Bentham's Blunder (Part 5)

A response to "Moral realism is true"

This is the fifth post in a series of posts responding to Bentham’s Bulldog’s post, Moral realism is true. Here are the previous posts in this entry:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

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11.1 Irrational desires

BB next presents the following argument:

1 If moral realism is not true, then we don’t have irrational desires

2 We do have irrational desires

Therefore, moral realism is true

Deductive arguments like this are always silly and pointless. They always require disambiguation. Once disambiguated, the premises either just entail the conclusion in virtue of the definitions of the terms, or don’t. If the former, the argument is trivial. If the latter, the argument isn’t sound because at least one premise will be false (or at least, one will be free to reject at least one of the premises). That’s just how deductive arguments work. They simply repackage the conclusion.

This argument is no different. Once we disambiguate what “irrational” desires are, this will either require:

1. Disambiguating “irrational” in such a way that for something to be irrational is for it to be inconsistent with stance-independent moral facts

2. Disambiguating “irrational” in such a way that the antirealist can endorse that people can have “irrational desires”

If (a), then the argument is not meaningfully different from simply reiterating that moral realism is true in the second premise, in which case the antirealist can reject P2, while if it’s (b) then the antirealist can reject P1. Since any non-ridiculous version of this argument wouldn’t allow for an antirealist to hold that there are “irrational desires” in a way consistent with antirealism, we’d have to go with (a), in which case whatever “irrational desires” are, if they exist, they must entail that realism is true. Let’s see what BB does with this argument.

BB begins by saying:

Premise one seems the most controversial to laypersons, but it is premise 2 that is disputed by the philosophical anti-realists. 

I don’t know if that’s true, but okay. 

Morality is about what we have reason to do — impartial reason, to be specific. These reasons are not dependent on our desires.

Once again, BB simply…presents an assertion. I don’t agree that morality is “about what we have reason to do,” nor do I grant that it specifically is about what we have “impartial reason” to do. It is entirely consistent with conventional conceptions of “morality” for partiality to not be immoral or to fall outside the bounds of morality: one might even think partiality is morally obligatory: that we have a moral obligation to assign greater worth to ourselves, our families, or our societies, and that it would be outright immoral to be impartial. BB is imposing a highly intellectualized, philosophical, Western conception of morality on his very conception of what morality is “about.” None of the rest of us are obligated to accept this as part of the meaning of morality or what morality is about. Impartiality is a feature of some normative moral theories, it isn’t part of any definition of morality I’d accept. BB continues:

Morality thus describes what reasons we have to do things, unmoored from our desires. 

Again, assertions without arguments. I can do the same: no it’s not. QED.

When one claims it’s wrong to murder, they mean that, even were one to desires [sic] murdering another, they shouldn’t do it — they have a reason not to do it, independent of desires. 

When one claims this? Who is “one” or “they”? That’s not what I mean when I make moral claims. Who is BB talking about?

While we’re at it, what does BB mean by a “reason”?

All of these remarks are setup for an argument for the first premise:

1 If there are desire independent reasons, there are impartial desire independent reasons

2 If there are impartial desire independent reasons, morality is objective

Therefore, morality is objective.

…This doesn’t appear to be a valid argument. For it to be valid, you’d need another premise, like “There are desire independent reasons.” But since moral realism more or less just is the view that there are desire independent reasons, this would be blatantly question-begging.

Note that this also doesn’t specify that the reasons in question are moral reasons, so there’s some sloppiness there: it doesn’t follow that if normative realism is true that moral realism is true. I also see little reason to think that if there are desire independent reasons that there are impartial desire independent reasons. Why would that follow? BB says:

Premise 1 is trivial — impartial desire independent reasons are just identical to non-impartial desire independent reasons, but adding in a requirement of impartiality. 

Yea, they’re identical other than in precisely the way they’re not…that still doesn’t mean that if there are non-impartial desire independent reasons that therefore there are impartial ones. One can simply reject the first premise without issue here. I’m not sure what BB is doing here but this argument is…not good.

BB concludes:

Thus, if you actual [sic] have reasons to have particular desires — to aim for particular things, then morality is objective. Let’s now investigate that assumption.

Sure, but this is trivial. Of course if you have reason to have particular desires independent of your desires then a view according to which there are facts about what reasons you have to do things independent of your desires is true and a view according to which you don’t have such reasons is false. What is BB trying to do here? Defeat his opposition with tautologies? This is no different than saying:

Thus if there are bananas, then the view that “there are bananas” is true, and the view that “there are no bananas” is not true.

