Boo realism!

A response to Sam Director

(Status: I dashed these remarks off quickly without giving them much of a read-over. There are undoubtedly typos and mistakes. If you see any let me know in the comments or just email me)

1.0 Introduction

Sam Director, a professor at FAU (where I did my undergraduate degrees) says the following:

It seems obvious to me that there's something very implausible (inconsistent, incoherent?) about moral anti-realists having first-order moral commitments, especially ones they'd protest for in public. But, many anti-realists do just this. What am I missing?

Lots of philosophers appeal to how obvious things seem. Fortunately, Sam avoids a common pitfall in such assertions: simply claiming that something “is” obvious or “seems” obvious without specifying who it seems obvious to. Here, Sam is clear that it seems obvious to Sam that this is the case. Fortunately, I have a powerful rebuttal: It seems obvious to me that there’s nothing implausible, inconsistent, or incoherent about a moral antirealist having first-order moral commitments. So I guess we’re even. 

I suspect most moral realists (perhaps including Sam) wouldn’t care too much about what seems obvious to me, and perhaps wouldn’t think we were even. Once again, I have a powerful rebuttal: I don’t care how obvious things seem to them, either, or at least, I don’t care any more than I suspect they care about how obvious things seem to me. One might pivot to the claim that more people find it obvious things are stance-independently wrong than find it obvious the aren’t, but that’s an empirical claim, and available empirical evidence simply doesn’t support that claim.

How obvious something seems to you is a private matter, and even if it was a form of evidence, none of the rest of us can feel the force of it from the outside. Instead, the only evidence how obvious something seems to someone provides to anyone else is an almost negligibly weak form of Bayesian evidence: that someone else thinks something may be provide some reason to think it’s true, all else being equal, but for it to be good evidence, we’d need a story about why it seems obvious to you. I grant that if a chess move seems obviously good to Magnus Carlsen, it probably is a good chess move. But I am not inclined to similarly defer to moral realists, because I do not think there’s a good story to be told as to why their intuitions are especially reliable, and I am especially skeptical that there’s good reason to believe their intuitions are more reliable than mine.

I am disappointed at the resurgence of Moorean foot stomping in academic philosophy. These appeals to obviousness are exhausting. As if anyone should care how obvious something seems to any particular philosopher. Is Sam going to abandon this position because I find the contrary to be obvious? I doubt it. So why should I, or anyone else, take how obvious something seems to Sam (or anyone else) all that seriously, without some antecedent reasons to think that their sense of what’s obvious is especially likely to be an indication of what’s true?

2.0 Gastronomic comparisons

What would be implausible, inconsistent, or incoherent about a moral antirealist having first-order moral standards? First, consider a gastronomic comparison: is there something implausible, incoherent, or incoherent about not being a gastronomic realist, but still having first-order gastronomic commitments, e.g., “Malbecs are tastier than cabernets”? 

Is this somehow incoherent or inconsistent to believe unless you think there are stance-independent gastronomic facts that provide us with external reasons to drink malbecs rather than cabernets independent of our taste preferences? Is it even implausible?

No. This is silly. A person can have first-order commitments about which food and drink is good or bad without supposing that commitments must be grounded in stance-independent gastronomic facts. Claims like “this tastes good,” can be readily understood to express first-order evaluative claims about or own subjective preferences. That’s a form of gastronomic antirealism, and there’s nothing ridiculous about it. I don’t endorse gastronomic subjectivism, but that’s irrelevant. The point is that gastronomic subjectivism provides a clear example of how one could have first-order normative commitments in a given domain without being a realist.

This should, at the very least, provide a bit of an intuition pump as to why I find it so obvious that there’s nothing implausible, inconsistent, or incoherent about normative antirealism in a given domain (morality, gastronomy, and so on) and having first-order commitments as an antirealist.

3.0 Boo that!

Let’s have a look at the remarks that follow. Sam follows this with:

"I strongly feel this!", "boo that!", "my culture believes this!", "this is possibly wrong but has no truth makers in the actual world" are not very strong rallying calls…

Antirealists probably wouldn’t use the first three of these as rallying cries, nor are they committed to doing so. However, all three of the first of these are at least better rallying cries than what is available to realists.

