Moral realist quackery: Another response to Bentham's Newsletter

1.0 Introduction

Bentham’s Newsletter is back at it with bad arguments for moral realism.  I have previously critiqued Bentham’s views on metaethics at length here. This time, it’s a sort of statement position on the matter that recycles old tropes. Go read it first here.

I will skip over most of the details of the article, instead focusing on two main issues: Bentham’s continued sloppy talk of how things “seem,” and Bentham’s penchant for terrible intuition pumps.

2.0 How things seem

Bentham continues with the regrettable habit of using unqualified statements about how things “seem”:

But lots of moral statements just really don’t seem like any of these.

The wrongness of slavery, the holocaust, baby torture, stabbing people in the eye—it seems like all these things really are wrong and this fact doesn’t depend on what people think about it.

 It seems very weird to think that what makes it wrong to torture people is what someone thinks about it—even weirder that statements like “torture is wrong,” are neither true nor false.

Denying objective morality is counterintuitive in a second, very different way.

Once that anti-realist admits there are reasons to care independent of your desires, it seems those reasons should give rise to moral reasons

Bentham talks often of what constitutes good or bad philosophy. So let me be clear: this is bad philosophy. The same habit of making unspecified claims about how things seem, what “we” think, what’s “intuitive” and so on is widespread among academic philosophers. It’s bad when they do it, and it isn’t any better when Bentham imitates this unfortunate habit.

What exactly do people who make these claims mean? Who knows, because they almost never specify what they mean. Does Bentham mean that it seems that way to him, or to rational agents, or to most people, or to most people after adequate reflection or what? 

What kind of phenomenology is associated with these “seemings”? Again, this isn’t specified. Is it the same across all of these scenarios? Are the same psychological processes involved? Is that supposed to matter? Again, it’s simply unclear.

Never mind that I am not sure anything “seems” any particular way to anyone: I think it’s entirely possible Bentham and other people have been inducted into confused, pseudopsychological ways of thinking and talking about their thoughts and experiences in ways that couldn’t meaningfully map onto a defensible account of human psychology. These “seemings” may not exist at all, or may refer to a host of different phenomena without Bentham realizing it. After all, merely because someone thinks they have certain kinds of experiences doesn’t mean that they do, nor does it mean that their account of what’s going on when having those experiences is accurate. Case in point: people may think they see auras. They can’t. Auras don’t exist, so nobody is capable of seeing them. Just so, I don’t think there are substantive a priori truths for one to “intellectually see” in the first place, so I am certainly not on board with claims that anyone has a special faculty for detecting them.

Even if we set this aside and grant that there’s some defensible account of seemings or intuitions, Bentham’s remarks are still bad philosophy. Why? Because they’re imprecise in a philosophically important way. Are these claims non-empirical? If so, they’re subject to challenge on philosophical grounds. If they’re empirical, then what are they claims about, exactly? How things seem to who? If they’re claims about the psychology of any particular portion of readers, that’s an empirical claim we’d need evidence to evaluate. I’m happy to grant that, conditional on intuitions and seemings being a thing, Bentham is welcome to tell us how things seem to him. But Bentham is not in a good position to make broad and general claims about how things seem to anyone else.

I don’t have realist seemings or intuitions. I don’t recall ever having them. It seems to me that antirealist accounts are always much better in every context without exception. Appeals to how things seem to yourself are not going to be dialectically very strong unless, at a minimum, they also seem that way to your audience. But Bentham has historically been extremely lazy about actually making a case for how things seem to others, or what intuitions most other people have. Bentham will claim most people have moral realist intuitions, but there is virtually no compelling empirical evidence that supports this claim. At present, the best available evidence suggests this isn’t true. 

Nevertheless, Bentham stated as recently as last month that “it seems most smart people and people in general have realist intuitions strongly on certain things, but it’s a bit unclear.” There are two components to this: the claim about “smart people” and the claim about “people in general.”

