Carry on as if nothing (stance-independently) matters
Twitter Tuesday #17
Moral progress
First, we have this argument for moral realism from Eric Martinez
1. Moral progress exists.
2. Progress can only exist if it progresses towards something existing, otherwise it doesn’t exist as progress, but merely change.
3. So, if Morality progresses, it has to progress towards a standard of objective morality.
4. So, objective morals exist.
The first premise, “Moral progress exists,” could be a bit more specific. There are antirealist conceptions of progress that wouldn’t support an argument for moral realism. It’d be more helpful to specify the kind of progress that exists. Unfortunately, doing so might push one towards something that looks a bit question-begging. I suppose one could avoid this by appealing to a kind of undifferentiated intuition that there is “moral progress” and then propose that this can be best (or only) accounted for by moral realism. If so, it’d still be helpful to make this more clear than it is here.
The second premise is a bit strange. The claim is that progress requires progression “towards something existing.” This is a bit obscure. There is probably a way to formulate what this means more clearly. At first glance, a more serious problem is that this seems consistent with antirealism. Standards, values, desire, preferences, and so on all exist. So it would appear consistent with this claim that there could be progress towards someone’s subjective moral standards.
The third premise is doing a lot of the work here. The first two, by themselves, could be construed in ways consistent with antirealism. The third could, too: the antirealist could believe that if there is progress, it must be progress towards an objective moral standard. The antirealist could then reject P1, and continue to endorse moral antirealism.
However, a moral antirealist could, instead, reject P3. That is, they could maintain that there are antirealist conceptions of “progress”, and instead deny that if there is moral progress, that it must be towards an objective moral standard.
So here’s how I think an antirealist should respond to an argument like this: they should ask for clarity about what’s meant by “moral progress.” If it is simply baked into the notion of progress that it must be objective progress, then P3 is redundant, and P1 ends up begging the question. The antirealist will reject P1 in this case. If it isn’t, then the antirealist is free to endorse P1 and deny P3.
The worst argument against moral antirealism?
Have a look at this exchange. If there is a “worst objection to moral antirealism of all time,” this is probably it.
The objection runs something like this: if moral antirealism is true, then “nothing matters.” This claim turns on an ambiguity that, if resolved, is either false or trivial and unthreatening to the antirealist.
Some conceptions of things “mattering” require realism. Call these “realist-mattering.” Some don’t: these conceptions of mattering are consistent with antirealism. Call these “antirealist-mattering.” An antirealist may maintain, for instance, that things matter in a subjective way, so they do matter, but that mattering isn’t of a form that requires realism.
When a realist claims that, if antirealism is true, then “nothing matters,” this is underspecified: do they mean that nothing realist-matters, nothing antirealist-matters, or both?
(1) If they mean only that nothing realist-matters, this is true, but it doesn’t show that nothing matters simpliciter. It only shows that the truth of antirealism is inconsistent with things mattering in a way that is only possible if antirealism isn’t true. This is completely trivial.
(2) It wouldn’t make sense for them to claim that things would antirealist-matter. So we can ignore this one, though if this were what they were claiming it wouldn’t be true that things couldn’t antirealist matter, and it’d be an open question whether they don’t matter in some way consistent with antirealism.
(3) If they mean both, then they’d just be combining (1) and (2), and would simply inherit the shortcomings of both.
A realist *could* maintain that only realist conceptions of mattering are true, or legitimate, or acceptable, or whatever. In that case, they may insist that antirealist-mattering is confused, or mistaken, or nonsensical, or whatever.
And that *could* be the case. It could be that (a) the only substantive conception of mattering is realist-mattering (b) realism is false, and nothing realist-matters so (c) nothing matters, full stop.
The problem is that it could both be the case that:
Moral realism is false
Accounts of things mattering which require moral realism are also false
Accounts of things mattering in a way consistent with antirealism are correct
If (a)-(c) are true, then realists who claim that if antirealism is true, then nothing matters, are wrong. And antirealists are not obliged to endorse accounts of mattering that require realism, or reject accounts which are consistent with antirealism. Realists could be wrong both about realism and about their notion of what it means for things to matter. Yet they routinely criticize antirealism as though the realist is at worst only half wrong: they are wrong about (a), but not (b). But this is silly: an antirealist *could* grant this, but they don’t have to. They could reject both moral realism and the realist’s conception of mattering. In which case, the antirealist is not required to agree that if realism is false, then nothing matters.
At best, realists can only uncontroversially maintain that if moral realism is false, then nothing realist-matters. But this is trivial.
Note the exchange with JPA. First, JPA indicates that if realism is false that “nothing matters.” But this then turns into the claim that it’s a matter of definition that “nothing matters objectively if realism is false.” The first claim is ambiguous between the trivial and nontrivial reading, while the second isn’t.
This ambiguity can give readers who don’t extract the disambiguation from JPA and other proponents of the claim that if realism is false that “nothing matters” the impression that nothing matters *in any respect*, including antirealist respects. This could include subjective, notions of mattering (i.e., things mattering “to me”), along with the attitudinal/emotional elements of things mattering, both of which are consistent with antirealism. This ambiguity is amplified by pragmatics and how such remarks are likely to be interpreted in ordinary language.
Compare, for instance, someone who says that gastronomic realism is false, then “nothing tastes good.” This would be extremely misleading: it would imply that if you didn’t endorse gastronomic realism, that the positive experiences you have, and your personal preference for certain foods, and so on, simply didn’t exist, or you were somehow mistaken if you said that “chocolate tastes good to me” or “according to my standards, pizza is delicious.” Yet this would *not* be an implication of rejecting gastronomic realism. The potential confusion prompted by such ambiguity is more obvious in such cases, but it’s still present in the moral case, as well.
So why do moral realists persist in speaking in unnecessarily ambiguous ways? The ambiguity could be mostly avoided merely by appending “objective” in front of normative notions like “mattering” or “good,” e.g., “if realism is false, then nothing objectively matters” or “nothing realist-matters.”
At worst, philosophers are simply inattentive to the confusions such ambiguities prompt. At worst, it’s a bad habit that exploits such ambiguity to the realist’s rhetorical benefit. Either way, philosophers should be clearer about what they mean.
If stance independent epistemologiccal norms don't exist, it doesn't matter what anyone believes. So moral realists might as well carry on believing moral realism.