Are moral antirealists dishonest if they don't let us know they're antirealists?

Twitter Tuesday #36

1.0 Antirealists and ordinary moral discourse

Over on Twitter, someone made the following claim:

Most academic anti-realists agree that ordinary moral talk is closer to realism than anti-realism. Hence, its incumbent on the anti-realist, who wants to be honest, to not be deceitful to speak in terms which makes it evident that they are not engagin in ordinary moral talk.

There are a few problems with this remark.

(1) It’s probably not true that most antirealists agree that moral talk is closer to realism than antirealism. Standard antirealist positions include a semantic thesis about the meaning of ordinary moral claims. Typically, only error theory grants that moral discourse presupposes realism. However, the results of the 2020 survey show that while 26.1% of respondents favor antirealism, only 5.3% endorse error theory:

10.6% favor expressivism, and another 20.8% endorse constructivism. Many of the constructivists (if the total number of antirealists is ~26%, then perhaps around half) are going to be consider themselves antirealists, but expressivism alone is double the rate of error theorists. Given this, a majority of antirealists may endorse views that are inconsistent with granting that ordinary moral language most closely resembles realism, if they endorse semantic theses that hold that ordinary moral language is nonpropositional (expressivism) or constructivist (and perhaps, as a result, intersubjective or, in any case, not closer to realism). It’s hard to know precisely how many antirealists would agree that ordinary moral language is closer to realism without directly asking, since some might agree that it is but add caveats or qualifications, or may endorse revisionist accounts or have other views about the relation between ordinary moral discourse and their particular metaethical positions. Maybe most would agree that ordinary moral language looks superficially like it’s realist. I’d disagree with them, but in any case the questions that were posed in this survey aren’t precise enough to settle the matter.

(2) There’s an unstated assumption here: that the academics in question are correct that moral talk is closer to realism than antirealism. Even if most antirealists thought that ordinary moral language was closer to realism, they could be mistaken about this. I think they would be mistaken about this, because I don’t think ordinary moral language is closer to realism.

(3) The biggest issue with this remark is that even if most antirealists thought that ordinary moral language was closer to realism than antirealism, and even if they were correct, it still wouldn’t necessarily follow that an antirealist using moral language in an antirealist way was being dishonest.

In order to be dishonest or deceitful, a person would have to intentionally speak in a way that they themselves believed to be untrue and with the intent to deceive others. A person may speak in nonstandard ways without the intent to deceive or mislead others. If so, then they still wouldn’t be being dishonest/deceitful. Speaking in an unconventional way, even knowingly, does not guarantee dishonesty. In order to show that a person is being dishonest/deceitful, you’d have to show that they believe ordinary language more closely reflects realism, but intend to intentionally deceive others by speaking in a way inconsistent with this.

(Technically, it’s also a little weird to focus on what antirealists think. It’s at least logically possible that a majority of moral realists don’t think ordinary language is closer to realism. I assume that the assumption is that most moral realists think moral language is closer to moral realism. I’d probably have made this explicit myself).

2.0 A majority of experts?

Subsequent discussion led to this additional remark:

Yes the majority of the experts on the subject-matter agree that ordinary moral talk takes on characteristics of realism.

Hold up. Why should we suppose that philosophers are the subject-matter experts on ordinary moral talk? We have a few options about how to evaluate ordinary moral discourse, but, roughly speaking, we can consider the matter to be one addressed:

1. In the armchair

2. In the field

Let’s consider the first. The armchair approach may or may not be empirical.

2.1 Armchair / Non-empirical

The non-empirical armchair approach would suppose that the meaning of ordinary moral claims is not an empirical matter, but an a priori matter to be settled using conventional philosophical methods (e.g., intuitions, reflective equilibrium, conceptual analysis, and so on). Under this assumption, philosophers employing these methods may be regarded as the relevant experts. Perhaps, on such a view, the goal of our account of ordinary moral talk is to determine the meaning of the terms ordinary people use, and, given one’s views in the philosophy of language, one might suppose that facts of this kind are not reducible to facts about the psychology of speakers or linguistic communities.

