Arguments and augury

Overreliance on formalism

1.0 Overreliance on formalism

Analytic philosophy leans into logic and formal approaches more than continental philosophy, lending it an (often superficial) aura of clarity, precision, and rigor. For all the advantages this provides, one downside is that those who engage with analytic philosophy often develop a pathological insistence that one present their arguments in the form of syllogisms, or to otherwise simplify and formalize one’s reasons for holding a view into a cluster of premises, with the conclusion being the view in question.

Such requests have a place. If someone is attempting to present an argument, and its structure is unclear, asking them to formalize it is a good exercise both for the person presenting the argument and anyone evaluating it. It can be a useful exercise for organizing your thoughts, or packing your position into a digestible form.

Yet I don’t think I’ve ever encountered an argument in simple syllogistic form that, on viewing it, moved me to endorse the conclusion. That isn’t to say I’ve never changed my mind. I have. Yet the process is not one that follows the direct path of failing to reject the premises of a formal argument. One’s reasons for believing in a particular view may be due to an amalgamation of inclinations, intuitions, insights, beliefs, and commitments that are enmeshed in a broader network of other beliefs. You might believe {A} in part because {A} fits neatly with your beliefs that {B, C, D}. And you might believe {A} because you are committed to fundamental principle {X}, an inclination to believe {Y}, a suspicion that {~Z}, and because all of these sentiments, attitudes, beliefs, and commitments fit within a broader methodological framework that you’re comfortable with, that seems viable, and that has served you well.

This is little more than a sketch of a sketch, and I’ll add to it with a visual metaphor: in some ways we could think of our beliefs as a tree. Some of our beliefs exist at the tips of the tallest branches, and, as one works their way down, these branches converge on larger branches, which converge on the trunk, and on down the roots. The tips of the branches represent beliefs that depend on more foundational beliefs, which in turn depend on yet more foundational beliefs. Much the same way, many of our beliefs function more at the extremity of our network of beliefs, while others are more foundational. 

In general, the subjective plausibility of a belief existing at one of these extremities turns on considerations at one of the converging nodes, a thicker branch closer to the trunk, which in turn depends on beliefs circling the trunk, which in turn depend on the beliefs at the roots. The degree to which our beliefs are justified, or reasonable, is mutually interdependent on the rest of our network of beliefs. Yet the holistic way in which our beliefs mutually support one another can be cast aside and forgotten in the demand for arguments. 

I recently participated in a video with Kane Baker, which involved ranking arguments for non-naturalist moral realism from best (S-tier) to worst (E-tier). Others suggested we do a similar tier-ranking video for naturalist arguments for moral realism. But the most interesting suggestion was that we rank arguments for antirealism. 

What I found on having a look at the list of arguments for moral antirealism is that I don’t find any of the arguments to be especially strong. I didn’t even find any of them convincing. What’s more, I didn’t even find them convincing in aggregate. That is, it is not the case that I came to endorse moral antirealism in the following way:

1. I have no or only a weak inclination towards moral realism or antirealism

2. I evaluate arguments for moral realism

3. I evaluate arguments for moral antirealism

4. I weigh the strength of both sets

5. I conclude that antirealist arguments are, in aggregate, stronger than arguments for moral realism

6. I tentatively endorse moral antirealism, pending the publication of new arguments

…this is the kind of picture one might think I would employ, and perhaps that other philosophers employ. And for all I know, some people do approach philosophical questions in this way. But I am not an antirealist because of the argument from disagreement or any other particular argument, or even the whole set of arguments. Clearly, the whole set of arguments doesn’t convince realists, either. The degree to which one finds any set of arguments compelling or not will depend on the rest of your views, views that fall outside the scope of the arguments themselves.

I think my antirealist commitments are rooted in my entire network of beliefs and conception of the world. It didn’t develop as a direct and isolated response to formal arguments for antirealism. To reiterate: I don’t even find any of those arguments convincing.

When ranking arguments for non-naturalist moral realism, we ended up with what amounted to a comparative ranking. An argument judged S-tier was simply the best of a bad lot: none of the arguments for moral realism are even a little convincing to me. I find them less compelling than arguments for theism. In fact, I find them less compelling than arguments for Bigfoot, such as this one.

In case you think that is some kind of comedic hyperbole, it isn’t. It’s not that I think there’s a compelling case that Bigfoot exists. I just think arguments for moral realism are that bad. If that sounds ridiculous to you, because, after all, philosophers are experts, and cryptozoologists aren’t, keep in mind the point I am driving at: my reasons for assigning non-naturalist moral realism less plausibility than Bigfoot existing is rooted in a broader network of beliefs and commitments.

From my point of view, Bigfoot’s existence is very unlikely, but not inconsistent with my view of how the world works (i.e., roughly something naturalistic). In contrast, non-naturalist moral realism would require a fundamental reorientation of my philosophical view, my metaphilosophy, my views about psychology, epistemology, and ontology, and so on from the ground up. It is tantamount to embracing theism, only perhaps less plausible.

