Bentham's Blunder (Part 6)

A response to "Moral realism is true"

This is the sixth and final 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

Part 5

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13.0 Phenomenal introspection

BB next says:

If we have an accurate way of gaining knowledge and this method informs us of moral realism, then this gives us a good reason to be a moral realist, in much the same way that, if a magic 8 ball was always right, and it informed us of some fact, that would give us good reason to believe the fact.

Sure, that’s true. If we have a way of knowing stuff and this method indicates moral realism is true, then this is a good reason to think moral realism is true. This is trivially true of literally any claim at all, including antirealism. What is the point of saying something like this?

BB continues:

Neil Sinhababu argues that we have a reliable way to gain access to a moral truth — this way is phenomenal introspection. Phenomenal introspection involves reflecting on a mental state and forming beliefs about what its [sic] like. Here are examples of several beliefs formed through phenomenal introspection.

1. My experience of the lemon is brighter than my experience of the endless void that I saw recently.

2. My experience of the car is louder than my experience of the crickets.

3. My experience of having my hand set on fire was painful.

We have solid evolutionary reason to expect phenomenal introspection to be reliable — after all, beings who are able to form reliable beliefs about their mental states are much more likely to survive and reproduce than ones that are not. We generally trust phenomenal introspection and have significant evidence for its reliability.

Thus, if we arrive at a belief through phenomenal introspection, we should trust it. 

Naturally, BB is going to claim that phenomenal introspection suggests that realism is true:

Well, it turns out that through phenomenal introspection, we arrive at the belief that pleasure is good. When we reflect on what it’s like to, for example, eat tasty food, we conclude that it’s good. Thus, we are reliably informed of a moral fact. 

Once again, BB invokes an unspecified “we,” apparently presuming to speak on behalf of everyone in the world, rather than just himself. BB is not in a position to speak for other people. Phenomenal introspection is a private matter. If BB wants to claim that when he introspects, it seems things are “good” in a way that favors realism, fine. But BB is not in a position to make such declarations about the results of other people’s phenomenal introspection. That’s a matter for each of those people to report. 

When I introspect, nothing about my experience of pleasure or tasty food suggests that it’s “good” in a realist sense. On the contrary, it seems good in a way that favors antirealism. In other words, my phenomenal introspection suggests that antirealism is true and that realism is not true. In fact, virtually nothing could seem more obvious to me in all the world. 

BB next addresses me explicitly and directly:

Lance Bush has written a response to an article I wrote about this argument; I’ll address his response here.

BB starts by summarizing Sinhababu’s argument:

I summarize Sinhababu’s argument as follows.

Premise 1: Phenomenal introspection is the only reliable way of forming moral beliefs.

Premise 2: Phenomenal introspection informs us of only hedonism

Conclusion: Hedonism is true…and pleasure is the only good.

First, “good” is ambiguous: is this a normative claim, a metaethical claim, or both? If this is supposed to be an argument for moral realism, it’s misleading and objectionable to use normative language like “good” without qualification. I’m an antirealist, and I think things are good or bad, just not stance-independently good or bad. It would be far better for those presenting such arguments to be explicit about this. Failure to do so amplifies the risk of normative entanglement: falsely implying that antirealists don’t think things are good or bad. Some antirealists may not, but this isn’t an entailment of antirealism so it isn’t appropriate to imply it.

Second, there’s a lot baked into the first premise. What’s a “moral belief”? Why is phenomenal introspection the only way to gain knowledge of “moral beliefs”? In any case, even if we just grant whatever is going on in the first premise, I’d probably just reject the second premise. Why on earth would I accept that phenomenal introspection informs us that “hedonism” is true? If “hedonism” here is taken to be realist-hedonism, where pleasure is the only stance-independent good, then of course I’m not going to accept that there’s a method that informs us of what’s true, and it informs us that their pleasure is stance-independently good. Why on earth would an antirealist grant that? One would need an argument for this. Presenting this as the argument is dialectically toothless. I could present an analogously pointless argument myself:

P1: Lance’s epistemic framework is the only way to arrive at truth.

