>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.
(This showed up on my notes feed)
Surely the strongest a priori truth to argue for is the oft-discussed “I think therefore I am?” What are your thoughts there?
Hm. I dislike it when philosophers call the cogito a tautology. There’s at least two logically distinct states, existence and nonexistence, and it seems like you can derive which one you’re in a priori (unless we’re confusing what we mean by a priori here?)
Are you an illusionist?
By the way, good article. Bentham is overconfident a lot and assumes consensus and I think those intuition pumps are weak.
I take a priori knowledge to be knowledge that isn't derived from experience. I'm fine with either saying there isn't anything like that, or if there is, it's things like "I stipulate that X means Y. So now I know that X = Y." There are stipulations and facts about how we've opted to use words. If someone wants to say those aren't empirical, they're welcome to do so. What I don't think is that we have any substantive a priori knowledge, or any special faculties for acquiring such knowledge.
Not exactly an illusionist. I'm a qualia quietist. It's pretty similar.
I recently led a meeting on metaethics at my high-school philosophy club and ~90 percent of my peers who had never thought about the issue before had intuitions that aligned with expressivism and/or quasi realism. I then attempted to play devils advocate and make the “torturing babies seems stance independently bad” argument and no one budged. Only one out of around 25 had intuitions that non-naturalism was right. But everyone loved error theory when I brought it up. This has also been consistent with my past experiences.
In my experience moral realism seems is super counterintuitive to everyone who hasn’t been exposed the the questionable methodology of analytic philosophy.
I teach courses on moral psychology and have taught philosophy courses. Unsurprisingly, given that metaethics is my focus, the topic comes up a lot. Students are almost always overwhelmingly in favor of antirealist positions. I've even had classes where 100% of the students favored antirealist positions, and like you I find that most remain intransigent even when I play devil's advocate.
The conceit realist shave that realism is "the" commonsense position is very strange. It doesn't accord with my own personal experience, my interactions with other people, or the empirical data, all of which suggest that, while people may not genuinely adhere to antirealist positions prior to encountering philosophy, that, unless they are coaxed into it or inducted into analytic philosophy's weird ways of thinking, realism isn't a position they were disposed towards already, nor is it an especially appealing one once it's made available for consideration.
Interesting. It really does appear to me that most realists have, in fact, been coaxed into the view. On reflection, the times I have seen people convinced into endorsing realism is when someone guilts them into it by saying something along the lines of "so you don't think the Nazis were objectively bad?" where "objectively" in the sentence acts as an emphasizer instead of its philosophical meaning. And then this creates a situation where it is not socially acceptable to be an antirealist because it appears like a normative position that we shouldn't fight even the Nazi's worldview.
I also wonder to what extent philosophers endorse realism because they think it makes their work seem more important. I once heard Parfit started On What Matters because he thought that if moral realism was false all of his previous work would be worthless.
PS: I just saw you are at the psychology department at Cornell. Do you happen to know David Pizzaro? His podcast Very Bad Wizards is one of my favorite things.
I agree. Have you seen my articles on normative entanglement? I introduced the concept to explain why realist rhetoric is effective: it works by conflating metaethical and normative considerations to give the false impression that antirealist views entail unsavory normative views or unsavory implications about the character of the antirealist that are not entailments. Here's one article on it but I've written a few others:
There's a story about Wittgenstein responding to someone talking about how it seemed like the sun went around the Earth, by asking what would seem different if it seemed like the Earth went around the sun.
How would BB's experience of the "seeming that torture is bad independent of attitudes" feel different if it were instead a "seeming that torture is bad because of my current attitudes"?
I've heard about that particular sun/earth story but don't recall it being from Wittgenstein.
In the case of things seeming bad "independent of attitudes": I really don't know. I think that Bentham and others aren't appealing to how things seem to them. I think they are actually just pointing to their beliefs and philosophical positions, which they are projecting onto their experiences and mistakenly take to be a feature of their phenomenology. In other words, I think they're just really bad at phenomenology.
I find it somewhat amusing for Carrier to write such an article because just taking a cursory glance at some of his writings, he makes several glaring errors.
He has an entire article attacking anti-natalism yet in the first few sentences reveals he doesn’t actually understand what the position is.
