Huemer is wrong about skepticism (Full post, Parts 1-4)

Parts 1-4

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In this series, I will be critiquing the claims Huemer makes about skepticism in this post. It is probably a good idea to read that post before continuing.

1.0 Introduction

In a recent blog post, Mike Huemer purports to debunk moral skeptics, i.e., people who doubt there are stance-independent moral facts or that we can have knowledge of them.

I don’t find any of what Huemer says convincing, and I don’t think you should, either. Huemer’s arguments rely on helping himself to assumptions I don’t accept and don’t think others have good reasons to accept. Huemer’s objections also amount to a kind of self-defeat argument that relies on vague, speculative armchair psychology about the potential motives and inclinations of moral skeptics. Psychologizing one’s opposition is a fraught enterprise (which isn’t to say psychological hypotheses can’t be correct and relevant to evaluating a philosophical view; I certainly think they can be since I use them myself). Some of what Huemer says seems plausible to me, and some doesn’t, but ultimately, Huemer has in mind a rather tepid and generic skeptic who, even if they are vulnerable to his objections, aren’t representative of other, stronger objections to his views and the views of other rationalistically inclined analytic philosophers.

More importantly, self-defeat arguments are typically quite weak, and Huemer’s are no exception. They typically rely on the halfway fallacy. Roughly, the halfway fallacy occurs when one grants that one’s opposition endorses some view, but then one presumes that one’s critic must be committed to some more fundamental or alternative view that conflicts with the view they hold or causes other philosophical problems for their views, such as (in this case) self-defeat. A foolish moral skeptic may endorse skepticism, and be committed to views inconsistent with their support for skepticism. If so, then by all means, criticize them for the inconsistency. But a skeptic can always go all in, rejecting whatever view they purportedly are committed to that results in a self-defeating position. Huemer or others may nevertheless reject skepticism as absurd and mistaken, but if so, it won’t be on terms the skeptic is obliged to accept. If a skeptic endorses both skepticism and some view that entails non-skepticism, their only recourse isn’t to abandon skepticism…they can simply reject the view that entails non-skepticism. As always, one philosopher’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens. Nobody is obliged to accept self-defeat. There is always a way out.

Huemer doesn’t lay out a precise argument, but notes that skeptics appeal to two main arguments: that our moral intuitions are the result of unreliable processes (such as evolution or cultural traditions), and that there is so much moral disagreement that we should conclude people don’t have reliable moral intuitions. Both objections center on arguing that we don’t have reliable moral intuitions. So, we get something roughly like this:

P1. If we have unreliable moral intuitions, then we don’t have moral knowledge.

P2. We have unreliable moral intuitions.

C: We don’t have moral knowledge.

Huemer suggests that the very intuitions that would cause one to endorse P2 are themselves the result of unreliable intuitions, and that therefore if we were to suppose this argument was successful, we’d have to suppose that P2 was similarly threatened by an analogous argument directed against it. Perhaps something like this:

P1: If we have unreliable skeptical intuitions, the skepticism isn’t justified.

P2: We have unreliable skeptical intuitions.

C: Skepticism isn’t justified.

Consequently, the skeptic isn’t in a position to reject moral knowledge without undermining the very means that would justify doing so, so skepticism cannot get off the ground.

Skeptics have a few ways around this. First, they could show that they do have reliable intuitions, but moral realists don’t. This might involve arguing that there are unique problems with the factors that prompt realists to endorse moral realism.

Second, they could simply offer some other argument for denying that we have moral knowledge or that there are moral facts that don’t appeal to the distinctive unreliability of moral intuitions.

While I am sympathetic to both approaches, my own response is hard to categorize, and arguably is a mix of the two. I will develop this response in subsequent blog posts, but for now let’s take a tour of what Huemer has to say.

2.0 Unclear definition

According to Huemer:

Moral skeptics argue that either there aren’t any moral facts, or there are but we don’t know them. Why? Because our mechanisms for forming moral beliefs are not reliably truth-directed.

There are three problems with this definition. First, it’s not clear whether Huemer takes moral skeptics to specifically deny that there are stance-independent moral facts, or to deny that there are any moral facts at all, including stance-independent ones. In other words, does his account treat moral constructivists and relativists as skeptics, or not? It would be helpful, when discussing metaethics, to explicitly specify whether the moral facts you’re talking about are stance-independent or not. Even if you intend to include all moral facts, including stance-dependent ones, it’s still a good idea to explicitly specify this.

Second, he says “but we don’t know them.” This doesn’t specify whether the issue is that we currently don’t know what they are but could in principle acquire knowledge of them, or whether (for whatever reason) we are unable to acquire knowledge of them, either in principle or in practice. It might be helpful to clarify this, as well.

Third, is this: “Because our mechanisms for forming moral beliefs are not reliably truth-directed” …part of the definition of a moral skeptic? Or is Huemer defining a moral skeptic as anyone who denies there are moral facts or believes we don’t have knowledge of the facts, and then presenting a common characterization of why someone might be a moral skeptic? It’s not clear from his remarks.

Altogether, then, this is not a good way to start one’s response to moral skeptics. It’s not clear from Huemer’s remarks who counts as a moral skeptic. I think there are moral facts, but I don’t think there are stance-independent moral facts. I think we can have knowledge of these stance-dependent moral facts, but I almost certainly hold a different view about what “knowledge” is than Huemer. So am I a moral skeptic? I can’t tell from his description. His subsequent remarks sure do seem to indicate that I’m a moral skeptic, but as per his definition, it’s simply not clear.

So my first objection to Huemer’s post is that his remarks lack clarity. A clear criticism of moral skeptics should carve up the conceptual space using precise terminology that would allow readers to easily determine whether their positions fall in or outside the scope of his critique. While one might be able to, with some confidence, infer that their position does or doesn’t qualify as moral skepticism, this shouldn’t be necessary. His remarks should be clear enough that we can tell without having to do any guesswork.

I’m not the only person who found these remarks unclear. I ran a short survey on my YouTube page to see how others thought about these remarks:

Is this a representative sample? No, of course not. Voters are presumably people who subscribe to my channel, so they are likely going to be biased towards my perspective on these matters (though I didn’t give them any context that would further bias them). Nevertheless, I take it my audience can think for themselves and may very well have disagreed with me about this. Only many of them didn’t. While a substantial portion thought the arguments for skepticism were clearly not part of the definition (38%), there’s a good spread of other responses, with a majority thinking the meaning is not clear and a substantial subset thinking the arguments were part of the definition. I get that this is a blog post, and one could undoubtedly find ambiguities and lack of clarity in my blog posts, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile to point it out when it occurs.

3.0 Two arguments for moral skepticism

Huemer attributes two “sub-arguments” to moral skeptics:

a) Our moral intuitions are produced by something that is insensitive to moral truth, like natural selection, or the cultural traditions we happened to be born under.

b) There is so much disagreement among moral judgments that we have to conclude that humans can’t reliably judge morality.

I might endorse some version of (a), but I don’t endorse (b). Is that enough to make me a skeptic if Huemer’s conception of a moral skeptic requires one to endorse one or both arguments? I’m not sure. Even if it doesn’t, I am a moral antirealist, so my views are probably close enough. Either way, what Huemer suggests is that these considerations can be turned back on the skeptic:

I suggest that there are similar arguments debunking skepticism itself: skeptical beliefs are produced by unreliable processes that produce lots of disagreement.

This is why I provided the syllogisms above. Huemer could construct two arguments analogous to these but directed against moral skeptics. They’d probably take something like this form:

Argument from Unreliable Skeptical Intuitions

P1: If moral skepticism is produced by unreliable processes, then moral skepticism is unjustified.

P2: Moral skepticism is produced by unreliable processes.

C: Moral skepticism is unjustified.

Argument from Disagreement against Moral Skepticism

P1: If there is a lot of disagreement about moral skepticism, then moral skepticism is not justified.

P2: There is a lot of disagreement about moral skepticism.

C: Moral skepticism is not justified.

Arguments like these might work for a very flat-footed and crude type of moral skepticism. But they are more of a sketch than a detailed objection. It would be nice if we could neatly classify processes as “reliable” or “unreliable,” appeal only to those which are reliable, and call it a day. But human psychology isn’t as simple as that. Many of the judgments we make are subject to biasing factors, factors that potentially threaten their accuracy. But there are non-categorical questions: how much do these biasing factors threaten judgments that rely on a particular process? And under what circumstances do those threats result in false beliefs? Merely gesturing at some process, or judgment, and observing that biasing factors are involved isn’t enough to show that the process, or the judgments that result from its application to a particular case, have resulted in error. For comparison, consider memory. Is memory “reliable”? Well, what does that mean? The processes that are involved in memory mostly provide accurate information much of the time. How much of the time? Well, that depends on the person, the memory, and a host of distinctive factors. Nevertheless, memory is fallible and is often faulty. Its reliability is a matter of degree. There is no magic threshold for how often or to what extent it is accurate that would allow us to categorically declare it reliable or unreliable. Just so with any other psychological process.

Biasing factors are involved in virtually every judgment about everything. Simply noting that a person may have biases isn’t a good reason to conclude that whatever conclusions they’ve arrived at are the result of unreliable processes and that therefore they are mistaken. What we need is a broad, abductive case that appeals to all relevant considerations. Should we have more confidence, on reflection, in the case made by the skeptic or the case made by the realist? Answers to questions like this are not best resolved by attempting to force the messy weighing of competing theories through the strictures of deductive syllogisms, and simply saying “I’m biased? Well so are you!” isn’t going to necessarily end in the two sets of biases canceling each other out. After all, climate models are not perfectly reliable, but neither is reading tea leaves. That doesn’t mean that if climatologists appeal to previously-accurate climate models and oracles read the future in entrails that if their claims conflict then they epistemically cancel one another out.

4.0 General skepticism

According to Huemer,

Philosophers as a group have an extreme skeptical leaning, compared to people from other disciplines. For virtually anything that philosophers talk about (not just morality), one of the leading philosophical theories will be an extreme form of skepticism. This is not true of any other field of study that I know of.

I agree. This is true, as far as it goes. The problem is that Huemer is already moving towards establishing assumptions I don’t grant. This centers on his use of the term “extreme form of skepticism.” The term “extreme” is a highly loaded, normatively laden term. Whether a particular position is “extreme” or not is itself a potential matter of dispute. I simply don’t grant that there’s anything “extreme” about being a moral skeptic. On the contrary, I think moral realism is a completely absurd position for which there isn’t a single good argument. I find moral realism to be extreme, for much the same reason I’d think it extreme to believe in astrology or crystal magic.

Realists, and even many antirealists, are likely to disagree. That’s fine. I am not claiming there is a single standard for whether a position is extreme or not that we all should or must accept at the outset of inquiry. Whether a skeptical position is “extreme” depends on one’s other views (and of course on what one means by “extreme”). And since we don’t all share the same views about how well-supported a particular view is, we are not obliged to agree that any particular skeptical position is “extreme” or not. Yet Huemer compares skepticism about morality to skepticism about the existence of chemicals or rocks:

E.g., among chemists, a leading theory is not that there are no chemicals or that we know nothing about them. Among geologists, there is no theory that anyone takes seriously that says there are no rocks. Among art historians, a major view isn’t that there is no art or that it has no history.

Denial in these domains of inquiry of the phenomenon in question would involve denial of the very subject matter of the domain. Rocks, chemicals, and works of art just are the topics of study in these fields. However, moral philosophy isn’t the study of stance-independent moral facts. It’s the study of morality. Moral skeptics, and more generally, antirealists, do not necessarily deny that morality exists. Some might. But that’s not the only way to be a skeptic (or an antirealist). I don’t deny morality exists. I deny it involves stance-independence. A closer analogy to Huemer’s comparison to chemists and geologists would be a philosopher denying that there are such things as moral judgments, attitudes, positions, beliefs, values, language, and so on; that is, that as a social and psychological phenomenon, that morality literally doesn’t exist. Imagine denying that people say things like “That’s immoral.” Imagine denying that there is any such thing as a moral judgment, or a moral claim, or a moral value: that nobody, anywhere, has ever held a moral position on anything. That would be a more apt comparison to denying the existence of chemicals or rocks. But antirealists don’t (typically) do this.

Moral realism is not a required, operative assumption to do moral philosophy. It is a stance one takes within moral philosophy. Rejecting stance-independent moral facts would be closer to denying that life is characterized by Élan vital, a sui generis vital force that is present in all living things. Believing in vital force is not necessary to do biology. Likewise, believing in the quasi-mystical forces of goodness and badness that non-naturalist realists endorse simply isn’t necessary to do moral philosophy.

Even if Huemer doesn’t intend to suggest that we have equally good reason to endorse moral realism as we do the existence of chemicals or rocks, a reader could still plausibly interpret his remarks in this way. Of course, one can always intend a comparison to illustrate similarities in some set of features without implying similarities in others. I don’t want to be guilty of the overcomparison fallacy, myself. This occurs when you misinterpret the intent of a comparison. Suppose I want to compare lemons and bananas by noting that both are yellow. It would be foolish to say:

You can’t compare lemons and bananas! They’re completely different!

