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.
I'll be quoting this in an upcoming blog post. Would you like credit? If so, how shall I refer to you? And if you really don't want it there I'll remove it but, at the moment, it's not got any name attached to it so I am hoping that'll be okay.
Good point. So academia tends to become the preserve of those who are into whatever’s fashionable in academia, while more independent (or, I would say, reality-oriented) thinkers either leave or never go into academia (at least, the Philosophy department) in the first place.
The problem is that whatever is fashionable in academia while youre in grad school and training to be an academic is outdated ten or fifteen years down the road. So you have people teaching material (cough Derrida Foucalt cough) that's basically the equivalent of Classic Rock Guy telling kids “have you heard of this great band called… The Rolling Stones?” These guys still believe themselves as edgy and rebellious but students (and other disciplines) kind of just snicker
This isn't true (at least not to the same extent) in the sciences simply because there new knowledge builds on old knowledge so the fashions of yesteryear are not outdated cringy fads but foundations for what is being done today. Other disciplines like to have a “intellectual revolution” every few decades or so and after awhile you kind of notice that if all you have is revolutions then you have no discipline
I actually have a lot more to say on this topic lol. I took a lot out before posting. I might add some comments later where I name some more twitter realist names. (It should be fine. I’ve told them what I think and we’ve become friendly despite our disagreements. Except for the guys who’ve blocked me. 😬)
It’s been a pleasure to see you giving voice to many of my own grievances on YouTube videos and blog posts. There have been times I’ve been mad for days about something only to find you also venting your frustrations over it. It’s been a sanity-preserving relief for me—keep up the great work! 🫡
I’ve taken a bunch of screenshots of some twitter interactions that I’d be happy to send by email?
But I’ve also grabbed a few quotes from realists to show that this attitude has been prevalent for awhile. There’s no need to do speculative psychologizing when philosophers are happy to tell you themselves.
Here’s Jerry Fodor (someone I adored and whose views I defended throughout my time at uni) being pretty hilariously blunt:
“The thing is: I hate relativism. I hate relativism more than I hate anything else, excepting, maybe, fiberglass powerboats [Jerry liked sailing, you see]. More to the point, I think that relativism is very probably false. What it overlooks, to put it briefly and crudely, is the fixed structure of human nature.” [from the concluding paragraphs of his précis for Modularity of Mind]
Perhaps commendably, Jerry at least was explicit about his bias, instead of just letting it implicitly influence his instruction.
Here’s John Searle complaining about his undergrad students having incorrect and confused intuitions:
“I have been a professional teacher of philosophy now for 60 years. One persistent philosophical confusion I have discovered is the temptation among intelligent undergraduates to adopt a conception of relativism about truth. It's not easy to get a clear statement of relativism…”
Besides having to deal with his annoying students, Searle was also regularly arguing frustratedly with his frenemy Foucault. Searle’s views on social ontology, meanwhile, bear some striking similarities to Foucault’s, which complicates Searle’s otherwise rabid realism, but that’s another story.
“He grew increasingly troubled by philosophical disagreement. He came to believe that dissent about ethics— especially dissent between leading philosophers—was evidence for the relativism of ethics. And he thought relativism essentially collapsed into nihilism. If your moral truth conflicted with, but was no less valid than, my moral truth, then this showed that, ultimately, nothing mattered.
“Most moral philosophers can engage in metaethical debates without this bleeding into the rest of their life— they still have hobbies and projects, they support certain political parties, they believe in and promote certain values, they care about the flourishing of their friends and family. But for Parfit, the thought that moral values might be something we project onto the world, caused him almost existential anguish. If moral values were relative, then he believed that he must conclude that almost everything in his life was pointless.”
Parfit (tbc, I think he was extraordinarily fascinating and undeniably a major philosopher) would tell the story of how, as a teenager, he had a combo of realizations all at once. First, he lost his faith. But also, he concluded that if values were not objective and real, then everything is permitted and nothing means anything. He strangely went on to spend much of his career writing giant tomes in an attempt to shore up philosophy against this (obviously invalid) inference. He would chase Bernard Williams out to his car in the rain without an umbrella pleading with him over moral realism. Bernie would just drive away, leaving Derek standing there, in order to get relief from the constant haranguing.
