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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Beebe, J. R., & Sackris, D. (2016). Moral objectivism across the lifespan. Philosophical Psychology, 29(6), 912-929. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2016.1174843

Bush, L. S., & Moss, D. (2020). Misunderstanding metaethics: Difficulties measuring folk objectivism and relativism. Diametros 17(64): 6–21. https://doi.org/10.33392/diam.1495

Crandall, V. C., Crandall, V. J., & Katkovsky, W. (1965). A children’s social desirability questionnaire. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 29(1), 27–36. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0020966

Davis, T. (2021). Beyond objectivism: New methods for studying metaethical intuitions. Philosophical Psychology, 34(1), 125-153. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2020.1845310

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Goodwin, G. P., & Darley, J. M. (2008). The psychology of meta-ethics: Exploring objectivism. Cognition, 106(3), 1339-1366. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.06.007

Heiphetz, L., & Young, L. L. (2017). Can only one person be right? The development of objectivism and social preferences regarding widely shared and controversial moral beliefs. Cognition, 167, 78-90.

Li, Z., Yan, S., Liu, J., Bao, W., & Luo, J. (2024). Does the cognitive reflection test work with Chinese college students? Evidence from a Time-Limited Study. Behavioral Sciences, 14(4), 348. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14040348

Miller, P. H., Baxter, S. D., Royer, J. A., Hitchcock, D. B., Smith, A. F., Collins, K. L., ... & Finney, C. J. (2015). Children’s social desirability: Effects of test assessment mode. Personality and Individual Differences, 83, 85-90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.03.039

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Moss, D., Montealegre, A., Bush, L. S., Caviola, L., & Pizarro, D. (2025). Signaling (in) tolerance: Social evaluation and metaethical relativism and objectivism. Cognition, 254, 105984. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105984

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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.

People sometimes object to moral antirealists by posing a question like this:

If your morals are just your preferences, why should anyone care about your moral position?

Or they may present a hypothetical:

Suppose I wanted to punch you in the face and take your lunch money. You say this is “wrong,” but all this means is that you disapprove of these actions. Why should I care?

These questions often operate as an implied critique of antirealism. The intent is to show that the antirealist’s characterization of morality is flawed in some way. The question could be taken to reveal that the antirealist lacks the ability to “ground” or “justify” their moral standards, or it may be used to suggest that, since the antirealist does think people “should” comply with their moral standards, that their everyday attitudes and practices of holding others accountable and believing they should comport with the antirealist’s moral values reveals an implicit commitment to moral realism.

This question can prove effective from a rhetorical perspective. Antirealists may flounder in response, unable to offer a compelling reply. What I want to do here is present an example of this occurring in the real world, argue that the question is defective, and describe how I think antirealists ought to respond.

Here is our sample instance of this critique taking place in the wild. It begins with someone observing that:

This discussion begins with someone providing two quotes from the same person. The first is a response to a theistic argument for moral realism by characterizing the view as “The only thing stopping me from murder is the bible”, calling this a “crazy thing to admit about yourself.” The second is an expression of happiness that a national abortion ban failed, implying at least some degree of alignment with a prochoice stance on abortion:

Ann, a guest on my YouTube channel, asked whether this was intended to “show an inconsistency”:

Another person then entered this discussion, asking:

Surely, SURELY YOU SEE HOW THIS UNDERMINES YOUR ENTIRE POSITION??!!???

To which Ann responds:

Nope. A non theist can find abortion immoral or morally justified. If murder is considered unjustified killing and he believes abortion is justified, then there’s no issue because abortion isn’t murder. Instead of sperging in all caps, please explain.

Here is where we get to the occurrence of “Why should others care?” question:

A.K. seems to believe Ann must judge that other people’s actions are not evil if those people endorse their own actions:

The thing you have refused to see here is that your argument leaves “murder” open to “whoever the murderer deems justified”. If a herdsman murders a farmer because he thinks he has the right to his land, under your worldview, it isn’t evil.

This does not follow. This remark seems to imply that Ann’s position is that if someone thinks an action is permissible, then it is permissible for that person to perform that action from Ann’s point of view or at least it’s “not evil” from Ann’s point of view. But this doesn’t follow at all. What A.K. seems to be describing sounds like some form of agent relativism, according to which whether an action is right or wrong can only be judged relative to the standards of the agent performing the action. But Ann does not endorse agent relativism (Ann explicitly confirmed this when asked). This person appears to have a misconception about Ann’s metaethical position.

Alternatively, A.K. may have in mind some form of antirealism according to which nothing is evil in the relevant sense; perhaps some form of noncognitivism or error theory. But Ann isn’t obligated to endorse these positions, either. Simply put, nothing about antirealism requires you to not think other people’s actions are “evil.”

However, here is the key remark:

It is not pedantic at all. I used that specific scenario because it is a real world scenario. Also, turn your second question on its head, why should the murderer believe your opinion on the issue? Why should he care that you think it isn’t justified?

Note how both questions presuppose that Ann thinks the murderer:

• Should believe Ann’s opinion on the issue

• Should care that Ann thinks their murder wasn’t justified

As such, these are technically complex questions. Complex questions are questions that include a presupposition that the respondent may not share. Such questions can be misused to make a respondent look evasive or to answer questions in ways that imply their acceptance of the presupposition. Sometimes one may simply grant the presuppositions, but in this case, antirealists shouldn’t do so.

Here’s why. This complex question is also tangled up with ambiguity:

What does the person posing the question mean by “should”?

Suppose you are an appraiser relativist. On such a view, your moral claims are reports of your own moral standards, so a statement like:

Murder is wrong.

means something like

I consider murder morally wrong.

or

I disapprove of murder.

Now, on such an analysis, the question A.K. is posing doesn’t make much sense. When Ann is asked why the herdsmen should believe Ann’s opinion, and why they should care that Ann thinks murder is not justified, what does “should” even mean in this context? For an appraiser relativist, normative moral terms like “should” are embedded in statements that implicitly index one or another different moral standards.

Nothing about appraiser relativism entails that one believes others “should” share your own values in any respect other than one might prefer that they do so. So if Ann were an appraiser relativist, to judge that others should believe Ann’s opinion or care that the murder in question is unjustified is just to judge that one would prefer or value that they do so. And if one does have such a preference, then it would be trivially true that they “should” believe Ann’s opinion and “should” care: all this amounts to is the recognition that Ann wants them to, which would be pretty easy to establish.

Alternatively, if the question is presuming some kind of stance-independent normative evaluative standard, then the question is presupposing something the appraiser relativist will probably reject: that there even is such a standard.

More generally, the question seems to rely on the presumption that antirealists will agree that other people “should” share their moral standards and “should” care what the antirealist themselves thinks. But antirealism doesn’t commit you to having a position on whether others should share one’s own moral standards or care what the antirealist thinks is wrong.

For some reason, critics of moral antirealism seem to think that antirealists believe that their moral standards should be relevant to others, and that we expect people to care about our moral values and have some motivation to comply with them. But we just don’t have to think this.

Antirealists should point out that this is a complex question and request that the people posing the question be clear about what they are asking. It may be difficult to do this without looking like one is trying to dodge the question, but such questions are misguided and useless at best, and outright misleading rhetorical tools that can dupe unwary audiences into thinking the antirealist’s position suffers from shortcomings it simply doesn’t have. I hope those who employ this strategy will recognize how hollow and misguided it is, and stop using it when arguing with moral antirealists.

1.0 People are wrong on Twitter

This may be news to you, but people say a lot of things on Twitter that aren’t true. Since I decided to make criticizing the lazy, thoughtless dogmas around the moral realism vs. antirealism dispute my personal crusade, I’ve remained vigilant against misunderstandings and errors related to metaethics. This marks my 50th entry in this series. I don’t plan to quit. If I have to make an example of the unending misunderstandings and mischaracterizations of moral antirealism with a thousand posts documenting the same nonsense, I will. There is no excuse for how badly philosophers and laypeople alike have managed to botch their handling of moral antirealism.

Here we have an extended exchange between somebody going by the name Homebody and someone called The Outsider Humanist, whose posts I have seen on occasion. You can see the start of the discussion here.

If you want to see a general template for how I approach these tweets, see Bentham’s Bulldog’s parody, which is an uncannily accurate characterization of the recurring themes in my critiques. Incidentally, I am also mentioned towards the end of this lengthy exchange. Perhaps I’m having some impact. I really hope I don’t have to write 1000 posts for people to stop making the same mistakes.

2.0 You don’t know what [word] means?!

Homebody begins with a practice I’ve seen people employ in many debates: When The Outsider Humanist asks Homebody what they mean by “better,” Homebody replies:

If you don’t know what better means, maybe you should consult a dictionary. Or keep playing dumb to avoid the question or whatever it is you’re doing.

One of the most annoying moves in the online debate world is the “if you don’t know what [term] means…” response. Here’s how it works. One person will make a particular claim that uses one or more terms. A second person will respond asking for clarification about one of the terms. Why might they do this? It’s possible that they are a sophist who wants to tangle the other person up in an endless web of pedantry. But there’s a far more innocent possibility: they want to understand what the other person means.

The Outsider Humanist is not some illiterate troglodyte asking what the word itself means. They’re asking Homebody what Homebody means. In case this is news to Homebody, not everyone means exactly the same when they use particular terms, especially in a philosophical context. Words don’t have a single meaning forged into the fundament by Hephaestus. Words are polysemous and their meanings shade and vary along different dimensions. Our terms in various situations have distinct meanings, or carry distinct pragmatic connotations in their contexts of usage, or their meaning is obscure, or their meaning is underwritten by one or more presuppositions held by the speaker. This is especially true in philosophical disputes, since terms are often loaded with that person’s presuppositions or theoretical positions, so it’s important to be clear about what that person takes those terms to mean.

When someone asks you what you mean, unless there is a very good reason to think they’re filibustering or trying to pull off some sort of linguistic legerdemain, here’s what I suggest: just answer them. What that person is typically trying to do is understand what you’re talking about. The specific words you use aren’t as important as what you mean by whatever words you use. The person is not trying to understand the words, isolated from any context or use or person using them. They’re trying to understand you. Sure enough, look at what The Outsider Humanist says next:

I didn’t ask what better means or what the dictionary says. I asked what *you* mean. But I won’t play dumb.

I think that “better,” when used on its own without a “for” attached, is a word that we use to express our preferences for one thing over another, along with belief or hope that others will share those preferences.

If that’s not what you mean by “better,” then what do you mean by it?

If you respond to someone’s request to clarify what you mean as an opportunity to ridicule them by suggesting they’re a moron who doesn’t understand English, you should reevaluate how you engage with others. And if you sincerely think that a person asking you for clarification is asking you for basic dictionary definitions, then maybe you should just provide one. The irony here is that people who say things like “You don’t know what [word] means?” are implying that the other person is being foolish when it is more foolish to sincerely think the person doesn’t know what the word means or to fail to appreciate they’re asking you what you mean, and are not asking for a basic dictionary definition.

We need better dialectical norms, and those norms need to be enforced. The “you don’t know what [word] means?” and its variants are top-tier forms of poor debate conduct (or simply incompetence) and people should call it out when they see it.

3.0 Ignoring Appraiser Relativism

The Outsider Humanist turned the question back on Homebody as you saw above, again asking Homebody what they mean by better. Did they answer? Of course not. Instead, they try to keep the ball in The Outsider Humanist’s court the entire time:

So if someone said it was better to not care about vulnerable people, that’s just fine because it’s their preference, yeah?

Homebody attempts to do what many critics of relativistic positions do: presume the person endorses agent relativism, then try to make it seem like that person must think that if someone else is okay with torture or whatever, that they (the relativist) must be okay with it. This is what Homebody does, and it reveals a straightforward misunderstanding of what The Outsider Humanist said. Recall that they said:

I think that “better,” when used on its own without a “for” attached, is a word that we use to express our preferences for one thing over another, along with belief or hope that others will share those preferences.

This is closer to appraiser relativism. If The Outsider Humanist says “Empathizing and caring about vulnerable people is better than not doing so” this would presumably mean something like:

I prefer that we empathize with and care about vulnerable people and hope others share this preference.