P2: According to Lance’s epistemic framework, moral realism is false.

C: Therefore, moral realism is false.

Absent a good argument for P1, nobody other than myself has any reason to take this seriously.

BB continues:

However, we can ignore premise one, because it serves as a reason other methods are unreliable — not as a reason phenomenal introspection is reliable. Lance says

I have a lot of concerns with (1), given that I don’t know what is meant by a “moral belief”

BB answers:

I take a moral belief to be a belief about what is right and wrong, or what one should or shouldn’t do, or about what is good and bad. Morality is fundamentally about what we have impartial reason to do, independent of our desires. 

The first part of this is inadequate: I’d just have to ask BB what it means to say something is “right” or “wrong”, what one “should” or “shouldn’t” do, and what’s “good” or “bad.” Note that all of these terms have nonmoral uses: We talk about the answers to test questions being right or wrong, we talk about what a chef should or shouldn’t do in the kitchen, and we talk about which movies are good or bad. All of these terms are only distinctively moral insofar as one implicitly appends “moral” to each of these terms: morally right or wrong, morally should or shouldn’t, and morally good or bad, which, of course, doesn’t help clarify what “moral” means. What BB does in this first response is simply implicitly employ the concept of morality in explaining the concept of morality. This is circular and useless.

Next, BB says that a moral belief is “fundamentally about what we have impartial reason to do, independent of our desires.” Well, that sounds like realism. In that case, the first premise seems to imply that there is a method for acquiring knowledge of stance-independent moral facts, i.e., knowledge that presupposes that moral realism is true. Since I don’t think we have a “reliable” (i.e., truth-conducive) method of forming “moral beliefs”, where such beliefs entail realism, then I’m not going to accept the first premise. Once one clarifies what is going on with the premise, the premise either itself begs the question in favor of moral realism, or BB’s presented an enthymeme with one or more implicit question-begging premises. In short: BB’s summary of Sinhababu’s argument appears to presume realism is true. In which case, I see no reason to accept the argument. 

BB quotes me criticizing Sinhababu’s claims about the reliability of phenomenal introspection, then says:

Lance here criticizes some types of introspection — however, none of this is phenomenal introspection. People are good at forming reliable beliefs about their experiences, less good at forming reliable beliefs about, for example, their emotions. Not all introspection is alike. 

No, BB, I was specifically talking about phenomenal introspection. I’m claiming that phenomenal introspection is unreliable. Here’s what I had said:

However, my initial reaction is to reject (2) because it seems like Sinhababu overestimates what kinds of information is available via introspection on one’s phenomenology, at least not without bringing in substantial background assumptions that aren't themselves part of the experience or that might have a causal influence on the nature of the experience. It’s possible, for instance, that a commitment to or sympathy towards moral realism can influence one’s experiences in such a way that those experiences seem to confirm or support one’s realist views, when in fact it’s one’s realist views causing the experience. Since people lack adequate introspective access to their unconscious psychological processes, introspection may be an extraordinarily unreliable tool for doing philosophy.

My point here is that various causal factors can influence the content of one’s phenomenal introspection in ways that undermine its truth-tracking status, selectively or in general. I was not talking about non-phenomenal introspection. BB has simply misinterpreted me. Note, too, that BB once again simply asserts “People are good at forming reliable beliefs about their experiences.” Well, BB, that’s exactly what I am denying!

I am, after all, broadly speaking in the illusionist camp about consciousness. I think people’s experiences systematically misrepresent the way the world is and that people systematically fail to introspect in a reliable way about the nature of their experiences. I don’t grant that people are good at phenomenal introspection, least of all philosophers, who I believe are inducted into ways of thinking that further compromise their ability to introspect accurately. If anything, I think studying philosophy has probably made BB worse at introspection! For what it’s worth, if by “phenomenal” Sinhababu is alluding to actual phenomenal states, or qualia, then I don’t even think there are any such things, so I certainly don’t think one can introspect reliably about them, because I don’t even think they exist to be introspected about in the first place.

