Here’s a remark from Ben Watkins:
If morality were nothing more than whatever we wanted it to be, there would be no rational basis for condemning our own desires as morally wrong. Yet anyone who has felt guilty for acting selfishly recognizes that our desires can conflict with the demands of morality.
This is not true. A person can have one or more desires and also have other desires that they consider more important or prioritize over those desires. Consider a person who is addicted to smoking. This person can simultaneously both desire to quit smoking and have an intense desire to smoke. Are these “desires” exactly the same?
No. They aren’t. “Desire” is a folk psychological term that picks out a range of psychological phenomena that don’t function the same way, aren’t experienced the same way, and don’t stand in exactly the same relation to one another. An intense urge to smoke can be characterized as a desire. So, too, can a reflective, sober recognition that smoking is unhealthy and that one would be better off in the long-term if they quit smoking. One can judge the former desire by appealing to the latter.
For this reason, a person could readily judge that it would be irrational to act on their desire to smoke. You can recognize the presence of a desire and override that desire by appealing not to stance-independent normative truths about what you should do independent of your desires, but by simply appealing to other desires that you consider more important.
What this illustrates is that antirealists who ground normative evaluations of what is morally right or wrong, or normatively good or bad in nonmoral domains, can evaluate the rightness, wrongness, goodness, badness, rationality, irrationality, and so on of actions entirely by appealing to one or more existing values. Just as Alex can judge Sam by Alex’s standards, so too can a person judge some of their values by appeal to other values.
For instance, a person can recognize that they have a compulsion to steal, or are disposed towards angry outbursts, or that they are rude or abrasive or even abusive when they drink too much. Such a person can act on desires in all of these cases: a desire to steal, yell, drink, and so on, and yet consider these desires irrational, because these desires are inconsistent with promoting their overarching goals. Nothing about this is weird or a stretch or in any way difficult for the antirealist to account for.
On the contrary, I personally think it only makes sense to speak of actions as rational or irrational in relation to our goals, i.e., to think of rationality exclusively in instrumental terms. Non-instrumental conceptions of rationality end up holding what I find to be a very strange view: A person can act on their deepest and most fundamental desires, and fully achieve them, but this person is “irrational” according to such views. Conversely, a person would be rational to do something they found repugnant and despised and that thwarted their goals and made them miserable. This is a silly conception of “rationality” and yet it is the one Watkins’s account alludes to.
As Watkins’s remarks may suggest (I’m not entirely sure if Watkins himself thinks this), realists sometimes take guilt to be a signal that moral considerations involve appeal to stance-independent moral standards. There is no need to appeal to such standards, though. Guilt can be readily accommodated by moral antirealists without issue.
Guilt is a psychological phenomenon that can be and frequently is experienced as involuntary or unwanted. Does this suggest that moral demands are stance-independent?
No. It doesn’t do so any more than the fact that we can want to enjoy certain foods but find that we simply don’t like them, or want to appreciate a particular piece of art but simply find it unappealing. Guilt is not an intellectual phenomenon that tracks our implicit commitments regarding stance-independent moral truth.
Guilt is an emotional state that evolved to prompt us to experience negative affect under particular circumstances associated with our behavior in order to discourage the behavior. As we are enculturated into society, we learn about our society’s customs, norms, and expectations. We learn what others think we ought to feel guilty about. This can be internalized over time, such that the reaction we have when we perform a certain action comes unbidden and is outside our voluntary control.
Consider a person who is raised Catholic and is taught that masturbation is immoral. Even if this person becomes an atheist later in life, they may still feel guilt when they masturbate. Why? Because our brains create very strong associations with certain actions, and these associations aren’t under our voluntary control. A person can feel guilt even if they sincerely believe, with a high level of confidence, that the action in question isn’t even wrong.
Guilt wouldn’t function very well if we could simply turn it off on a whim. And so we can’t. Our lack of voluntary control over guilt is a feature of natural selection just like our lack of voluntary control over pain. Can we actively suppress pain and guilt to some extent in some cases? Sure. But our capacity to do so is limited.
Guilt can be thought of as a culturally mediated (i.e., culture and personal experiences influence what prompts us to feel guilt) but ultimately biologically based pain-like reaction to violating social norms and behaving in ways that are regarded as antisocial. We are “tuned” by our experiences to feel guilt reactions in response to certain behaviors, and this tuning can persist, and even be ineliminable, even when our philosophical beliefs completely change.
Consideration of guilt and related psychological states suggests that aspects of our motivation, emotions, attitudes, and goals fall outside the scope of our voluntary control. They simply aren’t whatever we want them to be.
More generally, critics of moral antirealism often depict antirealism as allowing for moral standards to be whatever we want them to be. But this is ambiguous. It is sometimes used to suggest or outright state that the moral antirealist’s moral values are mere whims that could change at any moment. Feel like torture or dishonesty today? Then it’s justified!
But human psychology doesn’t work this way. Our desires can be and often are fairly stable and difficult to change. Can a person change their taste preferences on a whim? No. Can they change their sexual orientation just because they feel like it? I know of no evidence that they can.
Part of what makes objections to antirealism so misguided is sloppy, uncareful consideration of the term “desire.” Desires can refer both to psychologically deep and highly ingrained dispositions and preferences that we couldn’t change without radical science-fiction technology, while at the same time referring to unstable, volatile, and whimsical dispositions and decisions, e.g., the decision to suddenly go for a drive, or have a snack. They can refer to stable commitments that never change over the course of our lives, and they can refer to fleeting moods and attitudes that strike us involuntarily and against our will, attitudes that we don’t identify with and hope never to act on. There is a vast chasm between one’s desire not to feel pain and one’s momentary, intrusive desire to give someone who cut them off on the highway the middle finger.
More generally, the “demands of morality” can feel “imposed from the outside.” But they aren’t. They are imposed on us by our own psychology, and one can internalize a guilt response that isn’t under voluntary control much as one can come to find certain things disgusting or annoying or funny. We are not torn between the false dichotomy that every response we have that involves taking an evaluative stance towards something as good, bad, right, wrong, must be either the result of some desire under our voluntary control, or that it must instead be a reaction to a recognition of stance-independent normative truths. Attitudes, preferences, and desires are, themselves, frequently outside of our control.
Yet when someone speaks of someone doing what they “want,” this doesn’t distinguish between acting on involuntary desires and goals, or acting on judgments or decisions that fall within the scope of our voluntary control. To act on or do what one wants usually implies the latter. If you go to a restaurant you can order whatever you want. But does this mean you have control over your food preferences? No. The ability to act on what one wants is circumscribed. Even when you can act on what you want, you can’t just choose to want whatever you want.
Once disambiguated properly, there is a sense in which morality can be whatever you want it to be, while at the same time you can condemn your desires as irrational or morally wrong. The experience of guilt does not illustrate otherwise. The existence of guilt is entirely consistent with antirealist conceptions of value.