If someone else thinks it’s not better to do so, does it follow that “that’s just fine because it’s their preference”? No. This question doesn’t even make sense. Fine relative to what standard (i.e., what standard of preferences)? Obviously, it’s not fine relative to The Outsider Humanist’s preferences; they just said it’s not. And just as obviously it is fine relative to whoever does not think it’s better to empathize with and care about vulnerable people. What we have are two different sets of preferences. The Outsider Humanist is under no obligation to think that because someone else has a different set of moral standards that it’s “just fine” for them to have different preferences. Homebody has simply misunderstood The Outsider Humanist. They ably handle this in their own response, only to be met with a common question people pose to antirealists that continues to strike me as very strange:

If it’s just their preference, then why would you not be fine with it?

Note the use of the misleading modifier “just” their preference. I wouldn’t say it’s “just” a preference if someone preferred to kill me and my family. Preferences can be and often are significant. For whatever reason, critics of antirealists and relativists in particular, keep overcomparing the antirealist/relativist’s characterizations of moral standards as preferences with trivial and mundane preferences like a preference for ice cream. In other words, they seem to think that if moral values and taste preferences are both “preferences,” that the former inherit all the characteristics of the latter, including their lack of significance and limited scope. This simply isn’t true.

Not all preferences are trivial or mundane. I prefer my family over other people’s families. So much so that I would go to great lengths to rescue my family, but would not do so for other people’s families. Imagine how asinine and goofy it would sound to encounter the following exchange between a Normative Family Realist and a Normative Family Antirealist:

Realist: So you don’t think your spouse and children are objectively more important than other people’s spouses and children?

Antirealist: No, that’s absurd. That I prefer them is a fact about my psychology and my subjective values. I don’t think they’re intrinsically more important than other people’s families in a way other people would be obligated to recognize. I prefer my family, and they prefer their families.

Realist: So then why do you care more about your family than other people’s families?

Antirealist: …I simply do.

Realist: What’s your justification for preferring your family over other families?

Antirealist: My what? Why would I need a justification?

Realist: Of course you need one! What are you, an anti-intellectual? If you can’t provide a rational justification for preferring your family over other people’s families, then you’re not justified in prioritizing your own family. Let me put it this way: Suppose another family thought it was morally acceptable to murder your family and attempted to do so. Would you allow them to do so?

Antirealist: No…because I prefer they don’t murder my family. It wouldn’t be fine by my standards.

Realist: But it’s just their preference that they kill you and your family in order to survive, so why wouldn’t you be fine with it?

Antirealist: Because it would go against my preferences, and I act and judge on the basis of my own preferences, not theirs.

Realist: But your preferences aren’t any more valid or correct than theirs.

Antirealist: Not objectively, no. So what?

Realist: So then why do you care to act on your preferences?

Antirealist: Because my preferences just are the set of things I care about and that motivate me to act. What the hell else would motivate you to do anything?

I’ve had many exchanges similar to this with realists. They have this bizarre notion that you can’t just care about things. That there have to be truths about what things ought to be cared about independent of whether you care about them, and then you’re supposed to figure out what those truths are and comply, caring about the things that have the to-be-cared-aboutness property. It’s bizarre, and yet they claim their position is intuitive and antirealism isn’t. Something has gone seriously wrong with their intuitions. I’m not saying all realists think this way, but it’s a common occurrence. It’s also common to just hit a brick wall with people who seem incapable or unwilling to construe antirealism or relativism as anything other than some form of crude agent relativism.

So, if something was just someone’s preference, why would I not be fine with it? Well, it depends on the preference. If them acting on the preference is at odds with achieving my goals, then of course I am going to care. Just suppose moral realism is not true. Would you just not care if someone decided to kill you?

Incidentally, I wrote all of this before I even got to this part of the exchange:

The first couple of posts are a bit odd. Perhaps Homebody thought Outsider was just defending skepticism for the sake of argument. But I have encountered people who try to insist I don’t believe what I say I do, as if I am pretending or self-deceived. It’s obnoxious for people to do this, and I hope that isn’t what Homebody is doing here. But the latter part exhibits precisely the mistake I am talking about:

If you’re a moral skeptic, then why would you care if someone has a different preference than you about how to treat vulnerable people? Would you care if someone preferred a different flavor of ice cream?

This is ridiculous. Suppose you were standing at a bus stop late at night next to a stranger who also appeared to be waiting for the bus. Now suppose they say one of the following two things:

Ice Cream Man: “Where are you headed? I’m off to pick up some ice cream for my wife. She always wants weird flavors, like Earl Grey or watermelon mint, so I gotta go to Thermopylae (a local ice cream place that features 300 flavors). I just prefer chocolate.”

Skin Lamp Man: “Where are you headed? You know what it doesn’t matter. I’m an insane serial killer and I am going to take you home in a suitcase and turn you into a skin lamp. I really prefer my lamps to be made of human flesh.”

Now let me pose this question to you:

If you’re a skeptic, why would you care if someone has a different preference than you? Would you care if someone preferred a different flavor of ice cream?

It’s easy for a skeptic to say no to this. But now let’s ask a slightly different question:

If you’re a skeptic, why would you care if someone has a different preference than you? Would you care if someone preferred to murder you and use your flesh to create lampshades?

It’s just as easy for a skeptic to say “yes” to this. What would you say? After all, it’s just a preference, right? Why care?

What Homebody and other critics of antirealism/relativism fail to appreciate is that we can care about some preferences others have and not care about others. And we can have preferences that don’t concern what others do and we can have preferences that do concern what others do. Not all preferences are as mundane as taste preferences. Not all preferences are preferences merely about our own conduct. We can and we do have preferences about other people’s conduct. I prefer peanut butter ice cream. I don’t care what ice cream flavor you like. But I do care that everyone else not indiscriminately kill people.

This isn’t that complicated or nuanced or mysterious of an insight, so why do critics keep bringing up these same stupid objections? These objections are so bad, so lazy, and so thoughtless, they’re the kinds of inane remarks you’d expect in a sketch comedy or a comic strip. How do they survive in the wild? If everyone read my responses to this nonsense, would they stop doing it? I doubt it. I suspect many critics would be dismissive, or insult me, or ignore me, or quickly forget what I’ve said, and go right back to this. I see it repeatedly, so much so I have this incredibly repetitive blog where I keep bringing up these same points. Maybe I do need to go on Twitter and just keep engaging with people who say these things? I don’t know. What do you think? I really hate the thought of going on there.

In any case, The Outsider Humanist continues to present excellent responses:

Good lord. The attempts to dredge up some sort of objection just keep coming. Alright. Whatever. Let’s address this, too:

Sure sounds like you think that caring about all of that makes you a better person than someone who doesn’t care about all that.

Is this supposed to be a gotcha? Of course a skeptic can think that caring about things makes them a better person than someone who doesn’t care about the same things…relative to their own standards. For instance, I like progressive metal. I think my taste in music is better than people who like Drake, because Drake’s music is the worst. But I do not think my taste preferences are stance-independently better or that Drake’s music is stance-independently the worst. I am simply speaking about my own preferences. Nothing about doing so prohibits one from judging others relative to one’s own preferences, and doing so in no way bars us from making evaluations of what’s better or worse.

Are you a realist about what food is good or bad? If not, do you think it would make no sense to say that some restaurants are better than others? Must you think that a restaurant could only be better than another if it was better independent of anyone’s taste preferences, including your own?

But you also think that people who don’t care about all that OUGHT to care about all that like you do, right? That they OUGHT to adopt your preference rather than theirs.

If “ought” claims are construed relative to one’s own preferences, then this would be a bit like asking someone:

“Given that you prefer that people care about X, do you prefer that people who don’t care about X care about X?” to which the answer is a trivial “Yes.” Oughts are to be understood as claims relativized to the preferences of the person making the normative evaluation, so of course if you prefer other people share a given value then you think they “ought” to, since this is just another way of saying the same thing.

What troubles me about questions like this is that it’s as if the person raising these questions can’t get outside of their own mind and can’t analyze things from the perspective of the skeptic/antirealist/relativist. It’s as if they think the skeptic/antirealist/relativist simply must think that people “ought” to do things in some non-antirealist way.

4.0 Presumptions about ordinary moral language

Note that Homebody continues to ignore repeated requests to offer their own account of the relevant concepts. I’ll skip over some of the conversation that follows and proceed to this exchange:

We’re almost to the part where they mention me, but let’s pause a moment to consider this interaction. The Outsider Humanist repeatedly asked Homebody what they meant, which they ignored. Outsider politely let this slide and kept responding, right until they get to this point. After stating that they reject the ways they think Homebody uses terms like “should” and “ought” Homebody states that:

It’s the way normal people use them.

As we quickly discover, this way is the realist way:

I mean, you can argue all you want that you’re a moral skeptic, but you can’t argue that ordinary language users don’t use moral terms in a way that corresponds to moral realism. Any competent moral philosopher will grant that.

Of course you can argue this. What a bizarre claim to make. That ordinary people use moral claims in a way that best fits with moral realism is not something realists have ever convincingly established. Then we have this presumptuous remark that “Any competent moral philosopher will grant that.” Many of the most prominent metaethicists throughout the 20th century rejected this claim, as do several contemporary philosophers. Aside from moral realists and error theorists, many competent moral philosophers have explicitly argued that ordinary moral language best fits with various nonrealist analyses, including A.J. Ayer, R.M. Hare, and more recently Don Loeb and Michael Gill, all excellent philosophers. And they aren’t the only ones. Take, for instance, this paper from Nils Franzén. Here’s the abstract:

Within contemporary metaethics, it is widely held that there is a “presumption of realism” in moral thought and discourse. Anti-realist views, like error theory and expressivism, may have certain theoretical considerations speaking in their favor, but our pretheoretical stance with respect to morality clearly favors objectivist metaethical views. This article argues against this widely held view. It does so by drawing from recent discussions about so-called “subjective attitude verbs” in linguistics and philosophy of language. Unlike pretheoretically objective predicates (e.g., “is made of wood”, “is 185 cm tall”), moral predicates embed felicitously under subjective attitude verbs like the English “find” [...]

Homebody is welcome to insist all these people must be incompetent. If so, good luck making the case for that. Take, for instance, these remarks:

[...] in every case in which one would commonly be said to be making an ethical judgment, the function of the relevant ethical word is purely ‘emotive’. (Ayer, 1935, p. 108)

And as Gill (2009) notes:

Hare compares his task to that of a descriptive grammarian (see Hare 1964, i and 4) and he says explicitly that he is giving an account of moral terms as they are used, not as they might be used (see Hare 1964, p. 92). (as quoted in Gill, 2009, p. 216, footnote 1)

In short, noncognitivists took themselves to be accounting for what nonphilosophers are doing when they engage in moral discourse, and they rejected the notion that people were committed realists. Noncognitivism was an extremely popular position in the early half of the 20th century. It’s absurd to suppose that all competent philosophers presume folk realism. So the claim that all competent philosophers would agree that ordinary moral language is used in a realist way is simply not true.

I am finally referenced at this point:

Cool. Unfortunately, Homebody thinks the claim that ordinary moral language isn’t realist is a non-starter. What’s this based on? The conversation continues with Homebody just insisting they’re not interested in this line of argument, culminating in this exchange:

5.0 Belief, phenomenology, and moral language

After more pressure, Homebody allegedly went ahead and read the blog post that’d been linked. Unfortunately, Homebody goes off the rails here, saying some strange things:

Let’s take a look at this claim:

Ok, I read your article. There’s a reason why I said any COMPETENT philosopher would agree that ordinary moral language is moral realist. This dude completely misunderstands the issue. It has nothing to do with phenomenology or even with whether or not ordinary language users themselves accept moral realism, it has to do with the meaning of moral language. So that article was almost embarrassing in its fundamental failure to even grasp what the question is about.

This is wrong on multiple levels. I allegedly completely misunderstand “the” issue. Why? According to Homebody, it’s because “the” issue isn’t about phenomenology. What is Homebody talking about? There isn’t one issue. There are multiple issues. The blog post begins by addressing one of those issues. And that issue is phenomenology. Note that the article begins with me quoting and then responding to a professional moral philosopher who makes the following claim:

Clearly there are objective moral values; it’s a basic datum of experience.