BB again quotes me in this article, where I said this:

Philosophers may think that they can appeal to theoretically neutral “seemings” to build philosophical theories, but not appreciate that the causal linkages cut both ways, and that their philosophical inclinations, built up over years of studying academic philosophy, can influence how they interpret their experiences, and do so in a way that isn’t introspectively accessible. If this does occur (and I suspect it not only does, but is ubiquitous), philosophers who appeal to how things seem to support their philosophical views are, effectively, appealing to their commitment to their philosophical positions as evidence in support of their commitment to their philosophical positions. Without a better understanding of the psychological processes at play in philosophical account-building, philosophers strike me as being in an epistemically questionable situation when they so confidently appeal to their philosophical intuitions and seemings.

BB responds:

I think this objection to phenomenal conservatism is wrong. One can reject a seeming. For example, to me, the conclusion I describe here seems wrong, however, I end up accepting it upon reflection, because the balance of seemings supports it.

There was no objection to phenomenal conservatism here, so I don’t know what BB is talking about. Phenomenal conservatism holds that if something seems true, then you’re justified in believing it’s true in the absence of defeaters. I’m not rejecting that. I’m pointing to defeaters for specific people and specific forms of phenomenal introspection. I never suggested one can’t reject a seeming, either, so I have no idea what BB is on about here.

My objections are, however, apparently irrelevant because Sinhababu’s argument doesn’t rely on “seemings” but on “phenomenal introspection”:

But we can table this discussion because Sinhababu doesn’t rely on seemings — he relies on phenomenal introspection.

I hope you can hear my eyes rolling at that pronouncement: swap out “seemings” for “phenomenal introspections” in my above remark and I’d say the same damn thing. The distinction isn’t important to any points I am making. So this move of drawing attention to the distinction is irrelevant: it doesn’t change the substance of my claims.

BB continues to quote large portions of my article so I won’t repost those here, then eventually responds:

I agree that generally introspecting on experiences doesn’t inform us of their mind-independent goodness. But if we introspect on experiences that we don’t want but are pleasurable, they still feel good, showing that their goodness doesn’t depend on our desires.

This is not a good line of reasoning, because it smuggles in realist presumptions. Note that BB says: “showing that their goodness doesn’t depend on our desires.” 

Their goodness? Are you kidding me? Why on earth would I grant that because I can desire not to have a pleasurable state that this shows that the pleasurable state involves some kind of “goodness” independent of my desires? I want to pause here to draw attention to just how bad BB’s reasoning is here: BB is so caught up in thinking in realist terms that it doesn’t appear to have occurred to him that he’s reifying “goodness” in precisely the way I and other antirealists find objectionable. I don’t think pleasurable states have any sort of “goodness” independent of my desires!

When I introspect about experiences that I don’t want that are pleasurable, they do have a “pleasure” feel to them, but it’s misleading to say they feel “good.” Just what does one mean by this? They feel pleasurable, to be sure, and one might offer a descriptive account of what “pleasure states” are like and use the term “good” to refer to that description. But the use of the term “good” here is ambiguous: is it referring to the descriptive qualities of the state, or a normative evaluative stance towards the state? I think BB equivocates on the meaning of “good” and “goodness” here:

But if we introspect on experiences that we don’t want but are pleasurable, they still feel good [in a non-normative, descriptive sense], showing that their goodness [in a normative, non-descriptive] doesn’t depend on our desires.

I don’t think normativity is built into my experiences. I don’t think there are “goodness qualia.” Maybe BB does, but if so, and if BB appeals instead to the claim that when we introspect, that pleasurable states feel “good” in some normative sense, then I’d just deny this, since my experiences don’t feel “good” to me in that way.

BB does suggest this with his next response:

But when you reflect on pleasure it feels good in a way that seems to give one a reason to promote it — to produce more of it. 

