Thanks for the post. It was an interesting read. I did, however, think that perhaps you were slightly missing the point of Henry’s tweet (full disclosure I am an old friend of his). My immediate thought was that his point was more pedagogical than metaethical. I also teach philosophy, though at secondary school rather than university, and his tweet chimed with me. What I find interesting (perhaps even ‘bizarre’) is the way that many students are ready and willing to engage in pretty subtle reasoning at the metaethical level, following the line via Moore, Ayer, Hare, Gibbard, Mackie etc… to arrive at a considered anti-realism; but those same students on normative questions seem to be not only absolutely certain of their views but often unwilling to debate them and can even be hostile to intellectual challenges. While I appreciate anecdotes are not data, this certainly has been a pretty common experience for me over the last 15 years of teaching moral philosophy to adolescents. Perhaps the issue being highlighted by Henry isn’t revealing some analytic contradiction, but a tension in how students reason in the different domains of metaethics and normative ethics?
Wading into metaethical waters (a risky endeavour, I am hardly a strong swimmer), I would say that, as a moral realist, I do struggle to comprehend how anti-realists justify specific normative claims. This is particularly so on what you highlight as the question of scope. I certainly don’t doubt that the conative aspect of a moral judgement allows for a subject to hold views that are stance-dependent and to varying degrees of importance. Where I struggle is in justification of the universal scope (or prescriptive element) characteristic of moral claims. I (and I think most non-philosophers) have an intuition that there is an important difference between me saying “I strongly desire that you abstain from acting in this way” and “for you to act in this way is morally wrong”. I also have a strong intuition (again I think shared by most non-philosophers) that a claim for some normative prescription of universal scope should be justifiable. As the moral anti-realist lacks any stance independent element they have nothing but the conative element (whether personal, or culturally augmented) underpinning their expression of a claim’s universal scope. However this conative element lacks the ability to justify the universal scope being asserted, as the desire of a subject (no matter how strongly felt) cannot bridge the gap between ‘I strongly desire all do x’ and ‘x is morally mandated’. While I agree with you that there is no analytic contradiction here, and no necessary cognitive dissonance, I do think this is a problem. Perhaps the best way to describe it would be, following Philippa Foot’s terminology, a mistake of practical reasoning. To justify a universal scope prescription is not a task that can be performed without some recourse to something stance-independent; on the other hand to claim that we do not need to justify a claim of universal scope is to fall short of the normativity moral claims require.
Hi Sam, thanks for the response. Can you clarify what point you believe I missed? The account you go on to give more or less matches what I think Henry was alluding to, so I can’t see any points you are raising that I would agree I’ve overlooked.
When you say you take the point to be more pedagogical than metaethical, I’m not quite sure what you mean, since the two are consistent and orthogonal; one has to do with the social context and the other with the topic. If I were commenting on something students did in a math class, it’d be both about pedagogy and about math, and I don’t know what it’d mean to say it was more about one than the other.
//I also teach philosophy, though at secondary school rather than university, and his tweet chimed with me.//
I’ve taught both philosophy and moral psychology and the topic of metaethics comes up frequently. In fact, it came up in class today. Almost all of my students purport to endorse some form of moral relativism and many of them hold very strong moral convictions. So this also comports with my experience with students. What I don’t share is the perception that there is any issue with this at all. In particular, you say:
“What I find interesting (perhaps even ‘bizarre’) is the way that many students are ready and willing to engage in pretty subtle reasoning at the metaethical level, following the line via Moore, Ayer, Hare, Gibbard, Mackie etc… to arrive at a considered anti-realism; but those same students on normative questions seem to be not only absolutely certain of their views but often unwilling to debate them and can even be hostile to intellectual challenges.”
Well, consider me. I’m a moral antirealist and I am extremely confident about my moral views. I don’t know if I’d say I was unwilling to debate them or that I’m hostile towards challenges to those views, but I am certainly not going to seriously reconsider my opposition to, e.g., genocide or baby torture.
Not only do I experience absolutely no cognitive dissonance whatsoever in holding these views, if anything were bizarre to me, it’s instructors and philosophers more generally finding antirealism coupled with moral conviction and hostility towards disagreement to be bizarre. What’s bizarre about this? Nothing as far as I can tell.
