good thing. The sciences have flourished as a result, and philosophy has made halting progress and occasional breakthroughs, including its contributions to science. I think philosophy still has more to do, and that it isn’t a worthless discipline. But I do think analytic philosophy is still operating within a narrow paradigm that clings to a misguided 20th century conception of language and meaning that was heavily corrupted by early and misguided notions about language and cognition, which was further warped by the malefic influence of Chomskyan views of language. But that’s a digression. My point here is that misunderstandings or conceptual errors can have deep and, importantly, understandable roots. To be caught up in a web of verbal and conceptual confusion that results in a commitment to meaningless concepts does not require stupidity or incompetence; it merely requires allying oneself with the wrong intellectual tradition.

Conversely, suppose we took a conventionally antirealist position towards the realist’s position: that their position is false. If I were a conventional analytic antirealist, and bought into the mainstream assumptions of the field, I’d be in the unfortunate position of believing that the methods we’re using are sufficient to get the job done; they might even be the best or only viable methods available to us. If we use them properly, they should work, and we should arrive at correct conclusions. And yet, on such a view, moral realists get it wrong anyway. They have all the tools at their disposal to get the right answer (moral antirealism) but endorse the opposite. Why don’t we consider this perspective insulting? Why isn’t this even more insulting than concluding they’re using the wrong methods? For comparison, imagine two positions on why an engineer failed to build a bridge:

1. They have exactly the right tools and are fully capable, but failed anyway

2. They lacked the proper tools, and thus couldn’t have succeeded at the task

Which of these is more of an indictment of the competence of the engineer? I think the first of these is, if anything, the more insulting of the two. Likewise, calling another person’s position false may, in certain contexts, be a better candidate for a rude or insulting stance to take than accusing them of having an unintelligible position.

One might argue that to accuse someone of unintelligibility is still more insulting. It implies greater confusion or mistake. This isn’t quite right. It implies a more fundamental mistake, but a more fundamental mistake isn’t necessarily one that carries the implication that the person committing it is more foolish, or incompetent, or worthy of critical judgment. A more fundamental mistake could be less obvious and have less to do with one’s competence, for reasons outlined above. Or we might suppose that the nature of unintelligibility is itself somehow more intrinsically insulting. It’s one thing to say what someone says is false, but to say it’s not even false? That’s going too far. Only I don’t personally think of it this way at all. The false/unintelligible distinction is a qualitative distinction in the form of error; it isn’t a measure of the degree of error. I could repeat iterations of these sorts of concerns ad nauseam.

My point is simple: to hold that a particular term or concept is meaningless, and that any positions based on it are in error, does not in itself entail anything especially insulting, negative, or critical about those who made the ostensible mistake, relative to simply maintaining that the view in question is false. I, at least, don’t think of it this way, and thus at the very least cannot be accused of intending to insult others. If others find my position on the matter insulting or offensive for inscrutable or unwarranted reasons, then I am sorry to say, but that’s on them. So I’d ask that people dispense with these sorts of objections. I’m not insulting anyone and I’m not trying to insult anyone. Thinking a position is the result of the kinds of linguistic/conceptual confusions Wittgenstein and others have outlined is no more an indictment of the competence of the thinker than simply saying they’re wrong, and is perhaps less of one.

And again, whether I’m being rude or insulting is irrelevant to the truth of the unintelligibility thesis.

3.0 I am lying or pretending to not understand the relevant concepts

A related objection to my position is that I am lying, pretending to not understand the concept in question, that I am “disingenuous,” or that I am operating in bad faith. Others have questioned whether anyone has seriously accused me of this, so I began a channel on my Discord where I and others can document accusations of dishonesty like this. Several have been directed at me. Here are a handful of examples:

Note that these are just a handful I’ve happened to collect, only after years of similar examples. These accusations are, uniformly, baseless and ridiculous. I can only speculate that the main reasons people make these accusations are that (a) they are so incredulous someone could disagree with them that they presume the person must be lying, which says more about their own intellectual limitations than my own and (b) they don’t have substantive objections, since one would presume if they had them they’d present those instead of making baseless personal attacks.

In any case, there’s a trend of people accusing me of bad faith, dishonesty, disingenuity, and so on. None of these people could produce a single iota of credible evidence to support the notion that I am lying or engaging in bad faith. This is ironic, given that the rest of this post is about appeals to incredulity, yet the entire basis for people making these claims appears to be their own personal incredulity that I would claim not to have concepts or beliefs they have (and that they may consider obvious). The difficulty they have imagining how someone could not share the same concepts as them is quite strange; some people don’t have mental imagery or don’t have an internal monologue. Is it so hard to imagine some people don’t have certain concepts or can’t/won’t grasp something, even if others can grasp it? Some things are just beyond some people. That’s why I take the claim that I am “conceptually impoverished” or even brain damaged more seriously; I know I’m not lying, so if there is a meaningful concept in play here, the issue is my inability to access it, not my secretly having it and pretending not to.

I’ve been on the fence about addressing these sorts of comments, though. These kinds of accusations are barely worth dignifying. Unless you have substantive evidence or reasons for believing someone is being dishonest, such accusations say more about the accuser than the accused. Accusing someone of dishonesty merely for articulating a position you find implausible suggests a failure of imagination (they can’t imagine someone disagreeing, so they must not!) or intellectual laziness (it’s easier to dismiss a view you find implausible than engage with it), and may even imply that they themselves are disposed towards dishonesty (dishonest people may assume others are inclined to be dishonest, because they assume others think similarly and have similar motives).

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again here: my philosophical positions are very much woven into my personality. I am obsessed with metaethics and talk about it constantly offline with friends and family. They could all readily attest that I say exactly the same things privately as I do publicly (with, if anything, even more fervor). I’ve even thought about posting testimony just to make the point. What are my accusers going to do, then? Accuse me of lying to my friends and family? Insist the testimony is made up? Am I hiring paid actors? At a certain point, these accusations of dishonesty become painfully silly; they’d require implausible levels of conspiratorial organization on my part, or they’d require the insistence that I keep up the same act in private and that I have done so nonstop for years. I’d have to pretend to students when I teach courses, pretend to my wife, pretend to all of my friends, pretend in private email correspondence, pretend in my publications and at conferences, and so on, all of which express a consistent set of views. And what would be the motive? Do I profit somehow from all the lies and pretending? The primary consequence of me expressing these views hasn’t been fame or fortune or notoriety. It’s been frustrating dealing with annoying and baseless accusations that I’m pretending or being dishonest! I have not enjoyed the consequences of expressing these views. There have been few benefits, and mostly costs. And yet another irony is that the people accusing me of lying (again, what is the motive?) are themselves constituting the primary cost, and thereby are contributing to the lack of incentive I would have for lying in the first place.

And, of course, even if I were lying, that would be irrelevant to whether the position in question is true; the quality of a position does not turn on the honesty of the person articulating it. If a person who believed the earth was flat went around lying that it was round and presented arguments that it was round, those arguments would stand or fall on their own merits. Arguments aren’t worse because the person presenting them doesn’t believe them. So, just like the accusation that my claim is insulting, whether I was pretending to endorse the unintelligibility thesis would likewise be irrelevant.

4.0 Appeals to incredulity

Finally, one response to the unintelligibility thesis is to insist that my position relies on an appeal to incredulity. An appeal to incredulity is an informal fallacy. Informal fallacies are not formal errors in the logical structure of an argument, but turn instead on extraneous considerations related to the content of the argument and the inference patterns associated with it. Such fallacies are broad in scope, but typically relate to the drawing conclusions on the basis of irrelevant considerations or drawing conclusions that simply don’t follow from the premises in question, not because of the structure of the argument, but because of the specific content of the premises themselves. For instance, the claim that someone’s position is incorrect because that person is ugly would be an informal fallacy known as an ad hominem: that a person is ugly is irrelevant to whether their conclusion is true.

Usually, anyway. Informal fallacies are not uniformly applicable so long as some minimal, superficial conditions are met. Claiming that we should reject someone’s conclusions because they are stupid, ugly, or smell bad may look like an ad hominem, but the mere fact that your basis for rejecting their conclusion is also an insult does not entail that you’ve committed a fallacy. What matters is whether the insulting claim is relevant. Sometimes it will be. What this illustrates is that informal fallacies differ from formal fallacies in that they often lack principled, rigid application conditions; one must be attentive to the context and content of the argument to correctly assess whether a given inferential mistake has been made. Take the case of the “ad hominem” of saying someone is wrong because they are ugly. Is this necessarily a mistake? No, it isn’t. Suppose that the person in question made the following argument:

P1: I am beautiful.

P2: If I am beautiful, people should shower me with praise.

C: People should shower me with praise.

Arguing that this person’s conclusion is false because they are ugly is, in fact, relevant. It’s relevant because it would entail that P1 is false. As such, saying someone is wrong “because they’re ugly” isn’t necessarily a fallacy. It’s only a fallacy when it’s irrelevant. And any irrelevant consideration would be a “fallacy” in virtue of the simple fact that it’s irrelevant.

Informal fallacies like this are really just a label we slap onto recurring mistaken inference patterns. They are not uniformly applicable to every and any situation in which the event that is often associated with the fallacy occurs. Not every insulting remark used as a reason to reject a conclusion is an ad hominem, and the same holds true of many other informal fallacies. Take the slippery slope fallacy. This “fallacy” occurs when a person unjustifiably claims that if we take a particular course of action, this will lead to a chain of events that will terminate in undesirable consequences, and that, because of this, we shouldn’t take the initial course of action. For instance, someone might argue that we shouldn’t allow polygamy because it would obliterate all standards and guidelines for restricting marriage of any kind. Next, we’d have to allow marrying animals or sandwiches, which would lead to a breakdown in the norms and guidelines that sustain civilization, ultimately culminating in our extinction.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it’s an open question if and when it’s “fallacious”. If someone actually has arguments or reasons for thinking a particular cascade of catastrophic consequences would follow from a given course of action, there’s no reasonable sense in which it’s fallacious. Suppose we had a crystal ball and it turned out that allowing polygamy would lead to human extinction. It would make no sense to insist someone presenting an argument against polygamy was therefore committing a fallacy. They’d be correct and correct for justifiable reasons. There’s no reasonable sense in which such inferences could be a “fallacy.” (Just to be clear: I don’t think polygamy would lead to human extinction. The example is intentionally far-fetched to illustrate that how far-fetched something is does not entail that it is fallacious. One could in principle have good reasons for reaching conclusions that seem bizarre or implausible to us given limited information). Personally, I barely see the need to recognize this as a “fallacy.” It’s simply that sometimes claims about the consequences of an action are false (or at least unjustified) and sometimes they’re not.

This brings us to appeals to incredulity. What, exactly, is an appeal to incredulity? First, it is often called the personal incredulity fallacy. The “personal” element of the fallacy is important here. The mistake occurs when someone infers from the mere fact that they are unable to imagine how something could be true or find themselves incapable of believing that something is true, that therefore it’s false. It more or less amounts to reasoning like this:

“I can’t believe it! So it must be false!”

Does my rejection of the intelligibility of irreducibly normative reasons turn on an inference like this? And does it exclusively depend on my personal claim to be unable to understand the position? No. I have never made any inference from the mere fact that I don’t have or understand the concept to the conclusion that therefore, because of this fact alone, the concept is unintelligible.

There are also asymmetries between my position and standard characterizations of appeals to incredulity. Typically the “fallacy” has to do with concluding something isn’t or can’t be true, not that it is unintelligible. And these are typically predicated on a direct inference about one’s own psychology, independent of any considerations about why they’re unable to regard the claim in question as true. As with other informal fallacies, it’s simply not the case that any instance in which a person both thinks:

(1) I don’t understand [claim]

(2) Claim is false/nonsensical

…that they are necessarily committing some kind of fallacy. The only time this is a fallacy is if one concludes (2) on the basis of (1) in the absence of any relevant considerations that would account for (1) in such a way that it would warrant drawing the conclusion that (2). As with ad hominem and slippery slope “fallacies,” whether or not a mistake is occurring depends, crucially, on contextual considerations. Suppose a mathematician encounters someone who insists:

The number four is prime because God says so.

If the mathematician finds themselves unable to conceive of how 4 could be a prime number, and concludes that it isn’t, are they committing a fallacy? Is this an “appeal to incredulity”?

No, it isn’t. It is, in fact, in virtue of their understanding of prime numbers and the number four that they can’t imagine how four could be a prime number: its characteristics preclude it, by necessity, from being prime. As such, there is a good reason why they can’t believe four is a prime number: because the characteristics of prime numbers and the number four are inconsistent in such a way that it is impossible for four to be a prime number. It is, in fact, knowledge of these concepts that ensures that one can’t imagine how four could be prime and can’t believe it. Thus, there are at least some (there are, in fact, many) situations in which one’s inability to believe or comprehend something is a direct result of having a proper understanding of the conceptual matters under consideration. Correct understanding can close off the ability to conceive of something being true which is fundamentally at odds with e.g., matters of logical necessity or that would be incoherent on reflection. Can you imagine, for instance, that dogs have all the exact same characteristics, but are nevertheless a type of reptile? I can’t. Because I think being a reptile is constituted by precisely those properties that I am being asked to hold constant. The suggestion is a nonsensical one. There’s no special “reptile essence” that floats free of the features of dogs and reptiles.

Consider another case. We encounter a person who has been drugged, and the drug in question is known to cause temporary confusion and cognitive dysfunction. We find the person saying things like:

All the blorgnovs are smirgalong! Shabba shabba shabba!

…before screaming, then giggling, then rolling around on the floor. Is it reasonable to conclude that this person is talking nonsense? Is it a fallacy to find oneself unable to believe that all the blorgnovs are, in fact, smirgalong?

No, it isn’t. Once again, contextual considerations, including background knowledge, matter. One has good reason to believe this person is talking nonsense, as indeed they might be. And if someone is talking nonsense, then what they’re saying has no determinate truth value. Is this true or false?

Shabba shabba shabba!

Or how about this?

Lkjasdl lajkwertl qlkjwel jypqpe.

These strings of letters are neither true nor false. The former is just gibberish, while the latter is random letters I typed out. Nonsensical claims don’t have a determinate truth value. And one may be justified in appraising certain remarks as nonsensical, and therefore incapable of being true in principle, either because one has a good understanding of the conceptual landscape in question, or good background reasons to think apparent nonsense is nonsense (e.g., because it is being uttered by a person with cognitive impairment due to drugs known to cause people to babble nonsense).

This is roughly the situation I am claiming to be in with respect to appeals to irreducible normativity. I could be wrong. It’s possible that I am deluded and that the only reason I reject the meaningfulness of the concepts in question is my personal incredulity. But this is something someone would have to demonstrate via arguments and evidence. It is not transparently the case that I am moving straight from “I don’t get it” or “I find this unbelievable” to “therefore it’s not true” or, in my case “therefore it’s not intelligible.” This isn’t something I’ve said or done, and, in any case, even if I had in the past, I universally retract all such remarks and denounce them as mistaken. As such, any continued insistence that this is an inference my position is currently based on would be at best outdated, but more likely was never true to begin with. So, if I’m not explicitly or transparently committing a fallacy of an appeal to incredulity, those who accuse me of doing should do something quite simple:

(1) Provide direct quotes of my remarks (especially recent ones)

(2) Show how those remarks illustrate that I’m committing the fallacy.

I have yet to see anyone do this. I believe there’s a good abductive explanation for this: because I haven’t done this, and the people accusing me of appeals to incredulity can’t provide receipts showing that I have actually done so.

In short: claiming that something is inconceivable, nonsensical, or that one cannot understand how it could be true is not necessarily fallacious; it is only fallacious if one moves directly from the mere fact that one cannot imagine or accept the truth of a claim to the conclusion that the claim is false. This isn’t something I endorse doing (at least not knowingly), so I am not committing this particular fallacy…unless someone could show that I’ve unwittingly done so, which they haven’t.

This alone is reason enough to reject these criticisms. However, the emptiness of the charge is overdetermined by other considerations. Foremost among these is the fact that I offer more reasons for rejecting the meaningfulness of the terms than a mere appeal to my personal lack of the concepts in question. My primary reasons are not inductive inferences based on my personal experiences. Rather, they are abductive. I believe a decent case can be made that the concept is not part of ordinary thought (and it certainly isn’t part of ordinary language) and is instead an obscure technical term that arose only among academic philosophers.

Along with this, I believe I can offer some debunking considerations that can account for why philosophers would be drawn to the notion, despite its unintelligibility; this largely turns on Wittgensteinian considerations, namely that the methods and presuppositions of contemporary analytic philosophy render philosophers vulnerable to certain conceptual errors rooted in confusions and errors related to language and meaning. It also turns on pragmatic considerations about whether the use of the term or concept would make any practical or detectable difference to experience, on the fact that its proponents often concede that there is no non-circular way to convey the meaning of the concept (and that it is therefore unanalyzable, incommunicable, or ineffable) coupled with my belief that all concepts are built up on the basis of percepts and models associated with them that, collectively, are at least in principle communicable, along with the fact that there is no good reason to think I am uniquely incapable of comprehending this particular concept. Collectively, these considerations form an abductive basis for my position. Simply put, I think the unintelligibility of irreducibly normative reasons is the best explanation for:

1. The insularity and obscurity of the concept

2. The inability of its proponents to convey the meaning of the concept in a non-circular way not only to me, but to anyone (including one another)

3. The reliance proponents have on designating the concept “primitive” (this is a misnomer; the issue with the concept isn’t that it’s primitive), unanalyzable, ineffable, incommunicable, and so on, without any principled reason for doing so beyond their mere inability to communicate its meaning

4. The lack of pragmatic implications, i.e., whether we had or didn’t have irreducibly normative reasons would make no practical difference

5. Explanatory superfluity: irreducibly normative reasons don’t provide a better explanation for any uncontroversial observations or phenomena

6. Deliberative superfluity: irreducibly normative reasons are not convincingly required for deliberation or any other intellectual activities

7. Debunking considerations: we can explain why philosophers would be motivated to believe in irreducibly normative reasons, and how and why these mistakes have occurred as a result of the methods and presuppositions of contemporary analytic philosophy coupled with factors associated with enculturation, rhetorical advances of advocating for realism, and motivated reasoning

8. Collectively, these reasons for rejecting the meaningfulness of the concept constitute a cumulative abductive case. The fact that, in addition, I believe the inability of proponents of the concepts to communicate them to me in conversation constitutes additional, auxiliary inductive evidence is virtually an afterthought. In other words, this is one more piece of evidence:

9. Numerous interactions with proponents of the intelligibility of irreducibly normative concepts have resulted in their consistent failure to convince me of the meaningfulness of the concept, and if anything has actually increased my confidence that it isn’t meaningful due to how these conversations tend to go (i.e., nowhere)

This inductive evidence forms one small part of the overarching basis I have for rejecting the intelligibility of the concept. And yet unscrupulous and dishonest people like the YouTube commenter DisCog20 ignore this and focus only on the inductive component of my objections. This can be seen in this comment exchange between myself and DisCog20, who is also one of the people who accused me of “bad faith” without any evidence in the screenshots above. I provided both inductive and abductive reasons for rejecting the intelligibility of irreducibly normative reasons. Here was a remark that I made:

My basis for thinking it isn’t meaningful is predicated on inductive reasons (such as the inability of realists to explain what they mean) and abductive considerations (the concept is explanatorily superfluous, we have better explanations of all relevant data, we can explain why realists would make the mistake, etc.).

Here is how DisCog20 quoted me:

“My basis for thinking it isn’t meaningful is predicated on inductive reasons (such as the inability of realists to explain what they mean)” - - -

This is hilarious, YOU not being able to understand what they mean when they provide explanations does not mean they can’t provide any, this is a classic case of your own incredulity leading you to believe the concept must be unintelligible, and thus, you are in fact doing the very thing you are denying.

Notice how DisCog20 cuts off the quote in the middle of the sentence right at the end of the parenthetical, which gives the misleading impression that my only reason for thinking the concept isn’t meaningful is my “own incredulity.” Why someone would do this in a public forum where anyone could see they snipped the quote off is beyond me. This is an extremely dishonest and slimy thing to do, which is ironic since DisCog20 began the thread by accusing me of dishonesty and accused me again of “bad faith” in this very discussion. I would suggest to DisCog20 that they look in a mirror. If you readily think others around you are dishonest, this may reflect the fact that you yourself are a dishonest person and so you suspect others of dishonesty.

However, I want to make a more general point about how unsuitable an accusation of “appeal to incredulity” is for any accusation that a certain term or concept isn’t conceivable: conditional on the position being correct, it would have to be the case that anyone who is thinking correctly about the matter would be unable to understand the concept in question. People who understand prime numbers can’t “understand” the notion of “four as a prime number.”

Suppose a group of people were going around saying nonsense as a matter of stipulation, i.e., they definitely are saying nonsense, and there’s no legitimate dispute about the matter. Anyone who came across these people who wasn’t duped or confused into thinking these people were saying something meaningful wouldn’t be able to understand them because there wouldn’t be anything to understand. As such, they’d be unable to report understanding them. In short: if something is incapable of being understood, then nobody could understand it. As such, it should always be the case that someone with a correct perspective on the matter wouldn’t be able to understand it.

This is quite different from standard applications of appeal to incredulity. Note that it is standardly used to refer to cases where a person can’t imagine how something could be true, so they conclude it isn’t. Such cases don’t typically deal with accusations of meaninglessness or unintelligibility, where the very matter in contention is whether it is possible to imagine the thing in question. Rather, they deal with propositions (assertions about what is true or false) that are presumptively intelligible, and the only question is whether they are true or not. The extension of “appeal to incredulity” to claims of unintelligibility is inappropriate and misguided. Here’s why:

The person endorsing an unintelligibility thesis maintains that a given concept is not meaningful. The critic asks why. The proponent of the unintelligibility thesis offers reasons for thinking it is unintelligible. In addition, they may note that they are unable to understand people who employ the concept, and this may form part of their evidence. The defender of the concept may then focus exclusively on this fact to insist that the proponent of the unintelligibility thesis is making an appeal to incredulity, insisting that their inability to understand the concept is no reason to reject its intelligibility. This is misguided for two reasons. First, it is misguided insofar as the proponent of the unintelligibility thesis has other reasons for rejecting the intelligibility of the concept, as already noted. But it is also misguided because, conditional on the proponent of the UT being correct, it must be the case that they’re unable to understand the concept in question. As such, the inability to find the concept intelligible would only be a problem if the concept were, in fact, intelligible, which is precisely what the proponent of an unintelligibility thesis is denying. The only issue is whether it is appropriate to conclude that the concept in question is unintelligible merely because one is personally incapable of understanding it.

So, do I deny that irreducible normativity is unintelligible merely because I can’t understand it? No. This gets the causality backwards. My thinking isn’t:

I don’t understand it, therefore it’s unintelligible.

It is:

I don’t think this is intelligible, which would explain (among other things) why I’m not able to understand it.

…but it also explains other things, like the inability of its proponents to give non-circular definitions, to clearly communicate what they mean, why the concepts in question don’t appear to have any practical implications if they were true, and so on. More importantly, my primary concerns are those that are publicly evaluable and have nothing to do with my personal inability to understand something. The main question is whether the truth of the notion in question would make any practical difference or not. I contend that irreducibly normative truths wouldn’t.

5.0 Closed and open concept spaces

However, there’s another route I want to explore: closed and open concept spaces. A concept space is a conceivable set of interrelated concepts, such as geometric shapes, animals, moral transgressions, or numbers. An open concept space is one in which one can conceptualize freely, adding to the conceptual possibilities in a way that allows an infinite or quasi-infinite capacity to build on that space. Take the notion of an animal. Can one conceive of a six-legged elephant? A flying purple centipede? A species of squishy glowing mushrooms? Sure. And one could add to this list arbitrarily. But other concept spaces have inherent restrictions and limitations. For instance, there are no integers between 1 and 2. Imagine someone said:

I am referring to the integer between 1 and 2.

This person is talking nonsense, but it might not strictly be unintelligible nonsense. I think there is, in fact, a sense in which it is literally nonsense: conditional on understanding what it would mean for something to be an integer, the notion of an integer between 1 and 2 is nonsensical; there couldn’t be such a thing in principle. The concept space of integers doesn’t allow this, and a person who tried to refer to an integer between 1 and 2 isn’t merely failing to refer to something that exists, but would be conceptually confused. Some people may not like the notion that this is nonsense rather than false. I won’t die on that hill, so we can move on to consider other examples where I think the nonsensical nature of certain notions may be harder for people to resist.

Some concepts derive their meaning in part from the role they play in relation to other notions. Take the notion of taller. If you understand what it means for something to be tall, then understand that something can be tall only relative to some standard, or frame of reference. When someone says “Wow, your child is tall,” they do not mean tall relative to the typical size of a skyscraper or an NBA player; they mean “relative to other children” with, perhaps, some implicit presumptions about the children one is referring to. If we lived in a world with multiple civilized species, some of which had much taller children, the remark in question would presumably not include that species and would instead mean something like “relative to children of your species.”

Now suppose someone were to insist someone was taller simpliciter. They were simply intrinsically taller. When you ask, “Taller than who or what or with respect to what standard?” They say:

No! You don’t understand. This person is simply intrinsically taller.

If you again ask who or what they’re taller then, they respond that you are not understanding. They’re not taller than anyone or anything, they are taller simpliciter.

This is the sort of claim I think of as nonsense. I don’t know how much we might want to blur the lines between falsity and meaninglessness but suppose the person making this claim was unable to articulate what they meant by it, and insisted the concept was “unanalyzable.” What would you think of this? I’d think this person was confused and full of baloney. Why? In virtue of my understanding of “taller”, I understand that something can only be “taller” relative to some standard or reference, whether it be some other person or thing, or some abstract notion, e.g., “taller than the median redwood tree,” or “taller than the typical coal miner in 1932.” You could not just be taller simpliciter. This isn’t some mysterious notion; it isn’t a notion at all. It is a kind of stray use of words that doesn’t simply attempt to refer to something conceivable but fail. A person who claims to be able to conceive of the notion of “taller simpliciter” simply does not understand how the rest of us are using the term “taller.” Our use precludes the notion of “taller simpliciter.”

I think of normative concepts in a similar way. I cash out normative considerations in terms of a relation between goals, values, or standards, and some means of complying with or achieving those standards. This could be crudely conveyed via conditionals, or hypothetical imperatives, i.e., if you value wellbeing, then you ought to avoid intense pain. In other words, normative considerations are conceptually constituted by a means-end relation between some value and some means of acting in accord with that value. Take, for instance, this sentence:

It is morally wrong to punch people for fun.

An antirealist analysis like mine could make sense of this as asserting something like:

If you value X, then it would be inconsistent with this value to punch people for fun.

…where X could be any standard or value where this consistency relation would obtain, i.e., if you valued respecting others, not causing recreational harm, valued complying with the dictates of a God who prohibited punching people for fun, and so on.

Note how on this account normative considerations are reducible to a type of descriptive fact. That is, they are reducible to a fact about what is the case. As such, any normative terms like ought, should, good, and so on can be eliminated from the analysis. Normative talk can thus be reduced or eliminated, such that the meaning of a given normative statement could be effectively translated into purely descriptive terms. There is, in other words, no irreducible normativity. All normativity is reducible to descriptive considerations. To put it simply: I consider normativity a purely linguistic phenomenon; normative considerations are not conceptually or metaphysically distinct in any substantive way. Note that this does not mean I regard normative facts as a kind of hypothetical imperative. I do not think that one’s goals, desires, or standards “give” one reasons or “make it the case” that one ought to thereby perform or refrain from performing some action. Such construals fail to fully discharge “normativity” involved, and thus still retain irreducible normativity.

In contrast, irreducible normativity is precisely in opposition to this. Note the term irreducible: irreducibly normative reasons just are reasons that have “normative” properties of a kind that cannot be reduced in principle. They are, at the very least, conceptually irreducible, and on some accounts normative facts would be metaphysically distinct, too. How does the proponent of irreducible normativity analyze this same sentence?

It is morally wrong to punch people for fun.

…on such accounts, there are stance-independent moral facts such as “it is morally wrong to cause unnecessary suffering.” These facts give you a reason to abstain from punching people for fun. These reasons could be overridden by other considerations, but one at least has some reason, all else being equal, to perform the action in question. But what does it mean for you to “have a reason” to perform the action in question if that reason cannot be reduced to a descriptive fact? In contrast to the conditional means-end relation account I offered, there is little further that could be said. After all, if the normative reasons in question are irreducible, they can’t be reduced to descriptive considerations in principle (otherwise, they’d be reducible). Parfit and others say that normative reasons “count in favor” of the action, but this is just another way of saying the same thing. Generally speaking, proponents of irreducible normativity just don’t have much more to say. The concept of an irreducibly normative reason is supposed to be “primitive,” “properly basic”, “unanalyzable,” and so on: all just terms that amount to an acknowledgment that one is unable to explain what the terms mean. Here is what Parfit says on the matter:

When Williams argues that there are no such reasons, his main claim is that Externalists cannot explain what it could mean to say that we have some external reason. I admit that, when I say that we have some reason, or that we should or ought to act in a certain way, what I mean cannot be helpfully explained in other terms. I could say that, when some fact gives us a reason to act in some way, this fact counts in favour of this act. But this claim adds little, since ‘counts in favour of’ means, roughly, ‘gives a reason for’. Williams suggests that the phrase ‘has a reason’ does not have any such intelligible, irreducibly normative external sense. When he discusses statements about such external reasons, Williams calls these statements ‘mysterious’ and ‘obscure’, and suggests that they mean nothing. Several other writers make similar claims. (Parfit, 2011, p. 272)

I don’t know who these other writers are, but if it’s in fact the case that at least some of these philosophers have made such claims, then I’m not alone in suspecting that the concepts in question are unintelligible. Notably, Parfit suggests that at least one reason others have given for thinking the terms aren’t meaningful is that their proponents are unable to explain what they mean. It’s also not clear whether Williams actually thought what Parfit says he did (I’ve been unable to find any clear indication that Williams thought external reasons were unintelligible and if you know of any sources that clearly address the matter, please share them. What I have seen suggests Williams, at least some point in time, did appear to think the notion was meaningful).

Now, it would be one thing if Parfit and others went around giving detailed explanations of what the concepts meant, and others (myself, perhaps Williams, and perhaps these other mysterious philosophers Parfit refers to), just scratch our heads and claim to not get it. Compare, for instance, to me claiming that nobody has been able to explain how airplanes work. There are detailed explanations of how they work. It’d be quite bizarre for me to ignore these. But almost everyone I’ve interacted with who has tried to offer an account of irreducibly normative reasons has said things similar to Parfit. I have seen a few attempts, but these struck me as changing the subject or failing to articulate what I take Parfit and others to express, though I grant there could be more out there I haven’t seen yet. Of course there could be. This is a position I could readily update if given new information.

But so far, in most cases this doesn’t appear to be what’s going on. What’s going on is that Parfit and others are making appeals to mysterious concepts they themselves are unable to explain. Most concepts are not like this. They can be explained. So what do Parfit and others do when cornered with the awkward situation of claiming to “have” concepts they themselves can’t explain? In virtue of their inexplicability, they tend to designate these concepts as being “unanalyzable,” which is just a way of saying that they “have the property of being unable to be explained.”

How convenient.

