Most people wouldn't benefit from affirming value realism

1.0 Introduction

According to JPA, there are strong pragmatic reasons for the ordinary person to endorse value realism, the view that there are stance-independent values. JPA is mistaken. The ordinary person does not have any strong pragmatic reasons to endorse value realism. Doing so would yield few or no benefits, and they would not, in any way, be better off by endorsing value realism. My goal here is to offer a response to JPA’s dubious case for the alleged benefits of believing in value realism. You should first read JPA’s article here. If you leave a comment over there, be polite.

2.0 Value nihilism

According to JPA:

Whether one affirms Value Realism is of tremendous importance. It will determine, to a significant extent, (i) how one relates to other beings, (ii) how one conceives of oneself and the world more broadly, and (iii) how one structures and conducts one’s own life, in the very broadest sense.

These are big claims. But they are just that: claims. JPA has a lot of work to do to make a case that any of these claims are true. Unfortunately, what he offers simply does not provide any particularly strong case for endorsing (i), (ii), or (iii). Some of his claims are shuffled off into endnotes. Here’s one associated with (i):

If one thinks, for example, that there are stance-independent reasons (deriving from stance-independent value) to care about the welfare of nonhuman animals and suffering children in far away places, this is more likely to lead one to make personal sacrifices (e.g., by abstaining from factory-farmed meat and by donating to effective charities) than if one denies the existence of stance-independent value and regards one’s desires as one’s only source of reasons. To anticipate: yes, avoid-anti-realists about value can be extremely generous. I think it’s likely that such people’s professed metaethical commitments fail to align with their actual commitments. Such a suggestion is apt to annoy these people, but it’s manifestly the case that we’re often confused about our own views — and that we often say things (and fool ourselves into thinking that we believe things) in the course of philosophical debate that don’t reflect our actual commitments.

The first claim is an empirical one: that realists are more likely to make personal sacrifices. Given the wording (“this is more likely to lead one to…) JPA appears to be making a causal claim: that realism causes greater levels of personal sacrifice. This is an empirical claim. There is no good empirical evidence that it’s true, and JPA does not provide any evidence for this claim. He just…asserts it.

To anticipate: yes, avoid-anti-realists about value can be extremely generous.

This isn’t the objection I’d make. My objection is to JPA making a completely unsubstantiated empirical claim and offering no arguments or evidence at all for why we should think it is true. This is followed by yet another assertion:

I think it’s likely that such people’s professed metaethical commitments fail to align with their actual commitments.

This is just a statement of what JPA thinks. It isn’t even clear what he means here. I think he’s suggesting that people who claim to be antirealists act in ways inconsistent with their alleged commitment to antirealism. If this is what he means, why be coy? And in any case, what inconsistencies? We’re not told what these inconsistencies are, why they are inconsistencies, or why we should think he’s right about any of this. It’s just a pile of assertions.

Such a suggestion is apt to annoy these people, but it’s manifestly the case that we’re often confused about our own views — and that we often say things (and fool ourselves into thinking that we believe things) in the course of philosophical debate that don’t reflect our actual commitments.

I’m not even annoyed by these remarks anymore. I’m just bored by them. If I’m going to argue with an opposing side, I’d at least want them to put up a good fight. To raise serious objections. To compel me to have to do work to defend my position. But JPA’s anemic claims don’t do any of this. They’re just sodden assertions accompanied by little to no support. They don’t even present a decent target to strike at. Of course it’s true that “we’re often confused about our own views.” But JPA does nothing to show that antirealists are confused about their commitment to antirealism. He thinks we are. Well, that’s nice.

We get this remark for (ii):

The view of the world as devoid of stance-independent value is very different from the view of the world as teaming [sic] with value which ought to be recognized by those beings capable of recognizing it. The former view is that of a world in which, ultimately, nothing matters; the latter is that of a world in which things really do matter, regardless of what anyone believes or desires (such that the world really would have been worse for the Nazis’ prevailing, even if the only people left living on the face of the earth believed otherwise).

Note how dreadful this sounds:

The former view is that of a world in which, ultimately, nothing matters; the latter is that of a world in which things really do matter, regardless of what anyone believes or desires [...]

This is smoke and mirrors. JPA states at the outset of his article that:

[...] the ordinary person has very strong pragmatic reasons for affirming Value Realism: the view according to which value is real and objective (i.e., stance-independent); that at least something matters, as such. (emphasis mine)

The notion that “at least something matters, as such” is accompanied by an endnote explaining what this means:

Something matters as such just in case it matters intrinsically — due to its nature or one of its essential properties.