If anything, one might think the opposite would be true: for a moral realist, you may consider that you could be wrong about what’s morally right or wrong. But if you’re an antirealist, it’s a more difficult (which isn’t to say it’s necessarily impossible) to be mistaken. In may case, my moral values reflect my personal preferences. I have a pretty good idea what my preferences are, so good luck trying to show me I am mistaken! Perhaps it is moral realists who we should predict have weaker moral commitments. I don’t actually think this, for what it’s worth, but I don’t see any good reason to think antirealists should have weaker moral commitments.
//While I appreciate anecdotes are not data, this certainly has been a pretty common experience for me over the last 15 years of teaching moral philosophy to adolescents.//
As I said above, the description you give of students comports with my experience. Note that I was never doubting this was Henry’s (or your) experience. What I’m criticizing is the notion that there’s anything bizarre about this.
//Perhaps the issue being highlighted by Henry isn’t revealing some analytic contradiction, but a tension in how students reason in the different domains of metaethics and normative ethics?//
I don’t know if you listened to my video, but I explicitly state that I was not interpreting Henry as specifically claiming there’s a contradiction, but instead suggested that hey may think there’s some sort of tension between the views. If the claim was that there was a contradiction, I think that’d be mistaken. But I also don’t even think there’s a good case for there being any tension between relativism/antirealism and strong moral convictions. Literally none whatsoever. You could probably identify a handful of possible antirealist positions where there’d be a conflict, but generally speaking many forms of antirealism/relativism sit comfortably with strong moral convictions and hostility towards contrary perspectives.
//Wading into metaethical waters (a risky endeavour, I am hardly a strong swimmer), I would say that, as a moral realist, I do struggle to comprehend how anti-realists justify specific normative claims. //
Why do you think an antirealist would feel any need to justify their moral standards? My moral standards are metanormatively just like my food preferences. I don’t have to justify my food preferences; likewise, I see no need to justify my moral standards. That strikes me as a category error.
//This is particularly so on what you highlight as the question of scope. I certainly don’t doubt that the conative aspect of a moral judgement allows for a subject to hold views that are stance-dependent and to varying degrees of importance. Where I struggle is in justification of the universal scope (or prescriptive element) characteristic of moral claims.//
I can’t speak for what students think, but speaking for myself: I don’t need any sort of justification to have a preference for how other people act.
I don’t simply deny moral realism; I also deny that I have any obligation to provide “justification” for my moral standards, including imposing my moral standards on others. To be clear: I am literally saying that I don’t think I need any justification at all to impose my moral standards on others. If someone wanted to go around killing people, I’d try to stop them. I have no interest in justifying this. I’d stop them because I don’t want them to kill people. It’s as simple as that.
// I (and I think most non-philosophers) have an intuition that there is an important difference between me saying “I strongly desire that you abstain from acting in this way” and “for you to act in this way is morally wrong”. //
I don’t have such an intuition and I doubt most people do.
Whether nonphilosophers have an intuition of this kind is an empirical question. I’ve seen no good empirical evidence that they have intuitions of this kind. Depending on what you mean by intuitions, I may even deny nonphilosophers have intuitions at all, and I may even deny philosophers have intuitions. To be clear: I’m not saying that I think intuitions aren’t a good source of evidence; I quite literally have doubts about whether there even is any such psychological state as a “philosophical intuition,” depending on what one means by that. I don’t generally think nonphilosophers have metaethical intuitions, or, if we drop that term and go with more acceptable terms like “views,” “beliefs,” or “commitments,” I don’t even think most nonphilosophers have those regarding metaethical questions either. I should emphasize, though, that I take these to be empirical questions and philosophers routinely make claims about what they think nonphilosophers think without presenting any empirical evidence to support those claims.
// I also have a strong intuition (again I think shared by most non-philosophers) that a claim for some normative prescription of universal scope should be justifiable. //
Once again, I don’t have such an intuition and I doubt most people do. As above, I take this to be an empirical question and I don’t think there’s any good evidence most nonphilosophers think this way.
//To justify a universal scope prescription is not a task that can be performed without some recourse to something stance-independent; on the other hand to claim that we do not need to justify a claim of universal scope is to fall short of the normativity moral claims require.//
I don’t grant the presumptions here. The latter horn of this dilemma seems to suggest that if one claims to need no justification for their moral claims then they’d “fall short” of some kind of required normativity: but why would I think my moral claims require normativity? I’m not quite sure what you mean by that but I doubt I’d grant my views fall short of any particular requirement.
