(Status: Written quickly. May contain errors. Let me know and I’ll fix them.)
A debate between Trent Horn and Destiny has been making the rounds. Patrick from the Journal of Absolute Truth recently shared some thoughts on the debate between Trent Horn and Destiny. You can see that debate here and my review of it with Danny from PhilTalk here.
Incidentally, my very first blog post was a reply to Patrick, which you can see here.
Incidentally, Danny from PhilTalk put together a set of clips from the discussion and we reviewed them, which you can see here:
(1) Patrick says:
After all, if somebody is forced into nihilism to ‘justify’ their take on abortion, that is probably because the pro-life side has some powerful argumentation behind it.
I’m not a fan of the framing here. I don’t think Destiny or anyone else is “forced into nihilism” in order to justify their normative ethical views. This makes it seem like nihilism is some kind of fallback position one has to “retreat” to. I deny this, and I think other antirealists should deny this, too. Antirealists aren’t “forced” into anything to endorse moral antirealism. I also doubt it has much to do with the abortion debate. Moral antirealism is consistent with being both for and against the moral permissibility of abortion.
With respect to the notion that one is “forced” into antirealism: I not only endorse moral antirealism, I deny that there are literally any significant practical or theoretical costs to doing so at all. I think the charges moral realists level at the supposedly undesirable consequences of moral realism are not true.
(2) Patrick says:
In fact, there appears to be a parallel between the pro-choice party adopting moral anti-realism and the reductive naturalist embracing eliminativism, doesn’t there? Both seem like nuclear options, something the respective parties are forced to adopt because all other explanatory options available to their paradigm have been exposed as seriously defective, and for whatever reason they cannot embrace a paradigm shift.
I don’t agree with this, either. Antirealism is not a “nuclear option,” and people are not “forced” into it: at least, this is not a framing of the antirealist position an antirealist is obliged to endorse. An antirealist about morality can not only deny moral realism, they can also deny that there are strong arguments for realism, that realism enjoys any special presumption in its favor, and that anything of theoretical or practical value is lost in rejecting realism.
Antirealism also need not stem from any particular worldview, such as naturalism, so I don’t grant the implications about defective paradigms, either. Moral antirealism is consistent with rejecting naturalism and endorsing theism.
(3) Patrick says:
Again, anti-realism is precluding the possibility of true or false moral judgment altogether.
Only some forms of antirealism preclude true or false moral judgments. Relativism and constructivism both allow for moral truth, and possibly others, e.g., expressivist accounts with deflationary accounts of truth may also allow for true and false moral judgments, but they wouldn’t reference stance-independent moral facts. Only some forms of antirealism deny that there can be true and false moral judgments.
One also must be careful about precisely what this claim amounts to; insofar as one believes ordinary moral language is implicitly committed to false presuppositions about the metaphysical status of moral facts, and is thereby systematically false (i.e., error theory), this does not entail that the error theorist themselves must believe that there is no practically relevant or meaningful sense in which they could approve or oppose actions on moral grounds. That is, a moral antirealist may think that when nonphilosophers say “murder is wrong,” they are technically saying something false, but this in in way bars an antirealist from opposing murder and acting accordingly.
(4) Patrick says:
One must not miss the radicality of such a view – a view that is not the majority position among philosophers, as most philosophers, particularly ethicists, are moral realists. (This is an appeal to authority, obviously, but appeals to authority often have weight, even if not an overwhelming amount.)
I grant that it carries some weight, but it isn’t very much. There are a variety of reasons to doubt that what most philosophers think is especially good evidence. For what it’s worth, a large majority are atheists, too. I am skeptical because they’re convinced by good arguments for atheism. I suspect, instead, that atheists are more likely to become academic philosophers in the first place.
Without knowing about the base rate at which people endorse moral realism, it’s hard to say whether 62% in favor of moral realism is good evidence that moral realism is true. What if studying philosophy causes a significant decrease in support for moral realism from a very high baseline? For instance, suppose 95% of people start out as moral realists, but once they get their PhDs in philosophy, only 62% endorse it. That would suggest studying philosophy causes a large decrease in support for moral realism. I’d hardly see that as evidence of moral realism.
(5) Patrick says:
“Destiny said he cannot “observe” a moral fact (I saw a clip of this), so he embraces non-cognitivism, which is essentially the position that moral statements cannot be either true or false,”
adding:
“[...] what should we make of the idea that because one cannot observe a moral fact, this justifies anti-realism?
The answer is, not much.”
I agree that the fact that we cannot observe a given fact isn’t good evidence that it isn’t true. However, I think you’re letting Trent Horn off the hook a bit here. Trent say “I just think that we have a sense of observing morality just like we have a sense of observing the natural world.”
Maybe we do, but I do not think there is good evidence that people have such a sense. I don’t think it’d be good evidence against moral realism if we didn’t have such a sense, simply because I don’t think we need special senses for every domain of fact. However, while our inability to observe moral facts isn’t good evidence against their existence, Trent does make a claim that is subject to challenge: whether we do have such a sense. I suspect we don’t, and have seen little reason to think we do. I’m curious if you think people have such a sense.
