Both Sides Brigade Doesn't Understand the Unintelligibility Thesis
1.0 The inconceivability of irreducible normativity
According to Both Sides Brigade, some “militant” antirealists hold that:
[...] that stance-independent reasons not only don’t exist, but are literally inconceivable — that is, they report a total inability to even imagine or entertain the concept of a reason for action that doesn’t in some way depend on some agent’s goals or desires.
Go check out that post before proceeding, since this is a response to it.
To my knowledge, there are no unambiguous cases in the academic literature of anyone expressing such a view, I’m the primary person BSB has interacted with who has expressed this position, I have explicitly expressed it at least partially in these terms, and most of the people who’ve expressed similar views either got them from me or held them previously but don’t publicly defend them. Some of BSB’s later remarks also indicate there’s a strong chance he’s referring to at least me (and anyone who agrees with me). Given this, I want you to keep something in mind as I evaluate BSB’s post: not once does he explicitly mention me or anyone else who holds the views he’s criticizing, nor does he reference or quote anyone. This makes it extremely difficult to evaluate who BSB is criticizing, to verify the accuracy of his characterizations, or to assess the merits of what they say on their own terms. In contrast, I don’t even think you should read my critique without first reading what BSB says, I’ve provided a link to his post, and I will be quoting him directly throughout.
I draw attention to this because I don’t think it’s good form to critique views, especially when they’re held by a very small number of people (or even just one person), without making it clear who they are and what the view is, so that people can go see what those people say for themselves.
That issue aside, the position BSB appears to be referencing is the Unintelligibility Thesis. This is the view that certain terms used in contemporary analytic metaethics are not meaningful, but are instead the result of an interrelated cluster of conceptual confusions, introspective errors, and linguistic mistakes characteristic of the presumptions and methods employed in mainstream analytic philosophy. According to this view, certain forms of technical discourse among academic philosophers make reference to a handful of closely related notions: normative reasons, irreducible normativity, counting-in-favor relations, and so on. There are several reasons why I believe these terms do not refer to any meaningful concepts, but are instead meaningless confusions; as such, it’s not that the terms pick out incoherent or internally contradictory concepts, but rather they fail to refer to any concept at all. The terms “refer” to what one might call a pseudoconcept. Pseudoconcepts are, as the name suggests, not concepts. Rather, pseudoconcepts can be captured behaviorally, primarily through ways of speaking and thinking, that appear to involve the use of a meaningful concept where no such concept is present. Language and behavior create the illusion, both to the user of pseudoconcepts and those around them, that a real concept is in use, when in fact one isn’t. What is happening, instead, is that a person has been so thoroughly tripped up by theorizing and language that they are saying nonsensical things that they believe are meaningful.
I won’t be making a case for the Unintelligibility Thesis here. I’ve referenced some of the evidence for it in previous posts, but the work to make the case for it will be far too comprehensive to capture in anything less than a dedicated blog series and, eventually, a book. For now, my goal is instead to react to BSB’s critique. Unfortunately, if BSB is targeting the Unintelligibility Thesis, as seems likely, he’s misidentified what it is that the position holds is unintelligible. BSB appears to believe that what the position holds as unintelligible is the conceptual pairing of stance-independence and reasons. It’s likely I’ve made remarks to this effect in the past, though I don’t believe I’ve framed the position in this way in some time. My standard critique of realism relies and has relied on a trilemma for some time: that all forms of moral realism are trivial, false, or unintelligible. I do not consider the notion of a stance-independent moral fact, under a naturalist conception of morality, to be unintelligible. Stance-independence pairs conceptually with moral facts in a way I don’t find inherently disagreeable. The issue is with pairing stance-independence with a particular conception of moral facts that results in those facts being construed in certain ways. So far so good, since BSB doesn’t focus on stance-independent moral facts, but instead focuses on stance-independent “reasons”. This is most closely linked to Derek Parfit’s notion of “external reasons” as described in volume 2 of On What Matters. Here is the key passage, where Parfit references Williams:
When Williams argues that there are no such reasons, his main claim is that Externalists cannot explain what it could mean to say that we have some external reason. I admit that, when I say that we have some reason, or that we should or ought to act in a certain way, what I mean cannot be helpfully explained in other terms. I could say that, when some fact gives us a reason to act in some way, this fact counts in favour of this act. But this claim adds little, since ‘counts in favour of’ means, roughly, ‘gives a reason for’. Williams suggests that the phrase ‘has a reason’ does not have any such intelligible, irreducibly normative external sense. When he discusses statements about such external reasons, Williams calls these statements ‘mysterious’ and ‘obscure’, and suggests that they mean nothing. Several other writers make similar claims. (p. 272)
The notion of an “external reason” is contrasted with the notion of an “internal reason.” The implication here is that Williams would grant that internal reasons are intelligible, but that external reasons aren’t. External reasons are reasons for action that are given to us on the basis of facts other than our desires, e.g., the fact that an action would cause unnecessary suffering allegedly gives us an external reason to abstain from the act. Internal reasons, in contrast, are reasons given to us by our desires. The fact that a person wants to cause suffering gives them an internal reason to do so. “External” and “internal” roughly correspond to stance-independent and stance-dependent, and accordingly I will be understanding them in this way. Both conceptions of “reason” refer to normative reasons, which are distinct from other conceptions of reasons, such as causal reasons.
Given these distinctions, Parfit’s remarks seem to suggest the issue is with the intelligibility of stance-independent reasons in particular, which implies that stance-dependent reasons are perfectly intelligible. Perhaps Williams would endorse such a view, and perhaps others would, too. BSB seems to inherit his understanding of the Unintelligibility Thesis from this kind of contrast, and to believe that those of us who endorse the Unintelligibility Thesis share the implied view that stance-dependent reasons are intelligible.
This is a mistake. The problem isn’t with stance-independent reasons. It’s with the very concept of normative reasons itself. The unintelligibility is just as applicable to stance-dependent reasons as it is to stance-independent reasons. Those of us who cash out reasons discourse in terms of means-end relations do not think that such facts “give us” stance-dependent reasons; we preserve reason language, but we jettison the notion of normative reasons altogether, including stance-dependent/“internal” reasons.
There may very well be people who think there are normative reasons, and they must be based on desires. This appears to be the target of BSB’s critique. If so, this isn’t my view, and I don’t know anyone who endorses this view. It might be that BSB is criticizing a view that nobody holds. Since to my knowledge I am the primary proponent of the Unintelligibility Thesis, there’s a good chance I’m one of if not the primary intended target. It is unfortunate, then, that if this is the case, then BSB still doesn’t understand my position and, consequently, is unable to argue effectively against it.