Consider the situation that puts me in. Around a quarter of philosophers endorse a view (non-naturalist moral realism), that I consider significantly less plausible than the kind of nonsense you’d see on the History channel. And I’m supposed to be embarrassed by this fact, or reconsider my views in light of this. 

No. First, given my views, it simply follows that certain kinds of natural phenomena, while very unlikely, are orders of magnitude more probable given the rest of my beliefs and commitments than various prominent philosophical accounts. And I don’t think the mere fact that smart people who study a topic think something is a reason for me to move that much in the direction of the view. No belief can be considered in isolation. There wouldn’t be any way for me to accept that non-naturalist moral realism were true without a radical restructuring of much of the rest of my views, just as there’d be no way to accept the resurrection of Jesus as a likely historical event without that having radical implications for the rest of my beliefs. 

One can casually peruse the PhilPapers survey and find a significant representation for all manner of views one is likely to reject, and to reject rather strongly. The number of theists is not insignificant. And if you think solutions to Newcomb’s problem are sufficiently straightforward, you may be disappointed by these results:

Someone’s getting this way wrong.

I don’t have some grand, sweeping conclusion here. I want to press what should be a fairly anodyne point: however it is we form our philosophical beliefs, it is probably not a simple tallying of a numbered list of arguments with recognized names for and against a given position.

Our evaluation of isolated philosophical arguments always exists against a backdrop of our existing beliefs, attitudes, commitments, and dispositions, much of which include content so peripheral to the argument in question, and to adjacent philosophical topics, that no reasonable conversation at the surface level of the argument is going to do much to move anyone, anywhere. We have some limited room to reshuffle beliefs at the extremity but many clashes on surface issues are downstream of far more fundamental beliefs. I don’t believe in the hard problem of consciousness or in qualia. Disputes about these issues are virtually moot if my assumptions, methods, intuitions, or phenomenology are very different from someone who does endorse the hard problem or believes in qualia.

This is why I think it’s a mistake to keep pressing me for a premise-premise-conclusion argument for my views on moral antirealism. Logic and formalism have their place. But their overuse has led many people to operate as though, in the absence of a numbered and labeled taxonomy of formal arguments, one doesn’t have “an argument” for their view, and without “an argument,” one has no case to make.

Compare to a prosecution’s case. Such a case will be based on converging lines of evidence that point in the same direction, and the construction of a narrative that fits the available evidence. It would be absurd, and unhelpful, to focus on isolated formal arguments:

P1: If the murder weapon had the defendant's fingerprints on it, then they committed the murder.

P2. The murder weapon had the defendant’s fingerprints on it.

C: Therefore, they committed the murder.

Such an argument would be foolish because people would focus on rejecting P1: It’s possible that their fingerprints were on it even if they didn’t commit the murder. And taken in isolation, one could kick up enough doubt about this one argument that it seems, again, in isolation, to not be very strong.

One can then assess all the prosecution’s other lines of evidence individually, find plausible grounds for rejecting one or more premises in those arguments, and then, at the end of the day, find all of the arguments lacking.

But it isn’t this or that argument, or just summing up the argument that makes the prosecution’s case. It is the dynamic, holistic interplay between the arguments as well. The arguments don’t simply have to be individually strong, they must be consistent with one another.

Just the same, a strong case for a particular philosophical view isn’t the product of the simple tallying of arguments; it is a conclusion that seems to follow naturally from a set of background assumptions. Our stance towards any particular philosophical issue is going to follow fairly naturally, or perhaps grudgingly but decisively, from our broader worldview; there may be topics we’re not sure of yet, but this, too, is largely a product of inadequate integration within our existing web of belief. In short, we think and reason holistically, but an excessive reliance on formalism can lead us to forget this, and to treat individual arguments as decisive, and to assign greater weight to them than they actually carry. It can also atomize philosophical issues, and lead people to mistakenly imagine that such arguments can be considered in isolation in the first place. 

Our philosophical beliefs are closer to an ecology rather than a scattered ark of animals, each with an independent physiology, diet, and suite of behaviors. And yet the formalistic philosophical approach that dominates the analytic tradition treats philosophical arguments like a semi-autonomous zoo: take a left at the junction to go visit the ontological argument pens, and walk a little further to witness the transcendental arguments exhibit. This focus, while helpful when appropriately contextualized, can lead to a fractured, fragmented, and ultimately unworkable way of thinking about philosophical topics, one that discourages metaphilosophy and more foundational and methodological questions, and always circles back to the formal, structured arguments. Never mind which questions are worth asking or what the best ways to do philosophy: shut up and tell me why you reject premise one!

