Philosophy isn't about philosophy

Twitter Tuesday #19

1.0 Global normative antirealism

Nathan Nobis recently said the following on Twitter:

Critics of moral realism say stuff in response to it. 

They seem to think that people SHOULD consider that, that minds SHOULD change in response to what they say. 

But what "facts" could make those claims true? 

If those facts exist, so do moral facts?

Nobis isn’t very clear about what the concern is here, but links to his dissertation. I’m all in favor of people doing this, and think dissertations should get more eyes (in contrast to the stereotype that people typically ignore or set aside dissertations. I’m happy with mine!).

Nobis defends both moral and epistemic realism, i.e., that there are stance-independent normative facts in both domains. So when Nobis talks about normative and moral “facts” in the tweet, these should presumably be taken to be stance-independent facts.

There’s a lot going on in this small tweet, but the concern, roughly, centers in part on a parity premise, as indicated by the last question, “If those facts exist, so do moral facts?”

The short answer to Nobis is that his tweet poses no challenge whatsoever to moral antirealists: the solution is global normative antirealism. I deny that there are any stance-independent normative facts in any domain, including the epistemic domain. I further maintain that this poses absolutely no problems whatsoever. I don’t invoke stance-independent epistemic norms when I say moral realists (epistemically) should consider my objections and should change their minds in response to what I say; my use of “should” in these contexts is just as consistent with normative antirealism as my moral claims. There simply isn’t any issue here.

One might therefore think that the moral antirealist, in objecting to moral realism, is drawing on stance-independent epistemic facts to do so. But if Nobis thinks moral antirealists are so stupid and confused that we’re hopelessly appealing to the very concepts we are attempting to reject, then Nobis is attacking a very weak and indefensible form of moral antirealism: one that, at best, isn’t consistent, assuming Nobis is right about the parity premise (that moral and epistemic antirealism stand or fall together). And fair enough. If there are people who are being inconsistent, it’s worth pointing that out.

However, I do endorse the parity premise. However, if we endorse a parity premise, such that there are either both stance-independent moral and epistemic facts, or neither, the moral antirealist faces a potentially serious problem: they cannot draw on stance-independent epistemic facts to reject the claim that there are stance-independent moral facts, because if there are no stance-independent moral facts, there are also no stance-independent epistemic facts.

The solution to this, for the moral antirealist, is simple: they can simply (a) endorse epistemic antirealism too and (b) construe the “shoulds” they appeal to in rejecting moral realism in a way consistent with antirealism. This is trivially easy to do, because I already did this anyway. That is, I am a native antirealist: I am already disposed to think, speak, and act in both the moral and epistemic domains (and, indeed, all normative domains) in antirealist terms. 

That is, the moral antirealist can simply accept the parity premise, and deny both moral and epistemic realism.

Consider Nobis’s remark about how moral antirealists respond to moral realism:

They seem to think that people SHOULD consider that, that minds SHOULD change in response to what they say. 

Yes, I do think that people SHOULD consider that, and that minds SHOULD change in response to what I say. But I also say that people morally SHOULD do good things and morally SHOULD NOT do bad things. Normative realists don’t own normative talk, and there is no good reason to think that normative talk implicitly presupposes realism on my part. Indeed, I suspect normative realists may even frequently use normative talk in antirealist ways in their own everyday lives. As always, my go-to example is food. People deliberate about what to eat:

What should we have for lunch?

Would the sandwich be better than the soup?

Which of these ice cream flavors is the best?

We use all sorts of normative and evaluative talk when thinking about what we should eat, what food would be good, where we ought to go for dinner, and so on. Does any of this talk require normative realism? 

No. It doesn’t. We can simply appeal to our desires and the desires of others in accounting for such talk. And if a normative realist struggles to do this, they should consider stretching their imagination just a bit, because it really isn’t that difficult to explain why people would deliberate, argue, reason, and otherwise engage in all manner of considerations about food, without requiring the presumption of normative realism. 