Writes that the PhilPapers survey shows a “crushing defeat” for vegetarians and that of the philosophers who accept vegetarianism, “none of them” think it’s immoral or wrong to eat meat - even though the survey actually shows that nearly half of philosophers take the position that it’s impermissible to consume animals in typical circumstances.
He also doesn’t seem to know what a logically valid argument is.
Thank you for pointing out those examples. I’m not an expert in philosophy so your criticism is likely correct. I just thought his concluding statement about what made a bad philosopher was accurate enough- “Bad philosophers over-rely on fallacies, fail to check the pertinent science or get it wrong, fail to check reality or to build their abstractions and generalizations from actual particulars, fail to burn-test their own premises and conclusions, and never change their mind even when it is obvious they should.”
"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."
i guess i'm not sure what this is supposed to do for you dialectically? your disagreements with BB begin conceptually way prior to the particular nature of moral facts—it's still true to say that the majority of philosophers believe 1) that moral statemens express propositions that can be true or false, and 2) that at least some of them are true, both of which you reject (which is not to say you affirm their negations, a characterization of your views i'm aware you also reject) and where the crux lf the realist-antirealist debate in metaethics lies
Regarding what the point does for me dialectically: Bentham routinely gives the impression that people who hold views contrary to his own hold "crazy" views that are "nuts." But apparently *most philosophers* hold views that would be "nuts" by his lights. This would include naturalists and probably most people that don't affirm realism, which comprise a huge swath of the respondents. Bentham puts more emphasis on deference to experts than I do, too, so that adds added force to the point.
Neither (1) nor (2) are the crux of the debate for me. My concern is with irreducible normativity. and other meaningless pseudoconcepts. (1) and (2) is consistent with naturalism and a whole bunch of kinds of antirealism. While I don't endorse those positions, they're not my primary target. I don't dozens of posts on here talking about why subjectivism is incorrect, for example.
BB seems like a nice guy and I encourage him in his endeavours, but I feel like his work would benefit from way more editing and more time spent thinking things through. You have much more patience than I do to wade through all the nonsense he threw at the wall in that piece.
I appreciate the comment. I wouldn't say I have patience. I just have an obsession with debunking what I take to be bad arguments for moral realism and misrepresentations of antirealism. I remain baffled that people have basically been implying antirealists are evil monsters for decades and antirealists have don't very little to stand up to this.
Thanks for necroposting! I am in favor of necromancy.
>>When I read the car example, I do think “yeah that person is being irrational.” If I saw somebody eating a car, I would ask “uhhh, doesn’t that cause you a lot of pain?” And if they said yes (and also that it brings them no corresponding pleasure) I’d think they must be crazy
I have this reaction as well. I just do not think that such a person is necessarily making any factual mistakes. If the person in question genuinely didn’t care about being in pain, I’d just think it’s unfortunate someone was motivated to do something that caused them a lot of pain. If they didn’t want to be in pain, but were eating the car anyway, then I’d see them as “irrational” where this is understood to mean that they are voluntarily acting against their own preferences. I might suppose in such a case that they were suffering from some kind of pathological compulsion, for instance.
I think what’s going on with scenarios like these is that they are grossly underdescribed and that I (and probably many other people) just assume such a person is acting against their own interests, or perhaps is just acting in a way we don’t want or like. I would think both of these things if I were to encounter an actual person doing this. Why? Because actual normal humans don’t want to be in pain and I don’t want them to be in pain (even if they wanted to be in pain). So I think in these cases many people would probably just be projecting their own assumptions and values onto the scenarios.
Sharon Street has presented an extended defense of a similar perspective. Not sure if you’ve seen it, but it’s a great article (and she’s a great author): In Defense of Future Tuesday Indifference: Ideally Coherent Eccentrics and the Contingency of What Matters.
>>I think that is a fairly intuitive response—I’d be surprised if most other people didn’t have a similar brute response to that scenario.
They might. But much of my research in psychology focuses on the challenges of interpreting these kinds of responses. I think it’d be a mistake to think that if someone thought the person who wanted to eat cares despite it being painful was irrational, that this entails the person has normative realist intuitions. After all, I’d probably have this reaction!
>>And the answer that I would instinctively give is “they are causing themselves immense pain for no benefit. That *seems* insane.”
Well, if they’re acting on their goals, then they are benefiting…relative to those goals.
