Objectivity doesn't matter: A response to Both Sides Brigade

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I’m a bit busy at the moment, so I dashed off this long response largely stream of thought. There are probably errors, and Both Sides Brigade (hereafter BSB) is welcome to have a field day pointing them out. For now, I’ll say this: I am not convinced that BSB has pointed to a single feature of everyday moral practice that is best explained by moral realism or a commitment to moral realism. BSB seems very confident antirealists can’t account for everyday moral discourse. I have a lot to say below, so I’ll say this here:

1. Whether ordinary moral practice is best explained by attributing a commitment to realism or antirealism to the nonphilosophers engaged in it.

2. There is no compelling empirical evidence at all that most nonphilosophers think, speak, act, or are committed in any way to moral realism.

3. Everyday moral practice doesn’t require and isn’t best explained by attributing realism to people. It isn’t very challenging to put forward hypotheses that account for such practices without appealing to moral realism.

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Both Sides Brigade recently presented an argument for moral realism. You can find it here. The central thesis is this:

The essential features of moral discourse are best justified in other non-moral domains by reference to the objectivity of the facts involved, and this gives us good reason to believe that objectivity is what justifies those essential features in moral discourse as well.

There are a number of ways an antirealist could respond, but I’ll focus on just one: I simply deny moral discourse exhibits any essential features that are best justified by reference to the objectivity of the facts involved.

Rebutting this claim can be achieved in at least three ways: showing that the allegedly essential feature isn’t a feature of moral discourse at all, showing that it is but it isn’t essential, or showing that it is a feature of moral discourse but that it is not best justified by reference to the objectivity of facts (in this case, it’d be essential to show that the facts in question are distinctively moral facts). Most of my objections will appeal to the third strategy.

To assess the claim that there are any essential features best justified by reference to objective facts, we’re going to need some examples. And you have those. So let’s have a look:

Praise and Blame — While we might have a slight affinity for people who enjoy the same snacks or prefer the same hobbies, it would be unjustified for someone who held one view on these disputes to condemn or criticize someone else just because they endorse the opposite position.

There is no clear or explicit explanation or argument for why antirealists wouldn’t be able to account for praise and blame. I can do so easily: I praise and blame actions on the basis of my personal moral values. So do other people. When we come into conflict, it is in our respective interests to coordinate our actions or fight, depending on what we judge would best serve our interests. When groups of people with broadly shared values come together, they are able to navigate both the overlap and conflict between their respective interests by devising norms, standards, laws, and institutions for mutually regulating one another’s conduct to serve their respective personal interests.

Furthermore, BSB draws attention to practices that appear to be innocuous: in no way do these practices have any plausible negative impact on ourselves. Yet if they did, then by conventional, everyday standards of “justification” philosophers might invoke, we would be justified in condemning people. If, for instance, eating gummy bears would cause God to smite random people, or if taking up golf as a hobby would cause a famine or destroy all the crops, it would be perfectly reasonable to condemn people for engaging in these activities. The purpose of the examples BSB gives is, presumably, to give examples of precisely the kinds of actions that don’t carry these consequences, consequences that people would think do justify condemnation.

So if we’re accounting for everyday moral practice, it is fairly easy to offer a further way in which antirealists can account for why we might suppose condemning snack preferences and hobbies isn’t justified.

There are two important differences between your typical taste preference and your typical moral standard: scope and severity.

The scope of a moral standard refers to who it applies to (and, perhaps, when and where it applies). My preference for certain kinds of food is simply a preference about my own conduct. I don’t have any direct preferences about what other people eat. Conversely, my preference (and I do in fact think it is a preference in the same way my food preferences are preferences) for people to not slaughter each other or lie indiscriminately is a preference not just about my own conduct but about everyone else’s conduct. At least two simple scopes a preference or value could take are a personal scope, where the preference only applies to yourself, and a universal scope, where the preference applies to everyone. There could be other kinds of scopes, but these will suffice for our purposes.

Severity is just what it sounds like: it refers to how important one considers the issue. I prefer strawberry ice cream over chocolate, but I won’t be outraged if you give me chocolate ice cream. I don’t care that much. Conversely, I care a great deal about people not slaughtering one another or lying indiscriminately.