I suspect much of the real fight in philosophy turns on these foundational assumptions, but they often bottom out in impasses, are highly abstract, may involve empirical claims people can’t (or don’t want to bother to try to) resolve, or are so focused on methodology that they’re simply uninteresting. The result is that much of the literature is populated with superficial and pointless arguments, all of which function as formalizations that do little more than conceal the background assumptions behind those arguments. 

The result is an impression of a discipline that refuses to grapple with its foundational assumptions, its methods, and its purpose in any clear, directed, and sustained way, so as to make actual progress. Actual progress would dissolve these disputes at the extremity: the bread and butter of analytic philosophy’s self-imposed recreational futility. We can’t churn out more papers and advance our careers if we actually get anything done. Not in this field, not using the assumptions we’re used to, and were trained in. So let’s keep churning out the same pointless hypothetical exercises, that, like chess puzzles, are interesting but don’t actually help us get anything done. Personally, I can’t stomach the futility of such puzzles, not because I don’t enjoy a good puzzle, but because I can’t maintain the pretense that such puzzle-solving has value. 

Sufficient clarity about many of the terminological issues alone would probably suffice in the wholesale dissolution of much, possibly most philosophical dispute. That doesn’t mean all the major disputes would go away, but many of the philosophical tumbleweeds that have amassed around those issues would drift away, leaving a solid core of issues that, if anything, would be more tractable.

I didn’t go into the field to pander to mystery mongers, and I have no interest in the frivolity of a clever premise or an interesting hybridization of seemingly disparate views. I want to get shit done. Given the spread of beliefs in philosophy, that doesn’t seem to be happening (at least not as consistently and as efficiently as it could across areas of specialization). 

Perhaps excessive formalism is a part of it. Perhaps formalizing serves the role of signaling one’s induction in philosophy and one’s willingness to play the game (in addition to maintaining the illusion that something science-ish is being done; ironic given all the lamentations about “scientism”). But philosophy isn’t a recreational activity for me. So much of philosophy looks like a game of prestige chutes and status ladders, of vying for one’s place in some “prestigious” journal, of jumping through one institutional hoop or another, all in a way that is ever-increasing in its insularity, isolation, and irrelevance. There is little in the field that strikes me as organic, as genuine, or as open; the whole thing seems like a teetering tower of words, words, words, on the precipice of…what? I don’t know. I don’t know where this field is going, but I find its present state enervating, aggravating, and alienating.

Clever arguments for mysterious conclusions rarely move me. Instead, my inclination is to think that if your argument leads to a mysterious or weird conclusion, that there’s probably something wrong with your argument, and not something wrong with my beliefs. As always, one philosopher’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens. A philosopher can always just retroactively abandon a premise if they don’t like where it leads.

Much of the dispute around consciousness strikes me this way. One thought experiment after another is supposed to suggest to me that physicalism must be false, and that there’s more to the mind than the body and its operations. I’m not moved by these concerns. I don’t put as much stock in the powers of introspection as my colleagues; introspection didn’t land us on the moon, build bridges, or cure disease. 

There is something to be said for observing the contents of our minds just as we observe the world around us, but if contemporary cognitive science has taught us anything, it is that, whereas our judgments about the world can be quite reliable, our judgments about how we interface with the world are riddled with mirages and clever constructions designed to smooth over and simplify the chaotic flux or sensory inputs. That blooming and buzzing confusion never truly goes away; it’s simply papered over with a kind of sensory and narrative illusion. So much of philosophy seems to consist in the captivation with this illusion, and an effort to reconcile the fictional world we perpetually weave for ourselves with the jolts and jostles of a reality that does not quite fit the illusion. The anti-physicalist, and anti-illusionist confidence of philosophers is a detriment to progress on the matter of consciousness. I am confident if I turned my attention to other topics, I’d find much mainstream philosophy likewise serving as an impediment to progress.

The same holds for the topic I discuss the most: metaethics. I don’t take the popularity of moral realism among professional analytic philosophers to be a strong indication that moral realism is plausible (though it counts somewhat towards this claim), so much as a reason to question the expertise of professional analytic philosophers. As a sanity check and a point of comparison, how would you react if 62% of professional philosophers insisted that that numbers were sentient or that potatoes had greater moral status than humans? I would presume there was an error in the survey, or that philosophers had lost their minds, long before I took such claims any more than a negligible degree more seriously. That should give a rough sense of how implausible I find moral realism. 

Note, too, that most specialists in philosophy of religion are theists. Is that a good reason to endorse theism? No. There are a variety of reasons why the raw proportion of philosophers that endorse a view is not, in and of itself, a good reason to think the view is especially likely to be correct or incorrect (see my series on the PhilPapers Fallacy, which addresses this at length).