So by “mattering” JPA just means mattering-in-a-realist-sense. So when he says this:

The former view is that of a world in which, ultimately, nothing matters; the latter is that of a world in which things really do matter, regardless of what anyone believes or desires [...]

This amounts to the completely trivial observation that, according to the view that nothing matters-in-a-realist-sense, nothing matters-in-a-realist-sense, while realism holds that things do matter-in-a-realist-sense. This is, of course, true, but why should anyone find this threatening or troubling or concerning? I certainly don’t. I don’t care if things intrinsically matter. That doesn’t matter to me. This brings me to an important point: antirealists are free to conceive of and endorse other conceptions of things mattering or having value. Not only are we free to, we in fact do so. So here is one distinction:

• Mattering-to

• Mattering-intrinsically

Something can matter-to if it matters to me, or to you, or to anyone. That is, I can care about something, or value it, and so on. And in this respect, it can matter to me. For instance, my family matters to me. Mattering-to does not involve any notion of the target of my valuation, i.e., who or what matters to me, mattering in any intrinsic respect, i.e., mattering in virtue of its nature or essential properties, nor does mattering-to require that something matter independent of me or anyone else valuing it. For something to matter to me is for me to hold a certain stance towards it. This doesn’t require it to have the property of mattering, independent of whether I or anyone else cares about it (i.e., whether it matters to us).

Now, when it comes to what I care about, the only things I care about are things that matter to me. This is the kind of mattering that motivates me to act, that prompts me to feel happy or sad. That influences me. What about mattering intrinsically?

I don’t care what matters intrinsically. That doesn’t matter to me. If you were to tell me that while my family matters to me, some other family matters intrinsically, I would not care. I would prefer and care more about my family than that family. The fact that something matters intrinsically is completely motivationally and practically irrelevant to me. Now, suppose it mattered to me whether something mattered intrinsically. Then, if I discovered that something mattered intrinsically, it would matter more to me. This would mean that something mattering intrinsically would have practical significance, but its practical significance would be mediated by it mattering to me that it mattered intrinsically. What this suggests is that, for me, at least, even if anything did intrinsically matter, whether this would have any practical relevance to me would be subordinate to and fully dependent on whether it mattered to me that something mattered intrinsically. I at least think this is true about my own psychology. I don’t know exactly how others think. Maybe they think like me. Maybe they don’t. Maybe I’m wrong about my own psychology. At least some of these considerations turn on empirical data we probably don’t have. Pause and consider your own values. Does it matter to you whether something matters intrinsically?

If it doesn’t matter to you whether something matters intrinsically, then the fact that something matters intrinsically would have no practical significance for you. If it does matter to you whether something matters intrinsically, then the fact that something matters intrinsically would have practical significance, but that practical significance would still be predicated on what matters to you. So it could be that value realism has conditional practical relevance: whether it has practical relevance turns on whether any given individual cares about whether it’s true or not.

Now let’s say we set aside mattering-to entirely. Some things matter intrinsically and some things don’t. Now what? What do we do? What would move you to pursue what matters intrinsically rather than what doesn’t matter intrinsically? I would love to hear from realists who believe they have a good answer to this question. I don’t think that they will. I think the whole idea of disconnecting value from motivation, goals, and desires, is utterly nonsensical and that the entire foundation on which value realism is based is, to put it bluntly, utter madness. It is tantamount to insisting that nobody should ever eat anything based on how it tastes to them, but should instead exclusively make gastronomic decisions (decisions about what to eat, in terms of the flavor or other culinary aspects of consumption of food and drink, independent of moral, prudential, financial, and other considerations) on the basis of the intrinsic tastiness of different foods. Do you find mushrooms disgusting? Well, if they’re intrinsically tasty then tough shit, you should eat them on your pizza. If you find them gross you are incorrect. Eat the mushrooms.

To me, I am utterly baffled at the notion that anyone would care about things “mattering” in the realist sense, that is, of mattering intrinsically. If this is something you care about, reach out to me. I’d like to hear from you. Why do you care about whether things matter independent of your goals, values, and desires? If you don’t care, then I’d still like to hear from you. I’d find it fascinating if there was someone who thought that some things matter intrinsically but doesn’t care whether they do.

Finally, we have this, following (iii):

One’s life plan is apt to look different if one thinks that value is not merely a function of one’s own beliefs and preferences.