The fact that two things are different in various ways is completely irrelevant when it comes to assessing whether they are similar in some specified respect. Lemons and bananas both have the property yellow {Y}. It doesn’t matter if every other property in the respect set of properties for each were different:

Banana: {Y, A, B, C}

Lemon: {Y, D, E, F}

…It’d still be true to say “both have property {Y}”. If all Huemer has in mind by the comparison is that it’s as implausible to reject moral realism as it is to reject rocks and chemicals, then that’d be fine. But if that’s the goal, these are not very good choices. Both reflect the literal subject matter of the fields in question, while stance-independent moral facts simply are not the subject matter of moral philosophy. Stance-independent moral facts are a contentious, proposed set of phenomena that reflect one stance among philosophers. They aren’t the subject matter in the same way the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics isn’t the literal subject matter of physics. A physicist who rejects the Copenhagen interpretation isn’t denying the subject matter of physics, they’re just denying a specific interpretation of the nature of the subject matter.

Thus, even if the goal wasn’t to compare moral realism to geology and chemistry in respects other than it being similarly implausible to deny the phenomena in question, i.e., stance-independent moral facts, rocks, and chemistry, respectively, the fact that Huemer opted for phenomena that are the subject matter of the fields in question gives the impression that the same is true of moral philosophy, when this is not actually the case. This is thus at best unintentionally misleading and likely to exploit a greater implied similarity in the degree of absurdity of the skepticism.

Huemer’s comparison to the sciences is not ideal. Even if he only intended to offer analogous cases in which it’d be absurd to be skeptical, he chose these specific examples when he didn’t have to. If comparison with respect to characteristics the examples he gives share in common weren’t intended, it’d be very odd to choose such examples. In short, if the comparison were intended, it’s a mistake. If it wasn’t intended, then it’s misleading. Both are bad.

5.0 Is skepticism rare?

Even if I grant that skepticism about chemicals or rocks is “extreme”, why should I grant that skepticism about moral truths is extreme? Why should skepticism in philosophy more generally be “extreme”? Note what Huemer says next:

But among epistemologists, a leading theory is that there is no knowledge. Among ethicists, a major theory is that there is no right or wrong. When philosophers theorize about free will, someone is going to say that there is no such thing; when we talk about beauty, someone will say there is no beauty; when we talk about time, someone will say it isn’t real; etc. Basically, for anything that philosophers talk about, some of us are going to pipe up and propose that that thing “isn’t real”, or that we know literally nothing about it.

Of course, these radical skeptical positions are usually small minority views.

A lot is going to turn on what one means by a “small” minority view. 26.1% endorse moral antirealism. Is that a small minority view? I don’t think so. 11.2% deny free will. Is that small? Sort of, but it’s not that small. These are sizeable minority positions. “Small” just isn’t very informative. On plenty of plausible construals, these are small minority views. As we’ll see, even this is a bit misleading, though.

Some of Huemer’s claims are a bit hard to interpret. The claim that there “is no beauty” is a tough one. Does Huemer mean no objective beauty or no beauty at all? I don’t know of anyone arguing for the latter claim (which isn’t to say nobody does, but it’s still a weird way to phrase things). Conversely, ~40.6% of philosophers hold that aesthetic value is subjective. That’s not small; it’s just barely under the 43.5% who think aesthetic value is objective.

In all of these cases, you could further subdivide the views in question. Huemer endorses non-naturalist realism. That makes up only 26.6% of philosophers, barely more than the number of antirealists. Arguably, both naturalist moral realists and antirealists alike are skeptics of the kinds of moral facts Huemer believes in. In that regard, a majority of philosophers are skeptical of the type of moral realism Huemer endorses.

Likewise, only 18.8% endorse libertarian conceptions of free will. Sure, 59.1% endorse compatibilism, but compatibilism isn’t all that practically different from many skeptical positions about free will. Like naturalist realism, compatibilism arguably shares more in common with skepticism about free will than it does with libertarianism. And in this case, a majority of philosophers are skeptical of libertarian conceptions of free will. Should non-skeptics include compatibilists as skeptics or not? If they aren’t “skeptics,” why not? They don’t believe in what proponents of libertarian free will believe in; they believe in something quite different. Why should naturalistic and non-naturalistic views be collapsed into a single category when naturalist non-skeptical views often have more in common, philosophically and practically, with skeptical views? The naturalist is every bit as much a skeptic of what Huemer endorses as the antirealist, and many naturalist non-skeptics would sooner be skeptics than adopt the views of non-naturalists.

Compatibilism, like naturalist realism, is often dismissed (and, I think, rightly so) as a conciliatory position that sacrifices too much of substance just to reconcile with a naturalistic picture of the world. Sure, there’s a way in which these views are not “skeptical,” but they’re not skeptical in much the way a person isn’t skeptical of magic because they think stage magicians are “close enough.” A person who thinks stage magic is magic is just as much of a skeptic towards casting spells and doing “real” magic as an outright skeptic. There is little practical or even substantive metaphysical difference between the “magic naturalist” and the skeptic. Yet both are very different from someone who thinks the Harry Potter movies are a documentary.

More generally, To a non-naturalist, the dominance of many nominally non-skeptical positions differs only semantically or at best in a few not-very-significant ways from skeptical positions. A strong case could be made that these positions are practically speaking just skepticism with a bit of semantic window dressing to look like the “real thing,” i.e., what the non-naturalist is after. Pull back the semantic curtain on the naturalist and you’ve got a metaphysical skeptic. And such skeptics are every bit as much inclined to reject the worldview Huemer endorses as the skeptic. Even if we don’t count all these naturalists as skeptics, though, skeptics aren’t that rare. But a more important here is that a majority of analytic philosophers reject views like Huemer’s, often in greater or similar numbers to the degree to which they reject outright skeptical positions. Libertarian free will is an unpopular position. And there were almost exactly as many non-naturalist realists among analytic philosophers as there were antirealists. If skeptical positions are often small minority views, then the same is true of many of Huemer’s central views.

6.0 Is skepticism radical or extreme?

The rarity of skepticism isn’t my main concern. Skepticism is far less common than I think it should be, even if we grant that skepticism is a minority view on many or most issues. Yet Huemer has also helped himself to the assumption that various skeptical positions are “radical” or “extreme” (it’s not clear whether Huemer uses these terms as synonyms). What makes them radical? We’re not told, so we have no option but conjecture or to await clarification. Huemer has helped himself to the assumption that rejecting the following views is radical:

1. We have knowledge.

2. There are (stance-independent?) moral facts.

3. We have free will.

4. Beauty exists.

5. Time exists.

I don’t grant that denying any of these claims invariably reflects an “extreme” or “radical” skeptical stance. Skeptics who deny things on this list usually deny some specific conception of the thing in question. Usually, the skeptic will buy into a theoretically robust conception of the phenomenon in question, suppose that nonphilosophers use the term to refer to this robust notion or implicitly speak in ways that commit them to it, then, because nothing that matches this robust description exists, the thing in question doesn’t actually exist. As a result, commonsense thinking is mistaken, and thus by implication most people are mistaken.

The skeptic’s mistake in these cases is almost never denying the specific concept in question. The philosopher will have some fancy notion of time or beauty or free will, T_1, B_1, or FW_1, respectively. The skeptic will come along, agree that this is what “we” are all talking about, then argue that for this or that reason no such thing exists. Ta-da! Skepticism! The problem is not that they’re wrong that the thing in question doesn’t exist: they’re probably right! There is no T_1, or B_1, or FW_1. The problem is that they just go along with the non-skeptic in presuming that this is “the commonsense” view, the “obvious,” or “intuitive,” or “default,” view, or, more generally, that they think that such views either (a) provide an accurate account of the psychology of nonphilosophers and thus reflect the typical person’s stance or (b) provide the best account of the linguistic outputs of ordinary language; that is, they provide the best “externally adequate” account of the meaning of ordinary terms.

What’s wrong with this? Well, (b) relies on mistaken views about how language works, and a good skeptic should reject those. Words don’t mean anything outside a context of usage. If the skeptic shares the non-skeptic’s conception of the way language works, and they’re wrong, then the problem with the skeptic isn’t their skepticism; it’s that their skepticism doesn’t go deep enough. A more thoroughgoing skeptic should both deny T_1, B_1, and so on and also deny that these accounts reflect the semantic content of ordinary language.

Alternatively, philosophers who think (a) almost never bring receipts. They simply assume that nonphilosophers think the way that philosophers do, rather than providing empirical evidence that they do. Are most people moral realists? We have little evidence to support this claim. Do most people think there’s a hard problem of consciousness or have a concept of phenomenal states? Again, there’s little evidence that they do. We don’t have good evidence for a host of claims about how nonphilosophers think, and the data we do get frequently shows considerable cross-cultural variation, along with mixed and unexpected responses. There just isn’t good evidence that nonphilosophers think the way philosophers think they do. And even if we find convergence today much of that may be an artifact of who participates in studies, flawed study design (e.g., forced choice paradigms), and convergence in thought due to globalization. We rarely do research on remote and difficult-to-access indigenous populations, which shrink every day and experience increased exposure to world culture, and we have little or no access to how people thought in the past.

Simply put, we have a profound lack of data about how nonphilosophers think. There are 7000+ languages in the world. In how many of those languages do we have robust data about how nonphilosophers think? You might think “a dozen or so.” No. At the moment, the answer is: none. We barely are scratching the surface in English. We have almost nothing in any other language. The idea that we’re even in a position to know how nonphilosophers think is ludicrous. So why would a skeptic presume that the notions they deny are somehow the notions adopted by most of the world’s population? Accepting this in the almost total absence of evidence is not skeptical, it’s naïve.

Given this, my main problem with skeptics is that they aren’t skeptical enough. Most of the skeptics that analytic philosophers like Huemer deal with are really just analytic skeptics. They are skeptics who already buy in to many of the shared background assumptions analytic philosophers typically endorse: a host of unquestioned dogmas and practices that I and others think are mistaken. This buy-in ironically makes these analytic skeptics less skeptical than I am, but optically, they look more skeptical from the outside. Consider: this skeptic denies this or that metaphysical view, but they don’t deny the presuppositions and methods and background assumptions they share in common with non-skeptical analytic philosophers. Yet I not only reject the metaphysical views in question, I also reject the methods and presuppositions of analytic philosophers. The analytic skeptic merely disagrees about what’s on the branches of the tree. I deny the entire tree, roots and all.

And yet the analytic skeptic looks “radical” and “extreme” because these terms are relativized to some shared set of background assumptions. In this case, the analytic skeptic denies what most people allegedly believe or mean by their terms. The skeptic “denies beauty exists” or “denies time exists” or “denies morality exists,” and, in doing so, they mean this in what they themselves acknowledge is the sense most people mean and in the way most people use these terms in everyday life. They are skeptical in the same way we’d consider someone a skeptic if the moon landing occurred, or that aliens are abducting people, or that Bigfoot exists. These have straightforward conventional meanings, so it is very clear what being a skeptic in these cases entails. Just so, the skeptic who denies “time exists,” is taken to deny that time exists in the conventional, everyday sense. The problem with analytic skepticism isn’t that they’re wrong to deny beauty or time exists, it’s that they’re wrong to suppose that what they’re denying accurately captures the conventional, everyday sense. They’ve made an unforced error that makes their position far sillier and less plausible than it needs to be, again, ironically, because they aren’t skeptical enough.

But I am not an analytic skeptic. I am what I’ll call a metaskeptic (not to be confused with Huemer’s use of the term). A metaskeptic is not merely someone who is skeptical of a particular philosophical position, but is skeptical of the framing or background assumptions that have led philosophers to frame the dispute in terms of the categories and positions on offer. By analogy, a skeptic would look at a menu of possible positions and express skepticism towards one or all of the items on the menu. A metaskeptic would argue that the menu itself is the problem, and reject the entire menu, demanding that we go off-menu to find out what’s really available. Metaskepticism eschews conventional analytic framings of philosophical problems, and can dispense with charges of being extreme or radical in the sense of denying commonsense conceptions of this or that concept by denying what analytic philosophers put forward, that they are denying some aspect of nonphilosophical, conventional thinking. We are not obligated to grant that whatever baroque metaphysical view Huemer thinks is obvious actually captures everyday thought. We can say that Huemer or many analytic philosophers are wrong without thereby denying that most nonphilosophers are wrong as well.

Another aspect of denying what philosophers endorse is that, even if you think T_1 corresponds to the folk notion of time and that B_1 corresponds to the folk notion of beauty, and you think there is no T_1/time or B_1/beauty, you will probably still endorse some functional analog of the thing in question with the naughty bits removed. This is what skeptics typically do. Sure, if you don’t believe in time you still believe in schtime, a time-like expedient for effectively navigating the world. And sure, maybe beauty isn’t real, but we still appreciate the aesthetics of some things more than others. Likewise, a skeptic may deny that we have knowledge, but we have schmowledge, which works just like knowledge but lacks the metaphysical overreach or whatever other features made the skeptic reject knowledge. In most of these cases, little or nothing of substance is lost.