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2.0 Logic Bae

Some moral realists have characterized confidence in my views as arrogance (explicitly; see here). When I add that I think many accounts of moral realism are so conceptually muddled that they’re not even wrong, this has been met with incredulity and mockery. Yet note the asymmetry here: moral realists routinely claim that moral realism is “obvious.” They claim it’s so obvious that people like me aren’t worth taking seriously, as Matthew does here:

“Now, as someone who does have them very strongly such that I think moral realism is blatantly obvious, it’s hard to take Lance’s position seriously.”

…I have never seen anyone accuse moral realists of arrogance for making such claims (though it probably does happen on occasion). 

I draw attention to this to emphasize a double standard. For some reason, moral realists have carte blanche to claim their views are obvious, and that the opposition isn’t worth taking seriously. But if we antirealists are confident in our views, we’re arrogant. 

There is even a tendency in the philosophical literature for moral antirealists to be somewhat deferential towards moral realism. As though moral realism is some kind of unassailable incumbent view. And, like a lord on its throne, the antirealists must wait in line, humbly requesting an audience and submitting their petitions for their lord’s approval. Much of the way the contemporary discourse is framed is one in which realists depict themselves as having some kind of upper hand: their view is treated as presumptively correct in the absence of adequate arguments to the contrary. Antirealists allegedly have to bite a lot of bullets. We’re supposed to grovel and apologize for the audacity to deny the obvious. We’re skeptics. We’re radicals. One can picture the jester’s caps the antirealist is expected to put on if they’re sufficiently brazen to express such a view.

This atmosphere emerged only recently in contemporary metaethics. Antirealism was probably the more common view until a few decades ago. Look at how Railton frames the dispute as recently as 1986, the year I was born:

“Among contemporary philosophers, even those who have not found skepticism about empirical science at all compelling have tended to find skepticism about morality irresistible. For various reasons, among them an understandable suspicion of moral absolutism, it has been thought a mark of good sense to explain away any appearance of objectivity in morality discourse.” (p. 163)

This is not the sort of remark you’d expect as the opening sentences in a field where moral realism dominated.

Yet realism is the ascendent view. Most analytic philosophers are moral realists, and endorsement of moral realism may be on the rise (it went up from 56% in 2009 to 62% in 2020, but this isn’t enough to establish a trend). Why is moral realism more popular? It might be due to realists presenting compelling arguments and persuading people, but I’m skeptical.

No groundbreaking, compelling arguments for realism have emerged in the past thirty years. It’s not that arguments for realism are stronger. There have been new arguments, or at least new proponents of old arguments. Companions in guilt, convergence, Huemer’s ontological argument, Enoch’s deliberative indispensability argument. But I’m not convinced these arguments are pushing the realist dial up so much as they are symptoms of it being pushed up by more inscrutable factors. Of course I could be wrong. Maybe moral realists have successfully leveraged arguments to persuade others. But I’m not so sure, and I think we should be hesitant to presume that a rise in a given view is likely the result of convincing arguments. Of course, even if the arguments are convincing people, I, personally, think the arguments are all unconvincing, so that would only push the problem (if it is a problem) to a different explanatory battlefield. But we’re not there yet.

I suspect part of the success of realism is due to a successful PR campaign. In other words, realists managed to push their way into the limelight, and now present their mutual confidence in the “obviousness” of their position is all the testament they need to frame the dialectic in terms heavily biased in their favor. 

I’m tempted to call what’s happened “Moorean gaslighting”: gather enough people convinced of the obviousness of a view, obtain sufficient institutional gravitas to give the impression that your views are the “default,” position, then assure anyone who comes along, curious about the topic you study, that anyone who disagrees with you is an idiot, a psychopath, or a victim of some tragic, undiagnosed form of agnosia, a “conceptual impoverishment” that prevents them from “intellectually seeing” the truth as you do. 

The latter is, quite literally what Matthew is supposing we believe: that he, and other moral realists, inexplicably possess a unique power to discern the truth. No evidence that they possess such a power is provided. Those of us who don’t “get it” are simply and sadly conceptually impoverished. Matthew’s more recent commentary on this is hard to parse, though. Matthew states:

Those of us who have morally realist intuitions shouldn’t pay much heed to what anti-realists like Lance say—I’m very confident that I grasp the moral facts, and will continue to be in the absence of a powerful debunking account. If people like Lance don’t, all the worse for them.

And this doesn’t require thinking that these people are dumb or deficient. There are lots of things that all of us except Von Neumann can’t grasp. People have some intuitions that others don’t—so if people lack intuitions that you have, after suitable reflection, you shouldn’t give them weight. You are in possession of evidence that they are not and, as such, you shouldn’t take their belief, formed in the absence of the relevant evidence especially seriously.

