Bayesian Traps and the War of Optics
Bayesian Traps and the War of Optics
Normative Entanglement #4
1.0 How to cast “detect evil” on moral antirealists
This post expands on my previous introduction of the notion of normative entanglement. If you’re not familiar with that concept, you may want to review some of my earlier commentary on it, which you can find here:
Normative entanglement: A new name for an old rhetorical trick
Normative entanglement: The linguistic trap at the heart of realist rhetoric
Normative entanglement refers to instances in which people conflate metaethical and normative considerations, usually in a way that yields rhetorical or practical advantages such as implying that people who hold rival philosophical positions are bad people or have repugnant moral views.
There's a funny thing about the standard question I use to describe normative entanglement:
“Is torturing babies for fun objectively wrong?”
Part of what makes a “no” response so unappealing is that it can pragmatically imply that you have repugnant moral views. However, there’s another interesting feature of a “no” response: it actually provides evidence that you don’t think baby torture is wrong.
The question is a complex question since it involves responding to a metaethical and normative moral question simultaneously. You have two discrete response options: “yes” and “no.”
A “yes” indicates only one position: (1) you endorse realism and think baby torture is wrong.
A “no”, on the other hand, is consistent with three possibilities: (2) you endorse realism but think baby torture is not wrong, (3) you reject realism but think baby torture is wrong, (3) you reject realism and think baby torture is not wrong.
Most antirealists would probably want to endorse (3). However, a “no” response is consistent with (2), (3), and (4). In saying “no,” you rule out (1), so anyone who hears your response has now been given evidence that you don’t think baby torture is wrong. Two of the three positions you might endorse involve a normative moral stance that baby torture isn’t wrong. Here’s a chart from my work (Bush, 2023) that depicts these four possibilities:
This makes the question I’ve described extremely dangerous: those who exploit it double dip on the rhetorical punch of the question: they simultaneously exploit both the pragmatics of ordinary language to give the misleading impression those who say “no” are awful people, and exploit features of the complex question to create an asymmetric division in meaning for a “yes” and “no” response, where a “yes” simultaneously disambiguates one’s position on both questions, while a “no” doesn’t.
This asymmetry results in a “No” response lumping those who are opposed to the action in question but who simply reject moral realism in with those who aren’t opposed to the action (and may even be in favor of it). The result is a verbal trick that splits all respondents between realists who object to the action and an undifferientated amalgamation of everyone else: the antirealist that opposes baby torture has no choice but to “conceptually associate” with realists and antirealists who aren’t opposed to baby torture, in a way that fails to disambiguate their actual attitude towards baby torture without further clarification. As a result, a direct “no” response actually provides evidence they might be okay with baby torture. If that doesn’t strike you as an extremely devious question, I’m not sure what would.
2.0 Distinctive dangers for error theory
This is especially devious against error theorists, in particular. Recall that error theorists hold that:
Moral claims attempt to describe objective moral facts.
There are no objective moral facts.
So all moral claims are false.
Since the error theorist is committed both to a view about the metaphysics of morality and a view about the semantics of ordinary moral claims, they face an additional set of challenges when confronted with statements like “baby torture is wrong”: namely, that because they take “wrong” to just mean “objectively wrong,” it is challenging for them to sincerely and consistently affirm that “baby torture is wrong” in the way other antirealists can respond.
As a result, an error theorist might see (4) as redundant and technically true, and thereby endorse it instead of (3). This exposes them to even greater rhetorical challenges than other antirealists, at least in this particular case. For the error theorist, metaethical and normative concerns are inextricably bound up in one another when describing ordinary moral discourse. As a result, the error theorist will typically take “baby torture is not wrong” to be true because“wrong” just means “objectively wrong.”
However, even if the error theorist affirms that “it is not wrong to torture babies,” this does not entail anything about their personal attitude towards baby torture. It is completely consistent with this position to be personally opposed to baby torture, to find it repugnant, to have exactly the same reactive attitudes to it as a moral realist (or antirealist that is not an error theorist) and so on. This is because the error theorist views ordinary moral assertions as having realist presuppositions “baked in”: they reject those presuppositions, so ordinary moral assertions are false. But their falsehood is exclusively a result of the false metaethical presupposition (the presumption of realism).
Such ordinary language also carries pragmatic implications about the speaker’s attitudes, values, commitments, and so on. Yet none of these require the commitment to realism. That is, a person can have the same attitudes, values, commitments, and so on regardless of whether they presuppose realism. The trick critics of antirealism and of error theory in particular exploit in such cases is to act as if the antirealist/error theorist lacks these attitudes, values, and commitments, as though they have a defective moral character and disposition, even though this is not an entailment of the position.
