Are people who claim moral realism is unintelligible rude liars?

1.0 Introduction

One of my philosophical positions is that certain forms of moral realism (in particular, certain kinds of non-naturalist moral realism) often appeal to meaningless terms and concepts, like the notion of categorical reasons or irreducible normativity. I call this the unintelligibility thesis.

There are two common objections people make to this position:

1. It’s insulting, offensive, or an “ad hominem”

2. I’m lying. I actually do understand the concepts in question but I pretend not to for some rhetorical purpose

You can find instances of both of these claims in this recent YouTube comment:

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen accusations like this. They pop up every few weeks. So I figured I’d address them.

2.0 Claim #1: Unintelligibility theses are insulting, offensive, or are ad hominems

With respect to the first: for some reason, people seem to think that claiming that a position isn’t meaningful suggests that the person who holds the position is stupid or incompetent. It does not. It no more entails or even implies that this is the case than saying that a person is mistaken about the facts. The implication that someone who holds a false or unintelligible view is stupid or incompetent is contingent on why one thinks the person is making the error in question, and how competent or intelligent they’d need to be to avoid it.

I do not think realists who hold what I regard as unintelligible positions are stupid or incompetent for doing so, any more so than realists or antirealists think their rivals are stupid for holding false beliefs. With respect to the kinds of positions that I think are unintelligible, I don’t think it’s easy to recognize this because one’s sense that they are meaningful is downstream of certain background assumptions about, e.g., language and meaning, philosophical methods, phenomenology, etc. If the mistake occurs in some foundational aspect of one’s philosophical views, it may be very hard to root out the mistake.

In contrast, if you’re a moral error theorist, then you don’t think moral realism is unintelligible, it’s just false. Why is this any less insulting? After all, the error theorist and the realist both agree about the meaning of moral claims, and if they’re both analytic philosophers, may share most metaphilosophical assumptions in common. So, apparently, the realist has all the philosophical resources available to them to recognize that they’re mistaken, and yet they still get the answer wrong. Given this, one could argue that error theory is a highly insulting, rude, ad hominem position to hold, because it implies moral realists are a bunch of idiots who just fail to reason properly.

For comparison: suppose you saw someone make constant blunders in chess. They kept losing their queen for no apparent reason, they kept trading rooks for pawns, and so on. Which is a more insulting assumption:

1. This person has a perfect understanding of the rules of chess, and is trying their best to win

2. This person is confused about the rules of chess or what the goal of the game is

I think (1) is the more insulting of the two. And I believe (1) is a lot closer to thinking certain forms of moral realism are false than that they’re unintelligible. 

When I hold that certain forms of moral realism are unintelligible, I am suggesting that the proponents of these views are subject to a more foundational conceptual error that comes prior to the position itself. They may be making a mistake when introspecting about their phenomenology, or may be making a mistake rooted in linguistic confusions, or something of that kind. These mistakes, if they’re making them, would be due to holding misconceptions or committing errors that are non-obvious and do not immediately emerge in conventional metaethical discourse. They would be extremely subtle mistakes one makes with respect to language, meaning, introspection, and so on. They’re the kinds of mistakes really smart and thoughtful people make all the time. Of course, I could be mistaken about this, and they’re not making any such errors. In contrast, what kind of error is someone making if they aren’t confused at all, but still get it wrong? They’re closer to a person who knows exactly what the rules of chess are, and is trying to win, but just keeps failing.

Think, for a moment, about which of the two chess players has more potential to become a good chess player: the person doing their best, within the rules, to play well, but who keeps losing anyway, or the person who, for, let’s suppose, completely understandable reasons, doesn’t actually know the rules of chess, and keeps losing as a result? We have some evidence, at least, that the first person isn’t very good at playing chess. We have less evidence about the second person. Maybe they’d play better than the first person if they knew the rules. But I think it’s reasonable to suspect we have some evidence the first person doesn’t have a knack for chess but the second person might.

If that thought experiment doesn’t illustrate what I’m trying to get across, consider another: 

Suppose two people both attempt to bake a cake. One person is using a great recipe that, if followed, will yield a delicious cake. They nevertheless produce a disgusting, awful cake. A second person was given a bad recipe: there’s too much butter, not enough eggs, the baking temperature isn’t right, and so on. They produce a bad cake.