There’s a recent Simon Blackburn interview (with Alex O’Connor) where he brings up something else that has always struck me as suspect motivated (even if understandable) reasoning related to the modern resurgence of moral realism: Philippa Foot (along with Midgley et al) were explicit about how they thought that in the aftermath of the Holocaust, it seemed insufficient to just be repulsed by it, or find it appalling, grotesque, awful, etc. Moral philosophy, in their estimation, needed a means for stronger condemnation. Arguments that would support claims that the events were objectively, really and truly from a stance-independent view, *wrong*. Of course, I wholeheartedly agree about the abominable wrongness, I just don’t feel the need for any extra non-human authority to decree on the matter for me to declare it for myself.
Anyhow, the history of moral realism is shot through with motivated reasoning or fuelled by psychological needs (personally, I’m not sure how to make sense of “unmotivated reasoning”, but still, some motivations bear up to philosophical scrutiny better than others). These go beyond the aspects that seem fairly obviously related to the particular theological heritage associated with the Enlightenment/Western Philosophy (the requirement for universal applicability eg, which stems from expansionist religions like Christianity that are geared to move beyond a particular ethnicity, culture, or state).
Maybe we should start an Antirealism Anti-Defamation League? We can send representatives to check-in randomly on Ethics classes to make sure antirealism is getting a fair shake and is being judiciously characterized!
One last quote I’m recalling (from a new debate-style book on moral realism vs antirealism) made the remark that “it’s a lot easier to maintain your good humour as an error theorist.” 😆
I've heard the remark from Blackburn and it stood out to me. Yes, do send me the tweets by email, though you could DM them here too if that's easier. Thanks for those other quotes. I don't want to give you homework but if you have more I won't say no.
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.
Coming from a social scientific background, I wonder what everyone in these conversations means by "relativism." I find it's a real issue, especially in intro courses, that students learn critiques but not defenses of ideas, so that it's very easy to become a "lazy relativist" - not someone with a developed metaethical view, but rather someone who just tends to discard anything which has been critiqued (which ironically usually leads to taking some very firm stances about what is True - whatever isn't usually the target of antiestablishmentarian critique lol). I wonder if there's any analogy in philosophy.
Interesting assessment Lance! In a sense I’d expect moral realists to indeed be “the missionaries” here, though that might just be given my strong opposition. A quick google search tells me that 27.7% of modern philosophy professors claim to at least lean towards moral anti-realism while 56.4% claim to at least lean towards moral realism. That suggests a 49% disadvantage. But in truth I consider philosophy’s judgmental tradition of only considering who should be blamed versus praised (“morality”) versus that which constitutes the goodness to badness of existing for a given subject in itself (“value”), to be problematic. Why can’t philosophers go beyond praise and blame to at least additionally explore what constitutes the value of existing for any given subject? It seems to me that it should be difficult for psychologists and sociologists to effectively model human function if they’re unable to formally theorize what’s good/bad for the individuals and societies that they seek to model. Thus I advocate the creation of a new breed of philosopher which directly postulates that which constitutes value so that these still primitive fields might become founded well enough to begin developing effective models.
You are speaking about analytic metaethics classes, but I think in classical philosophy classes this issue is probably even more prevalent. Rather than utilize the more coherent conceptual distinctions of modern analytic philosophy, it kind’ve just defaults to what Plato says, especially if you have a straussian professor. I’ve enjoyed the classical philosophy classes I’ve taken, but many students come out of reading Plato with views on metaethics tilting towards realism, which I’m not sure is productive.
I’ve taken two classes that analyze Plato’s republic book by book, with straussian professors. I was probably the only student in the classes who challenged realist assumptions embedded in The Republic, and while the professors were receptive, the students mainly buy into stance-independent moral facts. One student I spoke to, who goes to St. John’s College (a school that highly emphasizes ancient philosophy), basically ignored me when I tried to bring up analytic metaethical terminology.
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.
I'll be quoting this in an upcoming blog post. Would you like credit? If so, how shall I refer to you? And if you really don't want it there I'll remove it but, at the moment, it's not got any name attached to it so I am hoping that'll be okay.