How does this not raise a red flag for anyone who isn’t already familiar with this exchange? Imagine if scientists went around claiming to have discovered new phenomena, but that they can’t prove it to others because the phenomena is “undemonstrable.” This would be laughed at by other scientists. It’s not clear to me why we shouldn’t be at least a little suspicious of mysteriously inexplicable concepts. Now, one might insist that perhaps some concepts aren’t explicable. Okay. Fine. Which ones? Why are they inexplicable? How did they figure out these concepts couldn’t be explained? And in general how do we determine when a concept is or isn’t explicable? What standards do we use? I have yet to see any clear or principled basis for determining what concepts are inexplicable that wasn’t predicated on presumptions at least as contentious as my own views. Even if the claims in question enjoy greater acceptance among philosophers more generally, this doesn’t entitle them to presume these background assumptions are correct. The rest of us are not required to grant that there are inexplicable concepts, nor are we required to grant that philosophers may declare a particular concept inexplicable and the rest of us are obliged to accept this without further argument.

So why, exactly, are those who appeal to these concepts entitled to simply declare them inexplicable? Why do my critics hassle me so much for suspecting these concepts aren’t meaningful, but they don’t turn around and hassle those who appeal to these concepts by agreeing with me that it’s quite suspicious that philosophers are out promulgating concepts the content of which they are unable to explain, and, apparently, don’t have any good explanations for why they’re not able to explain what the concepts in question mean?

They typically just throw up their hands and help themselves to the presumption that that’s just how some concepts are, and vaguely gesture at some motley array of other allegedly inexplicable concepts. This won’t do. Even if other concepts were inexplicable, one doesn’t simply get to declare whatever concept they want to likewise be inexplicable. How did they determine that they couldn’t explain irreducible normativity? And how would we distinguish a meaningful but inexplicable concept from instances in which people think they have concepts but the reason they can’t explain them is because they are confused and do not, in fact, understand or “have” the concepts in question? If we have no criteria for distinguishing between these two cases, then why should we be so confident irreducibly normative reasons are a meaningful but inexplicable notion, rather than confused nonsense?

At least one of the most serious problems with proponents of inarticulable concepts of this kind is that all the sources they have at their disposal are entirely private, inaccessible to, and cut off from any sort of public evaluation. If I went around saying that engineers were talking nonsense, they could readily demonstrate otherwise by building bridges and buildings that stood. Doctors could save lives. MMA fighters could consistently win fights. In substantive practical domains, the meaningfulness of the concepts people employ can be cashed out and corroborated by their actions.

No similar tests exist for the notion of irreducible normativity. It is ephemeral; its meaningfulness is entirely contingent on the testimony of people who purport to “have” the concept. There are no considerations subject to independent, external corroboration that would enable us to know whether a community of speakers who claim to “have” a concept, such that the concept is meaningful, without “acquiring” or “having” the concept ourselves, unless, and only unless, we do, in fact, employ such independent standards. If such standards are available, then proponents of “unanalyzable” concepts should agree with us that there are such standards, and then demonstrate that their concepts do, in fact, meet these public standards. If so, then it’d be possible for anyone incapable of acquiring the concept to at least know that other people have it. If, instead, the only way to confirm the meaningfulness of a concept is to partake of it, and there are no public means of corroboration, then there would apparently be an unbridgeable epistemic chasm between the haves and have nots, and those who don’t have the concept in question are simply out of luck.

I find this whole situation a bit bizarre and more than a bit dubious. There is far more to say about how strange the notion of unanalyzable concepts is, but I’ll simply note that we are not obliged to grant that there are any such things as unanalyzable concepts, nor have proponents of irreducibly normative reasons done much to argue for or demonstrate that the concept of an irreducibly normative reason is, in fact, incapable of being analyzed. In my experience, they simply assert that this is the case, and leave it at that. This is not a satisfactory way to make a case for one’s position. There’s far more to say about the questionable dialectical moves realists make with respect to this notion, but for now I want to appeal to the distinction between open and closed conceptual spaces. If the dispute between myself and proponents of the intelligibility of irreducibly normative reasons is to be resolved by the sorts of standards and considerations I appeal to, e.g., practical relevance, ability to distinguish circumstances in which there are irreducibly normative facts vs. situations in which there aren’t, and so on, then my opposition is playing in my court, and I think they’ll lose.

But if, instead, these methods are somehow inappropriate, and the matter is to be resolved primarily or exclusively by a priori considerations, then we’d be playing in the rationalist’s court. In that case, then, let me suggest that, conditional on this being the appropriate approach, then I see no reason to privilege the intuitions of my opposition over my own reasoning on the matter.

Normativity “strikes” me as conceptually closed. Just as the notion of “nonrelationally taller” is nonsensical, since “taller” just is a relational notion, such that for a given thing to be “taller” is for it to be taller in relation to something else, so too can norms only be meaningfully understood in a similarly relational manner: it is only meaningful to say that something is good or bad, right or wrong, required or prohibited, and so on, in relation to some set of standards. Something can be good for someone or according to some standard. But the notion that something can just be good simpliciter or that you can be required simpliciter and that these facts “give” you reasons independent of any goals, standards, or values, isn’t simply false, it is a kind of incomplete thought. It’s a bit like if someone were to cut off a remark mid-sentence. It makes no more sense to say something is good full stop than it does to say:

Put the shoes.

…this is an incomplete sentence. Likewise, to say something is “good” and to have this not be discharged in some implicit or explicit way: good for or with respect to makes no more sense than to say someone is taller but then insist they’re not taller than anyone or anything or in relation to any standard.

People who understand relational terms understand why it would make no sense to insist something is nonrelationally taller. Likewise, people who understand normativity understand that normative concepts are relational. Simply put, then, moral realists are conceptually confused, and their position consists not in getting the facts wrong in a direct sense, where they are making substantive claims about what is the case, but those claims fail to refer. Instead, the mistake they’re making is more like bad grammar, a bit like someone insisting that “Put the shoes” is meaningful. To “put” requires both an object and some location (literally or metaphorically) where the thing is to be placed. Context surrounding such a remark could allow one to make sense of it, but imagine someone insisted you can simply put things, simpliciter. This person has simply misunderstood the way “put” works, at least by others. If they want to employ some proprietary use of the term, they’re welcome to do so…in which case they’re invited to explain what they mean. If proponents of irreducibly normative reasons feel fine leaning on their own conceptual competence to maintain that they have the concepts in question, then I see no reason why I should be prohibited from doing so myself: in virtue of my correct understanding of the relevant concepts, I judge the realists in question to have misunderstood how normative terminology works, and drawn confused, nonsensical conclusions on the basis of this misunderstanding. If we’re to speak of intuitions, I might say that this is how things “seem” to me.

I’m being a bit tongue in cheek here. I don’t actually think this method works. Suppose I insist this is how normative concepts work, and realists disagree (as I am sure they do). How are we to resolve this dispute, if we cannot avail ourselves of empirical evidence about actual ordinary usage? Analytic philosophers may have something to say on the matter, but I think the answer is that there simply are no viable methods that can settle the matter. If we insist that facts about the meaning of ordinary normative discourse don’t turn on empirical considerations about actual usage, then my opposition is already helping themselves to assumptions about language and meaning I reject and am under no obligation to accept. To settle that matter, we’d have to pivot to a more fundamental discussion about language and meaning. But if the realist insists on helping themselves to the very methods I reject for settling these questions, then the only way to settle that dispute would be to have a discussion about even more fundamental metaphilosophical considerations. This process of getting even more fundamental would then need to be repeated until we arrive at a point where we agree on the methods used to settle a given dispute, we’d need to settle that dispute, and then we could move forward.

This is what I think is at the heart of so many philosophical disputes, and one reason I think they remain so intractable: philosophers are arguing at one or more steps removed from more fundamental disagreements, and either don’t realize it or don’t care. This makes about as much sense as people competing to see who will “win the game,” but nobody agrees on what the game is or what the rules are. This is the dismal state of much of contemporary analytic philosophy. Disputes remain intractable because most arguments concern matters that are contingent on one’s background commitments and metaphilosophy, but philosophers rarely adequately unpack what those commitments and metaphilosophical positions are, or pause to comprehensively resolve them before proceeding. They are trying to win games without agreeing on what the rules are. Even when they do agree, they often rely on faulty presuppositions that won’t allow them to succeed, which can be even worse than unclear rules: one may have the superficial impression of a viable set of rules, but they actually result in unwinnable games, a bit like having a hand in Solitaire that you cannot possibly win. It’s worse than trying to play chess with a pigeon. It’s like trying to play with a flock of pigeons without any clear sense of what the rules are or what any of you are playing.

References

Parfit, D. (2011). On what matters (Vol. 2). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

(Note: I’ll be using moral objectivism and moral realism interchangeably here, though it’s worth flagging that not everyone does so.)

Just yesterday, Joel Carini published a blog post titled “Most Philosophers Believe in Objective Morality”. Go check it out. What follows is not intended as a critique or rebuttal. I will make a few critical remarks, but this is mostly intended simply as a commentary. Overall, I think Carini’s piece is quite fair and does a great job in how it handles moral antirealists, and for that I am grateful. It’s always good to see an article that doesn’t treat antirealists as gibbering goblins skulking in sewers.

In any case, the first thing to note is that there’s already a great article that claims the opposite, helpfully titled “No, Most Philosophers Aren’t Moral Realists” which you can find here. This second article might seem like a response to the first, but it isn’t. It actually came out back in December of last year. Both articles center on the 2020 PhilPapers survey results. This was a large international survey that served primarily to catalog the philosophical positions of contemporary academic philosophers, mostly in the analytic tradition. Both articles center on this finding:

Approximately 62% of philosophers endorse moral realism, 26% reject it, and 13% chose some other response. According to Carini, these results indicate that most philosophers believe that morality is objective. This might be true, but it’s not clear from this data that, technically speaking, it is true. This is because, as Discourse points out, the measures presented here collapse “Accept” and “Lean” into a single aggregate score. If you hover over the darker and lighter bars seen above, you can see the breakdown of each as so:

A more precise breakdown that separates Accept and Lean yields these results:

• Accept moral realism: 37.35%

• Lean towards moral realism: 24.72%

• Accept moral antirealism: 11.58%

• Lean towards moral antirealism: 14.54%

• Other: 12.68% (I won’t bother subdividing this one)

That people lean towards a position does not mean they “believe” the position, so it is not clear that most philosophers “believe in objective morality.” They might, depending on whether, back to the wall, enough of those in the 24.72% of “lean towards moral realism (and perhaps some of those in the “Other” category) would affirm that they “believe” in moral objectivity/moral realism. However, “believe” is close enough to “accept” that this strikes me as a bit of a stretch. It’d be a bit odd if a huge proportion of those who said they “leaned” towards the position instead of choosing “accept” would choose “believe” if given the opportunity. And to lean towards a view is not the same thing as endorsing, believing, or accepting the view, so it may be most appropriate to conclude that it is not, in fact, the case that most philosophers are moral realists, where this is understood to mean “believing” moral realism. On the other hand, when you offer people the choice of “accept” or “lean,” “lean” may just be the softer way of expressing a low level of belief, or belief with less confidence. It’s hard to know. Discourse puts this a bit more firmly than I would, but the point is still a good one:

Merely leaning toward a position is importantly different from accepting it. Someone who merely leans toward moral realism is not, strictly speaking, a moral realist.

So, technically speaking, the claim that most philosophers are moral realists may not be correct. Where I differ from Discourse (but who knows, maybe they’d concede the point) is that I think survey options can push people to choose a response that may have a particular technical meaning (I lean this way, but don’t believe it) but they instead choose it for some other reason (I believe this, but not so strongly as to say “accept” when “lean” is an option). Nonetheless, it’s still true that more philosophers are at least sympathetic towards moral realism than they are towards moral antirealism.

Let’s have a look at what else Carini says:

Most people assume that academic philosophers, the people professionally tasked to think hardest about ethics, tend toward moral relativism: Serious, rigorous, scientifically-minded inquiry dissolves moral objectivity rather than supporting it.

To my knowledge, there is no empirical data on what most people assume about academic philosophers, so I don’t know if it is, in fact, true that most people assume academic philosophers tend towards moral relativism. It wouldn’t surprise me if they did, but this does strike me as rather speculative. If I had to wager, I’d bet that most people don’t have any position at all on what most academic philosophers think about metaethics, since most people don’t have a clue what moral relativism, moral realism, and other candidate positions actually are, or at best have a rudimentary and flawed understanding of these positions and how they relate to each other.

Another puzzling inclusion is the added remark that “Serious, rigorous, scientifically-minded inquiry dissolves moral objectivity rather than supporting it.” Do most people think of philosophers as engaging in scientifically-minded inquiry? I don’t think this, and I don’t know if laypeople generally think of philosophers as taking a “scientific-minded” approach. There’s a good chance they don’t think this, or even think the opposite.

Carini also says:

The people who have thought most carefully about whether morality is objective have mostly concluded that it is.

This remark might give readers the impression that the respondents have all thought about the arguments for and against moral realism carefully. But we have no good evidence this is true, nor any particularly good reasons to believe it’s true. Most of the respondents don’t specialize in metaethics (about ~13% reported specialization in metaethics, so a solid 87% are non-specialists). Academic philosophers increasingly specialize very narrowly. Since a large majority don’t specialize in metaethics, there’s a good chance a majority of the respondents lack a deep understanding of metaethics and haven’t thought about it that carefully. Mileage will vary from one philosopher to another. Just consider: 70% of philosophers are atheists. Should we conclude that they’ve all thought deeply about whether God exists or not, and arrived at this conclusion on the basis of a deep familiarity with philosophy of religion? I wouldn’t bet on it. And it’s not like substantive metaethics training is standard. Sure, you get exposed to it, but I never took or even saw a course in metaethics as an undergraduate or even a graduate student. I am sure they exist, but it’s not clear to me that they’re especially prevalent, much less a standardized part of analytic curriculum. Exposure may emerge obliquely in other courses, such as ethics courses, where professors themselves may not specialize in the topic or present much in the way of focused, specialized training in metaethics in particular. I’m really not sure; it would take another study just to figure out how much exposure philosophers generally have to metaethics and how competent they are.

However, it’s worth noting that the number of moral realists goes up slightly if you focus only on the subset of philosophers who specialize in metaethics to 65.35%. So, among those who presumably have, in fact, thought about the issue most carefully, about two thirds accept or lean towards moral realism. However, the claim that most have “concluded” that it is might give the impression that something like this has occurred:

Those who carefully studied the case for and against moral realism tend to conclude that moral realism is true as a result of this study. In other words, one might have the impression that these results show that studying philosophy causes most people to become moral realists.

To be clear, Carini does not make this claim. I am drawing attention to a possible interpretation or inference one might make on the basis of the claim. And such an interpretation would be highly questionable. First, there is the problem of selection effects. People who become professional philosophers may be disproportionately likely to favor moral realism compared to people who do not become professional philosophers. I discuss the problem of selection effects in detail here. Here’s the short version:

70% of philosophers endorse atheism, while only 19% endorse theism. But if you look at specialists in philosophy of religion, this flips: 70% endorse theism, while only 20% are atheists. Does this mean studying philosophy of religion turns people into theists?

No. This study found that philosophers are more likely to become atheists or agnostics once they begin studying philosophy of religion:

These numbers show that there was an overall shift toward atheism/agnosticism of 3.7% if we compare both directions of belief-revision: the direction of belief-revision was most frequently in the direction of atheism/agnosticism.

People disposed towards theism are more likely to study philosophy of religion, leading to a higher self-selected total proportion of theists among specialists in philosophy of religion. However, more of those who begin these studies become atheists than those who start as atheists become theists. The base rate of theists and atheists could be taken to give the misleading impression that if you study philosophy of religion, you will be convinced by the case for theism to become a theist. But there is no good evidence this is the case; it might even go the other way.

Both philosophers in general and metaethicists in particular tend to favor moral realism. How might we explain this? I suspect the answer may be that people who become philosophers are more disposed towards moral realism than people who choose not to become philosophers. Many more academics specialize in other topics than in philosophy. I’d be willing to bet people in the humanities more generally are more disposed towards moral antirealism, and that the same is true of those in STEM fields. What I mean is that the kinds of people who pursue these other fields may be naturally more disposed towards antirealism than people who study philosophy. If so, philosophy may attract people disproportionately disposed towards moral realism, in which case the 62% majority wouldn’t mean much, and certainly wouldn’t be a good reason to think moral realism is more likely to be true.

But let us suppose, instead, that the base rate of people drawn towards moral realism is so high in the population that most people are naturally inclined towards moral realism. Suppose it is, say, 95% of the population. If this is the case, this is even worse news. It would mean that if philosophers represent this population at the outset of studying philosophy (a starting rate of 95% moral realists), that somehow, as a result of studying philosophy, that rate drops to 62%. This would indicate studying philosophy is much more likely to convert moral realists into moral antirealists than vice versa. This is why a simple majority in favor of realism isn’t that relevant. What’s relevant is whether studying philosophy causes people to become moral realists, and the 2020 PhilPapers survey has no data to support this claim. For what it’s worth: I bet studying analytic philosophy currently does cause people to become moral realists, but I think this is an indictment of the poor state of the field and not an indication moral realism is true.

Carini continues with a discussion of moral realism:

Moral realism wasn’t always the default assumption in academic philosophy. For much of the twentieth century, under the influence of logical positivism, moral claims were widely treated as expressions of attitude or preference rather than genuine truths.

There are a lot of anecdotal accounts suggesting moral antirealism was the dominant view for much of the 20^th century, but I believe it was Mike Huemer that made the point that this could be misleading. We don’t have survey data from the 20^th century, and it may be that moral realism remained a majority stance but that moral realists kept quiet about their views. Carini helpfully makes a nod towards this possibility:

If any mid-century analytic philosophers were moral realists, they were embarrassed to admit it.

If I had to wager, I’d bet some of this was going on, and that some of it is just spin or narrative from people in the field. Antirealism may have been more prominent in academic publication even if it didn’t command the assent of most philosophers.

Carini goes on to outline a number of realist traditions, before concluding that:

Philosophers working from very different starting points, with very different tools, keep arriving at the same basic conviction: that ethics is a domain of genuine truth, not preference. That convergence is itself evidence worth taking seriously.

I don’t think this is evidence worth taking very seriously. There are many reasons to suspect that the proportion of philosophers who endorse a given view is not, by itself, good evidence for the view. I outline those reasons in this series on what I call the PhilPapers Fallacy. We don’t know the causal impact studying philosophy has on the degree to which philosophers endorse moral realism, we don’t know how strong the selection effects are for peopled disposed to endorse moral realism, we don’t know what sociological or other forces may be driving these changes, and we don’t know by the numbers alone whether philosophers are endorsing moral realism for good reasons.

I suspect a better account of the prevalence of these traditions, and of the increasing popularity of moral realism, is a host of sociological and institutional forces causing an uptick in people disposed towards moral realism doing philosophy, along with bandwagon effects whereby the prominence and success of such people attracts like-minded people and drives away those who hold views to the contrary.

I think the winds of fashion are driving these changes, not advances in the strength and quality of arguments for moral realism. In short, I don’t think new philosophical work is persuading people to become moral realists because the arguments are good; I think people who are disposed towards moral realism are increasingly likely to become and continue working as professional philosophers. Do I have evidence of this? No. But then again, anyone inclined to suggest good arguments are causing the rise in moral realism isn’t exactly furnishing us with data for that claim. And, in any case, there are no good arguments for moral realism.

1.0 Introduction

An article has recently been making the rounds that people are interpreting as evidence that children endorse moral realism. The article in question is “Children deny that God could change morality,” by Madeline Reinecke and Larisa Heiphetz Solomon. Since I doubt the virality of the article will persist, I felt it worth addressing it sooner rather than later, so my thoughts will be a bit more preliminary than they typically are. Nevertheless, my thesis is simple:

This article does not present strong evidence that children are moral realists.

My goal here will be to offer a brief explanation as to why. However, before proceeding, it’s worth noting that I was a research assistant in Dr. Heiphetz Solomon’s lab a little over a decade ago. I did data collection on studies related to religious belief but was not involved in research design or analysis. The experience was illuminating and I have a lot of respect for Dr. Heiphetz Solomon’s work, including this study. I think this type of research is fascinating and provides important insights into how children think about morality.

However, that does not mean that I think this study, or any others, provide reliable indicators that children endorse moral realism or antirealism in particular. Findings can yield a wealth of insights without necessarily allowing us to address specific empirical questions with any significant measure of confidence.

2.0 The study

The study purports to show that children aged 4 to 9 tend to believe that God cannot change certain widely endorsed moral values. Children were presented with six scenarios. Each scenario involved a story in which two characters disagreed about a “widely shared” moral issue (I’ll call these “uncontroversial”), controversial moral issue, or physical fact. Here are examples of the wording used for each, drawn from the text:

Disagreement about uncontroversial moral issue
“This person thinks that it is okay to stomp on someone’s foot really hard. This person thinks that it is not okay to stomp on someone’s foot really hard. Which person do you agree with more?”

Disagreement about controversial moral issue
“This person thinks that it is okay to steal food to feed someone who is hungry. This person thinks that it is not okay to steal food to feed someone who is hungry. Which person do you agree with more?”

Disagreement about physical issue
“This person thinks that germs are smaller than people’s houses. This person thinks that germs are bigger than people’s houses. Which person do you agree with more?”

Children were asked which person they agreed with and whether God could change the truth in question (they were also asked how certain they were of each of these judgments). The question about whether God could change the truth in question was worded like this:

“Do you think that God could make it not okay to stomp on someone’s foot really hard?”

Yes/No

Most children said “No” to questions like this.

3.0 Evidence of objectivism?

The authors do interpret their findings to support the notion that children are intuitive realists (or “objectivists”):

This result indicates that children may perceive widely shared moral beliefs as objective in multiple ways: Not only do they report that only one person could be right in a disagreement, which reflects a common conceptualization of moral objectivity (e.g., Goodwin & Darley, 2008; Sarkissian et al., 2011; Wainryb et al., 2004), but they also reject that even an ostensibly all-powerful being could change these moral norms. We take this finding as evidence that children’s objectivism regarding widely shared moral claims emerges early and may even persist into adulthood (Heiphetz & Young, 2017; Reinecke & Horne, 2018).

I believe these conclusions are premature and unwarranted. First, the Goodwin and Darley, Sarkissian et al., and Wainryb et al. studies all rely on the disagreement paradigm. My colleague David Moss and I offer a preliminary critique of this method here, and others have likewise catalogued extensive methodological shortcomings with this paradigm, which you can read about here and here (Pölzler, 2018; Pölzler & Wright, 2020). However, the most comprehensive case against the validity of the disagreement paradigm appears in my dissertation, where I dedicate an entire chapter to arguing that it is not a valid instrument for measuring realism/antirealism, a claim I likewise support with empirical data. First, it’s worth noting that these data at best tend to show highly variable rates of realism/antirealism.

3.1 Data to the contrary

For instance, consider how Sarkissian et al. (2011) describe the results of their studies:

The present studies offer a complex picture of people’s intuitions about whether morality is objective or relative. People do have apparently objectivist intuitions in certain cases, but our results suggest that one cannot accurately capture their views in a simple claim like: ‘People are committed to moral objectivism’. On the contrary, people’s intuitions take a strikingly relativist turn when they are encouraged to consider individuals from radically different cultures or ways of life. (p. 500)

Does this look like the straightforward conclusion that people are moral objectivists/realists? No. While the authors believe people have a “fixed commitment” to realism, this “fixed” commitment seems rather malleable, shifting in response to the slightest salience of disagreement occurring between people of different cultures. As I and others have noted, claiming that a disagreement between two people within a culture has a single correct answer is clearly consistent with one of the most common forms of moral antirealism: cultural relativism, where moral facts are made true by the stances of different cultures. One shortcoming of the disagreement paradigm is that it does not present cultural relativism as a distinct response option, so there is no way for participants to specifically select this position. What happens when they are given the opportunity to do so? See for yourself:

Cultural relativism was the most common (or “modal”) response for four of these five measures and had a strong showing for the fifth. Sarkissian et al. presented participants with disagreements between members of their own culture, another culture, and an alien civilization. This table shows the mean level of agreement that, with respect to a moral disagreement, at least one person has to be wrong:

Note that 7 would indicate strong agreement, or a higher “realist response,” while 1 would indicate strong disagreement, or a higher “relativist” response (setting aside, for a moment, that this is a false dichotomy since relativism and realism are consistent). So what we have is that, within the same culture the “realist” rate is a bit above the midpoint, while it is only marginally above the midpoint for the other culture condition and below the midpoint for the alien civilization. If the vast majority of people were committed to moral realism, all three of these means should be around 6-7. None of them are. And we have good reason to believe that the realist response rate for the same culture condition is probably an overestimate for two reasons. The first is the reason I already provided: when two people from the same culture disagree, both moral realists and cultural relativists would judge that at least one of those people is wrong. To make it perfectly clear why this is the case, consider what cultural relativism holds: moral truths are determined by, and are relative to, each culture. So if two people are members of the same culture, there is only one standard of moral truth relative to that culture, e.g., abortion is either morally permissible or impermissible according to that culture’s standards. So if two members of that culture are arguing, one for abortion, and one against it, one of those people is going to be mistaken.

A second reason the realist response rate is almost certainly exaggerated is that the authors used very extreme and clearly objectionable moral violations. Here they are, verbatim:

Horace finds his youngest child extremely unattractive and therefore kills him.

Dylan buys an expensive new knife and tests its sharpness by randomly stabbing a passerby on the street.

These actions would be considered extremely immoral by virtually all participants. Yet previous studies show that high consensus moral issues like this tend to yield much higher rates of realist responses, while more controversial moral issues tend to have much lower rates of realist responses, often below the midpoint, indicating that a majority of people gave an antirealist response. See, for instance, this table from Beebe (2015), which shows the proportion of people who chose the realist response option in Beebe & Sackris (2016):

As you can see, the proportion of people who choose the realist response option varies wildly across individual moral issues, ranging from as low as 17% to as high as 81%. Now, if you think murdering your own children or wantonly stabbing people with a knife on the street is about as bad, or worse, than being racist, then offer your own prediction: would we predict that the realist response rate if such items included in this study would be closer to the 81% for racism, or the 17% for donating to charity?

3.2 The stimulus-as-fixed-effect fallacy

What these findings exhibit is a common problem when researchers use specific, concrete items in their measures: those items are presumed to be representative of the set of stimuli from which they are drawn, which is known as the stimulus-as-fixed-effect fallacy (see Westfall, Nichols, & Yarkoni, 2017). Most readers will recognize that in order to have sample data that can generalize to a population of interest, the sample of participants must represent that population. In other words, the sorts of people used in your sample must be drawn from the population in a quasi-random way that ensures that they tend to be similar to that population overall. For instance, if I wanted to find out how wealthy people from a given nation are, I’d need to survey people who reflect the population as a whole. The best way to achieve this in practice is to attempt to approximate a random sampling. If one instead simply drove through wealthy neighborhoods and surveyed people who lived there, they’d obtain a distorted picture of the average wealth of people in that nation.

However, what most people, including most researchers, fail to appreciate is that this same principle applies to the stimuli used in a study. Not only must your sample approximate randomness, so too must your stimuli when that stimulus is intended to reflect members of a larger category, or “population.” In the context of studies in metaethics, what this means is that the specific moral issues you choose, e.g., abortion, stealing, lying, and so on, are drawn from the “population” of moral issues as a whole. Researchers typically make relatively unprincipled, ad hoc decisions about which items to choose. Even when they put some thought into which stimuli to use, they often do so based on a priori armchair supposition: they may choose two items they think are “extreme” and two they think are relatively milder, or they might choose items they feel crosscut the sorts of moral issues most people would paradigmatically think of. But they rarely put any effort into ensuring that:

• These items are prototypical moral issues by the standards of the population they are sampling

• That the participants themselves share the same normative stance towards the moral issues in question (e.g., researchers tend to be politically liberal and more secular; study participants are more varied in their political and religious perspectives)

• Participants exhibit a shared metanormative evaluation of the moral issues in question (that is, they agree with one another about the non-normative properties of the items in question, such as how severe they are)

• Most importantly, that the moral issues in question are randomly drawn from and therefore adequately representative of moral issues as a whole (the abstract “population of moral issues”)

• They use enough different moral issues. Instead, it’s typically the case that so few moral issues are chosen that a given study will only provide a distorted, unrepresentative cross-section, typically chosen in an unprincipled way, of the moral domain as a whole

This stimulus-as-fixed-effect fallacy has sweeping and pervasive implications in psychological research. See how it is described in fMRI research:

Most functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments record the brain’s responses to samples of stimulus materials (e.g., faces or words). Yet the statistical modeling approaches used in fMRI research universally fail to model stimulus variability in a manner that affords population generalization, meaning that researchers’ conclusions technically apply only to the precise stimuli used in each study, and cannot be generalized to new stimuli. A direct consequence of this stimulus-as-fixed-effect fallacy is that the majority of published fMRI studies have likely overstated the strength of the statistical evidence they report. (Westfall, Nichols, & Yarkoni, 2017)

This article, along with others, highlights how falling victim to this error can lead to overstated results. The same conclusion is applicable to Sarkissian et al. (2011). Not only do they use a nonrepresentative “sample” of moral issues, they only use a pair of moral issues. When you consider these moral issues, it’s worth noting that they are not prototypical at all: murdering your own children because they are ugly and stabbing random people to test how sharp a knife both involve bizarre, psychopathic behaviors that are utterly unlike standard, everyday moral transgressions. They are so over the top that I found them amusing and predict others would, too, especially when this is coupled with other stimuli used by Sarkissian et al., such as the description of aliens called “Pentars” whose only goal is to convert all matter into equilateral pentagons. They are thus both extremely weird and extremely immoral. As we’ve already seen, severe moral transgressions have already been shown to prompt much higher realist response rates. Previous research has shown that the use of bizarre or humorous stimuli can reduce the psychological realism of stimuli, as well, which can further distort response rates and undermine the reliability of results (see Bauman et al., 2014).

3.3 Misleading interpretations of existing data

Given all of these considerations, we can confidently make a few observations. First, Sarkissian et al. did not find strong evidence that most people are inclined towards moral realism. They found equivocal results that suggest people’s commitment to moral realism is tenuous at best, given how easily it can shift towards people agreeing with the antirealist response. Furthermore, the high rate of realism observed in their first condition includes a significant confound: cultural relativists should choose the same response option as realists.

And, as I’ve shown, participants frequently choose cultural relativism as a position when it is offered. As such, that such participants would be prominent within a sample is not speculative, but a confirmed empirical reality. This confound could easily have inflated “realist” responses, since a substantial portion of the antirealist responses would be lumped in with the realists.

Finally, the specific moral violations used in the study are not representative of moral violations in general, and instead anchor the extreme end of the distribution that tends to prompt realist responses. As Beebe’s findings show, realist response rates are highly variable across moral issues, so using items that anchor one extreme end of the distribution again likely massively exaggerated the realist response rate relative to what we would obtain were we to use different moral issues. For instance, if we’d used donating to charity, the realist response rate for the same-culture condition would likely approach zero, and we’d run into floor effects for the remaining two conditions where the proportion of people who favored the realist response rate would potentially be so low it’d be hard to estimate what the actual proportion was. This illustrates that which items you use matter as much as which people you sample from a population, a consideration that is often overlooked by researchers.

Now, why did I go into so much detail about this one study? I did so because academic articles will often cite articles which purport to support the author’s claims. However, careful examination of those articles often reveals that those articles do not, in fact, support the author’s claims. In fact, the findings in these studies often don’t support the conclusions of the very authors of the study in question. Researchers often describe their findings in misleading ways, or in ways that can easily be misunderstood or distorted by others.