In other words, all practical, functional aspects of your character, attitudes, and behavior could and probably would (since most error theorists probably aren’t psychopaths with unusual emotions and attitudes) be indistinguishable from the moral realist’s. The error theorist who affirms “baby torture is not wrong” can consistently act the same way as a moral realist. The only difference is that error theorists couldn’t sincerely say things like “[action] is objectively wrong,” or perhaps “[action] is wrong,” where there is an understanding that they are employing conventional meanings of terms (though they could clarify that they are using language in a revisionary sense).
3.0 A war of optics
Here’s what I find strange about all of this. I don’t think the points I am making about these tricky features of questions are revolutionary or even especially insightful. Efforts to score points in a debate by posturing and framing rival positions as stupid or evil are routine features of both casual and academic debate. What troubles me is that people constantly succumb to these traps. Victims of rhetorical moves like these rarely explicitly describe or draw attention to them, and typically respond in ways that result in poor optics for their positions. People rarely draw attention to these problems, or consciously recognize and circumvent them. Instead, they just bulldoze through them, attempting to describe their positions as accurately as possible, but failing to adequately respond to the rhetorical salvos leveled against them.
It looks, in other words, like people respond to questions like the prototypical normative entanglement question described above, as though their only task is to provide an philosophically satisfactory response, and not a rhetorically, diplomatically, or emotionally satisfactory response to their opponent or, often more importantly, their audience.
Debates often involve a war on two fronts. One front is the intellectual question of whether or not one’s position is correct. But the second front is the optics of one’s position: how socially acceptable is it? This latter war is a war of optics or public relations.
Proponents of skeptical positions often wage only the first war, failing to appreciate that they are losing the second war, the war of optics. Every philosophical position doesn’t rise or fall, or charm the public, or make academic inroads, or garner respect, purely in virtue of its epistemic merits. Philosophers market their positions like salespeople, and campaign in favor of some views and against others like politicians.
While philosophers may appreciate that polemic works its way into a great deal of philosophical work, I fear they have failed to appreciate just how covert polemical maneuvering can be: it can worm its way into the terms, categories, distinctions, questions, and framings that typify a discourse so thoroughly that the biasing influence of these polemical and rhetorical aspects of the discourse can fly under the radar.
Questions like the one at the outset of this post are magnificently devious because they look like a shot fired on the intellectual field of battle, while they are really serving two roles: such questions simultaneously serve as their own decoy and as their own ambusher: they present an ostensibly purely intellectual question, in all its technical glory, while surreptitiously functioning to ambush victims along the second front through the covert exploitation of a negative propaganda campaign against the target.
I suspect such covert operations are comon in academic philosophy and absolutely everywhere in everyday disputes: there’s a kind of constant subtext of positioning and posturing facilitated via implication and insinuation, and much of it is carried by our vulnerability to the unstated connotations associated with terms and turns of phrase and tone. While this may be obvious for most people most of the time, it almost seems as though people shift into a kind of “intellectual mode” where they suffer from a kind of temporary amnesia and forget that this is what people are really up to. It’s as if philosophers or people “doing philosophy” think they’re above it all. We’re not. We dupe ourselves into thinking we and others are really playing the philosophical game fairly, and can shift into a more neutral mode of thought. Granted, we’re probably a little better, but how much? I suspect more than negligibly, but less than we hope.
I suspect we’re just still largely working to to crush our enemies, humiliate our rivals, garner flattery, and broadcast our competence and virtue, all while operating under the brittle pretense that we’re engaged in some grand intellectual enterprise. It’s ridiculous, and I suspect on some level most people can smell the truth of it: most “debates” are the nerd’s equivalent of shoves and glares in a smoky bar or, at best, a polite game of pool.
Part of what’s so effective about these questions is that they recruit their targets into engaging on the intellectual front at the cost of the optical front, resulting in a self-inficted wound. It brings to mind a bully grabbing their victim’s arm, making them hit themselves, then mockingly saying “Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!”
Traps like these s could probably be directed at almost any philosophical position. Skeptical, eliminativist, reductionist, and antirealist positions are especially vulnerable, though, since it is much easier to equivocate between technical and non-technical meanings of terms to give the false impression that the proponents of such positions are stupid or evil. Perhaps it is time proponents of these views pay more attention to wars on the second front…and stop hitting themselves.