Moral realism and the sacrificial knife

Recently, I left a long comment on one of Bentham’s Bulldog’s posts, “Am I a Moral Fetishist?” BB claims not to be. However, I think that BB is. Specifically, I think BB is committed to complying with the moral facts, whatever they happen to be, even if those moral facts require BB to torture babies or do other horrible things.

BB responded to my comment with a post specifically addressing that reply, which you can see here. I do not believe BB’s defense is successful; on the contrary, I think it continues to turn on misunderstandings of my objection, continues to mischaracterize my views, and even seems to me to make the very concession I take to be an indication that BB is a moral fetishist.

BB begins with a mischaracterization of my views:

Bush has said repeatedly that he thinks that much of the moral language used by moral philosophers like external normative language is confused — he doesn’t understand what philosophers mean by the jargon surrounding reasons and counting in favor of, to the extent it can’t be given a reduction to facts about desires, for example. This makes his opining on the alleged systematic errors particularly odd — if a hotly contested philosophical topic seemed totally unintelligible to me, I’d be very hesitant to confidently proclaim confusion on behalf of participants in the dispute.

I addressed this in a recent comment. I’ll reproduce the relevant portion of that comment here:

This remark continues a theme of misunderstanding and thereby misrepresenting my views. The unintelligibility of the contested topic is a judgment I've made because I believe I understand the debate, not because I don’t understand the debate. As such, there's nothing odd about it. Yet your remark could easily be read to give the impression that there’s some substantive and coherent subject matter, but that I personally just don’t get it. That is not at all what I think. It’s not that the dispute “seems” unintelligible to me, it’s that I think it *is* unintelligible. And one cannot understand the unintelligible. One can only understand that the unintelligible is unintelligible. You’ve consistently failed to disambiguate these two senses of not understanding:

(1) One cannot understand something that could be understood, due to one’s one limitations

(2) One cannot understand something because there isn’t something to understand in the first place.

The only sense in which I’ve ever suggested I “don’t understand” the metaethical dispute is in in [sic] the sense of (2), and such “not understanding” is specifically based on the fact that I understand that the dispute isn’t something that can be understood, because its participants are confused. It takes a lot of understanding to understand when something can’t be understood. Yet your remarks give the impression of the opposite: that I’m claiming to lack understanding, when in fact I’m claiming to have a more extensive and accurate understanding than you and others.

I think the move of implying I “don’t understand,” stripped of context, gives your audience the impression that I’m a self-admittedly ignorant and confused person, which could serve to discredit me by undermining my credibility. I’m not suggesting this is intentional, as it may be that you’ve simply consistently failed to understand my views. But I am confident it gives people that impression, nevertheless.

In other words, I find your characterization of my views in your previous posts not merely to be inaccurate, but tendentious. While a decent steelman (I have reservations, but I won’t quibble about them just yet) goes some way in alleviating my concerns, I think you have overall handled my views outside of this post in a highly uncharitable way, and it will take more than an isolated and semi-accurate characterization to overcome that impression.

I find it remarkable this misunderstanding has proven so persistent. As one commenter pointed out:

What Lance is doing is no different from pointing out the confused nature of people talking about square circles or married bachelors. We understand all the individual words (“stance-independently,” “good,” “bad”), but they don’t amount to anything coherent when put together. Clearly the people putting them together, including you, -don’t- understand the individual words, or they’d be able to furnish definitions that made sense of their combined phrasing.

This is exactly correct. BB’s mistake is to consistently fail to disambiguate different senses in which one can “not understand” something, and has consistently construed what I mean by this in precisely the respect which I don’t mean.

This persistent inability to accurately represent my views is so severe that I will have to literally change the way I speak just to avoid the misrepresentation. Since it’s apparently too difficult to understand what it means to not understand something because it’s nonsensical, I am going to take that tool out of BB (and anyone else’s) hands:

Henceforth, I explicitly deny that I don’t understand the philosophical dispute about realism, ordinary moral language, and the relevant philosophical jargon. I retract all previous claims to have not understood what philosophers mean when they talk about “categorical reasons” and “stance-independent normative facts,” and so on. I am not in any way confused, in no way fail to understand what is going on or what is being said, and in no way does it remain mysterious or obscure to me. Instead, my official position is that I do understand what they are saying: it’s just that my position is that what they’re saying is unintelligible.

