A stronger version of the criticism in #16 is that in the context of philosophy seminars, undergraduates often take a reflexive position of moral relativism because they don't have the conceptual tools and conviction at that time to justify the moral judgements that they continually make when outside the seminar room. They don't yet have a coherent metaethics and what they can say when forced to justify themselves is much less than what they can say in their day-to-day life. It is no surprise then (as seen with #15 and #17) that many of these students desist after they becoming better at philosophising, just as they commonly stop being solipsists and radical sceptics about knowledge.
Or another way to put it, is that moral relativism as actually commonly encountered is usually less coherent and strongly held than the kinds of considered relativisms that people like Lance Bush would argue for. Lance is right that this isn't an argument against the best versions of the theory, though it must be admitted that people commonly encountered espousing relativism don't tend to hold those versions.
Yea, that seems right. I don't think most students have a clear conception of moral relativism to begin with. Professors seem to just presume that they do, rather than deeply solicit people's explanations. On doing so, one will quickly realize people have a host of jumbled commitments and positions. Which isn't even their fault or a mark against them. There's a host of sentiments, beliefs, and attitudes people without training in philosophy have that haven't yet been regimented and organized. I think it's more than a little unfair for instructors to do what amounts to picking on unprepared people in these circumstances.
I don't accept your response to the moral disagreement argument. Note that in the pizza case, no one really thinks you're disagreeing with each other when one of you says "I like pepperoni" and the other says "I like mushrooms." The disagreement is over what pizza to get. Disagreements in plans aren't disagreements about subjective attitudes; we agree about each of our subjective attitudes (unless for some reason one person thinks the other is mistaken or lying when they claim to like mushrooms).
So if there *is* a disagreement expressed when one person says "murder is wrong" and the other says "no, murder is fine", then it must be that "murder is wrong" and "murder is fine" aren't claims about subjective attitudes. The defense you give shows that they could, instead, be proposals for what to do, and I think it does so successfully. But that's an expressivist position, not a subjectivist one.
Suppose that instead of us trying to determine what pizza we were going to order for a group, we were all ordering our own pizzas. While waiting in line at the pizza parlor, we end up in a conversation about what the best pizza topping is: mushroom or pepperoni.
I think that most people would characterize this as a disagreement, just as people would characterize someone thinking Taylor Swift is a great musician and someone thinking she’s awful as a disagreement.
So I’d say that clashing evaluative attitudes alone *can* constitute a disagreement - even if they’re not properly characterized as disagreements about what to do.
I also think that using the language of agreement/disagreement even in the case of explicit preference reports is more common than you claim.
To take an example from my own life, a while ago I was having a discussion where I said “Personally I prefer smaller noodles”. My friend responded by saying “I agree, that’s why I like rotini”. It’s obvious that in saying he agrees, my friend wasn’t intending to express his shared belief that I, Travis, prefer smaller noodles. Rather he was intending to express that he shares my preference for smaller noodles.
So the former case isn't going to get much traction with me as I'm not a subjectivist about these kinds of disputes either--and for basically the same reasons as I'm not a moral subjectivist. One man's modus ponens is another modus tollens, as they say.
The second I find more interesting, and I agree that it shows we use the language of agreement/disagreement in cases of explicit preference reports. I'm writing this comment right after seeing yours, so I haven't really given it the time it would need to change my mind--this is a bit of a kneejerk response. However, it does seem to me that in that case, when your friend says "I agree" they aren't actually agreeing with what you said--they're instead using that language to indicate something else, like, as you say, that they share your attitude. I do agree, then, that expressions of agreement can be used in lots of different ways, but I don't think that really explains away the problem, because in that example they still aren't agreeing with the claim you made.
Of course, one option is to say that people never really have moral disagreements: they just have non-moral disagreements which they express in moral language. That is, since utterances have connotations beyond what they denotatively mean, people can disagree with the connotations of each other's claims without ever actually expressing the disagreement directly. But I think taking this solution is granting that subjectivism can't make sense of moral disagreement and just suggesting that that's not actually that bad. (To my eye, it's a substantive theoretical cost, but it could be outweighed by other theoretical merits of subjectivism--or made the best of a bad lot by the theoretical costs of other options.)
I agree that my friend wasn’t intending to express disagreement with the proposition I wasn’t affirming. Whether subjectivism can account for moral disagreement I think depends on how we construe disagreement.
If we construe moral disagreement as affirming the negation of a moral proposition someone else accepts, then I would agree - barring cases where we think someone is misreporting their own attitudes - subjectivism can’t account for that.
Though expressivism can’t account for that either, so I’m curious how you’d frame it.
I suppose one could try construing as rejecting a moral claim made by someone, but then one would have to spell out what “reject” and “claim” mean there. One issue I have is that I think it’s at best unclear whether on expressivism moral statements are appropriately called “claims” - it seems to me that for X to be a claim, X must be truth-apt.
I actually did recently start reading a paper (though I haven’t finished it yet) by John MacFarlane where he argues that it’s difficult to get a handle on what exactly “disagreement” consists in.
At least for the first account I don’t see it as a problem (absent evidence that people think of themselves as doing this, in which case I do think it would be a serious problem). I’d have to hear some alternative account in order to determine whether I think it’s an issue for subjectivism.
I do think subjectivism can at the very least make sense of people saying things like “I disagree” in response to people voicing a moral judgment they don’t share though.
> I agree that my friend wasn’t intending to express disagreement with the proposition I wasn’t affirming.
Here, do you mean *was* affirming?
I certainly wouldn't construe disagreement as affirming the negation of a proposition, as I agree that there are negations of plans, for example. However, I do think that you cannot simultaneously affirm a proposition and disagree with it. (If you're in conflict you might partially affirm it or go back and forth--but I don't think that's what's happening in the cases under consideration.) Disagreeing can take many forms, but if you're disagreeing with a proposition, I do think that requires rejecting that proposition. Similarly, for disagreements about what to do, I don't think you can reject a plan while endorsing it as a course of action; if I recommend getting a pizza, you can't say "I disagree, let's do that" or "I agree with you, let's not" without a kind of contradiction.
