Everyone's a realist, subjectivsts are disingenuous, and other recurring myths

Twitter Tuesday #34

We’ve got a person who checks three of the boxes on the “Questionable things people say about moral antirealism” Bingo card with this recent tweet:

It seems to me like almost everyone who talks about metaethics makes basic mistakes in characterizing even the most basic features of the most standard positions. Take a look at this tweet. They say:

The question of moral realism vs moral nihilism is about whether any of those views are correct or incorrect.

Sure, but subjectivism holds that moral claims can be correct or incorrect and most subjectivists would think that many moral claims are correct. Subjectivism is not a form of “nihilism” unless, and only unless we define nihilism trivially as the view that there are no nonsubjective moral facts, or something similar. Subjectivism is not the view that:

different people can have different feelings about what is right or wrong.

This is ambiguous but in any case is not what subjectivism entails. Subjectivism is not the descriptive claim that people have different feelings about what is right or wrong: that would be consistent with people having different feelings about what is stance-independently right or wrong (realism), different emotional attitudes towards moral considerations (noncognitivism), different positions about what is right or wrong that reflect their own moral values (subjectivism), and so on. This remark is far too ambiguous to characterize “subjectivism.”

Subjectivism, or individual subjectivism, understood as a metaethical position, is a kind of relativism according to which the truth of moral claims is indexed to the moral standards of the person making the claim. Moral truth could be cashed out in such a way that moral claims are true or false relative to the standards of the agent performing an action (agent individual subjectivism) or according to the standards of whoever is evaluating the actions of an agent performing an action (appraiser individual subjectivism). This distinction is extremely important because the failure to draw this distinction is one of the key problems with many critiques of so-called relativism or subjectivism. The SEP provides a great characterization of this distinction:

[…] that to which truth or justification is relative may be the persons making the moral judgments or the persons about whom the judgments are made. These are sometimes called appraiser and agent relativism respectively. Appraiser relativism suggests that we do or should make moral judgments on the basis of our own standards, while agent relativism implies that the relevant standards are those of the persons we are judging (of course, in some cases these may coincide). Appraiser relativism is the more common position, and it will usually be assumed in the discussion that follows. Finally, MMR may be offered as the best explanation of what people already believe, or it may be put forward as a position people ought to accept regardless of what they now believe. There will be occasion to discuss both claims below, though the latter is probably the more common one.

More importantly, what distinguishes subjectivism from noncognitivism, error theory, and other positions according to which there are no true first-order moral claims is precisely that it does hold that there are true first-order moral claims. It simply treats the truth of these claims as indexed to varying standards. Once again, I’ll cite an oft-quoted passage in the SEP that expounds on this point:

Relativism holds that moral claims contain an essential indexical element, such that the truth of any such claim requires relativization to some individual or group. According to such a view, it is possible that when John asserts “Stealing is wrong” he is saying something true, but that when Jenny asserts “Stealing is wrong” she is saying something false.

Subjectivism treats the truth of moral claims as indexed, or relative, but this doesn’t even entail that the truths in question are stance-independent. Joyce, in the passage above, continues:

In either case, it may be that what determines the difference in the two contexts is something “mind-dependent”—in which case it would be subjectivist relativism—but it need not be. Perhaps what determines the relevant difference is an entirely mind-independent affair, making for an objectivist relativism. (Consider: Tallness is a relative notion—John is a tall man but a short pro basketball player—but it is not the case that “thinking makes it so.”) Conversely, the subjectivist need not be a relativist.

Joyce uses “subjectivism” here to mean something like “stance-dependent” and “relativism’ to mean something like “indexical truth accounts.” Unfortunately, nobody is consistent with their terminology. Either way we disambiguate the terminology, the stance-dependence/stance-independence and indexed/non-indexed distinctions are orthogonal to one another, so neither interpretation of “subjectivism” would vindicate the tweet: if they mean that stance-dependent accounts are a form of “nihilism” this would be very strange: it would make all relation-designating accounts, including ideal observer theory, some crude forms of divine command theory, and certain forms of constructivism forms of “nihilism.” That’s a very weird way to use the term, and, in any case, it would commit one to insisting that a view according to which there is a single correct set of moral truths that are universally applicable to everyone is a form of “nihilism.” Conversely, if one construes relativism as a type of relativism, relativism is conceptually consistent with stance-independent accounts, and it’d be manifestly absurd to call such positions “nihilism.” Finally, perhaps what may be meant is some kind of hybrid account: a conjunction of both stance-dependence and indexing to different moral standards (e.g. of individuals or cultures). This still isn’t reasonably construed as a form of nihilism, since it still includes moral facts. Unless, again, nihilism just trivially means “any view according to which moral facts aren’t stance-independent and non-indexical.” In that case, accusing subjectivists of being nihilists ends up being a really weird, technical, and vacuous point to make. It amounts to saying:

A view according to which it is not the case that moral facts are exclusively non-indexed and stance-independent is a view that denies that moral facts are exclusively non-indexed and stance-independent

Is this something subjectivists are supposed to be being disingenuous about? Are they hiding the ball about their views? If so, how? Who is doing this? And why would they do so?