Next, BB seeks to defend the second premise:

Premise 2 states that there are, in fact, irrational desires. This premise is obvious enough.

No, it isn’t. It’s “obvious” only if you don’t disambiguate it. Of course I think there are “irrational desires,” but by this I don’t mean that there are desires which are inconsistent with what one has stance-independent reason to do. I mean that one can have desires that are inconsistent with achieving their broader reflective objectives. For instance, if a person deeply desires to be healthy, then a desire to eat nachos all day would be “irrational” in the trivial sense that this would be inconsistent with their other desire. I only endorse instrumental conceptions of rationality, according to which one is irrational insofar as one voluntarily acts out of accord with what would achieve their overall goals: some lower order desire may conflict with a higher order one, and insofar as the person acts on the former, they’re “irrational” in the sense that they’re failing to do what is in their own interests, relative to their own standards. Nothing about this implies or entails realism.

BB does what many philosophers do:

1. Present an innocuous statement that is ambiguous between a number of readings and that, in ordinary language, carries significant pragmatic implications

2. Declare that the statement is obviously true or false

3. Equivocate on the obvious truth or falsehood, which emerges from the ordinary reading of that statement, where those pragmatic implications are operative and yield the judgment that it’s obviously true or false, by conflating this “ordinary, pragmatic” use of the statement. This is achieved by:

4. Substituting in one’s purely semantic, non-pragmatic, stipulative account of the meanings of the key terms in the statement, one’s “stipulative, non-pragmatic” use of the same statement

5. One then claims that because it’s obviously true or false in the sense described in (4), the stipulative, non-pragmatic use, rather than in the sense of (3), when what causes people to generally conclude that it’s obviously true or false the ordinary, pragmatic use, not the stipulative, non-pragmatic use of the term.

BB, like many others, unwittingly relies on this conflation between ordinary language and technical discourse to give the impression that his philosophical positions are obvious, when in fact if you extract the pragmatic features of those statements it’s no longer clear that his position is as obvious as he seems to think it is.

In everyday discourse, to claim that there are “no irrational desires,” carries pragmatic implications for how you’d react to other people: that if you saw someone smoking cigarettes, or pursuing courses of action that seemed to reliably lead to their own misery, that you’d think “nothing to see here, moving along…” This is a perfectly reasonable presumption to make, because everyday contexts in which people make such remarks typically only manifest in conversations where something is at stake. People don’t just go around asserting abstract, technical philosophical truths for no purpose other than to make true statements. People talk for some purpose and to some end, and such purposes and ends usually center on that person’s desires or goals. Most people most of the time in most contexts aren’t just trying to say what they think is true; insofar as people bother to report one truth over another, there’s typically some reason why they’re doing so other than a mere desire to say what’s true.

Given this, if a person were to say in some real-world situation that “there are no irrational desires,” or “that person’s desires aren’t irrational,” this isn’t merely an expression of their philosophical views (if it is at all); rather, they’d be saying this for some purpose. They may be expressing their evaluation of the person, such as approval or disapproval, or otherwise signaling some social or conversational or personal goal. 

Philosophers don’t treat language like this. They act like we’re just proposition-spewing automatons. They abstract what we say away from everyday contexts, then seek to analyze what we mean by what we say outside those contexts. But this is simply throwing out the bathwater with the bathwater: what we mean just is what we’re trying to do in those contexts. 

That’s all language is: goal-directed behavior. It isn’t some bizarre quasi-mystical effort to align the mouth-sounds we make with some Platonic pattern. We talk to our ends and for purposes. Trying to distance the meanings of our terms from their pragmatic implications makes about as much sense as trying to study why people play baseball by studying baseballs and bats. If you want to study why people play baseball, you have to study the people playing baseball. If you want to know what people mean when they use certain terms or phrases, you have to study those people.

The philosopher’s misconceptions about language are, I believe, the original sin behind so many of these conflations and errors and bad arguments. It explains why BB and others think it’s “obvious” that there are “irrational desires.” The conflation between ordinary language, with its practical purposes and goal-directedness, which is captured in its pragmatic elements, and their weird, distilled, technical, theory-laden use of analogs to those terms, causes them to think that if something is “obvious” in the former sense this somehow carries over to their theories, because they think the ordinary use of the terms matches their technical use. If it doesn’t, then we’ve got a very, very big problem. In other words, suppose we have these two phrases:

Phrase 1 (Ordinary sense): There are irrational desires.

Phrase 2 (BB’s sense): There are irrational desires.