For an example of this, take Stich’s objections to “truth” in the Fragmentation of Reason. Stich rejects the notion that truth has any value. We could in principle endorse minor variations of truth, each of which is as or more useful than truth proper, denoted by truth*, truth**, and so on. On consideration, there’s no particular benefit in favoring truth over these. Stich ultimately jettisons truth entirely, favoring an account that puts our interests front and center. Yet as a colleague of mine has pointed out, this practice would be hard to carry out without some capacity for drawing a distinction between what is to-be-acted-upon and what isn’t, and that distinction would look functionally quite like the pragmatist’s distinction between truth and falsity. My point then is that Huemer and other anti-skeptics overstate what skeptics are committed to. Skeptics typically reject metaphysical excess. They don’t have to tie their hands further by denying various practical considerations.

The problem with many skeptics is that they’ve let the most metaphysically ambitious analytic philosophers declare a monopoly on our language. They accept the language these philosophers use but reject their baroque metaphysics. As a result, these skeptics end up saying things that sound silly, but on reflection aren’t actually all that silly. Suppose most philosophers insisted that the sun was, by definition, a god. To deny that the sun is a god is, therefore, to deny that the sun exists. What absurdity! What nonsense! We can look up in the sky and see the sun! Of course the sun exists! Skeptics are fools! What skeptics should do is not deny that the sun exists. They should refuse to accept the terminological imperium in the first place: yes, there’s a sun, but no, it is not a god. By allowing non-skeptical analytic philosophers to lay claim to English, skeptics have saddled themselves with the rhetorically impossible task of convincing people that things like knowledge and time don’t exist. While their skepticism is often completely sensible, this sounds ridiculous to people, and so skepticism remains a minority position. The problem, then, isn’t that the skeptical positions are absurd. It’s that skeptics don’t go far enough. They tacitly (or explicitly) buy into the language-metaphysics relation that their opposition endorses.

Skepticism’s apparent absurdity is, in short, largely a linguistic mirage. Skeptics shoulder much of the blame for this. The problem with the standard analytic skeptic isn’t that they go too far. It’s that they don’t go far enough. They should reject not only the analytic metaphysician’s baroque metaphysics, they should reject the entire edifice on which it’s built, with all its buy-ins and dogmas and presuppositions about language, meaning, and the relation between words and reality.

6.1 Skepticism = Inconsistent with commonsense

There is still more to say about the notion that there is something radical about skepticism. This could mean any number of things. But one possibility I’ve already alluded to is that for a philosophical position to be radical is for it to be highly inconsistent with ordinary thinking. Take error theory. Error theory is a form of moral skepticism, and error theorists think the following:

(1) Ordinary first-order moral claims like “abortion is wrong” purport to describe stance-independent moral facts.

(2) There are no stance-independent moral facts.

(3) So ordinary first-order moral claims like “abortion is wrong” are all false.

The error theorist is a skeptic because they endorse (2). But what makes them an “extreme” or “radical” skeptic? That would be the combination of their endorsements (1) and (2). What makes the error theorist position extreme/radical, in other words, is that the error theorist grants that everyday moral language presupposes moral realism but insists that ordinary ways of speaking and thinking about morality are mistaken. The error theorist thinks moral realism is the default, normal, everyday, commonsense position. The error theorist’s “radical” or “extreme” suggestion is that this allegedly standard, conventional set of commitments or beliefs most people tacitly accept is incorrect.

If the error theorist is correct, Huemer may be correct to judge them as extreme or radical insofar as to be extreme or radical is to endorse a view radically at odds with ordinary thought. “Ordinary thought” here is taken to capture those beliefs, dispositions, intuitions, ways of thinking, commitments implicit in our ways of speaking, and so on that characterize everyday thought, practice, and behavior. We may suppose that ordinary people believe objects exist, that time exists, that you can know things, and so on. So when the skeptic comes along and denies these things, they are denying something that we’ve already granted is a typical, everyday, and presumptively justified aspect of ordinary thought.

Philosophers often operate with the presumption that there’s a sort of epistemic inertia in favor of ordinary thought. This comports well with Huemer’s phenomenal conservatism, whereby one is justified in believing things are as they seem unless one is given good reason to believe otherwise. Let’s grant that, for the sake of argument, things are as they generally appear, and that we have some reason to that things are as they seem unless we’re given some overriding reasons to think otherwise.

Here's the problem. In all of these cases, philosophers conflate robust, philosophically loaded conceptions associated with the terms in question, e.g., “knowledge,” “objects,” “time,” “beauty,” “morality,” and so on with everyday uses of these terms, then suppose that if a skeptic denies the existence of knowledge, objects, time, and so on that they must be attributing radical error to ordinary thought and language. Take the notion of knowledge. Nonphilosophers go around saying that they know things, that we have knowledge, that some people are more knowledgeable than others, and so on. They appear to believe in knowledge. But does this require them to endorse any particular philosophical account of knowledge? No, it doesn’t. The way people use this term is likely highly variable, context-driven, and difficult to pin down in any systematic and philosophically rigorous way.

Let us designate the descriptive facts about the set of usages of the ordinary term “knowledge” there are as knowledge_o, for “ordinary.” This set may include only a single, shared concept, but I suspect it doesn’t, and that our set may consist of a range of semi-overlapping usages, knowledge_o…n = {knowledge_o1, knowledge_o2, ...}. Now, philosophers propose this or that theory of knowledge, each of which attempts to offer some kind of analysis or account of what constitutes knowledge, what the conditions for knowledge are, and so on. We can designate these accounts as philosophical conceptions, and describe the set of these usages as knowledge_p, for “philosophical.” This set definitely includes many different theories of knowledge, which we could slap arbitrary numeric values onto, giving us the set knowledge_p = “knowledge_p1, knowledge_p2, …}.

I think the quest for some sort of robust theoretical account of what “knowledge,” is, as though there is some distinct phenomenon, “knowledge” awaiting our discovery is futile. There is no such thing. There are various reasons why I think this, but that’d be a very long digression. What matters here is that this makes me, in a sense, a skeptic towards most, or perhaps even all of the members of the set knowledge_p. Yet if I were to say that I am skeptic about knowledge, this can give the superficial impression that I am denying that anyone has knowledge_o, that is, knowledge in the sense (or senses) that figure into ordinary thought and language. The conflation between knowledge_p and knowledge_o allows philosophers to depict skeptics as ridiculous idiots who are denying the obvious. Consider this toy example that roughly approximates an ordinary situation:

Alex: “It’s raining outside.”

Sam: “How do you know that?”

Alex: “Because I am looking out the window right now and I can see that it’s raining.”

Sam: “Oh, okay. Well, I guess we better get an umbrella.”

Alex’s response implies that she knows that it’s raining, and that she therefore has knowledge of the fact that it’s raining. As a knowledge skeptic, do I deny that Alex knows it’s raining?

Well, that depends. Do I deny Alex has some form of knowledge_p? Yes. I don’t think there are any distinct, correct accounts of knowledge. Do I deny that Alex has some form of knowledge_o? Absolutely not. I have no problem with Alex saying she knows it’s raining. I’d also say she knows it’s raining. But I don’t take this fact that she has knowledge to be amenable to a distinctive analysis or any particular correct “theory of knowledge.” I reject the entire framework in which Huemer and other philosophers operate, root and branch. I would even go so far as to say not only that there is no such thing as knowledge_p, but that even this grants too much to analytic philosophers; rather, I’d be a knowledge quietist that thinks the practices analytic philosophers are engaged in are so fundamentally misguided that it doesn’t even make sense to propose and discuss theories of knowledge_p; that the whole idea is just a terribly misguided approach to philosophy that relies on confused and mistaken background assumptions about language, thought, meaning, and metaphysics.

A skeptic need only be skeptical of some received or established conception of knowledge_p to be a skeptic. They are a skeptic about that account. This does not mean they deny all the pragmatic and practical considerations attached to everyday uses of the term. The skeptic can be (and, as a skeptic, I am) skeptical of philosophical theories. The problem is that many philosophers, including skeptics themselves, frequently take those philosophical theories to just be theories of ordinary thought and language, or at least some slightly-cleaned-up version of them. In other words, philosophers take the set of knowledge_p to include, or map onto, knowledge_o, such that to deny the former just is to deny the latter.

But skeptics don’t have to agree with this. The theories philosophers make up about this or that concept or phenomenon, like knowledge, morality, and so on, tend to be mistaken, not only in their particulars, but in the degree to which they map onto ordinary thought and language. As such, when I deny their theories, I am only denying their theories, I am not denying the truth or intelligibility of ordinary thought and discourse. While the philosophers in question may present their accounts as accounts of ordinary thought and language, I also deny that they have succeeded at doing so. As such, my skepticism is insulated against charges of radical revisionism or drawing extreme conclusions about our everyday practices because I think philosophers have failed on two fronts: their theories are wrong, and they’re not even accurate accounts of how “we” speak or think in the first place.

Skepticism often appears radical or extreme for at least three reasons: First, skeptics often grant that the accounts they are skeptical towards do capture ordinary thought. In these cases, skeptics may simply acknowledge that their position is “extreme” or “radical” but nevertheless insist that it is true. This is a completely viable route. Ordinary people are frequently wrong about things. Science has a long history of overturning dogmas. Why should we expect philosophy to be any different?

Second, skeptics may hold that they are rejecting certain aspects of ordinary thought, but that doing so doesn’t carry any radical or extreme practical implications. Error theorists, for instance, are not obliged to stop objecting to murder simply because they think the sentence “Murder is wrong” is technically false. Critics of skepticism often rely on the conflation between philosophical accounts and ordinary accounts to give the misleading impression that, in denying the philosopher’s theory, one thereby denies the truth or intelligibility of ordinary thought. There are massive problems with this. Ordinary discourse involves a host of pragmatic features that are typically excluded from philosophical analyses, yet, in denying this or that analysis of some term like “moral” or “immoral,” audiences are given the false impression that the skeptic is denying these pragmatic features. I have covered this particular issue extensively on this blog. See here for a recent, extensive discussion on this topic.

Third, it’s an open empirical question whether or not ordinary people actually hold any particular philosophical view. In many cases, they don’t. And when this occurs, the skeptic can deny the philosophical view but also deny that the view is commonsensical or widely held among nonphilosophers. Many skeptics fail to do this. But when this occurs, the problem isn’t that their skepticism goes too far, it’s that it doesn’t go far enough. Skeptics don’t have to accept that in rejecting this or that philosophical view that they are rejecting a view widely held among nonphilosophers. If I deny moral realism, or the correspondence theory of truth, or the existence of qualia, this does not require me to deny a “commonsense” view, because I can also deny that these notions are commonsense views.

Resources are readily available not only for skeptics to deny various philosophical accounts but to also deny that those accounts accurately capture how ordinary people speak or think. Claims about how nonphilosophers think, speak, or act are empirical claims. Philosophers rarely, if ever, gather actual empirical data to support their claims about what’s allegedly “commonsense.” This leaves many anti-skeptical views open to being undermined from an angle rarely taken by skeptics.

So far, I’ve been speaking of skepticism more broadly, but how does this relate to moral skepticism? This may all be moot if most people are moral realists. Yet as it turns out, there is no good evidence that most nonphilosophers are moral realists. Thus, skeptics are in a good position to deny that moral skepticism is extreme or radical in the relevant sense.

6.2 Moral realism is not a commonsense, default position

One issue Huemer doesn’t engage with (at least in this post) is the possibility that moral realism isn’t commonsense or intuitive to most people. Even if I agreed it’d be radical to deny that we know anything or that chemicals or rocks exist, insofar as this involves a rejection of something most people take to be obvious, I don’t think this is the case for moral realism because I don’t think ordinary people are moral realists or that moral realism is the best account of ordinary moral language. Why do I think this? I take claims about what most people believe or think or what they mean by what they say, to be empirical questions about human psychology. At present, there is no compelling evidence that most people are moral realists, and at least some evidence that casts doubt on this. I won’t rehash the case against folk moral realism here. I have already covered this topic extensively on the blog. See here for one of my articles addressing the prevalence of moral realism among nonphilosophers.

Here’s a quick summary: There have been a few dozen studies directly addressing whether nonphilosophers are moral realists or not. Most early studies found mixed results. Yet these studies had significant methodological shortcomings. As newer studies have emerged that have sought to mitigate these shortcomings, antirealist rates have tended to increase. Nevertheless, significant methodological limitations remain. These limitations are so severe that they have prompted me to argue that the best interpretation of the data is that nonphilosophers have no determinate metaethical position at all: they are neither realists nor antirealists. Why? Because they do not appear to interpret questions about metaethics as intended, and because there is no compelling theoretical or empirical rationale for supposing that we couldn’t explain ordinary moral thought and language without attributing a position to people on the metaphysical status of moral truth. Such claims are as esoteric and practically irrelevant as competing interpretations of quantum mechanics. If realists nevertheless insist nonphilosophers are also realists, the onus is on them to present actual evidence of this. Armchair analysis of English sentences is insufficient for reasons I outline here.

