"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."
Of course there is an issue! If you use of "should" in these contexts is just a stance you have, and other people don't , there is no reason. for them to change their minds. You can say the words, but you might as well not bother.
I'm not sure what you're hoping to get out of engaging with me like this. My remark was not an argument and was not intended to be an argument.
You raised what you take to be an issue. I don't think what you said, even if it was true, would be an issue, i.e., that if expressing what you think someone "should" do in some context, and you're only expressing a preference, that they have no reason to change their minds. Okay. Maybe they don't. I don't see why that would be an issue.
But I also just don't even hold the view that when people go around saying "you should..." that they're typically simply expressing preferences in the first place. So not only would this not be an issue if people did do this, it's not even clear what you're objecting to.
I am pointing out that you have no way of explaining ethical debate as a purposeful activity. Your previous theory, that moral discourse is just an expression of preferences, doesn't explain it, and your current theory, that moral discourse is "???? I dunno" , doesn't explain it either.
And it's not like you've bowed out the explanation game entirely .. you think realism has a problem of not being explain certain things.
Shafer-Landau correctly points out that anti-realism about normativity can't be easily contained. If you are going to be an anti-realist about normativity, you should probably be an anti-realist about many of the issues discussed in contemporary philosophy.
This applies especially to the "Three Ms" (morality, modality, and meaning), but not only to them. For example, let P = "There are no stance-independent normative facts."
You assert that P is true. P is a descriptive rather than a normative claim, so there are no concerns about (meta-)metanormativity here. But would you say the truth of P is stance-independent or stance-dependent?
If you say it is stance-independent, then you owe your critics an explanation of why your arguments against the stance-independence of normative truths do not also undermine the stance-independence of P.
If you say that P (and comparable philosophical claims) are only stance-dependently true, then it sounds like you are saying there are no "real" philosophical truths. This is fine as far as it goes, but it will upset people whose intellectual and emotional investment in the discipline and practice of philosophy rests on the assumption that it is worth spending time figuring out which philosophical claims are "really" true or false.
(Personally I think something like Huw Price's "global expressivism" offers the most promising solution to all these problems, although I confess I haven't taken the time to work through all the details, objections and counterobjections.)
//If you say it is stance-independent, then you owe your critics an explanation of why your arguments against the stance-independence of normative truths do not also undermine the stance-independence of P. //
Could you perhaps elaborate on why? (I appreciate you wrote a fairly long post; I'm just not familiar with Shafer-Landau's reasoning on this; more on that below).
I haven't seen any good reason to think that my reasons for rejecting normative realism pose any special problem for non-normative realist accounts. I'm probably not a realist about most of those things anyway (e.g., I'm not a scientific realist), but why would I owe some explanation for why an argument against X doesn't also apply to Y if I wasn't given what I took to be any good arguments or reasons to think it also applied to Y in the first place? Maybe I would, I just want to know what the arguments/motivations for this are.
In other words, why should I think Shafer-Landau is correct in the first place? Again, I probably am an antirealist or a quietist about most other things, anyway, but why does Shafer-Landau thing you can't easily contain normative antirealism? Maybe I'd be persuaded by this. What I can say in advance is that I'd be far more likely to be an antirealist about virtually everything before I'd consider moral realism remotely plausible.
Yea, if you reject "real" philosophical truth (and I probably do, though I'm not quite sure what that is!) I am willing to accept this is going to upset a lot of people in the discipline. Given how negative my attitude towards the discipline already is, this isn't much of a cost for me.
Somebody with ridiculously false and unjustified beliefs can be epistemically lucky and still "think outside the box" enough in a job interview to get the job later despite their false answers to the interviewers' questions; they can follow the wrong routes their GPS tells them and still end up in the right location; they can devise inconsistent mathematical axioms for each problem they solve yet still accidentally write down the right answer on all their homework problems. In other words, they can achieve the same practical utility concepts like truth and justification are supposed to offer, while having no true or justified beliefs. If agents and circumstances like these are conceivable, it's not clear to me at all what motivational force telling somebody "Your beliefs don't follow the stance-independent normative justification rules" is supposed to have, or what a stance-independent normative justification rule would even be doing in our daily lives if we can act against it but still accomplish our goals.
Relevant Wittgenstein quote:
>Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word ‘pain’ meant—so that he constantly called different things by that name—but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of pain—in short he uses it as we all do.
>Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.
" If agents and circumstances like these are conceivable, it's not clear to me at all what motivational force telling somebody "Your beliefs don't follow the stance-independent normative justification rules" is supposed to have,"
No, you don't need realism. But once you have epistemic norms, you can argue for ethical and metaethical claims in various ways ... so you are not stuck with "morality is just personal preference" as the only alternative to moral realism.
"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."
Of course there is an issue! If you use of "should" in these contexts is just a stance you have, and other people don't , there is no reason. for them to change their minds. You can say the words, but you might as well not bother.
I deny this is an issue at all.
