1.0 Forty foot, and full of sway

The post “College English Majors Can’t Read” went a bit viral some time ago. I’m not here to discuss the post. Instead, I want to draw attention to a passage presented in the post. Students were presented with the first paragraph of Bleak House by Charles Dickens and were asked to interpret it. Here is the passage:

LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

How well did you interpret this passage? The Biblical references, figurative language, and a handful of archaic ways of using terms (e.g., “wonderful”) may prove a challenge for many people. With time, English will evolve, and a passage like this will become almost completely incomprehensible to latter day English speakers. Would this mean that the words used in the passage would become literally meaningless?

No. Of course not. Dickens had an intent when writing the passage, and were Dickens fluent in contemporary English vernacular, he would have little trouble conveying, or “translating” the passage into Gen Z speak. In contrast, Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky will always be mostly nonsensical. Consider the first quatrain:

Some of the words here are ordinary English words: and, then, did. Yet there are many nonsense words here: brillig, slithy, outgrabe. These words don’t mean anything. As a result, the passage as a whole is nonsensical, for much the same reason one could not make complete sense of the demand that one “Please put the leerigs in the meldrif.” Yet, curiously, it mirrors meaningful language closely enough that it is still capable of giving the odd sense of being almost meaningful. To me, the passage sounds like a description of a calm nature scene. If I had to translate it, maybe I’d get something like this: It was calm, and the tall grasses blew back and forth in the gentle wind. All was peaceful deep in the woods, and the creatures of the forest were still.

I don’t know what vibe I was supposed to get, if any. Maybe the passage reads as ominous to you. But it doesn’t matter. This is a nonsense poem, and many of those words don’t mean anything. If you really wanted to, you could Jabberwockify the passage from Dickens and get similar nonsense. I asked ChatGPT to do so, and this is what I got (I repeated the first quatrain at the end since ChatGPT didn’t do this):

There’s a lot of nonsense there, and yet it still paints a picture of a dreary, muddy scene. There’s something to that. When apparent nonsense is inserted into a context, the surrounding context can often bleed into the nonsense terms, giving them a semblance of meaningfulness. But how and why we can extract a semblance of sense from nonsense is a discussion for another dronder. For now, I want to focus on the definitive nonsense. Terms like “lizzigants” and “outgrabe.” These words are meaningless. But what does that mean? What does it mean for a word to not mean anything?

I’m not sure. That’s different from saying I have no idea. But I have some hunches, ironically difficult to articulate in their own right. I’m still grappling with the notion, and perhaps, with time, I’ll have more of substance to say. But I want to say a bit about this now, before I’ve organized all my thoughts and dedicated more time to studying language and meaning more thoroughly. Perhaps then I’ll be confident enough to say something compelling. The sort of thing that would make others bustle out of my way, as if I were forty foot and full of sway. But for now what I’ll do is share my rough sentiments and suspicions.

2.0 The Lizzigants are out again

I don’t think words, sentences, phrases, and so on mean anything. Not literally. That might sound insane, but I don’t think that it is. I actually think that views to the contrary are a bit odd. What I mean is this: I don’t think the words themselves mean things. I think people mean things, and the words they use are a method of conveying what they mean. I’ve been repeating this slogan for some time now: Words don’t mean things; people mean things. What I mean by this is that language is a behavior that agents use to achieve their goals. For humans, language arose as a sociocultural technology largely developed to communicate with one another. It isn’t just about communication, though. As I said, I see language as a tool we use to achieve our goals.

This has yielded a host of benefits for us. It allows us to coordinate our actions. We can issue warnings, state what we need, negotiate, trade, argue, console, threaten, encourage, and on and on. Language is for doing. Words arose for us to do things. They are every bit as much a behavior as running or jumping or throwing a spear. Language is not some isomorphic mapping of mouth sounds or symbols onto some platonic realm of concepts.

This also doesn’t mean that language is necessarily used to communicate effectively. Lies provide a simple example. The goal of a lie is to cause others to believe things you yourself think aren’t true. It is intentional miscommunication. More generally, our goals are not always aligned with communicating with others, since there are times where it serves our interests to miscommunicate, or not communicate at all. Justin D’Ambrosio argues in this post that:

[…] language is often able to serve as a tool of influence only insofar as it does not function as a tool of communication.

D’Ambrosio then provides an example:

Suppose that I’m a politician, you are a member of my constituency, and we meet at a town hall. Your goal is to come to know my policies and plans, and whether you vote for me will be determined by whether you think our positions are aligned. My only goal is to get you to vote for me. You ask me what steps I plan to take concerning gun control, but I have no knowledge of what your background views on the subject are, and you have no idea whether I intend to be forthright about my plans.

D’Ambrosio goes on to argue that in such circumstances it is helpful for the politician to “use language that is practically meaningless,” though from his description (such language is flabby, amorphous, and noncommittal blather) this appears to either be a distinct instance of meaninglessness that would fall within the scope of my conception of the term, or a somewhat nonoverlapping notion. It’s hard to say.

The point I want to illustrate, in either case, is that language is serving in these situations as a tool, and that tool need not have one purpose: it will serve whatever purposes its users can effectively deploy it to achieve, and communication isn’t the only effective use of language.

Put a little differently, language is a type of behavior employed by people to achieve their goals, and since people have different goals, their communicative aims with any given use of language will differ from one context to another, even if precisely the same words are used as they are in other contexts. This shouldn’t be that complicated. It is no more complicated than noting that a stick can have multiple purposes, and that one might use a stick to do one thing in one situation, but something else in some other situation, even though it’s the same damn stick.

Yet many philosophers treat words as mysterious incantations that have the power to pick out inscrutable concepts, concepts the meaning of which can never be conveyed. One simply has a particular concept, and some word reliably refers to that concept. These concepts are variously described as unanalyzable, properly basic, bedrock, or primitive.

One must be careful not to conflate usages of these terms with other notions. For instance, primitive concepts usually refer instead to concepts the meaning of which cannot be reduced to or explained in terms of other concepts. One might think of these as atomic concepts: concepts that are not themselves composed of other concepts. Perhaps there are concepts like this, but this is a distinct notion from whether a concept’s meaning cannot be conveyed in or communicated at all. The latter notion, the one I am dealing with, is ineffable: its meaning cannot be conveyed at all, at least not through conventional means. One’s access to it is an entirely private affair. Perhaps one could provide some guidance in accessing the concepts in question, perhaps by gesturing at examples that can prompt one to acquire the concept.

3.0 Ineffability

The ineffability of a concept is a problem for me, but it does not appear to be a problem for many people who discuss philosophical matters. As I’ll understand the concept here, an ineffable concept is one whose content cannot be articulated in principle. Consider the concept of an apple. The concept of an apple isn’t atomic, because it can be broken down into sub-concepts: fruit, food, plant, organism, and so on. How do we acquire the concept of apple? I don’t know the exact psychological picture, but I don’t find it too much of a stretch to suggest experience plays some role. You don’t need to directly experience apples. You can hear about them from others. And provided they fit into your broader picture of the world, their coherence or consistency with your other concepts will be a factor as well. What about more abstract notions, like justice? I’m not sure how we acquire these concepts, but I again believe experience plays a pivotal role. One does not see justice directly or literally as one might an object. One might see justice in the sense of seeing someone get what they deserve, though. And in this respect, there’s nothing especially mysterious about seeing justice in at least one respect. Yet some concepts may require special training to grasp. Some concepts require special training or scaffolding on the basis of more sophisticated prior knowledge to acquire the concept, e.g., certain concepts in math or science, such as general relativity. But notice that in the case of the sciences, one could in principle acquire these concepts even if in practice people are often unable to do so, whether due to lack of educational resources or because they don’t have the requisite cognitive capacities (e.g., because they are babies). But in the sciences, what distinguishes one theory, concept, or account from another is that it makes different predictions about what we experience. While I may not understand general relativity, supposing I could, part of understanding it consists in understanding how a world in which general relativity operates differs from a world where it doesn’t.

Not all terms and phrases we use make a direct difference like this. Think of a term like the or and. Not all parts of speech pick out putative features of the world. But the concepts I take issue with among philosophers do. I’ll focus here on irreducible normativity.

Irreducibly normative facts are facts which cannot be reduced to or cashed out in non-normative terms. These normative truths are often said to give us reasons, and these reasons in turn are not contingent on or reducible to our stances. For instance, it may be an irreducibly normative truth that you ought not cause suffering for pleasure. While I would cash out the sentence:

“You ought not cause suffering for pleasure.”

…In purely descriptive terms, e.g., it would be inconsistent with [some specified normative standard] to cause suffering for pleasure, proponents of irreducible normativity insist this isn’t adequate.

Normative language is a familiar part of ordinary English: ought, should, must, good, obligation, prohibition, and so on. I believe these ordinary language terms are, like all language, deeply embedded in our everyday practices, which are inescapably practical and goal-oriented. Such language, when used by ordinary people, is used to do things. To cajole, condemn, persuade, boast, intimidate, assuage, and so on. We are not proposition engines that trundle about spewing propositions to no end. Even if we take our normative claims to be true in some sense, we wouldn’t use normative language unless it was for something. Whatever this language means, I contend that it must be practical. That is, their use, and by extension their meaning, depends on our goals, standards, and values.

Irreducibly normative truths are incapable of playing this practical role, at least in any direct way. They are, by design, completely divorced from practical considerations. Irreducibly normative truths about what we should or shouldn’t do, what’s good or bad, and so on are truths that are somehow “applicable” to us independent of our goals, standards, and values. That’s not some implication or extrapolation. That’s part of their definition, and is thereby a non-negotiable feature of the very concept of an irreducibly normative truth. They’d be applicable to us and thus “bind” us even if we didn’t know or care about them.

Consider a world in which there are such norms. Now consider another world in which there are no such norms. What possible experiences could we have that would allow us to distinguish one world from the other? None whatsoever. The existence of such norms would make no practical difference at all. This is altogether unlike scientific theories, which are distinct precisely in terms of making different predictions about what the world is like. Yes, there are different theories for what accounts for a given set of observations, e.g., the various interpretations of quantum mechanics. I find myself firmly in the camp that either these theories make predictive differences or there is no meaningful distinction between them. Even if philosophers balk at such a notion, ordinary language and ordinary thought is a thoroughly practical affair, not an abstract, theoretical one. Morality is for doing. I at least think our default assumption should be that folk morality should be heavily constrained by pragmatic considerations like the simple heuristic of making a difference.

4.0 You can’t bootstrap truths

Some critics may insist such irreducibly normative truths could or would make a difference. I don’t believe they would. The truths themselves never impinge on experience in a way independent of our reaction to these truths. Their only practical relevance must be mediated through the beliefs of agents. For comparison, if I leap into a bonfire, my beliefs or desires are irrelevant: I am going to burn. Conversely, even if I acquired knowledge that “I ought to” do something, what happens if I don’t care and simply ignore this alleged truth?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Irreducibly normative truths have no teeth. No power to compel. What would make a practical difference is if we wanted to comply with them. Or if we were motivated to comply with them through some involuntary means. In the former case, such truths have no force independent of our own stances. Now consider the practical difference between these two scenarios:

· Alex believes she irreducibly ought to be kind. It is an irreducibly normative truth that she ought to be kind. She is motivated by this belief and acts accordingly.

· Alex believes she irreducibly ought to be kind. It is not an irreducibly normative truth that she ought to be kind. She is motivated by this belief and acts accordingly.

The truth itself doesn’t do any direct work. It is belief, and its connection to motivation, that does the work. The facts themselves cannot make a difference. A critic may argue that this distinction overlooks that certain truth-conducive epistemic practices may only result in acquiring a justified belief that one has an irreducibly normative obligation to act in a given way if there, in fact, are such truths. As such, the epistemic situation in these two cases would be different. It would be too much of a digression to fully address this here, so rather than lay out an extensive argument to the contrary, I’ll put my pragmatist cards on the table and say this: I believe this gets things backwards. Truth is subordinate to and emerges from the practical cash value truths have in regulating our decisions and facilitating accurate predictions with an eye towards goal success. Irreducibly normative truths don’t make any predictive differences nor impinge on our experience independent of our reactions to them in the way that a sharp knife or burning fire do. We learn knives are sharp and fires burn by interacting with the world in ways that are not directly responsive to our wishes. Knives don’t care if you don’t want to be cut, and fires don’t care if you don’t want to be burned. They make a difference all the same, and these experiences are how we learn we’re not omnipotent, and why it makes good pragmatic sense to believe in an external world that is largely indifferent to your wishes. But irreducibly normative truths aren’t like this. If you don’t care about them, and don’t react to them, they effectively go away.

Scientific models are endorsed on the basis of their ability to make predictions. We favor the ones that do better. But a person operating on a belief in irreducibly normative truths and a commitment to abide by them is not able to make any better of a prediction about what will happen in the future than someone who denies such truths. They simply fall outside the scope of making a direct practical difference. Whatever practical difference they make must be and can only be mediated through beliefs about them. But this is trivially true of any belief one treats as motivationally relevant.

A person with severe paranoia may believe they’re being followed, and act accordingly. Would this entail that such a person is in fact being followed? No, it would not.

A population may worship a God that demands ritual human sacrifice, to which they oblige by carving out the hearts of thousands of victims. This belief makes a practical difference to their behavior, but does it entail that such a God is real? No, it does not.

In both cases, provided the person or people stop holding the belief, they will stop acting as they did. The beliefs are doing the work. Beliefs cannot be used to bootstrap truths into existence. Epistemic practices can’t simply latch onto truths, then because one cares about the truth, it thereby has practical value, and then appeal to this practical value to establish that the truth in question was true in the first place; that it made a practical difference in the first place was the criterion for establishing its existence. If pragmatism was obliged to anoint as true beliefs of this kind, they’d be required to acknowledge as true any set of normative standards a person found themselves believing in and motivated to comply with.

Or maybe they can. Maybe a good pragmatist should acknowledge that if the beliefs somehow work for you then in that respect they can earn the pragmatic badge of truth. This would still be anathema to the very picture normative realists who advocate for irreducibly normative truths are putting forward. Why? Because this would mean that these irreducibly normative, and ultimately stance-independent truths were somehow paradoxically (and, I think, impossibly) contingent on our stances, i.e., on our own subjective, stance-dependent goals and values, and what works for us personally. While pragmatists are not radically relativistic, pragmatism has an inescapably perspectival element.

The only way to attempt to derive any truths out of the pragmatic method will thus turn partially, though ultimately, on our stances. This is why I don’t think classical, or standard analytic conceptions of irreducible normativity play nicely with pragmatism; I suspect their proponents are committed to an anti-perspectival perspective. The pragmatic version would likely be seen as an inauthentic downgrade at best, and at worst confused, nonsensical, and utterly missing the point. If the critic wants to instead appeal to some non-pragmatic standard for establishing the reality of irreducibly normative truths, well then we’d have to have that discussion. They’re certainly not entitled to presume such standards are true without an argument if they want to persuade a pragmatist.

5.0 Insularity and Collective Delusion

The preceding considerations are not enough to establish that irreducible normativity is an unintelligible, or meaningless concept. Personally, I’m satisfied that the concept is nonsensical in part because its proponents cannot explain what it means, and because its putative truth would make no practical difference. But many readers may find this unsatisfying. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Putting forward the thesis that a given account is false is often a fairly straightforward affair. Demonstrating that a term or phrase is nonsensical is much trickier. It’s easy in the case of intentional gibberish inserted into a poem, but many people recoil at the suggestion that serious academics could be so thoroughly confused as to believe actual nonsense.

I want to disabuse people of this notion. For whatever reason, it’s apparently considered entirely acceptable to claim that a rival philosophical position is false. But to suggest that it is meaningless is considered more extreme, less charitable, more objectionable, and somehow a greater indictment of the people who hold such a view than “merely” claiming they’re mistaken.

This doesn’t make much sense. When a person is saying meaningless or nonsensical things, this can be and often is as much the product of confusion as being mistaken is. In many cases, it makes more sense.

Many of us are now familiar with the principle: garbage in, garbage out. The rough idea is that if you use the wrong method, you’ll consistently produce an output of little value. Many of my objections to analytic philosophers turn not on the premises of their arguments, but turn instead on the methods or background assumptions they rely on. If those more fundamental assumptions are misguided in a way that compromises their methods, then philosophers may be without an effective method. If their methods are garbage, they’re only going to get garbage out of them. I believe some of these metaphilosophical errors are rooted in misapprehensions about language, meaning, and human psychology. The result is a metaphilosophy that often leads philosophers into conceptual confusions. Does this mean these philosophers are stupid or incompetent? No. The mistakes are subtle, difficult to recognize, and fall outside the scope of mainstream analytic philosophy. They’re by no means obscure; far from it. Many of my objections are roughly similar to Wittgenstein’s critique of philosophy, and he is widely regarded as the most influential and important philosopher of the 20^th century. I don’t think Wittgenstein’s pessimistic read is easy to understand, and just as importantly, its implications are so threatening to standard philosophical practice that it would be an understatement to describe it as a bitter pill to swallow. It’s more of a suppository.

Now consider the alternative. Suppose the methods of analytic philosophy are entirely suitable to solving the problems it sets itself to, and suppose philosophers are in possession of the relevant facts and considerations. They should be, since those facts and considerations are typically non-empirical and are thus immediately available on proper introspection. Within this framework, everyone has the right tools for the job, and yet philosophers don’t agree about anything and constantly accuse one another of being incorrect.

In short: I am accusing philosophers of making mistakes that are rooted in them using the wrong tools for the job, whereas they are accusing one another of failing to use the right tools appropriately. This is a qualitative difference. It’s not immediately evident the former is somehow the more severe error. I think it’s more severe in one sense: It’s deeper and more systematic. Accepting my critiques would require a complete paradigm shift, a total upheaval of one’s existing views. Whereas recognizing that one was mistaken about this or that ancillary matter is far less threatening to the broad scope of one’s perspective. But I also think balking at such a suggestion and continuing to make this error is far more understandable, and thus far less an indictment of one’s character or competence, then having all the tools for the job but failing anyway. Who would you consider more of an incompetent oaf?

• A man who cannot build a house and keeps failing to hammer nails because he was given a wrench, and it isn’t very good at nailing boards together

• A man who is given a perfectly good hammer but keeps failing to hammer nails into the boards properly

The first may be a fool for failing to realize he needs a hammer. But if you were told a wrench is the only proper tool, and were trained to use it for twenty years, it’s understandable if you’d fail to appreciate that a hammer would get the job done better. Conversely, what excuse does the latter person have? None, it would seem. He’s bad at using the proper tools.

An analogous context applies to my unintelligibility thesis. Whereas I maintain that philosophers have spent years committing themselves to and internalizing a flawed metaphilosophy that reliably leads to error, part of which includes nonsensical concepts, the alternative strikes me as worse: philosophers arguing with one another apparently believe they’re in possession of the proper methods (they all have hammers) but are still reliably failing (they still can’t hammer boards together).

It would be difficult for me to show that philosophers are making the sorts of errors I claim that they are, but I want to make two observations. First, people often balk at my suggestion that analytic philosophers might have unintelligible or nonsensical views. Yet there is considerable irony in both these philosophers and their defenders reacting with such open hostility towards this suggestion. Often the reasoning is something like:

How could so many experts be collectively mistaken?

Why is this ironic? For the simple reason that analytic philosophers have consistently gone out of their way to distinguish themselves from continental philosophy, frequently and specifically because they charge the latter with being full of unintelligible nonsense. Well, there are a lot of continental philosophers and fans of continental philosophy. How could all these experts be so confused?

Apparently they can be, according to analytic philosophers and their defenders. So why is it such an outrage to suggest that something similar could be in play, in a few narrow instances, in analytic philosophy? The two share common roots and are similarly disconnected from practical affairs. If apologists for analytic philosophy can be so quick to gleefully disparage continental philosophy by hurling Judith Butler quotes at us like hand grenades, it’s ironic, hypocritical, and more than a bit revealing that members of this same community would be so dismissive and even offended at the far more modest and narrow suggestion that there are a few isolated instances of confusion among analytic philosophers (in contrast to continental philosophy, which is often depicted as more broadly confused, pretentious, and nonsensical).

Second, I want to end by returning to the beginning of this post. I described a fictional community, the Kel, who claim to practice the truest form of magic. Most readers will recognize that I am hinting at the Kel being a fraud. Not a conscious one. Not a malicious one. But it’s strongly implied that their claims to possess real magic are a sham. The question is: how could such a sham persist in a world with actual magic?

I believe part of the answer is collective insularity. An isolated individual may arrive at a host of confused and nonsensical views, but few others would take such a person seriously. Yet when a community forms, the community can serve to collectively reinforce whatever errors they are committed to. The social approval of one another can enhance one’s confidence and lead to feedback loops that drive insular communities towards ever more detached ways of thinking from the rest of the world. I believe this is part of what has gone on with academic philosophers, and that it is part of how philosophers have ended up with what I and others have diagnosed as deep confusions that have led them to endorse notions that are not even false, so much as unintelligible.

This isolation isn’t entirely physical. Philosophers don’t typically live in remote locations. But it is intellectual and social. Philosophers adopt unique jargon, shibboleths, and ways of thinking and speaking. They immerse themselves in a shared canon of readings. They treat specific figures as central to the discipline. Philosophers are trained on a similar corpus, and are trained to speak, think, and write similarly. They even adopt similar mannerisms as one another. See this clip, which does an excellent job of capturing philosophical affectations:

Philosophers frequently (if not usually) adopt being a philosopher as part of their social identity, and it becomes central to who they are as people. Philosophy is like art in that respect. One is an artist, first and foremost; that one’s art is also one’s profession is only fortunate happenstance. The artist gets paid to do what they wanted to do anyway. While this is true of many other professions, I doubt many people familiar with philosophers will fail to appreciate that philosophy is a way of life, a personality, a vibe, a state of being; it is far more than a job one clocks in for.

What I propose is that specific terms used in the cloistered contexts of philosophical theory have become so disconnected from everyday life that they fail to be about anything, to mean anything, to refer to anything, to make any potential difference in principle. Some of my critics may operate under the misapprehension that this is implausible precisely because this language is used “successfully” within academic contexts. Even nonsense can be successful within a narrow context. My daughter is 10 months old. She still babbles. She may say something like:

“Agoobagoo dah dah.”

I often respond as though she is engaged in real speech.

“That’s an excellent point. I completely agree. However, I am not so sure about your earlier remark, that bagoobagoo BAH! I believe that was a bit of a stretch.”

I don’t actually think she said anything meaningful, but I suspect in addition to being fun to talk to her it may also help stimulate linguistic development to engage with her in this way (I don’t know, I haven’t looked into it much). Nonsense can have a function in this respect. So, too, can nonsense be used to entertain, or befuddle, or manipulate. Language can and does serve roles independent of it referencing features of the world or describing anything we might experience or encounter. But this isn’t enough to secure the kind of meaning those who endorse irreducible normativity or qualia (two notions I reject as meaningless) are after. They believe they are capturing phenomena, properties, features of the world, and important ones, no less.

The non-technical discourse of everyday language emerges in far more grounded contexts. It is always for doing something. What works is preserved and what doesn’t is discarded. But even in everyday interactions people are sometimes confused or talk nonsense, even if they are generally competent. We shouldn’t be so allergic to the suggestion that people could be speaking nonsense. Though I suppose the objection is to the notion that a bunch of very smart people could consistently speak nonsense over an extended period of time. I don’t think nonsense language would be employed in everyday contexts for an extended period of time for the simple reason that if it proved useless in the pursuit of people’s goals, they’d stop doing it. Reality has a way of teaching us lessons. It gives us feedback. Terms and concepts emerge organically in response to this feedback.

The same is not true of technical concepts like irreducible normativity. They are not a direct response to the feedback of the world. I say “direct” because they do emerge to solve problems, but they are “problems” of an abstract, intellectual kind.

The kind that isn’t the direct product of the world giving one feedback, so much as the socially constructed feedback that emerges exclusively and entirely within certain intellectual contexts. This puts distance between the emergence of such terms and the grounded, practical realities of everyday life. This is why I think nonsense can emerge in academic contexts. There’s no feedback from the world itself. Scientific terms and concepts respond to and evolve directly in response to testing our predictions against the world: against rocks and rain and trees and air and fire and water and wind. But philosophical concepts only respond to the feedback of other philosophers. And this risks these concepts emerging not to solve any substantive practical problems, but to plug a gap in a syllogism or paper over dubious reasoning. Whereas proposals for new elements or new laws of physics are tightly bound to their predictive fidelity, the capacity to propose concepts in the platonic void in which philosophers operate is boundless and empirically untestable; one’s only checks are the crude sense of satisfaction one has when proposing them; some sense that one’s intuitions have been mollified.

These errors are exacerbated when they are proposed by respected figures within the field, such as Derek Parfit. Philosophy hasn’t simply created a subculture. It props up particular figures, both historical and contemporary, around which people gravitate and form allegiances. This already fosters a tribalistic and ideological mindset among philosophers, who come to identify not just with particular philosophers but with schools of thought, methods, specific positions, specific universities, programs, and so on. The professionalization of the field has only further amplified the tendency towards fashionable trends, since it funnels career advancement through the narrow bottleneck of whatever happens to be trending in publication in philosophy journals.

There are significant psychological, cultural, and sociological forces that account for the state of contemporary academic philosophy. A desire to signal one’s intelligence, maintain a particular identity, pursue a particular career, enjoy engaging in particular problems, to feel a sense of belonging to a particular community…all of these forces militate against receptivity to a line of critique that would unravel it all. And this is what I think is at the heart of hostility towards critiques on the basis of unintelligibility. That and simply not taking the time to engage with the position and regard it not as an unmotivated, ignorant, and radical thesis, but as a serious and sober position that deserves a seat at the academic table.

1.0 Introduction

According to JPA, there are strong pragmatic reasons for the ordinary person to endorse value realism, the view that there are stance-independent values. JPA is mistaken. The ordinary person does not have any strong pragmatic reasons to endorse value realism. Doing so would yield few or no benefits, and they would not, in any way, be better off by endorsing value realism. My goal here is to offer a response to JPA’s dubious case for the alleged benefits of believing in value realism. You should first read JPA’s article here. If you leave a comment over there, be polite.

2.0 Value nihilism

According to JPA:

Whether one affirms Value Realism is of tremendous importance. It will determine, to a significant extent, (i) how one relates to other beings, (ii) how one conceives of oneself and the world more broadly, and (iii) how one structures and conducts one’s own life, in the very broadest sense.

These are big claims. But they are just that: claims. JPA has a lot of work to do to make a case that any of these claims are true. Unfortunately, what he offers does not provide any strong case for endorsing (i), (ii), or (iii). Some of his claims are shuffled off into endnotes. Here’s one associated with (i):

If one thinks, for example, that there are stance-independent reasons (deriving from stance-independent value) to care about the welfare of nonhuman animals and suffering children in far away places, this is more likely to lead one to make personal sacrifices (e.g., by abstaining from factory-farmed meat and by donating to effective charities) than if one denies the existence of stance-independent value and regards one’s desires as one’s only source of reasons. To anticipate: yes, avoid-anti-realists about value can be extremely generous. I think it’s likely that such people’s professed metaethical commitments fail to align with their actual commitments. Such a suggestion is apt to annoy these people, but it’s manifestly the case that we’re often confused about our own views — and that we often say things (and fool ourselves into thinking that we believe things) in the course of philosophical debate that don’t reflect our actual commitments.

The claim that realists are more likely to make personal sacrifices is an empirical claim about human psychology. There is no good evidence that it’s true. There are two papers testing the causal impact of manipulations of belief in moral realism and antirealism: Rai and Holyoak (2013) and Young and Durwin (2013). Both studies have such significant methodological shortcomings that neither provides substantive evidence for JPA’s claims. Both misoperationalize their attempts at prompting changes in metaethical beliefs and neither provides convincing evidence of a significant shift in belief. For instance, Rai and Holyoak explicitly acknowledge that metaethical relativism does not entail a normative commitment to tolerance, and that moral realism doesn’t entail a commitment to intolerance. Nevertheless, their priming conditions explicitly violated their own operationalizations of these concepts. They state:

In the moral relativism condition, participants were told that our moral values are subjective opinions and we cannot impose them on another group of people… (p. 996)

In the moral absolutism condition, participants were told that some moral values are objectively right or wrong and it is our duty to impose our values on other groups of people regardless of what they believe… (p. 997)

In short, their priming conditions include a massive normative confound that makes it impossible to isolate the causal impact of an exclusive manipulation of belief in realism or antirealism.

Such manipulations are typically transient, anyway, and are unlikely to reflect the psychological consequences of internalized commitment to a metaethical position, rather than (at best) the short-term consequences of an abrupt threat to one’s current beliefs. Priming someone to be slightly less confident in moral realism in the midst of a study and then immediately assessing behavior does not reflect the psychological processes associated with being a committed antirealist for much the same reason priming a Christian to doubt Christianity for a few minutes and measuring their behavior isn’t a good way to measure the behavior of people who’ve been atheists for years. Similar issues in operationalization and transience are applicable to Young and Durwin’s (2013) study as well.

These studies provide very little evidence of the prosocial benefits of endorsing moral realism and aside from these there isn’t much else. For what it’s worth, research by Fisher et al. (2017) purports to show that adopting a cooperative mindset increases moral antirealism, which may indicate a positive link between antirealism and certain aspects of moral behavior. However, this study too suffers significant methodological shortcomings. Nobody should take mixed, preliminary data like this to be especially conclusive in the social sciences, anyway. It takes a large, well-validated, converging body of data gathered over an extended period of time to establish broad and general psychological findings about human behavior. What we have at present barely scratches the surface.

At present, we just don’t have any good evidence that realists are more altruistic than antirealists. Also, most people probably don’t endorse either position (see Bush, 2023), so it’s probably moot which one has more of an impact (if any) on behavior. Nevertheless, given JPA’s wording (“this is more likely to lead one to…”) he appears to be making a causal claim: that belief in realism causes greater levels of personal sacrifice. There is no good evidence that it’s true, and JPA does not provide any evidence for this claim. He just…asserts it.

This is one of the most disappointing aspects of JPA’s writing. He often makes assertions but provides no arguments or evidence for them. Productive philosophy involves more than simply reporting what one thinks; it involves presenting arguments, reasoning, or considerations that help others to understand why you think that and what might serve as evidence or reasons for them to endorse the position in question. This is followed by yet another assertion:

I think it’s likely that such people’s professed metaethical commitments fail to align with their actual commitments.

This is also just a statement of what JPA thinks. JPA appears to believe that people who are altruistic, generous, and so on are implicitly committed to moral realism, even if they claim to be antirealists. This suggests a performative inconsistency. But what is inconsistent about being an antirealist and being generous or altruistic? JPA doesn’t state what the inconsistency is. We’re given nothing. Just a brute assertion, with no elaboration, argument, or evidence.

His suggestion is extremely dubious. For comparison, people tend to invest a great deal in their aesthetic preferences: they eat the food they like, listen to the music they enjoy, pursue romantic relationships with people they are attracted to. Do these behaviors imply that people believe there are stance-independent normative facts about what food is tasty, what music is good, and what people are attractive?

No. Acting on one’s preferences in these domains in no way implies or fits better with a realist interpretation. Likewise, a moral antirealist may desire to help others or want to be kind or have a strong normative moral commitment to doing what they consider good. Just as there is no inconsistency in choosing food you like over food you dislike because you want to, there is no inconsistency in an antirealist being altruistic instead of selfish because they want to. What’s the tension here? What’s the inconsistency?

He continues:

Such a suggestion is apt to annoy these people, but it’s manifestly the case that we’re often confused about our own views — and that we often say things (and fool ourselves into thinking that we believe things) in the course of philosophical debate that don’t reflect our actual commitments.

Of course we can be confused about our own views. This goes both ways. JPA could be confused about his own values. People who claim to be realists could just be committed to and act like antirealists, with their professed realism doing nothing but trailing along whatever their subjective values are, anointing them verbally with the status of being stance-independently true, when really such people are every bit as driven to rationalize and justify their personal values and preferences. Without empirical evidence, speculation in either direction doesn’t mean much.

JPA also suggests we may be annoyed by such a suggestion, but I’m not even annoyed by these remarks. I’m just bored by them. If I’m going to argue with an opposing side, I’d at least want them to attempt to make a case for their position. But JPA doesn’t do this. JPA does nothing to show that antirealists are confused about their commitment to antirealism. He thinks we are. If JPA wants to do philosophy he should present arguments and reasons, not just tell us what he thinks. That’s the kind of remark that belongs in a diary, not a philosophy article.

3.0 Realist and antirealist views of the world

Moving on to the (ii), the notion that our views on value realism significantly determine “how one conceives of oneself and the world more broadly”, we get this:

The view of the world as devoid of stance-independent value is very different from the view of the world as teaming [sic] with value which ought to be recognized by those beings capable of recognizing it. The former view is that of a world in which, ultimately, nothing matters; the latter is that of a world in which things really do matter, regardless of what anyone believes or desires (such that the world really would have been worse for the Nazis’ prevailing, even if the only people left living on the face of the earth believed otherwise).

This account makes antirealism sound dreadful and unpleasant: antirealism is the view that “nothing matters” while realism is the view that things “really do matter.” This might sound like a substantive difference, but it isn’t. At the outset of the article, JPA states:

[...] Value Realism: the view according to which value is real and objective (i.e., stance-independent); that at least something matters, as such.

Note the use of “real and objective.” JPA just smuggles “real” into his account alongside objective as part of the definition, then adds that the notion that “at least something matters, as such” is accompanied by an endnote explaining what this means:

Something matters as such just in case it matters intrinsically — due to its nature or one of its essential properties.

By “mattering” JPA just means mattering-in-a-realist-sense. So, when he says that antirealism holds that “nothing matters” while realism holds that “things really do matter,” all this consists in is a restatement of the definitions of the positions: antirealists deny things matter stance-independently, and realists affirm that they do. It is thus extremely misleading to describe the former view as holding that “nothing matters,” and the latter as the view “things really do matter.”