I doubt it. It wouldn’t for me, at least. Even if there was intrinsic value, i.e., value that was not merely a function of my own beliefs and preferences, I still believe that, as a matter of descriptive fact, I only act on my personal values, i.e., what matters to me, and that insofar as this is reflected by my beliefs and preferences, and I don’t care if something is intrinsically valuable, even if I were convinced that some things had intrinsic value, this would make no practical difference to me at all. My life plans would be utterly unchanged. If this would matter to anyone else: why? Why change your life plans?

JPA continues:

According to Nihilism, nothing matters as such (i.e., in-itself). On this view, there are no ends which we ought, objectively, to pursue; reason cannot be practical (i.e., it can’t tell us what we ought to do); and there is no possibility of speaking sensibly in terms of our being more or less reasonable in our selection of ends.

I dislike much of the framing here, but this is all correct. “Nihilism” is a loaded term that carries negative connotations, and likewise saying that if you’re a value nihilist that you think “reason cannot be practical” sounds pretty bad. But these are all loaded ways of saying that if you don’t think there are stance-independent values then you don’t think there are stance-independent values, only with the use of terms that carry ordinary, colloquial meanings, which gives the misleading impression that the “nihilist” denies more than they in fact deny.

Yet JPA begins to misstep with the presumptive language here:

Nihilism entails that all of our acts are, ultimately, arational (i.e., not subject to rational evaluation or scrutiny).

This is sloppy. The term “ultimately,” may hint at the nihilist not thinking that our ends are subject to rational evaluation or scrutiny, which is true, but this remark does not clearly convey that the nihilist may endorse other conceptions of rationality, e.g., instrumental rationality, according to which we could evaluate people’s acts as rational or irrational. This implication is attenuated by the very next remark, which clarifies:

If Nihilism is true, then although our acts could be more or less conducive to the ends which we happen to have set for ourselves (i.e., more or less instrumentally rational), all of those ends would, in the final analysis, be arbitrary — and everything pointless and meaningless in the deepest possible sense.

…only to end with even more loaded language. The term “arbitrary” is misleading. Is it arbitrary for me to, all else being equal, prefer foods I like over foods I don’t like? Is it arbitrary for me to prefer listening to music I like versus music I don’t like? Is it arbitrary for me to prefer the company of people I want to be around rather than the company of violent strangers who want to torture me? The term “arbitrary” carries connotations of being a matter of whim or chance; it gives the impression the nihilist is just flitting about, with no principles or standards to guide their actions or ground their perspective on the world. But that isn’t true. The only meaningful sense in which the nihilist’s ends are “arbitrary” is in the sense that there is no principled reason why one has their particular set of values rather than some other set of values. Well, so what?

Yet JPA leverages this to go on to say that nihilism entails that “everything pointless and meaningless in the deepest possible sense.” This is comically loaded language. This is just a highly misleading way of saying that the nihilist does not think anything stance-independently has a point, or stance-independently has any meaning. As far as “in the deepest possible sense,” it’s not clear what that even means. I don’t agree that stance-independent points or meaning are deeper than stance-dependent points and meaning, so I think I just do not share JPA’s position on what constitutes the “deepest possible sense.” The deepest (and, indeed, only) sense in which I think things have a point or matter is in an antirealist way: they have a point to me or have meaning to me.

JPA then goes on to say this:

Given the nature of the psyche, the typical person will be better off subjectively (i.e., by the person’s own lights) by virtue of affirming Value Realism — provided that this person truly understands the bleakness of the alternative (as many do quite clearly do not).

Regular readers will know exactly what I will say next: whether people would be better off by their own lights by affirming value realism is an empirical question. Does JPA present any empirical evidence to support this claim? No. So we have, once again, a completely unsubstantiated assumption. And this time, it’s an unsubstantiated claim about human psychology. Let’s see if JPA will say anything to substantiate this claim.

3.0 The nihilist’s alleged predicament

In the next section of JPA’s post, he suggests the nihilist is saddled with a predicament:

Many nihilists will be worse off, subjectively, to the extent that their nihilism negatively impacts their thought patterns and affective states. These people might well find their nihilistic outlook dispiriting, demoralizing, and depressing; that it saddles them with a deep and pervasive sense of meaninglessness, forlornness, and general existential angst.

If belief in nihilism does have these consequences, then all else being equal the nihilist would be worse off. But once again, it’s an open empirical question whether any of this would follow from believing in nihilism. There’s a critical distinction here, though:

Logical entailments
These are the necessary implications of the truth of nihilism.

