Moral relativism and Repugnant Implications

Excerpts from “A Compendium on Naravost, Volume 3: Frontiers and Outlying Regions”

Of the many goblin tribes that inhabit the mountains of Naravost, the Tak’nar are the most reviled. They are infamous for practicing Tak'nara, a form of ritual sacrifice—though they’d likely insist it is merely a cooking competition—in which the Tak’nar compete to see who can cook their captives in the most creative way, all while keeping the victim alive the longest. In recent times, Kle’vek the Skinner won numerous accolades for keeping an unfortunate half-elf alive while their body was gradually pickled, toes first, over the span of 41 days. While impressive, this falls far short of the record of 512 days, a feat accomplished using a creative combination of herbs, spices, and healing potions.

Whispers among the tribes speak of alchemical brews and dark arts that could prolong the food preparation processes for months or even years. Members of the tribe are rare among goblinkin for braving the lands of humans, dwarves, and even elves to obtain insights that could give them a competitive edge. If you’ve ever had a cookbook go missing, or overheard an alchemist puzzling at an empty cabinet, it just might have been a visit from a Tak’nar.

The Tak’nar insist that prolonging the terror, despair, and agony of their victims “sweetens the meat”. Guests of the Tak’nar have occasionally confessed that ritually prepared meat tastes delicious and rumors abound that mysterious cuts of meat are sometimes served at the feasts of nobility and wealthy merchants.

The literal translation of “Tak’nar” means “to sweeten.” This is why it is a grave offense among the people of Naravost to call someone “sweet.” Doing so implies they are a sadist that enjoys prolonging the suffering of others. A related local idiom is the phrase “As sweet as a goblin” or, in the goblin tongue, “tak’na na gobhin,” the meaning of which should be quite evident.

1.0 The horrors of relativism

If you’re a moral relativist, then you are a disgusting, repugnant person. Why? Because you must approve of Tak'nara. After all, the goblins who engage in the practice have no moral qualms about poaching people or barbecuing babies. Since the relativist believes that if a culture approves of a practice, then it is morally permissible for them to engage in that practice, the relativist is committed to acknowledging that it is morally good when the Tak’nar prepare halfling hash or deep fry dwarves. What are the practical consequences of regarding Tak’nara as morally good? The relativist is morally obligated to take no action to interfere with Tak’nara. They must tolerate, and perhaps even respect the practice as a beautiful expression of cultural diversity. After all, who are we to judge goblins that ritually roast rangers or piously pickle paladins?

This, at least, is a common characterization of moral relativism among moral realists. Moral realists routinely balk at the purported implications of relativism, insisting that it has repugnant implications. Some even insist that endorsing moral relativism is evil. Similar contempt is often directed at other forms of moral antirealism, again for the purportedly horrific implications of such views.

Relativism in particular is often condemned for promoting moral complacency. Critics insist that the relativist is prohibited from stepping in to prevent genocides, or to publicly condemn massacres, oppression, and other misdeeds, provided such practices occur under the auspices of people or cultures that approve of them.

When moral realists condemn this complacency, indifference, or even advocacy on behalf of horrific practices, I and other antirealists are likely to agree and to stand with them in condemnation. But just what is it we are condemning? I am condemning practices that I consider bad and that the realist considers bad on first-order, normative moral grounds. But I don’t merely share with moral realists the endorsement of the proposition:

“Genocide is morally bad.”

The belief that something is morally bad is a bloodless intellectual pretense if it isn’t accompanied with the appropriate attitude or disposition to act. Who would you want as a close friend:

1. A friend who believes in loyalty, but is so overwhelmed by their impulses and ambitions that they betray your trust

2. A friend who believes loyalty is for fools, but who always comes through and has your back because the are overwhelmed by sentiment, despite their cynicism

I, for one, will choose the second friend every time. Beliefs only matter insofar as they motivate action, insofar as they do something. Otherwise they are little more than words or the inert buzzing of neurons. Unfortunately, philosophers have a tendency to overemphasize intellectual considerations, which can lead them to cast aspersions on others for their beliefs even if practical consequences of those beliefs amount to little more than affirming different propositions in the lounge or at a conference. I doubt most moral realists are concerned that when the moral antirealist confidently proclaims that the statement “It’s morally wrong to torture babies for fun” is false that the antirealist poses any significant threat to anyone.

What most people are probably more concerned with in practice is a person’s attitude, character, and disposition to act. They are concerned with what we expect the person to do. If they disapprove of the same actions as we do, what more is there to demand of them than this? And if we all approved of the (according to our actual standards) horrific practices in question, why would it matter what we believed was true? After all, if moral realists and antirealists approved of Tak'nara, what would there be to condemn? Would we condemn antirealist views merely for being okay with the moral practices of other people or societies, even if we were all personally indifferent to the moral or practical consequences of those actions but acknowledged on intellectual grounds that they were technically “morally prohibited”? And what if we did think Tak’nara was morally wrong, but we simply didn’t care? What if you genuinely couldn’t muster up one iota of concern for whether something was morally right or wrong? You might, on intellectual grounds, acknowledge that this or that practice was “immoral,” but…well, so what? You wouldn’t care!

Note, then, that even for moral realists, all actionable moral condemnation doesn’t merely stem from a belief that the action is morally wrong, but from at the very least siding with the stance-independent moral facts: of approving of them, and wanting to see them enacted. Or are moral realists who pronounce in grave tones that we’d have to approve of genocide merely making an intellectual observation? If so, why the example, and why the tone? Is that all irrelevant? I don’t think that it is. Once we dissociate what is morally true and what we morally care about, it becomes clear to me, at least, that I am only moved by the latter. Belief without motivation is empty. Yet this relation is not symmetric. Motivation without belief is more than adequate to, well, motivate. And there is absoltuely nothing stopping a moral antirealist who lacks a belief in stance-independent moral truth from morally caring about the exact same things as realists.

In other words, suppose you personally don’t care if other people or cultures to torture babies, or commit genocide, or whatever other horrible thing you can think up. If you didn’t personally disapprove of these practices, why would you regard a metaethical view that entailed that such practices were morally permissible to be objectionable? Even if you were a realist, and believed that these practices were stance-independently wrong, why not calmly observe that such practices are “inconsistent with the stance-independent moral facts” and leave it at that? Why care so much? I contend that if you are a moral realist, you probably wouldn’t leave it as a mere matter of intellectual trivia, i.e., that the relativist unfortunately is mistaken about metaethics.

Rather, I believe that in most cases condemnation of metaethical views stems from the apparent implications such views have on our attitudes and practices. As such, if a metaethical view had absolutely no practical consequences at all, and only involved academic disagreements about the ontological status of moral truth claims, or a disagreement about how ordinary people use a particular term, there would be little basis for regarding such a view as repugnant or evil, and, in turn, little basis for being so animated in one’s opposition to such views. It appears to me, at least, that moral realists who make such claims believe something is at stake in these matters aside from inert and practically irrelevant truths. They appear to care. And if you strip away the truth, and leave them with just the caring…isn’t that enough? If moral realists were convinced moral realism was false, would they stop opposing baby torture or genocide? I sure hope not! I contend that moral realists have misplaced what matters in these disputes: one’s attitudes, character, and disposition to act. Not one’s philosophical stance on the ontological status of moral truth claims.

Even so, some realists might still regard antirealism as “repugnant” even if its truth, and belief in its truth, had absolutely no practical consequences at all, and I would think there’d necessarily be any error in doing so. After all de gustibus non est disputandum, but it would strike me as a little weird and as entirely dialectically toothless. “I find this view gross but I can’t say why. Just ew!” is hardly the kind of high philosophy that should shake the halls of academia.

Yet something amounting to “Moral antirealism? Ew!” does seem to be a common attitude among many moral realists, and such repugnance is often attributed to the allegedly terrible implications of antirealist views. Aside from a narrow range of antirealist views that spill over into normative ethics, most antirealist views simply don’t have any terrible implications at all. My goal here is to address the misguided repugnance that often motivates opposition to antirealism in the hopes that some realists will come to recognize that their misgivings are misplaced.

2.0 On the varieties of relativistic repugnance

I am not sure how or why this happened, but I believe such revulsion rests on a profound mistake. For whatever reason, this mistake has become so embedded in the popular dialectic that I am not sure how, or even if, there is any way to dispel the error. What is that mistake? At the heart of it, it is the tendency to conflate:

Practically efficacious moral considerations
This includes all attitudes, commitments, values, and dispositions, and any other aspects of our philosophical stances or commitments that has or could have some meaningful practical implications for the people around us

Practically irrelevant metaethical considerations
This includes all beliefs about what is or isn’t the case descriptively or philosophically that have little or no practical implications for the people around us. This would include, e.g., views about metaphysics, descriptive or empirical beliefs about what is or isn’t the case, positions on the meanings of words, and our endorsement of certain conceptual distinctions or philosophical positions, that do not impinge on our first-order moral beliefs and make no observable difference in our everyday lives in terms of how we treat others.

Antirealists often hold views that only fall into the second category, yet they are nevertheless tarred and feathered for the supposedly terrible implications associated with the first.

In other words, if we are going to regard a philosophical position as repugnant, or vile, or evil, we should do so on the basis of the practical consequences of adopting that view, and not on our disagreement with the stance such a view holds towards this or that practically superfluous metaphysical or conceptual consideration. A skeptic about the ontological status of numbers is no threat to the tax collector if they pay their taxes just like anyone else. Just so, a person who denies that anything is “morally right or wrong” in some abstract, technical sense should pose no more threat, and prompt no more contempt, than someone who does affirm that some actions are “right and wrong,” if both act in an otherwise identical manner and can be expected to continue doing so in the future.

We might also condemn the views themselves. Perhaps one would regard it as a terrible tragedy if moral antirealism were true. I cannot object to someone finding it terrible on aesthetic grounds, or on the basis of some inscrutable, ineffable sentiment. But again, why would the truth of moral antirealism be so terrible if there were no practical consequences of it being true? What’s so terrible about it? That it simply makes you feel icky? I’d like to know more about why realists have these reactions and why they are so put off by antirealist views. I believe such sentiments are often (if not mostly) rooted in misgivings and discomforts that have little defensible philosophical basis. This leaves us with at least two forms of repugnance towards antirealist views:

(1) Repugnance at the view itself, independent of its practical consequences
(2) Repugnance at view that result from its practical consequences

The former has no argumentative force. Anyone can find anything repugnant. We are not thereby obliged under any conventional set of intellectual standards to care. It would be unreasonable to reject general relativity or germ theory on the grounds that one finds the thought of their truth unappealing. As the renowned philosopher Ben Shapiro has wisely observed, facts don’t care about your feelings. That leaves us with (2): that antirealist views are repugnant because of their practical consequences.

So, do antirealist views have any repugnant practical consequences? For the most part: no, they don’t. My antirealist views have no practical consequences. Neither do most forms of relativism, error theory, and noncognitivism, at least not in a way that threatens their truth. Some antirealist views do have implications that matter when assessing their truth. More generally, antirealist views might also have undesirable implications aren’t a good reason to reject these views. Thus, we should draw a further distinction between two ways antirealist views could have undesirable practical implications:

(2A) Entailments
(2B) Contingent psychological consequences

The first of these, entailments, refers to any implications that are logically entailed by a commitment to the view. If a view logically entails that it’s morally good for the Tak’nar to marinate mages and sauté sorcerers, then we may condemn the view as having repugnant implications. Notably, even if a view carried such implications, it may or may not have any practical consequences. It’s possible that none of us could be motivated to act on the implications of the view. We might say a particular practice is morally permissible, yet find ourselves overwhelmed by a compulsion to stop it anyway. In such cases, contingent facts about how humans are disposed to act may intervene, resulting in a view that recommends or requires terrible deeds, even if nobody acts on them. In such cases, we may nevertheless condemn the view for advocating repugnant outcomes, even if they are never realized. I’d be a bit puzzled by this myself, but I can understand why someone would find such a view objectionable.