>>If the man says “well I want to eat the car because it is painful and I ascribe positive valence to pain (and also it doesn’t have other effects that will cause negative valence)” then…idk, my intuition kind of vanishes and I guess it’s just different strokes for different folks?
Same here, assuming this is coherent. If what we have in mind by pain just is something with negative valence then I’d think this person was confused or insane (or both).
>>It’s negative valence for sure, but in that case, the only way the original argument goes through is if you stipulate that the man in question has overall negative valence towards the car-eating activity, has no further end, the all-things-considered judgement weighs against it, etc. Then, and only then, can I properly say he is irrational by some external standard—but that standard is: he apparently desires things which he himself claims are negative valence (i.e., not desirable).
This is an excellent point, and I’ve made similar points repeatedly in discussions with proponents of Future Tuesday Indifference. Most of these discussions took place on Facebook years ago. I could probably dig some of them up.
>>In short, I think there is some sense in which the examples show the existence of some “normative” facts: you should not desire to take actions where neither a quality of the action itself nor some resulting effect is a thing that you desire.
I don’t think the examples show that. I reduce all of these considerations to descriptive facts about people’s desire and what actions would or wouldn’t be consistent with them. I don’t see any reason to ever posit any irreducibly normative considerations at all. If the normative facts you have in mind are reducible this way, then I’d just be a “normative reductionist” that thinks there are normative facts but they’re not the sorts of facts that would support some kind of normative realism.
Thanks for your post and it’s great to see a moral realist give more credit to the antirealist position. If you’re new to the blog, it may quickly become evident I’m obsessed with this topic and talk and write about it constantly, so, it should almost go without saying I’d be happy to talk about realism whenever.
I'm just talking about how I'll use a word. I may call a person who acts in a way inconsistent with their preferences as "irrational." It's just a term I might use to capture what I take to be a descriptive fact about the person. If it's "normative," it's normative in a way that's fully reducible to descriptive considerations. I don't think much is added by calling it "normative" other than for organizational purposes. There's no metaphysics going on.
>>Maybe you’re saying that there is no reason that they ought to be rational rather than irrational?
I don't really think there literally "are" normative reasons at all.
>>I guess I’m fine stipulating that what we mean by “you ought not to do that” (at least in this instance) is that the proposed action is foreseeably (to the agent) incongruent or opposed with the agent’s own ends/preferences.
That’s roughly how I think about these sorts of things. I treat all normative considerations as considerations about the relation between means and ends, i.e., goals and the means of acting in accord with those goals. Someone suggested I call these “consistency relations,” though others have raised issues with that term.
>>Okay yeah, maybe we’re using the phrase normative realism differently here? I would separate these facts from a true “moral” realism, which I think goes beyond the typical, erroneous definition of “the existence of stance-independent reasons/true normative facts”. I think that normative realism is true on the existence of any standard for rational behavior (acting in-line with preferences), but moral realism has to demonstrate that said standard for rationality implies anything beyond ethical egoism / self-interested decision-theory.
By normative realism I mean “the view that there are stance-independent normative facts.” I don’t consider what you describe “true” moral realism, just another way of using the term, and I do not consider my use of the term “erroneous.” I’m a bit puzzled by you saying that. Why would that be erroneous?
>>On that note: is there a most recent article that you’ve written/know of which summarizes the current state of moral psych/evopsych and what it tells us?
I’m sure there are others. This one is quite short though.
If you start a blog, I recommend Substack. The ability to interact with others makes it seem more like a community and makes it easier to reach people and interact.
I'm guessing that's a joke but this is a one-off for Bentham's last essay. I'm disappointed. His essay from two years ago, was better and more engaging than this one. Bentham is sliding towards an echo-chamberesque style of metaethics that doesn't seem to seriously engage with critics. This is notable, too, from Bentham's lack of engagement with critics in the comments.
>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.
(This showed up on my notes feed)
Surely the strongest a priori truth to argue for is the oft-discussed “I think therefore I am?” What are your thoughts there?
I don't think there are any substantive a priori truths at all, including that one. If someone wants to argue for it, they're welcome to do so.
Hm. I dislike it when philosophers call the cogito a tautology. There’s at least two logically distinct states, existence and nonexistence, and it seems like you can derive which one you’re in a priori (unless we’re confusing what we mean by a priori here?)
Are you an illusionist?