One irony in focusing on Sarkissian et al. (2011) is that of the three studies cited by R&S (the other two being Goodwin and Darley, 2008, and Wainryb et al., 2004), this one has fewer methodological problems than either of those studies. The Goodwin and Darley study uses a combined measure of realism/antirealism that includes a measure that isn’t even face valid, while their other primary measure suffers so many methodological problems the results of their study are essentially inconclusive. Most importantly, even in that study they had very high levels of antirealist response rates for several moral issues; it’s just that they averaged across those issues, and found an on-average relatively high realist response rate. If you presented 8 random fruits to someone, and they told you they liked 5 of those fruits and hated 3 of them, would you conclude the person “loves fruit”? No; a more appropriate response is that they exhibit a mixed response. Goodwin and Darley do make comments to this effect in the paper:

The first major finding was that individuals were not particularly consistent in their meta-ethical positions about various ethical beliefs, and were instead highly influenced by the content of the beliefs in question. This finding suggests that unlike the meta-ethical systems of philosophers, which tend to be uniform in their treatment of a range of ethical beliefs, ordinary individuals’ meta-ethical systems are highly nuanced. (p. 1358)

But then they go on to say:

The second major finding was that ethical beliefs were treated almost as objectively as scientific or factual beliefs, and decidedly more objectively than social conventions or tastes. (p. 1359)

Both statements are true; the first emphasizes variability, while the latter emphasizes comparative averages across moral and nonmoral domains. Unfortunately, people who have drawn on these findings to support the oversimplified and inaccurate narrative that the findings suggest ordinary people are moral realists tend only to quote the latter remark (or remarks like it) to support that narrative. In doing so, they overlook the actual content of the article and the significant qualifications one must put on such conclusions. And again, this is entirely setting aside that the measures used in this study are not even valid in the first place.

I’m also not the only person to notice the way the results of Goodwin and Darley’s (2008) paper has been framed. Pölzler (2017) dedicated an entire paper to critiquing the tendency to frame early experimental metaethics studies as evidence of folk moral realism:

According to one of the most prominent arguments in favour of this view, ordinary people experience morality as realist-seeming, and we have therefore prima facie reason to believe that realism is true. Some proponents of this argument have claimed that the hypothesis that ordinary people experience morality as realist-seeming is supported by psychological research on folk metaethics. While most recent research has been thought to contradict this claim, four prominent earlier studies (by Goodwin and Darley, Wainryb et al., Nichols, and Nichols and Folds-Bennett) indeed seem to suggest a tendency towards realism. My aim in this paper is to provide a detailed internal critique of these four studies. I argue that, once interpreted properly, all of them turn out in line with recent research. (p. 455)

Note that Wainryb et al. (2004), the other study R&S cite, is included in this critique. As for the problems with Goodwin and Darley’s study, there are too many to present all of them here, so I will highlight just one. Goodwin and Darley collected open response data asking participants to explain why they thought the person they were told held a contrary moral position disagreed with them. For this method to be a valid measure of metaethical views, participants must attribute the source of disagreement to a difference in moral beliefs, standards, or values, rather than e.g., the other person misunderstanding the question or thinking of a specific context where the action in question would be permissible. While Goodwin and Darley reported that almost everyone interpreted the disagreement as intended (~93%), I requested the raw data of the responses these participants provided and recoded them myself, along with my colleague David Moss in Bush & Moss (2020). We report in that article that we found only 41% of participants interpreted the source of disagreement as intended, while 44% interpreted the source in some identifiably unintended way, such as attributing the disagreement to the other person imagining a situation where an otherwise immoral action would be justified. For instance, when asked about whether it would be acceptable to rob a bank, one person explained why another person may have disagreed with them by suggesting:

This person probably has specific details of such a happening where there were extreme circumstances that lead him/her to believe robbing a bank was not morally bad.

These kinds of responses reveal that the participant may have judged that the source of disagreement was due to the other person conceiving of a different scenario than the participant. If this factored into their judgment, then their response to the disagreement question would no longer be diagnostic of their metaethical stance. Wainryb et al. (2004) likewise asked the children in their study to explain their answers. As the authors report, children’s nonrelativistic judgments regarding moral issues “referred exclusively to moral criteria (fairness) to justify why moral beliefs are nonrelative […]” (p. 693). Yet from a metaethical perspective, this makes little sense. Whether moral truth is relative or not doesn’t depend on first-order moral truths; it depends on second-order moral considerations about e.g., the semantics of moral discourse and the metaphysics of moral truth. The pattern of responses children provided strongly suggests widespread normative conflation, a commonly documented tendency to default to normative, or first-order moral considerations, when evaluating questions ostensibly intended to elicit metaethical positions. Taken together, then, there are severe methodological limitations with all three of the studies R&S cite.

The shortcomings in these studies are not limited to just those studies. In my dissertation, I ran numerous tests that likewise assessed how participants interpreted questions about metaethics, and the results were quite similar. In study after study, only a minority (and often a marginal minority) reliably responded to various prompts in ways that indicated they interpreted various metaethical stimuli as intended. Instead, a significant majority of participants would either give responses that made it unclear how they interpreted the question or respond in ways that strongly suggest they did not interpret the question as intended.

R&S thus cite studies that do not support the claims made in their paper; that is, it is not the case that we have convincing empirical evidence that children and adults are disposed towards moral realism. On the contrary, such conclusions would only be sustained by an outdated interpretation of early studies in the literature that never supported such conclusions to begin with. As methods have improved, researchers have instead routinely very high rates of moral antirealism (e.g., Beebe, 2015; Davis, 2021; Pölzler, Tomabechi, & Suzuki, 2023; Pölzler & Wright, 2020). Furthermore, as Moss and I have argued and as I have subsequently supported with a considerable body of data, there are compelling reasons to believe adults (much less children) struggle to interpret questions about metaethics as intended. As Moss and I argued in earlier work:

1. The relevant metaethical theories are complex and difficult to grasp

2. Most people are unfamiliar with these distinctions prior to encountering them in studies

3. Metaethical theories are generally abstract and distant from real world practical questions lay populations would be more familiar with and expect to be asked about

4. There are typically plausible non-metaethical interpretations of the questions posed to respondents (Bush & Moss, 2020)

The collective effect of these factors lends itself towards skepticism about how people react to stimuli ostensibly designed to elicit their metaethical stances: people will typically reinterpret these questions in some other way, e.g., as a question about their normative moral stance and whether they adopt a negative appraisal of the other person, as an epistemic question about how certain we are of our moral stances and whether others could be justified in holding contrary perspectives, as a question implicitly asking whether we would tolerate people with contrary moral standards, as a descriptive question about whether people hold contrary moral perspectives, whether we regard moral claims as exceptionless or are more sensitive to context, and so on.

None of these alternative, unintended interpretations are speculative; I have gathered extensive empirical data that shows such unintended interpretations are not only common, but often surpass the proportion of people who appear to have interpreted stimuli as intended. For instance, people provide reasonable but unintended accounts of what they take terms like “objective” or “relative” to mean, propose that if someone disagrees with them about a moral issue that they may be thinking of some other context, that statements intended to represent relativism are claims about sensitivity to context or the descriptive claim that different people have different perspectives on what’s morally right or wrong, and that claims intended to represent realism are claims that moral rules have no exceptions. But these are just a few examples of a much broader body of data showing that people struggle, across a range of measures and contexts, to interpret questions about metaethics in the way researchers intend. And if adults do as poorly as the data suggests they do, why should we think children would do any better?

4.0 Why children are probably not moral realists

My critique of the previous studies is intended to establish precedent. What I’ve shown is that the authors of this study cite previous research that purports to establish that both children and adults tend to take an objectivist stance towards morality. This is achieved in all three studies via the disagreement paradigm. But we have good reason to believe the disagreement paradigm is not a valid measure even for adults, much less children, who are much less likely to interpret ambiguous and challenging stimuli as intended.

Note, however, that R&S also specifically say that their findings suggest children “may perceive widely shared moral beliefs as objective in multiple ways,” then cite both earlier studies using the disagreement paradigm and their current paradigm which asks whether God could change the moral rules. Let us now turn our attention to their own methods. Does the fact that most children stated that God could not change (at least some) moral rules provide evidence that those children are moral realists?

It does serve as evidence for this claim. This might sound like a bizarre concession to make in an article critical of this claim. But on strictly Bayesian grounds, if most children said God could change the moral rules, this would be at least some evidence that they think moral truths are contingent, which is more likely to be associated with an antirealist perspective. But the fact that a datapoint provides some evidence does not mean that it provides good evidence or that there aren’t compelling reasons to believe otherwise.

Mere evidence is cheap. The mere fact that many people believe Bigfoot exists and claim to have seen Bigfoot is some evidence that Bigfoot exists, for the simple reason that if Bigfoot existed, it’d be more likely there’d be people claiming to have seen Bigfoot than a world in which nobody did so. Good evidence is expensive. There is no good evidence Bigfoot exists, and plenty of reason to doubt that Bigfoot exists. And if we take into account what we’d expect if Bigfoot existed: more witnesses, high quality video footage, forensic evidence, and so on, it’s more reasonable than not to think Bigfoot doesn’t exist.

A single piece of evidence should always be considered against the backdrop of the surrounding body of evidence. And at present, the overall body of empirical evidence on the matter of whether children or adults are moral realists suggests that we have yet to devise compelling measures for either population and that the rates of unintended interpretation are so high that something more complicated may be going on. My personal hypothesis, one which I’ve supported with data and argued for extensively, is indeterminacy: children and adults are neither realists nor antirealists, but instead have no determinate position. I believe the forced choice design of empirical studies gives the illusory impression children are “realists” when really neither they nor adults typically have any metaethical position on the realism/antirealism dispute.

While the fact that children would say that God can’t change the moral rules is evidence children are moral realists, note that (a) generalizing from the population they were drawn from is going to be a problem and (b) this evidence must be weighed against every other consideration for or against early emerging belief in moral realism. Most importantly, however, these findings provide such weak evidence that children are moral realists that we should have little confidence that the authors have supported the claim that “children’s objectivism regarding widely shared moral claims emerges early and may even persist into adulthood” (Reinecke & Heiphetz Solomon, 2023, p. 8).

This characterization employs the phrase “children’s objectivism,” which helps itself to the presumption that children have an objectivist stance on the matter and that this can be inferred from their response to the paradigm used in this study. This inference is too quick.

4.1 Power relations and social desirability bias

Consider the situation children in these studies are in. Children stand in a different social relation to adults than other adults. Children can be punished if they do the wrong thing, and scolded if they report an attitude towards the operative moral and social norms they are currently subject to. They are more averse to such punishment and scolding, and will often strive to assure the adults around them that they endorse the established norm (even if halfheartedly or by rote, and not genuine commitment). Now these children are presented with familiar moral violations like stomping on someone’s foot and calling someone a mean name. They are then asked whether God could change these rules. Suppose a child says “Yes” to this question. Could this signal that the children themselves may want to commit these actions or aren’t opposed to violating existing moral rules? In other words, could it have implications for the child’s own attitude and conduct? I suspect it very well could, and that children may be reluctant, in the context of being asked about such questions, to express a view towards moral norms that treats them as contingent and liable to change on a whim.

To try to drive home how this might feel from the child’s perspective, imagine you were brought into the royal court of a terrible and powerful king who had the full authority to punish you as they saw fit. You are helpless before their might, and utterly vulnerable to whatever decree they might issue. You are familiar with the king’s rules, and how the king regards them as being of the utmost importance, never to be violated or else. The king’s aides approach you and begin asking you peculiar questions:

If the king said it was okay to steal from the royal treasure, would it be?

If the king said that it was okay to eat at tables reserved for nobility, would it be?

If the king said you may wear the royal colors openly in public, would it be?

These questions would put you in a difficult situation. On the one hand, presumably the king can do whatever he wants. On the other, if you say yes, what will this say about you? Does it signal that you have intentions to steal, ignore noble status, or partake of royal privilege? It might, and so you may interpret the question as one about your commitment to the king’s current, actual decrees, and respond accordingly. Researchers should be mindful that social considerations can and do influence how people respond to questions. One of my own research collaborations provides evidence that people are sensitive to the social implications of their moral judgments, and may respond accordingly (Montealegre et al., 2025) and that reputational stakes are a factor in metaethical evaluations (Moss et al., 2025).

The impact social considerations have on participant responses is not idle speculation. Social desirability bias is a well-documented tendency for people to react to psychological stimuli in ways that systematically depart from an unbiased response due to a motivation to be seen more positively by researchers or whoever else may observe the participant’s response (Piedmont, 2024). Social desirability has been documented among children for decades (e.g., Crandall, Crandall, & Katkovsky, 1965) and studies show social desirability is especially likely when studies are conducted in the form of an interview rather than in a class setting (Miller et al., 2015). Sure enough, R&S’s study employed interviews.

Not only do children have an incentive to depict themselves in a positive light, the power dynamics associated with interacting with adults posing questions about morality are especially relevant to children, who are at risk not only of being perceived negatively but are in an especially vulnerable position where genuine costs can follow from saying the wrong thing. Under these circumstances, expressing a commitment to existing moral norms by insisting God couldn’t change them makes strategic sense, insofar as it signals the child’s own commitment to those moral standards.

There are other reasons to be skeptical of these findings. Children may struggle to engage in the relevant kind of counterfactual thinking, and may have difficulty considering the relevant metaphysical, moral, and other considerations relevant to adequately understanding and addressing a question about God’s capabilities. For instance, do children understand the full implications of what it would mean for God to be all-powerful or all-good? Researchers treating the reaction of children as though children can (even if implicitly) weigh relevant factors about God’s attributes and the nature of morality are presuming a great deal about children’s capacity for understanding the relevant concepts as intended (God, omnimax powers, modal considerations, and so on), the salience of those concepts in influencing children’s judgments, and their competence at suppressing irrelevant biasing factors like social motivations and personal biases. Adults are not very good at any of these virtues, so it’s unclear why we should think children will perform any better.

Take, for instance, a common feature of the way adults may respond to a challenging question: substitution. Substitution occurs when we are presented with a challenging question as input, replace that question with a simpler and more readily answerable question, and then give the response to that other question as an output to the initial question. For instance, when adults are presented with the question:

A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Instead of performing the math, people have a reflexive, intuitive tendency to judge that the bat is $1.00 and the ball is $0.10, even though this response is incorrect. Studies frequently show failure rates on this question are extremely high, with fewer than 30% of participants getting the correct response in numerous studies (see e.g., Li et al., 2024). One explanation for why this occurs is substitution:

The explanation for the widespread “10 cents” bias in terms of attribute substitution is that people substitute the critical relational “more than” statement by a simpler absolute statement. That is, “the bat costs $1 more than the ball” is read as “the bat costs $1.” Hence, rather than working out the sum, people naturally parse $1.10, into $1 and 10 cents, which is easier to do. In other words, because of the substitution, people give the correct answer to the wrong question. (p. 269)

Adults engage in substitutions even in low-stakes situations and for questions that are far less abstract than the questions posed in R&S’s study, despite far greater linguistic competence and far more emotional and cognitive control than children. Yet in this case we’re dealing with children as young as four. They are far less capable of suppressing biases, interpreting tasks as intended by researchers, or even understanding English. They have greater social incentives for interpreting the study in a more acceptable way and less emotional regulation to suppress those biases. On top of all of this, they are presented with highly abstract questions about theology and metaethics in an unfamiliar context that they are far less prepared for than the typical adult participant. Why should we think they are any less likely than adults to employ heuristics that lead them to systematically interpret questions in unintended ways?

And on top of all that, the measure isn’t even a direct measure of whether they’re realists or not; it’s an indirect measure about a tangentially related theological consideration that at best may imply a metaethical stance, so interpreting these results as evidence children are moral realists requires the further inference that children possess considerable implicit philosophical consistency and sophistication to such an extent that we can plausibly extrapolate from their apparent position on one philosophical matter to their position on another philosophical matter.

This brings me to the main point: we simply don’t know why children are giving these answers. The only way their answers would indicate that they are moral realists is if the reason why they judge that God can’t change the moral rules is because they regard those rules as somehow necessary, eternal, incapable of change, and so on, which, notably, is not identical to stance-independence. One must infer stance-independence from these characteristics, and even these characteristics can only be inferred indirectly; we have no direct evidence that an implicit commitment (or, far less likely, an explicit belief in) any of these qualities is actually driving their judgments about whether God can change moral rules. Since we don’t know what’s causing the judgments, concluding that children are moral realists on the basis of these findings is largely a matter of questionable interpretation of indirect findings.

One reason for thinking they must be moral realists if they give this kind of response is if one assumes that realism would be the only or primary explanation for why they’d offer such a response, assuming they interpreted the question as intended. But if they have the sophistication to interpret the question as intended and the sophistication to adopt complex metaphysical positions like moral realism, it’s not clear why we should ignore the possibility that they might hold other, similarly sophisticated metaethical views, some of which are forms of moral antirealism.

After all, the belief that God can’t change the moral rules is consistent with antirealism. Moral realism is the view that moral truth is stance-independent, while moral antirealism is the view that there are no stance-independent moral truths. That moral rules cannot be changed does not entail that they are stance-independently true. Consider the antirealist position ideal observer theory. According to ideal observer theory, moral truths are determined by those moral beliefs we’d adopt if we were fully informed and ideally rational. Note, though, that under those conditions moral truths still depend on what a hypothetical version of us would endorse. As such, those facts are still stance-dependent, even if one believes all rational agents would converge on the same set of moral truths and that there is therefore only a single correct set of moral standards. People may assume that a metaethical position which holds that there is a single correct set of moral standards, and that those standards don’t even depend on the standards of any actual people or cultures, is thereby a realist system. But this is not the case. Technically, this is an antirealist position.

Do I think children might be ideal observer theorists? No. I present this example to make three points. First, I doubt anyone thinks that children have sophisticated metaethical views. Even if they were moral realists, they aren’t going to be Parfitian realists or Cornell realists or otherwise endorse well-developed and distinctive realist accounts with all the bells and whistles. What they’ll endorse will be some rudimentary analog. Well, there are rudimentary analogs to ideal observer theory. Here’s one: trust smart authority figures. They probably know what’s true, and probably have the best ideas about what to do. God fits the bill here perfectly: God is by far the smartest and most authoritative person. We should defer to God. Such deference doesn’t require one to specifically presume there are stance-independent, irreducibly normative moral facts. Suppose, for instance, God recommended I not go for a walk today, or not eat that piece of cheese in the fridge. I’d listen. Why? I wouldn’t listen simply because I think God is informing me of stance-independent normative truths. I’d assume God knows something about the nonnormative facts that I don’t know: that I’d get hit by a car if I went on that walk, or that the cheese has gone bad and will make me ill. Children may defer to God and further assume that since God already knows what’s best, he’s not going to arbitrarily change his mind on things. And this brings us to another point: if children (or adults, for that matter) were told why God wanted to change the moral rules, and the reason given was sensible, might they change their minds? I suspect so. So another issue here is that the question relies on the presumption that God would change the rules without explanation, on a whim. Even if you were a moral antirealist, you don’t necessarily think God could do this.

Why? Well, part of the reason has to do with God’s other traits. God is good, kind, merciful, and just. If we know God exhibits certain thick moral attributes, it wouldn’t make sense for God to maintain these traits but then insist on rules out of accord with them. Imagine I told you a person was an eternally unchanging and perfectly kind person. Could they choose to be cruel and malicious?

This is a weird question. Maybe they could, but not while maintaining the trait of being an eternally unchanging and perfectly kind person. So to grant that they could is to reject something which has just been stipulated. This is a tall order for a child to wrap their heads around. It might be quite strange for an adult. It’d be a bit like asking if a square can be a circle. Well, you could squish the lines and make it into a circle in one sense, but in another sense, it can’t both be a square and become a circle while still being a square. Likewise, would God even be God if God decided it was okay to punch people or lie or steal? I can see adults having a serious dispute about this matter. But somehow this is supposed to be no problem at all for children.

The second reason I provided the example of ideal observer theory is to provide a concrete alternative that emphasizes the importance of the fact that the study Reinecke and Heiphetz Solomon conducted does not include measures that directly assess whether the participants endorse moral realism or antirealism. Instead, that they endorse it must be at best inferred from their ostensible position on another topic. This creates an inferential gap that should provide considerable grounds for caution: one must presume that the underlying reason why children denied that God could change moral rules was because of an underlying (if implicit) commitment to moral realism. But this was not directly measured or observed; it requires a theoretical interpretation of the reason for the pattern of responses children provided. The possibility of alternative antirealist positions illustrates that there are identifiable reasons why, at least in principle, someone might respond to a question in a way that may seem to best fit one inference about their position, when in fact it not only doesn’t do so, but reflects a commitment to a contrary view. And if anyone is tempted to reject some rudimentary version of ideal observer theory on the grounds that it’s too sophisticated, I will simply serve the same point back to them about moral realism: it’s not clear it’s any less sophisticated, at least in its more robust forms, and it’s not clear which version has the simpler rudimentary analog.

If, in observing children’s responses to these studies, people are inclined to conclude children are implicitly committed to moral realism, we should first consider whether the reasons why they gave the responses in question could be attributed to some other causes.

Those other causes, whatever they might be, are probably not an implicit commitment to ideal observer theory. Instead, we must ask a more fundamental question: Why might children respond to a particular question, once one takes into account how it was asked and the experimental context in which it was asked? While we can make our best guesses as to why we observe a given pattern of results without data, every interpretation of the data will turn on background assumptions and data extraneous to the study itself.

References

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Over at Bentham’s Newsletter, Bentham’s Bulldog argues that selfishness is irrational. The specifics of the argument aren’t relevant to any points I want to make, so I’ll just focus on how BB argues for his position.

According to BB, without a belief in God, there is unlikely to be a defensible case for immaterial souls, which in turn probably leaves us without any defensible account of the continuity of identity:

But if there aren’t immaterial souls, then what could fix facts about personal identity? While you bear certain similarities to your four-year-old self, there is no highly robust sense in which you are the same person. Just as there may be no fact of the matter about whether a ship remains the same after changing out its planks, there may be no fact of the matter about whether a person remains the same after undergoing a bunch of changes.

BB trots out a few intuition pumps that serve to elicit this perspective from the reader, but let’s just grant it for the sake of argument: No god → no soul → no defensible account of the continuity of personal identity.

According to BB:

I think this illustrates that identity facts, given atheism, are probably vague and frequently indeterminate. There’s no really robust sense in which you will be the same person in one year. But then why care about your future self? It can’t be because they’re you in some deep sense! There is no deep sense in which they’re you!

For the sake of argument, then, we’re granting that there’s no deep sense in which anyone will be the same person in the future. This is supposed to somehow make caring about oneself over others irrational:

On this picture, caring more about your future self is like caring more about some stranger just because they resemble you more. It just seems clearly irrational. It involves caring about some nebulous, vague, and arbitrary property that isn’t the source of any genuine reasons. Without a non-physical soul to fix identity, there are just degrees of similarity. [Emphasis mine]

I have a simple objection to BB: No it doesn’t. I simply don’t care what “seems irrational” to BB. Nothing about preferring myself over others seems irrational to me, even given these assumptions. I don’t think non-instrumental preferences, cares, values, and so on are subject to evaluation as being rational or not; I view rationality as only concerning instrumental considerations. BB also adds that:

It involves caring about some nebulous, vague, and arbitrary property that isn’t the source of any genuine reasons.

I reject BB’s conception of “genuine reasons,” so I don’t think anything is the source of “genuine reasons” of the relevant kind.

The fulcrum of BB’s entire argument is an appeal to his personal intuitions, intuitions I don’t share and don’t care about. This is a bizarre and unconvincing way to argue, and it’s disappointing to see post after post from BB where arguments ultimately turn on remarks like “this just seems irrational” or “this just seems obvious” or “that just seems crazy.” BB rarely qualifies these remarks with a “…to me” or otherwise acknowledge that he’s making appeals to his personal thinking, rather than to some publicly evaluable method or standards, and rarely offers much more than such appeals. We will be given various thought experiments that are supposed to elicit the intuition in question, but whether they work or not will turn on whether one happens to share BB’s intuitions. I don’t. So why should I care at all what “seems” to be the case to BB? Why does anyone?

BB gives us another argument:

Imagine a person who only cared about their present self? Or perhaps one who cared about their welfare at all times except on future Tuesdays. Such a person would be irrational! That some period of pain or joy falls on a future Tuesday is no reason to care less about it. Similarly, we behave irrationally when we procrastinate and neglect our future welfare.

No arguments, evidence, or reasons are presented that show such a person is “irrational.” BB simply asserts that they are. I don’t think they would be. BB continues:

This illustrates that rationality isn’t just about getting whatever it is we want. The person who only wants current welfare behaves irrationally in neglecting their future welfare. But if it’s irrational not to care about your future self, why isn’t it irrational not to care about other people?

How does it “illustrate” this? BB presents us with a case where a person has weird preferences. BB has the intuition that this person is irrational, in that it’d be irrational for them to act on the basis of the specific thing they want in this case. This is then supposed to “illustrate that rationality isn’t just about getting whatever it is we want.” But how has this been illustrated? All BB has done is appeal to his personal preexisting conception of rationality as not being exclusively about what we want. BB isn’t “illustrating” that rationality isn’t about getting whatever we want; BB is simply employing a conception of rationality that already isn’t about getting whatever we want. Nothing has been “illustrated” beyond BB providing us an autobiographical window into a fragment of his personal psychology.

BB then considers how someone might try to defend the rationality of caring about their future selves but not others:

“They’re not me—what happens to them doesn’t affect me.” But similarly, the person who cares only about his present self could say “my future self isn’t present me—what happens to them doesn’t affect present me.”

“I just don’t care about their welfare as much as my own.” But similarly, the person who cares only about his present self could describe that he doesn’t care about his future welfare.

“You’ll later regret ignoring your future welfare.” But the person who just cares about his present self could object that his present self will never regret it. In a parallel way, other people will regret you not taking seriously their interests.

In each case, the explanation of why one is permitted to care only about one’s own welfare can be mirrored by the view that one is permitted to care only about one’s own present welfare. So long as we recognize that caring only about your present self is irrational, by symmetry, we should recognize that not caring about other people’s welfare is irrational.

What strange language. Permitted? I don’t need anyone’s permission to care about my future self, or to not care about anyone else.

BB goes on to make a number of other strange claims:

This claim is surprising but not extremely so. It seems that one has a reason to pull a child out of a pond even if one doesn’t want to. But if you have a reason to do something, then rationality would incline you to do it.

How does rationality incline anyone to do anything? Is this a claim about how human cognition works? Is “rationality” somehow tied to motivation? If so, how? How do “reasons” interact with rationality such that they “incline” us to do things? What are these reasons, and what mechanisms move from the fact that one has a reason to the cognitive processes associated with judgment and decision-making that ultimately result in initiating a particular task? Talk of us having “inclinations” sounds like talk of psychology. If this remark does interface with psychology, it does so in a mysterious and dubious way. If not, it’s unclear what it could mean, or whether what it does mean has any practical relevance.

BB also reiterates the same questionable talk about reasons “coming” from some source, as though they are an energy source like Pokémon energy cards:

I also think this position becomes more intuitive if you think that our reasons for acting don’t come from our desires. Even if one had a desire to cause themselves future agony, they wouldn’t have a reason to cause themselves future agony. But if this is right, then the fact that a person only cares about their own welfare tells us little about what they have reason to care about.

I address why this talk of reasons is profoundly misguided here:

Next, we are for once given a rare bit of explicitly qualified autobiography:

Lastly, I find the position more intuitive when I reflect. When, for example, I think about loved ones and imagine things from their perspective, it seems like the rational thing to do is care about their interests as my own. If we saw more clearly about morality and rationality, then we’d see everyone this way.

Once again, I don’t share this intuition. But let’s suppose I did. Would it support BB’s case? I don’t think so. Note how BB focuses on the intuitions of “loved ones.” But BB seems to think we should be less selfish in a broader sense: that we should care about the welfare of people who aren’t our loved ones. Yet when I try to adopt the points of views of these people, I don’t find anything remotely rational about caring about their interests as my own. BB seems to have narrowly reflected on a subset of considerations that favor his view when I think a broader form of reflection would militate against it. Selective intuition mongering, it seems.

I also question the extent to which we can imagine things from other people’s perspective. I grant that we can do this to a limited extent, but the extent to which we can do so will be incredibly shallow, heavily biased, and influenced by our knowledge of those people (and, importantly, our ignorance of those people, along with whatever assumptions we make about them, correct or not). As such, I think BB is layering one questionable psychological exercise (imagining the perspective of others) on top of another (reflecting on one’s “intuitions” about what’s “rational”).

BB never clarifies what he means by “irrational” but it wouldn’t make sense for it to be an instrumentalist conception of rationality. As such, from the very outset, BB is employing what appears to be a normatively realist concept of rationality and expecting this to have persuasive force with readers. In other words, I am expected to be concerned about what is or isn’t rational independent of whether it would be conducive to my goals or desires. Let’s pull apart acting on the basis of our desires and acting on the basis of what’s rational for a moment. Suppose, after considerable reflection, there were two courses of action you could take:

• Desire-optimizing
  This course of action optimizes achieving your goals and desires. Not simply some whim you had at a given moment, but your overarching goals, desires, and life plans. If you wanted to have a happy, flourishing family, this is what you’d achieve. If you wanted to help others, you’d achieve this, too. And so on. However, it turns out that acting in accord with desire-optimization is inconsistent with non-instrumental conceptions of rationality, such that in optimizing for your desires, you are technically acting in a way that is irrational.

• Rationality-optimizing
  This course of action optimizes compliance with what is non-instrumentally rational and what you have stance-independent reasons to do, independent of whether doing so would achieve any of your goals or desires. Now let us suppose that this course of action would lead to your utter misery and your failure to achieve any of your goals and desires. You will suffer immensely, as will your friends and family, and none of your ideals, goals, or personal preferences will be achieved. But your actions would be perfectly rational.

Which course of action would you favor?

Non-instrumentalist conceptions of rationality have no appeal to me at all. I only care about achieving my goals and desires. And I care more about myself and my friends, family, and loved ones than I do about everyone else. So do most people. Would I prefer if people were a bit less selfish? And that they donated more to charity, did more to help others, and so on? Absolutely. But I see no reason to believe, nor to care, whether being selfish is non-instrumentally “irrational.” I simply don’t care, and I don’t think most people would, on reflection, either. I think BB’s notion of rationality is bizarre and motivationally irrelevant, and the sooner philosophy can dispense with this absurd way of thinking and speaking about normative considerations the better.

At the same time, BB and others continue to lean so heavily on personal appeals to their intuitions that their “arguments” have very little substance to them. This is why I focus so much on metaphilosophy. This epidemic of appeals to intuition remains a massive impediment to productive philosophy and so long as people continue to be enamored of a broad metaphilosophical approach centered on intuition, the field will make little progress.

Lorenzo Elijah has written a blog post purporting to show how moral knowledge is possible. This is a response to it, so go read it first here.

The argument draws on Goff’s distinction between transparent and opaque concepts. According to Goff, phenomenal concepts are transparent. Transparent concepts are ones that allegedly “Reveal the essence of the referent to anyone who grasps them.” Triangles serve as an example. I already don’t grant this, as I think it gets the nature of such concepts wrong.

I think the concept of a triangle is a stipulated, rule-bound notion that we’ve constructed, whereby the content of the concept is one that emerged out of a particular discipline with a fixed, intentionally constructed foundation. Compare this to the rules of a game. It is “phenomenally transparent” that bishops move diagonally and rooks move in a straight line in chess. As soon as I understand the concept of bishops and rooks, I “fully grasp their essence.” Only, all this amounts to is simply learning that what it means to be a bishop or rook just is to exhibit these traits. Likewise for triangles.