Now suppose we ask what each of these sentences means, and we discover they mean:

Phrase 1: [All sorts of things, but not typically the same thing as Phrase 2]. For instance, one thing people might mean is “People sometimes choose to do things that aren’t in their best interests, by their own lights, and they come to regret those things.”

Phrase 2: There are stance-independent reasons why we should have certain desires.

If this turns out to be the case, then the obviousness of Phrase 1 doesn’t transfer over to Phrase 2. BB is not entitled to presume that if it’s obvious that there are “irrational desires,” that therefore it’s obvious there are stance-independent reasons why we should have certain desires.

If BB wants to directly insist the latter is “obvious,” this is a much tougher sell: nonphilosophers won’t know what a “stance-independent reason” is, because this is a technical term and there’s little indication ordinary people would understand this term. I’d also add that, on empirical grounds, I also doubt they have this concept or think about rationality in a realist way, even if they don’t have the vocabulary to do so.

BB goes on to say this:

Note here I use desire in a broad sense. By desire I do not mean what merely enjoys; that obviously can’t be irrational. My preference for chocolate ice-cream over vanilla ice cream clearly cannot be in error. Rather, I use desire in a broad sense to indicate one’s ultimate aims, in light of the things that they enjoy. I’ll use desire, broad aims, goals, and ultimate goals interchangeably.

Thus, the question is not whether one who prefers chocolate to vanilla is a fool. Instead, it’s whether someone who prefers chocolate to vanilla but gets vanilla for no reason is acting foolishly.

This is strange, because it’s consistent with antirealism to think someone is foolish if they do something that doesn’t optimize for their own preferences. It looks like an instrumentalist conception of rationality.

BB then says this, which seems like a weird pivot and departure from this characterization of rationality, which at first glance appears consistent with antirealism, whereas these remarks do not: 

The anti-realist is in the difficult position of denying one of the most evident facts of the human condition — that we can be fools not merely in how we get what we want but in what we want in the first place.

11.2 Future Tuesday Indifference

Antirealists are in no more a difficult position by denying this than we are in denying moral realism itself. There’s nothing difficult about denying this: I think the idea that people can be fools with respect to what they want in the first place is ridiculous, a kind of category error. I don’t even think this makes sense. BB presents cases that allegedly support his claim:

1 Future Tuesday Indifference: A person doesn’t care what happens to them on a future Tuesday. When Tuesday rolls around, they care a great deal about what happens to them; they’re just indifferent to happenings on a future Tuesday. This person is given the following gamble — they can either get a pinprick on Monday or endure the fires of hell on Tuesday. If they endure the fires of hell on Tuesday, this will not merely affect what happens this Tuesday — every Tuesday until the sun burns out shall be accompanied by unfathomable misery — the likes of which can’t be imagined, next to which the collective misery of history’s worst atrocities is but a paltry, vanishing scintilla.

They know that when Tuesday rolls around, they will shriek till their vocal chords are destroyed, for the agony is unendurable (their vocal chords will be healed before Wednesday, so they shall only suffer on Tuesday). They shall cry out for death, yet none shall be afforded to them.

Yet they already know this. However, they simply do not care what happens to them on Tuesday. They do not dissociate from their Tuesday self — they think they’re the same person as their Tuesday self. However, they just don’t care what happens to themself on Tuesday.

I don’t find anything even remotely irrational about this person. I simply think they have weird preferences.

BB eventually says:

This person with indifference to future Tuesdays is clearly making an error.

Clearly to who? It’s not clear to me that they are making an error. It’s clear to me they’re not making an error. This is a great thought experiment for demonstrating that only antirealism makes sense of human rationality! Once again, it appears BB is simply directly appealing to his own intuitions and reactions to these thought experiments. Sorry, BB, but I simply don’t care how you react to these scenarios. That’s not great evidence to me that you’re correct.

However, the anti-realist must insist that, not only is it not the greatest error in human history, it isn’t an error at all. 

I straightforwardly do so and deny there’s anything even remotely “difficult” about doing so. Future Tuesday Indifference is a bad thought experiment and I’m wholly unimpressed with Parfit on the topic of metaethics.

BB says:

Only the moral realist can account for their error 

This is silly. Obviously we deny there is an error. It’s only an “error” conditional on the realist being correct.

BB next considers some possible responses from an antirealist.

Now the anti-realist could try to avoid this by claiming that a decision is irrational if one will regret it. However, this runs into three problems.