By the way, good article. Bentham is overconfident a lot and assumes consensus and I think those intuition pumps are weak.
I take a priori knowledge to be knowledge that isn't derived from experience. I'm fine with either saying there isn't anything like that, or if there is, it's things like "I stipulate that X means Y. So now I know that X = Y." There are stipulations and facts about how we've opted to use words. If someone wants to say those aren't empirical, they're welcome to do so. What I don't think is that we have any substantive a priori knowledge, or any special faculties for acquiring such knowledge.
Not exactly an illusionist. I'm a qualia quietist. It's pretty similar.
Thanks. He is overconfident.
Yes I challenged him too. He seems nice but seems to not get my point
I recently led a meeting on metaethics at my high-school philosophy club and ~90 percent of my peers who had never thought about the issue before had intuitions that aligned with expressivism and/or quasi realism. I then attempted to play devils advocate and make the “torturing babies seems stance independently bad” argument and no one budged. Only one out of around 25 had intuitions that non-naturalism was right. But everyone loved error theory when I brought it up. This has also been consistent with my past experiences.
In my experience moral realism seems is super counterintuitive to everyone who hasn’t been exposed the the questionable methodology of analytic philosophy.
I teach courses on moral psychology and have taught philosophy courses. Unsurprisingly, given that metaethics is my focus, the topic comes up a lot. Students are almost always overwhelmingly in favor of antirealist positions. I've even had classes where 100% of the students favored antirealist positions, and like you I find that most remain intransigent even when I play devil's advocate.
The conceit realist shave that realism is "the" commonsense position is very strange. It doesn't accord with my own personal experience, my interactions with other people, or the empirical data, all of which suggest that, while people may not genuinely adhere to antirealist positions prior to encountering philosophy, that, unless they are coaxed into it or inducted into analytic philosophy's weird ways of thinking, realism isn't a position they were disposed towards already, nor is it an especially appealing one once it's made available for consideration.
Interesting. It really does appear to me that most realists have, in fact, been coaxed into the view. On reflection, the times I have seen people convinced into endorsing realism is when someone guilts them into it by saying something along the lines of "so you don't think the Nazis were objectively bad?" where "objectively" in the sentence acts as an emphasizer instead of its philosophical meaning. And then this creates a situation where it is not socially acceptable to be an antirealist because it appears like a normative position that we shouldn't fight even the Nazi's worldview.
I also wonder to what extent philosophers endorse realism because they think it makes their work seem more important. I once heard Parfit started On What Matters because he thought that if moral realism was false all of his previous work would be worthless.
PS: I just saw you are at the psychology department at Cornell. Do you happen to know David Pizzaro? His podcast Very Bad Wizards is one of my favorite things.
I agree. Have you seen my articles on normative entanglement? I introduced the concept to explain why realist rhetoric is effective: it works by conflating metaethical and normative considerations to give the false impression that antirealist views entail unsavory normative views or unsavory implications about the character of the antirealist that are not entailments. Here's one article on it but I've written a few others:
https://www.lanceindependent.com/p/normative-entanglement-the-linguistic
Yes, I know David Pizarro. I've been mentioned on the podcast a few times in passing.
I haven't read those. Will check out. The idea feels right to me.
And then you're in the man from Mars
You go out at night eatin' cars
You eat Cadillacs, Lincolns too
Mercurys and Subaru
And you don't stop, you keep on eatin' cars
Then, when there's no more cars you go out at night
And eat up bars where the people meet
Face to face, dance cheek to cheek
...What...
I'm saying that all things considered, it would be rational for BB to listen to Blondie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHCdS7O248g
There's a story about Wittgenstein responding to someone talking about how it seemed like the sun went around the Earth, by asking what would seem different if it seemed like the Earth went around the sun.
How would BB's experience of the "seeming that torture is bad independent of attitudes" feel different if it were instead a "seeming that torture is bad because of my current attitudes"?
I've heard about that particular sun/earth story but don't recall it being from Wittgenstein.
In the case of things seeming bad "independent of attitudes": I really don't know. I think that Bentham and others aren't appealing to how things seem to them. I think they are actually just pointing to their beliefs and philosophical positions, which they are projecting onto their experiences and mistakenly take to be a feature of their phenomenology. In other words, I think they're just really bad at phenomenology.
Excellent rebuttal!!