I do agree that subjectivists can make sense of people saying things like "I agree"--I have no problem with paraphrase strategies in general. But then you're not really accounting for moral disagreement, just denying it exists, at least among those who accurately report their own subjective moral stances. (I do think this is the best strategy for the subjectivist. But I also think it's pretty theoretically costly.)
I don't think this is that much on an issue. Whether people disagreeing about moral issues are doing so on the basis of an implicit commitment to stance independent moral issues is an empirical question and realists just haven't presented any good evidence that realism does explain actual moral disputes. Armchair rationales just can't tell us what people are actually doing when they argue.
Well to be clear, i don't think an implicit commitment to stance independent moral issues is the best or only explanation for moral disagreement. I'm not a realist. I think this is a problem for subjectivists, but not for most other antirealist metaethics.
Fair enough! I just don't think subjectivists face much of a challenge here. A lot of disagreement can, for instance, be based on presumptive intersubjective values. When I say the food at a restaurant is bad I'm not just expressing emotions and am not making realist claims. I'm assuming other people share similar food preferences.
Sure--I've been mostly using individual-preference-reporting as my model of subjectivism, and I don't have a general argument for why any possible version of subjectivism would fail at this. However, I haven't seen a version of subjectivism which was satisfying in my estimation.
The issue I'd take with presumptive intersubjective values is that the presumption is either part of the denotative content of the utterance or not. (Compare with the way "All birds are pretty" assumes some birds exist: clearly it does in terms of conversational implicature, in that it'd be an inappropriate utterance if there are no birds, but it probably doesn't require that denotatively.) If it's part of the denotative content, then you can't consistently express this kind of claim while acknowledging you're in the minority, or even that the issue is hotly-contested, so the only cases of moral disagreement are ones where both sides are convinced they hold the most popular position. If it isn't, then we're back to the same issue I've had before. I'll try not to rehash past comments too much, but succinctly: it doesn't explain moral disagreement, it only explains how people can express apparently-conflicting moral claims while actually disagreeing about something else.
On this last note: do you think there's a substantive difference between a moral disagreement and a non-moral disagreement expressed in moral language? (I'd think the latter occurs in cases where, for example, we don't disagree with what's actually said, but do disagree with something we take it to conversationally imply.)
That's an interesting response. Reports about one's preferences can also be used to express nonpropositional content. What a noncognitivist or expressivist would have to show is that people specifically and exclusively mean only to convey nonpropositional content; even that is disputable since many contemporary expressivists may not even require that, and might instead maintain that one can speak of moral claims being true or false. So what exactly is going on is going to depend on the type of expressivism or subjectivism in play, what predictions it makes about people, and whether it includes a descriptive thesis or not, and if so, of what kind.
In any case, disagreements about what to do still illustrate an alternative conception of disagreement that doesn't require them to be construed in terms of disputes about what the stance-independent or nonrelative facts are.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply! I don't quite agree with you about what noncognitivists have to show; while I agree that reports about preferences can be used to express nonpropositional content, it's also true that noncognitive utterances can convey, and be intended to convey, cognitive content. I might scream because I want to convey that I'm in pain, or pointedly yawn in order to convey that I'm bored, but that doesn't suffice to give the scream or yawn truth conditions.
Re: disagreements--note that moral claims can also be used to indicate the presence of factual disagreement. For example, if I say "Lance will steal your wallet the moment you turn your back" and my friend replies "No, Lance is a good guy", my friend is clearly indicating disagreement with the factual prediction I made. Is this sufficient to counter the point that subjectivists can't account for moral disagreement? I don't think it is--because the disagreement expressed here isn't actually about morality at all. It's about what Lance is going to do. The reason one person is able to use a moral claim to express their position is just that we have norms about conversational implicature that allow us to express factual disagreement without stating the opposing claims directly.
By a similar token, if moral claims aren't claims about what to do, I don't think noting that they can be used in conversations about what to do suffices to account for moral disagreement. It's just another case of conversational implicature allowing us to use moral claims to hint at other positions we hold which do disagree.
That being said, I do agree completely with your last paragraph, and I do appreciate that the post as a whole is much more geared towards defending against realist critiques than noncog ones. I actually also think that moral disagreements are best understood as disagreements about what to do--I just think that counts strongly in favour of understanding moral claims as proposals for what to do.
I don't really think there should be a huge issue here. Traditionally, philosophers have insisted that subjectivists cannot make sense of disagreements. And the reason for this is that they misconstrue moral disagreements as only concerning disputes about what the objective moral facts are. But *if* you and all other people are subjectivists, you can have conflicts between your goals or desires. When you then enter into a conversation, if you and others are subjectivists, one of the things you can do is use moral language to report your standards and values and, in addition, use it to do other things. What I've presented simply is, in a straightforward way, consistent with subjectivism. It's also possible for people to be noncognitivists or a host of other things. What remains true in any case is that disagreements don't just have to be disputes about what the objective facts are. Disagreements can result from conflicting goals. Do you disagree with that? Or something else?
>>while I agree that reports about preferences can be used to express nonpropositional content, it's also true that noncognitive utterances can convey, and be intended to convey, cognitive content.
If noncognitivism is the position that first-order moral claims do not express propositions about moral truths, then this can't be true. They could convey some other kind of propositional content, or we're using different definitions, or we're talking about some other kind of account (maybe some kind of contemporary expressivism).