Now simply transpose this over to the moral and epistemic domains. But wait! There’s a big difference! When it comes to food, I am concerned only with deciding what I should eat, what would be good according to my preferences, and so on. But moral and epistemic norms are typically not like this! We don’t simply concern ourselves with what we, personally, should do, we concern ourselves with what other people morally and epistemically should or shouldn’t do! So morality and epistemology are unlike gastronomy!

This is true. But it is also completely irrelevant. Yes, they are different:

Gastronomically, I am concerned with what I should eat, but not what you should eat.

Morally, I am concerned about both what I should do and what everyone else should do.

Epistemically, I am concerned about both what I should do and what everyone else should do.

Here’s the problem:

This difference has absolutely nothing to do with metanormativity at all, and is thus irrelevant to whether we are realists or antirealists about these domains. 

This is a difference in the scope of the norms: who they apply to, not what makes them true (e.g., stance-independent facts, stance-dependent facts, or some noncognitivist account where the claims can be construed in nonpropositional terms). There is zero inconsistency in endorsing gastronomic norms that only apply to yourself, and moral and epistemic norms that apply to everyone, in antirealist terms: an antirealist can have preferences about what they eat but no preferences about what others eat, and they can have preferences about how everyone morally acts and how everyone conducts themselves epistemically. There simply is absolutely no problem whatsoever for this view. Realists may point to everyday interactions and discourse, and insist realism makes better sense of deliberation, arguments, discourse, judgment, and other aspects of moral and epistemic behavior (i.e., people speak or act “like realists” in these domains), but this is also something I deny: I don’t think everyday moral and epistemic practice fits any better with normative realism in these domains than antirealism. That’s a topic for another day, though.

2.0 Philosophy isn’t about philosophy

For now, I want to draw attention to something interesting about this tweet: someone else presented my own views in response to Nobis. It’s really cool to see someone do that! The Outsider Humanist said, in response to Nobis:

Lance Bush would say (I think), and I would agree, that coherent and nontrivial "should" statements can be reduced to statements about means-ends consistency. There's no extra moral content or "reasons" beyond that.

This is spot on. I’ve been using the term means-end “consistency,” but some people don’t like that turn of phrase. Lots of ends are arguably “consistent” with a means even if they don’t fulfill or achieve the means. So it’s important to emphasize that what I mean by this is that there are descriptive facts about which means would achieve which ends, e.g., it’s a descriptive fact that drinking a cup of coffee would satisfy the goal of drinking a cup of coffee. You can see the rest of that tweet thread here. The Outsider Humanist eventually says:

My moral skepticism does affect my reasoning about these issues: I am focused on tragedy and how to mitigate it when I think about war for example, not who has a real true ultimate right to what, or who I am justified in wagging my finger at.

Nobis responds that:

Hmm. Others would think that tragedies of war often involve rights violations and when blame is due to those wrongdoers. So maybe you can't really think about the former without the latter.

This is an unfortunately anemic response. Yea, maybe you can’t. But this is precisely the kind of thing that a normative antirealist like me would deny. Okay, so others would think that. So what? Others would think you can’t explain life on earth without creationism. So maybe you can’t explain life on earth without creationism. I’m not terribly moved by what others think. I care about why they think it: do they have good reasons? Good arguments? In the case of moral (and epistemic) realism, I think the answer is no: there are no good arguments for moral or epistemic realism, any more so than there are for creationism. If philosophers want to balk at that comparison because of how outrageous creationism is, let me be clear: that comparison is intentional, and should give realists a sense of just how implausible I think all forms of normative realism are.

When I make such comparisons, moral realists have often responded by scoffing and pointing to the popularity of moral realism among professional philosophers, as if that should impress me. If 62% of professional philosophers endorsed astrology or homeopathy, this wouldn’t give me much pause to seriously consider these views; it would give me pause to seriously reconsider academic philosophy as a serious discipline. 