Contingent psychological consequences
These are the consequences that belief in nihilism has on any given individual.

Only the contingent psychological consequences of belief in nihilism are straightforwardly empirical, and only they have any direct practical consequences. I say “straightforward” and “direct,” because logical entailments of the truth of a position are, from a pragmatist perspective, entangled in empirical considerations in various ways that aren’t worth digressing to address, and in any case if the truth of a position entails some set of other truths, and those truths matter to a person, then the logical entailments of a position will at least have considerable indirect practical relevance. Practical relevance will always turn on what an agent’s goals and values are, though, and it is possible that a person simply wouldn’t care about the implications of a philosophical position.

Even so, there is a further distinction to make: (a) logical entailments of the truth of nihilism that are candidates for having practical relevance to people, and reactions to the truth of nihilism that are either (b) based on false beliefs about its implications or (c) aren’t based on truths or falsehoods about its implications at all, but on some contingent features of the psychology of the person reacting to the truth of nihilism. I’ll give an example of each:

1. Someone could personally care a great deal that there are stance-independent truths about what’s valuable. If they came to believe nihilism, they would no longer be able to consistently maintain this belief, and thus they’d lose something they cared a great deal about. This would be a genuinely negative practical consequence of belief in nihilism.

2. A person may believe that if nihilism is true that they cannot object to someone stealing their wallet or harming them, and they cannot intervene to stop others from committing atrocities. Absent belief in other positions besides nihilism itself (e.g., the belief that one must have some kind of stance-independent normative basis for imposing one’s standards on others), these are not implications of nihilism itself. This too is a genuine practical consequence, but it is crucially grounded in misunderstandings about the implications of nihilism that, if corrected, may dissolve.

3. Someone could simply find that the truth of nihilism makes them sad, or terrified, or angry, or whatever. There doesn’t have to be a principled rationale for having such reactions. This is also a legitimate practical consequence of belief in nihilism. However, it isn’t the result of one’s understanding or misunderstanding of the implications of the view, and so it may not be as amenable to being diffused by thinking through the implications of nihilism.

JPA seems to believe that the negative consequences of belief in nihilism stem from correctly understanding its implications. This seems to suggest that (a) is playing a big role in JPA’s account, and that the practical consequences that follow are in some way a result of correctly recognizing what nihilism entails. This is hinted at by JPA’s remark that a typical person is better off affirming value realism:

provided that this person truly understands the bleakness of the alternative (as many do quite clearly do not [...]

This is more than a little puzzling. Whether something is “bleak” is the sort of thing I’d have thought depends on a person’s individual psychology, i.e., how they react to affirming nihilism. They could fail to find its truth miserable and depressing because they don’t realize it has some particular implication, but if that’s the case, well, what are those implications? JPA’s way of framing the situation almost seems as though he’s smuggling in some auxiliary realist-like assumptions into his framing of the situation, as if there were a stance-independent fact of the matter about how one ought to react to the implications of nihilism. If so, this would be a fairly substantial mistake, and reveal a lack of imagination on JPA’s part. But it’s not clear he is making this mistake and in any case I’m sure he’d deny he’s making it.

In that case, I’d be curious to know from JPA what, exactly, he means by a person truly understanding the bleakness of nihilism. Does one only truly understand the bleakness of nihilism if they react in the ways JPA thinks they would? That is, if they are demoralized, dispirited, depressed, and so on? If so, I’d want to see the argument for that. If instead understanding nihilism but not having a negative reaction is a possible response, then this severs the link between understanding and any particular response, and again opens us up to the possibility that we’re dealing with an open empirical question: whether belief in nihilism (accompanied by truly understanding it and its implications) actually has any negative impact on anyone’s welfare.

In any case, I’m a value nihilist. I agree with JPA that conditional on what JPA means by the terms in question, that everything is arbitrary, pointless, and meaningless in the deepest possible sense, but these are all notions I don’t care at all about because they don’t matter to me. Would JPA insist I am failing to appreciate the implications of nihilism? Or is it that I do recognize its implications and I simply don’t care?

JPA recognizes the contingency of the nihilist’s reaction to believing in nihilism:

This is not to say we should expect all nihilists to be miserable. Many — I daresay most — will not understand the entailments of their own view or be psychologically affected by them even if they do understand those entailments; thus, subjectively, such people will be none-the-worse for being nihilists.