(6) Companions in guilt arguments aren’t going to get realists very far. Antirealists can simply reject epistemic realism, too. I maintain that there are no costs to doing so. Patrick says:
epistemic norms cannot go.
Yet epistemic antirealism does not hold that epistemic norms must go; it simply holds that there are no stance-independent epistemic normative facts. An epistemic antirealist can still employ epistemic norms. They just don’t think we “ought to” independent of our goals or desires.
(7) Patrick says:
First, one should show that the arguments for moral anti-realism are either seriously weak or beg the metaphysical question in favor of Scientistic Naturalism
Antirealists do not need to endorse scientistic naturalism to reject moral realism. Antirealists can largely rely on refuting arguments in favor of realism, and most arguments against moral realism do not require a commitment to naturalism. For what it’s worth, I don’t endorse arguments from disagreement or evolutionary debunking arguments; I don’t think either are very good nor do I think either is necessary for antirealism to be more defensible than realism.
(8) Patrick says:
From there, one might propose something like Phenomenal Conservativism as our epistemological launch pad
This isn’t going to help moral realists, either. It seems to me that moral realism is false. And I have yet to see any good defeaters. Phenomenal conservatism cuts both ways, and justifies antirealism just as readily as it does realism.
Phenomenal conservatism has other problems. The main one is that it only provides private justification, and is dialectically useless at resolving disputes between people with different seemings. Phenomenal conservatism may allow you to claim that your beliefs are justified, but it provides little or no substantive reason for anyone who doesn’t already share your views to endorse those views.
(9) Patrick says:
There are, of course, other moves one can make (see the two linked books, along with my post on moral relativism) but let me finish with the note that it is not illegitimate to tease out the consequences of the moral anti-realist position — consequences that will strike most everyday audience members as absurd.
I don’t know what consequences Patrick is referring to, but I doubt there are any substantive consequences of antirealism.
(10) Patrick says:
For the anti-realist, this means making it clear that there is no moral fact of the matter about so many things where the majority of people believe there is definitely some moral fact of the matter
There is no compelling empirical evidence that most people endorse moral realism. If you disagree, I’d be happy to discuss this with you. You list a set of normative claims. Most people agree that the claims you list are “wrong,” but it does not follow that most people believe they are stance-independently wrong.
“X is wrong”
“X is stance-independently wrong”
…are not necessarily synonyms, and evidence of the former is necessarily evidence of the latter. If you wanted to show that most people believe moral realism is true, you’d need to conduct the appropriate empirical research. Such research has been and is being done, and it doesn’t provide anything even close to decisive evidence that most people consistently endorse moral realism.
(11) Patrick says:
Again, it is often worthwhile to have the anti-realist go “on the record” about these things, since if they want to be consistent with their position, they will have to say what no human person should ever want to say concerning matters of rape, slavery, genocide, or what have you.
This is an appeal to engaging in normative entanglement. Normative entanglement occurs whenever critics of antirealism conflate metaethical claims with normative and character claims to give the misleading impression that one’s metaethical position carries implications about their normative moral values and their character or behavior. For instance, if a moral antirealist maintains that “it is not objectively wrong to torture babies,” this could be misinterpreted as an indication that the antirealist does not think it’s wrong to torture babies. This would be false. The antirealist can and probably does think it is wrong to torture babies; they just don’t think it’s objectively wrong. Furthermore, if someone were to say, in an everyday context:
“I see nothing wrong with lying.”
…we might naturally think this person is more likely to lie to us. Such a remark suggests an attitude towards lying that entails an increased willingness to lie, less likelihood of shame or guilt for engaging in lying, and so on.
Yet when a moral antirealist says that they don’t think the statement “lying is wrong” is true in an objective sense, they are making a highly technical claim about the metaphysical status of the truth-makers of moral claims. In particular, the antirealist only denies that there are stance-independent moral facts. A moral antirealist is only committed to denying that moral claims are true insofar as, and only insofar as moral claims are understood to express claims about what is stance-independently moral or immoral.
That is, if “murder is wrong” just means “murder is [stance-independently wrong,” then the antirealist agrees that “murder is wrong” is false. But this has absolutely no implications whatsoever for the antirealist’s attitude towards murder. It doesn’t entail that they are any less opposed to murder than the realist does, that they think murder is any less bad, that they’re any more likely to engage in murder, and so on.
Patrick’s suggestion that we get antirealists on record saying things that make them look bad is likely a sincere attempt at highlighting what Patrick takes to be the damning and awful implications of antirealism. But I believe Patrick is profoundly mistaken, and that, as sincere as his intentions may be, what is really going on when an antirealist is made to look bad is the result of an audience’s misunderstanding about what the antirealist is committed to, and what the antirealist means by what they say. The antirealist rejects a highly technical interpretation of certain sentences, understood in a distinctive philosophical context. Those contexts involve isolating and focusing exclusively on the semantic content of the claims in question. They then reject the semantic presuppositions associated with these technical formulations of the claim, but, critically, this does not entail a rejection of the pragmatic implications associated with the everyday use of these terms. To illustrate how this works, consider an ordinary person standing in the line at a coffee shop. We overhear this person in a heated discussion with someone else:
“No, lying is wrong.”
