Analytic moral realism and unsubstantiated empirical claims about moral experience

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J.P. Andrew (hereafter JPA) has recently revived his blog Reflections on What Matters. Go check it out. JPA is a proponent of non-naturalist moral realism, so it should come as no surprise that I have something to say on the matter. In this post, I want to address an updated version of an earlier article from JPA, simply titled “Moral realism.” JPA begins with this remark:

In a previous essay, I argued that if we take seriously the idea that some things matter, we will find ourselves pushed toward a form of:

Value realism: there exist stance-independent evaluative truths — truths about what is valuable that obtain independently of anyone’s beliefs, preferences, desires, emotions, or attitudes.

Note the phrasing: both the notion that if we take certain things “seriously,” and in particular that “some things matter.” I am a moral antirealist. I take seriously the idea that some things matter. And yet this doesn’t push me towards value realism. This is because the notion that “some things matter” doesn’t specify the respect in which things matter. As an antirealist, I think things matter to people and relative to different stances. This is the only defensible sense in which I think anything can or does matter. And there’s nothing unserious about this.

JPA’s remarks are thus, from the very outset, a form of rhetoric. They serve a preemptive framing function where JPA can depict his own account as “serious” and antirealist accounts, by implication, as “unserious.” Now, JPA is perfectly entitled to think that the only “serious” sense in which things could matter is from a realist view, but such a position is itself a substantive theoretical commitment that cannot be held from a neutral point of view of the overall debate. The way JPA sets up the dispute, this perspective-contingent conception of taking things seriously is nonobvious and could readily give the impression to readers that antirealism is in some overarching sense “unserious.”

Shortly thereafter, JPA states:

If moral realism is true, then morality is not something invented by human beings, negotiated into existence by societies, or constructed out of our attitudes. Moral truths are not made true by the fact that we approve of them. Rather, morality presents itself as something to which we are answerable. The moral domain appears, at least pre-theoretically, to involve standards that we discover rather than create.

Notice this remark: “Rather, morality presents itself as something to which we are answerable.” On a technical note, this does not follow. It is possible both for moral realism to be true and for it to not “present” itself to us in any way at all, much less in a way “to which we are answerable.”

On a more general note, what would it even mean for us to be “answerable” if moral realism were true? Consider ways we might use the notion of being “answerable” in ordinary language. We might say that a person is only answerable to the law, or to the King, or their boss, or whatever. In these cases, such answerability involves the notion that one is subject to being held accountable by some authority or other. And such accountability only carries weight through practically relevant carrots and sticks: the police can haul you off to jail, the King can cut off your head, your boss can fire you, and so on.

When it comes to violating stance-independent moral obligations to which you are allegedly “answerable,” what, exactly, is the consequence of you violating them? Well, the “consequence” is that you have violated them.

…That’s it. Whereas the kind of practical answerability enforced by police and monarchs has practical relevance, the kind of “answerability” realists believe is somehow the more “serious” and perhaps even the only true or legitimate or fundamental type of answerability has no teeth. It’s as if one takes a notion, strips it of all practical relevance, and then declares it the actual or true form of the thing in question:

• Real horses have no shape, no mass, no extension in space, and no properties at all that could impinge on you or anyone else.

• Genuine pain has no phenomenology, no functional features, and no causal impact on anyone, ever, even in principle.

…and so on. The realist view of morality seems to strip morality of anything of substance, of the very things that would lead pragmatists like me to say it is real, and then declares the phantom residue real. If that’s what reality is, I’ll stick with the shadows on the wall.

JPA began by simply introducing the reader to moral realism, stating that if we “take morality seriously” we’d be pulled towards moral realism, defined as follows:

Moral Realism: there exist stance-independent moral truths — truths about what one morally ought and ought not to do that obtain independently of anyone’s beliefs, preferences, desires, emotions, or attitudes.

Yet JPA immediately follows this with remarks about how morality presents itself to us, before culminating in the claim that:

The moral domain appears, at least pre-theoretically, to involve standards that we discover rather than create.

JPA shifts from defining moral realism to specific claims about moral phenomenology, as if these were the same thing. What moral realism is, as a position, is conceptually distinct from the epistemic considerations (such as our phenomenology) that would cause us to endorse the view. JPA seems to conflate these. And he does so with no preamble, no argument, and no justification, and in a way that is frustratingly unclear. When JPA says “[…] morality presents itself…” he doesn’t specify who it presents itself to. JPA reiterates this remark again, stating:

I begin by examining the way morality presents itself in ordinary experience.

Note the phrase “ordinary experience.” This term should be a red flag. Philosophers will use phrases like this, then eschew any serious engagement with empirical psychology. What, exactly, is “ordinary experience?” To speak of experience in the ordinary sense is to imply generalizations about how people experience things. Generalizations of this kind are empirical hypotheses. The question then becomes how one operationalizes “ordinary experience.” As we will see, JPA does not present any empirical evidence that ordinary experience presents itself to people in the way he describes. It certainly doesn’t present itself this way to me. So, what does JPA mean? He doesn’t clarify. It might be one of the following:

• Morality presents itself this way to JPA, personally

• Morality presents itself this way to most people

• Morality presents itself this way to most reflective and competent people

• Morality presents itself this way to everyone

…or it could mean something else. Morality can’t just “present” itself simpliciter. Something can only present itself to someone. JPA and other realists routinely speak of things presenting, appearing, seeming, and so on without qualification and thus without clarification.

