Against "Against Subjectivism" (Full Post)

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1.0 Introduction

“Against Subjectivism” by Christian Gonzalez sets out to do what it says in the title: to argue against subjectivism. I’m not a subjectivist, but I’m subjectivism-adjacent. In this post, I will defend certain aspects of conventional analytic metaethical subjectivism, while proposing and defending a better alternative which is closer to my own position, quietist subjectivism. Quietist subjectivism differs from conventional subjectivism in that it rejects philosophically robust notions of normative reasons. By rejecting such notions, the resulting position is, I argue, impervious to all of the objections Christian presents. Furthermore, Christian claims that subjectivist positions commit one to biting many bullets. I likewise deny this. Whether a position requires one to “bite the bullet” can only be judged relative to background judgments about the relative defensibility or desirability of certain positions. Since I think moral realism is implausible and undesirable, I do not take rejecting it to carry any costs, and as such deny outright that subjectivism and other antirealist positions bite any bullets at all.

2.0 There are no subjectivists in foxholes!

The article begins with two remarks that raise my hackles:

“Things only matter if we care about them.” Of all the attempts to make sense of normativity, of what matters, this is the most intuitive. But you don’t really believe that. Almost no body [sic] actually does when pressed.

Cue my standard reaction to remarks like these: intuitive to who? Such remarks are underspecified. Is this a claim about some presumptively shared feature of human psychology, a normative claim about how people ought to react to such remarks, a claim about how one would react under some counterfactual circumstances (e.g., conditional on adequate reflection, rationality, training in philosophy, etc.)? Who knows. People rarely specify what they mean by such remarks. Making underspecified claims is a bad habit and philosophers should stop doing it.

The second set of remarks raise my hackles even further: Christian claims that readers don’t “really” believe that things only matter if we care about them, and that nobody maintains such a position when pressed.

There is no good reason for making either claim. Both are empirical claims about human psychology, and the latter is an especially tricky one since it’s a claim about what people would do under certain counterfactual conditions. There is no compelling evidence for either claim. People really need to get out of the business of making psychological claims but not supporting those claims with appropriate data, or at least very compelling theoretical reasons, which we aren’t given here. As an aside, people sometimes ask me if I think we need studies to confirm the sky is blue or that people don’t like being set on fire. No, I don’t think we need studies to confirm this. Certain sorts of claims can reasonably qualify as general knowledge. “People are moral realists” is not among such claims.

Such remarks are presumptuous and patronizing and I’d encourage those inclined to frame things this way to stop doing so. It reminds me of Christians who say that nobody is “really” an atheist, and that all atheists are “in denial.”

2.1 A double-edged sword

This kind of armchair psychology also cuts both ways. Realists are often confident that if you scratch the surface of a subjectivist (or antirealist in general), you’ll find a realist. But this could be the other way around. Antirealists could appeal to the asymmetry in stakes between realists and antirealists to argue that realists are more likely to be subject to motivated reasoning that biases them towards their views, and that deep down they’re antirealists in denial.

There are at least some reasons for thinking this could be true. “Against Subjectivism” focuses on Parfit’s perspective. Parfit was deeply emotionally invested in the truth of moral realism and would allegedly become despondent over the failure of his colleagues to adopt the position. Parfit appeared to believe that if realism were not true, that life would be meaningless and his life’s work would amount to nothing. For realists like Parfit, the stakes are high. And the author of this article echoes similar sentiments shortly after this by explicitly stating that the stakes “couldn’t be higher.”

How high are the stakes? For some realists, all meaning, value, and purpose hinges on the truth of realism. If realism isn’t true, then nothing matters. Conversely, the stakes are not similarly high for me or subjectivists, since we think things matter regardless of whether moral realism is true. In other words, there is an asymmetry in what is at stake between realists and antirealists. For realists, everything is at stake, while for antirealists, very little is at stake (if I were convinced of realism I might, e.g., be embarrassed to have defended the wrong view for so long. But that’s about it).

So all else being equal, we have far less of a basis for being biased in favor of our views. I could leverage that fact to write articles that begin by making this point, then insist that nobody is really a moral realist. Those who claim to be realists are actually just in a desperate state of denial and have deluded themselves in an attempt to stave off the existential dread of a universe without purpose or value. I don’t do this, because I have no idea if this is true and even if it was true to some extent for at least some realists, it’s not that relevant to assessing whether realism is true.

Most importantly, I don’t want to get into the habit of psychologizing the opposition. While this is sometimes inevitable and justified, it is too easy to unjustifiably bootstrap confidence in one’s own views by assuring oneself that one’s opposition lacks the same conviction as you. To express such views openly can also poison any hope of a productive conversation with precisely those people. I know I find it annoying when someone says that nobody really believes something I believe.

2.2 Antirealist intimidation

I also want to pause a moment to comment on the notion that subjectivists don’t adhere to their views when pressed. Pressed how, exactly? Realists may make such remarks based on anecdotal experiences: press the subjectivist, and they ultimately relent and make concessions.

I don’t doubt this does occur, but why does it occur? Maybe it’s because subjectivism is an indefensible position. But it could also be a result of who they argue with and how they argue. People often bow to social pressure, and the way I see people address antirealists and subjectivists in particular often sounds a bit coercive (even if unintentionally). Shout at a student “So if someone thought it was fine to punch you in your face and take your wallet, you’d be okay with that?!” and it should come as no surprise if a student sheepishly says “No” and slinks back into their chair, apparently humbled by the Truth that Subjectivism is Wrong. Only this isn’t a good way to criticize subjectivism, especially not under the circumstances in which this sort of thing typically occurs.

If you’re wondering, “Does this ever really happen?” Yes, it does. Pointing out that I’ve witnessed it countless times myself is likely to lead to outcries of “But that’s just anecdotal!” Well, sure, but I’m not making inferences about populations from samples. Even so, I can do at least a little more than say “Trust me, bro!” First, here’s a survey I ran on my YouTube channel. I asked this:

When people endorse relativism, others will often ask questions like, “So you don’t think the holocaust was actually, objectively wrong?” or say things like “Then you couldn’t object to someone punching you in the face and stealing your wallet.”

In other words, people use highly loaded, charged scenarios, often in a misleading fashion, in order to shame or coerce relativists into recanting their positions or shutting up by implying that the relativist holds a ridiculous position or would have to be okay with genocide or torture or couldn’t object to things they obviously object to.

Let’s call this antirealist intimidation. I’d like to ask separate questions about people being obnoxious towards moral realists or people who hold other sorts of positions. For now, my focus is specifically on people who direct these remarks at moral relativists and moral antirealists.

What I’d like to know is if you, whether as a student at university or elsewhere, have ever experienced this sort of rhetorical move or have personally witnessed others being subjected to it.

Here were the results:

At 164 votes at the time of writing, more than four out of five people report experiencing or witnessing antirealist intimidation. Here are a handful of excerpts where people elaborate on the intimidation they experienced or witnessed:

I have never not experienced antirealist intimidation

I would say I pretty much only get intimidation or fear-mongering tactics when I discuss meta-ethics. But I identify as a moral abolitionist - which I think realists who haven’t heard the term look at me like I am crazier than crazy. Haha!

See this all the time, and have been subjected to it, though a lesser/small extent in actual academic contexts, and mostly, in my opinion, it’s a tactic employed by philosophically poorly trained/untrained individuals online.

This is so common that I’ve become desensitized to it (even though it’s still very frustrating).

Yes, very often. From the first ancient philosophy class I took on, and then it became a regular occurrence. To my part, anyway, even when I was a neophyte, it never scared me much, since it seemed bent on provoking an emotional answer out of me and compelling me to answer according to social mores or gut instinct, which, anyway, if it does anything, does not disprove the sort of point that usually preempts the challenge.

“Raise your hand if you think killing babies is wrong” in phil of religion

I’m not the only one who has had these sorts of experiences. What do they look like, in practice? Can I provide any examples at all of anyone doing this? Yes, I can. I can even provide an example from a professional philosopher. This is from the podcast Philosophy Gets Schooled, which begins around 8:27 here:

There will be people that I’ve taught over the years, I think probably way more than when I first started teaching fifteen years ago, there was way more people who were willing to just go down this route of “Oh well it’s all kind of relative, you know…it’s really hard to say if things are really definitely right or wrong because you know it’s just the culture you were brought up in and all that sort of stuff.” But nowadays people are more quick to admit from when I’ve been teaching and even back then people had a point where you just push them far enough and they’d become moral realists very quickly. So if you’d say things…the examples were always pretty unpleasant and things but you’d sort of have to say

“So you really think that morality…there’s no truth in morality at all and it’s just our sort of local customs that determine right and wrong?”

And they say “Yea! You know…probably.” And you go

“Well, that’s fine, so would you have stood outside a concentration camp and told the people in there, ‘Look, you’re just looking at it in the wrong way! Like what’s happening here isn’t morally wrong, it’s just that this is the local custom for the people in this town, that they think that this is how you should be treated, and you should be a bit more tolerant towards that.’”

Now at that point they go, “No, that’s disgusting! How dare you? Why would you do that?”

And I go “Well according to you it’d be a permissible thing to do. It wouldn’t be a crass thing to do. You’d actually be quite helpful to let them know that what was happening wasn’t one of the most grotesque injustices that’s ever happened in the history of humanity.”

And actually they very quickly go “Well no I mean obviously I’d draw a line somewhere” … So right we’re not saying that we ought all believe every single moral judgment we make is rooted in hard facts down to the tiny details, that literally every judgment I make is absolutely correct and I can relate it to a fact. I can still be wrong, and there be moral facts. It’s just that when you push far enough you will find there is always almost like a bedrock of moral facts, which even when people are disagreeing you find that maybe they’re just paying attention to different moral facts or they’re just misled or misunderstood some of those moral facts. It’s not that there are none, necessarily.

Telling a relativist that they’d have to walk up to people in a Nazi concentration camp and berate them for intolerance is extremely heavy-handed and likely to induce many students to recant the position not because they now recognize its intellectual shortcomings but because they don’t want to be seen as someone who’d be so disgusting and repugnant that they’d openly berate the victims of a genocide to their faces. Nothing about relativism requires that you do this.

Note, too, how students are allegedly told there’d be nothing “crass” about this. Moral relativism isn’t a position on what is or isn’t crass. This would be crass by the standards of any person I’d want to share a planet with. And one could, of course, be a relativist about crassness, so one could disagree about whether this is crass on such grounds (as an aside: it’s trivially straightforward for relativists to disagree; disagreement is not the sole province of realists, which is yet another myth realists perpetuate). Also, they incorrectly imply relativists deny there’s any truth at all, which is a basic mistake a professional philosopher shouldn’t make (and yet these remarks were made by a professional philosopher).

I want to stress that I do not take this antirealist intimidation to be intentional. It might be. But I think realists generally sincerely believe that the scenarios they describe and the questions they pose reveal the genuine implications of antirealist commitments. My task, then, is twofold: it is to show both that this isn’t the case, and that mistakenly presuming this is the case and framing questions and arguments in the way realists do can prompt people to retreat from antirealist positions not because of the philosophical indefensibility of those positions but because of inaccurate implications about the entailments of antirealist positions along with an accurate recognition that endorsing those positions would carry reputational costs, even if the potential antirealist recognizes the position in question doesn’t actually carry such unsavory implications. In other words: people can be misled into mistakenly thinking that antirealism carries terrible implications it doesn’t carry, and they can correctly recognize that even if it doesn’t carry these implications, if enough people think that it does, endorsing the position openly carries reputational costs people may be unwilling to pay.

Realists may also form the impression that subjectivists and other antirealists lack conviction or don’t seriously endorse these views because they form this impression on the basis of the subpopulations they happen to interact with. Many critics of subjectivism (and antirealism more generally) are arguing against impressionable undergraduates. It should be unsurprising if students turn out to have brittle commitments. Subjectivism and similar views are often the fence-sitter’s conciliatory stance, the sort of position one adopts in intellectually and culturally diverse environments where being perceived as tolerant and cosmopolitan is more desirable than signaling staunch adherence to stodgy principles. If these are the sorts of people realists often encounter, they build up experience dealing with soft targets who do, in fact, fold under pressure. This may give the impression that the position is weak when this isn’t the case and in fact tells us little about the merits of subjectivism.

Realists who don’t employ these strategies (whether intentional or not) still exist in an environment in which they are employed, which could result in developing the general impression that subjectivists (and other antirealists) aren’t committed to their views. Unfortunately, when one side always has the rhetorical disadvantage, this can become a self-reinforcing cycle: the very fact that they are perceived this way reinforces the impression that their position is weaker, which can bolster support for realism and weaken the resolve of anyone who dares to consider antirealist positions.

Even when one doesn’t employ these tactics, it is still inappropriate to presume to know what others think. And the claim that few people adhere to such views “when pressed” is not only a speculative claim about human psychology, but also a hypothesis about what people would do under poorly specified counterfactual conditions. Pressed how exactly? With good arguments, or rhetoric and coercion? Once again, Christian makes empirical claims for which he provides no meaningful support.

3.0 Setting up the claim

Next, Christian sets up the central thesis:

The thesis of this post is simple: there are things you should do which you nevertheless don’t want to do.

I don’t think this is simple. Even for an antirealist, it is intelligible to say that there are things you should do which you “don’t want to do.” I might say that I should go on a diet or exercise but that I don’t want to. Am I a realist? No. What I mean by this is that I believe it would be in my best interests to be healthier. This is one of the things I want. But that desire conflicts with my other desires, which are to eat lots of food and sit around writing blog posts about subjectivism. In other words, it would be in my best interests to be healthier but the actions I’d have to take in my long-term interests would be onerous and conflict with my short-term interests. Antirealism and even straightforward subjectivism are thus consistent with some construals of Christian’s remark. In order to disambiguate what the remark means in a way that rules out subjectivism would require unpacking the presuppositions implicit in the remark, such as what Christian has in mind by “should.” Yet following this remark, Christian immediately says:

This may seem so obvious as to not need to be mentioned, much less defended.

The apparent simplicity of the thesis conceals a mountain of metaphysics or, at best, underdescribed conceptual distinctions; e.g., it may invoke obscure concepts like “external reasons” that most people haven’t encountered. The obviousness of a position can often be concealed behind such underspecificity, such as the ambiguity between the ordinary meaning of terms and narrower concepts employed by philosophers. The setup continues:

But if we think that something mattering is only possible if we care about that thing, then this thesis becomes a real issue. Our options are:

1. subjective desires, or our caring about something, are the source of normativity

2. things matter objectively so, independent of our desires

3. nothing at all matters

I’m disappointed at the lack of parallelism in the three options. The first option mentions desires as the source of normativity, but the other two options don’t mention sources of normativity at all. Presumably there are objective facts in the second case that are the source of normativity, though it is unclear what the third position’s stance on normativity is: that there isn’t any?

Speaking for myself, I don’t endorse any of these positions. I don’t think there is any such thing as “normativity,” in any deep sense. While I think there is a subclass of descriptive facts one can refer to as normative facts, I don’t think there is any such thing as normativity itself, nor do I think there are any irreducibly normative facts. “Normativity” is, for me, a convenient term for picking out a potentially motivationally relevant subset of conditional facts about the relation between means and ends. So you could call me a normativity reductionist, or if you consider irreducibility to be a non-negotiable feature, I’d be an eliminativist. Without knowing what Christian has in mind by “normativity,” I simply can’t know if I’d endorse (1) or not.