If normative reasons were merely understood to refer to a specific form of discourse that picked out a relevant subcluster of means-end relations, I wouldn’t even have an issue with the term and with some conceptions of what a “normative reason” is. What I specifically deny is that there is any intelligible conception of irreducible normativity, the notion that there can be normative facts or properties that are not reducible to descriptive facts or properties. It is typically such facts that are said to “give” or “provide” reasons independent of one’s own goals, standards, or values. To be clear, I don’t think any facts, desires, stances, or otherwise, “give” or “provide” reasons. I think this is at best a potentially misleading metaphor, and at worst is literal nonsense. So, it’s not that I think our stances can “give” us reasons, but that non-stance facts (like that an action would cause suffering) can’t. Given this, I reject both the internalist and externalist view of normative reasons. I’m a quietist; I think the entire framework in which these views are pitted against one another is misconceived. To put it in simple terms, BSB seems to mistakenly associate the Unintelligibility Thesis with internalism about reasons, when in reality the position rejects internalism and endorses quietism.
This is because I don’t think “reasons” are “given” at all, and I don’t think one can literally have reasons. I think reasons-talk is, if used intelligibly, just a particular way of referencing relations between goals or standards and means of acting in accord with them. In other words, reasons-talk is just a way of speaking; the conceptual content is bound up in relational facts that don’t involve the reification of “reasons” in such a way that reasons are things-in-themselves, or are literally real.
To put it simply: reasons-talk is just a particular feature of the grammar of (at least some) languages. It doesn’t involve reference to any special phenomena or even any special concepts. I talk about this here, in my post “There are no irreducibly normative reasons.”
Call this reasons quietism: the view that there is nothing of substantive philosophical interest to discuss when it comes to the question of (normative) “reasons.” Once one understands the role reasons discourse plays in ordinary language, there simply are no special phenomena, facts, or robust philosophical considerations, metaphysical or otherwise, to engage with.
BSB also mistakenly links the Unintelligibility Thesis too closely to desires. I don’t think desires give us reasons, and I don’t even place any special emphasis in the means-end relational account on desires. Rather, I think that when people speak of having reasons to do things, these remarks only make sense if they implicitly index one or another presumptive standard or stance. It need not be a desire in the sense of a psychological disposition to want or care about something. For instance, someone could say that you shouldn’t do something because it “goes against the Bible.” The Bible isn’t a person and doesn’t have desires. Yet one could rephrase this as “The reason you shouldn’t do that is that it goes against the Bible.” I have no problem with this. Reasons-talk can be understood in terms of a consistency relation between a particular course of action and a particular standard; in this case, some course of action would be inconsistent with some standard. But I don’t think the Bible “gives” you a reason to do anything. I don’t think you have reasons.
I could stop here. BSB appears to not understand the position and thus cannot argue effectively against it. Insofar as BSB’s argument attempts to draw out an inconsistency in rejecting stance-independent reasons but not stance-dependent reasons, but still endorsing the notion of normative reasons that involve counting-in-favor relations that “give” us reasons: yea, sure, that position may be internally inconsistent. I don’t know of anyone who holds this view, but if they do, well, shame on them, I guess.
But let’s see what else BSB has to say, because it reinforces my claim that he’s misinterpreting the Unintelligibility Thesis.
2.0 Features of reasons discourse
BSB thinks that certain “close to undeniable” features of “reasons-discourse” make it hard to imagine how stance-independent reasons could be unintelligible:
Now, I certainly don’t think the people who make these claims are lying when they say they can’t conceive of moral realism being true. But, at the same time, I have to admit that I struggle myself to imagine how that could possibly be the case, given some basic features of reasons-discourse that are close to undeniable.
BSB slips here into talk of “moral realism.” I have never heard of anyone who claims that they can’t conceive of moral realism being true. I’m sure you could find someone on Twitter or a Facebook post or something saying this. Is this who BSB is responding to? Random people? My position (and those who agree with me likely hold a similar view) is that certain conceptions of moral realism are unintelligible. This is a very important distinction. In any case, let’s have a look at the features of “reasons-discourse” that allegedly make the meaningfulness of “moral realism” unintelligible (again, why moral realism? The Unintelligibility Thesis isn’t the view that moral realism is unintelligible).
To start, I just want to point out the basic fact that we often speak about and consider reasons without any essential reference to what exactly it was that “gave them to us.” Take these two informal syllogisms as an example:
Hungry: If you desire to eat a delicious slice of your favorite pizza, then you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza; you desire to eat a delicious slice of your favorite pizza; therefore, you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza.
Charity: If Big Frank’s Pizza is holding a fundraiser where half of what you pay will go to your local women’s shelter, then you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza; Big Frank’s Pizza is holding a fundraiser where half of what you pay will go to your local women’s shelter; therefore, you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza.
The Hungry case references a desire, while the Charity case does not. This contrast is key to the distinction BSB will lean on in his critique.
First, note that BSB started out saying that he wants to talk about basic facts about how “we often speak about and consider reasons,” then gives us these examples. Are these examples of how “we” often speak? Who is “we”? Ordinary people? The phrasing “you have a reason” sounds a bit contrived and probably isn’t something people would ordinarily say. But they might say something similar enough. More importantly, these remarks are phrased in terms of the formal inferential structure of a philosophical argument.
Ordinary people do not speak this way. These are formal syllogisms. Ordinary people don’t go around presenting arguments in the form of modus ponens. Granted, we do speak of people having reasons to do things (at least in English) without explicitly referencing what “gave them to us,” and BSB could have chosen examples that represent the sorts of things an ordinary person would actually say. So this might seem a little nitpicky. It isn’t, though. Because what these examples reflect is an inferential pattern BSB is attributing to ordinary thought. BSB has seemingly unintentionally conflated how ordinary people speak (those were his words, after all) with how they think. This distinction is important, because it reveals how BSB assumes without evidence that certain ordinary language locutions, such as remarks about people having reasons, implicitly reflect formal patterns of logical inference, without any empirical evidence that they do so, or how they do so, or in what contexts they do so.
BSB inherits the misguided tendency for philosophers to assume they know how ordinary people think based on what they say. But any move from utterances to the reasoning behind those utterances is an empirical question (and often a challenging one) that requires evidence to verify. What BSB furnishes us with here is a bizarre and distorted Frankenstein of certain ordinary language locutions embedded in formal syllogisms, which results in clunky, artificial phrases that simultaneously exhibit some features of ordinary language and some features of formal philosophical phraseology. This isn’t how we speak. It’s how BSB thinks. Analytic philosophers develop idiosyncratic and highly theory-laden ways of thinking, then project these ways of thinking onto ordinary language, imagining that their theoretical views underwrite ordinary discourse. They typically do so without presenting one iota of empirical evidence that the way ordinary people think comports with the way analytic philosophers think. BSB is no exception here. BSB is implicitly relying on assumptions about psychology and language for which he’s presented no arguments or evidence, and may not even be aware of.
With respect to how ordinary people “consider” reasons, we’d need to do empirical work to find out. What BSB offers is more like an inferential process, or a form of reasoning, rather than a way of speaking. I don’t know how often people reason this way. That’s an empirical question. And there are at least two separate questions: how often people employ modus ponens when reasoning in a general sense, and how often people specifically reason in terms of conditionals in which desires or facts can give you reasons, such that you “have a reason.” I am skeptical people do think this way, even if they do speak of people having reasons. This looks to me like BSB presuming without any good empirical evidence that people think in the way BSB himself does. I don’t grant this, and in any case such a claim is unsubstantiated.