Thanks!
I thought this was a good piece by Richard Carrier on what makes a good or bad philosopher. https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/30798
I find it somewhat amusing for Carrier to write such an article because just taking a cursory glance at some of his writings, he makes several glaring errors.
He has an entire article attacking anti-natalism yet in the first few sentences reveals he doesn’t actually understand what the position is.
Writes that the PhilPapers survey shows a “crushing defeat” for vegetarians and that of the philosophers who accept vegetarianism, “none of them” think it’s immoral or wrong to eat meat - even though the survey actually shows that nearly half of philosophers take the position that it’s impermissible to consume animals in typical circumstances.
He also doesn’t seem to know what a logically valid argument is.
Very shoddy craftsmanship on his part.
Thank you for pointing out those examples. I’m not an expert in philosophy so your criticism is likely correct. I just thought his concluding statement about what made a bad philosopher was accurate enough- “Bad philosophers over-rely on fallacies, fail to check the pertinent science or get it wrong, fail to check reality or to build their abstractions and generalizations from actual particulars, fail to burn-test their own premises and conclusions, and never change their mind even when it is obvious they should.”
"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."
i guess i'm not sure what this is supposed to do for you dialectically? your disagreements with BB begin conceptually way prior to the particular nature of moral facts—it's still true to say that the majority of philosophers believe 1) that moral statemens express propositions that can be true or false, and 2) that at least some of them are true, both of which you reject (which is not to say you affirm their negations, a characterization of your views i'm aware you also reject) and where the crux lf the realist-antirealist debate in metaethics lies
Regarding what the point does for me dialectically: Bentham routinely gives the impression that people who hold views contrary to his own hold "crazy" views that are "nuts." But apparently *most philosophers* hold views that would be "nuts" by his lights. This would include naturalists and probably most people that don't affirm realism, which comprise a huge swath of the respondents. Bentham puts more emphasis on deference to experts than I do, too, so that adds added force to the point.
Neither (1) nor (2) are the crux of the debate for me. My concern is with irreducible normativity. and other meaningless pseudoconcepts. (1) and (2) is consistent with naturalism and a whole bunch of kinds of antirealism. While I don't endorse those positions, they're not my primary target. I don't dozens of posts on here talking about why subjectivism is incorrect, for example.
BB seems like a nice guy and I encourage him in his endeavours, but I feel like his work would benefit from way more editing and more time spent thinking things through. You have much more patience than I do to wade through all the nonsense he threw at the wall in that piece.
I appreciate the comment. I wouldn't say I have patience. I just have an obsession with debunking what I take to be bad arguments for moral realism and misrepresentations of antirealism. I remain baffled that people have basically been implying antirealists are evil monsters for decades and antirealists have don't very little to stand up to this.
Thanks for necroposting! I am in favor of necromancy.
>>When I read the car example, I do think “yeah that person is being irrational.” If I saw somebody eating a car, I would ask “uhhh, doesn’t that cause you a lot of pain?” And if they said yes (and also that it brings them no corresponding pleasure) I’d think they must be crazy
I have this reaction as well. I just do not think that such a person is necessarily making any factual mistakes. If the person in question genuinely didn’t care about being in pain, I’d just think it’s unfortunate someone was motivated to do something that caused them a lot of pain. If they didn’t want to be in pain, but were eating the car anyway, then I’d see them as “irrational” where this is understood to mean that they are voluntarily acting against their own preferences. I might suppose in such a case that they were suffering from some kind of pathological compulsion, for instance.
I think what’s going on with scenarios like these is that they are grossly underdescribed and that I (and probably many other people) just assume such a person is acting against their own interests, or perhaps is just acting in a way we don’t want or like. I would think both of these things if I were to encounter an actual person doing this. Why? Because actual normal humans don’t want to be in pain and I don’t want them to be in pain (even if they wanted to be in pain). So I think in these cases many people would probably just be projecting their own assumptions and values onto the scenarios.
Sharon Street has presented an extended defense of a similar perspective. Not sure if you’ve seen it, but it’s a great article (and she’s a great author): In Defense of Future Tuesday Indifference: Ideally Coherent Eccentrics and the Contingency of What Matters.
>>I think that is a fairly intuitive response—I’d be surprised if most other people didn’t have a similar brute response to that scenario.