I certainly wouldn’t endorse (2) or (3) though. I do think things matter, I don’t think they matter independent of our desires, and I don’t think our desires are “the source of normativity.” Without clarification, I can’t be sure these are our only options unless they were clearly reframed to be jointly exhaustive and to not rely on presuppositions I reject. Christian then says:

The stakes couldn’t be higher.

I mentioned this earlier, but this seemingly minor remark is critical. Aside from the social costs associated with taking stances on these issues, I don’t think there are any stakes. At least not from an antirealist perspective. While Christian and many realists may consider the stakes in the realist/antirealist dispute to be very high, this is itself something about which one might disagree, and that I do, in fact, disagree. It wouldn’t matter to me at all if moral realism is true. I’d have exactly the same values I currently do and act in exactly the same way. I have absolutely no interest in complying with norms or rules that are inconsistent with my personal values.

4.0 On the prevalence of subjectivism

I’ll skip over Christian’s summary of the article and move on to the next remarks of interest:

These arguments matter for two reasons. First, Subjectivism is so prevalent across moral philosophy and various other disciplines like economics and psychology that it is often implicitly assumed, or explicitly presented as if there could be no other possible way for things to matter. If these people are mistaken, clearing up this confusion is important.

I’m not sure about this. I don’t think subjectivism is that common among academic philosophers. The 2020 PhilPapers survey indicates that 62% are moral realists. Expressivists and error theorists make up 10.6% and 5.3% of antirealists, respectively, leaving us with 20.8% who endorse constructivism and another 17.8% who chose other responses. Some constructivists may regard themselves as subjectivists, but we don’t have data on how many. Likewise for those who chose “Other,” though most chose “Agnostic/undecided” or a combination of the other views. The number of subjectivists is thus, at best, a minority, and probably a small one.

I don’t know how popular it is outside of philosophy, since I haven’t seen data on that. I do suspect it’d be a lot higher in economics and psychology, but I don’t know how high. Someone should do a survey and find out. Though I’d put a big asterisk on any such survey, since I doubt people outside of philosophy, even academics, have a great understanding of what philosophers mean by “subjectivism.” More generally, research (including my own) has provided strong evidence that untrained survey respondents rarely demonstrate that they interpret metaethics stimuli as intended. Next Christian says:

Second, if I can convince you that things matter, whether we want them to or not, this may alter much of how you live your life. These are important arguments.

Speaking for myself, I am not so sure that it would. I act in accordance with my desires. If there were facts about what I should do independent of my desires I don’t think I would care at all. I think the same is true for most people, but that, too, is speculative. Questions about human psychology really are handled best by doing psychology. Not just speculating and calling that philosophy.

5.0 Reasons-first approaches

Christian takes a reasons-first approach. According to Christian, there’s a “steady consensus” that the best way to understand questions about what we should do is to construe “should” in terms of reasons. I don’t know what this alleged consensus was based on or how Christian formed this position. Is that even true? How did Christian determine this was the consensus? Christian adds:

The reasons we’ll be discussing are normative reasons (which justify actions), not explanatory or motivational reasons (which explain actions). We will not be discussing reasons which justify belief, epistemology is a whole other beast.

I don’t have a problem with reason-talk in general. And I certainly don’t have a problem with explanatory or motivational reasons:

Explanatory: “The reason it’s wet is because it’s raining.”

Motivational: “The reason I went to the store was to buy some bread.”

But Christian believes there are normative reasons, which allegedly justify actions. The “reasons-first” approach substitutes should-talk for reason-talk, such that questions about what we should do are best understood as questions about what we “have most reason to do” such that we can take:

(A) What should I do?

And translate it to:

(B) What do I have most reason to do?

Christian tries to motivate this account:

To motivate this translation to (B) consider an answer to the original question (A). Perhaps I should go for a walk, you might say. Why? What reason do I have to do that? Maybe I know it would make me feel better. But on the other hand I know that I have pressing work that needs to get done that I cannot put off any longer. This internal tug of war is hinting at what we do when we reason. We weigh up competing apparent reasons for or against an action. We then consider whether each reason is, in fact, a reason. Finally, after careful consideration, we know that we ought to do whatever we have most reason, or decisive reason to do.

Here’s the problem: I don’t think there are normative reasons. At all.

In fact, that’s not quite right. It’s not simply that I think that there could be normative reasons, but there aren’t any. It’s that I suspect the very notion of a “normative reason” is meaningless. I think the phrase normative reason is vacuous. Empty. It has no content. To illustrate why, let us consider how I’d assess the scenario Christian uses to motivate the translation of should questions into questions about “reasons.” Let’s say I am considering these questions:

Should I go for a walk?

Should I get some work done?

When I deliberate about these questions, my goal is to decide which I desire most, or which would best achieve my goals, all things considered. People are complex, and we have many competing desires that emerge from various psychological systems that serve different functions. We are motivated to reduce stress and experience immediate pleasure, but we are also motivated to think about our long-term interests and abstain from pleasure now for the sake of greater pleasure in the future. We can even value causes and people and prioritize these over our own happiness. These various goals can come into conflict, and we enter an internal tug-of-war that results in whatever course of action we ultimately take. But at no point in this process do we ever need to invoke the notion of normative reasons. All talk of motivation can be fully reduced to descriptive questions about what would or wouldn’t serve a particular goal, and whether we prioritize one goal over another.

If we construe “reasons,” including “decisive reasons” fully in terms of what would achieve our goals, then talk of “normative reasons” would be innocent. All such talk could be mapped onto existing features of our psychology and thus wouldn’t require us to posit anything conceptually or metaphysically distinct from those phenomena psychologists already acknowledge. But that does not appear to be what Christian has in mind, nor is it what Parfit has in mind. There are already hints of divergence between mine and Christian’s views in remarks like this:

We then consider whether each reason is, in fact, a reason.

What would it mean for an [apparent] reason to be “in fact, a reason”? This suggests there are such things as reasons, and that something can be one. But what does that mean? I worry that Christian has already stepped into the territory of reification. I don’t think there literally are reasons, the way there are tables or chairs (to be clear, I’m not insisting that all things that there “are” must be physical, just that the thing in question exists in some literal sense). On my view, all reason talk could be eliminated. I can’t tell if Christian would adopt a similar view or whether “reasons” are a thing in their own right that couldn’t be eliminated (either due to its conceptual indispensability, or because they exist in some ontologically substantive way, etc.). Christian continues:

This applies to all possible acceptable answers to (A). By the very act of asking this question we are implicitly requesting a reason to justify (either to ourselves or to others) what we should do.

See, that’s just it. I don’t agree. I don’t think asking what I should do implicitly involves requesting “a reason to justify […] what we should do.” What on earth does that mean? All this talk seems to sidestep psychology and replace it with ethereal philosophical notions. When I’m trying to decide what I “should do,” I am trying to figure out what would best achieve my desires. That’s it. What I am not doing is something like this:

Step 1: I want to know what I should do.

Step 2: There’s a problem. What does that mean?

Step 3: Let’s do philosophy to figure out what we’re trying to do when we ask “What should I do?” Perhaps this means we should act on our desires. Or perhaps it means we should act on something other than our desires, such as external reasons.

No. Here’s what I’m doing:

Step 1: What would best achieve my desires?

…That’s it. Just one step. I don’t think there is some philosophical problem about the meaning of normative terms like “should,” and that a desire-based account best fits the bill. I am simply and directly trying to achieve my desires from the very outset. I’m not motivated to do anything else. I don’t even know how one could be in principle, since my desires just are the things I’m motivated to do. In other words: I have goals. All of my voluntary actions are directed towards achieving those goals. How the hell else would anyone voluntarily do anything? I won’t insist they couldn’t. Throw some arguments at me. What I’m doing here is simply describing how I think about it. Someone could change my mind. But what I am not doing is thinking that my account offers a solution to a legitimate problem. Rather, I think there is no problem here, and if someone thinks I’m wrong to endorse a desire-based account, they’d have to first convince me there’s a problem, then convince me that they (as a realist) have the solution.

5.1 Desire-based alternatives

Now, one might pivot to asking me what a “desire” is. I am not wedded to there being any conceptually rich conception of a “desire” that meets the stringent standards of certain persnickety analytic philosophers. And perhaps they would say the same of their notion of “reasons,” though I do suspect it couldn’t serve the same role I think desire-talk can serve. “Desire” may be a bit of folk psychology that doesn’t really map onto a distinct phenomenon with a precise set of boundary conditions. Think of e.g., a desire to eat a cookie, a desire to get into shape, a desire to live a long happy life, and so on. Are these all the same phenomenon? Do they draw on the same cognitive processes? Are “desires” a natural kind? I don’t know. What I do know is that you can operationalize “desire” in empirical terms and make predictions based on some local account of desires. And such accounts will allow you to anticipate future experiences, make predictions, and differentiate different outcomes not just in principle but in practice. This may result in “desire” fragmenting into two or more distinct psychological phenomena, the way “memory” divides into working memory, episodic memory, semantic memory, and so on.

Given this, the notion of a “desire” can be deployed for practical purposes to capture a cluster of features of human behavior roughly centered on motivation and voluntary action. For me, this is good enough; I am not wedded to nor do I insist on reifying all the words I use and treating them as ontologically distinct entities; if “desire” turns out to be inadequate to capture the range of psychological phenomena that I have in mind, and I’d need two or more terms to get the job done, that’s fine. Even welcome.

I’m not committed to there being one notion to get the job done that I must remain loyal to because I’ve discovered it on a priori grounds or because it’s so central to my views I couldn’t manage without it. What will suffice is to be able to point to the behaviors in question and say “that’s what I’m talking about!” or to employ various models of human cognition that can fruitfully employ desire-talk or some alternative vocabulary that facilitates the relevant body of predictions and explanations. This kind of terminological and conceptual flexibility is a natural consequence of taking a pragmatist and empirical approach to such questions; as William James notes, pragmatism limbers up one’s thinking, allowing terms and concepts to be deployed without locking them in as unmoving and eternal features of one’s accounts.

Another way to put this is: I don’t see the sorts of positive accounts I offer hinging on concepts with precise conceptual contours; any positive account I put forward is provisional, action-oriented, and rooted in trying to achieve desirable outcomes. It is not about pinning down each and every concept as if one were embedding them in resin like a butterfly on display. It is enough for a notion like “desire” to serve whatever relevant predictive and explanatory roles it is suitable for in whatever model of psychology we are presently operating with and, if future discoveries recommend abandoning the notion by e.g., fragmenting the relevant processes into two or more other concepts, then so be it. In short: some distinctive account of “desires” isn’t critical to me, since any account I’d offer would be negotiable anyway. My core commitments and interests would be retained under a variety of conceptions of the notion, and would persist even were it extirpated from my accounts entirely. So if we substitute “desires” for whatever cluster of cognitive processes are associated with the initiation of voluntary action, I am fine with that.

5.2 Reasons and deliberation

Christian continues:

This is why “reasons provide the deceive [sic] battlefield” in ethics (OWM II, 269). The primacy of reasons is inescapable by virtue of playing the deliberation game.

This is premature. Christian still hasn’t given a clear explanation of what a “reason” is, much less shown that there are such things. We also haven’t been given an argument as to why we should think reasons are inescapable when deliberating. Whether that’s true or not is going to turn on what a “reason” is.

Christian then abruptly shifts into a discussion about embodied cognition. This does not seem relevant and I have no idea why Christian brings it up, though these paragraphs end with:

So further clarity on what counts as a reason is of interest even for the most vibes-first folks among us.

I want to know what a “reason” is before I know what “counts” as one, but perhaps explaining what counts as one will shed light on what they are. Unfortunately, the reification saga continues:

What’s more, all other normative concepts can be cast in this [sic] in terms of reasons. Reasons are, therefore, the most important normative concept. To cash this out explicitly:

• Something is good or valuable or desirable if, or just when, some feature of that thing gives us reason to promote it, preserve it, respect it, or bring it about in some way.

• Something is right if, or just when, we have most or decisive reason to do that thing.

• We should do what we have most or decisive reason to do.

Note the first remark: “Something is good or valuable or desirable if, or just when, some feature of that thing gives us reason to promote it, preserve it, respect it, or bring it about in some way.”

What on earth does it mean to say that “some feature of that thing gives us reason to promote it […]”? A desire gives me a reason? What does that mean? Does it cause a reason to begin to exist? How am I being given the reason? Is this talk metaphorical? Here’s an alternative model:

1. People have desires.

2. Those desires motivate them to act.

That’s it. The desires don’t give them reasons to act. They just deliberate about the various factors that impel them to act in one way or another and, via deliberation, select a course of action. Reasons serve as this superfluous middleman mediating between desires and actions. And this is important. On my view, we go directly from desires to motivation:

Lance’s View: Desires → Deliberation about our desires → Action

One might quibble about where to place “motivation” in this framing, and perhaps that matters. But right now I’m being crude. The alternative model construes reasons as serving this role:

Reasons-first Realist’s View: Desires & other unspecified features of things → Reasons → Deliberation about our reasons → Action

Once one throws “reasons” into the mix, so as to precede the act of deliberation, one can then nominate non-desires as candidate factors that “give” us reasons, and then we’re off to the races: there’s already the possibility that our actions “should” be based on considerations other than our desires, because these non-desires “give” us “reasons.”

Note, too, that the very way Christian is describing reasons already begs the question against subjectivism. Reasons are already framed as being object-given, rather than stemming from or being reducible to facts about our desires (or any other stances). Recall that Christian says that things are good, valuable, or desirable when features of the things give us reason to promote them. This already presupposes that reasons are object-given, rather than stemming from our desires. This isn’t an appropriate way to describe normative reasons because it already externalizes normative and evaluative considerations to facts about the world independent of our desires, e.g., the features of families “give us reason” to have families, or the features of kindness “give us reason” to be kind. It is not appropriate to presuppose reasons are object-given in this way, since this frames all antirealist accounts which identify reasons with our desires as not technically providing us with normative reasons.

But I don’t think it means anything to say that non-desires can “give us reasons.” Technically speaking, I don’t think desires “give us reasons,” either, which I’ll get to. But for now, I want to focus on the notion of non-desires “giving” us reasons. When I ask realists what it would mean for something to give us a reason, or for us to have a reason, pretty much all I am told is that this means that some fact “counts in favor” of us performing the action in question. Yet as Parfit concedes, this just means that we have a reason. So, what we have is no explanation at all. “Reasons” of the relevant sort are ineffable. Their meaning cannot be communicated. I find this highly suspicious, but apparently almost nobody else does. As the article proceeds, we will see that Christian acknowledges that normative reasons are “undefinable,” but I think the situation is far worse than this.

Christian continues:

Someone may wish to define all these normative concepts in favor of their favorite, different, fundamental normative concept and then smack me over the head with a copy of Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good while shouting “Kegan stage 4!” but there’s several issues here. First, I see no way out of the inescapability of reasons as the implicitly requested answer format whenever we ask a question which invites deliberation on what we should do.

I’m puzzled by this last remark. Why are “reasons” inescapable? And why is Christian presuming that these are what we’re asking for when we ask questions which invite deliberation? That, too, is an empirical question.

They’re not what I’m asking for, and if they are what others are asking for, is that an empirical claim about their intentions? If so, is there evidence people employ this notion of normative reasons? If not, then what kind of claim is it? What research has shown that the goal of deliberation is to identify what “reasons” we have for action? This is a rhetorical question. No such research has (to my knowledge) been conducted. This is just more empirical speculation on Christian’s part.