I then argue against this claim. How on earth would it make any sense to insist that “the” issue is some other issue aside from this one? Whether we have realist phenomenology just is the initial topic of this article, and it’s not like I just randomly decided that this is what philosophers are all focused on and is “the” issue central to contemporary metaethics. It’s an issue I opted to address because it is a claim made by a philosopher that I think is mistaken, a claim also made by other philosophers. Is JPA the only philosopher who has made claims about people having realist phenomenology? No, of course not. One of the claims used to try to establish a presumption in favor of realism is that various aspects of people’s phenomenology, or experiences, dispose them towards moral realism. Numerous philosophers, many central to contemporary analytic metaethics, appeal to allegedly widespread realist phenomenology. For instance:

• Huemer (2007) and others defend moral realism by appeals to ethical intuitions, which he and others characterize as “seemings” or intellectual “appearances.” Indeed, the position is literally named phenomenal conservatism. Huemer is one of the most prominent and prolific defenders of non-naturalist moral realism. It doesn’t get more explicit than this.

• Here’s another case of someone explicitly appealing to phenomenology to defend moral realism: “Feeling values: a phenomenological case for moral realism” (Hammond, 2019).

• In David Enoch’s (2018) paper, “Why I am an Objectivist about Ethics (And Why You Are, Too)”, Enoch, a prominent contemporary moral realist, appeals to a phenomenological test as a method of revealing to his readers that they are (probably) moral realists.

• On page 111 of The Moral Universe, Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau (2024) explicitly state that appeals to phenomenology provide one avenue of potential support for their Reality thesis, the thesis that “there are moral truths and facts.” Earlier, on page 45, they construe their Unifying Principle of realism, that “The basic realist theses help to make sense of morality—in particular, the metaethical data,” and later on that same page state that the Unifying Principle that their various theses are not “a mere conjunction of claims about moral experience,” implying that their central theses do construe the “data” they describe in terms of moral experience, which is hard to square with the notion that a presumption in realism isn’t partially predicated on the claim that certain features of our experience/phenomenology support realism. Note that Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau are three of the most central figures in contemporary analytic metaethics. This is not a fringe work but the culmination of decades of development on non-naturalist accounts of moral realism.

• There is an entire literature on moral perception, i.e., there is an entire contemporary discussion dedicated to moral phenomenology, with much of it dedicated specifically to arguing for the ability to perceive moral facts. Claims like this are often leveraged in service of moral realism. See e.g., “Moral perception and the contents of experience” (Werner, 2016). See this book from Audi (2013) as well. Here’s an excerpt of a summary:

We can see a theft, hear a lie, and feel a stabbing. These are morally important perceptions. But are they also moral perceptions—distinctively moral responses? In this book, Robert Audi develops an original account of moral perceptions, shows how they figure in human experience, and argues that they provide moral knowledge.

• Philosopher and Christian apologist William Lane Craig routinely appeals to “moral experience” to justify his position on moral realism, such as here. Here’s a partial transcription:

I would defend it by moral experience, that in moral experience we apprehend a realm of right and wrong, good and evil, and that we have no grounds or reasons to deny or think that moral experience is delusory.

• Sharon Rawlette defends moral realism on the grounds that we have access to moral value as a direct aspect of our experience of the world (i.e., our phenomenology) in The Feeling of Value: Moral Realism Grounded in Phenomenal Consciousness. Here’s an excerpt:

In this book, Sharon Hewitt Rawlette turns our metaethical gaze inward and dares us to consider that value, rather than being something “out there,” is a quality woven into the very fabric of our conscious experience, in a highly objective way.

• In “Values and Secondary Qualities”, McDowell (2013) characterizes Mackie as arguing that (at least part of) what contributes to Mackie’s error theory is a claim about our phenomenology having a realist character.

…These are just a handful of disparate examples that represent a broad and consistent consideration of the role phenomenology plays in establishing a presumption in favor of realism. And this is just what I could find after a brief search. Is it the only or primary source of evidence? No, of course not, but I don’t even imply this in the article. I begin by saying:

The belief that ordinary people think or speak like moral realists or experience morality in a way indicative of moral realism (i.e., moral considerations seem to concern matters of stance independent fact) is one of the most persistent articles of faith among contemporary analytic philosophers working in metaethics.

Note the distinction between think and speak and then distinguish both from how people experience morality. These distinctions are there for a reason. This brings us to the second claim, which is that “the issue”…

[…] has nothing to do with phenomenology or even with whether or not ordinary language users themselves accept moral realism, it has to do with the meaning of moral language. So that article was almost embarrassing in its fundamental failure to even grasp what the question is about.

There are at least three separate issues here:

1. Phenomenology: The experience, or phenomenology, of morality

2. Belief: Whether nonphilosophers “accept moral realism”

3. Discourse: How nonphilosophers use moral language

Homebody must not have read my article very carefully or tracked how he himself phrased things prior to this remark. Look at this earlier remark from Homebody, which was his initial remark addressing ordinary language:

I mean, you can argue all you want that you’re a moral skeptic, but you can’t argue that ordinary language users don’t use moral terms in a way that corresponds to moral realism. Any competent moral philosopher will grant that.

This specific phrasing is critical: “you can’t argue that ordinary language users don’t use moral terms in a way that corresponds to moral realism.” Note the emphasis on how they use moral language. Now, let’s look at what I say in my article. Here is my first sentence:

The belief that ordinary people think or speak like moral realists or experience morality in a way indicative of moral realism (i.e., moral considerations seem to concern matters of stance independent fact) is one of the most persistent articles of faith among contemporary analytic philosophers working in metaethics.

This is likewise a remark about how people use moral language. After this remark, I first address the experience of morality, since I begin with a quote about moral experience. Later on, I say this:

What do the Tsimane and Machigenga think about moral realism? When they make moral claims, do those claims appear to commit them to realism? Do they make moral claims? If so, what are some prototypical moral claims in the languages they speak? There are over 6000 languages in the world. How many of those languages is Andrew immersed in, to know what the structure of their moral claims (if they have them) look like, and how they function, not only in the abstract, but within the contexts of the cultures and populations that speak those languages?

Note how I consistently distinguish what people think about moral realism from how they speak about it. And note how I refer to the structure of their moral claims and how those claims function. I again make this clear with the next remark:

It’s not merely the case that psychological differences between WEIRD and non-WEIRD populations are attributable to enculturation alone, but language can facilitate or reinforce these differences.

This remark would make no sense if I were not distinguishing how we use moral language from psychological differences in how we think (in this case, about metaethics). I also want to stress that Homebody themselves characterized their distinction accepting realism and “the meaning of moral language” earlier in terms of ordinary speakers use moral terms. Note, then, that Homebody’s own characterization of the analysis of the meaning of moral terms is framed in terms of how ordinary speakers use those terms. This matches my own characterization.

I then go on to discuss language variation rather than psychological variation, quoting Majid and Levinson (2010):

The linguistic and cognitive sciences have severely underestimated the degree of linguistic diversity in the world. Part of the reason for this is that we have projected assumptions based on English and familiar languages onto the rest. We focus on some distortions this has introduced, especially in the study of semantics.

Observe the focus on linguistic diversity, languages, and the study of semantics. None of this is about whether “ordinary language users themselves accept moral realism”, though I do address that (separately, because I draw a distinction between them; and again, there are numerous studies assessing whether people “accept realism” and “accepting” realism doesn’t explicitly require conscious assessment, anyway). But it gets worse. I then say:

The analysis of moral claims in the English language in particular is central to much, if not most of the descriptive project of contemporary analytic metaethics.

Note that this is not a remark I drew from outside the article Homebody allegedly read to demonstrate that I’m aware of the distinction between whether ordinary language users accept moral realism and the meaning of moral language, it is a remark from the article itself. And observe how the focus is on the analysis of moral claims, not whether ordinary speakers accept moral realism or moral phenomenology.

In short: Homebody appears to have accused me of incompetence for failing to distinguish between the question of whether people “accept realism” and what Homebody claims to be “the issue,” which is instead the “meaning of moral language.” Homebody bases this accusation off of an article in which I explicitly draw the distinction and explicitly refer to the analysis of moral language as “central” to “much, if not most” of the descriptive project of contemporary analytic metaethics.

Given this, there’s a good chance Homebody did not read the article (or didn’t read all of it, or read it very carefully). But I don’t like to accuse people of being liars, and Homebody claims to have read it. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to draw their own conclusion as to why Homebody would accuse me of incompetence for allegedly writing an article that construes “the issue” to be whether people accept realism and how they experience it, when “the issue” is in fact the analysis of moral language, when I simply don’t do this at all and in fact repeatedly and directly distinguish the latter and its centrality.

This is only natural, since I go into considerable detail about this distinction in my dissertation. In my dissertation, I make a point at the outset of noting that researchers conducting studies on how nonphilosophers think about metaethics consistently fail to distinguish between metaethical stances, i.e., people’s position on our beliefs about metaethics, and their commitments, which may be implicit and do not have to be reflected in any explicit belief or position that the person holds. I say this in part because I am well aware of the fact that much of analytic metaethics is construed in terms of the analysis of moral semantics, rather than the beliefs or attitudes of nonphilosophers. So let’s address this directly.

Regarding whether people “accept” moral realism, this is a nonspecific term and doesn’t explicitly mean something like “conscious endorsement.” Even if it did, (a) some of the experimental metaethics literature appears to be assessing this question and (b) this question is relevant to how people use moral language insofar as it provides indirect evidence about people’s linguistic practices. Why? Because all else being equal, one might expect one’s metalinguistic practices or beliefs about their practices to be more likely to coincide with those practices than to not do so. For example, if when asked about what they mean by the term “dog,” people insist that they’re not referring to turnips, this would be some evidence against any theory according to which the English word “dog” referred to turnips. We might scratch our heads in puzzlement if we then observed these people point at some turnips and say “look at those dogs over there,” of course, but the general point is that all else being equal what people accept about how they think is expected to be more likely to be consistent with how they speak than to be at odds with it.

Examples aside, my point is that if people explicitly accept moral realism when prompted (in the sense of judging it to be an appropriate reflection of what they or others mean when they make first-order moral claims), this would provide at least some evidence that they speak like moral realists or that realism is an implicit feature of their language. Is this strong evidence? No, my own position is that it is quite weak for reasons similar to those expressed by Genoveva Martí (2009; though see Machery, Olivola, & De Blanc, 2009). More generally, we may wonder: does this mean I think people’s claims about what they accept couldn’t be inconsistent with how they speak? Certainly not. I’m one of the least likely people to think this, given how critical I am of people’s capacities for introspection and my familiarity with people’s penchant for confabulation. But researchers studying whether people accept moral realism are not morons for doing so, and such evidence isn’t entirely irrelevant to how people speak. There are, for instance, studies that directly assess whether people think morality is “objective” (see e.g., Fisher et al., 2017). It is precisely because I’m aware of this literature that I framed my remarks in terms of what people think and how people speak and distinguish between the two. It is Homebody who is apparently unaware of this research. Ironically, I’m being accused of being oblivious to what the framing and focus of disputes in metaethics despite having read extensively about the relevant distinctions and explicitly drawing them and writing about them in my own work (see e.g., Bush, 2023, p. 24; p. 206; p. 238; Bush, 2023, Supplement 1, S8-17; Bush, 2023, Supplement 3, p. S519).

Given that this distinction figured prominently in my dissertation, and given that I’ve made a point of criticizing others for not being attentive to the distinction, Homebody’s presumption that I’m not aware of the distinction is ironic: Not only am I aware of this distinction, the distinction was so important to me that I went out of my way to include whole sections on the distinction in my dissertation, devise terminology specifically to facilitate drawing this distinction clearly, and included a glossary in part to assist readers in understanding the distinction. Collectively, this not only demonstrates my awareness of the distinction, but an unusually heightened preoccupation with it.

