Against "Against Subjectivism" (Part 2)
This is Part 2 of an ongoing series that critiques Christian Gonzalez’s article, “Against Subjectivism.” Here is Christian’s article and here is Part 1. I recommend reading these first before reading this article, since this picks up right from the end of Part 1.
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:
People have desires.
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.