JPA just stipulates that by “nothing matters” he means that nothing matters in the realist’s sense and that by “actually mattering” he just means things matter in the realist’s sense. By dropping these explicit stipulative characterizations of the meanings of these terms, and presenting those terms without these meanings immediately present, his remarks can and probably do give the misleading impression to some readers that he’s drawing attention to a nontrivial difference, when all he’s done is just repackage a technical distinction and jam it into phrases that have ordinary language uses that have pragmatic content that isn’t entailed by the technical distinctions he’s drawing. “Nothing matters” in ordinary language carries pragmatic implications about one’s attitude and disposition that aren’t accurately captured by the technical position that nothing stance-independently matters.

For comparison, suppose there were two views of knowledge: knowledge realism, and knowledge antirealism.

According to knowledge realism, knowledge requires the mystical perception of the fundamental nature of reality that can only be obtained by opening the third eye, typically through extensive meditation or psychedelic drugs.

According to knowledge antirealism, it is not the case that knowledge requires the mystical perception of the fundamental nature of reality that can only be obtained by opening the third eye, typically through extensive meditation or psychedelic drugs. This could be because the antirealist thinks that knowledge is impossible, or it could be that knowledge is possible but doesn’t require what the knowledge realist says it does.

Suppose a knowledge realist writes a blog post defending their view and decides to take a similar approach to JPA. They could say this:

The view of the world as devoid of the perception of truth is very different from the view of the world as teeming with knowledge which ought to be recognized by those beings capable of recognizing it. The former view is that of a world in which, ultimately, knowledge is impossible; the latter is that of a world in which genuine knowledge is possible.

This depicts knowledge antirealism as absurd. It gives the impression that only the knowledge realist thinks knowledge is possible, but the antirealist doesn’t. In everyday contexts, a person who went around saying that we couldn’t know anything would imply that we’d be paralyzed, unable to make decisions, and have no basis for favoring any particular belief over another. It would, in other words, carry clear practical implications about how we navigate through the world. And yet denying knowledge realism as defined above wouldn’t commit one to any of this. It would consist merely in denying a bizarre technical conception of knowledge. Doing so carries no practical implications at all. Likewise, denying value realism carries absolutely no practical implications.

If we step outside this closed terminological framing in which “knowledge” is tied to weird ideas about opening one’s third eye, knowledge antirealists can and most probably do think knowledge of some kind is possible, they just don’t agree that it requires dropping acid and listening to a bunch of Tool.

But given the knowledge realist’s stipulative definition of knowledge realism, it is in fact the case that most of my readers would deny knowledge is possible. It’s just that most of us think “knowledge is impossible” is only true conditional on a particular perspective of what this entails. Those of us who’d reject knowledge realism as described here would probably also reject the knowledge realist’s stance on what is required for knowledge. But the knowledge realist can always define knowledge in terms of these requirements, then insist that if you deny their account of the requirements for knowledge, you deny knowledge altogether.

This is what JPA is doing. JPA is framing the dispute between realists and antirealists as though even if antirealists rejected value realism, they’d still somehow be obligated to grant that only value realism entails that anything “genuinely matters.” But this is itself something value antirealists can and probably would reject. You can stipulate that what you mean by the terms in question just entails that only value realism allows for things to “genuinely matter,” but stipulation comes at the cost of a hollow victory.

JPA is thus exhibiting all the hallmarks of the standard halfway fallacy and the magic beans fallacy. His objections are based almost entirely on assuming he’s partially correct, then exploiting the implications of tendentious and misleading framing of the dialectical space to make antirealism look unappealing without actually presenting any substantive arguments for his views. This is the halfway fallacy. And to the extent that he relies on rhetorically framing only his position as entailing that things “really” matter, this is achieved by stipulative fiat, is vacuous, and prompts people to conflate his account of value with value itself. This is the magic beans fallacy. In short, what JPA is doing is argument by presumption, stipulation, and rhetorical framing. There is no substance to it.

4.0 Mattering-to vs. Mattering intrinsically

Why should anyone find JPA’s claims about the difference between realism and antirealism/nihilism (I’ll use these interchangeably) to be practically relevant? I certainly don’t. I don’t care if things stance-independently matter. That doesn’t matter to me. Antirealists are free to conceive of and endorse other conceptions of things mattering or having value. Here’s one such distinction:

• Mattering-to

• Mattering intrinsically

Something can matter-to if it matters to me, or to you, or to anyone. All that’s required is that one cares about, values, wants, desires, or prefers it, or however else you’d like to frame it, as long as it’s cashed out in terms of stances. On such a view I can care about something, or value it, and so on. And in this respect, it can matter to me. For instance, my family matters to me. Mattering-to does not involve any notion of the target of my valuation, i.e., who or what matters to me, mattering in any intrinsic respect, i.e., mattering in virtue of its nature or essential properties, nor does mattering-to require that something matters independent of me or anyone else valuing it. For something to matter to me is for me to hold a certain stance towards it whereby I value it. This doesn’t require it to have the property of mattering, independent of whether I or anyone else cares about it (i.e., whether it matters-to us).

Given that the antirealist is entitled to defend their own conception of value, we stand in a symmetric relation to the realist when it comes to accusing the other of “value nihilism.” I could stipulate that mattering-to is the only sense in which things “really do matter,” then point out that actually only we antirealists think things “really do matter” insofar as realists deny this kind of mattering is “real” or “actual” mattering, and that value realists thus don’t believe things matter in the only respect in which they “really” do. In other words: value realists are in fact value nihilists. Only the values antirealist think real values are real. Seemingly paradoxically, then, only value antirealists believe in real values, while value realists are committed to values that aren’t real.

Furthermore, when it comes to what I care about, the only things I care about are things that matter to me. This is the kind of mattering that motivates me to act, that prompts me to feel happy or sad. That influences me. It is, in other words, the only practically relevant kind of value. What about mattering intrinsically? I don’t care what matters intrinsically. That doesn’t matter to me. If you were to tell me that while my family matters to me, some other family matters intrinsically, I would not care. The fact that something matters intrinsically is completely motivationally and practically irrelevant.

If it doesn’t matter to you whether something matters intrinsically, then the fact that something matters intrinsically would have no practical significance for you. If it does matter to you whether something matters intrinsically, then the fact that something matters intrinsically would have practical significance, but that practical significance would still be based on what matters to you. So it could be that value realism has conditional practical relevance: whether it has practical relevance turns on whether any given individual cares about whether it’s true or not. Critically, though, it’s worth noting that it isn’t things mattering to you that would cause you to act, but your beliefs about what things mattered. Things mattering wouldn’t really be in the practical or motivational driver’s seat on its own; it must be mediated through beliefs, which in turn only become motivationally relevant if we have the right set of goals whereby those beliefs are motivationally relevant.

Does it matter to you whether something matters intrinsically? I think most people would find on reflection that it doesn’t, and that it is therefore not the case that value realism would be practically significant for most people. But I don’t know. That, too, is an empirical question.

Let’s say we set aside mattering-to entirely. Some things matter intrinsically and some things don’t. Now what? What do we do? What would move you to pursue what matters intrinsically rather than what doesn’t matter intrinsically? I would love to hear from realists who believe they have a good answer to this question. I don’t think that they will. I think the whole idea of disconnecting value from motivation, goals, and desires is utterly nonsensical and that the entire foundation on which value realism is based is utter madness. It is tantamount to insisting that nobody should ever eat anything based on how it tastes to them, but should instead exclusively make gastronomic decisions (decisions about what to eat, in terms of the flavor or other culinary aspects of consumption of food and drink, independent of moral, prudential, financial, and other considerations) on the basis of the intrinsic tastiness of different foods. Do you find mushrooms disgusting? Well, if they’re intrinsically tasty then too bad, you should eat them even if you find yourself sputtering and gagging the whole time. To what end, goal, or purpose should you do this? Apparently not your own.

To me, I am utterly baffled at the notion that anyone would care about things “mattering” in the realist sense, that is, of mattering intrinsically. If this is something you care about, reach out to me. I’d like to hear from you. Why do you care about whether things matter independent of your goals, values, and desires? If you don’t care, then I’d still like to hear from you. I’d find it fascinating if there was someone who thinks that some things matter intrinsically but doesn’t care whether they do.

5.0 Life plans

Finally, we have this, following (iii):

One’s life plan is apt to look different if one thinks that value is not merely a function of one’s own beliefs and preferences.

I doubt it. It wouldn’t for me, at least. Even if there was intrinsic value, i.e., value that was not merely a function of my own beliefs and preferences, I still believe that, as a matter of descriptive fact, I only act on my personal values, i.e., what matters to me, and that insofar as this is reflected by my beliefs and preferences, and I don’t care if something is intrinsically valuable, even if I were convinced that some things had intrinsic value, this would make no practical difference to me at all. My life plans would be utterly unchanged. If this would matter to anyone else: why? Why change your life plans?

Again, though, one’s plans might change if one believes in intrinsic value and one is also motivated to comply with those values, even if they don’t matter-to that person. But they’d still only matter insofar as it matters-to someone to comply with whatever matters stance-independently. Mattering-to is still in the motivational driver’s seat (unless the realist denies this, too, which they may). But this would at best suggest that life plans would differ only in a contingent way, conditional on human psychology. Regardless of whether one endorsed motivational internalism i.e., the view that a belief that something is stance-independently valuable necessarily but defeasibly motivates us to act accordingly, or externalism, which denies this, it becomes an empirical matter as to the extent to which belief in stance-independent value actually prompts any significant change in people’s behavior.

In practice, what might actually cause changes in behavior wouldn’t be a belief in stance-independent value, but would be downstream of a broader, comprehensive worldview change in which one came not only to believe in stance-independent value but adopted a host of other views about epistemology, intuition, motivation, and so on. Few philosophical positions as derivative and specific as value realism are likely to emerge in isolation of a host of surrounding views that render such a position coherent and stable, which is to be expected of just about any view. Accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior is unlikely to occur in isolation, while you retain a firm commitment to naturalism, or a denial of revelation or miracles or sin. In practice, then, it would be difficult to demonstrate that value realism is, itself, causally responsible for significant changes in behavior. In practice, it will tend to be massively confounded with other beliefs, attitudes, and commitments.

Given this, JPA’s central thesis, that there are practical benefits to endorsing value realism, is a thoroughly empirical claim. It’s strange to focus so much on psychology and yet not engage with any empirical work relevant to one’s hypothesis.

JPA continues:

According to Nihilism, nothing matters as such (i.e., in-itself). On this view, there are no ends which we ought, objectively, to pursue; reason cannot be practical (i.e., it can’t tell us what we ought to do); and there is no possibility of speaking sensibly in terms of our being more or less reasonable in our selection of ends.

I dislike much of the framing here, but this is all correct. “Nihilism” is a loaded term that carries negative connotations, and likewise saying that if you’re a value nihilist that you think “reason cannot be practical” sounds pretty bad. But these are all loaded ways of saying that if you don’t think there are stance-independent values then you don’t think there are stance-independent values, only with the use of terms that carry ordinary, colloquial meanings, which gives the misleading impression that the “nihilist” denies more than they in fact deny. A “nihilist” could think that “reason is practical” in the sense that reason can facilitate goal success.

JPA continues to slap various labels onto nihilism that are only applicable in a narrow way that presumes realism:

Nihilism entails that all of our acts are, ultimately, arational (i.e., not subject to rational evaluation or scrutiny).

A nihilist may agree that our stances cannot be subject to rational evaluation, i.e., it wouldn’t be irrational to hold any particular set of values. I do think this. But I don’t think this means our actions are “arational.” This is because I am fine with instrumental conceptions of rationality according to which one judges the degree to which an action is rational on the basis of its relation to the goals of the agent in question. For instance, if someone desires to quench their thirst, and has no other relevant desires, I’d consider them irrational if they chose to drink a glass of sand instead of a glass of water.

The term “ultimately” and JPA’s subsequent remarks acknowledge instrumental conceptions of rationality, but that only makes his initial claim all the more perplexing. Once again, JPA’s ways of framing things is superficial and misleading. The only sense in which we don’t think our actions are “ultimately” rational is in the non-instrumental sense. Yet saying we think actions are ultimately “arational” gives the impression that we’d go further than this. As you can see, this implication is attenuated by the very next remark, which clarifies:

If Nihilism is true, then although our acts could be more or less conducive to the ends which we happen to have set for ourselves (i.e., more or less instrumentally rational), all of those ends would, in the final analysis, be arbitrary — and everything pointless and meaningless in the deepest possible sense.

…only to end with even more loaded language. First, if the nihilist rejects non-instrumental conceptions of rationality and endorses instrumental ones, why would they agree that our actions are “arational”? They wouldn’t. They would agree that they’re not non-instrumentally rational, but JPA opts to use the term “ultimately” instead of non-instrumentally (or stance-independently, or some other equivalent). Once again, JPA employs ordinary language terms that often serve as intensifiers and carry practical implications as a stand-in for technical conceptions of terms. This allows technical positions JPA endorses, like non-instrumental rationality, to benefit from being reframed in non-technical terms that carry pragmatic implications that wouldn’t accompany the technical terms, thereby leeching rhetorical force from those terms.

This adds nothing to the case for value realism, since this can work equally well in reverse. If JPA rejects instrumental conceptions of rationality and only endorses non-instrumental ones, and if only instrumental conceptions of rationality are correct (or at least denies their relevance to how we conceive of value and mattering), then nothing is rational or irrational in the respects JPA thinks it is, and thus we could say from this antirealist perspective that the value realist thinks that we are “ultimately arational.” That sounds bad, but all it means is that value realists reject instrumental rationality as the proper conception of value for capturing the relation between value and rationality. And if that’s what someone means, they could just say that instead of an unhelpful and misleading remark about realists being committed to people being arational.

This misleading use of language doesn’t end here. The term “arbitrary” is also misleading. Is it arbitrary for me, all else being equal, to prefer foods I like over foods I don’t like? Is it arbitrary for me to prefer listening to music I like versus music I don’t like? Is it arbitrary for me to prefer the company of people I want to be around rather than the company of violent strangers who want to torture me? If so, then much of what I do is “arbitrary,” but…well, so what? JPA’s goal here is to show that value realism is somehow pragmatically relevant. If the notion of acting on the basis of what promotes my own goals and values is somehow “arbitrary,” then JPA must be operating on notion of “pragmatic” quite alien to my own. I take things to be pragmatically relevant because they promote my goals and values! JPA characterizes pragmatic reasons as:

A pragmatic reason to affirm some proposition P is a reason relating to the practical benefits of affirming P.

Just what exactly is a “practical benefit” if it isn’t a benefit from my point of view, and with respect to promoting my instrumental aims? JPA wants to convince us there are “pragmatic reasons” and thus “practical benefits” to endorsing value realism, but then criticizes views which construe rationality in such terms. This isn’t necessarily inconsistent. JPA can endorse the view that rationality is distinct from pragmatic considerations, but his own way of framing the matter suggests that pragmatic reasons, or practical benefits, insofar as these are themselves reducible to something instrumental, would be “arbitrary.” If this is supposed to be objectionable or bad, what is objectionable or bad about it? And if it is bad to pursue “arbitrary” ends, why should any of us care about the “practical benefits” of value realism? Wouldn’t these be arbitrary? If, on the other hand, it is arbitrary but this isn’t a problem, then why is JPA pointing out that on value nihilism our ends would be “arbitrary”? In any case, the value nihilist need not grant that on the mattering-to view that one’s values are “arbitrary.” Our values are simply given. They’re no more “arbitrary” then our hair color or our shoe size. To call our values arbitrary is just a category mistake.

Realists often employ this term, “arbitrary,” as a kind of sneer word that makes antirealist views sound bad. Yet it does so not by demonstrating the antirealist is committed to anything misguided, objectionable, or unappealing, but by relying on the negative connotations associated with the term. The term “arbitrary” in ordinary language typically means something held on the basis of whim or chance, rather than reason or principle. That sounds bad. But all arbitrariness amounts to in this context is that the antirealist (or “nihilist”) endorses only the view that we have values and that what’s rational or not can only be judged with respect to what’s conducive to those values. Values are taken as a given, and no set of values is any better or worse, or more rational or irrational than the others. It is this latter perspective that is taken to support or constitute the claim that on antirealist views our values are “arbitrary.” There’s no principled reason why I should hold any given set of values. And it is true that there isn’t on the antirealist view. But does this make such values arbitrary? I don’t see why it should. This would render all subjective stances towards anything “arbitrary.” When you choose what to eat, what shoes to buy, what music to listen to, who to spend your time with, and so on, these decisions are all based on your subjective preferences. They are “arbitrary” in the relevant sense. But are any of these decisions “arbitrary” in a way that should be remotely troubling to you? No, not at all. Of course any given set of food preferences is as good as any other (setting aside extraneous practical considerations like cost or nutrition). When it comes to what shoes to buy, there are aesthetic questions, like the color of the shoe, and practical questions, like whether the shoe is good for running or working in a factory. While your preferences are still relevant in the latter case, in that upstream of your desire to buy a pair of running or work shoes is some subjective goal or preference to run or to work at a factory, these preferences are always entangled with stance-independent facts about what the world is like. Suppose you want to eat healthy. Is it arbitrary what food you buy? To the extent that whether you “should get healthy” is subjective, what food you eat is “arbitrary” in JPA’s sense, since on an antirealist view there’s no stance-independent fact about what your goals should be. But it’s not arbitrary what you eat conditional on those goals. And this is the kind of arbitrariness I care about, and perhaps that you care about, too.

Does this in any way threaten or undermine the degree to which you’d prefer to choose in accord with your values, desires, preferences, and so on than not do so? Antirealists should reject the claim that on our view value is “arbitrary.” I consider this an inappropriate and presumptuous way of extending a notion to considerations where it isn’t applicable, and in any case the term carries misleading pragmatic implications. It makes it seem like the antirealist conception of value bottoms out in mere whims. And this simply isn’t true.

Yet realists continue to employ such terms to give the false impression the antirealist opting to pursue some goal or value is doing so in a way that is baseless, or intellectually indefensible, or misguided, or confused, or pointless. Is it pointless to pursue what you want? If you want to marry the person you love, is that pointless? If you want to become a doctor, or be happy, or enjoy a day at the beach, regardless of whether these pursuits are intrinsically valuable, but entirely because you care about these things, would this be meaningless in the deepest possible sense? Consider if you want to have children. If you want to have a girl rather than a boy, or vice versa, must there be some stance-independent normative truth about whether you ought to? And if there isn’t, and if your preference is based entirely on what you want, then does it undermine your desire to be told that it’s “arbitrary” or “arational”? Apparently JPA thinks so. Once you unpack the use of this sneer word, and see how it is deployed against antirealists, it can be exposed for exactly what it is: a term that may be true in some technical sense, but the only respects in which it could be said to be true fail to capture the pragmatic features of the ordinary language uses of the term.

At this point, JPA is exhibiting a consistent pattern of equivocating between technical uses of terms that lack the desired pragmatic implications of their ordinary language counterparts and those ordinary language counterparts, stipulating and defining the former in terms of the latter, in such a way as to try to depict the value antirealist in an unappealing light. No substantive objections or points have been made at all. It’s all just vacuous verbal legerdemain masquerading as philosophy. It very much seems like trying to win votes by gerrymandering alone, without convincing a single person to switch their vote from one candidate to another. If you can redistrict the language just right, and draw a stipulative line around that particular set of words, presto! You win by the stroke of the congressman’s pen, without having to lift a finger to convince your constituent of your policies.

The point here is that the only meaningful sense in which the nihilist’s ends are “arbitrary” is in the sense that there is no principled reason why one has their particular set of values rather than some other set of values. Well, so what?

Yet JPA leverages this to go on to say that nihilism entails that “everything pointless and meaningless in the deepest possible sense.” This is extremely loaded language and a highly misleading way of saying that the nihilist does not think anything stance-independently has a point, or stance-independently has any meaning. As far as “in the deepest possible sense,” it’s not clear what that even means, unless it’s yet another instance of employing ordinary language phrases that convey intensity and practical relevance when if pressed one would have to fall back on this having some technical meaning that one simply stipulates is what one means by the ordinary language phrase.

I don’t agree that stance-independent value or meaning is deeper than stance-dependent value and meaning, so I think I just do not share JPA’s position on what constitutes the “deepest possible sense.” The deepest (and, indeed, only) sense in which I think things have a point or matter is in an antirealist way: they have a point to me or have meaning to me.

JPA then says:

Given the nature of the psyche, the typical person will be better off subjectively (i.e., by the person’s own lights) by virtue of affirming Value Realism — provided that this person truly understands the bleakness of the alternative (as many do quite clearly do not).

Regular readers will know exactly what I will say next: whether people would be better off by their own lights by affirming value realism is an empirical question. Does JPA present any empirical evidence to support this claim? No. So we have, once again, a completely unsubstantiated claim. Nothing JPA has said up to this point illustrates that there are any practical benefits at all to endorsing value realism. Let’s see if JPA will say anything to substantiate this claim.

6.0 Psychoanalyzing the nihilist

In the next section of JPA’s post, he suggests the nihilist is saddled with a predicament:

Many nihilists will be worse off, subjectively, to the extent that their nihilism negatively impacts their thought patterns and affective states. These people might well find their nihilistic outlook dispiriting, demoralizing, and depressing; that it saddles them with a deep and pervasive sense of meaninglessness, forlornness, and general existential angst.

If belief in nihilism does have these consequences, then all else being equal the nihilist would be worse off. But once again, it’s an open empirical question whether any of this would follow from believing in nihilism. There’s a critical distinction here, though:

• Logical entailments
  These are the necessary implications of the truth of nihilism.

• Contingent psychological consequences
  These are the consequences that belief in nihilism has on any given individual.

The first of these isn’t empirical, but none of what JPA describes is a logical entailment of being an antirealist/nihilist about value. So appealing to these is a non-starter. Thus, we are only left with an empirical question about the psychological consequences of adopting value nihilism/antirealism.

It is possible that someone is psychologically constituted in such a way that they only care to do what is stance-independently valuable. If they became convinced nothing was stance-independently valuable, they’d be unable to act on what they want. That could lead to despair. But it would still be an empirical question whether this is true of any one in particular, and without empirical evidence that most people do think this way and would fall into despair if they came to believe there were no stance-independent values, JPA’s claims are at best speculative.

JPA seems to believe that the negative consequences of belief in nihilism stem from correctly understanding its implications. This is hinted at by JPA’s remark that a typical person is better off affirming value realism:

provided that this person truly understands the bleakness of the alternative (as many do quite clearly do not [...]

This is more than a little puzzling. Whether something is “bleak” is the sort of thing I’d have thought depends on a person’s individual psychology, i.e., how they react to affirming nihilism. How bleak we find things is a subjective matter that depends on our stances. I simply do not find anything bleak about antirealism at all.

JPA’s way of framing the situation almost seems as though he’s smuggling in some auxiliary realist-like assumptions into his framing of the situation, as if there were a stance-independent fact of the matter about how one ought to react to the implications of nihilism. But I don’t think there is, and in any case JPA hasn’t shown that there is.

In an endnote, JPA elaborates on this remark, adding that:

I have an error theory about this: most people are so full of desire, motivation, and concern — and so locked into their own perspective on reality — that the idea that nothing matters is almost psychologically impossible for them to entertain; things matter to them, and they’re generally unreflective about whether those things ought to matter to them (but on Nihilism, nothing ought, objectively, to matter to anyone). That human beings would be like this makes good evolutionary sense: it would have been highly maladaptive for Paleolithic humans to sit around wondering whether it really mattered, objectively, whether they starved to death or managed to find a mate and reproduce; thus, plausibly, we evolved to be relatively bad at thinking clearly about metaethics and, in particular, the entailments of metaethical anti-realism.

Once again, we have idle armchair speculation about people’s psychology. JPA presents no evidence to support this claim. I don’t see any reason to take it seriously. I don’t think most people would find value nihilism all that distressing. I embraced it long ago, and it had few consequences, because I recognized that value realism is a nonsensical position and that it wouldn’t matter-to-me at all if things “mattered” in the sense JPA thinks things matter. I do agree with this part:

[...] things matter to them, and they’re generally unreflective about whether those things ought to matter to them (but on Nihilism, nothing ought, objectively, to matter to anyone).

I do think people are generally unreflective about whether things ought to matter to them. Which is good, because it’s a nonsensical consideration. They’d be wasting their time. Finally, JPA engages in a bit of evolutionary psychological speculation:

That human beings would be like this makes good evolutionary sense: it would have been highly maladaptive for Paleolithic humans to sit around wondering whether it really mattered, objectively, whether they starved to death or managed to find a mate and reproduce; thus, plausibly, we evolved to be relatively bad at thinking clearly about metaethics and, in particular, the entailments of metaethical anti-realism.

There’s nothing plausible about this. JPA seems to be suggesting that we may suffer from an evolved, localized cognitive impairment that prevents us from thinking effectively about metaethics because if we did, we might question value realism, and that could undermine our wellbeing (and presumably decrease our reproductive fitness). I doubt over the course of most human evolutionary history these sorts of considerations arose in any considerable quantity and if so that they had enough of an impact on our evolution that we share a genetic predisposition for being bad at metaethics.

However, if, for whatever reason, this is the case, this could be a fantastic evolutionary debunking argument against moral realism. JPA’s claims, if true, would suggest that we have an evolved predisposition for shying away from nihilism and embracing value realism not because it is true but because doing so promotes our wellbeing. But I don’t think JPA’s proposal is very likely. People are generally bad at thinking about metaethics, but I don’t see any good reason to suppose this is some adaptive safeguard against doubting value realism. A far simpler theory is that things matter to people relative to their stances, that this is completely adequate for everyday life, and that questioning whether their values “really matter” was historically a boring and pointless waste of time.

Personally, I don’t find anything bleak about antirealism. Does this mean I’ve misunderstood its implications? JPA hasn’t provided much reason for me to think so. I’d be curious to know from JPA what, exactly, he means by a person truly understanding the bleakness of nihilism. Does one only truly understand the bleakness of nihilism if they react in the ways JPA thinks they would? That is, if they are demoralized, dispirited, depressed, and so on? If so, I’d want to see the argument for that. If instead understanding nihilism but not having a negative reaction is a possible response, then this severs the link between understanding and any particular response, and again opens us up to the possibility that we’re dealing with an open empirical question: whether belief in nihilism (accompanied by truly understanding it and its implications) actually has any negative impact on anyone’s welfare.

In any case, I’m a value nihilist. I agree with JPA that conditional on what JPA means by the terms in question, that everything is arbitrary, pointless, and meaningless in the deepest possible sense, but these are all notions I don’t care at all about because they don’t matter to me. Would JPA insist I am failing to appreciate the implications of nihilism? Or is it that I do recognize its implications and I simply don’t care?

JPA recognizes the contingency of the nihilist’s reaction to believing in nihilism:

This is not to say we should expect all nihilists to be miserable. Many — I daresay most — will not understand the entailments of their own view or be psychologically affected by them even if they do understand those entailments; thus, subjectively, such people will be none-the-worse for being nihilists.

The only “entailment” of the view is that there are no stance-independent values, which is simply the definition of the position. JPA has added nothing to that in this article. All he’s done is repackage that definition in various ways through ordinary language locutions, but all he’s managed to achieve is replacing the meanings of all these phrases with the definitions of the conflicting positions over and over. JPA’s entire article is a convoluted way of repeatedly stating that the implication of views which deny stance-independent value is that they deny stance-independent value.

JPA has presented no good reasons to think antirealists/nihilists misunderstand the implications of their views. Is it that nothing matters “in the deepest possible sense”? Well, so what? Sure, that sounds bad. But sounding bad and being bad are not the same. If it’s so bleak and terrible, JPA should be able to tell us why. I don’t think he has. Personally, I think the kind of value JPA believes in, intrinsic value, life having a “meaning” and a “point” independent of what I or anyone else cares about, is barking mad nonsense; I’ve never encountered even the whiff of a decent reason to care if my life has a “meaning” independent of what it means to me and the meaning I create for myself. There’s nothing terrible about the universe not having this kind of value in it. It is a ghostly value; a value disconnected from me and from everyone else. Value that isn’t ours isn’t any value I care about.

At least JPA believes most people may not be negatively impacted, though. I’m just very skeptical that the proportion who are represents a large enough population to advocate for endorsing value realism. I do grant, though, that value realism may be beneficial for some people, but the reverse may also be true: insofar as value realism could encourage some people to be malicious, it might cause others to be wracked with guilt or to otherwise suffer in ways that on net are bad for them. Which proportion outweighs the other isn’t something we could readily determine and may even be a moving target, changing depending on the population in question.

JPA goes on to say:

Particularly malevolent or anti-social individuals might even enjoy their nihilistic outlook, feeling freed from the pangs of conscience and the bonds of normative constraint.

This is the sort of perverse speculation I see from Christian apologists. Sure, they might. But I think remarks like these are a little irresponsible. People often incorrectly associate nihilism with psychopathy, antisocial tendencies, selfishness, and in general malevolence and evil. Playing around with armchair psychological speculation about how some of us might be malevolent monsters can plant the seeds of suspicion in readers about all nihilists. Also, if JPA is comfortable indulging in a bit of armchair psychoanalysis, we can, too. I often wonder whether people who say these sorts of things are engaging in projection. I sometimes hear theists say that if they didn’t believe in God or obey God’s moral rules, they’d be out manipulating people, cheating on their spouses, or otherwise doing horrible things. I think (or at least hope) most of them are wrong, but some probably would do more of those things. I think this says more about what kinds of people these are (hint: bad people) than it says about the implications of atheism.

Likewise, perhaps at least some moral realists are themselves “particularly malevolent or anti-social individuals” who wish they could be “freed from the pangs of conscience and the bonds of normative constraint” and are just projecting their own malevolent desires onto others. We can also flip this speculation on its head and suggest similarly nefarious motives for endorsing value realism:

Particularly malevolent or anti-social individuals might even enjoy their realist outlook, imposing their standards on others free of a guilty conscience, or appealing to realism to justify bigotry, violence, coercion, or otherwise terrible actions under the guise of moral righteousness.

Is this so implausible? Have we not heard of countless cases of religious leaders exploiting their positions of authority to coerce, exploit, and manipulate others? And have they not appealed to their own righteousness to grease the wheels of their malice, lust, and greed? The rhetorical advantages of framing one’s personal desires as stance-independent truths may be extremely powerful. What makes this possibility all the more disturbing isn’t simply that evil people could disingenuously exploit other people’s belief in value realism to justify their actions, but could even convince themselves, and thereby come to genuinely believe in the moral acceptability of actions they’d never accept as an antirealist.

Perhaps value realism would turn out, to the extent that it has been present among people historically, to be more closely associated with bigotry, coercion, and violence than with kindness, compassion, and altruism. This, too, is an empirical question, and one we’re probably not able to answer. Yet it is true that value realists could exploit belief in value realism to convince people to commit atrocities or to act against their own interests, thus serving as a tool of exploitation, manipulation, oppression, and violence. Value realism, like theism, outsources what’s right and wrong to a third party. And we’re all familiar with the potential to appeal to God to motivate people to commit atrocities (to be clear, I am not suggesting theism has historically done more harm than good; just that it can be leveraged to do so). Value realism could be the secular form of getting otherwise good people to do bad things.

I’m mostly being tongue-in-cheek here. What I said could be true. Even JPA’s own commentary, a bit later in the article, hints at this possibility:

One could, despite being correct about the existence of stance-independent value, be utterly mistaken about what has value; if one has a perverse theory of value, then it is likely that one will be actively motivated to behave as one ought not. Thus, if anything matters, it might matter that would-be fanatics are nihilists.

But I think it’d be irresponsible to casually suggest that a drive for moral realism might be motivated by malevolence. It wouldn’t take much to suggest the realist philosophers I was responding to might be psychopaths and monsters. But I don’t think that. I just think they’re mistaken about obscure philosophical matters. I don’t think any of these views have much of an impact on everyday behavior. My point is simply that one can readily conjure up just-so stories or plausible-sounding hypotheses about the behavioral consequences of philosophical views. What ultimately matters is how people actually respond in practice to affirming these views. And that, of course, is an empirical question.

JPA continues:

So too a certain kind of non-malevolent slacker (insofar as affirming Nihilism conduces to feeling unbothered by any sense that a life might be wasted) and those with a particularly weak will who are perpetually unable to act on moral reasons (or what they take to be moral reasons).

At this point, JPA appears to be engaging in a bit of armchair speculation about the various subspecies of nihilists:

• Ignorant nihilists: Confused fools who don’t understand that the proper response to nihilism should be misery and ennui.

• Malevolent nihilists: Evil nihilists who revel in the freedom to act without guilt or shame.

• Slacker nihilists: Lazy nihilists who just don’t care if nothing matters.

• Weak-willed nihilists: Nihilists who just can’t help but do bad things despite what they take to be moral reasons to do otherwise.

Not the most flattering taxonomy. This looks more like the fevered fantasies of someone who hates nihilism and wants to denigrate nihilists than someone seriously interested in analyzing the psychology of nihilists. If JPA is genuinely curious about the prognosis of embracing nihilism, I would encourage him to engage in empirical research, rather than engage in what appears to me to be little more than disdainful armchair speculation, like he’s trying to psychoanalyze people with a mental illness. JPA does conclude that some of us might be happy:

But happy nihilists, or would-be happy nihilists, surely are few in number.

This is a great opportunity to drag this quip from Dennett (2023) out of the shed:

[...] whenever you see the word “surely,” a little bell should ring—ding!—and you should pause to scrutinize what follows, since this is typically the weakest spot in the author’s case. It doesn’t “go without saying,” since the author feels the need to say it, but the author hopes a nudge (“surely”) can take the place of a supporting argument.