BB and others can no longer claim that I myself claim to not understand or to be confused by what realists (and metaethicists in general) are saying when they use various technical terms: my position is that I understand these terms to lack meaning. Now, if anyone wants to then try to insist I can’t understand it if I think it’s unintelligible, put a flag in that: that’s just equivocation, since it involves pivoting back to other sense of understanding, the one I don’t mean. So let this also serve as a preemptive effort to close off the kinds of equivocations and failures to disambiguate that have allowed this distortion of my position to persist.

For what it’s worth, this particular misrepresentation has been an especially tedious one to deal with. BB isn’t the only person who has seized on the “don’t understand” type language from me and misconstrued it to argue that there’s something odd about my views: as though I’m both simultaneously claiming to be ignorant of the relevant philosophical disputes and making confident pronouncements about them. This was never what was meant, and I am confident that I’ve been quite clear about this. How it continues to be misconstrued is a mystery to me. I don’t think the cause is a lack of clarity on my part. But I also don’t think it’s deliberate. However, note the convenience: BB and other people’s misunderstandings of my position always conveniently happen to kick up dust and allegedly create problems for my view. The misunderstandings are never serendipitous. This is not what we’d expect if they were just random misunderstandings. My guess is it’s a result of unconscious motivated reasoning.

I’d like to move past these misunderstandings and actually engage in our substantive disagreements. Being mired in skirmishes that persist out of a failure to actually understand my views is unsatisfying.

The rest of this post will consist of a systematic commentary on “Contra Bush on Moral Fetishism,” directed to BB.

This seems like a fundamental confusion about the nature of necessity. If the moral facts are necessary and are hedonistic utilitarian in nature — as I have a 41 part series arguing — then they couldn’t be otherwise. Thus, imagining the moral facts being different from what they are is like imagining a square circle.

No, there is no fundamental confusion about the nature of necessity. Not once have I disputed anything about necessity here. If a specific set of moral facts are necessary, e.g., hedonistic utilitarianism, then of course they couldn’t be otherwise. And of course, if this were the case, it would be a bit like imagining a square circle to try to imagine the moral facts being something else. Since I am not even disputing your account of necessity, it’s not clear why you are saying I’m subject to some kind of “fundamental confusion.”

Here’s an excerpt from the exchange that prompted BB’s response:

BB: No, it couldn't be that the moral facts command you to scream at tables. The moral facts necessarily don't say that -- they couldn't be different if we accept they're necessary.

Me: Why not? [...]

It’s possible BB interpreted the “Why not?” question to question why it couldn’t be the case that the moral facts could be {Y} if they were necessarily {X}. But that is not what I was asking. I was never granting that, as BB puts it, “The moral facts necessarily don’t say that;” the why not is directed at the first part of the remark, “it couldn’t be that the moral facts command you to scream at tables.” The question is thus directed not at why the moral facts couldn’t command you to scream at tables, given that they necessarily don’t say that, but was instead asking why the moral facts necessarily don’t say that. The rest of the questions I ask all only really make sense in light of this interpretation (rather than BBs), because they all challenge not whether the moral facts exclude screaming at tables, but whether they necessarily do so, hence why I asked:

Is there a logical contradiction of some kind in it being morally necessary to scream at tables? If so, what's the logical contradiction? If not, then on what grounds do you claim it's not possible for screaming at tables to be a necessary moral fact?

These questions make clear I am challenging whether or not it’s the case that the necessary moral facts exclude screaming at tables; nothing about these remarks makes much sense if I granted that the moral facts were necessary and excluded screaming at tables, but was asking why they couldn’t include screaming at tables even though they necessarily excluded them.