I don’t really disagree much with the second part of this:

Second, most other senses of the word should do not help us deliberate. The first option is you define should in terms of some natural fact like happiness-maximization or pareto efficiency, in which case there’s no longer any normative component. If you tell me an action is pareto efficient, I can always respond with “so what?” Without a follow up claim about what I have reason to do, you might as well just point out the color of the sky or some other random fact which has no bearing on me. You need to give me a reason to care. Chances are, you’re implicitly assuming that I have a reason to be efficient, or to satisfy some desire, or to experience some positive state of consciousness. But that’s just reason-first again in a trench coat.

This applies equally well to “reasons” that don’t terminate in desires. Suppose you discovered you had a “reason” to do something entirely contrary to all that you hold dear and care about. I’d respond with a “So what?” What about you? I have no interest in doing anything utterly at odds with my desires.

Furthermore, you could always ask why if all someone gives you is some fact about how something maximizes happiness. And it would be a legitimate question. But for me, this terminates with a response like “because I want to” or “because it would achieve my goals.” I consider these adequate foundations on which to deliberate about what to do. Nothing further is needed. Now, perhaps you don’t agree, but I’m not trying to defend a positive account of some alternative notion here. That isn’t simply because my goal here is to critique, but because I don’t think there’s any problem in need of solving or any legitimate question in need of answering in the first place. It would suffice for me to raise enough problems and red flags with Christian’s account that one retreats from it, even if one is left adrift not knowing what to endorse instead.

Note, by the way, this remark:

You need to give me a reason to care.

Emphasis is placed on “reason,” but I think the more important word here is “care.” If you want me to do something, I would in fact say that you’d need to “give me a reason to care.” But I interpret this as a demand to explain to me how something promotes my goals and interests; that’s just what it means for me to care. It may be that Christian has unwittingly acknowledged that external reasons (i.e., reasons that aren’t reducible to or based on our desires or stances) only function or are relevant to us if they comport with our stances or desires. This would be a fairly massive concession for realists to make.

Also, if “only” caring about your own goals or values sounds selfish, keep in mind that this does not necessarily mean you only care about your personal happiness or success; your goals can be altruistic or involve concern for others. Subjectivism is not hedonism. It also doesn’t mean that you don’t care about other people’s goals or values. It just means that those goals or values are not your goals or values, and that to the extent that you value them (if you do value them), it is in virtue of the fact that you value people achieving their values, provided those values aren’t at odds with your own values. I don’t share the values of someone else who, for instance, wants to chop people up and eat them, nor do I want them to act on such a value. I do care about the concerns and values of others, but only in a kind of secondary way: I care about people being happy and achieving their goals, not because I share their goals or experience their happiness, but because I think it’s good when other people are happy and achieve their goals…good relative to my values. A subjectivist view thus in no way entails wanton hedonism or a disregard for other people’s interests.

I also don’t care if I have “reasons” to do things that aren’t consistent with my desires. Do you? If so, what does it mean for you to care about complying with these reasons independent of your desires? The notion of reasons that aren’t reducible to desires sets up a strange intermediary step, as noted above. I move from desire to action. While it’s possible to desire to comply with whatever one has desire-independent reasons to do, this still means that whether these “reasons” have any motivating force over us still turns on whether we care about complying with them, i.e., on our desires. Stance-independent normative truths are thus always dependent for their actionability on comporting with our stance-dependent values. In the absence of such values, they are utterly inert. Speaking for myself, I am baffled at the notion that someone would desire to comply with reasons that aren’t constituted by their desires, especially since few people believe they know precisely what these reasons are. Why would you outsource your decision-making to standards that aren’t your own? What’s the point? Why do you care? These aren’t rhetorical questions. I’d actually like to hear from realists about this.

Moving on, according to Christian we do have another option besides this reasons-first approach, along with a presage of its shortcomings:

Your other option is to define your terms in Subjectivist ways, to necessarily link should or ought or right with our subjective desires or aims. But this, as we will see below, is a concealed tautology.

It is a sort of tautology, but there’s no “but”. This isn’t a problem. If in saying “I should go to the store” I mean “I want to go to the store,” I am offering a tautology. But there’s no problem with this. If two statements mean the same thing, well, then that’s just true.

Christian also offers another rationale for taking the reasons-first approach which I am sympathetic to in principle: a pragmatic reason to do so:

The final reason we should be reasons-first comes when we take a pragmatist’s perspective. I would simply invite the reader to put on this reasons-first mask, look around for a while, and ask yourself if it’s a useful frame. Anecdotally, when I first came across this framework a lot snapped into place for me. Various normative concepts started to fit together rather elegantly and I was able to more adeptly use them in domains they were specifically suited for. Perhaps a similar level of clarity will begin to shape up for you. Perhaps it’s already starting to.

Ironically, I am a pragmatist, and one of the main reasons I not only reject the reasons-first approach, but dismiss the notion of normative reasons because I don’t think the concept does any work: it is explanatorily and deliberatively superfluous. In other words, we don’t need to posit “reasons” to explain any observations or solve any problems, nor are they helpful in deliberating about what to do.

6.0 Effing the Ineffable

If we’re going to take a reasons-first approach, it’d be helpful to know what a reason is. Unfortunately, like Parfit, Christian can’t help us:

So what then is a reason? Well, reasons are… undefinable. I could truly tell you that reasons are facts which “count in favor of” an action, belief, or attitude. But “counts in favor” roughly means “gives a reason for” (OWM II, 272). That may be unsatisfactory but that’s also to be expected of a fundamental concept. Nor is this unusual. Other baseline concepts like space, time, consciousness, possibility, and necessity are similarly non-circularly undefinable. The best we can do is wave our hands around and utter enough noises until the thoughts which contain this concept (or that of space, time, etc.) are elicited in another’s mind. This is true even of colors.

We’re given the standard reasons = things that “count in favor,” coupled with the acknowledgement that this doesn’t really get us anywhere. What I take issue with is this: Christian simply declares the concept a “fundamental” concept. Ordinarily, we might expect someone using some term, especially a technical term, to tell us what it means. We’re not told what it means. Instead, Christian suggests that (a) we already use terms like this and (b) we can at best try to point and grunt until someone gets the idea, like colors.

I don’t find either of these satisfactory, though it also remains unclear to me what Christian means by the term being undefinable. That could have a fairly narrow meaning (something like that we can’t give a conceptual analysis or dictionary definition) or something broad (we can’t communicate the concept at all). I don’t have a huge problem with the former, but I do have a problem with the latter. Regardless of whether a concept can be defined, we at least expect people who introduce us to a new term to do something to cause us to acquire the concept.

If a biologist identifies a new organ in an animal, we expect them to be able to tell us what it is. Describe it. Show us a picture. Tell us about what it does. Tell us where we can find it.

If a physicist posits a new particle, they’ll tell us what observations it explains, what problems positing it solves, and what predictions we might make, conditional on the particle existing, that we’d expect if it does exist and that differ from alternative accounts that don’t posit it.

I could go on, but the general point here is that if one throws a new term or concept out there, we typically expect some account of what it is. And in the case of the other terms Christian claims are undefinable, I think we can give an account of all of them, with the possible exception of “consciousness,” which, if it refers to phenomenal consciousness, is a term I explicitly regard as meaningless.

But Parfitian normative reasons aren’t like this. Nobody can tell us what they are, or how they work. They’re mysterious. Those who claim to understand the concept of a reason simply insist they have the concept. People who think they have qualia or phenomenal consciousness do much the same. But terms like space and time readily figure into models in physics. They may be difficult to grasp but they aren’t “primitive” or incapable of being understood.

Personally, I think the notion of a normative reason is a pseudoconcept. I think that what’s happened is that English-speaking philosophers have reified certain terms, like “reason,” and mistakenly taken them to be things-in-themselves, something one can have, something that can be “generated” by facts or desires. But really, it’s just a word that figures into our discourse in various ways but isn’t something independent of those phenomena that we uncontroversially do have, such as desires or beliefs. As a result, the notion of a “reason” can break away from its role in explaining or appealing to our desires and serve some other purpose, a purpose it doesn’t serve in ordinary language and is instead a philosophical invention, a mutated extension of its everyday uses that emerges only in theoretical contexts and that cannot be reabsorbed into ordinary practice in any distinctive way. I could be wrong about this. But I am not convinced any of those other terms are “undefinable” in any nontrivial sense.

But even if they were, why should we induct normative reasons into the hallowed halls of terms like “time” and “space”? How does one identify concepts that belong in this category rather than instances in which one is confused or mistaken and in the possession of a pseudoconcept?

The best we can do is wave our hands around and utter enough noises until the thoughts which contain this concept (or that of space, time, etc.) are elicited in another’s mind.

How does one know when they’ve acquired the concept rather than simply become confused and mistakenly think that they have it? How does one know that one’s concept is the same as someone else’s?

This is true even of colors.

Color discrimination is a functional ability with a well-described basis in features of human anatomy (eyes, the brain, etc.) and physics (light). Since I don’t think there are any qualia at all, including color qualia, I don’t think there is some distinctive phenomenon that resists definability in this case, either. Again, though, this is going to hinge on what one means by something being “undefinable.” Since I’ll have to keep repeating that point, I’ll set these concerns aside for now and simply say this:

My current stance on normative reasons is not that they don’t exist, but that there is no actual concept of a normative reason. I think talk of such reasons is a conceptual confusion invented by philosophers. It’s hard to say more against the concept because so little can be said about it in the first place. And yet despite this, it serves a foundational role in Parfit’s and similar metaethical views. I think this should be a massive red flag.

Christian goes on to say that we may still ask:

When do we have a reason to act?

We can ask this, but I don’t think it means anything. Christian continues:

For every philosophical question, there’s typically a “common sense” answer, at least from the perspective of Western, usually STEM-educated or otherwise analytical individual [sic]. These individual [sic] are usually secular, favor reductive explanations, and operate out of a materialist worldview. Perhaps they’ve even read a little philosophy and are familiar with Kant’s idea of a hypothetical imperative which, translating to our reasons-first language, states that one has a reason to X when one has a desire or aim to X. This seems so obvious as to hardly be worth mentioning. It’s an apoditic [sic] truth a Kantian would probably say. Wanting to do something counts in favor of doing that thing! Duh! This is the fundamental intuition behind the Subjectivist tradition dating back most famously to Hume.

I really like the emphasis on demographic characteristics influencing people’s worldviews, because this is a point I stress constantly. I don’t know quite why we’d consider the views of this population “common sense” or what that’s supposed to mean, but I don’t personally grant that “one has a reason to X when one has a desire or aim to X.” I suspect Christian and others who say things like this mean it literally: that desires cause there to be reasons, but I think this is confused. I think people have goals and they are motivated to pursue those goals. And I think there are no further facts in the relevant sense. I don’t think their goals (or desires, or aims, or whatever) “give” them reasons or that one “has” reasons. While I might say “Mike has a reason to go to the store,” what I don’t mean is that if Mike desires to get something he could get at the store, this “gives” him a reason to go to the store. What I mean is something like “It would serve Mike’s (or some other person’s) goals to go to the store.” Talk of desires (or any other facts) “giving” reasons should be understood as a figure of speech. I worry that philosophers may have inadvertently elevated mere figures of speech to the status of serious metaphysical theses. I’ve said more about this elsewhere, such as here, but I’ll have more to say about this in the future.

I don’t think wanting things “counts in favor” of doing them since I deny that this is meaningful. And I don’t think subjectivism should be saddled with the conceptual confusions that plague realists. In other words, I don’t think desires “give us reasons” or “count in favor” of actions any more than anything else does. So my account rejects any kind of metaphysically or conceptually laden subjectivism if it, too, takes such notions on board by adopting ineffable conceptions of “reasons.” Note, in other words, that so long as subjectivism or any other antirealist account is saddled with weird conceptions of “reasons,” then its problems may stem (at least in part) from this rather than whatever other issues the position has. Ironically, then, the main issue with some antirealist positions may be that they’re too much like realism.

I don’t want to dwell on the notion of reasons being “undefinable” too much, so I’ll cut things short here. I’ll end with two remarks.

First, that “reasons” talk is “undefinable” should be taken as a significant red flag about a view. It is always better to define or in some way communicate what you mean than to concede that you’re unable to do so and evoke a mysterious or obscure notion that you can’t explain.

Second, framing these matters in terms of “reasons” is a relatively recent, parochial development. It is quite strange when proponents of such views take their perspective to be so inescapably self-evident that they don’t bother to ensure that others think the same way, either historically or in the present. There is little empirical evidence that ineffable notions of normative reasons are a feature of ordinary thought or language, among native English speakers or otherwise. As such, those who claim to “have” the concepts in question are not entitled to insist that their possession of such concepts is ordinary, typical, or representative of some universal way of thinking. That’s an empirical question, and nobody’s done the work to show that it’s true. So people allegedly in possession of these concepts are making a mistake when they treat those, like me, who are skeptical that there even is a concept to be had as though we are psychological outliers: this has yet to be demonstrated.

7.0 Analytic Subjectivism

Recall that Christian stated that:

Wanting to do something counts in favor of doing that thing! Duh! This is the fundamental intuition behind the Subjectivist tradition dating back most famously to Hume.

I am not on board with this and consider such a move indefensible. I do not think that wanting things “counts in favor” of doing those things. I think this notion of “counting in favor” is philosophical gobbledygook that doesn’t mean anything and reintroduces core features of what I find unacceptable about realism into subjectivist accounts as well. This is why I favor quietism, because it is not Humean in the sense this passage alludes to, which retains objectionable reification. Now, the reason I say this is because Christian attributes features to subjectivist views that a subjectivist doesn’t have to endorse. The various forms of subjectivism he deals with ultimately inherit many of their features from the analytic tradition in which Christian operates and in which the whole realist/antirealist dialectic takes place. Many of the problems with this dialectic are symptomatic of all the standard positions, and when antirealist views are saddled with some of these features, they may turn out to have problems that arise from the poor synergy between these features and their other characteristics. One way to rescue subjectivism, then, is to shrug off these features, e.g., notions of desires “giving” reasons, and so on.

While I am happy to defend subjectivism, I will not defend any accounts of subjectivism that stick their necks out and embrace the faulty notions of analytic philosophers. When Christian turns his attention to analytic subjectivism, then, I will largely abandon it to the wolves. But all is not lost! As I will argue, something akin to analytic subjectivism can readily emerge from the analytic ashes and do just fine. What is this form of subjectivism? I will call it quietist subjectivism. Quietist subjectivism rejects the notion that wanting things “counts in favor” of doing them or “gives” us “reasons” to do them. Instead, one simply holds that we are motivated in certain ways and act on those motivations, and…that’s it. Such an account jettisons normativity as anything distinct from descriptivity. Subjectivists who construe normativity in such a way that they think that something gives, provides, or generates “reasons” that “count in favor” of what we “should” do make a serious mistake: they treat normative talk as something conceptually and/or metaphysically separate and distinct from descriptive facts, as something one needs an account of, as a problem to be solved, then present desires as the solution.

But normative talk is just that: a way of talking. It isn’t a distinct property or phenomenon in need of accounting for in some metaphysically distinct or even conceptually rich sense. All we have to do is account for normative language, and any question of deep metaphysical issues or robust conceptual distinctions dissolves. Analytic subjectivism almost does this, but the kinds of subjectivism Christian addresses don’t adequately finesse the distinction between normative discourse in an abstract, theoretical, or philosophical context from its use in richer, practical, real-world contexts. With a few modifications, it would do just fine. So the position I defend is in some ways similar to analytic subjectivism, which is the very first form of subjectivism Christian addresses and arguably the one many would consider the least defensible.

So let’s address why that is, and how with a few modifications it will work just fine, before addressing the cluster of latter-day forms of subjectivism that follow in its wake. Christian says that analytic subjectivists:

like to draw a straight line between should, reasons, and desires.