The examples BSB gives: snack preferences and hobbies, are precisely the sorts of issues for which almost anyone reading their post would regard as having a personal scope and as having low severity. Most of us would think anyone who moralized issues they personally regard as having a local scope and low severity to be really weird, and we might recoil at such people, considering their attitudes unacceptable, or we might say, “unjustified.”

But we could readily agree to this simply because most of us don’t have preferences like these. If many of us did, then we’d react differently. In other words, any judgment that condemnation of snack preferences or hobbies is unjustified can be fully accounted for by appealing to the shared subjective preferences of most people. We don’t need to account for people’s opposition to anyone imposing such standards on others by attributing some kind of shared folk commitment to realism to ordinary moral practice. Intersubjective shared values handle the situation without any issue at all. It isn’t even a strained fit: this account does, I contend, at least as well as attributing some kind of realist features to moral discourse.

In short, absolutely nothing about the tendency for people to consider praise and blame appropriate for moral issues but not taste issues in any way is best accounted for by appeal to moral realism. The differences between morality and taste preferences can be fully accommodated by features other than treating one as stance-independent and the other as not being stance-independent.

In other words: everyday moral practice is perfectly consistent with moral antirealism being true and with every single person in a society being a moral antirealist (or at least not being a realist).

As far as “justification” for the imposition of our practices goes: well, BSB hasn’t made it clear what they have in mind by “justification.” Insofar as BSB’s account of justification appeals to BSB’s own normative values or intuitions, I and others can simply…not share those normative values or intuitions, in which case any judgments about what acts of condemnation for conduct one disapproves of being “unjustified” would be something I’d expect BSB to present an argument or additional justification for. None of us are obliged by fiat to go along with BSB’s own judgments on the matter.

Speaking for myself, I can address the notion that it would be unjustified for a person to condemn others for liking different snacks or having different hobbies quite handily:

If the notion of justification is one which I reject, then I don’t think any acts of praise or blame would be justified or unjustified at all. In other words, nothing would be justified or unjustified in the relevant respects, in which case I’d simply deny that a person would be unjustified for condemning other people for their snack preferences or hobbies.

Conversely, I could endorse an antirealist conception of justification, according to which a person is justified in praising, blaming, condemning and so on on the basis of their own values. If so, then if a person thinks certain snack preferences or hobbies are worthy of blame, then that person is thereby justified in holding such a view.

BSB says shortly after this example that:

To head off an obvious criticism, I’m not begging the question here by assuming these discursive practices are justified or unjustified in a specifically realist sense.

BSB may not be specifically presuming the truth of realism, but may nevertheless be begging other questions, e.g., BSB may be begging questions about what normative moral standards are acceptable or not, e.g., that a person couldn’t be justified in condemning others for their snack preferences or hobbies. I simply don’t grant that this is the case. Does BSB have an argument that it is? If so, none is presented here. Instead, BSB simply says:

I’m just speaking about the truth of general first-order judgments like “Scathing denunciation is an improper response to someone saying they don’t like gummy bears,” which is the sort of judgment that any plausible theory of justification should be able to return without an issue. (If anyone wants to stop the argument here by saying that isn’t the case in any sense, they’re welcome to, but I see that as basically the same as admitting defeat.)

No. This is not admitting defeat. I am not obliged to grant that people would be “unjustified” in denouncing people for disliking gummy bears. First, if I reject BSB’s account of justification, then I don’t think anyone would be unjustified in condemning people for anything. Am I “admitting defeat” if I don’t agree with whatever account of justification BSB has in mind? No; absolutely not, and if BSB insisted I were then BSB would just be begging the question regarding their conception of justification. If BSB is instead appealing to some descriptive claim about folk notions of justification: good luck with that! That’d be an empirical question. I’m not sure easy it’d be to operationalize, but I’d put money on it not coming out as some kind of decisive evidence for some kind of folk realism.

Also, one could ask: do I think someone would be justified in condemning someone for disliking gummy bears according to my own moral standards and own conception of justification?

No. But I endorse a thoroughly antirealist conception of both morality and justification. And so the fact that I agree with BSB is moot. Someone could disagree with BSB because they have different normative standards than BSB or I. Maybe they really love gummy bears and think anyone who hates them is evil and should be killed. I don’t think this person’s judgments would be “unjustified” in anything other than a stance-dependent respect (as in, it’d be unjustified according to my standards). And if we transpose my standards back onto our practices of praise and blame, I endorse a thoroughly antirealist conception of whatever “justification” we have, if any, for our practices of praise and blame. As such, nothing about such practices calls for any reference to stance-independent moral facts.