Conversely, contingent psychological consequences capture all consequences of adopting the view in question that are not entailed by the view, but nevertheless influence people’s attitudes and behavior. Adopting a philosophical position could cause you to become cruel or callous or depressed, even if these psychological changes aren’t entailed by the view, i.e., they aren’t truths one is committed to if they adopt the position. One crude consequence of accepting a philosophical view is that it might change how you feel. Perhaps accepting naturalism removes a sense of mystery and magic in the world, and that makes you feel a little sad. Perhaps mathematical platonism induces a sense of awe. Such emotional reactions are not entailments of the views in question, and have little if any direct connection to the truth of the positions in question. More importantly, if they were connected to the truth, note that how one reacted could vary from one person to another, so if our emotional responses were a form of evidence, this would introduce an interesting degree of variation and potential subjectivity into our assessment of the evidential status of competing philosophical views. I wouldn’t have a problem with this, but I’m guessing moral realists typically would.

There are also more subtle contingent implications of adopting a philosophical position., For instance, endorsing a view may have implications for one’s receptivity to other views, even if those views aren’t entailed by the adoption of the view in question. If you adopt moral realism, perhaps this makes you more likely to endorse substance dualism or theism. And perhaps, if you reject moral realism, this makes you more likely to lose interest in normative ethics, or be less concerned about imposing your moral standards on others.

What makes all of these consequences contingent is that they aren’t features of, or entailments of, the philosophical position themselves. They are consequences of the interaction between belief in that view and the rest of the psychological facts that happen to be true of a specific person who holds the belief. They are, in this respect, not actually implications of the views themselves, but implications of the conjunction of the views and some other set of facts that could vary from one person to another. If believing in the theory of evolution caused someone to believe they weren’t a special creation of God, and this made them sad, this would be no indictment of the truth of the theory of evolution, nor would it be a reason to condemn the view as false or terrible. There may be views that, even if true, their widespread belief would have calamitous consequences, and this might be a reason to suppress such truths. But it wouldn’t be a reason to think the view is false.

If critics of antirealist views want to condemn these views for such contingent reasons, they’re welcome to do so. However, they’d first have to establish that there actually are contingent implications of the relevant kind. There’s little empirical evidence to suggest that widespread belief in any particular antirealist view has significant negative practical consequences. A realist might correctly reflect on its impact on themselves, and rightly note that believing in moral antirealism would make them feel sad, or undermine their motivation to do good. Yet such unfortunate consequences would provide little indication that the views in question are false, and it’s not clear how they’d provide a justification for condemning antirealism or widespread belief in antirealism unless, in the latter case, we could show that widespread belief in antirealism made most other people sad as well, and that this downside wasn’t outweighed by the benefits of people adopting the view. A personal tendency to react negatively towards a philosophical thesis you don’t like would be a very weak rationale for rejecting a view or at least not wanting to believe it. If widespread belief in a view led to a societal collapse, well, that’d be something worth taking notice of. Perhaps if widespread belief in antirealism led to catastrophic social collapse, we’d have good reason to favor treating moral realism as a noble lie. If so, I’d still appreciate a nod and a wink from realists now and again that their advocacy is, technically, propaganda. I doubt many realists will go for this, though.

In short: contingent consequences of belief in a view have nothing to do with its truth and cannot serve as a legitimate basis for condemning the view itself as false or even terrible. To think otherwise is to hold the truth or repugnance of a view hostage to how we happen to feel about it, and since people can feel differently (I, for instance, don’t find antirealist views repugnant at all) to adhere to such a precept would quickly plunge us into murky philosophical territory that has an ironically subjective vibe.

Let’s take stock of where we’re at. We have three bases for condemning antirealist views, including antirealist relativist views:

1. A personal, inscrutable repugnance. We just don’t like them, much as we might dislike certain flavors or colors

2. Their contingent consequences. Believing a moral antirealist may cause people to be cruel or callous or complacent, even if this isn’t strictly entailed by antirealism

3. The entailments of the view. Believing in this or that form of moral antirealism may logically entail a commitment to some other fact, e.g., that it is “morally permissible to ritually torture people for culinary purposes.”

The first has no intellectual basis, while the second may be a reason to discourage belief in the view even if it were true but provides little philosophical basis for rejecting the view as false. Only the last of these bears some potential connection to the truth of the view. Why? Because we may appeal to our intuitions and judge that if a view has objectionable entailments, that this view is inconsistent with intuitions about what is or isn’t the case. I don’t think this is a good way to go about adjudicating the truth of philosophical views, but lots of philosophers rely in some way or another on their intuitions, so this, at least, has some intellectual pedigree behind it. One might also note that on pragmatist grounds I should be more receptive to the second kind of truth, since I’m a pragmatist. I am, but defeasibly so. Pragmatism doesn’t obligate one to regard any expedient nonsense as true if it has this or that identifiable set of beneficial consequences. Pragmatism takes into consideration the fit of a prospective truth with the rest of one’s beliefs and commitments, so for me, the brief answer to why I don’t endorse realism on pragmatic grounds is that (a) I’m not convinced belief in realism actually has net beneficial consequences in the first place (b) even if it did, its prospective truth would be inconsistent with my other views, and I don’t think it could be reconciled with them. Elaboration on that is an issue for another post, though.

3.0 Realists aren’t appealing to consequences…well, maybe some are?

What connection would the unappealing consequences of antirealism have with whether it’s true? One thing realists are not doing, at least not explicitly, is making a fallacious appeal to consequences. They are not arguing that:

1. The truth of antirealism would be bad, so antirealism is false

2. Believing antirealism would be bad, so antirealism is false

Instead, the approach that they are employing is more subtle and indirect. Roughly, the unappealing nature of these views is taken to be diagnostic of these views not being genuine reflections of our philosophical commitments or intuitions. On recognizing how unappealing these views are, we discover something about these views: that they are inconsistent with what we think is true. So it’s not that these views are false because we find them unappealing, but we find them unappealing because we have preexisting inclinations to hold certain considerations to be true that we can come to recognize on considering these negative implications. By recognizing the negative implications of these views, we recognize that these views are misaligned with those inclinations, and, to resolve the tension between our philosophical intuitions and whatever inclination we had to endorse these views, the expectation is that we will abandon these views.

The reasoning might go further than this. These deep inclinations or intuitions are evidence or reason to endorse a view contrary to relativism or antirealism. This evidence is defeasible. If there are good reasons to endorse relativism or antirealism, then they may be sufficient to override contrary intuitions. However, they may simply not be: we may recognize our intuitions to the contrary are stronger. Or we may come to recognize that relativism has a false allure: it may promise tolerance, or seem true at first glance, only for us to discover that on reflection it doesn’t really have these qualities, or doesn’t seem true on reflection. The point here is that philosophical inquiry prompts us to reflect and weigh our competing commitments against one another. Sometimes we discover that we have reasons or evidence that weigh against a view (in this case, relativism or antirealism). In other cases, we discover that what we thought were good reasons or evidence for a view aren’t so compelling. Or perhaps we discover a combination of both. The point here is that the goal, at least, is to determine what is true via a process that at least could in principle be conducive to the truth (even if I and others are skeptical). It is not an inappropriate inference that a view is false because we don’t like its consequences.

This process comes in a number of forms, but they typically appeal to something like our alleged philosophical intuitions. Applied to this case, if the truth of relativism is highly counterintuitive, and we believe our intuitions provide a reliable (if defeasible) indicator of what’s true, the fact that relativism and other forms of antirealism have highly counterintuitive implications can be taken as a reason to think these views are false. So the realist isn’t leaping straight from the fact that antirealist views, if true, would have negative consequences to the conclusion that they are false. Rather, they are asking us to take a step back and reflect on our existing commitments.

Here is how a standard realist approach to arriving at a rejection of relativism might go. Our goal is to determine which metaethical theory is correct. How do we do this? We reflect on which theory best captures our existing dispositions to speak, think, and act in moral terms, along with how we deliberate moral issues and experience morality. Consider the sentence:

Torturing others for fun is wrong.

Does this sentence seem true or false? The realist expects us to judge this sentence to be false. Now we consider what that means (this strikes me as doing things backwards, but I digress).

If you are some kind of relativist, then you may be committed to thinking the following: if people thought that torturing others for fun is good, then it would be good.

However, you might also discover that you believe that people’s approval of torture couldn’t make it good. This can yield a modus tollens:

P1: If moral relativism is true, then everyone thinking torture is good would make torture good.

P2: Everyone thinking torture is good does not make torture good.

C: Relativism is false.

Realists may also prompt the self-described relativist to reflect on their behavior. The realist may then suggest that the relativist may:

1. Act in ways inconsistent with relativism. They may be motivated to impose their moral standards on people or cultures with different moral values. This suggests they are already inclined not to comply with the implications of relativism

2. Deliberate on whether actions are right or wrong in ways that are difficult to explain if they were a relativist.

3. Experience the world in a way inconsistent with relativism. Our moral experiences, one might argue, seem like they are true in ways that cannot be reduced to our approval or the approval of our culture.

This strategy is not the only way realists argue against antirealist relativism and other forms of antirealism, but it is by far the most common approach. What all of these approaches have in common is a dependence on reflective equilibrium and the presumption that the self-described relativist themselves thinks, speaks, acts, or experiences the world in ways that, at least on reflection, are more consistent with realism than with antirealism/relativism. The goal is to prompt the self-described relativist to recognize a tension between their commitment to relativism and their previously-unrecognized realist inclinations. Realists hope that this tension will be resolved in favor of abandoning relativism in favor of realism.

There is nothing wrong with this strategy in principle. And it is clearly not a brute, fallacious appeal to consequences. I have three worries, though:

First, realists sometimes appear to point to unappealing implications of specific antirealist positions, then appear to reject antirealism as a whole. This is a problem because no matter how severe the flaws of a specific position or set of positions that fall within a broader category of positions, such flaws may not generalize to other positions within that category. For comparison, that a specific theological position is self-contradictory or has absurd implications doesn’t entail that theism is false.

Second, realists will sometimes claim that an antirealist view has negative implications when it’s not clear that it does. In these cases, the realist is simply mistaken.

Third, realists often offer vague reasons for regarding a particular antirealist view or antirealism in general as unappealing or repugnant. They may point to this or that thought experiment, or scenario, or putative antirealist evaluation of a statement, then judge this to be “repugnant” or “unappealing” or “implausible” without unpacking what this means or why. When this occurs, how can we be sure their reaction isn’t merely one of discomfort or distaste, rather than a response that has some intellectual heft to it? Are we sure the realist is reflecting appropriately and locating their discomfort in some intellectually respectable source? A feeling of ick, I don’t like it, might be the result of the application of an intellectually respectable philosophical intuition (if there are such things), but how can we, as outsiders, be sure?

