Huemer is wrong about skepticism (Part 2)

Part 2

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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

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.