Realists can and often do think I am too confident. I don’t think I am, but I could be. What I won’t do, however, is be intimidated or coerced by scoffing, ridicule, and appeals to what most professional philosophers think. There is a remarkably anti-philosophical quality to the way philosophers have frequently tried to pressure me into tempering my views to be more in line with mainstream analytic philosophy, not by presenting good arguments, but merely by insisting my views are “counterintuitive” or “fringe” or “not endorsed by anyone” or are “very unpopular” or whatever. Sure, the fact that a view isn’t the most common view among those who study a topic is some (in this case, weak) evidence against the view, but this is trivially true of any view on Bayesian grounds: the fact that some people believe in creationism is evidence of creationism, but it’s nowhere near enough to move me towards thinking creationism is remotely plausible. Just so with moral realism: I think normative realist accounts are extremely implausible. Even if normative realists had good arguments (and they don’t; see my video with Kane B here where we review common arguments for moral realism), I would probably still not find moral realism very plausible, because it is wildly out of accord with what I think reality is like. 

This may make me locally incorrigible in a certain sense: I don’t think my views on moral realism could plausibly change towards endorsing the view…given what else I think about reality. For a moral realist to convince me, I’d need to be convinced that some critical array of my background beliefs or commitments were mistaken, such as my metaphilosophical views, my views about language, my views about metaphysics, my views about the reliability of philosophical intuitions, and so on. Changes to my philosophical roots could (and likely would) cause changes in the philosophical branches. Just so with many moral realists: I suspect they, too, are often locally incorrigible and could only be persuaded by a more foundational shift in their worldview.

Yet philosophers continue to argue matters at the extremities of their worldviews, and routinely find these disputes intractable, their interlocutors incorrigible, and the matters frustratingly unresolved. Is it not obvious that arguing at the extremities of one’s views is pointless if one has more foundational disagreements at their roots? And yet analytic philosophers continue to plod on, arguing at the extremity, without appreciating that productive debate should be taking place at a more foundational level: in metaphilosophy, in philosophical methods, and in basic features of how we interface with and think about the world. My pessimistic hypothesis is that even were the field to shift, wholesale, towards such endeavors (and it won’t), we may still discover that our ways of seeing the world are so radically at odds at the most foundational level that we’d simply never reach an accord. Toss in a healthy heaping of cognitive dissonance and a deep emotional drive not to abandon cherished beliefs that ward off nihilism and other philosophical boogeymen, and I see philosophy making little progress any time soon.

I worry that this perpetual stalemate is exactly what, deep down, many philosophers hope for. I worry that philosophers are drawn, not to the resolution to the millenia-sprawling war that is Western philosophy, but to the war itself. The combat, the glory, the clever ploy, the unexpected turn, the brilliant combination of seemingly disparate notions into some novel chimera. I worry that philosophers skirmish at the periphery because to go deeper would be to set course towards an actual resolution to the war, a war that has raged so long that philosophers come to identify with it in the course of their studies. The history of philosophy is replete with its heroes and generals, its wars and its upsets, its epochs of bloodshed and respites from the maelstrom of syllogisms. Who wouldn’t enjoy the thought of their image depicted on a crumbling bust, ages from now? Who wouldn’t want a sprawling Wikipedia page dedicated to their ideas, or, better yet, an entire entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy dedicated to them by name? (I can’t deny the appeal of a page titled, simply,  “Lance S. Bush”). A lot of people, probably. Philosophy isn’t that popular. But selection effects will attract precisely those who are.