Good philosophy is clear and disambiguates precisely those claims most central to one’s position. It matters a great deal who morality presents itself to in this way. If it only presents itself this way to JPA or just a few philosophers, why should any of the rest of us care? If it presents itself to most other people, well, that should make us sit up in our chairs.

Furthermore, facts about what presents itself in a given way and to who are, of course, psychological claims. While I’m happy to grant a philosopher’s self-report about how things present themselves to that philosopher, philosophers are not entitled to make sweeping claims about how things present themselves to others unless they’re prepared to present appropriate empirical evidence to support those claims. The empirical details matter here, even if some philosophers deny that they do.

This failure to disambiguate often allows moral realists to make psychological claims while retaining plausible deniability that they are engaging in and making psychological hypotheses (though I would argue that it is implausible deniability). I suspect they want to avoid doing so because they’re unable or unwilling to substantiate these psychological claims, or lack an adequate understanding of what constitutes a psychological claim.

There are other problems with JPA’s remark. If JPA’s remarks are about how things appear to JPA, personally, it’s unclear if or to what extent anything could have appeared to JPA “pre-theoretically” or, if it did, how JPA would have knowledge of this fact. By the time philosophers are in a position to make remarks like this, what they personally thought pre-theoretically is in the past, often the quite distant past, and as such they must rely on memory. Memory is generally fairly reliable, but when it comes to philosophical views, it’s not so clear how reliable our memory is. It is quite common for people who change their mind on matters of central importance to insist, and to convince themselves, that “they thought that all along” even when they clearly didn’t. I doubt memory is a reliable guide to what we, personally, thought pretheoretically. If, on the other hand, JPA is making a claim about how things seem to others pre-theoretically, well, that’s an empirical claim, and JPA doesn’t present any empirical data to support such a claim.

Finally, the discover/create dichotomy is an imperfect fit for the realism/antirealism divide. Do people discover or create their food preferences? I don’t know about you, but when I try food for the first time, I don’t “create” whether I like it or not. I discover whether I like it or not. Does this mean taste is stance-independent? No, it does not. Some discoveries are discoveries about our tastes. Metaethicists should retire this dichotomy, because it is misleading.

In JPA’s next section, on moral experience, he continues to make vague and unsubstantiated empirical claims. After clarifying that moral realism is simply the position that “at least some moral judgments are true independent of what anyone happens to think about them,” JPA states:

If it is wrong to torture conscious beings merely for amusement, then it would remain wrong even if every human being on Earth came to approve of such behavior. If compassion is genuinely better than cruelty, then this is not merely a reflection of our contingent emotional dispositions or cultural practices. It is instead a truth about how one ought to relate to other conscious creatures.

And this, I think, captures the way morality ordinarily seems to us. We do not generally experience morality as a system of arbitrary conventions, akin to etiquette or fashion. We experience moral demands as possessing a peculiar authority. Morality seems to place genuine constraints upon us, such that it is up to us to conform ourselves to it, rather than up to morality to conform itself to us.

Notice the profoundly vague use of the term “us.” Who is “us”? It’s not me, since this is not how morality seems to me. So who is JPA referring to? JPA simply does not specify. This is standard for analytic moral realists, who seem to make empirical hypotheses but often refuse to be specific or to state them in a way that is clear enough to generate a testable hypothesis. JPA presents no arguments, evidence, or reasons to believe that this is how morality “seems to us.” This is simply asserted. This is likewise a common feature of the way many analytic moral realists present their views. They frequently make a host of unsubstantiated assertions.

Notice what JPA goes on to claim:

Yes, appearances can be misleading. But: if we abandon the principle that things are generally as they appear absent a defeater, skepticism threatens to spread very far indeed.

[…]

To deny this altogether is not merely to reject a philosophical theory: it is to radically reinterpret one of the central dimensions of human experience.

These attempts to suggest the rejection of realist seemings would usher in the threat of skepticism are premature. But notice, again, the remark at the end here: JPA claims that realist seemings are “one of the central dimensions of human experience.”

This is an unambiguous empirical claim. And yet again: no evidence, no arguments, no substantiation at all. What JPA has presented so far isn’t so much philosophy as it is bad psychology.

JPA’s subsequent objections to antirealism are not impressive. He states:

Still, anti-realist views face a persistent difficulty: namely, that they seem unable fully to capture the authority morality appears to possess.

Morality does not appear to me to possess authority. Are moral antirealists obligated to specifically account for why things seem a certain way to JPA and others to whom things seem this way? If so, then is the primary goal of moral antirealism to psychoanalyze realists?

