Bentham's Blunder (Part 1)

A response to "Moral realism is true"

This is the first post in a series of responses to the blog post Moral realism is true. It was written as a single, extended post. I will make the full response available as a single post shortly after I finish posting the individual parts of this post. I opted to break it up into sections to make it a bit more digestible.

1.0 Introduction

I’ve been working on a response to Bentham’s Bulldog’s (hereafter “BB”) blog, “Moral realism is true” for a while. That response ended up approaching the length of a short book, so I’ve opted to write a slightly shorter critique. It’s still very long, but I wanted to get it out there anyway. In a way, it’s a kind of retrospective of various points I’ve raised about the dispute between moral realists and antirealists in the past two years on this blog. As you’ll see, I frequently refer to earlier posts that address specific points. 

In brief: BB presents an aggressive polemic in favor of moral realism, but fails to present any good arguments for moral realism. My “short” response will still be pretty long. I don’t think it’d be worthwhile to revisit the longer version. We’ll see.

Much of this outline is a point-by-point of the order of commentary as it appears in BB’s post. That will probably not make for very exciting reading. I would strongly encourage reading or referencing the article before reading this or referencing it as I proceed.

2.0 Response to “An Introduction to moral realism”

BB’s introduction consists almost entirely of empty rhetoric and dubious claims that seem intended to depict antirealism as an insane and disreputable view that no reasonable person would endorse. BB’s remarks suggest:

• Antirealism is “crazy”

• Antirealism isn’t worth taking seriously

• Antirealism falls in the category of allegedly absurd views like external world skepticism

• Members of this category don’t have much significance

• Members of this category are rare

• Members of this category exist largely as curiosities for philosophers

This is mostly just tendentious rhetorical sneering that reveals more about BB’s attitude towards a view than any substantive philosophical claims. What I find more puzzling is the suggestion that skeptical views are especially rare. It is very common for philosophers to hold skeptical positions. See the 2020 PhilPapers survey. To provide just a few examples:

• 15% endorse scientific antirealism

• 29.8% deny the hard problem of consciousness

• 11.2% deny free will

These are not tiny numbers, and represent only a very small sample of skeptical positions that appear in the PhilPapers survey. Taken in isolation, they might look fairly small, but with so many positions one can take, it would be unsurprising if a majority of philosophers held at least one “skeptical” position. In fact, 5.4% are external world skeptics. That’s 96 people who responded to that question: not an insignificant number of philosophers at all. 

In short: it is common for philosophers to hold skeptical views. More generally, philosophers often hold unconventional or rare views that deviate from what most other philosophers think.

BB also trots out a lot of the mistakes I’ve documented in the past few years. Take this remark:

So if you think that the sentence that will follow this one is true and would be so even if no one else thought it was, you’re a moral realist. It’s typically wrong to torture infants for fun! 

This is run of the mill normative entanglement. I’m an antirealist, and I think “It’s typically wrong to torture infants for fun!” I even think it’d be wrong even if no one else thought it was! Giving the impression that antirealism entails disagreeing with this is misleading. BB should know better. 

BB also says:

We do not live in a bleak world, devoid of meaning and value. Our world is packed with value, positively buzzing with it, at least, if you know where to look, and don’t fall pray [sic] to crazy skepticism.

This is also normative entanglement. Antirealism only entails that we live in a world without stance-independent moral facts, not a world without “meaning and value”. The latter is a normative claim that is consistent with both realist and antirealist conceptions of meaning and value. Realists are not entitled to help themselves to the presumption that only realist conceptions of meaning and value are legitimate, and that therefore, if you’re an antirealist, you think the world has no meaning and value. Antirealists can both (a) reject moral realism and (b) reject conceptions of meaning and value, and hold that antirealist conceptions of meaning and value are correct. 

BB does what many realists do: they drop any explicit indication of a realist conception of first-order terms like “meaning” and “value,” which gives the impression that antirealism rejects not only the realist’s conception of these notions, but any conception of these notions at all (as if only the realist’s conception of meaning and value are legitimate). I call this the halfway fallacy, and discuss why I think it’s a problem here.