If we are going to insist in this restrictive form of nihilism, it’s going to have some pretty weird implications. One implication is that we’d need to be nihilists about people’s names. After all, statements like “I am Lance” are likewise indexed, such that their truth or falsehood is indexed to the speaker: If I say “I am Lance,” this statement is true, while if someone else says “I am Lance” but they aren’t Lance, the same statement would be false.

Furthermore, facts about our names are invented by our parents, by ourselves, by our friends, and so on. They aren’t discoveries about what our True Name is. We can legally choose to change our name because we want to. In that respect, then, facts about our names are also stance-dependent. Thus, statements about names meet both conditions: they’re both stance-dependent and indexicalized. If whatever one could reasonably mean by “subjectivism” is a form of nihilism, then so are claims about our names.

So if we’re going to insist that subjectivism entails that there are no correct answers about what’s morally right or wrong, great: let’s also agree that there are no correct answers about what anyone’s name is. If subjectivism is nihilism, and we want to be consistent, then there are no correct or incorrect views about what anyone’s name is.

Maybe the comparison to names is too obscure. I am trying to do something other than always appeal to food examples. But if the comparison to names isn’t doing it for you, we can always go back to food claims: if you’re a subjectivist about claims like:

“Chocolate cake is delicious”

…rather than a realist who endorses gastronomic realism (the view that there are facts about what food is gastronomically good or bad, independent of how it tastes to you or anyone else), then are you really a gastronomic nihilist? Do you think that no food is “really” good or bad? That since it’s all a matter of personal preference, taste preferences are completely arbitrary? Are people who claim that chocolate cake is delicious being disingenuous if they don’t lead with the fact that they’re nihilists about the goodness or badness of food?

Is everyone writing reviews on Yelp a bunch of sneaky, disingenuous losers merely pretending that food can be good or bad? Why don’t they just shut up and eat slop? Only a gastronomic realist genuinely believes in the Goodness and Badness of food!

No. This is silly. The same holds for characterizing subjectivism as nihilism. It isn’t nihilism. Yet this person goes on to say:

I'll just leave it by saying that most people are not moral nihilists. We think that some things are right and other things are wrong, and that there is at least some objective fact of the matter.

Note the “most people” claim. As always, we have people making sweeping empirical claims for which there is no compelling empirical evidence at all. While I agree that most people are “not moral nihilists,” this person appears to take this to mean, or at least claim that in addition to such a fact, that “we” are realists, in that “we” think some things are objectively right and others are objectively wrong.

Again, as always: who is “we”? And how does this person know what “most people” think?

Finally, they end by accusing subjectivists of being “disingenuous” when they don’t lead with admitting they’re “nihilists”:

If you're just a moral nihilist you should probably lead with that, rather than making what seem like moral arguments. It's pretty disingenuous.

They shouldn’t lead with this because subjectivists aren’t nihilists. And it’s a pretty unethical thing to do to preemptively declare whole groups of people disingenuous based on your (in this case, mistaken) identification of one position with another.

Other people aren’t obligated to agree with this person that subjectivism entails or “is basically” nihilism; they can sincerely deny this. They’d be correct, but even if they weren’t it’s ridiculous to suppose that because you personally think that X entails or is the same as Y, that therefore anyone that claims they’re an X is disingenuous if they don’t agree that they’re a Y. They’d only be disingenuous if they agreed with you that X = Y, but wanted to conceal this fact. If they don’t, then why not just say that such people fail to realize that their commitment to subjectivism commits them to nihilism? Why accuse them of being disingenuous?

These accusations of being disingenuous, bad faith, dishonest, lying, pretending and so on are flying around all over the internet. What is wrong with people? Why are people so quick to assume that people who hold views they don’t agree with are lying rather than simply thinking that those people are incorrect?

I really hope more people start reacting negatively to people who are quick to accuse others of being disingenuous. It is a profoundly unproductive accusation to make when it is made without adequate evidence.

In any case, note how we’ve checked off three boxes in a row: this tweet has three paragraphs, and each one of them makes one of the recurring mistakes I have critiqued on this blog … what, dozens of times now at this point? But I will just keep going. Maybe I’ll eventually win at Bingo and get some kind of prize.