I’m not convinced by the part about not understanding the entailments of their own view. What are those dreadful entailments supposed to be? As far as I can tell, JPA still hasn’t told us what they are. Is that nothing matters “in the deepest possible sense”? Well, so what? Sure, that sounds bad. But sounding bad and being bad are not the same. If it’s so bleak and terrible, JPA should be able to tell us why. I don’t think he has. Personally, I think the kind of value JPA believes in, intrinsic value, life having a “meaning” and a “point” independent of what I or anyone else cares about, is barking mad nonsense; I’ve never encountered even the whiff of a decent reason to care if my life has a “meaning” independent of what it means to me and the meaning I create for myself. There’s nothing terrible about the universe not having this kind of value in it. It is a ghostly value, a value disconnected from me and from everyone else. Value that isn’t ours isn’t any value I care about.

JPA goes on to say:

Particularly malevolent or anti-social individuals might even enjoy their nihilistic outlook, feeling freed from the pangs of conscience and the bonds of normative constraint.

This strikes me as a bit of perverse speculation. Sure, they might. But I think remarks like these are a little irresponsible. People often incorrectly associate nihilism with psychopathy, antisocial tendencies, selfishness, and in general malevolence and evil. Playing around with armchair psychological speculation about how some of us might be malevolent monsters can plant the seeds of suspicion in readers about all nihilists. Notably, one could speculate in the same way about the motivations one might have for being a moral realist:

Particularly malevolent or anti-social individuals might even enjoy their being a value realist, exploiting the rhetorical benefits of convincing others that they are justified, even obligated, to carry out actions that go against their own desires or that they find objectionable because they are “objectively” the right thing to do.

Value realists could exploit belief in value realism to convince people to commit atrocities or to act against their own interests, thus serving as a tool of exploitation, manipulation, oppression, and violence. Value realism, like theism, outsources what’s right and wrong to a third party. And we’re all familiar with the potential to appeal to God to motivate people to commit atrocities. Value realism could be the secular form of getting otherwise good people to do bad things.

Of course, I’m being tongue-in-cheek here. Mostly, anyway. What I said could be true. Even JPA’s own commentary, a bit later in the article, hints at this possibility:

One could, despite being correct about the existence of stance-independent value, be utterly mistaken about what has value; if one has a perverse theory of value, then it is likely that one will be actively motivated to behave as one ought not. Thus, if anything matters, it might matter that would-be fanatics are nihilists.

But I think it’d be irresponsible to casually suggest that a drive for moral realism might be motivated by malevolence. It’d only take a wink emoji to make it clear I was suggesting the realist philosophers I was responding to might be psychopaths and monsters. But I don’t think that. I just think they’re mistaken about obscure philosophical matters. I don’t think any of these views have much of an impact on everyday behavior. My point is simply that one can readily conjure up just-so stories or plausible-sounding hypotheses about the behavioral consequences of belief in nihilism, realism, or whatever else. What ultimately matters is how people actually respond in practice to affirming these views. And that, of course, is an empirical question.

JPA also shuffled off another remark to the endnotes following his remark about people not understanding the implications of value nihilism, so let’s have a look at that:

I have an error theory about this: most people are so full of desire, motivation, and concern — and so locked into their own perspective on reality — that the idea that nothing matters is almost psychologically impossible for them to entertain; things matter to them, and they’re generally unreflective about whether those things ought to matter to them (but on Nihilism, nothing ought, objectively, to matter to anyone). That human beings would be like this makes good evolutionary sense: it would have been highly maladaptive for Paleolithic humans to sit around wondering whether it really mattered, objectively, whether they starved to death or managed to find a mate and reproduce; thus, plausibly, we evolved to be relatively bad at thinking clearly about metaethics and, in particular, the entailments of metaethical anti-realism.

Once again, we have idle armchair speculation about people’s psychology. JPA presents no evidence to support this claim. I don’t see any reason to take it seriously. I don’t think most people would find value nihilism all that distressing. I embraced it long ago, and it had few consequences, because I recognized that value realism is a nonsensical position and that it wouldn’t matter-to-me at all if things “mattered” in the sense JPA thinks things matter. I do agree with this part:

[...] things matter to them, and they’re generally unreflective about whether those things ought to matter to them (but on Nihilism, nothing ought, objectively, to matter to anyone).

I do think people are generally unreflective about whether things ought to matter to them. Which is good, because it’s a nonsensical consideration. They’d be wasting their time. Finally, JPA engages in a bit of evolutionary psychological speculation:

That human beings would be like this makes good evolutionary sense: it would have been highly maladaptive for Paleolithic humans to sit around wondering whether it really mattered, objectively, whether they starved to death or managed to find a mate and reproduce; thus, plausibly, we evolved to be relatively bad at thinking clearly about metaethics and, in particular, the entailments of metaethical anti-realism.