But there is a second reason I proposed why the moral facts can’t be bizarre things — commanding us to scream at tables

What do you mean by “bizarre” here? The degree to which something seems “bizarre” is a matter of perspective. To a society who thinks we ought to scream at tables, it may seem “bizarre” to be overly-concerned with wellbeing. Since I don’t think moral philosophers have reliable methods for determining what the moral facts are, I don’t see any particular reason to think wellbeing is a good candidate for a moral fact, but screaming at tables isn’t. I grant that most moral philosophers care about wellbeing and none (or at least very few!) care about screaming at tables is some minimal evidence, but not much.

From the vantage of any isolated group with a similar set of subjective preferences, who mistakenly think those preferences are objective, those preferences might seem “normal” and anything else “bizarre.” Human values may be highly parochial and contingent, and I’m not willing to grant that they aren’t.

Morality would necessarily resonate with us if we were fully rational and impartial — this is true by definition, as I claim in the original article.

I’m not sure what you mean by “resonate,” but in the original post, you said: “As I’ve argued before, morality describes something like what we’d do if we were totally rational and impartial.”

It sounds (though I’m not sure) like you’re claiming that if we were fully rational and impartial we’d have some kind of motivation to, or necessarily be motivated, to engage in some action or other. If so, this is starting to look suspiciously like a descriptive claim. If morality is supposed to tell the actual me - who is not completely rational or impartial - what to do, it may make no difference to me what a rational and impartial version of me would do. Indeed, I can state categorically that it wouldn’t: I don’t necessarily care what some other version of me would do. I may in some cases and not in others. That’s my prerogative.

In any case, you are also veering into making what look like empirical claims. Whether or not we’d act certain ways under certain conditions is an empirical question. You’re welcome to stipulate some special hypothetical conditions, i.e., the relevant kinds of moral facts just are those facts that would, e.g., necessarily motivate, but we’d only be able to determine whether there are facts of such a kind empirically, since facts about how motivation works and what it’s responsive to are questions about the function of psychological mechanisms, something that cannot be determined a priori. So even if there were facts of that kind, they may be practically unavailable to humans due to features of their psychology. In other words, if there were some set of necessarily motivating facts such that, if you believe them, you will be motivated, but humans were constituted such that they weren’t motivated by their beliefs, it may be that such beliefs aren’t available to humans.

In principle, it could turn out that, e.g., humans are only motivated by their desires, and thus there are no facts of the sort realists believe in that could motivate them. I’m not saying this is true, I’m saying that whether or not it’s true isn’t something philosophers can settle from the armchair.

Adequately addressing this would also require delving into what you mean by “rational,” and “impartial.” I find it likely I’d consider the former to be nonsensical, along with moral realism, and likely just another way to smuggle in your subjective judgments about what actions are good or bad. I don’t think there’s any association between how “rational” an agent is and what values it would have. I don’t think it’s some kind of analytic feature of morality that it requires impartiality, either, so I simply reject the notion that impartiality is some kind of essential feature of moral facts. So put a flag in this, too: I simply deny morality is what we’d do if we were rational and impartial. I’m happy to grant that one can call what we’d do if we were rational and impartial “morality,” but I’d prefer to label that as a distinctive form of “morality,” morality_BB or something.

For this to be otherwise, greater wisdom and impartiality would have to make us conclude that tables are worth screaming at, but if this were so, it would no longer seem like we have no reason to scream at tables. By definition, in this bizarre subset of epistemic space, it would be only foolishness that makes us not scream at tables.

Let’s grant all this for the sake of argument.

Now swap out “screaming at tables” with “torturing babies for fun.” If it turned out that under conditions in which we were fully rational and impartial that we concluded it was morally necessary to torture babies for fun, would you, as a moral realist, conclude that you ought to torture babies for fun? And would you do so?

Now Bush seems to reformulate the challenge as an epistemic one

I’m formulating it as it should have been formulated to begin with.

Additionally, as I argued at length in my moral realism article, we have reliable ways of gaining moral knowledge that inform us that we shouldn’t scream at tables.

