Philosophers misuse "biting the bullet" as a rhetorical move

Philosophers will often say that if you accept a certain position that you’re “biting the bullet.” This is usually invoked when the position in question is thought sacrifice plausibility for the sake of consistency. The person who bites the bullet is “paying a cost” to maintain their stance. Such remarks are often presented in a way that suggests that the person who is paying the cost agrees that they are doing so. If I must give up endorsing some position in order to be consistent, I am expected to acknowledge that I am “biting the bullet” to do so. Many people will readily embrace the claim that they’re biting a bullet, and may even be proud to do so: consistency is a virtue, and people are at times willing to display their mettle by publicly embracing some alleged “cost” to do so.

I think this is often a mistake: one might reject a view for the sake of consistency, but also deny that the view in question was plausible to begin with, or has any distinctive appeal that would make abandoning it undesirable in the first place. Philosopher are too quick to agree that they’re biting a bullet, or to allow such accusations to go unchallenged. Many philosophers will treat some particular set of philosophical views, often supposedly “commonsense” views, as a sort of default position, against which any alternative requires “biting the bullet” or adopting a “revisionary” stance. Yet those who adopt these alternative stances can, and often should, both endorse these alternative positions and deny that their position is paying a cost, or is revionary, or involves the rejection of some “default” position.

This may not seem like a big deal: a person may be content with consistency, and may even enjoy the taste of bullets, but the overall consequence of failing to challenge such charges is that one’s own position can seem less appealing to others, and one can tacitly concede dialectical ground that is completely unearned. When charges of biting the bullet all tend to go in the same direction, with some views widely regarded as “biting the bullet” and others not, it can also create the potentially misleading impression that certain positions enjoy some kind of priority over others. For instance, moral realists may insist that to reject moral realism is to “bite the bullet.” And proponents of qualia and the hard problem of consciousness may insist that illusionism or any other view which rejects phenomenal consciousness must pay some enormous cost to do so, that it is “biting the bullet,” and that, while a person can maintain such views, they must do so at the cost of violating some kind of strong presmption in favor of the contrary.

Yet why should the proponent of antirealism or illusionism grant that the views they reject enjoy any kind of priority or presumption in the first place? Personally, I think conceding that certain aspects of experience could only be explained by positing qualia would involve biting a massive bullet; I find such views not only implausible, but counterintuitive. I don’t operate under the presumption that “commonsense”or “intuition” strongly favors views about consciousness that are popular in mainstream analytic philosophy, and I don’t grant that some kind of nascent commitment to such views is implicit in ordinary or “folk” thought, so I also deny that such views are “commonsense.” So not only do I reject such views, I also reject that they enjoy any special appeal or plausibility: I am not biting a bullet when rejecting such views. I’d be biting a bullet were I to make a concession to them! Indeed, that I find such views profoundly implausible is part of the reason I reject them in the first place. Yet proponents of such views often depict people who endorse views like mine as engaging in a procedure like this:

(a) we start, like they do, with a batch of commonsense intuitions and ordinary ways of thinking that most people share. These views suggest that we have “qualia”or “phenomenal states” or whatever: that consciousness has certain really special properties

(b) we are so enraptured by the success of science and the wonders of a physicalist framework that we adopt a strident, scientistic commitment to such approaches

(c) we are so committed to this framework that we then work backwards to try to square all commonsense thinking and intuitions with our commitments to (b). If we can make it fit, we do so. If we can’t, we simply deny the existence of the phenomena in question, no matter how silly this is. Since much of what’s central to consciousness cannot be squared with the physicalist framework, we’re left in the awkward position of denying a bunch of stuff that obviously exists. It’s implausible, but at least it’s consistent.

Here’s the problem: I’m not a physicalist. I never found mainstream views that include qualia plausible in the first place, and I don’t find whatever inclinations people have to believe the world is populated by qualia or phenomenal states to be so compelling that rejecting that there are such things is some massive cost in the first place. Nothing about Dennett’s views strikes me as “implausible” or to serve as some massive theoretical cost.

For comparison, it seems to many people that life, and the universe itself, were designed. Yet we can offer naturalistic explanations for the universe, and for life. Some recoil at this, feeling that no naturalistic explanation could account for the universe or the complexity of life. I’m not one of those people. I never had such inclinations to begin with. Yet one could imagine that, had such a view held sway over many philosophers, they could insist that anyone who accepts natural selection or standard cosmological accounts is “biting a bullet” in rejecting the “obvious” design in our world. I never had such inclinations to begin with, but even if I or others have, our intuitions themselves can change or at least diminish to such an extent that rejecting them becomes, at most, a negligible cost, while in many cases it isn’t a cost at all, or even pays us back. There are at least two ways this lack of significant cost can occur: it may be that

(a) we never held the views we reject for the sake of consistency, or never regarded them as enjoying any priority, plausibility, or appeal in the first place, so giving them up simply isn’t an issue

(b) in virtue of other changes in our beliefs, such views can lose their appeal, or even become unappealing or implausible, such that rejecting them is no longer a cost, but a benefit.