What I suspect is that moral realism is a highly idiosyncratic view held almost exclusively by academic philosophers and people influenced by their work. There are probably fewer people who endorse moral realism than believe in ghosts, magic, astrology, and all manner of pseudoscientific, supernatural, paranormal, and conspiratorial beliefs. And it would be ridiculous to call me a radical or extreme skeptic for denying any of those beliefs. For what it’s worth, these beliefs may also be more common among academics than moral antirealism. Many people in academia are theists, and a belief in at least some form of the paranormal is incredibly common. It is far less clear that most people are moral realists, or even have a clue what the dispute between realists and antirealists is actually about. I think Huemer and other realists radically overestimate how many people are actually disposed towards moral realism.

6.3 Is moral skepticism is radical because it’s inconsistent with what most experts think?

Perhaps moral skepticism is extreme or radical because it deviates from what experts think. 62% of philosophers endorse moral realism, while only 26% endorse moral antirealism. That’s a significant majority in favor of realism.

A view endorsed by a quarter of the experts is not in any meaningful sense extreme or radical. It’s just a minority view. And as I’ve argued several times, the 62% in favor of moral realism is extremely misleading. That 62% is composed of both naturalist and non-naturalist realists. They are lumped together merely because they share the same semantic analysis of first-order moral claims. Aside from this, these positions are about as different as naturalist realism is from antirealism; perhaps more so. Many naturalists would default to antirealism before they’d endorse non-naturalist realism, because the former would require fewer inferential leaps from their present positions. Indeed, the deep, qualitative differences between naturalism and non-naturalism are so significant that Huemer himself has recently said the following:

You can wonder if this is the important distinction to make…between realism and antirealism. You at one point in my book, in Ethical Intuitionism, I say ‘Actually the most fundamental distinction is between intuitionism on the one hand, and all other views, because it’s only the intuitionist that have a fundamentally different ontology…like every other view holds that there are really only descriptive facts, and these other views differ from each other semantically. And the intuitionists view differs ontologically from everyone else. They’re the only ones who think there’s another class of facts. Now when I say the other views differ semantically what I mean is […] they sort of agree on what the fundamental facts are and then they differ about what those facts makes true.

I completely agree with Huemer about this. In fact, I’ve proposed that the more fundamental dispute is between those who believe in irreducible normativity and those who don’t. Those who don’t deny that there are any normative facts that can’t be reduced to descriptive facts. As such, the latter could reasonably be called moral descriptivists or descriptive reductionists, while those who endorse Huemer’s non-naturalism would reject this reductionism.

Huemer’s remarks allude to naturalist realists and antirealists alike, they are the descriptivists. This is a problem for anyone claiming that moral skepticism is an extreme or radical position. The semantic dispute between naturalists and antirealists isn’t even the most central and fundamental dispute. The ontological dispute between non-naturalists and everyone else is. Given this, let’s revisit what the 2020 PhilPapers data shows about the proportion of realists and antirealists:

Realists are a significant majority here. Again, it’s worth emphasizing that 26.12% is by no means a fringe view. But that isn’t even the biggest problem here. The biggest problem is that these results are misleading. If the central dispute is between ethical intuitionists, which is functionally a stand in for non-naturalists, and “everyone else,” which we can charitably confine only to naturalists and descriptivists, while exclude everyone in the Other category (even though many might be closer to antirealism than realism), we get this:

Non-naturalists only make up 26.56% of the respondents, only marginally more than the 26.12% that endorsed moral antirealism. If this is the more central dispute of the two, then even if we wanted to charge antirealists with a radical, extreme, minority view on the semantics of moral discourse, moral antirealists are actually in the majority on the more fundamental ontological dispute about the existence of irreducible normativity. If I am understanding Huemer, he himself regards the latter as the more important of the two, and so do I. It would appear that, at present, it is moral antirealists, along with their naturalist realist allies, that are winning the more fundamental of the two disputes. Given this, it’s a bit odd for moral non-naturalists to trot out the PhilPapers data in support of their view’s ascendence. The data tells a different story.

I am being a bit too quick here. At least some antirealists are going to have more in common with realists in one respect: they may endorse irreducible normativity, but hold that the normative facts in question depend on our stances in some way. This may be true of some constructivists, for instance. Constructivists may hold that moral facts give us irreducibly normative reasons to perform actions even if those norms are dependent in some way on our stances. If so, they’d leap back over the fence to the non-naturalists side. This won’t hold for expressivists or error theorists. But let’s suppose all constructivists thought this way. In that case, we’d have to add up:

26.56+20.8 = 47.36% in favor of irreducible normativity

31.64+10.64+5.27 = 47.55% in favor of descriptivism

…that’s a marginal victory for the descriptivist, so we can just declare this a tie. Even under the worst of circumstances for descriptivists, they still at least tie (by technically coming out just slightly ahead). This still isn’t a win for proponents of irreducible normativity. They do not have some kind of majority view that would allow them to declare views to the contrary extreme or radical.

Of course, skepticism technically involves a denial of naturalist realism. But Huemer himself rejects naturalism. Naturalists make up only about a third of respondents to the 2020 PhilPapers survey, so there’s nothing especially extreme or radical about that. What we really have is a complicated tug of war between at least three camps: realists, naturalists, and antirealists, each of which could be further subdivided, and each of which represents a fairly artificial boundary. The boundary lines could be drawn elsewhere, and the proportion of proponents would shift considerably. Across all of these cases, skeptics at worst only end up being a significant majority position. Their views never diminish to some sort of bizarre fringe view that only a handful of crackpots favor.

Moral skepticism simply is not a radical or extreme view insofar as this is understood to be a view out of accord with what subject matter experts think. It is common among academic philosophers, including specialists in metaethics.

6.4 Is it radical or extreme to deny commonsense?

I also just don’t think there’s anything especially radical or extreme, in a more general sense, about suggesting that commonsense just is straightforwardly misguided about various matters of contention. I don’t share with Huemer and many analytic philosophers what strikes me as a radically conservative mindset: that we ought to preserve, to the best of our ability, our ordinary terms, practices, and language, when doing philosophy, and that much of our task is to vindicate our initial intuitions. I see this as a misguided approach to philosophy. So again, to the extent that my views, and those with “skeptical” views are “radical,” or “extreme,” we may be at best radical or extreme only relative to our deviation from some set of norms and presumptions that I don’t even accept.

To put this in a broader historical context: I view judgments of a view as “radical” or “extreme” as only being meaningful against the backdrop of where these views stand in relation to some orthodox view. Had Christianity dominated in Western philosophy, atheists would be seen as extreme. Had conspiracy theorists with tinfoil hats been in charge, denying alien abductions would be extreme. If moral antirealists dominated academic philosophy, moral realism might be seen as extreme. To a skeptic willing to reject orthodox views, that we are judged as extreme or radical by proponents of those views just isn’t something we have much need to worry about. Mainstream views are often wrong.

Analytic philosophers who endorse skeptical views may maintain such views despite conceding that they are radical or extreme. In doing so, they may agree with realists that they are paying a theoretical cost to do so, that they are biting a bullet. Skeptics have conceded such ground too readily for too long. Realists have consistently taken such concessions and done far more with them than is reasonable, leveraging the allegedly counterintuitive implications of antirealist views as a definitive or nearly definitive rationale for rejecting antirealism without further consideration.

Oh, antirealism commits one to the view that “it’s wrong to torture babies for fun” is not objectively true? Well, that’s obviously absurd! QED!

Skeptics often grant that their positions seem absurd. Skeptics who agree with realists that antirealism seems absurd have already been largely misled by the same linguistic and conceptual errors that mislead moral realists, and are likely buying into many of the same presuppositions and dogmas. But this is a problem for analytic skeptics. You can be a skeptic without buying into the assumptions of mainstream analytic philosophers.

7.0 Susceptibility to Bias

I’m still not clear on what Huemer means when he says skeptical views are “radical” or “extreme,” but I’ve argued that skeptics have a few responses to these charges. I doubt the charge of being radical or extreme is supposed to do that much work though. A more direct question concerns whether support for skeptical positions, and moral skepticism in particular, are self-defeating because their proponents arrive at skeptical conclusions via unreliable psychological processes.

Note that the preceding considerations are still relevant here. If it turns out that moral realism is an idiosyncratic view that few people hold, then it shouldn’t be included among claims like “rocks exist” or “time exists,” because moral realism wouldn’t be one of these mundane, commonsense views that most people hold. And if that’s the case, Huemer and other moral realists are far more vulnerable to cultural debunking arguments that flag their positions as the result of contingent cultural, educational, and other environmental influences that may be the result of causes that raise distinctive challenges about the epistemic justification for their views. However strong the case may be that the intuitions of moral realists are threatened by the origins of those intuitions, Huemer nevertheless believes one can level challenges to the reliability of the processes that give rise to such skepticism in the first place.

Nevertheless, the reliability of skeptical intuitions may be threatened if there are any distinctive ways in which such intuitions may be biased. To support this possibility, Huemer provides a list of considerations of reasons why a belief might be especially subject to bias:

1. Beliefs based on abstract reflection, rather than observation, scientific study, etc.

2. Beliefs stated in vague terms rather than precise terms.

3. Beliefs that rely on empirical speculation.

4. Beliefs that are ideologically significant.

5. Beliefs that require high-level judgment calls, e.g., weighing up complex bodies of evidence.

Huemer then says:

I assume it’s obvious why each of those types of belief would be relatively easily influenced by bias. Notice that moral skepticism, or the premises of the arguments for it, have all five of these traits.

I suppose the rough idea is that moral skepticism and the arguments for it turn on claims that are vulnerable to various biases, and this should increase the probability that such views are the result of unreliable cognitive processes.

That moral skepticism and the arguments for skepticism collectively fit into these five categories does not demonstrate that skeptics are especially biased or that their judgments are the result of unreliable cognitive processes. One would need to demonstrate that they are subject to each of these biases. Huemer doesn’t do so.

Let’s consider each of these in turn:

1. Beliefs based on abstract reflection, rather than observation, scientific study, etc.

This is a weird one. Consider the two original arguments Huemer attributes to skeptics:

a) Our moral intuitions are produced by something that is insensitive to moral truth, like natural selection, or the cultural traditions we happened to be born under.

b) There is so much disagreement among moral judgments that we have to conclude that humans can’t reliably judge morality.

Both of these positions are especially empirically oriented, in that both turn on scientific claims about human psychology. Huemer’s non-naturalist realism, on the other hand, is less grounded in scientific study. Between skeptics and ethical intuitionists, it is the latter whose positions are based more on abstract reflection.

2. Beliefs stated in vague terms rather than precise terms.

This is, ironically, incredibly vague. And it’s not clear this is any more applicable to skeptical positions than to non-naturalist realists. Many realists even regard the content of the position, irreducibly normative moral facts, as primitive, unanalyzable, or otherwise ineffable. The very position Huemer is arguing for is one that posits concepts that their meaning probably can’t be communicated in non-circular terms. That’s much more suspicious than being vague or imprecise.

3. Beliefs that rely on empirical speculation.

Sure, once one begins speculating there is vulnerability to bias. But is this any less of a threat than whatever processes are prompting non-empirical appeals to how things “seem”? Who knows, because we don’t even know what processes are causing Huemer and others to report having the intuitions they’re reporting. Yea, we have to speculate. But realists don’t even bother to do that, and are typically content with an incurious disinterest in what’s actually causing them to think the way they do. It’s once again unclear why empirical speculation renders a belief especially prone to bias, especially relative to competing accounts. So, sure, can bias get in through speculation? Absolutely. But it can also emerge to a much greater extent when one relies on non-empirical methods.

4. Beliefs that are ideologically significant.

I do not think moral antirealism is ideologically all that significant. However, I have noted an asymmetry here: to many moral realists, the falsehood of moral realism would be catastrophic. Many realists say things like “If moral realism wasn’t true, life would have no purpose or meaning,” or otherwise catastrophize about the allegedly horrific implications of moral antirealism. I, on the other hand, don’t think there are any negative consequences of antirealism at all. Moral realism serves much the same role as Christianity does: it has titanic existential import to its adherents, whereas us skeptics only differ in that we typically don’t put much ideological stock in our skepticism. Moral antirealism may be downstream of various ideological commitments, to e.g., empiricism, naturalism, physicalism, and so on, but this isn’t necessarily the case and I’d nevertheless maintain that of the two positions, moral realism is far more steeped in ideology and far more proximally so.