I really like Henry and generally agree with him, so while I agree with you too, especially about the discourse, I also want to steelman him.
I think Henry's points are:
1. On relativism, moral disagreement normal and expected.
2. There's something a inadequate about the analogy between moral preferences and aesthetic preferencess.
On the first point, this is not literally what he initially says. He talks about "unshakeable convictions" and "moral monstrosity". But, charitably, I think what he is trying to communicate is an attitude of shock and dismay on being confronted with disagreement.
This comes out more in a reply he gives to Rachel Jamison.
"Wisdom doesn’t need to lead to relativism, but it should give insight into why disagreement occurs."
My steelmanned (or over-charitably misinterpreted) Henry agrees that it is reasonable to see the views of others as abhorrent and monstrous, but the point is that you should not be terribly phased by the existence of such disagreement.
On the second point, I don't really agree with Henry, but he could be interpreted as just gesturing at the idea that the analogy needs to be fleshed out a bit to be really satisfactory. I would do this by pointing out how moral disagreement is consequential and aesthetic disagreement is not.
I would also point out that the reason someone is not a "monster" for having dispreferred aesthetic taste is just because the word "monster" does not apply to aesthetic disagreement. We have other, analogous words, like "philistine", "vulgarian", "boor", or, I guess, conversely, "hipster", "snob" etc.
Terms like "shock" and "fazed" carry connotations of having been surprised or confronted with something unexpected. I'm skeptical whether that's going on. My suspicion is that he's observing hostility and disgust towards people with opposing moral standards, which is completely consistent with being a relativist. Ask these students about variation in moral beliefs around the world, and I'd bet they'd be the first to tell you there's quite a lot of disagreement.
Either way, I don't think with your steelman it does much to warrant calling the pair of attitudes bizarre. And if that is what he meant, then that would motivate a second criticism: that he wrote quite an unclear and underdeveloped remark, and then didn't follow it up with much clarification. Bizarre how? Why doesn't he say? People in the comments interpreted it as a claim about a contradiction and I didn't see him contradict that.
I'm not trying to be harsh, and I hope I am not being too harsh. But, well, you know, defending antirealism is kinda my thing, so if someone people like makes remarks I find objectionable, I'm still going to object. You're not the first person to say that Henry is great and to ask me to be charitable. I take that sort of thing seriously, especially when the person (as you do) has a lot of credibility with me.
Lance, thanks a lot for writing this. I'm a moral realist myself, and don't always see eye to eye with you on metaethics - but as I read through this post, I found myself nodding my head a lot in agreement.
In particular, I think your account of how people go from being laypeople with mixed intuitions to being trained to prune them because they're philosophically inconsistent is quite right (although I think the process itself is/can be epistemically legitimate). And I haven't seen many other people talking about this, and sometimes even seen people talk as if it wasn't true (eg. when they poll laypeople about their ethical intuitions and then are surprised that those intuitions conflict).
I think the most charitable reading of Shevlin and Hoyeck is that they think it's in some way *arrogant* to be a relativist who insists that others follow their moral standards. For instance, if someone thought that morality was stance-dependent because it can be reduced to eg. cultural standards, then to insist that everyone else follow your ethical convictions (and refuse to brook disagreement) might seem a little brash because it seems to imply that your culture is better than everyone else's. This, I think, is why Hoyeck makes the remark about taste in movies - he's internally comparing the arrogance of thinking your culture is better than everyone else's to the arrogance of thinking your taste in movies is better than everyone else's. (Although I don't even know if that analogy is good at face value; how many serious movie connoisseurs will have an unshakeable conviction that I'm wrong if I insist that Boss Baby is the best movie ever made?)
Anyway, I think that's the least objectionable construction of their tweets. But even that formulation still leaves much to be criticized. What's bizarre about undergraduates being a bit brash in their ethical beliefs? Heck, even if they *are* philosophically inconsistent, what's bizarre about that? They're going to your class *in order* to learn philosophical skills like maintaining a consistent position, reflecting on your ethical intuitions, learning to rigorously formulate your arguments so you don't assert more than you can prove, and so forth. Of course undergraduates aren't intellectually perfect; it's your job, as an ethics professor, to teach them how to better themselves, rather than publicly making fun of them for not being already perfect. I wouldn't want to be one of Shevlin or Hoyeck's students, if that's the disposition they have towards undergrads.