There are further issues with BSB’s example of snack preferences and hobbies. BSB’s setup presents practices that appear designed to elicit the judgment that these practices could not plausibly harm us or interfere with the pursuit of our goals.

This is already a problem, because the mere fact that someone dislikes gummy bears could harm someone or interfere with their goals. What if knowledge of their dislike caused someone intense distress or misery? What if one of someone’s goals was to kill anyone who dislikes gummy bears? In both cases, knowledge of the existence of a person who dislikes gummy bears would directly harm me and/or conflict with my goals. In these cases, why wouldn’t they be justified in condemning, or even outright killing someone? People may recoil in response to these cases, and consider these actions unjustified, but this can just as readily be attributed to differences in their normative values as it could be attributed to some kind of commitment to realism about values. In fact, I’d say it would make far better sense of people’s reactions. Any attempt to circumscribe the range of what is or isn’t an acceptable moral value already involves substantive and questionable normative assumptions I and others are not obliged to accept. And, insofar as such attempts pivot to descriptive claims about how nonphilosophers think or what kinds of practices they engage in, these can be (and I think, correctly would be) attributed to shared values among those people, and thus realism doesn’t offer a better explanation of the practices in question than antirealism (or my own view, indeterminacy: I don’t think everyday moral discourse is realist or antirealist).

BSB next turns to consistency:

Consistency — Since our tastes aren’t bound by any logical implications, it would be unjustified to demand that someone who takes a position in one particular instance also take that position in every single relevantly similar instance across the board.

I simply don’t agree. I don’t think we’re “justified” in demanding consistency in morality but not with respect to taste preferences. If BSB has an argument for this, I’d like to see it. If BSB wants to appeal to the fact that people often do, as a matter of practice, demand consistency in people’s moral standards but not with respect to their taste preferences, there are at least two problems with this: it’s an open empirical question how much people actually care about or demand consistency in people’s moral standards. Maybe this is largely of concern to philosophers, while ordinary people don’t care very much. How much do nonphilosophers care about validity, or consistency, or other norms that concern philosophers? A bit, perhaps, but I doubt they’re especially rigid about it. And if someone did have taste preferences that were obviously contradictory, I would likewise guess that people may notice this and draw attention to it. Again, though, this is an empirical question. My point here is simply that I don’t know if it’s actually true that people are distinctively disposed to demand consistency of our moral standards but not our taste preferences.

But there is a second, more obvious reason why people might draw more attention to and demand consistency in other people’s moral standards, but care less about consistency in their taste preferences: practical relevance. If some rival person or group wants to legalize or ban abortion, or raise or lower taxes, or start a war, or whatever, this has enormous practical relevance to us and may conflict with values we hold that are (a) universal in scope and (b) high importance. Conversely, if they have different taste preferences or hobbies that, by stipulation, have absolutely no practical impact on us at all, why would we care, or even consider, any potential inconsistencies in those taste preferences?

I have a friend who loves to go fishing, but absolutely despises the taste of fish and won’t eat them. He used to catch a bunch of fish then invite us over for a cookout to eat the fish he wouldn’t eat. There’s a bit of a tension there. It’s a bit weird to love fishing but hate fish. Not good enough for you? We could probably spot instances of people reporting preferences that violated transitivity or some other principle, thereby showing their preferences to be logically inconsistent. But why bother doing this? Why demand they be consistent? It has no practical relevance to us. If it did, we would care, and we would demand consistency.

So even if people do tend to demand consistency for moral issues but not taste preferences this can be perfectly accounted for without any reference to moral realism. Non-metaethical differences in the normative content of subjective values (e.g., scope and severity) and more generally practical relevance can perfectly account for such differences, if they exist (and I’m not sure they do). Incidentally, I wrote about this recently in the article Do You Want Other People to Share Your Preferences?