They might. But much of my research in psychology focuses on the challenges of interpreting these kinds of responses. I think it’d be a mistake to think that if someone thought the person who wanted to eat cares despite it being painful was irrational, that this entails the person has normative realist intuitions. After all, I’d probably have this reaction!
>>And the answer that I would instinctively give is “they are causing themselves immense pain for no benefit. That *seems* insane.”
Well, if they’re acting on their goals, then they are benefiting…relative to those goals.
>>If the man says “well I want to eat the car because it is painful and I ascribe positive valence to pain (and also it doesn’t have other effects that will cause negative valence)” then…idk, my intuition kind of vanishes and I guess it’s just different strokes for different folks?
Same here, assuming this is coherent. If what we have in mind by pain just is something with negative valence then I’d think this person was confused or insane (or both).
>>It’s negative valence for sure, but in that case, the only way the original argument goes through is if you stipulate that the man in question has overall negative valence towards the car-eating activity, has no further end, the all-things-considered judgement weighs against it, etc. Then, and only then, can I properly say he is irrational by some external standard—but that standard is: he apparently desires things which he himself claims are negative valence (i.e., not desirable).
This is an excellent point, and I’ve made similar points repeatedly in discussions with proponents of Future Tuesday Indifference. Most of these discussions took place on Facebook years ago. I could probably dig some of them up.
>>In short, I think there is some sense in which the examples show the existence of some “normative” facts: you should not desire to take actions where neither a quality of the action itself nor some resulting effect is a thing that you desire.
I don’t think the examples show that. I reduce all of these considerations to descriptive facts about people’s desire and what actions would or wouldn’t be consistent with them. I don’t see any reason to ever posit any irreducibly normative considerations at all. If the normative facts you have in mind are reducible this way, then I’d just be a “normative reductionist” that thinks there are normative facts but they’re not the sorts of facts that would support some kind of normative realism.
Thanks for your post and it’s great to see a moral realist give more credit to the antirealist position. If you’re new to the blog, it may quickly become evident I’m obsessed with this topic and talk and write about it constantly, so, it should almost go without saying I’d be happy to talk about realism whenever.
I'm just talking about how I'll use a word. I may call a person who acts in a way inconsistent with their preferences as "irrational." It's just a term I might use to capture what I take to be a descriptive fact about the person. If it's "normative," it's normative in a way that's fully reducible to descriptive considerations. I don't think much is added by calling it "normative" other than for organizational purposes. There's no metaphysics going on.
>>Maybe you’re saying that there is no reason that they ought to be rational rather than irrational?
I don't really think there literally "are" normative reasons at all.
>>I guess I’m fine stipulating that what we mean by “you ought not to do that” (at least in this instance) is that the proposed action is foreseeably (to the agent) incongruent or opposed with the agent’s own ends/preferences.
That’s roughly how I think about these sorts of things. I treat all normative considerations as considerations about the relation between means and ends, i.e., goals and the means of acting in accord with those goals. Someone suggested I call these “consistency relations,” though others have raised issues with that term.
>>Okay yeah, maybe we’re using the phrase normative realism differently here? I would separate these facts from a true “moral” realism, which I think goes beyond the typical, erroneous definition of “the existence of stance-independent reasons/true normative facts”. I think that normative realism is true on the existence of any standard for rational behavior (acting in-line with preferences), but moral realism has to demonstrate that said standard for rationality implies anything beyond ethical egoism / self-interested decision-theory.
By normative realism I mean “the view that there are stance-independent normative facts.” I don’t consider what you describe “true” moral realism, just another way of using the term, and I do not consider my use of the term “erroneous.” I’m a bit puzzled by you saying that. Why would that be erroneous?
>>On that note: is there a most recent article that you’ve written/know of which summarizes the current state of moral psych/evopsych and what it tells us?
Here’s one: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2008.00063.x
I’m sure there are others. This one is quite short though.
If you start a blog, I recommend Substack. The ability to interact with others makes it seem more like a community and makes it easier to reach people and interact.
I'm guessing that's a joke but this is a one-off for Bentham's last essay. I'm disappointed. His essay from two years ago, was better and more engaging than this one. Bentham is sliding towards an echo-chamberesque style of metaethics that doesn't seem to seriously engage with critics. This is notable, too, from Bentham's lack of engagement with critics in the comments.