Hey Lance, I'm a little confused as to what a quietist subjectivist can and cannot say in a principled way. Can they say all of the following?
* You should do X
* This is a good reason to do X
* Do X
If the quietist can say all of them which sorts of statements can they *not* say?
Similarly, are there no reasons to act whatsoever? Or that we do have reasons but they ultimately bottom out in statements like "because you desire to"?
They can say any of those things. What they shouldn't do is say those things in contexts or in ways that would imply or explicitly include philosophical commitments that their quietism rules out.
>>Similarly, are there no reasons to act whatsoever? Or that we do have reasons but they ultimately bottom out in statements like "because you desire to"?
"There are reasons to act" and "There are no reasons to act" are ambiguous. If one is using these phrases in ordinary language, they're entirely appropriate and meaningful. If these are being used in an analytic philosophy context that takes on board a philosopher's mistaken presuppositions, then the answer is no, there are no reasons to act whatsoever.
I draw a distinction between whether the same phrase is being uttered in a philosophical and ordinary context. A statement can be true in one and not in the other, because they mean different things.
How is this not nihilism then? If there are no reasons to do anything then nothing matters. Talking about desires doesn't change this fact, it would be akin to stating some random descriptive fact like the sky is blue.
This stuff about "desire", "preference" “stance” is something I've been considering recently. Moral anti-realists say moral realism is gibberish - and that seems pretty much true. But moral anti-realism also just seems like gibberish. What the hell is a "desire", "stance” etc?
Nobody's ever given a clear meaning, and it seems like you get inconsistent answers from different psychologists. Psychology notoriously has huge methodological problems. It's no surprise it would produce pseudo-concepts. This "preference" stuff has been around for decades in psychology, and we've yet to see a clear empirical accounting. It would not surprise me if it turned out to be junk pseudo-science that disappears just like qualia will.
Moral antirealists don’t typically say that moral realism is gibberish. This claim is commonly associated with me, but it’s not even accurate in my case. My position is a trilemma: I argue that all forms of realism are trivial, unintelligible, or false. They aren’t all gibberish. Most antirealists, especially in academia, tend to regard moral realism as false, in particular, but not gibberish.
With respect to talk of desires or stances: moral antirealism only requires rejecting moral realism. The truth of antirealism doesn’t hinge on whether antirealists can offer a defensible account of stances or desires.
WRT your first comment, Sure I can appreciate that distinction.
WRT your second comment, I'm trying to make an independent observation that Anti-Realists are adding in unnecessary baggage to their replies, which is that they go beyond pointing out moral realism is nonsense, and start proposing alternative views which are similarly packed with mystery. Namely, this stuff about "desire", etc.
What's your position on the matter, if you don't mind my asking?
Great article, although I think it is a tad long to be fully enjoyable to read in digital format (I can concentrate better with paper than with pixels, but maybe that's just me). In the past I tended to get really frustrated with BB, as I felt whenever he talked about these issues, his responses consisted either of 1) ignoring counterarguments or 2) different rephrasings and restatements of 'I have these intuitions, and they are self-evidently true. Not sharing them means you're crazy and wrong'. And this has led me to just stop reading him altogether.
It really does seem to be his modus operandi to simply report intuitions about things, declare anyone who doesn't have those intuitions crazy, and then ignore or barely engage with anyone that raises substantive objections.
Perhaps I'm being unfair but I think your efforts go well beyond what the interaction deserves. I can't believe that Bentham is sincere: either they're trolling or they're refusing to participate on common ground with the terminology. The distinctions at hand are not that difficult.
I think there's a meta-issue here about the carrying on of amateur philosophy by people who are only willing to educate themselves so far and no further. It's demeaning to engage with such people (no criticism intended).
Bentham has over 10,000 subscribers and professional philosophers have declared him the greatest undergraduate (at the time) in the world. His way of framing things and arguing is also quite consistent with much of contemporary analytic metaethics, so it isn't even especially unusual as far as metaethics goes.
What an interesting set of reasons to not accept reasons, which makes the argument self-defeating.
See the below article on what a “reason” is (happy to address any questions or critiques). But in short, a reason is an objective explanation, they serve to reduce doubt of something for anyone who understood the relevant meanings.
Reasons, given by Lance from his perspective, considered by you from your perspective. At no point in Lance writing, or in you reading this article was a reason provided from a non-linguistic, non-standpoint perspective. That's not even meaningful or coherent.