Speak for yourself! When I reflect on my pleasure, it does not feel good to me in a way that “seems to give one reason to promote it.” That is precisely the kind of theory-laden, philosophical nonsense I think BB and others infer, fail to realize that they’re inferring, and then mistakenly claim is a feature of their phenomenology. BB once again appears to be making claims about people’s phenomenology: if they’re claims about me, they’re false. If they’re claims about people in general, well, those are empirical claims, and I doubt BB has good empirical evidence for those claims. If they’re claims about BB’s own introspection, that’s fine, but I see no good reason to privilege BB’s introspections over my own.

BB then says:

This is a distinctly moral notion. 

Not for me it isn’t. Nothing about my experience of pleasure is “distinctly moral.” Once again, BB seems to be engaged in some kind of phenomenal imperialism, implying some claim about how I or others think without any evidence. If this is how it seems to BB: once again, fine, but BB is not in a position to speak on behalf of everyone else.

BB just continues with similar assertions:

Pleasure feels good in the sense that it’s desirable, worth aiming at, worth promoting. 

Not to me, and I don’t think it feels that way to most other people (but that’s an empirical claim). Again, speak for yourself.

If this argument successfully establishes that pleasure is worth promoting, then it has done all that it needs to do.

Yea, but it hasn’t.

I want to draw attention to another difference between BB and I. BB quotes me saying this:

I don’t think any of my experiences involve any distinctively moral phenomenology, and such experiences are better explained in nonmoral terms. I’d note, however, that the notion that “hedonism is true” doesn’t make clear that hedonism is the true moral theory which isn’t explicitly stated here. I don’t know if Sinhababu (or BB, or anyone else) claims to have distinctively moral phenomenology, but I don’t think that I do, and I’m skeptical that anyone else does.

Then responds:

This question is ambiguous, but I think the answer would be no.

…That’s it. Notice that BB doesn’t explain what the ambiguity is, or try to disambiguate two or more interpretations. He just says it’s “ambiguous” and moves on. Ambiguous how? Who knows! He doesn’t bother to explain! This is a difference between BB and I: I take the time to actually disambiguate what I claim are ambiguous remarks. In this case, at least, BB doesn’t. He just asserts something is the case and moves on. This is lazy philosophy.

Next, BB quotes me saying this:

In any case, if this remark: “Therefore, hedonism is true — pleasure is the only good,” … is meant to convey the notion that hedonism is true in a way indicative of moral realism, I still I am [sic] very confident that it doesn’t mean anything; that is, I think this is literally unintelligible. I find my experiences to be good, in that I consider them good, but I don’t think this in any way indicates that they are good independent of me considering them as such, nor do I think this even makes any sense.

BB says he has a few things to say:

1 It seems that most people have an intuitive sense of what it means to say something is wrong. This normal usage acquaintance is going to be more helpful than some formulaic definition that appears in a dictionary.

Unfortunately, this is completely irrelevant to my point. Even if I grant that “most people”, presumably nonphilosophers, are competent users of the non-technical English word “wrong” in ordinary language, this has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m claiming is unintelligible. I am not claiming that everyday uses of the term “wrong” are unintelligible. I’m claiming Sinhababu’s use of the term in a technical context is unintelligible. Note that I specifically said:

[...] if this remark: “Therefore, hedonism is true — pleasure is the only good,” … is meant to convey the notion that hedonism is true in a way indicative of moral realism [...]

I'm talking about the meaning of BB’s use of the term “good”, in the context of BB’s argument. I’m not talking about ordinary language uses of “good.” After all, I don’t think ordinary people are moral realists! I explicitly maintain that BB’s use of the term doesn’t match ordinary language and thought, so ordinary language and thought is (on my view) irrelevant. If anything, the disparity between BB’s usage and what ordinary language and thought is one of the issues I have with BB’s use of terms like “good”: I find them to be weird, technical, and idiosyncratic.

2 This seems rather like denying that there’s knowledge on the grounds that we don’t have a good definition of it. Things are very difficult to define — but that doesn’t mean we can’t be confident in our concepts of them. Nothing is ever satisfactorily defined.