This is exactly how rejecting qualia, stance-independent moral facts, and many other allegedly “commonsense” views seems to me. I don’t find these views plausible, or appealing, or desirable, or worth maintaining at all.

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This generalizes. Many of the views I endorse, which I am told involve "biting the bullet," don't strike me as biting any bullets at all: they pay no theoretical costs and don't strike me as implausible. Sometimes they never did. Sometimes they stopped seeming like costs when the rest of my views shifted. Indeed, much of the motivation to favor consistency by rejecting such views is prompted by the appeal of doing so: after all, I think I hold the rest of my views for good reasons; a view that is extremely inconsistent with the rest of my views is undesirable for that reason, among others.

For instance, if I reject Companions in Guilt arguments on the grounds that I not only deny that there are stance-independent moral facts, but also stance-independent epistemic facts, I may be told I am "biting the bullet." Supposedly, also rejecting epistemic realism is some huge, implausible, deeply undesirable cost I have to pay to remain consistent. But not only do I deny epistemic realism, I also deny that it is a plausible, desirable, or more sensible position than epistemic antirealism, and so on. The problem is that philosophers posture as though there is some background agreement on which philosophical positions are more or less plausible, or desirable, or whatever, and that accepting certain positions is somehow implausible or a “concession” or a “cost” and thus requires one to “bite the bullet.”

This is complete nonsense. A person who endorses such views can also reject popular conceptions within the philosophical community about which positions are more or less plausible, or desirable, or theoretically costly, or whatever. And this isn’t merely hypothetical: I think all forms of normative realism are preposterous, and obviously so. I would consider it a cost of my views if I did somehow have to accept epistemic realism to be consistent. Far from biting a bullet, I take rejecting epistemic realism to be an instance of spitting them out.

I'd see myself as biting a bucket of bullets to even consider epistemic realism. From whose vantage point is my position the untenable one? The epistemic realist’s? I not only reject epistemic realism, I also reject that it’s a plausible position in the first place! Realists aren’t entitled to presume their positions enjoy greater prima facie appeal. I deny that, too!

This bullet biting maneuver is often a method of shaming views not seen as mainstream. It's a means of subtly enforcing conformity to an ostensible orthodox or mainstream philosophical position. And it does so in a way that is reminiscent of poisoning the well. Philosophers whose views hold preeminence within a given field (regardless of whether this is warranted) will cast a broad net, a kind of ambient background of approval and disapproval over a range of potential views, making it clear that the further one moves away from the mainstream, orthodox view, the more one’s views are “radical,” or “revisionary,” or require one to bite bullets. The implication here is that one should avoid such views, not because of the quality of the arguments for or against them, but merely because they’ve been discredited by a looming miasma of doubt fabricated by proponents of mainstream views. This is merely well poisoning on a mass scale that consists of preemptively discrediting any deviation from one’s own views.

Proponents of such views should not only ignore such aspersions, they should object to the framing of their positions as “radical,” or “revisionary,” and object to the claim that they’re biting any bullets.

So no, I don’t think moral antirealism involves biting any bullets. No, I don’t think rejecting epistemic antirealism involves biting any bullets. And no, I don’t think denying phenomenal consciousness exists involves biting any bullets. In all of these cases, I view the mainstream views, which hold these things to be “intuitive” or “obvious” or even “self-evident” to be predicated on conceptual confusions and errors and to be rooted, in many cases, in views that seem to have inadequately engaged with empirical/scientific findings that I take, on reflection, to render such views implausible or even unintelligible.

For comparison, imagine we still hadn’t figured out natural selection. One could imagine academic philosophers generally endorsing creationism, and insisting that anyone who proposed a mundane, naturalistic explanation for how life on earth changed over time and adapted to its environment, was “biting the bullet” and endorsing a “radical” position. Yet from our vantage point, there is nothing radical or bullet-biting about endorsing natural selection as the primary mechanism of evolution. It’s not just that natural selection is the best account, it’s also that there’s nothing radical or especially bullet-biting about it.

From my point of view, many of the philosophical positions I reject strike me as relying on the premature conclusion that empirical methods are inadequate to resolve or significantly inform and dissolve longstanding philosophical disputes. In the place of such methods, such views often seem to me to rely on rococo and dubious methods that are themselves inadequately informed by our best available knowledge of human psychology (e.g., our knowledge of human judgment and reasoning is relevant to the epistemic status of intuitions).

These concessions not only strike me as premature, but look to me like a viewing the world as a place riddled with mysteries utterly inaccessible to the sciences. This strikes me as, if not outright magical, pretty damn close. And I don’t think I’m biting any bullets or thinking anything radical when I deny the existence of magic. Until philosophers start summoning familiars or we discover Descartes’ horcrux on some dusty shelf in the Vatican, I don’t think there’s anything radical about denying that there are non-natural “properties” or realms of Platonic objects far beyond the sky.

Those of us who endorse views like moral antirealism should stop conceding that we're biting any bullets. We're not. One may only defensibly maintain that others are biting bullets from within the very theoretical frameworks and according to those very epistemic conventions which we are likewise free to reject.

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Substantial additions were made to this post on 10/25/2023.