That is a blog post written in ENGLISH language. How on earth is that a non-linguistic reason? You're telling me to READ WORDS on a page and then you're telling me to dupe myself that I didn't just read words.
Sure, once you argue that normative reasons as stance-dependent (grounded only on personal motivations and desires) then accepting this argument would itself be grounded on personal motivations or desires, and there would be no objective rationale to accept the argument independent of subjective desire.
Although reasons (including normative reasons) are stance independent, as the linked article shows, such that your arguments could be subject to disinterested scrutiny depending on its merits rather than anyone’s personal motivations.
"there would be no objective rationale" - why would that be a problem when that's the very point at issue.
If you assume it's a problem then you're question begging. From Lance's worldview, it obviously isn't a problem, given that the opposite is the conclusion of Lance's position.
You're saying this. "You argue for this conclusion. But if you're right, that would be in tension with the opposite of your conclusion!"
(1) Are you responding to my position? If so, which part? I don't recognize my position in your response.
(2) It's unclear how what you've described would show that my position is "self"-defeating. Perhaps you could explain what you have in mind by a position that is "self-defeating" and then show how my position is, in fact, self-defeating.
(3) The linked article does not "show" that there are stance-independent reasons. Bentham's only "argument" is that it seems to him that there are such reasons.
(1) if you have any quibbles with how I worded your position, then phrase it here and I’ll address it directly. I don’t play the “you didn’t state my position like how I wanted it stated” game.
(2) once you address (1) I’ll explain it more clearly
(3) the article I linked above certainly does, it defined what “reasons” are and this concept of reasons is stance-independent
I wrote a nearly 20,000 word article explaining my views which links to another 3000+ article detailing those views further. I will not rearticulate my position in my comment section. I've written enough already.
Now you come into my comment section confidently claiming my position is self-defeating and show no indication you even know what my position is. Then you react in a way that strikes me as haughty and demanding.
I don't like talking to be people with shitty attitudes. So you can either immediately engage in a friendlier way and do the work to accurately address my position based on what I've already written, or you can fuck off.
If you can’t summarize your thesis in the amount of time it took you to write all that, then your arguments are too diffuse to be coherent. This is why I don’t play the phrasing game. My argument above was based on my understanding and reading of your work and if you don’t believe it sufficiently captured your work, then maybe your work was unclear and sloppy.
Believe it or not but I had read your work in good faith and will not have bother commenting if I didn’t think a conversation would be worthwhile. But if you have no desire to engage with a good faith reader, then I’ll gladly fuck off. You win the argument, thanks for the great philosophical discussion.
What an interesting thing to say, considering you more than likely didn’t read the entirety of this article within just 10 minutes after it was posted. You must be Spencer Reid.
If you don't believe that I read and understood the piece before commenting, such that this comment responding to the argument is uninformed, then feel free to ignore and don't address the comment's merits. I don't know who that is.
The article was published at 11:12 ET. Your first comment appeared at 11:22 ET, 10 minutes after the post went live. Assuming you opened the article up and began reading it within one minute of publication, and assuming it took you one minute to write your post, that would give you 8 minutes to read the article.
The article is about 18000 words. The average person reads nonfiction at a rate of 240 WPM with a standard deviation of about 50 WPM. For you to read the whole article in that time would require a reading speed of 2,250 WPM, or about nine standard pages a minute. This would be about 40 standard deviations above the mean. The chances of this are effectively zero. It would not be physically possible for you to have read the entire article in that time.
You’d rather take the time to do the calculations than actually address the argument I’ve made or phrase your thesis in a way to ground a real discussion. You should be thanking your readers for taking the time to read your work, not scrutinizing them. If you don’t believe I read your article, then don’t. I’m not the one confused about the nature of reasons.
The preceding argument didn’t give any “reason” for believing I didn’t read your work, it was just a reflection of your own personal motivations and desires. Nothing stance independent that anyone is bound to accept.
Hey Lance, I'm a little confused as to what a quietist subjectivist can and cannot say in a principled way. Can they say all of the following?
* You should do X
* This is a good reason to do X
* Do X
If the quietist can say all of them which sorts of statements can they *not* say?
Similarly, are there no reasons to act whatsoever? Or that we do have reasons but they ultimately bottom out in statements like "because you desire to"?