People don’t rally in response to philosophers pointing out that there are stance-independent moral facts that provide them with external reasons to act in accordance with those facts. People rally around things they feel strongly about, that they’re inclined to boo (or cheer) at, and that accords with values they care about (whether they are the values of their culture or personal values in opposition to that culture). Ancient generals didn’t rally their troops by reminding them of their objective duties. They rallied them by appealing to their feelings. Feelings are what move us, and no fact has the power to move us unless it is relevant to what we care about.

Why on earth would strong emotional sentiment not be a strong rallying cry? What’s the alternative, stale, motivationally inert “external reasons”? The kinds of “reasons” moral realists often provide us with are, by their very nature, reasons that aren’t reducible to our goals, standards, values, preferences, interests, life objectives, or anything that could be of any direct motivational relevance to us. In short, they are not, in and of themselves, things that anyone cares about. But these motivationally inert “reasons” are a stronger rallying cry? If so, why? One can parody this in the opposite direction::

“It’s a stance-independent irreducibly normative fact that you have external reasons to perform this action even though it is completely inconsistent with your personal goals and values.” “It’s intrinsically wrong!” “Moral realists are experts at having correct intuitions and they have the intuition that it’s wrong. Sure, I know, their intuitions are completely at odds with your own preferences and values and to comply with the experts would require you to act against what you take to be your own considered interests, but morality isn’t about your feelings, it’s about the facts!”

These aren’t just weak rallying calls, they’re ridiculous nonsense that nobody outside of academic circles would take seriously. Even if it were a stance-independent moral fact that you ought to X, unless you (a) already had a desire to do X, regardless of whether it was a stance-independent moral fact, or (b) had a desire to comply with the stance-independent moral facts, whatever they happen to be, you simply wouldn’t X. As Schiller says,

[...] factual data and logical reasonings are not ‘necessary’ in themselves; rather, their ‘necessity’ is only aroused in consciousness when the will needs to affirm them against resistance in the pursuit of its ends. That ‘2 and 2 must be 4’ only marks the rejection of some other result: if we desire to adhere to our system of arithmetical assumptions and are determined to go on counting, we cannot be called upon to add 2 and 2 in any other way. But behind the ‘can’t there always lurks a ‘won’t.’ [...] The feeling of necessity, therefore, is at bottom an emotional accompaniment of the purposive search for the means to realise our ends [...] (Schiller, Axioms as postulates, note 13)

I very much doubt even academic philosophers who regard themselves as moral realists would actually comply with cold and inert moral facts if those facts didn’t sufficiently align with their goals and interests, unless we discover strange facts about human psychology, e.g., that moral facts are a special kind of fact that, upon believing them, move us to act accordingly. I doubt there’s a compelling model of human cognition that would vindication such a notion.

Instead, I suspect such facts need to sync up with our motivational systems somehow if they’re to prompt us to act in accordance with them, and how are they going to do that unless we want to comply with them? And why would we want to comply with them unless we were moved, somehow, to do so? Sure, a belief can be relevant to what we decide to do, but I don’t believe beliefs can, by themselves motivate us to act.

Humans aren’t puppets who dance to the tune of pure logic. We’re creatures motivated by desires and goals. The realist’s rallying cries are far less strong than the antirealist’s for the simple reason that feelings are doing all the heavy lifting, while the moral realist’s stale facts add nothing that can move people beyond this, unless, and only unless, those facts are mediated by the motivational systems of whoever it is who comes to believe those facts, and motivations don’t just prompt action in response to mere “facts.” When it comes to voluntary action, beliefs may help us steer in a particular direction, but its boos and hurrahs that fill our sails.

One of the more unfortunate features of Sam’s remarks is how uncharitable the characterization of the antirealist’s rallying cries are. An antirealist who wants to call others to action doesn’t need to, and probably wouldn’t, appeal to their own interests, without regard for whether they're appealing to share those interests. Rather, they’d appeal to the interests of the people they are attempting to rally. 

First, consider the notion that “Boo that!” is not a strong rallying cry. If one were to simply boo at something, without regard for what those around you feel bout it, that probably would be a terrible rallying cry. But boos are often initiated in the midst of those with similar goals and interests, and in these contexts, booing is an almost quintessentially powerful way of rallying people.