5. Beliefs that require high-level judgment calls, e.g., weighing up complex bodies of evidence.

This is a weird one. Are such judgments especially prone to bias? Relative to what, exactly? If it’s relative to a simple straightforward perceptual judgment, then sure. But what if it’s compared against, e.g., a philosophical intuition? Then it’s not at all clear.

Overall, these claims are difficult to evaluate. There’s a lack of clarity on what kinds of biases we’re talking about, how significant those biasing influences are, and what reference classes we’re comparing these various biasing factors to. This is all just so vague. It’s hard to even know what Huemer is trying to say here. If you have a better sense than I do, please do leave a comment and weigh in.

Huemer goes on to say:

Notice that moral skepticism, or the premises of the arguments for it, have all five of these traits.

Huemer’s comments suggest an odd narrowing of the rationale for being a skeptic. The arguments for skepticism all have these traits? Which arguments? The two sketches of arguments Huemer provides? Are these the only arguments? Even if these five biasing factors applied to those, would that mean they applied to all such arguments? How broadly are the two arguments Huemer offered conceived? Do my reasons for doubting moral realism fall within one or both of those categories? I don’t know, and I don’t think it’d be easy to know because everything about this is so vague.

Given the vagueness of Huemer’s claims, I don’t even think it’s possible to meaningfully evaluate whether the claim that skepticism is vulnerable to all five of these biasing factors is even true.

Is my skepticism rooted in abstract reflection rather than observation, scientific study, and so on? No, not really. My own work centers on the psychology of metaethics and much of my skepticism is rooted in scientific study, including my own studies. Hell, I’m a psychologist that studies the psychology of metaethics!

Are my beliefs stated in vague rather than precise terms? Not especially, no.

Do my beliefs rely on empirical speculation? Yea, I suppose so, but how is that especially subject to bias? As opposed to what, exactly? Huemer gives an example of what this third type of bias is supposed to involve:

(Examples of 3: the claim that moral beliefs are adaptations; specific evolutionary explanations for specific moral beliefs.)

I’m not a moral nativist, so these examples don’t apply to me. Are my beliefs ideologically significant? I don’t know, because I don’t know what Huemer means by that. But if I had to guess, I’d say: no, not particularly. Do my beliefs require high-level judgment calls that involve weighing up complex bodies of evidence? Sure. But how is this supposed to be a biasing factor? Relative to what alternative way of forming beliefs? This is just too vague to evaluate. Huemer’s remarks in this section are, like much of this post, rather obscure, which has made them difficult to evaluate. My overall impression is that there’s barely an argument in all of this, and more like a gestures at one.

8.0 Sources of skeptical bias

In this section Huemer speculates on why philosophers may have a “skeptical bias.” We’re given a list of potential sources of skeptical bias. Here’s the first:

Some people have an abnormal fear of being duped, which they express by taking extreme skeptical philosophical stances.

Sure, people may have an abnormal fear of being duped, which may prompt them to adopt “extreme skeptical philosophical stances.” But some people have an abnormal regard for preserving the status quo or not abandoning comfortable and familiar beliefs. Moral realism is an excellent candidate for this. Sure, some of us get our kicks out of being rebels, of taking the red pill, of leaving the Matrix. But most people are just incurious conformists who want to fit in and accept things as they are. One might suppose that Huemer’s brand of philosophy exemplifies the latter: a “radically” conservative approach to philosophy where one begins with a set of claims about how things “seem,” then work backwards to vindicate one’s initial presumptions. This is likely a far more attractive disposition than that of the skeptic. Of course, is any of this speculation true? Who knows. These are open empirical questions, and merely tossing out a hypothesis is hardly the kind of work one would need to do to make a case for a particular position. Simply suggesting people who hold some view may have some bias or other achieves little if everyone who holds any position is biased in some way.

But how much of a factor is this for skeptics generally or in any particular case? Who knows. And how much does it undermine the reliability of a philosopher’s judgments? Again, who knows. Conversely, there are very strong biases towards social conformity and accepting the status quo. Which is a more powerful force, on average? A desire to conform to majority/consensus views, to endorse views you grew up with or were enculturated to endorse, to adopt views that maintain one’s reputation and make one look like less of a fool around others, etc.?

I’d bet a large sum of money that the latter contributes far more to the unreliability of our judgments than the former. Concerns about being duped may, if anything, reflect a healthy correction on existing biases that work in the opposite direction. It’s possible skeptical philosophers overcorrect, but the general philosophical disposition of the philosopher is probably more intellectually conservative than transgressive.

Some people get a sense of superiority and cleverness, or a pleasurable feeling of rebelliousness, from “debunking” the beliefs of others.

That’s true, but this cuts in every direction. Realists and non-skeptics, too, may enjoy a sense of superiority and cleverness from debunking skeptics. Given the glee with which philosophers like to dunk on views they deem stupid and wrong, I don’t see any good reason to think this is more common among skeptics than non-skeptics.

In the case of moral realism, we have another way in which realists may enjoy a sense of superiority: by depicting themselves as having the moral high ground, and characterizing antirealists as evil, confused, delusional, and so on. In my experience, realists are far more likely to come off as smug, condescending, cocksure, overconfident, dogmatic, and generally unpleasant towards antirealists. A routine part of the arsenal of moral realists is to engage in normative entanglement, giving the misleading impression that antirealism is a doorway to evil. It’s extremely common to see people float the possibility that antirealists are psychopaths, or liars, or confused, and the grandstanding and posturing realists employ, and the way they dunk on agent relativism as if that were some sort of objection to antirealism as a whole, is remarkably common.

Note that what Huemer is doing is emphasizing all the possible ways moral skeptics (or skeptics in general) may be biased towards skeptical views. But he doesn’t weigh these considerations against the countervailing disincentives to adopt skeptical positions. One of these is distinctive to moral skeptics: we have to constantly work around the insinuations that we’re evil, psychopathic monsters that are okay with baby torture. This comes at a substantial rhetorical cost. If we’re counting up biases for a view, why not count up ways in which we would be biased against it, too? And how do these weigh in the balance against one another? Who knows. The kind of crude analysis Huemer offers does nothing to quantify or weigh competing motivations.

Skeptical stances make intellectual life simple and easy. It’s a lot easier to just reject or pretend to doubt X than it is to figure out the actual nature of X. Arguing with others is easier too; just reject every premise that the other person puts forward, or claim to not see why it’s plausible.

This is where Huemer’s objections start to really go off the rails. Skepticism does not make intellectual life simple and easy.

First, we have to deal with non-skeptics, who constantly hassle us and give us a hard time about our views, routinely caricaturing us and depicting us as delusional, dishonest, or stupid. Huemer’s post is quite literally an instance of this kind of frustrating treatment. Here, rather than dealing with our views directly, we’re treated to a post about why there’s no need, coupled with armchair psychologizing about what’s wrong with us. This isn’t the kind of engagement I want from opposing viewpoints: speculation on what’s wrong with me, rather than substantive engagement with my views.

Second, skeptics rarely just express some skeptical stance, and then go about their business. Rather, we routinely go out of our way to develop substantive philosophical views. Yet we do so without the benefit of helping ourselves to the large repository of shared terms, resources, and assumptions that non-skeptics have. Far from saying “knowledge doesn’t exist” then going about our day, we have to battle on two fronts: one is the battle against mainstream dogma and a field where certain presumptions are so entrenched in the thinking, methods, and jargon of the field that we have to constantly strive to extricate what we take to be flawed ways of thinking, framing, and approaching issues. This is a bit like an atheist having to study the nature of the cosmos a thousand years ago, where Christianity was dominant. They have to keep their head down, try to overcome entrenched pro-Christian biases, and to think, write, and communicate within an environment utterly hostile to their entire way of thinking. Then, in addition to this, we have to devise our philosophies, often from the ground up, all the while battling off a relentless fusillade of mischaracterizations, caricatures, mockery, and ridicule.

Much of my skepticism is rooted in empiricism and more specifically in pragmatism. While pragmatism isn’t exactly the go-to example of a source of skepticism, it does represent an approach to philosophy largely at odds with Huemer’s approach, and that threatens to dissolve many metaphysical as a confused waste of time. In that regard, it is often likened to logical positivism. More generally, empiricist positions are going to motivate skepticism towards much of the metaphysical excesses of views precisely like those of Huemer. Caricatures of such views are abundant. The way philosophers handled positivism is an embarrassment. But pragmatism has also been on the receiving end of this profoundly uncharitable treatment. William James and Schiller had to deal with a tsunami of smug caricatures and denunciations, all the while trying to build a distinct approach to philosophy from the ground up.

The notion that skeptics have it easy is simply not true. Sure, a skeptic could just be lazy and dismiss commonsense views out of some motivation for things to be simple and easy. I have never met a skeptic like this, though. Also, let’s put this in perspective. The skeptic is supposed to take a radical or extreme position at odds with convention and commonsense. How is it easier to do this than to accept the status quo? What could possibly be easier than the steps Huemer and other philosophers employ?

Step 1: How do things seem? Well, that’s how they are.

Step 2: Defend how things initially seem to you at virtually any cost.

The approach Huemer and others take functions, in practice, like picking your conclusions first, then reasoning backwards to vindicate those conclusions. The skeptic, on the other hand, insofar as things seem to them the same way they seem to the non-skeptic, has to work to overcome and see past initial appearances. How is that simple and easy? Is it easy to be an illusionist? No, not really. It requires far more work to reject qualia than to accept them in the contemporary philosophical landscape.

The notion that adopting counterintuitive views is especially simple and easy, relative to views which accept things as they appear to be is very strange, an almost inversion of how I think it is. And that’s not even getting into the fact that I (a) don’t think the views Huemer thinks are commonsense actually are commonsense and (b) I don’t find the views Huemer finds to be intuitive to be intuitive, not to mention that (c) I don’t even think the kinds of intuitions Huemer seems to believe in are a real type of psychological process. And how, as a moral skeptic, did I arrive at these views? Well, let’s see: I take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of metaethics that draws on philosophy and psychology. This involved getting a bachelor’s degree in both fields, an MA in philosophy, and a PhD in psychology. I spent more than half my life so far in college studying these topics, and studying to a lesser extent evolutionary theory, and findings from a host of other social scientific fields to supplement my knowledge of morality. I teach, publish, conduct empirical research, and write about morality regularly. My views draw on the synthesis of, just to name a few examples, Sperber and Mercier’s argumentative theory of reasoning, a host of findings in evolutionary, social, and cognitive psychology, work on the evolution and nature of language, broad theoretical work on the evolution of human cognition and of morality in particular from e.g., Stich, Machery, Mallon, Sterelny, and others, along with studying the psychology of metaethics and metaethics itself. My skepticism developed out of an interdisciplinary synthesis of multiple fields of study. It wasn’t easy. Skeptics aren’t just lazy naysayers that react to positions like Huemer’s by saying “nuh uh!” We build substantive theories, accounts, and views of our own. Those views simply involve rejecting the metaphysical excesses of views like Huemer’s. What they do not involve is just doing this, and not producing substantive accounts of our own. So when Huemer says:

It’s a lot easier to just reject or pretend to doubt X than it is to figure out the actual nature of X.

If the view in question is one that is widely accepted and deeply entrenched in how people think, rejecting the view in question can be incredibly difficult. Does Huemer think it was easy to reject belief in God for atheists and agnostics in the Christian and Muslim world? Far from it: it is one of the most challenging things one could do. Skepticism often requires a dangerous leap into the unknown. It can result in disorientation, fear, depression, and a sense of alienation. You can lose friends, and even lose your life. Whether skepticism is easier or not is going to depend on the intellectual, social, and broader cultural atmosphere in which you find yourself.

It is often harder to reject “X” than to “figure out the actual nature of X.” Among other things, when we reject X, this is frequently accompanied by figuring out what actually is going on instead of X, including why people mistakenly think X is going on. In other words, Huemer depicts the non-skeptic as recognizing there is some phenomenon, X, then nobly attempting to understand its nature. The skeptic, on the other hand, is just lazy or possibly dishonest and just denies there is X in the first place, and that’s that. But this is rarely what skeptics do. Skeptics routinely say “X isn’t real, but now I have two tasks. To explain why other philosophers mistakenly think X is real, and to explain what’s really going on, Y.” The skeptic often takes on multiple tasks, not just one. Also, note that if there is no X, you can’t figure out the nature of it. Huemer is simply helping himself to the presumption that the thing skeptics are skeptical of is real.

For example, consider skeptics of paranormal activity. Is it easy to explain why people have religious experiences, but are mistaken about them? Or why so many people believe in ghosts, when there are no such things? Not at all. Skepticism about widely held beliefs is often incredibly challenging. The skeptic doesn’t simply reject that a thing is true, then leave it at that. They task themselves with offering an explanation of why people are so convinced something is true when it isn’t. This can be far more challenging than justifying the original view itself. First, if you are strongly inclined to hold that view, you must overcome that inclination. Being a post-Christian is not always easy. People struggle with existential shock, loss of family, friends, colleagues, and community. They may experience guilt or shame, or even face ostracism. Adopting a skeptical position in philosophy can be lonely, alienating, frustrating, confusing, and lead people to write blog articles suggesting that you’re lazy and dishonest. Second, even if you overcome your inclinations, or didn’t have them in the first place, you must still offer an account of why others find them so compelling. This is very challenging. Ironically, this requires psychologizing non-skeptics, much like what Huemer is doing here with respect to skeptics.