In such contexts, this person may be expressing all of the following:
(1) the normative moral position that lying is wrong
(2) the metaethical position that lying is stance-independently wrong
(3) A negative attitude towards lying
(4) They may also be signaling their disinclination to lie, which gives us information about their likely behavior.
In such circumstances, every instances of a person’s moral claim contains but the formal semantic content, which may consist of (1) and (2), as well as pragmatic implications about their attitudes (3) and behavior (4). However, when philosophers address moral claims, they are not addressing real world moral claims. They are addressing moral claims outside their everyday contexts, and they seek specifically to set aside their pragmatic associations, e.g., (3) and (4), and focus exclusively on their semantics (they can and do discuss pragmatics, but typically the focus is on semantics). They then develop theories about the semantics of these isolated, decontextualized moral claims.
Moral antirealism predominantly concerns the semantics of these decontextualized moral claims. Such “moral claims” exist in a kind of conceptual cold storage, outside any real-world contexts of usage, and, as such, do not carry the pragmatic implications associated with their usage in any given context because they aren’t being used in any particular context. That is, the sentence “lying is wrong,” outside some context of usage can’t carry the pragmatic implications implied by a speaker because there is no speaker and no context.
The moral antirealist means only to deny the distinct semantic content of these decontextualized, isolated toy sentences. An antirealist denies that there are stance-independent moral facts. As such, insofar as a moral claim is taken to commit one to (2), the antirealist denies the claim. But this metaethical element of the claim is entangled with (1), (3), and (4). As such, to deny (2) can give the false impression that the antirealist also denies (1), (3), and (4).
The problem is that the metaethical presupposition is embedded inside the rest of these claims, such that to deny the metaethical claim gives the impression you’re denying everything else, too…even though this isn’t an entailment of antirealism. For comparison, imagine if someone asked you:
“Do you think the earth is magically round?”
If you say “yes,” they can scoff and say “wow, you believe in magic? That’s absurd!”
If you say, “no,” they can scoff and say “wow, you don’t believe the earth is round? That’s absurd!”
…The question is a catch 22. The reason is that this is a kind of complex question, where there are at least two claims in play:
Whether you think the earth is round
Whether you think it is round in a magical way
Since both claims are tangled up in a single yes/no question, there is no way to say “yes” to one but “no” to the other, without a more nuanced response. But a more nuanced response may be viewed as a hedge, or as a kind of sketchy and suspicious way of not directly engaging the question. Move back over to metaethics and see how this works. A realist can ask an antirealist:
“Do you think it’s objectively wrong to torture babies?”
An antirealist can’t say “yes” without conceding to the realist.
If they say “no,” the realist can imply the antirealist isn’t opposed to torturing babies and is an awful monster, even though this doesn’t follow.
Finally, if the antirealist doesn’t unhesitatingly respond with a clear “yes” or “no,” the realist can simply point to this fact and say “wow, see how the antirealist can’t give a clear response to a simple question?” and then gloat, and depict the antirealist as some kind of evil monster for hedging on whether baby torture is bad.
When moral realists do this, they have effectively constructed a rhetorical Kafkatrap. There is no possible way to respond that the realist couldn’t leverage against you, not because realism has any genuine philosophical advantages over antirealists, but because the realist can always lean on implications of one’s response to misleadingly imply that there’s something wrong with antirealism, even when there isn’t.
What makes normative entanglement especially insidious is that it is shrouded in plausible deniability. Since the appeal of this move relies on insinuation and indirect implication, realists need not explicitly explain why the antirealist’s response is so horrible, evil, or stupid. They can simply lean in to the mere fact that the antirealist has publicly said something as obviously ludicrous and monstrous as “torturing babies isn’t wrong,” point to the sentence, and leading an audience to conflate the technical meaning that the antirealist has in mind with the everyday meaning, replete with all the pragmatic implications that the antirealist is not actually committed to.
(12) Patrick says:
All the better if you can find instances where they themselves have made bold moral proclamations, which is hardly difficult, for virtually no anti-realist lives consistently with their position, especially when it comes to politics
Nothing about antirealism is inconsistent with making “bold moral proclamations,” and I live completely consistently with my position. If you think there is an inconsistency, what is that inconsistency?
Conclusion
I’d be happy to have a discussion with you on moral realism on your channel or my own, or to have a blog exchange.
I love how he says "One must not miss the radicality of such a view – a view that is not the majority position among philosophers, as most philosophers, particularly ethicists, are moral realists" appealing to a 62% majority to bolster an argument against the pro-choice view which 86% of philosophers endorse. Methinks there's no consistent theory of expert deference here...