Imagine you were at the Super Bowl and you were sitting in the stands, which are almost entirely composed of fans of the same team you are rooting for. A referee makes a bad call and appears biased in favor of the other team. Which do you think would be more likely to rally people?

1. Attempting to work the crowd up by shouting “Boo! You suck!” at the referee

2. Telling everyone “Excuse me, fellow philosophers. That referee violated the stance-independent normative moral facts regarding sportsmanship. Let us express our opposition to the wrongness of the referee’s actions by judging them to have violated their objective moral duties.”

I don’t know how many invocations of stance-independent moral facts have ever, in practice, actually led people to rally, but booing certainly has. If we tally up which of these two methods has, as a matter of empirical fact, been used to successfully rally people, booing wins by a landslide.

Note, however, that Sam opens with a far less charitable example:

"I strongly feel this!

This is an extremely uncharitable characterization of how a moral antirealist would attempt to rally others. An antirealist may believe that the correct analysis of a moral claim, like “murder is wrong,” is that it conveys the speaker’s feelings, and thus expresses something like “I strongly disapprove of murder” or “boo murder,” but the fact that they’d analyze moral claims in this way does not mean that they’re obliged to attempt to rally others by appealing to this semantic analysis. 

A moral antirealist could (and very likely would) appeal to the interests of the people they were attempting to rally. If I wanted to rally people to join me in protest in public, I would appeal to other people’s values, not my own. I wouldn’t say “I disapprove of this,” I’d remind other that they disapprove of whatever it is I want those people to protest, and I would try to appeal to the sentiments of the people I was addressing. As a matter of descriptive fact, this is very likely how people actually try to rally others. And nothing about this requires or presupposes realism.

4.0 Alleyway mugging

Compare this to another situation. Suppose you’re walking down the street when a mugger leaps out of an alley, brandishes a knife, and threatens to kill you.

Suppose you can’t flee, and you have no choice but to talk with them. What would you say? Would you point out that it’s stance-independently wrong to kill you? I doubt it. Instead, I suspect most people would appeal to the person’s goals, interests, and sentiments.

You might try to argue that there’s no need to kill you, they can have your money.

You might insist they could get caught, or that you might be able to defend yourself and hurt them.

You may beg them not to hurt you because you have a family, hoping they’d feel guilty.

You may insist their mother wouldn’t be proud of them. 

Such appeals might work, and they’d work by appealing to what that person cares about. You would be, in effect, attempting to “rally” their conscience, or their self-interest, or whatever it was that would prompt them to not want to kill you. And insisting that it would be morally wrong may not be very high on the list of plausible ways of discouraging them from murdering you. We can even suppose this person is a psychopath, and explicitly says:

Oh, I know it’s morally wrong to kill you, but I don’t care. Now why, exactly, shouldn’t I kill you and take all of your money?

Now what is the realist going to do? We can imagine the realist saying:

You don’t understand. You must comply with the stance-independent moral facts. They provide you with overriding and decisive reasons not to kill me.

Good luck with that. A literal “boo murdering me” would probably be more effective. Unless moral realists think they can persuade people by confusing them with technical jargon. It would be an interesting form of mentalism, at the very least.

In short: a moral antirealist’s rallying call isn’t an appeal to how strongly they feel, but an appeal to the feelings of whoever it is they want to rally. And such appeals are not only powerful, they are likely the most effective method of rallying people. I grant that people can and sometimes are moved by intellectual considerations, but it’s a conceit of philosophy to suppose that the musings of academics have more power to move hearts and minds than a simple ‘boo’, and, in any case, I believe that even in these cases motivation and desire plays an essential role in regulating people’s responses to the facts in question.

5.0 Moral facts as empirical facts

Sam’s subsequent remarks are puzzling. In response to other comments, Sam states:

Although I do believe in moral facts as abstract, irreducible normative claims, there are versions of realism where moral facts are reducible to empirical facts.

This is true. There are naturalist accounts that reduce moral facts to empirical facts. But does Sam think pointing to such facts is any better a rallying cry than what is available to an antirealist (I’m not sure, so I’m not presuming the answer is ‘yes’)?

First, an antirealist can point to exactly the same set of empirical facts; they just regard them as stance-independent moral facts. 

