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Glen Kappel's avatar

I’ve come to think that what is going on here is that antirealism (of any kind) is considered anti-philosophical by people who teach philosophy in general. To be an antirealist is, in their minds, to betray the project of philosophy as they understand it. Philosophy *just is*, on this metaphilosophical view, the attempt to reach or arrive at timeless universal truths about the way things are from a Gods-eye View from Nowhere. If you are not seeking such conceptions of Truth or objective facts pertaining to each domain, why even do philosophy? This seems to be the prevailing attitude.

So the field itself selects for people with strong inclinations toward moral realism, both in terms of profs and students. Self-selection effects follow in both directions. Ethics profs see themselves as courageous defenders of the idea that there are context-free true moral statements or objective moral facts. They are standing up for truth-seeking—that’s the duty of philosophy (as they see it)! Conversely, if you don’t think morality is real or that there are universally normative moral facts, you may not bother taking any Ethics classes let alone consider becoming a prof teaching the field. Pragmatic antirealists, I suspect, are more likely to leave academia (or analytic philosophy) than realists; partly due to feeling unwelcome, partly due to lack of interest or preferring to do something more practical with their lives.

Here’s another line of argument so bad it confused me (it came up in a discussion I had with Oliver Scott Curry re his Morality as Cooperation view): we were agreeing on many things (naturalism, being against the Big 3 foundationalisms, running agent sims with cooperative traits to yield adaptive behaviour that looks like what we call morality) but when I linked a paper about doing the same kind of thing under a pragmatist-antirealist view (re AI ethics), he considered this to be “resigning yourself to an unscientific approach”. The idea being that in order to do a “science of morality” you need to have “a single theory” that explains everything that you can somehow (he seems to think) pull universal normativity out of.

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Steve Watson's avatar

Since you asked for data points: My first formal exposure to metaethics was a 4th year/grad seminar (at my school, the 4000 and 5000 level phil classes are all seminars taken jointly, and the MA students have to turn in about 50% more work). The prof (Gordon Davis, if you want to look him up) did his Ph.D under Parfit. I don't recall him pushing either side in a noticeable way -- he pushed back on any point you made, but that's what profs are supposed to do. I took an anti-realist position throughout, and got a A+ for the course, so if he disagreed, he didn't hold it against me. The readings were reasonably balanced, I think (Mackie, Cuneo, Joyce, Parfit). We also covered the ways in which the realism/anti-realism debate spills over in to other domains like epistemology and mathematics.

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