That people don’t speak this way and there’s no evidence they think this way already puts BSB in a bad spot. As an aside, BSB also says:
I just want to point out the basic fact that we often speak about and consider reasons without any essential reference to what exactly it was that “gave them to us.”
The first case references a desire and the second references a non-desire fact. Neither is explicit about whether it is the desire or non-desire fact that “gives” us reasons, but because both examples frame things in terms of conditionals, they could be read to imply that the desire or non-desire fact “gives” us the reason in question. This can be implied without it being explicit (though that doesn’t mean it is implied or intended to be implied; I don’t think facts by themselves are typically thought of as giving us reasons). Alternatively, both remarks could implicitly appeal to some standard or other without having to explicitly reference the source. Part of the issue with BSB’s phrasing is that while the Hungry case doesn’t explicitly reference what “gives us a reason,” it explicitly refers to desires. Pragmatics can do the rest of the work by implying that it is the desire that “gives us a reason.”
Yet pragmatics can also reference desires in the Charity case. While the Charity case does not reference desires or conditionalize what one has reason to do on them, that one’s reason for buying a pizza is ultimately based on one’s desires can still be pragmatically implied or presumed by a speaker, even if no reference to desire is made. After all, if as BSB correctly appreciates, we don’t need to explicitly state what “gives us a reason,” we also don’t need to explicitly reference desires for them to play a necessary role in determining the meaning of what’s being said. The facts that implicitly “give” us reasons could be appended such that their relevance is conditional on us having the relevant desires:
Charity: If Big Frank’s Pizza is holding a fundraiser where half of what you pay will go to your local women’s shelter, [and if you desire to support a local women’s shelter], then you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza; Big Frank’s Pizza is holding a fundraiser where half of what you pay will go to your local women’s shelter [and you desire to support a local women’s shelter]; therefore, you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza.
There is no reason in principle why a person who made a remark in the vicinity of the Charity case couldn’t be operating on the assumption that the person they’re speaking to desires to support local charities. In fact, suppose that there were two actual speakers, Alex and Sam. Neither of them is likely to say anything about the charity or that the other has a reason to order a pizza if they don’t either personally want to support the local women’s shelter or believe the other person would desire to if they knew about it (and either also support doing so or for whatever reason don’t care to but want to inform the other person of the charity). Ordinary language isn’t simply an unprompted, undirected vocalization of propositions. It serves a purpose. If Sam was a traditionalist husband who thought it was fine to hit your wife if she were disobedient, it’d make little sense for Alex to make the Charity remarks to Sam, unless Alex thought he could convince Sam to change his views, and wanted Sam to do so. Any actual instance of ordinary language must always make reference to the goals of the speakers. Language is a social behavior, and meaning is determined by the social goals of speakers. BSB presents us with artificial formal ways of thinking stripped of context. This is a hopeless way of assessing what people might mean, because it strips ordinary discourse of features essential to its meaning.
I’ll return to this language issue later. For now, I want to focus on the examples themselves. The Hungry case is supposed to provide an example of a desire “giving” a reason, while the Charity case is supposed to provide an example of a non-desire fact (the fact that Big Frank’s Pizza is holding a fundraiser where half of what you pay will go to your local women’s shelter) “giving” the reason.
I have no issue at all with accepting that ordinary reasons discourse does involve instances where people point to facts, rather than desires, as a rationale for what reasons we have for action, because such remarks can still be underwritten by implicit assumptions about those facts only being relevant given certain goals or standards. I’ll return to this, but first let’s look at what BSB does with these examples:
In either case, it’s trivially easy to just apply the law of detachment and see that both result in the same general conclusion, which is that you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza. And crucially, from this point on, it doesn’t really matter which syllogism got you there — so long as you know you have a reason to order the pizza, all the same relevant normative conclusions fall out regardless: You’ll know, for example, that you also have a reason to pick up the phone and dial, or that ordering the pizza is the right move in the absence of any countervailing reason to do otherwise. (The only thing that might differ is the relative strength of the reason itself, but we can account for that easily by just stipulating that your desire for cheap pizza is exactly as strong as the corresponding moral weight of helping to support a women’s shelter.)
BSB’s objection reinforces my impression that he misunderstands what I and others consider unintelligible. Notice how he starts after giving the examples:
In either case, it’s trivially easy to just apply the law of detachment and see that both result in the same general conclusion, which is that you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza.
But the Unintelligibility Thesis holds that you don’t have a reason in either case. BSB seems to want to argue, by some kind of parity of reason, that if you grant that you “have a reason” in the Hungry case that there’s no good reason to think you don’t “have a reason” in the Charity case, too, since they both work the same way. But since the Unintelligibility Thesis denies that you “have a reason” in either case, this kind of companions in guilt argument simply doesn’t work. BSB goes on to say:
And crucially, from this point on, it doesn’t really matter which syllogism got you there — so long as you know you have a reason to order the pizza, all the same relevant normative conclusions fall out regardless: You’ll know, for example, that you also have a reason to pick up the phone and dial, or that ordering the pizza is the right move in the absence of any countervailing reason to do otherwise. (The only thing that might differ is the relative strength of the reason itself, but we can account for that easily by just stipulating that your desire for cheap pizza is exactly as strong as the corresponding moral weight of helping to support a women’s shelter.)
But we don’t think you “have a reason” in either case. Here’s how I’d interpret the two cases:
Hungry: If you desire to eat a delicious slice of your favorite pizza, then you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza; you desire to eat a delicious slice of your favorite pizza; therefore, you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza.
It would be conducive to the goal of eating a slice of delicious pizza to order from Big Frank’s Pizza.
Charity: If Big Frank’s Pizza is holding a fundraiser where half of what you pay will go to your local women’s shelter, then you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza; Big Frank’s Pizza is holding a fundraiser where half of what you pay will go to your local women’s shelter; therefore, you have a reason to order a pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza.
It would be conducive to the goal of supporting a local women’s shelter to buy pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza.
As you can see, my way of interpreting these remarks cashes them out in the same way. I don’t regard the Hungry case as meaningful but the Charity case as somehow weird or confusing or unintelligible. It’s just that the Hungry case makes explicit reference to desires while the Charity case doesn’t. The former is more explicit about what standard the action of ordering pizza would promote while the latter is more implicit about it. But in both cases the only way to make sense of either of these is, on my view, to understand talk of reasons in terms of their relation to some standard or goal. Critically, the standard or goal need not be one that anyone in particular holds. It need not be a desire in the psychological sense. And that means-end relations make sense of reasons discourse does not mean that reasons are given by desires or stances.