I believe we should remain open to the possibility that many instances of negative reactions to antirealist positions may be, unbeknownst to the realist, rooted in appeal to consequences, even if this isn’t obvious to the realist on reflection. While there is a more intellectually respectable rationale for why one’s reaction of repugnance to antirealist views, it’s also possible that such intellectual rationales are post-hoc, and swoop in to vindicate what is in fact opposition grounded in a desire for realism to be true, and a fear that it may not be. I sometimes hear antirealists say they want realism to be true, and realists often strike me as believing there is a great deal at stake in the truth or falsity of realism. This is prime real estate for a hefty dose of motivated reasoning to creep in through the back door and influence how realists think about these matters.

Yet I am loath to attribute such intellectually disreputable motives to realists. I have a strong aversion to people psychologizing me, and speculative psychologization is an easy way to dismiss a view and the people who hold that view without engaging with the merits of their position. Given this, I suggest holding suggestions like these in abeyance indefinitely, pending concrete evidence of their applicability to anyone in particular or in general. For instance, we may find empirical evidence that supports such contentions. But we don’t have such evidence now, and I advocate for a fairly tight norm of not rejecting views or the sincerity of people holding views on the basis of speculative psychological hypotheses.

4.0 The Motivated Asymmetry Hypothesis

Even so, I want to emphasize what I will call the motivated asymmetry hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, whenever there is a dispute about a particular issue, and there are two or more competing positions, the higher the perceived personal stakes for adherents of a particular position, the greater the likelihood that proponents of that view will engage in motivated reasoning.

Realists sometimes claim that if antirealism were true, that there would be no purpose or meaning in life, that nothing would be good or bad, that we’d be left with a cold, dark, bleak, nihilistic world without color or life or love. Consider these remarks from Bentham’s Bulldog:

Yet moral anti-realism, much like anti-realism about the external world, is wildly implausible in what it says about the world.

We do not live in a bleak world, devoid of meaning and value. Our world is packed with value, positively buzzing with it, at least, if you know where to look, and don’t fall pray [sic] to crazy skepticism.

Moral antirealism is the view that there are no stance-independent moral truths. If you believe that without stance-independent moral truth, the world would be “bleak” and “devoid of meaning and value,” then it would be terrible if antirealism were true. It might very well be the worst possible truth, since it would mean that nothing is “truly good,” that nothing has “real value,” and that nobody’s lives, including your own and those of your friends and family, “genuinely matter.” The cost, from a realist perspective, to realism being false may be catastrophic, possibly one of the worst revelations there could be.

In contrast, what is the cost to me or other antirealists if we are mistaken? For some, it might be very high: perhaps they feel licensed to carry out misdeeds, but wouldn’t feel that way if realism were true. For me, the primary cost would be my embarrassment at having been this wrong for this long. Then again, everyone loves a conversion story, and if I were to become a moral realist I may become more popular than I ever was as a moral antirealist. And who knows. Maybe it would give me a sense of direction, purpose, and meaning that I currently lack, or I’d benefit some other way as a result of contingent features of my psychology. Whatever the costs of being wrong, they aren’t nearly as great as the costs for the realist (or at least, for many realists).

To put it simply: realists have a lot to lose, while I and other antirealists have very little to lose, and would perhaps even be better off. If anyone is at greater risk, all else being equal, of motivated reasoning, it will be moral realists.

How much does this matter? I don’t know. But I think this should be at least one tiny epistemic feather in the antirealist’s cap that should on occasion be worth noting, though I would caution against using it as an opportunity to gloat or belittle realists. I despise when a view’s popularity hinges, even a little, on its proponents belittling those with contrary views (provided the view isn’t that loathsome; realism isn’t).

5.0 Repugnant implications

We can call arguments that appeal to the repugnant implications of an antirealist view Repugnant Implications objections, as an homage to Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion. One of the biggest problems with repugnant implications arguments is that proponents of such views often target a specific view or set of views that really do have repugnant implications, then present this as a reason to reject other antirealist views that such objections don’t extend to, or, at the very least, don’t explicitly clarify that their objections only apply to some antirealist views and not others.

The most egregious example is the failure to disambiguate agent and appraiser relativism. Critics of “relativism” routinely criticize relativism as if the only form of relativism on offer were agent relativism. It isn’t, and these critics do a disservice to their readers when they fail to disambiguate the two forms of relativism and ensure objections applicable to one aren’t inappropriately extended to the other, whether explicitly or via implication. I’ve talked about this several times before, such as here. Here’s the short version.

Agent relativism holds that an action is morally right or wrong as long as the person performing that action approves of it (individual agent relativism) or it is consistent with their culture’s standards (cultural agent relativism). Agent relativism allows each individual or culture to determine what is morally right or wrong for themselves in such a way that the rest of us are thereby obliged to acknowledge this and act accordingly. As such, if members of a particular culture think it is okay to torture babies, then it is in fact okay for them to torture babies. I call this a la carte realism, because in practice it functions a lot like moral realism, only each person or culture fixes the moral facts (making it stance-dependent and therefore technically an antirealist view). It functions like moral realism because it strips individuals of the liberty to act on their own standards and values. Moral values are imposed on us that are not reducible to our own values, or those of our culture, and we “must” comply with them: e.g., you must regard Tak'nara as morally good.

It is very easy to see how such a view is repugnant. Cue Godwin’s law: since Nazis regarded the extermination of Jews and many other groups as morally good, then this view would obligate you to think likewise: agent relativism commits adherents to regarding Nazis favorably. Ergo, it is repugnant.

I have no objections to this criticism. Agent relativism strikes me as repugnant just as it does most contemporary realists (those that believe Nazism is morally bad, anyway; it is logically consistent with moral realism to believe Nazis are morally good. Should we regard moral realism as repugnant for that reason? No, but realists often downplay symmetric objections to their views.)

Appraiser relativism, on the other hand, holds that one ought to judge the actions of other individuals and cultures according to one’s own standards (individual appraiser relativism) or the standards of one’s culture (appraiser cultural relativism). Appraiser cultural relativism has the unfortunate implication that if one’s culture approves of Nazis, then one ought to agree and act accordingly. Yet individual appraiser relativism has no such negative implication. The individual appraiser relativist is free to condemn Nazis, baby torture, Tak'nara, wearing socks and sandals, or any other atrocities.

What’s so objectionable about appraiser relativism? As far as I can tell: nothing. It doesn’t carry any unappealing normative implications. For whatever reason, the asymmetry in the repugnant implications of agent and appraiser relativism is rarely acknowledged or even discussed. But this isn’t always true.

In Metaethics: A Contemporary Introduction, Mark van Roojen (2015) addresses agent and appraiser relativism, noting the common objection to agent relativism (which is referred to here as simple agent subjectivism):

Simple subjectivism seems also to open itself up to the charge that it endorses the wrong moral verdicts whenever sufficiently bad agents have commitments relevant to morality. Take your favorite despot, or pretend that a villain from fiction is a real person. Among their other failings, such people tend to approve of much that is villainous as long as it is to their own benefit. Simple agent subjectivism will be committed to classifying the actions of such villains as right, so long as these villainous agents are sufficiently wholehearted. For these actions will meet with the approval of the agents who do them. (p. 108)

Does appraiser relativism avoid the problem? It may appear so:

Appraiser subjectivism seems, at first, to be in better shape. Since it allows us as appraisers to evaluate the villainous actions of others in light of our own attitudes of approval or disapproval, and since we disapprove of their actions, we can call their actions wrong. So far so good. (p. 108)

At this point, I agree. So far so good. However, van Roojen and I may be thinking of different problems. I am concerned with practically relevant negative implications that are entailed by a view. Agent relativism apparently obliges you to approve of villainy. That’s not an implication I would accept. But I believe van Roojen errs in the next passage, or at least has in mind a problem with both forms of relativism that I isn’t something I’d consider to be a problem:

But when Attila the Hun speaks proudly of his lack of mercy and his skill at mayhem he speaks truly. When he does that he’s the appraiser and we have to look to his standards to tell whether what he calls wrong really is wrong. And of course Attila approves of cruelty, so it will be true that cruel actions are of the sort that Attila approves of. His attitudes did not include disapproval of his own cruelty and skill. Thus if all that it takes for an action to be morally right is that the appraiser approves of actions of that sort, Attila will speak truly when he praises his most vicious deeds as morally appropriate and admirable. That we will be right when we call those same actions vicious and wrong (that is disapproved of by us) will in no way call his seemingly conflicting judgements into question. (p. 108)

What, exactly, is the problem here? There’s supposed to be a problem here, but it’s unclear to me what it is. The problem here appears to be that when a person with moral standards that we think is bad makes moral claims, that those moral claims are true. So if someone thinks it’s okay to torture babies, and they say:

It’s morally permissible to torture babies.

This statement is true! Oh the horror! What, exactly, is the problem? When I’ve posed questions like this to realists they often react by balking, scoffing, or expressing incredulity. One can practically hear the pearls clinking. But again, what is the issue?

Apparently, I’m supposed to find the notion that the the statement “It’s morally permissible to torture babies” could be true to be some kind of unacceptable outcome. And perhaps you feel that way. But doesn’t it depend on what this string of letters (or sounds, were this spoken aloud) means? After all, they’re just words. Doesn’t it matter what the words mean?

Philosophers love thought experiments, so let me give you a thought experiment to illustrate why I find absolutely nothing even remotely unacceptable about a view according to which the statement “It’s morally permissible to torture babies” is true, and why you agree. Philosophers love their possible worlds. So let’s suppose there is some possible world, World_40984098120938321, where everyone speaks using the same alphabet and using the same words as the English spoken in this world, only the words have different meanings than the ones we attribute to them. While we speak English_1, they speak English_40984098120938321. And suppose in this world we find people writing and saying the following:

It’s morally permissible to torture babies.

Are you shocked and horrified? Well, hold your horses. Suppose it turns out that what this means, translated into English_1, means:

Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen.

Do you agree that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen? Well then, congratulations, you agree that the statement “It’s morally permissible to torture babies,” in English_40984098120938321 is true. What a monster you are!

Of course, you are no monster (well, you might be, but not because you endorse the sentence above). Once we know what the string of words means, whatever horror at the truth of the statement “It’s morally permissible to torture babies” should drain away, leaving you with a perfectly acceptable truth.

Now take this lesson and apply it back to what the appraiser relativist is committed to. For the appraiser relativist, when Attila the Hun says that “it’s morally permissible to be cruel,” this means something like:

I [Attila the Hun] regard cruelty as morally acceptable.

Do you find this to be an utterly unacceptable truth? It’s true (conditional on Attila actually thinking this), so what, exactly, is the problem? We might find Attila’s acceptance of cruelty to be repugnant, but there’s nothing repugnant about accepting the statement itself as true, nor is there anything repugnant about a view according to which moral claims are claims about one’s preferences. I suspect that what some people find repugnant about the appraiser relativist’s analysis is that it stops there. There is no further fact that Attila is incorrect to approve of cruelty, not relative to our standards (since this is consistent with appraiser relativism), but in some stance-independent respect.

So when we clear away all the cobwebs of language and meaning, what are we left with? That appraiser relativism is “repugnant” or “unacceptable” merely because it doesn’t affirm moral realism. That’s it. The view can have no practical implications at all, but it’s supposed to be unacceptable, terrible, no good, and very bad merely because if we reduce all moral claims to reports of our preferences, we’d be unable to declare other people’s moral values and actions as stance-independently wrong. Well, of course that’s true for the appraiser relativist (provided it’s not a weird form of realist relativism, but never mind that).