They can say any of those things. What they shouldn't do is say those things in contexts or in ways that would imply or explicitly include philosophical commitments that their quietism rules out.
>>Similarly, are there no reasons to act whatsoever? Or that we do have reasons but they ultimately bottom out in statements like "because you desire to"?
"There are reasons to act" and "There are no reasons to act" are ambiguous. If one is using these phrases in ordinary language, they're entirely appropriate and meaningful. If these are being used in an analytic philosophy context that takes on board a philosopher's mistaken presuppositions, then the answer is no, there are no reasons to act whatsoever.
I draw a distinction between whether the same phrase is being uttered in a philosophical and ordinary context. A statement can be true in one and not in the other, because they mean different things.
>there are no reasons to act whatsoever
How is this not nihilism then? If there are no reasons to do anything then nothing matters. Talking about desires doesn't change this fact, it would be akin to stating some random descriptive fact like the sky is blue.
This stuff about "desire", "preference" “stance” is something I've been considering recently. Moral anti-realists say moral realism is gibberish - and that seems pretty much true. But moral anti-realism also just seems like gibberish. What the hell is a "desire", "stance” etc?
Nobody's ever given a clear meaning, and it seems like you get inconsistent answers from different psychologists. Psychology notoriously has huge methodological problems. It's no surprise it would produce pseudo-concepts. This "preference" stuff has been around for decades in psychology, and we've yet to see a clear empirical accounting. It would not surprise me if it turned out to be junk pseudo-science that disappears just like qualia will.
Moral antirealists don’t typically say that moral realism is gibberish. This claim is commonly associated with me, but it’s not even accurate in my case. My position is a trilemma: I argue that all forms of realism are trivial, unintelligible, or false. They aren’t all gibberish. Most antirealists, especially in academia, tend to regard moral realism as false, in particular, but not gibberish.
With respect to talk of desires or stances: moral antirealism only requires rejecting moral realism. The truth of antirealism doesn’t hinge on whether antirealists can offer a defensible account of stances or desires.
WRT your first comment, Sure I can appreciate that distinction.
WRT your second comment, I'm trying to make an independent observation that Anti-Realists are adding in unnecessary baggage to their replies, which is that they go beyond pointing out moral realism is nonsense, and start proposing alternative views which are similarly packed with mystery. Namely, this stuff about "desire", etc.
What's your position on the matter, if you don't mind my asking?
My position on what, specifically?
Great article, although I think it is a tad long to be fully enjoyable to read in digital format (I can concentrate better with paper than with pixels, but maybe that's just me). In the past I tended to get really frustrated with BB, as I felt whenever he talked about these issues, his responses consisted either of 1) ignoring counterarguments or 2) different rephrasings and restatements of 'I have these intuitions, and they are self-evidently true. Not sharing them means you're crazy and wrong'. And this has led me to just stop reading him altogether.
It really does seem to be his modus operandi to simply report intuitions about things, declare anyone who doesn't have those intuitions crazy, and then ignore or barely engage with anyone that raises substantive objections.
Perhaps I'm being unfair but I think your efforts go well beyond what the interaction deserves. I can't believe that Bentham is sincere: either they're trolling or they're refusing to participate on common ground with the terminology. The distinctions at hand are not that difficult.
I think there's a meta-issue here about the carrying on of amateur philosophy by people who are only willing to educate themselves so far and no further. It's demeaning to engage with such people (no criticism intended).
Bentham has over 10,000 subscribers and professional philosophers have declared him the greatest undergraduate (at the time) in the world. His way of framing things and arguing is also quite consistent with much of contemporary analytic metaethics, so it isn't even especially unusual as far as metaethics goes.
What an interesting set of reasons to not accept reasons, which makes the argument self-defeating.
See the below article on what a “reason” is (happy to address any questions or critiques). But in short, a reason is an objective explanation, they serve to reduce doubt of something for anyone who understood the relevant meanings.
https://neonomos.substack.com/p/what-is-a-reason
Reasons, given by Lance from his perspective, considered by you from your perspective. At no point in Lance writing, or in you reading this article was a reason provided from a non-linguistic, non-standpoint perspective. That's not even meaningful or coherent.
That is my read of the article as well. See below for an account of non-linguistic, non-standpoint reasons
https://neonomos.substack.com/p/what-is-a-reason
That is a blog post written in ENGLISH language. How on earth is that a non-linguistic reason? You're telling me to READ WORDS on a page and then you're telling me to dupe myself that I didn't just read words.