First, a general point: is Bentham making a direct claim about the intuitions of most smart people and people in general? No, instead, we’re treated to Bentham saying that “it seems” that such people have realist intuitions. So what do we have here, a seeming about a seeming? It doesn’t seem to me that most smart people or people in general have realist intuitions. Why should I or anyone else care about Bentham’s seemings about empirical questions if Bentham doesn’t demonstrate any knowledge of the relevant empirical literature on this question? I’m not especially interested in how things “seem” when it comes to empirical questions when there is no indication that the person in question has any substantive knowledge of the relevant empirical literature.

Whether or not most people have any particular kind of psychological state is an empirical question. In the absence of relevant knowledge or expertise, one’s personal seemings have very limited purchase on such questions. Bentham simply isn’t in a good position to have a reliable sense of whether most “smart people” (however that’s operationalized) or “people in general” have “realist intuitions” (however that’s operationalized).

This use of “seeming” may not even be consistent with other uses. It’s one thing to speak of seemings as perceptual or quasi-perceptual states:

1. It seems that apple is red

2. That seems like a high-pitched sound

3. It seems like this has mint in it

4. It seems that 2+2=4

It’s quite another to say

5. It seems that most people like pizza.

Is there anything wrong with #5? Not really. I’m happy to say that it seems to me that most people like pizza. It’s just that what I mean by “seems” here is different from what I mean when I say that it seems like an apple is red or that 2+2=4. I don’t, and I don’t think I could, perceive or quasi-perceive (via some quasi-perceptual intellectual faculty) some inference I’ve internalized about human food preferences. Not every use of an ordinary term like “seem” carries the same epistemic weight or draws on the same psychological processes.

Even if there are genuine quasi-perceptual intellectual seemings, and that there are stance-independent moral facts is among those seemings for some philosophers, it doesn’t follow that other instances of “seemings” involve the same psychological processes, are associated with the same kind of phenomenology. Sometimes we use the term “seems” simply to express what we believe or think, without necessarily invoking any distinct phenomenology or psychological state. If so, it’d be helpful for philosophers who employ distinct and technical conceptions of “seems” to be more careful when they use the term in other ways. Bentham is not very careful, here or elsewhere.

One advantage of Bentham’s claim is that it can allow Bentham to avoid being held accountable for a more direct empirical claim. Compare:

1. Most smart people have realist intuitions

2. It seems to me that most smart people have realist intuitions

While I may question the former, it’s much harder to question the latter. Even if the notion that most smart people have realist intuitions was false, one could still insist that it seems as if most of them have realist intuitions. This epistemic timidity is a good way to avoid taking responsibility for what amounts to an empirical claim. After all, why should any of the rest of us give two syllogisms how things seem to Bentham when it comes to questions about whether smart people or people in general actually have moral realist intuitions?

Why wouldn’t we consult the actual empirical literature on this question?

That’s a rhetorical question. We sure as hell should. And the empirical literature does not support the claim that most people have moral realist intuitions. So Bentham is welcome to insist that it really does seem to him that smart people and people in general have realist intuitions. It seems to me that nobody else should care.

The more important question is the question of whether most smart people in fact have moral realist intuitions. Is there any good evidence for this?

No. Not really. We have the 2020 PhilPapers survey results, which find that 62% of the philosophers who answered that particular question favor some form of moral realism. Most of the “moral realists” that responded to the survey, however, favor naturalist moral realism. These people don’t even endorse the sorts of stance-independent moral facts Bentham believes in! Indeed, a significant majority of philosophers don’t endorse non-naturalist moral realism. Only 26.6% endorse non-naturalist realism, meaning that nearly 75% don’t.

Even so, this doesn’t tell us what proportion of these respondents have moral realist intuitions, nor does Bentham clarify whether the intuitions in question are intuitions that there are non-naturalist stance-independent moral facts, or any kind of stance-independent moral fact (which would include naturalist positions). We’re simply not told because, once again, Bentham can’t be bothered to be clear about what he means.

It could be that most naturalist realists and even antirealists have moral realist intuitions, but reject realism in spite of this. It could be that many of them don’t. Who knows? We’d need a survey for that, and we simply don’t have one. But let’s suppose we did, and let’s suppose most of the respondents did report having moral realist intuitions, and let’s even bypass all the problems with whether or not the measures used to ask this question were valid and just assume they were (a tall order which, again, given Bentham’s track record, Bentham seems to underestimate problems with measurement and validity). 