There’s nothing plausible about this. JPA seems to be suggesting that we may suffer from an evolved, localized cognitive impairment that prevents us from thinking effectively about metaethics because if we did, we might question value realism, and that could undermine our wellbeing (and presumably decrease our reproductive fitness). I doubt over the course of most human evolutionary history these sorts of considerations arose in any considerable quantity and if so that they had enough of an impact on our evolution that we share a genetic predisposition for being bad at metaethics.

However, if, for whatever reason, this is the case, this could be a fantastic evolutionary debunking argument against moral realism. JPA’s claims, if true, would suggest that we have an evolved predisposition for shying away from nihilism and embracing value realism not because it is true but because doing so promotes our wellbeing.

JPA continues:

So too a certain kind of non-malevolent slacker (insofar as affirming Nihilism conduces to feeling unbothered by any sense that a life might be wasted) and those with a particularly weak will who are perpetually unable to act on moral reasons (or what they take to be moral reasons).

At this point, JPA appears to be engaging in a bit of armchair speculation about the various subspecies of nihilists:

Ignorant nihilists: Confused fools who don’t understand that the proper response to nihilism should be misery and ennui.

Malevolent nihilists: Evil nihilists who revel in the freedom to act without guilt or shame.

Slacker nihilists: Lazy nihilists who just don’t care if nothing matters.

Weak-willed nihilists: Nihilists who just can’t help but do bad things despite what they take to be moral reasons to do otherwise.

Not the most flattering taxonomy. This looks more like the fevered fantasies of someone who hates nihilism and wants to derogate nihilists than someone seriously interested in analyzing the psychology of nihilists. If JPA is genuinely curious about the prognosis of embracing nihilism, I would encourage him to engage in empirical research, rather than engage in what appears to me to be little more than disdainful armchair speculation, like he’s trying to psychoanalyze serial killers. JPA does conclude that some of us might be happy:

But happy nihilists, or would-be happy nihilists, surely are few in number.

This is a great opportunity to drag a remark from Dennett out of the shed:

[...] whenever you see the word “surely,” a little bell should ring—ding!—and you should pause to scrutinize what follows, since this is typically the weakest spot in the author’s case. It doesn’t “go without saying,” since the author feels the need to say it, but the author hopes a nudge (“surely”) can take the place of a supporting argument.

This applies to JPA’s remark. JPA is merrily trotting out a host of empirical claims for which he provides exactly no empirical evidence whatsoever.

Given some widely-shared assumptions about what would matter, given Value Realism, it’s likely that nihilists (mistaken or not) will be disposed to act in ways that it matters one ought not, and to value things which ought not be valued.

Again, there simply isn’t any empirical evidence for this claim. Even if value realism is true, there is no guarantee that value nihilists will be significantly less likely to comply with whatever the stance-independent moral facts are than the realist. One would first have to show that belief in nihilism actually results in substantially different behavior in the first place. We don’t have any good data to support this claim. But even if we did, what you’d also have to show is that the deviations nihilists are disposed to make from complying with stance-independent values are greater than the deviations of value realists. It’s possible that value realists are more disposed to rationalize their personal values, or to be caught up in religious views or ideologies that are misaligned with what’s stance-independently valuable, or are more rigid and inflexible in their thinking and more likely to hold conservative views that fail to converge on the moral truth at the same pace as value nihilists do. There are a variety of reasons why the psychology of those disposed towards value realism might ironically cause them to be less inclined to comply with what’s stance-independently valuable. Do I think this is the case? No, but again, how value nihilists and realists actually behave, and the degree to which their values comport with whatever the moral truth turns out to be, is an open empirical question.

Nevertheless, I’m happy to grant for the sake of argument that it’s more likely value nihilists would act in ways inconsistent with stance-independent truths about what’s valuable than value realists. JPA offers some reason to think this would be the case:

For on our best moral theories, our desires are unreliable guides to stance-independent value; thus, one who regards one’s desires as one’s only reasons for action will tend to be disinclined towards what matters (if anything matters).

Even if this is true, there are a host of other potential causal factors associated with endorsement of value nihilism and realism that could drag nihilists and realists alike further or closer to acting in accord with whatever stance-independently matters. This isn’t a matter that can be settled from the armchair. Even so, I find it plausible that value realists would be more inclined to care about what’s stance-independently valuable and adjust their actions accordingly. Let’s grant this, then, for the sake of argument.

