A Critique of Huemer on Reasons and Consistency
I’ve done my best to transcribe excerpts from this clip:
Antirealists frequently want to make room for people to do moral reasoning. They don’t want the whole field of ethics to be made obsolete by the fact that there are no moral truths. So then they will say something like “Well, so you can still do reasoning to try to make your moral attitudes consistent.” And so okay we supposedly still have reason to do that […] And that’s supposedly what we’re doing in moral philosophy, okay. But my claim is “No, there’d be no reason to do that. Like if there aren’t any objective moral truths there’d be no reason to worry about the consistency of your attitudes.”
Huemer makes several mistakes in this short clip.
First, he implies that antirealists think that there are no moral facts. But this is imprecise. Some moral antirealists think there are no moral truths (error theorists, noncognitivists), but others don’t (constructivists, subjectivists, some contemporary expressivists). What Huemer said isn’t quite incorrect so much as imprecise and potentially misleading.
Second, his statement that “And so okay we supposedly still have reason to do that” is ambiguous. What kind of reason is he referring to? A stance-independent reason, or a stance-dependent one? Both pose a problem for Huemer’s remarks.
Huemer goes on to say “No, there’d be no reason to do that. Like if there aren’t any objective moral truths there’d be no reason to worry about the consistency of your attitudes.” This implies Huemer is only thinking in terms of stance-independent reasons, and is assuming that the antirealists who say they’d care about consistency think they have stance-independent reasons to do so. This is because he concludes that if there aren’t any objective (stance-independent) moral truths, then there’d be “no reason” to worry about consistency. This wouldn’t follow unless the reasons were stance-independent.
One problem with this claim is that moral antirealists only deny that there are stance-independent moral truths. Is the norm “one ought to have consistent beliefs” a moral norm, or a nonmoral norm? Having consistent beliefs is not a paradigmatic instance of a moral norm, but is perhaps closer to an epistemic, logical, or prudential norm (or some combination of these). While one could make the case that it’s a moral norm, moral antirealists are not obliged to do so. They could be antirealists about moral truths, but could be normative realists about whatever normative domain they believed consistency fell within. Given this, the rejection of moral realism does not straightforwardly entail that one does not have stance-independent reasons to have consistent beliefs.
Second, Huemer doesn’t appear to even consider another possibility: that the moral antirealist is also an antirealist about whatever reasons they’d have for favoring consistency. The reason an antirealist would care about consistency in such circumstances could simply be that they subjectively value consistency. Moral antirealists face no challenges whatsoever in rejecting moral realism and believing one has stance-dependent reasons to be consistent.
Huemer continues:
The reason why we care about the consistency of our beliefs is that inconsistent beliefs are guaranteed to be false […] If there’s no facts, it doesn’t matter.
It’s true that if you have inconsistent beliefs, some of those beliefs must be false. But this isn’t the entire story. I don’t simply care about maximizing the number of true beliefs I have and minimizing the number of false beliefs. I care about having the sorts of beliefs that allow me to succeed in pursuing my goals. And inconsistent beliefs are an impediment to pursuing our goals effectively. Truth, for me, is bound up in goal pursuit, in success, and, ultimately, in action. I am not simply a truth-tallying lump that sits around attempting to have consistent beliefs because I want to minimize false beliefs. I care about consistency to the extent that it is useful to do so.
Right now, each and every one of us holds at least some inconsistent beliefs. Are you desperately trying to root out every inconsistency and eliminate it? Probably not. Why not? Because you have better things to do with your time. You’d be late for a meeting if you did that. You need to pick the kids up from school. You need another cup of coffee. You need to answer that annoying email. We are not subordinate to the pursuit of consistency because we are in turn subordinate to holding true beliefs; no, our epistemic pursuits are ultimately subordinate to our ends.
His latter remark is especially baffling. He says, “If there’s no facts, it doesn’t matter.” It’s not clear what facts Huemer is implying the antirealist thinks don’t exist; he just says “no facts” without qualification. Antirealists typically believe in all sorts of facts. They only deny that there are stance-independent moral facts (and if they are normative antirealists, that there are stance-independent normative facts). They don’t necessarily deny that there are facts of any other kind. And we antirealists encounter the same world as everyone else. If I hold inconsistent beliefs, there could be consequences. Maybe I hold inconsistent beliefs about the Napoleonic Wars. This is unlikely to ever have any real-world consequences for me. I may never discover the inconsistency. Yet if I hold inconsistent beliefs about whether the pill on my table is a medication I need or a dangerous poison, well, now I’m in trouble. Yes, consistency matters because it is related to truth, but we are only concerned in practice with consistency when it matters to us, when we care, when it impacts us.
And, of course, there is a problem with the claim that “it doesn’t matter.” Does Huemer mean that it doesn’t stance-independently matter, or that it doesn’t matter in any respect at all? Because antirealism does not entail that nothing matters, it only denies that anything stance-independently matters… and even that’s a stretch, because again, moral antirealists only deny that there are stance-independent moral facts. This is entirely consistent with being a realist about other sorts of value, and thinking that things can “stance-independently matter” in various nonmoral domains.
What I find most frustrating with these remarks is the imprecision and ambiguity that result from constantly using normative language without making the metanormative presuppositions implicit in his use of those terms explicit. While in most contexts doing so isn’t necessary, in this case, for the sake of clarity, it is.