Now, one thing you may note is that I weave between how people speak and how people think. This is because my own view of language is one according to which meaning is determined by communicative intent. I don’t think it makes sense to talk about how people use moral language without regarding this as (at least in part) a question about their psychology. I reject conceptions of language that externalize meaning to something other than the psychology of speakers and the functional role terms and phrases play in social contexts. Nevertheless, I am conscious of the fact that this is one view about language and that other conceptions of language differ. And so I operate on the assumption that empirical data is relevant, both to understanding whether people accept moral realism and, more critically, how they use moral language. In other words, I take claims about the meaning of ordinary moral language to only be determinable by engaging with empirical data on how people use the language. I do not consider the meaning of ordinary moral claims to be an a priori matter. This does not mean that I’m not aware that the meaning of moral language has been and remains central to metaethical disputes, while whether nonphilosophers “accept” moral realism isn’t; it means that I take both claims to be empirical and regard data about how people think to be relevant to what they mean. I’m not alone in thinking this way. See, e.g., Gill (2009) or more importantly Loeb (2008). Note what Loeb has to say on the matter:

The claim that moral language is relevant to metaethical inquiry is not new. What is not often appreciated, however, is that the matter to be investigated consists largely of empirical questions. In saying this I do not mean to claim that empirical science can easily discover the answers, or even to presuppose that the answers can be uncovered at all. That remains to be seen. However, an inquiry into what, if anything, we are talking about when we employ the moral vocabulary must at least begin with an inquiry into the intuitions, patterns of thinking and speaking, semantic commitments, and other internal states (conscious or not) of those who employ it. (pp. 355-356, emphasis original)

Loeb specializes in metaethics. This is not an obscure remark from an unknown person, but someone well versed in contemporary analytic metaethics. And Loeb isn’t alone in thinking this way; experimental ethics has expanded over the past few decades and now includes input from many philosophers, including Knobe, Nichols, Pölzler, and many more. As such, my approach in the article Homebody ridicules is well within the scope of how contemporary analytic metaethicists frame and approach both metaethics as a whole and the analysis of moral language. Indeed, I didn’t develop my view from scratch; my approach was explicitly inspired by the work of analytic philosophers like Gill and Loeb. My entire framing of the issue is, in other words, derivative of the way the matter has been framed in the academic literature itself. Homebody’s suggestion that there’s something “embarrassing” about my framing is ironically, only an embarrassment for Homebody, since it suggests that Homebody is ignorant of the literature despite claiming to have read “plenty of scholarly moral philosophy.”

Homebody claims that my article was “almost embarrassing in its fundamental failure to even grasp what the question is about.” There was nothing embarrassing, almost or otherwise, about my article, but I can’t say the same about Homebody’s reaction to it.

References

Audi (2013). Moral perception. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Bengson, J., Cuneo, T., & Shafer-Landau, R. (2024). The moral universe. Oxford University Press.

Bush, L. S. (2023). Schrödinger’s categories: The indeterminacy of folk metaethics (Order No. 30318258). Available from Dissertations & Theses @ Cornell University and the Weill Medical College; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (2827166985). Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/schrödingers-categories-indeterminacy-folk/docview/2827166985/se-2

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

Hammond, T. (2019). Feeling values: A phenomenological case for moral realism. [Doctoral dissertation, Boston University]. OpenBU. https://open.bu.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/fa70b292-3069-4e74-b6de-cb669d098add/content

Enoch, D. (2018). Why I am an objectivist about ethics (and why you are, too). In R. Shafer-Landau (Ed.), The ethical life: Fundamental readings in ethics and moral problems (4^th ed., pp. 208–221). New York: Oxford University Press.

Fisher, M., Knobe, J., Strickland, B., & Keil, F. C. (2017). The influence of social interaction on intuitions of objectivity and subjectivity. Cognitive science, 41(4), 1119-1134.

Huemer, M. (2007). Compassionate phenomenal conservatism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 74(1), 30-55.

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.

Machery, E., Olivola, C. Y., & De Blanc, M. (2009). Linguistic and metalinguistic intuitions in the philosophy of language. Analysis, 69(4), 689-694.

Majid, A., & Levinson, S. C. (2010). WEIRD languages have misled us, too. [Commentary on Evans & Levinson, 2009]. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 103-104. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X1000018X

Martí, G. (2009). Against semantic multi-culturalism. Analysis, 69(1), 42-48.

McDowell, J. (2013). Values and secondary qualities. In T. Honderich (Ed.), Morality and objectivity (Routledge Revivals) (pp. 110-129). New York, NY: Routledge.

Rawlette, S. (2016). The Feeling of Value. California: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Werner, P. J. (2016). Moral perception and the contents of experience. Journal of Moral Philosophy, 13(3), 294-317.

Where do normative reasons come from? Nowhere. Philosophers often argue about whether desires give us reasons or whether facts about what’s morally right or wrong can give us reasons independent of our desires. But I think both views are mistaken. Reasons don’t come from anything. Talk of reasons is just that: talk. I don’t think there literally are reasons and that minds “give” them to us or “generate” or “provide” them in any literal sense. I think this is a mistaken bit of reification, where people inappropriately imagine that there literally are reasons independent of the phenomena which purportedly give rise to them (minds, nonmental facts, etc.). I think this is a mistake. Instead, I think we should think of talk of reasons as just being a way of referencing various descriptive facts. Some uses of the term “reason” involve explanations or other non-normative notions, e.g.:

Alex: What’s the reason why the ground is all wet?

Sam: Because it rained.

This is not the kind of reason we’re talking about. Instead, we’re talking about normative reasons. Normative reasons are associated with evaluating or prescribing courses of action in various ways, and are often associated with what one “should” or “ought” do or not do. For instance, we might say:

She has a reason to avoid going to that dangerous neighborhood.

The main reason to avoid harming others for personal profit is that it is wrong.

…and so on. What does “reason” mean in these contexts? I don’t think words have fixed meanings. They mean whatever the person using the term intends for them to mean. So what do people intend for normative use of the term “reasons” to mean? I don’t know. That’s an empirical question. But if I had to guess, I think they probably mean something that is very theoretically thin: something that does not determinately commit them to realism or antirealism. In that respect, I endorse what you could call folk reasons indeterminacy, which is closely related to the broader notion of folk metaethical indeterminacy: the thesis that, as a matter of empirical fact, most people neither explicitly endorse moral realism or antirealism, nor would our best accounts of what people are implicitly committed to, or what they mean or think by what they say, be best explained by realism or antirealism in particular. For comparison, most people do not have explicit views on how best to interpret quantum mechanics, so it would be absurd to interpret claims like “The sun will rise tomorrow,” in accord with the Copenhagen or Many Worlds interpretation of quantum events that would inevitably unfold between now and tomorrow. People simply don’t need to take a stand on such matters to talk about the future. Likewise, people don’t need to endorse a metaethical position, or to speak or think distinctively like moral realists or antirealists, in order to make moral claims and engage in moral judgment.

So what are reasons? On my view, there are, in a literal sense, no reasons per se. This might sound absurd. Does it mean I would agree with the following remark?

There is no reason for me to avoid being set on fire.

No, it does not. I would disagree with this statement. There is a reason for me to not be set on fire: I don’t want to be. Is this a contradiction? No, it is not. When I say that there are, in a literal sense, no reasons, what I mean is that there is no such thing as a reason simpliciter, or a reason as such. Reasons are not things-in-themselves. Reason-talk is just a shorthand for specifying what the reason is. For comparison, consider the word “thing”. Do things exist? Well, what does this mean? Here are two possible interpretations:

• Reducible things
  Things exist, in the sense that there are objects that exist: tables, chairs, trees, apples, xylophones, and so on. These are things, insofar as the term “things” refers to various unspecified objects.

• Irreducible things
  Things exist simpliciter. There are things that exist, but these things aren’t anything in particular. They’re just things, but they are not tables, chairs, trees, apples, xylophones, or anything else in particular.

Now, given these possible interpretations, should we judge this statement to be true or false?

Things exist.

In any ordinary conversation, I’d readily say that this statement is true. Of course things exist. There are tables and chairs and trees and such. I can point to them. Lots of things exist. But philosophers often use terms in ways that depart from what I believe their ordinary uses are. They redeploy these terms outside their ordinary contexts. In such cases, they sometimes explicitly hold that their use is highly theoretical or may not represent ordinary usages. In other cases, they insist (often with little or no supporting evidence) that they are using the term in its ordinary sense. Now imagine there were philosophers who thought that there were irreducible things. They thought there were objects out there that were simply things, but not anything in particular.

I would conclude that these philosophers were confused. I’d judge them to be confused about the ordinary meaning of the term “thing.” The term “thing” is simply a placeholder for not specifying some object or other, but there is a presumptive promissory note that the thing in question is some particular thing, even if we aren’t specifying what it is (for whatever reason, e.g., because we don’t know or don’t think it’s important).

I believe something like this is going on with contemporary analytic conceptions of “reasons.” Reasons are being treated as irreducible reasons, as reasons simpliciter. Reasons are, on this view, somehow distinct from, and not fully reducible to, the facts or values that “give,” “generate,” or “provide” us with those reasons, all of which are common terms associated with this characterization of reasons. Sometimes they talk of the facts or desires as being the reasons themselves. They might say:

The fact that torture would violate someone’s rights is a reason to not perform that action.

Here the fact is treated as the reason itself. But you might also see remarks like this:

The fact that torture would violate someone’s rights gives you a reason to not perform that action.

The former notion, where a fact “is” a reason, faces its own set of problems, but I want to focus on the notion of facts giving reasons. If this were meant in some nonliteral or metaphorical way, speaking this way may be benign. But in the context of philosophical conversation, such language alludes to reasons being something distinct from the things that give rise to them. This way of speaking suggests a similar distinction to reducible and irreducible conceptions of “things”:

• Irreducible (normative) reasons
  Reasons as things-in-themselves, as autonomous properties or phenomena which one may “have” in a literal sense.

• Reducible (normative) reasons
  “Reason” talk is like “thing” talk. All such talk serves as a placeholder for some unspecified facts themselves. The facts don’t give, provide, or generate reasons per se; there just are the facts themselves. In any given instance in which one references a normative reason, such talk could always (in principle) be replaced with reference to some descriptive fact or other.

Suppose, on the latter view, we said that:

Alex had a reason to avoid being set on fire.

On this view, Alex does not literally have a reason simpliciter that has been given by some other fact about the world, such as the fact that Alex desires not to be set on fire, or that pain is intrinsically bad and that this fact gives reasons to avoid it. Rather, we could only meaningfully speak of Alex “having” a reason by literally replacing talk of having reasons with the facts themselves:

Alex desires not to be set on fire.

Being set on fire would cause Alex a lot of pain.

The fact that being set on fire would cause Alex pain, and the fact that Alex desires not to be set on fire, don’t give Alex reasons, they just are the prospective reasons. And to be clear, I am not suggesting that reasons are a certain kind of thing that can be described in terms of the fact. I’m saying something more deflationary than this: that talk of “reasons” can always be either meaningfully discharged in terms of some non-reason facts, or it can be meaningless, insofar as one mistakenly takes there to be reasons-in-themselves, or reasons simpliciter, much as it would make no sense to think that something is a thing simpliciter. In other words, if you think it’s weird to speak of something being a thing simpliciter, then you may also find it a bit odd to think that desires or facts can “give” us reasons, and these reasons aren’t the desires or facts themselves, but something distinct and ineliminable: a reason-in-itself. I don’t take this to be an especially extreme claim. I just think that talk of reasons results in us saying that we “have reasons” in the same way we could say that we “own some things.” Neither requires positing any special features of our ontology to make sense of what’s being said. If this isn’t weird or objectionable for talk of things, why would it be weird or objectionable for talk of reasons?

So there are reasons, and there are things. But we should not mistake these terms to mean that there are reasons-themselves or things-themselves. These are just parts of speech that allow us to speak without complete specificity.

Critics of this way of framing things often make a very serious mistake, which I outlined in my dialog about Jack and the Magic Beans. I’ll give a similar account here. Essentially, people will conflate their personal account of a phenomenon with the phenomenon itself, and then take any denial of their particular account to be an outright denial of the phenomenon. Roughly, this would be a bit like if you insisted that all birds were sacred. Then, if anyone denied that birds were sacred, you reacted as though they denied the existence of birds altogether. Something a bit like this:

Alex: Do you believe in birds?

Sam: Yes, of course.

Alex: But I thought you were an atheist and didn’t believe in the sacred?

Sam: …What? Yes, I am an atheist. And I don’t believe in the sacred.

Alex: But you believe birds exist.

Sam: …Yes, and?

Alex: Birds are sacred.

Sam: I know you think that, but I don’t.

Alex: Oh, so you believe birds don’t exist. But that’s silly. There’s a bird right over there, in that tree.

Sam: I agree there’s a bird there. I just don’t think it’s sacred.

Alex: That makes no sense, birds are sacred by definition.

Sam: I don’t think that they are.