Conversely, “opaque concepts” allegedly don’t reveal their essence to anyone who grasps them. Again, I don’t think this is a genuine dichotomy; I don’t think there are concepts that (for some mysterious reason) are a bit voyeuristic and strip down so we can see all their tidbits, while others are more coy and waltz about clothed, revealing only an ankle here or a sultry gaze over there. Rather, I think Goff and others are conflating this distinction with a different distinction. Some of the language we use refers to “top-down” concepts, while other language refers to “bottom-up” concepts.

When we are personally in charge of the content of a concept, it has a top-down structure where we start with the concept, then slap a label onto it. They aren’t “transparent.” They’re stipulated. This puts us fully in charge of the contents. When this occurs, we go from the stipulated content of the concept to the terms we use to refer to the content of the concept.

Content of the concept → Label or name for the concept

In short, top-down concepts are defined by and characterized fully in terms of stipulative accounts of their meaning. These concepts typically emerge from technical disciplines in which we take some set of characteristics and pin a name on some useful notion with clear and distinct boundaries, e.g., “we need a name for the geometric figure that plays this role in Euclidean geometry so let’s call it a ‘triangle’.” Obviously I don’t think this is exactly how things happened; there’s more of a dynamic feedback between the needs of some technical field and the terms it uses, and terms gradually become entrenched over some span of time, but roughly the idea is that we pin labels to concepts that we ourselves conceive of as having a fixed set of characteristics.

Bottom-up concepts reverse this structure. We don’t stipulate their contents. Rather, these “concepts” pick out things we experience. Long before anyone sat down to work out what water was, we were drinking water, swimming in water, and so on. So we go from the stuff we refer to to the content:

The thing we refer to with a given name/label → the content of the concept

We don’t stipulate what the content of “water” is because it’s not up to us. It’s that stuff out there. It is whatever it turns out to be. The name “bottom-up” is a bit misleading, since the “concepts” in question arguably aren’t concepts or are best construed as a set of concepts comprised of a family of notions that overlap in meaning. Rather, these “concepts” are roughly picked out by shared linguistic, philosophical, and other overlapping practices centered on our shared sensory experiences. Bottom-up concepts emerge in ordinary language. Ordinary language is largely improvisational, with words shading and varying in a vast, semi-overlapping panoply of context-distinct uses. As such, there is no distinctive, rigid stipulative use for a given term or concept. People won’t agree on what counts as a weapon, or a cake, or a sandwich, not because the content of the concept isn’t transparent, but because our ordinary linguistic practices aren’t top-down and stipulative. They’re improvisational, dynamically evolving across contexts and over time, and needs-driven. We will bend and warp language to serve our purposes as needed. Where top-down concepts are a rigid rod of iron, bottom-up concepts are amorphous, clay-like, and ready to be molded to suit the many practical purposes of everyday life.

Analytic philosophy goes astray in large part due to its failure to grapple with the way language and human thought actually work. In its effort to regiment the way people speak in accord with the normative standards and theoretical presuppositions endemic to the field, it engenders a systematic failure to adopt the appropriate tools for examining ordinary language and the “concepts” that emerge from it. Instead, ordinary language is treated almost like a mysterious code: terms pick out “concepts,” and the concepts have “essences” or content that isn’t immediately apparent, but must be discovered via careful armchair reasoning.

I don’t think ordinary language is like this. I don’t think ordinary terms specifically refer to some particular “concept,” some of which have content we can “see,” while others have content we have to go and discover (such as by using the tools of science).

Note how Goff characterizes concepts as “revealing” their essences, while opaque concepts don’t. This framing of the distinction makes it seem as though there’s some abstract repository of concepts whose content we access and discover via different methods: the “essence” of some concepts is somehow “acquired” because the concept “reveals” itself to us (however that’s supposed to be cashed out epistemologically, psychologically, and so on); as a consequence, some concepts are promiscuous, while others play hard to get. Compare this instead to my distinctions, in light of the examples Elijah provides:

A triangle is a transparent concept. The concept of a triangle refers to any closed object composed of three straight lines. Simply by knowing this concept, you know the essence of a triangle. You can figure out that the internal angles of a triangle must sum to 180 degrees just by thinking.

Water is an opaque concept. Simply knowing the concept of water doesn’t mean you can figure out that water is essentially H2O. That requires scientific investigation.

The former, triangle, is a top-down concept the content of which was specified by us. The latter, water, isn’t. Water is an ordinary language term we use to refer to a recurring experience we have of particular substances we encounter. Its content isn’t invented by us, but must be acquired via scientific investigation. However, both concepts are ultimately rooted in our experiences and practices. The concept of a triangle would not have emerged in the absence of our direct engagement with and experience of the world. Navigating that world can be facilitated in part by certain constructed, useful idealizations, which is how geometry emerged. Math is a human invention, or tool, we ourselves created. Water isn’t. That’s why water’s “essence” is “opaque.” We use the term water to pick out a cluster of experiences. If we wanted to, we could invent an idealization, or top-down concept based on our acquired knowledge of chemistry, whereby we stipulate that water is H₂O. Or we could just not do this. It’s up to us. If we did, then the concept of “water” in this technical, stipulative concept, would be “transparent.” In fact, its content very likely is transparent in certain academic contexts, where “water” is just an easy way to say H₂O. Maybe this is how chemists talk when doing chemistry, and they don’t fret over or find the notion of what water “really” is to be remotely mysterious. Incidentally, the “water” we typically encounter isn’t pure H₂O since it has impurities (though one might argue that we’re not referring to these when we refer to water).

In any case, on Goff’s view, pain is a transparent concept. Now, Goff isn’t the one doing the talking here. Elijah is. And Elijah continues:

This distinction in hand, Goff argues our phenomenal concepts are transparent. Roughly, his argument begins with the Cartesian thought that I can be virtually certain of my direct, immediate experiences.

When I step on a Lego brick, I feel the sensation of blinding pain. Is it possible for me to doubt that in that very moment, I am feeling pain? Goff thinks I can’t. In his words, I’m super justified in believing there is pain going on. This belief is super justified because I know it with the same level of certainty that I know 2 + 2  =  4 (at least in the moment).

I don’t agree with this. I think you could doubt you’re in pain. I have a chronic pain condition. I am almost always in pain. It’s a dull, low-level pain that varies in intensity. Sometimes it’s distracting and unpleasant. Usually it’s just kind of there, slightly worsening my life. But sometimes it’s mostly (or perhaps even entirely) suppressed. I go long periods of time where my attention is directed elsewhere, and the pain is “tuned down” in my conscious awareness. Since I am so habituated to the presence of the pain, I often just presume it is there. But sometimes these background differences in intensity vary without my noticing, and when I redirect my attention to the pain, I have to really consider whether I’m “in pain” or not. I’ve had experiences ranging from the following:

1. “Yep, there it is. Ugh.”

2. “Oh, yea, there it is. But just barely. Nice.”

3. “Is that the pain? I think so. Yea. Yea it is.”

4. “Is the pain there? Where? Hmm…well, I can’t seem to find it. I guess it’s gone. Awesome!”

Given my lifelong familiarity with pain, if I were confident about anything, it’s that I am not always confident whether I am “in pain.” Some might even argue that the experiences I’ve described don’t even constitute pain. Pain, one might insist, must prompt an aversive reaction or must exhibit a distinct phenomenology of displeasure. Since there are instances in which my pain doesn’t do either of these, it’s “not really pain.”

Ha! Well, look what we have here. What we have, in such cases, is a philosopher’s attempt at stipulating a top-down definition. Pain, so they say, “just is” the kind of experience that prompts an aversive phenomenology. If what I’m experiencing doesn’t have this quality, it’s just not pain. Note how this is analogous to simply stipulating that water is H₂O, so whatever I’m drinking, if it’s not H₂O, it isn’t water.

This kind of move is the subtle shift, the sleight of hand, philosophers often employ: a shift between our ordinary use of terms like “pain,” and some stipulative, top-down, theoretical construction on the part of the philosopher. The way I personally use the term “pain,” it can and does encompass aspects of my mental life that I can doubt.

However, the example Elijah gives is stepping on a Lego brick, a notorious source of “blinding pain.“ Maybe “blinding” pain can’t be doubted. This still doesn’t convince me. I don’t know enough about the experience of blinding pain to know if it’s possible to doubt it or not, and I don’t know if this is an a priori question. But setting such meta-doubt aside (i.e., my doubt about whether it’s possible to doubt one is in blinding pain), another issue is that it does not follow from the fact that one is incapable of doubting they’re in pain that they are “justified,” much less “super justified” in believing they’re in pain. Incorrigibility is not a uniquely powerful form of justification. If it were, then the world’s most obstinate idiots, the kinds of people utterly incapable of changing their minds about anything, would be …what? Ultra justified merely in virtue of their intransigence? Yet we’re told:

This belief is super justified because I know it with the same level of certainty that I know 2 + 2  =  4 (at least in the moment).

This seems to conflate confidence with justification. 2+2=4 is true because we’ve defined terms in such a way that it’s true. One’s private experiences of pain aren’t like this. We all know how the pieces move in chess because we’ve mutually agreed that they do. This is a matter we can publicly check on with others. But there’s no way to check on the private experiences of Goff or anyone else to determine, from the outside, whether they even have the experiences that they report having, much less that they are of some kind that we (from the outside) should consider whatever judgments they arrive at on the basis of their alleged experiences to be “justified.” If Goff or anyone else’s personal confidence or incorrigibility “justifies” their beliefs, it is a hollow justification because it is entirely private, and utterly inaccessible to the rest of us.

Compare, for example, a prosecution in a criminal trial claiming that they had “private justification” of the defendant’s guilt, and thus couldn’t present it for the jury’s consideration. Nobody would take this seriously. Likewise, I see little reason to take anyone’s private justification seriously unless there is some external method of corroborating the reliability of the judgments in question.

Now, returning to the matter of pain, Elijah explains why we’re “super justified” in our judgments about pain:

Goff’s answer is that super justification is best explained by transparency. If the whole nature of pain is present in your experience (because pain just is that experience), then you grasp the nature of pain once you grasp the concept. So, phenomenal concepts are transparent to us.

Since I don’t grant that we’re super justified in the first place, I don’t grant that we need to explain why we are super justified. I’d first need to see a good argument for why we are “super justified.” In the meantime, I also reject the notion that “pain” is a transparent concept. I don’t grant that this is a real kind of concept in the first place. Going by my own distinctions, is the meaning of pain stipulated? In that case, if it includes content I don’t agree exist, e.g., that pain is “intrinsically bad,” then I don’t think this is something someone could experience and I deny anyone has “pain” of the relevant kind. If it’s instead a bottom-up concept, then its content isn’t stipulated and is instead something we’d have to figure out, so Goff would be mistaken.

Already, then, there are multiple points where I don’t think Goff’s argument gets off the ground. I don’t grant the transparent/opaque distinction, I don’t grant that we’re “super justified” about our judgments about pain, and I don’t grant that pain is a transparent concept. I don’t think we’ve been given good reasons, here at least, for endorsing any of these claims.

Nevertheless, Elijah continues:

Suppose we accept Goff’s argument for the transparency of phenomenal concepts. If so, then once I grasp the concept of pain, I know the essence of pain. So what?

Well, notice that pain is not neutral, pain is bad. Badness is a negatively valanced normative concept. To say that something is bad, is to say you have reason to avoid it. When I stub my toe, I immediately recognise the badness of my pain.

I see more moves being made here that I don’t grant. I don’t grant that to say that something is bad is to say “you have a reason to avoid it.” This is ambiguous. What does Elijah mean by this? I don’t know. If it’s a claim consistent with my own view of reasons, then I grant this, but it isn’t going to get you to moral realism. If it isn’t, and Elijah is instead invoking some other notion of reasons, then I would reject this claim, leading to yet another point of departure. Elijah also says

I immediately recognise the badness of my pain.

This phrasing worries me. It sounds like it is reifying the notion of something being bad, as though “badness” is some feature of the pain itself, out there in the world, distinct from our evaluations. But this isn’t how I view things being good or bad. I don’t think there literally is any such thing as badness, and I don’t think we “recognize” it as something apart from ourselves. Rather, I think goodness and badness are fundamentally matters of our personal appraisal, or terms we use to refer to the real or hypothetical appraisals of others. As such, the language of recognizing “the badness” of pain employs language that I’d keep an eye on, because it is worded in a way that hints at a conception of pain that I also don’t grant. Elijah continues:

What’s more, if I think about different scenarios with similar pain, I get the intuition that these experiences of pain would be bad too. Indeed, I can’t think of a single possible world with pain like this in which I don’t see its badness.

This is too ambiguous to evaluate. What kinds of scenarios is Elijah referring to? Scenarios where Elijah himself is experiencing pain, or anyone? Because it does not follow from the fact that we find our own pain to be bad that therefore anyone else’s pain is bad. If the intuition is that it’s “bad” for someone else to be in pain other than Elijah, not relative to Elijah’s standards, but in some stance-independent way, well…I don’t have that intuition. In other words, it doesn’t seem to me that it is stance-independently bad for anyone to be in pain, myself included. I also worry about the notion of “seeing” the badness of pain. I’m not quite sure how literally we should take such language. I don’t think anyone can “see” badness. Elijah continues:

Now what explains these intuitions? I think the best explanation is that badness is part of pain’s essence. In other words, badness is part of what it is to be in pain.

Since I don’t know what the content of these intuitions is, it’s hard to offer an explanation. Does Elijah think pain is stance-independently bad, or bad in some other way? If it’s the latter, then these intuitions won’t support an argument for moral realism. If it’s the former, it’s not clear to me whether such intuitions are justified, much less super justified. Either way, I don’t share these intuitions, and, as I’ve already highlighted, there are so many points in the case made here where I’d disagree, and that I don’t think we’ve been given much in the way of arguments or reasons to endorse such a view, that I see very little going for this account.

Elijah ends with a few other remarks. Here’s one:

This argument won’t convince anyone to become a moral realist. But so what? The argument isn’t even trying to do that. Its aim is to show how moral knowledge is possible, not to convince sceptics.

I don’t think the argument shows that moral knowledge is possible, either. At least not in a way that’s interesting or worth engaging with. Too much ambiguity. Too many claims made without arguments or evidence in their favor. It’s unclear whether we’ve been shown that moral knowledge is possible. And, in any case, I don’t think pain alone is an adequate foundation for a plausible moral theory.

Since my critique of Bentham’s post about normative reasons was extremely long and most people won’t read it, I will offer a tl;dr version.

Bentham wrote an article criticizing antirealist conceptions of normative reasons. He focuses on antirealist conceptions of reasons that hold that reasons are given either by our desires, our long-term desires in particular, or by the desires we’d endorse on reflection. Bentham repeatedly asks how this could be, i.e., why should we think our desires give us reasons to do anything? Bentham believes there are no satisfying answers to this question, because our reasons are not given to us by our desires, but by stance-independent facts.

On the one hand, Bentham is correct: there are no good reasons to endorse any of these antirealist accounts of reasons. Bentham also offers a solid objection to the reflective desire account: there may be no single, stable fact about what an ideal version of you would endorse, since there are “many possible idealization procedures,” which might lead to different outcomes depending on various factors, such as “the order on [sic] which you learn the facts.” I agree.

However, Bentham presents little by way of a positive argument for stance-independent facts “giving” us reasons, either. These positions are not mutually exclusive. Demonstrating that reasons aren’t given by our desires doesn’t show that they’re given to us by something other than our desires. There is a third alternative:

Nothing “gives” us reasons.

Bentham (along with many academic philosophers) speaks of reasons as something that are “given” by facts or desires, as though reasons are something one can literally have. I don’t believe this is the case. Instead, I believe talk of “reasons” in everyday English does not literally evoke any implicit commitments at all about reasons as something given by anything. Instead, talk of reasons in normative contexts is a contingent, idiosyncratic way of referencing real or hypothetical values that the specified course of action would promote. Here’s how my account differs from the analytic antirealist accounts Bentham critiques. Suppose someone says:

You have a good reason to avoid petting that tiger.

Analytic antirealist accounts propose that this statement means something like this:

Your desire to not be mauled by a tiger gives you a reason to avoid petting the tiger.

My own position, in contrast, is this:

It would not promote your values to pet the tiger.

This view cuts out the “giving” component, where desires “give” reasons, and simply interprets the statement as a direct remark about the relation between your desires and the act in question. Note that the statement could be false. The speaker may presume to know what your values are. Note, too, that I use the term “values.” This is to distance my characterization from the three “desire” accounts Bentham presents. This is because (as I detail more in the full article) “desire” is a folk psychological term that isn’t rich or detailed enough to support a psychologically accurate account of how human cognition actually works. A proper antirealist account should dispense with crude, psychologically naïve conceptions of “desires.”

I believe Bentham and the antirealists he criticizes share a common, misguided propensity to reify reasons, and that this mistake is rooted in their shared acceptance of the methods and preconceptions of analytic philosophy.

Finally, the main article stresses two other points. Bentham begins his post by claiming that our starting “datum” is that it seems we have reasons to do things. Bentham then claims that antirealism is unable to account for this datum.

This objection is trivial because, even if we grant that it “seems” that we have reasons, these will either be reasons consistent with antirealism, in which case antirealism can account for us having reasons, or they won’t be consistent with antirealism, in which case our “datum” consists of phenomena that are, practically by definition, inconsistent with antirealism. For comparison, this would be a bit like someone saying that the position that ghosts don’t exist is wrong because part of our “datum” is that we have ectoplasm that came from ghosts. If that were true, then obviously the claim that ghosts don’t exist is wrong.

Bentham follows this claim about the datum by repeatedly maintaining that antirealist accounts fail because they are inconsistent with Bentham’s personal intuitions. Bentham’s personal intuitions do not provide a strong rationale for rejecting antirealist accounts of reasons.

Finally, Bentham repeatedly refers to the kinds of reasons he and other realists endorse as “genuine” reasons, implying that the sorts of reasons antirealists believe in are somehow not “genuine.” This frames the dispute between realists and antirealists in a way that tendentiously labels the rival positions in a way favorable to realism. After all, why should antirealists grant that realist reasons are “genuine”, but antirealist reasons somehow aren’t? Antirealists don’t even think realist reasons exist, but many do think antirealist reasons exist. Why think the nonexistent thing is the “genuine” form of a reason, rather than the kinds of reasons you think actually exist? Bentham has never given a satisfactory justification for this misleading rhetorical framing of the dispute.

Oh, and I also discuss research on people’s preferences for how to cut a sandwich.

There you have it. I managed to summarize the main points in less than five percent of the length of the original article. If this entices you to take the plunge and read the full article, you can find it here.

When my brother was younger, he had a strong preference for sandwiches to be cut into triangles instead of squares. Yet as he aged, he grew out of this. My verdict: he came to see that there wasn’t really any reason to care about the shape of the sandwich. He came to see that he was aiming at some things that he didn’t really have any reason to aim at. – Bentham’s Bulldog

I turn 40 this year. I still prefer my sandwiches to be cut into triangles. Some data suggests that, at least in certain societies, most people do. This mysterious, unshakable conviction invites us to consider the most fundamental question in all of philosophy:

Why?

Is this preference an arbitrary, irrational whim? Or does it point to something deeper about the human psyche that, once revealed, would shed light on the most intractable questions in philosophy and yield profound insight into the human condition?

The answer is…probably neither. Yet the belief that one’s preferences, however innocuous, arbitrary, or weird, could be irrational, unreasonable, or mistaken figures into a broader set of beliefs and commitments largely distinctive to academic philosophers: the notion that there are stance-independent reasons to act in certain ways. According to Bentham and others, desires may not give us reasons to do anything. Instead, reasons are given to us by facts or considerations that have nothing to do with our desires, goals, or preferences. When deciding what to do, your primary concern shouldn’t be to ask, “What do I value?” or “What do I want?” but to instead ask “What external reasons do I have to do one thing rather than another?”

I believe this view is profoundly mistaken. While psychologists have yet to hammer out a precise set of distinctions that cleanly partition, collapse, or eliminate folk notions like desire, preference, goal, aim, impulse, and so on, we may still roughly appreciate that voluntary action requires motivation, i.e. those factors that prompt and maintain goal-directed behavior. It is not clear to me how anyone could ever voluntarily do anything that they didn’t want to do, more or less on tautological grounds: to act voluntarily just is to act on one’s goals or desires (again, with the acknowledgement that the language of “goal,” “desire,” and so on is imprecise here, and may need to be refined).

Thus, even if there were “reasons for action” independent of our goals, desires, preferences (or whatever other term we want to use), my general outlook is that we’d still need to desire to comply with such “reasons” for them to have any impact on our behavior. Maybe I’m mistaken or confused about this, but I’ve never seen a plausible alternative conception of voluntary action. If you know of one, feel free to leave a comment or respond to this post. But, speaking for myself, as far as I can tell I am only interested in acting on my desires, and even if there were reasons for me to do things distinct from those desires, I have no desire to factor such reasons into my deliberations. But this post isn’t about my conception of deliberation, desire, or motivation. It is about the case Bentham makes to the contrary. My goal in this post will be to systematically evaluate the case Bentham makes against the notion that desires “give us reasons” and in favor of the view that our reasons are “given” to us by facts external to our desires.

My main thesis is simple: Bentham provides no good arguments for such a view. While examining the shortcomings of his arguments, I also argue that his entire perspective is predicated on a more fundamentally misguided notion that “reasons” are a distinct property or phenomenon that could in principle be “given” by anything. I provide an alternative conception of our use of the term “reason” that strips it of any distinct metaphysical import or conceptual independence by deflating its use in English and illustrating how talk of “reasons” can be understood in ways that don’t require or presuppose that one can literally “have” reasons. In so doing, I reject both mainstream analytic conceptions of “reasons” to maintain that they are given to us by our desires, and realist conceptions of “reasons” that maintain that they are given to us by something other than our desires. Simply put, nothing gives us reasons.

1.0 Current and Previous Critiques

In a recent post, “Reasons and Moral Anti-Realism,” Bentham’s Bulldog raises an objection to moral antirealism: namely, that moral antirealism can’t account for genuine “reasons.” This is taken to be some sort of severe shortcoming with moral antirealism. It isn’t, and Bentham continues a pattern of offering tepid objections to antirealism. For previous critiques of Bentham’s takes on metaethics, see here:

Bentham’s Blunder

Moral Realist Quackery

Bentham’s overarching objection appears to be that he finds it intuitive that we have stance-independent normative reasons, i.e., reasons for action that are not reducible to one’s desires. Moral antirealists deny this, and while antirealists often offer various alternative accounts of normative reasons, he doesn’t consider these to be satisfactory.

2.0 Ambiguity about reasons

The problem with this objection to antirealism is that it is completely trivial. Here’s why. Moral realism is typically characterized as the view that there are stance-independent moral facts. These are facts about what is morally right or wrong that are true independent of our goals or desires. Moral antirealism is the view that there are no stance-independent moral facts. For an antirealist, if there are reasons, those reasons cannot be independent of our desires.

Thus, insofar as moral facts are “reason giving,” only moral realism, by definition, can “give” us reasons to act in a way independent of our desires. For comparison, only theists can believe that God created the universe. It is a surface-level entailment of atheism that it is inconsistent with the belief that God created the universe. By “surface-level,” I mean that the entailment in question is a direct and straightforward implication of the position in question, rather than a non-obvious one that someone familiar with the position could reasonably overlook.

Likewise, it is simply part of the surface-level features of realism and antirealism that realism can provide us with stance-independent reasons and antirealism can’t. As a result, to object to moral antirealism on the grounds that it fails to furnish us with stance-independent reasons is a trivial objection. It is not meaningfully different from objecting to atheism by asserting that:

It seems that God created the universe. But atheists deny that God created the universe, so atheism is unable to account for this datum.

Compare this to how Bentham begins his post:

Here is something that seems obvious to me: sometimes, I have a reason to perform an act. I have a reason not to stab myself in the eye for no reason. I have a reason to eat when I am hungry. I have a reason to eat healthy foods. Can anti-realism accommodate this datum?

If by “reason,” Bentham just means the kinds of reasons that are only consistent with a realist account, then the objection to antirealism based on these remarks is just as trivial as the objection to atheism I just presented. In other words, suppose that the kinds of reasons Bentham takes to be the datum just are stance-independent reasons. If moral antirealism rules out that there are such reasons, then it’s simply a logical entailment of antirealism that we don’t have such reasons, just like it’s a logical entailment of atheism that God didn’t create the universe. And objecting to atheism on the grounds that because the “datum” just is that God created the universe presupposes that atheism is false. If, instead, “reason” doesn’t refer only to the kinds of reasons inconsistent with antirealism, then it is open to the antirealist to point to conceptions of realism consistent with antirealism, which satisfies the condition of accommodating the “datum” in question. Bentham’s entire argument thus relies on concealing the emptiness of his objection behind a veil of ambiguity: once disambiguated, Bentham’s objection is either trivial or false.

As an aside, Bentham’s use of “datum” is a poor way to frame a philosophical matter. His phrasing is ambiguous, and the term “datum” is inappropriate for use in philosophical contexts like these. Just what is the “datum” here? That certain things seem obvious to Bentham, that we in fact have the kinds of reasons Bentham supposes we do (whatever that means), or something else? And does the datum consist in any distinctive account of “reason” or not? If so, what is that account? If not, how can it serve as “datum” if the content of “reason” hasn’t been disambiguated in such a way that we know what it consists in? For comparison, one couldn’t treat an object in a box as datum a theory must account for if one isn’t clear about whether the object is, e.g., a fossil rabbit from the Pleistocene or the Precambrian. After all, the former would be utterly mundane while the latter would upturn the theory of evolution. Likewise, the notion of a “reason,” absent disambiguation, remains in an indeterminate state such that whether an antirealist could or couldn’t account for the “reasons” in question will turn on what’s meant by “reason.” If by “reason” Bentham means the sorts of reasons that are inconsistent with antirealism, then it can’t, while if Bentham means the sorts of reasons that are consistent with antirealism, then it can. Another problem is the ambiguity about whether the datum is Bentham’s intuitions, or something other than Bentham’s intuitions. Some philosophers claim that certain positions they regard as intuitive enjoy some kind of public or general default status. It’s not clear whether Bentham thinks this or not.

Another reason I dislike this language is because it coopts a scientific term. “Datum” is often used to convey information or facts one has acquired that has a distinctively empirical connotation. But setting that matter aside, it is most distinctively associated with the sort of information that is taken for granted at the outset of inquiry. Here is the first definition I found when searching for a standard dictionary definition of “datum”:

Something given or admitted; a fact or principle granted; that upon which an inference or an argument is based; -- used chiefly in the plural.

When someone like Bentham claims that something is “datum,” this implies or could readily be interpreted to imply that the claim in question should be treated as a given or “admitted.”

As such, it is very important to establish whether the “datum” in question is simply Bentham’s intuition on the matter, or whether the claim that there are “reasons” of the sort Bentham supposes there are is supposed to be the datum. If the former, the antirealist’s task is a lot easier. It’s not so daunting to account for why Bentham might have a particular intuition, nor is the fact that Bentham has such an intuition terribly threatening to whether antirealism is true. If, on the other hand, the datum is supposed to be that we have such reasons, then it becomes more critical than ever to know what kinds of reasons Bentham thinks the datum consists in. If they are the kinds of reasons inconsistent with antirealism, then Bentham’s objection is trivial. Imagine if, for instance, I claimed that part of the “datum” philosophers must “accommodate” is that:

Moral realism seems false.

One may then proceed as if it were established that one’s interlocutors have or at least ought to grant that “moral realism seems false.” Now, if the datum Bentham is presenting is merely that Bentham personally finds certain things to be obvious, that may tell us something interesting about Bentham’s psychology, but it’s not the sort of thing I think serious thinkers should spend a lot of time devising theories to accommodate. Why should I or anyone else invest time and effort in assuaging Bentham’s personal predilections? It “seems obvious” to many people that paranormal powers are real, that reptile aliens have infiltrated the upper echelons of society, that astrology provides valuable insights into human nature, and so on. People believe all kinds of nonsense. Why should anyone care what Bentham thinks?

If, on the other hand, the “datum” is something more public and less personal, then I don’t grant that there is such “datum”. That’s something Bentham would have to argue for. But in typical fashion, Bentham, like many analytic philosophers, isn’t very clear about what he means. At the time of writing, I was able to resolve some of the ambiguity. I asked Bentham for clarification on the latter point, and fortunately he obliged. I said:

Bentham’s Bulldog Can you clarify what the datum is here? Is it:

(1) You find it obvious we have reasons to perform certain acts.

(2) There are reasons of the kinds you list.

(3) Something else.

Bentham’s response was:

That there are sometimes reason [sic] to do things.

This confirms that the “datum” we are to accept is that “there are sometimes reasons to do things.” Unfortunately, this doesn’t address a second ambiguity. Following this response, I asked Bentham:

There is further ambiguity when you say that “There are sometimes reasons to do things.” What kinds of reasons do you think are part of the datum? Stance-independent reasons in particular, stance-dependent reasons in particular, or something else?

It’s been several days since I asked, but at the time of writing he has not responded. At this point I don’t expect a response. So we’ll proceed with this question unanswered. Note how I included a third option. The “reasons” Bentham takes to be the datum could be stance-independent reasons, stance-dependent reasons, or they could be something else. This could be a combination of the two (“reasons pluralism”), or he might believe there’s a determinate answer but he doesn’t know (“reasons agnosticism” I suppose), which would be consistent with pluralism, or he might go another route entirely, and suggest that the reasons in question are reasons tout court, i.e., simply “reasons” without further qualification. This possibility was suggested by @Tower of Babble, who said:

Can’t he just say reason tout court? Like why should he specify ‘stance-dependent’ or ‘stance-independent.’

He could say this, but I don’t think it would be a very convincing move. Let’s draw a distinction between abstract concepts and concrete concepts. Take the notion of fruit. Fruit is an abstract concept that can refer to any number of objects: apples, bananas, pears, and even, metaphorically, buildings or achievements, as when one speaks of the “fruits of one’s labor.” Can a person have a fruit? Yes, they can, as long as we’re clear on what that means. A person can have a fruit in the sense of having a concrete instance of a fruit: they can have an apple or a banana or a grapefruit. But a person cannot literally have a fruit simpliciter. That is, one cannot be in possession of an object, and that object is a fruit, but it isn’t any kind of fruit in particular.

This just isn’t how “datum” works. If people have reasons, they have something in particular. I responded to Tower of Babble on a similar note:

[…] Let’s say all fruits are apples or bananas. As part of our data, we know that everyone has one fruit. Can they literally have a fruit simpliciter? I don’t think they can. It’s not possible to literally have an abstract object. All data is concrete, even if you don’t know what the data is.

There’s also the matter of access to knowledge about the objects. Is the epistemology of having stance independent and stance dependent reasons the same? How does he know we have reasons is part of the datum? If the way by which he knows is distinctive to one or the other kind, shouldn’t that matter?

Personally, I suspect not being specific would be hand wavy, and might not make much sense. I don’t think you can literally have a reason simpliciter. Maybe you could know you have a reason but not be sure what kind, but I’m not sure how that’s supposed to happen.

I think he might want to say this anyway. Huemer said similar things when I spoke to him. But I think this might be a rationalistic error.