Second, if all a realist account amounts to is insisting that some set of empirical facts just are the moral facts, it’s unclear how that could plausibly motivate anybody beyond whatever motivating force those empirical facts have regardless of whether they are moral facts or not. For instance, a moral antirealist and a moral realist who thinks moral facts are facts about what promotes wellbeing could both point to the same empirical fact, e.g., “action X would increase wellbeing by amount Y.” What rallying advantage does the naturalist have? I think that the answer is: none whatsoever. All the realist can do is insist that those facts are the moral facts. But this makes no practical difference to the content of the facts in question.

Why, then, doesn’t Sam throw naturalists in with the antirealists? I don’t know. The naturalists, in this respect at least, seem to have more in common with antirealists than with realists.

6.0 Antirealism doesn’t entail that you don’t think your values are important

Continuing with this thread, Sam responds to another remark by stating:

My point is that if that's the case, then having beliefs about morality (i.e. factory farming is wrong) and protesting in their defense amounts to a very strange position, like "I don' think this is true in any important way, but I'll go out and defend it with my whole heart!"

Nothing about antirealism entails that you don’t consider your moral standards, values, preferences, commitments, and so on important. I’m a moral antirealist, and I deny that there’s anything more important about stance-independent moral facts than my (non-realist) moral values and preferences. Indeed, I consider only the latter to be important, while I consider stance-independent moral facts to not be important at all. This is yet another instance of the halfway fallacy. 

An antirealist is under no obligation to share realist conceptions of the conditions for something to be “important.” The degree to which something is important is itself something for which I deny there are stance-independent normative or evaluative facts, nor do I think stance-independent facts about what’s good or valuable or whatever are relevant to the importance of anything. My view of importance is itself an antirealist conception. So I can state, categorically, that as an antirealist, I don’t think my values aren’t “true in any important way.”

7.0 Belief and motivation

One respondent, Michael Schmitz, says the following:

It seems obvious to me that there's something very implausible (incoherent?) about moral realists having moral commitments, especially ones they'd act on, because actions have goals, but they say morality is about facts. But, many anti-realists do just this. What am I missing?

Sam responds:

I don't see any puzzle there. Why can't it just go like this, "I believe suffering is objectively bad, I think factory farming causes suffering, thus I should act to stop factory farming"? My belief leads to a goal, which leads to action.

That seems puzzling to me.  How, exactly, does the belief “lead to” the goal? Does it cause it? If so, how? Is there an empirical claim here, such that moral beliefs cause goals of some kind? Is there evidence that moral beliefs in fact cause goals? If so, what is that evidence that this is how your (or anyone else’s) cognition works?

My own inclination is to ask: why care if something is objectively bad? Why comply with such facts? Insisting that they have, among their properties, that they “stance-independently matter” would be a profoundly strange consideration to me. I am motivated by what matters to me, not by what “matters” independent of whether it matters to me. If realists think they can be motivated by facts, independent of how those facts interact with their own motivations and values, that strikes me as a profoundly bizarre and probably empirically false (or even incoherent) conception of how cognition works.

8.0 Some other remarks

There are a handful of other remarks in the thread that I find interesting.

8.1 Suggesting normative reasons

Sam also says:

But, protesting against something seems to suggest that I think there is normative reason against that practice.

It doesn’t seem that way to me. Why should we think this is true? Note here that Sam has fallen back on mentioning how things seem without specifying who it is they seem that way to (I’ve probably done so several times myslf in this post. It’s a bad habit).

8.2 Dogmatic realism

Here’s one from one of the most prominent realists on Twitter, J. P. Andrew:

I think you’re missing nothing. This is why I’m an unapologetic, dogmatic moral realist. If moral realism is false, then absolutely nothing matters.

It’s good to have it on record that J. P. Andrew regards himself as a “dogmatic” moral realist. The remark about nothing mattering is weird. If moral realism is false, then the only sense in which nothing matters is in a realist sense. But if realism is false, and an antirealist conception of what matters is true, then things would matter…they just wouldn’t matter in a way that presupposes realism. This is, yet again, an instance of the halfway fallacy. If Andrew were wrong about moral realism, Andrew could also be wrong about what it means for something to matter. So I don’t grant that if moral realism is false then “absolutely nothing matters.”