>>Re: disagreements--note that moral claims can also be used to indicate the presence of factual disagreement. For example, if I say "Lance will steal your wallet the moment you turn your back" and my friend replies "No, Lance is a good guy", my friend is clearly indicating disagreement with the factual prediction I made. Is this sufficient to counter the point that subjectivists can't account for moral disagreement? I don't think it is--because the disagreement expressed here isn't actually about morality at all.
I'm not quite sure what point you are trying to make in saying this. Are you disagreeing with me about something?
>>By a similar token, if moral claims aren't claims about what to do, I don't think noting that they can be used in conversations about what to do suffices to account for moral disagreement.
...But that's not what I'm saying. Subjectivists can use moral claims to report or express their moral positions. That's consistent with everything I've said. People can have disagreements about what to do. That doesn't mean when they say things like "we should get mushrooms on the pizza" that this is merely an expression of a plan of action. It can report a belief.
At this point I'm not sure if you disagree with me, and if so, what, specifically, you disagree with me about.
> Disagreements can result from conflicting goals. Do you disagree with that? Or something else?
I agree that disagreements can result from conflicting goals. I don't think conflicting goals inherently involve disagreement, but I think disagreements about what to do are real disagreements. I fully accept that.
> They could convey some other kind of propositional content, or we're using different definitions,
Yeah, I don't think the propositional content they convey is moral, for the noncognitivist. I'm just saying that you can infer cognitive content from noncognitive utterances, and that doesn't make those utterances actually cognitive.
>At this point I'm not sure if you disagree with me, and if so, what, specifically, you disagree with me about.
The point I'm trying to make is that explaining how we can use moral language to express disagreement is not the same as allowing for moral disagreement. That's what I was using the "Lance will steal your wallet"/"he's a good guy" exchange to show. The issue I have with your account is that I don't take it to show how we can have moral disagreement, even though we can have disagreements about what to do, because unless moral claims are claims about what to do, a disagreement about what to do is not a moral disagreement.
>>I'm just saying that you can infer cognitive content from noncognitive utterances, and that doesn't make those utterances actually cognitive.
I'm really not sure what you mean. Anyone can infer anything about anything. That wouldn't make the inference true. I'm not sure what you are proposing here.
>>The issue I have with your account is that I don't take it to show how we can have moral disagreement, even though we can have disagreements about what to do, because unless moral claims are claims about what to do, a disagreement about what to do is not a moral disagreement.
The disagreement would be born by the rest of the context in which the discussion is taking place...I'm really not sure I understand what you disagree with me about.
Sure--I'm using "can" in a licensing sense; that is, it is often rational to infer cognitive content from noncognitive sentences. The important point though is that that capacity does not make the utterances cognitive. I'm responding to this claim from you: "What a noncognitivist or expressivist would have to show is that people specifically and exclusively mean only to convey nonpropositional content". I'm saying that noncognitive utterances can convey and be intended to convey cognitive information.
I'm not sure how to put the disagreement I see more clearly. I understand your point to be subjectivists can have moral disagreement because they can have disagreement about what to do. But I think, for the subjectivist, a disagreement about what to do is not a moral disagreement. So I don't think accepting disagreement about what to do allows the subjectivist to accept moral disagreement.
What about Michael Huemer’s argument in Ethical Intuitionism that subjectivists must hold they are infallible, since morality is just preferences and there’s no way to be mistaken about what you prefer? I think it’s a weak argument but you should add it here.
Great, thanks! I think Huemer's arguments are basically question begging and rely on assumptions that are hidden in his wording. I like this project - before I read some subjectivists' writing I just assumed that I had to be a moral nihilist or moral realist because of the whole "subjectivists can't condemn slavery" thing
I've always found moral realism to be counterintuitive and the syllogistic arguments in favor of it unconvincing. Also, the recent growth in the popularity of notions such as so-called "effective altruism" strikes me as rather strange.
I don't have any formal training in philosophy (except logic & axiomatic set theory classes, if that counts), but I've read a bit about it, so I suppose I have some idea of what seems wrong about moral realism.
In particular there seems to be a semantic issue at play. Presumably, the existence of an epistemically objective morality means that there's some 'measure' by which actions or states of affairs involving people can be determined to be moral or otherwise.
I can't think of a better measure other than something like 'maximal goodness'. But what do we mean when we talk about goodness? It seems to me that people don't mean exactly the same thing when talking about goodness; i.e. the intension differs between speakers. 'Goodness' can in principle refer to any set of objects, properties, predicates, etc., and in general, people don't seem to be (indirectly) referring to the same objects, properties etc. when speaking of 'goodness', let alone in such a fine grained way as to allow them to have a shared definition of goodness. E.g. such and such action is preferred over some other action in literally *all* contexts or states of affairs.
So there doesn't seem to be such thing as commensurable goodness, in the sense that two competing notions of goodness are simultaneously maximally good/preferable for two different people *and* qualitatively different. Therefore, they can't be commensurable.
Furthermore, even if there were some universally good action that everyone hypothetically agreed on, it's not obvious to me that it could be non-arbitrarily justified: Why is it good? Because we all agree that it's good. I suppose this would be in a sense objective, but not exactly rational, which goes against what at least most moral realists seem to be getting at.
I think your last point is important. In a world where everyone converged on the notion that green was the best color, many might be tempted to declare green objectively the best. I think I'd be pedantic enough to object "if someone *was* crazy enough to prefer another color, they would be making any factual *error*"
Non-objectivist views are in principle consistent with a high degree of first-order convergence, even unanimity.
Writing this as an outsider to the field... Substack has been serving me a large heaping of moral philosophy, so here are some thoughts! First of all, thanks for your posts, you're very clear at explaining your side of the debate, and I mostly agree with your position.
> Do you choose, create, or make your food preferences? I don’t.
In the context of moral relativism, moral judgments are often compared to preferences. Feeling that X is wrong is (in some ways) like preferring your food spicy.
