Huemer is wrong about skepticism (Part 3)

Part 3

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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.

Table of Contents

Part 1
Part 2

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.