Of course, I’m moving back and forth between the skeptics Huemer is targeting and my own, personal views, which differ from the skeptical targets Huemer has in mind. Maybe those skeptics are a bunch of complete idiots with indefensible views, but Huemer isn’t exactly precise in who or what he’s objecting to, and while there may be some concerns with some skeptics out there, one would hope that he’d take on the strongest or most defensible instances of a given perspective, and not pick on its least defensible incarnations.

What I find far more objectionable is this part:

It’s a lot easier to just reject or pretend to doubt X than it is to figure out the actual nature of X.

Huemer sneaks in a quick jab by floating the possibility that skeptics are dishonest liars who are just pretending to doubt things. This is a disappointing remark to hear from an otherwise serious philosopher. Ironically, while Huemer suggests skepticism is easy and floats the suggestion that maybe we’re just pretending, there is a pretty easy way to dismiss people with contrary views: accuse them of being dishonest liars who don’t even believe what they say. Next, we have this remark:

The profession (academic philosophy) rewards people who give clever defenses of “interesting” positions — which often means surprising and radical positions. Skepticism is perhaps the easiest such position to think of.

This is true. I think Huemer is correct that there are rewards for a philosophical hot take and that (at least what is perceived) as a skeptical position is a paradigmatic example of this.

Huemer moves on to specific causes of moral skepticism:

Many people think that it’s bad to be “judgmental”. The ultimate in not being judgmental is being a skeptic.

Maybe this would apply to random people who claim to be moral relativists outside of academic philosophy, but I don’t know of any actual antirealist philosophers who are reticent about judging others. This certainly doesn’t apply to me, and I don’t know of any moral skeptics that it does apply to.

Many people have succumbed to the ideology of scientism. Since ethics doesn’t sound like “science” (i.e., natural science), the science-worshippers have to reject it.

Again, who is Huemer criticizing here? Academic skeptics or random undergraduates who haven’t studied philosophy? I don’t know any serious skeptics who reject moral realism because they’re afraid of ethics because it doesn’t sound like science. If I were to base my armchair psychology on the kinds of moral realists I encounter in the wild, then I’d have a field day describing all the ridiculous, ignorant, dogmatic, obnoxious, and hostile things they say. Should I transpose my conclusions about all of those encounters over to my assumptions about Huemer or other academic moral realists? No, of course not. Because I can distinguish between random YouTube commenters and professional philosophers. It sounds like Huemer is not drawing a clear distinction between “street skeptics” and actual academic skeptics.

Morality is often inconvenient for us.

This sounds for all the world like a Christian saying that people are atheists because they want to sin. I don’t know of any skeptics who endorse moral skepticism so they can go around stealing and lying and killing indiscriminately, nor is there any good evidence moral skeptics are motivated to endorse moral skepticism because morality is “inconvenient.” Moral skepticism is about rejecting metaphysical and conceptual claims made by philosophers. It has nothing at all to do with one’s personal conduct or commitment to being a good person.

9.0 Explaining the causes of skepticism

Next, Huemer considers two possibilities:

Ok, philosophers are way more skeptical than researchers in any other field. There are two salient explanations: (a) Maybe it stems from philosophers’ intellectual virtues; e.g., perhaps we are more rational, open-minded, and intelligent than other researchers, and maybe these things lead to skepticism because skepticism is correct. (b) Maybe it is a bias, as I’ve been suggesting.

Huemer goes on to say:

Theory (b) is obviously more plausible than (a), for at least 3 reasons.

Obvious to who? Huemer continues the common pattern that philosophers partake in of saying things are obvious or intuitive without specifying who things are obvious or intuitive to. We need a name for this. If you have suggestions leave one in a comment. As for myself, I don’t find (b) more obvious than (a), but I also don’t think either of these are true. First, note that skeptics are in the minority among philosophers. If skepticism is correct, and it is due to being virtuous, rational, and open-minded, it is we skeptics who exhibit these intellectual virtues, not the non-skeptics like Huemer. So I wouldn’t say it’s philosophers who are intellectually virtuous, but skeptics in particular. For what it’s worth, I don’t find it especially intellectually virtuous to accuse those with contrary views of pretending to hold their views. At any rate, I suspect the causes of skepticism are more complicated than this, but I will say this: I do, in fact, think that I am more rational and open-minded than Huemer and other non-skeptics. Why wouldn’t I? I think I’m correct! Even so, let’s consider why Huemer thinks (b) is more plausible:

Again, philosophers develop and take seriously radical skeptic theories about virtually everything they look at. If we did it for just one thing (say, morality), it might be plausible to say that that one thing isn’t real or isn’t knowable. But the prior probability that multiple different things that everyone else thinks we obviously know about are all unreal — morality, time, consciousness, free will, numbers, matter, meaning, truth, beauty, causation, epistemic reasons, theoretical entities in science — is near zero. All of those are things that philosophers have rejected, and been taken seriously by other philosophers. The prior that skepticism is a reasonable position for multiple of those things is much lower than the prior that philosophers have a general bias toward skepticism.

First, there is already a contentious claim here:

But the prior probability that multiple different things that everyone else thinks we obviously know about are all unreal […]

I don’t grant that skeptics typically are denying “things that everyone else thinks we obviously know.” Let’s go through the list:

Morality

• Not obvious to everyone. I deny most people are moral realists or find moral realism obvious. Moral antirealists also don’t have to think morality is “unreal,” they just deny that there are stance-independent moral facts. Unfortunately Huemer is not clear on what he takes skeptics to deny here or for any other of the examples he gives.

• I’m a moral skeptic and I think this position is correct. I’d even say it’s obvious to me that it’s correct.

Time

• Not obvious to everyone. I deny most people have any substantive philosophical views about what time is. Whatever it is the skeptic is denying, it’s probably the metaphysical excesses of philosophers, and not the pragmatic features of everyday temporal discourse like “It’s going to rain tomorrow.” Skeptics don’t typically deny that time “exists” in the latter sense.

• If skeptics are supposed to reject A-theory or something, then I think they’re probably correct to do so and in that respect I’d be a “time skeptic.”

Consciousness

• Not obvious to everyone. I deny most people are implicitly committed to qualia/phenomenal states. I endorse Mandik’s meta-illusionism and I think the notion that we have qualia is something invented by and is largely distinctive philosophers and people influenced by them. There is also growing empirical research on this and so far most of it hasn’t found much evidence to suggest nonphilosophers think about consciousness the way philosophers do.

• Skeptics of “consciousness” are usually skeptics of qualia/phenomenal consciousness in particular. Since I endorse qualia quietism, I am a skeptic of phenomenal consciousness.

Free will

• Not obvious to everyone. There’s little evidence of a coherent, shared concept of free will among nonphilosophers. Some cultures appear not to have a concept of free will. The notion of “free will” is likely a weird cultural invention and not some phenomenon people have any sort of immediate access to phenomenologically or otherwise.

• I’m a free will quietist, which effectively makes me a free will skeptic.

Numbers

• Not obvious to everyone. Most people have no specific philosophical position on the nature of numbers. Skeptics about “numbers” are almost certainly not denying that numbers exist in many conventional senses. They’re probably just denying something like mathematical Platonism or something similar. Again, skeptics typically deny the metaphysical excesses of philosophers. But I don’t think most people find it obvious that numbers exist in the way e.g., platonists think they do.

• I reject mathematical platonism or any other account according to which numbers are “real” in some metaphysically robust sense. That makes me a math skeptic.

Matter

• Not obvious to everyone. Most people have no clue what’s at stake philosophically when philosophers talk about materialism/physicalism and wouldn’t be in a position to take a stance on it one way or another. I don’t even think philosophers can clearly articulate what physicalism is committed to. As such, once again, the skeptic is typically going to be denying some specific metaphysical position, not some everyday, commonsense notion.

• Maybe some people think “matter exists” in a way skeptics frequently deny. But once again, I think the skeptics are probably correct. Fundamental physics depicts a world radically unlike folk physics. Folk physics is, in fact, quite mistaken.

• I reject physicalism/materialism so I’m also a skeptic about matter.

Meaning

• Not obvious to everyone. It’s unclear what this means. Does Huemer mean “meaning” in some stance-independent respect? If so, then I don’t think most people have a position on the matter and in any case don’t think most people are “meaning realists.”

• I’m a skeptic about realist conceptions of meaning, too.

Truth

• Not obvious to everyone. This is a tough one. If Huemer means correspondence conceptions of truth, then I deny most people endorse correspondence theory. There isn’t much empirical evidence that they do, for what it’s worth.

• I deny correspondence theory and endorse a pragmatic view of truth. This makes me a skeptic of conventional mainstream analytic conceptions of truth.

Beauty

• Not obvious to everyone. It’s unclear what it means to deny beauty is real. Once again, is this a denial of aesthetic realism, or a denial of “beauty” in any respect at all? The latter would be weird and I don’t know of any skeptic that would hold such a view, so if this is referring to something like aesthetic realism, then I don’t think most people are aesthetic realists.

• If we’re talking about aesthetic realism then I’m definitely an aesthetic skeptic.

Causation

• Not obvious to everyone. I don’t know of any studies on how nonphilosophers think about causation but I doubt they have any coherent position that accords with what analytic philosophers think.

• I’d probably be some kind of pragmatist or quietist about causation. I don’t know if that makes me a skeptic or not. But since I’d almost certainly reject almost every analytic account on offer, I’ll go with yes, skeptic.

Epistemic reasons

• Not obvious to everyone. I don’t think there’s any evidence that nonphilosophers have a concept of “epistemic reasons,” and if they did I doubt they’d be realists about it.

• I’m definitely a skeptic about “epistemic reasons.” Probably a quietist.

Theoretical entities in science

• Not obvious to everyone, but probably quite a lot of people. This might be the one closest to capturing how I’d expect most nonphilosophers to think. Even so, we still don’t know what proportion of people actually think the contents of “theoretical entities in science” are real. Scientific thinking has to be learned and is acquired through enculturation. Even if this is a common view now, it’s probably not universal and it wouldn’t apply to how people thought in the past.

• I’m a pragmatist and something approximating a scientific antirealist, so definitely a skeptic.

I am a skeptic of literally everything on Huemer’s list. However, I go further than this. I am a metaskeptic (not to be confused with Huemer’s use of the term in the article I am responding to). Not only do I deny all of the phenomena in question, I also deny that “everyone else thinks we obviously know about” these phenomena.

Why? Well, first of all, Huemer is being sloppy. Everyone? Does he mean that literally? I sure hope not. But if that’s a bit of hyperbole, and he means something like “most people,” well, what exactly is it that most people know is “real”? In almost all of these cases, the skeptic is skeptical of some specific conception of the phenomenon in question, or some cluster of conceptions. I’ve already given many examples, but again, the skeptic about math doesn’t deny that people in their everyday lives pay bills and count and add things up. They don’t deny all the pragmatic roles that math discourse plays in everyday life. Instead, they think that, insofar as this discourse is taken to involve metaphysical claims, that those metaphysical claims are false. In doing so, math discourse doesn’t become useless or unintelligible. The typical skeptic is an analytic skeptic, someone who, like the analytic non-skeptic, is concerned with distilling semantics out of ordinary language and focusing on the pure semantics of our claims, stripping away all the pragmatics. And then their concern is with the truth or falsehood of the semantic content of those claims. The analytic skeptic goes about this task employing the same methods and presuppositions as the analytic non-skeptic. They already buy into so much of what the non-skeptic thinks that they are more or less playing the same game, or a very similar one.

But what if skeptics are correct that the phenomena they are skeptical about don’t exist, but mistaken to buy into the methods and presuppositions of their analytic colleagues? What if there is a deeper problem here? Think about how both the analytic non-skeptic and analytic skeptic proceed:

• Step 1: Take some snippet of ordinary language, e.g., “rocks exist,” “that is beautiful,” “lying is wrong,” and so on.

• Step 2: Provide a semantic analysis of the meaning of these claims cashed out as a proposition to which one assigns a truth value (TRUE or FALSE).

• Step 3: Argue that the propositions in one’s semantic analysis are TRUE or FALSE.

The skeptic reaches their conclusions in Step 3 by going through Step 1 and 2. The buy into the methods and presuppositions of other analytic philosophers. They play their game by their rules. And this is why skeptics flounder so much and why their positions appear radical and extreme. It sure would appear radical or extreme to agree that while everyone thinks there are trees and rocks and tables and values, that they’re just totally wrong about everything, and actually none of that is real. Only, two things.

