Normative entanglement and performative threats

Moral realists will sometimes try to make moral antirealists look bad by implying that antirealists have a lax or permissive attitude towards atrocities. They often do this by pressuring the moral antirealist to answer questions such as:

“Is it objectively wrong to torture babies for fun?”

They also sometimes just assert incorrect or misleading things about antirealists, e.g.

“Antirealists believe everything is morally permissible, even torturing babies for fun.”

“As an antirealist, you can have no objection to someone torturing babies for fun.”

All of this may be captured by the phenomena I call “normative entanglement”, which may be defined as:

*Exploiting an inappropriate conflation between metaethical and normative considerations for rhetorical purposes.*

Yet there’s a version of normative entanglement on steroids that is especially worrisome, which I’ll call the “performative threat”. This occurs when the moral realist says something like:

Performative threats:

(1) “Well what if I barged into your house and butchered your family? Since you’re a moral antirealist, you can’t say that that’s wrong, and you can’t raise any objections to me doing it.”

(2) “Oh, so you think nothing is morally right or wrong? Well then, you’d have no objection to me punching you in the face and taking your money.”

These kinds of moves illicitly borrow persuasive force from incorrectly presuming that antirealists couldn’t object to these actions. Yet there’s also something more deeply sinister and weird about these kinds of moves; as though, in their outrage at antirealism, realists who do this sort of thing are venting some of their anger and frustration with the antirealist by performatively pretending to threaten them.

Of course such threats aren’t sincere and are hyperbolic largely for demonstrative purposes, but there’s something suspiciously worrisome about the aggressive glee I’ve seen realists present these scenarios with, as though they can substitute the quality of a good argument with a caustic tone and an aura of superiority, a kind of smug “checkmate, antirealist” vibe.

I suspect if I were to solicit experiences like these, I’ll find quite a few instances of moral realists doing this. Moral philosophers who specialize in metaethics and know better may wish to discourage this kind of maneuver. It’s a kind of pop moral realist move that may help to spread moral realism, but in much the same way Christianity spreads through the threat of hell and punishment. I would have hoped philosophical positions would spread because they’re good ideas, and not because their proponents want coerce dissidents into compliance.