Yea, but none of the rest of us are obligated to accept arguments you’ve made extraneously to this one. I don’t think the arguments you made in those posts were successful. Hypotheticals have to be considered on their own terms; you’re not entitled to presume you’re correct about whatever extraneous philosophical views would buffer you against the force of an objection, since we can always hold those in abeyance for the purpose of the hypothetical. I do this all the time, including in this post.

Yet you don’t seem to demonstrate a similar willingness to consider hypotheticals in a similar fashion. Sometimes for-the-sake-of-arguments have to go up the chain to more fundamental positions one holds in order to properly consider a hypothetical. If you’re unable to do that, it isn’t necessarily a flaw with the hypothetical.

The fetishism challenge is not best understood as an epistemic one, at least as it’s genuinely formulated

Do you mean “generally” or do you mean “genuinely”? Either way, my response is going to be a “so what?” It doesn’t matter how an argument is generally formed, and it doesn’t mean anything to say some versions of an argument are “genuine” and others aren’t. I’m happy to give you a non-genuine argument. What are you going to do, copyright strike it?

As far as I can tell, your response to the alternative is to declare it impossible. So the “genuine” challenge is the one you can easily dismiss in a sentence by pointing out that it asks something logically impossible, but the version of the argument I’ve presented (the epistemic one), which can’t be dismissed so easily, isn’t “genuine”? If someone makes the epistemic version of challenge, can one respond that it’s irrelevant because it’s not “genuine”? Perhaps we should only accept arguments if they’ve been registered with the patent office?

The question is not how we know that we shouldn’t scream at tables — though that is a question that can be raised, albeit not a particularly difficult challenge. Instead, it’s whether we would in fact have genuine reasons to do crazy things if the moral facts commanded them — things like yelling at tables.

I’m not asking how we know. I’m presenting the challenge as one in which we assume for the sake of argument that you do know. An epistemic challenge need not rely on addressing the substantive epistemological pathway by which we arrive at knowledge/justification, it need merely appeal to knowledge/justification directly, under the presumption that the conditions are met in some way.

And it follows that if we did know it was a stance-independent moral fact that we should scream at tables that, according to those views whereby we have “genuine reasons” to comply with the stance-independent moral facts, and such facts are necessary, it would be morally necessary to scream at tables.

If you acquired moral knowledge that you ought to torture babies or do some other horrible thing, would you be committed to doing so? And would you in fact do so? If so, that’s all that is needed to consider you a moral fetishist. It would mean that you’ll do whatever morality requires of you, regardless of what that is.

Every moral realist is thus committed to potentially torturing babies, destroying the universe, throwing their grandma into a vat of acid, vivisecting puppies, and so on. Perhaps antirealists like me, who would never do any of these things regardless of what the moral facts “required,” should be wary. All it would take, in principle, for a moral realist to engage in horrific actions, is the firm belief that they were morally required to do so. This creates an symmetry which, to me, favors antirealism: I am completely unwilling to commit atrocities. Realists, on the other hand, seem committed to doing so as long as they believe (mistakenly or otherwise) that they’re morally required to do so. I discuss this in greater detail here. Here’s an excerpt:

One common objection or concern with relativism and antirealism more generally is that the relativist could just wake up tomorrow and desire to torture or kill people, and then be perfectly okay with committing such actions.

This strikes me as quite a bizarre worry. The fact that a relativist’s moral standards may be contingent by their own lights does not in any obvious way make them any more unstable than the realist’s moral standards; the difference is simply what it is that’s unstable.

The relativist could wake up and decide that it’s consistent with their standards to torture and kill people, and therefore decide that it’s morally permissible to do so.

But a realist could wake up and believe that they have an objective moral obligation to torture and kill people, and therefore decide that it’s morally permissible to do so.

If our concern is with moral judgment and behavior, it’s not obvious why we should think changes in fundamental standards and values should be more unstable than beliefs about what’s objectively morally permissible or impermissible. The former might even be more stable than the latter: it's a lot more difficult for me to change my preferences than my beliefs.