I find this analogy psychologically unconvincing. Preferences are an important part of one's identity, but at some level, we're often aware that they are "just a preference". If someone argues too forcefully for a preference like pineapple on pizza, at some point we stop taking them seriously. Art criticism is possibly the kind of preference-talk that is allowed to take itself seriously, but that's only in certain rarefied circles.
Morality is not like that! We feel the wrongness of X in our gut, and people take moral talk really seriously. More importantly, moral judgments feel like *their own thing*. We're not confused as to we're having one or not. It probably activates dedicated areas of the brain. It probably has deep and specific evolutionary origins, related to our ability as a species to navigate the trade-offs between concern for the individual and groups within larger groups.
So I'd like to propose a different analogy. Moral judgments are like sexual attraction. When we're physically attracted, it hits us with a very specific kind of force. Our groins activate with the stored energy-pattern of countless generations of ancestors implicitly learning to fine-tune their strategies for passing their genes.
As an outsider to the field, I think it's high time to stop litigating the old chestnut of stance-independence. Those who cannot be convinced probably never will, and will go on thinking that things are intrinsically bad or good, just like some people are inherently sexy. So might as well redirect all this energy to looking into the real question: if goodness/badness is not an intrinsic property of actions or states of affairs, then *what is it*, and how does it work?
When I compare moral values to taste preferences in the particular section you quoted, my only goal is to compare moral values and taste preferences with respect to the fact that neither is the sort of thing we can simply choose on a whim.
I am opposed to murder. This isn't a whim. I couldn't just stop opposing murder.
Likewise, I like pineapple. This, too, isn't a whim. I couldn't just choose to not like pineapple.
The point of this comparison is to illustrate that the notion that *if* something is a preference or is subjective/relative, *then* it is matter of choice or whim. This is not true. Any other ways in which one thinks that moral values and taste preferences may differ isn't relevant to the comparison.
When making a comparison with respect to one characteristic, it is important not to overcompare: to assume that the person saying X is similar to Y in that both share property {A}, that one is also suggesting they share other properties {B, C, ...}. I am not doing that in this particular case (though I personally do think of my moral values as literal preferences).
If you're speaking of the comparison to morality and preferences in a more general sense, there are certainly respects in which moral values aren't identical to taste preferences or other sorts of mundane preferences, but I still think that they are a certain kind of preference. That a preference is important to us doesn't make it not-a-preference.
>>More importantly, moral judgments feel like *their own thing*. We're not confused as to we're having one or not. It probably activates dedicated areas of the brain. It probably has deep and specific evolutionary origins, related to our ability as a species to navigate the trade-offs between concern for the individual and groups within larger groups.
For me, moral judgments don't feel like their own thing. But the sense that they do for others is, I believe, a product of enculturation, not deep evolved psychology. I do think people can be and often are confused if they're engaging in or thinking about morality, and I think there is empirical evidence of this. Among other findings, it is difficult to even get groups of people in the same sample (which should be pretty similar to one another) to even agree on what does or doesn't count as a moral issue. See e.g.:
Wright, J. C., Grandjean, P. T., & McWhite, C. B. (2013). The meta-ethical grounding of our moral beliefs: Evidence for meta-ethical pluralism. Philosophical Psychology, 26(3), 336-361.
There's also data showing that moral thinking isn't as central to everyday life as many people believe, and evidence that some cultures may not share distinctively Western conceptions of "moral" thinking, in that, among other things, they lack any straightforward cognate terms for morality. See:
Berniūnas, R. (2020). Mongolian yos surtakhuun and WEIRD “morality”. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 4(1), 59-71.
I think normative thinking has deep evolutionary roots, including various norms related to prosocial behavior and morality. In that respect, I'd be fine with acknowledging likely differences between moral values and taste preferences. But note that taste preferences have even deeper and far less contestable evolutionary roots. We have preferences for color, taste, aesthetics, hobbies, and all sorts of other things. These preferences likely stem from different cognitive processes and have different evolutionary histories. But they're all still preferences. So the fact that moral values probably have different psychological roots than taste preferences doesn't, by itself, make analogies inappropriate.
Regarding sexual attraction: I think this is technically quite a good analogy to moral values, probably for some of the reasons you would think that it is. But I avoid that topic because it can more readily become politically charged and I avoid any discussion of politics. It would be all too easy to provoke people into talking about sexual orientation and other politicized topics, which would quickly drive me away from engaging.
Regarding the debate about stance-independence: a couple things. First, I can point to explicit, and in some cases public instances of having persuaded people through my work. Second, arguing with entrenched proponents of a view isn't about convincing them in particular, but is instead about (a) convincing others and (b) raising the status and defensibility of one's position, thereby making it a more socially acceptable choice for newcomers. I don't think it's easy to, for instance, convince committed creationists that creationism is not true. By debunking their claims clearly and publicly is a good way to ensure public understanding of evolution and the inadequacies of creationism.
"Groups within groups", right: Koestler's holarchy. Each holon owes ethical duty to all other holons because everything connects. A person (holon) is responsible to the systems and organs (holons) of which they are composed. Don't do drugs. Fasten your seatbelt. A person is responsible to others (holons) in the family, tribe, bridge club, church, political party, nation, species, biosphere to which they belong. A person owes duty to other holons here and now, elsewhere and in the future. Morality is complicated, requires information, takes thought and time. We never have enough information, time or thought to get it right, because what is right for these friends (holons) here and now will necessarily be not so right for others elsewhere and later. So when we say some choice is good, we are judging as members of a particular group (holon) at a particular time honoring our duty to our friends (holons). What is good depends on who our friends are.