What a strange claim from JPA. Suppose it seems to an unspecified group of people that the sky is purple. I look up at the sky and it seems blue to me. I conclude “The sky is not purple.” Is the problem with my position that it does not account for why the sky appears purple?

First, note again how weird such a question would be. Does not appear purple to who? The answer to that question matters. Second, if it’s the case that it seems like realism is true to some realists, and if realism is false, then any antirealist account that includes an account of the error in question will presumably require some kind of psychological hypothesis to account for the error. After all, the error in question isn’t an intellectual one. It isn’t a mistaken inference or deduction. It’s a phenomenological error. Given this, it seems that the only possible way to adequately critique realism by accounting for realist “seemings” is to engage in empirical psychology. And if that’s the case, then realists should certainly be interested in moral psychology, since it would be an integral component of any viable critique of realist “seemings.”

Let’s have a look at what else JPA says:

If moral judgments ultimately reduce to preferences, emotional reactions, social practices, or practical endorsements, then it is difficult to understand why morality should bind us in the robust way it seems to do.

The antirealist response to this is simple: it doesn’t seem this way (to at least some of us). Once again, is the defensibility of antirealism contingent on whether we can offer a psychological account of why JPA and other realists are having weird and mistaken experiences? And here we get one of the clearest articulations of a seemingly empirical claim:

Ordinary moral phenomenology does not merely register that one happens to dislike cruelty or approve of compassion. It presents certain actions as genuinely worthy of condemnation, admiration, guilt, resentment, praise, or blame.

Ordinary moral phenomenology. JPA keeps playing fast and loose with the claims in question. Whose experiences is he talking about? Once again, if they are the alleged experiences of ordinary people, the onus is on JPA and others to actually demonstrate that this is how ordinary people experience things. At present, there is no compelling or even particularly good evidence that ordinary people experience morality in the way JPA does. Maybe some do, but “ordinary” remains too vague to make quantitative inferences. Does he mean most? If so, why not say so?

JPA then makes this claim:

Moreover, moral anti-realism often proves unstable upon reflection. Many who officially endorse it nevertheless continue to speak and act as if at least some moral claims possess universal authority.

It isn’t unstable for me. JPA provides no evidence, or even any examples to substantiate this claim. So once again we’re treated to unsubstantiated and underdeveloped claims. What would constitute speaking or acting “as if” at least some moral claims possessed “universal authority”? Also, even if some moral antirealists acted this way, this wouldn’t show that the position itself is somehow inherently or inevitably unstable. It would only show that some people act or think in ways inconsistent with it. Without any further reason to believe this is an especially serious problem, this would not indict antirealism. It is consistent with just about any philosophical belief for the one who believes it to think or act in ways inconsistent with it. That this is possible and in some cases occurs in no way shows that the view is mistaken or unlivable or whatever. Is Christianity false or in serious trouble because Christians often think or act in ways inconsistent with their commitment to Christianity? I don’t think so. JPA goes on to make puzzling remarks that suggest he may misunderstand what is consistent with antirealism:

Tolerance, equality, justice, and human rights are frequently defended not merely as local preferences, but as norms that others genuinely ought to recognize.

I do genuinely think others ought to recognize all of these things! That’s entirely consistent with antirealism!

But once morality is reduced to cultural attitudes or individual preferences, it is difficult to explain why anyone outside those frameworks should be bound by them (or even care about them).

I don’t think people are “bound” by my preferences in some realist sense. I just want them to comply. I also think they’d usually be better off by their own lights if they did.

The rest of JPA’s remarks are dedicated to naturalism, the argument that morality is metaphysically weird, and theism. I don’t particularly care about any of these topics, so I’ll wrap things up here. Instead, I want to focus on more features of the alleged experience of morality JPA introduces in his conclusion:

Morality presents itself as objective, authoritative, and irreducibly normative.

JPA now adds the feature “irreducibly normative.” Once again, morality doesn’t present itself this way to me, and JPA provides no evidence that it presents itself this way to ordinary people or that it is a “central dimension of human experience.” JPA just piles on the unsubstantiated empirical claims.

My work and the work of others raises serious challenges to JPA’s claims, and much of his case for realism would be undermined if those claims turn out to be false. To my knowledge, JPA remains disinterested in engaging with this literature and dismissive towards me in particular. He also has a penchant for blocking antirealists who try to engage with him on Twitter, and disables comments on his Substack posts, so people aren’t able to engage with him there. This is unfortunate. I enjoy engaging with people who disagree with me, and I think JPA and I could learn and benefit from interacting with one another. Sadly, I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Either way, there is a single, common thread tying this post together: JPA makes a host of unsubstantiated empirical claims about human psychology. At present, the best available empirical evidence suggests these claims are probably not true, I have documented this evidence in detail, and I have addressed JPA’s claims to the contrary extensively on my blog already. JPA is, as always, welcome to reach out to have a conversation, and I’d be happy to discuss the empirical literature on this topic, clarify his claims about ordinary experience, and otherwise discuss matters that seem fundamental to our respective positions on metaethics. I don’t think those who agree with JPA, or those who agree with me, benefit from siloing ourselves away and not engaging with one another.