2.2 Armchair / Empirical

The empirical armchair approach holds that claims about ordinary moral discourse are empirical, but regards armchair methods as superior to conventional scientific methods (e.g., surveys, behavioral studies, etc.) for addressing such questions.

Here’s how this might work. We might think that the best way to figure out whether nonphilosophers speak like realists or antirealists is to ask them, or to conduct surveys that try to determine their metaethical views in some indirect way. However, ordinary people lack the relevant philosophical training for such methods to work. Consider, for instance, Kauppinen’s claims about the prospects of such research in his article, “The rise and fall of experimental philosophy”:

I argue that this philosophical research programme, a key branch of what is known as ‘experimental philosophy’, rests on mistaken assumptions about the relation between people’s concepts and their linguistic behaviour. The conceptual claims that philosophers make imply predictions about the folk’s responses only under certain demanding, counterfactual conditions. Because of the nature of these conditions, the claims cannot be tested with methods of positivist social science. We are, however, entitled to appeal to intuitions about folk concepts in virtue of possessing implicit normative knowledge acquired through reflective participation in everyday linguistic practices. (p. 95)

According to Kauppinen, the social scientific tools experimental philosophers employ are insufficient for the task of evaluating how nonphilosophers think because nonphilosophers lack the ability to reliably provide valid responses to these methods. Why? Because a proper response to the sorts of questions that interest philosophers (e.g., whether people speak more like realists or antirealists) can only be answered under highly demanding conditions that require specialized training to reliably respond to in a way that we can be confident reveals one’s intuitions or commitments on the matter. What are these demanding conditions? The respondent must meet the following conditions for their intuitive response to a prompt in order to serve as an instance of the kind of evidence we’re after:

1. They must be a competent speaker of the relevant language

2. They must be free of performance errors

3. And they must be responding exclusively to semantic considerations, which requires a competence at partitioning off pragmatic features of language

Even if ordinary people meet (1), they will reliably fail (2) and (3) and thus their responses, when asked, are not exhibitions of their robust intuitions but of surface intuitions (p. 97). Whether most people “are moral realists,” on this view would turn on their robust intuitions. Social scientific methods won’t give us access to these robust intuitions. However, as experts who meet all three conditions (1), (2), and (3), philosophers are in a position to make judgments of the relevant sort from the armchair, without engaging in empirical research employing conventional social scientific methods. According to Kauppinen:

In practice, assessing the truth of intuition claims can remain a relatively armchair business that begins with our own considered reactions to the case at hand. We are entitled to have confidence in such reflection, since we take a lot of real-life experience of using concepts to the armchair with us.

[...]

By the time we begin to do philosophy, we have accumulated years and years’ worth of experience about what counts as proper application of concepts to different cases—we have, as it were, already done the sort of research I sketched above [...] (p. 110)

These are two excerpts from a longer passage in which Kauppinen lays out his conclusions. It’s a great paper and I encourage having a look at it, even if I disagree with much of it. Note Kauppinen’s framing at the end: the “research” has already been done. I don’t know what Kauppinen’s own take on the matter is, but it strikes me as possible for people who consider facts about the meaning of ordinary moral discourse to be empirical or non-empirical to both side with Kauppinen on this specific matter, leaving open an avenue for those with a variety of views about the nature of language to hold that conventional survey methods aren’t going to tell us whether nonphilosophers speak more like realists or antirealists. In other words, even if one considers this to be an empirical question, one might still think armchair methods are the proper means of resolving such questions.

On such a view, questions about whether nonphilosophers are moral realists or not are best addressed from the armchair.

2.3 In the field

Finally, one may take questions about whether ordinary moral language is closer to realism or antirealism to be a straightforward empirical question about, e.g., the psychology of speakers. On this view, questions about how nonphilosophers think are best resolved using conventional scientific methods. I am, perhaps to what might be the surprise of some people, fairly sympathetic to Kauppinen’s concerns about surveys. I think there are significant, and perhaps even insurmountable barriers to some of the empirical questions we might pose, and the methods we might use to address them. Yet at the same time, I don’t think that philosophers are in a privileged position to correctly judge the matters in question. Either the tools of science can settle the matter, or I’m not sure the matter in question can be settled.