Given this, what BSB says next is irrelevant:
Crucially, this isn’t how things work in other situations where clearly inconceivable options are on the table. You can imagine, for example, an impossible world in which both square and round circles exist. In that world, a syllogism about square circular objects and a syllogism about round circular objects could both end up giving you the conclusion that you’ve got a circular object, period — but if you try to consider what would follow from that conclusion, you come up empty, because it’s just not possible to understand what a circular object would be if that understanding needs to allow for both the round and square versions. In contrast, a reason to act by itself carries all the sorts of normative implications you’d want from a reason, regardless of whether we stipulate that reason as coming from a desire or from some objective moral fact.
The problem is that I don’t analyze the Hungry or Charity case any differently. Both would either involve appeals to irreducible normativity, in which case they’d be nonsensical, or they don’t, and would instead be construed in terms of consistency relations, and thus reduced to descriptive claims. My account doesn’t struggle at all with making sense of the downstream considerations, or what would follow from “having a reason” talk.
Here’s how that works. As BSB says:
And crucially, from this point on, it doesn’t really matter which syllogism got you there — so long as you know you have a reason to order the pizza, all the same relevant normative conclusions fall out regardless: You’ll know, for example, that you also have a reason to pick up the phone and dial, or that ordering the pizza is the right move in the absence of any countervailing reason to do otherwise.
I agree. It doesn’t matter. But nothing follows from this and it is no threat to the Unintelligibility Thesis. Consider how I’d assess these cases:
It would be consistent with the goal of eating a delicious slice of pizza to order from Big Frank’s Pizza. It would also be conducive to this goal to pick up the phone and dial.
It would be consistent with the goal of supporting a local women’s shelter to order from Big Frank’s Pizza. It would also be conducive to this goal to pick up the phone and dial.
Notice how there is no meaningful difference between these two cases at all. My account allows me to trivially arrive at all the same conclusions without ever supposing that there are irreducibly normative reasons, or that facts can “give” us reasons independent of our stances, desires, or attitudes. BSB goes on to say:
What this suggests to me is that the essential conceptual content of a reason doesn’t come with any reference to subjectivity or objectivity “baked in,” so to speak.
I agree. I don’t think ordinary discourse does have either baked into it. While I maintain that we can only make sense of reasons discourse by appeal to implicit indexes to standards, this does not mean that I am claiming that subjectivity is “baked in” to ordinary discourse. I’m not even entirely sure what that would mean. Is this a psychological claim? Or some other kind of claim?
My dissertation was a defense of folk metaethical indeterminacy. I don’t think ordinary language commits people to subjectivism, and I don’t think ordinary people are subjectivists. I think the way people speak is consistent with realism and antirealism, but isn’t distinctively committed to either. What I am showing here is that an antirealist account can make sense of ordinary language without any difficulty, so there is no good reason to suppose only realism can account for ordinary discourse, or that it can do so better than antirealism. It doesn’t do a better job. Contrary to what realists suppose, it just isn’t the case that the overall way ordinary people speak, think, or act suggests they are committed to moral realism or employ the notion of irreducibly normative reasons.
Furthermore, BSB is speaking of the conceptual content “of a reason” as though there is such a thing and it’s part of ordinary discourse. But I am denying this. I think the philosophical conception of normative reasons that BSB has in mind is a philosophical invention, and that ordinary talk of “reasons” doesn’t appeal to reasons in the reified way BSB seems to me to have in mind here. So the issue isn’t that I and those with my views think ordinary discourse appeals to reasons in the reified sense BSB favors, but cashes them out in terms of their relation to desires; it’s that I don’t think irreducible normativity or BSB’s conception of reasons plays any necessary role in ordinary discourse and thinking in the first place.
BSB also hasn’t demonstrated some kind of asymmetry between the Hungry and Charity examples, because I’ve preserved this analysis across both examples, including the example that’s supposed to be a case of stance-independent facts “giving” us reasons. As I’ve shown here, identifying both the Hungry and Charity case as involving implicit indexing to standards is just as consistent with BSB’s considerations. As such, BSB has not successfully disentangled implicit consistency relations from reasons discourse. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since BSB doesn’t appear to understand that this is what I and others are arguing for, rather than the mistaken notion that only desires somehow give reasons, but that non-desire facts don’t.
To put this in very simple terms: we can understand explicit reasons-talk about facts “giving” us reasons as implicitly appealing to real or hypothetical goals, desires, or standards, even if it isn’t explicitly stated. And it certainly doesn’t need to be, nor would it be typical in ordinary language to always be explicit about such standards, even when they are implied and plausibly present. For example, imagine this exchange:
Sam: I’m going to go swimming.
Alex: No! Don’t!
Sam: Wait, what? Why not?
Alex: There’s sharks in the water, and you have a cut on your hand!
Sam: Oh, damn. Really? Never mind then.
We could ratchet this reference to sharks into the same modus ponens structure BSB provided for the Hungry and Charity cases:
Sharks: If there are sharks in the water and you are bleeding, then you have a reason to not go swimming. There are sharks in the water and you are bleeding; therefore, you have a reason to not go swimming.
Notice how this more closely mirrors the Charity case than the Hungry case. There is no reference to desires, goals, or values at all. And yet a perfectly sensible way of making sense of Sharks is that the reason you shouldn’t go swimming ultimately turns on the implicit presumption that you don’t want to be eaten by sharks.
In other words, it isn’t the fact that sharks are in the water that does all the work. It’s not as though, in other words, if you are bleeding and sharks are in the water, these facts alone entail that you “shouldn’t go swimming.” Lurking behind all of this is the widespread presumption that people don’t want to be eaten by sharks, and that you (the person being told not to go swimming) don’t want to be eaten.
Consider some counterfactuals: what if sharks were friendly and would heal your cuts? Then it would make sense to say that you should go in the water. Yet this only makes sense if we assume that the reason why one would or wouldn’t go swimming had something to do with their goal to not be injured. Or imagine most people had a strong desire to be eaten by sharks. Weird? Sure. But if they did, why would Alex mention that sharks were in the water as a reason to not go swimming? Simple: Alex wouldn’t. The only way to make sense of Sharks is to understand that the fact that sharks are in the water isn’t doing all of the work in conveying what’s meant.
This is because when it comes to ordinary discourse, much of what we mean goes unstated, because it is carried by context and assumptions. The only way to make sense of ordinary discourse is to understand who is engaging in that discourse and what their goals, standards, and values are. Discourse is a voluntary, goal-driven behavior that serves social purposes; it isn’t simply a vehicle for spewing propositions. Analytic philosophers routinely induct people into a pathologically confused and misguided way of thinking about language that strips it of its social and contextual elements. The result is a profoundly muddled way of thinking about ordinary discourse that loses sight of these background assumptions. If we go all the way back to the Charity case, the presumption someone who made such a remark would presumably have is that the person they are saying has a reason to buy pizza would want to support a local women’s shelter. Or perhaps they want the person to support the women’s shelter, even if that person may not want to. There may be other possibilities. The point is that any such remarks, if they were to occur in ordinary discourse, would invariably involve people with goals, desires, and standards, and those goals, desires, and standards would be relevant to and influencing what they said and why they said it. And because language serves this social, goal-driven function, we tend to invoke both our own goals and standards when engaging with others, and to make assumptions about other people’s goals and standards.