This applies to JPA’s remark. JPA is merrily trotting out a host of empirical claims for which he provides exactly no empirical evidence whatsoever. “Surely” is no substitute for data. Another strange thing about JPA’s remark that happy nihilists are surely few in number is that he initially said:

This is not to say we should expect all nihilists to be miserable. Many — I daresay most — will not understand the entailments of their own view or be psychologically affected by them even if they do understand those entailments; thus, subjectively, such people will be none-the-worse for being nihilists.

There’s some tension between supposing most people won’t be negatively impacted by nihilism and then concluding at the end of that paragraph that there aren’t many happy nihilists. It might even be inconsistent.

Another problem with JPA’s overall approach here is that the psychoanalytic claims put him in a perfect position to appeal to unfalsifiable claims. Since JPA comfortably proposes that self-professed antirealists are really crypto-realists who act in a way inconsistent with their public commitments, he could argue that if evidence showed us most self-professed antirealists were happy, that many of them aren’t really antirealists to begin with, and that their crypto-realism is what’s behind their happiness. True antirealists would be miserable nihilists.

Given some widely-shared assumptions about what would matter, given Value Realism, it’s likely that nihilists (mistaken or not) will be disposed to act in ways that it matters one ought not, and to value things which ought not be valued.

Again, there simply isn’t any empirical evidence for this claim. Even if value realism is true, there is no guarantee that value nihilists will be significantly less likely to comply with whatever the stance-independent moral facts are than the realist. One would first have to show that belief in nihilism actually results in substantially different behavior in the first place. We don’t have any good data to support this claim. But even if we did, what you’d also have to show is that the deviations nihilists are disposed to make from complying with stance-independent values are greater than the deviations of value realists. It’s possible that value realists are more disposed to rationalize their personal values, or to be caught up in religious views or ideologies that are misaligned with what’s stance-independently valuable, or are more rigid and inflexible in their thinking and more likely to hold conservative views that fail to converge on the moral truth at the same pace as value nihilists do. There are a variety of reasons why the psychology of those disposed towards value realism might ironically cause them to be less inclined to comply with what’s stance-independently valuable. Do I think this is the case? No, but again, how value nihilists and realists actually behave, and the degree to which their values comport with whatever the moral truth turns out to be, is an open empirical question.

Nevertheless, I’m happy to grant for the sake of argument that it’s more likely value nihilists would act in ways inconsistent with stance-independent truths about what’s valuable than value realists. JPA offers some reason to think this would be the case:

For on our best moral theories, our desires are unreliable guides to stance-independent value; thus, one who regards one’s desires as one’s only reasons for action will tend to be disinclined towards what matters (if anything matters).

Even if this is true, there are a host of other potential causal factors associated with endorsement of value nihilism and realism that could drag nihilists and realists alike further or closer to acting in accord with whatever stance-independently matters. This isn’t a matter that can be settled from the armchair. Even so, I find it plausible that value realists would be more inclined to care about what’s stance-independently valuable and adjust their actions accordingly. Let’s grant this, then, for the sake of argument.

So what? If value realism is true, I would still have no interest in complying with what’s stance-independently valuable. So this is hardly a criticism. If belief in value nihilism is going to make me miserable or undermine my goals, I’d care about that, but that’s a very different sort of outcome.

So JPA can claim that value nihilists will not be disposed to act in ways that “it matters one ought not” and that value nihilists will “value things which ought not be valued.” Even if this were true, again, why should anyone care? I certainly don’t. Do you care? If so, why?

This is where things get weird. JPA then states:

Insofar as we have pragmatic reason to mitigate the risk of becoming agents disposed to wrong action, we have such reason not to be nihilists.

Okay, but I don’t think we do have pragmatic reasons of this kind. Is this “pragmatic reason” some fact about what would be conducive to our goals and interests? If so, why would it be in my interests or promote my goals to abstain from stance-independently wrong action and to engage in stance-independently good action? Isn’t the whole point that such actions aren’t necessarily aligned with my goals and interests?

If it is in my interests to do what is stance-independently valuable, then it is also stance-dependently valuable. And if it is stance-dependently valuable, then this is sufficient to motivate me and everyone else to act accordingly. If so, then the fact that it’s stance-independently valuable is superfluous: I’d perform the actions in question because they serve my interests, not because they’re intrinsically valuable. If, on the other hand, the actions in question don’t serve my interests, then I don’t have pragmatic reasons to comply with them.

So JPA’s suggestion here either renders value realism practically superfluous, or he’s just incorrect. I will dub this the motivational superfluity dilemma. The dilemma is that all stance-independent facts about what we should do are either:

• (a) Something we’d already want to do anyway, so value realism is superfluous

• (b) Something we wouldn’t want to do anyway, so value realism is not in our pragmatic interests

You can thread this needle by describing a person who wants to do whatever it is that they stance-independently ought to do, regardless of the content of what that turns out to be. But this still makes the pragmatic value of complying with value realism subordinate to our subjective values, and it’s an open empirical question who actually does value complying with whatever stance-independently matters.

And how plausible is it that there are people who have the following psychological disposition:

I have a personal, subjective desire to comply with whatever it is that turns out to be valuable independent of whether I have a personal, subjective desire for it. In other words, what matters to me is what matters intrinsically, independent of the degree to which the content of what matters intrinsically would be consistent with what matters to me other than the fact that it matters to me what matters intrinsically. For instance, it matters to me what matters intrinsically, and it matters to me that I value my family more than strangers. But if it turned out that I should be an impartial utility maximizer, I’d be motivated to suppress my partiality towards my family and act towards the greater good.

Are there people like this? I think there probably are. Maybe JPA is one of them. Maybe there are a lot of them. Who knows. Personally, I think this sounds profoundly bizarre and if I had to put bets on it, I suspect almost nobody actually thinks this way. Time, or rather data, will tell.

7.0 Some objections

JPA ends by considering objections. He rightly notes that many common responses to Pascal’s wager won’t work for the Realist’s wager. For instance, one can’t object to endorsing value realism on pragmatic grounds by appealing to stance-independent normative considerations if one is a value nihilist, since if one is a value nihilist this resource won’t be available. And since JPA isn’t making any claims about infinite value, common concerns about infinities won’t apply. JPA considers a few other weak objections and dispenses with them. Maybe something could be made of them, but I have little interest in objecting to minimal doxastic voluntarism or some analogue of the many gods objection.

My objection is simple: JPA has not presented any compelling arguments or evidence that there’d be significant practical benefits to endorsing value realism. Whether there would be benefits of this kind would be (a) an empirical question and (b) contingent on the values and interests of each individual. If I am correct that it doesn’t matter to me whether value realism is true, then I’d obtain few if any practical benefits from endorsing value realism. I suspect the same is true for the typical person as well, but this is an empirical question that awaits future research.

JPA’s concluding remarks put no dent in this objection. JPA recaps his argument as follows:

To recount: I have argued that, first, most of us have a broadly pragmatic interest in affirming Value Realism. There are three reasons for this. With respect to the ordinary person, S, (i) S’s life likely to go best, subjectively, if S is a value realist; (ii) S reduces S’s moral risk by being a value realist (being thereby less apt to act wrongly), and (iii) S has the best chance of being acquainted with real value by being a value realist.

JPA presents no substantive arguments for (i). Even if (ii) and (iii) are true (and they very well may be), it’s not clear why I or anyone else should (on subjective grounds) care. I don’t care if I risk acting stance-independently wrongly, and don’t care about being acquainted with “real” (i.e., stance-independent) value. There are no subjective benefits to either of these.

As a value “nihilist” (as per JPA’s definition), I don’t just believe that nothing stance-independently matters, I also don’t care if anything stance-independently matters. I don’t have a name for this additional view, but JPA’s claims regarding (ii) and (iii) only carry weight if someone is disposed towards nihilism but would care if realism were true. What JPA has not done is make a strong appeal to our interests. The latter two concerns would only matter if one cared to reduce their “moral risk” with respect to the stance-independent moral truths and if they had any interest in being “acquainted with real value.” I have absolutely no interest in either of these objectives.

8.0 Conclusion

As JPA brings his article to a close, he hits us with this oft-repeated but misguided remark:

In the end, The Value Realist’s Wager simply gives formal statement to a natural, but rarely-expressed, thought: namely, that there could be no reason to be a nihilist — because if Nihilism is true, then nothing matters.

This is not true unless it is disambiguated in such a way that the remark becomes vacuous. There can be no stance-independent reason to be a nihilist if nihilism is true for the trivial reason that if nihilism is true there are no stance-independent reasons for anything. Antirealists can offer antirealism-consistent accounts of reasons and reason discourse without appealing to the stance-independent reasons, so it does not follow that if nihilism is true one would have “no reason” to be a nihilist. This remark is highly misleading and whatever rhetorical force it has is obtained by suppressing the modifier “stance-independent,” to conceal how vacuous the claim is. What JPA is saying here amounts to saying this:

If there are no stance-independent facts about what you ought to believe, then it would not be the case that one stance-independently ought to believe that there are no stance-independent facts about what one ought to believe.

This is true, and it is completely trivial. Of course this is true. But conceptions of “reasons” that presuppose realism aren’t the only accounts one could endorse. I “have a reason” to be a nihilist: because I want to believe what’s true, and I think nihilism is true. My “reasons” are reducible to facts about the relation between my desires and facts about how to act in accord with those desires. Technically, I don’t think anyone has reasons for anything, but this can give the misleading impression that I’d agree that I “have no reason” to be a nihilist/antirealist. This is false. I don’t take such language to require presupposing one literally has reasons, but rather that such discourse can be meaningfully employed to capture means-end relations. Doing so doesn’t require reifying reasons and treating them as having autonomous ontological status. JPA’s remark that “nothing matters” likewise misleadingly suppresses the fact that the only sense in which “nothing matters” in JPA’s above passage is in the sense of things mattering intrinsically. He might as well say:

In the end, The Value Realist’s Wager simply gives formal statement to a natural, but rarely-expressed, thought: namely, that there could be no stance-independent reason to be a nihilist (i.e., to deny that there are stance-independent reasons)— because if Nihilism is true, then nothing matters intrinsically (such that it gives us stance-independent reasons for doing things).

Suppressing their specific, narrow usage of specific terms like “reason” and “matters” in phrases like these is a common practice among realists. It incidentally has the effect of making nihilism look really loathsome and awful, when all these remarks typically amount to are vacuous restatements of the logical implications of nihilism, which consist merely in denying the metaphysical and conceptual overreach of realist accounts without carrying any practical consequences at all. There isn’t any pragmatic reason to care about realism unless one happens to already care about it, which makes JPA’s whole thesis redundant. JPA’s remark is about as vacuous as making this move:

Step 1: Stipulate a notion of “mattering” which means “Is prescribed by God,” and a notion of “love” which means “A relationship blessed by God,” such that your distinctive use of each term requires the existence of God by definition.

Step 2: Make a remark like this: If atheism is true, then nothing matters and love is impossible.

If anyone challenges you on this, point out that “nothing matters” just means that nothing is prescribed by God, and that love would be impossible by definition on your account because love is a relationship blessed by God. If God doesn’t exist, clearly nothing matters and love is impossible in this respect! Therefore,

If atheism is true, then nothing matters and love is impossible.

Wow, that sure does make atheism look awful, doesn’t it? But of course, this is a completely misleading way to describe the implications of atheism.

What JPA is doing is no different than this. JPA takes his narrow, realist-only conception of terms like “reason” and “matters,” which have technical meanings in philosophical contexts, then surreptitiously imposes them onto what appear to be ordinary language constructions; yet ordinary language terms like “reason” and “matters” have a host of pragmatic features such that, if one were to insist that nihilism involves the denial or rejection of reasons and mattering in the ordinary sense, it would involve a rejection of these various pragmatic associations, not just (if at all) JPA’s narrow technical conception of the meaning of these terms. Critically, nihilism doesn’t actually entail the denial of these pragmatic associations, so the claim that nihilists think that “nothing matters” is misleading in almost any ordinary context. For whatever reason, JPA and others persist in making highly misleading remarks that give the false impression that nihilism carries terrible, practically relevant implications. Analytic philosophers routinely do the same for a variety of skeptical positions, such as illusionism, as well.

JPA and other analytic philosophers should be more attentive to pragmatics. If they were, they may perhaps start to realize how much of what they say may unintentionally function as highly misleading rhetoric. Unfortunately, I suspect that they don’t realize this because they are too blinded by the rhetorical force of their own conflations between their semantically-distilled use of terms like “reason” and their ordinary language analogues.

Value realism has no direct or unconditional pragmatic value, insofar as the latter is construed in terms of stance-dependent value. Simply put: stance-independent value only has stance-dependent value if you have the relevant stance. I don’t have such a stance. I suspect most people don’t.

References

Bush, L. S. 2023. Schrödinger’s categories: The indeterminacy of folk metaethics (Publication No. 30318258) [Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. https://www.proquest.com/docview/2827166985

Dennett, D. C. (2023). I’ve been thinking. W. W. Norton & Company.

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.

Rai, T. S., & Holyoak, K. J. (2013). Exposure to moral relativism compromises moral behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(6), 995-1001.

Young, L., & Durwin, A. J. (2013). Moral realism as moral motivation: The impact of meta-ethics on everyday decision-making. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(2), 302-306.

Both Sides Brigade (BSB) made some comments about this recent critical response. Let’s have a look.

Someone let me know that Lance Bush just put out a truly gargantuan response to an old post of mine, so I snuck behind his block to check it out and maybe put together some thoughts — but to be honest, when I got the point about 10,000 words in where he condemns “armchair philosophers” for making the “totally unsubstantiated empirical claim” that many people believe there are reasons for action, I just sorta lost the will to live respond. (Although it is admittedly funny that he complains I offer “absolutely no reason at all” for thinking that they do.)

Let’s have a look at what BSB originally said, and what I said in response. BSB initially said this:

Moreover, it isn’t as if the alternate model I’m talking about here is some obscure or controversial way of thinking that was dreamed up just to test the limits of an anti-realist’s imaginative skills — it’s one that millions and millions of people successfully rely on every day to make the exact same sorts of decisions that anti-realists do!

The model BSB is talking about is his particular conception of reasons. BSB isn’t especially clear on the precise content of this model, but it is an account of normative reasons, and characterizes reasons in terms of “counting-in-favor” relations. That is, reasons are considerations that “count in favor” of an action. This is a framing Parfit employs, and it is associated with a broadly anti-reductionist view of reasons, according to which reasons cannot be reduced to or explained in other terms, such as purely descriptive terms. They are, in other words, irreducibly normative. I am operating on the assumption BSB thinks of normative reasons in this way.

What I deny is that this specific account of reasons is one that “millions and millions of people” use “every day.” Many of my positions turn on making this sort of critique:

1. Philosophers come up with a sophisticated, highly theoretical notion involving various conceptual, metaphysical, semantic, and/or other sorts of claims.

2. They then infer that this account has certain theoretic virtues, such as accommodating their intuitions

3. They then infer, on the basis of this, that this conception is part of the ordinary concept associated with use of the term in ordinary language.

4. What I argue is this inference is often misguided. These philosophers are mistakenly generalizing on the basis of how they think to how nonphilosophers think.

This standard line of critique draws a distinction between philosophical accounts of ordinary thought and discourse and the content of ordinary thought and discourse, and argues that philosophers are mistakenly taking the former to be an accurate representation of the latter. There is nothing absurd about this. The extent to which any particular theoretical account of what ordinary people mean or think when they say things is, in fact, an empirical question; it isn’t something philosophers are entitled to presume to be the case without evidence nor can such claims be established using conventional a priori approaches. You cannot draw informed and accurate inferences about population level statistical claims merely by thinking really hard.

It is therefore not very illuminating to say:

[…] he condemns “armchair philosophers” for making the “totally unsubstantiated empirical claim” that many people believe there are reasons for action.

…without making it clear that what I am denying is BSB’s specific account of what it means for there to be a “reason for action”. Without that crucial context, it could look like I am saying something wildly stupid. It might look, for instance, like I’m making the ridiculous claim that people don’t speak of reasons, or wouldn’t say that people “have reasons,” or that I deny outright that there is any way to account for reasons-talk. I don’t think any of those things. I just don’t think BSB’s account captures how ordinary people reason or speak.

Furthermore, I am entirely fine with saying “there are reasons for action” and granting that ordinary people think and would say if asked that “there are reasons for action” as long as we’re clear about what that means and distinguish it from BSB’s specific account…just like e.g., the proponent of a stance-dependent relativist account is fine with saying that people think things are morally wrong, but wouldn’t grant the realist’s semantic thesis that when people make such claims those claims purport to describe stance-independent moral facts. A relativist couldn’t think this; it’s constitutive of such views to hold that moral claims implicitly appeal to stances. And since traditional metaethical positions typically presupposes semantic uniformity, proponents of such views would typically deny that “millions and millions” of people would mean something else when making moral claims. Thus, not only is there nothing absurd about what I said, it’s one of the rare cases in which similar claims are completely typical, if not central to standard analytic metaethics.

So I do deny that people think there are “reasons for action” if by that you mean irreducibly normative reasons. What’s so absurd about that? It is, in fact, true that there is no good evidence “millions and millions” of people employ such a notion. To my knowledge, there are no studies specifically dedicated to addressing this question.

For comparison, imagine if someone claimed that mathematical platonism was true, and then said that “millions and millions of people” employ the notion of mathematical platonism successfully every day when they file their taxes or count how many apples they’ve picked.

It would be entirely reasonable to point out that there aren’t any studies addressing this question, and there isn’t any good empirical evidence that ordinary people are mathematical platonists. Would it be reasonable for the person who claimed millions of people held such a view to say:

when I got the point about 10,000 words in where he condemns “armchair philosophers” for making the “totally unsubstantiated empirical claim” that many people believe numbers exist, I just sorta lost the will to live respond.

Do you see how misleading this would be? It makes it seem like the person who denies that there are “millions and millions” of mathematical platonists is saying something far more extreme and insane.

BSB is doing something like that here. Just totally failing to clearly distinguish between what I am denying and the pragmatic implications of what it would sound like I am denying if one doesn’t provide adequate context.

What I said, and what BSB is balking at, is true: there is no good empirical evidence at all that ordinary people believe in or make use of the concept of irreducibly normative reasons.

Claims about what people mean when they say things and what they think are empirical claims about people’s psychology. If it’s so obvious people employ the technical philosophical concept of a normative reason when they talk about reasons, it should be pretty easy to present some decent empirical evidence for this. I’d be happy to assist in the design of these studies, too, if anyone wants to run them.

The latter remark about how it’s funny that I offer “absolutely no reason at all” is also ridiculous. This would only be funny if it were interpreted to suggest I’m somehow contradicting myself or employing the concepts I’m denying. But I’m not. I employ reasons-talk all the time. I just don’t think reason-talk is used by ordinary people to refer to special irreducibly normative properties, because (a) we have better accounts of what ordinary people mean (b) there’s no good evidence people employ this conception and (c) it’s unintelligible, and generally speaking I lean on the heuristic that ordinary people probably aren’t committed to meaningless nonsense when they reason or say things (though it’s possible they could).

Also, the use of “reason” in this context is an epistemic one, and means something similar to him providing no “arguments” or “evidence” for his position. “Reason” is a polysemous term. Sometimes it refers to causal explanations:

The reason the ground is wet is because it rained

Sometimes it refers to facts that serve as evidence:

The reason we think he committed the murder is that his fingerprints were on the knife.

…and so on. So this wouldn’t even be the right context for the use of the term “reason” in the first place. But even if it were, it’s not as if I don’t use reason talk in normative contexts. I just don’t think such talk requires or typically (among ordinary people) appeals to irreducible normativity. I can and do say things like:

That police officer had no good reason to arrest her.

Or

I think we have good reasons to oppose fraud.

I’ve offered my own account of how to make sense of these locutions without reifying reasons. It’s downright goofy to claim that it’s funny that I use the term “reason.” It almost seems as though BSB can’t distinguish his theoretical accounts of ordinary language from ordinary language itself, as if there just is no difference between the explanans and the explanandum.

I just don’t know, man — it makes perfect sense why people with wildly implausible views would want to do philosophy on easy mode like this, but for the life of me, I really can’t see why anyone else finds it appealing. I’m beginning to think the real appeal of “quietism” is just the power to remain “quiet” about things that would make your position hard to defend, and very non-quiet about everything else.

This is silly for numerous reasons. First, the last claim is an attempt to be cute about “quietism,” but it doesn’t land at all. BSB’s remark suggests I am somehow “quiet” about things that would make my position hard to defend. No examples are given. What, exactly, would make my position hard to defend that I am avoiding or being quiet about? This suggestion is baseless. I am one if not the most active, prolific, and enthusiastic proponents of antirealism, and go out of my way to seek people to debate and interact with.

With respect to the claim that my views are "wildly implausible”, I don’t agree. BSB seems unable to distinguish what he thinks from what may or may not be the case independent of what BSB thinks. BSB, like many moral realists, seems to operate on the assumption that the realist’s account is “plausible,” and the antirealist’s account is “implausible,” and that the dialectical space in which we operate is one in which this is established. The only question is whether we antirealists can present enough defeaters to overcome how “implausible” our views are. But I don’t grant this. I not only reject BSB’s view, I also consider it wildly implausible.

Regarding BSB’s remark that he can’t for the life of him figure out why anyone else finds my approach appealing, here’s a suggestion: ask them. I know BSB seems to have an aneurism whenever I point out that something is an empirical question, but sometimes you’ve got to point out the obvious enough times for it to sink in. This is no different. If you want to know why people think something, the most obvious and natural thing to do is to ask them.

However, the most objectionable remark here is the suggestion that I do things on easy mode:

[…] would want to do philosophy on easy mode like this

On what basis does BSB think I’m doing anything on “easy mode”? How is anything I’ve said or done easy? How would BSB even know?

This is the sort of baseless insult people make when they have little of substance to say, and just want to take jabs at another person. That or they are just extremely ignorant about the other person’s views, how challenging their approach is, and what is required to get to the point where one can even effectively employ their approach.

Let’s take a look at the situation I am in. I take an interdisciplinary approach to philosophy and psychology. This involved me pursuing graduate education in both disciplines. I worked hard to get into one of the top terminal masters programs in philosophy, Tufts University. I did well enough to then get into Cornell University to do my PhD in psychology. Does BSB think getting into these programs was easy?

I never felt entirely at home in either discipline. Professors often criticized my work in philosophy for being too psychological, while psychologists often had little interest or understanding of my work in psychology. I was told I shouldn’t even be in one of these programs, had graduate students suggest that I leave because I’m not a good fit, and been insulted, criticized, sidelined, or simply ignored. That isn’t to say I didn’t have great experiences and positive, productive encounters at both institutions, but when you do work outside the mainstream and conventional approaches, you can find yourself treated quite poorly by at least some people. You also run into people who not only reject your work, but often don’t seem to understand it at all, provide little productive engagement, and often end up being rude or insulting towards you.

And because both institutions were devised towards conventional specialization within the respective fields, there was little in the way of active efforts to encourage or provide training in the interdisciplinary approach I favored. I liked experimental philosophy, but due to its polarizing reputation, I was discouraged from using it in my writing sample or focusing too much on it. And because there were no courses on the subject, and nobody to mentor me on my particular interests, I had to develop my views more or less on my own, and much of what I studied required working outside the formal education at either institution. This eventually culminated with me developing an interest in experimental metaethics, which I studied for my PhD. Shortly before and then during my dissertation, a series of events unfolded:

1. I suffered several serious and debilitating medical issues that impacted both my physical and mental health, culminating in a permanent, severe, debilitating medical condition. I’ve talked about the details on my YouTube channel at times, but the short version is that I have severe tinnitus, chronic pain, and a handful of other issues.

2. My dissertation project was scooped. Somebody published a paper that required me to abandon my project and start over from scratch.

3. After beating cancer and going through chemotherapy, my mom died of medical complications. I was barely able to make it to her in time to see her. This was a few months after I was supposed to be working on my dissertation.

4. COVID hit, and I lived in near total isolation, with little interaction other than with my wife, for several years. Constant moves led to social isolation and financial instability and have left me with virtually no friendships with anyone in person or any social life at all.

In spite of all of that, I managed to come up with a new idea, and spent the next few years furiously reading a massive amount of literature in metaethics, experimental philosophy, metaphilosophy, measurement and methodology in psychology, and various related works across a variety of fields, as needed. My studies touched on and led me to encounter work in metaphysics, epistemology, metaethics, metaphilosophy, philosophy of language, linguistics, history, language cognition, evolution, anthropology, statistics, and probably some other fields I can’t remember. Why? Because I felt it was necessary to draw on a broad, interdisciplinary host of considerations to support the interrelated set of theses I wanted to defend in the dissertation.

This research culminated in reading hundreds of papers and numerous books, conducting more than a dozen studies, and writing a dissertation draft that was so long I had to shorten the official version and move most of the content I’d written to the supplements. Including all supplements and appendices, the final version was 1,249 pages. It was the culmination of a strenuous, backbreaking effort that left me burnt out. I finished looking older with greying hair. And I am proud of what I accomplished. It’s a sprawling, interdisciplinary work that was anything but easy. I could have done something easier and shorter, but I chose not to. I chose to do things the hard way. That work is part of the backbone of what led me to develop the views I now defend on my blog and YouTube channel. It was the end result of a decade of graduate study across two graduate programs. And during this entire period I was struggling with grief, pain, discomfort, anxiety, and isolation. Since finishing my dissertation, I’ve had to move several times and suffered yet more setbacks and medical issues.

I finally began blogging and running a YouTube channel. And the views I now defend have only expanded on my initial work through further reading across multiple fields, and by constantly discussing and refining those ideas privately and publicly. I’ve written extensively on my blog and have produced dozens of hours of content on my YouTube channel, including debates with people who disagree, live call-ins on TikTok, interviews, and livestreams where my views are stress tested in real time. Most people who do philosophy don’t do all of this. This isn’t doing this on easy mode.

Having a blog and YouTube channel has been rewarding. But because of the philosophical views I hold, I routinely encounter people who:

• Accuse of lying, pretending, being disingenuous, engaging in bad faith, or otherwise being dishonest. I was accused of “pretending” by someone today (at the time of writing, 6/22/2026)

• Claim my views are “fringe” views, tell me I’ll never have any influence or convince anyone of my “crazy” views, and mock me for having views most philosophers reject

• Accuse me of being a psychopath, sociopath, and so on (this has happened in the comment sections of my own blog and many times elsewhere)

• Suggest that I have conceptual deficiencies or brain damage

• Insult me in a variety of other ways, or make unsubstantiated and false claims about me, including BSB himself, who based his own allegations on nothing other than his impressions and refused to retract those accusations or support them with anything better

Does BSB think defending views that lead you to be constantly insulted, misunderstood, and treated like shit is doing things on easy mode? Does BSB think it’s easy to hold unorthodox views? Is it “easy mode” to take an interdisciplinary approach that requires familiarity with multiple disciplines? I often don’t even pick which philosophical views to endorse from among existing ones, because I don’t find any of them satisfactory. So I’ve opted to develop and defend my own views. Is that doing things on “easy mode”? Is taking a quietistic approach that requires sensitivity to pragmatic considerations, knowledge of the relevant empirical literature, and the occasional requirement to conduct your own studies doing things on “easy mode”?

“Easy mode” is endorsing the most mainstream, widely accepted philosophical views out there. “Easy mode” is patching over every shortcoming in your arguments by appeal to your intuitions, or how things “seem” to you, or what’s “obvious” to you without having to know anything about psychology or linguistics or how ordinary people actually speak or think. Easy mode is making sweeping, presumptuous empirical claims without doing any empirical work to evaluate your claims. Or reading the work of others. Or even caring about such work.

When I began devising empirical hypotheses for my dissertation, e.g., that nonphilosophers don’t interpret questions about metaethics as intended, did I run a study or two?

No. I ran a few dozen studies and gathered thousands of participants across multiple datasets, gathered datasets from other researchers, and then spent years not only conducting quantitative studies but devising and implementing a mixed methods approach that involved both quantitative and qualitative data that required extensive thematic analysis of thousands of written responses. Meanwhile, BSB just balks and scoffs at me for pointing out that he doesn’t have any good empirical evidence “millions and millions” of people think about reasons the way he does. I spent years gathering the evidence to support my claims. How many studies has BSB conducted to support his claim that he’s scoffing at me for rejecting?

Oh, that’s right, absolutely none.

So which one of us, exactly, has been doing things on easy mode? Because it hasn’t been me. And in case BSB needs reminding, I ran and analyzed those studies in nearly constant pain with what sounded like police sirens screaming in my head. I’m sure BSB would have no problem blogging with the equivalent of an active smoke alarm glued to his head and constant, pulsing pain radiating across his face. I’m sure he’d find it super easy, barely an inconvenience.

But leaving that issue aside, even if I were in perfect health and felt absolutely fantastic all the time, the approach I take is anything but easy. I’ve never had the luxury to read some other philosopher’s view and conclude “Yea, that’s right.” I never took the easy path of adopting the orthodox methods and presuppositions of a given field then unthinkingly employed them. Instead, I’ve been actively circumspect about the methods and mainstream practices of both philosophy and psychology, not only questioning them but studying heterodox and critical perspectives on both to try to develop a more cautious and informed perspective. And when you question the very fields you are part of, this often isn’t easy or well-received.

Alienating, heterodox interdisciplinary approaches which you have to develop on your own because existing work in philosophy (and psychology, for that matter) isn’t adequate, and that requires the synthesis of knowledge from multiple disciplines, is pretty much the opposite of easy mode.

[Edited to add on 6/23/2026, at 9:25 AM ET]

Here’s a TL;DR for what motivated this post.

I stopped interacting with BSB some time ago. However, I recently discovered BSB had written a critique of the Unintelligibility Thesis. To my knowledge, I am the only vocal proponent of this view. There are others who’ve endorsed it, but I don’t know of anyone publishing or even blogging about the view. Given this, and given some of BSB’s comments in the post, it appeared to be a critique of my view. I think it’s important to address public misrepresentations of your views, so I decided to do so, despite not wanting to interact with BSB.

The problem was that BSB misunderstood my view. He took my issue to be the unintelligibility of the conjunction of stance-independence and normative reasons, such that he interpreted my position to be that:

Normative reasons are intelligible, and stance-independence is intelligible, but the conjunction of these, “stance-independent normative reasons” is somehow not intelligible.

This is false. This is not my position and is not to my knowledge the position of anyone else on the matter (though I am fine granting that there probably are people who think this or say things like this).

My position is that:

Irreducible normativity is unintelligible.

I also think the notion of “counting-in-favor” relations and a handful of other terms and concepts aren’t intelligible.

So BSB wrote a whole post, apparently criticizing my views, but having totally misunderstood what my views were. And this misunderstanding was the basis for the critique, so the entire critique is irrelevant. It’s a critique of a combination of views few if anyone actually holds. Certainly not me.

What makes this all the more frustrating is that BSB didn’t mention me by name, or anyone else, yet made several remarks that implied multiple people held this view. When I noted this lack of clarity in my critique, BSB scoffed at this, pointing out that I blocked him. That someone blocked you does not mean that if you opt to write a critique of them, that you aren’t allowed to mention them by name, quote them, or otherwise reference them. This is all the more evident that BSB publicly stated that he circumvented the block to read my blog post. So clearly BSB is able and willing to read my work. So why was BSB willing to read my response to his critique, but couldn’t be bothered when writing the critique to actually quote me or engage with what I said?

There’s no good reason for this. It’s at best negligent and lazy.

1.0 The inconceivability of irreducible normativity

According to Both Sides Brigade, some “militant” antirealists hold that:

[...] that stance-independent reasons not only don’t exist, but are literally inconceivable — that is, they report a total inability to even imagine or entertain the concept of a reason for action that doesn’t in some way depend on some agent’s goals or desires.

Go check out that post before proceeding, since this is a response to it.

To my knowledge, there are no unambiguous cases in the academic literature of anyone expressing such a view, I’m the primary person BSB has interacted with who has expressed this position, I have explicitly expressed it at least partially in these terms, and most of the people who’ve expressed similar views either got them from me or held them previously but don’t publicly defend them. Some of BSB’s later remarks also indicate there’s a strong chance he’s referring to at least me (and anyone who agrees with me). Given this, I want you to keep something in mind as I evaluate BSB’s post: not once does he explicitly mention me or anyone else who holds the views he’s criticizing, nor does he reference or quote anyone. This makes it extremely difficult to evaluate who BSB is criticizing, to verify the accuracy of his characterizations, or to assess the merits of what they say on their own terms. In contrast, I don’t even think you should read my critique without first reading what BSB says, I’ve provided a link to his post, and I will be quoting him directly throughout.

I draw attention to this because I don’t think it’s good form to critique views, especially when they’re held by a very small number of people (or even just one person), without making it clear who they are and what the view is, so that people can go see what those people say for themselves.

That issue aside, the position BSB appears to be referencing is the Unintelligibility Thesis. This is the view that certain terms used in contemporary analytic metaethics are not meaningful, but are instead the result of an interrelated cluster of conceptual confusions, introspective errors, and linguistic mistakes characteristic of the presumptions and methods employed in mainstream analytic philosophy. According to this view, certain forms of technical discourse among academic philosophers make reference to a handful of closely related notions: normative reasons, irreducible normativity, counting-in-favor relations, and so on. There are several reasons why I believe these terms do not refer to any meaningful concepts, but are instead meaningless confusions; as such, it’s not that the terms pick out incoherent or internally contradictory concepts, but rather they fail to refer to any concept at all. The terms “refer” to what one might call a pseudoconcept. Pseudoconcepts are, as the name suggests, not concepts. Rather, pseudoconcepts can be captured behaviorally, primarily through ways of speaking and thinking, that appear to involve the use of a meaningful concept where no such concept is present. Language and behavior create the illusion, both to the user of pseudoconcepts and those around them, that a real concept is in use, when in fact one isn’t. What is happening, instead, is that a person has been so thoroughly tripped up by theorizing and language that they are saying nonsensical things that they believe are meaningful.