Christian draws on Parfit’s characterization of desires:

any state of being motivated, or of wanting something to happen and being to some degree disposed to make it happen, if we can. (As quoted in Parfit, 2011, p. 43)

This account of desires seems fine to me. But Christian charges proponents of this view with saying something vacuous. Here’s the problem. According to Christian, analytic subjectivists hold that we should interpret:

we have most reason to act in some way

as

this act would best fulfill our present fully informed terminal desires

In addition, analytic subjectivists hold that:

we have most reason to do what would best fulfil our present fully informed terminal desires

The problem is that once we combine these claims, the position amounts to holding that:

what would best fulfill our present fulfill [sic] informed terminal desires is what would best fulfil our present fully informed desires.

…So the position ends up as a tautology. Insofar as this is an accurate representation of an actual view, I don’t endorse it. Why? Because this account already bakes in some of the features Christian introduces later on, features which presuppose certain concerns analytic philosophers have that presuppose reason-talk. In this case, the main problem is the inclusion of “fully informed.” The purpose of this feature of the account is to distinguish between cases in which we have false information about what would serve our interests from cases in which we don’t. Suppose you wanted to drink a glass of clear liquid you mistakenly believed was water, when in fact it was poison. If you were fully informed, you wouldn’t want to drink it. This feature is supposed to account for the fact that you don’t “have a re ason” to drink the poison water. But this is only included as a result of confused reactions to thought experiments that fail to distinguish terminal and instrumental desires. Our “intuition” that we don’t “have a reason” to drink poison merely because we think it is water (and we want to drink water to quench our thirst) is better understood as recognizing that a particular desire (to quench our thirst) wouldn’t be satisfied in a scenario in which we stipulate a course of action wouldn’t satisfy the desire. We’ll encounter this below when we get to the relevant scenario. But the bigger problem with Christian’s characterization of the analytic subjectivist account is that the analytic subjectivist purportedly offers us an account of what it means to say we “have most reason” to do something, then once this is answered, repeats the question with the analysis excluded from the phrasing “most reason.” If the analytic subjectivist goes along with this, they have been complicit in walking into a linguistic trap they never needed to walk into. Note how Christian says that the analytic subjectivist analyzes:

we have most reason to act in some way

as

this act would best fulfill our present fully informed terminal desires

then they allegedly turn around and say that the answer to what we have most reason to do is to:

best fulfill our present fully informed terminal desires

This is bizarre. Why would someone think that the answer to the question “What do you have most reason to do?” is to say that you have most reason to best fulfill our present fully informed terminal desires, and to interpret the question as asking them what would best fulfill their present fully informed terminal desires, but somehow be so confused as to fail to distinguish the question itself as the culprit behind the terminology, and instead willingly allow one’s position to become some kind of tortured verbal abomination like this:

What would best fulfill our present fulfill informed [sic] terminal desires is what would best fulfil our present fully informed desires

As if one were separately answering the question in such a way that the notion of what one had most reason to do were distinct from the answer, while simultaneously analyzing the question itself in terms of the analysis predicated on one’s answer? This is as silly as doing the following:

Alex: What is your favorite fruit?

Sam: As an analytic bananaist, I interpret the phrase “favorite fruit” as “banana.” Therefore, I interpret your question to be asking me “What is your banana?” So my answer is that my banana is my banana.

Alex: …what?

Alex is right. What? What a bizarre response. The problem with the analytic bananaist’s response is that the question is asking them which account they favor. It is not asking them to offer an analysis of the question of which account they favor in terms of which account they favor, such that to ask them what their “favorite fruit” is is to ask them to offer an analysis of “favorite fruit” in such a way that this is taken to be identified with their answer, then reanalyzed in terms of their answer, such that the question becomes a weird and pointless inquiry that already presupposes their answer. Yet this is how the analytic subjectivist is depicted by Christian. The analytic subjectivist, for some reason, interprets the phrase “most reason to do” in terms of their account, then simultaneously treats “most reason to do” as distinct from the account, ratcheting in the account after this, such that:

Most reason to do = What would best fulfill our present fully informed terminal desires

…and, at the same time, still treating what one has most reason to do as something one can offer an answer to distinct from the phrasing itself, as though there’s still a verbal slot open for the answer to the floating questions “What do you have most reason to do?” distinct from the analysis of the meaning of the question itself in terms of the answer. Let’s see how that works in dialog form.

Alex: What do you have most reason to do?

Sam: As an analytic subjectivist, I interpret the phrase “most reason to do” as “what would best fulfill our present fully informed terminal desires”. Therefore, I interpret your question to be asking me “What would best fulfill your present fully informed terminal desires?” So my answer is that “What would best fulfill my present fully informed terminal desires is what would best fulfill my present fully informed terminal desires.”

Alex: …what?

This is really bizarre. But it’s an understandable error that occurs when one attempts to offer an analysis in certain abstract, theoretical discussions among philosophers rather than simply talking about how you’d speak and what you’d mean by what you say in everyday contexts. In other words, Christian’s characterization of analytic subjectivism saddles them with offering an “account” that ends up an empty analysis of how to interpret a set of sentences outside any relevant contexts of usage. Whose discourse is it even an analysis of? I don’t endorse the view that this is what nonphilosophers mean when they make moral claims. And I don’t endorse the view that sentences have meanings independent of usage. And this isn’t what I mean. I see no reason why I should endorse this account. But I also don’t see why someone couldn’t reject this view, reject the reasons-talk common among philosophers, and the weird abstract contexts in which these analyses are being offered, and still be some sort of subjectivist. Yet Christian proposes that:

[…] to avoid circularity, Subjectivists should use the word “should” in the reason-implying sense, essentially, to mean that we should do what we have most reason to do.

Subjectivists don’t have to do this. They can simply recognize that what one should do in abstract terms is to act on their desires while also appreciating that in any concrete instance this would be realized in concrete terms by the specific desire in question. Suppose the gastronomic analytic subjectivist goes to dinner. Technically they believe that what one ought to choose for dinner is whatever would most satisfy their desires. After they look over the menu, and the waiter asks them what they’d like, do you suppose they’d respond:

“I’d like that which I most desire”?

I don’t think they would. I think they’d pick something in particular. Nothing about being committed to choosing the dish you most desire saddles you with an actual vacuous or problematic tautology in practice. What you would choose at the restaurant in the abstract is whatever you most desire. What you’d choose in concrete instances would be the specific dish. The appearance of a tautology only remains as long as you insist on framing the position in abstract terms.

Christian’s suggestion, on the other hand, may avoid meaningless and nonproblematic circularity (which needn’t be avoided in the first place), but at the cost of reintroducing a reified notion of “reasons” into our account that saddles the subjectivist account with one of the features I reject in realist accounts: an invocation of ineffable (and, I suspect, meaningless) notions of “reason.” Any form of subjectivism that imports such notions inherits precisely one of the central features of moral realism that make it so objectionable in the first place. In other words, if we go back to the original set of claims the analytic subjectivist allegedly endorses, I just wouldn’t endorse one-to-one correspondence between the phrases Christian provides and various “analyses” of those claims. I’d instead just say that there are facts about our desires and when I talk in certain, relevant contexts, what I’m doing is reporting what those desires are. This creates absolutely no problems whatsoever. I’ll say more about this in a bit. For now, Christian continues:

So if we are to make substantive claims, we need to use “most reason”, “should”, and “ought” in this reason-implying sense.

This is not the case. First, as already noted, we don’t need to do this since there was never a problem it’s needed to solve in the first place. Second, I deny reasons-implying claims are substantive, since I don’t think the notion of reasons at play in these accounts (some kind of normative reason) is substantive. As Christian noted, this concept of a reason is ineffable. I don’t think there are substantive but ineffable concepts, because I think that the reason why the terms can’t be understood is that there isn’t anything to understand. Reason-talk among philosophers is just a reification of some quirks in the English language, mistakenly perceived as some kind of independent property, when no such thing exists. It makes about as much sense to think there are reasons as that there are althoughs or howevers.

Third, rejecting analytic subjectivism doesn’t require you to endorse a specific alternative like this, for much the same reason that rejecting Christianity doesn’t require that you become an atheist. Our only options aren’t analytic subjectivism or a belief in allegedly substantive normative reasons. We can reject all of these positions and still make substantive claims. To be fair, I don’t think Christian is likely to have intended a genuine dichotomy (after all, someone could abandon all of these accounts and go be a noncognitivist or something); I just don’t think subjectivists, if they want to avoid tautology, have to embrace ineffable concepts.

The problem with analytic subjectivism as described here is that it tacitly concedes that one must offer some account of reasons, identifies these reasons with desires, then holds that one has reason to do what one desires. In effect, it reifies reasons, treats them as something distinct from desires, then offers an analysis that re-identifies them with desires, thereby treating them simultaneously both as distinct and not distinct, which is why once you unpack it you get this weird tautology. To summarize very quickly why this is silly, the view amounts to something like this:

1. My account of what it means to say I have most reason to do something is that it would fulfill my desires.

2. I think we have most reason to fulfill our desires.

3. So, my position is that it would fulfill my desires to fulfill my desires.

The mistake here is in step two. If you already think talk of what you have most reason to do reduces to what you desire, why would you say you have most reason to fulfill your desires? Recall: if you think “favorite fruit” just means “banana,” why would you say “My favorite fruit is banana”? This would be like saying “Banana is banana,” which is ridiculous. In most contexts, you wouldn’t say these sorts of things, but as we’ll see, this concealed tautology is perfectly respectable in certain contexts. Because of this, in a way, the tautologous aspect of analytic subjectivism isn’t the problem. Ironically, Christian thinks the only way for the analytic subjectivist to avoid the problem of one’s account revealing itself to be a tautology is to embrace a nonreductive, substantive notion of reasons distinct from desires. I argue that the opposite is the case: that the subjectivist has already conceded too much to Christian in granting that there is any meaningful conception of ineffable normative reasons apart from desires in the first place, such that they need to offer an “account” of them distinct from the reduction of reasons to desires.

For the analytic subjectivist, if you were asked why you have most reason to fulfill your desires, the answer would be “because it would fulfill my desires,” which is weird and vacuous and makes your position sound silly. But what an analytic subjectivist could do instead is insist that facts about what one has most reason to do just are facts about what would or wouldn’t fulfill one’s desires. And then asking someone: “What do you have most reason to do?” just becomes the question: “What would fulfill your desires?” At that point, it would be a little weird to say “I would fulfill my desires.” Is this vacuous? It sure seems like it. But that’s only because the question is being posed outside any specific context in which someone is asking which desires would be fulfilled by which actions. Instead, the question is posed in a context in which the analytic reduction of “most reason” to desire fulfillment hasn’t yet been implemented, such that the question leaves open what one might have “most reason” to do in a way that isn’t necessarily reducible to facts about desire fulfillment.

For comparison, if someone asks what your “favorite fruit” is, they are not asking you to offer a definition of “favorite fruit” that reduces it to whatever your favorite fruit is, such that to ask what someone’s favorite fruit is is to ask them a vacuous question from the outset: “What is your [whatever their answer is]?” which will yield the response “[their answer.]” This would be an insane question to ask. Rather, the person posing the question is asking something like

Of the possible fruits one might prefer, of which there are more than one, which one do you prefer?

To answer:

Banana.

…already tacitly acknowledges that something other than “banana” is a viable option. But if you’re an analytic subjectivist, do you interpret “most reason” in this open-ended way, such that one could in principle have “most reason” to do something other than what would fulfill their desires, or not?

There is no straightforward way to answer this question. Why? Because there are two separate answers: an unconditional and a conditional.

The unconditional answer should be “yes”: not conditional on my analysis of “most reason,” one could slot some other answer into a response to the question of what one has most reason to do other than what would fulfill one’s desires.

The conditional answer would be “no”: conditional on “most reason” being analyzed in accord with the analytic subjectivist’s response, the question itself asks “What would fulfill your desires?” to which the analytic subjectivist responds “what would fill my desires.”

This distinction reveals something extremely important:

The tautology only emerges conditional on the analytic subjectivist’s account being accepted (at least conditionally) in the first place.

Why is that important? Because the “tautology” emerges only on the conditional victory of the analytic subjectivist. If they’ve already won, if we’ve already granted that “most reason” = “what would fulfill your desires,” they can close shop there and do a victory dance. The problem would be with the person posing the question. There’s nothing wrong with responding to a vacuous question with a vacuous answer. Ask empty questions, get empty answers.

There’s no other analysis of “most reason” on offer if we accept the conditional response, so there are facts about what would fulfill our desires and it wouldn’t make any sense to ask if one has “most reason” to do something else instead, because “most reason” just means what would fulfill one’s desires.

The reason the analytic subjectivist’s response appears to be a problematic tautology is a result of failing to distinguish these unconditional and conditional responses. The problem is that the question is structurally framed in a way that presents itself as an unconditional response. As a result, if one offers the conditional response, such that one reanalyzes the question in terms of the analysis, the question itself participates in setting up the tautology:

Question: What would fulfill your desires?

Answer: What would fulfill my desires.

Structurally, the analytic subjectivist is expected to simultaneously treat the question of what they have “most reason” to do in unconditional terms: as not reduced to “what would fulfill my desires” and at the same time treat it as conditional, such that it does mean this. Now when we go back to Christian’s characterization, we can see how this has occurred.

Here’s the analytic subjectivist’s conditional response:

These subjectivists use words like ‘reason’ and ‘should’ in the internal senses. So they interpret the claim

we have most reason to act in some way

as

this act would best fulfill our present fully informed terminal desires

Then the analytic subjectivist is expected to offer an unconditional response in which the notion of “most reason” is held open to alternative possible accounts or reductions. Only Christian doesn’t pose the question that generates the problem. Christian just says:

we have most reason to do what would best fulfil our present fully informed terminal desires

But if the analytic subjectivist already thinks “most reason” just means “what would best fulfil our present fully informed terminal desires” why would they then say that they have “most reason” to do what would best fulfil our present fully informed terminal desires? Conditional on their analysis, they wouldn’t; this would be redundant and an empty tautology. It’s only when “most reason” is taken to be unconditional and thus ex hypothesi not reduced to the analytic subjectivist’s analysis that they’d make the claim that

we have most reason to do what would best fulfil our present fully informed terminal desires

…This is exactly like the banana example. If you’re asking me what my favorite fruit is in an unconditional sense, then it makes perfect sense to say:

My favorite fruit is banana.

If you’re asking in a conditional sense, where we reinterpret “favorite fruit” in line with my answer, now you are asking me something a bit awkward like

What is your banana?

Now, if I am required to verbally reiterate your distinction between “favorite fruit” and “banana” in my response, such that I am required, again, by the very setup you yourself are imposing on me, to slot “banana” in for “favorite fruit,” now I can’t just say:

Banana.

I have to say:

My favorite fruit banana is my banana.

The lesson we should extract from this is that analytic philosophers completely trip all over themselves creating pseudoproblems that result from a failure to be attentive to language, mostly to disambiguate and distinguish what one means in various contexts of usage. They conflate different contexts, smashing them together into a single question or single phrase or analysis or account, don’t keep the various contexts in which one might say one or another thing distinct, demand responses to questions that look awkward outside any real-world or practical contexts of usage, then declare victory when the result, which is often tortured, vacuous, and redundant verbiage looks weird or vacuous or empty or whatever. But such weird, vacuous language only emerges if one twists English into enough pretzels that one more or less compels a rival response to sound weird in the contrived, abstract contexts one has created. At least one problem is that these contexts often have little or no bearing on what a proponent of a position would say in any practical, concrete context. They don’t raise any actual practical problems with a position. And the theoretical problems are not genuine problems, either. They are pseudoproblems that only emerge when we aren’t careful with language.