Consider if an ordinary person was a moral realist and did think that you ought to buy pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza because it would support a local women’s shelter. Why would this person bother saying that you should order pizza from Big Frank’s Pizza merely because they judged that it was true that you morally ought to? There are countless truths we could express to others. Do ordinary people go around endlessly expressing truth claims, without regard for the content of those claims?
No. They do not. Even if someone thought this particular moral fact was stance-independently true, the most likely reason they’d say this to you is if they wanted you to order pizza. Goals and desires are never absent from ordinary discourse. I’m not even sure we could make sense of these sorts of conversations without supposing people were acting with respect to their goals and standards. And so when we look back at the Charity case, while one could try to make sense of it in terms of facts themselves somehow giving us reasons to buy pizza, a more sensible way to make sense of someone telling someone else about the charity is that they want the other person to support women’s shelters or believe that other person would want to do so (or both). These motivations are a little distinct, so let me give an example of each:
Alex: Sam, you shouldn’t go to the party. Sandra will be there.
Sam: Alex, you should apply for that job in New York. It’s right up your alley.
Alex may tell Sam not to go to a party because Alex doesn’t like Sandra and doesn’t want Sam around her.
Sam might tell Alex to apply for a job not because Sam wants Alex to get the job, but because Sam believes Alex would want to get the job, but doesn’t know about it, and Sam wants Alex to be successful. In other words, Sam could have a second-order preference that Alex act on their preferences.
In BSB’s Charity case, whatever goal a person would have need not be explicit. We couldn’t tell merely from them remarking on the fundraiser whether they want others to buy pizza to support the women’s shelter, or because they know others would want to, or both, or something else.
Why does this matter? What I am trying to illustrate here is that while what we say in ordinary language is always goal driven, the goals and values in play are rarely explicit. We have goals. The people we are speaking to have goals. And we make assumptions about what their goals are likely to be. And all of these facts play an essential role in why we bother to speak in the first place. But we frequently don’t explicitly reference what those goals are. As an aside, I am also not claiming that implicit reference to goals or standards of some kind must be present in some form; I’m only saying this is the only way such remarks would make sense. It’s entirely possible for people to say things that don’t make sense. People do so all the time. Nevertheless, people do have goals, and those goals are relevant to why they say things, and I hypothesize that at least much of the time these goals would account for why someone would employ normative language.
Any analysis of ordinary discourse that extracts propositions from the social contexts in which they occur and tries to assess their meaning without reference to these goals is thus not analyzing ordinary discourse. The goal-driven context in which ordinary language occurs isn’t some ancillary feature one can simply throw aside, it’s the whole damn point of it. Simply put, BSB’s examples and analyses fail from the very outset to engage with how “we often speak about and consider reasons.” How we speak about and consider reasons is a psychological and social question that can only be properly understood by appreciating that language is a goal-driven behavior.
3.0 BSB’s persistent reification of reasons
Presumably, the anti-realist accepts that someone in the Hungry case has a reason to order the pizza, and that such a reason carries all sorts of important normative entailments.
No, BSB, we don’t accept this. The whole point is that we don’t think anyone ever “has a reason.” Has-a-reason talk can be made to make sense if it is indexed to a standard, but that standard need not be a desire and such a view does not mean that the person literally has a reason.
Why not just fix the presence of that reason and the nature of its entailments in place and then imagine the whole thing being given by something else instead of a desire?
Because reasons aren’t given by anything. There are no reasons to be given. Note the very clear reification here: the presence of that reason. BSB is still thinking in reified, analytic terms, and is projecting this understanding onto me and others. This isn’t our view, BSB; it’s your view.
What BSB is criticizing isn’t my view and probably isn’t very many other people’s views. What BSB has done is create a weird hybrid, a kind of conceptual chimera, that consists partially of BSB’s own views and partially of my views and those who hold views like mine. BSB then identifies problems within this chimeric view, and writes about them. This is what I call the halfway fallacy. It is easy to mash your own views together with another person’s views then find inconsistencies therein. It’s much harder to deal with positions on their own terms. They’re rarely so transparently inconsistent.
BSB continues to affirm that he’s making precisely the mistake I am attributing to him as well. Note this next remark:
This is, ultimately, what I find so earnestly baffling about the idea that two reasons for ordering a pizza could differ radically in conceivability, solely because one of them is given by facts about desires and the other by facts about the world: To paraphrase the esteemed philosopher Pam Beesly, they’re the same reason! It’s the same fundamental X-counts-in-favor-of-Y relation, with the only difference being what we choose to fill the first variable. Of course, anti-realists are free to think that relations like this only ever do take desires as their first component — they’d have to, or else they wouldn’t be anti-realists — but to go the extra step and say that it’s literally inconceivable for a non-desire fact to play that antecedent role is just legitimately hard for me to fathom.
BSB is still thinking of the position he’s arguing against in terms of desires “giving” reasons. This isn’t my view. Whose view is this? Who knows, because BSB doesn’t name anyone and doesn’t provide any references or quotes.
I don’t know of any published work in which a philosopher has put forward the claim that irreducible normativity is unintelligible. If they have, why doesn’t BSB quote them? Parfit attributes something similar to Bernard Williams, but I’ve been unable to locate any clear indication that Williams actually held such a view, and at least one of Williams’s papers seems to offer an account of reasons, which would be difficult to do if Williams thought reasons were unintelligible. Given this, I probably am one of the primary targets of the objection, and yet it doesn’t even seem to engage my view.
If BSB wants to argue that he’s not targeting my view, but some other view, fine. In that case, BSB is going after a position I don’t know of anyone holding, other than random people online who may have even adopted some misinterpretation of my view. Either way, it’s not especially clear or helpful for BSB to target a position without giving a clear example of anyone else expressing it.
BSB continues to make other remarks that miss the point:
My feelings about stance-independent reasons are very similar: I just don’t see why it would be hard to focus on the normative entailments of a desire for pizza, fix them in your mind, and then just imagine those same entailments being realized by another fact instead.
The issue is irreducible normativity, not stance-independence.
You don’t even have to believe that the other fact in question could ever actually play that normative role, just like you don’t need to believe that any human being could ever actually wake up as a bug in order to understand The Metamorphosis. All you need to do is patch together two things you already accept — the normative entailments of desires on one hand, and some objective fact about the world on the other — inside the structure of a general counting-in-favor relation.
BSB seems to think that the proponent of the Unintelligibility Thesis independently endorses two separate concepts as meaningful: counting-in-favor-relations and stance-independence, but for some inexplicable reason can’t seem to put them together. But the problem is that this isn’t what we think; we reject the counting-in-favor-relation itself as part of what is unintelligible. It’s just false that there are two things we already accept.
If there really are people out there for whom this sort of move just doesn’t compute, then I guess I can’t fault them — but hopefully they won’t fault me for thinking that it seems like a move that shouldn’t be that hard to make!