As I say there:

When discussing metaethics, people often make comparisons to matters of taste. One of these comparisons is in terms of scope and imposition: who those standards apply to and, on normative grounds, whether or not and to what extent it is good (or even mandatory) to impose those standards on others. One of the paradigmatic distinctions between morality and aesthetic matters is that we typically want to impose our standards on others: we want moral rules against stealing and defrauding and killing to be maintained and enforced, if not by the law, then by social condemnation. Conversely, we are expected to have little interest in imposing our taste preferences on others. I would not support laws criminalizing chocolate ice cream (I prefer vanilla) or listening to Drake (I prefer not listening to Drake).

While this is generally true, I don’t believe that there is a sharp, categorical divide: moral norms are to be imposed on others, while taste preferences aren’t. Rather, speaking for myself, and, I hypothesize, many other people, there’s a bit of overlap between the moral and taste domains, such that for many of us:

1. There is an extent to which we are sympathetic to or outright support at least some degree of imposition of our taste preferences on others, including our preferences in music, art, food, and entertainment.

2. There is an extent to which we are reluctant to or outright opposed to the imposition of certain moral standards we ourselves follow on others; this reluctance or opposition is often context dependent as well, i.e., we wouldn’t want to impose certain standards on others given their cultural background, age, or other characteristics.

In other words, I simply deny that as a matter of everyday normative practice, there is a sharp dividing line between our willingness to impose our moral values and other norms with respect to our unwillingness to impose our taste preferences on others. I think many people are disposed to treat their moral values as personal in scope (or at least, more personal, or personal up to a point), and that people are disposed, to at least some small extent, to impose their moral standards on others.

Thus, not only do I reject the notion that realism best accounts for moral practice and that antirealism best accounts for taste practice, I don’t even think the two domains exhibit any other clear and distinctive characteristics. This is just one small part of a broader view I hold: I simply deny there is any principled distinction between moral and nonmoral norms in the first place. Stich phrases this bluntly as the view that there is no moral domain. I think this is more or less accurate, but I do think moral language, at least in English, picks out a cluster of somewhat related notions. I just think that, if it is a domain, it’s a wobbly, partially subjective, unprincipled mess, largely bound by contingent features of our shared culture, language, and history. But that’s a topic for another day.

My point here is simply that BSB’s remarks may suggest a more rigid and principled difference in the way people treat moral and nonmoral norms, and I just don’t think as a matter of empirical fact that there are sharp dividing lines between different domains…so much so that I am not even sure there even is a “moral domain.”

Next, we have:

Intransigence — In situations where only one outcome is possible and the relevant parties disagree, then some sort of compromise or impartial decision is called for, and it would be unjustified to just dig in your heels and demand that everyone else submit to whatever you want most.

This is a bit vague, but yet again, I simply disagree. I don’t think compromise or impartial decisions are always called for, in moral or nonmoral disputes. And I don’t think this is some kind of requirement of everyday moral thinking either. I also don’t think as a matter of descriptive fact that it is. An insistence on impartiality is a feature of some people’s moral values, but I doubt it was historically or frequently is of all or most existing people’s moral standards or practices. Demands for compromise or impartiality sound like the kinds of modern, liberal values someone growing up in a democracy may endorse. Such demands strike me as highly contingent and culturally parochial. I see nothing bizarre or implausible about someone thinking that the proper solution to there being only one possible outcome, and they disagree with the other side is to kill them and burn down their village. And I don’t simply mean people would go this route. I mean they’d think it was perfectly acceptable to do so. Plenty of societies do not treat outgroup members as having the same moral status. And outgroup members are precisely the sorts of people one is likely to run into conflicts of this sort with.

In short, I think BSB is simply reporting their own normative moral values here. This isn’t some essential feature of moral discourse. It’s just some thing lots of people today endorse. So in this case, I’m not convinced this is some essential part of moral discourse. But let’s suppose it was. Well, why think this has anything to do with moral realism?

Having addressed all three examples, let’s move on to what BSB says about them. This is a key claim:

Still, with that said, here’s the big problem for antirealists: It isn’t just that discursive practices like these happen to be inappropriate for subjective disputes, but rather, it’s that the subjective nature of the dispute in question is what best explains their impropriety.

No, it isn’t, and BSB hasn’t shown that it is. BSB just…asserts this. I don’t think the best explanation of any of these disputes is that they are subjective, while moral issues aren’t. Rather, I think the accounts I outlined above do a better job: we engage in disputes when the issues are of practical relevance to us or conflict with our values, and we don’t when they don’t.