Alex: This isn’t a matter of dispute. I’m stipulating that what I mean by “bird” just is a sacred animal. So either you believe birds are sacred or you don’t believe in birds.

Sam: Alright, well if by the word “bird” you just mean sacred avians in particular, then yes, I don’t believe in “birds,” where “birds” refers to sacred avians.

Alex: I knew it! So you admit you don’t believe in birds.

Sam: I do believe in birds, I just mean something different from you when I talk about “birds.”

Alex: Right, so you don’t believe in actual birds. Your position is ridiculous.

This is often how critics are disposed to react to me about talk of “reasons.” They’ll bake their preconception of what a “reason” is into some claim, like:

We have reasons to avoid pain.

But note that the term “reasons” here doesn’t specify whether it is meant in the sense they mean irreducible or reducible reasons. I believe in reasons_reducible but not reasons_irreducible. I would say that I “have a reason” to avoid pain: namely, that I desire not to be in pain. But if I say “yes,” they’ll declare victory and insist I’m conceding to their position. I am not. Because I believe in reasons_reducible, not reasons_irreducible. Conversely, if I say “no,” they will leverage the unresolved ambiguity between the reducible and irreducible meanings to make my position sound absurd:

Lance thinks he has no reason to avoid pain!

This makes it sound like I don’t desire to avoid pain, which is not true. And it does make me sound insane, if one doesn’t clearly disambiguate the sense of “reason” I deny from the sense of “reason” I don’t deny.

What I don’t think is that my desire to avoid pain literally gives me a reason to avoid pain. I just think I desire to avoid pain, period. And in English, at least, one way I might convey this is to say that I “have a reason” to avoid pain. This should no more be taken to mean that I literally have a reason than if someone says “Oh for Pete’s sake” that they think Pete literally has a sake, and that sakes are real. Rather, the notion of sakes is a quirk of language, a byproduct of the often idiomatic, metaphoric, and nonliteral ways speakers use to convey meaning. This point was stressed to a different end by Dennett (2012), who asked:

Are there sakes, as suggested by such familiar idioms as “for Pete’s sake” and “for the sake of —”? What are the identity conditions for sakes? How many sakes might there be? How do they come into existence? Can one still do something for FDR’s sake, or did it expire with him decades ago? Art for art’s sake shows that not only living things can have sakes. (p. 13)

These questions are likely intended to be a bit tongue in cheek, with the implication that there are no good answers to these questions. I believe we should treat talk of reasons the same way, and that philosophers have stumbled over themselves in a misguided act of idiomatic excess in characterizing normativity in terms of facts and desires giving us reasons. As the notion of sakes illustrates, along with dints and related terms that emerge in everyday language, there are at least candidate terms for potentially misguided reification. Dennett continues:

Quine gave us reasons to see the ontological candidacy of sakes as something of an accident of ordinary language (more specifically, of English, since there aren’t clear synonyms in all other languages), a sort of potential cognitive illusion frozen in a few idioms, waiting to be vivified by an unwary and profligate semanticist. The restriction to a few idioms (“for the sake of”, “on behalf of” and the like) which might rather gracefully be “fused” into unanalysed prepositions does suggest, as Quine proposed, that this noun is defective, and its putative referents need not be taken seriously from an ontological point of view. (p. 13)

We should take the same stance towards distinctively irreducible use of reasons. It is entirely fine to speak of sakes, dints, and so on, provided one appreciates that these do not refer to literal things-in-themselves, with their own ontological social security number, but rather can always be conceptually discharged in such a way that no indivisibly sake-ish or dint-ish residue is left over.

We should treat talk of reasons the same way. Irreducible reasons are a cognitive illusion that results from idiosyncrasies in ordinary English that have been given an artificial semblance of life by incautious ethicists.

A great deal of philosophy is used to paint one’s opposition as silly by failing to disambiguate between a meaning of a term that presupposes one’s own philosophical position from meanings that don’t presuppose one’s own view, then leveraging this ambiguity to give the impression that the person who denies your pet theory about the nature of some phenomenon denies the reality of the phenomenon in any respect at all.

This is how people often treat terms like “reason.” They presuppose their own conception of the notion in question, conflate this with how one might use the term in ordinary discourse, where there are pragmatic features of the use of the term that are not captured by or reducible to that person’s distinctive (and perhaps idiosyncratic) conception of the term, but then vacillate between use of the term in the ordinary sense and their specific use of it (though they may insist, often without any good evidence, that their use is the ordinary use). This is why people mistakenly think that I am somehow committed to going around saying things like:

There are no reasons to avoid pain.

I have no reason to object to someone punching me in the face.

I wouldn’t say these things. I would say that I have reasons to avoid pain and object to people punching me in the face. But in saying this, I am not obligated to mean what those who believe in irreducible reasons mean when they say these things. I’m not obligated to accept their definitions or conceptions of things. So, rhetoric aside, I don’t think proponents of irreducible reasons have much going for their accounts. It isn’t so much that they struggle to offer compelling arguments for the metaphysical status of the notion of an irreducible reason (though they might), but that once one diagnoses what may be causing the mistaken belief that there even is an intelligible notion of an irreducible reason, this can account for why these theorists would be prone to making this error.

Unfortunately, there may be no easy way to convince those who are convinced of the meaningfulness of their pseudoconcepts. From a first person point of view, they can feel as real and as compelling as anything else, so introspection may provide little succor. And from a dialectical perspective, the concept has so small a metaphysical footprint that some philosophers purport to establish realism without making any substantive metaphysical claims at all. If so, then there isn’t enough of a metaphysically robust position sticking its neck out to provide a target to strike at. Any further disputes will have to be waged on the grounds of intelligibility, who has the correct account of what’s going on with language, empirical claims about people’s psychology and historical claims about the etiology of their belief and concept formation, and so on. Those are challenging topics I cannot litigate from the armchair; they’d require considerable effort. And so for now, I will set them aside.

In short, I deny that there are any irreducibly normative reasons. This does not mean that I am so foolish and confused as to go around saying things like:

There are no reasons to believe anything.

I have no reason to avoid pain.

…and so on. I say all of these things, and don’t think I mean anything significantly different from what ordinary people mean when they say these things. What I don’t accept is a specific conception of “reasons” distinctive to academic philosophers.

People sometimes conflate their conception or account of a phenomenon with the phenomenon itself. And, as a result, they insist that if you don’t accept their account of the thing, you are denying the thing outright. But we don’t have to do this. We can use a term but not accept someone else’s account of what it means.

This is how I propose that we treat talk of reasons. We should treat reason-talk a useful way of speaking. Reasons are not things one can have. They are not given by facts or desires. Reasons are no more something one can have than one can have sakes, or put things, or discover a thing that isn’t anything in particular.

References

Dennett, D. C. (2012). Sakes and dints: And other definitions that philosophers really need not seek. TLS. Times Literary Supplement, (5683), 12-15.

1.0 What is metaethical relativism?

Metaethical relativism (or just “relativism”) is a philosophical position according to which the truth of moral claims can only be judged relative to one or another of multiple, distinct standards. Typically, these are either the standards of individuals or cultures.

Like other metaethical positions, relativism takes a position on the meaning of ordinary moral claims. An ordinary moral claim is not a mysterious or technical notion. It is simply the sorts of claims people would make in everyday circumstances about what is morally right, wrong, good, bad, permitted, prohibited, and so on. Philosophers typically give prototypical examples of moral claims like this:

“It is morally wrong to get an abortion.”

“It is morally obligatory to take care of your children.”

Notice that these sentences are a bit stilted and unnatural. In everyday language, you might instead hear things like:

“He stole a car?! He should get locked up!”

“Anyone who is cruel to animals is a trash human being.”

“Prolifers are scumbags.”

“You can’t trust nonbelievers, since they don’t believe they are accountable to a higher power.”

Notice that everyday moral language involves slang, is often harsh, and often doesn’t explicitly reference morality. In addition, it often focuses not on the actions themselves (lying, stealing, etc.) but on the character of the people performing the actions, or the people who support performing those actions. While the examples I gave are, of course, made-up, they still reflect a common disconnect between philosophical discussion about “moral language” and the reality of actual moral language as studied by psychologists (Pizarro & Tannenbaum, 2012).

2.0 Indexicality

According to relativists, moral claims contain an indexical element (which may be implicit) that allows the truth status of a moral claim to vary in accord with who is making the claim (Joyce, 2007).

What is an indexical? Indexicals are linguistic expressions that allow the meaning of an utterance to vary depending on its context of usage by varying what the speaker/writer is referring to. Standard indexicals include “I,” “you,” and “me”, as well as terms like “this,” and “that” (I am sure you can think of more).

This indexicality is implicit in that it is not represented by an explicit use of indexical phrasing. Suppose someone were to try a slice of pizza at a new pizza place and exclaimed:

“This pizza is delicious!”

Now ask yourself how this person would respond to the following question:

“If someone else tried this pizza, but did not find it delicious, would they be mistaken?”

Aside from the fact that this person might say something like “What are you talking about? Leave me alone, I’m trying to enjoy this pizza,” were they to seriously entertain the question they may very well say “no.” Why? One reason could be that they do not think that their remark about the pizza being delicious was a statement about some intrinsic property of the pizza. In other words, it would not be like picking up a rock and saying “This is a piece of quartz.” After all, if it is a piece of quartz, and someone else picked it up and said “No, this is a piece of basalt,” they would be incorrect. So what did our pizza lover mean? They might say something like:

“I only meant that I found the pizza to be delicious.”

If this is what they meant, then this gives us all the tools we need for understanding how an implicit indexical works. When this person initially said “This pizza is delicious!” they meant something like:

“This pizza is delicious [to me].”

Or

“[I find that] this pizza is delicious!”

Note the use of the terms “me” and “I” here: they are indexicals. They were implied but not explicitly stated. Relativists about morality hold that moral claims are used in much the same way. They, too, express something about the speaker’s standards, or the standards of the speaker’s culture. So a moral claim like:

“Lying for personal gain is wrong” can be understood to express something like:

“[I am opposed to] lying for personal gain”

“Lying for personal gain is wrong [according to my/my culture’s moral standards]”

“Lying for personal gain is [inconsistent with my values]”

3.0 Individual & Cultural Relativism

There are, of course, other distinctions to be made. First, there is the question of which standard a moral claim is relativized to. Most of the time this is either the standards of individuals or the standards of cultures. There is little consistency with the former, but we may call it individual subjectivism, or individual relativism (or just “subjectivism”). The latter is almost always called cultural relativism.

Individual relativism
The truth of a moral claim can only be judged relative to the standards of different individuals.

Cultural relativism
The truth of a moral claim can only be judged relative to the standards of different cultures.

Technically, moral claims could be judged relative to other standards, such as the standards of different species (e.g., humans). In fact, it is even possible to relativize moral standards to something other than the values of individuals or groups. This brings us to an important, though often overlooked fact about moral relativism: moral relativism is not necessarily inconsistent with moral realism. Let’s define moral realism and its negation, moral antirealism:

Moral realism
The position that there are stance-independent (or “objective”) moral facts.

Moral antirealism
The position that there are no stance-independent (or “objective”) moral facts.

What does “stance-independent” mean? It means that the truth of the claim in question is not made true by a stance. Consider the following statements:

“I like pineapple on pizza.”

“Carbon atoms have six protons.”

The statement about pineapple on pizza would only be true if you did, in fact, like pineapple on pizza. It is made true by your preferences. The second statement, however, is not. Whether carbon atoms have six protons or not does not depend on your preferences. If you preferred carbon atoms have 22 protons or 4 protons or no protons at all, this wouldn’t change how many protons they have (Note: I am presenting this distinction and these examples as facts, though it is possible in principle for people to disagree, and either believe both claims are relative or neither are).

Given this distinction, we can now see why moral relativism is consistent with moral realism. Antirealists hold that there are no stance-independent moral facts. To be an antirealist, you could instead hold that there are no moral facts at all, or that there are stance-dependent moral facts, i.e., facts about what is morally right or wrong that are true, but their truth depends on a stance. Both individual relativism and cultural relativism are forms of antirealism not because they are relativistic, but because the truth of moral claims depends on stances, either of individuals or of cultures.

