Against "Against Subjectivism" (Part 1)

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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.