Also, the "in 2025" references are just weird. University freshmen thinking that all morality is relative and "just your opinion, man" is a phenomenon that's been around for a very long time. r/askphilosophy, an online forum for laypeople to ask questions to philosophers, has an FAQ section on it because it's such a common question. Moral relativity is an incredibly common ethical intuition amongst laypeople! It's straight up conspiratorial thinking to lay that at the feet of a "cult of feeling" caused by therapy and over-affirmation. And of course, serious moral relativists have much more to say about morality than "it's just a feeling", and it's intellectually dishonest to lump them in with the unprepared remarks of philosophical undergrads.
So, from the POV of a moral realist: these guys are being really unserious. I disavow them, I was annoyed to read their tweets, and I want to reassure you that we aren't all like this. There are way better arguments for moral realism than picking on first year undergraduates for having ethical stances that, everything considered, aren't even that odd or far-out.
PS: Some of the responders seem motivated by culture war stuff (eg. the random references to "postmodern philosophy", therapy, "overly affirmed" kids, "moral relativism is the root problem with the world today", etc.) more than genuine philosophical disagreement. Normally I wouldn't bring this up, but if they're going to talk about "cults of feeling"...
Thanks, I appreciate the response. I agree with almost all of this. I don’t think the suggestion of arrogance is likely, though. If that’s what they meant, why wouldn’t they just say so? But even if it is, as you say, there’s still much to criticize. I can’t fault a charitable reading.
I saw a lot of the culture war stuff, but I was steering around that. There were a lot of sneering and contemptuous political readings on Henry’s post, but note that he said in one response he really wasn’t trying to make a political point. I think those people were just seeing what they wanted to see in the remark.
“it’s a bit odd to think that whether an action is right or wrong depends on the standards of the person performing the action (or their culture), but to then be outraged by people acting on those standards: after all, they’re acting in a morally acceptable way! So why be outraged by their disagreements?”
It depends, I suppose, on why they’re agent relativists. If they think it’s the correct semantic account of public language, they can coldly affirm agent relativism and prioritise their cares and concerns over what’s “morally acceptable”.
Thanks for the post. It was an interesting read. I did, however, think that perhaps you were slightly missing the point of Henry’s tweet (full disclosure I am an old friend of his). My immediate thought was that his point was more pedagogical than metaethical. I also teach philosophy, though at secondary school rather than university, and his tweet chimed with me. What I find interesting (perhaps even ‘bizarre’) is the way that many students are ready and willing to engage in pretty subtle reasoning at the metaethical level, following the line via Moore, Ayer, Hare, Gibbard, Mackie etc… to arrive at a considered anti-realism; but those same students on normative questions seem to be not only absolutely certain of their views but often unwilling to debate them and can even be hostile to intellectual challenges. While I appreciate anecdotes are not data, this certainly has been a pretty common experience for me over the last 15 years of teaching moral philosophy to adolescents. Perhaps the issue being highlighted by Henry isn’t revealing some analytic contradiction, but a tension in how students reason in the different domains of metaethics and normative ethics?
Wading into metaethical waters (a risky endeavour, I am hardly a strong swimmer), I would say that, as a moral realist, I do struggle to comprehend how anti-realists justify specific normative claims. This is particularly so on what you highlight as the question of scope. I certainly don’t doubt that the conative aspect of a moral judgement allows for a subject to hold views that are stance-dependent and to varying degrees of importance. Where I struggle is in justification of the universal scope (or prescriptive element) characteristic of moral claims. I (and I think most non-philosophers) have an intuition that there is an important difference between me saying “I strongly desire that you abstain from acting in this way” and “for you to act in this way is morally wrong”. I also have a strong intuition (again I think shared by most non-philosophers) that a claim for some normative prescription of universal scope should be justifiable. As the moral anti-realist lacks any stance independent element they have nothing but the conative element (whether personal, or culturally augmented) underpinning their expression of a claim’s universal scope. However this conative element lacks the ability to justify the universal scope being asserted, as the desire of a subject (no matter how strongly felt) cannot bridge the gap between ‘I strongly desire all do x’ and ‘x is morally mandated’. While I agree with you that there is no analytic contradiction here, and no necessary cognitive dissonance, I do think this is a problem. Perhaps the best way to describe it would be, following Philippa Foot’s terminology, a mistake of practical reasoning. To justify a universal scope prescription is not a task that can be performed without some recourse to something stance-independent; on the other hand to claim that we do not need to justify a claim of universal scope is to fall short of the normativity moral claims require.