BB also employs what I take to be objectionable rhetoric by suggesting that antirealism involves biting a bullet. I explain why I think this is a mistake here. The short version of this is simple: I not only deny moral realism, I also deny that there’s anything appealing about realism or any presumption in its favor. I don’t think rejecting moral realism involves biting a bullet any more than denying the existence of vampires does.

BB and other realists often try to frame moral antirealism as some kind of insane fringe view that only gibbering idiots would endorse. It’s never a good sign when critics have to go out of their way to craft a misleading narrative to try to make rival positions look bad. If the position really is so stupid and insane, the arguments themselves should be enough to demonstrate this without all the rhetorical fireworks.

3.0 Response to “A Point About Methodology”

BB’s next section introduces phenomenal conservatism (PC). This is, roughly, the view that you are justified in believing that things are the way they seem so long as there isn't a compelling reason to give up those beliefs.

I don’t endorse phenomenal conservatism, but granting it for the sake of argument does very little (if anything) to strengthen the case for moral realism. 

Phenomenal conservatism at best provides only private, personal “evidence” for a view: if you find that things seem a certain way to you, then you are to that extent “justified” (whatever that means) in believing those things.

It seems to me that moral realism isn’t true. PC does just as much to “justify” my antirealism as it does to justify the realist’s realism (if it seems to them that realism is true). PC is neutral with respect to which of these positions is correct, and does not distinctly favor realism or antirealism.

BB also proposes “wise” PC:

Wise Phenomenal Conservatism: If P seems true upon careful reflection from competent observers, that gives us some prima facie reason to believe P.

The use of “careful reflection” and “competent observers” provides a ton of wiggle room. I regard myself as a competent observer who has carefully reflected on moral realism, and the result is that I am even more confident it isn’t true. This revision to PC probably isn’t going to achieve much, since it will just prompt a pivot towards discussion of what careful reflection and competent observation entails, and how we can determine who meets these conditions.

BB brings up some responses to PC, but I don’t care about those so I will move on.

4.0 Responding to, “2 Some Intuitions That Support Moral Realism”

BB begins with the following:

The most commonly cited objection to moral anti-realism in the literature is that it’s unintuitive. There is a vast wealth of scenarios in which anti-realism ends up being very counterintuitive.

BB does something I frequently criticize: describe things as intuitive or counterintuitive without qualification. Counterintuitive to who? No claim is intrinsically intuitive; how “intuitive” something is depends on the intuitions of the person evaluating the claim. I don’t find moral antirealism counterintuitive, nor do I think there are any scenarios where it is counterintuitive. It better accords with my intuitions, and I don’t think there are any good reasons to accord more weight to BB’s or anyone else’s intuitions than my own. So claims that it’s “counterintuitive”, in and of themselves, don’t have much dialectical force. One could say “I find such claims implausible” and then speculate about whether your readers will, too.

BB goes on to say each version of antirealism has distinct counterintuitive implications:

We’ll divide things up more specifically; each particular version of anti-realism has special cases in which it delivers exceptionally unintuitive results. Here are two cases 

I now turn to these cases.

4.1 The first “counterintuitive” case

Here’s BB’s first case:

This first case is the thing that convinced me of moral realism originally. Consider the world as it was at the time of the dinosaurs before anyone had any moral beliefs. Think about scenarios in which dinosaurs experienced immense agony, having their throats ripped out by other dinosaurs. It seems really, really obvious that that was bad.

Of course it was bad. This in no way demonstrates anything counterintuitive about any form of antirealism. An antirealist can simply regard this as bad.

BB continues:

The thing that’s bad about having one’s throat ripped out has nothing to do with the opinions of moral observers. Rather, it has to do with the actual badness of having one’s throat ripped out by a T-Rex. 