No, we fault you for consistently misunderstanding us and not engaging adequately with what we actually say.
4.0 Fools and morons
What’s even more remarkable about this is that BSB anticipates part of the response I and others like me would give, but doesn’t quite get it right. Look at this remark, which echoes much of what I’ve already said above:
Now, by this point, I’m sure a few anti-realists have their responses already typed out. You fool! they’ll say. You moron! Don’t you understand that we don’t believe reasons as you describe them even exist? When we say someone has a reason to act based on their desires, we aren’t trying to say that those desires have generated a new “thing” called a “reason” that can exist over and above whatever “generated” it; rather, we’re just using the term “reason” to pick out a particular sort of means-ends consistency that is necessarily desire-based, since it’s very obviously the case that only desires can fix an agent’s actual ends. So of course we’re going to think that stance-independent reasons for action are inconceivable — reasons for action, to the extent that we speak of them existing at all, just are facts about what would or wouldn’t help to accomplish an agent’s stance-dependent goals.
Now I am quite confident BSB is describing my views, since to my knowledge I am the only person publicly framing reasons in this way (if you know of anyone else, please let me know in the comments. I’d like to know who they are! This is a case where I’d be delighted to be mistaken). Now, the mistake here is this:
we’re just using the term “reason” to pick out a particular sort of means-ends consistency that is necessarily desire-based, since it’s very obviously the case that only desires can fix an agent’s actual ends.
This is not the view. Means-end relations don’t require any actual desires. They only require a standard, regardless of whether anyone holds it. This is why it makes perfect sense to say that an action is wrong according to the Bible. The Bible doesn’t have desires, but we can still speak of which course of action would or wouldn’t be consistent with the Bible, or even a randomly generated set of rules printed out on a sheet of paper. Likewise, one can appeal to the desires of whoever is interacting with or evaluating the person, so we don’t have to appeal to their own desires. I can tell someone “You shouldn’t do that” because I desire that they don’t do so, regardless of whether they themselves do so. Neither I nor anyone else who holds views similar to mine would claim that a person only “has a reason” to do something if they have the appropriate desire.
There is never any need to appeal to it “obviously” being the case that only desires can “fix an agent’s actual ends.” BSB is still imposing his own presuppositions on us; he’s still thinking that one “has reasons” and that these reasons must be grounded in, or “fixed,” by some set of facts. But the whole point of our view is that nothing grounds reasons because there isn’t anything to ground. When we speak of means-end relations, we’re speaking of an infinite landscape of relational facts between means and ends. These will be motivationally relevant to an agent only insofar as they have a goal or desire. Given that goal or desire, certain courses of action would be conducive to achieving that goal or desire. There aren’t any further facts. There are only descriptive facts: facts about what people’s actual goals are, and facts about what courses of action would be conducive to those goals. To speak of reasons in a given context may or may not appeal to that person’s actual goals or desires; it may appeal to the goals or desires of the speaker, or it may appeal to standards that aren’t relevant to anyone’s goals or desires. At no point on such a view are “reasons” fixed by “desires.” This is analytic speak, and it is about as confused and nonsensical in the case of desires “giving” reasons as it is in the case of facts doing so.
In short: there are just facts about what ends people have, facts about what means would achieve ends, and facts about the relation between means and ends. There are no further facts.
Also, this last part is still not quite right:
[…] reasons for action, to the extent that we speak of them existing at all, just are facts about what would or wouldn’t help to accomplish an agent’s stance-dependent goals.
To this, I reply: Yes, trust me, I’m aware. (You guys aren’t exactly shy when it comes to making this point!) But what conception of reasons you actually have isn’t particularly relevant here — what matters is whether you could wrap your head around a different conception, one that also seems compatible with all the important first-order features of reasons that we’d expect an account to preserve. After all, I’m absolutely sure right now that Mark Twain was Samuel Clemens, and that means any alternative theory is going to strike me as necessary false. But if one of those alternate theories can vest all the essential Mark-Twain-defining features in someone else instead, then even if that theory will never be convincing, it should still be trivially easy for me to imagine the sort of situation it describes.
Our view is that there are consistency relations and reasons-talk is a way of referencing these relations, whether they capture the actual goals or desires of the agent they’re attributed to, to the goals of the speaker, or to a hypothetical, presumptive set of goals. Someone actually having a given set of goals isn’t needed to meaningfully use reason-talk, and I could say that someone “has a reason” to do something even if it wouldn’t promote that person’s goals. The reason could be that e.g., it promotes my goals. Talk of whether one “has a reason” on my account doesn’t require facts about whether the agent that “has” the reason has any particular goal or desire.
BSB also references “guys” as though there are multiple people defending the view described here. Maybe there are. If so, I’d like to know who these people are.
However, the issue here is whether BSB’s intended rebuttal succeeds. It doesn’t, because BSB continues to help himself to assumptions we don’t grant. BSB says:
what matters is whether you could wrap your head around a different conception, one that also seems compatible with all the important first-order features of reasons that we’d expect an account to preserve
But BSB’s account doesn’t seem to me to be compatible with all the “important first-order features of reasons that we’d expect an account to preserve” because I don’t think it’s intelligible. Notice how BSB uses “seems” in the unqualified sense. Seems to who? Not to me.
I’d already have to understand the concept in order for it to “seem compatible” with anything, but the whole point is that I don’t think there’s a concept to understand. Given this, it makes no sense to appeal to it “seeming compatible” with anything as an argument for its intelligibility, since it’d have to seem intelligible to us to “seem compatible” in the first place.
This is also another instance of the Halfway Fallacy. BSB is appealing to what BSB himself thinks then fails to distinguish this from what other people think. BSB then fuses what he thinks and what others think into a single worldview, points to a problem in this worldview, and thinks he’s pointed out a problem with our worldview. This is a bit like if a Christian thought it was obvious God answers prayers, then argued:
Atheists deny that God exists. But it also seems obvious that God answers prayers. So atheists face this bizarre inconsistency.
BSB’s example doesn’t help:
After all, I’m absolutely sure right now that Mark Twain was Samuel Clemens, and that means any alternative theory is going to strike me as necessary false. But if one of those alternate theories can vest all the essential Mark-Twain-defining features in someone else instead, then even if that theory will never be convincing, it should still be trivially easy for me to imagine the sort of situation it describes.
Yes, because there’s nothing unintelligible about someone having all of those features. This doesn’t demonstrate anything.
BSB is also still operating under the presumption that we need an account of reasons to account for “all the important first-order features of reasons.” He’s just not getting it. I’m denying that we need to offer any account of reasons at all, because there’s no such thing as “reasons” to give an account of. “Reason” is a word in English that serves particular roles in ordinary language. That’s it. What there is to account for are facts about human linguistic practices and human psychology. There’s no “reason essence” we need to distill and figure out, so that we know what “reasons” truly are. BSB’s notion of an alternative theory is still operating within the presumption that the dialectical framework we must operate in is one according to which there are reasons, and I and others are simply offering an alternative account of them. But we’re not. We’re critiquing the very assumptions of the dialectical framework itself. That’s why the Unintelligibility Thesis is ultimately a quietist position.