I also note here that there is an epistemic question on the table. How did Bentham determine that the fact that we “sometimes have reasons” is part of the “datum”? If it involved introspection on a priori considerations, then does this process somehow furnish one with knowledge that one has reasons, but doesn’t tell one what kind of reasons one has? If so, why? And why should we think that the epistemic access one would have to stance-independent reasons would be the same as the way one would access stance-dependent reasons? One might suppose that knowledge of the latter would exhibit a distinct phenomenological profile.

Before proceeding, I want to address two caveats.

3.1 Surface-level entailments & reasons-first approaches

One objection to my claim that Bentham’s central thesis is trivial is simply deny that it’s trivial. Sometimes the entailments or implications of a philosophical position are non-obvious. By drawing attention to these features, one can make meaningful progress in raising a substantive objection to a position. Suppose a philosophical position seems entirely plausible at first glance. However, it turns out that an implication of this position is that 2+2=43, or that the sun is made of bologna. Once one realizes that these are implications of a seemingly plausible position, one might then be inclined to reject the position. @Tower of Babble offered a response along these lines here:

Re your first two paragraphs: If I say something like “classic utilitarians are committed to the acceptability of utility monster cases, but that’s obviously crazy!” It seems like it would be silly to respond “that’s just an entailment of the view.” The point is that the view has unacceptable entailments, that many people might not find obvious, but when pointed out to them they come down hard against said view.

I agree that this would be entirely appropriate in the case of utility monsters as a non-obvious objection to utilitarianism. However, I don’t think this is analogous to the notion that antirealism can’t account for the kinds of reasons realists think there, because I take the inconsistency between antirealism and such reasons to be an obvious or surface-level entailment of antirealism. Why do I think this? Take utilitarianism: this is the view that one ought to impartially maximize utility. It is an entailment of the view that if there is an entity that enjoyed eating people so much that it would maximize utility to feed everyone to it, that one ought to do so. That’s not necessarily obvious to people until you point it out.

Now consider moral antirealism. Moral antirealism is typically construed as the position that there are no stance-independent moral facts. But a case could be made that moral antirealism could be equally or better characterized as the position that there are no stance-independent reasons. Why? I offered an explanation for why this would be a reasonable way to characterize the realism/antirealism dispute is here. I’ll reproduce the relevant portion here with some minor changes:

The dispute between realists and antirealists is typically construed in terms of whether there are stance-independent moral facts. But this is just one way of construing the dialectic. Another way places normative reasons at the center of the dispute.

Indeed, many contemporary metaethicists take just such a reasons-first approach according to which normative reasons are the most fundamental unit of theoretical consideration in metaethics, not facts about what one should or shouldn’t do, what’s good or bad, and so on. Instead, these concepts are construed as downstream of and dependent on reasons. This approach has grown in popularity in recent years. Schroeder’s “Reasons First” provides one example. Here’s a quote from the description:

“In the last five decades, ethical theory has been preoccupied by a turn to reasons. The vocabulary of reasons has become a common currency not only in ethics, but in epistemology, action theory, and many related areas. It is now common, for example, to see central theses such as evidentialism in epistemology and egalitarianism in political philosophy formulated in terms of reasons. And some have even claimed that the vocabulary of reasons is so useful precisely because reasons have analytical and explanatory priority over other normative concepts-that reasons in that sense come first.

Reasons First systematically explores both the benefits and burdens of the hypothesis that reasons do indeed come first in normative theory […]”

In other words, an entirely conceptually legitimate way of defining the realism/antirealism dispute just is as a dispute about whether we have the kinds of reasons Bentham is talking about in the article or not.

This isn’t simply a matter of it being some concealed, non-obvious entailment of antirealism. Contemporary metaethicists quite literally can and have described the landscape in such a way that the best way of construing moral realism and antirealism would be that:

• Moral realism is the view that we have reasons to do things independent of our stances.

• Moral antirealism is the view that we don’t have reasons to do things independent of our stances.

[…]

It’s also worth noting that the centrality of reasons in contemporary ethics is closely associated with Parfit, the very person featured in the image in Bentham’s post, and that Bentham’s own realist perspective appears to be heavily inspired by Parfit.

I regard definitions of moral realism/antirealism in terms of facts rather than reasons to be a contingent, incidental feature of the recent history of metaethics; it could just as readily have gone the other way around, and in the coming decades defining realism and antirealism in terms of reasons rather than facts could become the norm.

As such, when I say that what Bentham is arguing is trivial, I am doing so in light of my familiarity with the contemporary metaethical landscape and where I take Bentham’s views and inspiration to fall within that landscape.

Roughly, the issue is this. An entirely defensible approach to defining moral realism is as the view that there are stance-independent reasons. And if one has a stance-independent reason, that reason is by definition a reason that cannot depend on or be reducible to your desires (or anything else that constitutes a stance; “desire” would either be a kind of stance, though some might even just use “stance” and “desire” interchangeably, which would make my point even stronger).

That antirealism doesn’t allow for us to have reasons independent of our desires is, if not a definition, very close to one. This is why Bentham’s objections are trivial. They are about as close as one can get to complaining that something is false because the contrary is true without saying exactly that.

3.2 “Desires” and stances

This construal in terms of independence of desires is inaccurate for my taste. I do not think we can just neatly treat the stance-independence/stance-dependent divide as reducible to desire-independent/desire-dependent divide, since the ways in which moral facts can depend on stances is either not fully identical to stances being desires or the term “desire” would have to be artificially widened to encompass the sorts of positions that typically fall within the ambit of antirealism. If, for instance, one is a cultural relativist, then one may believe moral truth for a given culture is determined by a crude majority of members of that culture, or by whatever institutional forces hold power, even if it isn’t a strict majority. While the consensus or the position of the elites might bottom out in desires, it might not (more on this in a moment), but the critical point here is that even if moral facts depended in some way on desires, they wouldn’t necessarily be your desires.

So it is entirely consistent with moral antirealism that there are facts about what you have reason to do that are not reducible to your desires. Second, “desire,” may not capture the full range of psychological states that can serve as stances, and it is questionable whether a stance need be literally constituted by a desire in the first place, since a stance could be hypothetical or held in some non-psychological sense, such as adherence to a moral code outlined in a book. If what one had reason to do depended on the stances of different books, then one would have a kind of relativism, and one would have a kind of antirealism since those moral facts weren’t true independent of a stance; it’s just that the stances in question would be the stances of books. The content of those books need not reflect the desires of anyone, or at least anyone currently living. As such, at the very least, antirealism allows for there to be reasons to do something that don’t depend on any occurrent desires.

Lastly, I’ll just note that “desire” is a piece of technical philosophical jargon used in philosophical contexts, and that it may or may not correspond to any distinct cognitive phenomena recognized by contemporary cognitive psychology.

4.0 Misleading modifiers

Recall that Bentham asks whether antirealism can accommodate the “datum” that we sometimes have reasons. Bentham continues:

I believe that the answer is no. As Parfit suggested, if moral anti-realism is true, all our reasons to act are built on sand. No action is more worth taking than any other. There might be actions that we are, in fact, psychologically disposed to take. But there are none that we have genuine reason to take.

Bentham continues with the unfortunate use of misleading modifiers like “genuine.” Just what does “genuine” mean here? Antirealists and realists are going to have different accounts of reasons. Why should we simply refer to the realist’s reasons as “genuine”? What makes them genuine? Bentham’s use of “genuine” serves a similar role that terms like “really,” “actual,” and related terms. This label naturally invites us to regard the antirealist’s conception of reasons as somehow ingenuine or fake. Sure, the antirealist may offer us “reasons,” but they are somehow counterfeit, or not the real thing. This is normatively loaded language that subtly indicts alternative conceptions. It is rhetorically manipulative. And it’s disappointing to see Bentham continuing to employ this kind of rhetoric in his articles. I present an extended critique of using terms like “genuine” in this way here. Here’s an excerpt:

The idea here is that the realist will claim that their conception of morality or value involves a belief in “real,” or “true” or “actual” or “genuine” value, with the implication that the antirealist’s conception of morality or value is somehow not real. This is why I have dubbed this use of deceptive modifiers the fake cheese fallacy.

The fake cheese fallacy: The use of deceptive modifiers, when describing one’s own position in relation to other positions, e.g., “true,” “genuine,” or “real,” that give the misleading impression that one’s own position is in some way more likely to be correct or desirable. This works by exploiting the connotations with colloquial uses of these terms.

Example: “As a realist about moral value, only I think that actions are really right or wrong.”

In fact, the fake cheese fallacy is baked into the very names of the competing positions. Realists are, after all, realists. They think morality is “real,” allegedly, while antirealists don’t. This is, of course, also misleading and unhelpful.

I’m an antirealist, but I don’t think morality isn’t real; I think that there are no stance-independent moral facts. What would it even mean to say morality isn’t “real”? This leaves open what it is we’re saying isn’t real. While I and other antirealists don’t think there are stance-independent moral facts, this does not mean that we think nothing matters, or that we don’t oppose hurting people, or that happiness isn’t desirable and worth pursuing, and so on. Yet all of this is commonly implied or assumed by critics, and suggested by moral realists who ought to recognize none of this follows from our views (or, they might insist, it does follow; in which case they’d need an argument for this). We differ from moral realists not in that we don’t care about the same things, and that we can do so with just as much fervor as they do; it’s just that we don’t think this involves distinctive metaphysical and conceptual commitments.

While denying that anything is valuable in any respect at all is consistent with thinking that if things aren’t good or valuable in the realist’s sense, that they aren’t good or valuable at all, this isn’t an entailment of antirealism; an antirealist is free both to reject realist conceptions of goodness/value and to reject the notion that only realist conceptions of goodness/value are “true,” or “genuine” or “real.” The antirealist who doesn’t do this may be buying into realist’s notions that only their conceptions of morality and value are legitimate, even if the antirealist proceeds to deny that the realist’s position is true. And this may be due to a persistent campaign by realists to employ deceptive modifiers like “real” and “true,” modifiers that both create an unearned positive association with realist positions, and, if repeated often enough, can take advantage of truth-by-repetition; as the expression goes, if a lie is repeated often enough, it becomes the truth.

I don’t believe Bentham has adequately addressed the objection that his use of a term like “genuine” serves no legitimate philosophical purpose and instead serves an exclusively misleading rhetorical function. Unfortunately, many antirealists do buy into the realist’s tendentious framing, granting that the antirealist must accept that they don’t have real or genuine reasons. Some antirealists go even further, denying that we have reasons without any caveats or qualifications, or denying that there are “moral facts” at all, or that morality “is real.” There are defensible ways of characterizing antirealism in these terms, but framing things in this way without a mountain of qualifications unnecessarily cedes rhetorical ground to realists, who are often all too happy to exploit these rhetorical vulnerabilities to make antirealism look bad without actually delivering any philosophically substantive blows to it.

5.0 The analytic antirealist

Bentham moves on to address his concerns with antirealist conceptions of reasons:

The anti-realist presumption is generally that one’s reasons to behave in some way are given by their desires. This is supposed to be the default. Yet I do not see why the mere fact that one wishes to perform some act gives them a reason to do it. Why do my reasons come from my desires and not from, say, my neighbor’s desires? What is it that makes it so that the wise and sensible action to perform is whichever one accords with my aims?

Here’s the thing: I agree. Why should the fact that someone wishes to perform an action give them a reason to do it? I don’t think antirealists will be able to offer a satisfactory answer to this question. So what is the alternative? The way Bentham construes the dispute between realists and antirealists, each side thinks something like this:

• Realists: We have reasons, and they are not given to us by our desires.

• Antirealists: We have reasons, and they are given to us by our desires.

6.0 Crude Antirealist Desire Reductivism

But there is an alternative position an antirealist can take:

We don’t have normative reasons in any literal sense. To say that one has reasons to do things in ordinary language is a perfectly legitimate way to talk, but it does not imply or require any distinctive conception of “reasons” where they are understood as a distinct property or phenomenon given by desires or anything else. Instead, talk of reasons is best understood to be an idiosyncratic quirk of the English language; such talk can always be reduced to or redescribed in terms that don’t invoke the notion of “reasons.”

Talk of reasons, in most instances in ordinary language, can be understood in terms of claims about explanations, motivations, desires, hypothetical goals or values, or other mundane means by which such talk can be discharged without implying or entailing that one can literally have reasons. This view contrasts with analytic moral realism and antirealism in that both mistakenly reify reasons, treating them as things-in-themselves. Once this view is rejected, and we reject the notion that we have reasons in any literal sense, both the realist and antirealist accounts reveal themselves to rely on mistaken shared presuppositions.

This might sound absurd. But it is not absurd. It is, in fact, the least absurd position one can take on the matter. The reason the dispute between analytic realists and analytic antirealists appears intractable is because it is: both are committed to a mistaken view of “reasons” that reifies them, treating them as something that facts (for realists) or desires (for antirealists) can give or generate and that we subsequently literally have. One alternative is to reject the notion that there are reasons and that one can have them in some literal, irreducible sense, whereby reasons are something distinct from and given by something, whether it be facts or desires. One might construe such views as reductive, deflationary, or quietistic. Here’s a simple version of such a view:

Crude Antirealist Desire Reductivism
There are facts about what agents desire. There are also facts about what agents could desire or what others desire that they desire. To say that one has a normative reason isn’t to say that these desires or hypothetical desires give reasons, but rather that any verbal reference to one “having” a normative reason just is a reference to a real or hypothetical desire.

Let’s take this view and see how it handles Bentham’s characterization of a standard analytic antirealist account where desires “give” reasons:

The anti-realist presumption is generally that one’s reasons to behave in some way are given by their desires. (emphasis mine)

Note how Bentham’s remarks would make little sense if talk of reasons could be eliminated and replaced directly with talk of one’s goals, motivations, or desires. This is because the way Bentham frames things here, the desires give the reasons; they’re not identical to them.

Crude antirealist desire reductivism doesn’t have this problem. Reasons are not given by desires. Literally speaking, there are no “reasons.” References to reasons simply refer to desires, whether they are real or hypothetical.

Bentham continues:

Yet I do not see why the mere fact that one wishes to perform some act gives them a reason to do it. Why do my reasons come from my desires and not from, say, my neighbor’s desires?

On crude antirealist desire reductivism, these questions are no longer applicable. Reasons don’t “come from” desires. They just are desires. In other words, there are facts about what our desires are, and to say that one “has a reason” to do something just is to say that they desire to do it, or to imagine or project some hypothetical desire on them. For instance, to say:

Mike has a reason to avoid punching me in the face.

Could convey that:

It would satisfy Mike’s desires (even if Mike doesn’t realize it) to avoid punching me in the face.

I desire that Mike avoid punching me in the face.

There are intersubjective moral standards that, on reflection, Mike would endorse, according to which Mike would recognize that it’s against his interests to punch me in the face and would thereby no longer have the desire to do so.

There might be yet more desires/values one might be referencing with the initial remark about Mike “having a reason.” The point here is that all such talk terminates in the desires of some real (Mike, you) or hypothetical person (an idealized version of Mike) would have. On such a view, it’s not that your desire to perform an action gives you a reason to perform the action. It’s just that you desire to perform the action (or someone else desires that you do so, or a hypothetical version of you would desire to do so, etc.), and there are no further facts (such as that this “gives” you a reason to do so).

The second question about why your reasons “come from” your desires rather than your neighbors doesn’t really make sense, but an approximate response would be that the reason why your desires are your desires rather than your neighbors has to do with facts about the way human psychology works. Desires are generated by our brains. My desires come from my body, and my neighbor’s desires come from their body (I say “body” and not “brain” because desires are causally influenced by e.g., hormone release and other factors that are not directly located in the brain). For instance, when I desire to eat, this is not because my neighbor is hungry, but because of causal-historical facts about when I last ate, physiological facts about my metabolism, and neurophysiological facts related to e.g., hormone release and psychological elements of satiation. These facts provide a clear and (I hope, but who knows with philosophers) uncontroversial explanation of why I am hungry, and it is this hunger that causes my desire to eat.

The only reasonable sense in which my desires even are my desires rather than my neighbor’s desires already presupposes the legitimacy of a distinction like this (and if one wants to get into some Parfitian skepticism about identity, that’d be quite a digression but it’d threaten more than just the antirealist’s views). Bentham continues:

What is it that makes it so that the wise and sensible action to perform is whichever one accords with my aims?

This is ambiguous. If by “wise” or “sensible action to perform” is understood in accord with instrumental conceptions of rationality, then the answer is straightforward: to be wise or sensible in the relevant sense just is to act in such a way so as to effectively achieve one’s desires. If this isn’t what Bentham means, then he may be invoking some realist conception of being wise or sensible. If so, it wouldn’t make sense to ask how an antirealist could meet such demands, since they’re an antirealist! It’d be like asking an atheist, “What makes it the case that your atheistic view is wise and sensible according to God?” Bentham has a problem with remarks like this. He sometimes employs ambiguous remarks that, when disambiguated, reveal themselves to be trivial or unmotivated. This is one such instance.

Once we reject any lurking realist conceptions of being wise or sensible, it is clear that antirealists are not obligated to think that one’s desires are wise or sensible in any deeper sense than that they are wise or sensible relative to one’s own desires, where “desire” is broadly construed to capture one’s overarching set of values. In other words, if you’re an antirealist, you’re not going to have any trouble being an antirealist about what’s wise and sensible.

Bentham goes on to give examples that purportedly show how radically counterintuitive it would be for antirealist to maintain that we have reasons (or don’t have reasons) to do certain things. For instance, it’s supposed to be absurd to claim that if a person desires to eat a car, then they “have a reason” to eat a car. Criticisms of this sort fail to distinguish between a particular philosophical account of what a particular sentence means, and what that sentence would mean on some other account. Take a phrase like:

“There is magic in the world.”

This phrase could be used to convey that the kind of magic in Harry Potter is real. But it could also be used to convey the less fantastical claim that there are incredible and mysterious things in the world that inspire wonder. Interpreted in the first way, the statement would be false. In the second, it may be true. Just so, the desire-reductive antirealist is not obliged to accept the conceptual and/or metaphysical confusions of realists like Bentham when using or responding to snippets of ordinary moral discourse. Take, for instance, someone who says:

“Oh, for Pete’s sake.”

Must this person be committed to the notion that people literally have sakes? No. This would be ridiculous. Likewise, the mere fact that the desire-reductive antirealist would say things like:

“I have good reason to avoid intense suffering.”

…does not commit them to thinking they literally have reasons, where reasons are understood be something distinct from and in addition to one’s desires, values, preferences, goals, and so on. Such a statement could just be another way to say:

“I desire to avoid intense suffering”

Or:

“Conditional on the goal of avoiding intense suffering, it would be in one’s interests to avoid it.”

…or any number of locutions that don’t presume that one’s desires give one reasons; talk of “having reasons” on such an account is just a roundabout way of saying something about one’s real or hypothetical desires, values, goals, etc.

I want to pause here for a moment to say a bit about how I think about language, and to illustrate why I think Bentham and others are employing bad methods that reliably lead them to make egregious mistakes. These mistakes are, I believe, a product of induction into analytic philosophical methods that retain profound and pervasive misunderstandings about language and meaning from a warped, anti-psychological and anti-empirical 20^th century conception of language. These mistakes lead Bentham and others to be systematically insensitive to pragmatics. Formally speaking, pragmatics is often construed as the study of how context contributes to meaning. I find this to be a bizarre definition, since I don’t think context contributes to meaning so much as constitutes, or fully determines it. One way to put this is that, personally, I reject the pragmatics/semantics distinction; for me, there is only pragmatics. It is context all the way down. This may be a radical or mistaken position, but adopting it or agreeing with me isn’t at all necessary to sustain the kinds of objections I raise here. One need merely appreciate that pragmatics plays a significant enough role to account for the kinds of errors I outline here.

This insensitivity to pragmatics is coupled with an obsessive, narrow focus on contemporary English, to the almost total exclusion of any consideration of how things are phrased in other languages. Like all languages, English is replete with verbal roundabouts and nonliteral or oblique ways of phrasing things. “Having” a reason is just one of many examples.

Languages evolve through the decentralized accretion of accepted linguistic mutations in a patterned but ultimately unplanned way. This is true of most languages most of the time throughout most of history, anyway, with the exception being constructed language or deliberate efforts to introduce order into a language, though this is the exception and not the norm. At the same time, language is never used outside a context (since this would be impossible). For comparison, one cannot use a knife, but not use it in any particular way. To use something is to use it in some way, to some end, for some purpose, and so on. Language is no different. Every word, every sound, and every gesture intentionally used by someone is used to some end or purpose. Meaning is to be located in those ends and purposes, not in the words, sounds, or gestures themselves. Language is a means to an end. The end is located in facts about the psychology of the language users, not the words and gestures themselves. In sloganized form: words don’t mean things, people mean things.

Utterances, writing, and phrases are always used in some context, meaning that they are used for some purpose or goal. Real language is always contextualized, embodied, and concrete. Language is a behavior, and behaviors are the goal-directed activities of agents. Agents differ in their goals, even when employing the same set of words in the same language. Language is improvisational and flexible, adapting on a momentary basis to the communicative goals of people interacting with one another. Once one appreciates this, they can start to appreciate the sharp disparity between the kinds examples Bentham works with and the real thing. Bentham routinely asks us to assess sentences, but these sentences are presented without any context. They aren’t being uttered by anyone in particular in any actual context to any conceivable end, apart from what few details are stipulated. But even these stipulated details are still fictional. If I say “Imagine Alex yelled at his neighbor because he was angry,” you are not considering any actual instance of any actual person actually yelling at anyone. Yet Bentham will routinely present us with sentences and situations that lack the contextual cues we’d ordinarily use to make judgments. Does a desire to eat cars sound weird? Well, what if the being in question was a giant mechanical monstrosity that consumed metal? Now would it be weird? If we’re to imagine a person who wanted to eat cars, despite the fact that they’d be unable to metabolize parts of the car or even succeed at biting off parts of it, it’d be entirely appropriate to presume that they had some pathology. But that’s just it; the context is missing, and so we’re given open-ended, vague scenarios where conscious and unconscious processes alike are left to fill in the gap.

7.0 The “That’s absurd!” objection

The most obvious rejoinder to an account like this is that it’s absurd to claim that we don’t have reasons. But it’s important to be clear about what this means. What this means is that, literally speaking, we don’t have reasons, with emphasis on have. It’s not that one can’t speak of reasons, or speak of us “having reasons,” provided one doesn’t mistakenly reify the notion of having reasons such that one believes that reasons are a literal thing one can have. On such a view, talk of “having reasons” is perfectly sensible. Critics of a view like this may be inclined to make the following sort of move:

This position is ridiculous. It would commit the antirealist to saying things like “We have no reason to do anything” or “we have no reason to avoid torture and dismemberment.” But we clearly do have reasons to do at least some things, and this includes the fact that we have a reason to avoid torture and dismemberment.

This is false. The desire-reductive antirealist is not committed to saying these things. Whether the antirealist is committed to agreeing that we have no such reasons will depend on the context in which such a remark is presented. If the desire-reductive antirealist is in a conversation with philosophers who make it clear that they are speaking of reified reasons “given” by facts, desires, or whatever else, the desire-reductive antirealist doesn’t think there are reasons of this kind. But the desire-reductive antirealist isn’t therefore obligated to import the metaphysical or conceptual presuppositions of mainstream analytic philosophers into ordinary language, and suppose that they and others are somehow committed to speaking and thinking in ways that comport with the analytic philosopher’s penchant for reification. It is entirely consistent with the position to construe ordinary use of reason-talk in a way consistent with the antirealist’s view, and thereby speak of “having reasons” in ordinary contexts. Note how insane it would sound, in ordinary contexts, to say something like:

I’d like to buy a sandwich from your sandwich shop, and you’d like to sell it. So we both share a common desire to make a transaction. However, we have no reason to do so.

Or:

I know I’m in a burning building and I very much want to live, but I have no reason to avoid sitting in this chair and burning to death.

These remarks sound insane because they are insane. But why do they sound insane? These remarks sound insane because of the way pragmatic implication works. To say that I would like something or wants something in these remarks, but then to immediately say that one “has no reason” to do so sounds like an inappropriate attempt at Gricean cancellation. Here’s a simple example of where cancellation would work. John sits down to dinner with some friend, and there are many dishes at the table to choose from. John sees a pizza and says:

Wow! That pizza looks delicious!

This could be taken to imply that John would like a slice of pizza. However, John could cancel this implication by adding:

Wow! That pizza looks delicious! Unfortunately, I’m watching my carbs, so I’ll have to pass.

Note how the qualification “Unfortunately…” cancels the implication of the initial remark, and does so in a fairly natural way. This works because the initial remark may imply a desire to eat the pizza, but doesn’t logically entail such a desire. Now compare this to the latter of the preceding examples:

I know I’m in a burning building and I very much want to live, but I have no reason to avoid sitting in this chair and burning to death.

In this context, a natural interpretation of “having a reason” would be something like having a desire or motivation. So the remark sounds nonsensical and internally contradictory. Imagine if we “translated” both parts of the sentence into explicit desire language:

I desire to live and not be burned to death, but I have no desire to avoid dying by being burned to death.

This is now a clear contradiction and an obvious nonsense phrase. What realists who criticize antirealists often do is take remarks like this (though they often leave out a second clause with a “but…” or something similar), that contrast a statement about the implications of some action or event that one would ordinary expect people to have specific desires or motivations in relation (e.g., desire to avoid pain or a desire to avoid torturing people, respectively), then contrast this with some weird or repugnant desire. This is how future Tuesday cases work:

I know I will be in intense agony on Tuesday, but I have no desire to avoid such pain.

This sounds insane because we expect normal people to want to avoid intense agony regardless of what day it is. The cancellation here is technically legitimate: it is not a logical entailment of the fact that one will be in intense agony on Tuesday that therefore one must have a desire to avoid it (though this might be contestable on some views), but it sounds weird. Why does it sound weird? Because our standard profile of people is that they very much want to avoid intense agony. What I believe is happening with realists is that they project, or impose, schemas or models of conventional motivational profiles onto the entities in hypothetical scenarios, and this creates a kind of “ghost contradiction” or “ghost conflict” between the explicit, stated desires of the agent in the hypothetical, and the realist’s strongly felt sense of what an agent is expected to, or “ought to” desire. This conflict generates a sense of unease or “wrongness” in the realist, which they then mistakenly interpret as a signal that there’s something mistaken or impossible about the situation.

This yields your standard “intuition” that the person in this scenario “ought to” want to avoid such agony, even when it is explicitly stated that they simply don’t care about whether they are in agony on Tuesday (it might also be that realists don’t want other people to be in agony even if those people want to; there might be a number of psychological explanations that account for the realist’s stance on these matters without granting them some special truth-tracking power).

Now, to get back to the original point, imagine how it would sound if antirealists went around saying things like:

I have no reason to refrain from setting you and your family on fire.

Or:

Nobody has ever had a reason to drink a glass of water.

These remarks sound insane. Why do they sound insane? The first would, in ordinary contexts, pragmatically imply that the person making such a remark may wish to harm you. This makes them sound dangerous and insane. More generally, the claim that one has or doesn’t have a reason, in ordinary language, often carries pragmatic implications about one’s goals, desires, or motivations. Critically, this would be true even if moral realism was true, and even if we had stance-independent reasons. Suppose, for instance, a moral realist sees a person drop their wallet. Their friend suggests they keep the money in it, and they say:

That would be wrong!

Does this remark merely convey that they consider it morally wrong to keep someone else’s wallet? No. It also implies that they desire or are motivated to not keep the money, and, presumably, that they are about to go chase the person who dropped the wallet down to return it to them. This is how actual moral judgments work in real ordinary contexts, unlike the decontextualized, abstract moral sentences Bentham and other moral philosophers typically deal with. Actual moral judgment occurs in a real-world context, where, whatever one’s philosophical commitments, one’s judgments typically carry implications or convey pragmatic implications about one’s goals, desires, motives, intentions, and so on, at the very least in addition to whatever one’s philosophical commitments might be.

In light of this example, let’s now return to the objection that the person who claims that we don’t literally have reasons is somehow committed to saying things like:

I have no reason to refrain from setting you and your family on fire.

Nobody has ever had a reason to drink a glass of water.

That they are somehow committed to saying these things without qualification, regardless of the conversational context, is absolutely false. While it is true that, in a philosophical context in which it is explicitly specified that “reasons” are reified in the sense Bentham thinks they are that they are committed to affirming these statements. But what this commits them to is only this:

I have no stance-independent, reified reason to refrain from setting you and your family on fire.

Nobody has ever had a stance-independent, reified reason to drink a glass of water.

Now is it obvious that these statements are ridiculous or nonsensical? It might “seem obvious” to Bentham or other moral realists, but I hope they would be less confident that ordinary people without training in philosophy would quickly and consistently share the same judgment that these statements are ridiculous. I hope, instead, they’d appreciate that many people would react by saying:

“…What the hell is a stance-independent, reified reason?”

All the desire-reductive antirealist is committed to is affirming these statements in a highly rarefied academic context in which rival conceptions of “reasons” are explicitly specified. They are not thereby committed to saying the same things outside of these contexts in ordinary language. Why? Because in those contexts, such remarks at least carry pragmatic implications about goals, desires, or motives, even if reasons-talk wasn’t fully reducible to them. So in an ordinary context, these statements would be best interpreted as:

I have no reason to refrain from setting you and your family on fire. I am seriously considering doing so because I’m a psychopath that enjoys threatening other people with a painful death.

It has never been in anyone’s interest to drink water.

The subtext of the first remark doesn’t assert something that is necessarily false (though it probably is, since most antirealists are not psychopathic arsonists), but it nevertheless would be understood in ordinary contexts to imply that the speaker is dangerous and evil. Why would an antirealist be committed to saying such a thing? They wouldn’t. But moral realists like to claim that they would, and in doing so can prompt people who lack adequate training to recognize this rhetorical trick for what it is (in fact, I think that moral realists themselves usually fail to recognize the misleading rhetorical nature of this move. This is a lose-lose for realists. If they do realize this is what they’re doing, and do it anyway, they are malicious. If they don’t, this raises questions about their competence).

The second remark would assert something idiotic and clearly false. Once again, realists exploit the conflation between a purely “semantic” reading of a sentence outside ordinary contexts of usage, where the only features of the sentence are carried by the theoretical commitments of the theory under discussion, and the ordinary language reading, which includes the pragmatic implications of the sentence, including the subtexts outlined above (that the speaker is evil or stupid). Moral realists, like analytic philosophers more generally, consistently conflate semantics and pragmatics, fail to notice the pragmatic features associated with the ordinary language uses of phrases, and then react in an entirely appropriate way, via their sensitivity to such pragmatics, by rejecting the statements in question, but then mistakenly misattribute these appropriate rejections of the statements not to the pragmatic implications of the statements but to some “intuition” that supports rejecting rival theories, which are almost always also semantics-only theories that have nothing to do with pragmatics in the first place.

In short, my diagnosis of the mistake analytic philosophers make is that, by studying analytic philosophy, they have adopted a mode of evaluating sentences that systematically impairs their ability to interpret language accurately, which results in the systematic misattribution of the causes of their judgments, and in turn causes them the theorize about competing philosophical theories on the basis of such misattributions. In short, philosophers systematically induce themselves into a state of localized incompetence, then theorize while in this state of self-induced incompetence. The result is a broad, systematic propensity for error that implicates just about every area of analytic philosophy. Since Bentham drinks up mainstream analytic philosophical presuppositions like a firehose, he has mastered this mode of misguided theorizing.