Oh, I’m honoured! You can use my name: Glen Kappel 🫡
Good point. So academia tends to become the preserve of those who are into whatever’s fashionable in academia, while more independent (or, I would say, reality-oriented) thinkers either leave or never go into academia (at least, the Philosophy department) in the first place.
The problem is that whatever is fashionable in academia while youre in grad school and training to be an academic is outdated ten or fifteen years down the road. So you have people teaching material (cough Derrida Foucalt cough) that's basically the equivalent of Classic Rock Guy telling kids “have you heard of this great band called… The Rolling Stones?” These guys still believe themselves as edgy and rebellious but students (and other disciplines) kind of just snicker
This isn't true (at least not to the same extent) in the sciences simply because there new knowledge builds on old knowledge so the fashions of yesteryear are not outdated cringy fads but foundations for what is being done today. Other disciplines like to have a “intellectual revolution” every few decades or so and after awhile you kind of notice that if all you have is revolutions then you have no discipline
This is one of the best comments I've received on my blog. Thanks. So much substance and a lot I am sympathetic to.
Oh wow, thanks—much appreciated!
I actually have a lot more to say on this topic lol. I took a lot out before posting. I might add some comments later where I name some more twitter realist names. (It should be fine. I’ve told them what I think and we’ve become friendly despite our disagreements. Except for the guys who’ve blocked me. 😬)
It’s been a pleasure to see you giving voice to many of my own grievances on YouTube videos and blog posts. There have been times I’ve been mad for days about something only to find you also venting your frustrations over it. It’s been a sanity-preserving relief for me—keep up the great work! 🫡
I'd be very interested in hearing about some of the realists over on Twitter (blocked or otherwise). And thanks! I will keep at it!
I’ve taken a bunch of screenshots of some twitter interactions that I’d be happy to send by email?
But I’ve also grabbed a few quotes from realists to show that this attitude has been prevalent for awhile. There’s no need to do speculative psychologizing when philosophers are happy to tell you themselves.
Here’s Jerry Fodor (someone I adored and whose views I defended throughout my time at uni) being pretty hilariously blunt:
“The thing is: I hate relativism. I hate relativism more than I hate anything else, excepting, maybe, fiberglass powerboats [Jerry liked sailing, you see]. More to the point, I think that relativism is very probably false. What it overlooks, to put it briefly and crudely, is the fixed structure of human nature.” [from the concluding paragraphs of his précis for Modularity of Mind]
Perhaps commendably, Jerry at least was explicit about his bias, instead of just letting it implicitly influence his instruction.
Here’s John Searle complaining about his undergrad students having incorrect and confused intuitions:
“I have been a professional teacher of philosophy now for 60 years. One persistent philosophical confusion I have discovered is the temptation among intelligent undergraduates to adopt a conception of relativism about truth. It's not easy to get a clear statement of relativism…”
Besides having to deal with his annoying students, Searle was also regularly arguing frustratedly with his frenemy Foucault. Searle’s views on social ontology, meanwhile, bear some striking similarities to Foucault’s, which complicates Searle’s otherwise rabid realism, but that’s another story.
Finally, quote-wise, here’s Derek Parfit’s biographer:
“He grew increasingly troubled by philosophical disagreement. He came to believe that dissent about ethics— especially dissent between leading philosophers—was evidence for the relativism of ethics. And he thought relativism essentially collapsed into nihilism. If your moral truth conflicted with, but was no less valid than, my moral truth, then this showed that, ultimately, nothing mattered.
“Most moral philosophers can engage in metaethical debates without this bleeding into the rest of their life— they still have hobbies and projects, they support certain political parties, they believe in and promote certain values, they care about the flourishing of their friends and family. But for Parfit, the thought that moral values might be something we project onto the world, caused him almost existential anguish. If moral values were relative, then he believed that he must conclude that almost everything in his life was pointless.”
Parfit (tbc, I think he was extraordinarily fascinating and undeniably a major philosopher) would tell the story of how, as a teenager, he had a combo of realizations all at once. First, he lost his faith. But also, he concluded that if values were not objective and real, then everything is permitted and nothing means anything. He strangely went on to spend much of his career writing giant tomes in an attempt to shore up philosophy against this (obviously invalid) inference. He would chase Bernard Williams out to his car in the rain without an umbrella pleading with him over moral realism. Bernie would just drive away, leaving Derek standing there, in order to get relief from the constant haranguing.