Okay. So if most people from the sort of population that responds to the PhilPapers survey (e.g., analytic philosophers, about 50% in the United States), does this tell us that most “smart people” have moral realist intuitions?

Again, no. There is no particularly good reason to think that the intuitions of analytic philosophers generalize to “smart people.” Firstly, maybe some of the respondents aren’t very smart. Is this likely? No. Most philosophers aren’t stupid. So it is a population of what are probably mostly smart people. But they are also smart people that share something highly unusual in common: they’re all philosophers. Do philosophers think the way smart nonphilosophers do? I don’t know. This article by Starmans and Friedman (2020) provides evidence that philosophers make knowledge attributions differently than academics in other fields. Bentham has in the past sustained his empirical claims about most people having moral realist intuitions by appealing to a single study. I won’t do that. Because I know, and I suspect Bentham knows as well, that one should beware the man of one study. 

At present, we simply don’t have any good empirical evidence that most smart people have realist intuitions. I have no idea what Bentham is basing this claim on, but if it’s based on personal anecdote, one might wonder: is it plausible that Bentham is biased towards judging that a person is smart when they endorse moral realism? Is it plausible Bentham tends to associate with people he finds smart and that endorse moral realism? Is it plausible Bentham is more attentive to confirmatory evidence than disconfirmatory evidence. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to ponder these difficult questions.

I don’t know if Bentham will read this, but I implore him: please stop thinking your personal experiences and anecdotes are a good substitute for actual empirical data. Even if armchair philosophy can answer some questions, it is ill-suited to answer questions about human psychology. 

As for the question of whether most people in general have realist intuitions, once again, there is no compelling evidence this is true. There are now a few dozen studies addressing this question. At present, most of the more rigorous studies find higher rates of antirealist responses. Nevertheless, I do not endorse these results. I don’t think most people have realist or antirealist intuitions. We shouldn’t begin with the assumption that they’ll have one or the other. It’s also a possibility people don’t typically have realist or antirealist intuitions. I’ve covered this topic so many times on my blog I am not going to go back over it all. You will find ample articles with titles that make it clear they explicitly address this question…probably, at this point, at least a half dozen. So see it as an opportunity to explore my blog post archive if you want to see my discussions on this research.

Tl;dr: Philosophers should be careful to clarify what they mean when they say that something seems a certain, or is intuitive. If they are only speaking for themselves, they should be explicit about this (e.g., “it seems to me…”). Bentham continues to make claims about how things “seem” to him that are unclear and at this point seem to me conveniently designed to evade taking responsibility for empirical claims. This is, at best, a very bad habit that Bentham has developed, and I hope, by drawing attention to it, that others will avoid it. I have little hope Bentham will heed advice from me, since I am not one of those “smart people” that endorses moral realism.

3.0 Intuition dumps

I propose that we imagine a kind of abstract graveyard of sorts. When the ambiguities and subterfuge that plague a particular thought experiment or syllogism are finally exposed, and the word king of verbal and conceptual confusions are mercifully euthanized, they shouldn’t be laid to rest in a crematorium where there ashes will soon blow away and be forgotten. Instead, they should be placed in the intuition dump.

The intuition dump is just that: a dump. And like all dumps, one could walk through the mounds of refuse, only in this case one encounters putrid premises, decaying deductions, and festering fallacies. There are plenty of arguments, thought experiments, and philosophical positions that belong in the dump, which could serve as a museum of mistakes best avoided.

3.1 External reasons

Bentham’s unnecessarily long list of intuition pumps belong in the intuition dump. Bentham says:

Denying objective morality is counterintuitive in a second, very different way. If there are stance-independent reasons—reasons to care about things that don’t depend on what you actually care about—then moral realism is almost definitely true. Once that anti-realist admits there are reasons to care independent of your desires, it seems those reasons should give rise to moral reasons. If I have a reason to prevent my own suffering, it seems that suffering is bad, which gives me a moral reason to prevent it.