Committed moral realists are subordinate to their beliefs about what the “moral facts” are. This puts their commitments, and motivations, at some distance to their desires and preferences, such that the realist seems more disposed to commit actions inconsistent with their nonmoral/personal goals and preferences than an antirealist (other than their goal/preference to comply with what they believe the “moral facts” are, which are often construed as overriding of other considerations). All it takes for a moral realist to do horrible things is to believe they should. A committed moral realist is someone who would murder their friends if they sincerely believed they “ought to.”

I’m being a little facetious here, but only a little. Moral realism is terrifying: by externalizing one’s notion of things being “good,” and “mattering,” realists divorce their potentially deepest actionable commitments from the entire rest of their nonmoral goals, values, and interests. It takes a deep commitment to and belief in the moral righteousness of one’s actions to silence one’s revulsion while lifting the sacrificial knife. Everything we subjectively care about falls by the wayside before the almighty force of moral facts, facts which override anything and everything else we may care about.

I, on the other hand, would never wield the sacrificial knife, nor would I torture babies, even if moral realism were true and it were morally “required” to do so.

What about you, BB? If you came to sincerely believe it was morally necessary to torture babies, would you consider it good to do so? And would you go and torture babies?

As I explain in the article, morality necessarily does have force

What does that mean? What is this “force” that morality has? Even if morality just was what we’d do if we were rational and impartial (an account I reject), well, I don’t care what I’d do if I were “rational” and “impartial.” I also don’t think you could convince me of your account of rationality (which I suspect is about as nonsensical as realism itself), or that I can or should be impartial. And even if morality did represent what we’d do if we were rational and impartial, how does that give it “force”? It seems like the position is that if a variety of epistemic, metaphysical, and psychological conditions were met, I’d act in such-and-such a way, and therefore this…has some implications for how I should act outside circumstances in which those conditions are met? What is the claim, exactly?

Am I required to enumerate every single philosophical assumption that I make and lay them out in detail in the article, rather than reference other places where I’ve argued for them

No, and I never suggested otherwise.

it shouldn’t require the falsity of the rest of the realist hypothesis

It doesn’t, and I never suggested that it did. “The rest of it” - no, just *specific* views.

If fetishism worries are inherently theory-laden, such that they have force if and only if one is an anti-realist, then they shouldn’t move realists at all.

That’s not what my objection was. Fetishism challenges could have force under a variety of construals of realism; they don’t specifically require antirealism. And if they did, nobody would make them (myself included), because that would obviously be silly.

The illusionism analogy is particularly inapt.

If so, you failed to explain how.

If I had some argument that was supposed to convince someone that illusionism was false, it couldn’t have premises that one would only accept if they’re not illusionists.

Sure it could. Indeed, this is incredibly common and may even be the norm for arguments. An argument that’s supposed to convince an illusionist may very well appeal to at least one premise they’d reject. What’s the alternative? A bunch of premises consistent with illusionism? That’s not very likely, in practice, because the reasons one would have for rejecting illusionism may turn on a variety of premises that are only true if illusionism is false. The philosophical work would go into convincing the illusionist of the premises, not simply presenting them with the argument and expecting it to stick.

Illusionists and those who reject illusionism don’t typically disagree on some surface issue, but agree on everything else. Rather, the disagreements go deeper. This is true of many philosophical positions that are downstream of more fundamental philosophical positions. It could turn out that an argument against illusionism may appeal to premise {X}, which the illusionist rejects because it’s only a premise they’d accept if they weren’t an illusionist. So to convince them of the force of the argument, you’d need to appeal to a second argument to convince them of {X}. Yet when you do so, they may appeal to a premise {Y} in that argument. You’d then need to convince them of that. Many disagreements in philosophy are like this, and the lower-level argument for e.g. {X} might require an argument for {Y} which might require an argument for {Z}. It may be that there’s just no compelling argument against illusionism that doesn’t go up the chain to more fundamental premises in this way.