However, it is possible to relativize moral standards to something other than a stance. To provide one (possibly humorous) example, you could hold that different moral standards apply to different people depending on their astrological signs. Perhaps it is permissible for Geminis to lie, but if you’re a Taurus, you are prohibited from lying. On such a view, the truth of a moral claim would be indexed to different moral standards, such that if a person were to say “It’s okay to steal,” whether this is true or false would depend on whether they were a Gemini or were referring to the actions of a Gemini. I’ve never heard of anyone holding a position like this, but the point is simply that it is possible.

Conversely, you could reject moral realism but not be a relativist. There are many ways to do this. Here are the two most common:

Error theory
All moral claims about what is right, wrong, good, bad, and so on are false. Typically this is because all such claims are implicitly committed to a false presupposition (e.g., all moral claims express God’s will. If God does not exist, all such claims are false).

Noncognitivism
Moral utterances do not make truth claims at all. Instead, they express nonpropositional content (content that does not attempt to assert anything true or false).

However, you could believe that there are stance-dependent moral facts, but that these facts do not vary from one person to another. Suppose you believed that moral facts depended on God’s preferences, and there is only one God. In this case, moral facts would be stance-dependent (so you’d be an antirealist), but nonrelative (their truth does not vary depending on which standard is being relativized to, since there’s only one standard). One position in the literature that exemplifies this view would be ideal observer theory:

Ideal observer theory
There is a single set of moral facts which reflects the standards of an ideal observer, a being that is fully informed and perfectly rational (i.e., without any bias).

This distinction is rarely discussed. It is subtle and perhaps a bit confusing. For a source that discusses this distinction, see here.

4.0 Agent & Appraiser Relativism

Another important and overlooked distinction is the difference between agent and appraiser relativism. Note that this distinction is consistent with the individual/cultural distinction, such that you could be an agent individual relativist, an agent cultural relativist, an appraiser individual relativist, or an appraiser cultural relativist (and you could likewise apply the agent/appraiser distinction to any other standard of relativization besides individuals and cultures):

Agent relativism
The truth of a moral claim is judged according to the standards of the agent performing the action (or the standards of that agent’s culture).

Appraiser relativism
The truth of a moral claim is judged according to the standards of the agent evaluating the action (or the standards of that evaluator’s culture).

There is an important distinction here. When a person makes a moral claim, a relativist will recognize that the claim in question is implicitly indexed to some standard or other. The truth of that claim is determined by whether the statement is consistent with the standard in question. Suppose Alex considers it morally acceptable to steal, says:

Stealing isn’t morally wrong.

…then proceeds to steal something.

Sam comes along and hears Alex say it’s not wrong to steal, and then steal something. How do these two forms of relativism assess the truth of Alex’s claim? On both accounts, Alex’s statement means something like:

I consider it morally acceptable to steal.

…and on both accounts, this statement is true. Alex does consider it acceptable to steal, and so the statement is true because it is indexed to Alex’s standards.

However, the critical difference is that as an agent relativist, you yourself are obliged to judge whether it is right or wrong for Alex to steal on the basis of Alex’s standards. If Alex thinks it’s not wrong to steal, then it isn’t wrong for Alex to steal, full stop. That is, any outside evaluator must accept that it is morally permissible for Alex to stela. Agent relativism thus “fixes” the rightness or wrongness of an action by the standards of the agent.

If you’re an appraiser relativist, things get a bit more complicated. Alex’s statement is true, since it is indexed to Alex’s own standards. But as an appraiser relativist, judgments about whether an action is right or wrong are not made on the basis of the standards agent performing the action, even if the statements made by that agent, insofar as they are indexed to that agent’s standards, are true. Instead, the appraiser relativist judges whether an action is right or wrong on the basis of their own standards. As such, the appraiser relativist is committed to judging whether it is morally wrong for Alex to steal by appeal to their own standards.

As such, agent and appraiser relativism are best construed as accounts of how we judge moral actions, not as accounts of how we assess the truth of moral claims. In practice, all instances in which a person is making a moral claim will tend to be accompanied by a judgment about the rightness or wrongness of the act in question. Both agent and appraiser relativists can assess whether the statements people make are true in the same way: by allowing the context to determine the referent of the implicit indexical, i.e.:

Alex: Stealing is wrong

…is implicitly indexed to Alex’s standards, amounting to the statement:

Alex: I consider stealing wrong.

Both accounts should regard this statement as true, since in this case the agent and the evaluator are one in the same. But whereas the agent relativist is committed to judging the moral status of stealing by the standards of agents engaging in the action, the appraiser relativist dissociates their evaluation of the action from the agent performing it, and instead judges the rightness or wrongness of each agent by their own standards.

One common criticism of “relativism” is that it requires you to tolerate other people’s actions, even if they conflict with your own, and that you must condone or abstain from interfering when people steal or do even worse things. As you can see from these definitions, this is (at best) only true of agent relativism, not appraiser relativism. In practice, most critics of “relativism” only target agent relativism, and almost never mention appraiser relativism. This might be because they aren’t aware of the distinction. But it is suspiciously convenient that many critics focus on the form of relativism most subject to a rhetorically powerful objection.

In fact, there are many popular objections to relativism that are similarly misleading or downright false. Many philosophers seem to have it out for relativism. The philosopher Mike Huemer even has a section in one of his books that states that he hates relativism. I can’t do much about people hating relativism, but much of that hatred appears to be rooted in misunderstandings of the position. Regardless of whether you walk away from this class accepting, rejecting, or having no definitive position on relativism, I’d like you to be aware of all the reasons you shouldn’t reject the position. Here, we will cover some of the most prominent. Note that while some of these are mistakes that any reasonable person should agree with, some are more contestable, and at least some (if not many) academics would disagree with the assessment offered here.

[This section was edited on 12/17/2025 at 2:37 PM ET. Thank you to Randomize 12345 for the critical feedback.]

5.0 Normative and Descriptive Relativism

Metaethical relativism is sometimes conflated with two other notions, neither of which reflects a genuine metaethical position:

Descriptive relativism
The empirical position that there are widespread and fundamental differences in the moral values of different individuals or cultures.

Fundamental differences in moral values are differences that are due to a commitment to conflicting moral standards, and not due to a difference in nonmoral belief. For instance, there could be two individuals or cultures in which everyone agrees you should employ the method of punishment that most effectively deters crime. In one culture, they may practice executions but not in the other because the culture practicing execution believes it is the best way to deter crime, and the culture that doesn’t practice it thinks it isn’t an effective way to deter crime. If the society that practiced execution were given convincing evidence it wasn’t an effective deterrent, they’d stop the practice. In this case, both societies have the same fundamental moral standards, but implement different moral practices out of differences in their nonmoral beliefs. If everyone shared the same fundamental values in this way, descriptive relativism would be false.

A fundamental difference in moral value would be one that isn’t attributable to differences in nonmoral beliefs. If Alex believes it is good to punish criminals as an end in itself, and Sam thinks it is only permissible to do so for the positive consequences this yields to that person and society, and these moral values are not the result of a commitment to a deeper and more foundational moral value, then they have a genuinely fundamental difference in moral standards.

Normative relativism
The position that we should respect or at least tolerate people and cultures with moral standards that differ from our own.

Metaethical relativism is not the same as either of these positions, nor does it entail either of these positions. In fact, none of these positions entail the others. Unfortunately, critics of metaethical relativism often conflate these three positions.

References

Joyce, R. (2007). Moral objectivity and moral relativism. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy archive. https://plato.stanford.edu/ARCHIVES/WIN2009/entries/moral-anti-realism/moral-subjectivism-versus-relativism.html

Pizarro, D. A., & Tannenbaum, D. (2012). Bringing character back: How the motivation to evaluate character influences judgments of moral blame. In M. Mikulincer & P. R. Shaver (Eds.), The social psychology of morality: Exploring the causes of good and evil (pp. 91–108). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/13091-005

Illusionism is a position on the nature of consciousness according to which systematic and misleading introspective misrepresentations cause people to think they have phenomenal consciousness, but they are mistaken; there is no such thing as phenomenal consciousness. Or, in simpler terms:

1. People think they have phenomenal states (or qualia)

2. There are no phenomenal states (or qualia)

“Illusionism” is an unfortunate name. The name has prompted one of the laziest objections to a philosophical position. The criticism goes something like this:

Illusionism is self-defeating. According to illusionists, we are subject to the illusion of phenomenal consciousness. But in order to be subject to an illusion, you’d need to be phenomenally conscious! So it’s not possible for phenomenal consciousness to be an illusion. After all, if anything seems any way at all to you, then you’re phenomenally conscious, so phenomenal consciousness itself can’t be an illusion.

There are two straightforward responses to this objection:

First, it begs the question against illusionists by presuming that the only way one could be subject to an illusion is if they were phenomenally conscious of it. Illusionists are not obliged to agree that the only way one could be subject to an illusion is if they were phenomenally conscious of it.

Second, the position does not turn on the notion of an illusion in the first place. The illusionist can describe the position without any appeal to illusions. For instance, they can say that human minds are structured (or can be structured given appropriate experiences) to prompt people to make mistaken judgments about the nature of their consciousness. Notions such as belief, judgment, and so on don’t require the presumption of phenomenal consciousness.

The latter objection highlights how absurd this line of reasoning is. It’s as if critics think they can sink the position just by making uncharitable inferences entirely on the basis of the name of the position, as if the name and whatever assumptions one makes about the position on the basis of its name were somehow essential to the position. They aren’t.

In case you think nobody actually makes this sort of objection, they do. Here are some examples:

Here’s one from JPA

This one is especially explicit:

Similar remarks have even been made by people in response to my blog posts:

These sorts of mistakes are even made by professional philosophers outside of more informal contexts like Twitter. Here’s a similar remark from Galen Strawson (2018):

One of the strangest things the Deniers say is that although it seems that there is conscious experience, there isn’t really any conscious experience: the seeming is, in fact, an illusion. The trouble with this is that any such illusion is already and necessarily an actual instance of the thing said to be an illusion.

This is especially absurd because of the inclusion of necessarily. It’s necessarily the case that if it seems to you that consciousness is a certain way, then you are phenomenally conscious? When was this established? How was this established?

Will Lugar helpfully provided an example in a published article as well, from Searle:

We cannot show that consciousness is an illusion like sunsets or rainbows because, where the very existence of consciousness is concerned, we cannot make the distinction between reality and illusion. If I consciously have the illusion that I am conscious, then I already am conscious. Traditional eliminative reductions rest on a distinction between reality and illusion, but where the existence of consciousness is concerned, the conscious illusion is itself the reality of consciousness. (Searle, 2007, p. 171)

This is ridiculous. The illusionist does not think that you are phenomenally conscious of the illusion that you’re phenomenally conscious. Instead, they’d either think you are conscious of the illusion in some non-phenomenal sense or that you are subject to the illusion without being “conscious” of it.

I’m not the first person to notice this bizarre, question-begging reaction to illusionism. Keith Frankish, a prominent contemporary proponent of illusionism, explicitly noted this himself. Have a look at this exchange from over five years ago:

Note that Keith Frankish considers the most common and/or worst misconception about illusionism to be the notion that it’s “self-defeating since illusions themselves involve phenomenally conscious experience” because it “simply begs the question.”

Frankish is right. It does beg the question. I don’t know exactly why critics raise such a lazy and weak objection against illusionism. Many critics of illusionism seem openly hostile and contemptuous of illusionism for reasons I still find mysterious. Others seem to not understand the position and appear dedicated to not doing so. I’ve discovered on more than one occasion that a critic of illusionism has never read Dennett’s work or appears to know little about the position. I have a dim recollection that I may have even encountered a person who doesn’t know who Dennett was and yet was aggressively denigrating illusionism.

Contempt for or ignorance of the position may account for some instances of this objection, though some may be committing a kind of nominal fallacy: the mistake of inferring what the position is on the basis of its name alone.

Nominal fallacy: The mistaken presumption that an accurate understanding of a concept, position, or phenomenon can be inferred from the name(s) or label(s) used to refer to it.