I won’t be making a case for the Unintelligibility Thesis here. I’ve referenced some of the evidence for it in previous posts, but the work to make the case for it will be far too comprehensive to capture in anything less than a dedicated blog series and, eventually, a book. For now, my goal is instead to react to BSB’s critique. Unfortunately, if BSB is targeting the Unintelligibility Thesis, as seems likely, he’s misidentified what it is that the position holds is unintelligible. BSB appears to believe that what the position holds as unintelligible is the conceptual pairing of stance-independence and reasons. It’s likely I’ve made remarks to this effect in the past, though I don’t believe I’ve framed the position in this way in some time. My standard critique of realism relies and has relied on a trilemma for some time: that all forms of moral realism are trivial, false, or unintelligible. I do not consider the notion of a stance-independent moral fact, under a naturalist conception of morality, to be unintelligible. Stance-independence pairs conceptually with moral facts in a way I don’t find inherently disagreeable. The issue is with pairing stance-independence with a particular conception of moral facts that results in those facts being construed in certain ways. So far so good, since BSB doesn’t focus on stance-independent moral facts, but instead focuses on stance-independent “reasons”. This is most closely linked to Derek Parfit’s notion of “external reasons” as described in volume 2 of On What Matters. Here is the key passage, where Parfit references Williams:

The notion of an “external reason” is contrasted with the notion of an “internal reason.” The implication here is that Williams would grant that internal reasons are intelligible, but that external reasons aren’t. External reasons are reasons for action that are given to us on the basis of facts other than our desires, e.g., the fact that an action would cause unnecessary suffering allegedly gives us an external reason to abstain from the act. Internal reasons, in contrast, are reasons given to us by our desires. The fact that a person wants to cause suffering gives them an internal reason to do so. “External” and “internal” roughly correspond to stance-independent and stance-dependent, and accordingly I will be understanding them in this way. Both conceptions of “reason” refer to normative reasons, which are distinct from other conceptions of reasons, such as causal reasons.

Given these distinctions, Parfit’s remarks seem to suggest the issue is with the intelligibility of stance-independent reasons in particular, which implies that stance-dependent reasons are perfectly intelligible. Perhaps Williams would endorse such a view, and perhaps others would, too. BSB seems to inherit his understanding of the Unintelligibility Thesis from this kind of contrast, and to believe that those of us who endorse the Unintelligibility Thesis share the implied view that stance-dependent reasons are intelligible.

This is a mistake. The problem isn’t with stance-independent reasons. It’s with the very concept of normative reasons itself. The unintelligibility is just as applicable to stance-dependent reasons as it is to stance-independent reasons. Those of us who cash out reasons discourse in terms of means-end relations do not think that such facts “give us” stance-dependent reasons; we preserve reason language, but we jettison the notion of normative reasons altogether, including stance-dependent/“internal” reasons.

There may very well be people who think there are normative reasons, and they must be based on desires. This appears to be the target of BSB’s critique. If so, this isn’t my view, and I don’t know anyone who endorses this view. It might be that BSB is criticizing a view that nobody holds. Since to my knowledge I am the primary proponent of the Unintelligibility Thesis, there’s a good chance I’m one of if not the primary intended target. It is unfortunate, then, that if this is the case, then BSB still doesn’t understand my position and, consequently, is unable to argue effectively against it.

If normative reasons were merely understood to refer to a specific form of discourse that picked out a relevant subcluster of means-end relations, I wouldn’t even have an issue with the term and with some conceptions of what a “normative reason” is. What I specifically deny is that there is any intelligible conception of irreducible normativity, the notion that there can be normative facts or properties that are not reducible to descriptive facts or properties. It is typically such facts that are said to “give” or “provide” reasons independent of one’s own goals, standards, or values. To be clear, I don’t think any facts, desires, stances, or otherwise, “give” or “provide” reasons. I think this is at best a potentially misleading metaphor, and at worst is literal nonsense. So, it’s not that I think our stances can “give” us reasons, but that non-stance facts (like that an action would cause suffering) can’t. Given this, I reject both the internalist and externalist view of normative reasons. I’m a quietist; I think the entire framework in which these views are pitted against one another is misconceived. To put it in simple terms, BSB seems to mistakenly associate the Unintelligibility Thesis with internalism about reasons, when in reality the position rejects internalism and endorses quietism.

This is because I don’t think “reasons” are “given” at all, and I don’t think one can literally have reasons. I think reasons-talk is, if used intelligibly, just a particular way of referencing relations between goals or standards and means of acting in accord with them. In other words, reasons-talk is just a way of speaking; the conceptual content is bound up in relational facts that don’t involve the reification of “reasons” in such a way that reasons are things-in-themselves, or are literally real.

To put it simply: reasons-talk is just a particular feature of the grammar of (at least some) languages. It doesn’t involve reference to any special phenomena or even any special concepts. I talk about this here, in my post “There are no irreducibly normative reasons.”

Call this reasons quietism: the view that there is nothing of substantive philosophical interest to discuss when it comes to the question of (normative) “reasons.” Once one understands the role reasons discourse plays in ordinary language, there simply are no special phenomena, facts, or robust philosophical considerations, metaphysical or otherwise, to engage with.

BSB also mistakenly links the Unintelligibility Thesis too closely to desires. I don’t think desires give us reasons, and I don’t even place any special emphasis in the means-end relational account on desires. Rather, I think that when people speak of having reasons to do things, these remarks only make sense if they implicitly index one or another presumptive standard or stance. It need not be a desire in the sense of a psychological disposition to want or care about something. For instance, someone could say that you shouldn’t do something because it “goes against the Bible.” The Bible isn’t a person and doesn’t have desires. Yet one could rephrase this as “The reason you shouldn’t do that is that it goes against the Bible.” I have no problem with this. Reasons-talk can be understood in terms of a consistency relation between a particular course of action and a particular standard; in this case, some course of action would be inconsistent with some standard. But I don’t think the Bible “gives” you a reason to do anything. I don’t think you have reasons.

I could stop here. BSB appears to not understand the position and thus cannot argue effectively against it. Insofar as BSB’s argument attempts to draw out an inconsistency in rejecting stance-independent reasons but not stance-dependent reasons, but still endorsing the notion of normative reasons that involve counting-in-favor relations that “give” us reasons: yea, sure, that position may be internally inconsistent. I don’t know of anyone who holds this view, but if they do, well, shame on them, I guess.

But let’s see what else BSB has to say, because it reinforces my claim that he’s misinterpreting the Unintelligibility Thesis.

2.0 Features of reasons discourse

BSB thinks that certain “close to undeniable” features of “reasons-discourse” make it hard to imagine how stance-independent reasons could be unintelligible:

Now, I certainly don’t think the people who make these claims are lying when they say they can’t conceive of moral realism being true. But, at the same time, I have to admit that I struggle myself to imagine how that could possibly be the case, given some basic features of reasons-discourse that are close to undeniable.

BSB slips here into talk of “moral realism.” I have never heard of anyone who claims that they can’t conceive of moral realism being true. I’m sure you could find someone on Twitter or a Facebook post or something saying this. Is this who BSB is responding to? Random people? My position (and those who agree with me likely hold a similar view) is that certain conceptions of moral realism are unintelligible. This is a very important distinction. In any case, let’s have a look at the features of “reasons-discourse” that allegedly make the meaningfulness of “moral realism” unintelligible (again, why moral realism? The Unintelligibility Thesis isn’t the view that moral realism is unintelligible).

To start, I just want to point out the basic fact that we often speak about and consider reasons without any essential reference to what exactly it was that “gave them to us.” Take these two informal syllogisms as an example:

Hungry: If you desire to eat a delicious slice of your favorite pizza, then you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza; you desire to eat a delicious slice of your favorite pizza; therefore, you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza.

Charity: If Big Frank’s Pizza is holding a fundraiser where half of what you pay will go to your local women’s shelter, then you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza; Big Frank’s Pizza is holding a fundraiser where half of what you pay will go to your local women’s shelter; therefore, you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza.

The Hungry case references a desire, while the Charity case does not. This contrast is key to the distinction BSB will lean on in his critique.

First, note that BSB started out saying that he wants to talk about basic facts about how “we often speak about and consider reasons,” then gives us these examples. Are these examples of how “we” often speak? Who is “we”? Ordinary people? The phrasing “you have a reason” sounds a bit contrived and probably isn’t something people would ordinarily say. But they might say something similar enough. More importantly, these remarks are phrased in terms of the formal inferential structure of a philosophical argument.

Ordinary people do not speak this way. These are formal syllogisms. Ordinary people don’t go around presenting arguments in the form of modus ponens. Granted, we do speak of people having reasons to do things (at least in English) without explicitly referencing what “gave them to us,” and BSB could have chosen examples that represent the sorts of things an ordinary person would actually say. So this might seem a little nitpicky. It isn’t, though. Because what these examples reflect is an inferential pattern BSB is attributing to ordinary thought. BSB has seemingly unintentionally conflated how ordinary people speak (those were his words, after all) with how they think. This distinction is important, because it reveals how BSB assumes without evidence that certain ordinary language locutions, such as remarks about people having reasons, implicitly reflect formal patterns of logical inference, without any empirical evidence that they do so, or how they do so, or in what contexts they do so.

BSB inherits the misguided tendency for philosophers to assume they know how ordinary people think based on what they say. But any move from utterances to the reasoning behind those utterances is an empirical question (and often a challenging one) that requires evidence to verify. What BSB furnishes us with here is a bizarre and distorted Frankenstein of certain ordinary language locutions embedded in formal syllogisms, which results in clunky, artificial phrases that simultaneously exhibit some features of ordinary language and some features of formal philosophical phraseology. This isn’t how we speak. It’s how BSB thinks. Analytic philosophers develop idiosyncratic and highly theory-laden ways of thinking, then project these ways of thinking onto ordinary language, imagining that their theoretical views underwrite ordinary discourse. They typically do so without presenting one iota of empirical evidence that the way ordinary people think comports with the way analytic philosophers think. BSB is no exception here. BSB is implicitly relying on assumptions about psychology and language for which he’s presented no arguments or evidence, and may not even be aware of.

With respect to how ordinary people “consider” reasons, we’d need to do empirical work to find out. What BSB offers is more like an inferential process, or a form of reasoning, rather than a way of speaking. I don’t know how often people reason this way. That’s an empirical question. And there are at least two separate questions: how often people employ modus ponens when reasoning in a general sense, and how often people specifically reason in terms of conditionals in which desires or facts can give you reasons, such that you “have a reason.” I am skeptical people do think this way, even if they do speak of people having reasons. This looks to me like BSB presuming without any good empirical evidence that people think in the way BSB himself does. I don’t grant this, and in any case such a claim is unsubstantiated.

That people don’t speak this way and there’s no evidence they think this way already puts BSB in a bad spot. As an aside, BSB also says:

I just want to point out the basic fact that we often speak about and consider reasons without any essential reference to what exactly it was that “gave them to us.”

The first case references a desire and the second references a non-desire fact. Neither is explicit about whether it is the desire or non-desire fact that “gives” us reasons, but because both examples frame things in terms of conditionals, they could be read to imply that the desire or non-desire fact “gives” us the reason in question. This can be implied without it being explicit (though that doesn’t mean it is implied or intended to be implied; I don’t think facts by themselves are typically thought of as giving us reasons). Alternatively, both remarks could implicitly appeal to some standard or other without having to explicitly reference the source. Part of the issue with BSB’s phrasing is that while the Hungry case doesn’t explicitly reference what “gives us a reason,” it explicitly refers to desires. Pragmatics can do the rest of the work by implying that it is the desire that “gives us a reason.”

Yet pragmatics can also reference desires in the Charity case. While the Charity case does not reference desires or conditionalize what one has reason to do on them, that one’s reason for buying a pizza is ultimately based on one’s desires can still be pragmatically implied or presumed by a speaker, even if no reference to desire is made. After all, if as BSB correctly appreciates, we don’t need to explicitly state what “gives us a reason,” we also don’t need to explicitly reference desires for them to play a necessary role in determining the meaning of what’s being said. The facts that implicitly “give” us reasons could be appended such that their relevance is conditional on us having the relevant desires:

Charity: If Big Frank’s Pizza is holding a fundraiser where half of what you pay will go to your local women’s shelter, [and if you desire to support a local women’s shelter], then you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza; Big Frank’s Pizza is holding a fundraiser where half of what you pay will go to your local women’s shelter [and you desire to support a local women’s shelter]; therefore, you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza.

There is no reason in principle why a person who made a remark in the vicinity of the Charity case couldn’t be operating on the assumption that the person they’re speaking to desires to support local charities. In fact, suppose that there were two actual speakers, Alex and Sam. Neither of them is likely to say anything about the charity or that the other has a reason to order a pizza if they don’t either personally want to support the local women’s shelter or believe the other person would desire to if they knew about it (and either also support doing so or for whatever reason don’t care to but want to inform the other person of the charity). Ordinary language isn’t simply an unprompted, undirected vocalization of propositions. It serves a purpose. If Sam was a traditionalist husband who thought it was fine to hit your wife if she were disobedient, it’d make little sense for Alex to make the Charity remarks to Sam, unless Alex thought he could convince Sam to change his views, and wanted Sam to do so. Any actual instance of ordinary language must always make reference to the goals of the speakers. Language is a social behavior, and meaning is determined by the social goals of speakers. BSB presents us with artificial formal ways of thinking stripped of context. This is a hopeless way of assessing what people might mean, because it strips ordinary discourse of features essential to its meaning.

I’ll return to this language issue later. For now, I want to focus on the examples themselves. The Hungry case is supposed to provide an example of a desire “giving” a reason, while the Charity case is supposed to provide an example of a non-desire fact (the fact that Big Frank’s Pizza is holding a fundraiser where half of what you pay will go to your local women’s shelter) “giving” the reason.

I have no issue at all with accepting that ordinary reasons discourse does involve instances where people point to facts, rather than desires, as a rationale for what reasons we have for action, because such remarks can still be underwritten by implicit assumptions about those facts only being relevant given certain goals or standards. I’ll return to this, but first let’s look at what BSB does with these examples:

In either case, it’s trivially easy to just apply the law of detachment and see that both result in the same general conclusion, which is that you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza. And crucially, from this point on, it doesn’t really matter which syllogism got you there — so long as you know you have a reason to order the pizza, all the same relevant normative conclusions fall out regardless: You’ll know, for example, that you also have a reason to pick up the phone and dial, or that ordering the pizza is the right move in the absence of any countervailing reason to do otherwise. (The only thing that might differ is the relative strength of the reason itself, but we can account for that easily by just stipulating that your desire for cheap pizza is exactly as strong as the corresponding moral weight of helping to support a women’s shelter.)

BSB’s objection reinforces my impression that he misunderstands what I and others consider unintelligible. Notice how he starts after giving the examples:

In either case, it’s trivially easy to just apply the law of detachment and see that both result in the same general conclusion, which is that you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza.

But the Unintelligibility Thesis holds that you don’t have a reason in either case. BSB seems to want to argue, by some kind of parity of reason, that if you grant that you “have a reason” in the Hungry case that there’s no good reason to think you don’t “have a reason” in the Charity case, too, since they both work the same way. But since the Unintelligibility Thesis denies that you “have a reason” in either case, this kind of companions in guilt argument simply doesn’t work. BSB goes on to say:

And crucially, from this point on, it doesn’t really matter which syllogism got you there — so long as you know you have a reason to order the pizza, all the same relevant normative conclusions fall out regardless: You’ll know, for example, that you also have a reason to pick up the phone and dial, or that ordering the pizza is the right move in the absence of any countervailing reason to do otherwise. (The only thing that might differ is the relative strength of the reason itself, but we can account for that easily by just stipulating that your desire for cheap pizza is exactly as strong as the corresponding moral weight of helping to support a women’s shelter.)

But we don’t think you “have a reason” in either case. Here’s how I’d interpret the two cases:

Hungry: If you desire to eat a delicious slice of your favorite pizza, then you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza; you desire to eat a delicious slice of your favorite pizza; therefore, you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza.

• It would be conducive to the goal of eating a slice of delicious pizza to order from Big Frank’s Pizza.

Charity: If Big Frank’s Pizza is holding a fundraiser where half of what you pay will go to your local women’s shelter, then you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza; Big Frank’s Pizza is holding a fundraiser where half of what you pay will go to your local women’s shelter; therefore, you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza.

• It would be conducive to the goal of supporting a local women’s shelter to buy pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza.

As you can see, my way of interpreting these remarks cashes them out in the same way. I don’t regard the Hungry case as meaningful but the Charity case as somehow weird or confusing or unintelligible. It’s just that the Hungry case makes explicit reference to desires while the Charity case doesn’t. The former is more explicit about what standard the action of ordering pizza would promote while the latter is more implicit about it. But in both cases the only way to make sense of either of these is, on my view, to understand talk of reasons in terms of their relation to some standard or goal. Critically, the standard or goal need not be one that anyone in particular holds. It need not be a desire in the psychological sense. And that means-end relations make sense of reasons discourse does not mean that reasons are given by desires or stances.

Given this, what BSB says next is irrelevant:

Crucially, this isn’t how things work in other situations where clearly inconceivable options are on the table. You can imagine, for example, an impossible world in which both square and round circles exist. In that world, a syllogism about square circular objects and a syllogism about round circular objects could both end up giving you the conclusion that you’ve got a circular object, period — but if you try to consider what would follow from that conclusion, you come up empty, because it’s just not possible to understand what a circular object would be if that understanding needs to allow for both the round and square versions. In contrast, a reason to act by itself carries all the sorts of normative implications you’d want from a reason, regardless of whether we stipulate that reason as coming from a desire or from some objective moral fact.

The problem is that I don’t analyze the Hungry or Charity case any differently. Both would either involve appeals to irreducible normativity, in which case they’d be nonsensical, or they don’t, and would instead be construed in terms of consistency relations, and thus reduced to descriptive claims. My account doesn’t struggle at all with making sense of the downstream considerations, or what would follow from “having a reason” talk.

Here’s how that works. As BSB says:

And crucially, from this point on, it doesn’t really matter which syllogism got you there — so long as you know you have a reason to order the pizza, all the same relevant normative conclusions fall out regardless: You’ll know, for example, that you also have a reason to pick up the phone and dial, or that ordering the pizza is the right move in the absence of any countervailing reason to do otherwise.

I agree. It doesn’t matter. But nothing follows from this and it is no threat to the Unintelligibility Thesis. Consider how I’d assess these cases:

It would be consistent with the goal of eating a delicious slice of pizza to order from Big Frank’s Pizza. It would also be conducive to this goal to pick up the phone and dial.

It would be consistent with the goal of supporting a local women’s shelter to order from Big Frank’s Pizza. It would also be conducive to this goal to pick up the phone and dial.

Notice how there is no meaningful difference between these two cases at all. My account allows me to trivially arrive at all the same conclusions without ever supposing that there are irreducibly normative reasons, or that facts can “give” us reasons independent of our stances, desires, or attitudes. BSB goes on to say:

What this suggests to me is that the essential conceptual content of a reason doesn’t come with any reference to subjectivity or objectivity “baked in,” so to speak.

I agree. I don’t think ordinary discourse does have either baked into it. While I maintain that we can only make sense of reasons discourse by appeal to implicit indexes to standards, this does not mean that I am claiming that subjectivity is “baked in” to ordinary discourse. I’m not even entirely sure what that would mean. Is this a psychological claim? Or some other kind of claim?

My dissertation was a defense of folk metaethical indeterminacy. I don’t think ordinary language commits people to subjectivism, and I don’t think ordinary people are subjectivists. I think the way people speak is consistent with realism and antirealism, but isn’t distinctively committed to either. What I am showing here is that an antirealist account can make sense of ordinary language without any difficulty, so there is no good reason to suppose only realism can account for ordinary discourse, or that it can do so better than antirealism. It doesn’t do a better job. Contrary to what realists suppose, it just isn’t the case that the overall way ordinary people speak, think, or act suggests they are committed to moral realism or employ the notion of irreducibly normative reasons.

Furthermore, BSB is speaking of the conceptual content “of a reason” as though there is such a thing and it’s part of ordinary discourse. But I am denying this. I think the philosophical conception of normative reasons that BSB has in mind is a philosophical invention, and that ordinary talk of “reasons” doesn’t appeal to reasons in the reified way BSB seems to me to have in mind here. So the issue isn’t that I and those with my views think ordinary discourse appeals to reasons in the reified sense BSB favors, but cashes them out in terms of their relation to desires; it’s that I don’t think irreducible normativity or BSB’s conception of reasons plays any necessary role in ordinary discourse and thinking in the first place.

BSB also hasn’t demonstrated some kind of asymmetry between the Hungry and Charity examples, because I’ve preserved this analysis across both examples, including the example that’s supposed to be a case of stance-independent facts “giving” us reasons. As I’ve shown here, identifying both the Hungry and Charity case as involving implicit indexing to standards is just as consistent with BSB’s considerations. As such, BSB has not successfully disentangled implicit consistency relations from reasons discourse. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since BSB doesn’t appear to understand that this is what I and others are arguing for, rather than the mistaken notion that only desires somehow give reasons, but that non-desire facts don’t.

To put this in very simple terms: we can understand explicit reasons-talk about facts “giving” us reasons as implicitly appealing to real or hypothetical goals, desires, or standards, even if it isn’t explicitly stated. And it certainly doesn’t need to be, nor would it be typical in ordinary language to always be explicit about such standards, even when they are implied and plausibly present. For example, imagine this exchange:

Sam: I’m going to go swimming.

Alex: No! Don’t!

Sam: Wait, what? Why not?

Alex: There’s sharks in the water, and you have a cut on your hand!

Sam: Oh, damn. Really? Never mind then.

We could ratchet this reference to sharks into the same modus ponens structure BSB provided for the Hungry and Charity cases:

Sharks: If there are sharks in the water and you are bleeding, then you have a reason to not go swimming. There are sharks in the water and you are bleeding; therefore, you have a reason to not go swimming.

Notice how this more closely mirrors the Charity case than the Hungry case. There is no reference to desires, goals, or values at all. And yet a perfectly sensible way of making sense of Sharks is that the reason you shouldn’t go swimming ultimately turns on the implicit presumption that you don’t want to be eaten by sharks.

In other words, it isn’t the fact that sharks are in the water that does all the work. It’s not as though, in other words, if you are bleeding and sharks are in the water, these facts alone entail that you “shouldn’t go swimming.” Lurking behind all of this is the widespread presumption that people don’t want to be eaten by sharks, and that you (the person being told not to go swimming) don’t want to be eaten.

Consider some counterfactuals: what if sharks were friendly and would heal your cuts? Then it would make sense to say that you should go in the water. Yet this only makes sense if we assume that the reason why one would or wouldn’t go swimming had something to do with their goal to not be injured. Or imagine most people had a strong desire to be eaten by sharks. Weird? Sure. But if they did, why would Alex mention that sharks were in the water as a reason to not go swimming? Simple: Alex wouldn’t. The only way to make sense of Sharks is to understand that the fact that sharks are in the water isn’t doing all of the work in conveying what’s meant.

This is because when it comes to ordinary discourse, much of what we mean goes unstated, because it is carried by context and assumptions. The only way to make sense of ordinary discourse is to understand who is engaging in that discourse and what their goals, standards, and values are. Discourse is a voluntary, goal-driven behavior that serves social purposes; it isn’t simply a vehicle for spewing propositions. Analytic philosophers routinely induct people into a pathologically confused and misguided way of thinking about language that strips it of its social and contextual elements. The result is a profoundly muddled way of thinking about ordinary discourse that loses sight of these background assumptions. If we go all the way back to the Charity case, the presumption someone who made such a remark would presumably have is that the person they are saying has a reason to buy pizza would want to support a local women’s shelter. Or perhaps they want the person to support the women’s shelter, even if that person may not want to. There may be other possibilities. The point is that any such remarks, if they were to occur in ordinary discourse, would invariably involve people with goals, desires, and standards, and those goals, desires, and standards would be relevant to and influencing what they said and why they said it. And because language serves this social, goal-driven function, we tend to invoke both our own goals and standards when engaging with others, and to make assumptions about other people’s goals and standards.

Consider if an ordinary person was a moral realist and did think that you ought to buy pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza because it would support a local women’s shelter. Why would this person bother saying that you should order pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza merely because they judged that it was true that you morally ought to? There are countless truths we could express to others. Do ordinary people go around endlessly expressing truth claims, without regard for the content of those claims?

No. They do not. Even if someone thought this particular moral fact was stance-independently true, the most likely reason they’d say this to you is if they wanted you to order pizza. Goals and desires are never absent from ordinary discourse. I’m not even sure we could make sense of these sorts of conversations without supposing people were acting with respect to their goals and standards. And so when we look back at the Charity case, while one could try to make sense of it in terms of facts themselves somehow giving us reasons to buy pizza, a more sensible way to make sense of someone telling someone else about the charity is that they want the other person to support women’s shelters or believe that other person would want to do so (or both). These motivations are a little distinct, so let me give an example of each:

Alex: Sam, you shouldn’t go to the party. Sandra will be there.

Sam: Alex, you should apply for that job in New York. It’s right up your alley.

Alex may tell Sam not to go to a party because Alex doesn’t like Sandra and doesn’t want Sam around her.

Sam might tell Alex to apply for a job not because Sam wants Alex to get the job, but because Sam believes Alex would want to get the job, but doesn’t know about it, and Sam wants Alex to be successful. In other words, Sam could have a second-order preference that Alex act on their preferences.

In BSB’s Charity case, whatever goal a person would have need not be explicit. We couldn’t tell merely from them remarking on the fundraiser whether they want others to buy pizza to support the women’s shelter, or because they know others would want to, or both, or something else.

Why does this matter? What I am trying to illustrate here is that while what we say in ordinary language is always goal driven, the goals and values in play are rarely explicit. We have goals. The people we are speaking to have goals. And we make assumptions about what their goals are likely to be. And all of these facts play an essential role in why we bother to speak in the first place. But we frequently don’t explicitly reference what those goals are. As an aside, I am also not claiming that implicit reference to goals or standards of some kind must be present in some form; I’m only saying this is the only way such remarks would make sense. It’s entirely possible for people to say things that don’t make sense. People do so all the time. Nevertheless, people do have goals, and those goals are relevant to why they say things, and I hypothesize that at least much of the time these goals would account for why someone would employ normative language.

Any analysis of ordinary discourse that extracts propositions from the social contexts in which they occur and tries to assess their meaning without reference to these goals is thus not analyzing ordinary discourse. The goal-driven context in which ordinary language occurs isn’t some ancillary feature one can simply throw aside, it’s the whole damn point of it. Simply put, BSB’s examples and analyses fail from the very outset to engage with how “we often speak about and consider reasons.” How we speak about and consider reasons is a psychological and social question that can only be properly understood by appreciating that language is a goal-driven behavior.

3.0 BSB’s persistent reification of reasons

Presumably, the anti-realist accepts that someone in the Hungry case has a reason to order the pizza, and that such a reason carries all sorts of important normative entailments.

No, BSB, we don’t accept this. The whole point is that we don’t think anyone ever “has a reason.” Has-a-reason talk can be made to make sense if it is indexed to a standard, but that standard need not be a desire and such a view does not mean that the person literally has a reason.

Why not just fix the presence of that reason and the nature of its entailments in place and then imagine the whole thing being given by something else instead of a desire?

Because reasons aren’t given by anything. There are no reasons to be given. Note the very clear reification here: the presence of that reason. BSB is still thinking in reified, analytic terms, and is projecting this understanding onto me and others. This isn’t our view, BSB; it’s your view.

What BSB is criticizing isn’t my view and probably isn’t very many other people’s views. What BSB has done is create a weird hybrid, a kind of conceptual chimera, that consists partially of BSB’s own views and partially of my views and those who hold views like mine. BSB then identifies problems within this chimeric view, and writes about them. This is what I call the halfway fallacy. It is easy to mash your own views together with another person’s views then find inconsistencies therein. It’s much harder to deal with positions on their own terms. They’re rarely so transparently inconsistent.

BSB continues to affirm that he’s making precisely the mistake I am attributing to him as well. Note this next remark:

This is, ultimately, what I find so earnestly baffling about the idea that two reasons for ordering a pizza could differ radically in conceivability, solely because one of them is given by facts about desires and the other by facts about the world: To paraphrase the esteemed philosopher Pam Beesly, they’re the same reason! It’s the same fundamental X-counts-in-favor-of-Y relation, with the only difference being what we choose to fill the first variable. Of course, anti-realists are free to think that relations like this only ever do take desires as their first component — they’d have to, or else they wouldn’t be anti-realists — but to go the extra step and say that it’s literally inconceivable for a non-desire fact to play that antecedent role is just legitimately hard for me to fathom.

BSB is still thinking of the position he’s arguing against in terms of desires “giving” reasons. This isn’t my view. Whose view is this? Who knows, because BSB doesn’t name anyone and doesn’t provide any references or quotes.

I don’t know of any published work in which a philosopher has put forward the claim that irreducible normativity is unintelligible. If they have, why doesn’t BSB quote them? Parfit attributes something similar to Bernard Williams, but I’ve been unable to locate any clear indication that Williams actually held such a view, and at least one of Williams’s papers seems to offer an account of reasons, which would be difficult to do if Williams thought reasons were unintelligible. Given this, I probably am one of the primary targets of the objection, and yet it doesn’t even seem to engage my view.

If BSB wants to argue that he’s not targeting my view, but some other view, fine. In that case, BSB is going after a position I don’t know of anyone holding, other than random people online who may have even adopted some misinterpretation of my view. Either way, it’s not especially clear or helpful for BSB to target a position without giving a clear example of anyone else expressing it.

BSB continues to make other remarks that miss the point:

My feelings about stance-independent reasons are very similar: I just don’t see why it would be hard to focus on the normative entailments of a desire for pizza, fix them in your mind, and then just imagine those same entailments being realized by another fact instead.

The issue is irreducible normativity, not stance-independence.

You don’t even have to believe that the other fact in question could ever actually play that normative role, just like you don’t need to believe that any human being could ever actually wake up as a bug in order to understand The Metamorphosis. All you need to do is patch together two things you already accept — the normative entailments of desires on one hand, and some objective fact about the world on the other — inside the structure of a general counting-in-favor relation.

BSB seems to think that the proponent of the Unintelligibility Thesis independently endorses two separate concepts as meaningful: counting-in-favor-relations and stance-independence, but for some inexplicable reason can’t seem to put them together. But the problem is that this isn’t what we think; we reject the counting-in-favor-relation itself as part of what is unintelligible. It’s just false that there are two things we already accept.

If there really are people out there for whom this sort of move just doesn’t compute, then I guess I can’t fault them — but hopefully they won’t fault me for thinking that it seems like a move that shouldn’t be that hard to make!

No, we fault you for consistently misunderstanding us and not engaging adequately with what we actually say.

4.0 Fools and morons

What’s even more remarkable about this is that BSB anticipates part of the response I and others like me would give, but doesn’t quite get it right. Look at this remark, which echoes much of what I’ve already said above:

Now, by this point, I’m sure a few anti-realists have their responses already typed out. You fool! they’ll say. You moron! Don’t you understand that we don’t believe reasons as you describe them even exist? When we say someone has a reason to act based on their desires, we aren’t trying to say that those desires have generated a new “thing” called a “reason” that can exist over and above whatever “generated” it; rather, we’re just using the term “reason” to pick out a particular sort of means-ends consistency that is necessarily desire-based, since it’s very obviously the case that only desires can fix an agent’s actual ends. So of course we’re going to think that stance-independent reasons for action are inconceivable — reasons for action, to the extent that we speak of them existing at all, just are facts about what would or wouldn’t help to accomplish an agent’s stance-dependent goals.

Now I am quite confident BSB is describing my views, since to my knowledge I am the only person publicly framing reasons in this way (if you know of anyone else, please let me know in the comments. I’d like to know who they are! This is a case where I’d be delighted to be mistaken). Now, the mistake here is this:

we’re just using the term “reason” to pick out a particular sort of means-ends consistency that is necessarily desire-based, since it’s very obviously the case that only desires can fix an agent’s actual ends.

This is not the view. Means-end relations don’t require any actual desires. They only require a standard, regardless of whether anyone holds it. This is why it makes perfect sense to say that an action is wrong according to the Bible. The Bible doesn’t have desires, but we can still speak of which course of action would or wouldn’t be consistent with the Bible, or even a randomly generated set of rules printed out on a sheet of paper. Likewise, one can appeal to the desires of whoever is interacting with or evaluating the person, so we don’t have to appeal to their own desires. I can tell someone “You shouldn’t do that” because I desire that they don’t do so, regardless of whether they themselves do so. Neither I nor anyone else who holds views similar to mine would claim that a person only “has a reason” to do something if they have the appropriate desire.

There is never any need to appeal to it “obviously” being the case that only desires can “fix an agent’s actual ends.” BSB is still imposing his own presuppositions on us; he’s still thinking that one “has reasons” and that these reasons must be grounded in, or “fixed,” by some set of facts. But the whole point of our view is that nothing grounds reasons because there isn’t anything to ground. When we speak of means-end relations, we’re speaking of an infinite landscape of relational facts between means and ends. These will be motivationally relevant to an agent only insofar as they have a goal or desire. Given that goal or desire, certain courses of action would be conducive to achieving that goal or desire. There aren’t any further facts. There are only descriptive facts: facts about what people’s actual goals are, and facts about what courses of action would be conducive to those goals. To speak of reasons in a given context may or may not appeal to that person’s actual goals or desires; it may appeal to the goals or desires of the speaker, or it may appeal to standards that aren’t relevant to anyone’s goals or desires. At no point on such a view are “reasons” fixed by “desires.” This is analytic speak, and it is about as confused and nonsensical in the case of desires “giving” reasons as it is in the case of facts doing so.

In short: there are just facts about what ends people have, facts about what means would achieve ends, and facts about the relation between means and ends. There are no further facts.