I don’t want to digress into addressing what solutions I favor, but I’ll make one quick point about this. I think a lot of conventional experimental philosophy relies on the mistaken assumption that nonphilosophers think in accord with the categories and distinctions typical of contemporary analytic philosophy. As a result, they treat established philosophical positions as if they were psychological constructs, presume they can be readily operationalized, and then devise studies with the expectation that one can neatly categories nonphilosophers in accord with these categories.

I think these presumptions are frequently (if not usually) wildly presumptuous, and, more importantly, mistaken. The problem with these approaches is that experimental philosophers are designing studies with a top-down theoretical presupposition about how nonphilosophers think from the very outset: e.g., that they think like philosophers do, and can be neatly boxed in accord with established analytic schools of thought. But why suppose this is the case? I don’t believe we have especially good reasons to think this is the case, and, on the contrary, have some good reasons to think it isn’t. I favor bottom-up research that doesn’t make so many assumptions about how nonphilosophers think about traditionally philosophical topics. Observational, descriptive, and qualitative research, much of it involving interviews and research more closely resembling anthropology, are, I believe, better tools for addressing some of the questions that interest experimental philosophers than surveys and conventional social psychological or cognitive psychological methods.

2.4 So, what’s the problem?

So, why did I mention these three approaches? Because I endorse 2.3, but I reject approaches 2.1 and 2.2. The majority of philosophers employ armchair methods, not experimental methods. Yet I regard the question of whether ordinary people speak more like realists or antirealists to be an empirical question best addressed using the tools of social science. As such, I don’t consider analytic philosophers to be the relevant experts for addressing such a question. Of course, this position is itself a philosophical position, since I am taking a philosophical stance on who is or isn’t an expert. But analytic philosophers that employ armchair methods aren’t entitled to just declare, or assert, that they are the relevant experts, and that social scientists aren’t. That, too, would be a philosophical stance, and not one the rest of us are obliged to grant without an argument.

Having said all this, let’s reconsider this remark:

Yes the majority of the experts on the subject-matter agree that ordinary moral talk takes on characteristics of realism.

What, exactly, makes philosophers experts about ordinary moral talk? If questions about what ordinary people mean are empirical questions best addressed in the field, but most philosophers rely exclusively on armchair methods and aren’t experts in employing these methods, then most philosophers aren’t the relevant experts when it comes to addressing these questions.

The person who wrote these tweets makes several other questionable remarks in the thread. Have a look at the parts of the exchange that led up to the initial comment I addressed:

3.0 Conclusion

The rest of the exchange is worth having a look at to provide fuller context for my remarks. In any case, the notion that antirealists are being deceptive if they don’t presuppose realism when they talk is not reasonable. Even if most people spoke like moral realists, and even if an antirealist believed this, they don’t thereby acquire a moral obligation to go around constantly tediously qualifying all their language to make their philosophical presuppositions explicit on penalty of being “deceitful.” Their motivations for speaking the way they do would be relevant to assessing any accusations of deception, and it would also be important to evaluate whether, when engaging in ordinary language, whether deviation from widespread metaethical presuppositions led to breakdowns of communication or misunderstandings. I suspect they generally wouldn’t.

For comparison, some philosophers are mathematical platonists, and some aren’t. Must we first establish whether ordinary people are more inclined towards mathematical platonism or anti-platonism, then instruct all philosophers who hold the minority position to adjust their remarks about math accordingly? Suppose most people are some sort of mathematical platonists. If so, must all philosophers who endorse some anti-platonist conception or other let people know, when paying bills or taxes, or telling someone how many hours from now something will be, or how old their children are, that they don’t technically believe in actual numbers? Should they go around saying “These shoes were non-platonically $75”? Would we accuse them of being dirty, deceitful liars if they didn’t append qualifiers to all of their numeric discourse?

No. This would be ridiculous. And it’s likewise ridiculous to think that antirealists are dishonest if they don’t qualify all of their moral language. In any case, such considerations are probably moot: ordinary moral language isn’t “closer to realism,” and most ordinary people aren’t moral realists.

References

Kauppinen, A. (2007). The rise and fall of experimental philosophy. Philosophical explorations, 10(2), 95-118.