Note a few things. First, I’m confident Matthew doesn’t grasp the moral facts, and, depending on what Matthew thinks an intuition is, I’m not even granting that Matthew actually has the intuitions he reports having: I think it’s possible to be so conceptually and methodologically muddled one fumbles their own phenomenology, conflating theory-laden elements bundled up in one’s verbal and conceptual presumptions that one mistakes their inferences about their experiences for the content of the experiences themselves. At the very least, there’s a dilemma here. If the intuitions Matthew has in mind are some kind of special psychological state Matthew has but I don’t, well, where is the evidence that Matthew has such psychological states, and why should I believe he has them? I am not obligated to grant that Matthew actually has some kind of special, reliable “intellectual seeming” while I have no analogous intellectual seeming to the contrary. 

Conversely, if the intuitions in question involve the mundane type of psychological states that I do think people have, myself included, then I have intuitions to the contrary: it does seem to me that moral realism is obviously false, and I may be just as confident in its falsity as Mathew is in its truth. In which case, Matthew’s purported asymmetry isn’t real, and we stand (all else being equal) in a symmetric epistemic relation. Either way, Matthew’s portrayal of the situation is open to question: in the first case, I suspect Matthew is simply mistaken, and in the second, Matthew isn’t in any better position than I am. 

In short, Matthew’s purported asymmetry either 

(a) is one that, on my view, probably doesn’t exist because Matthew doesn’t even have the intuitions he thinks he has, or those “intuitions” aren’t as reliable and truth-tracking as Matthew thinks. I also don’t think Matthew could tell a good psychological story that would provide a plausible justification for claiming that he and others have intuitions in favor of views, while people in my situation simply lack intuitions on the matter altogether (rather than having equal and opposite intuitions to the contrary)

(b) I have comparable intuitions to the contrary, and thus Matthew is in no better a position than I am.

…It’s really going to depend on how Matthew cashes out intuitions. I think there are important and underdeveloped empirical questions about our respective cognitions that I don’t think Matthew has developed much (or if he has, I haven’t seen it).

Second, I appreciate this remark:

And this doesn’t require thinking that these people are dumb or deficient.

Note, however, that there’s a common rhetorical tactic where one says someone is an X without saying they’re an X. A politician may say:

I’m not saying my opponent is a crook and a liar, but…

This is a great way to say that one’s opponent is a crook and a liar. I will be charitable in assuming Matthew sincerely doesn’t want to accuse me (and those like me) of being “dumb or deficient,” but I think this remark pragmatically implies that maybe we are, and that its use was unnecessary: either omitting the qualifier entirely or providing even greater qualification (explicitly insisting we’re super smart, though maybe Matthew doesn’t think that) may have gone further. 

As it stands, however, the remark looks indistinguishable from a rhetorician’s way of planting that idea that Lance is “dumb or deficient” with sufficient plausible deniability to insist otherwise in public. Again, to be clear, I don’t think Mathew is intentionally doing this. My attitude is that Mathew is insufficiently sensitive to pragmatic implications and probably doesn’t appreciate how incautious wording can influence readers. I think this is a problem ubiquitous in analytic philosophy. There’s so much focus on decontextualized semantic analysis that people engaged in a philosophical mode of communication lose sight of pragmatic implication. This is central to my case for normative entanglement. The (presumably unintentional) implication that maybe I am just dumb or deficient is exacerbated by the very next remark:

There are lots of things that all of us except Von Neumann can’t grasp

Von Neumann is renowned as one of the most intelligent people who ever lived. I grant that the point of the comparison is that some people can’t grasp things other people can grasp, and that this doesn’t mean that those who can’t grasp the concepts in question aren’t “dumb or deficient,” but if your goal is to emphasize this point, why opt for an example of someone who, in virtue of our inability to see things the way they did, probably does indicate that we’re dumb or deficient, at least relative to them? This is a bit like saying:

I’m just saying that moral realists like Matthew are dumb or deficient. There are some things only people like Einstein and myself can grasp. Some people just can’t.

It may be true that I only intend to communicate that Einstein and myself may happen to get things in virtue of shared features of our minds other than our mutual brilliance, but it’d be incredibly weird to invoke an iconic genius for the comparison if there was no need: you risk (in fact, I’d go so far as to say you’d guarantee) that many readers would interpret this to indicate that you’re implying you’re smart like Einstein, and those who disagree with you aren’t. I think the same thing is going on here: Matthew’s remark formally suggests I’m not dumb or deficient, but given its phrasing, and the subsequent reference to Von Neumann, I think it implies or heavily hints that I am dumb or deficient relative to Matthew, since Matthew is engaged in the opposite of guilt-by-association. Matthew’s remarks give the impression that realists stand in relation to antirealists in the same way Von Neumann (a genius who sees the world in a way strictly more accurately and insightfully than the rest of us) stands in relation to the rest of us. Whether intentional or not, Matthew’s remarks imply that moral realists are more insightful than moral antirealists, in virtue of their distinctive capacity for having certain kinds of intellectual seemings.

