If you don't have justification, you can't have any pudding!

When discussing moral realism and antirealism, I am often told that if you’re a moral antirealist, you can’t provide a justification or reason for your moral values. If, for instance, the antirealist is opposed to stealing, they may be told:

• There is no more reason to oppose stealing as there is to endorse it

• They have no justification for opposing stealing

• Opposition to stealing is arbitrary

• They have no justification for objecting to other people stealing

And so on. The realist may demand that you provide a reason or justification for acting in accordance with your moral standards. One might say that the antirealist must bite the bullet and accept that they have no reasons or justifications, and must concede that their values are in some objectionable way “arbitrary.” Yet I don’t think antirealists should accept framings that make it seem like they’re making a concession to realists, or biting some kind of bullet. There simply isn’t any bullet to bite in the first place: the problem is that such questions presuppose one needs a justification or reason for acting in accordance with their values. I’m not going to accept such presumptions without an argument, and I haven’t heard any arguments that I’ve found persuasive.

Such demands reflect a general tendency for people to claim as weaknesses of opposing views its inability to satisfy conditions they think their view can satisfy. Yet often the problem is that if the other view is correct, the conditions the critic thinks that view fails to satisfy wouldn’t need to be satisfied. It is no weakness of someone who doesn’t believe in God that they don’t have a view on how God’s omniscience is compatible with free will; this simply isn’t a problem for the atheist.

Likewise, an antirealist need not buy into much of the background framework realists presuppose or endorse regarding reasons, justification, and so on. In other words, the antirealist need not reject moral realism, but can reject the background philosophical assumptions in which the philosophical dispute between realists and antirealists is framed.

In the contemporary literature on metaethics, moral antirealists often buy into many of the ways analytic philosophers frame issues, e.g., presuming that we must offer some kind of correct analysis of moral claims that is uniform and determinate. As a result, antirealists often find themselves making concessions to realists because the very way in which the dispute is framed involves presuppositions that favor the realist’s views; yet these presuppositions are themselves subject to objections, and (I believe) rightly so.

Progress in making a stronger case for antirealism will involve questioning many of these assumptions. It will involve, in other words, cutting down moral realism not at its branches, but at its roots.

One way to illustrate the emptiness of demands to justify acting on one’s goals in an antirealist framework is to make a comparison to gastronomic considerations. I am fond of such comparisons, which are inspired by Loeb’s (2003) paper on gastronomic realism. I made a remark on this elsewhere which illustrates the issue:

Suppose you were about to sit down to eat your favorite food. A gastronomic realist shows up and demands that you provide your reasons or justifications for eating whatever it is you're going to eat. Any answer other than an account of robust stance-independent gastronomic normative facts is, they insist, insufficient. Unless there are stance-independent gastronomic facts that dictate what you should and should not eat, gastronomically speaking, you simply aren't justified in eating what you were going to eat. You have to have a reason to eat what you want to eat, and that reason cannot be reducible merely to your goals or preferences. After all, such goals and preferences are arbitrary and meaningless and cannot provide an adequately robust rationale for eating something. You simply must provide a philosophically defensible account of gastronomic realism, along with a defensible account of gastronomic normativity that reveals that it's gastronomically permissible for you to eat what you were planning to eat. How would you react? Would you provide such an account? If so, I'd be curious to hear what this account of gastronomic realism looks like. But supposing you couldn't provide an account of gastronomic realism, would you concede that you cannot do so, and then not eat whatever it is you were going to eat? In other words, would you never eat your favorite food anymore, and only eat foods approved of by gastronomic realists? In short, you'd have two options: (a) Eat the food anyway (b) Recognize that you have no gastronomic justification for eating your favorite food, and abandon your intention to eat it

I would eat the food anyway. But how can you have any pudding if you don't have justification?

References

Gill, M. B. (2009). Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics. Philosophical studies, 145(2), 215-234.

Loeb, D. (2003). Gastronomic realism—A cautionary tale. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 23(1), 30-49.