Also, this last part is still not quite right:

[…] reasons for action, to the extent that we speak of them existing at all, just are facts about what would or wouldn’t help to accomplish an agent’s stance-dependent goals.

To this, I reply: Yes, trust me, I’m aware. (You guys aren’t exactly shy when it comes to making this point!) But what conception of reasons you actually have isn’t particularly relevant here — what matters is whether you could wrap your head around a different conception, one that also seems compatible with all the important first-order features of reasons that we’d expect an account to preserve. After all, I’m absolutely sure right now that Mark Twain was Samuel Clemens, and that means any alternative theory is going to strike me as necessary false. But if one of those alternate theories can vest all the essential Mark-Twain-defining features in someone else instead, then even if that theory will never be convincing, it should still be trivially easy for me to imagine the sort of situation it describes.

Our view is that there are consistency relations and reasons-talk is a way of referencing these relations, whether they capture the actual goals or desires of the agent they’re attributed to, to the goals of the speaker, or to a hypothetical, presumptive set of goals. Someone actually having a given set of goals isn’t needed to meaningfully use reason-talk, and I could say that someone “has a reason” to do something even if it wouldn’t promote that person’s goals. The reason could be that e.g., it promotes my goals. Talk of whether one “has a reason” on my account doesn’t require facts about whether the agent that “has” the reason has any particular goal or desire.

BSB also references “guys” as though there are multiple people defending the view described here. Maybe there are. If so, I’d like to know who these people are.

However, the issue here is whether BSB’s intended rebuttal succeeds. It doesn’t, because BSB continues to help himself to assumptions we don’t grant. BSB says:

what matters is whether you could wrap your head around a different conception, one that also seems compatible with all the important first-order features of reasons that we’d expect an account to preserve

But BSB’s account doesn’t seem to me to be compatible with all the “important first-order features of reasons that we’d expect an account to preserve” because I don’t think it’s intelligible. Notice how BSB uses “seems” in the unqualified sense. Seems to who? Not to me.

I’d already have to understand the concept in order for it to “seem compatible” with anything, but the whole point is that I don’t think there’s a concept to understand. Given this, it makes no sense to appeal to it “seeming compatible” with anything as an argument for its intelligibility, since it’d have to seem intelligible to us to “seem compatible” in the first place.

This is also another instance of the Halfway Fallacy. BSB is appealing to what BSB himself thinks then fails to distinguish this from what other people think. BSB then fuses what he thinks and what others think into a single worldview, points to a problem in this worldview, and thinks he’s pointed out a problem with our worldview. This is a bit like if a Christian thought it was obvious God answers prayers, then argued:

Atheists deny that God exists. But it also seems obvious that God answers prayers. So atheists face this bizarre inconsistency.

BSB’s example doesn’t help:

After all, I’m absolutely sure right now that Mark Twain was Samuel Clemens, and that means any alternative theory is going to strike me as necessary false. But if one of those alternate theories can vest all the essential Mark-Twain-defining features in someone else instead, then even if that theory will never be convincing, it should still be trivially easy for me to imagine the sort of situation it describes.

Yes, because there’s nothing unintelligible about someone having all of those features. This doesn’t demonstrate anything.

BSB is also still operating under the presumption that we need an account of reasons to account for “all the important first-order features of reasons.” He’s just not getting it. I’m denying that we need to offer any account of reasons at all, because there’s no such thing as “reasons” to give an account of. “Reason” is a word in English that serves particular roles in ordinary language. That’s it. What there is to account for are facts about human linguistic practices and human psychology. There’s no “reason essence” we need to distill and figure out, so that we know what “reasons” truly are. BSB’s notion of an alternative theory is still operating within the presumption that the dialectical framework we must operate in is one according to which there are reasons, and I and others are simply offering an alternative account of them. But we’re not. We’re critiquing the very assumptions of the dialectical framework itself. That’s why the Unintelligibility Thesis is ultimately a quietist position.

If, for instance, I deny outright that Mark Twain existed or authored anything, I don’t need to give an account of who the author of Mark Twain’s writings was. Likewise, if there are no reasons, we don’t have to give an account of what “gives” us reasons. In both cases, if we can account for the mistaken view that Mark Twain existed, or that reasons exist by explaining what caused the mistake then our work is done.

BSB tries to bolster his case by claiming that lots of people think about things the way he does:

Moreover, it isn’t as if the alternate model I’m talking about here is some obscure or controversial way of thinking that was dreamed up just to test the limits of an anti-realist’s imaginative skills — it’s one that millions and millions of people successfully rely on every day to make the exact same sorts of decisions that anti-realists do!

That’s exactly what I think it is: an obscure and controversial way of thinking that was dreamed up, not to test the antirealist’s imaginative skills, but to satisfy whatever goals proponents of accounts like BSB’s have. Yet BSB claims “millions and millions of people” successfully rely on BSB’s conception of reasons every day. What is the evidence for this claim?

This is a totally unsubstantiated empirical claim, and BSB offers absolutely no reason at all to think it’s true. I am consistently amazed armchair philosophers are entirely comfortable making sweeping population-level claims about how people speak or think without presenting any evidence.

In fact, a central commitment of anti-realism (or at least the particular version of anti-realism favored by so many who say they can’t conceive of stance-independent moral reasons) is that first-order moral discourse is metaethically indeterminate, in the sense that it doesn’t require any specific second-order understanding of the terms involved. But isn’t that, by itself, a good reason to think that all the second-order frameworks functioning successfully behind the scenes are, at the very least, coherent?

No. I also don’t think they are “functioning successfully behind the scenes.” BSB is helping himself to claims I’m not granting. Obviously if I think there’s no intelligible concept, I don’t think it can successfully function. So if I granted that it did, I’d be granting its intelligibility. BSB more or less fills the latter half of this objection with the unsubstantiated presumption that his conception of reasons “successfully functions” and is used by “millions and millions” of people without presenting any good reason to think either of these claims is true.

Think about it this way: An anti-realist and I could easily have a straightforward, first-order discussion about abortion, and if we did, it’s likely that “reason talk” would play a major role — we might talk about the reasons women choose abortions, what reason a legislature might have to ban it, our reasons for supporting or opposing those bills, whatever. And even if we don’t ultimately end up agreeing, the conversation would at least qualify as some real, honest-to-goodness moral discourse. But if that anti-realist wants to turn around and say that a stance-independent reason is truly inconceivable, then they’d also have to say that I was talking (or at least thinking) nonsense the whole time, right? So it seems like a very remarkable coincidence that moral discourse still somehow works!

No, there’s nothing remarkable or coincidental about this. If one’s theoretical commitments make no practical difference to normative theorizing, then it simply wouldn’t matter if they held such views. Their reasons-talk and my reasons-talk would involve conflicting theoretical commitments, but the realist’s theoretical commitments could be superfluous. As a matter of fact, I think they are. I am, after all, a pragmatist; the absence of a practical difference is one of the primary criteria for dismissing certain metaphysical and conceptual disputes as misguided.

That non-naturalist realism is both unintelligible and practically superfluous isn’t a coincidence; it at best aspires to a kind of relevance, but such relevance typically works only against the backdrop of a host of conceptual confusions and a variety of mistaken views about metaphysics, psychology, and language. I don’t think the kind of error realists make is an inexplicable mistake in an otherwise coherent framework. Rather, I think the entire methodological and metaphilosophical framework in which BSB operates is rotten to the core. Irreducible normativity is a symptom of a larger set of mistakes.

I mean, think of all the other inconceivable things out there that anti-realists are fond of comparing to stance-independent reasons, and try to imagine what it would be like having a conversation about them with a true believer.

Given that almost nobody is a proponent of such views, it’s still unclear who these people are supposed to be.

If I was stuck in a debate with someone who thought all bachelors were married, for example, I don’t think we’d get very far discussing what society should do about the rising number of single men

BSB must be even more confused than I thought. “Married bachelor” is nonsense of a kind, but it doesn’t strike me as necessarily unintelligible so much as identifiably internally contradictory. It’s nonsense, and one might be unable to conceive of a married bachelor, but this is a different kind of mistake than the kind I think BSB and others are making. It might be that BSB has conflated unintelligibility with inconceivability.

When I’ve written about this, I think a closer analogy is a grammatical mistake, like “Put the shoes.” There’s no contradiction here, no P and ~P. It’s just a malformed string of letters that has no content. I typically explicitly distinguish between the sense in which I think BSB’s conception of reasons is unintelligible and such contradictory statements, so again I’m not sure whose position BSB is criticizing.

Because beliefs that are literally meaningless or impossible to grasp don’t tend to be productive!

BSB apparently hasn’t considered that I (or “we”) don’t think realist discourse is productive.

But unless anti-realists want to argue that their realist interlocutors are just getting really, really lucky whenever they try to morally deliberate, it seems like a reasonable conclusion would be that something at least somewhat meaningful is actually going on inside their heads.

No. I reject both. BSB has not presented any good reason to think that if realists can engage in productive first-order moral discourse that this suggests their metaethical views are meaningful. I don’t think they’re lucky. I just think their conception of reasons is irrelevant to first-order discourse and reasoning. That or they are getting things wrong, and are confused, and are talking past antirealists in certain contexts. In other words, I think a few things could be happening:

1. There will be instances where realist second-order views are practically irrelevant, so they can speak to antirealists without an issue

2. There will be instances where it may not be practically irrelevant, and this may lead to conflicts, confusion, misunderstandings, or lack of success in discussing things with antirealists, and to nonsensical or confused private deliberations

I think both probably occur to varying extents, but that both mostly occur in theoretical contexts where we aren’t engaged in ordinary moral interactions, so they’re mostly irrelevant to everyday interactions, anyway. Regarding the latter: why would BSB presume that I think his conception of reasons is nonsense, but nevertheless that he could employ this concept in a way that is equally deliberatively successful as the way I and others think? I wasn’t asked if I thought this was the case, and I think the answer is, at least some of the time, probably not. However, if I may speculate for a moment, I think most of what’s going on with moral realists deliberating is largely just consistent with what antirealists do when they deliberate: I think realists may, without realizing it, just act on their subjective goals and values, and mistakenly take the processes they’re engaged in to reflect deliberation about stance-independent moral truths. This is why I think it’ll either be successful but superfluous and irrelevant because it overlaps with antirealist conceptions, or unsuccessful. It’s one or the other.

In other words, I don’t think the conceptions I consider unintelligible can actually succeed at anything; I think they’re either not actually reasoning on the basis of them and successfully deliberating in a way consistent with antirealists, or are trying to reason on the basis of them and failing.

And since those realists report that what’s going on inside their heads involves considerations of stance-independent reasons for action, then (barring some extreme introspective error I see no evidence for) the anti-realist ought to take them at their word.

This does not make sense. Since we reject their conception of reasons as a pseudoconcept, on our view their reports could not be accurate. They’re wrong about what’s going on in their head. If they weren’t, and we had to grant that they “had the concept” in question, this would require that there be a concept for them to have, which would entail that our position was wrong. It’s absurd for BSB to think that we are under some sort of obligation to grant as true something that would entail that we’re wrong.

We aren’t under any such obligation. We do think they are making an “extreme introspective error.” That’s what all of this comes down to, after all. In that respect then, I don’t take them at their word. That’s kind of the point. After all, when I introspect, it’s obvious to me that this conception of reasons is unintelligible. That is, in virtue of the concepts I “have,” one consequence of these concepts is that BSB’s conception of reasons is unintelligible. If I’m wrong about this, I’m making an “extreme introspective error” myself. This cuts both ways.

I say “virtuously inconceivable” there because, for all I know, the anti-realists who say they can’t conceive of stance-independent reasons for action might just be reporting a brute psychological fact about themselves, rather than trying to make any judgment as to the actual coherence of the concept in some ideal sense — in which case, I guess all I can do is wish them the best in eventually figuring out how to conceive of it like the rest of us can!

“[…] for all I know”? Has BSB considered asking us?

Our position isn’t “We can’t conceive of this concept.” It’s that there is no concept to conceive of, and thus you, BSB, can’t conceive of it. So yes, obviously the position is that you and others are making an introspective error. That’s pretty much part of the position by definition!

No. I’ve clarified explicitly and repeatedly that I, at least, am not doing this. I am not reporting brute psychological facts about myself of the form “I don’t get it.” It’s that I do get it, and that’s why I think BSB and others are confused. I am not appealing to a “brute psychological fact” about myself. I’m appealing to a theoretical stance. It’s beyond tedious to have to clarify this over and over for people who just can’t help but think we’re making self-reports about how things seem to us, and are appealing to these self-reports as the basis for our position. We aren’t.

For comparison, suppose you know the game of chess very well, and you know what all the pieces in the game are. Now imagine a person says that the “archer” is a standard piece in the game. You ask what it looks like and how it moves, and they are unable to tell you. They insist they and all their friends are experts at chess and know the archer is a real piece. You confirm it isn’t the king, queen, bishop, knight, rook, or pawn. It’s another piece entirely. But they can say nothing about what the piece is or how it moves. What would you conclude?

• They don’t know what they’re talking about, and are probably very confused about chess. This is because you understand what all the pieces in chess are and know that “archer” isn’t among them. You also have reason to be suspicious given that they’re unable to show you the piece, explain what it does, or otherwise speak in a way accessible to you about it. The only people who apparently claim to understand this piece can’t publicly demonstrate anything about it at all

• You just don’t understand them. You are just making a brute psychological appeal to your lack of knowledge of the archer piece. You are not making any further judgments such as that there is no piece, or that the person claiming that there is is wrong and probably very confused.

The first of these is the more reasonable option for anyone familiar with chess. It is in virtue of your understanding of chess that you conclude that the person claiming there is an archer piece doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It is not an appeal to ignorance. It is the opposite: it is an appeal to sufficiently comprehensive knowledge. I am making a similar claim about reasons-talk. It is in virtue of my having correctly understood reasons-talk in the English language that I have an adequately comprehensive understanding of such discourse, such that I am capable of recognizing that people who come around speaking about facts and desires “giving” us reasons are confused, and if those people claim to “have” concepts predicated on these confusions, they’re wrong about that, too, much as a person who claimed to “see an archer piece on a canonical, official chessboard” would be wrong, because there is no such piece.

But if the idea is that their inability to conceive of stance-independent reasons for action indicates any legitimate issue with the concept itself, then the fact that so many realists are able to apply the concept so effectively should at the absolute very least put pressure on anti-realists to explain what they think is really going on.

BSB really doesn’t get it. BSB: we don’t grant that you are able to “apply the concept so effectively”. This isn’t something you’ve demonstrated here at all.

These, then, are the two reasons I’d give for thinking that stance-independent reasons for action ought to be conceivable: First, because it seems as though the concept of a reason is separable from any particular notion of stance-dependence or independence, and it should just generally be possible to conceive of something having any of its non-essential aspects altered; and second, because we have empirical evidence that a fair number of self-aware and thoughtful people are successfully relying on the concept of a stance-independent reasons for action when engaging in moral discourse, which would be incredibly surprising if the concept was actually totally meaningless (as the claims of inconceivability seem to suggest).

If I had any hair at this point, I’d pull it out. The Unintelligibility Thesis is not the position that stance-independent reasons are inconceivable in particular. It’s that the notion of reasons serving in counting-in-favor relations is unintelligible, as is any conception of reasons tied to irreducible normativity; this would include views which hold that desires (or anything else one could regard as a “stance”) “give us reasons.” BSB has simply misunderstood what the position is, or is targeting a strawman or a position held by a few weaker, marginal conceptions of the sort of view I hold. We don’t grant that there is a “concept of a reason” that is “separable” in the relevant respects at all.

Second, BSB has not provided as far as I can tell any substantive evidence that people successfully rely on the concept in question. I think BSB has made some inferential leaps without clearly spelling out an argument that’s supposed to serve as evidence for this. I don’t grant that the ability to engage in first-order moral discourse somehow entails that you’re successfully employing second-order concepts to do so.

5.0 Conclusion

This whole post from BSB was a frustrating disappointment. It’s riddled with confusions and misconceptions, a lack of engagement with the actual view in question, and virtually no clear effort to present quotes or other remarks from proponents of the view so that readers can evaluate the fidelity of BSB’s characterization. Some of BSB’s remarks strongly allude to me being one of if not the primary proponents of the views BSB is targeting, but if I am, then BSB has managed to botch my view quite badly. If there are others who hold these views, it’s suspicious for BSB not to mention any of them, or provide any quotes, links, or sources at all. Who are these people?

Conversely, notice how my response directly engages with BSB’s remarks. I link to his post. I refer to him by name. And I directly assess his remarks. This is how you ensure you’re targeting an actual person’s views, and it helps to keep me accountable that others can read what BSB says and what I say in response and judge for themselves if my characterizations are inaccurate. BSB, on the other hand, is coy about the views he’s criticizing. Who are these people? Where are their views expressed? Why doesn’t he say who he is talking about or provide any links or resources for readers?

BSB’s arguments are also just straightforwardly bad. Of the two primary arguments, the first is based on a misconception about the target view, and the second is presumptuous and unsubstantiated, and BSB does almost nothing to argue for it. From the looks of it, it might even just beg the question.

Part of me thinks it’s a waste of time to engage with positions like these. What’s the point? But maybe posts like BSB’s can help people like me to more clearly articulate what we think and why we think it, and, almost as importantly, what we don’t think. I don’t think I have or ever will make any headway with BSB, but maybe others can benefit from reading my response.

References

Parfit, D. (2011). On what matters (Vol. 2). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Addendum

[Added 6/23/2026 at 12:10 AM]

I can now officially confirm that the conception of reasons BSB has in mind is irreducibly normative. He explicitly said:

I don’t think there’s any sense of reasons that isn’t irreducibly normative in the way Lance describes.

He goes on to say:

As far as I can tell, to be “irreducibly” normative just means to be normative at all — if someone believes there are actually reasons for action, given by their own desires or by anything else, then that would count as believing in “irreducible” normativity.

Once again, we have the misleading modifier “actually” only irreducibly normative reasons are “actual” reasons. No, irreducibly normative means normative in a way that isn’t reducible. A reductionist view of normativity doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as normativity; it just means that normativity is reducible to or can be fully described in non-normative terms. Reductionism doesn’t entail that the thing that’s being reduced isn’t real or actual in some sense. But BSB seems to be making a stronger, analytic claim: that to be normative just means to be irreducibly normative. I see no reason to grant this.

So in that sense, I think it’s actually a much, much broader category than even the category of moral realism in particular. As Lance himself says at the start, full-on normative nihilism is actually extremely rare!

I don’t recall saying that at the start. Maybe I did. I don’t know quite what BSB has in mind here.

Now, of course, that isn’t to say that everyone who says “Sure, I have a reason to X” has a fully worked out metaphysical sense of what reasons are. And I can see wanting to avoid counting people who have truly never given it a thought before. But the problem is that we have some great examples of first-order judgments that do seem to require the concept of irreducible normativity in order to make sense — for example, a statement like “Sometimes there are things I should do, not because I want to do them, but just because they’re the right thing to do.”

Nothing about that remark requires irreducible normativity. I won’t even bother explaining why it doesn’t, because BSB doesn’t bother explaining why it does.

I don’t think it’s even remotely plausible to argue that an (extremely widespread) sentiment like that is compatible on its face with normative nihilism

I’m not a normative nihilist. I deny irreducible normativity. If BSB just wants to use “normative nihilism” to mean the denial of irreducible normativity, then fine. Why should I care at all whether BSB doesn’t think this is remotely plausible? So what? I don’t think irreducible normativity is remotely plausible. Who cares? Tossing around remarks about what you find plausible achieves nothing and is “easy mode” philosophy.

So even if you restrict the category to only those people who express actual judgments that indicate a belief in irreducible normativity, it’s still a huge number of people.

BSB moves directly from what he personally finds plausible to the conclusion that a huge number of people employ the concept of irreducible normativity. BSB has reached an empirical conclusion without doing any empirical work. And BSB has the audacity to claim that I’m the one doing philosophy on “easy mode.”

And even that doesn’t even really matter, since my original claim in the piece was just that “millions” of people believe it — and since I’m very confident that millions of people in the world would self-consciously identify as either moral realists or else just “believers in objective morality,”

Personal confidence is not a legitimate basis for making empirical claims. Even if millions of people would identify as moral realists or “believers in objective morality,” this wouldn’t even entail that they specifically endorse irreducible normativity in particular. Many naturalist moral realist philosophers wouldn’t do so, and they may hold highly refined realist views. Simply being a moral realist isn’t good enough. You’d have to specifically endorse this particular conception of reasons.

As I noted in a comment, there are only a few tens of thousands of philosophers. There may be only 20,000-30,000 academic philosophers in the world who have ever even heard of irreducible normativity. Maybe fewer. And then may be a few tens of thousands of people in the orbit of these philosophers have aren’t totally confused about what this might mean. If, as I argue, this is a bizarre, confused, nonsensical pseudoconcept made up by philosophers, there’s no good reason to suppose it’s somehow present among millions and millions of laypeople.

Whether it is or isn’t is an empirical question, and confirming that millions of people hold such a view cannot be resolved by appeals to what you consider “plausible” or what you just declare yourself to be “very confident” about. Again, I cannot stress enough: BSB accused me of doing philosophy on easy mode, and yet his entire basis for a sweeping empirical claim about human psychology apparently consists of merely asserting that it’s “plausible” and that he’s “very confident” without providing much in the way of a substantive rationale for why, so these are apparently just appeals to BSB’s personal intuitions. This isn’t philosophy on easy mode. It’s philosophy on story mode.

Disagreeable Me (DM) has provided some commentary on my critical response to Bookbinder here. I respond to DM here.

1.0 The Mundane/Distinctive Spectrum

In my critique, I argue that the conceptions of intuition philosophers use tend to fall on a spectrum: on one end they refer to mundane psychological states that can’t serve the more ambitious roles philosophers often put them to while on the other they refer to robust and distinct psychological states that can serve the ambitious roles philosophers put them to. These two ends of the spectrum tend to exhibit the following clusters of traits:

Mundane

1. Refer to existing psychological processes (beliefs, dispositions, etc.)

2. Have no distinctive phenomenology

3. Tend to include a heterogeneous array of different cognitive processes

4. Usually supported by current empirical evidence

5. Can’t serve the epistemic roles many philosophers believe intuitions can serve

Distinctive

1. Refer to sui generis or distinct psychological processes

2. Have a distinctive phenomenology

3. May refer to a more homogeneous set of processes or even a single faculty

4. Are not strongly supported by current empirical evidence

5. Can serve the epistemic roles many philosophers believe intuitions can serve

Even a spectrum is a bit of an oversimplification, as something more like family resemblance may bind (even if loosely) different conceptions of intuitions. Given this messiness, it’d be a mistake to say that intuitions don’t exist without qualification. Instead, my position is that conceptions of intuitions more roughly associated with the mundane end of the spectrum often exist, while intuitions on the other end of the spectrum probably don’t. I believe Bookbinder’s conception of intuitions falls well within the distinctive end of the spectrum and is thus at best very unlikely to exist.

2.0 DM’s critique

For the sake of simplifying the narrative (which I don’t object to), DM opts for a sharp dichotomy between mundane and outlandish conceptions of intuition. Outlandish intuitions roughly correspond to the distinctive category above, though DM describes them as involving “a distinct faculty of directly perceiving truth somehow, with associated distinct phenomenology.” DM agrees that outlandish intuitions don’t exist, but argues that Bookbinder’s conception of intuitions falls within the mundane category:

The remaining substantive content of Bookbinder’s post seems reasonable enough to me. This is because he can be read as writing about mundane intuitions, and not as arguing for what Lance takes him to be arguing for. Indeed, the core disagreement comes across to me as arising out of mutual misinterpretation.

1. Lance says (outlandish) intuitions don’t exist.

2. Bookbinder interprets him as saying that (mundane) intuitions don’t exist.

3. Bookbinder says Lance must be cognitively impaired if he doesn’t have (mundane) intuitions, and defends the philosophical use of (mundane) intuitions.

4. Lance responds with a post arguing against what he perceives as a defence of (outlandish) intuitions.

I don’t agree. I think Bookbinder endorses distinctive intuitions, though whether they’d qualify as “outlandish” on DM’s account isn’t clear to me. Part of the reason for this is that DM opts to characterize outlandish intuitions in terms of intuitions as a form of truth perception with distinct phenomenology. But Bookbinder doesn’t mention either of these qualities in his account, and I’m explicitly arguing against Bookbinder’s conception of intuition, as it was presented in his article. Specifically, this is the description Bookbinder gives:

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

There is no mention of intuition as a form of perception or any reference to distinct phenomenology. I even explicitly comment on the absence of the latter feature, noting that it is a bit idiosyncratic because of this. Given this, I find it a bit strange that DM would include these features in his characterization of outlandish intuitions, then claim that my position is that outlandish intuitions don’t exist. I didn’t interpret Bookbinder to be defending the characterization DM labels “outlandish,” I explicitly argued against Bookbinder’s specific account, breaking it down word-by-word.

I argue that this characterization of intuitions: “[…] spontaneous, rapid psychological assessment of truth and prompting to judgment about a priori propositions” …falls well within the realm of unsubstantiated and very likely pseudoscientific. Furthermore, I think there’s enough context aside from this specific characterization to be confident Bookbinder’s characterization of an “intuition” doesn’t comport with colloquial notions of “hunch.”

Another reason DM’s characterization doesn’t stand up well is that much of my objection focuses on how Bookbinder’s specific account is underspecified such that it would be hard to operationalize and test it. I then argue that to the extent that it does have enough content to evaluate, I don’t think such a faculty exists, and, at the very least, there’s no good evidence that it exists. DM seems to have created two extraneous categories, mundane and outlandish, then claimed that I took Bookbinder’s account, B, and misclassified it as an instance of outlandish rather than mundane. This framing is in considerable tension with how I argued for my view. I argued directly against B, and then classified it as outlandish in virtue of its own internal features. In other words, what I didn’t do was say that there was a category of outlandish intuitions with a certain set of features (e.g., quasi-perceptual, involving distinct phenomenology), then interpret Bookbinder’s account as exhibiting those features. I directly targeted the features of Bookbinder’s account itself.

3.0 Single faculty accounts

Bookbinder also uses language that suggests a single faculty account, while at other times suggesting that certain faculties (such as moral intuitions) are the product of particular selective pressures, which suggests a more pluralistic conception of intuition, which points to lack of clarity or internal tensions in Bookbinder’s account. If the single faculty account is true, this would favor the distinctive account, while if the multiple faculties account were correct, this would push it closer to the mundane end of the spectrum. The problem with Bookbinder’s account is that it’s unclear which of these interpretations is accurate.

However, DM offers some puzzling suggestions for my concerns about how many “faculties” are involved in intuition:

Perhaps an issue for Lance is that “faculty” is something of a success-term. If you have the faculty to do X, then X is implicitly appropriate or apt or good in some way.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. This sounds like an analytic concern. Perhaps I didn’t articulate what my concerns are explicitly enough in my post, but I am treating “faculty” in a psychological sense, not in terms of the sorts of concerns that motivate analytic philosophers. See for instance a standard dictionary definition:

cognitive faculty
“a specific aspect or domain of mental function, such as language, object recognition, or face perception. See faculty psychology.”

“Faculties” in psychology refer to distinct psychological systems that are specialized for operating within a particular domain, e.g., visual perception, memory, language, and so on. The brain isn’t just an undifferentiated mass. We have distinct subsystems specialized for specific tasks. What I’m claiming is that we don’t have a specialized system that yields “intuitions” as an output in the way we have specialized systems that involve memories or visual percepts. Reliability or success isn’t relevant to my critique, and I don’t believe I ever mentioned it.

I also think associating Bookbinder’s account with hunches is misguided. “Hunch” is a folk term that captures a certain kind of feeling that something is true, will happen, has happened, and so on. Hunches can be based on prior experience, emotional reactions, training, sensitivity to unconscious cues in one’s environment and so on. You could, for instance, have a hunch that someone is watching you. This would be a hunch about an empirical matter. Critically, hunches also frequently (if not usually) concern empirical matters. Hunches about people’s personalities or what’s going to happen if you make a left turn are empirical. But Bookbinder’s account explicitly refers to rational intuitions that concern a priori matters exclusively. This already puts considerable strain on any attempt to associate his conception of intuition with hunches.

Furthermore, given the way hunch-talk is used, it is very unlikely to be the output of a single faculty in the sense outlined above. We don’t have a specialized “hunch faculty” analogous to our faculties of memory or visual perception.

To support the idea that Bookbinder means a monolithic faculty, Lance quotes Bookbinder as saying “Intuitions are another kind of mental faculty”, and points to the fact that “faculty” is singular.

His use of the term “mental faculty” is singular, which suggests a single dedicated faculty.

I don’t think it does suggest that.

It does suggest a single faculty reading. It’s just not decisive. Think of this in simple Bayesian terms. If someone thought of something in singular terms rather than pluralistic terms, using the definite article “the” as in “the faculty” is more in line with what we’d expect, and would be considerably undermined if they used the plural, e.g., “faculties of intuition.” Bookbinder is mostly consistent in referring to intuition as the product of a faculty, not a set of faculties:

Intuitions are another kind of mental faculty.

Language like this also suggests a singular reading:

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

Note the use of the singular “a power”.

There are also two other lines of evidence that suggest a single faculty reading. First, there is the analogy to a host of other “mental faculties” that do roughly meet the conditions for being singular faculties (I say roughly because some are clusters of functionally related faculties, e.g., various forms of memory). For example, sensations such as seeing, hearing, and tasting are all faculties in the relevant sense, as are nociception, proprioception, and so on. These are all specialized subsystems that operate within a circumscribed domain.

Second, Bookbinder also makes a point of describing various deficits in these faculties. Such deficits are specific impairments in distinctive functions, not generalized cognitive deficits, e.g., blindness is an impairment in visual perception, aphantasia is the inability to form mental images, and so on. Localized impairments like these only make sense if the faculties in question are distinct from others; otherwise localized lesions or impairments wouldn’t result in the distinct impairments in question.

Given this, Bookbinder’s suggestion that I suffer from a congenital cognitive impairment such that I lack intuitions would make little sense if intuitions were the output of a broad and heterogeneous array of psychological processes. As DM says:

if hunches are other psychological phenomena, and hunches are a grab bag of disparate psychological phenomena including instinct, learned expertise, cognitive illusion and so on, then they’re not a single monolithic faculty distinct from everything else.

I also treated hunches as heterogeneous earlier in this article:

Hunches can be based on prior experience, emotional reactions, training, sensitivity to unconscious cues in one’s environment and so on.

If Bookbinder’s conception of “intuition” maps onto these notions of “hunch,” then in order for me to have a congenital cognitive deficit that barred me from having intuitions at all, I’d have to suffer from a broad, diffuse, and ultimately catastrophic array of cognitive abnormalities that would require impairments in pattern recognition, memory, emotion, learning, sensitivity to environmental cues, and every other psychological process associated with intuition. This isn’t a reasonable psychological hypothesis. It would lead to the prediction that I should have severe general cognitive and emotional deficits, which I clearly don’t have. And if these other systems are supposed to be intact but all somehow only are impaired in their capacity for producing intuitions, this wouldn’t make sense because it would require all these separate systems to operate mostly normally except, for some reason, that they’re all uniquely impaired in their capacity for producing intuitions. Given that these systems are neurophysiologically and cognitively distinct, this would be a remarkable and bizarre coincidence.

Finally, Bookbinder was clearly building up to something like the suggestion of a particular, identifiable deficit (which I’ve dubbed anoesia, an inability to perceive philosophical truths) by specifically mentioning all the other faculties and their associated deficits, e.g., blindness, aphantasia, anendophasia, and so on. All of these deficits consist of impairments to specific, specialized cognitive systems, and are good candidates for natural kinds. It’d be a bit strange to lean so heavily on analogies to what are distinctive and largely single faculty systems with associated deficits, only for intuition to not be a single faculty and to instead be heterogeneous and not fundamentally connected to distinct, specialized cognitive subsystems or clusters of interrelated systems in the way every other faculty on his list is. And note that he refers to all of these as faculties.

Given the structure of Bookbinder’s article, the intention appears to be to present the faculty of intuition as being a faculty of the same kind as the other faculties on his list, which are all good candidates for natural kinds. This casts doubt on DM’s suggestion that Bookbinder’s conception of intuition wouldn’t be a natural kind:

What if he had said “Dairy animals are another kind of livestock”? That seems like a natural kind of thing to say, but it doesn’t commit one to thinking that either “dairy animals” (plural) or “livestock” (singular) is a distinct category or natural kind.

I agree in this specific case, but all else being equal use of singular language is still suggestive of a single faculty reading; in this case our background knowledge about what “livestock” is would weigh against a natural kind reading. As always, context matters, and my basis for interpreting Bookbinder as appearing to defend a single faculty reading is based on a more holistic reading of his article that considers the context in which the remarks are made. In short:

1. The use of singular terminology

2. The analogy to single-faculty systems

3. The suggestion that I lack intuition due to a congenital deficit

…are all more consistent with a single faculty reading. Yet when DM continues, he says:

So I don’t think Bookbinder’s post commits him to a distinct, singular, monolithic faculty of intuition.

Lance acknowledges that this isn’t clear...

“But Bookbinder simply isn’t clear about this, since later speculation about the evolution of moral intuitions points to two different mechanisms,”

… so I think that just reinforces the idea that Bookbinder probably isn’t arguing for what Lance takes him to be arguing for.

This is an odd way of framing and responding to my position. DM’s way of describing my position makes it seem like I favor the single faculty interpretation, but then note that it isn’t clear. Yet this isn’t quite right. Here’s what I say later in those sections:

The single-capacity account has very little going for it, and Bookbinder’s other article talking about the evolution of moral intuitions suggests a heterogeneous conception of intuition, so it’s likely that language suggesting a single faculty is just an imprecise and misleading way of speaking about intuition.