Hi Sam, thanks for the response. Can you clarify what point you believe I missed? The account you go on to give more or less matches what I think Henry was alluding to, so I can’t see any points you are raising that I would agree I’ve overlooked.
When you say you take the point to be more pedagogical than metaethical, I’m not quite sure what you mean, since the two are consistent and orthogonal; one has to do with the social context and the other with the topic. If I were commenting on something students did in a math class, it’d be both about pedagogy and about math, and I don’t know what it’d mean to say it was more about one than the other.
//I also teach philosophy, though at secondary school rather than university, and his tweet chimed with me.//
I’ve taught both philosophy and moral psychology and the topic of metaethics comes up frequently. In fact, it came up in class today. Almost all of my students purport to endorse some form of moral relativism and many of them hold very strong moral convictions. So this also comports with my experience with students. What I don’t share is the perception that there is any issue with this at all. In particular, you say:
“What I find interesting (perhaps even ‘bizarre’) is the way that many students are ready and willing to engage in pretty subtle reasoning at the metaethical level, following the line via Moore, Ayer, Hare, Gibbard, Mackie etc… to arrive at a considered anti-realism; but those same students on normative questions seem to be not only absolutely certain of their views but often unwilling to debate them and can even be hostile to intellectual challenges.”
Well, consider me. I’m a moral antirealist and I am extremely confident about my moral views. I don’t know if I’d say I was unwilling to debate them or that I’m hostile towards challenges to those views, but I am certainly not going to seriously reconsider my opposition to, e.g., genocide or baby torture.
Not only do I experience absolutely no cognitive dissonance whatsoever in holding these views, if anything were bizarre to me, it’s instructors and philosophers more generally finding antirealism coupled with moral conviction and hostility towards disagreement to be bizarre. What’s bizarre about this? Nothing as far as I can tell.
If anything, one might think the opposite would be true: for a moral realist, you may consider that you could be wrong about what’s morally right or wrong. But if you’re an antirealist, it’s a more difficult (which isn’t to say it’s necessarily impossible) to be mistaken. In may case, my moral values reflect my personal preferences. I have a pretty good idea what my preferences are, so good luck trying to show me I am mistaken! Perhaps it is moral realists who we should predict have weaker moral commitments. I don’t actually think this, for what it’s worth, but I don’t see any good reason to think antirealists should have weaker moral commitments.
//While I appreciate anecdotes are not data, this certainly has been a pretty common experience for me over the last 15 years of teaching moral philosophy to adolescents.//
As I said above, the description you give of students comports with my experience. Note that I was never doubting this was Henry’s (or your) experience. What I’m criticizing is the notion that there’s anything bizarre about this.
//Perhaps the issue being highlighted by Henry isn’t revealing some analytic contradiction, but a tension in how students reason in the different domains of metaethics and normative ethics?//
I don’t know if you listened to my video, but I explicitly state that I was not interpreting Henry as specifically claiming there’s a contradiction, but instead suggested that hey may think there’s some sort of tension between the views. If the claim was that there was a contradiction, I think that’d be mistaken. But I also don’t even think there’s a good case for there being any tension between relativism/antirealism and strong moral convictions. Literally none whatsoever. You could probably identify a handful of possible antirealist positions where there’d be a conflict, but generally speaking many forms of antirealism/relativism sit comfortably with strong moral convictions and hostility towards contrary perspectives.
//Wading into metaethical waters (a risky endeavour, I am hardly a strong swimmer), I would say that, as a moral realist, I do struggle to comprehend how anti-realists justify specific normative claims. //
Why do you think an antirealist would feel any need to justify their moral standards? My moral standards are metanormatively just like my food preferences. I don’t have to justify my food preferences; likewise, I see no need to justify my moral standards. That strikes me as a category error.
//This is particularly so on what you highlight as the question of scope. I certainly don’t doubt that the conative aspect of a moral judgement allows for a subject to hold views that are stance-dependent and to varying degrees of importance. Where I struggle is in justification of the universal scope (or prescriptive element) characteristic of moral claims.//
I can’t speak for what students think, but speaking for myself: I don’t need any sort of justification to have a preference for how other people act.