A stronger version of the criticism in #16 is that in the context of philosophy seminars, undergraduates often take a reflexive position of moral relativism because they don't have the conceptual tools and conviction at that time to justify the moral judgements that they continually make when outside the seminar room. They don't yet have a coherent metaethics and what they can say when forced to justify themselves is much less than what they can say in their day-to-day life. It is no surprise then (as seen with #15 and #17) that many of these students desist after they becoming better at philosophising, just as they commonly stop being solipsists and radical sceptics about knowledge.
Or another way to put it, is that moral relativism as actually commonly encountered is usually less coherent and strongly held than the kinds of considered relativisms that people like Lance Bush would argue for. Lance is right that this isn't an argument against the best versions of the theory, though it must be admitted that people commonly encountered espousing relativism don't tend to hold those versions.
Yea, that seems right. I don't think most students have a clear conception of moral relativism to begin with. Professors seem to just presume that they do, rather than deeply solicit people's explanations. On doing so, one will quickly realize people have a host of jumbled commitments and positions. Which isn't even their fault or a mark against them. There's a host of sentiments, beliefs, and attitudes people without training in philosophy have that haven't yet been regimented and organized. I think it's more than a little unfair for instructors to do what amounts to picking on unprepared people in these circumstances.
I don't accept your response to the moral disagreement argument. Note that in the pizza case, no one really thinks you're disagreeing with each other when one of you says "I like pepperoni" and the other says "I like mushrooms." The disagreement is over what pizza to get. Disagreements in plans aren't disagreements about subjective attitudes; we agree about each of our subjective attitudes (unless for some reason one person thinks the other is mistaken or lying when they claim to like mushrooms).
So if there *is* a disagreement expressed when one person says "murder is wrong" and the other says "no, murder is fine", then it must be that "murder is wrong" and "murder is fine" aren't claims about subjective attitudes. The defense you give shows that they could, instead, be proposals for what to do, and I think it does so successfully. But that's an expressivist position, not a subjectivist one.
Suppose that instead of us trying to determine what pizza we were going to order for a group, we were all ordering our own pizzas. While waiting in line at the pizza parlor, we end up in a conversation about what the best pizza topping is: mushroom or pepperoni.
I think that most people would characterize this as a disagreement, just as people would characterize someone thinking Taylor Swift is a great musician and someone thinking she’s awful as a disagreement.
So I’d say that clashing evaluative attitudes alone *can* constitute a disagreement - even if they’re not properly characterized as disagreements about what to do.
I also think that using the language of agreement/disagreement even in the case of explicit preference reports is more common than you claim.
To take an example from my own life, a while ago I was having a discussion where I said “Personally I prefer smaller noodles”. My friend responded by saying “I agree, that’s why I like rotini”. It’s obvious that in saying he agrees, my friend wasn’t intending to express his shared belief that I, Travis, prefer smaller noodles. Rather he was intending to express that he shares my preference for smaller noodles.
So the former case isn't going to get much traction with me as I'm not a subjectivist about these kinds of disputes either--and for basically the same reasons as I'm not a moral subjectivist. One man's modus ponens is another modus tollens, as they say.
The second I find more interesting, and I agree that it shows we use the language of agreement/disagreement in cases of explicit preference reports. I'm writing this comment right after seeing yours, so I haven't really given it the time it would need to change my mind--this is a bit of a kneejerk response. However, it does seem to me that in that case, when your friend says "I agree" they aren't actually agreeing with what you said--they're instead using that language to indicate something else, like, as you say, that they share your attitude. I do agree, then, that expressions of agreement can be used in lots of different ways, but I don't think that really explains away the problem, because in that example they still aren't agreeing with the claim you made.
Of course, one option is to say that people never really have moral disagreements: they just have non-moral disagreements which they express in moral language. That is, since utterances have connotations beyond what they denotatively mean, people can disagree with the connotations of each other's claims without ever actually expressing the disagreement directly. But I think taking this solution is granting that subjectivism can't make sense of moral disagreement and just suggesting that that's not actually that bad. (To my eye, it's a substantive theoretical cost, but it could be outweighed by other theoretical merits of subjectivism--or made the best of a bad lot by the theoretical costs of other options.)
I agree that my friend wasn’t intending to express disagreement with the proposition I wasn’t affirming. Whether subjectivism can account for moral disagreement I think depends on how we construe disagreement.
If we construe moral disagreement as affirming the negation of a moral proposition someone else accepts, then I would agree - barring cases where we think someone is misreporting their own attitudes - subjectivism can’t account for that.
Though expressivism can’t account for that either, so I’m curious how you’d frame it.
I suppose one could try construing as rejecting a moral claim made by someone, but then one would have to spell out what “reject” and “claim” mean there. One issue I have is that I think it’s at best unclear whether on expressivism moral statements are appropriately called “claims” - it seems to me that for X to be a claim, X must be truth-apt.
I actually did recently start reading a paper (though I haven’t finished it yet) by John MacFarlane where he argues that it’s difficult to get a handle on what exactly “disagreement” consists in.
https://johnmacfarlane.net/disagreement.pdf
At least for the first account I don’t see it as a problem (absent evidence that people think of themselves as doing this, in which case I do think it would be a serious problem). I’d have to hear some alternative account in order to determine whether I think it’s an issue for subjectivism.
I do think subjectivism can at the very least make sense of people saying things like “I disagree” in response to people voicing a moral judgment they don’t share though.
> I agree that my friend wasn’t intending to express disagreement with the proposition I wasn’t affirming.
Here, do you mean *was* affirming?
I certainly wouldn't construe disagreement as affirming the negation of a proposition, as I agree that there are negations of plans, for example. However, I do think that you cannot simultaneously affirm a proposition and disagree with it. (If you're in conflict you might partially affirm it or go back and forth--but I don't think that's what's happening in the cases under consideration.) Disagreeing can take many forms, but if you're disagreeing with a proposition, I do think that requires rejecting that proposition. Similarly, for disagreements about what to do, I don't think you can reject a plan while endorsing it as a course of action; if I recommend getting a pizza, you can't say "I disagree, let's do that" or "I agree with you, let's not" without a kind of contradiction.