8.0 Applying the diagnosis

With the desire-reductivism account and this diagnosis in hand, let’s see what Bentham says next, and assess how well it applies. Following Bentham’s questions about why our own desires should give us reasons rather than our neighbors, and why we should think it is wise or sensible to act on our desires, he says:

This becomes clearer when one considers more vividly cases where a person has a desire to perform an act but no reason to perform it otherwise. Suppose that a person has a strong desire to throw their mug across the room or smash their hand against the table. Do they really have any reason to do so? Or suppose a person has a strong desire to consume a drug, even though doing so would give them no pleasure. Do they have any reason to consume it? I believe the answer is no.

On my account, these questions make no sense. It would be a bit like asking:

If a person has a strong desire to throw their mug across the room or smash their hand against the table, do they really have a desire to do so?

Yes.

If a person has a strong desire to consume a drug, even though doing so would give them no pleasure. Do they have any desire to consume it?

Yes.

That was easy. Note the leveraging of weird preferences and apparent “inconsistencies” in the above examples.

Throwing a mug across a room

Smashing your hand against a table

Taking drugs even though they won’t give you pleasure

The first example is a weird desire most people wouldn’t have. The second desire is a weird desire because most people don’t want to cause themselves pain. And the third desire is a weird desire insofar as we presume that one’s primary or sole motivation for taking a drug is to feel pleasure.

Note that in all these cases, the “intuition” we’re supposed to have that one “doesn’t have a reason” to do these things relies on underspecification. By not specifying a context that might account for why a person might want to perform these activities, Bentham can exploit a reader’s presumption that one would perform these activities “for no reason,” or on a whim or impulse, or because they have inexplicable alien desires utterly unlike human desires. But of course, we can readily imagine reasons why a person might want to do any of these things:

Throwing a mug across a room to hit an intruder as a method to slow them down.

Smashing your hand against a table because it is encased in ice and you want to break off the ice.

Take drugs even though they won’t give you pleasure because you have an illness and they’d treat the illness.

It is trivially easy to come up with “reasons” why someone would want to do any of these things that would immediately be acceptable to just about anyone, including Bentham, by simply coming up with some context where the action promotes a typical desire we’d expect someone to have (to stop intruders, maintain use of one’s appendages, recover from illness, etc.). The moment we start describing people acting on arbitrary, seemingly-purposeless whims is the moment we begin important notions of mental illness or profound weirdness. Far from serving as appropriate testing grounds for assessing the limitations of antirealist accounts, such implications can instead distort and warp our assessment of the scenarios if we are insensitive to pragmatics or insensitive to the psychological processes causing our judgments or reactions to these scenarios. Such insensitivity, coupled with misidentification, is what I think is actually going on with Bentham and others.

I hypothesize that Bentham and others have adopted an approach to philosophy that prompts them to systematically misidentify twinges of emotion, discomfort, or judgments of infelicity as a special faculty for truth detection. Instead, what is happening is that these psychological processes are prompting “code red” or “something weird is going on here” reactions when philosophers try to jam the square peg of bizarre scenarios through the round hole of ordinary language, the latter of which presupposes a kind of background normality. That poor fit prompts a reaction, which is mistakenly taken to be an indication that any theory one can concoct that would prompt such a reaction is therefore mistaken. I would like to see Bentham offer a convincing rebuttal to the preceding points, but I want to move on to address the form of antirealism Bentham addresses in the article.

9.0 A return to analytic antirealism

I’ve presented a crude reasons-reductive antirealist account as a position that circumvents all of Bentham’s concerns. I doubt this will satisfy Bentham, but I don’t know what Bentham would say about the position because he doesn’t address it. Instead, Bentham addresses what I can only imagine is a kind of mainstream analytic antirealist position:

Now, my sense is anti-realists often think it is an analytic truth that your reasons are given your desires. It is, they claim, true by definition. But this is hard to believe. Suppose my friend does not want to get life-saving surgery that would benefit him in the long-run. Or suppose my friend has an unfortunate predilection for recreational homicide. I say to him “come on, you have reason to stop murdering,” or “you have a reason to get the surgery.”

I think Bentham should rely on more than just his sense. He could try asking antirealists. At least a few have responded and offered alternative accounts. I predict Bentham will not substantively engage with any of these positions. Make of that what you will.

At any rate, I’m an antirealist, and I don’t think it’s an analytic truth that your reasons are given by your desires. That sounds like complete nonsense to me. Bentham continues:

I think what I am saying is true. But even if you deny that it’s true, it seems, at the very least, that my position is substantive. I am not simply speaking nonsense or misusing language. Yet if it was an analytic truth that you have reason to do what you most want to do, then my sentence would be equivalent to saying “you want to stop murdering,” which would be trivially false. So long as the value realist position isn’t a misuse of language, it must not be an analytic truth that reasons are given by desires. So long as you can coherently ask whether one has genuine reason to do what they want, it can’t be an analytic truth that one has reason to do what they want.

Bentham just isn’t saying much of substance here, so let’s deal with this quickly:

• I don’t care if Bentham thinks what he’s saying is true. This is trivial to point out

• He uses “it seems” without qualification. It seems that way to who? It does not seem that way to me. I don’t think Bentham’s position is substantive. I don’t know if I’d say it “seems” like it isn’t substantive, but it certainly doesn’t seem to me that it is.

• I think Bentham probably is speaking nonsense or misusing language. But who cares what I think? I explain at least part of the reason why I think this here.

I’ll separate off these last two remarks to address them specifically:

So long as the value realist position isn’t a misuse of language, it must not be an analytic truth that reasons are given by desires.

While this is true, it is also true that even if we reject that it is an analytic truth that reasons are given by desires, it does not follow that the value realist position isn’t a misuse of language (which, again, I think it is).

So long as you can coherently ask whether one has genuine reason to do what they want, it can’t be an analytic truth that one has reason to do what they want.

This is also true. So now one might expect Bentham to provide a compelling explanation of what he means by a “genuine reason” and to explain how one can coherently ask whether we have them. He does not do this. Instead, we’re treated to repetition, assertions, and rhetorical questions:

Anti-realists generally claim that we have a reason to pursue our ends, but no reason to have the ends in the first place. Our reasons, it is claimed, are just given by our ends. But this seems to make real reasons illusory! How can you have a reason to take an action in furtherance of an end if you have no reason to have that end?

• Once again, Bentham simply appeals to how things “seem,” presumably to Bentham himself. Why should any of the rest of us care how things seem to him?

• Bentham continues the use of deceptive and misleading language by using the phrase “real” reasons. He should know better by this point.

Bentham picks up on the last question in the next paragraph, adding:

I only have a reason to buy a plane ticket to Paris if I have a reason to go to Paris. And yet if going to Paris is simply something I choose, how does that give me a reason? The fact that I decided to aim at something doesn’t seem to make aiming at it the wise or prudent thing to do. And what explains why we have any reason to pursue our aims? As we’ve seen, it isn’t an analytic truth. So why is it true?

Bentham appears to be smuggling in realist presuppositions here. He says “The fact that I decided to aim at something doesn’t seem to make aiming at it the wise or prudent thing to do.” What does he mean by “wise” and “prudent”? If we adopt antirealist conceptions of wisdom and prudence, it would be trivially easy for one’s decision in this case to be wise and prudent. If we adopt a realist conception, well, of course one’s desire-given reasons wouldn’t be stance-independently wise and stance-independently prudent. Bentham once again poses an ambiguous question that, when disambiguated, either asks something trivial that an antirealist could easily address, or asks something impossible and inappropriate: for the antirealist position to be able to account for realist presuppositions.

And what explains why we have any reason to pursue our aims? As we’ve seen, it isn’t an analytic truth. So why is it true?

Why is it true that a bachelor is an unmarried man? Why is any analytic truth true? Whatever your answer: plug it in here. Bentham continues with this muddled line of thought, straddling the ambiguity of various nonmoral normative terms as he continues to struggle with trying to force antirealist positions to accommodate his realist positions, which they obviously can’t do:

The division between what you have a reason to do and what you want to do becomes clearer in cases where you want to do things that are unreasonable. Suppose you want to eat a car, for example. Or set yourself on fire, not because you’d enjoy being set on fire, but just because of a brute desire. Or perhaps you want to stay up late, even though you know it will make tomorrow much worse. It seems clear that you have a reason to behave otherwise—that you will be behaving irrationally if you behave that way.

Once again, what does Bentham mean by unreasonable? If by “reasonable” we’re invoking a notion of instrumental rationality whereby an act is reasonable insofar as it furthers your ends, then it’s trivial for an antirealist to point out how acting on your desires furthers your ends: your ends are your desires. Even I, the arch-nemesis of people claiming things are obvious, must acknowledge that acting on your desires furthers your desires! If, on the other hand, Bentham means stance-independently unreasonable, then Bentham would just be begging the question by supposing there are cases where what you have reason to do and what you want to do come apart. Once again, once you disambiguate Bentham’s language, his objections are either trivial or false (and in this case, question begging). Bentham caps off these remarks with yet another appeal to his personal intuitions:

It seems clear that you have a reason to behave otherwise […]

If by “it seems clear” Bentham means he personally an intuition that you “have a reason to behave otherwise” then what we have here is the autobiographical report of a realist about reasons, i.e., someone who thinks there are stance-independent reasons, and, critically, in this case they think this because they have the intuition that they have stance-independent reasons, criticizing an antirealist account on the grounds that it is inconsistent with his personal non-antirealist intuitions. Of course it is. It would have to be. Bentham continues with more scenarios presumably intended to serve as intuition pumps that elicit realist intuitions in his readers. It’s largely a waste of time. If they have them, they may reject antirealism. If they don’t, they won’t. What we need is a way to move past this initial stage setting to actually determine which side is correct. And this will not be achieved by self-reporting our personal intuitions (if we even have those). Note how emphatic Bentham gets, though:

Or, to take a more peculiar example, imagine that you are indifferent to pain in your colon. You cannot differentiate between your colon and pancreas. But you simply, at a higher-level, don’t care at all about pain from your colon. Currently, you are writhing around and screaming in agony. You instruct the doctor: check to see whether the pain originates from my colon or pancreas. If it is from my pancreas, then of course you should treat it. But if it’s from my colon, then keep it as it is.

This just seems so clearly irrational!

Once again, by “clearly irrational” does Bentham mean stance-dependently (or “instrumentally”) or stance-independently. If instrumentally, then he’s wrong; it would be rational. If he means stance-independently, then it doesn’t “seem clearly [stance-independently] irrational” to me, and I don’t particularly care if it seems that way to Bentham. Bentham also continues using the misleading modifiers. Remarks like “genuine desire” and “there wasn’t really any reason” spring up in the paragraphs that follow. Then we get to Bentham’s “final gripe”:

I have a final gripe with the claim that it is an analytic truth that one has reason to pursue their ends, which is that this fails to make it the genuinely wise, rational, or sensible thing to do.

This isn’t a final gripe. Bentham already alluded to this concern earlier and it suffers the same problem as his other gripes. First, he once again uses the misleading modifier “genuinely.” In case it bears repeating, antirealists are not obligated to agree that something would only be wise, rational, or sensible, if it were stance-independently wise, rational, or sensible. On the contrary, if the antirealist believes they have the correct conception of normative concepts like “wise,” “rational,” or “sensible,” then things are only wise, rational, or sensible in the antirealist’s sense, and not in the realist’s sense; as such, it would in fact be the antirealist who believes things are wise, rational, or sensible in the respect that they actually are, which is a pretty good candidate characteristic for referring to them as “genuine.” What Bentham is doing throughout this article is helping himself to a rhetorically loaded term that surreptitiously frames the realist’s normative conceptions in a more positive and desirable light than the antirealist’s. Bentham should be aware of this, and, again, to my knowledge, has not offered any substantive rebuttal to this point. Maybe Bentham isn’t aware of this, and is oblivious to the point. Or he is, but doesn’t agree there’s anything inappropriate about using such language. If the latter, I’d like to know what the rationale is for continuing the use of such language.

As I said, this remark suffers the same problem as every preceding remark: once one disambiguates the meaning of “wise,” “rational,” and “sensible.” If these are understood in an antirealist way, then the antirealist can trivially meet the conditions for all three. If these are understood in a realist way, then they can’t. Bentham continues:

Suppose someone claims that it is true by definition that the morally right action is to maximize pleasure minus pain. I am skeptical of this semantic account. But even if it was correct, it would seem to give no genuine reason to maximize pleasure.

If this is correct, it would tell us only that people use the word moral to refer to maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. But why does that give us any genuine reasons? How people speak tells us nothing about the sensible way to behave. “Oh no, if I don’t act as a utilitarian, my actions will no longer merit certain folk-theoretic names!”

This sounds like analytic naturalism, which is a form of moral realism, not antirealism. And the link at the end of this remark is to an article largely focused on criticizing metanormative concerns about agency, and didn’t appear to me at a quick glance to raise the same kinds of concerns as the antirealist views he’s criticizing here. But maybe I’m missing something, or he just wanted to reference that cool David Lewis quote at the beginning of the essay.

The questions that follow from Bentham are quite strange to me:

In similar fashion, suppose it is an analytic truth that you have most reason to do whatever it is you desire. All that would mean is that English speakers typically use the word reason to refer to people getting what they desire. But how does that make that the sensible or wise way to behave? If I’m deciding how to behave, why should I care about whether I can aptly be described as rational, if the word rational is just a veiled term for a person who does what they aim at.

Personally, I think of “desires” broadly as those factors that motivate me to act. I’m not sure how I could engage in any voluntary actions that I didn’t desire to engage in. I don’t think I’d be comfortable calling that an analytic truth, but how, after deliberating, would one consider and be motivated by something other than a desire if they didn’t desire, or want to in some sense, act in accord with such non-desire considerations (in other words, how can one act on non-desires if one doesn’t at least have a second-order desire to do so)? This isn’t a rhetorical question; not all philosophers are Humean or at least Humeanesque, and so they will have some alternative view. But I personally wonder whether such views won’t be, from a psychological perspective, word salad or pseudoscience that fails to accord with how human cognition actually works. Bentham anticipates this kind of response:

It might be claimed that one has no choice but to do what they want. Every time you perform an action, you desired to perform that action. Yet this account seems at risk of saying that people never act irrationally, for they always act in ways they want.

This oversimplifies things. Those of us who think we are motivated by desires don’t just think that people have desires and then whenever they act, they acted consistently with a desire and were therefore rational. This is why I objected to use of the term “desire” way back at the start of this essay. “Desire” is a term Bentham and other philosophers toss around sloppily and with little regard for the fact that, whatever a desire is, it is a feature of human psychology, and the crude, unscientific terminology philosophers routinely employ may not adequately capture the details, and complexity, of how human cognition operates. “Desire” is a folk psychological term that fails to capture the different physiological and neurophysiological processes associated with motivating agents to act. Psychologists don’t typically even construe “desires” as a single, distinct phenomenon, but rather draw distinctions between dissociable phenomena, or, in some cases, even propose collapsing folk distinctions altogether (for instance, see this account that collapses belief and desire into prediction). Just as philosophers draw distinctions, psychologists draw distinctions, often not on the basis of a priori considerations but on what data reveals about the form and function of human behavior and the cognitive (and other physical processes) involved in behavior.

To radically oversimplify: we may draw a distinction between actions motivated by more proximal impulses, which one might call “desires” that compel or motivate one to act in ways that conflict with an agent’s long-term interests. A person may be overwhelmed by rage, or hunger, or jealousy, and act on those desires, even if they would recognize in a more sober state of mind that doing so isn’t in their overarching interests, and even if they later come to regret those decision. People can have more stable, long-term goals and values that serve a more overarching regulatory goal. These may motivate planned, deliberative actions, but may run up against or conflict with more proximal “desires.” To take a very simple example: suppose I want to eat healthy and cut calories. As a result, I have a “desire” to avoid eating the cheesecake in the fridge. At the same time, I also really enjoy cheesecake and very much “desire” to eat the cheesecake. If I give in to the latter temptation and scarf down the cake, I might, as an antirealist, regard such action as “irrational.”

But this makes no sense, because I acted on my desires, right? Not so fast. Such a claim fails to consider whether I prioritize some desires, goals, or values over others, or whether I regard “rational” behavior as being behavior more in accord with certain kinds of “desires,” e.g. long-term, deliberative goals over others, e.g., “impulses” or “occurrent desires.” This is, of course, a crude and barely-psychological account of the relevant kinds of distinctions, but one would have to be extremely uncharitable or ignorant to fail to appreciate that the psychological story behind an antirealist’s conception of “desire” couldn’t be more complicated and defensible than lumping all desires together and thereby treating an action as “rational” so long as it was consistent with at least one state of mind we might (in folk psychological terms) call a “desire.”

The kind of distinction I am alluding to has a well-established history within psychology going back to classical studies such as Mischel’s research on delayed gratification. In a series of studies, children were presented with an opportunity to:

• Have a small snack immediately

• Wait a little bit and receive double the snacks

Children differed in their degree of ability to delay gratification and await the larger reward. How can we make sense of this? One way of making sense of this is to propose that there are at least two systems associated with motivating behavior. In a more recent paper (relative to when this research was conducted; it is still almost thirty years old now) Metcalfe and Mischel refer to this as a distinction between a “hot” system and a “cool” system, and outline this two-process framework:

A 2-system framework is proposed for understanding the processes that enable—and undermine—self-control or “willpower” as exemplified in the delay of gratification paradigm. A cool, cognitive “know” system and a hot, emotional “go” system are postulated. The cool system is cognitive, emotionally neutral, contemplative, flexible, integrated, coherent, spatiotemporal, slow, episodic, and strategic. It is the seat of self-regulation and self-control. The hot system is the basis of emotionality, fears as well as passions—impulsive and reflexive—initially controlled by innate releasing stimuli (and, thus, literally under “stimulus control”); it is fundamental for emotional (classical) conditioning and undermines efforts at self-control. The balance between the hot and cool systems is determined by stress, developmental level, and the individual’s self-regulatory dynamics. The interactions between these systems allow explanation of findings on willpower from 3 decades of research. (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999, p. 3)

Is this distinction shockingly unfamiliar, bizarre, implausible, or weird? I very much doubt that it is. Indeed, even leaning entirely on armchair, first-person philosophical reflection, I suspect most of us can appreciate how our “desires” manifest differently from one another. The phenomenological profile of the urge to grab that cookie and eat it now is quite a bit different than the experience of wanting to abstain from eating it. The processes involved in recognizing these respective desires likewise differ: the former may be immediate, while the latter may benefit from some degree of deliberation. And both may exhibit varying degrees of stability or instability sensitive to different kinds of stimuli; e.g., how much you desire to eat a cookie may be driven by how recently you’ve eaten, if you feel sick, what mood you are in, and so on, while your desire to avoid eating the cookie may relate to more sober considerations about your long-term health or whether you recently read a report about dangerous additives in cookies.

The point here is that no antirealist is required to ground their notion of what “gives us reasons” in terms of a crude, singular, folk psychological notion like “desire.” They can and should ground whatever notions they have in terms of the categories and distinctions best supported by contemporary cognitive science. And the tools and resources to recognize that reducing everything to a single, uniform notion of “desire” is too crude to do justice to the accounts available to antirealists have been around for more than half a century. Bentham’s oversimplification is thus entirely unwarranted, and reflects a low effort means of characterizing the antirealist’s presumptive views. Just consider how silly it would be if the antirealist was confronted with this scenario:

Mike has always been a kind and level-headed person who treats others with kindness and compassion. However, he recently began exhibiting increasing signs of irritability and anger. This culminated in him getting into a shouting match that almost led him to assault someone in a grocery store. Concerned about what was happening to him, he went to a neurologist. An MRI revealed a small, but operable brain tumor that was likely causing poor impulse control and anger. After a quick and uncomplicated surgery, the tumor was removed, and Mike’s behavior returned to normal.

Now consider various desires Mike had prior to the removal of the tumor, while he had it, and after it was removed:

Prior: Someone cut Mike off on the highway in a dangerous way. He felt angry, but he suppressed his anger, recalling that he’d made risky moves like that in the past and reasoned that we all make mistakes. He put on some music, calmed down, and quickly forgot about the incident.

During: Mike was at the grocery store when a man abruptly slammed into him from behind, nearly knocking him over. He was outraged, and stormed after the man, shouting “Hey, you stupid motherfucker! I am going to kick your ass!” The other man, startled, ran away. Patrons restrained him and when a manager arrived, they calmly explained that the man who had bumped into Mike had just received a call that his child had been in a serious car accident, and that is why he rushed out of the store in haste. Ashamed, Mike apologized profusely, and left the store without incident.

After: Mike recognized the man who had bumped into him months ago while in the grocery store. As he approached, the other man flinched and began to move away. “Wait,” Mike said, “I am not angry. I wanted to apologize for what happened before…but I have to ask, is your daughter okay?” The other man, a little hesitant, says “Yes. The car was totaled but she only had a few bumps and scratches.” Relieved, Mike said “I’m happy to hear that. I’d like to explain what happened…” Mike proceeds to tell the man about the brain tumor. The conversation ends with both of them shaking hands.

Now, in all three of these situations, Mike “acted on his desires.” Is an antirealist who believes our desires “give us reasons” required to judge that Mike acted “rationally” in all three cases? Of course not. Even Mike didn’t seem to think he was acting rationally in the second case. After all, he apologized, felt something was wrong, and sought out medical help. He did not seek out medical help for acting on the desires before and after the event. Why not? Because some of the proximal desires we act on are consistent with our overarching goals and values, and some aren’t. When the two are aligned with one another, we experience little tension, and proceed as normal. But sometimes they do conflict. Why? Because the psychological processes that motivate human action aren’t mediated by the output of a single system, but multiple systems, some of which may conflict with one another. An antirealist need not anoint the output of and subsequent motivation to act on each and every single one of these systems as “rational” or treat them as being, on reflection, on equal normative footing. They can and typically do regard certain “desires” as taking normative priority over others, and as thereby constituting “rational” behavior, while they regard others as irrational.

Recall that Bentham’s concern is that if all voluntary actions are actions we desired to perform, and desire gives us reasons to act, that therefore people “never act irrationally” because they always do what they want. Bentham continues:

To see where this goes wrong, we should distinguish between three things:

1. Inclinations: psychological states inclining one in some direction. These aren’t voluntary. An example would be having a desire to eat a bagel. It is not subject to rational evaluation.

2. Choices: what one ultimately decides to do.

3. Aims: what things, in the world, determine what actions one takes. What, at a high-level, people are attempting to achieve.

Often these are conflated under the umbrella term “desire.” But when we distinguish them, we see that one doesn’t need to accord with one’s own aims. One needs to act however it is they choose, but they could, in principle, aim at something other than what they deeply care about (say, what their neighbor cares about).

I appreciate the effort to disambiguate different concepts that might be conflated with one another, but I question Bentham’s account. Bentham claims that:

One needs to act however it is they choose, but they could, in principle, aim at something other than what they deeply care about (say, what their neighbor cares about).

Just what does Bentham mean when he claims that a person could, in principle, aim at something other than what they “deeply care about”? Just what is an “aim” psychologically speaking, that it can come apart from what one “deeply cares about”? Note that Bentham characterizes “aims” as “what, at a high-level, people are attempting to achieve.” Can a person, at a high level, attempt to achieve something they don’t “deeply care about”? Just what is the conceptual distinction between these? To me, at least, the notion of “What, at a high level, people are aiming to achieve” is nearly synonymous with the notion of what that person “deeply cares about.” Even if it weren’t, it’s unclear whether, at least in practice (and perhaps in principle), a person is capable of just “aiming” for something they don’t “deeply care about.” Is this possible? If so, how would we operationalize “aims” and things we “deeply care about” in psychological terms such that we could show that it’s possible to “aim” at something you don’t “deeply care about”? What would that look like? Bentham continues:

Similarly, this distinction shows what goes wrong when people say there can’t be stance independent reasons, because desires cannot be rationally evaluated. This is true in the above sense, if desires and inclinations are used synonymously but not true of ultimate aims. One can reflect on one’s aims and have reason to change them. You could, tomorrow, simply decide to ditch your ultimate aims and maximize the number of bullfrogs in the world.

I think Bentham is simply wrong here. More importantly, Bentham presents no argument that it’s true that:

One can reflect on one’s aims and have reason to change them.

Bentham suggests that while we can’t rationally evaluate whether one ought or ought not have a given inclination we can evaluation whether one ought to have a given aim. Well, why should I or other antirealists grant this? And how, in merely presenting the distinction, has Bentham demonstrated that we can have reasons to change our aims? Simply put: he hasn’t made any argument at all. He’s simply presented a distinction and then asserted that something true of one concept isn’t true of the other. Perhaps this is because it “seems” to Bentham that:

You could, tomorrow, simply decide to ditch your ultimate aims and maximize the number of bullfrogs in the world.

I don’t think you could. And in any case, Bentham has not demonstrated that you could, in principle or in practice. Worse still, even if you could change your aims, this still wouldn’t show that you had a “reason” to do so independent of your desires (whether they be inclinations or aims). I don’t think Bentham has made much of a case at all here.

Bentham continues:

Now, anti-realists often say that the irrationality, in the above cases, comes from the fact that you’re not acting in accordance with your long-term desires. But I don’t think this is adequate.

First of all, this doesn’t explain why my brother went wrong in aiming for triangle sandwiches. If that aim was no less legitimate than his aim to avoid agony, then it’s hard to see why that was irrational but avoiding agony is rational.

This is silly. I don’t grant that his brother did go wrong in aiming for triangle sandwiches, nor do I grant that it was irrational. Note, too, the subtle shift here: Bentham shifted to “aiming” rather than “desiring,” smuggling in presumption that the desire to cut the sandwich into triangles is a “high level” aim. But we need not necessarily grant that the desire for triangle-shaped sandwiches was, in fact, mediated by some long-term aim or higher-order value. One can simply have recurrent “inclinations,” or proximal desires.

Since Bentham provided us with an anecdote, I will do the same. Since my wife and I recently had a baby, we are often scrambling to get out the door in the morning. This has resulted in a division of labor where I often make her a breakfast sandwich. She likes her sandwiches toasted and cut in half. I hope you can see where this is going. When I put the sandwich down on a plate, I face the eternal dilemma: Do I cut the sandwich into triangles, or rectangles?

I feel compelled to cut the sandwich into triangles. Going by Bentham’s terminology, this is an inclination, not an aim. It is not something I deeply value or reflected on. Even if it were, I simply deny there’d be anything irrational or mistaken about doing so. But what I can report, from a first-person perspective, is that I simply deny there’s anything remotely troubling or problematic about this kind of behavior. We have impulses, and when they’re innocuous enough, there’s no harm in acting on them. If they rose to the level of some overarching, high-level aim (which I doubt was true of Bentham’s brother), I don’t see any reason to grant that it’s irrational to have such an aim, either. Bentham is once again helping himself to the presumption that we grant that there’s something irrational about such behavior.

There is, in fact, some reason to think that such a preference is not irrational. First, it’s worth noting that there is survey data on whether people prefer sandwiches to be cut diagonally (to create a triangle shape) or straight (to create rectangles). It will probably not surprise that this survey data found that more people prefer sandwiches cut into triangles than rectangles:

As you can see, about twice as many people prefer the triangle cut to the rectangle cut. Why might people have such a preference? This is not, to my knowledge, a topic that has been adequately explored by psychologists, but that’s just it: there may very well be an answer. This article speculates that a diagonal cut may result in a sandwich that is:

• More visually appealing

• It may create the misleading impression that there is a greater filling-to-crust ratio

• Provides a better filling-to-bread ratio when eaten

• It may be less messy

• It may be easier to dip into sauces

If confirmed, some of these results may indicate such a preference is irrational. If, for instance, one is taken in by the illusion of more filling. But if there are practical benefits to such a shape, or it simply makes one happier to cut it this way because of its greater aesthetic appeal, then it’s not clear why it would be irrational to have such a preference.

While Bentham may have presented the sandwich cut example as something intended to be regarded as an arbitrary, meaningless preference, there may instead be shared features of human psychology that make a diagonal cut more appealing and that “give us a reason” for such a preference. Such shared psychology may account for our preferences without entailing that those preferences are arbitrary or that it is not in some way in our interests to act on one preference over the other.

Bentham continues:

Similarly, it does not explain cases like the colon case, where one simply doesn’t care at all about the thing in question—no matter how much agony it causes them. They may dislike the state that they’re in, in the sense that they find it unpleasant, but they have no genuine desire to avoid it, provided the pain comes from their colon.

What is there to explain? Why this is “irrational”? Once again, the antirealist can just deny that it’s irrational. Antirealist accounts aren’t required to be consistent with what Bentham thinks is intuitive or obvious.

It also seems incompatible with the fact—which strikes me as obvious—that even if I had a strong desire to slam my hand against the desk, I would have no genuine reason to.

Again, antirealists will just reject that this is a “fact.” Note how ridiculously trivial Bentham’s objection is: the antirealist position, according to which, by entailment and perhaps even (approximately) by definition, we have no stance-independent reasons can’t explain why it’s a “fact” (and an obvious one, at that), that we do, in fact, have stance-independent reasons. Bentham’s central arguments seem to share a similar form:

1. There is a position according to which not-P.

2. However, it’s obvious to me that P.

3. Therefore not-P is false.

I don’t think arguments that take this form are very convincing. Bentham continues:

Second, it isn’t clear why one would be behaving irrationally if they did what was bad from the perspective of their long-term desires. Anti-realists hold that rationality does not mandate acting in others’ interests. But why would it mandate acting in my own interests long-term? If I simply do not care what happens to me in five years, then what error could I possibly be making? Unless, of course, I have irreducible reason to care about my future welfare.

I don’t know what Bentham isn’t clear about. If the antirealist thinks that it’s irrational to act inconsistently with one’s long-term desires, then it’s just an entailment of the position that if one acts inconsistently with their desires then they are acting irrationally. If Bentham wants to know why they think that (whether they think it’s true on analytic or some other grounds), then he should engage with the arguments antirealists have for those positions, such as e.g., what arguments they’d have for favoring an instrumental view of rationality or an argument for why they carve up the “desire” space in a particular way. Bentham is posing these questions in a vacuum in which antirealists are unable to answer, and he is doing so without engaging with any of the arguments they might present for why they might think such a thing. He just tosses these questions out here, almost rhetorically, as though Bentham’s personal incredulity should have persuasive force.

As far as the last part of this:

But why would it mandate acting in my own interests long-term? If I simply do not care what happens to me in five years, then what error could I possibly be making?

Bentham is mixing things up here. Bentham is conflating “long-term” values with something like “valuing one’s welfare in the long-term future.” While this is one thing someone might mean by a “long-term” value, this isn’t typically what they do mean. Instead they are typically drawing a distinction between stable, well-entrenched values that they’ve arrived at, firmly established, and that provide a kind of top-down regulatory role in motivating their behavior over extended periods of time. It is not an entailment of prioritizing such values over occurrent values, or “inclinations” that the former must include a concern for oneself in the distant future. I think Bentham is just tripping up over terms and distinctions here and is making a basic error.

And Bentham shouldn’t be making such an error. After all, Bentham should be well aware that many of us antirealists are not convinced by Parfit’s “Future Tuesday agony” case; we do not think one is rationally compelled to care about themselves in the future. Rather, we would tend to think that one is rational insofar as they act in accord with high-priority values; but the content of those high-priority values could be anything; it need not specifically involve caring about oneself at some point in the future. For instance, an antirealist might believe this:

1. Honor is the most important value

2. It is bad to suffer and die, but less bad than doing what is dishonorable

Note how the higher-order value here is not one that prioritizes one’s future welfare. When confronted with a situation in which the honorable thing to do is to fight and die painfully, or run away to avoid suffering and live longer, the antirealist who acts on their higher-order values will stand, fight, and die, even though this ensures that they will suffer immensely. And they might even recognize high risk of capture and torture over an extended period of time. Is a person who prioritizes honor over suffering and death “irrational”? I don’t think so, and I think this is a clear instance in which the antirealist’s conception of rationality is more in tune with what I suspect “ordinary” intuitions are than the weird cases Bentham and other moral realists bring up.