“Illusionism” is simply a cute name for the view. One can drop the notion of an illusion entirely and it would make no difference whatsoever to the content of the position. For instance, illusionism could be construed in terms that drop any reference to illusions and simply speak in functional, behavioral, or other non-phenomenal terms. We could rename the position, for instance, phenomenal error theory, or something like that, and restate the whole position without any reference to illusions. It would make no difference. I think reflexive hostility, dogmatism, intellectual laziness, and social forces (it’s rewarding to be part of a crowd that has already decided to publicly shit on the position) collectively account for much of the dismissiveness towards illusionism. This hostility is often so overt, and its proponents are often so open in patting one another on the back for their collective denigration, that it strikes me as a kind of diffuse bullying or social pressure by people who regard their position as being in the dominant position directed against a view with few defenders.

The kind of social pressure I’ve seen from academics and laypeople alike often seems intended to shame people with less popular views or encourage them to capitulate or shut up. Coupled with broad acceptance of mockery and insults directed at views and their proponents along with silly, asinine objections, the lazy, cliquish way philosophers denigrate certain philosophical positions has been one of my primary sources of disappointment with academia.

References

Searle, J. R. (2007). Dualism revisited. Journal of Physiology-Paris, 101(4-6), 169-178.

Note: This list will be updated and modified based on user suggestions, feedback, and criticisms. The goal is to gather a comprehensive archive of bad objections to metaethical relativism as well as common misunderstandings and provide a (relatively) short response to them.

If you have suggestions on how to organize these into broader categories I will also reorder them to better fit those categories. If there’s something I don’t cover here, please leave a comment explaining what it is.

If you would like to submit your own response or commentary and I think it’s good I’d be happy to include it as a separate addendum or to incorporate it into the response here (with your permission, and with whatever form of credit you’d like to receive).

1. Relativists cannot condemn other people or cultures

This is at best only true for some forms of relativism. If you’re an appraiser relativist, you judge other people and cultures by your own standards, and nothing about your standards prohibits you from potentially considering their actions right or wrong. Things get more complicated for agent relativism. If other people or cultures have standards that differ from your own, then they are not doing anything wrong when they engage in actions that you yourself wouldn’t engage in. Things can get complicated if the agent relativist’s moral values directly conflict with another person’s moral values. If you believe you have a moral right to defend yourself from an attack, and someone else thinks it’s morally acceptable to attack you, what, as an agent relativist, do you do? Perhaps an agent relativist could tell us how to address such conflicts, but the point is that appraiser relativists can condemn other people and cultures without issue.

In addition, both appraiser and agent relativists can criticize people who act in a way inconsistent with their own standards or the standards of their culture. If a society’s moral standards hold that all citizens are equal, but members of that society nevertheless discriminate against some citizens, relativists can condemn them for failing to comply with their own moral standards.

Critics who present this objection should be more specific about which types of relativism the objection applies to (if any) and why it is that they can or cannot condemn other people and cultures.

2. Relativism leads to contradictions

Some critics insist that moral relativism contradicts itself because it allows for the same statement to be both true and false. This is not true. Relativism does not allow for the “same statement” to be both true and false. Technically, relativism holds that a statement like:

Stealing is morally wrong.

Could be true and false, but this is because relativism treats such claims as having an implicit indexical component. Consider words like “I,” “you,” or “me”. Consider the statement:

I am Lance.

Is this statement true or false? It depends who says it. If I say it, it is true. If someone who is not Lance says it, it is false. So the exact same statement, “I am Lance” can be both true and false at the same time. You can stand myself and someone who is not named Lance side by side. Every time I say “I am Lance” it is true, and every time they say “I am Lance” it is false. Why? Because the word “I” is an indexical. In this case, it refers to the person making the claim. So when I say “I am Lance” I am referring to myself, and when anyone else says “I am Lance” they are referring to themselves. The relativist takes statements like “Stealing is morally wrong” to mean something like:

Stealing is morally wrong according to my standards.

or

I consider stealing to be morally wrong.

This implicit indexing allows the truth status of the “same” moral claim to be true when one person says it but false when another says it because the truth of the claim can only be judged relative to the respective moral standards of those people.

Indexicals are a familiar, ordinary feature of the way people are already disposed to speak and think, so it is a bit surprising that critics of relativism are so disposed towards making this serious of a mistake.

3. Relativism is self-refuting

Some critics argue like this: “If you claim that morality is relative, then that statement is itself relative!” First of all, this would not be a self-refutation. So what if the statement itself was true in a relative sense? That wouldn’t make it false. More importantly, these critics mistakenly take relativism to be making a broader claim about what sorts of statements are relative than it is actually committed to. Relativism is a claim about first-order moral claims. What are these? These are direct claims about what is right or wrong, good or bad, prohibited or permitted, and so on (e.g., “Stealing is wrong”). It is not a position about the relativity of any other claims, including nonmoral claims (“That house is made of bricks”) or, critically, second-order or metaethical claims (these mean the same thing), such as “All moral claims are relative.” While this is a claim about morality, it is not a first-order moral claim, and the claim does not apply to itself.

Other critics will insist that if you claim that morality is relative that this statement presumes a nonrelative standard, so you are contradicting yourself. Again, this is a result of failing to understand that moral relativism is a position about first-order moral claims. The claim “all moral truths are relative” does not apply to itself. There is no contradiction in being a nonrelativist about the truth of relativism. Note another mistake here: these critics are simply assuming that if you say that all moral claims are relative, that you must mean this in a nonrelative way. How do they know this? Simple: they don’t. Critics of relativism often presume to know what proponents of relativism mean by what they say, when they aren’t in a position to do so.

4. It is impossible to live as a relativist

No it isn’t.

Such accusations are almost completely unsubstantiated and are typically supported by appeal to one or more other confusions and misunderstandings about relativism. It is not impossible to live as a relativist.

5. Relativism denies that there are moral truths, or that morality exists

Not it doesn’t. Relativism is a position about the nature of moral truth. It is a part of the position that there are (or at least can be) moral truths.

As far as the claim that morality doesn’t “exist”, this is ambiguous. Often critics mean something like the claim that “there are nonrelative, stance-independent moral facts.” Relativists do deny these exist, but firstly, relativists can believe there are stance-independent moral facts. Most don’t, though. More importantly, relativists don’t deny that people engage in moral judgment, that we have laws, institutions, and social norms that reflect moral principles and values, and so on. In other words, they think morality exists as a genuine psychological, social, cultural, religious, and more generally human phenomenon. These are very mundane respects in which morality clearly exists.

To accuse the relativist of thinking morality doesn’t “exist” is highly misleading without clarifying what this means. If all it means is that relativists deny that there are nonrelative moral truths, this is a trivial observation, and cannot serve as any substantive sort of objection. For comparison, this would be like objecting to atheism by saying that the position “denies the existence of God.” This is not an objection. It is literally just a description of what the position is. Just so, objecting to relativism on the grounds that it denies the existence of nonrelative moral truth is not a legitimate objection.

6. Relativism cannot make sense of moral disagreement

This objection has more going for it than others, but it is still misguided.

The argument runs roughly like this. Suppose you and a friend were arguing about the capital of New York. They insist it’s New York City, but you know it’s Albany. You disagree about what the facts are. It would make no sense to say that you disagreed, but neither of you held a different position on what the truth of the capital of New York.

Critics transpose this rationale over to morality. If you think stealing is wrong, but you run into someone who doesn’t think it’s wrong, you’re in the same situation as you’d be about state capitals: there is a stance-independent fact about whether stealing is wrong or not, so you disagree about what the truth is.

How can relativists make sense of this? When you say “stealing is wrong” this means that you disapprove of stealing. This is true. When the other person says “stealing is not wrong,” this means they don’t disapprove of stealing. This is also true. So there are no facts for you to disagree about. So does relativism make no sense because you don’t disagree about anything?

Not so fast. Are all disagreements disputes about what’s true? Have you and your friends ever wanted to order pizza, and had a dispute about what toppings to get? Maybe one friend hates mushrooms or another is vegetarian. You may go on to have a discussion about what toppings to get. It might even get a little heated. “You always insist on pepperoni!” One might consider such a dispute a…disagreement. And yet does anyone think that there is an objectively correct (or stance-independent) set of toppings to get? I suspect not. It’s really a matter of collective choice. And that’s just it. Some disagreements are not disputes about what’s true, they’re disagreements about what to do.

Such occurrences are common. If you go to buy a car or house, you will probably negotiate the price. The seller wants the highest price they can get, you want the lowest. You disagree about the price, and may argue about it. But this does not mean that there is a stance-independent fact about the “correct” price of the house or car. There is simply whatever price you’d both agree to.

The argument that relativism can’t handle disagreement relies on an overly narrow conception of “disagreement” that construes disagreements exclusively in terms of disputes about what the facts are, rather than a broader range of disputes that can include coordinating actions or coming to agreements. Indeed, we even call the resolution to conflicts about what toppings to get, or how much to pay for a car, and so on agreements.

Now, taking this back to morality, imagine a person who is opposed to abortion is out protesting abortion. A person who is prochoice confronts them, and they begin arguing with one another. Must we presume this would only make sense if they both think there is an objective (stance-independent) fact about whether abortion is right or wrong? No. Even if both are individual relativists, think about their overall set of attitudes:

Alex: Prochoice. Thinks abortion is not wrong. And wants there to be access to abortion.

Sam: Prolife. Thinks abortion is wrong. And wants to restrict access to abortions.

These people have different goals. And their goals directly conflict with one another. Why wouldn’t this be a good reason to argue?

As a final example, suppose you are confronted by a bully who demands your lunch money. Presumably you wouldn’t want to hand it over. You may argue with them or try to persuade them not to take it. But do you and the bully disagree about what the facts are? They want your money. You don’t want to give it up. Suppose you say “But what you’re doing is wrong”? …and they respond “Yea, so? I don’t care.” Now what are you going to do? You both agree on what’s going on, and both agree it’s wrong to take your lunch money. Note that you don’t disagree on any of the facts. So there’s no disagreement, right?

I don’t know about you, but this strikes me as quite strange. Just because you agree on what the facts are doesn’t mean you’d have no objection to them stealing from you. You may (and probably would) still wish to persuade them not to, by threatening to report them, pointing to a security camera and note there’d be evidence, call out for help, run away, and so on.

7. Relativism can’t account for moral progress

Yes, it can. Progress can be understood as progress relative to a goal, standard, or set of values. These goals don’t need to be objective duties or obligations you are required to follow independent of your subjective values or preferences. People make progress on personal goals all the time: in video games, in playing music or doing art, and so on.

In other words, we already think of ourselves as making progress in areas where there is no plausible set of stance-independent (objective) normative facts about what’s right, wrong, good, bad, etc. So why think this is somehow impossible for morality?

8. Moral relativism requires us to tolerate others, and even to tolerate intolerance

This might be true to some extent for agent relativism but it is not true for appraiser relativism.

9. Relativism is a lazy position people use as an excuse to justify their actions

It might be true that some people endorse relativism out of laziness or to excuse bad behavior. This is irrelevant to whether relativism is true. The mere fact that some people who hold a position may do so for questionable reasons does not mean the position is wrong. Some people accept what they’re taught in school without putting much effort in. They end up believing in the sun and the existence of bacteria and that water is H2O. This in no way indicates that any of these beliefs are false.

Also, one could argue that people appeal to moral realism to justify their bad behavior. After all, it’s a lot easier to justify your actions if you insist they aren’t your values, they’re just the moral facts, and you are obligated to obey them whether you wanted to or not.

10. The existence of widespread moral diversity proves relativism is true

It doesn’t. People disagree about all sorts of things: the existence of God, the causes of climate change, whether there was ever life on Mars, and so on. This does not mean that relativism about scientific claims or the existence of God are only true or false relative to different people’s preferences.

11. Moral relativism holds that morality is “made” rather than “discovered”

This is a bit misleading. Do you choose, create, or make your food preferences? I don’t. Simply because some fact about what you consider right or wrong depends on your moral values or those of your culture doesn’t mean this is a simple matter of choice.

12. Relativism can’t handle moral reformers

Yes it can (at least most forms of it can). First, reformers often attempt to convince their society to live by the moral standards it claims to adhere to in the first place. For instance, civil rights reformers may appeal to the fact that a surrounding culture oppressing them purports to believe in “equality” for all, or to the notion that we are all entitled to happiness, liberty, or opportunity. It is possible for the dominant cultural forces in a society to live in a way inconsistent with their own ideal standards, to come to realize this, and to change so as to live better in accord with their more fundamental moral values.

Second, individual forms of relativism have no problem accounting for reformers.