Here’s the first one:

First, if anti-realism is true then we have no desire independent reason to do things. It doesn’t matter if we’ll regret them. Thus, regrettably, this criteria fails. Second, by this standard both getting the pinprick on a single Monday and the hellish torture on Tuesday would be irrational, because the person who experiences them will regret each of them at various points. After all, on all days of the week except Tuesday, they’d regret making the decision to endure a Monday pinprick. Third, even if by stubbornness they never swayed in their verdict, that would in no way change whether they choose rightly.

This is not a good response. An antirealist is not obliged to grant that things only “matter” if we have desire independent reasons to do them. Things can “matter” in a way consistent with antirealism. The antirealist can therefore hold that something is irrational if we’d regret it, and that this “matters” whereby it mattering means that we care about whether we’d regret something or not, i.e., they could offer a subjective conception of things “mattering” that’s consistent with antirealism. BB offers no reasons why an antirealist couldn’t do this. He simply helps himself to the presumption that the only sense in which things can matter is in a realist sense. Antirealists don’t have to grant this. This is yet another instance of the halfway fallacy. BB next says:

Second, by this standard both getting the pinprick on a single Monday and the hellish torture on Tuesday would be irrational, because the person who experiences them will regret each of them at various points. 

An antirealist can consider things as irrational all else being equal if one would regret them, but also add that if one’s options are restricted to events that one would regret all else being equal, that it’s not irrational to choose the one that they’d regret the least. 

11.3 Picking grass

This is BB’s next scenario:

Picking Grass: Suppose a person hates picking grass — they derive no enjoyment from it and it causes them a good deal of suffering. There is no upside to picking grass, they don’t find it meaningful or causing of virtue. This person simply has a desire to pick grass. Suppose on top of this that they are terribly allergic to grass — picking it causes them to develop painful ulcers that itch and hurt. However, despite this, and despite never enjoying it, they spend hours a day picking grass.

Is the miserable grass picker really making no error? Could there be a conclusion more obvious than that the person who picks grass all day is acting the fool — that their life is really worse than one whose life is brimming with meaning, happiness, and love?

Once again, I simply do not find it “obvious” this person is making any sort of mistake. They’re doing exactly what they want to do. What, exactly, is the mistake they’re making? This is, once again, a brute appeal to realist intuitions. So far, BB doesn’t seem to have much else than such brute appeals. 

BB’s other scenarios are all like this. They describe weird people with weird preferences, then BB prompts us to share in how “obvious” it is that these people are “fools.” Well, they may be “fools” by my lights: they’re doing things and living their lives in ways I find unfortunate and pointless and regrettable…relative to my values. But I don’t think they’re making any mistakes relative to their own values, and I don’t think there’s any other sense in which they’re making any kind of normative errors, because, after all, I’m not a realist.

For me, these kinds of thought experiments backfire: they’re so terrible and underwhelming that I think to myself, “If this is the best realists have, then they probably don’t have much” and it actually causes me to be even more confident that moral realists are wrong. Yet this is all BB has in support of his premises: a repetitive list of thought experiments that only serve to preach to the choir. There is nothing to make an antirealist question their stance.

I think what’s going on with these scenarios is that BB and other realists are simply projecting their own values and preferences onto the scenarios, failing to model things from the first person POV of the people in these scenarios, mixing up how awful they would find it to live their lives in those ways, and then concluding that it must be bad for the people living their lives in that way. This is a speculative hypothesis, but let me just spell it out explicitly: I think BB and others may very well be crypto-antirealists who actually think more or less in the way I do: they act in accord with their own goals and values, and only care about their own goals and values, but they mistakenly project or externalize these onto the world around them, mistakenly thinking their own preferences and values are actually coming from the outside and are part of the furniture of the world itself. I don’t have any proof of this, and I don’t think BB or any other realists are committed to agreeing with me about this: I take them at their word that they mean what they say. But I do think that something like this could be going on outside of their conscious awareness.

In short: I suspect realists actually think more in line with antirealists, but fail to realize it, and that it is, in fact, antirealists who are better attuned not only to their own thinking but to how people think in general. Another way to put this is that I think realists are often really bad at introspection. I think we antirealists are generally better at it, and that realists are tripped up over their phenomenology and lost in weird intellectual ratiocinations that abstract away from the world so much they lose track of it.

12.0 The discovery argument

BB’s next argument begins by talking about mathematical discovery:

One of the arguments made for mathematical platonism is the argument from mathematical discovery. The basic claim is as follows; we cannot make discoveries in purely fictional domains. If mathematics was invented not discovered, how in the world would we make mathematical discoveries? How would we learn new things about mathematics — things that we didn’t already know?