People have put honor over comfort and survival countless times throughout history. These people are often praised as heroes, not raving, irrational morons. Quite the contrary. In the recent TV series A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Duncan the Tall is offered a bribe. He rejects it, even though it might help in the long-term. He is nearly defeated in combat, but through grit and determination, he gets up and continues fighting. In doing so, he was practically guaranteeing he’d suffer more injuries and might even get himself killed. But he stood up, and he continued fighting. If Duncan knew he might sustain permanent, painful injuries, do you think he’d have yielded? I don’t. Does this seem irrational to you? It doesn’t seem irrational to me. It seems impressive, awesome, heroic, praiseworthy, and, if nothing else, badass. Of course, this is a work of fiction, but it still depicts a range of possible human motivational profiles, and people can and do still evaluate the fictional characters within these stories. And there is little if any indication that people simply dismiss such behavior as irrational.

This is all a very long way of saying: antirealists can and probably would deny outright that we must prioritize our “long-term interests.” So the answer to this question is simple:

If I simply do not care what happens to me in five years, then what error could I possibly be making?

…you’re not necessarily making an error. Bentham again helps himself to the presumption that we share his intuitions and that an antirealist account must accommodate those intuitions. If you prioritize other goals and values over what happens to you in five years, perhaps no error is being made at all. Perhaps you are like Duncan the Tall, and would rather do what you believe is noble, honorable, or right, than what will benefit you in the long run. Now, it’s unlikely Duncan doesn’t care at all what happens to him in five years, but it is clearly not his top priority, relative to acting in accord with his values. But it is not hard to handle cases where a person has the weird value of not caring at all about their future self: the antirealist is simply not obligated to think this is irrational. Bentham continues with a critique of reflective views of value:

It is similarly often claimed by anti-realists that your reasons come from your reflective desires. You have a reason to perform some act if you would want to perform the act after ideal reflection. My brother, it might be claimed, had no reason to cut the sandwiches into triangles, because if he reflected more, he wouldn’t want to.

I have little desire to defend these accounts, but it’s worth doing so to witness just how terribly weak Bentham’s objections are.

First of all, it cannot account for the intuition that you might reflectively have no desire to perform some act but still have a reason to. If a person, after perfect reflection, had no desire to avoid future agony, it still seems they’d have a reason to. If a smoker was aware of all the pertinent facts, and still wanted to smoke, despite smoking vastly lowering his welfare, it still seems irrational.

Once again, Bentham’s criticism is that an antirealist view can’t “account for” intuitions to the contrary. Of course it can’t. No view, in and of itself, can “account for” intuitions to the contrary. This is an utterly trivial observation to make. A proponent of this view might be able to “account for” Bentham’s intuition by offering a debunking account that explains why he has the intuition in question in a way that strips it of its epistemic justification, but such an account would be extraneous to, and not part of, the antirealist account itself. Bentham is criticizing views for failing to do something they simply can’t do!

Second, it isn’t clear, given anti-realism, why I should care about my reflective desires. Other preferences do not, in general, work this way. The foods I should eat are the ones I like, not the ones that I’d like if I reflected ideally. What if I just don’t care about my reflective desires? Why should I pursue them?

There’s not much of an objection here. Bentham simply claims it’s “not clear” why one might think this. Well, perhaps it isn’t, but does Bentham engage here with someone who holds such a view, and consider their arguments? No. So sure, maybe it’s not clear to Bentham. So what? Then we’re given this example that other preferences don’t work this way. We’re told:

The foods I should eat are the ones I like, not the ones that I’d like if I reflected ideally.

Again, Bentham doesn’t present an argument here. He just asserts something. And once again, I don’t see any particular reason to agree with him. What does he mean by the foods he “should” eat? If “should” means something like “the foods I present enjoy eating”, i.e., the foods he likes, then what he’s saying amounts to something like:

The foods I like are the ones I like, not the ones that I would like if I reflected ideally.

…which would be trivial. If, instead, he means something else, then what, exactly, does he mean by should? If, for instance, he thinks it’s stance-independently true that one should eat what they like, rather than what they would like, then he’s simply begging the question by merely asserting as true the contrary of the position he’s rejecting. Once again, Bentham’s ambiguous remarks conceal either triviality or falsehood.

Then we get this:

Third, even though this accounts for what things you have reason to do, it doesn’t explain why you have such reasons! Why is the sensible thing for me to do whatever my idealized self would want to do. Whatever explanation is given will be analogous to explanations of the alleged fact that you have reason to do what you want to do—and will fall prey to the same objections.

That’s fine: those other objections were bad, anyway! Next, Bentham finally presents a point that actually resonates with me:

Fourth, I don’t think ideal reflection is some stable, precise procedure. As Joe Carlsmith points out, the version of me upon ideal reflection is very unlike me. This version of me knows all the facts (and the world has a great many facts). He’s some practically omniscient, Godlike being, with a brain the size of a galaxy. It isn’t clear why I should care about whatever weird alien things this guy cares about. There’s no important sense in which he remains me.

Weirdly, Bentham veers off to make this other, unrelated point about how the ideal version of you would be very different. This seems like an irrelevant digression, but he gets back to what I take to be the real problem:

But it also isn’t clear that there’s a narrow fact about what your idealized self would aim at. There are many possible idealization procedures. What you’d care about might depend on the order on which you learn the facts. So it just seems clearly unstable and subject to arbitrary facts.

I agree. In fact, this is my main reason for rejecting these accounts. And this is what a good objection looks like. Points to Bentham for this one. I also want to note that acknowledging that there’s one good argument buried in here amidst a mountain of bad arguments provides at least some indication that I am not fully committed to finding something wrong with everything Bentham says. I readily acknowledge I have an axe to grind, but I’m able to give the whetstone a rest.

Bentham ends by suggesting a possible move antirealists might make:

Perhaps it will be claimed that it’s just a brutely normative fact that you should do whatever it is that you desire.

Some might go this route, but I hope they don’t. I don’t believe there are brute normative facts, and I’d find the notion that there were about as objectionable as moral realism itself. Even so, I can’t help but take a parting shot at Bentham’s last remark:

But if one is positing brute and irreducible normative reasons, then, in light of many of the cases discussed above, it seems sensible to think that you sometimes have normative reason to do other than what you want to do. Once irreducible normativity is in the picture, it isn’t clear why one wouldn’t simply be a realist.

This is not well-reasoned; the antirealist may believe there are brute normative facts and that all those facts are given by what you desire, while also rejecting that Bentham has presented a strong case in this article. It may simply not “seem sensible that you sometimes have normative reason to do other than what you want to do.” I don’t believe Bentham has presented much of a case for this at all, beyond appeals to how things personally “seem” to Bentham. And why should any of the rest of us care about that?

10. Conclusion

There is no good reason to believe that facts or desires can “give” us reasons to do anything. Philosophers who believe that there literally are reasons have been duped by idiosyncratic features of the English language. Bentham’s critique of antirealists only works against antirealists that buy into the same underlying, flawed framework that Bentham himself relies on. Once that framework is rejected, it reveals that both analytic realists and antirealists have confused, unworkable positions that are riddled with flaws because they both draw from the same well.

And I do have a reason to cut my sandwiches diagonally: because I want to.

References

Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. E. (2016). Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. American Psychologist, 71(8), 670–679. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000059

Metcalfe, J., & Mischel, W. (1999). A hot/cool-system analysis of delay of gratification: dynamics of willpower. Psychological Review, 106(1), 3-19.

Some time ago, Mike Huemer wrote an article discussing “absurd” theories of truth. I don’t want to address the article as a whole, but instead want to focus on two components: the linguistic tests Huemer favors, and pragmatic accounts of truth.

Huemer suggests that, under certain conditions, namely, when a proponent of a view doesn’t think terms like “true” express a given concept in English, they should subject these accounts to “tests of linguistic usage”:

[...] rival theorists of truth should submit their disagreement to tests of linguistic usage. We should try to think of examples where the rival theories of “truth” would make different predictions about what ordinary speakers would say.

This is fine so far as it goes, but one issue with Huemer’s approach is that he doesn’t seem to rely on gathering empirical data on what users do in fact say. Rather, Huemer seems content to presume to know what they’d say if asked. But perhaps Huemer would be open to empirical data were it gathered, and simply regards armchair judgments as reasonable interim data until empirical findings are available. Either way, Huemer presents pragmatic accounts of truth as a candidate for such tests:

For example, the Pragmatic theory predicts that ordinary speakers should find the phrase “useful falsehood” nonsensical. They should disagree with T-schema sentences (e.g., “‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white.”) They should judge that “Is it useful to believe what’s true?” means the same as “Is it useful to believe what’s useful to believe?” They should be happy with changing the standard courtroom oath from “I solemnly swear to tell the truth…” to “I solemnly swear to say what is useful…”

This isn’t true, and it leads me to wonder how familiar Huemer is with the various forms of pragmatism. If we’re going with, e.g., classical pragmatism, William James already addressed claims like this in The Meaning of Truth. I also grant that Huemer has presented a conditional here: that if one is making claims about what is expressed by the ordinary concept, then such tests are in order. But a pragmatist need not take themselves to be making such claims. However, the central issue is that classical pragmatism wouldn’t predict that people would consider the notion of a useful falsehood nonsensical because classical pragmatism itself doesn’t regard the notion of a useful falsehood as nonsensical.

On a classical pragmatist account, truth requires more than a belief simply being locally expedient to a prospective believer. It’s not the case, then, that any belief can qualify as true provided it is (proximally) useful, e.g., it does not hold that if it was useful to believe I was the smartest person alive because it would boost my self-esteem, then it is true that I am in fact the smartest person alive. Usefulness is a bit more complicated than this, not the least because the usefulness of a belief consists, in part, in how well it synergizes with the rest of one’s belief, and how well it stands the test of time, e.g., believing you’re not seriously ill and in need of treatment might feel fine now, but if you don’t get treatment, you’re still going to die.

Pragmatism takes a holistic approach to truth, where truth is the result of our overall ongoing acts of inquiry, taken as a whole. True beliefs, on this view, are the scarred and battered survivors that work together, that cohere with one another, and that have withstood the slings and arrows of their role in our entire worldview tested against the world via our experiences. The truth of our beliefs thus does not consist in any arbitrary value they can provide on an à la carte basis, but in their role in making predictions and allowing us to anticipate future experiences alongside the rest of our beliefs. Thus, while there is a perspectival element to truth, and truths will turn out to be useful, this does not guarantee that anything useful will be true.

James is at pains to clarify, repeatedly and out of clear frustration, that pragmatism does not mean, “If useful, then true.” Lots of beliefs could be and are useful but false on the pragmatic view, since there are a wealth of ways in which a view could be useful to this or that end but not qualify as true given pragmatism’s broader and more robust requirements for truth than mere expedience. At the very least, a belief only earns its status as true if it fits well into the rest of our beliefs, like a piece fitting well into a broader jigsaw puzzle of other beliefs.

One way to put this is that even if usefulness is a necessary condition for truth, it is not a sufficient condition; a belief must at the very least synergize with the rest of our beliefs as well, and the kind of usefulness it should exhibit involves more than any arbitrary role it could play in fulfilling some goal; goals can conflict with one another, and were a person to anoint as true any belief that had any use, without regard for its relation to the rest of one’s beliefs and their use, one would become hopelessly mired in contradictions. Pragmatists don’t propose we go that route.

It’s also worth noting that pragmatism may not be an appropriate target for these sorts of linguistic tests. Pragmatism was already emerging prior to and leading into the early 20th century, so it may also be anachronistic to frame the view in terms of what it would predict about ordinary language. However, even if we did want to associate predictions with classical pragmatism:

(1) It’s not clear that James or others would predict that ordinary speakers should regard the notion of a “useful falsehood” as nonsensical, since (classical) pragmatism itself doesn’t hold that “useful falsehood” is nonsensical.

(2) It’s not clear, even if classical pragmatists did predict that ordinary moral thought, behavior, and judgment best fit a pragmatic approach, that this would lead to specific predictions about what people would say when asked, for reasons related to the methodological challenges associated with operationalizing claims about ordinary linguistic practice; i.e., even if people were implicit pragmatists and employed a pragmatic notion of truth, this wouldn’t necessarily entail any specific predictions about what they’d say about truth.

(3) More generally, even when a philosophical account includes empirical claims about ordinary thought or practice, it rarely entails any specific predictions about the outcomes of specific studies, since the relationship between a philosophical account (even one with empirical implications) and the methods by which we empirically test that account require the addition of auxiliary hypotheses about the measurement, validity, and interpretation of any particular attempt at operationalizing an empirical claim for the purposes of empirical evaluation. These auxiliary hypotheses aren’t entailments or part of the philosophical account itself, but are instead part of a broader network of theoretical commitments regarding proper research design in psychology, linguistics, etc. As such, it is generally a mistake to claim that a philosophical account predicts people would say such-and-such if asked.

(4) It’s not clear James or others would predict that the surface level judgments people have about what they take themselves to mean when they speak of truth would best fit the pragmatic account, even setting aside the notion of useful falsehoods. In fact James alludes to the possibility that the popular conception of truth isn’t aligned with the pragmatic conception of truth. In Chapter Six of Pragmatism James says:

The popular notion is that a true idea must copy its reality. Like other popular views, this one follows the analogy of the most usual experience.

Given this, it’s doubtful James would take ordinary people to respond to prompts about the nature of truth in a way consistent with pragmatism even if he took pragmatism to be an accurate account of how people employ the notion of truth. If he did make a such a prediction, it would just be an error on his part; such predictions aren’t an intrinsic feature of pragmatism, anyway.

James was no slouch when it comes to psychology (for reasons that, I hope, are obvious), but it took nearly a century for experimental philosophy to step onto the scene to actually test how nonphilosophers think about philosophical questions. Anyone familiar with such research will readily recognize that it isn’t so easy to predict what people actually think, whatever one’s philosophical perspective even if we can do a pretty good job of predicting what they’d say much of the time (though I doubt we’re very good at this, either). This is because responses to study probes may or may not be reflective of a person’s implicit philosophical views, since people can be confused, mistaken, or rely on faulty metalinguistic judgments. I address this at length here in section 8.0. I’ll quote the punchline of the points I make there:

One of the most important points to stress is that, even if you can predict the results of a study, that does not necessarily tell you how the respondents to that study think. Such a claim relies on the presumption that you’ve interpreted the results of the study correctly, such that the observed response patterns in your data are the result of valid measures and that you’ve interpreted them correctly. Correctly predicting, for instance, that most people would choose a “realist response” over an “antirealist response” does not entail that most of the respondents are realists, since this would only follow if choosing what was operationalized as a realist response actually indicates that the respondent is a realist.

I am, perhaps, a bit more familiar than most with the disconnect between what a philosophical theory suggests about ordinary thought and practice and what people would say if asked. Early on in my academic studies, I was interested in the question of whether nonphilosophers were moral realists or moral antirealists. I quickly came to suspect that the answer was “both”: that there was both variation between people, with some more committed to realism and others more committed to antirealism, and within each person’s judgments: a person may be a realist about some issues and an antirealist about others (I was heavily inspired by this paper from Gill, 2009).

Early research seemed to support this conclusion. For instance, Wright, Grandjean and McWhite’s (2013) findings supported what they called “metaethical pluralism,” which is exactly what it sounds like. However, I became disillusioned with the methods used in these studies as I became increasingly skeptical about whether participants were interpreting questions about moral realism/antirealism in a way consistent with researcher intent. This led to a preliminary paper on the topic (see Bush & Moss, 2020) and eventually culminated in my dissertation research, where I attempt to demonstrate that participants consistently interpret metaethical stimuli in unintended ways.

Why do I say all of this? Because even if a theory predicts people think or act in a way most consistent with a particular philosophical account, it does not thereby predict that if presented with statements philosophers recognize as consistent with that theory that the person in question will affirm those statements. There is a winding maze of methodological pitfalls between what philosophers intend to ask and how nonphilosophers interpret what they are being asked that can pose serious challenges to making any straightforward predictions about what people should agree or disagree with. In short: it’s just not true that pragmatism predicts that people should find the phrase “useful falsehood” nonsensical. It’s not true, first and foremost, because this phrase isn’t even nonsensical on the pragmatist account, but second, even if it were, it still wouldn’t entail such a prediction.

Philosophical accounts about what’s true, as well as accounts about ordinary thought and practice, don’t entail straightforward predictions about how people would respond to stimuli. This is because how people respond to stimuli involves a host of methodological and psychological facts concerning, e.g., the role of demand characteristics and other social factors that influence how participants respond to prompts under laboratory conditions, facts about the relation between use and metalinguistic intuitions (see Martí, 2009), facts about the validity of the measures being used and the success of whatever operationalization is employed, facts about the conceptual consistency between one’s empirical operationalizations and the philosophical account they’re intended to correspond to, facts about whatever idiosyncrasies may obtain in a given language that could influence interpretation, facts about interpersonal variation in the psychology of participants that could not only lead to mismatches between researcher intent and participant interpretation, but also interpretative variation between participants (some of which may be systematic across populations and subpopulations, leading to problems related to measurement invariance), and…well, I could keep adding to this list, but I think I’ve illustrated the point well enough: there are many, many hurdles that one must cross before one moves from armchair philosophy to philosophically informed psychology.

To put it bluntly (and, I hope, not too harshly), philosophers who make crude pronouncements about what a philosophical position predicts about how ordinary people would respond in an experimental context who aren’t sensitive to, and take proper account of, the preceding considerations are not well informed and any criticisms predicated on those predictions are tainted by that naivety.

If you want to make claims about what a philosophical theory predicts about how people would respond, you are doing psychology. Philosophers are fond of criticizing scientists who insist they don’t need philosophy and that they aren’t personally making any philosophical assumptions. Philosophers are quick to note (and rightly so!) that such people rely on philosophical presuppositions whether they realize it or not, observing that one can either do philosophy consciously and do it well, or one can do it unwittingly and do it poorly.

This is no less true of philosophers: if one wants to dabble in psychology, but not take proper stock of what’s needed to do it well, then they’re not in a position to claim they’re not doing psychology. They are doing psychology. Just badly.

Huemer’s objections to pragmatism fail on three fronts. At least some forms of pragmatism don’t regard the notion of useful falsehoods as nonsensical, so it would make no sense to predict that ordinary people (if they were pragmatists) should do so. Second, pragmatism is not necessarily in the business of making such predictions in the first place. Third, even if pragmatism were intended to offer a description of ordinary thought and practice, and even if it did hold that useful falsehoods were nonsensical, it wouldn’t necessarily predict that nonphilosophers would explicitly agree when prompted. As some small evidence to the contrary, James appears to describe correspondence as the “popular” view. Huemer has offered us little reason to think pragmatism is an absurd account of truth.

References

Bush, L. S., & Moss, D. (2020). Misunderstanding metaethics: Difficulties measuring folk objectivism and relativism. Diametros 17(64): 6–21.

Gill, M. B. (2009). Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics. Philosophical studies, 145(2), 215–234.

Martí, G. (2009). Against semantic multi-culturalism. Analysis, 69(1), 42–48.

Wright, J. C., Grandjean, P. T., & McWhite, C. B. (2013). The meta-ethical grounding of our moral beliefs: Evidence for meta-ethical pluralism. Philosophical Psychology, 26(3), 336–361.

1.0 Introduction

If moral realism was true, and there were stance-independent facts, I would not care at all. The reason for this is simple: I am only interested in acting on my values. And I do not value compliance with whatever the stance-independent moral facts are. If those moral facts happened to align with my values, I’d be motivated to perform those actions, but this would be coincidental and would have nothing to do with the fact that the actions in question were stance-independently moral. If they don’t align with my values, I would have absolutely no interest in complying with them.

Unless I am radically mistaken about my own psychology or about how motivation works, this picture would remain unchanged were moral realism itself true. All the insistence in the world that refusing to comply with the moral facts would be immoral or irrational is irrelevant to me. David Lewis recognized the powerlessness of the realist’s “authority”:

Why care about objective value or ethical reality? The sanction is that if you do not, your inner states will fail to deserve folk-theoretical names. Not a threat that will strike terror into the hearts of the wicked! But whoever thought that philosophy could replace the hangman?

Both Sides Brigade (BSB) objects to this sentiment in a blog post “Of Course Everyone Should Care About Objective Moral Facts.” BSB’s article is a response to this one, from Discourse. It might make sense to read both of those first.

The title helps itself to a claim that doesn’t move me: I’m an antirealist about all normativity, including whatever domain the “should” in the title may fall in. Not only do I not care about stance-independent moral facts, I also don’t care if I should care about them. “Shoulds” that aren’t reducible to facts about my values have no sway over me. Reality itself wields no axe. If anyone is to be decapitated, people must hold the blade. That’s how actual authority works. The “authority” realists believe in is a mockery to the notion, and has about as much power to enforce as a man in his basement declaring himself the Pope.

From the very outset, even if there was an argument with the true conclusion that I “should” care about such facts, I wouldn’t care, and, in any case I just don’t care. If BSB doesn’t like that, too bad. This clip perfectly captures my reaction to even a hypothetical situation in which there were stance-independent normative facts about what I should do (or care about):

2.0 Oh, the seemings you’ll have!

BSB makes a few preliminary claims before getting to the meat of the dispute. Here is one:

Now, to be clear, what follows isn’t meant to be a criticism of Discourse in particular, since as I said, it’s a pretty widespread sentiment among relativists in general. But as a widespread sentiment, it still just seems obviously wrong!

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you’ll already hear these words in your head, but I’ll say them anyway:

It “seems” obviously wrong to who?

It’s not obviously wrong to me. In fact, it’s obviously right! If BSB is making a personal report about their own psychology, and some of the surrounding commentary suggests this is the case, well, that’s fine. God’s existence is obvious to many theists. Astrology’s efficacy is obvious to many astrologers. Bigfoot’s magnificently furry feet are quite real to those who believe in Bigfoot. None of the rest of us are obliged to care in the slightest. I simply don’t care if something is “obviously wrong” to BSB. BSB has wildly different priors and background beliefs to me. As a bit of autobiography, this is perhaps interesting, but if such remarks are intended to serve as rhetorical weight on the scales against the relativist, I’d advise readers to be cautious when people claim things are “obvious.” This has no force if we don’t share the critic’s judgments about what’s obvious. I don’t mean to be too harsh; as I said, there really is some casual autobiography going on here, as BSB next remarks:

I really can’t wrap my head around the logic — and since I’m stuck between Christmas dinners with nothing to do, I thought it would be fun to quickly lay out exactly why I find it so baffling.

Fair enough, but perhaps BSB’s struggles to understand the logic are a result of BSB failing to fully consider the matter from the relativist’s point of view. As we’ll see, I think BSB falls victim to the halfway fallacy, and continues to impose their own perspective or presuppositions onto the framing of the dispute in a way that a relativist isn’t obliged to grant (and that I certainly don’t).

To be fair: I may very well be guilty of the halfway fallacy myself in claiming I wouldn’t care if moral realism was true. Why? Because if moral realism is true, this may be associated (or strongly suggest, or even entail) that much of what I think is mistaken in addition to my mistaken rejection of moral realism. My reaction to the truth of moral realism could very well change were I persuaded of the truth of numerous auxiliary claims. I can’t escape my own point of view, so I will simply concede that if I am mistaken about enough positions at the periphery of moral realism that lend weight to its truth, I may not be in a position to adequately anticipate how I’d react were I both to believe moral realism and the host of auxiliary positions that support it.1 These concerns cut both ways. I am willing to concede as much, but as of yet I rarely see realists do the same. Perhaps some will.

Either way, our respective stances on moral realism and its implications stand or fall not merely on the basis of the positions themselves, but the auxiliary positions that surround them. I think this kind of position holism is an extremely important consideration and one of the main reasons philosophers struggle to resolve matters: they argue about positions in isolation from one another, but few if any positions are islands unto themselves. It’s like a grand competition between people deciding which move is best or who scored the last point, but nobody can agree on which game they’re playing. Until this latter matter is settled, disputes on the field seem like a profound waste of time.

3.0 Relativism and properties

My primary objection to BSB’s account centers on the way BSB frames the relativist’s interests. This occurs here:

Let me start by pressing a simple point, one that relativists themselves often complain about people forgetting: With the exception of a few clinical psychopaths and/or error theorists, everyone agrees that some things really are wrong! Take recreational puppy torture, for instance — the fundamental disagreement between realists and relativists has never been whether that sort of act has the property of wrongness, but rather what the nature of that wrongness consists in. The realist thinks the wrongness of torturing puppies is an objective moral fact, while the relativist thinks that same wrongness is the product of their own subjective stances. Still, both agree that, whatever the ultimate nature of wrongness turns out to be, it’s definitely something that recreational puppy torture has.

There is a sense in which I agree: I do think some things “really are wrong.” However, I think BSB begins to smuggle in certain analytic presuppositions into the framing of this truth that I don’t accept. When I say that some things “really are wrong,” what I mean is that there are certain things that are inconsistent with my moral values. That’s it. Yet BSB says:

[…] the fundamental disagreement between realists and relativists has never been whether that sort of act has the property of wrongness, but rather what the nature of that wrongness consists in.

This may be true for some relativists, but I don’t accept this framing. I don’t think the act of puppy torture “has the property of wrongness,” in some unspecified way, where anything could serve as the property in question, and it’s only a matter of determining what that property is. BSB takes a sort of top-down approach: first we agree that something “has the property of wrongness,” whatever that means, then we try to figure out what that property consists in, in such a way that we’ve committed ourselves to caring about that wrongness, whatever it turns out to be.

This is not how I approach the matter. I take a kind of bottom-up approach. I disapprove of recreational puppy torture. I don’t frame my position in terms of actions having properties, and I don’t care what any analytic philosopher says, whether e.g., they insist what I think is equivalent to this; I refuse to affirm this framing. Sometimes people will be conciliatory and say something like “sure, if you want to frame this in terms of properties, then yes, puppy torture ‘has the property of wrongness’ where this just means that I disapprove of it,” or something along those lines. But I think we should stop doing this. It may be polite and agreeable to accept someone else’s framing, but much of the legerdemain (intentional or not) that analytic philosophy partakes in occurs when one accepts the analytic philosopher’s framing. Once one does, all manner of equivocation and confusion over words can occur. So no, I refuse. I do not think of puppy torture as “having the property of wrongness.” I don’t care if you stipulate that what you mean by this includes my perspective. If you do, then sure, it trivially follows that I think it “has the property of wrongness.” But I won’t say this, and I won’t agree to anyone framing my position in these terms.

3.1 A digression about framing and rhetoric

You can handle my position in the terms I phrase it, and I will engage with you, or not, and I won’t. It’s the prerogative of anyone to redescribe anyone’s position in terms suitable to their preferred terminology. In that case, let me suggest that we frame “moral realism is true” as the view that “genocide and puppy torture are awesome,” where I trivially define this phrase to just mean moral realism is true. Given this, technically all moral realists agree that genocide and puppy torture are awesome. Of course, this is trivially true, but I’ll bet you won’t see many moral realists publicly willing to accept this framing. And the reason why is obvious: they’d look bad if they did so, even if there’s no legitimate dispute about whether it’s trivially true that moral realists agree that genocide and puppy torture are awesome given the way I’ve stipulated I’m using that phrase.

Of course, I’m being silly, and this is a ridiculous example. But it highlights in the extreme what often occurs in a less extreme way when realists address antirealist positions: they insist on framings that conveniently (again, none of this has to be intentional) give the impression by pragmatic implication that antirealists are evil monsters, psychopaths, or idiots. These impressions are, I believe, doing much if not all of the heavy argumentative lifting in these exchanges, especially among audiences that lack formal training. I want to pause on this for a moment to emphasize something:

(1) That realists routinely do this seems obvious to me (see how I specify who things seem obvious to, realists? Why can’t you do this?)

(2) Whether or not it seems obvious to anyone in particular is irrelevant, since realists demonstrably do this regularly

(3) The continued practice of leveraging pragmatic implicature to make moral antirealists look like evil monsters ought to be increasingly attributed to severe ignorance on the part of moral realists who don’t realize what they’re doing, culpable negligence in the case of those in a position to know better, and active malice for those who do know better but do it anyway

(4) I sometimes see people criticize me for focusing on rhetoric rather than the substance of arguments. To these people: have you stopped and thought about whether rhetoric might play a role in whether people accept or reject positions? And that it isn’t purely about arguments? Have you considered whether rhetoric may influence people’s attitudes and dispositions in ways that prompts motivated reasoning, or causes people to be stubborn or rigid or overconfident or fail to adequately engage with the premises of arguments? Rhetoric and formal arguments are not independent of one another; they interact, because both have to be passed through the sieve of human judgment. We ignore rhetoric, and its relevance to philosophical dialectic, at our peril. I also focus on this because almost nobody else does, and because it’s important. If someone was trying to argue with you and throw shit at you at the same time, you’d probably want them to stop flinging feces before you responded to the arguments.

Note BSB’s remark above:

With the exception of a few clinical psychopaths and/or error theorists, everyone agrees that some things really are wrong!

There’s an unintentionally threatening implication here:2

People who don’t agree with me might be psychopaths.

If you don’t agree moral realists literally and explicitly imply that everyone either agrees with them or is a psychopath (at least BSB thinks you can be a psychopath or an error theorist; more on this in a moment), well, here’s an example of one of them explicitly saying this:

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that almost everyone believes in moral realism and almost everyone, at least in the circles I usually move in, denies believing in it. Everyone, with the possible exception of psychopaths, feels that some things — stealing from a friend who trusts you, for example — are wrong, not just illegal or imprudent but wrong.

I don’t feel that things are “wrong” in a realist way. I am also not a psychopath. Friedman is wrong. Now, BSB recognizes you could be a psychopath or an error theorist. Do you think an unwary listener might pick up the vibe that some of the stain of psychopathy rubs off on the error theorist by syntactic osmosis? I certainly do. Just imagine someone saying:

The people who don’t endorse this position are either genocidal maniacs or moral realists.

Is it hard to imagine someone reacting with the impression that being a moral realist might be really really bad given where it’s placed in this sentence? This is probably testable, and I bet guilt-by-association like this works to create at least a subtle negative impression about a rival perspective. Realists often do this in online debate spaces. BSB’s remarks here aren’t the worst or best instance of it; they’re rather mild by comparison to much of what I’ve seen. And they’re not quite as bad as normative entanglement, but the constant, again probably unintentional pairing of moral antirealists with psychopaths does, I suspect, contribute to a kind of malevolent aura around antirealism, one that moral realists have actively created through the way they frame things and by the examples they choose.

3.2 Returning to properties

Rhetoric and framing aside, there are also substantive errors and confusions to disentangle in BSB’s account, and much of this is rooted in this talk of the “property” of wrongness. Even if there is a sense in which you could trivially stipulate that what I think can be cashed out in terms of actions having properties, I think cashing things out in this way opens the door to precisely the kinds of analytic shenanigans that I think cause so many confusions. What it does is allow the analytic philosopher to treat the relativist antirealist and the realist’s concerns as fixed in certain respects, but with a different referent. So the antirealist and realist both agree:

Puppy torture has the property of wrongness.

But they then disagree about what “wrongness” is.

Antirealist relativist
Wrongness consists in facts about one’s stances.

Realist
Wrongness consists in stance-independent facts.