If someone else’s snack preferences or hobbies threatened our welfare, we’d be “justified” in condemning them. If (for whatever weird reason) these actions weren’t harmful to us but we moralized them anyway, we’d certainly see ourselves as justified. BSB just happened to choose examples almost anyone reading the article won’t moralize, and so would find someone who held such standards to be weird (and possibly insane). The point is: if lots of readers moralized harmless practices like these, they would think condemnation was justified. We can thus fully account for people’s reactions without appealing to people being realists about these issues: they can be fully accounted for by the contingent subjective values people happen to have, and their position towards what kinds of values they themselves would find tolerable in others (we would probably not be okay with someone going around trying to outlaw harmless dietary choices or music preferences).

Similar considerations apply to consistency and intransigence: practical relevance can (and, I believe, does) fully account for why people would treat morality differently from taste preferences.

Yet BSB says:

In other words, if you were asked why [sic] would be unreasonable to sincerely condemn someone for picking licorice over gummy bears, the proper response is to simply point out that neither option is objectively better; once it’s clear that an interlocutor’s views are just as valid as yours from an impartial perspective, the idea of ascribing praise or blame in a dispute like this should be automatically nonsensical.

First, I wouldn’t say this is “unreasonable.” But if I did, I’d say it’s “unreasonable” according to my own values because I don’t care if people like licorice. My judgments about whether it’s reasonable or unreasonable are thus entirely dependent on my normative values. This illustrates that an antirealist approach to this matter can account for someone’s judgments just as readily as realism can.

I cannot stress enough how easily an antirealist can account for this. If someone’s preference for licorice over gummy bears threatened us or conflicted with our goals, we would condemn it. The whole point is that these are supposed to be examples where such actions don’t threaten us and don’t conflict with the goals of any psychologically normal person likely to read BSB’s post. Thus, by design, the examples BSB gives involve:

1. Moral issues that plausibly conflict with the values readers are likely to have

2. Nonmoral issues that very likely don’t conflict with any values readers are likely to have

We’re supposed to give a realist reading of the former and a subjectivist reading of the latter. Yet we could instead just give a subjectivist reading of both, and note that the differences in our judgments about the two are driven by differences in their other features. Specifically, the moral conflicts are all ones in which people acting on different moral values than us would plausibly harm us or impede our goals, while the nonmoral (taste) issues are ones that would not harm us or impede our goals. But if they did, then people would care and would be fine with condemning such preferences. Thus, our own subjective values can fully account for why people would condemn practices they consider “immoral” but not condemn differences in “taste”: it is baked into the very examples that the latter don’t conflict with our goals or values in any way at all.

We’re supposed to be realists about the former and subjectivists about the latter, but the scenarios also perfectly divide along the lines of issues that have practical relevance to us, in that conflicts could lead to outcomes that harm us or impede our goals, and that don’t have practical relevance to us, in that conflicts wouldn’t harm us or impede our goals.

Since the latter distinction can perfectly account for the differences in our judgments in a way consistent with us being antirealists about both moral and nonmoral issues, BSB has simply structured the differences between the domains in a way that pulls moral and taste issues apart in a way that is consistent with a realist interpretation of the former and an antirealist interpretation of the latter, but BSB has failed to note the confound: there are other differences between the moral and taste issues that can explain differences in our attitudes towards them, and those differences happen to make perfect sense on an antirealist (or at least nonrealist) reading.

BSB goes on to say:

And the same goes for why someone would compromise when different people’s preferences conflict, or why it would be bizarre to expect that someone who chooses woodworking one day could never choose knitting the next. In all these cases, what’s primarily relevant to the first-order justification of a particular approach to discourse is the subjective nature of the claims under dispute.

BSB simply hasn’t shown that this is the case, or presented any argument that this is the case. This is simply asserted. Whether a person is willing to compromise or not depends on how important the matter in question is to them, what kind of personality they have, and what they think the likelihood of success would be. Nothing about conflict or compromise requires any appeal to stance-independent moral truths or a commitment to their existence (implicit or otherwise). Attitudes towards compromise can be fully accounted for by mundane features of people’s psychology, without ever needing to posit any stance-independent moral facts.

The woodworking example is also weird. Someone who did this wouldn’t be doing anything inconsistent. Also, it would be bizarre for someone who loved woodworking to completely lose interest in it and take up knitting the next day. Subjective preferences of this kind are often quite stable. Some of them may not even be voluntary. I can’t just choose to like different activities on a whim.