I do agree that subjectivists can make sense of people saying things like "I agree"--I have no problem with paraphrase strategies in general. But then you're not really accounting for moral disagreement, just denying it exists, at least among those who accurately report their own subjective moral stances. (I do think this is the best strategy for the subjectivist. But I also think it's pretty theoretically costly.)
I don't think this is that much on an issue. Whether people disagreeing about moral issues are doing so on the basis of an implicit commitment to stance independent moral issues is an empirical question and realists just haven't presented any good evidence that realism does explain actual moral disputes. Armchair rationales just can't tell us what people are actually doing when they argue.
Well to be clear, i don't think an implicit commitment to stance independent moral issues is the best or only explanation for moral disagreement. I'm not a realist. I think this is a problem for subjectivists, but not for most other antirealist metaethics.
Fair enough! I just don't think subjectivists face much of a challenge here. A lot of disagreement can, for instance, be based on presumptive intersubjective values. When I say the food at a restaurant is bad I'm not just expressing emotions and am not making realist claims. I'm assuming other people share similar food preferences.
Sure--I've been mostly using individual-preference-reporting as my model of subjectivism, and I don't have a general argument for why any possible version of subjectivism would fail at this. However, I haven't seen a version of subjectivism which was satisfying in my estimation.
The issue I'd take with presumptive intersubjective values is that the presumption is either part of the denotative content of the utterance or not. (Compare with the way "All birds are pretty" assumes some birds exist: clearly it does in terms of conversational implicature, in that it'd be an inappropriate utterance if there are no birds, but it probably doesn't require that denotatively.) If it's part of the denotative content, then you can't consistently express this kind of claim while acknowledging you're in the minority, or even that the issue is hotly-contested, so the only cases of moral disagreement are ones where both sides are convinced they hold the most popular position. If it isn't, then we're back to the same issue I've had before. I'll try not to rehash past comments too much, but succinctly: it doesn't explain moral disagreement, it only explains how people can express apparently-conflicting moral claims while actually disagreeing about something else.
On this last note: do you think there's a substantive difference between a moral disagreement and a non-moral disagreement expressed in moral language? (I'd think the latter occurs in cases where, for example, we don't disagree with what's actually said, but do disagree with something we take it to conversationally imply.)
That's an interesting response. Reports about one's preferences can also be used to express nonpropositional content. What a noncognitivist or expressivist would have to show is that people specifically and exclusively mean only to convey nonpropositional content; even that is disputable since many contemporary expressivists may not even require that, and might instead maintain that one can speak of moral claims being true or false. So what exactly is going on is going to depend on the type of expressivism or subjectivism in play, what predictions it makes about people, and whether it includes a descriptive thesis or not, and if so, of what kind.
In any case, disagreements about what to do still illustrate an alternative conception of disagreement that doesn't require them to be construed in terms of disputes about what the stance-independent or nonrelative facts are.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply! I don't quite agree with you about what noncognitivists have to show; while I agree that reports about preferences can be used to express nonpropositional content, it's also true that noncognitive utterances can convey, and be intended to convey, cognitive content. I might scream because I want to convey that I'm in pain, or pointedly yawn in order to convey that I'm bored, but that doesn't suffice to give the scream or yawn truth conditions.
Re: disagreements--note that moral claims can also be used to indicate the presence of factual disagreement. For example, if I say "Lance will steal your wallet the moment you turn your back" and my friend replies "No, Lance is a good guy", my friend is clearly indicating disagreement with the factual prediction I made. Is this sufficient to counter the point that subjectivists can't account for moral disagreement? I don't think it is--because the disagreement expressed here isn't actually about morality at all. It's about what Lance is going to do. The reason one person is able to use a moral claim to express their position is just that we have norms about conversational implicature that allow us to express factual disagreement without stating the opposing claims directly.
By a similar token, if moral claims aren't claims about what to do, I don't think noting that they can be used in conversations about what to do suffices to account for moral disagreement. It's just another case of conversational implicature allowing us to use moral claims to hint at other positions we hold which do disagree.
That being said, I do agree completely with your last paragraph, and I do appreciate that the post as a whole is much more geared towards defending against realist critiques than noncog ones. I actually also think that moral disagreements are best understood as disagreements about what to do--I just think that counts strongly in favour of understanding moral claims as proposals for what to do.
I don't really think there should be a huge issue here. Traditionally, philosophers have insisted that subjectivists cannot make sense of disagreements. And the reason for this is that they misconstrue moral disagreements as only concerning disputes about what the objective moral facts are. But *if* you and all other people are subjectivists, you can have conflicts between your goals or desires. When you then enter into a conversation, if you and others are subjectivists, one of the things you can do is use moral language to report your standards and values and, in addition, use it to do other things. What I've presented simply is, in a straightforward way, consistent with subjectivism. It's also possible for people to be noncognitivists or a host of other things. What remains true in any case is that disagreements don't just have to be disputes about what the objective facts are. Disagreements can result from conflicting goals. Do you disagree with that? Or something else?
>>while I agree that reports about preferences can be used to express nonpropositional content, it's also true that noncognitive utterances can convey, and be intended to convey, cognitive content.
If noncognitivism is the position that first-order moral claims do not express propositions about moral truths, then this can't be true. They could convey some other kind of propositional content, or we're using different definitions, or we're talking about some other kind of account (maybe some kind of contemporary expressivism).
>>Re: disagreements--note that moral claims can also be used to indicate the presence of factual disagreement. For example, if I say "Lance will steal your wallet the moment you turn your back" and my friend replies "No, Lance is a good guy", my friend is clearly indicating disagreement with the factual prediction I made. Is this sufficient to counter the point that subjectivists can't account for moral disagreement? I don't think it is--because the disagreement expressed here isn't actually about morality at all.