This is a common theme I’ve seen throughout philosophy: a subtle undercurrent of rhetoric and implication. Again, this isn’t a matter of intent. I can’t read minds. But I do think we’re all motivated reasoners, and that people fall into the habit of framing their positions in ways that are biased in their favor and against opposing views. And I suspect much of this biased framing bleeds through the pragmatics of everyday discourse. The nominal precision and rigor of analytic philosophical claims serves, I suspect, as a cover, for a kind of Necker-Cubean sleight of hand, where one makes a claim that has two readings: the anodyne philosophical interpretation, regal in its purely semantic garb, and the invidious ordinary language analog, replete with its implied aspersions. 

I am increasingly suspicious that much of analytic philosophy is a guise for signaling, rhetoric, and pushing one’s views under the guise of engaging in serious argument, when one is in fact fairly incorrigible with respect to their views, isn’t motivated to change them, and is unwittingly engaged in an activity driven more by the sorts of motives one might find here or here than a genuine quest for truth. If so, it’s not clear I’m any less subject to such motives, which is a disturbing notion.

At any rate, the notion that Matthew and other realists have special access to the Truth through some superpower while I and others (like Bernard Williams) are tragically deprived of this gift is a bizarre and dismissive rationale for why I don’t see things the way Matthew does. It would be insulting if it weren’t so ridiculous. Matthew doesn’t take antirealism seriously. That’s fine. I don’t take Matthew’s baseless claim to have philosophical superpowers seriously, either.

In the conversations I’ve witnessed or participated in, moral realists also occasionally depict themselves as though they are morally superior to antirealists, and as though antirealism were some kind of dirty, wicked view. One can almost picture moral antirealists as sewer dwellers lurching out of storm drains at night to scrawl our arguments in feces. The moral realist doesn’t need a good argument to deal with us. They need a hose.

Antirealists are expected to scramble to come up with excuses for why they aren’t monsters, and how their worldview, if widely adopted, wouldn’t lead to the wholesale collapse of society. Such arguments are moot, because their guilt has already been determined, and their continued presence is tolerated for the sake of having a foil. It looks, for all the world, like how a predominantly Christian community would have viewed atheists in the past: without God, we’d be nothing but animals, and life would have no meaning or ultimate purpose. There are obvious overlaps in this depiction of the world and Parfit’s own existential concerns about a world without objective value. I don’t think the overlap is incidental.

It doesn’t require looking that closely to get a sense that there’s something suspiciously quasi-religious going on with the way some realists construe the debate, and with the way they make their case for it. Hence declarations of some special power of discernment for intuiting the moral truths, and a host of other truths, for that matter. This is ironic, given that the primary proponents of such views are atheists. Perhaps thousands of years of inculcation in monotheistic religions have had a residual impact on Western philosophy, and, despite several centuries of decline, philosophers are still influenced by something like a notion of divine revelation. Only the revelatory powers have been stripped of their theological trappings. Where once God spoke to us, we now are left with the whispers of a voice without origin. 

Much of philosophy strikes me this way: as a kind of or oracular method of interpreting, not the will of God, but of reality itself.  So long as our latter day oracles occupy the Ivory Tower rather than the Temple of Apollo, and garnish their proclamations with a sprinkle of logic and formalism, like a philosophical Salt Bae, they can at least give the appearance of a respectable discipline. Perhaps if we required analytic philosophers to wear silly robes and stupid hats people would regard what they say with the appropriate level of gravitas.

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3.0 The Origin of Nonsense in the Breakdown of the Analytic Mind

I’m reminded of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a work so captivatingly strange that I’ve always hoped there was some truth to it. Roughly, Jaynes argues that consciousness only arose in the past few thousand years. Prior to this, people were not conscious in the way we are today. Instead, people’s minds were divided into two separate and interactive parts: one half consisted of the hallucinatory voices of Gods directing the other half, while that second half received these directives and executed the will of the Gods. There was no unified self, no singular center of narrative gravity, but a “bicameral mind,” that functioned quite differently from the modern mind. On Jaynes’s view, consciousness is not an automatic output of the default structure of the mind, but something that must be acquired and developed. You can find a summary of the view here. As Weijers puts it, “Consciousness, in Jaynes’s definition, is a box of conceptual tools that is not ‘included with the hardware’. It is ‘software’ that had to be invented, like tools such as the wheel.” Modern consciousness arose in the wake of the gradual decline of the bicameral mind, an event that took place over the span of several centuries following the Late Bronze age collapse (~1200 BCE).

Prior to this, Gods reigned supreme, and the bicameral mind was in full force. But the time of the Gods did not last forever. In his excellent review of the book, Alexander summarizes Jaynes's account of the breakdown that eventually led to the modern conscious mind. A little over 3000 years ago, increased trade led to greater cross-cultural interaction. Couple with geographic displacement, people were forced to adapt to changing conditions, conditions which prompted the emergence of a theory of mind. And with its emergence, the voices of the Gods began to fade.