So BB describes a scenario, says that it “seems really, really obvious that that was bad,” which is an ambiguous remark that can be interpreted in ways that are trivially easy to show are consistent with antirealism, then follows this by simply asserting that it was bad in a way only consistent with realism. So BB’s first demonstration of something counterintuitive is to present an innocuous scenario then assert that it’s bad in a realist sense.

When I say that such scenarios are bad, I am telling you something about what I think about them: That I disapprove of them, regard them as undesirable, don’t want them to occur, and so on. It absolutely has something to do with the opinion of a moral observer: me. Here, BB says this has to do with “actual badness.” Here we have the use of a deceptive modifier, “actual” (see this article where I elaborate on how realists misuse deceptive modifiers).

The implication here is that if something were bad in some nonrealist sense, like a subjectivist sense, then it isn’t actually bad. Well, I don’t like the taste of shit. But I’m not a gastronomic realist (i.e., I don’t think there are stance-independent facts about whether food tastes good or bad). Does that mean the taste of shit isn’t “actually bad”? Should I just be indifferent to the taste of what I eat since there are no stance-independent normative facts about taste? I don’t know about you, but that strikes me as ridiculous.

Realists have no business claiming that only their conception of morality involves “actual” badness. Antirealism isn’t the view that nothing is “actually” good or bad. It’s a rejection that anything is good or bad in the realist’s sense. The antirealist is not obliged to grant that things only could be good or bad in the realist’s sense, i.e., would only “actually” be good or bad if they were stance-independently good or bad: we can reject this, too. And I do. I think the only sense in which anything is “actually” good or bad is in an antirealist sense. What you see here is, yet again, rhetoric and misleading framing and a presumption in favor of realism all through BB’s characterization of the dispute.

So far, BB has not presented any substantive critique of antirealism. BB appears to have presented a scenario and asserted that things in that scenario are bad in a realist’s sense. Assertions aren’t arguments. Perhaps a reader is supposed to read this and go “yea, I think it’s that way, too.” I’d be surprised if as standard a scenario as this prompted someone to reflect or recognize they had realist intuitions where they didn’t previously. I suspect instead this would simply prompt them to affirm whatever they were already disposed to affirm. But perhaps this scenario would somehow prompt some readers to recognize realist inclinations. I don’t know. Whatever the case may be, this scenario does not strike me as having much argumentative force.

BB continues:

When we think about what’s bad about pain, anti-realists get the order of explanation wrong. We think that pain is bad because it is — it’s not bad merely because we think it is. 

Again, who is “we”? BB makes a vague and unqualified assertion about how “we” think: that “we” think things are bad because they are; they’re not bad because we think they are. Again, this is simply an assertion. Assertions aren’t arguments. This is the very thing BB is supposed to be demonstrating. Not simply declaring. Insofar as this assertion is supposed to characterize how anyone other than BB thinks: that’s an empirical claim, and not one BB is entitled to assert as true. This isn’t how I think. When I say things are “bad” the causality is in the antirealist direction: their badness is constituted by my attitude towards them. I think it’s BB who gets the causal story backwards. BB has presented absolutely nothing that would suggest he’s right about this and I’m wrong. What we have here are mere assertions.

4.2 The second “counterintuitive” case

BB’s second scenario is:

The second broad, general case is of the following variety. Take any action — torturing infants for fun is a good example because pretty much everyone agrees that it’s the type of thing you generally shouldn’t do. It really seems like the following sentence is true

“It’s wrong to torture infants for fun, and it would be wrong to do so even if everyone thought it wasn’t wrong.”

It seems to who? That sentence doesn’t “seem true” to me. It’s also unclear what it means. Is BB asking me whether I’d think torturing infants for fun would be wrong, relative to my standards, even if everyone else thought it wasn’t wrong? If so, that’d be consistent with antirealism: I do think it’d be wrong even if everyone else thought otherwise. 

If, instead, I am included in this scenario, then I’d be being asked whether it’d still be wrong even if I thought it wasn’t wrong. But note that there are two different versions of me: the actual me evaluating this scenario, and a hypothetical me with repugnant moral values. Again, who is this statement being relativized to? To the actual me or the hypothetical me? If you ask me whether torturing infants for fun would still be wrong relative to my actual moral values even if a hypothetical version of me thought it wasn’t wrong, then the answer is, again, still consistent with antirealism: yes, it’d still be wrong, relative to my actual values. 