As such, it’s just wrong to say that arguments that are supposed to convince someone to reject illusionism couldn’t have premises they’d only accept if they aren’t illusionists: very likely they would have such premises, and you’d need to convince them of those premises! The way professional philosophers are convinced is rarely by ambush deduction, where they suddenly realize their existing commitments entail that e.g., illusionism is false. I have a lot of critical things to say about philosophers, but they’re rarely so goofy as to not have considered very basic entailments of the kinds of premises that appear in standard arguments. They usually have.

Rather, their views often change by considering matters holistically, or reasoning abductively. Due to an overemphasis on deductive logic, philosophers lose sight of this, and develop a poor understanding of how belief change actually works, and how people actually reason in practice. We’re persuaded by efforts to convince us of the premises of arguments whose conclusions we reject. Indeed, if we’re dealing with a sound argument, with true premises, if the premises would necessarily entail the conclusion that one’s current view is false, then it may be difficult or impossible to present someone with an argument against e.g., illusionism the premises of which don’t strictly entail that illusionism is false. As such, what you’re saying may even be the opposite of true: it may be that a sound deductive argument against illusionism would only be viable if it had premises a person would accept if they’re not illusionists!

This is a point stressed, even more strongly than I’m comfortable putting it, by Schiller (1912) in his book, Formal Logic. In particular, see chapter 16, section 9, titled, “Is the syllogism a petitio principii?” Schiller’s conclusion is: yes; all valid arguments in standard syllogistic form are question-begging. This is a radical claim, and I’m not necessarily endorsing it. However, I think if you examine the foundations of formal logic more carefully, you’ll catch a suspicious whiff of circularity in the way it operates. The passage from Schiller is less than 4 pages, and can probably be found online. Have a look. More generally, I’d encourage you to look into the works of those who fall outside the mainstream analytic traditions, especially pragmatists like Schiller and James.

Unfortunately, there’s a deeper issue here, which points to one of the fundamental deficiencies of relying so much on syllogistic logic and formalist approaches to debate, and it’s one of the reasons why e.g., Schiller was so critical of the way analytic philosophers operated in his time, a century ago. One can always reject at least one of the premises to an argument. To compel someone to accept that premise, one would need to provide an argument for the premise. But one could reject one of the premises to that argument, as well. This leaves us with a potentially infinite regress of rejections of premises. This is what I was alluding to, when I pointed to the holistic nature of philosophy. And in many (perhaps all) cases, the premises one would reject would entail the falsehood of the position one holds, so in practice, you might very well tend to present people with arguments that not only have conclusions inconsistent with a person’s position, but premises as well.

For an argument to have force against another’s position, it should challenge their assumptions — if their position being true refutes the objection, then it’s just begging the question.

Right, so I’m challenging your assumption not whether the moral facts are necessary, but whether among those necessary moral facts is the fact that we’re required to scream at tables. If your position being true refutes an objection predicated on this, then you’d be “just begging the question.”

Hypotheticals can’t feature logically impossible things (plausibly)

Sure, but it can be an open question whether something is logically impossible. Are all legitimate hypothetical questions constrained by your current beliefs?

If you were presenting a thought experiment to a theist in an effort to persuade them of atheism and they responded that it’s not logically possible for them to consider that hypothetical, or any other hypotheticals that could imply that theism was false, how would you respond? Such a person would sound like a presuppositionalist. Ironically, you sound like a bit of one yourself in your responses, with all this talk as though your specific moral beliefs are necessary, so you literally cannot entertain otherwise. More generally, there are many ways in which you frame and discuss your position that strike me as a kind of secularized version of theism or Christianity.

And this would make sense, if the mistakes that prompted people to take moral realism seriously are a residual effect of Christianity endowing generations to think of the world in terms of an external, cosmic conflict between good and evil, the contours of which are determined by forces outside themselves, in a universe in which a God gives our lives meaning, rather than our subjective values. And that’s just the point: I think there’s a direct causal pathway from contemporary infatuation with moral realism among philosophers and the theological pools from which contemporary philosophy emerged.