What I do in the article is present a conditional set of objections: Bookbinder would face one set of problems on the single faculty account, and a different set of objections on the heterogeneous account. I take both to suffer serious problems. Given this, it doesn’t make much sense for DM to claim that

Bookbinder probably isn’t arguing for what Lance takes him to be arguing for.

DM’s remarks here seem to imply that my objections to Bookbinder center on the single faculty reading, but that because Bookbinder isn’t in fact defending a single faculty account, he isn’t in fact arguing for what I’m objecting to. This reading doesn’t make much sense, since I favor the heterogeneous interpretation and argue against it, too, which DM then immediately addresses:

In that case, Lance says:

“If, instead, “intuition” captures a range of processes, this exposes it to being a superfluous and unhelpful term that doesn’t pick out anything in particular.”

In response to this, DM says:

I don’t see how it makes it any more unhelpful than the term “hunch”. I see the two as being synonymous in most cases. The reason to use the term “intuition” is primarily because “hunch” is too informal for philosophy journals.

That’s fine, but note that this is a matter of DM and me disagreeing about whether my objection is correct or not. It’s not a matter of misinterpreting Bookbinder. Let me try to clarify, at this point, what I take the mistake on DM’s part to be.

DM seems to think my objection to Bookbinder’s conception of intuitions turns on interpreting it in a specific way. But that interpretation is wrong, so my critique is misguided. I’m right about the notion of intuitions I am objecting to, it’s just that this notion isn’t the one Bookbinder is defending.

Where DM has gone wrong here is in thinking that I am only rejecting that specific conception (maybe specifically single faculty accounts). But I’m rejecting Bookbinder’s account based on its specific content, which doesn’t clearly specify whether it’s a single faculty account or a heterogeneous one. I suspect it’s heterogeneous, but I find it objectionable either way.

So I don’t think the proper framing of the disagreement between DM and me is that I have misinterpreted Bookbinder but DM hasn’t. I think we share roughly the same interpretation, but disagree about how defensible that account is on its own terms. So I’ll directly address DM’s objection to my claim that:

If, instead, “intuition” captures a range of processes, this exposes it to being a superfluous and unhelpful term that doesn’t pick out anything in particular.

Which, to repeat, was this:

I don’t see how it makes it any more unhelpful than the term “hunch”. I see the two as being synonymous in most cases. The reason to use the term “intuition” is primarily because “hunch” is too informal for philosophy journals.

I’ll address both points here: whether the term would be helpful or not, and DM interpreting intuitions as hunches.

First, maybe I wasn’t as clear as I thought about why I think it wouldn’t be helpful. Philosophers want to make general claims about the epistemic status of intuitions. But if “intuitions” are the output of, say, twenty different systems, then it’s unlikely such generalizations would be true. This is because the epistemic status of any given intuition would be contingent on which one of these twenty systems delivered that intuition as an output. Furthermore, if intuitions are defined in terms of their output features (such as their phenomenology) and not the processes that give rise to them, but those processes are epistemically relevant, then we encounter a serious problem: which process was involved in a given intuition won’t be introspectively accessible. Let me illustrate with an analogy.

Suppose there are twenty programs on a computer. All of these systems operate very differently. One system is always reliable. One is never reliable. The others are reliable in some cases but not others, but it depends on the context. You submit an inquiry, and you get an answer. You have no idea which one of the twenty systems processed the inquiry. Is your answer reliable? You will have no idea. Whether it’s reliable or not depends on the specific process. Since you don’t know the process, you won’t know if it’s reliable or not.

In order for philosophers to make generalizations about the epistemic role of “intuition,” if intuitions are the product of a heterogeneous set of psychological processes, they’d first have to catalogue what those processes are and independently evaluate their reliability. Otherwise, any declarations that intuitions are “reliable” is a bizarre claim that the outputs of a mysterious array of blackboxes are uniformly “reliable” even though we don’t even know which systems are involved in general or which are involved in any given instance in which a person has an intuition.

Compare to hunches. Some people believe they have the power of premonition. They may describe premonitions as “hunches.” Supposing premonition isn’t real, these people are probably engaged in a kind of self-imposed cognitive error (or delusion, if we want to use less flattering language), much as people who think they can read minds or see auras may be sincere but are mistaken about what’s really going on. These judgments won’t be reliable. Conversely, an experienced detective may have a hunch that a witness was lying, and opt to investigate further, eventually discovering that they were. In this case, the detective may be picking up on subtle body language or microexpressions without realizing it. Or a soldier may have a hunch that they’ve been spotted, and take cover, only for bullets to whiz past where they were moments later. In these cases, the “hunches” in question may be unconscious visual or auditory processing that warned them of danger. The point then is that whether a “hunch” is reliable or not depends on what cognitive processes caused the hunch. Since “hunches” aren’t a natural kind and aren’t produced by a single faculty, generalizations about the reliability of hunches won’t be appropriate. Some hunches are outright delusions. Others are highly specialized reactions to years of training and experience.

Just so, if philosophical intuitions are the output of a whole array of disparate processes, or pseudoprocesses (comparable to a person believing they have premonition), then assessing their epistemological role will require assessing which process is involved, and doing that will require doing empirical psychology, which is exactly what Bookbinder and so many others seem to want to avoid, and is exactly what I am calling for.

4.0 Intuitions as hunches or dispositions to believe

Next, DM also wants to treat intuition as a fancy, formal term that is synonymous with “hunches” in most cases. DM goes on to say:

In any case, I would take it to be a family resemblance term, roughly picking out dispositions to believe which are spontanaeous in the sense that we may not have direct introspective access to where they come from. For the most part, people can use the term to communicate successfully without a very precise specification. It would only become an issue if somebody were to drastically misinterpret what is intended, which I suspect does not happen all that often, but would seem to be happening here, either because Lance or I am misinterpreting Bookbinder.

I do not believe Bookbinder is defending intuitions as the mere disposition to believe. Dispositions to believe have no special connection to the truth and thus couldn’t play the epistemic role Bookbinder attributes to intuitions. They’re also too broad, since they’d include empirical considerations. It’s also a bit of a stretch to suppose that dispositions to believe could be reasonably described as a faculty. I also don’t think dispositions to believe are synonymous with “hunches.” DM continues:

In philosophy in particular, it tends to serve the purpose of a claim I take to be true, cannot justify, but need not justify, because I expect most of my readers to also take it to be true. The precise psychological or neurological origins of the intuition are not particularly important if this is the role it is playing, as long as it is taken to be true.

Note how anemic this conception of intuitions is. DM treats intuitions as claims that we ourselves take to be true, but can’t justify, yet this isn’t an issue because most readers will take them to be true. Yet this is not how Bookbinder describes intuitions. Earlier in Bookbinder’s article, he states that the other mental states he described (memory, perception, and so on):

[…] are used as reasons, as evidence, to believe things. They are all sources of knowledge.

Bookbinder’s whole article turns fundamentally on maintaining that intuitions have the same status:

My response to the debunking argument is this: it leads directly to radical skepticism. Replace “intuition” with “perception” in the preceding paragraph and you’ll see what I mean. If we’re going to dismiss intuition on evolutionary grounds we’ll need to dismiss perception on exactly the same grounds. Well, so much for empirical knowledge. Adios. If you like that option, you might as well stop reading here. I don’t think you’ll get many followers, though.

Note the close analogy to perception: they’re epistemically interchangeable. Perception furnishes us with knowledge of the physical world. We detect it. Likewise, by analogy, intuition furnishes us with knowledge of a priori reality. So…do we detect it? Or dare I say … perceive it? I think these would be reasonable suspicions to have about Bookbinder’s analogy, but Bookbinder isn’t explicit about how far the analogy goes. It doesn’t have to, though. Bookbinder doesn’t need to explicitly treat intuition as quasi-perceptual for it to play an epistemic role that DM’s interpretation of intuitions as “hunches” can’t play.

Are hunches sources of knowledge in a way analogous to perception? Are dispositions to believe interchangeable with perception in their epistemic role? I don’t think so, but maybe Bookbinder is using these terms in ways that differ from how I’ve typically seen them used by philosophers. Philosophers, at least, frequently go out of their way to explicitly insist that intuitions are not hunches (more on this below).

DM also takes issue with my concerns about “intellectual seemings” or “appearances.” This barely comes up in my critique of Bookbinder, but I will address one point:

And for those philosophers who do talk of phenomenology, I suspect that what they have in mind is more mundane and less outlandish than Lance has in mind.

I’m not quite sure what DM is referring to here. I don’t think I specifically maintained that there’s anything outlandish about the phenomenology people associate with intuition. My suspicion about intuition phenomenology isn’t that it’s outlandish, or even that it’s not real. I’m entirely on board with granting that people who report distinct phenomenology with intuitions are, in fact, having distinct phenomenology.

My specific claim here is about what’s causing intuitions. Whereas philosophers may think they’re employing an innate or learned capacity to detect a priori truths in some quasi-perceptual way, I believe what is going on instead is that they have been induced to have experiences they misinterpret as being a genuine type of epistemically legitimate quasi-perceptual capacity to detect truth.

I don’t think people possess or learn to develop a genuine truth-detection ability. Instead, my working hypothesis is that studying philosophy and interacting with people who study philosophy leads to a process of philosophical induction in which novice philosophers are socialized into specific ways of thinking, speaking, and reacting to philosophical work, and that part of this process is being inducted into reporting and in some cases genuinely experiencing certain experiential states they systematically misinterpret as a genuine experience that has some special epistemic connection to the truth. What I think is going on is instead a bit like what happens with people who are convinced by a guru that they can see auras (the paranormal ability to detect energy fields around people that can be differentiated by their distinct colors). Such people may very well be having genuine experiences. It’s just that those experiences aren’t actual instances of seeing auras. Maybe they’re misreporting mundane experiences as instances of seeing auras. Maybe they’ve been able to literally perceive colors around people as a result of some kind of self-induced hallucination. Whatever’s going on, I don’t think they’re actually seeing auras. Likewise, whatever is going on with philosophers who report a “seeming” that some philosophical claim is true, I don’t think they’re really “detecting” truth with a special power.

I don’t find any of this especially outlandish. It’s just a hypothesis about what’s actually causing the phenomenology in question. My proposal may seem far-fetched. But something like this would have to be true if my broader worldview is correct. For comparison, some people believe they literally speak to God. If you’re an atheist, you can’t consistently just accept that they have this ability. So if they sincerely believe they’re able to talk to God, and report hearing God’s voice, what alternative do you have other than to hypothesize that they’re doing something like (a) misinterpreting their own inner monologue as God or (b) hallucinating or (c) some other mundane-but-definitely-not-God-talking account? A consistent atheist would have no choice but to suppose something like this is going on.

I think something like this is going on with many philosophers. I think they are committed to construing their intuitions in theoretical terms that are inconsistent with the actual nature of what’s happening. Something is happening: some affective reaction, or feeling, or hunch, but what they explicitly report and are committed to is something far more than this: some quasi-perceptual apprehension of a transempirical reality. It is on par with claiming to see auras. I don’t think there’s anything mundane about this. To continue to push the comparison, suppose that what’s going on with people who report seeing auras is that they pick up on body language, appearance, facial expression, and so on, and get certain emotional responses. They then associate their emotions with colors, and describe the person as having a “green aura.”

• (1A) In reality, something mundane is going on: they’re associating emotional responses to visual cues with colors.

• (1B) But the person construes themselves as having the paranormal ability to detect energy fields.

Now compare to philosophers. A philosopher is presented with a thought experiment and reports their intuition about it.

• (2A) In reality, they’re having some affective reaction, recollection, unconscious inferential processing, or other mundane psychological event.

• (2B) But that person construes themselves as having a special capacity for perceiving a priori using their mind, but in a way that transcends all empirical considerations and is utterly divorced from and not responsive to physical stimuli in the world.

I don’t think there’s anything mundane about (2B). It sounds pretty similar to claiming to have magic powers to me.

5.0 Did I misinterpret Bookbinder?

DM’s last section continues to claim that I’ve misinterpreted Bookbinder somehow:

Much of Lance’s post seems to me to be concerned with arguments which are predicated on what I take to be a misreading of Bookbinder.

I still haven’t seen a single clear instance of a way in which I’ve misinterpreted Bookbinder, but I’ll consider what DM says in this section, which addresses a few issues:

“How, for any given judgement, do we know when it is the output of the mental faculty of intuition instead of the output of some other faculty, such as memory”

(predicated on the monolithic (mis)interpretation)

No, this isn’t based on a monolithic interpretation. Even if a phenomenon is supposed to be pluralistic and thus the product of multiple distinct processes, this doesn’t mean it can be the output of any process. Memories and hunches are not the same thing. I don’t have a hunch that 2+2=4. On that note, think about how poor a fit the term “hunch” is for Bookbinder’s examples of intuitions:

• 5+7=12

• It is wrong to torture puppies for fun.

• If you know something, then you believe it.

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

• Cycling implies cyclists.

• Everything obligatory is also permissible.

• Impossible things never happen.

None of these are the sorts of things people would describe as hunches. These are all examples of things people would be pretty damn sure of, whereas “hunches” are typically a lot more tentative. This is quite a strong point against DM’s hunch interpretation. Far from supporting the contention that I’ve misinterpreted Bookbinder, I think this flips the table on DM and more strongly favors the conclusion that DM is guilty of misinterpretation.

At the same time, my general point in these sections is that one’s reaction to these cases can often be explained by mundane processes like memory. Thus, I am not drawing a distinction between reacting to these scenarios on the basis of a single faculty account of intuitions as something distinctive or instead viewing one’s reaction as based on some process that could be plausibly associated with a heterogeneous conception of intuition. Rather, I draw attention to processes that wouldn’t fit either account. Thus, I think DM has both misinterpreted Bookbinder and misinterpreted me.

· Interesting empirical questions to explore but not necessary for successful communication

“How did it evolve?”

I’m not sure all the questions I posed are strictly necessary, but I don’t believe I claimed they were. There are a few reasons for bringing up evolution, though. First, it’s a critical part of the explanation of any faculty or faculties. Second, the evolutionary history of psychological processes is relevant to their function, which is in turn relevant to functional differences, which is in turn relevant to how many faculties there are, and is thus relevant to the question of homogeneity or heterogeneity of process. Third, Bookbinder himself brings up evolutionary considerations, so it seemed worth mentioning since Bookbinder appears to acknowledge the relevance of evolutionary considerations. Also, I address evolution in part because it’s relevant to drawing a distinction between proximal and ultimate explanations. I note that the latter doesn’t resolve questions about the former and shouldn’t be mistaken as an adequate explanation for the phenomenon in question because it doesn’t directly assess the cognitive processes involved.

· Interesting semantic questions that may be worth exploring in particular contexts, but probably not always and everywhere

“Must intuitions be rapid?”

I don’t think DM appreciates why this is a problem. First, consider my general strategy against Bookbinder. What I did was take each one of the features Bookbinder attributes to intuition then show that it’s questionable how defensible this feature is, given how philosophers use intuitions or engage in intuition talk. If I can show that each of the traits Bookbinder attributes to intuitions are ones that we’d either want to abandon or that raise questions about how adequately they capture intuition-talk among philosophers, Bookbinder would either have to give up one more feature of his account or commit to an account that would be in tension with philosophical practice and with other conceptions of intuitions. And if enough features are given up, this strips Bookbinder’s account of intuition of most of its content, leaving it a conceptually empty husk.

In other words, if intuitions must be rapid, then we run into a host of problems with actual philosophical practice. Many things philosophers may want to call intuitions wouldn’t be. This may serve as a reductio. Conversely, if they don’t have to be rapid, then Bookbinder made a mistake and would have to give up some of the content of his account. If enough of these mistakes accumulated, it’d be death by a thousand (or in this case, a half a dozen) cuts.

· Somewhat, I’m sorry to say, pedantic point-scoring

“Do intuitions have to be judgements about whether something is true?”

This might be a little pedantic, but it was a two sentences out of a ~30,000 word post. I think DM’s depiction of my concerns would give readers who haven’t read those concerns the impression that my objections are petty, when I think DM is just drawing attention to this particular one being an especially weak one (which it admittedly is).

However, I didn’t exclude it for a reason. Again, recall the strategy outlined above: what I am trying to show is that once you look at each component of Bookbinder’s account of intuition, if you can poke holes in each, the whole account ends up being empty. Consider Bookbinder’s account:

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

Now suppose we show that:

• An acceptable account wouldn’t be restricted to a priori propositions, and if this is what “rational” means, then they don’t have to be “rational” either

• They don’t have to be spontaneous

• They don’t have to be rapid

• “Psychological” appears superfluous here, so we can drop that

• It’s not clear what it means for them to be “prompting to judgment”

If it also turns out that they’re not even necessarily about assessments of truth, then what, exactly, would we be left with? Maybe something like:

Intuitions are an assessment about propositions.

…if that’s all Bookbinder is left with, I’d consider that a victory for me. Removing “truth” from the list would be part of that.

In short, the reason I even included “truth” in my critique was to continue the general pattern of showing that every or nearly every word Bookbinder associated with intuitions was questionable. Unfortunately, when I gave examples of alternatives to judgments about truth, I did a poor job of elaborating. I simply said:

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

DM responds to this question by saying:

(because a judgement that X is Y is, to me, more or less equivalent to a judgement that “It is true that X is Y” — I don’t see why this question matters.)

This is true enough. One could readily construe all the examples I gave as truth claims. This shows that the examples I give don’t really plausibly allow alternative construals of the content of intuitions to escape being about truth. So perhaps the answer to this particular question is a simple “yes, they’re about truth.” I’m fine with that. Not all of my questions are going to be devastating. I do want to raise a concern, though.

Do hunches invariably involve assessments of the truth of propositions? I suspect not. On the contrary, I suspect hunches often take the form of, say, a feeling of unease or some other affective or nonpropositional state. If so, while I may have failed to provide a good example initially, Bookbinder’s identification of intuitions with hunches may now provide one: it may be that Bookbinder’s emphasis on truth assessment is in some tension with hunches, insofar as the latter aren’t restricted to being associated with assessing truths. DM could perhaps suggest that feelings of unease or other affective hunches can be construed in propositional terms, but I’m not so sure this is defensible.

Suppose I walk into a room, and feel a deep sense of unease. I then conclude I should get out of there, because it might be dangerous. Is the judgment “I should leave” or “it might be dangerous” the hunch, or is the feeling that prompted these judgments the hunch? I think a reasonable case could be made that the feeling is the hunch, and the feeling caused the judgment, but that the judgment isn’t always constitutive of the hunch itself.

In other words, Bookbinder’s account of intuition may be committed to a cognitivist construal of intuitions, whereas the notion of a hunch may include (even if it isn’t limited to) noncognitive states. If so, this would put further strain on DM’s claim of near-synonymy.

DM continues:

If I’m right that Bookbinder doesn’t have anything particularly outlandish in mind, then I think that undercuts a lot of Lance’s demands and criticisms. For example, Bookbinder need not establish that the distinctive phenomenon of intuition exist if he is not talking about a distinctive phenomenon.

As already noted, my criticism is conditional. If intuitions aren’t a distinctive phenomenon this exposes Bookbinder to a different set of problems than if it is. I will stress though that there are weird internal tensions in Bookbinder’s account. Every one of the examples of mental faculties he draws on is a distinctive phenomenon (or cluster of related distinctive phenomena), so it’d be quite strange to say that intuition is one of them, but somehow isn’t a distinct phenomenon. I also don’t take heterogeneity to mean something isn’t a “distinct phenomenon” since heterogeneity of process doesn’t entail heterogeneity of function or epistemic role. So perhaps DM and I have different things in mind here we’d need to resolve through discussion.

6.0 Do I misinterpret other philosophers?

Lastly, we get to this:

Furthermore, if I’m right that Lance has misinterpreted Bookbinder, then Lance may be misinterpreting other philosophers, and the prevalence of outlandish conceptions of intuition may not be the problem Lance takes it to be.

I’m still not clear on what the misinterpretation is supposed to be. As I said, my critique focuses on the features Bookbinder explicitly attributes to intuitions. I didn’t try to take Bookbinder’s discussion of intuitions and interpret it to fit some other account, and then critique that other account.

On my view, Bookbinder falls within a broader camp who hold pseudopsychological views about intuition. I don’t think Disagreeable Me has done much to show otherwise, but much of this is based on the specific mundane/outlandish dichotomy. Disagreeable Me associates Bookbinder with the mundane category, and closely associates this with intuitions as hunches. So my impression is that DM interprets Bookbinder’s account to roughly be that intuitions are like hunches.

I think this is mistaken. One reason is that Bookbinder’s use of “rational intuition” seems to cleave closely to Bealer’s terminology and characterization, and I’m familiar with Bealer and a handful of other philosophers generally treating intuitions as a fairly distinct phenomenon often explicitly distinguished from hunches. In fact, Bookbinder explicitly contrasts his view with mine by associating it with these philosophers:

At the other end of the spectrum is the testimony of Saul Kripke: “Some philosophers think that something’s having intuitive content is very inconclusive evidence in favor of it. I think it is very heavy evidence in favor of anything, myself. I don’t know, in a way, what more conclusive evidence one can have about anything, ultimately speaking.” Plenty of other prominent philosophers agree, like Ernest Sosa, George Bealer, Robert Audi, etc. I’m not appealing to their authority here, just pointing out that using intuition as evidential is a mainstream (albeit not universal) view.

Bookbinder is only comparing his account to these in terms of them treating intuitions as evidential, and is not explicitly claiming to endorse the same view of intuitions as any of them. Nevertheless, the epistemic role Bookbinder assigns to intuition is more closely associated with these conceptions than the more mundane end of the spectrum; indeed, it is often the point of those who maintain that a proper conception of intuition places them on the mundane end of the spectrum is that, as a result, they can’t play the ambitious epistemic roles Bealer, Sosa, Audi, and so on attribute to them. As such, Bookbinder’s association with these accounts does hint at the overlap likely being greater than the mere overlap in the evidential role of intuitions.

DM wants to associate Bookbinder’s account with the mundane end of the spectrum, which DM treats as closely identifying intuitions with hunches. What do those who fall into the “intuitions as evidence” camp generally think of this association? I couldn’t find any specific reference in Sosa, Audi, or Kripke stating that intuitions are not hunches, but Bealer explicitly says that they aren’t:

Intuitions are also quite distinct from judgments, guesses, and hunches. As just indicated, there are significant restrictions on the propositions concerning which one can have intuitions; by contrast, there are virtually no restrictions on the propositions concerning which one can make a judgment or a guess or have a hunch. Judgments are a kind of occurrent belief; as such, they are not seemings. Guesses are phenomenologically rather more like choices; they are plainly not seemings. And hunches are akin to merely caused, ungrounded convictions or noninferential beliefs; they too are not seemings. (p. Bealer & Strawson, 1992, p. 103)

Phenomenologically, this kind of episode is quite distinct from a mere hunch. (Bealer, 1998)

The way Sosa, Audi, and Kripke talk about intuitions, however, doesn’t comport very well with treating them as hunches. Kripke (1980) claims that he can’t think of what more conclusive evidence one could have about anything (p. 42). Is it reasonable to think Kripke thought hunches were the most conclusive evidence one could have? Audi (2004) says explicitly that:

A mere inclination to believe is not an intuition; an intuition tends to be a “conviction” (a term Ross apparently sometimes used for an intuition) and tends to be relinquished only through such weighty considerations as a felt conflict with a firmly held theory or with another intuition (p. 34)

This is explicitly and obviously inconsistent with DM’s characterization of intuitions as:

[…] a family resemblance term, roughly picking out dispositions to believe

Sosa’s (1996) account of intuition is most congenial to DM’s, and likely falls closer to (or within) the mundane end of the spectrum. Nevertheless, in his earlier writings, Sosa does say that:

The intuitions of interest are a priori intellectual seemings, which present themselves as necessary (p. 151)

While sympathetic to Bealer’s account, Sosa was at the time also open to less restrictive conceptions of intuition, and suggests that they:

[…] might be viewed as inclinations to believe on the basis of direct experience (sensory) or understanding (intellectual) regardless of any collateral reasoning, memory, or introspection – where the objects of intellectual seeming also present themselves as necessary. (p. 154)

Some years later, Sosa appears to have been less tentative in construing intuitions in terms of dispositions:

On my proposal, to intuit that p is to be attracted to assent simply through entertaining that representational content. The intuition is rational if and only if it derives from a competence, and the content is explicitly or implicitly modal (i.e. attributes necessity or possibility). (Sosa, 2007, p. 101)

Sosa thus appears to endorse a competence-based account of intuition that may fit reasonably well with DM’s construal of intuitions as dispositions to believe. However, intuitions are still restrictive in that they concern a priori matters, and at least on the earlier account are characterized as “seemings” which “present themselves as necessary,” indicating that they have both a distinctive phenomenology and content that isn’t consistent with construing them as hunches. Thus, Sosa may favor a “disposition to believe” account, but the account still includes features that are inconsistent with hunches, insofar as hunches are presumed not to require distinctive phenomenology or to exclusively concern matters of necessity. Without diving into the details of precisely how this competence is supposed to work, it’s hard to say whether I’d consider Sosa’s specific account to refer to phenomena that don’t exist; I may just question whether philosophers actually have the relevant kind of competence.

As an aside, note the title of the first Sosa reference: “Rational intuition: Bealer on Its Nature and Epistemic Status”. This and other places, “rational intuition” is used to designate a subset of intuitions and is associated with Bealer’s and other, similar conceptions. In the influential “Intuition and the autonomy of philosophy,” Bealer (1998) says:

When we speak here of intuition, we mean “rational intuition.”

This is why I pegged Bookbinder as alluding to a similar conception of intuition, even if his articulation of it in his blog post was somewhat different. Such notions of intuitions other than Bookbinder’s are usually (but not always) on the far end of the distinctive spectrum, and do tend to fall within what DM would already agree are “outlandish” conceptions of intuition.

Bealer and Audi are not the only philosophers who explicitly distinguish intuitions from hunches or dispositions to believe, either. Let’s have a look at what other authors have said:

Recall at the beginning of this section that DM suggested that if I’m misinterpreting Bookbinder, perhaps I’m misinterpreting other philosophers as well. I don’t think I’m generally misinterpreting these philosophers insofar as I don’t think their account of intuitions is nearly synonymous with “hunches” for the simple reason that most of the remarks above are some version of them explicitly saying “intuitions aren’t hunches.” Alternatively, some instead say that doing so is an uncommon or problematic approach, or that even if hunches are intuitions, the philosophical intuitions of interest to them aren’t hunches.

One of the main reasons I don’t think it’s very likely I’m misinterpreting these and other philosophers when it comes to what they think intuitions are is that interpretation isn’t really a significant factor here. At least on the topic of intuition, philosophers are often quite straightforward about what they are referring to. It doesn’t take subtle exegesis or a deep well of knowledge to interpret convoluted prose or byzantine jargon. If a philosopher says that it’s clear intuitions have nothing to do with hunches, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that they don’t think that intuitions are hunches. I could be misinterpreting them anyway, but I think the straightforwardness of the quotes above puts the onus squarely back on DM to show that this is likely.

Collectively, these quotes present a consistent tendency for philosophers to explicitly distinguish intuitions from hunches or, where they include hunches within the scope of intuition, to draw further distinctions, narrowing the scope of the intuitions of interest to “rational intuition.” Of course, there are likely several different conceptions of what “hunches” are at play here, some of which may differ from DM, so any given quote could turn out to be consistent with DM’s views due to terminological differences. But I hope what I’ve shown here provides a reasonably compelling basis for the notion that there is a non-negligible subset of philosophers who construe intuitions in ways that wouldn’t reasonably fit with DM’s suggested conception of intuitions. Some of the comments here even indicate that viewing intuitions as hunches is a minority view, though without explicit data it would be difficult to confirm if this was the case.

7.0 Conclusion

Given all these quotes, we can distinguish between at least three theses:

1. Whether a given construal of intuitions is pseudopsychological, false, or “outlandish”

2. What proportion of conceptions of intuitions fit these descriptions

3. Whether Bookbinder’s account fits these descriptions.

I think there are construals that fit (1), that many (though I don’t know how many) accounts fit this description, and that Bookbinder’s account is one of them. I don’t think DM’s suggestion of intuitions as hunches or dispositions would hold much sway among philosophers who endorse intuitions; such accounts of intuition are often favored by those who believe intuitions play little or no role, or at least little substantive evidential role, in philosophical methodology. So while such accounts do exist, they typically curtail the ambitions of philosophers who seek to place intuitions at the center of philosophical methods. This isn’t to say no such accounts would construe intuitions in this way and consider them central; competence accounts may do so. But I see little indication from Bookbinder’s characterization that he’s opted for such accounts. And as I’ve noted from the outset, the main problem with DM’s claims that I’ve “misinterpreted” Bookbinder is that my primary objections engage directly with Bookbinder’s characterization, rather than some interpretation of Bookbinder’s views that infers Bookbinder endorses some third-party account. Given this, I think the accusation of misinterpretation isn’t just mistaken but is itself like a misinterpretation of the approach I took in my critique.

References

Antognazza, M. R., & Segala, M. (2023). Intuition in the history of philosophy (what’s in it for philosophers today?). British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 31(4), 574-578.

Audi, R. (2004). The good in the right: A theory of intuition and intrinsic value. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Bealer, G. (1998). Intuition and the autonomy of philosophy. In M. R. DePaul & W. Ramsey (Eds.), Rethinking intuition: The psychology of intuition and its role in philosophical inquiry (pp. 201–240). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Bealer, G., & Strawson, P. F. (1992). The incoherence of empiricism. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 66, 99-143.

Bedke, M. S. (2018). Moral intuition. In The Routledge Handbook of Moral Epistemology (pp. 360-374). Routledge.

Bengson, J. (2015). The intellectual given. Mind, 124(495), 707-760.

Bruder, M., & Tanyi, A. (2014). How to gauge moral intuitions? Prospects for a new methodology. In Experimental ethics: Toward an empirical moral philosophy (pp. 157-174). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Cekiera, K. (2024). Intuition as a source of evidence in philosophy: The minimal view. Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso, (24), 9-24.

Dabbagh, H. (2018). Intuiting Intuition: The Seeming Account of Moral Intuition. Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 18(52), 117-132.

Drummond, J. J. (2015). Intuitions. Teorema: Revista Internacional de Filosofía, 34(3), 19-36.

Ellis, A. (2013). Beyond experimentalism. In A. Chapman, A. Ellis, R. Hanna, T. Hildebrand, & H. W. Pickford (Eds.), A new rationalist manifesto (pp. 41-72). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Goldman, A. I. (2007). Philosophical intuitions: Their target, their source, and their epistemic status. Grazer Philosophische Studien, 74, 1-26.

Hopp, W. (2015). Intuitions. Teorema: Revista internacional de filosofía, 34(3), 5-17.

Kripke, S. A. (1980). Naming and necessity. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kuntz, J. R., & Kuntz, J. R. (2011). Surveying philosophers about philosophical intuition. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2(4), 643-665.

Lutz, S. (2009). Ideal language philosophy and experiments on intuitions. Studia Philosophica Estonica, 117-139.

McGahhey, M., & Van Leeuwen, N. (2018). Interpreting Intuitions. In J. Kirsch & P. Pedrini (Eds.), Third-Person Self-Knowledge, Self-Interpretation, and Narrative (pp. 73-98). Springer.

Nado, J. (2014). Why intuition?. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 89(1), 15-41.

Osbeck, L. M. (1999). Conceptual problems in the development of a psychological notion of “intuition”. Journal for the theory of social behaviour, 29(3), 229-249.

Pailos, F. M. (2012). Intuition as Philosophical Evidence. Essays in Philosophy, 13(1), 296-309.

Paul, E. S. (2023). Cartesian intuition. British journal for the history of philosophy, 31(4), 693-723.

Pust, J. (1997). Intuitions as evidence. [Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona]. UA Campus Repository. https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/288736

Pust, J. (2024). “Intuition”. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/intuition/

Ramsey, W. (2018). The cognitive source of philosophical intuitions: Troubles for the etiological project. Belgrade Philosophical Annual, (31), 85-113.

Sosa, E. (1996). Rational intuition: Bealer on its nature and epistemic status. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 81(2/3), 151-162.

Sosa, E. (2007). Experimental philosophy and philosophical intuition. Philosophical studies, 132(1), 99-107.

Zouhar, M. (2015). On the Alleged Indispensability of Intuitions in Philosophy. Balkan Journal of Philosophy, 7(1), 37-44.

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

1.0 Look at my magic beans!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.0 Bookbinder’s Defense of Intuitions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intuitions are another kind of mental faculty.

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

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

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

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

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

3.0 Blind from Birth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am disposed to believe that the external world exists.

I vericeive that the external world exists.

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

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

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

Instead, they are characterized as:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lance: I don’t believe in psychic powers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4.0 Bookbinder’s underdescribed definition

Bookbinder characterizes intuitions as follows:

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

He also provides several examples of intuitions:

• 5+7=12

• It is wrong to torture puppies for fun.

• If you know something, then you believe it.

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

• Cycling implies cyclists.

• Everything obligatory is also permissible.

• Impossible things never happen.

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

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

5.0 A case of the mundane

After presenting these examples Bookbinder adds:

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

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

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

Let’s begin with the math equation:

5+7=12

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

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

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

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

Next, we have a moral claim:

It is wrong to torture puppies for fun.

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

If you know something, then you believe it.

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

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

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

Cycling implies cyclists.

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

Everything obligatory is also permissible.

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

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

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

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

Impossible things never happen.

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

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

Mark did the impossible and overcame his fear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of what Bookbinder says is accurate enough, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5.1 “Mental faculties” and the single-capacity reading

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

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

1. Domain specificity

2. Mandatory operation

3. Limited central accessibility

4. Fast processing

5. Informational encapsulation

6. ‘Shallow’ outputs

7. Fixed neural architecture

8. Characteristic and specific breakdown patterns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 5+7=12

• It is wrong to torture puppies for fun.