I'm not quite sure what point you are trying to make in saying this. Are you disagreeing with me about something?
>>By a similar token, if moral claims aren't claims about what to do, I don't think noting that they can be used in conversations about what to do suffices to account for moral disagreement.
...But that's not what I'm saying. Subjectivists can use moral claims to report or express their moral positions. That's consistent with everything I've said. People can have disagreements about what to do. That doesn't mean when they say things like "we should get mushrooms on the pizza" that this is merely an expression of a plan of action. It can report a belief.
At this point I'm not sure if you disagree with me, and if so, what, specifically, you disagree with me about.
> Disagreements can result from conflicting goals. Do you disagree with that? Or something else?
I agree that disagreements can result from conflicting goals. I don't think conflicting goals inherently involve disagreement, but I think disagreements about what to do are real disagreements. I fully accept that.
> They could convey some other kind of propositional content, or we're using different definitions,
Yeah, I don't think the propositional content they convey is moral, for the noncognitivist. I'm just saying that you can infer cognitive content from noncognitive utterances, and that doesn't make those utterances actually cognitive.
>At this point I'm not sure if you disagree with me, and if so, what, specifically, you disagree with me about.
The point I'm trying to make is that explaining how we can use moral language to express disagreement is not the same as allowing for moral disagreement. That's what I was using the "Lance will steal your wallet"/"he's a good guy" exchange to show. The issue I have with your account is that I don't take it to show how we can have moral disagreement, even though we can have disagreements about what to do, because unless moral claims are claims about what to do, a disagreement about what to do is not a moral disagreement.
>>I'm just saying that you can infer cognitive content from noncognitive utterances, and that doesn't make those utterances actually cognitive.
I'm really not sure what you mean. Anyone can infer anything about anything. That wouldn't make the inference true. I'm not sure what you are proposing here.
>>The issue I have with your account is that I don't take it to show how we can have moral disagreement, even though we can have disagreements about what to do, because unless moral claims are claims about what to do, a disagreement about what to do is not a moral disagreement.
The disagreement would be born by the rest of the context in which the discussion is taking place...I'm really not sure I understand what you disagree with me about.
Sure--I'm using "can" in a licensing sense; that is, it is often rational to infer cognitive content from noncognitive sentences. The important point though is that that capacity does not make the utterances cognitive. I'm responding to this claim from you: "What a noncognitivist or expressivist would have to show is that people specifically and exclusively mean only to convey nonpropositional content". I'm saying that noncognitive utterances can convey and be intended to convey cognitive information.
I'm not sure how to put the disagreement I see more clearly. I understand your point to be subjectivists can have moral disagreement because they can have disagreement about what to do. But I think, for the subjectivist, a disagreement about what to do is not a moral disagreement. So I don't think accepting disagreement about what to do allows the subjectivist to accept moral disagreement.
What about Michael Huemer’s argument in Ethical Intuitionism that subjectivists must hold they are infallible, since morality is just preferences and there’s no way to be mistaken about what you prefer? I think it’s a weak argument but you should add it here.
It's been added.
Great, thanks! I think Huemer's arguments are basically question begging and rely on assumptions that are hidden in his wording. I like this project - before I read some subjectivists' writing I just assumed that I had to be a moral nihilist or moral realist because of the whole "subjectivists can't condemn slavery" thing
It's not possible that I overlooked that because I'm infallible.
Yes, you're absolutely right! A complete oversight, since I have addressed that objection several times. I'm not sure how I forgot about it.
Great essay.
I've always found moral realism to be counterintuitive and the syllogistic arguments in favor of it unconvincing. Also, the recent growth in the popularity of notions such as so-called "effective altruism" strikes me as rather strange.
I don't have any formal training in philosophy (except logic & axiomatic set theory classes, if that counts), but I've read a bit about it, so I suppose I have some idea of what seems wrong about moral realism.
In particular there seems to be a semantic issue at play. Presumably, the existence of an epistemically objective morality means that there's some 'measure' by which actions or states of affairs involving people can be determined to be moral or otherwise.
I can't think of a better measure other than something like 'maximal goodness'. But what do we mean when we talk about goodness? It seems to me that people don't mean exactly the same thing when talking about goodness; i.e. the intension differs between speakers. 'Goodness' can in principle refer to any set of objects, properties, predicates, etc., and in general, people don't seem to be (indirectly) referring to the same objects, properties etc. when speaking of 'goodness', let alone in such a fine grained way as to allow them to have a shared definition of goodness. E.g. such and such action is preferred over some other action in literally *all* contexts or states of affairs.
So there doesn't seem to be such thing as commensurable goodness, in the sense that two competing notions of goodness are simultaneously maximally good/preferable for two different people *and* qualitatively different. Therefore, they can't be commensurable.
Furthermore, even if there were some universally good action that everyone hypothetically agreed on, it's not obvious to me that it could be non-arbitrarily justified: Why is it good? Because we all agree that it's good. I suppose this would be in a sense objective, but not exactly rational, which goes against what at least most moral realists seem to be getting at.
I think your last point is important. In a world where everyone converged on the notion that green was the best color, many might be tempted to declare green objectively the best. I think I'd be pedantic enough to object "if someone *was* crazy enough to prefer another color, they would be making any factual *error*"
Non-objectivist views are in principle consistent with a high degree of first-order convergence, even unanimity.
I was hoping to read about dragons. Sigh.
https://open.substack.com/pub/marlowe1/p/my-writing-ads?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=sllf3
Writing this as an outsider to the field... Substack has been serving me a large heaping of moral philosophy, so here are some thoughts! First of all, thanks for your posts, you're very clear at explaining your side of the debate, and I mostly agree with your position.