In all of these cases, I’m not even convinced that a particular approach to discourse is “justified” or “unjustified.” Even if I thought they were, my first go-to would be that they’d be “justified” entirely on antirealist grounds. And, across all of these cases, I see no reason to think that it is subjectivism that accounts for any differences in people’s attitudes towards these approaches, rather than differences in e.g., scope, importance, and practical relevance more generally. Simply put, I do not think BSB has given us any reason to think that differences in our judgments about moral and taste issues are best accounted for by people being realists about morality and subjectivists about taste. We can just as readily explain both morality and taste as matters of preference, and simply note that our preferences can differ in their scope and importance.

BSB goes on to say this:

We can see the same dynamic playing in reverse by taking a look at paradigmatic examples of objective disputes, like whether evolution through natural selection is true or whether nitrogen is a better fertilizer than gasoline. Here, it seems obvious (again, in a first-order sense) that the same discursive practices highlighted above are now not only appropriate, but arguably incumbent on rational agents. It’s totally justified to condemn people who adopt absurd and unsubstantiated beliefs about the world, or to expect that an opponent in debate will avoid arbitrarily dismissing what they’ve previously asserted, or to refuse to compromise on disputes where the other party is very clearly wrong.

It seems obvious to who? None of this “seems obvious” to me. I don’t think it’s justified to condemn people who adopt absurd and unsubstantiated beliefs about the world! I’m an atheist, and I think religious beliefs are absurd and unsubstantiated. But if the people who hold such beliefs benefit from them, or at least aren’t harmed and aren’t harming me, I would be appalled at anyone “condemning” them. I condemn beliefs only when they threaten me or impede my subjective goals and values. In other words, I only condemn people insofar as their actions conflict with my subjective values. As far as expecting people to avoid arbitrarily dismissing what someone has asserted: I find this rude and think it’d be unproductive to talk to such a person.

And the best explanation for why these discursive practices are suddenly acceptable just is that these disputes now relate to claims where there’s a fact of the matter as to which is correct; the switch from subjective to objective has opened up the possibility of legitimate error.

Well, I don’t agree that they are acceptable! I certainly don’t accept the first of these. And why should I think this is the best explanation for these practices? Once again, I think practical considerations likely account, not only for my practices, but for most other people’s. I don’t care at all if people have unsubstantiated or absurd beliefs, if those beliefs couldn’t plausibly negatively impact me or other people. I only start caring about other people’s beliefs when they become a practical impediment to me. And I’d be willing to bet quite a bit that this is how most people are. We care about truth mostly to the extent that it has some practical relevance, and likewise are mostly concerned with what others believe when it conflicts with our values or threatens us. If anything, I think people are far closer to crypto-pragmatists who are mostly concerned with adopting beliefs and practices that work well, not in arbitrarily condemning and more generally regulating what others think or say on the mere basis of whether it’s true in some non-pragmatic sense.

In any case, even if I grant that people are realists about nonmoral descriptive matters, I don’t think BSB has shown that moral discourse is relevantly similar or can’t easily be accounted for without being a realist about such matters.

BSB then says:

This, for the record, is a big part of why I’m so unsympathetic to a lot of antirealist language policing. You’ll often hear that saying things like “just a stance” or “mere preference” is somehow prejudicial, and that realists should avoid implying that stance-dependent justifications are necessarily weaker than stance-independent ones. But as we’ve seen above, we generally distinguish between the justificatory power of objective and subjective groundings, and further, juxtaposing them with words like ‘just’ or ‘merely’ is a common feature of discourse in any domain.

I don’t agree. I don’t think BSB has actually shown that the major driving factor in the moral/taste divide is objective/subjective. Differences between the two can be entirely accounted for by appeal to other differences in their respective features. If I had to take a side on the matter, I’d propose that people only ever act on their preferences or values, and that it is differences in scope and importance of those values that accounts for the above differences, not objectivity versus subjectivity.

Suppose someone tried to mug you in an alleyway. Which course of action would be more likely to succeed? Which would you favor using?

1. Attempt to convince the person that their actions are inconsistent with the stance-independent moral facts, and thus morally wrong in an objective way.