• If you know something, then you believe it.

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

• Cycling implies cyclists.

• Everything obligatory is also permissible.

• Impossible things never happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

5.2 The evolution of intuitions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5.3 Must intuitions be spontaneous?

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

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

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

“Can I warn the people on the track?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5.4 Must intuitions be rapid?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5.5 What is a psychological assessment?

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

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

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

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

Does Smith have knowledge in this case?

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

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

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

“Yes”

Or

“We’d all endorse utilitarianism”

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

5.7 Must intuitions prompt judgments?

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

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

5.8 Is Bookbinder’s definition too broad?

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

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

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

5.9 Is Bookbinder’s definition too narrow?

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

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

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

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

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

5.10 Do intuitions involve any distinct phenomenology?

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

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

6.0 Insults & Accusations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Scoff at skeptics and caricature their perspectives

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

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

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

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

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

7.0 Conclusion

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

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

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

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

References

Amalric, M., & Dehaene, S. (2019). A distinct cortical network for mathematical knowledge in the human brain. NeuroImage, 189, 19-31.

Andow, J. (2015). How “intuition” exploded. Metaphilosophy, 46(2), 189-212.

Andow, J. (2017). Intuition-talk: virus or virtue?. Philosophia, 45(2), 523-531.

Baron, J., & Gürçay, B. (2017). A meta-analysis of response-time tests of the sequential two-systems model of moral judgment. Memory & Cognition, 45(4), 566-575.

Bealer, G. (1998). Intuition and the Autonomy of Philosophy. In M. DePaul & W. Ramsey (Eds.), Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry (pp. 201-239). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Bealer, G. (1999). A Theory of the A Priori. Philosophical perspectives, 13, 29-55.

Bengson, J. (2013). Experimental attacks on intuitions and answers. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 86(3), 495-532.

Bengson, J. (2014). How philosophers use intuition and ‘intuition’. Philosophical Studies, 171(3), 555-576.

Bengson, J. (2015). The intellectual given. Mind, 124(495), 707-760.

Berker, S. (2009). The normative insignificance of neuroscience. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 37(4), 293-329.

Bluhm, R. (2014). No need for alarm: A critical analysis of Greene’s dual-process theory of moral decision-making. Neuroethics, 7(3), 299-316.

Cappelen, H. (2012). Philosophy without intuitions. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Cohnitz, D., & Häggqvist, S. (2009). The role of intuitions in philosophy. Studia Philosophica Estonica, 1-14.

Evans, J. S. B. (2008). Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. Annu. Rev. Psychol., 59(1), 255-278.

Fodor, J. A. (1983). The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gaber, D., & Schlimm, D. (2015). Basic mathematical cognition. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 6(4), 355-369.

Goldberg, T. E., Harvey, P. D., Wesnes, K. A., Snyder, P. J., & Schneider, L. S. (2015). Practice effects due to serial cognitive assessment: implications for preclinical Alzheimer’s disease randomized controlled trials. Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring, 1(1), 103-111.

Grady, R. H., Ditto, P. H., Loftus, E. F., Levine, L. J., Greenspan, R. L., & Relihan, D. P. (2023). From primary to presidency: fake news, false memory, and changing attitudes in the 2016 election. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 11(1), 6-24.

Greene, J. D. (2007). Why are VMPFC patients more utilitarian? A dual-process theory of moral judgment explains. Trends in cognitive sciences, 11(8), 322-323.

Greene, J. D. (2008). The secret joke of Kant’s soul. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology: The neuroscience of morality: Emotion, brain disorders, and development (Vol. 3, pp. 35–79). MIT Press.

Greene, J. D. (2009). The cognitive neuroscience of moral judgment. The cognitive neurosciences, 4, 1-48.

Greene, J. D. (2014). Beyond point-and-shoot morality: Why cognitive (neuro) science matters for ethics. Ethics, 124(4), 695-726.

Greene, J. D., Morelli, S. A., Lowenberg, K., Nystrom, L. E., & Cohen, J. D. (2008). Cognitive load selectively interferes with utilitarian moral judgment. Cognition, 107(3), 1144-1154.

Hoogeveen, S., Borsboom, D., Kucharský, Š., Marsman, M., Molenaar, D., de Ron, J., ... & Wagenmakers, E. J. (2024). Prevalence, patterns and predictors of paranormal beliefs in The Netherlands: a several-analysts approach. Royal Society Open Science, 11(9), 240049.

Hutcherson, C. A., Montaser-Kouhsari, L., Woodward, J., & Rangel, A. (2015). Emotional and utilitarian appraisals of moral dilemmas are encoded in separate areas and integrated in ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 35(36), 12593-12605.

Kahane, G. (2012). On the wrong track: Process and content in moral psychology. Mind & language, 27(5), 519-545.

Kahane, G., Everett, J. A., Earp, B. D., Farias, M., & Savulescu, J. (2015). ‘Utilitarian’ judgments in sacrificial moral dilemmas do not reflect impartial concern for the greater good. Cognition, 134, 193-209.

Kahane, G., Wiech, K., Shackel, N., Farias, M., Savulescu, J., & Tracey, I. (2012). The neural basis of intuitive and counterintuitive moral judgment. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 7(4), 393-402.

Kauppinen, A. (2007). The rise and fall of experimental philosophy. Philosophical explorations, 10(2), 95-118.

Keogh, R., & Pearson, J. (2024). Revisiting the blind mind: Still no evidence for sensory visual imagery in individuals with aphantasia. Neuroscience Research, 201, 27-30.

Kumar, A. A. (2021). Semantic memory: A review of methods, models, and current challenges. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 28(1), 40-80.

Moffett, M. A. (2025). The indispensability of intuitions. Cambridge University Press.

Nado, J. (2014). Why intuition?. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 89(1), 15-41.

Nado, J. (2016). The intuition deniers. Philosophical Studies, 173(3), 781-800.

Nash, R. A., Wheeler, R. L., & Hope, L. (2015). On the persuadability of memory: Is changing people’s memories no more than changing their minds?. British Journal of Psychology, 106(2), 308-326.

Pust, J. (2000). Intuitions as evidence. New York, NY: Routledge.

Pust, J. (2024). Intuition. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/intuition/

Robbins, P., & Drayson, Z. (2025). Modularity of mind. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2025 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2025/entries/modularity-mind/

Siegler, R. S., Adolph, K. E., & Lemaire, P. (1996). Strategy choices across the life span. In L. R. Reder (Ed.), Implicit memory and metacognition (pp. 79-121). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Talis Per Se. (2025, January 20). Justification through intuition. Substack.

Per Se

Justification Through Intuition

Dispelling Misconception…

Read more

2 years ago · 27 likes · 27 comments · Talis Per Se

Van Inwagen, P. (1997). Materialism and the psychological-continuity account of personal identity. Philosophical Perspectives, 11, 305-319.

Williamson, T. (2004). Philosophical ‘intuitions’ and scepticism about judgement. dialectica, 58(1), 109-153.

Williamson, T. (2007). The philosophy of philosophy. Blackwell Publishing.

1.0 JPA on antirealism

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

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

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

2.0 Trivial objections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.0 Misleading modifiers and vacuous synonymy

I also want to flag this remark:

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

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

The problem with moral antirealism is that it rejects realism.

4.0 JPA’s bad taxonomy

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

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

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

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

5.0 A non-objection to error theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

Error theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6.0 Antirealist commitments

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

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

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

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

They distinguish good arguments from bad ones.

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

They criticize fallacious reasoning.

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

They regard contradictions as defects in thought.

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

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

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

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

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

This remark is also quite strange:

But these norms themselves appear irreducibly normative.

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

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

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

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

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

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

7.0 Moral realism as the best explanation

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Disputes about what’s true

2. Disputes about what to do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No arguments. Just assertions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then we’re treated to a self-report:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8.0 Conclusion

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

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

1.0 I mean what they mean

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

I mean what the term ordinarily means.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.0 Mischaracterize questions as overly demanding

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

3.0 Leverage social norms to turn audiences against the interrogator

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

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

4.0 You already know

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

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

5.0 You’re a liar!

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

6.0 Ordinary and philosophical discourse is not the same

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

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

“I always thought gay marriage was acceptable!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

7.0 An example

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.0 JPA on relativism

According to JPA,

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

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

2.0 How I construe relativism

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

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

“Slavery is wrong.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.0 JPA’s misleadingly non-trivial claims

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also, the subtitle of the essay is

Why Moral Relativism Collapses Into Anti-Realism

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

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

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

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

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

4.0 Does relativism have radical implications?

4.1 Global relativism

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

4.2 Comparison to preferences

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

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

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

JPA continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4.3 Individual and cultural relativism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JPA points to yet another alleged problem with relativism:

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

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

JPA’s comparison to whether you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4.4 The alleged “instability” of relativism

JPA continues:

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

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

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

Relativists reject this stance-independence.

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

His next remark doesn’t help:

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

…Uh…yes. That’s what relativism is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JPA continues:

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

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

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

4.5 The alleged “costs” of relativism

JPA goes on to say:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JPA ends with yet more bizarre remarks:

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

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

5.0 Conclusion

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

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

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

1.0 A comment and a block

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

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

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

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

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

2.0 Are some antirealists deliberatively out of reach?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.0 Native antirealism

Gonzalez continues:

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

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

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

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

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

4.0 Huffing too much metaethics

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

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

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

• most people

• would say

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Ignore me

• Deny the claims they’re making are empirical

Impressively, Gonzalez has opted to do both.

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

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

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

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

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

This is confused in a number of ways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6.0 Source???

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

1. Make highly contestable empirical claims

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

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

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

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

I’m unironically with the guy on the right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shortly thereafter, JPA states:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Morality presents itself this way to JPA, personally

• Morality presents itself this way to most people

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

• Morality presents itself this way to everyone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notice what JPA goes on to claim:

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JPA then makes this claim:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.0 New Survey Reports Most Americans Reject Moral Realism

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

Realism 35.9%

Emotivism 43%

Cultural relativism 18.2%

Error theory 3.0%

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

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

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

2.0 Survey methods

According to the report on the survey:

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

Here was the question respondents were given:

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

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

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

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

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

3.0 Problems with the survey

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

3.1 Forced choice

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

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

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

▢ Apple
▢ Banana

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

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

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

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

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

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

▢ Apple
▢ Banana

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.2 Lack of alternative positions

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

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

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

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

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

3.3 Lack of subcategories/variants

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

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

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

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

3.4 Crowding out of alternatives

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

3.5 Questionable use of examples & metaphors

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

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

Objectivism

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

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

Emotivism

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

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

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

I like my wife.

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

Cultural relativism

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

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

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

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

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

Error theory

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

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

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

Stealing is wrong.

…would mean something like:

Stealing is against God’s rules.

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

Stealing is wrong.

…mean:

Stealing is stance-independently wrong.

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

3.6 Use of technical terminology & ambiguous phrasing

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

• Impartial judgment (“The judge was objective”)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.7 Lack of face validity in noncognitivist response option

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

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

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

Murder is wrong.

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

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

Murder is wrong!

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

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

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

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

3.8 Error theory item is unclear and too technical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.9 Variation based on paradigm

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

4.0 Conclusion

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

Acknowledgements

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.0 The unintelligibility thesis

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

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

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

2.0 The UT is insulting/uncharitable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4.0 Appeals to incredulity

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

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

P1: I am beautiful.

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

C: People should shower me with praise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1) I don’t understand [claim]

(2) Claim is false/nonsensical

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

The number four is prime because God says so.

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

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

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

All the blorgnovs are smirgalong! Shabba shabba shabba!

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

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

Shabba shabba shabba!

Or how about this?

Lkjasdl lajkwertl qlkjwel jypqpe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The insularity and obscurity of the concept

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is how DisCog20 quoted me:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is:

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

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

5.0 Closed and open concept spaces

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

I am referring to the integer between 1 and 2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is morally wrong to punch people for fun.

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

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

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

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

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

It is morally wrong to punch people for fun.

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

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

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

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

But so far, in most cases this doesn’t appear to be what’s going on. What’s going on is that Parfit and others are making appeals to mysterious concepts they themselves are unable to explain. Most concepts are not like this. They can be explained. So what do Parfit and others do when cornered with the awkward situation of claiming to “have” concepts they themselves can’t explain? In virtue of their inexplicability, they tend to designate these concepts as being “unanalyzable,” which is just a way of saying that they “have the property of being unable to be explained.”

How convenient.

How does this not raise a red flag for anyone who isn’t already familiar with this exchange? Imagine if scientists went around claiming to have discovered new phenomena, but that they can’t prove it to others because the phenomena is “undemonstrable.” This would be laughed at by other scientists. It’s not clear to me why we shouldn’t be at least a little suspicious of mysteriously inexplicable concepts. Now, one might insist that perhaps some concepts aren’t explicable. Okay. Fine. Which ones? Why are they inexplicable? How did they figure out these concepts couldn’t be explained? And in general how do we determine when a concept is or isn’t explicable? What standards do we use? I have yet to see any clear or principled basis for determining what concepts are inexplicable that wasn’t predicated on presumptions at least as contentious as my own views. Even if the claims in question enjoy greater acceptance among philosophers more generally, this doesn’t entitle them to presume these background assumptions are correct. The rest of us are not required to grant that there are inexplicable concepts, nor are we required to grant that philosophers may declare a particular concept inexplicable and the rest of us are obliged to accept this without further argument.

So why, exactly, are those who appeal to these concepts entitled to simply declare them inexplicable? Why do my critics hassle me so much for suspecting these concepts aren’t meaningful, but they don’t turn around and hassle those who appeal to these concepts by agreeing with me that it’s quite suspicious that philosophers are out promulgating concepts the content of which they are unable to explain, and, apparently, don’t have any good explanations for why they’re not able to explain what the concepts in question mean?

They typically just throw up their hands and help themselves to the presumption that that’s just how some concepts are, and vaguely gesture at some motley array of other allegedly inexplicable concepts. This won’t do. Even if other concepts were inexplicable, one doesn’t simply get to declare whatever concept they want to likewise be inexplicable. How did they determine that they couldn’t explain irreducible normativity? And how would we distinguish a meaningful but inexplicable concept from instances in which people think they have concepts but the reason they can’t explain them is because they are confused and do not, in fact, understand or “have” the concepts in question? If we have no criteria for distinguishing between these two cases, then why should we be so confident irreducibly normative reasons are a meaningful but inexplicable notion, rather than confused nonsense?

At least one of the most serious problems with proponents of inarticulable concepts of this kind is that all the sources they have at their disposal are entirely private, inaccessible to, and cut off from any sort of public evaluation. If I went around saying that engineers were talking nonsense, they could readily demonstrate otherwise by building bridges and buildings that stood. Doctors could save lives. MMA fighters could consistently win fights. In substantive practical domains, the meaningfulness of the concepts people employ can be cashed out and corroborated by their actions.

No similar tests exist for the notion of irreducible normativity. It is ephemeral; its meaningfulness is entirely contingent on the testimony of people who purport to “have” the concept. There are no considerations subject to independent, external corroboration that would enable us to know whether a community of speakers who claim to “have” a concept, such that the concept is meaningful, without “acquiring” or “having” the concept ourselves, unless, and only unless, we do, in fact, employ such independent standards. If such standards are available, then proponents of “unanalyzable” concepts should agree with us that there are such standards, and then demonstrate that their concepts do, in fact, meet these public standards. If so, then it’d be possible for anyone incapable of acquiring the concept to at least know that other people have it. If, instead, the only way to confirm the meaningfulness of a concept is to partake of it, and there are no public means of corroboration, then there would apparently be an unbridgeable epistemic chasm between the haves and have nots, and those who don’t have the concept in question are simply out of luck.

I find this whole situation a bit bizarre and more than a bit dubious. There is far more to say about how strange the notion of unanalyzable concepts is, but I’ll simply note that we are not obliged to grant that there are any such things as unanalyzable concepts, nor have proponents of irreducibly normative reasons done much to argue for or demonstrate that the concept of an irreducibly normative reason is, in fact, incapable of being analyzed. In my experience, they simply assert that this is the case, and leave it at that. This is not a satisfactory way to make a case for one’s position. There’s far more to say about the questionable dialectical moves realists make with respect to this notion, but for now I want to appeal to the distinction between open and closed conceptual spaces. If the dispute between myself and proponents of the intelligibility of irreducibly normative reasons is to be resolved by the sorts of standards and considerations I appeal to, e.g., practical relevance, ability to distinguish circumstances in which there are irreducibly normative facts vs. situations in which there aren’t, and so on, then my opposition is playing in my court, and I think they’ll lose.

But if, instead, these methods are somehow inappropriate, and the matter is to be resolved primarily or exclusively by a priori considerations, then we’d be playing in the rationalist’s court. In that case, then, let me suggest that, conditional on this being the appropriate approach, then I see no reason to privilege the intuitions of my opposition over my own reasoning on the matter.

Normativity “strikes” me as conceptually closed. Just as the notion of “nonrelationally taller” is nonsensical, since “taller” just is a relational notion, such that for a given thing to be “taller” is for it to be taller in relation to something else, so too can norms only be meaningfully understood in a similarly relational manner: it is only meaningful to say that something is good or bad, right or wrong, required or prohibited, and so on, in relation to some set of standards. Something can be good for someone or according to some standard. But the notion that something can just be good simpliciter or that you can be required simpliciter and that these facts “give” you reasons independent of any goals, standards, or values, isn’t simply false, it is a kind of incomplete thought. It’s a bit like if someone were to cut off a remark mid-sentence. It makes no more sense to say something is good full stop than it does to say:

Put the shoes.

…this is an incomplete sentence. Likewise, to say something is “good” and to have this not be discharged in some implicit or explicit way: good for or with respect to makes no more sense than to say someone is taller but then insist they’re not taller than anyone or anything or in relation to any standard.

People who understand relational terms understand why it would make no sense to insist something is nonrelationally taller. Likewise, people who understand normativity understand that normative concepts are relational. Simply put, then, moral realists are conceptually confused, and their position consists not in getting the facts wrong in a direct sense, where they are making substantive claims about what is the case, but those claims fail to refer. Instead, the mistake they’re making is more like bad grammar, a bit like someone insisting that “Put the shoes” is meaningful. To “put” requires both an object and some location (literally or metaphorically) where the thing is to be placed. Context surrounding such a remark could allow one to make sense of it, but imagine someone insisted you can simply put things, simpliciter. This person has simply misunderstood the way “put” works, at least by others. If they want to employ some proprietary use of the term, they’re welcome to do so…in which case they’re invited to explain what they mean. If proponents of irreducibly normative reasons feel fine leaning on their own conceptual competence to maintain that they have the concepts in question, then I see no reason why I should be prohibited from doing so myself: in virtue of my correct understanding of the relevant concepts, I judge the realists in question to have misunderstood how normative terminology works, and drawn confused, nonsensical conclusions on the basis of this misunderstanding. If we’re to speak of intuitions, I might say that this is how things “seem” to me.

I’m being a bit tongue in cheek here. I don’t actually think this method works. Suppose I insist this is how normative concepts work, and realists disagree (as I am sure they do). How are we to resolve this dispute, if we cannot avail ourselves of empirical evidence about actual ordinary usage? Analytic philosophers may have something to say on the matter, but I think the answer is that there simply are no viable methods that can settle the matter. If we insist that facts about the meaning of ordinary normative discourse don’t turn on empirical considerations about actual usage, then my opposition is already helping themselves to assumptions about language and meaning I reject and am under no obligation to accept. To settle that matter, we’d have to pivot to a more fundamental discussion about language and meaning. But if the realist insists on helping themselves to the very methods I reject for settling these questions, then the only way to settle that dispute would be to have a discussion about even more fundamental metaphilosophical considerations. This process of getting even more fundamental would then need to be repeated until we arrive at a point where we agree on the methods used to settle a given dispute, we’d need to settle that dispute, and then we could move forward.

This is what I think is at the heart of so many philosophical disputes, and one reason I think they remain so intractable: philosophers are arguing at one or more steps removed from more fundamental disagreements, and either don’t realize it or don’t care. This makes about as much sense as people competing to see who will “win the game,” but nobody agrees on what the game is or what the rules are. This is the dismal state of much of contemporary analytic philosophy. Disputes remain intractable because most arguments concern matters that are contingent on one’s background commitments and metaphilosophy, but philosophers rarely adequately unpack what those commitments and metaphilosophical positions are, or pause to comprehensively resolve them before proceeding. They are trying to win games without agreeing on what the rules are. Even when they do agree, they often rely on faulty presuppositions that won’t allow them to succeed, which can be even worse than unclear rules: one may have the superficial impression of a viable set of rules, but they actually result in unwinnable games, a bit like having a hand in Solitaire that you cannot possibly win. It’s worse than trying to play chess with a pigeon. It’s like trying to play with a flock of pigeons without any clear sense of what the rules are or what any of you are playing.

References

Parfit, D. (2011). On what matters (Vol. 2). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

(Note: I’ll be using moral objectivism and moral realism interchangeably here, though it’s worth flagging that not everyone does so.)

Just yesterday, Joel Carini published a blog post titled “Most Philosophers Believe in Objective Morality”. Go check it out. What follows is not intended as a critique or rebuttal. I will make a few critical remarks, but this is mostly intended simply as a commentary. Overall, I think Carini’s piece is quite fair and does a great job in how it handles moral antirealists, and for that I am grateful. It’s always good to see an article that doesn’t treat antirealists as gibbering goblins skulking in sewers.

In any case, the first thing to note is that there’s already a great article that claims the opposite, helpfully titled “No, Most Philosophers Aren’t Moral Realists” which you can find here. This second article might seem like a response to the first, but it isn’t. It actually came out back in December of last year. Both articles center on the 2020 PhilPapers survey results. This was a large international survey that served primarily to catalog the philosophical positions of contemporary academic philosophers, mostly in the analytic tradition. Both articles center on this finding:

Approximately 62% of philosophers endorse moral realism, 26% reject it, and 13% chose some other response. According to Carini, these results indicate that most philosophers believe that morality is objective. This might be true, but it’s not clear from this data that, technically speaking, it is true. This is because, as Discourse points out, the measures presented here collapse “Accept” and “Lean” into a single aggregate score. If you hover over the darker and lighter bars seen above, you can see the breakdown of each as so:

A more precise breakdown that separates Accept and Lean yields these results:

• Accept moral realism: 37.35%

• Lean towards moral realism: 24.72%

• Accept moral antirealism: 11.58%

• Lean towards moral antirealism: 14.54%

• Other: 12.68% (I won’t bother subdividing this one)

That people lean towards a position does not mean they “believe” the position, so it is not clear that most philosophers “believe in objective morality.” They might, depending on whether, back to the wall, enough of those in the 24.72% of “lean towards moral realism (and perhaps some of those in the “Other” category) would affirm that they “believe” in moral objectivity/moral realism. However, “believe” is close enough to “accept” that this strikes me as a bit of a stretch. It’d be a bit odd if a huge proportion of those who said they “leaned” towards the position instead of choosing “accept” would choose “believe” if given the opportunity. And to lean towards a view is not the same thing as endorsing, believing, or accepting the view, so it may be most appropriate to conclude that it is not, in fact, the case that most philosophers are moral realists, where this is understood to mean “believing” moral realism. On the other hand, when you offer people the choice of “accept” or “lean,” “lean” may just be the softer way of expressing a low level of belief, or belief with less confidence. It’s hard to know. Discourse puts this a bit more firmly than I would, but the point is still a good one:

Merely leaning toward a position is importantly different from accepting it. Someone who merely leans toward moral realism is not, strictly speaking, a moral realist.

So, technically speaking, the claim that most philosophers are moral realists may not be correct. Where I differ from Discourse (but who knows, maybe they’d concede the point) is that I think survey options can push people to choose a response that may have a particular technical meaning (I lean this way, but don’t believe it) but they instead choose it for some other reason (I believe this, but not so strongly as to say “accept” when “lean” is an option). Nonetheless, it’s still true that more philosophers are at least sympathetic towards moral realism than they are towards moral antirealism.

Let’s have a look at what else Carini says:

Most people assume that academic philosophers, the people professionally tasked to think hardest about ethics, tend toward moral relativism: Serious, rigorous, scientifically-minded inquiry dissolves moral objectivity rather than supporting it.

To my knowledge, there is no empirical data on what most people assume about academic philosophers, so I don’t know if it is, in fact, true that most people assume academic philosophers tend towards moral relativism. It wouldn’t surprise me if they did, but this does strike me as rather speculative. If I had to wager, I’d bet that most people don’t have any position at all on what most academic philosophers think about metaethics, since most people don’t have a clue what moral relativism, moral realism, and other candidate positions actually are, or at best have a rudimentary and flawed understanding of these positions and how they relate to each other.

Another puzzling inclusion is the added remark that “Serious, rigorous, scientifically-minded inquiry dissolves moral objectivity rather than supporting it.” Do most people think of philosophers as engaging in scientifically-minded inquiry? I don’t think this, and I don’t know if laypeople generally think of philosophers as taking a “scientific-minded” approach. There’s a good chance they don’t think this, or even think the opposite.

Carini also says:

The people who have thought most carefully about whether morality is objective have mostly concluded that it is.

This remark might give readers the impression that the respondents have all thought about the arguments for and against moral realism carefully. But we have no good evidence this is true, nor any particularly good reasons to believe it’s true. Most of the respondents don’t specialize in metaethics (about ~13% reported specialization in metaethics, so a solid 87% are non-specialists). Academic philosophers increasingly specialize very narrowly. Since a large majority don’t specialize in metaethics, there’s a good chance a majority of the respondents lack a deep understanding of metaethics and haven’t thought about it that carefully. Mileage will vary from one philosopher to another. Just consider: 70% of philosophers are atheists. Should we conclude that they’ve all thought deeply about whether God exists or not, and arrived at this conclusion on the basis of a deep familiarity with philosophy of religion? I wouldn’t bet on it. And it’s not like substantive metaethics training is standard. Sure, you get exposed to it, but I never took or even saw a course in metaethics as an undergraduate or even a graduate student. I am sure they exist, but it’s not clear to me that they’re especially prevalent, much less a standardized part of analytic curriculum. Exposure may emerge obliquely in other courses, such as ethics courses, where professors themselves may not specialize in the topic or present much in the way of focused, specialized training in metaethics in particular. I’m really not sure; it would take another study just to figure out how much exposure philosophers generally have to metaethics and how competent they are.

However, it’s worth noting that the number of moral realists goes up slightly if you focus only on the subset of philosophers who specialize in metaethics to 65.35%. So, among those who presumably have, in fact, thought about the issue most carefully, about two thirds accept or lean towards moral realism. However, the claim that most have “concluded” that it is might give the impression that something like this has occurred:

Those who carefully studied the case for and against moral realism tend to conclude that moral realism is true as a result of this study. In other words, one might have the impression that these results show that studying philosophy causes most people to become moral realists.

To be clear, Carini does not make this claim. I am drawing attention to a possible interpretation or inference one might make on the basis of the claim. And such an interpretation would be highly questionable. First, there is the problem of selection effects. People who become professional philosophers may be disproportionately likely to favor moral realism compared to people who do not become professional philosophers. I discuss the problem of selection effects in detail here. Here’s the short version:

70% of philosophers endorse atheism, while only 19% endorse theism. But if you look at specialists in philosophy of religion, this flips: 70% endorse theism, while only 20% are atheists. Does this mean studying philosophy of religion turns people into theists?

No. This study found that philosophers are more likely to become atheists or agnostics once they begin studying philosophy of religion:

These numbers show that there was an overall shift toward atheism/agnosticism of 3.7% if we compare both directions of belief-revision: the direction of belief-revision was most frequently in the direction of atheism/agnosticism.

People disposed towards theism are more likely to study philosophy of religion, leading to a higher self-selected total proportion of theists among specialists in philosophy of religion. However, more of those who begin these studies become atheists than those who start as atheists become theists. The base rate of theists and atheists could be taken to give the misleading impression that if you study philosophy of religion, you will be convinced by the case for theism to become a theist. But there is no good evidence this is the case; it might even go the other way.

Both philosophers in general and metaethicists in particular tend to favor moral realism. How might we explain this? I suspect the answer may be that people who become philosophers are more disposed towards moral realism than people who choose not to become philosophers. Many more academics specialize in other topics than in philosophy. I’d be willing to bet people in the humanities more generally are more disposed towards moral antirealism, and that the same is true of those in STEM fields. What I mean is that the kinds of people who pursue these other fields may be naturally more disposed towards antirealism than people who study philosophy. If so, philosophy may attract people disproportionately disposed towards moral realism, in which case the 62% majority wouldn’t mean much, and certainly wouldn’t be a good reason to think moral realism is more likely to be true.

But let us suppose, instead, that the base rate of people drawn towards moral realism is so high in the population that most people are naturally inclined towards moral realism. Suppose it is, say, 95% of the population. If this is the case, this is even worse news. It would mean that if philosophers represent this population at the outset of studying philosophy (a starting rate of 95% moral realists), that somehow, as a result of studying philosophy, that rate drops to 62%. This would indicate studying philosophy is much more likely to convert moral realists into moral antirealists than vice versa. This is why a simple majority in favor of realism isn’t that relevant. What’s relevant is whether studying philosophy causes people to become moral realists, and the 2020 PhilPapers survey has no data to support this claim. For what it’s worth: I bet studying analytic philosophy currently does cause people to become moral realists, but I think this is an indictment of the poor state of the field and not an indication moral realism is true.

Carini continues with a discussion of moral realism:

Moral realism wasn’t always the default assumption in academic philosophy. For much of the twentieth century, under the influence of logical positivism, moral claims were widely treated as expressions of attitude or preference rather than genuine truths.

There are a lot of anecdotal accounts suggesting moral antirealism was the dominant view for much of the 20^th century, but I believe it was Mike Huemer that made the point that this could be misleading. We don’t have survey data from the 20^th century, and it may be that moral realism remained a majority stance but that moral realists kept quiet about their views. Carini helpfully makes a nod towards this possibility:

If any mid-century analytic philosophers were moral realists, they were embarrassed to admit it.

If I had to wager, I’d bet some of this was going on, and that some of it is just spin or narrative from people in the field. Antirealism may have been more prominent in academic publication even if it didn’t command the assent of most philosophers.

Carini goes on to outline a number of realist traditions, before concluding that:

Philosophers working from very different starting points, with very different tools, keep arriving at the same basic conviction: that ethics is a domain of genuine truth, not preference. That convergence is itself evidence worth taking seriously.

I don’t think this is evidence worth taking very seriously. There are many reasons to suspect that the proportion of philosophers who endorse a given view is not, by itself, good evidence for the view. I outline those reasons in this series on what I call the PhilPapers Fallacy. We don’t know the causal impact studying philosophy has on the degree to which philosophers endorse moral realism, we don’t know how strong the selection effects are for peopled disposed to endorse moral realism, we don’t know what sociological or other forces may be driving these changes, and we don’t know by the numbers alone whether philosophers are endorsing moral realism for good reasons.

I suspect a better account of the prevalence of these traditions, and of the increasing popularity of moral realism, is a host of sociological and institutional forces causing an uptick in people disposed towards moral realism doing philosophy, along with bandwagon effects whereby the prominence and success of such people attracts like-minded people and drives away those who hold views to the contrary.

I think the winds of fashion are driving these changes, not advances in the strength and quality of arguments for moral realism. In short, I don’t think new philosophical work is persuading people to become moral realists because the arguments are good; I think people who are disposed towards moral realism are increasingly likely to become and continue working as professional philosophers. Do I have evidence of this? No. But then again, anyone inclined to suggest good arguments are causing the rise in moral realism isn’t exactly furnishing us with data for that claim. And, in any case, there are no good arguments for moral realism.

1.0 Introduction

An article has recently been making the rounds that people are interpreting as evidence that children endorse moral realism. The article in question is “Children deny that God could change morality,” by Madeline Reinecke and Larisa Heiphetz Solomon. Since I doubt the virality of the article will persist, I felt it worth addressing it sooner rather than later, so my thoughts will be a bit more preliminary than they typically are. Nevertheless, my thesis is simple:

This article does not present strong evidence that children are moral realists.

My goal here will be to offer a brief explanation as to why. However, before proceeding, it’s worth noting that I was a research assistant in Dr. Heiphetz Solomon’s lab a little over a decade ago. I did data collection on studies related to religious belief but was not involved in research design or analysis. The experience was illuminating and I have a lot of respect for Dr. Heiphetz Solomon’s work, including this study. I think this type of research is fascinating and provides important insights into how children think about morality.

However, that does not mean that I think this study, or any others, provide reliable indicators that children endorse moral realism or antirealism in particular. Findings can yield a wealth of insights without necessarily allowing us to address specific empirical questions with any significant measure of confidence.

2.0 The study

The study purports to show that children aged 4 to 9 tend to believe that God cannot change certain widely endorsed moral values. Children were presented with six scenarios. Each scenario involved a story in which two characters disagreed about a “widely shared” moral issue (I’ll call these “uncontroversial”), controversial moral issue, or physical fact. Here are examples of the wording used for each, drawn from the text:

Disagreement about uncontroversial moral issue
“This person thinks that it is okay to stomp on someone’s foot really hard. This person thinks that it is not okay to stomp on someone’s foot really hard. Which person do you agree with more?”

Disagreement about controversial moral issue
“This person thinks that it is okay to steal food to feed someone who is hungry. This person thinks that it is not okay to steal food to feed someone who is hungry. Which person do you agree with more?”

Disagreement about physical issue
“This person thinks that germs are smaller than people’s houses. This person thinks that germs are bigger than people’s houses. Which person do you agree with more?”

Children were asked which person they agreed with and whether God could change the truth in question (they were also asked how certain they were of each of these judgments). The question about whether God could change the truth in question was worded like this:

“Do you think that God could make it not okay to stomp on someone’s foot really hard?”

Yes/No

Most children said “No” to questions like this.