I don’t simply deny moral realism; I also deny that I have any obligation to provide “justification” for my moral standards, including imposing my moral standards on others. To be clear: I am literally saying that I don’t think I need any justification at all to impose my moral standards on others. If someone wanted to go around killing people, I’d try to stop them. I have no interest in justifying this. I’d stop them because I don’t want them to kill people. It’s as simple as that.
// I (and I think most non-philosophers) have an intuition that there is an important difference between me saying “I strongly desire that you abstain from acting in this way” and “for you to act in this way is morally wrong”. //
I don’t have such an intuition and I doubt most people do.
Whether nonphilosophers have an intuition of this kind is an empirical question. I’ve seen no good empirical evidence that they have intuitions of this kind. Depending on what you mean by intuitions, I may even deny nonphilosophers have intuitions at all, and I may even deny philosophers have intuitions. To be clear: I’m not saying that I think intuitions aren’t a good source of evidence; I quite literally have doubts about whether there even is any such psychological state as a “philosophical intuition,” depending on what one means by that. I don’t generally think nonphilosophers have metaethical intuitions, or, if we drop that term and go with more acceptable terms like “views,” “beliefs,” or “commitments,” I don’t even think most nonphilosophers have those regarding metaethical questions either. I should emphasize, though, that I take these to be empirical questions and philosophers routinely make claims about what they think nonphilosophers think without presenting any empirical evidence to support those claims.
// I also have a strong intuition (again I think shared by most non-philosophers) that a claim for some normative prescription of universal scope should be justifiable. //
Once again, I don’t have such an intuition and I doubt most people do. As above, I take this to be an empirical question and I don’t think there’s any good evidence most nonphilosophers think this way.
//To justify a universal scope prescription is not a task that can be performed without some recourse to something stance-independent; on the other hand to claim that we do not need to justify a claim of universal scope is to fall short of the normativity moral claims require.//
I don’t grant the presumptions here. The latter horn of this dilemma seems to suggest that if one claims to need no justification for their moral claims then they’d “fall short” of some kind of required normativity: but why would I think my moral claims require normativity? I’m not quite sure what you mean by that but I doubt I’d grant my views fall short of any particular requirement.
I really like Henry and generally agree with him, so while I agree with you too, especially about the discourse, I also want to steelman him.
I think Henry's points are:
1. On relativism, moral disagreement normal and expected.
2. There's something a inadequate about the analogy between moral preferences and aesthetic preferencess.
On the first point, this is not literally what he initially says. He talks about "unshakeable convictions" and "moral monstrosity". But, charitably, I think what he is trying to communicate is an attitude of shock and dismay on being confronted with disagreement.
This comes out more in a reply he gives to Rachel Jamison.
"Wisdom doesn’t need to lead to relativism, but it should give insight into why disagreement occurs."
My steelmanned (or over-charitably misinterpreted) Henry agrees that it is reasonable to see the views of others as abhorrent and monstrous, but the point is that you should not be terribly phased by the existence of such disagreement.
On the second point, I don't really agree with Henry, but he could be interpreted as just gesturing at the idea that the analogy needs to be fleshed out a bit to be really satisfactory. I would do this by pointing out how moral disagreement is consequential and aesthetic disagreement is not.
I would also point out that the reason someone is not a "monster" for having dispreferred aesthetic taste is just because the word "monster" does not apply to aesthetic disagreement. We have other, analogous words, like "philistine", "vulgarian", "boor", or, I guess, conversely, "hipster", "snob" etc.
Terms like "shock" and "fazed" carry connotations of having been surprised or confronted with something unexpected. I'm skeptical whether that's going on. My suspicion is that he's observing hostility and disgust towards people with opposing moral standards, which is completely consistent with being a relativist. Ask these students about variation in moral beliefs around the world, and I'd bet they'd be the first to tell you there's quite a lot of disagreement.
Either way, I don't think with your steelman it does much to warrant calling the pair of attitudes bizarre. And if that is what he meant, then that would motivate a second criticism: that he wrote quite an unclear and underdeveloped remark, and then didn't follow it up with much clarification. Bizarre how? Why doesn't he say? People in the comments interpreted it as a claim about a contradiction and I didn't see him contradict that.
I'm not trying to be harsh, and I hope I am not being too harsh. But, well, you know, defending antirealism is kinda my thing, so if someone people like makes remarks I find objectionable, I'm still going to object. You're not the first person to say that Henry is great and to ask me to be charitable. I take that sort of thing seriously, especially when the person (as you do) has a lot of credibility with me.