To put it bluntly: objections to analytic subjectivism largely involve abusing language to generate the misleading impression of a problem. The analytic subjectivist’s position should be rejected insofar as the analytic subjectivist themselves buys into the practices of analytic philosophy that generate the problem. If analytic subjectivism is (perhaps a bit ironically) defined in terms of its commitment to these practices, then I reject it. If it isn’t, then analytic subjectivism in some form can be rescued.

But I’d prefer to just grant that the position is committed to its own internally self-negating confusions, and suggest quietist subjectivism as an alternative. Whether one wants to call this a form of analytic subjectivism is up to them. Words, after all, are subordinate to us, though people who do analytic philosophy too much seem to have it the other way around. In any case, quietist subjectivism dispenses with the verbal confusions characteristic of so much of analytic philosophy and stops Christian’s critique cold. Subsequent analyses of modifications to subjectivism are unnecessary, since we never give the initial ground that requires is to buy into the notion of construing normative considerations in a “reason-implying” sense, which I take to be a concession that there are ineffable reasons and any successful account would need to explain what we have “reasons” to do.

Have I rescued analytic subjectivism? Not necessarily. It depends on how much the analytic subjectivist wants to participate in the language games analytic philosophers engage in. I’ve maintained that there’s nothing inherently wrong with asserting a tautology. Carrots are carrots. As far as I can tell, that’s true. And I am not going to get struck by lightning for saying it. There’s nothing vacuous or obviously empty about saying that claims about what one has most reason to do will be understood as claims about what would promote one’s desires.

The real problem here isn’t the tautology in such a position, but that it accepts as meaningful to even say that one “most reason to fulfill our desires” as if there were some conception of should that didn’t reduce to fulfilling one’s desires while simultaneously maintaining that there isn’t. The whole way “I have most reason to fulfill my desires” is framed pragmatically implies that something other than desire fulfillment could be ratcheted into the slot for “should,” but, conditional on analytic subjectivism, it couldn’t. So really we should see the statement as an innocuous tautology conditional on analytic subjectivism, and there really shouldn’t be a problem with it consisting in a tautology. But it sounds weird, and if that’s reason enough to reject the view, we can finesse what a subjectivist is up to without paying tacit lip service to the legitimacy of “most reason” as a nonreductive notion while simultaneously claiming to have reduced it in the way we ourselves talk.

7.1 A detour about zapples

There’s some serious linguistic strangeness going on with the preceding critique of analytic subjectivism, and I really want to drive home what the issue is. So consider this section another attempt at approaching the topic. It may be slightly redundant, but this is a blog and part of what I am doing is thinking things through as I write. If you think you’ve understood well enough what I take the issue to be, you can skip ahead to the next section.

Suppose a new product comes along: the zapple. You examine it thoroughly and determine that zapples are just apples. Not a specific kind of apple or anything like that. They’re just plain ol’ apples. Now someone asks you:

What is a zapple?

And you say:

A zapple is an apple.

Would it be much of a critique of your view to say:

Oh, so if you say “This zapple is an apple” you mean to say “This apple is an apple”? That’s a tautology. Why would you go around saying something vacuous like that?

Do you see the problem? It isn’t the zapple-apple reductionist who proposed that zapples were something distinct from apples. And if they were to be in charge of how we spoke about zapples, they might suggest we drop all talk of zapples and just call them apples. So they’d never need to say “zapples are apples.” They’d just talk about apples. But it was other people who insisted on calling something a zapple rather than an apple. All the zapple-apple reductionist has done is close this verbal loop. Yet if they were engaged with zapple nonreductionists, the nonreductionists may insist on verbally distinguishing zapples from apples. In response, the zapple-apple reductionist may, in exasperation, insist that zapples just are apples, only to be met with:

But that’s a tautology! “Zapples are apples” just means “Apples are apples” on your view.

Indeed it does. But this isn’t vacuous or meaningless or a problem in the context of arguing with zapple-apple nonreductionists. In exactly the same way, a person who reduces talk of what one should do to talk of what would promote one’s desires can reduce the former to the latter in a way that would yield tautologies in an entirely innocent way: innocent in exactly the same way that someone who concluded that zapples were apples wouldn’t be saying anything vacuous or confused or mistaken in the context of a dialectic in which others held that zapples aren’t or at least might not be apples.

The “tautology” plays a dialectical role: it closes a verbal loop, and yields a tautology that effectively dissolves an undischarged demand for an account of zapples. Determining that there is no distinct thing as a zapple may simply be the correct position. Just so, judging that there is no distinct content to or conception of should-talk apart from it referring to one’s desires can settle any dispute about whether one should do something other than what one desires. One can even allow that a kind of open question could be meaningfully posed, but note that this would simply involve someone using the same terms to mean something other than what the analytic subjectivist themselves means: it’d be a tautology for the analytic subjectivist to say “I should do what I desire” but not for others. There’s just no problem with this.

But if an analytic subjectivist agrees with everyone else that reasons are something distinct from desires, while simultaneously trying to reduce reasons to desires, then of course they’re going to have a problem. I think one could perhaps still call themselves a subjectivist while denying this or any other problematic features Christian associates with the view, but let’s just grant that subjectivists hold some weird, objectionable view that buys into some of the assumptions of non-subjectivists but can’t successfully reconcile these with their account of reasons as desires. Fine. Then we can reject the view. But a suspiciously similar-looking phoenix can readily rise from the ashes, and simply abandon those dubious features it couldn’t reconcile.

A something-like-a-subjectivist like myself doesn’t have to grant that there are reasons, that reasons are desires, or that reasons “give” us reasons. My account simply rejects any notion of normative reasons altogether, and thus denies that I need to offer an “analysis” of “should” that treats it as distinct from facts about what would fulfill my desires in the first place. What I think is simple:

1. There are facts about our desires.

2. There are facts about what is conducive to achieving those desires.

3. There are no further normative facts at all. It isn’t the case that, e.g., we have “most reason” to act to fulfill our desires or anything of the sort.

This presents an alternative to analytic subjectivism which I’ll call quietist subjectivism or if that isn’t descriptive enough, reasons-eliminativist subjectivism. On this account, reasons-talk isn’t ineffable, reasons-talk and should-talk just is (at least for the quietist subjectivist) talk of desires. Insofar as this allegedly saddles the subjectivist with empty tautologies: it does not. The tautologies only emerge in contexts in which the subjectivist is clarifying their position on the meaning of should/reason talk. There is nothing vacuous about a non-subjectivist asking, “How do you use reasons-talk and should-talk?” and a subjectivist responding “to refer to desires.” If the non-subjectivist then says, “Wait, so if I asked what you should do, you’d say ‘fulfill my desires’? but all this would mean is that it would fulfill your desires to fulfill your desires! Why would you present me with a tautology?”

The subjectivist can point out that in the context of the question the meaning of “should” is being treated as theoretically open to non-subjectivist analyses that don’t reduce should-talk to desire talk. Since the analytic subjectivist does reduce should-talk to desire-talk, when they respond that one “should do what one desires,” all they are doing is collapsing the putative autonomy of the two concepts. This results in a tautology, but it isn’t a vacuous one: it is one that, in a dialectical context in which the subjectivist is distinguishing their position from non-subjectivist positions, illustrates the collapse, or reduction. This does not carry over outside this context into the subjectivist going around asserting tautologies like an idiot in any real-world contexts. In those contexts, people are almost always asked a context-specific practical should question. In other words, we can distinguish two types of “What should you do?” questions:

• Abstract theoretical
  What should you do?

• Contextualized practical
  What should you do?

Note how both look identical. But that is because sentences mean different things in different contexts. Let’s unpack what these questions involve in their proper contexts:

• Abstract theoretical

  What should you do? = What is your account of normativity? That is, when it comes to the question of how you deliberate about what choice to make and proceed to take action, what theory captures the considerations relevant to doing so?

• Contextualized practical

  (For this, I have to provide a hypothetical context. Here it is. You are deciding whether to eat leftovers or go out to have a nice dinner. What should you do?)

Note how in the second case, responding to “What should you do?” with “stay home and eat leftovers” or “go out to dinner” makes perfect sense: if you want to save money and eat healthy, stay home. If you want to splurge and enjoy yourself more, then go out to have a nice dinner. There’s no tautology here. If you responded with “what I desire,” that might seem vacuous, but that’s only because you aren’t clarifying what it is you desire. Think of it this way. If the question “what should you do?” in this situation amounted to “what do you desire?” in this situation, you could respond with “whatever I want.” This might be a glib and unhelpful response, and one might even say it’s vacuous, but so what? You’re not theorizing here. In a practical context, this couldn’t generate any serious philosophical problems for you. It is only in theoretical contexts where the nonspecificity is both mandated, because there is no specific context, and seemingly vacuous. But that seeming vacuity is a byproduct of philosophers failing to distinguish practical and abstract contexts, such that the sense of vacuity bleeds into how they’d interpret the remark in practical contexts. If the response to literally every question: “What should you do?” in every practical context amounted to “What I desire,” which was the equivalent of saying “What I should do,” you really would have an empty theory. But this isn’t what a quietist subjectivist (or an analytic subjectivist, for that matter) is actually committed to. In any practical context, they can just report the desire:

What should you do?

Go out and have a nice dinner.

There is nothing remotely vacuous about this.

With respect to the first, abstract theoretical question, the quietist subjectivist can respond: My account reduces considerations of what I should do to considerations of my desires. When deliberating, I would ideally choose that course of action most consistent with my desires (and I’d try to do my best given the information available to me). Note that on this view, a reduction can result in a tautology without any issue at all. Recall that if you think zapples are apples, such that you can substitute “zapple” for “apple,” then you can translate the statement “Zapples are apples,” which doesn’t look like a tautology, even though “Apples are apples,” clearly is a tautology. But this is an innocent tautology because the reduction of zapples to apples occurs in contexts where the status of zapples is in dispute: others may think they aren’t apples. That you think they are as a matter of definition does result in “Zapples are apples” meaning exactly the same thing as “Apples are apples,” but that you’re stuck with this tautology isn’t your fault; it’s a byproduct of a dialectic in which others hold incorrect or unspecified views.

If in practical contexts the notion of “should” weren’t in dispute, there is no need to be theoretically open about one’s meaning, so the tautologies need not emerge to threaten the subjectivist’s account. In those contexts, responding to practical questions about what one should do with “what I desire” would instead be used to express either an unwillingness or inability to respond, whether one is being glib or is confused. You may have heard conversations like this:

Parent: Well, if you’re not going to stay here and do your chores, what are you going to do?

Child: Whatever I want!!!

It would be silly to interpret the child as asserting a tautology. Keep the theoretical and practical contexts distinct, and subjectivists just don’t face any serious threat or need to invoke ineffable notions of reasons to explain what they mean and to offer a substantive account.

Incidentally, I think Christian has accurately diagnosed the problem with the analytic subjectivist position he outlines:

The issue with Analytical Subjectivism is not using reason in the internal sense alone. It’s using reason in the internal sense paired with using “most reason” or “should” in the internal or desire-fulfillment sense.

Christian believes the proper solution is to abandon this circularity by using the term “should” in the “reason-implying” sense:

Instead, and to avoid circularity, Subjectivists should use the word “should” in the reason-implying sense, essentially, to mean that we should do what we have most reason to do. This makes reasons alone to be the “key battle ground in ethics.” So if we are to make substantive claims, we need to use “most reason”, “should”, and “ought” in this reason-implying sense.

As I have argued, subjectivists do not need to embrace a reason-implying sense of “should” to make substantive claims. And I have argued that this isn’t the only or best path for the subjectivist to take. Instead, the subjectivist can just reject the demand that, in theoretical contexts, they are required to offer an account of “most reason” or “should” talk in such a way that they are saddled with weird tautologies. They can instead argue that such talk, in these conversations, is the artificial, theoretical construction of analytic philosophers, that it doesn’t map onto practical contexts or ordinary language, and that an account that reduces “should”-talk and “reason”-talk to desires can offer tautological responses in some of these contexts without this rendering their account vacuous or in any other way philosophically suspect. This quietistic move demonstrates that the subjectivist can speak and reason in ways that make perfect sense and don’t saddle them with vacuity.

In short, the problem with the analytic subjectivist as Christian depicts them here is that they appear to be complicit in tacitly conceding:

1. That there is an open question about normative questions about what one ought to do (or what one has “most reason” to do, or “should” do, etc.)

2. That this question is, in fact, closed: what one ought/has most reason to/should do is what would most fulfill their desires

Christian has thus crafted a position with an internal tension, then criticized it for having that tension. He then presents only one solution, and proceeds from there, without considering the way of resolving the tension I’ve proposed here. The critique of the position only lands insofar as the analytic subjectivist themselves fails to recognize that their position exists in a kind of Necker-cubean superposition, failing to collapse the open question into a closed one. But if they do close it, the problem dissolves, and the tautology is only a tautology in a cross-theoretical context, i.e., between proponents of the question being closed by analysis and those who think it remains open. That is, it only appears to be an empty tautology if we are discussing matters as if the question were closed, when in fact it isn’t empty in any context in which the reductive analysis that closes the verbal loop between normative terms (should, ought, most reason) and descriptive terms (what would most fulfill desires) remains open. For comparison, if the question of what a zapple is remains open, it is not at all empty or vacuous to propose that zapples are apples. But once we agree that zapples are apples by definition, now asking “What is a zapple?” becomes a closed question. But it is only a closed question once the analysis is accepted. It is equivalent to asking “What is an apple?” to which “An apple” is an entirely appropriate response in that context. Note, though, that “An apple” may seem glib or dismissive precisely because, if the question were closed, asking someone what an apple was would probably not be taken to ask whether an apple was an apple, but to ask something further, such as to ask about its properties or category memberships (e.g., a red or green fruit known for being crisp, slightly sweet…). Careful attention to language dissolves any problems analytic subjectivism might face on grounds of asserting empty tautologies.

Since the subjectivist doesn’t need to embrace should-talk in the reason-implying sense, I could end my rebuttal here. I have provided a way for analytic subjectivists to embrace a bit of quietism and thereby embrace quietist subjectivism. This allows a form of the position more or less like the original to emerge unscathed. But let’s continue anyway, to address Christian’s other remarks.

8.0 Non-analytic subjectivism

Christian next turns to non-analytic subjectivism. As someone who doesn’t think there are reasons, this is a worrisome beginning:

Here are the rules of the philosophy game we’re about to play. I’m going to propose a principle which tells us when we have a reason to act. I’m then going to raise various thought experiments that will prompt your intuitive responses. Some of these thought experiments will be outlandish and some will be tame. The point is to evoke your underlying beliefs about when we have a reason to act or not.

Given that I don’t think we have “reasons,” this is going to be a challenge for me, but let’s proceed:

Desire-based Theory: We have reason to do whatever would fulfill any of our present desires (OMW I, 58) [sic]

Since I don’t know what this question is asking, in that I don’t know what’s meant by “have reason,” I am unable to answer the question. I think talk of “reasons” only makes sense when its meaning is made clear in the relevant context. If someone asks about the reasons for why water turns to ice when it’s cold, there’ll be some explanation for this. If someone asks what reason I had to go to the store, I will report what my goals or motivations were. Reason-talk is, on my view, perfectly meaningful; it’s just that I don’t think we literally have reasons. So when someone asks me what my “reasons” are for something in some abstract, theoretical contexts, what are they asking me to do? I could convert their question into a question about my desires, in which case this question would just amount to:

I would desire to do whatever would fulfill any of my present desires.