8.3 Antirealists don’t regard their values as less important

Thomas Metcalf makes a bizarre remark in response to Schmitz above:

If some of the facts are about the way the world ought to be, then I don't see the puzzle at all. If I think it's very important that the world be F, then I'll be motivated to try to make the world be F. If I'm an anti-realist, then it's less important that the world be F.

This is an embarrassing remark for a philosophy professor to make. It isn’t just wrong, it’s profoundly and outrageously wrong. Antirealism has nothing to do with how important things are to you. Nothing about thinking a fact is stance-independently right or wrong entails anything about you being more motivated to perform that action than not thinking this. It is completely consistent with antirealism to consider it just as important that the world be F as it is for a moral realist to think it’s important that the world be F. Antirealists just disagree on what it is that makes things “important’ or not.

It’s possible, as a matter of contingent facts about human psychology, that realists tend on average to care more about what they consider important than antirealists, but (a) that’s an empirical claim (b) I don’t know of any good evidence it’s true and (c) even if it were true, it wouldn’t be an entailment of realism, but at best merely a quirk of how human psychology handles endorsing antirealism (it would also have no relevance to whether antirealism were false. Believing one’s moral values are magical might motivate us to consider them more important, but that wouldn’t make magic real).

Michael Schmitz’s reply to this is reassuring in one respect, and disappointing in another. Schmitz replies:

So you really think that people are anti-realists because ethics is less important to them? 

I can't speak for anti-realists and find their view even weirder than realism, but I suppose what motivates is rather that they take notions such as fact and objectivity more seriously.

I’m disappointed that my view is seen as weirder than realism. What’s weird about it? But I also find the speculation here a bit strange. First, you could try asking us what motivates us. Second, the answer, for me at least (I can’t speak for other antirealists, only myself) is simple: I’m motivated by what I care about. Is that weird? Are moral realists motivated by something else? If so, what?

9.0 Conclusion

I will close by making a positive point from an antirealist’s perspective.

I believe people are motivated to act in accordance with their goals, desires, values, interests, and so on. I’m not too picky about what term we use for the psychological states in question. Simply put, we care about things, and I believe voluntary action is directed at obtaining those things. The psychological picture of what’s really going on is a messy, complicated quagmire that may involve competing drives and interests and a variety of psychological mechanisms vying to sit in the behavioral driver’s seat, but ultimately, I think intentional action is directed at the achievement of our goals.

These goals include all the mundane goals a person might have: a desire to alleviate hunger and boredom. A desire to have fun. A desire to have a fulfilling life, to accomplish and achieve and overcome obstacles. None of this requires any presumption that there are facts about what my goals should be or what I should care about that have nothing to do with my own interests or values. For instance, when deciding what music to listen to, I have never been concerned with stance-independent facts or external reasons about what I ought to listen to. I choose the music I want to listen to. 

This generalizes to all of my decisions in every context. This includes my moral values. It’s goals all the way down. Doing what I think is morally right isn’t about conforming my action to some tablet of duties I discover by engaging in philosophical reflection, duties that I “ought” to comply with no matter how repugnant I personally find them, or how misaligned they are with my concerns or interests. My moral values are my concerns and interests, and nothing more. 

I find this to be a natural, intuitive, and simple way to think about moral values. It is moral realists who strike me as having a profoundly bizarre, overwrought, metaphysically baroque notion of “morality.” The realist’s conception of morality (at least, that of secular non-naturalists) looks to me like a quasi-religious mystical conception of morality, as though even in the absence of God there’s a list of commandments prescribed by the universe.

I find the realist’s conception of morality to be a profoundly alien way of thinking about morality. It is a lifeless thing, the output of an empty intellectual exercise that relies on inscrutable and dubious methods and is rooted, I suspect, in a long history of Christian and Western philosophical influences on the minds of most of those engaged in analytic philosophy that are drawn to such views.

This is part of why I think cross-cultural research into moral psychology is so important: I suspect analytic philosophy is primarily comprised of thinkers whose training and enculturation is so homogenous and parochial that this gives the misleading impression that their ways of thinking, and their “intuitions,” are grasping some kind of transcendent truth, rather than reflecting the output of psychological systems that reflect a narrow, idiosyncratic, and culturally parochial.