Here Bentham alludes to the notion of external reasons, or reasons that “count in favor” of an action independent of whether that action would achieve one’s desires. Such a notion of a “reason” is one of the key notions in the crosshairs of my unintelligibility thesis: I don’t simply deny that there are any reasons of this kind. I deny that this notion of a “reason” is meaningful at all. While this position is rare, in that aside from myself and a few friends, colleagues, and random commenters online, I know of only one prominent philosopher who appears to have suggested something similar, Bernard Williams. Here is a passage I often quote from Parfit (2011)

When Williams argues that there are no such reasons, his main claim is that Externalists cannot explain what it could mean to say that we have some external reason. I admit that, when I say that we have some reason, or that we should or ought to act in a certain way, what I mean cannot be helpfully explained in other terms. I could say that, when some fact gives us a reason to act in some way, this fact counts in favour of this act. But this claim adds little, since ‘counts in favour of’ means, roughly, ‘gives a reason for’. Williams suggests that the phrase ‘has a reason’ does not have any such intelligible, irreducibly normative external sense. When he discusses statements about such external reasons, Williams calls these statements ‘mysterious’ and ‘obscure’, and suggests that they mean nothing. Several other writers make similar claims. (p. 272.)

I agree with Williams’s instincts in this passage. I think the notion of a “reason” that Bentham invokes, which as far as I can tell accords with Parfit’s notion of an “external reason,” isn’t simply mysterious or obscure, but that it has no meaning whatsoever. At least one red flag (though not a dispositive one) is that proponents of the notion of an external reason of this kind appear unable to communicate the meaning of the alleged concept. That is, they can’t explain to others, without vacuous and vicious circularity, what they even mean. Now, could it be that there are incommunicable concepts of this kind? I grant it as an epistemic possibility. But based on my current understanding of how concepts work, I think the answer is a firm no. There will certainly be concepts the meaning of which can’t be communicated to some people. Quantum physics isn’t meaningless simply because we can’t explain it to toddlers. But the concept of an external reason Parfit and Bentham seem to have in mind is one the meaning of which couldn’t be communicated in principle. 

While I am fine with people claiming that there are unanalyzable concepts in the sense of the concept in question being unable to be explained in terms of more fundamental concepts, this really just leaves us with concepts that cannot be subdivided into more basic concepts. In other words, there may very well be “atomic” concepts that comprise “compound concepts.” But this isn’t the same thing as communicability. When I ask what proponents of external reasons mean, I am not asking for the conceptual analysis of “external reason.” I’m asking them to communicate what they mean. Apparently, they can’t do this. While this is not by itself a decisive reason to conclude that they don’t even have such a concept, and are simply confused, I do take it to (all else being equal) favor that hypothesis. 

At the very least, I’d like to know why I should think there there are incommunicable concepts, and how they distinguish when a concept is incommunicable in principle from instances in which (a) the person communicating the concept is doing a good job, the their targets are unable (for whatever reason) to grasp the concept and (b) the person communicating the concept is bad at communicating the concept, but someone who was more capable could do so. 

Setting aside the rather serious problem that Bentham’s position might be unintelligible, I at least agree that if you could convince me that there are external reasons, this would be a very significant concession. Maybe not enough to grant non-naturalist realism, but close enough that I, at least, would count it as a win for the other side. So, I do want to resist the notion that there are external reasons of this kind.

Given this, does Bentham make a good case for the existence of such reasons? Bentham tries to prompt readers to recognize that there are such reasons with a set of intuition pumps. Bentham begins:

But this means that moral anti-realists must think that you can never have a reason to care about something independ [sic] of what you actually do care about. This is crazy as shown by the following cases:

3.2 Eating cars

I do indeed believe that you “can never have a reason to care about something independent of what you actually do care about. Let’s have a look at the first case and see if it would be “nuts” to consider it and not think that we have reasons independent of what we care about:

A person wants to eat a car. They know they’d get no enjoyment from it—the whole experience would be quite painful and unpleasant. On moral anti-realism, they’re not being irrational. They have no reason to take a different action.

So…what is this supposed to illustrate? Presumably, I am supposed to think that this person really does “have a reason” to avoid eating the car. I’m supposed to think that people all “have a reason” to avoid what is painful and unpleasant, independent of whether they value doing so in any way at all. Well, I simply don’t think this. What would that even mean? They “have a reason” to avoid pain? 