There’s a recent Simon Blackburn interview (with Alex O’Connor) where he brings up something else that has always struck me as suspect motivated (even if understandable) reasoning related to the modern resurgence of moral realism: Philippa Foot (along with Midgley et al) were explicit about how they thought that in the aftermath of the Holocaust, it seemed insufficient to just be repulsed by it, or find it appalling, grotesque, awful, etc. Moral philosophy, in their estimation, needed a means for stronger condemnation. Arguments that would support claims that the events were objectively, really and truly from a stance-independent view, *wrong*. Of course, I wholeheartedly agree about the abominable wrongness, I just don’t feel the need for any extra non-human authority to decree on the matter for me to declare it for myself.
Anyhow, the history of moral realism is shot through with motivated reasoning or fuelled by psychological needs (personally, I’m not sure how to make sense of “unmotivated reasoning”, but still, some motivations bear up to philosophical scrutiny better than others). These go beyond the aspects that seem fairly obviously related to the particular theological heritage associated with the Enlightenment/Western Philosophy (the requirement for universal applicability eg, which stems from expansionist religions like Christianity that are geared to move beyond a particular ethnicity, culture, or state).
Maybe we should start an Antirealism Anti-Defamation League? We can send representatives to check-in randomly on Ethics classes to make sure antirealism is getting a fair shake and is being judiciously characterized!
One last quote I’m recalling (from a new debate-style book on moral realism vs antirealism) made the remark that “it’s a lot easier to maintain your good humour as an error theorist.” 😆
I've heard the remark from Blackburn and it stood out to me. Yes, do send me the tweets by email, though you could DM them here too if that's easier. Thanks for those other quotes. I don't want to give you homework but if you have more I won't say no.
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.
That sounds great. Thanks for sharing!
Coming from a social scientific background, I wonder what everyone in these conversations means by "relativism." I find it's a real issue, especially in intro courses, that students learn critiques but not defenses of ideas, so that it's very easy to become a "lazy relativist" - not someone with a developed metaethical view, but rather someone who just tends to discard anything which has been critiqued (which ironically usually leads to taking some very firm stances about what is True - whatever isn't usually the target of antiestablishmentarian critique lol). I wonder if there's any analogy in philosophy.
That is common and I'd discourage anyone from being a lazy relativist. But we also don't want to be lazy realists.
Interesting assessment Lance! In a sense I’d expect moral realists to indeed be “the missionaries” here, though that might just be given my strong opposition. A quick google search tells me that 27.7% of modern philosophy professors claim to at least lean towards moral anti-realism while 56.4% claim to at least lean towards moral realism. That suggests a 49% disadvantage. But in truth I consider philosophy’s judgmental tradition of only considering who should be blamed versus praised (“morality”) versus that which constitutes the goodness to badness of existing for a given subject in itself (“value”), to be problematic. Why can’t philosophers go beyond praise and blame to at least additionally explore what constitutes the value of existing for any given subject? It seems to me that it should be difficult for psychologists and sociologists to effectively model human function if they’re unable to formally theorize what’s good/bad for the individuals and societies that they seek to model. Thus I advocate the creation of a new breed of philosopher which directly postulates that which constitutes value so that these still primitive fields might become founded well enough to begin developing effective models.
You are speaking about analytic metaethics classes, but I think in classical philosophy classes this issue is probably even more prevalent. Rather than utilize the more coherent conceptual distinctions of modern analytic philosophy, it kind’ve just defaults to what Plato says, especially if you have a straussian professor. I’ve enjoyed the classical philosophy classes I’ve taken, but many students come out of reading Plato with views on metaethics tilting towards realism, which I’m not sure is productive.
Thanks for your input! Can you elaborate on what you have in mind by classical philosophy classes?
I’ve taken two classes that analyze Plato’s republic book by book, with straussian professors. I was probably the only student in the classes who challenged realist assumptions embedded in The Republic, and while the professors were receptive, the students mainly buy into stance-independent moral facts. One student I spoke to, who goes to St. John’s College (a school that highly emphasizes ancient philosophy), basically ignored me when I tried to bring up analytic metaethical terminology.