2. Attempt to convince the person that their actions are inconsistent with their own subjective goals and values, e.g., point to security cameras and note that they would probably be caught and go to jail.

I, for one, think (2) would blow (1) out of the water. When it comes to disputes about value, I think people act on what they care about, and that their practices, implicit commitments, or explicit thoughts are almost never best explained by a concern for stance-independent moral truth. In every case, non-realist explanations can account for everyday moral practice as well or better than realism can.

Here’s one quick example: Just last week, I was in a meeting at work to discuss a fairly major change in operations requested by a coworker; my manager’s response, verbatim, was “Is there an actual reason to change things, or is it just a preference?” Their sentiment wasn’t perfectly put into philosopher-speak, obviously. But still, the idea that it would matter whether someone in a dispute had any objective grounding for their position was totally uncontroversial, as was the idea that a phrase like ‘just a preference’ properly expressed the relative weight of an ungrounded stance. Of course, I understand why antirealists find this kind of implicit normative hierarchy uncomfortable, but it’s by no means an inappropriate or underhanded realist trick - it’s just how normal people talk!

Normal people don’t talk like realists, and nothing about this language suggests that they do. The distinction here uses the language of “actual reason” and “preference,” which may look to a philosopher like it’s a realist/antirealist distinction. It could be. Such language is certainly consistent with that reading. But this could easily be accounted for by a distinction between broad, intersubjective standards and parochial, idiosyncratic, personal preferences.

For comparison, suppose a group of engineers were building a bridge, and their boss comes by and says:

“Hey everyone, change of plans. We’re going to paint the bridge white.”

A person might respond:

“Is there an actual reason for this, or is it just a preference?”

Consider what they might have in mind by it being “just a preference.” Suppose the construction of the bridge is being funded by a wealthy donor. They could be imagining that the donor likes the color white (perhaps it’s one of the colors of their favorite sports team), or wants it to be that color on a whim.

Now consider what they could have in mind by an “actual reason.” A bridge that has been painted white may get less hot in the sun, or be resistant to corrosion, or deter birds from building nests, or be easier to spot at night. Yet every one of these reasons is itself ultimately rooted in the goals and preferences people have when it comes to building a bridge. Does it make sense to build a bridge that wouldn’t get super hot (making it dangerous to walk on), would be resistant to corrosion, easier to spot, and so on?

Sure. But why does it make sense? Well, because all of these considerations are consistent with most people’s goals. Most people would not prefer bridges that corrode faster or get hot in the sun. So an “actual reason” could simply be a reason that, while still grounded in our subjective preferences, is grounded in preferences people broadly share, rather than the personal and idiosyncratic whims of a random person.

Just so, in the scenario BSB describes, the distinction between an “actual reason” and a “preference” could easily be accounted for on similar grounds. In fact, for most companies pursuing some goal or other, this would probably make more sense. For instance, suppose the new CEO of a company proposed to the board that they change the logo from red to blue. The board could ask:

“Is there an actual reason to do this, or is it just a preference?”

This might be a bit rude or bold to ask a CEO, but how would you interpret this? I’d interpret this as something like “Is there a good reason from a marketing perspective to do this, in that it would achieve our goal of increasing sales and earning more money, or do you want to change the logo on a whim?”

The “actual reasons” for changing the color of the logo are still ultimately dependent on people’s values, and there would be no good reason to think that what people had in mind were any sort of stance-independent normative facts about what color the logo “ought to be.” Rather, appeal to “actual reasons” makes better sense on antirealist grounds.

Given these examples, note what BSB says:

But still, the idea that it would matter whether someone in a dispute had any objective grounding for their position was totally uncontroversial

This is weird for a couple reasons. First, people can have “objective groundings” for their preferences or subjective values. If it’s true that white paint would achieve the desired outcomes, then there is an “objective grounding” in one respect for painting a bridge white. But this objective grounding is still ultimately rooted in the pursuit of shared, subjective values.

Second, if this isn’t what BSB has in mind, and I hope it isn’t because it would mean the remark is consistent with subjectivism, then I simply don’t think BSB has given an example that clearly or unambiguously demonstrates that the person was appealing to stance-independent facts regarding the reasons in question in the first place.