Okay, what reason do they have to avoid pain?

See, that’s just it. I want to know what the reason is. But there isn’t more to say here. One simply “has a reason” to avoid pain, because, well, it’s pain, and pain is bad. One should want to avoid it.

This is where the vacuity of external reasons shows itself. All of these are just words, words, words that do little more than circle around the same hollow pseudoconcept of an external reason.

This intuition pump already takes us nowhere. It’s simply a direct and crude attempt to prompt the reader to share Bentham’s unsophisticated sense that a person who has preferences radically unlike his own or any psychologically familiar being must somehow being making a mistake. After all, they don’t want the “correct” things to want. And what are those? Well, they’re what Bentham wants, of course, or at least something in the vicinity of what  Bentham wants.

With respect to Bentham and every other philosopher who comes away from intuition pumps like this with the sense that the person in the scenario has an “external reason”: I think ya’ll are just projecting your own values onto the scenario, noticing that you wouldn’t want to eat a car if it would be painful and unpleasant, and then mistakenly inferring that this feeling, which you cannot fully suppress, must mean that the person in the scenario likewise ought not eat the car. It is, in other words, a failure to fully adopt another person’s point of view, a failure to step outside one’s own values and valuations of the world. 

So the person who has the “external reason” intuition here may, I propose, be in the state of a kind of conceptual duckrabbit: they are the duck, and they are asked to imagine what it’s like to be a rabbit. Yet hard as they try, they simply can’t fully distance themselves from their nature as a duck. They’re asked to imagine a creature that enjoys running on the ground, but hates swimming. That lives in a burrow, but can’t fly. And they simply can’t shake the feeling that this is just wrong. One should fly, and swim, and gosh darnit you’ve just gotta quack!

The weird thing about Bentham’s intuition pumps is that they’re all just iterations of this same idea. Nothing new or creative or interesting ever crops up. It’s just the same bad idea repeated over and over again. Here’s the next one:

A person desires, at some time, to procrastinate. They know it’s bad for them, but they don’t want to do their tasks. On anti-realism, this is not a rational failing.

And here’s the next:

A person wants to torture themselves. They have this desire—despite getting no joy from it—despite knowing the relevant facts. On anti-realism, they’re not being irrational.

Bentham presents a total of six of these. What’s the point? None of them do anything any notably different from the rest. This is like presenting six different versions of the Kalam using different sets of synonyms. 

Whatever the reason, I think all of these intuition pumps do the same thing. They invite the reader to join Bentham in suffering from a failure of imagination. I think these intuition pumps achieve this by prompting a kind of "ghost-projection" of the audience's own values. The audience is asked to imagine someone with weird preferences who by stipulation wants to pursue those preferences. As with realists saying "it's a waste of your life to count blades of grass," the realist is relying on the presumptive, intersubjectively shared values of ordinary human psychology: humans don't want to spend their lives counting blades of grass…or eating cars, or torturing themselves. 

If someone did, this would be decent evidence of some kind of pathology or disorder that the person would thank you for were you to correct it. In short, the intuition pump fails insofar as it prompts audiences to project or impose presumptions about their own or familiar human psychology onto the weird agents described in the scenarios, then just that the agent has a reason to do whatever is they think they have a reason to do independent of the agent’s own desires, because Bentham and those who fall prey to this failure of imagination think that he agent ought to want what they want, or at least that they want the sorts of things that the person evaluation the scenario is familiar with and comfortable attributing to agents.

3.3 Lose-lose-lose

The scenarios Matthew employs also involve subtle exploitations in ambiguity about the meaning of terms like "rational." We're told that the antirealist would not regard the agents in these scenarios as “irrational.”

This is false. Antirealism does not entail anything about whether the agents in these scenarios are “rational” or note without first disambiguating what is meant by “rational.”