3.0 Evidence of objectivism?

The authors do interpret their findings to support the notion that children are intuitive realists (or “objectivists”):

This result indicates that children may perceive widely shared moral beliefs as objective in multiple ways: Not only do they report that only one person could be right in a disagreement, which reflects a common conceptualization of moral objectivity (e.g., Goodwin & Darley, 2008; Sarkissian et al., 2011; Wainryb et al., 2004), but they also reject that even an ostensibly all-powerful being could change these moral norms. We take this finding as evidence that children’s objectivism regarding widely shared moral claims emerges early and may even persist into adulthood (Heiphetz & Young, 2017; Reinecke & Horne, 2018).

I believe these conclusions are premature and unwarranted. First, the Goodwin and Darley, Sarkissian et al., and Wainryb et al. studies all rely on the disagreement paradigm. My colleague David Moss and I offer a preliminary critique of this method here, and others have likewise catalogued extensive methodological shortcomings with this paradigm, which you can read about here and here (Pölzler, 2018; Pölzler & Wright, 2020). However, the most comprehensive case against the validity of the disagreement paradigm appears in my dissertation, where I dedicate an entire chapter to arguing that it is not a valid instrument for measuring realism/antirealism, a claim I likewise support with empirical data. First, it’s worth noting that these data at best tend to show highly variable rates of realism/antirealism.

3.1 Data to the contrary

For instance, consider how Sarkissian et al. (2011) describe the results of their studies:

The present studies offer a complex picture of people’s intuitions about whether morality is objective or relative. People do have apparently objectivist intuitions in certain cases, but our results suggest that one cannot accurately capture their views in a simple claim like: ‘People are committed to moral objectivism’. On the contrary, people’s intuitions take a strikingly relativist turn when they are encouraged to consider individuals from radically different cultures or ways of life. (p. 500)

Does this look like the straightforward conclusion that people are moral objectivists/realists? No. While the authors believe people have a “fixed commitment” to realism, this “fixed” commitment seems rather malleable, shifting in response to the slightest salience of disagreement occurring between people of different cultures. As I and others have noted, claiming that a disagreement between two people within a culture has a single correct answer is clearly consistent with one of the most common forms of moral antirealism: cultural relativism, where moral facts are made true by the stances of different cultures. One shortcoming of the disagreement paradigm is that it does not present cultural relativism as a distinct response option, so there is no way for participants to specifically select this position. What happens when they are given the opportunity to do so? See for yourself:

Cultural relativism was the most common (or “modal”) response for four of these five measures and had a strong showing for the fifth. Sarkissian et al. presented participants with disagreements between members of their own culture, another culture, and an alien civilization. This table shows the mean level of agreement that, with respect to a moral disagreement, at least one person has to be wrong:

Note that 7 would indicate strong agreement, or a higher “realist response,” while 1 would indicate strong disagreement, or a higher “relativist” response (setting aside, for a moment, that this is a false dichotomy since relativism and realism are consistent). So what we have is that, within the same culture the “realist” rate is a bit above the midpoint, while it is only marginally above the midpoint for the other culture condition and below the midpoint for the alien civilization. If the vast majority of people were committed to moral realism, all three of these means should be around 6-7. None of them are. And we have good reason to believe that the realist response rate for the same culture condition is probably an overestimate for two reasons. The first is the reason I already provided: when two people from the same culture disagree, both moral realists and cultural relativists would judge that at least one of those people is wrong. To make it perfectly clear why this is the case, consider what cultural relativism holds: moral truths are determined by, and are relative to, each culture. So if two people are members of the same culture, there is only one standard of moral truth relative to that culture, e.g., abortion is either morally permissible or impermissible according to that culture’s standards. So if two members of that culture are arguing, one for abortion, and one against it, one of those people is going to be mistaken.

A second reason the realist response rate is almost certainly exaggerated is that the authors used very extreme and clearly objectionable moral violations. Here they are, verbatim:

Horace finds his youngest child extremely unattractive and therefore kills him.

Dylan buys an expensive new knife and tests its sharpness by randomly stabbing a passerby on the street.

These actions would be considered extremely immoral by virtually all participants. Yet previous studies show that high consensus moral issues like this tend to yield much higher rates of realist responses, while more controversial moral issues tend to have much lower rates of realist responses, often below the midpoint, indicating that a majority of people gave an antirealist response. See, for instance, this table from Beebe (2015), which shows the proportion of people who chose the realist response option in Beebe & Sackris (2016):

As you can see, the proportion of people who choose the realist response option varies wildly across individual moral issues, ranging from as low as 17% to as high as 81%. Now, if you think murdering your own children or wantonly stabbing people with a knife on the street is about as bad, or worse, than being racist, then offer your own prediction: would we predict that the realist response rate if such items included in this study would be closer to the 81% for racism, or the 17% for donating to charity?

3.2 The stimulus-as-fixed-effect fallacy

What these findings exhibit is a common problem when researchers use specific, concrete items in their measures: those items are presumed to be representative of the set of stimuli from which they are drawn, which is known as the stimulus-as-fixed-effect fallacy (see Westfall, Nichols, & Yarkoni, 2017). Most readers will recognize that in order to have sample data that can generalize to a population of interest, the sample of participants must represent that population. In other words, the sorts of people used in your sample must be drawn from the population in a quasi-random way that ensures that they tend to be similar to that population overall. For instance, if I wanted to find out how wealthy people from a given nation are, I’d need to survey people who reflect the population as a whole. The best way to achieve this in practice is to attempt to approximate a random sampling. If one instead simply drove through wealthy neighborhoods and surveyed people who lived there, they’d obtain a distorted picture of the average wealth of people in that nation.

However, what most people, including most researchers, fail to appreciate is that this same principle applies to the stimuli used in a study. Not only must your sample approximate randomness, so too must your stimuli when that stimulus is intended to reflect members of a larger category, or “population.” In the context of studies in metaethics, what this means is that the specific moral issues you choose, e.g., abortion, stealing, lying, and so on, are drawn from the “population” of moral issues as a whole. Researchers typically make relatively unprincipled, ad hoc decisions about which items to choose. Even when they put some thought into which stimuli to use, they often do so based on a priori armchair supposition: they may choose two items they think are “extreme” and two they think are relatively milder, or they might choose items they feel crosscut the sorts of moral issues most people would paradigmatically think of. But they rarely put any effort into ensuring that:

• These items are prototypical moral issues by the standards of the population they are sampling

• That the participants themselves share the same normative stance towards the moral issues in question (e.g., researchers tend to be politically liberal and more secular; study participants are more varied in their political and religious perspectives)

• Participants exhibit a shared metanormative evaluation of the moral issues in question (that is, they agree with one another about the non-normative properties of the items in question, such as how severe they are)

• Most importantly, that the moral issues in question are randomly drawn from and therefore adequately representative of moral issues as a whole (the abstract “population of moral issues”)

• They use enough different moral issues. Instead, it’s typically the case that so few moral issues are chosen that a given study will only provide a distorted, unrepresentative cross-section, typically chosen in an unprincipled way, of the moral domain as a whole

This stimulus-as-fixed-effect fallacy has sweeping and pervasive implications in psychological research. See how it is described in fMRI research:

Most functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments record the brain’s responses to samples of stimulus materials (e.g., faces or words). Yet the statistical modeling approaches used in fMRI research universally fail to model stimulus variability in a manner that affords population generalization, meaning that researchers’ conclusions technically apply only to the precise stimuli used in each study, and cannot be generalized to new stimuli. A direct consequence of this stimulus-as-fixed-effect fallacy is that the majority of published fMRI studies have likely overstated the strength of the statistical evidence they report. (Westfall, Nichols, & Yarkoni, 2017)

This article, along with others, highlights how falling victim to this error can lead to overstated results. The same conclusion is applicable to Sarkissian et al. (2011). Not only do they use a nonrepresentative “sample” of moral issues, they only use a pair of moral issues. When you consider these moral issues, it’s worth noting that they are not prototypical at all: murdering your own children because they are ugly and stabbing random people to test how sharp a knife both involve bizarre, psychopathic behaviors that are utterly unlike standard, everyday moral transgressions. They are so over the top that I found them amusing and predict others would, too, especially when this is coupled with other stimuli used by Sarkissian et al., such as the description of aliens called “Pentars” whose only goal is to convert all matter into equilateral pentagons. They are thus both extremely weird and extremely immoral. As we’ve already seen, severe moral transgressions have already been shown to prompt much higher realist response rates. Previous research has shown that the use of bizarre or humorous stimuli can reduce the psychological realism of stimuli, as well, which can further distort response rates and undermine the reliability of results (see Bauman et al., 2014).

3.3 Misleading interpretations of existing data

Given all of these considerations, we can confidently make a few observations. First, Sarkissian et al. did not find strong evidence that most people are inclined towards moral realism. They found equivocal results that suggest people’s commitment to moral realism is tenuous at best, given how easily it can shift towards people agreeing with the antirealist response. Furthermore, the high rate of realism observed in their first condition includes a significant confound: cultural relativists should choose the same response option as realists.

And, as I’ve shown, participants frequently choose cultural relativism as a position when it is offered. As such, that such participants would be prominent within a sample is not speculative, but a confirmed empirical reality. This confound could easily have inflated “realist” responses, since a substantial portion of the antirealist responses would be lumped in with the realists.

Finally, the specific moral violations used in the study are not representative of moral violations in general, and instead anchor the extreme end of the distribution that tends to prompt realist responses. As Beebe’s findings show, realist response rates are highly variable across moral issues, so using items that anchor one extreme end of the distribution again likely massively exaggerated the realist response rate relative to what we would obtain were we to use different moral issues. For instance, if we’d used donating to charity, the realist response rate for the same-culture condition would likely approach zero, and we’d run into floor effects for the remaining two conditions where the proportion of people who favored the realist response rate would potentially be so low it’d be hard to estimate what the actual proportion was. This illustrates that which items you use matter as much as which people you sample from a population, a consideration that is often overlooked by researchers.

Now, why did I go into so much detail about this one study? I did so because academic articles will often cite articles which purport to support the author’s claims. However, careful examination of those articles often reveals that those articles do not, in fact, support the author’s claims. In fact, the findings in these studies often don’t support the conclusions of the very authors of the study in question. Researchers often describe their findings in misleading ways, or in ways that can easily be misunderstood or distorted by others.

One irony in focusing on Sarkissian et al. (2011) is that of the three studies cited by R&S (the other two being Goodwin and Darley, 2008, and Wainryb et al., 2004), this one has fewer methodological problems than either of those studies. The Goodwin and Darley study uses a combined measure of realism/antirealism that includes a measure that isn’t even face valid, while their other primary measure suffers so many methodological problems the results of their study are essentially inconclusive. Most importantly, even in that study they had very high levels of antirealist response rates for several moral issues; it’s just that they averaged across those issues, and found an on-average relatively high realist response rate. If you presented 8 random fruits to someone, and they told you they liked 5 of those fruits and hated 3 of them, would you conclude the person “loves fruit”? No; a more appropriate response is that they exhibit a mixed response. Goodwin and Darley do make comments to this effect in the paper:

The first major finding was that individuals were not particularly consistent in their meta-ethical positions about various ethical beliefs, and were instead highly influenced by the content of the beliefs in question. This finding suggests that unlike the meta-ethical systems of philosophers, which tend to be uniform in their treatment of a range of ethical beliefs, ordinary individuals’ meta-ethical systems are highly nuanced. (p. 1358)

But then they go on to say:

The second major finding was that ethical beliefs were treated almost as objectively as scientific or factual beliefs, and decidedly more objectively than social conventions or tastes. (p. 1359)

Both statements are true; the first emphasizes variability, while the latter emphasizes comparative averages across moral and nonmoral domains. Unfortunately, people who have drawn on these findings to support the oversimplified and inaccurate narrative that the findings suggest ordinary people are moral realists tend only to quote the latter remark (or remarks like it) to support that narrative. In doing so, they overlook the actual content of the article and the significant qualifications one must put on such conclusions. And again, this is entirely setting aside that the measures used in this study are not even valid in the first place.

I’m also not the only person to notice the way the results of Goodwin and Darley’s (2008) paper has been framed. Pölzler (2017) dedicated an entire paper to critiquing the tendency to frame early experimental metaethics studies as evidence of folk moral realism:

According to one of the most prominent arguments in favour of this view, ordinary people experience morality as realist-seeming, and we have therefore prima facie reason to believe that realism is true. Some proponents of this argument have claimed that the hypothesis that ordinary people experience morality as realist-seeming is supported by psychological research on folk metaethics. While most recent research has been thought to contradict this claim, four prominent earlier studies (by Goodwin and Darley, Wainryb et al., Nichols, and Nichols and Folds-Bennett) indeed seem to suggest a tendency towards realism. My aim in this paper is to provide a detailed internal critique of these four studies. I argue that, once interpreted properly, all of them turn out in line with recent research. (p. 455)

Note that Wainryb et al. (2004), the other study R&S cite, is included in this critique. As for the problems with Goodwin and Darley’s study, there are too many to present all of them here, so I will highlight just one. Goodwin and Darley collected open response data asking participants to explain why they thought the person they were told held a contrary moral position disagreed with them. For this method to be a valid measure of metaethical views, participants must attribute the source of disagreement to a difference in moral beliefs, standards, or values, rather than e.g., the other person misunderstanding the question or thinking of a specific context where the action in question would be permissible. While Goodwin and Darley reported that almost everyone interpreted the disagreement as intended (~93%), I requested the raw data of the responses these participants provided and recoded them myself, along with my colleague David Moss in Bush & Moss (2020). We report in that article that we found only 41% of participants interpreted the source of disagreement as intended, while 44% interpreted the source in some identifiably unintended way, such as attributing the disagreement to the other person imagining a situation where an otherwise immoral action would be justified. For instance, when asked about whether it would be acceptable to rob a bank, one person explained why another person may have disagreed with them by suggesting:

This person probably has specific details of such a happening where there were extreme circumstances that lead him/her to believe robbing a bank was not morally bad.

These kinds of responses reveal that the participant may have judged that the source of disagreement was due to the other person conceiving of a different scenario than the participant. If this factored into their judgment, then their response to the disagreement question would no longer be diagnostic of their metaethical stance. Wainryb et al. (2004) likewise asked the children in their study to explain their answers. As the authors report, children’s nonrelativistic judgments regarding moral issues “referred exclusively to moral criteria (fairness) to justify why moral beliefs are nonrelative […]” (p. 693). Yet from a metaethical perspective, this makes little sense. Whether moral truth is relative or not doesn’t depend on first-order moral truths; it depends on second-order moral considerations about e.g., the semantics of moral discourse and the metaphysics of moral truth. The pattern of responses children provided strongly suggests widespread normative conflation, a commonly documented tendency to default to normative, or first-order moral considerations, when evaluating questions ostensibly intended to elicit metaethical positions. Taken together, then, there are severe methodological limitations with all three of the studies R&S cite.

The shortcomings in these studies are not limited to just those studies. In my dissertation, I ran numerous tests that likewise assessed how participants interpreted questions about metaethics, and the results were quite similar. In study after study, only a minority (and often a marginal minority) reliably responded to various prompts in ways that indicated they interpreted various metaethical stimuli as intended. Instead, a significant majority of participants would either give responses that made it unclear how they interpreted the question or respond in ways that strongly suggest they did not interpret the question as intended.

R&S thus cite studies that do not support the claims made in their paper; that is, it is not the case that we have convincing empirical evidence that children and adults are disposed towards moral realism. On the contrary, such conclusions would only be sustained by an outdated interpretation of early studies in the literature that never supported such conclusions to begin with. As methods have improved, researchers have instead routinely very high rates of moral antirealism (e.g., Beebe, 2015; Davis, 2021; Pölzler, Tomabechi, & Suzuki, 2023; Pölzler & Wright, 2020). Furthermore, as Moss and I have argued and as I have subsequently supported with a considerable body of data, there are compelling reasons to believe adults (much less children) struggle to interpret questions about metaethics as intended. As Moss and I argued in earlier work:

1. The relevant metaethical theories are complex and difficult to grasp

2. Most people are unfamiliar with these distinctions prior to encountering them in studies

3. Metaethical theories are generally abstract and distant from real world practical questions lay populations would be more familiar with and expect to be asked about

4. There are typically plausible non-metaethical interpretations of the questions posed to respondents (Bush & Moss, 2020)

The collective effect of these factors lends itself towards skepticism about how people react to stimuli ostensibly designed to elicit their metaethical stances: people will typically reinterpret these questions in some other way, e.g., as a question about their normative moral stance and whether they adopt a negative appraisal of the other person, as an epistemic question about how certain we are of our moral stances and whether others could be justified in holding contrary perspectives, as a question implicitly asking whether we would tolerate people with contrary moral standards, as a descriptive question about whether people hold contrary moral perspectives, whether we regard moral claims as exceptionless or are more sensitive to context, and so on.

None of these alternative, unintended interpretations are speculative; I have gathered extensive empirical data that shows such unintended interpretations are not only common, but often surpass the proportion of people who appear to have interpreted stimuli as intended. For instance, people provide reasonable but unintended accounts of what they take terms like “objective” or “relative” to mean, propose that if someone disagrees with them about a moral issue that they may be thinking of some other context, that statements intended to represent relativism are claims about sensitivity to context or the descriptive claim that different people have different perspectives on what’s morally right or wrong, and that claims intended to represent realism are claims that moral rules have no exceptions. But these are just a few examples of a much broader body of data showing that people struggle, across a range of measures and contexts, to interpret questions about metaethics in the way researchers intend. And if adults do as poorly as the data suggests they do, why should we think children would do any better?

4.0 Why children are probably not moral realists

My critique of the previous studies is intended to establish precedent. What I’ve shown is that the authors of this study cite previous research that purports to establish that both children and adults tend to take an objectivist stance towards morality. This is achieved in all three studies via the disagreement paradigm. But we have good reason to believe the disagreement paradigm is not a valid measure even for adults, much less children, who are much less likely to interpret ambiguous and challenging stimuli as intended.

Note, however, that R&S also specifically say that their findings suggest children “may perceive widely shared moral beliefs as objective in multiple ways,” then cite both earlier studies using the disagreement paradigm and their current paradigm which asks whether God could change the moral rules. Let us now turn our attention to their own methods. Does the fact that most children stated that God could not change (at least some) moral rules provide evidence that those children are moral realists?

It does serve as evidence for this claim. This might sound like a bizarre concession to make in an article critical of this claim. But on strictly Bayesian grounds, if most children said God could change the moral rules, this would be at least some evidence that they think moral truths are contingent, which is more likely to be associated with an antirealist perspective. But the fact that a datapoint provides some evidence does not mean that it provides good evidence or that there aren’t compelling reasons to believe otherwise.

Mere evidence is cheap. The mere fact that many people believe Bigfoot exists and claim to have seen Bigfoot is some evidence that Bigfoot exists, for the simple reason that if Bigfoot existed, it’d be more likely there’d be people claiming to have seen Bigfoot than a world in which nobody did so. Good evidence is expensive. There is no good evidence Bigfoot exists, and plenty of reason to doubt that Bigfoot exists. And if we take into account what we’d expect if Bigfoot existed: more witnesses, high quality video footage, forensic evidence, and so on, it’s more reasonable than not to think Bigfoot doesn’t exist.

A single piece of evidence should always be considered against the backdrop of the surrounding body of evidence. And at present, the overall body of empirical evidence on the matter of whether children or adults are moral realists suggests that we have yet to devise compelling measures for either population and that the rates of unintended interpretation are so high that something more complicated may be going on. My personal hypothesis, one which I’ve supported with data and argued for extensively, is indeterminacy: children and adults are neither realists nor antirealists, but instead have no determinate position. I believe the forced choice design of empirical studies gives the illusory impression children are “realists” when really neither they nor adults typically have any metaethical position on the realism/antirealism dispute.

While the fact that children would say that God can’t change the moral rules is evidence children are moral realists, note that (a) generalizing from the population they were drawn from is going to be a problem and (b) this evidence must be weighed against every other consideration for or against early emerging belief in moral realism. Most importantly, however, these findings provide such weak evidence that children are moral realists that we should have little confidence that the authors have supported the claim that “children’s objectivism regarding widely shared moral claims emerges early and may even persist into adulthood” (Reinecke & Heiphetz Solomon, 2023, p. 8).

This characterization employs the phrase “children’s objectivism,” which helps itself to the presumption that children have an objectivist stance on the matter and that this can be inferred from their response to the paradigm used in this study. This inference is too quick.

4.1 Power relations and social desirability bias

Consider the situation children in these studies are in. Children stand in a different social relation to adults than other adults. Children can be punished if they do the wrong thing, and scolded if they report an attitude towards the operative moral and social norms they are currently subject to. They are more averse to such punishment and scolding, and will often strive to assure the adults around them that they endorse the established norm (even if halfheartedly or by rote, and not genuine commitment). Now these children are presented with familiar moral violations like stomping on someone’s foot and calling someone a mean name. They are then asked whether God could change these rules. Suppose a child says “Yes” to this question. Could this signal that the children themselves may want to commit these actions or aren’t opposed to violating existing moral rules? In other words, could it have implications for the child’s own attitude and conduct? I suspect it very well could, and that children may be reluctant, in the context of being asked about such questions, to express a view towards moral norms that treats them as contingent and liable to change on a whim.

To try to drive home how this might feel from the child’s perspective, imagine you were brought into the royal court of a terrible and powerful king who had the full authority to punish you as they saw fit. You are helpless before their might, and utterly vulnerable to whatever decree they might issue. You are familiar with the king’s rules, and how the king regards them as being of the utmost importance, never to be violated or else. The king’s aides approach you and begin asking you peculiar questions:

If the king said it was okay to steal from the royal treasure, would it be?

If the king said that it was okay to eat at tables reserved for nobility, would it be?

If the king said you may wear the royal colors openly in public, would it be?

These questions would put you in a difficult situation. On the one hand, presumably the king can do whatever he wants. On the other, if you say yes, what will this say about you? Does it signal that you have intentions to steal, ignore noble status, or partake of royal privilege? It might, and so you may interpret the question as one about your commitment to the king’s current, actual decrees, and respond accordingly. Researchers should be mindful that social considerations can and do influence how people respond to questions. One of my own research collaborations provides evidence that people are sensitive to the social implications of their moral judgments, and may respond accordingly (Montealegre et al., 2025) and that reputational stakes are a factor in metaethical evaluations (Moss et al., 2025).

The impact social considerations have on participant responses is not idle speculation. Social desirability bias is a well-documented tendency for people to react to psychological stimuli in ways that systematically depart from an unbiased response due to a motivation to be seen more positively by researchers or whoever else may observe the participant’s response (Piedmont, 2024). Social desirability has been documented among children for decades (e.g., Crandall, Crandall, & Katkovsky, 1965) and studies show social desirability is especially likely when studies are conducted in the form of an interview rather than in a class setting (Miller et al., 2015). Sure enough, R&S’s study employed interviews.

Not only do children have an incentive to depict themselves in a positive light, the power dynamics associated with interacting with adults posing questions about morality are especially relevant to children, who are at risk not only of being perceived negatively but are in an especially vulnerable position where genuine costs can follow from saying the wrong thing. Under these circumstances, expressing a commitment to existing moral norms by insisting God couldn’t change them makes strategic sense, insofar as it signals the child’s own commitment to those moral standards.

There are other reasons to be skeptical of these findings. Children may struggle to engage in the relevant kind of counterfactual thinking, and may have difficulty considering the relevant metaphysical, moral, and other considerations relevant to adequately understanding and addressing a question about God’s capabilities. For instance, do children understand the full implications of what it would mean for God to be all-powerful or all-good? Researchers treating the reaction of children as though children can (even if implicitly) weigh relevant factors about God’s attributes and the nature of morality are presuming a great deal about children’s capacity for understanding the relevant concepts as intended (God, omnimax powers, modal considerations, and so on), the salience of those concepts in influencing children’s judgments, and their competence at suppressing irrelevant biasing factors like social motivations and personal biases. Adults are not very good at any of these virtues, so it’s unclear why we should think children will perform any better.

Take, for instance, a common feature of the way adults may respond to a challenging question: substitution. Substitution occurs when we are presented with a challenging question as input, replace that question with a simpler and more readily answerable question, and then give the response to that other question as an output to the initial question. For instance, when adults are presented with the question:

A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Instead of performing the math, people have a reflexive, intuitive tendency to judge that the bat is $1.00 and the ball is $0.10, even though this response is incorrect. Studies frequently show failure rates on this question are extremely high, with fewer than 30% of participants getting the correct response in numerous studies (see e.g., Li et al., 2024). One explanation for why this occurs is substitution:

The explanation for the widespread “10 cents” bias in terms of attribute substitution is that people substitute the critical relational “more than” statement by a simpler absolute statement. That is, “the bat costs $1 more than the ball” is read as “the bat costs $1.” Hence, rather than working out the sum, people naturally parse $1.10, into $1 and 10 cents, which is easier to do. In other words, because of the substitution, people give the correct answer to the wrong question. (p. 269)

Adults engage in substitutions even in low-stakes situations and for questions that are far less abstract than the questions posed in R&S’s study, despite far greater linguistic competence and far more emotional and cognitive control than children. Yet in this case we’re dealing with children as young as four. They are far less capable of suppressing biases, interpreting tasks as intended by researchers, or even understanding English. They have greater social incentives for interpreting the study in a more acceptable way and less emotional regulation to suppress those biases. On top of all of this, they are presented with highly abstract questions about theology and metaethics in an unfamiliar context that they are far less prepared for than the typical adult participant. Why should we think they are any less likely than adults to employ heuristics that lead them to systematically interpret questions in unintended ways?

And on top of all that, the measure isn’t even a direct measure of whether they’re realists or not; it’s an indirect measure about a tangentially related theological consideration that at best may imply a metaethical stance, so interpreting these results as evidence children are moral realists requires the further inference that children possess considerable implicit philosophical consistency and sophistication to such an extent that we can plausibly extrapolate from their apparent position on one philosophical matter to their position on another philosophical matter.

This brings me to the main point: we simply don’t know why children are giving these answers. The only way their answers would indicate that they are moral realists is if the reason why they judge that God can’t change the moral rules is because they regard those rules as somehow necessary, eternal, incapable of change, and so on, which, notably, is not identical to stance-independence. One must infer stance-independence from these characteristics, and even these characteristics can only be inferred indirectly; we have no direct evidence that an implicit commitment (or, far less likely, an explicit belief in) any of these qualities is actually driving their judgments about whether God can change moral rules. Since we don’t know what’s causing the judgments, concluding that children are moral realists on the basis of these findings is largely a matter of questionable interpretation of indirect findings.

One reason for thinking they must be moral realists if they give this kind of response is if one assumes that realism would be the only or primary explanation for why they’d offer such a response, assuming they interpreted the question as intended. But if they have the sophistication to interpret the question as intended and the sophistication to adopt complex metaphysical positions like moral realism, it’s not clear why we should ignore the possibility that they might hold other, similarly sophisticated metaethical views, some of which are forms of moral antirealism.

After all, the belief that God can’t change the moral rules is consistent with antirealism. Moral realism is the view that moral truth is stance-independent, while moral antirealism is the view that there are no stance-independent moral truths. That moral rules cannot be changed does not entail that they are stance-independently true. Consider the antirealist position ideal observer theory. According to ideal observer theory, moral truths are determined by those moral beliefs we’d adopt if we were fully informed and ideally rational. Note, though, that under those conditions moral truths still depend on what a hypothetical version of us would endorse. As such, those facts are still stance-dependent, even if one believes all rational agents would converge on the same set of moral truths and that there is therefore only a single correct set of moral standards. People may assume that a metaethical position which holds that there is a single correct set of moral standards, and that those standards don’t even depend on the standards of any actual people or cultures, is thereby a realist system. But this is not the case. Technically, this is an antirealist position.

Do I think children might be ideal observer theorists? No. I present this example to make three points. First, I doubt anyone thinks that children have sophisticated metaethical views. Even if they were moral realists, they aren’t going to be Parfitian realists or Cornell realists or otherwise endorse well-developed and distinctive realist accounts with all the bells and whistles. What they’ll endorse will be some rudimentary analog. Well, there are rudimentary analogs to ideal observer theory. Here’s one: trust smart authority figures. They probably know what’s true, and probably have the best ideas about what to do. God fits the bill here perfectly: God is by far the smartest and most authoritative person. We should defer to God. Such deference doesn’t require one to specifically presume there are stance-independent, irreducibly normative moral facts. Suppose, for instance, God recommended I not go for a walk today, or not eat that piece of cheese in the fridge. I’d listen. Why? I wouldn’t listen simply because I think God is informing me of stance-independent normative truths. I’d assume God knows something about the nonnormative facts that I don’t know: that I’d get hit by a car if I went on that walk, or that the cheese has gone bad and will make me ill. Children may defer to God and further assume that since God already knows what’s best, he’s not going to arbitrarily change his mind on things. And this brings us to another point: if children (or adults, for that matter) were told why God wanted to change the moral rules, and the reason given was sensible, might they change their minds? I suspect so. So another issue here is that the question relies on the presumption that God would change the rules without explanation, on a whim. Even if you were a moral antirealist, you don’t necessarily think God could do this.

Why? Well, part of the reason has to do with God’s other traits. God is good, kind, merciful, and just. If we know God exhibits certain thick moral attributes, it wouldn’t make sense for God to maintain these traits but then insist on rules out of accord with them. Imagine I told you a person was an eternally unchanging and perfectly kind person. Could they choose to be cruel and malicious?

This is a weird question. Maybe they could, but not while maintaining the trait of being an eternally unchanging and perfectly kind person. So to grant that they could is to reject something which has just been stipulated. This is a tall order for a child to wrap their heads around. It might be quite strange for an adult. It’d be a bit like asking if a square can be a circle. Well, you could squish the lines and make it into a circle in one sense, but in another sense, it can’t both be a square and become a circle while still being a square. Likewise, would God even be God if God decided it was okay to punch people or lie or steal? I can see adults having a serious dispute about this matter. But somehow this is supposed to be no problem at all for children.

The second reason I provided the example of ideal observer theory is to provide a concrete alternative that emphasizes the importance of the fact that the study Reinecke and Heiphetz Solomon conducted does not include measures that directly assess whether the participants endorse moral realism or antirealism. Instead, that they endorse it must be at best inferred from their ostensible position on another topic. This creates an inferential gap that should provide considerable grounds for caution: one must presume that the underlying reason why children denied that God could change moral rules was because of an underlying (if implicit) commitment to moral realism. But this was not directly measured or observed; it requires a theoretical interpretation of the reason for the pattern of responses children provided. The possibility of alternative antirealist positions illustrates that there are identifiable reasons why, at least in principle, someone might respond to a question in a way that may seem to best fit one inference about their position, when in fact it not only doesn’t do so, but reflects a commitment to a contrary view. And if anyone is tempted to reject some rudimentary version of ideal observer theory on the grounds that it’s too sophisticated, I will simply serve the same point back to them about moral realism: it’s not clear it’s any less sophisticated, at least in its more robust forms, and it’s not clear which version has the simpler rudimentary analog.

If, in observing children’s responses to these studies, people are inclined to conclude children are implicitly committed to moral realism, we should first consider whether the reasons why they gave the responses in question could be attributed to some other causes.

Those other causes, whatever they might be, are probably not an implicit commitment to ideal observer theory. Instead, we must ask a more fundamental question: Why might children respond to a particular question, once one takes into account how it was asked and the experimental context in which it was asked? While we can make our best guesses as to why we observe a given pattern of results without data, every interpretation of the data will turn on background assumptions and data extraneous to the study itself.

References

Bauman, C. W., McGraw, A. P., Bartels, D. M., & Warren, C. (2014). Revisiting external validity: Concerns about trolley problems and other sacrificial dilemmas in moral psychology. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 8(9), 536-554. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12131

Beebe, J. R. (2015). The empirical study of folk metaethics. Etyka, 50, 11-28. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8282-4297

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

De Neys, W., Rossi, S., & Houdé, O. (2013). Bats, balls, and substitution sensitivity: Cognitive misers are no happy fools. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 20(2), 269-273. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-013-0384-5

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

Montealegre, A., Bush, L. S., Moss, D., Pizarro, D. A., & Jimenez-Leal, W. (2025). Does maximizing good make people look bad? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672251361210

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

Piedmont, R. L. (2024). Social desirability bias. In Encyclopedia of quality of life and well-being research (pp. 6526-6526). Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17299-1_2746

Pölzler, T. (2017). Revisiting folk moral realism. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 8(2), 455-476. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-016-0300-9

Pölzler, T. (2018). How to measure moral realism. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 9(3), 647-670. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0401-8

Pölzler, T., & Wright, J. C. (2020). Anti-realist pluralism: A new approach to folk metaethics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(1), 53-82. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-019-00447-8

Pölzler, T., Tomabechi, T., & Suzuki, T. (2023, November). Lay people deny morality’s objectivity across cultures (to somewhat different extents and in somewhat different ways) [Preprint]. ResearchGate. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.24917.19689

Reinecke, M. G., & Horne, Z. (2018). Immutable morality: Even God could not change some moral facts. Preprint. PsyArXiv. http://dx.doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/yqm48

Reinecke, M. G., & Solomon, L. H. (2023). Children deny that God could change morality. Cognitive Development, 68, 101393. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2023.101393

Sarkissian, H., Park, J., Tien, D., Wright, J. C., & Knobe, J. (2011). Folk moral relativism. Mind & Language, 26(4), 482-505. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2011.01428.x

Wainryb, C., Shaw, L. A., Langley, M., Cottam, K., & Lewis, R. (2004). Children’s thinking about diversity of belief in the early school years: Judgments of relativism, tolerance, and disagreeing persons. Child Development, 75(3), 687-703. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2004.00701.x

Westfall, J., Nichols, T. E., & Yarkoni, T. (2017). Fixing the stimulus-as-fixed-effect fallacy in task fMRI. Wellcome Open Research, 1, 23. 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.10298.2

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.