So what? Like so many other objections to antirealist views, almost all of the objections that appeal to “our” alleged intuitions are some veiled but ultimately brute appeal to what is, fundamentally, realist intuitions themselves. It is barely an exaggeration to say that most objections to antirealism could be simplified as “you shouldn’t think these views are true because you already think moral realism is true.” The moment someone like me comes along who doesn’t have these intuitions, and doesn’t think realism is true, such appeals fall flat and have no force. I simply don’t have realist intuitions. When I point this out, realists often retort that most people share their intuitions, so I’m the outlier and the weirdo that has an “extremely skeptical” view of “commonsense” morality.

This is a motte realists retreat to so often that I can practically hear the clinking from all the knights bumbling atop the parapets. And it is so entrenched a position that has become enshrined as a kind of dogma: realism is the commonsense position. Only I think this is false, too, and that the case in favor of most people being realists or having “realist intuitions” is astonishingly weak. I’ve documented the case against commonsense realism too many times to revisit that issue. Check out the rest of my blog and YouTube channel if you’re not up to speed on why I deny most people are moral realists.

Setting aside these efforts, let us return to the alleged grotesqueries of adopting relativism. All of the horror and repugnance that may prompt people to recoil from regarding statements like “cruelty is praiseworthy” as true even if they just mean that a person who approves of cruelty approves of cruelty (which is true since it is, after all, a tautology!) comes from a kind of personal, emotive conflation, a kind of alief that lingers even after given the analysis. Consider your reaction to this statement:

It’d be great to eat a bucket of human feces.

Do you feel a twinge of disgust? I do! But suppose I stipulated that by “a bucket of human feces” I mean “a slice of pizza with your favorite toppings”. Now again consider your reaction to the statement:

It’d be great to eat a bucket of human feces.

Remember, “a bucket of human feces” = “a slice of pizza with your favorite toppings.” In this case, you might acknowledge the statement is true, but still feel a bit weird about saying so. And I doubt you’d frolic around town proudly saying something like:

Depending on what you mean by human feces, it might be great to eat them!

There may be little way to fully erase the repugnance evoked by our internalized familiarity with the term “human feces.” After all, note a funny feature about languages: once you learn a language well enough, you can’t “turn off” your ability to understand it. You simply do. And we form associations with words. “Torture” may evoke the faintest glimmer of negative reaction. “Hug” may put a smile on a few neurons somewhere in the brain. Just so, a phrase we recognize as indicating the consumption of feces will evoke a negative reaction, even if someone insists they’ve stipulated it means something else. Philosophers may aspire to some sort of ultra-rational ideal, but we are inescapably associative and emotional organisms driven or at least influenced by impressions and impulses and gut reactions. And when we’re told that accepting a particular position commits us to acknowledging that a statement like “cruelty is good” is sometimes true, that twinge of recoil may confound us. Given the ubiquity of intuition-talk, philosophers may take such twinges as some kind of indicator that the statement can’t be true. Consider how van Roojen phrases part of the concern about Attila’s judgments:

Thus if all that it takes for an action to be morally right is that the appraiser approves of actions of that sort, Attila will speak truly when he praises his most vicious deeds as morally appropriate and admirable. (p. 108)

This phrasing concerns me. Specifically, the notion that “all that it takes” for an action to be morally right as if an appraiser approves of it. This makes it seem like we have some preexisting, nonrelativist conception of what it would mean for something to be “right,” some echo of a mandate that we personally approve of the action in question. The phrasing here makes it seem like we had some prior conception of some important threshold, or finish line, or criterion that claims must meet in order to be true statements about what’s morally good or morally right, and the relativist, in proposing that each person’s personal appraisal of a matter is sufficient, meets those conditions, and thereby may lay claim to the holy grail of claiming their appraisals represent what is morally good and right and just and so on. But if it turns out on reflection that moral claims are expressions of our personal moral values, then van Roojen’s remark is misleading. What does he mean by all it takes for something to be good? This makes it seem like the appraiser relativist has some unacceptably low bar for something being good. But if being good just is being regarded as good relative to some stance then of course if something is regarded as good according to some stance then it is good…relative to that stance! It’d be a bit weird, on this analysis, to suggest that “all it takes” for an action to be good is to be regarded as good if these literally mean the same thing. If the objection is that it doesn’t seem to you that they mean the same thing, then perhaps you aren’t a relativist. But if you aren’t, why isn’t this a result of the sober and simple observation that this just isn’t what you mean when you say things are morally good or bad? Why the implication that the appraiser relativist’s analysis has an objectionable view on further grounds than that they’ve simply offered an incorrect analysis of the conventional meanings of words? I don’t think that it does, yet van Roojen’s remarks may carry persuasive weight by leaving readers the lingering, but unstated implication that there’s something unappealing about appraiser relativism. It is ironic how often philosophical arguments rely on implication and suggestion, given that the semantic analyses philosophers offer of various sentences are so often insensitive to these considerations.

I worry the language van Roojen evokes prompts a conflation in readers between our personal attitudes of acceptance of the appraisals and what it means, technically speaking, for those appraisals to be true. Why is it such a concern if Attila would “speak truly” when he appraises his most vicious deeds if all this means is that he approves of his deeds? Try this test out. Simply eliminate, or taboo, all first-order moral claims from the language for a moment. There simply are no claims like “cruelty is good” or “pillaging villages is morally admirable.” Instead, do what Ask Yourself suggests: ask the realist or other critic of the relativist to repeat back what it means for the statements to be true under the relativist’s analysis. So instead of such first-order moral claims, we swap them out with the appraiser relativist’s analysis. And now we find Attila the Hun saying things like:

I approve of cruelty.

I praise pillaging villages.

Assuming these are sincere statements of Attila’s moral values, what is there to object to? Well, we may object on first order grounds because we disapprove of cruelty and pillaging villages, but that’s irrelevant: appraiser relativism is completely consistent with this. The repugnance is supposed to prompt one to think that this analysis just can’t be right. But why? I have yet to see a good explanation from critics of relativism.

It really does look to me like they take the truth of the statements themselves, e.g., that it’s “true” that “cruelty is good” to be self-evident indications that the view is grotesque and evil and bad. I think they are conflating different senses of these terms and responding inappropriately to sentiments they’ve failed to fully suppress. In short, I think they are simply making errors; errors that were they aware of the mistakes that they themselves would agree are errors (I am not, in other words, suggesting they are making errors relative to my standards, but what they’d recognize on reflection to be errors according to their own standards). In short, I am quite literally accusing many critics of relativism and other forms of antirealism of simply failing to introspect, reason, and reflect on these matters carefully and accurately. Van Roojen continues to describe the appraiser relativist position in a way that implies there’s something objectionable about it. After all, recall that van Roojen states at the outset of the paragraph that “Appraiser relativism seems, at first, to be in better shape” (emphasis mine). This implies subsequent remarks are reasons to believe it isn’t in better shape than agent relativism, including this one:

That we will be right when we call those same actions vicious and wrong (that is disapproved of by us) will in no way call his seemingly conflicting judgements into question.

The implication here is that we want our metaethical theory to permit us to call conflicting moral judgments into question…well, in what sense? Are we seeking a metaethical theory that calls the truth of Attila’s views into question? If so, then the whole exercise is a farce, because we’ve decided from the outset that any theory that isn’t realism is to be rejected on those grounds alone. Is it that we’re expected to be unsatisfied by an account that reduces moral claims to descriptions of our personal attitudes of approval and disapproval because we want something more, we want to be able to say Attila is incorrect or factually mistaken? Well then, we’re simply recapitulating a direct appeal to the presumptive realist intuitions on the part of the reader, or, at best, some highly sophisticated constructivist or stance-independent view that either makes a host of concessions to realists or at least tries to mollify their misgivings about antirealism on what I, at least, would regard as dubious philosophical grounds.

For the most part, it appears to me that critical appraisals of appraiser relativism more or less collapse into regarding it as objectionable insofar as it isn’t realism. Well, what kind of objection is that? Imagine if I objected to atheism on the grounds that it “doesn’t allow us to make claims that presume God’s existence.” Well, yes, that is an implication of the position, but that’s hardly an objection: it’s just a restatement of the position!

Many critiques of antirealist positions, including appraiser relativism, seem to appeal to the presumptive realist inclinations of the critic. These presumptive realist inclinations are leveraged, over and over, in response to noncognitivism, error theory, and constructivist and relativist views as though each time they are invoked we are discovering a new and distinctive problem. But if they all have a common source in a presumptive realist inclination, then any metaethical view contrary to those presumptions is going to “feel wrong” or “seem counterintuitive.” So many of these objections converge on a common source: alleged realist intuitions. Philosophers who raise all of these objections as though they are distinct seem to be double-counting or worse, resulting in recounting the same objection multiple times under a different guise in different contexts. Yet if all of these objections amount to it super duper feels to me like we need realism, then this is really just one objection masquerading as many. What’s more, my contention stands that realism isn’t really doing the work. Rather, in all of these cases, what’s really doing the work is the misguided sense that acknowledging the truth or falsity (or the lack thereof) of this or that common English sentence sounds bad, because the philosopher judging it can’t override the mistaken sense that to judge that e.g.:

Torturing babies is not morally wrong.

Cruelty is morally praiseworthy.

There is nothing at all wrong with setting babies on fire.

…is to approve of these actions and to act accordingly, when this is almost never entailed by anything other than a narrow bandwidth of stance-dependent relativist views, e.g., agent relativism, while the obligation to approve of cruelty, or genocide, or torture, simply isn’t a feature of any other antirealist views: noncognitivism, error theory, most forms of constructivism, appraiser relativism, antirealist quietism (my view), and so on simply do not require one to be okay with torture or genocide or whatever else it is one considers bad. Ironically, moral realism often does leave open the possibility that one might be obligated to approve of genocide and torture and all the other bad things, unless one pairs realism with some heavy-duty epistemic claims about the moral truths being self-evident, etc.

And again, I cannot repeat this enough: launch agent relativism into the sun if you want. Now tell me what’s wrong with the rest of the antirealist views out there. What’s so repugnant about those?

As a colleague of mine put it, it almost seems like philosophers are superstitious about how it sounds to say something. Critics of antirealist views even phrase their objections this way sometimes:

If appraiser relativism is true, then you have to say that if Attila says baby torture is good, that the sentence “baby torture is good” is true.

Yes, you do “have to say” that. So what? If I stipulated that “baby torture is good” means “2+2=4” then provided you think 2+2=4 you have to say “baby torture is good” is true in the relevant contexts in which my stipulation is operative. What implications does this have for your attitudes, character, or behavior? Absolutely none whatsoever.

Regarding a view as repugnant because it sounds bad prior to unpacking what the bad-sounding phrases actually mean is ridiculous. We should be judging views as repugnant or non-repugnant on the basis of what they actually commit us to, not superficial associations we have with how the position sounds. What we should really be doing when judging views as true or false, repugnant or not repugnant, is looking at the practical entailments of the view. If judging that sometimes the statement “baby torture is good is true” is an implication of your metaethical stance, but all this commits you to is acknowledging that when people who approve of baby torture say that baby torture is good that they are stating that they approve of baby torture, such statements become trivially true and have no practical implications for you or anyone else.