If, for instance, I deny outright that Mark Twain existed or authored anything, I don’t need to give an account of who the author of Mark Twain’s writings was. Likewise, if there are no reasons, we don’t have to give an account of what “gives” us reasons. In both cases, if we can account for the mistaken view that Mark Twain existed, or that reasons exist by explaining what caused the mistake then our work is done.
BSB tries to bolster his case by claiming that lots of people think about things the way he does:
Moreover, it isn’t as if the alternate model I’m talking about here is some obscure or controversial way of thinking that was dreamed up just to test the limits of an anti-realist’s imaginative skills — it’s one that millions and millions of people successfully rely on every day to make the exact same sorts of decisions that anti-realists do!
That’s exactly what I think it is: an obscure and controversial way of thinking that was dreamed up, not to test the antirealist’s imaginative skills, but to satisfy whatever goals proponents of accounts like BSB’s have. Yet BSB claims “millions and millions of people” successfully rely on BSB’s conception of reasons every day. What is the evidence for this claim?
This is a totally unsubstantiated empirical claim, and BSB offers absolutely no reason at all to think it’s true. I am consistently amazed armchair philosophers are entirely comfortable making sweeping population-level claims about how people speak or think without presenting any evidence.
In fact, a central commitment of anti-realism (or at least the particular version of anti-realism favored by so many who say they can’t conceive of stance-independent moral reasons) is that first-order moral discourse is metaethically indeterminate, in the sense that it doesn’t require any specific second-order understanding of the terms involved. But isn’t that, by itself, a good reason to think that all the second-order frameworks functioning successfully behind the scenes are, at the very least, coherent?
No. I also don’t think they are “functioning successfully behind the scenes.” BSB is helping himself to claims I’m not granting. Obviously if I think there’s no intelligible concept, I don’t think it can successfully function. So if I granted that it did, I’d be granting its intelligibility. BSB more or less fills the latter half of this objection with the unsubstantiated presumption that his conception of reasons “successfully functions” and is used by “millions and millions” of people without presenting any good reason to think either of these claims is true.
Think about it this way: An anti-realist and I could easily have a straightforward, first-order discussion about abortion, and if we did, it’s likely that “reason talk” would play a major role — we might talk about the reasons women choose abortions, what reason a legislature might have to ban it, our reasons for supporting or opposing those bills, whatever. And even if we don’t ultimately end up agreeing, the conversation would at least qualify as some real, honest-to-goodness moral discourse. But if that anti-realist wants to turn around and say that a stance-independent reason is truly inconceivable, then they’d also have to say that I was talking (or at least thinking) nonsense the whole time, right? So it seems like a very remarkable coincidence that moral discourse still somehow works!
No, there’s nothing remarkable or coincidental about this. If one’s theoretical commitments make no practical difference to normative theorizing, then it simply wouldn’t matter if they held such views. Their reasons-talk and my reasons-talk would involve conflicting theoretical commitments, but the realist’s theoretical commitments could be superfluous. As a matter of fact, I think they are. I am, after all, a pragmatist; the absence of a practical difference is one of the primary criteria for dismissing certain metaphysical and conceptual disputes as misguided.
That non-naturalist realism is both unintelligible and practically superfluous isn’t a coincidence; it at best aspires to a kind of relevance, but such relevance typically works only against the backdrop of a host of conceptual confusions and a variety of mistaken views about metaphysics, psychology, and language. I don’t think the kind of error realists make is an inexplicable mistake in an otherwise coherent framework. Rather, I think the entire methodological and metaphilosophical framework in which BSB operates is rotten to the core. Irreducible normativity is a symptom of a larger set of mistakes.
I mean, think of all the other inconceivable things out there that anti-realists are fond of comparing to stance-independent reasons, and try to imagine what it would be like having a conversation about them with a true believer.
Given that almost nobody is a proponent of such views, it’s still unclear who these people are supposed to be.
If I was stuck in a debate with someone who thought all bachelors were married, for example, I don’t think we’d get very far discussing what society should do about the rising number of single men
BSB must be even more confused than I thought. “Married bachelor” is nonsense of a kind, but it doesn’t strike me as necessarily unintelligible so much as identifiably internally contradictory. It’s nonsense, and one might be unable to conceive of a married bachelor, but this is a different kind of mistake than the kind I think BSB and others are making. It might be that BSB has conflated unintelligibility with inconceivability.
When I’ve written about this, I think a closer analogy is a grammatical mistake, like “Put the shoes.” There’s no contradiction here, no P and ~P. It’s just a malformed string of letters that has no content. I typically explicitly distinguish between the sense in which I think BSB’s conception of reasons is unintelligible and such contradictory statements, so again I’m not sure whose position BSB is criticizing.
Because beliefs that are literally meaningless or impossible to grasp don’t tend to be productive!
BSB apparently hasn’t considered that I (or “we”) don’t think realist discourse is productive.
But unless anti-realists want to argue that their realist interlocutors are just getting really, really lucky whenever they try to morally deliberate, it seems like a reasonable conclusion would be that something at least somewhat meaningful is actually going on inside their heads.
No. I reject both. BSB has not presented any good reason to think that if realists can engage in productive first-order moral discourse that this suggests their metaethical views are meaningful. I don’t think they’re lucky. I just think their conception of reasons is irrelevant to first-order discourse and reasoning. That or they are getting things wrong, and are confused, and are talking past antirealists in certain contexts. In other words, I think a few things could be happening:
There will be instances where realist second-order views are practically irrelevant, so they can speak to antirealists without an issue
There will be instances where it may not be practically irrelevant, and this may lead to conflicts, confusion, misunderstandings, or lack of success in discussing things with antirealists, and to nonsensical or confused private deliberations
I think both probably occur to varying extents, but that both mostly occur in theoretical contexts where we aren’t engaged in ordinary moral interactions, so they’re mostly irrelevant to everyday interactions, anyway. Regarding the latter: why would BSB presume that I think his conception of reasons is nonsense, but nevertheless that he could employ this concept in a way that is equally deliberatively successful as the way I and others think? I wasn’t asked if I thought this was the case, and I think the answer is, at least some of the time, probably not. However, if I may speculate for a moment, I think most of what’s going on with moral realists deliberating is largely just consistent with what antirealists do when they deliberate: I think realists may, without realizing it, just act on their subjective goals and values, and mistakenly take the processes they’re engaged in to reflect deliberation about stance-independent moral truths. This is why I think it’ll either be successful but superfluous and irrelevant because it overlaps with antirealist conceptions, or unsuccessful. It’s one or the other.
In other words, I don’t think the conceptions I consider unintelligible can actually succeed at anything; I think they’re either not actually reasoning on the basis of them and successfully deliberating in a way consistent with antirealists, or are trying to reason on the basis of them and failing.
And since those realists report that what’s going on inside their heads involves considerations of stance-independent reasons for action, then (barring some extreme introspective error I see no evidence for) the anti-realist ought to take them at their word.