Jaynes then describes the fallout of this centuries-long decline. Alexander describes this, as well (really, you should go read the review in its entirety; here I am doing my best to paraphrase only portions of it). Where the Gods were once omnipresent, they appeared less and less often, emerging only at key moments, and then eventually not at all. This shift wasn’t so gradual that people didn’t notice. It was accompanied by numerous documented lamentations about the decline of the Gods. Some of these remarks are ominously and suspiciously consistent with Jaynes’s proposal, as far-fetched as it is. Alexander provides two examples, noting that they are “oddly, well, on point”:

My god has forsaken me and disappeared

My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance

The good angel who walked beside me has departed.

One who has no god, as he walks along the street

Headache envelops him like a garment

As the voices receded from people’s minds, they turned to ritual in an effort to summon the Gods back, ushering in a period in which people focused heavily on omens and portents. And where once one could speak with the Gods in temples and shrines, we invented heavens and hells and populated them with the disembodied and voiceless spirits that once surrounded us. 

The Gods and their supernatural hosts became ever more distant, ever more relegated to spiritual realms beyond our direct ability to observe. Eventually, only a few prophets and oracles could commune with the Gods, as their voices were, for most people, gone entirely. With time, the oracles and prophets became ever more scarce, until Apollo, through the last oracle at Delphi, declared that no future prophecies would be revealed.

There’s a somber vibe to this narrative, and I can’t help but feel sympathy for the people who occupied what is probably a largely fictional past. As fanciful (and again, something about this account is just so bizarre I want it to be true) as this account may be, even if the gods mostly retreated from our world, they never fully went away. Prophets have emerged throughout the modern age, and people continue to consult horoscopes, claim to hear or at least feel God’s presence, and to believe in the power of prophecy. 

With the rise of secularism, many people no longer hear the voices of God. Yet I have this persistent sense that something like this persists in the way more rationalistically inclined philosophers approach the questions that interest them. It isn’t God that speaks to them, but the whispers of a bicameral mind, a second self, an intermediary, an oracle lurking in one’s mind that doesn’t hear the directives of God but the universe itself.

Psychology has only started to grapple with the fact that we know almost nothing about variation in how humanity, as a whole, thinks. This is because almost all psychology research was conducted in, on, and by people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies, with an even more narrow focus on college freshman to boot. The result has been that our findings concern only a tiny portion of humanity. 

A now substantial body of empirical evidence suggests that most of the participants in our studies are psychological outliers with respect to the rest of humanity, and we are therefore very limited in what we can say about how people in general think. I discuss this at length in this blog post and this video. This does not mean people all over the world are radically different and we don’t know anything about psychology. Rather, it’s that we don’t know which features of psychology generalize to all populations, and which exhibit population level variation. Nevertheless, existing evidence suggests that moral and prosocial behavior are prime candidates for significant cultural variation, and it’s well within the realm of possibility that various aspects of moral psychology vary as well.

As scientific fields have rendered their distinctive body of questions sufficiently tractable to a set of empirical methods, they have peeled off one by one from their host, leaving behind a husk gradually shedding itself of questions that once fell within its domain. I’ll dig up the numbers for a future post, but for now, we can ask: if the social sciences have picked up a lot of the researchers interested in morality, and those researchers are no longer in philosophy, and those who opt to study morality empirically versus more classically in philosophy differ in their disposition, it may be that precisely those people with an empirical disposition have gone on to pursue the study of morality outside of philosophy itself, leading to a kind of funneling effect where those with the least empirical and most a prioristic dispositions have been left to their own devices, in an increasingly hollow echo chamber of those with similar philosophical dispositions. If so, what we may be seeing is an artifact of the way institutions have changed over time, both with respect to the study of morality and more broad changes in the distribution of researchers across disciplines. 

Meanwhile, analytic philosophers studying morality have remained obstinate in their lack of engagement with the relevant literature. Notably, the moral psychology literature itself is already comically inadequate for addressing cross-cultural questions, but at least some people are trying, even if efforts to do so are spotty, inconsistent, and far from adequate, you do have serious efforts, such as Curry, Mullins, & Whitehouse (2019).

Yet for whatever reason, philosophers have persisted in theorizing through a culturally blinkered lens, without knowing the extent to which their judgments on any given philosophical matter have been shaped by their enculturation. It’s a bizarre situation, and while some acknowledge this fact, I see no efforts to do much about it. Perhaps exposure to other cultures or immersion in other languages would help contextualize and reshape their moral theorizing, undermining confidence that “we” find this or that claim intuitive, as they internalize an appreciation that there is no singular “we” when it comes to humanity (assuming, of course, that I’m correct that there isn’t and that people pick up on this via cultural immersion).