Another perspective one might have on such statements is not one of recoiling at their repugnance, but one might instead have the intuition that that’s just not how people talk about morality. One might think that because we antecedently indisposed to judge statements like “cruelty is good” as true when Attila makes such remarks, that therefore we aren’t appraiser relativists. This is fine, as far as it goes. If you aren’t disposed to speak that way, then perhaps you have discovered that you don’t speak like an appraiser relativist. But this doesn’t entitle you to generalize to what other people mean or think on reflection when they speak about morality. Philosophers often presume that because they are native speakers of a given language, that their judgments about the meaning or entailments of the terms and phrases used in that language are reliable indicators of their meaning in ordinary language. I consider this a highly contestable presumption, and I invite you to do the same. Philosophers undergo extensive training and self-select into a subculture (<0.1% of the world’s population) that gets even narrower if we restrict ourselves to analytic philosophers. I see little reason to think induction into a highly distinct subcommunity that all read the same works and think, speak, write, and engage topics similarly to one another via intellectual osmosis are in a good position to presume their ways of speaking and thinking generalize to members of their own culture or speakers of their own language, much less everyone else in the world. I go into this at length in my article Generalizing from the Armchair.

Suppose, as I do, that questions about what people mean when they make moral claims are empirical questions. And suppose we discover that most English speakers speak like appraiser relativists. As a result, suppose we are drawn to the conclusion that ordinary English claims like “cruelty is morally bad” just mean “I disapprove of cruelty.” In other words, suppose appraiser relativists have correctly captured the conventional semantics of ordinary moral discourse in English. Now what? Should we reject relativism for being repugnant? Again, on what grounds? It is, first and foremost, a semantic thesis about what people mean. And if this is what people mean, well, too bad: that’s what they mean!

6.0 The Wrong Verdicts

Van roojen continues in the next section with the presumptive realist sentiments I mentioned in the previous section. Many arguments against antirealist views, including standard forms of agent and appraiser relativism, operate in this way:

1. They begin with the assumption that whoever is reading the argument is psychologically disposed to think in particular ways.

2. They then point out that the antirealist view in question (e.g., agent or appraiser relativism) has implications inconsistent with these psychological dispositions.

3. They imply or explicitly indicate that the inconsistency between the antirealist view and our psychological disposition is a reason to reject the antirealist view in question.

This kind of argumentation strikes me as having a very strange form. Compare to a scientific discovery. If we uncovered life on Mars, or found liquid water on an exoplanet, we wouldn’t find ourselves discovering some hidden belief we had all along. We’d be finding out something new about the world around us. But many objections to antirealist views begin with the assumption that, on some implicit level, you are already disposed towards moral realism, or at least disposed to reject the specific antirealist view in question (though ultimately through process of elimination we’re eventually left with just moral realism). So you aren’t making a discovery about the world around you, you’re making a discovery about how you already were disposed to think. Note how van Roojen begins the next section:

Intuitively there are things that it would be wrong to do even if no one disapproved of them. (p. 108)

I have a few problems with this remark.

First, I don’t have this intuition.

Second, the phrasing is a little frustrating to me: “Intuitively there are […]” depersonalizes “intuitions” as though they aren’t things one must have. I don’t think things just are or are not intuitive; they can only be intuitive-to-someone or intuitive-to-some-population. Unless one thinks that claims can be intuitive independent of whether anyone has or is disposed to have the relevant intuitions, in which case I’d probably object that nothing is intuitive in that respect. Either way, one is left with the impression that something just is or isn’t intuitive, rather than how intuitive something is potentially varying from one person to another. And, as I said, I don’t have this intuition, so what would it mean to say “Intuitively…” in this case? Is it a report of the author’s intuitions, or of most people’s intuitions, or something else? If so, what? And why not specify what?

Third, there are open questions about what “intuitions” are, whether they serve as evidence, and if so, how much evidence they provide.

Yet the bigger problem is the ambiguity embedded in its phrasing. When I am asked whether I think something would be morally wrong “even if no one disapproved” just what are you asking me? Wrong in what sense? If you’re asking me whether it would be stance-independently wrong, then obviously I think not, and if you did, then you already endorse realism, so of course you’re not going to endorse an antirealist view. And if you’re asking me whether it is stance-dependently wrong, then wrong according to what standard? My current standards, or the standards of some hypothetical version of me in the universe in question? In other words:

1. Are you asking me whether, relative to my current moral standards, I would regard something as wrong even if everyone in some counterfactual or hypothetical scenario (including some hypothetical version of me) didn’t disapprove of the action?

2. Are you asking me whether, relative to the standards of a version of me in the counterfactual or hypothetical scenario that didn’t disapprove of something, would that version of me regard it as wrong?

3. Something else?

It’s easy to answer (1) and (2): yes, and no, respectively. Even if everyone else approved of baby torture, I’m still against baby torture. And obviously if there is some version of me that approves of baby torture, then that version of me approves of baby torture. So if the question is asking me whether something would be stance-independently wrong, then no. If it’s asking me whether it’d be wrong relative to my actual standards, then yes. And if it’s asking me whether it’d be wrong relative to the standards of a version of me that regarded it as wrong, then, trivially, yes. Once you disambiguate what this question is asking, the antirealist, including the appraiser relativist, should have no trouble at all addressing the question.

To elaborate on (1), even if there were some other people who approved or disapproved of something, that has no relevance to my approval or disapproval of it. So as an antirealist, and as someone who makes stance-dependent claims and speaks and functions much like a relativist, my answer would be a simple and straightforward no. An appraiser relativist could likewise say “no” to this question. So if this is what we’re being asked, then the appraiser relativist does in fact give the “intuitively” appropriate response.

Regarding (2), even if there was some world in which everyone approved of baby torture, the me in this world is still against baby torture. And if there were some version of me that approved of baby torture and they lived in a world where everyone approved of baby torture, obviously that version of me would approve of baby torture. So just what intuition am I supposed to have here? I am guessIng I am supposed to think that baby torture would be “wrong” in some sense, even if “everyone” (again, this is unclear) didn’t disapprove of it. But what would that mean? If you’re a relativist, for something to be morally wrong just is for people to disapprove of it. So asking a relativist this question would be a bit like asking whether something would be disapproved of if it were disapproved of. It would be asking them to accept or reject a tautology. And clearly they’d endorse the tautology. Unless it’s asking something else. In which case, it’s not clear what it’s asking. Absent disambiguation, I see no reason to grant this consideration any dialectical force against appraiser relativism.

To the extent that anyone would find this “counterintuitive” this would only make sense if they were antecedently disposed to reject appraiser relativism in the first place. But if that were the case, what, exactly, are we demonstrating?

It would appear to me that we’re demonstrating that people who aren’t disposed to favor appraiser relativism are not disposed to favor appraiser relativism. Again, this is completely trivial. The only nontrivial question of relevance here is whether the reader of van Roojen’s passages is, in fact, antecedently disposed to reject appraiser relativism. And if they are, why go through the whole rigamarole of engaging with appraiser relativism in the first place? Just note you have non-appraiser-relativist intuitions and move on. At best this sort of objection might help people who were implicitly opposed to appraiser relativism come to recognize this fact. So we’re not discovering whether appraiser relativism is true or false, we’re discovering whether we already are disposed, all else being equal, to think it’s false. And if, like me, you don’t discover this about yourself, now what? I simply don’t find appraiser relativism conflicts with my intuitions or seems false. I simply don’t have that intuition. Am I incorrect? If so, why? Presumably I’m not incorrect because someone else has the intuition that appraiser relativism is mistaken. What makes their intuitions better than mine?

Either way, are we to expect readers to be so oblivious and so incapable of self-reflection they hadn’t considered the matter beforehand? If so, these objections to appraiser relativism seem less like an appeal to externally evaluable evidence and more like an attempt at prompting people to engage in a form of self-discovery: to find out whether they already rejected the view to begin with. And if turns out they don’t, such an argument doesn’t work. What’s weird about this approach is that whether it “works” or not is contingent on the psychology of the person considering the objection. Maybe there is a trivial sense in which that’s true of all evidence. Either way, I don’t have such intuitions, so it’s not clear to me why I should reject appraiser relativism based on the considerations presented by van Roojen.

As for others, once they’ve read these passages, hopefully they can discover whether they favor appraiser relativism or not…assuming they avoid the many pitfalls and errors I’ve outlined here and elsewhere. Travis has an excellent video that unpacks the ambiguity in this remark. It’s only seven minutes long, and I encourage you to stop and go check it out, since he outlines similar concerns with the kind of phrasing van Roojen employs here in a different way than I do:

Simply put, appraiser relativism doesn’t allow for moral claims to be true or false simpliciter. They can only be true or false relative to one or another standard. As such, when the question about whether an action would still be wrong if “everyone disapproved of it,” the question only makes sense (since otherwise it’s asking something quite trivial) if you interpret as a question about whether an action could be wrong simpliciter. Again, recall the dilemma: if you’re asking whether it could still be wrong relative to my standards if everyone else disapproved of an action, the appraiser relativist can easily answer “yes.” No problem. If you’re asking whether an action would still be wrong even if the appraiser relativist and everyone else approved of it, the answer would be a trivial “no”, since this would amount to asking whether anyone disapproved of an action that nobody disapproved of.

As such, the question of whether something could still be wrong even if everyone approved of it amounts to veiled but nevertheless direct appeal to realist intuitions. Van Roojen continues:

So when I now consider whether it is or is not wrong, I should think it is wrong only in scenarios where I exist and continue to disapprove of such cruelty. But that typically is not what we think when we believe that such cruelty is wrong. (p. 109)

Wrong in what sense? In a relative or non-relative way? Note that we’re told we should only think it’s wrong as an appraiser relativist “in scenarios where I exist and continue to disapprove of such cruelty.” Is this even true? The implication here is that whether it’s right or wrong depends on the appraisal of the hypothetical version of us, not the current us. But these are two distinct stances from which one can appraise the action in question. If there is no version of me that disapproves of the action in the scenario, am I obligated to judge that cruelty is “not wrong”? Not wrong relative to what standard? There’s no me in that scenario, so it wouldn’t be wrong according to that version of me…but this doesn’t mean the action isn’t therefore wrong according to actual standards of actual me. So I don’t think we should grant the claim that “I should think it is wrong only in scenarios where I exist…” this looks to me like there may be an equivocation about who “I” refers to. There are two versions of I, the actual_I, and the counterfactual version of myself, counterfactual_I. I think this statement is prompting us to think something like this:

[actual_I] should think it is wrong only in scenarios where [counterfactual_I] exist and continue to disapprove of such cruelty.

If so, then this isn’t true. We can assign a truth condition to the claim relative to the standards of both actual_I and counterfactual_I and these can differ. I am not obligated to not disapprove of cruelty relative to my actual standards in worlds where some other version of me either (a) exists but doesn’t disapprove of cruelty or (b) doesn’t exist. I can (and I do) judge the goodness or badness of cruelty in those worlds relative to my standards in this world; not the standards of other versions of me. Each can be indexed separately. There is an attempt to demonstrate that if I appraise actions as right or wrong relative to my own standards, that I am somehow obliged to think all sorts of awful things: that I’d be obligated to think torturing babies is good if some counterfactual version of me thinks it’s good, and so on. Appraiser relativists aren’t obliged to think this. An appraiser relativist would think that if there’s some other version of them that’s in favor of baby torture that: (a) they still disapprove of baby torture and (b) that other version of them approves of baby torture, which is trivially true. The appraiser relativist simply isn’t committed to anything repugnant or objectionable.