First, the skeptic is only denying these things are real in a very peculiar sense: a sense which partitions off many (and in some cases, all) of the practical consequences of skepticism. To deny that “morality is real” isn’t to stop caring about murder and mayhem, but to deny some abstruse metaphysical thesis, then go about one’s day. To deny that matter is real isn’t to stumble into walls, fall off cliffs, and be unable to navigate the world. It is to deny that our presumptions about the nature of our experiences are correct, while going about our business talking and walking and doing things in a fashion that is almost entirely unchanged, if it changes at all.

Second, the skeptic’s position at best appears radical because they accept the framing of the non-skeptic: that the things they deny appear obvious, or are commonsensical, or are part of everyday thought, discourse, and practice. This is the skeptic’s great sin. They simply are not skeptical enough. And, almost paradoxically, with greater skepticism comes a less radical position. The skepticism I advocate, metaskepticism, doesn’t attribute catastrophic error to ordinary thought and practice. It attributes that error to a common source: philosophers themselves.

I’ll have much more to say about this, but suppose, for the moment, that I am correct, and that the common cause of so many errors is not everyday thought, but philosophers themselves. Suppose these philosophers just mistake their own thinking for everyday thinking, and suppose their own thinking is the result of bad methods. This leaves us with a fairly common principle: garbage in, garbage out. Given this, let us return to Huemer’s claim:

But the prior probability that multiple different things that everyone else thinks we obviously know about are all unreal — morality, time, consciousness, free will, numbers, matter, meaning, truth, beauty, causation, epistemic reasons, theoretical entities in science — is near zero.

This claim relies on the presumption that the positions Huemer takes are, in fact, positions that “everyone else thinks we obviously know about.” But the metaskeptic rejects this.

Suppose the skeptic didn’t. Suppose, instead, that we are dealing with standard analytic skepticism. If this were the case, then what we’d be supposing is that “everyone” (most people?) is radically mistaken about a great many things. If we think it’s highly improbable that all or most people are radically mistaken about many things, then perhaps Huemer would have a decent point. Perhaps it really is implausible that nonphilosophers are wrong about so much.

However, I simply don’t find this so improbable. I don’t have some kind of high prior on everyone generally being correct. It’s one thing for people to be incorrect about all the pragmatic aspects of their experience. It’s quite another for people to be wrong about the philosophical positions they take on their experience. I do find it incredibly improbable that people would consistently be wrong about the former. But I see no good reason to think people wouldn’t be massively prone to error with respect to the latter.

But even if I did think nonphilosophers were highly prone to error, I completely deny Huemer’s presumption that the claims the skeptic denies are in fact things “everyone else thinks we obviously know.” I simply deny that everyone thinks that there are stance-independent moral facts or finds various claims “obvious” that would suggest they are committed to realism, or in general that what philosophers think people think when they speak of morality or beauty or time or whatever is real because I think philosophers are wrong about what people think. Yet Huemer seems to insist that there is something very improbable about all of these positions being wrong. He says:

The prior that skepticism is a reasonable position for multiple of those things is much lower than the prior that philosophers have a general bias toward skepticism.

What is Huemer even talking about. The prior? As if there is a single, correct prior to take towards claims? I don’t think priors, or Bayesian probability, works this way. I take priors to be descriptive facts about the psychological status of individuals, an indicator of the level of confidence they feel towards propositions. I simply deny, outright, that there is any nonrelative fact of the matter about what the correct prior on a broad skepticism even is, or that there is any correct prior to take on any issue. Huemer is welcome to say the prior that skepticism towards many of these things is lower than the prior that philosophers have a general bias towards skepticism. If we’re in the business of making assertions, I can do the same:

No it isn’t. There is no such thing as “the prior.” There is only my prior and your prior and anyone else’s prior. And my prior is that skepticism towards literally everything Huemer mentions in this post is not very low at all. In fact, I see no reason not to be blunt about this: I think Huemer’s remarks about priors are ludicrous. I find the whole idea of someone declaring that “the” prior for a claim is high or low to be absurd. Neither I nor anyone else is under an obligation to grant Huemer’s assumptions about the nature of probability. And if Huemer isn’t referring to some objective notion of a correct prior, then he’s speaking unclearly, and it isn’t my fault that he’s opted to frame things this way.

There is, in addition, a final reason to reject Huemer’s claims about the prior being low that you should consider even if you don’t share all my skeptical views. Huemer’s claim that there is a low prior lacks much in the way of elaboration or argumentative support, but it seems to implicitly draw on something like the following reasoning.

Suppose everyone finds it obvious that we know a set of claims are true: {A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, …}. If we suppose that people are usually correct about what they believe, then perhaps it wouldn’t be so surprising if we were correct about all of these claims. Nevertheless, if someone suggested that we were mistaken about {A}, but not about anything else, we might consider this possible, if unlikely. But if they added to this list, proposing that we were incorrect about {A, B, C…} and so on, the more they added to this list, the more improbable their skepticism would become.

This sort of thinking seems to be lurking in the background of Huemer’s declaration that there’s a “near zero” chance that skeptics could be correct about so much. But this thinking is flawed. It relies on the assumption that each of these judgments is sufficiently independent of one another that the cumulative probability that all of these claims is mistaken is much lower than the probability that only one of them is mistaken. To illustrate the reasoning behind this assumption, consider the following.

Suppose we take ten temperature readings from ten different thermometers, each of which was produced in a different manufacturing facility. All ten give the same temperature reading. Is this good evidence that we have an accurate measure of the temperature? Yes. And if one of them gives a different reading than the other nine, we’d probably conclude that this one had a defect and reject this reading.

Now suppose we take ten temperature readings from ten thermometers all produced in the same manufacturing facility. All ten give the same temperature reading. This is much worse evidence that we know what the temperature is. Why? Because if there is a manufacturing defect that causes the thermometer to give an inaccurate reading of the temperature, it may impact all ten thermometers, not just one.

What does this illustrate? It illustrates that it is the independence of the source of evidence for different claims that gives rise to the cumulative improbability of so many of those claims being false. If the evidence comes from the same source, then it could be that the mistake is more fundamental, and infects any claim based on that common source.

If you have a faulty algorithm, it will give you the wrong answer over and over. If you have a poisoned well, all of the water coming from that well will be poisoned. If you employ bad methods, all or most of your answers will tend to be mistaken for the same reason.

Consider astrology. Is it unreasonable to claim that most of the predictions of most astrologers will tend to be mistaken? No, because they’re all using the same bad methods.

Huemer’s presumption that it’d be very unlikely for people to be mistaken about so many things seems to rely on the presumption of independence (this does not require total independence, just enough that there is significant nonoverlap in what’s causing the judgments to be made).

Yet think about how Huemer and other philosophers go about drawing conclusions about how nonphilosophers think about morality, time, beauty, and so on: every single one of their judgments relies on armchair theorizing about what nonphilosophers think that draws on the same methods and tools: those of analytic philosophy, and on the peculiar notion that one can appeal to one’s own intuitions and judgments to draw conclusions about how ordinary people speak, think, and act.

In other words, what we don’t have is a body of independent, mutually corroborating empirical evidence that nonphilosophers think that beauty is {B}, time is {T}, morality is {M}, and so on. If we did, then the skeptic really would be denying what everyone believes about B, T, M, and so on. And perhaps that really would be very implausible.

But this isn’t what’s happening. Instead, Huemer and others rely on a shared set of methods for drawing inferences about what they think nonphilosophers think. People go around saying things about beauty, time, and morality, and Huemer and others use the same set of methods to conclude that people mean {B} and {T} and {M}. But if those methods are flawed, then their conclusions all share a common source. And what’s “the prior” that the methods Huemer and other employ, i.e., mainstream analytic armchair methods, are flawed? Well, I don’t think there is a “the prior,” but my prior is pretty damn high, and my current position is that Huemer and others are more likely than not employing deeply flawed methods. More importantly, what this illustrates is that it isn’t the case that philosophers independently arrive at a host of conclusions about what’s true. If those methods are flawed, then philosophers may be systematically wrong about what’s true. Since these methods also include the tools they use to make inferences about how nonphilosophers think, then this illustrates that the set of beliefs philosophers attribute to people share a common source. Let’s call that source Mainstream Analytic Methods, or MAM.

Analytic skeptics think something like this:

MAM is true. The output of MAM is that nonphilosophers think things like {B, T, M}. But they are wrong. {B}, {T}, and {M} are not real.

But the metaskeptic thinks something like this:

MAM is false. Its outputs are all flawed and misguided. Some might be true by accident, but there is a common cause to the mistaken claims that people believe {B, T, M}.

The metaskeptic’s position is arguably more radical in one respect, namely, in the sense that it holds that mainstream analytic philosophers are subject to massive error. But it is less radical in the sense that if the metaskeptic is correct, this enables them to not attribute sweeping, radical error to everyone else. Most importantly, it attributes the error to a common cause, undermining the presumptive independence of the many positions one might be a skeptic about, thereby undercutting the primary rationale for why the prior that people would be wrong about so many things is near zero. In short: garbage in, garbage out.

Next, Huemer says:

Philosophers have taken up forms of skepticism that would impugn the work of all other researchers in all other fields. E.g., inductive skepticism would impugn all work in all the sciences. Therefore, either the skeptical philosophers are being overly skeptical, or everyone else in every other field is insufficiently skeptical. The former is obviously more likely.

This isn’t a good criticism of broad skepticism. It would at best only work against specific forms of skepticism. Maybe skeptics are wrong in these cases and not others. That doesn’t mean skepticism about all the other things skeptics are skeptical of is implausible. All it would mean is that if you’re skeptical in a specific way about a specific philosophical presupposition characteristic of some other field, that insofar as people in that field rely on that assumption that they are mistaken. Does this apply to moral skepticism? No. And what about the other kinds of skepticism on Huemer’s lists? It’s not clear it applies to many (if any) of them.

Furthermore, it’s an open question whether and to what extent those working in other fields actually do rely on the assumptions in question, and if so, in how they rely on them. Do scientists use induction? Sure. Does skepticism about induction impugn their work? No, I don’t think it does. After all, how, exactly, is it supposed to impugn it? The only way I can see this working is if we append further assumptions to our notion of induction. How is scientific practice supposed to be impugned? Are we going to say:

Aha! Since we’re skeptics about induction, then you scientists aren’t justified in drawing the inferences you do!

Well, do scientists require philosophical notions of justification to do their work? Do they use them? I think the answers are “No,” and “Probably not.” They’re only “impugned” in the stale and practically irrelevant sense that scientific practice would fail to live up to the epistemic ideals of philosophers. Scientists can happily continue doing their scientific work, including using induction, while not giving the faintest of damns about Hume or problems of induction. Maybe induction isn’t “justified” in some non-pragmatic sense. Well okay, but it’s still worked so far. Scientists have a very easy out for all of this: they could simply be pragmatists, and almost all of the philosophical worries that haunt analytic philosophers would dissolve. And that is in fact exactly what I recommend. I also suspect some inchoate form of pragmatism offers a more descriptively accurate account of how scientists actually proceed. I think they do just fine more or less completely ignoring much of mainstream analytic philosophy’s approach to truth. In short, skepticism about scientific practices need only impugn certain analytic presuppositions about the justification of the practices of scientists; it does not require denying science’s success.

Next, Huemer says:

Skeptics are always telling us that disagreement about X supports skepticism about X. But there is huge disagreement among philosophers about the merits of skeptical theses and argument. This shows that the belief-forming methods that philosophers are using are unreliable.

Well, skeptics are wrong to do this. Disagreement is not a good reason to support skepticism. Skeptics, myself included, can and should simply abandon this argument. Problem solved!

10.0 Why not just argue?

In the next section, Huemer says:

You might wonder: Why not just directly evaluate the arguments given by moral skeptics? Once we do that, there will be no need to speculate about the psychological infirmities of their authors.

This is a good question. Let’s see how Huemer addresses it.

The answer is that if there is a pro-skeptical bias among philosophers, then the people evaluating the skeptical arguments are likely to share that bias, and thus our direct evaluation of the skeptical arguments will be unreliable. We need to look at the second-order evidence, which suggests the unreliability of the belief-forming mechanisms leading to skepticism.

This is a very strange response. First, Huemer seems to be operating under the bizarre assumption that if there is a “pro-skeptical bias” among philosophers, that this bias affects everyone. Why should we think that’s the case? There are individual variations among people. It’s possible some people have a pro-skeptical bias, some have an anti-skeptical bias, and some have no particular bias in either direction. It’s even possible people have biases in both directions, or that they have pro-skeptical biases towards some issues, anti-skeptical biases towards others, and no particular bias in other cases. Huemer seems to be treating bias as some kind of all-or-nothing phenomenon. I see absolutely no reason to presume that this is how bias would impact philosophers.