Now one can maintain that since both are committed to (1) it being true that puppy torture has the property of “wrongness”, and that (2) they care about puppy torture in virtue of its possession of this property, BSB can now argue that it is possible for the relativist to be mistaken about what the wrongness they believe in consists in, such that were they to discover that what they thought was the wrongness-making property of the action (that it is inconsistent with their values) is mistaken, and in fact it is the intrinsic, stance-independent wrongness of the action, everything else should remain intact: they clearly cared about the wrongness of recreational puppy torture when they mistakenly believed puppy torture “had the property of wrongness” where this meant that it was inconsistent with their values, but now you can just swap out “inconsistent with my values” with “inconsistent with the stance-independent moral facts.” Since we are keeping what the relativist cares about fixed (they care about the “property of wrongness,”) but allowing the referent of this property to vary, this allows BSB to argue that the relativist is confused and mistaken when insisting they wouldn’t care if something is objectively/stance-independently wrong: they clearly do care if things are “wrong,” and are just mistaken about what their wrongness consists in. This is exactly what BSB suggests:

So if objective moral facts do actually exist, which is the premise of the counterfactual here, then the relativist must be incorrect about something. But what, exactly, are they incorrect about? It can’t be their original judgment that torturing puppies is wrong, since that’s equally true given realism. Instead, all they’re actually incorrect about is whether that wrongness is subjective — they believe the property they’re talking about is a product of their own individual stances, when in reality, it’s just an objective moral fact. So once they learn that moral realism is true, what they realize is that, in some sense, they’ve been caring about objective moral facts this whole time, since it turns out that’s what wrongness actually is.

No. A thousand times: No! I think this remark highlights the deep and pervasive problem in the way BSB approaches these matters.

First, an important caveat: BSB’s objections probably do work against certain kinds of analytic stance-dependent relativist accounts. Certain analytic philosophers really do think within the analytic straitjackets characteristic of mainstream practices in the field, which are entrenched in bizarre semantic-centric and property-centric framings.

So much for these positions, if so. A relativist need not endorse them, and need not accept the framings and presuppositions operative in mainstream analytic metaethics. They shouldn’t, because they are the root of the problem for both mainstream analytic realists and antirealists, which is why I reject all contemporary analytic antirealist positions. But one can readily identify a post-analytic analog to relativism, constructivism, or whatever other stance-dependent cognitivist normative antirealist account one fancies, that simply discards the confused framings and presuppositions.

3.3 A previous comment on properties

I ended up responding to someone in a way that addresses where I planned to take this next here. So here is that comment, reproduced here. There will be some overlap with what I’ve already said, but I tried to cut out some of the redundancy:

The problem with BSB’s remark is using property talk to treat judgments of “wrongness” in such a way that “wrongness” becomes separable from attitudes/values/preferences, such that the relativist can be “incorrect” about what’s driving the judgment that puppy torture is “wrong.”

It looks like BSB thinks that both relativists and realists come at the question of whether puppy torture is wrong in a kind of stepwise process:

1. Have the intuition that puppy torture is wrong.

2. Seek an explanation for why it’s wrong. We know it’s wrong, it’s just a matter of figuring out what philosophical account explains this.

I grant that this is the way a mainstream analytic philosopher who lands on relativism might approach things, but it isn’t how I or others on Substack appear to be approaching the matter, and it’s not how a relativist “must” approach the matter. Instead, what I and others are doing is finding that we oppose puppy torture, and then when we speak of things being right or wrong this is what we intend to convey when using ordinary language phrasings.

There’s no placeholder. It’s not that I think puppy torture is “wrong” in abstracta, first, then there’s a separate, distinct question about whether this wrongness that I’m picking up on is reducible to my values or is instead some kind of objective fact. No. When I say puppy torture is wrong, this just is an expression of my attitudes and values, full stop. There’s no ambiguity here, no reasonable possibility of me being “wrong” about this. When I say it’s wrong, I am not theorizing about what wrongness is. I’m just stipulating that my use of moral talk is a way of expressing my preferences. Being a “relativist” as an individual speaker doesn’t require or presuppose some kind of semantic theory about the meaning of ordinary language terms among ordinary language users, or a theory about the meaning of ordinary moral claims themselves, and so on.

In a way, it’s a kind of top-down approach to devising an account. We start at the top level with first fixing our use of terms: “puppy torture is wrong.” We agree on this. And, critically, realists and relativists alike will affirm that we care that it’s “wrong.” Then, because our commitment to it being “wrong” is fixed, BSB can argue that we have mislocated wrongness in our values, when it is instead located in the objective wrongness of puppy torture. Since our commitment to it being “wrong” is locked on the first-order moral claim “puppy torture is wrong,” and because we’ve already granted we care about this truth, if we’re mistaken about the referent of the truth, then we’re still committed to caring, but we’re wrong about what it is we’ve cared about all along.

By analogy, suppose I and another person both agree that we care about what’s in a particular box. So we both affirm:

What’s in that box is important to me.

I think the box has X in it, and they think the box has Y in it.

Now they argue:

We’ve both agreed that what’s in the box is important to us. However, while you think that the important thing in the box is X, it isn’t X, it’s actually Y. So since you agree that what’s in the box is important, but you’re wrong that the thing in the box is X, actually what’s important to you is Y, so you should care about Y.

This is the mistake BSB is making, because I don’t just care about whatever is in the box, regardless of whether it is X or Y. Instead, my position is this:

X is what’s important to me, and I believe X is what’s in the box, so “What’s in the box is important to me” is only conditionally true on the thing in the box being X. If it turns out to be Y, I won’t care about it.

Transposing this over to talk of moral values: when I say that puppy torture is morally wrong, I am not dissociating in some abstract context the notion that “puppy torture is wrong,” and thinking this is true, whatever wrongness turns out to be, then happening to think what this wrongness consists in is my preferences. Instead, what I am saying is “Puppy torture is against my preferences,” and that’s just what I mean when I say it’s “wrong.” There’s no placeholder content in “wrong” for it to possibly be objective wrongness instead.

The result of this is that if we go all the way back to the start of this response, where I quoted BSB, we can now see what the problem is. Here’s the remark again for reference:

So if objective moral facts do actually exist, which is the premise of the counterfactual here, then the relativist must be incorrect about something.

No, I am not incorrect about anything here. My language is “pre-reduced” in advance: my talk of puppy torture being wrong just is talk of my personal preferences. There is no gap between my preferences and the meaning of the term. There is no reasonable possibility of me being incorrect, in virtue of my own commitments or ways of speaking, about “whether that wrongness is subjective.” There is no such thing, on my view, as “wrongness,” apart from subjectivity from the very outset of describing my stance and what I take (my, at least) moral claims to mean. As far as anyone else saying that puppy torture “is wrong,” well, it’s an open question to me what they mean. And they are welcome to tell me.

My way of approaching metaethics is thus not vulnerable at all to this objection from BSB. What any given instance of “puppy torture is wrong” means is, to me, an open question contingent on the communicative intent and philosophical commitments of any given speaker. There is no free-floating “puppy torture is wrong” sentence in abstracta about which BSB and I could disagree; I just reject outright that there are any meaningful sentences or claims outside some context of usage. There are only facts about what I mean, what BSB means, and what anyone else means, and we can simply report, or stipulate what is meant by any given usage of “puppy torture is wrong” that is the present subject of discussion.

BSB seems to not understand this, and I think this is partially rooted in misguided reification and property talk rooted in mainstream analytic philosophical methods.

So it’s not that I just have some inchoate sense that there’s something fishy about the way BSB is approaching the matter. It seems very clear to me what the problem is. I could be mistaken about all of this. And, as a final note, when I say it’s fishy I don’t mean to impute intent on BSB. I don’t think BSB is being e.g., suspicious or sneaky or anything. I think BSB is employing a different metaphilosophical approach to my own and that BSB’s mistakes are located in those metaphilosophical differences.

In case there is any doubt that I’ve accurately described the move BSB is making, BSB is explicit about this:

In other words, recognizing the truth of moral realism wouldn’t magically expose the relativist to a whole new world of objective moral facts that they’d been previously cut off from — it would just correct their erroneous beliefs about the stance-dependence of the moral properties they already accept as motivationally relevant.

BSB gets this exactly wrong. Yes, recognizing the truth of moral realism would expose (many of) us to a whole new world of objective moral facts I’d previously been cut off from (magically or otherwise). That’s the whole point! That’s why antirealists like myself and others are stressing how much we don’t care about these moral truths. Whatever these moral facts are, they have nothing to do with what we care about. I am not against puppy torture because I think it has the “property of wrongness,” and I am simply motivated to act on what I think has such properties. I am opposed to puppy torture and am motivated to stop it because I don’t like it and don’t want it to happen. I then label this opposition “wrong.” It’s bottom-up, not top-down. To put this in the simplest possible terms:

Puppy torture is immoral (to me) because I am opposed to it; I’m not opposed to puppy torture because I think it’s immoral.

BSB continues:

And it should be obvious that discovering the objectivity of a property which you already take to be subjectively important can’t possibly undercut that property’s motivational “oomph,” right?

BSB takes “wrongness” to be a “property,” and this “property” can be subjective or objective. The relativist cares about the property, but mistakenly thinks it’s subjective, when in fact it’s objective. So discovering it’s objective shouldn’t change whether they care about it.

But neither I nor any antirealist or relativist I know (which isn’t to say there aren’t ones I don’t know) of thinks of “wrongness” as something independent of our subjective values, such that it could even in principle turn out to be objective or stance-independent. When I say “puppy torture is wrong,” I just mean that it is against my preferences, i.e., that it’s inconsistent with my stance. So what BSB says here makes no sense on my view. It presupposes a conception of what’s under dispute that I reject, and that misconstrues what I and others think.

If wrongness simpliciter is something a relativist cares about, then the objectivity of that wrongness should at, the absolute very least, make no difference whatsoever.

Many of us don’t believe in “wrongness simpliciter.” It isn’t something we care about. I don’t even think such a notion is intelligible, personally.

BSB adds:

Rather, I think they’re just trying to emphasize that their moral reasoning has an essential affective aspect, and that “pure objective wrongness” wouldn’t move them apart from their own subjective cares and concerns. But this is a total non sequitur, since moral realism doesn’t require (or even suggest) that our moral decision-making should only be driven by some neutral, passionless detection of The Good. Instead, realism just requires that the things we naturally take to be relevant — fairness, respect, the flourishing of friends and family, and so on — carry an objective moral weight.

This just left me scratching my head. A “non sequitur” in this context would presumably mean something like “a claim that does not follow from the claims that preceded it.” But what claims preceded “I wouldn’t care if moral realism is true,” that would make such a position a non sequitur? What is it a non sequitur to? Presumably, some kind of implied claim like:

[O]ur moral decision-making should only be driven by some neutral, passionless detection of The Good. Instead, realism just requires that the things we naturally take to be relevant — fairness, respect, the flourishing of friends and family, and so on — carry an objective moral weight.

The issue here is that if we don’t take these things to be relevant, or if we take some other things to be relevant, we’re not necessarily making any mistakes. And insofar as we take the things BSB lists here as relevant, they are relevant insofar as, and only insofar as, we subjectively care about them, and no further and in no other respect. BSB still doesn’t seem to grok the antirealist perspective on this matter: things like fairness and respect are relevant when they are relevant because we care about them subjectively, and only because we do so. If we didn’t care about them, then they wouldn’t be relevant.

Not everyone “naturally” (or unnaturally, I guess?) considers the same things “relevant,” much less in the same way or to the same extent, either. And we, as relativists, would not think that an alien species that considers the greatest moral good to go on an intergalactic crusade to torture and eat all other species to be making factual errors. We’d just think they were dangerous maniacs.

BSB goes on to say:

There’s a very simple answer, then, for any relativist who demands a reason for caring about objective moral facts: Because you already do!

No, we don’t. And BSB hasn’t shown that we do.

You already care about right and wrong, and good and bad, and all that jazz, and if moral realism is true, then all those things are objective moral facts.

No, we don’t care about right and wrong, good and bad, and all that jazz. We care about our subjective values. Those subjective values are what we are referring to when we call things right and wrong, good and bad, not the other way around. You’ve got it entirely backwards.

BSB continues to reiterate the same errors and misguided presumptions, over and over:

Again, it’s important to remember that the objective moral fact and their own subjective judgment are both relating to the same property of wrongness, which is already motivationally relevant for everyone involved.

This exemplifies, more than anything else said in BSB’s post, the shenanigans wrought by this talk of “properties,” and clearly illustrates how property-talk has misled BSB into thinking we care about the “property of wrongness” independent of whether it is subjective or objective, and then the only dispute is whether it is subjective or objective. No, our use of the language is not relating to the same “property of wrongness.” We’re using the word wrongness to refer to something else, a different “property” entirely, if you insist.

And in my case, what I’m referring to is quite literally a matter of stipulation. I am informing BSB what I care about: my subjective preferences, and not the objective facts. It’s not some theory I have about what I take myself to be doing that is a serious matter of philosophical contention, any more than any other report of my personal preferences is a serious matter of philosophical dispute. I’m reporting this in the same way I’d report that I like the color purple. Now, I could be wrong about what I care about and what I think, but that’s a separate question entirely, and my position is what it is regardless of whether I’m personally deluded about what I care about. For comparison: the strength of the case for moral relativism/antirealism would remain largely unchanged even if a person presenting the case for it was lying or playing devil’s advocate.

Another angle to take is this: My subjective values are what are motivationally relevant to me, not whether something is “moral” or “immoral.” So if I discovered something was objectively moral or immoral, this would always be motivationally irrelevant to me. What I’d consider, at that point, is whether I subjectively cared, not whether it was right or wrong. If an act is something I subjectively favored and it was morally right, that I subjectively favored it is doing all the motivational work. If I subjectively favor something but it’s wrong, then I will do it anyway, because again, my preferences are doing all the motivational work. What’s motivationally relevant to me, in other words, are my preferences. If this required me to completely divorce those preferences from all moral talk of things being right, wrong, morally good, or morally bad, then so be it: if morality isn’t about my preferences, then I don’t care about it.

BSB continues with this remark:

So if the relativist figures out an objective moral fact that surprises them, all they’d be learning is that some moral property they care about — goodness, rightness, badness, wrongness, whatever — is showing up somewhere they’d previously missed it.

But we don’t care about “moral properties” like “goodness” or “badness” or whatever. We directly care about whatever it is we care about: puppies not being tortured, our family being happy, and so on. This doesn’t pass through some middleman property like “goodness” or “rightness.” BSB seems to think relativists think about morality in the way BSB does, but the way BSB thinks about morality strikes me (and others) as extremely weird. BSB seems to think that motivation works like this:

1. We consider what we care about

2. What we care about are moral properties {goodness, badness, rightness, wrongness, etc.}

3. Whatever it is these properties consist in, that’s what motivates us, so things that we care about, like fairness, respect, flourishing of friends and family are cared about because they have moral properties

4. If those moral properties are subjective, that’s fine. But if they are objective, that’s fine, too. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we care about which things have moral properties.

In other words, we get something like this:

Subjective values → Intermediary target of value: Moral properties → Downstream target of value: Concrete matters that exhibit these properties (e.g., fairness, respect, etc.)

But this isn’t how we care about things. Our care is direct:

Subjective values → Target of value: Concrete matters of concern, e.g., fairness, respect, etc.

We then label these targets of value “good”, “bad”, etc. These are just verbal labels, or redescriptions, of the things we value on subjective grounds. We’re not attributing the “property of goodness” to them.

4.0 Hedgehogs in the light of the moon

[…] that morality has at least some inherent conceptual content that limits just how weird the facts could get; as Philippa Foot famously points out, “no one should look at hedgehogs in the light of the moon” just isn’t the sort of thing that could properly count as an ethical command.

One does not simply point out such things. This is a claim, and it is open to contention. I don’t agree that the hedgehog claim couldn’t be a moral claim; I don’t see any reason why anyone couldn’t moralize just about anything. If BSB or Foot think otherwise, they’re welcome to argue for such a claim, but they’re not entitled to just declare it so. The wisdom of Boromir is inevitable:

There are a few other loose ends to address, which I’ll address to BSB directly:

[…] Let’s imagine a relativist figures out a way to get in touch with all the objective moral facts, and they actually line up pretty nicely with what that relativist already takes to be subjectively true — cruelty and hatred are out, generosity and kindness are in, that sort of stuff. But then let’s say there’s one particular moral issue where that relativist sees the merit to both sides and isn’t quite sure where they land. If they consult the objective moral facts and learn the actual truth of the matter, and it turns out to be one of the positions that they already considered plausible, then how should they respond? Would anyone really argue that it shouldn’t matter one bit what the objective moral facts say in that case? I’m sorry, but that’s just ridiculous!

Yes. It wouldn’t matter one bit.

I mean, come on: We’ve got someone who already has a desire to do the right thing, but when they find out what the right thing objectively is, that knowledge somehow doesn’t make a difference? If that’s really what relativists are trying to say here, then it just seems more like normative stubbornness than any sincere challenge for a realist. But on the other hand, if the relativist does take a nibble of the bullet and agrees that objective moral facts could at least play a tie-breaking role, then that’s no good for them either, since objective moral facts could only ever have a normative authority like that on account of being, you know, facts about what’s right and wrong. And since that’s what all objective moral facts are, of course, what reason could we have for only considering them in cases like these?

No, BSB, you begin with an error: we don’t desire to “do the right thing” and are then open to doing whatever the “right thing” is. We just have desires and consider some of those desires to be “the right thing.” The latter is just a labeling, a rubber stamp, a verbal afterthought; what matters to us is our values themselves. That is, we have desires about what we want to do and not do, how we want the world to be and not be, and so on, and we act accordingly. That’s it. There’s no intermediary. You think there’s an intermediary, so you mistakenly think we do, too.

You just have a profoundly misguided model of our psychology, which appears to me to be a result of imposing aspects of your own presuppositions and ways of thinking onto us, then declaring our perspectives ridiculous or whatever other negative appellations you’ve used across your various articles based on a serious mischaracterization of what we actually think. Then, when we repeatedly tell you what we actually think, this seems to bounce off of you like you’ve got some kind of forcefield around you, and you go right back to making the same mistakes over and over. It’s tedious, and I know others with similar views feel much the same way. It feels like you’re not engaging with our positions, but with some imaginary, dopey relativist whose views are all tangled up into pretzels. You accuse us of stubbornness here:

If that’s really what relativists are trying to say here, then it just seems more like normative stubbornness than any sincere challenge for a realist.

That’s not what we (I’m roughly identifying as something like a relativist here) are trying to say. You could’ve just asked us.

Instead, it just seems obviously, near-tautologically true that moral facts about which acts are good, bad, right, and wrong should always be relevant for anyone who cares about goodness, badness, rightness, and wrongness, regardless of whether it turns out those properties are objective or subjective.

From my antirealist perspective, whether something is relevant is a matter of psychology, not something that could be settled a priori. As such, whether moral facts are “relevant” to me isn’t something that could, even in principle, be a tautology.

Weirdly, towards the end of the article, you stumble on the correct solution:

The only way out of this bind would be for the relativist to say their moral judgments necessarily center on a distinct property of “subjective wrongness” that has nothing whatsoever to do with the entirely distinct property of “objective wrongness” that objective moral facts involve.

This is more or less correct, but note how tortured and byzantine this is. The notion is that our moral judgments center on “a distinct property of ‘subjective wrongness.’” Not quite: the “moral judgments” just are judgments about what’s subjectively right or wrong. They don’t “center” on the “property” of subjective wrongness, they just are judgments of this kind.

But this just isn’t how properties work, or else (ironically) some of the more abrasive moral realists out there would be correct to say that relativists and other anti-realists aren’t really doing ethics in any meaningful sense.

BSB, you are the one framing all of this in terms of properties, and you are now saying this isn’t how “properties” work. You’re insisting on framing our positions in terms familiar with and comfortable to you, then giving the imaginary relativist/antirealist who holds such a view a hard time for it. First, they could disagree with you about whether this is how properties work. Or, second, as I do, they can reject this framing altogether as a weird and confused way of talking about metaethics that they don’t accept from the outset.

Also, that conclusion that it is we, the relativist and antirealists that “aren’t really doing ethics in any meaningful sense,” seems to privilege realist conceptions of morality, but I don’t grant this: I would just flip this on its head and say that you and other realists aren’t really doing ethics in any meaningful sense. Only antirealists are talking about actual morality, because BSB and other realists are talking about things that are either unintelligible, don’t exist, or are trivial on reflection to practical deliberation (at least to me and, I maintain, most people).

That’s the funny thing about these labels: I actually do, quite literally, think something like this is the case. Since I, as an antirealist, think that only antirealist conceptions of morality are about something real and practically relevant, while I think realists are mistaken or confused, there is a literal sense (not just a for-the-sake-of-argument sense) in which I think that we antirealists think is real, and what BSB and other realists think isn’t real. In other words, antirealists are the real realists, and realists are the real antirealists. I cannot stress enough: I do not privilege realist conceptions of morality over antirealist conceptions. If I had to privilege one over the other, I’d go with antirealist conceptions, and insist that realists have been and remain wildly out to lunch on these matters.

So if relativists want to secure the independence of first-order moral reasoning from metaethical assumptions — which, as far as I can tell, is a major goal of theirs — then they’ll have to accept that relativists and realists are referring to the same property of wrongness when they make their moral judgments.

No. I reject this. And I reject any attempt on the part of a philosopher who insists I “have to” or “must” do something. There’s a simple way to show that they’re mistaken about this:

I don’t.

And if I didn’t do something, then clearly I didn’t have to!

In case it’s not obvious to you, I am being a bit tongue in cheek here. I presume “have to” means something like “is compelled by the arguments/logic” to do so, not in the sense of being literally incapable of doing otherwise. But if it’s not also obvious, I deny any convincing arguments have been presented that would support such a claim.

BSB ends with this remark:

In the same way, so long as a relativist cares about some things being wrong, then they should care just the same about those things being wrong objectively. Saying otherwise might be a good way to troll moral realists, but as an actual normative claim, it’s hard to take seriously.

“Trolling” is typically associated with attempting to provoke others. It is closely associated with being unserious or insincere, and with being inflammatory, obnoxious, or manipulative. It is a nasty thing to suggest about others, and this is a terrible way for BSB to end this post. We’re not trolling you, BSB. You just don’t understand our perspective.

Imagine if I reversed this by saying something like this:

BSB, you must be pretending to think the things you’ve said in this post. After all, nobody could present arguments as bad as you have and actually be serious about it. They’d have to be unserious and just trolling. It’s far more charitable to assume you’re trolling than that you’re this confused and incompetent.

That would be obnoxious, wouldn’t it? And yet that’s exactly how you’ve opted to frame our positions: to suggest we’re “trolls” if we present these objections.

I don’t think you’re a troll. I just think you’re wrong.

Footnotes

Consider this recent response from Huemer when asked whether evolution can fully explain our moral intuitions. This starts at 6:05 in the video, which I’ve timestamped:

Starting at 6:26 Huemer claims that evolution would predict that selfish behavior and that this is something you’d learn from the book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. This is not true.

His initial response to the question of whether our moral intuitions and judgments can be fully explained by evolutionary psychology is:

Sort of and sort of not […]

I am sympathetic to this reaction. I think evolution can go some way in explaining moral judgment, but it cannot fully explain it…at least not directly. Part of the reason for this is that I do not believe every facet of human cognition is a direct product of innate psychological mechanisms. Instead, I endorse gene-culture coevolutionary accounts which emphasize the centrality of culture in shaping human cognition.

Natural selection might predict we will communicate, but won’t predict that we’d speak French or Malay in particular. It may predict that we’d fight, but won’t predict the specific weapons we’d use or what we’d make them from. It may predict that we’d create games or other forms of recreation, but won’t predict that we’d invent chess or baseball in particular.

The vagaries of culture fill in the gap, and the specific details of the culture and practices of any given population will be contingent on historical idiosyncrasies that cannot be directly inferred from knowledge of our evolutionary history unless this included all the fine-grained details of each culture that arose. My own perspective is that the notion of a distinctive normative domain of “morality” is historically contingent, and arose only in some populations but not others (see Machery, 2018 for a similar view).

Furthermore, I don’t believe there is any principled way to distinguish moral from nonmoral terms (Stich, 2018); moral judgments don’t represent a natural kind (Machery & Stich, 2022; Sinnott-Armstrong & Wheatley, 2012), we don’t have an innate capacity for distinctively moral cognition (Machery & Mallon, 2010), and much of the emphasis on morality is a byproduct of a WEIRD/Western-centric approach to normative theorizing (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010).

I don’t know if Huemer would agree with any of that, but there may be some overlap in our skepticism about the degree to which evolution can explain human morality. Even so, my main concern is not where Huemer and I may find overlap in our views, but in how Huemer characterizes The Selfish Gene. Huemer goes on to say:

You can come up with evolutionary explanations for virtually everything, right? […] You can come up with explanations for morality in the same way that you could come up with an explanation for anything that happened […] But could you come up with explanations that you would have anticipated before you knew what our actual moral beliefs were? No, probably not.

Depending on the specifics, I might agree that there are certain distinctive moral attitudes or practices one couldn’t readily predict just by understanding human evolution, because culture may lead people to hold unusual and highly specific moral practices for which there is little direct (though there could be an indirect) evolutionary rationale, e.g., a taboo against saying specific words, or eating certain foods, or wearing certain colors of clothing. If you knew everything about human biology but nothing about a particular culture, and that culture tabooed wearing blue because they happened to associate it with death, this is not something you could predict without specific knowledge of that culture’s history. But that’s not the direction Huemer takes this. He continues:

You learn from evolutionary theory that evolution selects for selfishness. This is what you learn if you read great books like The Selfish Gene.

This is not accurate. Dawkins argues that genes are the fundamental unit of selection, and describes them in an anthropomorphic and metaphorical way as “selfish.” However, Dawkins stresses that while genes may be selfish, it does not follow that the organisms that genes give rise to are selfish.

Dawkins draws a distinction between genes as the fundamental unit of selection, and organisms as the “vehicles” genes cooperate to build so as to maximize the amount of themselves that are copied into future generations. This has at least two implications.

First, it means that from a “selfish” perspective, genes actually have an incentive to cooperate with other genes. Dawkins likens this to a rowboat: you all have to row together at the same pace and speed or you’ll be thrown off course. Likewise, the destiny of any one gene is bound up in the destiny of the other genes in a given genome, and as such it is in their individual interest to cooperate.

Second, once you focus on genes as the unit of selection, this actually helps explain why some organisms are not entirely selfish: because copies of a given gene are not only located in the body of the vehicle in which they reside, but in the organisms around oneself, and because making deals with others can be mutually beneficial, it is adaptive for genes in some situations to promote altruistic or cooperative behavior at the level of individual organisms.

This latter point is one of the central themes of the book, which Dawkins points out is more about how to account for altruism than selfishness. I’ve gathered some excerpts from the introduction of the 40th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene to illustrate what the book’s key themes are, and to provide evidence of Huemer’s mischaracterization. First, we can see that the actual contents of the book have more to do with explaining altruism than selfishness:

The best way to explain the title is by locating the emphasis. Emphasize ‘selfish’ and you will think the book is about selfishness, whereas, if anything, it devotes more attention to altruism. (viii)

Dawkins is also explicit that the only firm attribution of predicted “selfishness” applies to genes, but is not necessarily applicable to other levels of selection (individuals, groups, species, etc.):

The correct word of the title to stress is ‘gene’ and let me explain why. A central debate within Darwinism concerns the unit that is actually selected: what kind of entity is it that survives, or does not survive, as a consequence of natural selection. That unit will become, more or less by definition, ‘selfish.’ Altruism might well be favored at other levels. (viii)

Dawkins is also clear to note that non-selfishness at the level of individual organisms is a result of selfishness at the level of genes, then goes on to reference the two primary mechanisms that explain how non-selfish behavior is selected for:

Or does natural selection, as I urge instead here, choose between genes? In this case, we should not be surprised to find individual organisms behaving altruistically ‘for the good of the genes’, for example by feeding and protecting kin who are likely to share copies of the same genes. Such kin altruism is only one way which gene selfishness can translate itself into individual altruism. This book explains how it works, together with reciprocation, Darwinian theory’s other main generator of altruism. (vii-ix)

Given that so much of the book is dedicated specifically to outlining, in excruciating detail, how and why a gene-centric understanding of evolution makes sense of altruism at the individual level, it is fair to say that this is what one ought to predict, if one has a proper (from the book’s perspective) understanding of evolution. The Selfish Gene categorically does not predict selfishness at the individual level. It explicitly argues for the opposite of this. The rationale for the title is, in part, rooted in the quasi-paradoxical observation that selfishness at a lower level (genes) can give rise to and directly account for non-selfishness at higher levels, i.e., selfish genes predict non-selfish behavior (at least some of the time). This isn’t just some auxiliary point; it is arguably the central thesis of the entire book. And Huemer not only gets it wrong, but gets it exactly backwards.

Dawkins also explicitly excises misleading passages from the first chapter that suggest selfishness at the individual level:

[...] I do with hindsight notice lapses of my own on the very same subject. These are to be found especially in Chapter 1, epitomized by the sentence ‘Let us try to teach generosity and altruism because we are born selfish.’ There is nothing wrong with teaching generosity and altruism, but ‘born selfish’ is misleading [...] Please mentally delete that rogue sentence and others like it [...] (ix-x)

And when discussing titles, considers stressing altruism or cooperation as viable alternative titles:

The Altruistic Vehicle would have been another possibility. (x)

Another good alternative to The Selfish Gene would have been The Cooperative Gene. It sounds paradoxically opposite, but a central part of the book argues for a form of cooperation among self-interested genes. (x)

Here’s a clip of Dawkins talking about another possible title, The Immortal Gene:

I cannot stress enough: The Selfish Gene is not about selfishness. It does not suggest in any way that organisms should be expected to be selfish. The term “selfish” was used as a way to anthropomorphize genes, allowing one to characterize how natural selection operated in a quasi-agentic fashion. The title of the book, and the contents of the book, don’t really have anything to do with predicting that organisms would be selfish, though the book does spend a great deal of time explaining why some organisms will be under certain conditions unselfish. It was a poor choice of title, and it looks like Dawkins himself suspects this may be the case.

Finally, it’s worth noting that one of Dawkins’s first remarks is to mention philosophers mischaracterizing his work:

Many critics, especially vociferous ones learned in philosophy as I have discovered, prefer to read a book by the title only. (viii)

I worry that something like this may have happened. I find it hard to believe anyone could read the book and come away with the impression Huemer expressed in this video. Either way, this is a lose-lose for Huemer. Either he made assumptions about the contents of the book without having read and understood it, or he did read the book but somehow catastrophically misunderstood its contents.

(An earlier version of these remarks was initially posted as a comment to the video).

References

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.

Machery, E. (2018). Morality: A historical invention. In K. J. Gray & J. Graham (Eds.), Atlas of moral psychology (pp. 259-265). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Machery, E., & Mallon, R. (2010). Evolution of morality. In J. M. Doris & The Moral Psychology Research Group (Eds.). The moral psychology handbook (pp. 3-47). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Machery, E. & Stich, S. (2022). The Moral/conventional distinction. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Summer 2022 ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/moral-conventional/

Sinnott-Armstrong, W., & Wheatley, T. (2012). The disunity of morality and why it matters to philosophy. The Monist, 95(3), 355-377.

Stich, S. (2018). The moral domain. In K. Gray & J. Graham (Eds.), Atlas of moral psychology (pp. 547- 555). New York, NY: Guilford Press.