Unfortunately, Bentham doesn’t clarify what he has in mind by “rational.” So let’s disambiguate the term into roughly two possibilities:

1. A conception of rationality that would be inconsistent with antirealism

2. A conception of rationality that would be consistent with antirealism

With respect to (1), what conceptions of rationality would be inconsistent with antirealism? Why, of course, any that are constituted by or entail the sorts of claims an antirealist is committed to denying, i.e., stance-independent moral facts, or anything that would entail or strongly favor the conclusion that there are such facts, such as external reasons. Recall that, according to Bentham: 

If there are stance-independent reasons—reasons to care about things that don’t depend on what you actually care about—then moral realism is almost definitely true

Again, we’re granting this for the sake of argument. That out of the way, what is the antirealist committed to saying in this situation. Well, if they’re committed to claiming that the person who wants to eat a car is “not being irrational,” the only sense in which this would be entailed by endorsing antirealism is insofar as they must deny that the person is being “irrational” in some sense that entails (or strongly favors) moral realism. This might be, for instance, some non-instrumental conception of rationality that invokes robust notions about what’s “rational” or “irrational,” that are true of agents independent of what those agents want. In other words, the only sense in which Bentham’s remark would be true amounts to a veiled restatement of what it is the antirealist is denying in the first place.

Let me put this another way: the only sense in which it would follow that the antirealist would be committed to denying that the car eater is being “irrational” is if “irrational” entails that the car eater has an external reason to not eat cars.

Bentham might as well rephrase the intuition pump like this:

A person wants to eat a car. They know they’d get no enjoyment from it—the whole experience would be quite painful and unpleasant. On moral anti-realism, they’re not being irrational they don’t have any reasons independent of what they want to not eat the car. They have no reason to take a different action.

This same analysis applies to the instance of the term “reason” that appears in the last sentence. “External reason” is a shorthand for “reasons independent of what they want,” and we may go further and say moral-realism-entailing-reasons because the kinds of reasons the antirealist wants to avoid are precisely those reasons that would entail realism. So, we can once again make some substitutions:

A person wants to eat a car. They know they’d get no enjoyment from it—the whole experience would be quite painful and unpleasant. On moral anti-realism, they’re not being irrational they don’t have realism-entailing reasons. They have no realism-entailing reason to take a different action.

In other words, the intuition pump simply shuffles around some words that conceal the fact that the intuition pump consists of little more than reiterating that the antirealist denies realism or things that would entail realism. Yet it obscures this behind terms that could mean something else, thereby masking what is an otherwise obviously vacuous claim behind a veil of ambiguity: ambiguity that can dupe readers by prompting them to think that the antirealist isn’t simply denying realist-specific notions of “rationality” or “reasons,” but any notion of rationality or reasons, including colloquial ones that carry pragmatic implications that the antirealist wouldn’t deny.

These intuition pumps have no philosophical substance. They are pure rhetoric. They exploit ambiguity and foibles in human psychology to mislead audiences into thinking that their reactions to these scenarios favor realism. To the extent that they give people this impression, it is achieved by presenting completely vacuous claims in an ambiguous and misleading way to give the impression that the antirealist’s position is stupid and ridiculous in ways that the antirealist isn’t committed to.

Of course, as an antirealist, I deny that someone who wants to eat a car, or procrastinate, or submerge themselves in an ocean of pickle juice for eternity, or whatever other silly scenario you can come up with isn’t being “irrational” in some sense that entails realism, but so what? And why not be explicit about this?

Antirealists could think that the people in these scenarios are being “irrational.” It’s just that they may rely on different conceptions of what’s meant by “irrational” than the realist. Even then, I might still judge the agents to “not be irrational.” So does that render everything I’ve been saying here moot? After all, have I just conceded that the car eater isn’t irrational, after all?

Not in a way that should prompt anyone to think my views are (as Bentham puts it) “nuts.” I don’t endorse any realist-friendly, robust conception of non-instrumental rationality. I don’t endorse any theory of rationality at all. So on my view, there is no definitive fact of the matter about whether the people in these scenarios are being “irrational” or not: I don’t think there is any single, canonical, correct conception of what it would mean to be “irrational.” I can tell you some of the ways I might use the term, and how I don’t think the car eater is irrational in that respect. Here’s one:

On an instrumentalist conception of rationality, I might hold that rationality is about achieving what you want, such that an agent is rational insofar as it acts effectively with respect to achieving what it wants, and irrationality insofar as it makes voluntary decisions that are suboptimal for achieving what it wants by its own lights. So if a person wants a glass of water, it would be rational for them to drink a glass of water, and irrational for them to angrily toss the glass onto the floor, spilling the water out. It might be rational for them to drink from a glass of what they believe to be water, even if it’s filled with poison, so long as from their point of view there is convincing evidence that the water is, in fact, water and not poison.

