Against "Against Subjectivism" (Part 6)

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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.