Well, that’s true. So this statement is true, I suppose? But is that what I’m being asked? I don’t imagine Parfit intended to ask us to respond to a tautology. So what am I being asked?

I don’t know.

So there’s no way to respond. Note how Christian talks about this account, though:

On this theory there is no such thing as an irrational desire, all desires we have in the present moment provide us with a reason to act.

I agree that there are no irrational (non-instrumental) desires, though this remark doesn’t yet introduce a distinction between instrumental and non-instrumental desires. But what on earth would it mean to say that our desires provide us with a reason to act? If the claim is that our desires motivate us, that would be one thing. If a “desire” is operationalized by psychologists in terms of processes that motivate us to act, then this, too, would be rather empty. It would amount to saying:

All motivations we have in the present moment motivate us.

Christian seems to impute this ineffable notion of reasons, which desires allegedly can “provide” us, to the subjectivist. Next, we’re asked to consider this scenario:

Snake: While walking in some desert, you have disturbed and angered a poisonous snake. You believe that, to save your life, you must run away. In fact you must stand still, since this snake will attack only moving targets. (OMW I, 34). [sic]

Christian says:

In Snake you have a strong, present desire, predicated on false beliefs, to run away. Yet most of us would agree that this desire does not provide us with a reason to run. If we share this intuition, we ought reject the desire-based theory. Subjectivist [sic] could patch up their theory by incorporating one of two further principles to account for this tension.

This is a serious problem, not for me, but for how critics of subjectivism understand subjectivism. A sensible subjectivist doesn’t think that we “should” do whatever it is we desire to do, where “desire” is crudely understood to refer to whatever instrumental means we believe will achieve our desires. They think we should do what would in fact achieve our desires. What do I mean by this? I mean that, all things considered, the course of action I would like to act upon would be the one that most accomplishes my desires. Only I don’t know what, precisely, will achieve this outcome, since I don’t have perfect information or reasoning abilities. Given this, we can draw a distinction between:

• Non-instrumental desires
  The fundamental desires we want to satisfy

• Instrumental desires
  Given our limited information and fallibility, that set of desires or motivations we act upon in order to achieve our non-instrumental desires.

Let me illustrate the distinction. Suppose I am thirsty and would like to quench my thirst. I see a glass of what appears to be water on the table. Only it is not water, it is poison. Do I “have a reason” to drink the water? On the crude and inaccurate characterization of subjectivism, the answer is yes. After all, we’re told:

We have reason to do whatever would fulfill any of our present desires

The reasoning here is supposed to be that:

I desire to drink the glass of water.

However, since doing so would result in me dying, this wouldn’t be in my interests. The critic of the desire-based theory thus reasons that:

1. The desire-based theory holds that in the glass of water scenario, the desire-based theorist is committed to the belief that people have reason to act on their present desires.

2. Since they presently desire to drink the glass of water, they will act in such a way that they will bring about their own deaths.

3. This is counterintuitive. We shouldn’t favor a theory that holds that we have reason to bring about our deaths.

4. So the desire-based theory should (all else being equal) be rejected.

Yet there is a very clear and obvious mistake in this line of reasoning:

It’s simply false that the desire-based theorist’s only present desire is to drink the glass of water.

This line of reasoning fails to distinguish instrumental from non-instrumental desires. The desire-based theorist should (and probably does) think more like this:

1. I non-instrumentally desire to quench my thirst.

2. I don’t want to die.

3. This here is a glass of water which will quench my thirst.

4. I instrumentally desire to drink this glass of water in order to quench my thirst.

The desire-based theorist can thus identify the mistake being made as being a mistake with respect to one’s instrumental desires. But why is it a mistake? Why does the person in this scenario, who wants to quench their thirst and not die, desire to drink the water? Because they mistakenly believe it will achieve their fundamental desire. So the desire-based theorist can easily account for the “intuition” that the person does not “have a reason” to drink the water. They can easily explain the situation like this:

1. It would not satisfy their desires to drink the poison.

2. They mistakenly believe that it would.

Now, let’s go back for a moment to the original characterization of this account. We were told:

On this theory there is no such thing as an irrational desire, all desires we have in the present moment provide us with a reason to act.

In the present moment, my desire is to quench my thirst, and I believe that the means by which I can achieve this desire is to drink the glass of what appears to be water. While we can say I desire to drink the water, this is an instrumental desire. Instrumental desires can fail to achieve our non-instrumental desires. There just aren’t any issues here, unless, and only unless, one keeps trying to inject “reasons” into their account all willy-nilly. Subjectivism is entirely consistent with our instrumental desires being “irrational,” insofar as this consists in acting in ways inconsistent with our non-instrumental desires. However, this phrasing would be misleading. One might have no good evidence to believe what appears to be water is poison. A person mistakenly acting in a way inconsistent with their desires isn’t “irrational,” they’re just incorrect about what would achieve their non-instrumental desires. That’s all that’s going on in this scenario. There’s no need for fancy notions of rationality or normativity. Yet Christian’s claims would leave us with something like this line of reasoning:

Do we have a reason to drink the glass of apparent water? No! Because it would harm us! So the account that says we do “have a reason” must be wrong!

It’s easy to beat up on bad ideas. The idea here is that it’s counterintuitive to think you “have a reason” in this case. I don’t know what judgments or phenomenology are associated with people who’d report something like this, but my guess is that they think roughly that facts about what “count in favor” of an action shouldn’t be based on instrumental desires because instrumental desires can be mistaken and result in undesirable outcomes. Christian seems to treat the best solution for this to be to locate reasons elsewhere. But there’s a much simpler solution: abandon the notion of normative reasons entirely. If we construe this and any subsequent scenario entirely in terms of:

1. Psychological facts about what an agent believes

2. Facts about what is true or false

We can easily describe all of these scenarios without ever wondering whether any given set of facts, including facts about our desires, “give” us reasons. We can just say that there are facts about what our non-instrumental desires are, facts about what our instrumental desires are conditional on the information available to us in a given context, and facts about whether the instrumental desires would or wouldn’t achieve the non-instrumental desires. We don’t need to say anything else. Unless, of course, we have realist intuitions that aren’t satisfied by these accounts. But if that’s the case, of course these accounts aren’t going to appease such people. So what? It isn’t a requirement of a philosophical position that it satisfy the intuitions of people who have intuitions to the contrary.

When I, as an agent, am trying to decide what to do, my goal is always to try to achieve my non-instrumental desires by means of the instrumental desires I believe are most conducive to achieving those non-instrumental desires. We can then ask a host of epistemic questions about what course of action is most likely to yield success for me as an agent with bounded rationality operating under a given set of constraints. There are lots of questions to ask in such circumstances. But the question of whether any given set of instrumental desires, non-instrumental desires, or non-desires “give” me reasons never arises.

Parfit’s approach seems to kick up so much dust via reasons-talk that desire-based accounts look silly and indefensible. And they do look silly and indefensible if you twist them into pretzels by trying to force some intuitively satisfying notion of “reasons” into the mix. But such intuitive satisfaction is, I believe, a profound error; a result of buying into the reified and/or conceptually confused reasons-talk invented by philosophers, a form of thinking and discourse that clings like a parasite to some tentative conception of what we’d think and say in ordinary discourse, only extracted from those contexts and dissected outside of them in ways that appear to reveal anomalies: but those anomalies are only present due to the artificial armchair conditions in which the terms and concepts are being assessed. Philosophers are employing a method that can’t work, for much the same reason you cannot understand wild animal behavior by capturing animals and placing them into zoos. To understand how language works, you need to study it in the wild. Not study it in the armchair and insist that such study reveals its use in the wild.

Returning to Christian’s Snake scenario, it is easy to reanalyze this with these tools in hand:

1. I non-instrumentally want to avoid being bitten by a snake.

2. I mistakenly believe running away would achieve this desire.

Insofar as I could speak of “having a reason” to do things, I would cash it out in this way:

1. Given my mistaken beliefs, I “have a reason” to run away from the snake in the sense that I instrumentally desire to run away and am motivated to do this.

2. Given my non-instrumental desires, I “have a reason” to not run away from the snake in the sense that doing so would satisfy my desire to not be bitten.

The subjectivist faces absolutely no difficulties whatsoever in addressing this situation. The only apparent difficulties emerge from the confusions generated by talking about “having reasons,” and treating these as literal things one has. If one objects that I don’t actually “have a reason” to run away from the snake, because it won’t achieve my non-instrumental desires, then what sense are they using “have a reason” in? I can explain how I’d use the term; can they? Whereas they are stuck with an ineffable, apparently inarticulable sense that something about this or that scenario is “counterintuitive,” I can, in all such cases, discharge the meaning of the terms in familiar ways, then assess whether the statements are true or false, without need of intuitions. My account is better. It’s cleaner. The only thing it doesn’t do is appease realist intuitions. But again, I deny this is a requirement of a satisfactory account, for much the same reason a proponent of natural selection doesn’t have to satisfy the intuitions of people who insist nature appears to be “designed” and can’t shake the intuition. So much the worse for intuitive creationists. Just so, so much the worse for intuitive normative realists.

A desire-based theorist should adopt quietist subjectivism, and in doing so deny that any of their desires, instrumental or otherwise, “give” them or “provide” them with reasons. All the supposedly counterintuitive implications of subjectivism emerge from confusions generated by speaking in these terms. The way out for the subjectivist is to reduce and discharge all talk of having reasons by translating it into talk of instrumental and non-instrumental desires. Once they do, absolutely no problems for their position emerge at all.

I don’t need any intuitions to judge that, in a hypothetical scenario in which a person mistakenly thinks running away from a snake will serve their interests, and they are motivated to do so that they think doing so would serve their interests and are motivated to do so. This is simply what’s been stipulated. If that seems like a hollow analysis of the scenario, good. I wasn’t the one who adopted what I regard as a misguided method of analyzing such scenarios to demonstrate how one doesn’t have “reasons.” It isn’t a problem for me if the scenario doesn’t present any actual problems on my view; that’s the whole point. My approach to these issues doesn’t solve the problem by providing an answer; it solves the “problem” by showing it was never a problem in the first place. And this is exactly what I think about much of the way not only Parfit argues for his positions, but analytic philosophers in general: I am explicitly accusing them of using bad methods to generate pseudoproblems, then presenting their theories as solutions.

Christian (Parfit, too) is already aware of the instrumental/non-instrumental distinction, and moves on to allowing the desire-based theorist to introduce the distinction to “rescue” their position from absurdity:

Subjectivist [sic] could patch up their theory by incorporating one of two further principles to account for this tension.

(E) reasons are provided only by desires that depend on true beliefs

or

(F) reasons are provided only by terminal desires, or aims

This position is still inadequate because it continues to cling to ineffable notions of “reasons,” and so I still reject it in favor of a quietistic account that rejects what I’ve diagnosed as confused reason-talk.

I also want to draw attention to the unfortunate way Christian frames this: That the subjectivist can “patch up” their theory by making these moves, as if they hadn’t already done so in the first place. This is unfortunate because it is a common way of framing rival positions employed by philosophers. While I doubt Christian intends to employ rhetoric or strawman subjectivism, this way of framing things nevertheless serves this function even if it is entirely innocent and unintentional.

Let’s call it the Matryoshka Fallacy. My mom used to have a set of Matryoshka dolls: a set of hollow, painted wooden dolls, each designed to fit inside the other. When you opened the largest one, you’d find a smaller doll inside, and when you opened that, a smaller one still, until you reached the final doll.

Sometimes, when someone is describing an opposing position, instead of simply misrepresenting the position and then attacking that misrepresentation—a classic strawman—they present various weaker forms of the position, note deficiencies with these, and then state that the proponent of the view can “fix” or “patch up” or otherwise address shortcomings with the position by modifying or adding onto it. This ends up crafting a narrative in which the actual position a person holds is depicted as if it were the result of a desperate retreat that has resulted from multiple concessions and ad hoc maneuvers. The narrative looks something like this:

The rival position endorses X. But here’s a problem with X. They could shore up this weakness by adopting X*. But there’s a problem with X*. One way out of this is to adopt X**. But, alas! That suffers from a problem of its own. Of course, they could bite the bullet and retreat to X***…

This is misleading when the person endorsed X*** all along. It makes the position they already held appear to be this battered, beaten thing, not because it’s been battered and beaten, but because you’ve depicted it that way.

I already construed desires in terms of instrumental and non-instrumental desires, and already would’ve readily been able to respond to Parfit’s critiques of desire-based accounts before ever encountering Parfit. I imagine the same would be true of any competent subjectivist.

The positions Parfit is targeting here are crude and unsophisticated and seem artificially engineered to be vulnerable to a series of critiques. It’s as though Parfit is just lining up a series of strawmen he can knock down so that he can depict the final opposition as a craven, retreating position fleeing in terror from Parfit’s philosophical blitz. In any case, Christian insists these moves aren’t going to work:

While (E) might seem more plausible at first, we can post-pone [sic] any updates to the Desire-Based Theory by appeals to truth. Instead, we can appeal to (F). This would result in the simplest plausible subjective theory. To motivate (F) consider Apple.

Now we’re given a rather extensive hypothetical:

Apple: Suppose that I want to eat the two remaining apples that are on some tree. I also want to climb a ladder so that I can reach the higher apple. Suppose next that this tree’s owner allows me to eat only one of these apples, and lets me choose which apple I shall eat. If instrumental desires gave us reasons, I would have more reason to choose the higher apple. If I chose the lower apple, I would then fulfill only my desire to eat this apple. If I chose the higher apple, I would fulfill not only my desire to eat this other apple, but also my instrumental desire to climb this ladder so that I can reach this apple. [So I therefore should choose the higher apple as two desires would then be satisfied]. But this reasoning is obviously mistaken (OMW I, 59). [sic]

According to Christian:

As Apple highlights, instrumental desires do not provide us with reasons. If they did, a life well lived would merely consist in causing ourselves to have many arbitrary desires, and then satisfying them. If you agree at [sic] the absurdity of the situation, we can incorporate (F) by updating the Desire-based theory to

Christian doesn’t quote the rest of what Parfit says in this passage. Parfit adds:

This reasoning is obviously mistaken. Since I want to climb this ladder, not for its own sake, but only as a means of reaching this apple, I have no further, independent reason to fulfil this desire. My reason to climb this ladder derives entirely from, and adds nothing to, my reason to fulfil my desire to eat this higher apple. (OWM, vol. 1)

What Parfit is trying to do is show that instrumental desires can’t “give us reasons.” Parfit is right, of course. Instrumental desires don’t give us reasons. But who thought they did? Perhaps one of the Matryoshka dolls. The problem is, as before, Parfit’s own confused talk of reasons generating the apparent problem. Parfit’s scenario also doesn’t make much sense, and may even be incoherent. Let’s unpack the scenario:

1. I non-instrumentally want to eat two apples.

2. One is higher in a tree, one is lower in the tree.

3. I can only eat one apple.

4. I instrumentally want to climb the ladder to eat the taller apple.

5. If instrumental desires gave us reasons, I would have more reason to choose the higher apple than the lower apple.

This whole scenario only generates problems if the desire-based theorist has weird views about reasons and thinks instrumental and non-instrumental desires alike both “give” us reasons, and that instrumental desires give us reasons independent of what would be needed to achieve our non-instrumental desires. This way of characterizing reason-giving also collapses the distinction between instrumental and non-instrumental desires into both giving us just one kind of “reason.” But why think my “reasons” for acting in accord with my non-instrumental values are on the same footing as my reasons for acting on my instrumental desires? There is no good reason for this: it only makes sense to think of us as having a reason to act on instrumental desires insofar as doing so would serve some non-instrumental desire. But Parfit has given us a scenario in which someone has a free-floating instrumental desire. This makes no sense. It’s just not how instrumental desires work.