Second, this would be a weak response even if all philosophers suffered from a pro-skeptical bias, including those evaluating skeptical arguments. Biases can make our judgments less accurate, but they don’t make us incapable of accurate judgment. By analogy, consider an archer firing an arrow at a target. A bias is like the wind: it can blow the arrow off target, but, when one is aware of its presence, it is something one can potentially correct for. The mere fact that we have biases does not make us incapable of rendering judgments. Every judge and juror in the world has biases of various sorts. Does this mean they are incapable of coming to the correct conclusion? No, it does not.

So let us suppose that all have pro-skeptical biases. So what? Why should that mean we shouldn’t evaluate the arguments for skepticism? But consider the rest of what Huemer has to say. First, we have pro-skeptical biases, so we cannot directly evaluate skeptical arguments. So we should go one step up and evaluate the second-order evidence, which according to Huemer suggests that the belief-forming mechanisms leading to skepticism suffer from biases. Only there’s a problem: how are we to evaluate the second-order evidence? By what standards? Are those standards free of bias? I don’t see any reason why we should suppose that an evaluation of the second-order evidence uniquely confirms that the belief-forming processes motivating skepticism are biased, but that the belief-forming processes motivating non-skeptical positions aren’t biased. Maybe they’re not subject to the same biases, but may very well be subject to a whole host of biases of their own. And I have little doubt we could easily generate a massive list of biases against non-skeptical conclusions, not the least of which includes some of the most ubiquitous and powerful biases out there: status quo bias and a bias towards social conformity, both of which apply much more strongly, and perhaps even exclusively, to non-skeptical conclusions. Status quo bias refers to a tendency to favor the existing status quo. Insofar as Huemer and others maintain that their views reflect commonsense, or the default or starting position, to defend them is to defend the status quo. And since people have a bias towards the status quo, and against anything challenging the status quo, this represents a strong anti-skeptical bias that, being humans, philosophers probably are subject to. Likewise, recall that Huemer maintains that skeptical positions are typically minority views. People routinely experience strong social pressure to adopt majority views, and those who hold majority views often bully and denigrate those who hold minority views. This is again a ubiquitous feature of human psychology that distinctively reflects a non-skeptical bias. I could go on to speculate on additional biases, but my point here is simply that there are biases that would apply to any belief-forming processes that motivate our second-order evaluations and any anti-skeptical belief-forming processes as well.

In short, there enough are enough biases to fill the Nile:

This, by the way, is perfectly parallel to what the skeptics themselves say about why you shouldn’t just directly evaluate moral propositions and see whether any of them are true.

Who says this? I certainly don’t. Go ahead and “directly evaluate” them to “see” whether they are true. What I have an issue with is the very notion that one can “see” truth in the first place.

Next, Huemer says the following:

What’s the result of becoming skeptical of skepticism itself? Do we just become completely skeptical about everything? Or do we return to our normal beliefs?

The answer is the latter. This is the process:

a. First, we have prima facie justification for believing certain first-order moral propositions, like “you shouldn’t torture babies”, because these things seem obviously correct and we have no reason (yet) for doubting them.

b. Skeptics present second-order evidence that our moral intuitions are unreliable. This undercuts our justification for the 1st-order moral claims.

c. Anti-skeptics present third-order evidence that the (alleged) 2nd-order evidence given by the skeptics is unreliable. This undercuts our justification for believing that our moral intuitions are unreliable. With no justification for believing that anymore, we no longer have an undercutting defeater for the 1st-order moral claims. So the 1st-order moral claims are justified again.

There are huge problems with this. First, let us consider returning to “our” “normal beliefs.” First of all, who is our? I have criticized the vague use of terms like “we”, “us” and “our” among philosophers, and this is yet another instance of this. What people believe is an empirical question. My “normal beliefs” include not being a moral realist. I don’t find moral realism intuitive or obvious or plausible. Furthermore, I don’t believe most people are moral realists. So if Huemer suggests that in rejecting skepticism we return to our “normal beliefs,” maybe that would mean Huemer would be a realist, but I think it would also mean that most people would not be moral realists. The same applies across the board to every position about which skeptics are skeptical. Analytic skeptics may agree with Huemer that the particular beliefs Huemer considers “normal” are in fact normal. But I think those skeptics are wrong, and that it is not the case that the sorts of things skeptics are skeptical of are “normal” in the first place. On the contrary, I think the beliefs Huemer holds are weird and idiosyncratic views that almost nobody, anywhere has held, either now or in the past. In short, I think Huemer is simply and straightforwardly wrong about what “normal beliefs” are.

Now let us consider each of Huemer’s claims in turn:

a. First, we have prima facie justification for believing certain first-order moral propositions, like “you shouldn’t torture babies”, because these things seem obviously correct and we have no reason (yet) for doubting them.

No, we don’t. Such claims may seem obvious to Huemer, but whether they seem that way to anyone else is an empirical question. And at present, available empirical evidence does not support the contention that these statements “seem obviously correct” to most other people. Note, too, that this is vague and underdeveloped. What is it that seems correct? Do they seem correct in a stance-independent respect? Once again, Huemer, like many other moral realists, presents us with first-order moral claims, talks about them being true, but is not explicit about any particular metaethical interpretation of those statements. So we have a couple options here:

• (1) Sure, statements like “you shouldn’t torture babies” seem obviously correct, but once we cash out what this entails, it is just as consistent with moral antirealism as it is with moral realism, so this gives us no reason to be moral realists rather than moral skeptics.

• (2) If instead this statement is intended to exclusively convey a realist interpretation, then I simply deny that “we” have justification for reaching such conclusions.

We also have this claim:

b. Skeptics present second-order evidence that our moral intuitions are unreliable. This undercuts our justification for the 1st-order moral claims.

Sure, we can do this. But I also present third-order evidence that it’s not even true that people have the kinds of moral intuitions Huemer thinks people have. In fact, I don’t even think most people have moral intuitions at all, because I do not believe moral intuitions are a genuine psychological phenomenon. I think the notion of philosophical intuitions is a bit of confused pseudopsychology invented by philosophers, and that it does not accurately describe how most people think. At best, I think having “moral intuitions” is something people must be taught to have by studying philosophy.

Finally, we have this:

c. Anti-skeptics present third-order evidence that the (alleged) 2nd-order evidence given by the skeptics is unreliable. This undercuts our justification for believing that our moral intuitions are unreliable. With no justification for believing that anymore, we no longer have an undercutting defeater for the 1st-order moral claims. So the 1st-order moral claims are justified again.

This isn’t going to work. Skeptics can present evidence (third or fourth order?) that the methods used by these anti-skeptics are unreliable. This undercuts the anti-skeptics’ justification for doubting the skeptical doubts. Also, again, my own first-order judgment is that moral realism is obviously false, and that moral antirealism is obviously correct, so if Huemer or others are justified in endorsing moral realism, I am equally justified in endorsing moral antirealism, if he were correct about this. And we’d still have to engage with the arguments to see which of us is correct. Moral realism is not a privileged position, or, at best, it is only privileged in an extremely minor and dubious way: that it presents holds a slight majority among academic philosophers (though there are problems with this, too), but not among nonphilosophers, most of whom are probably not moral realists. I deny that there is any initial presumption in favor of realists. What realists like Huemer have is a personal, private type of “justification.” They are no more justified in their “seemings,” than I am in mine, to the extent that either of us even have “seemings.”

Huemer makes several other remarks towards the end of his post, but I won’t address them all. I will, however, address this one:

Moreover, not all philosophical arguments are equally unreliable. We should be especially suspicious of arguments that

1. contradict extremely widely-shared beliefs that we initially would have ascribed very high credence to;

2. follow a more general pattern of arguments that contradict other widely-shared, high-credence beliefs;

3. turn on subjective, speculative, vague, or otherwise unreliable abstract judgments.

Even if we should, Huemer has not established that moral realism is a widely-shared belief that “we” would initially ascribe a very high credence to. Furthermore, Huemer implies moral realism is a “high-credence” belief. Whether one has high credence in a belief is a personal matter. I realize Huemer has a high credence in moral realism. I don’t. And I don’t think most people do, either.

Huemer’s last remark is especially ironic. We should be suspicious of arguments that rely on:

[…] turn on subjective, speculative, vague, or otherwise unreliable abstract judgments.

My rejection of moral realism is no more based on subjective, speculative, vague, or unreliable abstract judgments than Huemer’s own position. Note the irony of objecting to “speculative, and “vague” judgments: Huemer seems to think that moral realism is a “widely-shared” belief. This is an empirical question, and there is no good empirical evidence that it’s true. Furthermore, to my knowledge, Huemer has not extensively studied the empirical research on whether nonphilosophers are moral realists or antirealists, making his own judgment on the matter highly speculative and likely rooted in subjective judgments of his own. My own position, on the other hand, is rooted in a decade of directly and extensively engaging with the empirical research, including acquiring a PhD in psychology where I specifically dedicated the bulk of my time to studying whether people are moral realists, including collecting extensive data of my own. That is the opposite of subjective, speculative, and vague. Meanwhile, Huemer says incredibly vague things like “we” and “widely-shared” without specifying who we is, or how widely shared the views in question are supposed to be. Yet Huemer says:

These are all true of arguments for moral skepticism. They are much less true of the argument, here, for disregarding moral skepticism.

No, they aren’t. Huemer is simply wrong about this. His own position is one that relies heavily on subjective, speculative, and vague, not to mention abstract judgments, that, in my estimation are no less, and probably quite a bit more rooted in biases than skepticism, especially my own skepticism, which isn’t analytic.

Huemer then says:

Appearances can be revealing. A fundamental rule of rationality is to start from the assumption that things are pretty much the way they seem, unless and until you have specific reasons to doubt that.

Great. In that case, it seems to me that moral realism is absurd. I have yet to encounter specific reasons to doubt this. Arguments for moral realism—every single one I have seen—are weak. They almost always rely on appeals to realist intuitions which I don’t have and have no reason to take seriously. Those that don’t, like the argument from moral convergence, don’t fare any better. We have far better explanations for convergence in moral standards than positing the existence of stance-independent moral facts. Mundane facts about human history and human psychology handle convergence just fine.

Huemer continues:

Sometimes, something surprising is the case. If you have a friend who has a conspiracy theory, perhaps you should listen to him — after all, sometimes there are conspiracies! But if your friend repeatedly comes up with conspiracy theories, for virtually everything he thinks about, then at some point, you should just disregard everything he says about these theories. You shouldn’t listen to all the details and try to rebut each specific argument. You should just disregard them wholesale.

Huemer wants to lump moral skepticism in with tinfoil hats and conspiracy theories. This is ridiculous. Almost the entire basis for Huemer’s endorsement of moral realism are arguments an antirealist can easily address, coupled with a private, inaccessible appeal to Huemer’s personal moral intuitions, intuitions I don’t share, that I think most people don’t share, and that if anything run contrary to my own inclinations on the matter. Moral realism strikes me as manifestly absurd. If I were to employ the same methods as Huemer, I’d place the tinfoil hat on his head: I have encountered no good reason to endorse moral realism at all. Not one. And not for lack of trying.

What Huemer says here could do harm to discussions on metaethics. It discourages people from engaging with moral skeptics, and encourages a dismissive attitude where we are treated as confused tinfoil-hat wearing idiots likened to Alex Jones. Most of what Huemer says in this post is wrong. Huemer helps himself to a vast host of assumptions he doesn’t bother to argue for, and about which I think he either has no compelling case or is even demonstrably mistaken about. Yet almost everything he says relies, directly or indirectly, on those dubious assumptions. Yet we are expected to jettison skepticism entirely on the basis of those questionable assumptions, without entertaining them or engaging with them. Meanwhile, Huemer’s way of handling skepticism may continue to encourage non-skeptics to denigrate us and treat us with condescension, dismissiveness, and contempt.

11.0 Conclusion

There’s nothing wrong with speculating about the psychology of one’s opposition. But one would’ve thought philosophers of all people would be a little more self-reflective. There are enough biases to go around that if having biases made one’s judgments “unreliable,” then nobody would have reliable judgments about anything. There are much harsher remarks I could say about the way Huemer concludes. The comparison to Alex Jones and conspiracy theories is a gratuitous rhetorical swipe that is more insult than argument. But instead, I’ll say this. This kind of post is exactly why I have become so critical of so much of contemporary analytic philosophy. Huemer ends by saying:

It’s not one time that philosophers came up with the idea that maybe we’re being radically deceived. It’s every goddamned time we talk about anything. At some point, rational people should just disregard everything we have to say about our radical skeptical theories.

Yes, well, it’s not one time that anti-empiricist philosophers fail to presume that the way they think is the way everyone, everywhere thinks. It’s every goddamned time they talk about anything. They go around making sweeping empirical claims about how everyone thinks without providing a shred of empirical evidence to support those claims. At some point, perhaps rational people—and by rational people I mean people who appreciate that empirical claims like “moral realism is a widely-shared belief” should be supported by adequate empirical evidence—should disregard everything these philosophers have to say. Only, I am being sarcastic. I don’t think we should disregard what they have to say. Unlike Huemer, I favor directly and thoroughly engaging with their claims. Not coming up with reasons to dismiss them.