The idea that “discovery” implies realism about a domain does not strike me as very compelling. One can invent a set of rules, or axioms, then make discoveries relative to those rules. This happens all the time. We’ve made lots of discoveries in chess. One can likewise make discoveries about what would best promote human interests, or achieve one’s goals, or maximize utility, and so on, without any of this suggesting there are stance-independent moral facts. Discovery is not inconsistent with antirealism. Nevertheless, BB suggests otherwise:

Well, when it comes to normative ethics, the same broad principle is true. If morality really were something that we made up rather than discovered, then it would be very unlikely that we’d be able to reach reflective equilibrium with our beliefs — wrap them up into some neat little web.

Yet again BB just makes assertions, without explanations or arguments. Why would it be “very unlikely”? Who knows! BB doesn’t say why. He just asserts that this is the case. Reflective equilibrium involves resolving tensions and inconsistencies in one’s overall set of beliefs in order to move towards a state of greater internal coherence. Nothing about such a process is inconsistent with moral antirealism. The discover/made up dichotomy is a false dichotomy: you make discover things within something that’s “made up,” and, in any case, it’s simply false that antirealism entails that one’s moral values are “made up.” Compare: I didn’t make up my food preferences, yet there is still no stance-independent fact of the matter about what food is good or bad. 

What BB is delivering here is a canard cake: layers upon layers of false dichotomies, misrepresentations, dubious framings of the dispute, and underdeveloped distinctions, all in the service of implying there’s something defective or objectionable about antirealism without actually explicating what it is.

But as I’ve argued at great length, we can reach reflective equilibrium with our moral beliefs — they do converge. We can make significant moral discovery. The repugnant conclusion is a prime example of a significant moral discovery that we have made.

People have generally converged on which chess openings are better or worse. That doesn’t mean chess wasn’t invented.

With respect to the repugnant conclusion: I don’t find it repugnant. So I deny it’s any sort of “discovery.” Note that BB doesn’t show how it’s a discovery or explain what the discovery is or how we discover it. He just casually asserts that the repugnant conclusion is something “we” discovered.

BB continues with the unargued assertions:

Thus, there are two facts about moral discovery that favor moral realism.

First, the fact that we can make significant numbers of non-trivial moral discoveries in the first place favors it — for it’s much more strongly predicted on the realist hypothesis than the anti-realist hypothesis.

Once again, this is misleading. Either the “discoveries” in question are consistent with antirealism, in which case the fact that we’ve made such discoveries doesn’t favor moral realism, or the “discoveries” are of such a kind that they’re somehow better evidence of realism than of antirealism, in which case I’d probably just deny that we made discoveries of this kind. Unfortunately, BB doesn’t present any arguments or reasons to think we’ve made any such discoveries, he just asserts that we have.

Second, the fact that there’s a clear pattern to the moral convergence. Again, this is a hugely controversial thesis — and if you don’t think the arguments I’ve made in my 36-part series are at least mostly right, you won’t find this persuasive. However, if it turns out that every time we carefully reflect on a case it ends up being consistent with some simple pattern of decision-making, that really favors moral realism.

There’s also convergence on drinking Coca-Cola and enjoying the same TV shows. Convergence isn’t better evidence of realism than antirealism unless realist explanations for convergence are better than antirealist explanations. BB doesn’t actually show that realist explanations are better (or at least, not here). He just asserts that convergence favors moral realism. 

Next, BB presents an inductive argument:

Consider every other domain in which the following features are true.

1 There is divergence prior to careful reflection.

2 There are persuasive arguments that would lead to convergence after adequate ideal reflection.

3 Many people think it’s a realist domain

All other cases which have those features end up being realist. This thus provides a potent inductive case that the same is true of moral realism.

This is too vague a sketch to be very useful. If the best you can show is that some people are realists about other domains, so maybe realism is true in this case, well, which domains? Let’s actually look at some examples. Note, too, that the third point is simply that many people think these domains are realist domains. If BB wants to argue that there’s an inductive case in favor of thinking moral realism is true, great: I agree. But one can always suspect that people are inconsistent or mistaken in those other domains, as well. 

We’d actually have to agree that realism is consistently the best explanation in these other domains for this argument to even get off the ground, but BB doesn’t provide any specific examples or actually do much to build an inductive case. This brings me to a general observation about BB’s arguments: they’re all pretty bad, but they also come off as half-hearted and low-effort, as though BB couldn’t be bothered to put much effort into making a case even if a case could be made.