Follow up to: William Lane Craig and the conflation between metaethics and normative ethics
There is a family of allegories which purport to show that moral relativism is untenable, and that people who profess to be moral relativists are engaged in a kind of performative contradiction. Such stories are often told as though they describe real events, and typically feature a college student claims to be a moral relativist. Then, upon turning in a paper, or an exam, or arrogantly announcing their relativist convictions during a lecture, they meet their downfall at the hands of a clever professor.
In versions where the student submits an exam or paper, they receive an F. In versions where the student challenges the professor, they may be met with what I have called "performative threats": the professor may insist that they could take the students laptop away, or steal their wallet, and so on.
In both cases, the student is told that, as a relativist, they have no grounds to object to such treatment since, after all, they're a moral relativist.
If such events ever did occur, they would reveal nothing other than the professor's deep misunderstanding of moral relativism. If a person were a very specific kind of individual agent subjectivist, they *might* be prohibited (on their own terms) from having any justification for objecting to how others treat them. However, individual agent subjectivism isn't the only option available to moral relativists. They might instead endorse appraiser relativism, or at least deny relativization exclusively in an agent-based way. Regardless, the sorts of objections raised by these apocryphal professors would miss the mark, failing to actually demonstrate what they intend to demonstrate.
And what is it these stories are supposed to show? Perhaps that relativists don't live consistently with their purported commitment to relativism. They are engaged in a kind of performative contradiction, their actions and attitudes revealing that they don't genuinely endorse relativism.
These sorts of objections circumvent raising any actual philosophical objections to relativism. Instead, they reflect a kind of quasi-religious allegorical approach to demonstrating that relativists are confused and don't even believe what they purport to believe, all without having to raise any serious objections to relativism.
Such objections reflect a more general problem with criticisms of moral antirealist accounts: they're almost all terrible. They routinely involve mischaracterization, insinuations about the supposedly terrible moral character of antirealists, and so on.
Even when they don't, they routinely (if not typically) appeal to the brute convictions of the person objecting to antirealism that moral realism is true. This is, in turn, often leveraged in service of the presumption that all or most people share the realist's intuitions, convictions, or tendency to favor realism. Antirealism is, in contrast, a kind of deviation from, and rejection of, the way we are ordinarily disposed to think. Insofar as such framings of the dispute between realists and antirealists favor realism, they are only as strong as the truth of the presumption that realism is, in fact, "the" commonsense or intuitive view. As I've endeavored to show by discussing the empirical data, there is little support for such a claim.
Part of my goal in raising the sorts of objections I raise against realism is to illustrate a general problem with philosophical exchanges. Typically, people entering these exchanges accept at face value whatever the conventional way of framing the dispute happens to be, and then play the philosophical game *within* that framing. Yet such framings are often based on skewed or false presuppositions. The result is that antirealists put themselves at a dialectical disadvantage from the very outset.
For instance, antirealists will "concede" that they're "biting the bullet" or endorsing a "radical" or "extreme" view when they reject some realist framing. Such framing matters. It makes antirealism seem deeply unpalatable, and drives people away from it for reasons unrelated to the merits of the position.
Many philosophical arguments also appeal to formalisms and technical jargon, which gives the appearance of a sophisticated and thoughtful argument for or against some view. Yet scratch the surface, and such arguments often involve subtle equivocation, or function as well as they do only by pragmatic implication that anyone who objects is confused or a bad person or subject to some kind of self-defeating commitments. Much of the time, such implications are not entailments at all, and the position is only "self-defeating" if the person who holds that view grants various presuppositions from their interlocutor that they are under no obligation to accept.
For instance, normative antirealist positions are supposedly self-defeating because their proponents can't appeal to stance-independent normative reasons to endorse their view. This could work as a criticism *if* the normative antirealist both rejected that there are stance-independent normative facts *and* thought such facts were necessary for justification).
But they're not required to do this. They could even reject even more fundamental aspects of the realist's framing: why should I care to obtain the mysterious "justification" in the analytic sense for my beliefs? If my epistemic practices reliably achieve the outcomes I want, I'd be utterly untroubled by an analytic philosopher's insistence that my beliefs aren't "justified."
If this has no practical implications, it amounts to nothing more than a particular academic community's declaration that they won't use a certain word to refer to my belief-forming practices. It's almost as though philosophers think they are a licensing committee that issues permits for beliefs, as though they are the Platonic police. Unfortunately, from a pragmatist's perspective, the only authority in a position to license my belief-forming practices is the world itself.