Misuses of phenomenal conservatism

I am concerned with the growing popularity of phenomenal conservatism. This isn’t because I reject phenomenal conservatism, but because it is being used in many philosophical disputes as a means of foisting the argumentative burden onto others with little or no effort. I’ll outline a few observations related to this:

(1) People may simply not bother to present substantive arguments for a position. Instead, they appeal to PC, then say that because they’re justified in believing it, they don’t need to provide any sort of argument for it. So if someone wants to dispute their position, they’re welcome to offer defeaters. People employing this approach then feel free to claim that we have free will, that God exists, that moral realism is true, etc., all by appealing to the fact that these claims seem true to them. No further argument is necessary. It seems to me that PC is having a negative influence on such discussions, since people making these sorts of claims stop attempting to make a case for their positions and remain satisfied in passively asserting that it “seems true.” End of discussion. This does not result in very productive discussions.

(2) People who appeal to PC often presume that how things seem to think is also how they seem to others, and they will make either ambiguous and unclear claims about how things “seem” without making it clear whether they’re talking about how things seem to them, or how they seem to others. For instance, moral realists appealing to PC may say that it “seems like it’s wrong to torture babies for fun,” with the implication that it generally seems this way to people, rather than just themselves. Thus PC is often accompanied by implicit empirical claims about how things seem to other people. This is not a component of PC, yet it gets smuggled along with it inappropriately.

(3) PC seems to offer something extremely trivial to any philosophical exchange. It provides an individual with “justification” for their belief. What does that mean? And so what if it does? What does that amount to? The issue here is that even if PC provided “justification” for an individual to hold a belief, this has almost no practical relevance to anyone else. This is because PC at best consists of almost exclusively private evidence. It contributes an extremely marginal amount of evidence, at best, to any public discussion, and is thus largely negligible for resolving philosophical disagreements.

Suppose, for instance, two people want to know whether moral realism is true. One says that it seems true. The other says that it does not seem true to them. How are they to resolve this disagreement and find out if moral realism is true? PC isn’t going to help them resolve their disagreement.

(4) Related to (1)-(3), people often seem to become self-satisfied with PC. They lose interest in resolving the disputes outlined in (3), content to simply insist that it seems true to them. I had thought one of the central purposes of philosophy was to find out what is true, and much of this involves engaging with others with contrary views. Yet if people begin relying on PC to disengage from such disagreements, it will have had a negative effect on the quality of philosophical disputes, since it will have effectively encouraged people to insulate themselves from contrary philosophical views. Two people can just both insist things seem the way they do to them, and that’s that. It seems to the realist realism is true. It seems to the antirealist antirealism is true. And both can waiting around insisting the other has to provide defeaters.

(5) This brings me to the final point. I’ve also seen that, in practice, people don’t seem to quantify the amount of evidence PC provides. Prima facie justification? Fair enough, in principle. But in practice, people appeal to PC to entrench themselves in a position. You end up with exchanges like this:

Moral realist: It seems to me realism is true. I am therefore justified in endorsing realism in the absence of defeaters.

Moral antirealist: Okay, here are some objections: [Objection 1], [Objection 2].

Moral realist: That’s fine, those are some okay arguments. But I don’t think you understand. My intuition that realism is true is very strong. Those defeaters just aren’t good enough

The moral antirealist can present as many defeaters as they like, but the realist has positioned themselves to judge them, individually or collectively, as inadequate to overcome the strength of the seeming that realism is true.

Realists have even sloganized these kinds of claims, insisting that any arguments against moral realism are less plausible than the intuition that realism is true (or that some claim that would entail realism is true, e.g., that “it’s wrong to throw puppies in volcanoes” - note, of course, that this is a normative claim that doesn’t make realism explicit; this is yet another mistake realists constantly make, that involves concealing their metaethical presuppositions inside normative claims).

This is why I say that PC often serves as a cover for a kind of moving prior: the proponent of PC can lay claim to the epistemic virtue of fallibilism, by making the modest claim that their seemings provide prima facie justification. But in practice, they can always insist that their seemings override any evidence or arguments to the contrary; that is, the seeming can be “stronger” than any putative defeaters. As a result, PC can in practice function as what I call “phenomenal dogmatism”: assigning arbitrarily greater epistemic weight to one’s seemings than to defeaters.