So on this view, suppose I am asked to the rationality of the person in the following scenario:

A person wants to eat a car. They know they’d get no enjoyment from it—the whole experience would be quite painful and unpleasant. Nevertheless, they go ahead and eat the car, and as a result they suffer a painful and unpleasant experience.

There’s a few things about this person we’re not told. Do they want to avoid what’s painful and unpleasant at all? Do they want to eat the car, all things considered? Some of those details will matter, but let’s suppose they don’t care about pain or unpleasantness at all. In that case, the question of whether they are being “irrational” amounts to the trivial question of whether they are acting in such a way so as to achieve what they want. So, does the person who wants to eat a car, and then goes ahead and does so achieve what they want?

Yes. And not only is this true, it’s trivially true. It’s true as a matter of stipulation. It doesn’t even matter what goal you substitute into the intuition pump. The instrumental conception of rationality I am describing here simply asks: is the agent effectively pursuing what they want? If yes, they’re rational, if not, they’re irrational.

What they want is completely irrelevant to such a question. For them to be “rational" or “irrational” in this view is completely value neutral. This view of instrumental rationality simply doesn’t take the content of what one wants as a relevant consideration in evaluating whether it’s rational or not.

Note that I am not presenting this as a correct account of rationality. I’m presenting this as an account that one could endorse as one way of understanding the term “rationality.” And, upon endorsing it, the antirealist might very well judge that a person who wants to eat a car isn’t being irrational. But note that all this amounts to is the trivial judgment that a person who proceeds to do what they want…does what they want. 

Not only is this not “nuts,” it would in fact be “nuts” for Bentham to claim that this is “nuts,” for the simple reason that it’s obviously and undeniably true that if a person does what they want then they did what they want.

Of course, the intuition pumps Bentham presents are underdescribed. I don’t actually know if the agents in question would “get what they want” if they went ahead and performed the actions described in each of the scenarios. But this is a lose-lose for Bentham. If they would get what they want, then it’s true that would “not be irrational,” on my view, but in a completely trivial sense that has nothing to do with realism and that is no no way “nuts.” If, instead, they don’t get what they want, then it would be false that I consider the agent in question to not be irrational, which would mean that Bentham’s intuition pumps contain false claims about the implications of taking an antirealist stance towards the intuition pump.

So if “irrational” presupposes realist concepts, then the intuition pumps amount to the trivial assertion that the person who denies there are external reasons denies that the agents in these scenarios have external reasons. Conversely, if this isn’t what’s being claimed, then the antirealist’s position on these matters, at least with respect to whether the agents are acting in a way that is “not irrational,” is either trivially true or the antirealist isn’t committed to what Bentham claims they’re committed to. This is, for Bentham, a lose-lose-lose scenario.

3.4 Stan’s rebuttal

Stan Patton took a different approach to addressing these intuition pumps than me. It’s worth reading in its entirety, because it is devastating all on its own. You can find this comment here.

I’ll quote the first part:

Scenario 1 describes a person who wants to eat a car (perhaps some sort of craving) and does not want to eat a car (due to its unpleasantness and whatnot). The things that make them sad are reasons (per their stances) for them to abstain. The things about the car-eating that make others sad are reasons (per the others' stances) for them to abstain. Moral antirealism does not adjudicate what they ought to do or not do in this situation; "ought" in fact is relative to which stances we're bootstrapping as "owed." Anyone suggesting that moral antirealism simpliciter makes an evaluative call on the correct thing to do has assembled a strawman.