This does not make sense. Since we reject their conception of reasons as a pseudoconcept, on our view their reports could not be accurate. They’re wrong about what’s going on in their head. If they weren’t, and we had to grant that they “had the concept” in question, this would require that there be a concept for them to have, which would entail that our position was wrong. It’s absurd for BSB to think that we are under some sort of obligation to grant as true something that would entail that we’re wrong.
We aren’t under any such obligation. We do think they are making an “extreme introspective error.” That’s what all of this comes down to, after all. In that respect then, I don’t take them at their word. That’s kind of the point. After all, when I introspect, it’s obvious to me that this conception of reasons is unintelligible. That is, in virtue of the concepts I “have,” one consequence of these concepts is that BSB’s conception of reasons is unintelligible. If I’m wrong about this, I’m making an “extreme introspective error” myself. This cuts both ways.
I say “virtuously inconceivable” there because, for all I know, the anti-realists who say they can’t conceive of stance-independent reasons for action might just be reporting a brute psychological fact about themselves, rather than trying to make any judgment as to the actual coherence of the concept in some ideal sense — in which case, I guess all I can do is wish them the best in eventually figuring out how to conceive of it like the rest of us can!
“[…] for all I know”? Has BSB considered asking us?
Our position isn’t “We can’t conceive of this concept.” It’s that there is no concept to conceive of, and thus you, BSB, can’t conceive of it. So yes, obviously the position is that you and others are making an introspective error. That’s pretty much part of the position by definition!
No. I’ve clarified explicitly and repeatedly that I, at least, am not doing this. I am not reporting brute psychological facts about myself of the form “I don’t get it.” It’s that I do get it, and that’s why I think BSB and others are confused. I am not appealing to a “brute psychological fact” about myself. I’m appealing to a theoretical stance. It’s beyond tedious to have to clarify this over and over for people who just can’t help but think we’re making self-reports about how things seem to us, and are appealing to these self-reports as the basis for our position. We aren’t.
For comparison, suppose you know the game of chess very well, and you know what all the pieces in the game are. Now imagine a person says that the “archer” is a standard piece in the game. You ask what it looks like and how it moves, and they are unable to tell you. They insist they and all their friends are experts at chess and know the archer is a real piece. You confirm it isn’t the king, queen, bishop, knight, rook, or pawn. It’s another piece entirely. But they can say nothing about what the piece is or how it moves. What would you conclude?
They don’t know what they’re talking about, and are probably very confused about chess. This is because you understand what all the pieces in chess are and know that “archer” isn’t among them. You also have reason to be suspicious given that they’re unable to show you the piece, explain what it does, or otherwise speak in a way accessible to you about it. The only people who apparently claim to understand this piece can’t publicly demonstrate anything about it at all
You just don’t understand them. You are just making a brute psychological appeal to your lack of knowledge of the archer piece. You are not making any further judgments such as that there is no piece, or that the person claiming that there is is wrong and probably very confused.
The first of these is the more reasonable option for anyone familiar with chess. It is in virtue of your understanding of chess that you conclude that the person claiming there is an archer piece doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It is not an appeal to ignorance. It is the opposite: it is an appeal to sufficiently comprehensive knowledge. I am making a similar claim about reasons-talk. It is in virtue of my having correctly understood reasons-talk in the English language that I have an adequately comprehensive understanding of such discourse, such that I am capable of recognizing that people who come around speaking about facts and desires “giving” us reasons are confused, and if those people claim to “have” concepts predicated on these confusions, they’re wrong about that, too, much as a person who claimed to “see an archer piece on a canonical, official chessboard” would be wrong, because there is no such piece.
But if the idea is that their inability to conceive of stance-independent reasons for action indicates any legitimate issue with the concept itself, then the fact that so many realists are able to apply the concept so effectively should at the absolute very least put pressure on anti-realists to explain what they think is really going on.
BSB really doesn’t get it. BSB: we don’t grant that you are able to “apply the concept so effectively”. This isn’t something you’ve demonstrated here at all.
These, then, are the two reasons I’d give for thinking that stance-independent reasons for action ought to be conceivable: First, because it seems as though the concept of a reason is separable from any particular notion of stance-dependence or independence, and it should just generally be possible to conceive of something having any of its non-essential aspects altered; and second, because we have empirical evidence that a fair number of self-aware and thoughtful people are successfully relying on the concept of a stance-independent reasons for action when engaging in moral discourse, which would be incredibly surprising if the concept was actually totally meaningless (as the claims of inconceivability seem to suggest).
If I had any hair at this point, I’d pull it out. The Unintelligibility Thesis is not the position that stance-independent reasons are inconceivable in particular. It’s that the notion of reasons serving in counting-in-favor relations is unintelligible, as is any conception of reasons tied to irreducible normativity; this would include views which hold that desires (or anything else one could regard as a “stance”) “give us reasons.” BSB has simply misunderstood what the position is, or is targeting a strawman or a position held by a few weaker, marginal conceptions of the sort of view I hold. We don’t grant that there is a “concept of a reason” that is “separable” in the relevant respects at all.
Second, BSB has not provided as far as I can tell any substantive evidence that people successfully rely on the concept in question. I think BSB has made some inferential leaps without clearly spelling out an argument that’s supposed to serve as evidence for this. I don’t grant that the ability to engage in first-order moral discourse somehow entails that you’re successfully employing second-order concepts to do so.
5.0 Conclusion
This whole post from BSB was a frustrating disappointment. It’s riddled with confusions and misconceptions, a lack of engagement with the actual view in question, and virtually no clear effort to present quotes or other remarks from proponents of the view so that readers can evaluate the fidelity of BSB’s characterization. Some of BSB’s remarks strongly allude to me being one of if not the primary proponents of the views BSB is targeting, but if I am, then BSB has managed to botch my view quite badly. If there are others who hold these views, it’s suspicious for BSB not to mention any of them, or provide any quotes, links, or sources at all. Who are these people?
Conversely, notice how my response directly engages with BSB’s remarks. I link to his post. I refer to him by name. And I directly assess his remarks. This is how you ensure you’re targeting an actual person’s views, and it helps to keep me accountable that others can read what BSB says and what I say in response and judge for themselves if my characterizations are inaccurate. BSB, on the other hand, is coy about the views he’s criticizing. Who are these people? Where are their views expressed? Why doesn’t he say who he is talking about or provide any links or resources for readers?
BSB’s arguments are also just straightforwardly bad. Of the two primary arguments, the first is based on a misconception about the target view, and the second is presumptuous and unsubstantiated, and BSB does almost nothing to argue for it. From the looks of it, it might even just beg the question.
Part of me thinks it’s a waste of time to engage with positions like these. What’s the point? But maybe posts like BSB’s can help people like me to more clearly articulate what we think and why we think it, and, almost as importantly, what we don’t think. I don’t think I have or ever will make any headway with BSB, but maybe others can benefit from reading my response.
References
Parfit, D. (2011). On what matters (Vol. 2). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.