No, it’s not. There’s lots of things that are hard to define but that are perfectly intelligible. I am very much on board with the late Wittgenstein, and have been critical of the failed project of providing “sufficient and necessary conditions,” of engaging in conceptual analysis, and of attempting to treat philosophy as some kind of super-dictionary adventure almost for as long as I’ve done philosophy. I would be the absolute last person to demand “good definitions” for anything. BB has this completely wrong.

3 I take morality to be about what we have impartial reason to aim at. In other words, what we’d aim at if we were fully rational and impartial.

This is wildly unhelpful. Even if I employed standard analytic philosophical methods, I’d reject the first part of this: I don’t grant that philosophy is about what we have “impartial” reason to aim at. I think it’s perfectly consistent even within analytic philosophy to maintain that it isn’t analytically true that morality requires impartiality. I see no issue at all with normative moral theories explicitly including various forms of partiality towards oneself and others. These theories don’t fail merely on the grounds that they’re not impartial.

Second, notions like “fully rational,” insofar as they bake in realist conceptions of rationality (and, I would bet, they do), seem to characterize morality in realist terms from the outset. Why on earth would I grant that? BB is welcome to stipulate a definition like this, but I’m not obliged to grant it the status of being a good or correct account of morality. At best, I’d regard it as a proprietary account.

In any case, this explanation does nothing to address my charge of unintelligibility, nor do BB’s other two replies.

BB continues to make claims that don’t really seem to engage with my concerns:

The beliefs about what they’re like are beliefs about the experience. So, for example, the belief that hunger is uncomfortable is reliably formed through phenomenal introspection.

That they’re “uncomfortable” in what sense? If we’re to move from phenomenal introspection to something like realism, then either the realist “stuff” is part of the content of the phenomenal introspection (which I’m denying), or it’s an inference one makes based on the content of the phenomenal introspection, but is not itself a part of it, in which case (a) it isn’t even phenomenal introspection, but involves non-phenomenal inferences about our phenomenal introspection, and (b) even if phenomenal introspection were reliable, that doesn’t mean one’s inferences about one’s phenomenal introspection are reliable. 

In other words, if phenomenal introspection is somehow intended to support moral realism, this is either going to be because something in the content of our phenomenal experiences that lends itself to realism, e.g., if we have access to “intrinsic goodness qualia” or whatever, or it isn’t part of the experience, in which case we’re inferring realism based on those experiences, in which case even if phenomenal introspection were reliable, that doesn’t entail that the theoretical inferences we make about our experiences are reliable.

BB quotes me again, and the chain of quotes within quotes is getting a little complicated, so I’ll indicate explicitly what I was saying and what BB was saying:

Me: There are other difficulties with BB’s framing here:

BB: “Premise 2 is true — when we reflect on pleasure we conclude that it’s good and that pain is bad.”

Me: This is ambiguous. What does BB mean by ‘good’ and ‘bad’? Since I understand these in antirealist terms, if Premise 2 is taken to imply that they’re true in a realist sense, then I simply deny the premise. I find it odd and disappointing that BB would echo the common tendency for philosophers to engage in such ambiguous claims. BB knows as well as I do that one of the central disputes in metaethics is between realism and antirealism. So why would BB present a premise that only includes, on the surface, normative claims, without making the metaethical presuppositions in the claim explicit?

BB says in response:

This was responded to above — when we reflect on pain we conclude that it’s the type of thing that’s worth avoiding, that there should be less of. We conclude this even in cases when we want pain. To give an example, I recall when I was very young wanting to be cold for some reason. I found that it still felt unpleasant, despite my desire to brave the cold.

Once again with the “we”. This is not what happens when I reflect on pain. I do not conclude that “it’s the type of thing that’s worth avoiding,” in general, or with respect to this particular scenario. I don’t think there should be less of the “unpleasant” experience associated with cold even in circumstances where I find it desirable. I don’t think this is the type of thing “worth avoiding.” Yet BB seems perfectly comfortable speaking on behalf of others. BB should get over this conceit: simply because you’ve reached a particular conclusion, doesn’t mean others have or should reach the same conclusion.

Yet again, BB continues with the bizarre use of “we” without qualification. Imagine I did this:

When we introspect, we realize moral realism is obviously not true.