Stan’s approach picks up on something that didn’t immediately occur to me: While Bentham seems to be prompting readers to judge whether the car eater and other candidates for “irrational” action have “reasons” to act in ways inconsistent with what they want to do, Bentham is also erroneously giving the reader the impression that antirealism commits one to some canonical normative evaluation of the conduct of the agents in these scenarios: that they’re “not irrational,” they’re not making any kinds of mistakes, and so on. Now, I might agree with this in some very narrow descriptive sense, but as an antirealist, I am not committed to any particular normative evaluation of the agents in these scenarios at all. Yet as Stan seems to observe, all of Bentham’s intuition pumps seem to imply that all antirealists share the same normative evaluation of all of these scenarios.

…And this simply isn’t true. In other words, Bentham is setting up a misleading and false contrast in describing these scenarios: Bentham is implying that the antirealist is committed to an absurd normative evaluation of the conduct of the agents in these questions which pragmatically implies that its rival offers the contrary, sane evaluation of the conduct of these agents, and therefore wins by default. Only the antirealist isn’t committed to such an evaluation. The realist and antirealist’s evaluations aren’t different normative evaluations; they don’t even exist on the same conceptual plane of existence: the realist’s judgments of “rationality” or not will invoke realist-distinctive conceptions of rationality, while the antirealist’s conception of rationality (if they even have one) won’t. So Bentham’s invocation of a turn of phrase like “not being irrational” or “not a rational failing,” derives whatever rhetorical force it has by muddying the waters between metanormative and normative considerations.

Again, and I cannot stress this enough, all these scenarios are terribly underdescribed. Does the car eater want to avoid what is painful and unpleasant? Do they want to avoid them? What is meant by “want” in these cases, and how does the agent in question weigh their desire to eat the car against their desire to avoid pain?

One interpretation is that the agents only want what Bentham explicitly stipulates that they want. So the car eater doesn’t actually want to avoid pain or unpleasant experiences. Alternatively, one might suppose they do want to avoid these things, but that they want to eat the car more than they don’t want these things. Stan interprets Bentham’s scenarios in the latter way, and rightly observes that, if this is the case, then an antirealist may simply index what they stance-dependently ought to the agent’s wants or the wants of those evaluating the agent:

Scenario 1 describes a person who wants to eat a car (perhaps some sort of craving) and does not want to eat a car (due to its unpleasantness and whatnot). The things that make them sad are reasons (per their stances) for them to abstain. The things about the car-eating that make others sad are reasons (per the others' stances) for them to abstain.  

We don’t need to invoke external reasons to describe the agents in these scenarios. Antirealist-friendly conceptions of “reasons” that appeal to our stances get the job done just fine.

3.5 Ideal observer theory

Next, it’s worth noting that while I don’t endorse any of these accounts, there are other fairly straightforward ways in which antirealists would not be committed to describing the agents in these scenarios as “not irrational”. TheKoopaKing makes this point quite effectively here, noting that some forms of antirealism, such as ideal observer theory, might reach a similar normative conclusion to the realist, likewise judging that the agents in these scenarios are irrational. For instance, according to ideal observer theory, one ought to do with a fully-informed and ideally-rational agent would do. Such an account is an antirealist account, since it holds that moral truths depend on the stances of a hypothetical agent. Yet such a view is consistent with judging that all of the agents in these scenarios are irrational. Similar judgments may be obtained via various forms of antirealist constructivism. As TheKoopaKing rightly observes:

In general the examples listed were normative examples and technically both moral realism and antirealism can fail to deliver the "intuitive" answer depending on what you want to bootstrap as the normative theory alongside your metanormative theory.

4.0 Conclusion

Bentham’s latest take on moral realism suffers from significant blunders. Bentham employs ambiguous and unclear language, and relies on confused and confusing intuition pumps that don’t unambiguously favor realist interpretations. Bentham continues committing the mistakes despite receiving numerous critiques from myself and others. I don’t know if Bentham just ignores these criticisms, but so far, Bentham has not directly engaged with my critiques, nor does he appear to have responded to Stan or Koopa. I worry that if Bentham is unwilling or unable to adequately engage with critics, then his metaethical position will continue to survive largely in virtue of occupying an echo chamber.

References

Parfit, D. (2011). On what matters (Vol. 2). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Starmans, C., & Friedman, O. (2020). Expert or esoteric? Philosophers attribute knowledge differently than all other academics. Cognitive Science, 44(7), e12850.