Moral realism as very bad phenomenology

I have goals and values. Some of my goals and values are directly concerned with my life. Things I want to do. Things I want to achieve. Others concern the welfare of others, and how I want the world to be. Long after I die, I want people to live in a flourishing world, living fulfilling lives.

I am motivated mostly by the former self-regarding goals, and on occasion by the latter, other-regarding goals. Yet both sets of values represent my highest-order values and principles, those abstract ideals and aspirations that I want to drive all of my actions. Call these my higher-order personal values. The kinds of goals that sit at the top of my motivational hierarchy, the goals and interests that I intend to drive my overall life plan.

Unfortunately, I often fail to live up to my own ideals. I am constantly tugged and pulled by compulsions that drive me to engage in suboptimal behavior. I’ll stay up late, knowing I’ll regret it in the morning. I eat unhealthy food, knowing the long-term consequences are less than ideal. I fail to make a variety of decisions to optimize my health and wellbeing.

Aside from my poor decision-making, I also find myself constantly propelled by impulses that override and interfere with my higher-order goals, compelling me to act in ways that don’t directly serve my overarching life goals. For instance, I feel hungry. Even if I’m reading something interesting, or playing a game, or doing something else I’d much rather do, hunger can only be ignored for so long. While I enjoy food, it would save me a lot of time if I didn’t have to eat. So I’d rather not get hungry, or require food, all things considered. In other words, eating is not something that I really want to have to do. And yet I feel the need to eat anyway, independent of my goals and values.

When I think about the phenomenology of hunger, that is, how it feels or what it’s like to be hungry, I observe that my experience of hunger is not a feature of my higher-order personal values. It’s not what I really want or desire. And yet I nevertheless feel the demand to eat.

The phenomenology of hunger thus seems like it’s providing me with reasons to eat that don’t depend on my goals, standards, or values. I simply must eat, regardless of whether I want to or not.

In other words, I might take my phenomenology to suggest that gastronomic realism is true. At least, a very minimal form of gastronomic realism is true: one ought to eat, independent of one’s goals, standards, or values. But we don’t have to stop there. I’m not merely indiscriminately hungry to eat any physical objects. I don’t feel compelled to eat buckets of sand or to take a bite out of the cosmic microwave background radiation. I feel inclinations to eat certain foods more than others. For instance, I am more inclined towards eating pizza or donuts than I feel inclined to eat saltines.

I could take all this phenomenology as an indication that there really are facts about what we ought to eat and what we ought not to eat that “provide us with reasons” to eat what we ought to eat, and not eat what we ought not to eat, independent of our goals, values, and interests. After all, it’s not merely that I want to eat some foods over others, but I feel compelled to do so, quite independent of my higher-order personal values.

I could appeal to all of this as a basis for arguing for gastronomic realism by pointing to the seemingly-externalistic nature of the phenomenology of the compulsions. Those compulsions simply aren’t reducible to my goals, standards, or values. They’re not merely my preferences, at least not my all-things-considered preferences, because I’d prefer not to have the gastronomic preferences that I have. For instance, I could save a lot of money by preferring to drink water and eat the most cost-effective foods.

Of course, this would be ridiculous, because gastronomic realism is ridiculous. Why is it ridiculous? At least part of the reason why we should think it’s ridiculous is because my phenomenology is not especially good evidence for stance-independent gastronomic facts in the first place. We can explain my compulsions to eat certain things and not others by appealing to mundane facts about human psychology, e.g., individual experience, the culture I am from, our shared evolutionary history, and so on all play a role in determining my food preferences, which can be further understood, at a more local level, by studying the psychological and physiological mechanisms associated with hunger. It seems very likely we could account for everything there is to say about hunger and its influence on our overall judgment and behavior without needing to invoke the existence of stance-independent gastronomic facts to explain anything about our judgment, behavior, or indeed, our gastronomic phenomenology.