Suppose, for instance, that many cultures around the world don’t think like people from WEIRD populations when it comes to abstract considerations about the nature of morality. Suppose exposure to other cultures would improve the way philosophers theorize from the armchair, since they’d become increasingly aware of the degree to which their judgments may be the output of parochial, culturally-shaped psychological systems. If so, then immersion and interaction with other cultures could lead to the lessening of the a prioristic “voice” behind their intuitions: it could lead to an analogous breakdown in the “bicameral mind” of the modern philosopher. 

Whereas the bicameral mind of the past consisted of a conduit for the gods and a recipient for their instructions, the modern philosopher could be thought of (metaphorically speaking) as a conduit for intuitions: whispers from a transcendent realm of Truth, and a recipient, who receives and interprets these inscrutable and mysterious insights in a passive “non-inferential” way. I, of course, don’t mean any of this literally. My point rather is to illustrate the strange and schismatic way in which analytic philosophers inclined towards realist accounts and enchanted with “intuitions” seem to keep truth at a distance from their own goals, values, and practices. Philosophy isn’t an instrument constructed for our purposes, but a method for discerning what the world is like and, unlike mere descriptive sciences, prescribing our behavior. It is normative a way that has some kind of mysterious authority over us. 

The normativity of philosophical truths purportedly exerts some kind of force over how we “must” think and what we “ought” to do. This is the supposed “normativity” of logic, of epistemology, and of ethics. Once discovered, these “normative” truths dictate how we must think and what we must do, regardless of whether doing so would serve our interests or achieve our goals. For example, once we have a proper analysis of “knowledge,” we’ll know the application conditions for the concept of knowledge, and will now be in a position to know the precise conditions in which we can know or fail to know something. Since this is “normative,” we presumably ought to comply, and if we don’t, we’re “irrational” or failing as epistemic agents. Never mind whether the analysis that reveals itself serves our interests. It is the correct analysis, and so we have no choice but to comply. We must. It is, after all, normative.

The philosopher’s normativity is a strange thing: a mysterious force that has no power over us so long as we’re ignorant of it. But, once discovered, it compels us, like Platonic puppet strings, to direct our thought and action in accordance with the transcendent Truths. Why would anyone want to discover such truths? They have nothing to do with our goals and interests, but instead direct us in accordance with some non-agentic and inscrutable force. It’s as though philosophy were the process of opening one’s mind to ineffable Cthulhian wisdom. With each insight, each “intellectual seeming,” formless entities reach across from another world to bind us to their will, as we become mere vessels for executing the contents of propositions.

I got carried away with this metaphor. My point is this. I want to achieve my goals. Philosophical theorizing purportedly furnishes us with all sorts of facts, some of which are “normative.” Yet the kinds of judgments and actions they indicate that I “should” comply with either are aligned with my goals and interests, in which case I’d have done them anyway, and could have skipped the trouble of figuring out whether extradimensional orders align with my goals, or they don’t, in which case I have no interest in complying with them and, in any case, I simply won’t. 

Philosophy can tell me what’s true. But it can’t tell me what to do, regardless of whether I want to or not. It can try. But I just won’t. And why would I want to? I suppose the better question is: why do philosophers want to comply with these “truths” or even think they “must” do so? Why do they care whether they “ought” to accept a conclusion or “should” perform some action, if they don’t want to? 

4.0 Conclusion

Logic and formalization play an essential role in ensuring clarity, precision, and rigor. But they must be used judiciously and in their appropriate contexts. Much of analytic philosophy, high on the purity of logical and formal approaches, has taken too much of its own supply, and become enamored of formalism for its own sake. The result is a pathological propensity to think in a distinctively analytic, sequential, and atomistic style, to the exclusion of more holistic approaches to philosophy. Enchantment with formalism has also bled into the broader online community.

This is all the more bizarre, given that most people aren’t very good at logic. It is, simultaneously, and somewhat paradoxically, both undervalued in that it almost never used when it would be appropriate to do so, and overvalued, in that it is deployed when it is superfluous, distracting, or unhelpful. And perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. If something like the argumentative theory of reasoning (see Mercier & Sperber, 2011) is correct. That is, if human reasoning was selected for its role in assessing and constructing persuasive arguments, and is geared more towards persuasion than the mutual pursuit of truth, it may come as no surprise if philosophy touts grand ideals, but fails to live up to the hype. Perhaps all that clarity, precision, and rigor is a way to flatter ourselves while what philosophers are really doing is navigating social hierarchies to reap the benefits of status and prestige. Philosophers are, after all, human.

References

Curry, O. S., Mullins, D. A., & Whitehouse, H. (2019). Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies. Current anthropology, 60(1), 47-69.

Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2011). Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behavioral and brain sciences, 34(2), 57-74.

Railton, P. (1986). Moral realism. The philosophical review, 95(2), 163-207.