So what? If value realism is true, I would still have no interest in complying with what’s stance-independently valuable. So this is hardly a criticism. If belief in value nihilism is going to make me miserable or undermine my goals, I’d care about that, but that’s a very different sort of outcome.

So JPA can claim that value nihilists will not be disposed to act in ways that “it matters one ought not” and that value nihilists will “value things which ought not to be valued.” Even if this were true, again, why should anyone care? I certainly don’t. Do you care? If so, why?

This is where things get weird. JPA then states:

Insofar as we have pragmatic reason to mitigate the risk of becoming agents disposed to wrong action, we have such reason not to be nihilists.

Okay, but I don’t think we do have pragmatic reasons of this kind. Is this “pragmatic reason” some fact about what would be conducive to our goals and interests? If so, why would it be in my interests or promote my goals to abstain from stance-independently wrong action and to engage in stance-independently good action? Isn’t the whole point that such actions aren’t necessarily aligned with my goals and interests?

If it is in my interests to do what is stance-independently valuable, then it is also stance-dependently valuable. And if it is stance-dependently valuable, then this is sufficient to motivate me and everyone else to act accordingly. If so, then the fact that it’s stance-independently valuable is superfluous: I’d perform the actions in question because they serve my interests, not because they’re intrinsically valuable. If, on the other hand, the actions in question don’t serve my interests, then I don’t have pragmatic reasons to comply with them.

So JPA’s suggestion here either renders value realism practically superfluous, or he’s just incorrect. I will dub this the motivational superfluity dilemma. The dilemma is that all stance-independent facts about what we should do are either:

• Something we’d already want to do anyway, so value realism is superfluous

• Something we wouldn’t want to do anyway, so value realism is not in our pragmatic interests

You can thread this needle by describing a person who wants to do whatever it is that they stance-independently ought to do, regardless of the content of what that turns out to be. But this still makes the pragmatic value of complying with value realism subordinate to our subjective values, and it’s an open empirical question who actually does value complying with whatever stance-independently matters.

And how plausible is it that there are people who have the following psychological disposition:

I have a personal, subjective desire to comply with whatever it is that turns out to be valuable independent of whether I have a personal, subjective desire for it. In other words, what matters to me is what matters intrinsically, independent of the degree to which the content of what matters intrinsically would be consistent with what matters to me other than the fact that it matters to me what matters intrinsically. For instance, it matters to me what matters intrinsically, and it matters to me that I value my family more than strangers. But if it turned out that I should be an impartial utility maximizer, I’d be motivated to suppress my partiality towards my family and act towards the greater good.

Are there people like this? I think there probably are. Maybe JPA is one of them. Maybe there are a lot of them. Who knows. Personally, I think this sounds profoundly bizarre and if I had to put bets on it, I suspect almost nobody actually thinks this way. Time, or rather data, will tell.

4.0 Some objections

JPA ends by considering objections. He rightly notes that many common responses to Pascal’s wager won’t work for the Realist’s wager. For instance, one can’t object to endorsing value realism on pragmatic grounds by appealing to stance-independent normative considerations if one is a value nihilist, since if one is a value nihilist this resource won’t be available. And since JPA isn’t making any claims about infinite value, common concerns about infinities won’t apply. JPA considers a few other weak objections and dispenses with them. Maybe something could be made of them, but I have little interest in objecting to minimal doxastic voluntarism or some analogue of the many gods objection.

My objection is simple: JPA has not presented any compelling arguments or evidence that there’d be significant practical benefits to endorsing value realism. Whether there would be benefits of this kind would be (a) an empirical question and (b) contingent on the values and interests of each individual. If I am correct that it doesn’t matter to me whether value realism is true, then I’d obtain few if any practical benefits from endorsing value realism. I suspect the same is true for the typical person as well, but this is an empirical question that awaits future research.

JPA’s concluding remarks put no dent in this objection. JPA recaps his argument as follows:

To recount: I have argued that, first, most of us have a broadly pragmatic interest in affirming Value Realism. There are three reasons for this. With respect to the ordinary person, S, (i) S’s life likely to go best, subjectively, if S is a value realist; (ii) S reduces S’s moral risk by being a value realist (being thereby less apt to act wrongly), and (iii) S has the best chance of being acquainted with real value by being a value realist.

JPA presents no substantive arguments for (i). Even if (ii) and (iii) are true (and they very well may be), it’s not clear why I or anyone else should (on pragmatic grounds) care.

