A Choir of Unspecified Size
A critical response to JPA's "Against Moral Anti-Realism"
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:
Disputes about what’s true
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.