I believe much of mainstream analytic philosophy is not really about getting anything done. That is, it is not about obtaining wisdom or arriving at the truth or resolving age-old questions. The economist Robin Hanson is known for the amusing but disturbingly accurate claim that many things that seem to be obviously about one thing aren’t really about that thing at all, e.g., in this blog entry from many years back, “Politics isn’t about Policy” Hanson opens with the following list:

Food isn’t about Nutrition
Clothes aren’t about Comfort
Bedrooms aren’t about Sleep
Marriage isn’t about Romance
Talk isn’t about Info
Laughter isn’t about Jokes
Charity isn’t about Helping
Church isn’t about God
Art isn’t about Insight
Medicine isn’t about Health
Consulting isn’t about Advice
School isn’t about Learning
Research isn’t about Progress
Politics isn’t about Policy

Hanson goes on to clarify the general undercurrent of such remarks:

When I say “X is not about Y,” I mean that while Y is the function commonly said to drive most X behavior, in fact some other function Z drives X behavior more.

Hanson makes a compelling, or at least intriguingly strong case for such claims in many domains, which you can see in Simler and Hanson’s excellent book, “The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.” Maybe I should write a review at some point.

For now, I want to add one more “X is not about Y” to the pile:

Philosophy isn’t about Truth.

Philosophy, as a discipline, is ostensibly intended to furnish us with the tools to uncover what the world is really like, to obtain “wisdom,” or knowledge of the fundamental nature of reality. Yet I suspect this is not what philosophy is really about. Instead, I think much of philosophy is the lingering carcass of the confused puzzles and problems of a bygone age, prior to the rise of modern science. Those useful elements of philosophy that persist are those that remained grafted to science and empiricism more broadly, and they show their value in the insights they provide to these fields. My favorite example is Dennett’s work on consciousness, which I believe is on the right track. Unsurprisingly, Dennett is routinely the target of mockery, scorn, and ridicule from among his philosophical brethren, much to their ignominy: illusionism and similarly eliminativist views will, I predict, be vindicated, and the whole matter will be, many years from now, as embarrassing and shameful an episode in the history of philosophy alchemy or vitalism.

Why would people pick at a carcass, given how little sustenance in the form of knowledge and insights is left? Simple: they’re not really there for the truth. They are there because they enjoy picking at the carcass.

Much of contemporary analytic philosophy is not about truth. It is about recreation. It is a fun exercise for those involved. It is a game. A way of showing off how clever you are. How smart you are. How capable you are of concocting an argument that will impress your colleagues. It is a field saturated in intellectual decadence. And many of those outside the field can smell the cloying scent wafting off of philosophy’s self-important baptism in its own Eau de Cologne. Philosophers dismiss criticisms from outside the field as ignorant and uninformed. They’re often right to do so in some ways: many of these criticisms, when given substance, are foolish and ignorant. However, it is a mistake to reject the spirit of these objections: while the content of the objections is often bad, the objections, I believe, arise from a deep and accurate sense (or an intuition, if you will) that there is something deeply and seriously wrong with the way much of academic philosophy works. Its insularity, its self-importance, its profound lack of practical relevance, and its Janusian insistence on “naturalism” and supposed coziness with the sciences coupled with its functional if often covert scorn and resentment for the sciences. Philosophers often scoff, too, at declarations of the death of philosophy, proudly pointing to its continued existence. And indeed, they are right. Academic philosophy still exists. But that’s about the best that could be said of most of it: that it exists. What it isn’t doing is thriving, flourishing, and, most importantly getting shit done. I keep returning to this remark from Wittgenstein, because I think it expresses, so aptly, my own attitude towards philosophy. The fact that Wittgenstein felt the need to make such a remark suggests, to me, precisely the contrast Wittgenstein had between his own approach and the approach that typifies philosophy. Wittgenstein said:

My father was a business man and I am a business man. I want philosophy to be business-like, to get something done, to get something settled.

I, too, want philosophy to get something done. But if philosophy is about getting something done, getting something settled, then much of contemporary academic philosophy isn’t about philosophy, because it sure as hell isn’t about getting anything settled. Quite the opposite: precisely those puzzles which persist are those pseudoproblems, and irresolvable confusions and nonsense, that are most amenable to the endless game that is mainstream academic philosophy. And it is a game that I simply don’t want to play.