This is where we get to what strikes me as the most serious flaw in your argument:

It would be bizarre to object to mathematical platonism on the grounds that it holds that if math were different then we’d get different results — on mathematical platonism, math couldn’t be difficult. If moral realism is true, the scenario is logically impossible — thus, it can’t feature in a genuine hypothetical.

I agree that that would be bizarre, but that *isn’t* my objection. You’re conflating your first-order moral beliefs with the notion that some set of first-order moral beliefs would represent the necessary moral facts. I am not suggesting that, in entertaining the notion that the moral facts could require you to torture babies, that you should consider the moral facts being different than they are; I’m asking you to consider if the moral facts required you to torture babies all along, but you didn’t know it. There’s no proposal that you consider them being different.

Obviously, if the mathematical facts are necessary, they cannot be different, so it makes no sense to ask whether we’d get different results if math were different. Just the same, I agree that if the moral facts were necessary, that they couldn’t be different than they are, so asking to consider some alternative set would be logically impossible - but this is precisely why I have repeatedly emphasized that it is only the epistemic version of the argument that makes sense, not the one you wrongly consider to be the genuine (metaphysical) form of the argument, which is easily dismissed on the grounds of logical impossibility.

I’ll borrow your math analogy to illustrate the point. First, morality. You may think it’s morally necessary to maximize utility. However, you could be mistaken about what the necessary moral facts are due to an epistemic error. It could turn out that it’s morally necessary to torture babies.

Now compare to mathematics. You could believe that 41 is not a prime number. If I asked you to consider a hypothetical in which it was a prime number, it would be ridiculous for you to say that this is logically impossible *because* it’s not a prime number, on the grounds that I’d be asking you to consider some change in the fundamental nature of mathematics. This would involve a conflation about what those mathematical facts are, and what you *believe* those mathematical facts are. It would turn out, in this case, that you’d be mistaken: 41 actually is a prime number. There’s nothing logically impossible about considering whether it was a prime number.

At best, you could only say that it’s impossible that 41 is a prime number conditional on your belief that it isn’t a prime number being correct - a conditional that may be false (and in this case would be).

Likewise for moral claims: it’s only impossible that the moral facts are “different” than what you think they are conditional on them being what you think they are. Thus, the only reason you claim to be unable to entertain the hypothetical is not due to what the moral facts actually are, unless they actually are what you think they are! But we have to distinguish between your beliefs about what’s true, and what actually is true. You can’t just treat them as the same thing. And yet that is exactly what you’ve been doing. It seems as though you are unable to distinguish between facts and your beliefs about what the facts are.

Now, if you genuinely believe something is logically impossible because of your beliefs, it may not be possible for you to entertain the hypothetical. But it wouldn’t follow that it’s actually logically impossible to entertain the hypothetical. The example about 41 being prime above illustrates why.

This seems to be a strange proprietary anti-realist notion of bizarreness

Strange and proprietary? Are you joking? My point is that the degree to which something will strike one as “bizarre” is a matter of perspective: what strikes you as bizarre wouldn’t necessarily strike someone else as bizarre. There’s nothing strange or proprietary about this.

Even if we accept anti-realism, it would be a strange fact if morality commanded us to scream at tables

Not necessarily. It may be strange to people who find it strange, but it wouldn’t be strange to people who don’t find it strange. This is trivially true.

As I explain, we have reliable ways of gaining moral knowledge

It’s generally not a good move to claim to have “explained” why a particular philosophical position is correct. One argues for positions. To “explain” implies that it’s some kind of established fact, but I don’t agree that we have reliable ways of gaining moral knowledge.

Morality commanding us to scream at tables is epistemically unlikely — my earlier comments address the epistemic challenge.

I don’t agree. There may be some minor reasons to think it’s less likely, but not, by lights, by any substantial margin.

Remember, I’m currently not claiming that a person who spends their life screaming at tables is necessarily irrational or bizarre — though I would claim that. I’m merely claiming here that it would be a bizarre turn of events if that’s what the moral facts really commanded.

Well, what do you mean by bizarre?