Now recall the last part of the remark:

But that typically is not what we think when we believe that such cruelty is wrong. (p. 109)

As I never get tired of saying, who is “we”? When Pölzler and Wright (2020) surveyed college students and people using the online survey platform Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, they trained participants to draw the relevant distinctions, excluded those who repeatedly failed comprehension tests, and provided a robust list of response options including cultural relativism and individual subjectivism. What did they find? They found that relativist responses were by far the most common response among participants:

Does this mean most people are moral relativists? No. I’m not even convinced most participants in this study are moral relativists, since I remain unconvinced they interpreted the questions as intended. Nevertheless, these sorts of findings highlight the fact that we can tackle questions about what people think by using empirical methods, and we should. After all, claims about what people think are psychological claims, and psychological claims are best addressed using empirical methods, not armchair methods. It may be difficult to do so (in fact, I think it’s astonishingly difficult), but philosophers are not simply entitled to make sweeping claims about what “we” typically think. Van Roojen continues:

We think it is actually wrong, but also that it would remain wrong were I to notice it or not and even if I did not exist to disapprove of it. (p. 109, emphasis mine)

Note the language here: “actually.” If an appraiser relativist thinks the correct analysis of moral truth claims is that they express propositions about one’s attitudes of approval or disapproval, and if this is the correct analysis, then this is what it actually means to say something is right or wrong.

So what work is “actually” doing here, other than to surreptitiously imply that something would only be right or wrong if it were right or wrong in the realist’s sense? Isn’t this the matter of contention? Why use language that frames one of these positions as correct and the other as incorrect in one’s descriptions of the position? I have written about the use of terms like “actually,” “really,” and “genuinely” at length. I object to certain instances of their use among academic philosophers, as I believe they are highly misleading. For instance, consider section 2.0 of my recent blog post on misleading modifiers and this whole blog post dedicated to the issue.

In short, appraiser relativists are entitled to regard their own conception of morality as things actually being right and wrong. This language of “actually” and “really” is unhelpful for characterizing philosophical views because it reflects a biased framing of rival positions as having a defective conception of the matter in question when the legitimacy of their conception is itself precisely the matter (or at least, a potential matter) of contention.

Relativists are not obliged to agree that even if their views were correct, nothing would “actually” be right or wrong. On the contrary, “antirealists” are entitled to say that if antirealism is true, that it is, in fact, moral realists that don’t think anything is actually right or wrong, since it is the realist that has a mistaken conception of what’s right or wrong. “Realism” and “antirealism” are terrible labels. Antirealists don’t have to think morality isn’t “real” or that nothing is “really” or “actually” right or wrong. We can, and we do, favor conceptions of rightness and wrongness according to which things are right and wrong, good and bad, and so on. And if we’re right, these are the actual senses in which things are right or wrong, not the realist’s sense.

The only exception to this is the error theorist, since they share the realist’s conception but disagree on metaphysical grounds. But I’m not an error theorist, and neither are appraiser relativists. And if “actually” just means “stance-independently,” then it’s misleading to say “actually.” If it doesn’t mean this, it’s unclear what it does mean, but it’s probably not philosophically substantive. Philosophers should just say “stance-independently.” But note how this statement would look if we did that:

We think it is [stance-independently] wrong, but also that it would remain wrong were I to notice it or not and even if I did not exist to disapprove of it.

Note that if this isn’t what van Roojen means, it’s not clear the statement in question is inconsistent with appraiser relativism, in which case the objection may be misplaced. If this is what is meant, then the objection once again appears to be an objection to an antirealist conception of appraiser relativism on the grounds that it isn’t realism. Once disambiguated, many objections to antirealist views sound a bit like this:

The problem with atheism is that we think God exists.

If this isn’t a good objection to atheism, it’s not clear to me why van Roojen’s has raised a good objection to appraiser relativism here. The objection seems to amount to the empirical claim that “we” already aren’t appraiser relativists or at least have very strong (if defeasible) inclinations to the contrary. Maybe these claims are true, but those are empirical questions and, in any case, I don’t think we have good evidence that most people aren’t appraiser relativists because they have moral realist leanings. The best available evidence simply doesn’t, at present, support that conclusion.

7.0 What “we” think

Van Roojen makes a number of other claims in the chapter that trouble me. Here’s one:

Many of us think that at least some moral truths are necessary. (p. 109)

I don’t know who “us” is. Philosophers? Nonphilosophers? Both? And “many” is unhelpfully underspecified. How many? Most? A few thousand? Billions? I grant that there are many readings of this claim that will turn out to be true. Most respondents to the 2020 PhilPapers are moral realists, but that’s only a little over 1,000 people. Many of them probably believe that “at least some moral truths are necessary” but how well does this generalize to everyone else? Even if we generalized to all philosophers, what does this amount to? A few tens of thousands of people? Perhaps that’s fine: many of them are ostensibly experts on the topic, so perhaps their position matters more than most people. After all, we probably care what most theoretical physicists believe about theoretical physics, even if the general public is clueless. So, okay, lots of people think there are some necessary moral truths. At any rate, van Roojen contrasts this point about how many people think some moral claims are necessary with (simple) agent and appraiser relativism, which treat all moral truths as contingent:

But simple subjectivism entails that all moral truths are contingent. Our psychological attitudes, including our attitudes of approval and disapproval, are merely contingent. I do in fact disapprove of parricide, but had I been brought up differently and perhaps abused I might not have disapproved of such cruelty. (p. 109)

…and it’s plausible that many of them believe that at least some moral truths are necessary. How many? I don’t know, because we don’t have polling data on this. We have just over 1,000 moral realists that responded to that survey. Van Roojen then notes that something can’t be both necessary and contingent (fair enough) before concluding that:

So we might follow Mark Schroeder [...] and call this the modal problem for simple subjectivism. It gives moral claims the wrong modal status. And this just means it makes the wrong judgement about certain sorts of counterfactual scenarios. (p. 109)

Well, hold up! It appears van Roojen is moving from the fact that many people think there are non-contingent moral truths to the conclusion that a view according to which there are no non-contingent moral truths is false. The fact that many people think something is true is not a good reason to think that a view that is inconsistent with such a belief is false. Van Roojen simply hasn’t shown that the types of relativism he’s described give moral claims the wrong modal status, or that they make the “wrong judgement” about certain sorts of counterfactual scenarios.

8.0 Can relativism handle disagreement?

Lastly, van Roojen claims that the forms of relativism he criticizes here are unable to account for disagreement that purportedly occurs. He begins:

Common sense says that if I tell you that some particular action was wrong and you reply by saying that it was not wrong, we disagree.

Let’s agree with this for the sake of argument. Is relativism unable to account for these scenarios? I don’t think it is, but van Roojen does. Van Roojen states that:

The simplest versions of appraiser subjectivism cannot deliver that verdict. According to such theories, we are each talking about our own attitudes toward the action in question. I am saying that it meets with my disapproval (or some such attitude) and you are denying that it is disapproved of by you. But those claims could both be true. It could be true that I disapprove of Sam’s action and you don’t. In fact, in most cases where I think something wrong and you don’t, that is how it is likely to be. I disapprove and you don’t. So the claim I assert (according to appraiser subjectivism) and the claim you deny (again according to appraiser subjectivism) are not the same claim. I assert something you don’t deny and you deny something I don’t assert. I am making a claim about my attitudes toward Sam’s action and you are making a claim about your attitudes toward Sam’s action. These claims do not disagree. (p. 110)

I think van Roojen is mistaken. Why? Because I believe he relies on a narrow and impoverished conception of disagreement, and on a winnowing of the semantic analysis of the meaning of moral claims that inappropriately presupposes that the simple relativist has no access to pragmatic features of language, even though they do, because nothing about relativism entails that one denies pragmatics plays an important role in ordinary moral discourse, including moral disputes. In Kinds of Disagreements, I draw a distinction between disagreements about what’s true, vs. disagreements about what to do. This particular blog post is essentially an essay specifically dedicated to this issue, so I’d recommend simply reading that. But I’ll say a bit about what I am up to there.

The standard relativist analysis of moral claims only examines the semantics of those claims. Suppose Alex and Sam disagree about abortion. Alex thinks that abortion is morally wrong. Sam thinks abortion is not morally wrong. Both are appraiser relativists, and both agree to the following:

Alex: When I say that abortion is morally wrong, I mean that I disapprove of it.

Sam: When I say that abortion is not morally wrong, I mean that I don’t disapprove of it.

This means that they agree on the following facts:

1. Alex disapproves of abortion

2. Sam does not disapprove of abortion

Since neither of them disagrees on the truths of any proposition, then there is no disagreement. But if we think that there are moral disagreements, something must be wrong with the relativist analysis. This is supposed to be a decisive problem for relativism: there are disagreements, relativism says there aren’t, so relativism is wrong.

However, let’s go back to Alex and Sam’s interaction. Alex and Sam are both appraiser relativists, and have contrary positions on abortion. Since they don’t disagree on what’s true, does this mean we couldn’t make sense of them arguing, or fighting, or yelling at each other, or anything else that they might do? You know, the sorts of things we actually observe people doing and that we use to infer that people disagree about moral issues?

No. We can make sense of what they are doing even if they are explicit, committed appraiser relativists. This is because appraiser relativism is only a view about the semantics of moral claims. It in no way bars people’s moral claims from having pragmatic features, expressing emotive content, or conveying emotions, imperatives, or other sorts of nonpropositional attitudes. Even if appraiser relativism is the correct account of the semantics of ordinary moral claims, well, so what? Alex and Sam both agree on all the facts. But that doesn’t mean they want the same things. They don’t disagree about what’s true. They disagree about what to do.

For comparison, if someone wants to steal from me, and I don’t want them to steal from me, we both agree on all the facts: they want my money, and I don’t want to give them my money. Does it follow that because we agree on the facts that there is no dispute or argument to be had? No. We have conflicting goals, and this is the root cause of our altercation, not a dispute about what’s true.

There is no good reason to think people can only find themselves in conflicts with people who have disagreements about what’s true. Often, agreement over what’s true is a precondition for certain types of disputes. And people in these circumstances will appeal to one another’s standards, make threats, try to change their mind, try to get the other person to recognize that maybe they’re wrong about what they want, and so on. They might threaten to kill me if I don’t hand over my wallet. I might point out that we’re in a busy street and there are probably security cameras. An argument can still proceed even if we agree that the two of us having conflicting values, and that neither of those values is factually mistaken with respect to stance-independent moral truths. This is because arguments can consist of pointing to descriptive facts that are potentially relevant to the goals and motivations of one’s interlocutor, or making declarations that change the incentive structure that the person is faced with in a way that is motivationally relevant, e.g., “Hand over your wallet or else.” One can narrowly stipulate that by an “argument” one just means a dispute about the facts, but this is already tantamount to question begging: if relativists think disagreements occur but don’t involve disputes about facts, declaring that “disagreements” occur where “disagreement” just means a “dispute about the facts” then one is begging the question against the relativist. Relativists are entitled both to endorse relativism and to hold a contrary position on what’s going on when people disagree with one another. Note, too, the potential conflation of the philosopher. There are at least two senses of “disagreement” under discussion:

1. Abstract disagreement: Disagreement as a philosophical term that refers to any instance in which two people endorse inconsistent propositions

2. Concrete disagreement: Disagreement as an observed everyday social behavior in which two people are arguing over some matter

Philosophers aren’t entitled to simply assert that our observed everyday social behaviors that fall under the colloquial term “disagreement” just are disputes about the truth of propositions; this is itself something they’d be required to establish. But oftentimes they just don’t clearly draw this distinction at all and move between the two without carefully distinguishing what type of “disagreement” they’re talking about.