Yet it seems to me that many moral realists do just this, but for morality. That is, they appeal to their phenomenology, their experience of moral values as “external”, as not reducible to their higher-order personal values. Our personal values may be inconsistent with what we feel that we morally ought to do or not do. I may value, or desire, to lie, or steal, or do something else, only to find that I feel that such an action would be wrong. If I performed that action anyway, I may feel guilt or shame, would regret doing the action, and judge that I had done something I ought not to have done. Such moral values may often overlap with my feelings, desires, values, sentiments, and goals, but they don’t have to overlap, and they sometimes diverge.

So it seems, via introspection, I can know that my intuitions about what is morally right or wrong can’t be reducible to my higher-order personal values. Nor, for that matter, can they be reduced to any of my lower-order desires. I may desire to buy an expensive new computer that I can’t afford, or to buy the most expensive thing on the menu in a restaurant, or to live in a more luxurious home, but such desires are not consistent with my higher-order personal values. They are lower order desires, which I attempt to suppress.

Yet my sense of what’s morally right or wrong isn’t like these lower-order desires, either. Such desires are experienced as wants, they’re all about me. And it makes sense to attribute lower-order desires to mundane features of my psychology. So my sense of morality doesn’t seem reducible to either my higher-order values, nor my lower-order desires. It simply isn’t reducible to any particular set of goals, values, or standards that are identifiably my own.

So perhaps moral standards seem to come from out there somewhere, in the world.

This inference seems like an extraordinarily leap to me. There is a simpler, alternative explanation. Our compulsion to eat particular foods may not be reducible to our higher-order values, but it does seem like it’s a feature of our lower-order desires. Yet moral compulsions don’t necessarily feel like desires. Yet we are often motivated to act on compulsions that don’t even feel like desires. I often feel the need to wash my hands, or do other things I don’t really want to do because I’ll be anxious if I don’t do them. For instance, I sometimes leave my house, only to feel convinced left the front door unlocked or the oven on. I don’t want to go home, but I go home anyway just to check. This compulsion isn’t reducible to higher-order values or lower-order desires, that’s just not how it feels. Yet I am not even for a moment tempted to think that I’m responding to Transcendent Check-Your-Oven Forces that compel me to check whether the oven is on.

Our sense of what’s morally right and wrong could likewise be an acquired or evolved disposition to comply with the internalized norms and standards of our society. Much of what motivates us to comply with moral demands may draw on evolved psychological mechanisms. Our ancestors were a social species, and effectively navigating social situations was a major selective pressure over our recent ancestral history. Those who ignored feelings of guilt or shame would have suffered considerable costs: social isolation, exile, even death. Those who responded to feelings of guilt and shame enjoyed greater reproductive fitness.

A motivation to comply with moral norms may be experienced as though it isn’t part of our higher-order personal values because it isn’t part of our higher-order personal values. Yet that does not mean that it involves a sensitivity to facts out there in the world; it need merely involve motivations that bubble out from our unconscious, and figure into our overarching motivational scheme, competing with our higher-order personal values, lower-order desires, and whatever other factors compete to drive our judgment and behavior.

In short, the phenomenology realists report as evidence of realism may be little more than a byproduct of the lack of introspective access to the psychological processes causing moral phenomenology, intuitions, and judgments. One introspects, one’s sense of what’s morally right and wrong doesn’t feel like it’s “from us” because we receive the output of our moral sentiments but have no access to the psychological processes causing that output, and then one mistakenly infers from this experience that this is because we’re somehow detecting moral facts outside of ourselves, rather than failing to detect psychological processes within ourselves.

For some reason, moral realists often seem convinced that their phenomenology lends itself towards moral realism. Yet I don’t think that it does. And I think moral realists could come to recognize this if they thought more generally about the rest of their phenomenology, and thought more about human psychology, to consider whether we could account for why our phenomenology might seem the way that it is as a result of mundane psychological facts, before appealing to whole new ontologies.