I doubt BB or anyone else would take this seriously, because that’s not what they conclude when they introspect. It’s just bizarre to just go around talking about what “we” conclude when “we” introspect as if you’re speaking on behalf of others. 

Can I nevertheless just declare that this is what BB concludes when BB introspects? Of course not. Because I don’t have enough intellectual conceit to imagine that when anyone else introspects, that they will arrive at the same conclusions as me (or at least they should if they’re thinking “properly”, i.e., like me). BB, apparently, does. BB is simply presenting himself as in a privileged position to speak on behalf of how others think.

I hope BB will in the future either (a) speak only for himself (b) speak on behalf of people who agree with him or (c) specify who “we” is and present reasons or evidence to think his claims about this “we” are true. Just dropping “we” and “us” all over the place like this is a very poor way to argue; it’s unclear, and depending on what one means, it may simply not be true.

Finally, I say this:

The other problem with this remark is the claim that when “we” reflect on pleasure we conclude that it’s good and that pain is bad. Who’s “we”? Not me, certainly. I don’t reach the same conclusions as BB does via introspection. BB echoes yet another bad habit of contemporary analytic philosophers: making empirical claims about how other people think without doing the requisite empirical work. BB does not have any direct access to what other people’s phenomenology is like, so there’s little justification in making claims about what things are like for other people in the absence of evidence. And there’s little empirical evidence most people claim to have phenomenology that lends itself to moral realism.

BB responds:

I think Lance does — he’s just terminologically confused. When he reflects on his pain, he concludes it’s worth avoiding — that’s why he avoids it! I think if he reflected on being in pain even in cases when he wanted to be in pain, he’d similarly conclude that it was undesirable.

This is remarkable. BB really does appear not only to be making claims about his own phenomenology, but to be making claims about other people’s phenomenology. Here BB is quite literally just declaring—without any arguments or evidence—that my experiences are just like his. Based on what, exactly? Maybe BB does think this. Okay. Why? And why should any of us agree with him?

Not only does BB claim to know what my phenomenology is like, he even declares what my conclusions are. He says, “he concludes it’s worth avoiding.” Again, based on what?

BB presents little reason to think he knows better than I do what my experiences are like, what the results of my philosophical introspection are, or what my conclusions are about my experiences. He then makes this claim:

I think if he reflected on being in pain even in cases when he wanted to be in pain, he’d similarly conclude that it was undesirable.

I’ve already reflected on this and concluded otherwise. I’ve been studying this topic for a very long time. It’s really bizarre to suggest that if I were to reflect on the matter, I’d reach the same conclusion, as if I hadn’t already reflected on the matter many times, reached conclusions contrary to this, and that’s part of why I’m suggesting otherwise. 

I am happy to grant that BB has reflected on his experiences and reached different conclusions from me. I just think BB’s conclusions are wrong. Maybe BB has similar phenomenology as me, but is making incorrect inferences about it. Maybe his phenomenology is different. Absent compelling evidence one way or another, I see little reason to think BB’s speculations about what my experiences are like, and how I’ve reflected on my experiences, are any more likely the result of confusion or error than his own.

14.0 Addressing BB’s section, “Responding to Objections”

BB responds to several objections. I don’t find any of these objections very good to begin with so I have no interest in defending them.

15.0 Conclusion

I don’t have much to add. I don’t think BB has presented a single decent argument for moral realism. I hesitate to even say BB has done much to present many arguments at all. Almost everything BB has to say is some variation of the notion that realism is obvious, intuitive, and comports with “our” phenomenology. I believe I’ve adequately conveyed why I don’t think this is convincing at all. Insofar as BB has presented much beyond this, I don’t find any of that very convincing, and I don’t think you should, either. Many of BB’s objections turn on misleading characterizations and framings of antirealist commitments. Once disambiguated, a clear picture of the dialectic reveals, I believe, that BB has very little to say in favor of realism or against antirealism. Antirealists can easily rebut everything of substance BB has to say here, what little there is.