Look at this feature of the scenario:

I also want to climb a ladder so that I can reach the higher apple.

Later on, Parfit says:

If I chose the higher apple, I would fulfill not only my desire to eat this other apple, but also my instrumental desire to climb this ladder so that I can reach this apple.

There is a serious problem here. The only purpose of an instrumental desire is to achieve some non-instrumental desire. What non-instrumental desire is achieved by climbing the ladder? None! Parfit has stipulated a scenario that simply makes no sense. Either there would be some non-instrumental desire which would be achieved by climbing the ladder rather than not doing so, or there isn’t. If there is, then it makes perfect sense for a person to climb the ladder. If someone really enjoyed climbing ladders, or wanted to exercise when choosing apples, or wanted to get a better view from being up higher, then there’s nothing absurd or unreasonable about them climbing the ladder. If they don’t have a non-instrumental desire that’d be achieved by climbing the ladder, then it makes no sense to talk of them having an instrumental desire.

Parfit has set up a scenario that employs a concept in a way that omits an integral component of what would render the concept meaningful in the first place. In doing so, he creates the false impression that the problem is with the agent in the scenario, and the resulting analysis desire-based accounts would give of the scenario. But the problem is with Parfit’s set up.

But let’s set that aside for a moment to see what the issue is supposed to be. According to Christian:

As Apple highlights, instrumental desires do not provide us with reasons. If they did, a life well lived would merely consist in causing ourselves to have many arbitrary desires, and then satisfying them. If you agree at [sic] the absurdity of the situation, we can incorporate (F) by updating the Desire-based theory to:

Terminal Desire Theory: We have most reason to do whatever would best fulfill or achieve our present terminal desires or aims.

I don’t think this scenario illustrates much. Subjectivists are not committed to thinking that it would be a good thing to satisfy instrumental desires for their own sake. Yet Christian’s remark suggests that the subjectivist has a goal like:

Maximize the number of instrumental or non-instrumental desires fulfilled by one’s actions.

This just isn’t something subjectivists are committed to. So it does not follow that a life well-lived would, for the subjectivist, consist in generating then satisfying desires. So Christian has not identified an absurdity with the scenario. I want to satisfy whatever my desires are. I have no desire to have desires in order to satisfy them. We don’t need to consider instrumental desires “giving us reasons” to move on to the terminal desire theory. This is already what a subjectivist is likely to favor.

I still think the subjectivist should reject this and any other account which employs an ineffable conception of reasons. I don’t endorse the view that what we have “most reason” to do is whatever would best fulfill or achieve our present terminal desires or aims. Christian also suggests subjectivists may want to incorporate a truth requirement into the position, but this would depend on an empirical question:

Can beliefs cause us to have a different set of terminal desires or aims?

I don’t know the answer to this question. But I also don’t care much about incorporating truth conditions into my own account, so I’m not interested in pursuing this line of inquiry. Christian seems to believe adding a truth condition to one’s subjectivist account would enhance its plausibility. I don’t. Roughly, the idea would be something like this. At a given time, I have one set of non-instrumental desires. However, with new information, my beliefs may change, and if these could cause my non-instrumental desires to change, then I’d have “most reason” to do something other than what I seem to have most reason to do in the absence of this information. We can imagine scenarios where, in other words, my non-instrumental desires are based on false beliefs. In these cases, I’d simply note that one would be motivated or desire to achieve outcomes based on false beliefs. There’d just be a descriptive question here. And I wouldn’t have any further position on whether one “has a reason” to believe or non-instrumentally desire something else instead. This modification is so rooted in considerations of what one “has a reason” to do that it’s irrelevant to my own position.

Part of the reason I’m not that interested in this distinction is that any interest in correcting for one’s false beliefs such that they’d subsequently prompt changes in one’s desires would, for me, be predicated on whether one desires such changes. Desires are still in the driver’s seat, and it’s simply a further descriptive question whether one has the desire for their non-instrumental desires to be receptive to such changes or not. There’s no non-desire-based fact about what I have “most reason” to do that is given by facts alone, rather than my desires, which—consistent with subjectivism—can be responsive to facts. I see no need to entertain further complications Christian introduces and will thus hop off the metaphorical train here.

9.0 Against objective theories

Christian takes the remaining portions of his case against subjectivism in a new direction: referencing and briefly discussing objectivist theories, though Christian makes it clear this is just a brief overview, adding:

I will not defend this here as it would take far too long, it took Parfit 1200 pages to do so. I will merely state it so we can contrast it as we work through the objections to Subjectivism.

Christian begins by telling us how objective theories differ from subjectivism:

Objective theories hold that there are certain facts that give us (external) reasons to have certain aims and to do whatever would best achieve these aims.

I’ve always found this extremely puzzling. What could it possibly mean for a fact to give us an “external reason”? In any typical case, if one asked for the “reason” for something, this “reason” could be discharged. What I mean by this is that nobody would say that one has a reason simpliciter. Instead, they’d answer by stating what the reason was. For instance, if someone said “What was the reason the dinosaurs went extinct?” one might answer “An asteroid hit the earth.” Or one might say “Why did Charles die?” to which one might reply “He had pancreatic cancer.” These are explanatory reasons. But we also speak of reasons in a normative or justificatory sense in other contexts. “What reason did Sally have for yelling at Sam?” One might respond: “Sam called her names.” One normative reason we could give to account for our actions is to appeal to our desires:

Sam: Why are you majoring in engineering?

Alex: Because I want to be an engineer.

Sam: Why do you want to be an engineer?

Alex: Because the topic interests me, and it’s a career path that is likely to have jobs available that pay well.

Sam: Why do you want to get paid well and have a job? Why do what interests you?

Alex: Because I like having money. It lets me live comfortably and purchase things that ensure my wellbeing. And I do things that interest me because I like to do so, and would rather do that than something really awful and boring.

Sam: Why do you like ensuring your wellbeing and avoiding things that are awful and boring?

Alex: Because I want to be happy and avoid suffering.

Sam: Why?

Alex: I just do.

This conversation leads us to discover Alex’s non-instrumental desires. Non-instrumental desires can provide a “reason” for why you’d do something. What does this mean? One way you can understand this is to be an account of what explains why you are motivated to pursue the actions in question. But when someone comes along and supposes that we have “external reasons” to do things, reasons given by the facts themselves, but those facts are not our desires, what on earth could this possibly mean? There is a nominal attempt to discharge the reason:

Alex: You have external reasons not to torture people for fun.

Sam: Okay. What are those reasons?

Alex: Well, it would cause those people unnecessary suffering.

Sam: Okay, but why is that a reason not to do it?

Alex: No, it’s not that the fact is the reason, it’s that the fact gives you the reason.

Sam: Wait, so the fact isn’t the reason? It gives me the reason? Then what is the reason?

Alex: …What do you mean? What “is” the reason?

Sam: Yes. What is the reason why I shouldn’t torture people for fun?

Alex: Well, it would cause them unnecessary suffering.

Sam: I agree that it would. But what does it mean for that fact to give me a reason?

I don’t think Christian or anyone else can give us a good answer to this question (though they are welcome to try). I think talk of facts giving reasons is literal nonsense. And I think conversations like this one reveal that external reasons are not actually discharged. If one asks what the reason itself is, there is no answer: it is a reason simpliciter. One simply “has a reason” not to torture people for fun. I suspect the mistake is a kind of linguistic mirage. Here’s roughly what I think is going on. In ordinary language, reason-talk could always be discharged in principle. If someone asks what reason you had for doing something, you could, in principle, point to some explanation or goal or other consideration that would allow you to say what the reason was. In other words, there are no reasons simpliciter. Reasons are all checks that can be cashed in terms of explanations, desires, and so on.

What philosophers have done is to abstract away from any given context, then ask whether we could “have reasons,” as though reasons were some kind of autonomous property or phenomenon one could “have” simpliciter, without reducing or discharging reason-talk to desires, explanations, and so on. Reasons are their own thing, a bit like David S. Pumpkins. In short, philosophers have made something a bit like a grammatical mistake. For comparison, consider the term put. One can put on their shoes, or put their shoes away, or put the shoes inside a box, and so on. But one cannot simply put simpliciter. One must put something somewhere. Put on a smile. Put on a show. And so on. Put isn’t an intransitive verb. You put something somewhere. Even if someone said “put it” in a given conversation, there’d need to be some contextual cues indicating what was being put somewhere and where it was being put, e.g.:

Alex: Should I put the shoes away?

Sam: Yes, put them.

This use of put is a bit odd, but it would make sense in that context. All it would mean though is “Yes, put [the shoes away].” Put-talk has a specific role in ordinary discourse. Just so, I believe reason-talk works in a similar way. One cannot simply have reasons to do things. Facts and desires don’t give reasons; rather, reason-talk is cashed out in such a way that it simply serves as a stand-in for some specific explanation or desire relevant to that context, sometimes with and sometimes without specification:

The reason the ground is wet is because it rained.

The reason I went to the store was to buy groceries.

Reasons can be discharged by specifying what the reason is, just as “put” has to be discharged to be meaningful: you put the shoes in the box. You can’t just put the shoes. Or put in the box. Or put. Yet reason talk is weird, because you can state that someone “has a reason” to do something without specifying what the reason is.

She has a reason to go to the store.

Okay, well what is the reason? I take such remarks to only be meaningful if one could specify what the reason is. One can’t just have reasons. Yet because reason-talk doesn’t require explicit reference to what the reasons are, one can imagine anything “giving” or “providing” a reason in normative contexts. Not just desires, but facts themselves. So we can say things like:

The fact that torture would cause suffering gives you a reason to not torture.

What reason does it give you? Such a question isn’t supposed to make sense. The fact gives the reason, and it is a reason simpliciter. I think this way of speaking about reasons is something akin to bad grammar.

This is my general concern with approaches to morality (and normativity in general) that rely on ineffable notions of reasons. But Christian wants to explore some arguments and see how objective theories stack up against subjectivism.

9.1 The agony argument

This is a classic from Parfit and one I’ve engaged with extensively (mostly in its Future Tuesday form):

Case One: I know that some future event would cause me to have some period of agony. Even after ideal deliberation, I have no desire to avoid this agony. Nor do I have any other desire or aim whose fulfillment would be prevented either by this agony, or by my having no desire to avoid this agony (OMW I, 73-4). [sic]

Subjectivist accounts hold that one has no reason to avoid the agony. I agree with these accounts (because I don’t think there are reasons at all). According to Christian:

1. We all have a reason to want to avoid, and to try to avoid all future agony.

2. Subjectivism implies that we have no such reason.

3. Subjectivism is false.

Since subjectivism just is the view that there are no stance-independent normative facts of the sort required to “give us reasons” independent of our desires, the first premise is not meaningfully different from simply asserting that subjectivism is false. The argument isn’t much different from saying:

1. There are gods.

2. Atheism implies there are no gods.

3. Atheism is false.

Arguments like this only “work” by abstracting the language and its logical entailments away from the claim under dispute so the question-begging nature of the argument isn’t too obvious (which isn’t to say this is intentional). The result is, hopefully, that one can prompt their interlocutors to have an intuition of the appropriate kind. In this case, I’m supposed to have the intuition that we have a reason to avoid future agony. I don’t have such an intuition, so this argument is not compelling to me. If we don’t just accept the first premise on the grounds that it’s intuitive, then what’s the argument for the first premise? Whatever that argument is, it’s going to be tantamount to an argument for realism itself.

Christian considers a number of objections, but I don’t find any of them worth considering. Christian simply hasn’t given us any arguments for why we should think this is true:

We all have a reason to want to avoid, and to try to avoid all future agony.

Later, after viewing several objections, Christian states:

So the Agony Argument stands and provides a bullet that the Subjectivist must bite

I not only reject the argument, I also deny that in doing so I am biting any bullets. To bite a bullet is to accept some unsavory conclusion. But I find nothing unappealing or difficult with rejecting the agony argument and its Future Tuesday variant. Note that Christian says that subjectivists must agree that:

(G) the nature of agony gives us no reason to want to avoid being in agony.

Then adds that:

But we can argue:

(H) The nature of agony does give us a reason to want to avoid being in agony.

Okay, then what is the argument for (H)? Christian doesn’t give one. Instead, we’re told:

Subjectivists might claim that in arguing against (G) we are simply asserting (H). But if there is anything that gives us a reason to act, it’s the avoidance of agony. This is a belief everyone who is not a nihilist would endorse. Therefore, these arguments stand.

This is not an argument. Christian simply asserts:

But if there is anything that gives us a reason to act, it’s the avoidance of agony.

This is misleading. Throughout this entire section, Christian simply uses the term “reason.” But it’s not as though subjectivists (or myself) wouldn’t say that we “had a reason” to avoid agony. It’s just that what we mean by this is:

Subjectivists: Our desire not to be in agony gives us a reason to avoid agony.

Quietist subjectivist (i.e., myself): To say I “have a reason” to not be in agony is to simply say I don’t want to be in agony (but I don’t think this literally gives me a reason).

Christian’s arguments only work if the kind of “reason” a subjectivist (quietist or otherwise) doesn’t have access to is somehow inconsistent with subjectivism. Let’s call these “objective reasons.” So when Christian says:

But if there is anything that gives us a reason to act, it’s the avoidance of agony.

This should read as something like:

But if there is anything that gives us an objective reason to act, it’s the avoidance of agony.

Now it is easy for subjectivists and myself to respond: we can simply disagree. Nothing gives us objective reasons to do anything. That’s the whole damn point of our positions. Simply asserting:

If anything is an X, it’s Y.

…Simply doesn’t in any way demonstrate X. Perhaps nothing is an X!

This is a belief everyone who is not a nihilist would endorse .

What exactly does Christian mean? Why “nihilist” and not subjectivist?

Therefore, these arguments stand.

Note that Christian has not presented much support for the first premise, so he has not shown that the argument “stands.” It’s an argument, to be sure, but one I and others are entitled to simply reject one of the premises. And I do. An argument doesn’t “stand” because you asserted that it does. I could just present some argument to the contrary and declare that it “stands.” How convincing would Christian find that? Probably not at all.

9.2 The all or none argument

Next, Christian says:

Subjectivists might be inclined to say that all terminal desires (or all terminal desires after rational reflection) provide reasons. They are self-justifying.

Then we are given this case:

Case Two: I want to have some future period of agony. I am not a masochist, who wants this pain as a means to sexual pleasure. Nor am I [a] repentant sinner, who wants this pain as deserved punishment for my sins. Nor do I have any other present desire or aim that would be fulfilled by my future agony. I want this agony as an end, or for its own sake. I have no other present desire or aim whose fulfillment would be prevented either by this agony, or by my having my desire to have this agony. After ideal deliberation, I decide to cause myself to have this future agony, if I can (OMW I, 83). [sic]

According to Christian:

If all terminal desires were self-justifying, then so too would this desire to be in a future period of agony. This is hard to believe.

Christian simply asserts that this is “hard to believe.” For who? I don’t see an argument here. Just the assertion that something is hard to believe. If Christian is simply reporting it’s hard for him to believe something, none of the rest of us are obliged to assign much epistemic weight to this. If Christian is claiming that it’s hard for others to believe this, well, that’s an empirical question, it’s underspecified, and it may or may not apply to his readers. How hard something is to believe varies from one person to another, and I don’t see any particularly good reason to think it’s a good indication of what’s true. It’s hard for Christians to believe Jesus wasn’t the son of God. It’s hard for atheists to believe God will answer their prayers. What matters is why something is difficult to believe.