In short, I think BSB is simply interpreting the remark in question in a way consistent with realism when I think an antirealist interpretation is just as good if not better. If realists go hunting for realism in ordinary talk, it’s easy to see it. But I think BSB and other realists are just not sensitive enough to how readily ordinary language that looks realist to them can be easily accounted for from an antirealist perspective as well.

Of course, I understand why antirealists find this kind of implicit normative hierarchy uncomfortable, but it’s by no means an inappropriate or underhanded realist trick - it’s just how normal people talk!

I simply deny that it is. I don’t think that people generally talk like normative realists about anything, moral or otherwise, and I don’t think BSB has shown that they do.

I’ll pause here for a moment and say that moral antirealists are, of course, free to reject everything I’ve said so far and deny that a subjective/objective distinction is the best explanation for why our discursive practices diverge the way they do (and why they’re justified in doing so). But if they do reject it, then it’s incumbent on them to actually provide an alternate account for the divergence, one with both explanatory and justificatory power.

I’ve provided an alternate account for the divergence in terms of explanatory power, but I am not sure what BSB has in mind by “justificatory power.” I’m also not sure it is incumbent on me to provide “justificatory power” either. That will depend on what BSB has in mind.

It isn’t enough to just take a survey of our discursive practices as they happen to be and then reverse-engineer whatever set of rules are required to make those practices work; antirealists should be expected to provide a foundational normative framework that explains and justifies the divergence, in such a way that we not only understand why we treat the disputes in question differently but also why that disparate treatment is valid.

Wait, what? Why do I have to grant that the disparate treatment is valid? What if I just…don’t think that it is?

(As before, I’ll say that denying its validity in a first-order sense is equivalent to admitting defeat.)

You can say this, but this is just an assertion. I can do the same. Watch:

No it isn’t.

BSB is frustratingly doing something I often criticize philosophers for: Simply making assertions. I’m not admitting defeat by disagreeing with you.

For example, one alternative - that we just care more about the issues involved in moral discourse, and are therefore more willing to “commit” to our stances - is vulnerable to serious counterexamples, and either way fails to justify the commitment

I doubt this is true, and I don’t accept thatI need to justify the commitments.

The same goes for evolutionary and social frameworks that can only ever (imperfectly) explain, in a descriptive sense, why it is that human beings happen to act the way they do. At every point, the realist can simply ask why it is that these habits and impulses are justified; if the antirealist has no answer, then their theory is necessarily weaker than what it’s meant to supplant.

Again: wait, what? Why is the theory weaker if it doesn’t offer a “justification” for our practices?

Antirealists might also be tempted to adopt a more radical approach that denies the need to justify these features of discourse entirely. They can just say these sorts of discursive practices are appropriate in one domain but not another, and that’s just the way it is. But a move like this imposes a major theoretical cost, in that it reduces all questions of justification to mere social convention or else renders the entire project incomprehensible.

Yet again, BSB is simply making assertions. I outright deny that this imposes any theoretical cost whatsoever. Maybe the project you’re engaged in is incomprehensible. How is that a major theoretical cost for me? What exactly is this “cost” and why should I agree I’m paying it?

To say that something is justified, after all, just is to say that it isn’t arbitrary, or ungrounded, or without proper basis. But if the standard by which those evaluations are made displays in itself the qualities it’s meant to indicate against, then what exactly is the point of justification in the first place?

There is a very good chance I don’t think there is any point to BSB’s conception of justification.

And regardless, it has to be emphasized again that we’re comparing the virtues of two distinct explanations for a particular practice we observe in the world around us. So even if the antirealist has some method for salvaging the importance of justifying discursive acts, it’s still the case that even a vaguely functional realist account will be better than an antirealist one with nothing to say on the matter at all (just like even an incomplete or partially erroneous physical theory would be better than the idea that objects just move, and that’s that).

There is a very good chance I don’t think it is a virtue of a theory that it offers whatever kind of justification BSB has in mind, in which case it simply wouldn’t follow that the realist account does any better than the antirealist account: not by any standard of “better” I accept, anyway. And I’m not obliged to accept BSB’s conception of what would make an account better. That is something that we could also disagree about (and probably do disagree about).

If you accept that the justificatory relevance of the subjective/objective distinction is at least plausible, then the path forward for the rest of my argument should be clear.

As far as I can tell, I reject its relevance entirely and do not consider it even remotely plausible. But it’s hard to judge, because I am not sure what BSB has in mind by justification.