Expertise and the unintelligibility thesis
When I have argued that certain forms of moral realism are unintelligible, one of the most common responses is that this is very implausible because most specialists in metaethics don't think this.
I have several concerns with this sort of response, but one of my ongoing concerns centers on how we should handle appeals to expertise.
At least one consideration is this: it may be that the "expertise inference" is working backwards here, compared to how it is attributed in other domains. We accord doctors, engineers, chefs, chess masters, and so on expertise because they are employing the methods of fields that have demonstrated their efficacy. We infer the efficacy of their methods due to their track record of success. So the inference is success → expertise.
However, I don’t think contemporary analytic metaethics has a publicly demonstrable track record of success. It furnishes us with no obvious equivalent to healthy patients or standing bridges or delicious dishes. Instead, we must rely on the assurances of those working in the field that if they reach a consensus on the matter, this is an indication of “success.” We are thus expected to make the inference in reverse: expertise → success.
However, I infer expertise from success, not the other way around. How am I supposed to know whether most philosophers thinking such-and-such a thing have achieved a degree of success on the matter?
Much of my dispute with contemporary analytic philosophy, and much of the reason why I believe the concepts in question are unintelligible, center on metaphilosophical objections to the presuppositions and methods commonly employed in the field. Yet I’m expected to renounce my views or at least seriously consider their merits as a result of the presumptive consensus among those employing those methods? It’s a bit strange to respond to the objection “You’re wrong about this position P, because it’s a result of method X, and method X doesn’t work,” with “Yes, but according to experts at using method X, position P is true.”
I am not endorsing those presuppositions and methods, but reaching different conclusions, as we might imagine of two scientists having a dispute about how to interpret a dataset. Rather, I am disputing the very means by which we should assess the merits of competing philosophical accounts, and in many instances I am rejecting the entire framework in which a metaethical dispute is framed. Appealing to a consensus among those employing those methods is a bit strange, in light of these objections.
As an example, I am routinely told that there are only three antirealist positions: relativism, noncognitivism, and error theory. Yet I reject this, because I reject the presumption that antirealist positions must rely on semantic theses about the meaning of ordinary moral claims, and I deny that there is any uniform and determinate meaning to ordinary moral claims. Furthermore, I deny that questions about the meaning of ordinary moral claims are non-empirical, and I believe that, insofar as they are empirical, the best account is that ordinary moral claims are indeterminate, and thus the semantic claims of noncognitivism, error theory, and relativism are all false. As a result, I see these three positions as a false trichotomy predicated on either (a) mistaken presuppositions about language and meaning or (b) false empirical theories. I didn’t develop this position myself, either. Rather, it is an extension of work I encountered when I first began my studies. Loeb (2008), an analytic metaethicist, likewise regards the claims in question as empirical. Consider this remark:
The claim that moral language is relevant to metaethical inquiry is not new. What is not often appreciated, however, is that the matter to be investigated consists largely of empirical questions. In saying this I do not mean to claim that empirical science can easily discover the answers, or even to presuppose that the answers can be uncovered at all. That remains to be seen. However, an inquiry into what, if anything, we are talking about when we employ the moral vocabulary must at least begin with an inquiry into the intuitions, patterns of thinking and speaking, semantic commitments, and other internal states (conscious or not) of those who employ it. Although not everyone would be comfortable with the phrase, I’ll loosely refer to these internal states as our “linguistic dispositions.” (pp. 355-356)
Loeb goes on to propose that ordinary moral discourse may be simultaneously committed to conflicting metaethical positions, resulting in a type of incoherentism.
Gill (2009) proposes that the intractability of semantic disputes between cognitivists and noncognitivists, realists and antirealists, and so on could be resolved by proposing that ordinary moral discourse has no uniform and determinate commitment to any particular metaethical position, and as such competing accounts could do an equally adequate job of accommodating some or all of the relevant data. It may even be that ordinary moral discourse just isn’t in the business of expressing any commitment one way or another with respect to the disputes that occupy contemporary metaethics.
I emphasize views like these because they stem from analytic philosophers, are relatively recent, aren’t widely known, but had a substantial formative influence on my own thinking, and on the development of my view that at least some forms of moral realism aren’t meaningful. These weren’t the only influences, but they reflect significant departures from the entrenched way in which metaethical disputes about realism and antirealism are often framed in the field. One will rarely see “incoherentism,” “indeterminacy,” or “variability” on those metaethics flowcharts that try to catalog available positions (I’ve never seen any of these positions on any of those flowcharts).
Maybe they don’t belong in our flowcharts, much less in textbooks? After all, each only has one or perhaps a handful of proponents who have made no serious impact on the literature. Perhaps we should operate under the heuristic that if most people don’t endorse a view, it must be nonsense, and we should dismiss it.
This would be an absurd reaction. Every new view has to start somewhere. And an appraisal of merits should turn on the quality of the arguments for and against it. Dismissing a view merely on the grounds that it is unpopular displays little more than a dogmatic adherence to an orthodox way of thinking on a matter. While the sciences would have considerable legitimacy in dismissing sufficiently implausible proposals (e.g., that the earth is flat), philosophy has not achieved a comparable degree of convergence.
References
Gill, M. B. (2009). Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics. Philosophical studies, 145(2), 215-234.
Loeb, D. (2008). Moral incoherentism: How to pull a metaphysical rabbit out of a semantic hat. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology: The cognitive science of morality (Vol. 2) (pp. 355-386). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.