> Do you choose, create, or make your food preferences? I don’t.
In the context of moral relativism, moral judgments are often compared to preferences. Feeling that X is wrong is (in some ways) like preferring your food spicy.
I find this analogy psychologically unconvincing. Preferences are an important part of one's identity, but at some level, we're often aware that they are "just a preference". If someone argues too forcefully for a preference like pineapple on pizza, at some point we stop taking them seriously. Art criticism is possibly the kind of preference-talk that is allowed to take itself seriously, but that's only in certain rarefied circles.
Morality is not like that! We feel the wrongness of X in our gut, and people take moral talk really seriously. More importantly, moral judgments feel like *their own thing*. We're not confused as to we're having one or not. It probably activates dedicated areas of the brain. It probably has deep and specific evolutionary origins, related to our ability as a species to navigate the trade-offs between concern for the individual and groups within larger groups.
So I'd like to propose a different analogy. Moral judgments are like sexual attraction. When we're physically attracted, it hits us with a very specific kind of force. Our groins activate with the stored energy-pattern of countless generations of ancestors implicitly learning to fine-tune their strategies for passing their genes.
As an outsider to the field, I think it's high time to stop litigating the old chestnut of stance-independence. Those who cannot be convinced probably never will, and will go on thinking that things are intrinsically bad or good, just like some people are inherently sexy. So might as well redirect all this energy to looking into the real question: if goodness/badness is not an intrinsic property of actions or states of affairs, then *what is it*, and how does it work?
Hi skaladom. Thanks for the response.
When I compare moral values to taste preferences in the particular section you quoted, my only goal is to compare moral values and taste preferences with respect to the fact that neither is the sort of thing we can simply choose on a whim.
I am opposed to murder. This isn't a whim. I couldn't just stop opposing murder.
Likewise, I like pineapple. This, too, isn't a whim. I couldn't just choose to not like pineapple.
The point of this comparison is to illustrate that the notion that *if* something is a preference or is subjective/relative, *then* it is matter of choice or whim. This is not true. Any other ways in which one thinks that moral values and taste preferences may differ isn't relevant to the comparison.
When making a comparison with respect to one characteristic, it is important not to overcompare: to assume that the person saying X is similar to Y in that both share property {A}, that one is also suggesting they share other properties {B, C, ...}. I am not doing that in this particular case (though I personally do think of my moral values as literal preferences).
If you're speaking of the comparison to morality and preferences in a more general sense, there are certainly respects in which moral values aren't identical to taste preferences or other sorts of mundane preferences, but I still think that they are a certain kind of preference. That a preference is important to us doesn't make it not-a-preference.
>>More importantly, moral judgments feel like *their own thing*. We're not confused as to we're having one or not. It probably activates dedicated areas of the brain. It probably has deep and specific evolutionary origins, related to our ability as a species to navigate the trade-offs between concern for the individual and groups within larger groups.
For me, moral judgments don't feel like their own thing. But the sense that they do for others is, I believe, a product of enculturation, not deep evolved psychology. I do think people can be and often are confused if they're engaging in or thinking about morality, and I think there is empirical evidence of this. Among other findings, it is difficult to even get groups of people in the same sample (which should be pretty similar to one another) to even agree on what does or doesn't count as a moral issue. See e.g.:
Wright, J. C., Grandjean, P. T., & McWhite, C. B. (2013). The meta-ethical grounding of our moral beliefs: Evidence for meta-ethical pluralism. Philosophical Psychology, 26(3), 336-361.
There's also data showing that moral thinking isn't as central to everyday life as many people believe, and evidence that some cultures may not share distinctively Western conceptions of "moral" thinking, in that, among other things, they lack any straightforward cognate terms for morality. See:
Berniūnas, R. (2020). Mongolian yos surtakhuun and WEIRD “morality”. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 4(1), 59-71.
I think normative thinking has deep evolutionary roots, including various norms related to prosocial behavior and morality. In that respect, I'd be fine with acknowledging likely differences between moral values and taste preferences. But note that taste preferences have even deeper and far less contestable evolutionary roots. We have preferences for color, taste, aesthetics, hobbies, and all sorts of other things. These preferences likely stem from different cognitive processes and have different evolutionary histories. But they're all still preferences. So the fact that moral values probably have different psychological roots than taste preferences doesn't, by itself, make analogies inappropriate.
Regarding sexual attraction: I think this is technically quite a good analogy to moral values, probably for some of the reasons you would think that it is. But I avoid that topic because it can more readily become politically charged and I avoid any discussion of politics. It would be all too easy to provoke people into talking about sexual orientation and other politicized topics, which would quickly drive me away from engaging.
Regarding the debate about stance-independence: a couple things. First, I can point to explicit, and in some cases public instances of having persuaded people through my work. Second, arguing with entrenched proponents of a view isn't about convincing them in particular, but is instead about (a) convincing others and (b) raising the status and defensibility of one's position, thereby making it a more socially acceptable choice for newcomers. I don't think it's easy to, for instance, convince committed creationists that creationism is not true. By debunking their claims clearly and publicly is a good way to ensure public understanding of evolution and the inadequacies of creationism.
"Groups within groups", right: Koestler's holarchy. Each holon owes ethical duty to all other holons because everything connects. A person (holon) is responsible to the systems and organs (holons) of which they are composed. Don't do drugs. Fasten your seatbelt. A person is responsible to others (holons) in the family, tribe, bridge club, church, political party, nation, species, biosphere to which they belong. A person owes duty to other holons here and now, elsewhere and in the future. Morality is complicated, requires information, takes thought and time. We never have enough information, time or thought to get it right, because what is right for these friends (holons) here and now will necessarily be not so right for others elsewhere and later. So when we say some choice is good, we are judging as members of a particular group (holon) at a particular time honoring our duty to our friends (holons). What is good depends on who our friends are.