I also don’t know why a subjectivist would have any interest in arguing that their desires were “self-justifying.” Why think desires require justification at all? I don’t think they do. They’re just facts about us. My favorite color is purple. Does this require justification? Suppose I wasn’t justified in preferring the color purple. Okay. I’m not justified. Now what? What happens if I keep liking it? Are the Forms going to materialize and smite me? Critics of various antirealist or subjectivist views will often insist these views lack “justification” or fail to meet various criteria set by the critics. Simply because one claims that a particular position fails to meet some standard doesn’t mean this poses any meaningful problem even if it’s true that the position has that particular problem. For example, atheists cannot believe they are complying with the will of God. This is a problem if you think it’s very important to try to comply with God’s will. But not if you don’t care about complying with God’s will. Antirealists like myself don’t care if our moral values aren’t “justified” any more than we care whether our food preferences are justified. This isn’t a problem from our perspective, and we’re not required to grant that it is a problem any more than we’re required to grant moral realism itself.

Christian eventually suggests that one move subjectivists might take would be:

we have no reason to accept or reject any terminal desires

I endorse this position. I deny we have any reason to accept or reject any terminal desires. But Christian says:

But then no actions would be justified as all justification ultimately flows from these desires. All justification would ultimately be arbitrary, no justification at all.

Again, this simply isn’t a problem. If Christian thinks it is: okay, what exactly is the problem? I consider justification to only make sense relative to some standard or other. If Christian is employing a non-subjectivist notion of justification, then he’s helping himself to realist assumptions the antirealist isn’t going to grant in the first place. Note, too, how he says “no actions would be justified at all as all justification ultimately flows from these desires. This is virtually a contradiction within the same breath: if justification flows from these desires, then why does he say there’d be no justification? There is justification! It’s just not a kind of justification Christian endorses. He then reiterates the contradiction, stating that All justification would “be arbitrary,” then suggests this is “no justification at all.” Is it justification or not? How is it arbitrary justification…but also not justification? Which is it? Because it can’t be both.

So in one sense, I disagree: I employ alternative notions of justification which only work in a stance-dependent way, and thus play nicely with subjectivism but not realism. In another, I agree: insofar as I can make sense of what Christian is saying, I agree that no actions would be justified in the relevant sort of way. It’s just that I think there are absolutely no undesirable consequences of this. What would they be? Your actions can, on the antirealist view, be entirely justified with respect to your subjective standards, and be optimized for achieving your goals and acting on your values. The only sense in which they’d not be justified is insofar as they failed to comply with stance-independent normative standards. Why care about this? It carries no practical implications at all. It makes no practical difference whatsoever whether one complies with or completely ignores standards of justification that are disconnected from our values. Christian then says:

If we have desires-based reasons for acting, all that would matter is whether some act would fulfill the terminal desires that we now have after ideal deliberation. It would be irrelevant what we want, or would be trying to achieve.

Therefore:

Either all such desires give us reasons, or none of them do.

I don’t see the problem with this. Yet Christian continues:

If all such desires gave us reasons, our desires could give us decisive reasons to cause ourselves to be in agony for its own sake, to waste our lives, and to try to achieve countless other bad or worthless aims.

We could not have such reasons.

The former remark only makes sense if one reifies reasons. On the quietist view I’ve presented, there would simply be facts about what one desires. If someone desired to cause themselves to be in agony, it would simply be a fact about them that they did so. It wouldn’t “give” them a “decisive reason.” There are some other issues with this remark:

Waste our lives

try to achieve countless other bad or worthless aims.

These remarks are presumptuous and employ evaluative language without clarifying whether the language is itself presupposing realism. “Waste” relative to what standard? “Bad” or “worthless” aims relative to what standard? If you’re a subjectivist, and your only desire is to count blades of grass, Christian and others might regard this as a “waste” but the person counting the blades of grass wouldn’t. After all, that they don’t consider it a waste is a matter of stipulation! Whether it “really is” a waste independent of their subjective preferences just presupposes realism. It is simply not persuasive to a subjectivist to point out that we could subjectively value the incorrect things; the position practically is a direct repudiation of this view. Even if the values in questions are ones I don’t like, my opposition to them stops there, and that’s good enough: I am opposed to certain goals and values. Why would it matter if they were factually mistaken? Suppose a person only desired to set everyone else on fire. Would this be “bad”? Bad relative to whose standard? Not the person who wants to do this! But this has no practical relevance to what any of the rest of us “should” do. We have our desires, and they have theirs.

Christian continues with yet another conclusion that’s supposed to follow from this:

None of these desires gives us any reason. We have no such desire-based reason to have any desire, or to act in any way (OWM I. 90).

This is true. Is this a problem? If so, what is the problem? Why would I need a “desire-based reason” to have desires? Compare to your food preferences. Suppose you prefer chocolate over vanilla and are deciding what ice cream to get. Chances are you’ll choose chocolate. Now, do you have a desire-based reason to prefer acting on your taste preferences? Suppose (and I grant) that you don’t. Well then, I guess choosing chocolate over vanilla is “arbitrary” and you have no fundamental reason to do so. If this is supposed to be a problem it’s unclear what the problem is. I want to act on my preferences. I don’t need to have a preference to act on my preferences to “give me a reason” to do so. Christian concludes:

This is the All or None argument. Given the All or None argument, Subjectivists are faced with a dilemma. Since they cannot coherently accept some terminal desires and reject others which have survived ideal deliberation, they are forced to choose either

(1) All terminal desires provide us with normative reasons

or

(2) No terminal desires provide us with normative reasons.

According to Christian:

If Subjectivists appeal to (1), then they have to bite many bullets: the desire for future agony for instance.

I simply deny accepting future agony involves biting any bullets at all. This notion of “biting bullets” is a weird one. Christian and others often invoke this notion. But whether one considers any given implication a concession (or “bullet”) or not depends on their other views. Given the rest of my views, moral realism is absurd and positions which lead me to reject its implications are a theoretical virtue, not a cost or bullet to bite. There is no arbiter external to our respective worldviews by which we can determine that one position bites more bullets than another. How much a position bites bullets turns on the rest of one’s views.

If Subjectivists instead appeal to (2), then we have no reason to do anything at all since all reasons would end in desires which we do not have any reason to have.

This is the correct response. Since the notion of “reason” in question is unintelligible, abandoning it doesn’t cause any problems. Christian presents the following objection:

“If I want it for its own sake why should I need to scramble for a reason?”.

Christian responds:

Simple, because when we reflect on our desires, we will often find some of them to be worthy of question.

This is not what happened when I reflected on my desires. Once again, Christian makes an empirical claim about the results of a particular psychological procedure. And the results for me only serve to reinforce antirealism and the rejection of realism. Christian doesn’t even qualify his claim. Does he think everyone will arrive at the conclusion he proposes on reflection? What if they don’t? Did they make a mistake if they don’t? If so, what was the mistake? And how does he know?

My terminal desires are not the sort of thing to be “worthy of question,” and, in any case, I don’t find on reflection that there are any desire-independent standards by which I have ever questioned any of my desires. I can only judge any of my desires or standards by appeal to my other desires and standards. My deliberation is thoroughly subjectivist. I don’t question whether I have a ‘good reason’ for having my desires in the sense Christian implies. I’m not sure whether others do; that’s an empirical question and Christian has not presented any evidence that people generally arrive at the same conclusion as he has or that they do so using an epistemically respectable method (and that I don’t).

Objectivists, by contrast, make the much simpler claim: we can want things which are bad for us.

I don’t see any reason to view this as “simpler.” My view accommodates ordinary moral language without presuming to know a great deal about ordinary people’s psychology (which Christian’s position does and for which he’s presented essentially no meaningful evidence) and posits fewer metaphysical phenomena (the notion that we can want things which are “bad for us” requires at least certain irreducible concepts and will on most philosophers’ views other than e.g., Parfit, Scanlon, and so on). My position does away with all of this. It is in several respects much simpler. Realists do not have an advantage on grounds of parsimony, regardless of how important we consider parsimony to be.

10.0 Conclusion

Christian ends with a section called “Why people are subjectivists.” It begins with this remark:

At first subjectivism seems obviously true.

Seems obviously true to who? Christian does what so many other people do: simply makes assertions about how things seem without qualification. The reason-based conceptions of subjectivism Christian outlined here don’t seem obviously true to me, nor is there much evidence they seem obviously true to any particular proportion of the general population. Christian makes several other strange claims here:

The fact that our subjective aims often track what we objectively ought to aim at is the source of the fundamental confusion with subjectivists about reasons. They have it precisely backwards. It is not our desires which give us reasons it’s our responses to reasons which give us desires. Once you see the confusion it’s like showing a fly out of the bottle.

Is this an empirical claim? How does this work psychologically? Christian says our responses to reasons “give” us desires. Does this mean they cause us to have desires? If not, what does this mean? If so, how does that work? Reasons have causal powers? Whatever the case may be, Christian’s remarks are entangled in psychological claims about how human cognition works. There is, at present, no meaningful body of cognitive psychological research that supports these claims, nor any compelling theoretical basis for making them. This is speculative at best, but most likely is simply pseudopsychology. It is remarkable how often philosophers feel entitled to just make psychological claims without appreciating that they are no more epistemically entitled to do so when it comes to psychology than they are for chemistry or cosmology. Human cognition is not something you can figure out through a priori reasoning or theorizing from the armchair.

Christian’s claims are also woefully vague. It’s hard for me to even criticize this because I am not sure what Christian is even claiming. But if the claim is that reasons cause us to have desires, I’d like to know how that’s supposed to work and why I should think that this is true.

I’m reminded of those experiments where a patient’s corpus callosum is severed and they give one hemisphere an instruction, to get up for example. They then ask the other unknowing hemisphere why they’re getting up and a post-hoc rationalization soon follows. This is what I think these secular, Western, reductionist materialist types are doing. They search for a ground to justify normativity, and reach for what’s available and well within the materialist worldview: desires.

This isn’t a good dig. It’s just weak, speculative armchair psychologizing that stereotypes subjectivists. Christian sounds exactly like religious apologists who conflate “atheist” with being secular, a materialist, politically on the left, and so on. Christian even uses some of the exact same terms apologists use.

Despite being an arch-antirealist, Christian’s remarks don’t even apply to me. I’m not not a materialist! As far as “secular” and “Western,” well, guilty as charged. But I could turn this right around on Christian and note that the legacy of Plato and monotheism has left many philosophers and laypeople alike with a residual predisposition towards wanting to find meaning and value in something cosmic and external to themselves, and so they are drawn to the notion that value must be out there in the world. Nietzsche’s prescience on the matter could readily accommodate the modern renaissance of moral realism among secular moral philosophers. Thousands of years steeped in monotheism externalized our source of meaning and value to a higher power. Now that secular philosophers lack this foundation, they grope for it in philosophy itself. Armchair psychologizing like this is easy. The real feat would be to provide evidence for such claims. It is far easier to devise hypotheses like these than to confirm them. Anyone can psychologize in this way. The question is whether there’s actual evidence to support one’s claims. A bit of speculation can be fun, but it’s not going to get us very far. Christian continues:

But in most of their actual deliberations, they don’t use desires to justify their actions. They think they’re justifying actions with their desires, when in reality, they use their intuition to make judgements about what they have reason to do, and then corresponding desires spring up soon thereafter.

How does Christian know that most people’s deliberations don’t involve appealing to desires to justify actions? I welcome Christian to make a case for this. Christian is welcome to show me that I am mistaken about what I think I am doing. I don’t think I use intuitions to make judgments about what I have reason to do, since I don’t think there are any intuitions or reasons. I think these are pseudoconcepts philosophers made up that have little to do with how actual human psychology operates.

That Christian’s positions ultimately turn on so-called intuitions emerges in the conclusion:

The All or None Argument paired with the Agony Argument give [sic] the Subjectivist a dilemma: accept either that we are justified in having every single one of our present terminal desires, no matter how intuitively horrendous, or we have no reason whatsoever to have any of them and they’re all arbitrary yet immune to interrogation.

I don’t find any of the examples “intuitively horrendous” and find nothing remotely troubling about granting that we have “no reason whatsoever” to have any particular desire and that “they’re all arbitrary yet immune to interrogation.” I don’t technically grant that they’re immune to interrogation; it’s just that I think any such interrogation can only occur against the backdrop of my desires themselves; there’s no desire-independent standard from which to evaluate our desires. Either way, this latter horn of the dilemma is simply unthreatening.

Christian insists:

In either case, the Subjectivist has to bite a bullet.

No we don’t. What’s the bullet, exactly? That subjectivism lacks qualities realists think a good theory should have? So what? This isn’t any more of a bullet to bite than for a theist to critique atheism on the grounds that it “bites the bullet” that nature shows all the hallmarks of divine craftsmanship. The atheist will often think otherwise, which is part of why they’re an atheist in the first place.

Speaking for myself, I am under no obligation to grant that subjectivism bites any bullets at all. I consider whether the stance one takes involves biting a bullet to itself be relative. And, relative to my views, I think realism is one of the most outrageous and implausible positions anyone could have. Why would I think rejecting such a position involves biting bullets? Christian says:

Either we may have horrible desires (e.g. to cause ourselves to be in agony), or we may lack certain obviously good desires (e.g. to avoid causing ourselves to be in agony).

I think causing ourselves to be in agony is horrible because it’s inconsistent with my subjective standards, not because I think it’s horrible independent of them! And I think it’s entirely possible to lack certain “obviously good” desires that are obviously good relative to my subjective standards. Christian’s uses terms like “horrible” and “obviously good,” which can either be used in subjectivist ways that completely strip them of argumentative force, or they aren’t used in such a way, in which case Christian is simply helping himself to the presumption that things can be non-subjectively “horrible” or “good,” which is precisely what I and subjectivists aren’t going to grant. Ultimately, then, Christian seems to reject subjectivism because Christian personally finds it counterintuitive. Well, so what? I don’t have Christian’s intuitions. So why should I reject it?

To put this another way, “horrible” and “obviously good” are evaluative terms that can either be cashed out in a subjectivist way, in which case Christian’s point won’t land, or they presuppose realism, in which case the terrible consequences of subjectivism are, apparently, that it would allow for situations in which it would be subjectively good to act on non-subjectively bad values, and subjectively bad to act on non-subjectively good values. This is absurd: the subjectivist doesn’t think anything is good or bad in the non-subjective sense in the first place, so pointing to these consequences as a bullet to bite only makes sense if you think it’s a cost for a philosophical position if it is subjectivist. This is like a dualist claiming that physicalism must bite the bullet of denying the “obvious fact” that mind is non-physical.

Christian ends with a list of possible options. My position does not appear on the list. The closest would be:

Reject all normative reasons, become nihilists: Nothing matters, there’s nothing you have to do.

However, the problem is that I deny that in rejecting normative reasons one must become a nihilist and conclude that “nothing matters” or that “there is nothing you have to do.” I think things matter. And I think there are lots of things I have to do. I just don’t think mattering or having to do things has anything at all to do with normative reasons. I am especially opposed to any suggestion that adopting a position like this, or endorsing subjectivism, involves biting bullets. This makes it seem like accepting these positions requires paying some kind of cost, of accepting something one wouldn’t otherwise want to accept. But I find nothing appealing, desirable, or plausible about moral realism. If I thought of anything as biting a bullet, it’d be moral realism.