Translate it into Thai or Russian if you want to then. The argument remains.
Those are languages. How do I translate it into language independent reasons? Can you just give me the language-independent reasons?
Use whatever set of symbols or representations you want to (language, mathematical notations, etc). The argument remains.
If you have an argument for why my views are "self-defeating" you're welcome to present it here.
Sure, once you argue that normative reasons as stance-dependent (grounded only on personal motivations and desires) then accepting this argument would itself be grounded on personal motivations or desires, and there would be no objective rationale to accept the argument independent of subjective desire.
Although reasons (including normative reasons) are stance independent, as the linked article shows, such that your arguments could be subject to disinterested scrutiny depending on its merits rather than anyone’s personal motivations.
"there would be no objective rationale" - why would that be a problem when that's the very point at issue.
If you assume it's a problem then you're question begging. From Lance's worldview, it obviously isn't a problem, given that the opposite is the conclusion of Lance's position.
You're saying this. "You argue for this conclusion. But if you're right, that would be in tension with the opposite of your conclusion!"
Obviously. That's the point.
(1) Are you responding to my position? If so, which part? I don't recognize my position in your response.
(2) It's unclear how what you've described would show that my position is "self"-defeating. Perhaps you could explain what you have in mind by a position that is "self-defeating" and then show how my position is, in fact, self-defeating.
(3) The linked article does not "show" that there are stance-independent reasons. Bentham's only "argument" is that it seems to him that there are such reasons.
(1) if you have any quibbles with how I worded your position, then phrase it here and I’ll address it directly. I don’t play the “you didn’t state my position like how I wanted it stated” game.
(2) once you address (1) I’ll explain it more clearly
(3) the article I linked above certainly does, it defined what “reasons” are and this concept of reasons is stance-independent
I wrote a nearly 20,000 word article explaining my views which links to another 3000+ article detailing those views further. I will not rearticulate my position in my comment section. I've written enough already.
Now you come into my comment section confidently claiming my position is self-defeating and show no indication you even know what my position is. Then you react in a way that strikes me as haughty and demanding.
I don't like talking to be people with shitty attitudes. So you can either immediately engage in a friendlier way and do the work to accurately address my position based on what I've already written, or you can fuck off.
If you can’t summarize your thesis in the amount of time it took you to write all that, then your arguments are too diffuse to be coherent. This is why I don’t play the phrasing game. My argument above was based on my understanding and reading of your work and if you don’t believe it sufficiently captured your work, then maybe your work was unclear and sloppy.
Believe it or not but I had read your work in good faith and will not have bother commenting if I didn’t think a conversation would be worthwhile. But if you have no desire to engage with a good faith reader, then I’ll gladly fuck off. You win the argument, thanks for the great philosophical discussion.
What an interesting thing to say, considering you more than likely didn’t read the entirety of this article within just 10 minutes after it was posted. You must be Spencer Reid.
If you don't believe that I read and understood the piece before commenting, such that this comment responding to the argument is uninformed, then feel free to ignore and don't address the comment's merits. I don't know who that is.
You definitely didn't understand it given that the question-begging phil-101 form of your response in the comments.
It's not clear how they could've understood it, given that they didn't read it.
The article was published at 11:12 ET. Your first comment appeared at 11:22 ET, 10 minutes after the post went live. Assuming you opened the article up and began reading it within one minute of publication, and assuming it took you one minute to write your post, that would give you 8 minutes to read the article.
The article is about 18000 words. The average person reads nonfiction at a rate of 240 WPM with a standard deviation of about 50 WPM. For you to read the whole article in that time would require a reading speed of 2,250 WPM, or about nine standard pages a minute. This would be about 40 standard deviations above the mean. The chances of this are effectively zero. It would not be physically possible for you to have read the entire article in that time.
You’d rather take the time to do the calculations than actually address the argument I’ve made or phrase your thesis in a way to ground a real discussion. You should be thanking your readers for taking the time to read your work, not scrutinizing them. If you don’t believe I read your article, then don’t. I’m not the one confused about the nature of reasons.
You didn't take the time to read my work, as I demonstrated in the preceding comment.
The preceding argument didn’t give any “reason” for believing I didn’t read your work, it was just a reflection of your own personal motivations and desires. Nothing stance independent that anyone is bound to accept.