It wouldn’t be wrong relative to the hypothetical version of me’s values, but this is trivially true for the antirealist: if on my view what it means for it to be wrong just is whether it is wrong relative to an evaluative standard, then if you say “suppose everyone held an evaluative standard according to which it wasn’t wrong,” then it would be trivially true that the action in question wouldn’t be wrong relative to the evaluative standards of anyone in that hypothetical. This is, again, trivially true. It’s like asking:

“If nobody liked the taste of chocolate, would anyone like the taste of chocolate?”

The answer will be a definitive “of course not.” BB’s scenario exploits ambiguity to confuse readers into having the misleading impression that if you’re a moral antirealist, that you’re somehow contingently okay with torturing babies for fun in a nontrivial sense. After all, if BB wants to show there’s something mistaken or wrong or repugnant or unappealing about moral antirealism, it won’t do to say “if you thought torturing babies for fun wasn’t wrong, would you think torturing babies for fun wasn’t wrong?” Conditional on antirealist views that relativize moral claims, that’s all such a question would amount to, so it’d be trivial. The only way for BB’s scenario to “work,” i.e., to not ask something trivial, is if we employ a realist notion of wrongness in here somewhere. In that case, though, the scenario is superfluous: it may ostensibly be intended to serve as an intuition pump, but since it’s worded in an ambiguous and misleading way, whatever value it has for this purpose is inextricably entangled with its ambiguous and confounding aspects; adequate disambiguation functionally amounts to simply asking the reader if torturing infants for fun is stance-independently wrong. The “scenario” is at best a mere recapitulation of asking someone if they’re a realist towards a specific moral issue, and at worst is actively misleading.

The futility of this scenario is eclipsed by the next example BB gives:

Similarly, if there were a society that thought that they were religiously commanded to peck out the eyes of infants, they would be doing something really wrong. This would be so even if every single person in that society thought it wasn’t wrong.

I cannot stress this enough: I am an antirealist, and I completely agree with BB. That’s because whether *I* think something is morally right or wrong isn’t determined by whether individuals or societies approve of a particular action. I don’t think that if some society is okay with plucking out the eyes of infants, that this somehow makes it okay. Whether it’s morally good or bad relative to my values depends on my values. BB gives the impression here that we should actually interpret what he’s asking in the previous scenario to whether something is morally right or wrong depends on the values of the agents performing the action, i.e., agent relativism. Agent relativism holds that whether an action is right or wrong is determined by the standards of the agent performing the action or, in the case of agent cultural relativism, the standards of that agent’s culture. 

This form of relativism has the unusual but noteworthy implication that if Alex thinks torturing babies for fun is good, then it is, in fact, good, in such a way that I and everyone else must respect: if Alex wants to torture babies, and attempts to do so, the rest of us are obliged to regard this as “good” and to stand aside. In other words, agent relativism imposes constraints on everyone else’s actions that are binding on those people independent of their own goals, standards, and values. It functions a lot more like realism than any antirealist view I’d consider remotely acceptable. I often refer to it as “a la carte realism.” While not technically a form of moral realism, since moral facts are stance-dependent, its most objectionable elements are, ironically, precisely the respects in which it most closely resembles moral realism. Critics of antirealism often depict relativism as if agent relativism were the only form of relativism. 

Antirealists do not have to think that an action wouldn’t be wrong if the people performing that action think it’s not wrong. Our own evaluative standpoints don’t have to shift and move in accord with other people’s moral standards. We can (and I do) always judge in accord with our own standards. Moral antirealism doesn’t entail agent relativism. Insofar as BB’s scenario conflates antirealism and agent relativism, this scenario not only doesn’t serve as any substantive critique of antirealism or bolster the case for realism, it serves only to muddle the dispute.