Lance, thanks a lot for writing this. I'm a moral realist myself, and don't always see eye to eye with you on metaethics - but as I read through this post, I found myself nodding my head a lot in agreement.
In particular, I think your account of how people go from being laypeople with mixed intuitions to being trained to prune them because they're philosophically inconsistent is quite right (although I think the process itself is/can be epistemically legitimate). And I haven't seen many other people talking about this, and sometimes even seen people talk as if it wasn't true (eg. when they poll laypeople about their ethical intuitions and then are surprised that those intuitions conflict).
I think the most charitable reading of Shevlin and Hoyeck is that they think it's in some way *arrogant* to be a relativist who insists that others follow their moral standards. For instance, if someone thought that morality was stance-dependent because it can be reduced to eg. cultural standards, then to insist that everyone else follow your ethical convictions (and refuse to brook disagreement) might seem a little brash because it seems to imply that your culture is better than everyone else's. This, I think, is why Hoyeck makes the remark about taste in movies - he's internally comparing the arrogance of thinking your culture is better than everyone else's to the arrogance of thinking your taste in movies is better than everyone else's. (Although I don't even know if that analogy is good at face value; how many serious movie connoisseurs will have an unshakeable conviction that I'm wrong if I insist that Boss Baby is the best movie ever made?)
Anyway, I think that's the least objectionable construction of their tweets. But even that formulation still leaves much to be criticized. What's bizarre about undergraduates being a bit brash in their ethical beliefs? Heck, even if they *are* philosophically inconsistent, what's bizarre about that? They're going to your class *in order* to learn philosophical skills like maintaining a consistent position, reflecting on your ethical intuitions, learning to rigorously formulate your arguments so you don't assert more than you can prove, and so forth. Of course undergraduates aren't intellectually perfect; it's your job, as an ethics professor, to teach them how to better themselves, rather than publicly making fun of them for not being already perfect. I wouldn't want to be one of Shevlin or Hoyeck's students, if that's the disposition they have towards undergrads.
Also, the "in 2025" references are just weird. University freshmen thinking that all morality is relative and "just your opinion, man" is a phenomenon that's been around for a very long time. r/askphilosophy, an online forum for laypeople to ask questions to philosophers, has an FAQ section on it because it's such a common question. Moral relativity is an incredibly common ethical intuition amongst laypeople! It's straight up conspiratorial thinking to lay that at the feet of a "cult of feeling" caused by therapy and over-affirmation. And of course, serious moral relativists have much more to say about morality than "it's just a feeling", and it's intellectually dishonest to lump them in with the unprepared remarks of philosophical undergrads.
So, from the POV of a moral realist: these guys are being really unserious. I disavow them, I was annoyed to read their tweets, and I want to reassure you that we aren't all like this. There are way better arguments for moral realism than picking on first year undergraduates for having ethical stances that, everything considered, aren't even that odd or far-out.
PS: Some of the responders seem motivated by culture war stuff (eg. the random references to "postmodern philosophy", therapy, "overly affirmed" kids, "moral relativism is the root problem with the world today", etc.) more than genuine philosophical disagreement. Normally I wouldn't bring this up, but if they're going to talk about "cults of feeling"...
Thanks, I appreciate the response. I agree with almost all of this. I don’t think the suggestion of arrogance is likely, though. If that’s what they meant, why wouldn’t they just say so? But even if it is, as you say, there’s still much to criticize. I can’t fault a charitable reading.
I saw a lot of the culture war stuff, but I was steering around that. There were a lot of sneering and contemptuous political readings on Henry’s post, but note that he said in one response he really wasn’t trying to make a political point. I think those people were just seeing what they wanted to see in the remark.
“it’s a bit odd to think that whether an action is right or wrong depends on the standards of the person performing the action (or their culture), but to then be outraged by people acting on those standards: after all, they’re acting in a morally acceptable way! So why be outraged by their disagreements?”
It depends, I suppose, on why they’re agent relativists. If they think it’s the correct semantic account of public language, they can coldly affirm agent relativism and prioritise their cares and concerns over what’s “morally acceptable”.
They could, but I take it the issue here is whether their appraisals in such situations would still be framed as moral. In this case they wouldn't be.