As I said before, this is not a genuine metaphysical possibility,

Only conditional on it actually being the case that the necessary moral facts don’t include screaming at tables. The hypothetical asks you to consider a situation in which this isn’t the case. None of the rest of us are obliged to accept that there’s any kind of impossibility in the moral facts being different than what *you* think they are.

so there’s no possible world in which one should convert all matter into bananas — except on utilitarian grounds, of course — thus, it can’t feature in a thought experiment.

It can, if it turns out that it’s a necessary moral fact that we ought to do so. There’s no way for you to deny this without question-begging or declaring yourself infallible about what normative moral facts are. See above.

morality denotes what we’d do if we were rational and impartial

I don’t agree. And my responses don’t require that I agree.

The answer is clearly yes — this would show it’s simple error on our part to oppose conversion of the universe to bananas.

And if it required you to torture babies? Is it a simple error on our part to oppose baby torture? If so, I will happily embrace making errors.

Bush’s objection misidentifies the point. If we accept that we have ways of reasoning about morality — which we should — then we’re justified in thinking that the moral facts almost certainly hold that people matter and helium doesn’t.

No, I didn’t misidentify any points. I don’t agree that we should accept that we have ways of reasoning about morality - reliable or accurate ways, at least. Disagreement isn’t the same thing as missing a point. This is a good example of an instance where you seem to presume the truth of your views and then criticize me on the basis of that, when the truth of your views is the matter of contention, or at least a potential matter of contention.

There is a reason I described epistemic conditions under which it would become more plausible that the moral facts require us to maximize helium: because under those circumstances, the kinds of appeals that Yetter Chappell makes would no longer work. They work only under the contingent conditions we happen to be in. Which isn’t to say I think it’s likely those conditions will change, but it reveals something contingent, unstable, and subject to being overturned on epistemic grounds about the realist’s position on what the substantive moral facts are.

This was addressed above — for an argument to be dialectically persuasive, it shouldn’t assume background claims that the other person would reject

I agree. In which case, it’s ironic that almost all of your arguments rely on appeals to a bunch of background claims other people reject or at least are free to reject. This almost seems like a tacit acknowledgment that you don’t present dialectically persuasive arguments.

That’s a bit glib, though. I want to draw attention to what I am really getting at, which is that you seem to want to secure points down the dialectical stream without having first secured the upstream points. A lower level argument may only ever be persuasive from a particular theoretical vantage point, that is, to accept view {X}, one would have to accept view {Y}, which one might only accept if they accept {Z}, and so on. You couldn’t convince me that utilitarianism is the objectively correct moral theory without convincing me of moral realism, for instance. Many (possibly most) arguments in philosophy are like this: not only are they only persuasive if they do assume background claims that the other person is correct, they might be highly implausible, or not even make sense without assuming those background assumptions. So when a person argues for {X}, {X} may only be true if {Y} is true. And a person may only find {X} persuasive if they already accept {Y}. If they don’t accept {Y}, arguing for {X} would be a waste of time. You’d have to first convince them of {Y}. But they might object to {Y} if it requires {Z}, and they reject {Z}, and so on up the chain. Arguments are typically persuasive only within a dialectical context that assumes the very background assumptions that make the premises of the conclusion true. In many cases, it simply won’t be possible to make an argument for a position that doesn’t assume background assumptions that the other person would reject.

None of them seem to salvage the moral fetishism charge from my objections.

You said this: “The answer is clearly yes — this would show it’s simple error on our part to oppose conversion of the universe to bananas.”

If the necessary moral facts required us to torture babies for fun, would it also be a simple error on our part to oppose doing so? And if so, would you think we ought to torture babies for fun? If you believed that we should do so, would you?

If your answers to these questions is “yes,” that’s moral fetishism.

Once you commit yourself to acting in accordance with an external set of rules, without regard for whether those rules are consistent with what you want or personally value, then your personal repugnance and subjective values can never serve as an excuse for abstaining from such acts. If morality required the committed realist to butcher people by the millions and build a mountain of skulls, the moral realist is committed to doing so, even if they had to stifle their revulsion with every swing of the ax.