Of course people routinely dispute what’s true or false; they do so for e.g., what time it is, or when a movie came out, and so on. When it comes to morality, they could be disputing the truth of many facts, but those truths could be peripheral or could be cashed out in ways that don’t require the dispute to turn, fundamentally, on a dispute about what is stance-independently right or wrong. And if this isn’t what’s entailed by insisting people are engaged in “disagreements,” then whatever people are doing is potentially consistent with relativism. If it is, then insisting people have disagreements of this kind effectively begs the question against relativists (unless relativists inexplicably agree that while people are relativists, they disagree in ways that are only consistent with them being nonrelativists).

Consider another situation: I want to buy a car. The car salesman wants as much money as possible. I want to pay as little as possible. We disagree about the price. But is this disagreement a disagreement about stance-independent normative truths about the True Price of the car? No. We don’t have conflicting beliefs about what’s true, we have conflicting goals. Is it therefore impossible to explain the conversation that ensues? Or would we insist that two people arguing about the price of the car aren’t engaged in a disagreement? If so, then we’re simply declaring post-hoc that any real-world disputes that don’t fit our stipulative definition of a disagreement aren’t “disagreements.” Fine, in that case, then relativist can then argue that moral disagreements don’t actually occur.

If the critic of relativism then wants to object that this is absurd, because people clearly do disagree with one another, what are they going to point to? Recall we drew a distinction between abstract and concrete disagreements. The critic may insist that since “disagreements occur,” that it would be absurd for the relativist to deny this. Yet the relativist doesn’t deny this. What they are denying is that most everyday instances of concrete moral disagreements are instances of abstract moral disagreements. The critic may try to argue relativism is absurd, but only by conflating concrete and abstract disagreements and giving the false impression that concrete moral disagreements typically are abstract moral disagreements. But if relativism is true, then while it isn’t strictly an entailment of relativism that most concrete moral disagreements are not abstract moral disagreements, that most of such concrete disagreements are, in fact, abstract disagreements would be very strong, if not decisive evidence against relativism. One philosopher’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens: in this situation, the relativist is well-positioned to deny that that this is the case, and the onus will be on the critic of relativism to demonstrate that concrete moral disagreements are, in fact, abstract moral disagreements. What critics are not entitled to do is simply presume that they are by conflating the two and scoffing, insisting:

Obviously moral disagreements are real.

This is ambiguous: are they claiming concrete moral disagreements are real, or that abstract moral disagreements are real? The relativist isn’t denying there are concrete disagreements, only that there are (at least many) abstract moral disagreements. Critics of the relativist can leverage this ambiguity to misleadingly imply relativists hold an absurd view by implying the relativist denies something they don’t deny with a view that, if true, would virtually entail relativism were false. I’ve seen this equivocation occur countless times (though not clearly in van Roojen’s chapter, fortunately). Such conflations typify a common feature of analytic philosophy: to prompt audiences to conflate different senses of a term to falsely imply rival positions are committed to absurd conclusions that they are not, in fact, committed to.

Now, when we turn our attention back to Alex and Sam, we can see that they do not have conflicting beliefs about what’s true. But they probably do have conflicting goals. After all, while they both agree that statements of the form “X is wrong” convey the speaker’s preferences, this does not mean that in addition to this that Alex and Sam don’t also aspire to have their moral standards enshrined in law, adopted by others, and generally accepted. Even if you recognize that someone else’s moral claims reflect preferences contrary to your own, this does not mean you can’t or don’t want them to share your preferences, or at least compromise or reach some agreement that, in practice, would more closely approximate the kind of world you want to live in.

In this case, Alex may want to ban abortion, but Sam may want to expand access to abortion. They have a real conflict over what kinds of laws to pass. And if they argue with one another, it may be over a host of ancillary facts. Maybe Alex is against abortion because she thinks it violates God’s will. If Sam thinks God doesn’t exist, Sam may try to convince Alex that God does not exist. Or perhaps Sam thinks that fetuses only become conscious late in development, and that abortion prior to this is acceptable because it won’t cause suffering. In such cases, relativists can agree that they hold contrary, and non-conflicting first-order moral claims, but still argue that those first-order judgments are mistakenly predicated on false nonmoral beliefs. This would allow relativists to argue about what’s true, only the truths in question would be indirectly related to the first-order moral claims (which don’t conflict).

However, the most important form of disagreement I have alluded to is a disagreement not about what’s true, but a disagreement about what to do. Even if two people agree on all the relevant facts, they may still find themselves in conflict with one another. Two people haggling over the price of a car don’t have to dispute descriptive facts about the car’s features, but may still find themselves not agreeing on the price. Not all such disagreements need to be contentious, either. Consider situations where you and a friend or spouse are trying to decide what to eat for dinner, or what movie to watch, or where to go on vacation. Have you ever had disagreements of this kind? I certainly have. In these cases, do you suppose there is a stance-independent fact of the matter about which restaurant you should go to, or what movie you should see, or where you should go for vacation? That is, is there a correct answer to these questions that isn’t depend the stances or preferences of you, your friends, or your spouse? If philosophers wish to appeal to what’s counterintuitive, that should strike them as highly counterintuitive. And it would also be counterintuitive to insist all of these cases aren’t disagreements. In other words, if we want to talk ordinary language and everyday intuitions, I already think there is a fairly decisive case, via the conventional methods of analytic philosophers that:

1. There are lots of events that we’d call disagreements.

2. These events clearly don’t involve disputes about nonrelative normative facts.

If so, then there are concrete disagreements in nonmoral contexts that are consistent with relativism. Why, then, would we be unable to account for concrete moral disagreements in the same way? I think the answer to that is that we can, and that objections to relativism on the grounds that it can’t account for disagreement are clearly mistaken.

And yet people nevertheless argue about these matters. Consider how people might negotiate a dispute about which movie to see:

Sam: We’re going to the movies, right?

Alex and Sam were arguing about which movie to see. If we asked them, they might both agree that there are no stance-independent cinematic truths: facts about what movies you should see that are true independent of your cinematic preferences. And they might both endorse appraiser relativism about statements like “Zombie Dinosaur Tornado IV is a good movie.” Nevertheless, they still found themselves arguing about what movie they should see. What were they arguing about? They weren’t arguing with the implicit presumption that there is a stance-independently correct answer as to what movie they should see. They weren’t arguing about what was true at all. They were arguing about what to do. And that argument centered on negotiating their social relationship, and pointing out various descriptive facts: that the movie has good reviews, the absence of better alternatives, that one of them chose the last few movies, so fairness would favor letting the other choose, and so on. There don’t have to be stance-independently correct answers to any of these issues: neither need feel they have an obligation independent of their own values as to whether they should take turns picking movies. This may very well be a norm they’ve both tacitly (or explicitly) accepted because they both value fairness and reciprocity. As such, once that consideration becomes salient, Alex realizes that it’s relevant given his own values and is thereby willing to defer to Sam on what movie to see out of a personal sense of fairness. Absolutely nothing about this argument requires any presumption at all of stance-independent normative truths, yet it is still recognizably a disagreement.

This exact kind of consideration could readily account for many real world moral disputes. Even if the simple objectivist construes the semantics of first-order moral claims in appraiser relativist terms, this in no way bars people speaking as relativists from disagreeing on nonmoral facts or having conflicts with respect to their goals and values, the latter of which can be resolved by arguments and appeals to intersubjective or shared values. Philosophers love their formalisms so here’s one:

(P1) If relativists can disagree about what movie to see, they can disagree about what’s morally right or wrong.
(P2) Relativists can disagree about what movie to see.
(C) Therefore, relativists can disagree about what’s morally right or wrong.

In sum, I believe van Roojen’s claim that relativists cannot account for moral disagreement rests on an presumption that masks and ambiguity that, when resolved, results in van Roojen’s claim either being:

1. False

2. Trivially true in a way that doesn’t threaten relativism

What’s the issue this time? It turns on what’s meant by “disagreement.” If, by disagreement, we just mean a dispute about what the stance-independent moral facts are, then insofar as we presume everyday disagreements involve such disagreements, then relativism obviously can’t account for this and is obviously wrong. This is trivial because if we already knew people regularly disagreed over what the stance-independent moral facts were, then we’d already know that they were speaking and thinking as moral realists, and not as relativists, and so we’d have no need to consider the matter further. In other words, the objection that relativist views fail to capture moral disagreement only works if we assume that the moral disagreements in question presuppose views that are inconsistent with relativism. But if we presupposed people engage in practices inconsistent with relativism, then we already know that these people aren’t relativists.

Relativists need not agree that people do engage in disagreements of this kind, nor that they even appear to do so. I don’t grant either concession. It doesn’t appear to me that everyday moral disputes are disputes about what the stance-independent moral truths are, based on how I think about moral language and my personal experiences talking about these issues with people, and based on my familiarity with experimental metaethics, which is the direct empirical investigation of how nonphilosophers think about realism and antirealism. Notably, the most prominent paradigm in this research is the disagreement paradigm, which is exactly what it sounds like, and use of this paradigm does not indicate that people are widely disposed to endorse moral realism.

Either way, the actual nature of such disputes is an empirical question, and I don’t think there’s any good empirical evidence that everyday moral disputes are driven by disagreements over stance-independent moral facts. Unless and until we explore what’s actually causing disagreements in everyday situations, it is premature and highly questionable to presume that such disagreements are best or only explained as disagreements over the truth status of first-order moral propositions, rather than disagreements over nonmoral facts or disagreements over what we should do.

Van Roojen acknowledges something like the kinds of objections I’ve raised here, stating:

A fan of appraiser subjectivism might reply by admitting that the claims we make—the psychological claims about our attitudes toward Sam’s actions—don’t disagree. But still they might argue, our attitudes—the ones we are each talking about—do clash. !at clash, they might argue, explains the sense in which our initial arguments disagree. Our judgements (which are about our attitudes toward Sam’s action) disagree because the attitudes they attribute disagree. !is reply has a certain amount of initial plausibility. Sometimes we do express disagreements by talking about our attitudes, as when I say, “I think the highway runs north-south,” and you disagree with, “No, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. I think it runs east-west.” (p. 110)

Unfortunately, I do not find van Roojen’s response to this very compelling. Van Roojen states:

There’s reason to be suspicious of this general strategy. On the most natural understanding of the subjectivist view, ‘Sam’s action was wrong’ and ‘Sam’s action was not wrong’ do not self-attribute conflicting attitudes. Rather the theory should say that one sentence self-attributes an attitude that the other self-attributes the absence of (p. 110)

I don’t know exactly what van Roojen has in mind here, but everyday moral claims don’t occur in a vacuum. People aren’t just mindless machines that go around uttering propositions. If an ordinary person is going to bother to make a moral claim, even if that claim technically expressed their preferences, provided their expression of the moral claim was a voluntary action, it will have been expressed for some purpose. In other words, the person would have some reason, with respect to their goals, for making the statement. I want to revisit a distinction I drew above and propose a different set of names. I don’t know which of the two is better, but I think I prefer this one and this framing. Anyway, here it is:

1. Propositional disagreement

2. Interpersonal disagreement

A propositional disagreement is any instance in which two people endorse conflicting propositions, even if those people have no knowledge of one another’s position on the matter or are even aware of one another’s existence. Suppose Sam endorses P. Now suppose Alex lives in a remote part of the world and has never met Sam. If Alex endorses not-P, we may say that they have a propositional disagreement: they assign different truth values to the same proposition.