We have good reason to believe the first person is not a good baker. We have much less reason to think the second person is a bad baker. Now, suppose the second person has an obviously terrible recipe, e.g., it says they should add a bucket of toenails to the mix, or that they should bake the cake at 400 C for a year. Sure, okay, maybe the second person is more incompetent than the first, since they fail to recognize obviously nonsensical instructions. But if the second person has good general baking knowledge, and it’s not immediately apparent that there’s anything obviously wrong with the recipe (perhaps there are changes to the temperature, or the amount of eggs, but it’s a recipe for a cake that uses a different type of flour), then the person’s mistakes are far more understandable and far less an indication that they’re a bad baker than the first person.

This is generally how I see many philosophical disputes. Insofar as I think other people are making errors, I don’t think they’re easy to spot, so I don’t think the people making them (if they are making them) are making catastrophic and obvious mistakes.

In sum: thinking that a person’s position is unintelligible doesn’t entail anything especially insulting. Error theorists, like proponents of antirealist quietism like myself, are more than capable of recognizing that our beliefs exist against a backdrop of a much wider web of beliefs, and that philosophical positions we don’t hold can seem plausible conditional on the rest of one’s beliefs. The defensibility of one’s beliefs is a holistic matter; any individual philosophical position is rarely an indication that its proponent is stupid or incompetent when considered in isolation. That just isn’t how I judge other people’s philosophical acumen, and I very much doubt it’s how error theorists, or noncognitivists, or other antirealists judge realists. 

Nothing about thinking positions are unintelligible carries any such implication. If people infer such implications from these claims, such inferences are phantom of their own making.

3.0 Claim #2: Proponents of unintelligibity theses are lying

The second suggestion is worse. This person suggests that people like me, who endorse unintelligibility claims, are doing something that is a “largely performative, rhetorical trick.” The suggestion here seems to be that we’re merely pretending to find the terms in question unintelligible to serve some rhetorical purpose.

Maybe some people do that, but how would this person know? On what basis are they making such an inference? I’ve commented on the propensity for people to charge the targets of their criticism with dishonesty recently in this comment.

People don’t have telepathic powers. It’s a very serious charge to suggest that another person is lying or pretending to hold the views that they hold. 

If you’re going to make such an accusation, I think you should have a darn good reason for making such a claim. Raising this suggestion is highly destructive to productive exchanges. It poisons the well, inviting others to share in the presumption that the people expressing these views are insincere. Insofar as such accusations serve to justify dismissing the position, this is far closer to an ad hominem than anything I’ve said. After all, a position isn’t mistaken even if the person making the claim doesn’t believe it. So even if proponents of intelligibility theses were intentionally lying and engaging in performative rhetorical tricks, the claim that the terms in question may be unintelligible would still stand. 

It’s also just rude and presumptuous to suppose not only that one knows what people’s actual motives are, but that those motives are bad motives. It’s a very bad habit to go around hurling accusations of dishonesty without presenting anything to back those accusations up.

I talk about metaethics every day. I talk to friends and family about it. My wife has heard me discuss my views privately, on a regular basis, for years. So have several of my friends. If I were lying or pretending, it would be profoundly strange that I continue to maintain this charade in my private life, and to express such views with apparent exasperation. It wouldn’t be that difficult for me to provide testimony from at least some of them confirming as much. For me to be lying or pretending for rhetorical effect, I’d have to be one of the world’s greatest actors engaged in some kind of insane, prolonged method acting for years…just to employ a rhetorical trick that has primarily led to random people on the internet occasionally insulting me and accusing me of lying.

4.0 Conclusion

In most contexts, these accusations are simply unjustified. There’s nothing especially rude or insulting about unintelligibility theses. Such suggestions were prominent throughout much of the 20th century. They’re less common now, but they have been a part of mainstream philosophical tradition for a while now. They are a perfectly conventional line of critique, and have nothing at all to do with suggesting other people are stupid or incompetent.

There’s also no particularly good reason to think that the people who’ve made such claims are just a bunch of liars. I’d never even encountered such a suggestion until I started seeing people make these claims online. Are we to suppose that the logical positivists were a bunch of liars pretending that various metaphysical claims were nonsense merely for rhetorical effect? The suggestion is ridiculous. It’s no less ridiculous when it’s directed at people like myself, since we’re often drawing on or are influenced by precisely these traditions. We’re not insulting anyone and we’re not pretending. I really hope people recognize this and stop making these accusations so readily.