In short, I suspect moral realists who think their phenomenology provides significant evidence of moral realism are simply engaged in very bad phenomenology. Even realists who do not directly appeal to their phenomenology may be misled by it, seeming convinced that moral realism must be true because it just seems so true!

Without knowing what particular psychological processes are driving our "seemings," we should perhaps be a bit more circumspect. Philosophers may appeal to the general reliability of our intuitions as a justification for presuming that they're reliable in the particular case of judgments about realism, but I'm not sure why we should think this is true, either. That is a topic for another post, though. Here, I want to draw attention to how unimpressive realist phenomenology is.

I also want to make two final points.

First, I don't have realist phenomenology. Realists often seem to presume others share their phenomenology, and that I'm unusual in not having realist phenomenology. But facts about people's phenomenology are empirical questions. If moral realists want to make claims about what proportion of people share their phenomenology, the onus is on them to provide that evidence. Why aren't they out conducting empirical studies?

Second, it's possible that the phenomenology that prompts realists to infer that it seems like there are stance-independent moral facts may be an idiosyncratic feature of their culture, their education, or their individual psychology. Here are a few possibilities:

(1) People who grow up in societies influenced by Christian or other monotheistic values with a Manichean division between cosmic forces of good and evil are especially disposed towards the kind of moral phenomenology moral realists report: the phenomenology of things being distinctively morally good or bad. It may be that people who are not from such cultures or not substantially influenced by them would lack this phenomenology. Most psychological research is conducted in WEIRD societies, however, so whatever empirical research is conducted may be conducted among psychologically unrepresentative populations (I say “may,” but in truth it would almost certainly be conducted on e.g., college students in the United States or people on online survey platforms in the United States).

(2) Philosophy education may cause philosophers to make inferences about their phenomenology that are not a feature of the phenomenology itself. It may be that, for instance, our gastronomic and moral phenomenology is actually quite similar, and under different historical circumstances, the former or both might be regarded in normative realist terms. It may be that exposure to academic philosophy systematically prompts realists to interpret their moral phenomenology in realist terms, but because similar phenomenology in other normative and evaluative domains (such as gastronomy) is widely regarded as absurd, they aren’t similarly inclined to think this way about gastronomy. In other words, it may be that moral realists and antirealists like myself share similar moral phenomenology, but that moral realists are making inferential errors about their phenomenology, which they may even mistake as features of the phenomenology itself. This is, in fact, what I suspect is going on, and it points to a more general issue with appeals to phenomenology: namely, that philosophers may conflate their philosophical inferences about their phenomenology with the phenomenology itself, mistakenly imputing the former onto the latter, and inappropriately insisting that there’s a certain infallibility to their philosophical inferences by misdescribing them as features of their experience.

(3) Contemporary analytic philosophy may self-select for precisely those sorts of people who are disposed to appeal to intuitions and phenomenology in ways that point towards more external, or metaphysically weighty notions about what the world is like. After all, outside of philosophy you probably aren’t going to find too many people insisting on idealism, or who seriously entertain the notion that we’re all in a simulation. Those of us without such inclinations may feel discouraged from entering a profession with such grand metaphysical aspirations, a field that regularly views the vicissitudes of the mortal realm they’re grudgingly forced to operate in with disdain, and whose practitioners often feel convinced that their a prioristic methods yield insights into the world that cannot be achieved by conventional empirical means. Those of us who feel philosophy ought operate on more friendly terms with the sciences may be disproportionately less likely to remain in the field. In other words, the kinds of people most disposed to work on practical issues may be precisely those people who don’t get PhDs in philosophy because they become doctors or engineers or physicists. If so, the field of psychology may host a psychologically unrepresentative population that doesn’t reflect people in general. If so, those with realist phenomenology, or inclined to interpret their phenomenology in realist terms, may be disproportionately to operate within academic philosophy, which could give the misleading impression that such views are more common, appealing, and defensible by leading people to think that the proportion of philosophers who endorse such a view is an indication of how “intuitive” that view is, rather than an indication that philosophy recruits people who think differently from nonphilosophers.