However, interpersonal disagreements are actual instances in which two people encounter one another and are engaged in some form of discussion in which their conflicting positions are the topic of discussion. Sam may run into Alex outside an abortion clinic, and they may get into an argument. This is an interpersonal conflict, and these are what I am tempted to call, ironically, “actual” disagreements. I’ll refrain from doing so.

These interpersonal disagreements are the grist for the philosopher’s mill. Philosophers aren’t merely observing that people hold contrary positions on the truth status of propositions, they are typically referring to actual arguments, disputes, and disagreements that manifest as things people say and do. So what we need to do is figure out what’s going on in interpersonal disagreements; we cannot simply help ourselves to the presumption that such disagreements are propositional disagreements, since this would beg the question against relativists. Let’s take a look at the whole paragraph in which this objection appears:

On the most natural understanding of the subjectivist view, ‘Sam’s action was wrong’ and ‘Sam’s action was not wrong’ do not self-attribute conflicting attitudes. Rather the theory should say that one sentence self-attributes an attitude that the other self-attributes the absence of. For, on the most natural version of the theory, the negation of ‘Sam’s action was wrong’ should be the negation of ‘I disapprove of Sam’s action.’ And we negate ‘I disapprove of Sam’s action’ with ‘I don’t disapprove of Sam’s action.’ Since ‘Sam’s action was not wrong’ is the negation of ‘Sam’s action was wrong,’ it should say the same thing. But then ‘Sam’s action was not wrong’ doesn’t attribute an attitude that conflicts with disapproval, it just denies the presence of the original attitude (in oneself). (You may need to reread this paragraph again to get the point that is simple enough once you grasp it.) (p. 110)

This objection relies on an overly formalistic conception of what an attitudinal disagreement amounts to. Take this claim from Alex:

Alex: Abortion is morally wrong.

The relativist characterization of this would be:

Alex: I disapprove of abortion.

We might be tempted to think the proper negation of this would be:

Sam: I approve of abortion.

…but it isn’t. The proper negation is:

Sam: I don’t disapprove of abortion.

That Sam doesn’t disapprove of abortion doesn’t entail that Sam approves of abortion. Sam may be indifferent on the matter. And if so, Sam may not have any particular attitude towards the rightness or wrongness of abortion. Ergo, on the most straightforward characterization of the relativist’s analysis of first-order moral claims, it wouldn’t make much sense to depict moral disagreements as bottoming out not in dispute about what’s stance-independently true, but as conflicts of attitude, because the proper negation doesn’t attribute an attitude to the other person.

With respect to van Roojen, this strikes me as an extraordinarily weak objection. It relies on an overly formalistic characterization of what a relativist is committed to. If we were talking about propositional disagreements, then this would be a problem. The negation of “I affirm that P” wouldn’t be “I affirm that not-P” but “I don’t affirm that P.” Transposed to attitudinal states, this would involve attributing an attitude to the first person but not the second: “I have an attitude of approval of P” would be paired with “I do not have an attitude of approval of P.” The latter person has not expressed that they have a negative attitude; they’ve only stated that they don’t have a particular attitude. As such, this person has not expressed an attitude!

Relativism demolished? Not so fast. Actual Interpersonal disagreements occur in social contexts where pragmatics readily picks up the slack. Imagine once again that Alex and Sam are arguing about abortion outside of an abortion clinic, and we see this exchange:

Alex: Abortion is morally wrong.

On van Roojen’s characterization of how the relativist would analyze these sentences, we would get the following:

Alex: I disapprove of abortion.

If the relativist, fool that they are, insists that we can account for the original disagreement in terms of Alex and Sam expressing conflicting attitudes, we have a problem: Sam has not expressed an attitude. Why? Because this is the proper analysis for the relativist:

Alex: I disapprove of abortion. This expresses my negative attitude towards abortion.

Sam: I do not disapprove of abortion.

Sam hasn’t expressed any attitude towards abortion at all, so this can’t be a conflict of attitudes. Now, I want you to imagine Alex and Sam actually arguing with each other outside an abortion clinic. Perhaps Alex is holding up a sign that says “Stop murdering babies!”. Perhaps they’re both yelling and angry. When Sam says something like “No it isn’t!!!” even if the technical analysis of the semantics of this claim involve the expression of a lack of disapproval of abortion, is it at all plausible that this is Sam’s only goal? Is Sam merely intending to inform Alex that he doesn’t have the same attitude as Alex?

Why would anyone do that? I don’t think that they would. In practice, “No it isn’t” almost certainly would carry significant pragmatic implications about Sam’s attitude in this context. Indeed, we can infer a whole lot about Sam in this context:

Sam doesn’t think abortion is wrong. Sam has an attitude of approval of access to abortion clinics. Sam probably thinks people who go to abortion clinics should be allowed to do so, and shouldn’t be harassed or shamed when they do. Alex’s tone, attitude, and the social context in which the conflict occurs all inform how we should (and, I think, would) interpret Sam. We wouldn’t even have to make these inferences if we were there. We can just ask Sam. And do you think Sam would respond, in a monotone, “No. I have no attitude one way or another. I am totally indifferent to abortion. I simply do not have an attitude of disapproval.” Again, cue philosophers’ appeal to intuitions. I am tempted to say this is counterintuitive. But I won’t speak for readers or insist “we” find it counterintuitive. Maybe you think people screaming at each outside abortion clinics are emotionless robots.

Whatever your intuitions tell you, I, at least, would infer that Sam is expressing various tacit attitudes of approval of abortion or at least of tangential norms related to abortion, e.g., a person may hold the view that abortion isn’t a good thing, and that it’d be best if people didn’t get them, but might also believe that people should be legally permitted to do so and should be able to do so safely and without fear of harassment.

In short, the relativist’s position only looks dopey and implausible if we imagine the relativist has a profoundly blinkered and narrow view of language that totally ignores social context and pragmatics. And why should we think that?

Also, in practice, do people really talk like logicians? Do all moral disagreements strictly follow this structure:

Alex: I endorse moral position P.

Sam: I do not endorse moral position P.

No. Many times when people disagree you may see remarks like this:

Alex: Abortion is evil.

Sam: No it isn’t. Your misogynistic religion is evil, you asshole!

By “No it isn’t,” is Sam merely expressing “I do not endorse the proposition that abortion is evil”? Maybe. But oftentimes ordinary claims that appear to only express the negation of another claim pragmatically imply a positive claim to the contrary. Once again, relativism is supposed to offer a semantic analysis of ordinary moral claims, including those involved in moral disagreements. Nothing about such an analysis prohibits the relativist from accounting for what goes in disagreements by appealing to pragmatic considerations. And pragmatics will often do much if not all of the heavy lifting. Indeed, speaking for myself, I deny there is any conceptually clear distinction between semantics and pragmatics: I think it’s pragmatics all the way down, and so for me, the only way to properly assess what’s going on in a moral disagreement is to consider the contexts in which it occurs. And absolutely nothing about everyday moral disputes strikes me as baffling or inexplicable on the assumption that the people arguing with one another are appraiser relativists.

Consider me, personally. I’m not a layperson or an ignorant dope on questions of morality. I am not a moral realist, and when I make moral claims, I explicitly and self-consciously intend to make remarks about my values. In short, in practice, I routinely speak as an appraiser relativist. Does this mean I’m committed to not engaging in interpersonal moral disagreements with others, or that if I do, that this is some kind of performative contradiction?

No. Because what I am trying to do in these situations is prompt others to reflect on their own values, with an expectation that if they do so they may come to adopt my position on the matter. Or I may believe they have other, mistaken views that, if they come to light, would alter their perspective on the moral issue in question. What motivates me to do this? Because I want people to share my moral standards. I have certain goals and desires regarding how I want the world to be, and I want others to share those goals so that the world will be a better place from my perspective. In other words, I have certain goals and desires, and when I argue with others, my goal is to get people to act in ways that are more conducive to those goals. None of this requires presumptions about moral realism. A great deal of disagreements are motivated by the goal of social coordination. They’re about getting people to do what you want, not about getting them to affirm propositions as true. In fact, the latter sort of disagreement would make almost no sense as a target goal: why would care about what propositions someone affirmed as true unless this had some practical implications that you cared about?

Philosophers often seem to think we are truth-first in our interactions. We’re not. Consideration of truths is subordinate to our goals and desires. We argue about what’s true or false because we have some goal or interest we want to achieve. Truth is almost never the target goal for its own sake. Everyday discussions of truth are always (or at least nearly always) instrumental to our interests. Even realists who are arguing about the truth of a moral claim probably wouldn’t be engaged in a passionless intellectual exercise; typically, they care about what others think is morally right or wrong because they want that person to act in certain ways. Their desires for how they want to see the world influence which disputes about what’s stance-independently true they opt to engage in. Even those abstract, disinterested disputes are best seen as a kind of sparring for when genuine interpersonal moral conflicts arise in the real world. Or am I to believe that moral realists are utterly detached from real world outcomes? I very much doubt that, and note the irony, were that true, of realists posturing so much about how relativists and other antirealists are such terrible, awful people. Am I to seriously believe this is entirely a disinterested intellectual point?

No. Our goals are in the driver’s seat, and this is true as much or nearly as much for moral realists as it is for antirealists. Desires do the heavy lifting; not belief in the truth of propositions. We’d do nothing without the former; we get by just fine without the latter.

For whatever reason, critics of relativism do not appreciate the conceptual and argumentative resources available to the relativist to account for everyday phenomena (or, for that matter, the noncognitivist, the error theorist, and the quietist). Critics of relativism routinely assume that people speak, think, and act implicitly like moral realists. I believe this is a profound mistake. Often the characterizations they offer for what we would expect on a relativist analysis underestimate the relativist’s ability to account for our ordinary practices. And I say this in spite of the fact that I don’t even think most people are implicit relativists.

My goal here has not been to argue that the folk conception of morality is relativistic; rather, my goal is to show that relativism can account for how people are ordinarily disposed to speak, think, and act at least as well as realism with respect to many of the common discussion points (e.g., disagreement). Overall, I think relativism does a slightly better job, in part because I think it’s highly uncharitable to attribute a view as absurd and implausible as moral realism to ordinary people.

Societies have never needed any commitment to moral realism to function as they do, and we’ve never needed to invoke realism to account for the way people speak, think, and act. Overlap in our shared values is more than adequate to build functioning societies, with or without cryptorealist commitments lurking in the shadows of our words.

References

Pölzler, T., & Wright, J. C. (2020). Anti-realist pluralism: A new approach to folk metaethics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11, 53-82.

van Roojen, M. (2015). Metaethics: A Contemporary Introduction. Routledge. New York, NY.