As a value nihilist, I don’t just believe that nothing stance-independently matters, I also don’t care if anything stance-independently matters. I don’t have a name for this additional view, but JPA’s claims regarding (ii) and (iii) only carry weight if someone is disposed towards nihilism but would care if realism were true. What JPA has not done is make a strong appeal to our interests. The latter two concerns would only matter if one cared to reduce their “moral risk” with respect to the stance-independent moral truths and if they had any interest in being “acquainted with real value.” I have absolutely no interest in either of these objectives.

JPA then hits us with this oft-repeated but misguided remark:

In the end, The Value Realist’s Wager simply gives formal statement to a natural, but rarely-expressed, thought: namely, that there could be no reason to be a nihilist — because if Nihilism is true, then nothing matters.

This is not true unless it is disambiguated in such a way that the remark becomes vacuous. There can be no stance-independent reason to be a nihilist if nihilism is true for the trivial reason that if nihilism is true there are no stance-independent reasons for anything. But stance-independent reasons aren’t the only reasons, so it does not follow that if nihilism is true that one would have “no reason” to be a nihilist. This remark is highly misleading and whatever rhetorical force it has is obtained by suppressing the modifier “stance-independent,” to conceal how vacuous the claim is. What JPA is saying here amounts to saying this:

If there are no stance-independent facts about what you ought to believe, then it would not be the case that one stance-independently ought to believe that there are no stance-independent facts about what one ought to believe.

This is true, and it is completely trivial. Of course this is true. But conceptions of “reasons” that presuppose realism aren’t the only conception of “reasons” one could endorse. I have a reason to be a nihilist: because I want to believe what’s true, and I think nihilism is true. My reasons are reducible to facts about the relation between my desires and facts about how to act in accord with those desires. JPA’s remark that “nothing matters” likewise misleadingly suppresses the fact that the only sense in which “nothing matters” in JPA’s above passage is in the sense of things mattering intrinsically. Why not say:

In the end, The Value Realist’s Wager simply gives formal statement to a natural, but rarely-expressed, thought: namely, that there could be no stance-independent reason to be a nihilist (i.e., to deny that there are stance-independent reasons)— because if Nihilism is true, then nothing matters intrinsically (such that it gives us stance-independent reasons for doing things).

Suppressing their specific, narrow usage of specific terms like “reason” and “matters” in phrases like these is a common practice among realists. It incidentally has the effect of making nihilism look really loathsome and awful, when all these remarks typically amount to are vacuous restatements of the logical implications of nihilism. JPA’s remark is about as vacuous as saying this:

• Step 1: Stipulate a notion of “mattering” which means “Is prescribed by God,” and a notion of “love” which means “A relationship blessed by God,” such that your distinctive use of each term requires the existence of God by definition.

• Step 2: Make a remark like this:

  • If atheism is true, then nothing matters and love is impossible.

If anyone challenges you on this, point out that by “nothing matters” just means that nothing is prescribed by God, and that love would be impossible by definition on your account because love is a relationship blessed by God. If God doesn’t exist, clearly nothing matters and love is impossible in this respect! Therefore,

If atheism is true, then nothing matters and love is impossible.

Wow, that sure does make atheism look awful, doesn’t it? But of course, this is a completely misleading way to describe the implications of atheism.

What JPA is doing is no different than this. JPA takes his narrow, realist-only conception of terms like “reason” and “matters,” which have narrow, technical meanings in philosophical contexts, then surreptitiously imposes them onto what appear to be ordinary language constructions; yet ordinary language terms like “reason” and “matters,” have a host of pragmatic features such that, if one were to insist that nihilism involves the denial or rejection of reasons and mattering in the ordinary sense, it would involve a rejection of these various pragmatic associations, not just (if at all) JPA’s narrow technical conception of the meaning of these terms. Critically, nihilism doesn’t actually entail the denial of these pragmatic associations, so the claim that nihilists think that “nothing matters” is misleading in almost any ordinary context. For whatever reason, JPA and others persist in making highly misleading remarks that give the false impression that nihilism carries terrible, practically relevant implications. Analytic philosophers routinely do the same for a variety of skeptical positions, such as illusionism, as well.

JPA and other analytic philosophers should be more attentive to pragmatics. If they were, they may perhaps start to realize how much of what they say may unintentionally function as highly misleading rhetoric. Unfortunately, I suspect that they don’t realize this because they are too blinded by the rhetorical force of their own conflations between their semantically-distilled use of terms like “reason” and their ordinary language analogues.