Third, appraiser relativism has no problem accounting for reformers. Reformers would be immoral relative to the standards of whoever they’re opposing but moral relative to their own standards.

13. Relativists must regard all moral standards as equally valid

This objection is strange because it seems to smuggle in the nonrelativistic presuppositions of the critic. It is true that a moral relativist will not believe there is any privileged point of view, i.e., a nonrelative view from which one could judge one moral standard to be “better” or “more moral” than another. But there is also no such vantage from which one could judge all moral standards to be equally good, either. There simply is no nonrelative standard from which to evaluate different moral standards at all.

Furthermore, when we say that another person’s perspective is “valid” this may imply that we are tolerant of that perspective and don’t oppose it. But relativists are not necessarily committed to tolerating moral standards that differ from their own. So this objection also carries implications that smuggle in other misunderstandings about relativism.

14. Relativism is a counterintuitive position almost nobody actually holds

This is an empirical claim. There is, at present, very little empirical evidence to support this claim.

15. Most philosophers are moral realists, while almost none are relativists, so relativists hold a position wildly at odds with what most philosophers think

This one is actually true. It’s just not clear this is a very good reason to reject moral relativism. While we might consider what most analytic philosophers think to be some evidence for a position, it is at best indirect evidence. Ultimately what matters is the overall quality of arguments and evidence for a view, not the mere fact that people believe it.

16. Relativists don’t really believe what they say

Some critics of relativism will insist that nobody sincerely believes relativism. This has nothing to do with whether relativism is true. In addition, this is an empirical claim, and those who make such claims rarely have any evidence to substantiate these claims. Most of the time, people who make these claims are not in a position to know whether any particular person or people in general don’t believe what they say. They can’t read minds! Rather, this is a way of criticizing the people who espouse a view without engaging with the view. What makes this approach insidious is that, while they can rarely substantiate these claims, it’s also hard to disprove them, as well. If a critic can successfully undermine trust in the relativist, they can threaten their position without offering any reasons to think relativism is mistaken.

17. Relativists readily abandon their position under pressure

Critics of relativism sometimes claim that people who profess to endorse the view easily relent or abandon these views with the slightest pressure. This is an empirical claim, and there’s no well established body of empirical data suggesting it’s true. This is, at best, based on anecdotal evidence, and at worst is simply something critics will make up or suppose is the case without being able to support this claim.

Even if it were true that people readily abandoned relativism under pressure, this does not mean relativism is false. Furthermore, we may wonder whether abandoning relativism is an indication that they were persuaded it was mistaken. It may not be. People care about their reputations and care about their grades. If a professor challenges a student espousing relativism, recanting their position (at least publicly) may be a way to preserve standing with a professor. Critics also often misrepresent relativism in ways that imply that you are a bad person if you endorse moral relativism. Publicly implying that someone has bad moral character if they believe something can incentivize people abandoning a view or at least no longer publicly supporting it if that person is more concerned with their reputation than with defending the view.

First, note that this has nothing to do with whether relativism is true. Second, this is an empirical claim about the psychology of individuals. It may or may not be true of any particular people that they don’t actually believe what they say they do, but critics are rarely in a good position to know this, since they can’t read minds.

18. Relativism is evil or if you endorse relativism, you are evil

People are entitled to think views are evil or that if you endorse a view, then you are evil. However, if they do make this claim, it’s often based on misunderstandings about relativism. Among other things, relativism is a descriptive position. A person who endorses that it’s true isn’t necessarily endorsing it as good or desirable. For comparison, endorsing the belief that cancer exists does not mean that you think cancer is a good thing.

19. Thinking things are right or wrong implies you’re not a relativist

Sometimes people will say that a person claims to be a relativist, but then goes on to judge other people’s actions or express views about what’s right or wrong. They then claim or imply that this is some kind of contradiction. It isn’t. For comparison, if you don’t think there are stance-independent truths about what food or music is good or bad, does this mean you are contradicting yourself if you say that you like a particular song or restaurant? No. This is absurd. The position that your moral claims express your value or your cultures values does not mean that you don’t have moral values, nor does it mean that you are prohibited from judging other people or cultures.

20. If you have a strong moral stance, this suggests you’re not really a relativist

Some people think that if you’re a moral relativist, that this indicates you should be less committed to your moral values. So if a relativist appears to be passionate about a moral issue, this is taken to indicate they’re actually a nonrelativist realist. This is not true. There is no inconsistency between being a relativist and having firm moral convictions.

21. Relativism treats morality exactly like our preference for ice cream flavors

This is misleading. While individual relativism does treat moral claims as something approximately like expressions of preferences, critics of relativism often imply that your moral claims are preferences, and your taste claims (like a preference for chocolate over vanilla) are preferences, then they are not only alike in that they are both expressions of preferences, but they are alike in other respects as well. I call this the overcomparison fallacy. The overcomparison fallacy occurs whenever a comparison is made between two things, such that have a particular thing or things in common, but others mistakenly think that they must have other things in common as well. For instance, suppose I say that lemons and the sun are alike in that both are yellow. It would be a mistake to say “You’re saying lemons are just like the sun? That’s ridiculous! The sun is much bigger and hotter!”

Likewise, the fact that a moral standard is a preference does not mean it is identical to food preferences in any other respects. Here are two important differences:

Scope: Food preferences are often preferences about our own conduct. They only concern what we eat ourselves, and have nothing to do with what others eat. In contrast, moral preferences often concern other people’s conduct. I don’t have a preference that other people enjoy the same food as me, but I do have a preference that they don’t lie or steal indiscriminately. Preferences can thus vary in scope, i.e., who they apply to.

Importance: If my ice cream preferences changed tomorrow, I wouldn’t care. But I’d care a whole lot if I were told that tomorrow I’d start finding it acceptable to lie and steal indiscriminately. I wouldn’t want to be that sort of person. Some values are more important to us. Some values are important enough to us that we prefer to retain those values no matter what, whereas others are incidental: they could differ, and we wouldn’t (given our current preferences) care very much.

Critics of relativism will often compare it to food preferences to scoff at the position. Yet when they do so by suggesting that the relativist thinks their moral values are as arbitrary or unimportant as simple taste preferences, or they think the relativist’s views make no sense because preferences only apply to oneself, they are mistakenly think that because you think moral standards and food preferences are both products of our own goals and values, that moral preferences and taste preferences are identical in every other respect as well. This simply isn’t true.

22. Conflating metaethical relativism with normative relativism

Some critics conflate metaethical relativism with normative relativism, which is the view that we should tolerate or respect other people or cultures with different moral standards.

23. Conflating metaethical relativism with descriptive relativism

Some critics conflate metaethical relativism with descriptive relativism, which is the empirical hypothesis that different individuals or cultures have fundamentally different moral values.

24. Subjectivism/Relativism imply that we are infallible

This objection is often directed against individual relativism (or “subjectivism”) in particular, which is the view that moral claims are made true by each person’s preferences and are thus relative to individuals rather than groups. However, the same objection could apply to other forms of relativism.

According to this objection, if relativism were true, we’d be incapable of making errors. This, critics insist, is absurd. The objection would go something like this:

P1: If relativism is true, we are morally infallible.
P2: We are not morally infallible.
C: Therefore, relativism is not true.

The reasoning behind the first premise is that if moral truth reflects whatever it is we prefer, or desire, or believe is morally right or wrong, then it’s not possible for us to make mistakes about what’s morally right or wrong. For comparison, one might think if you find that you prefer vanilla over chocolate, this isn’t something you could be incorrect about. All your judgments about what you prefer or disprefer simply determine what is true or false, and, as such, you need never worry about being mistaken. Even if you change your mind, whatever you change your mind to is now the truth.

Yet it is supposed to be very counterintuitive that we can’t be wrong about moral beliefs. We might think of times when we decided we were mistaken, or where we felt someone else was mistaken. Yet this would be impossible if people were infallible. Or we can imagine changing our minds about what’s morally right or wrong, or wondering if something really is right or wrong. This seems reasonable, but if we were infallible, wondering about such things wouldn’t make much sense. So, the reasoning goes, since it seems like we are fallible, relativism couldn’t be true.

This is not a good objection to relativism. The relativist has at least two main responses, but, taken together, they highlight how this objection derives what little persuasive force it has from misleading audiences.

Both of these objections first rely on being very clear about what the relativist is committed to. If you’re an individual subjectivist, you may hold the view that moral truth is determined by whatever our desires are. However, sophisticated forms of subjectivism often draw a distinction between instrumental and non-instrumental desires. An non-instrumental desire is a desire for something that isn’t a means to some further end; it is an end in itself. An instrumental desire is a desire that serves our non-instrumental desires; it is a means to an end. For instance, suppose you have the non-instrumental desire to be happy and avoid suffering. To achieve this end, you may need to go to the dentist, even though this would cause you some suffering. You may reason that since you desire less overall suffering in the long-term, it is best to suffer somewhat now. Going to the dentist is thus an instrumental desire, rather than something you desire for its own sake.

First, a relativist may point out that we could be mistaken about many of our non-instrumental desires. Why? Because we can be incorrect about what means would achieve our ends. Just because you have the goal of having a successful career does not entail that you know which decisions will realize that goal. A relativist could argue that it’s not that implausible that we could be infallible with respect to one or a handful of our most fundamental, non-instrumental values (e.g., a desire for happiness), but that we could quite easily be mistaken about just about every instrumental desire.

What this results in is a fairly modest claim to infallibility: I am not capable of being mistaken about my most basic desires, like a desire to be happy. This would result in rejecting “P2: We are not morally infallible.”

Second, subjectivism does not entail that we’re infallible even about our non-instrumental desires. It is consistent with subjectivism to believe we simply are capable of being mistaken about our own desires, including our non-instrumental ones. So another approach a subjectivist may take is to simply deny that we’re infallible. This would result in rejecting “P1: If relativism is true, we are morally infallible.”

However, the best strategy for relativists is to combine these two possibilities, draw attention to the vacuousness of the critic’s objection, and note how it is rooted in misleading audiences. Here’s how this works.

First, the subjectivist should ask the critic whether they think we are incapable of making mistakes about at least some of our desires. If the critic answers “Yes,” then the subjectivist can immediately not that the critic’s objection no longer works. After all, the subjectivist identifies moral truth claims with reports about their desires. If the critic things we are capable of being mistaken about our reports about our desires, then it would make no sense for them to think the subjectivist is committed to infallibility. After all, the subjectivist takes moral claims to be reports about their desires. If they’re fallible about the latter, then they are fallible to their moral claims.

If, on the other hand, the critic insists that we are infallible with respect to our desires, well, then, what’s so objectionable about the subjectivist position believing our moral judgments are infallible? Conditional on the belief that reports about our desires are infallible, then if our moral claims just are reports about our values then ipso facto our moral claims are infallible. The realist themselves will have undercut their own rationale for holding that this position is absurd, because they themselves are committed to the relevant form of infallibility.

The reason this argument appears persuasive to some people is that the critic fails to be explicit about what it is the subjectivist may think we’re infallible about. If we take some isolated claim:

Stealing is morally wrong.

…and are then told that the subjectivist believes we’re “infallible” about this claim then, insofar as “Stealing is morally wrong” is not regarded as a report about the speaker’s desires, this claim might seem absurd. In other words, it might appear absurd provided one doesn’t disambiguate what the statement means, allowing audiences to conflate the subjectivist’s analysis with some non-subjectivist analysis, and give the false impression that the subjectivist is suggesting we are infallible with regard to something other than reports about our desires. Suppose you translated the subjectivist’s moral claims into their explicitly subjectivist analysis:

I disapprove of stealing.

Is it that outlandish to say that people are infallible regarding such claims? Evidently not, or it would make no sense for the critic themselves to insist that subjectivism would entail infallibility: they themselves are implying that they think reports about our desires are infallible.

Now, why might one think we are fallible about our moral claims. Well, the subjectivist might think that we are fallible for various reasons consistent with subjectivism. But the main purpose of the criticism that subjectivism is absurd because it entails infallibility is a direct appeal to the audience’s hoped-for non-subjective moral intuitions. That’s it. Such objections ultimately amount to “subjectivism is false because non-subjectivism is true.” This is coupled with some misleading window dressing that conceals how empty such an objection is. It is not markedly different than saying that atheism is absurd because it denies the existence of God, but, since God exists, atheism is false.

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