I deny that that was an argument at all.
I'm not sure what you're hoping to get out of engaging with me like this. My remark was not an argument and was not intended to be an argument.
You raised what you take to be an issue. I don't think what you said, even if it was true, would be an issue, i.e., that if expressing what you think someone "should" do in some context, and you're only expressing a preference, that they have no reason to change their minds. Okay. Maybe they don't. I don't see why that would be an issue.
But I also just don't even hold the view that when people go around saying "you should..." that they're typically simply expressing preferences in the first place. So not only would this not be an issue if people did do this, it's not even clear what you're objecting to.
I am pointing out that you have no way of explaining ethical debate as a purposeful activity. Your previous theory, that moral discourse is just an expression of preferences, doesn't explain it, and your current theory, that moral discourse is "???? I dunno" , doesn't explain it either.
And it's not like you've bowed out the explanation game entirely .. you think realism has a problem of not being explain certain things.
Your remark should have been an argment because it's a general rule of philosophical debate to support claims with arguments.
Shafer-Landau correctly points out that anti-realism about normativity can't be easily contained. If you are going to be an anti-realist about normativity, you should probably be an anti-realist about many of the issues discussed in contemporary philosophy.
This applies especially to the "Three Ms" (morality, modality, and meaning), but not only to them. For example, let P = "There are no stance-independent normative facts."
You assert that P is true. P is a descriptive rather than a normative claim, so there are no concerns about (meta-)metanormativity here. But would you say the truth of P is stance-independent or stance-dependent?
If you say it is stance-independent, then you owe your critics an explanation of why your arguments against the stance-independence of normative truths do not also undermine the stance-independence of P.
If you say that P (and comparable philosophical claims) are only stance-dependently true, then it sounds like you are saying there are no "real" philosophical truths. This is fine as far as it goes, but it will upset people whose intellectual and emotional investment in the discipline and practice of philosophy rests on the assumption that it is worth spending time figuring out which philosophical claims are "really" true or false.
(Personally I think something like Huw Price's "global expressivism" offers the most promising solution to all these problems, although I confess I haven't taken the time to work through all the details, objections and counterobjections.)
Thanks for the comment!
//If you say it is stance-independent, then you owe your critics an explanation of why your arguments against the stance-independence of normative truths do not also undermine the stance-independence of P. //
Could you perhaps elaborate on why? (I appreciate you wrote a fairly long post; I'm just not familiar with Shafer-Landau's reasoning on this; more on that below).
I haven't seen any good reason to think that my reasons for rejecting normative realism pose any special problem for non-normative realist accounts. I'm probably not a realist about most of those things anyway (e.g., I'm not a scientific realist), but why would I owe some explanation for why an argument against X doesn't also apply to Y if I wasn't given what I took to be any good arguments or reasons to think it also applied to Y in the first place? Maybe I would, I just want to know what the arguments/motivations for this are.
In other words, why should I think Shafer-Landau is correct in the first place? Again, I probably am an antirealist or a quietist about most other things, anyway, but why does Shafer-Landau thing you can't easily contain normative antirealism? Maybe I'd be persuaded by this. What I can say in advance is that I'd be far more likely to be an antirealist about virtually everything before I'd consider moral realism remotely plausible.
Yea, if you reject "real" philosophical truth (and I probably do, though I'm not quite sure what that is!) I am willing to accept this is going to upset a lot of people in the discipline. Given how negative my attitude towards the discipline already is, this isn't much of a cost for me.
Somebody with ridiculously false and unjustified beliefs can be epistemically lucky and still "think outside the box" enough in a job interview to get the job later despite their false answers to the interviewers' questions; they can follow the wrong routes their GPS tells them and still end up in the right location; they can devise inconsistent mathematical axioms for each problem they solve yet still accidentally write down the right answer on all their homework problems. In other words, they can achieve the same practical utility concepts like truth and justification are supposed to offer, while having no true or justified beliefs. If agents and circumstances like these are conceivable, it's not clear to me at all what motivational force telling somebody "Your beliefs don't follow the stance-independent normative justification rules" is supposed to have, or what a stance-independent normative justification rule would even be doing in our daily lives if we can act against it but still accomplish our goals.
Relevant Wittgenstein quote:
>Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word ‘pain’ meant—so that he constantly called different things by that name—but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of pain—in short he uses it as we all do.
>Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.
" If agents and circumstances like these are conceivable, it's not clear to me at all what motivational force telling somebody "Your beliefs don't follow the stance-independent normative justification rules" is supposed to have,"
It gives them a higher hit rate.
?
Normative rules of epistemology are supposed to give you beliefs that are more likely to be correct than random guessing: that's the point of them.
You don't need normative realism for that.
No, you don't need realism. But once you have epistemic norms, you can argue for ethical and metaethical claims in various ways ... so you are not stuck with "morality is just personal preference" as the only alternative to moral realism.
Nice quotes from Wittgenstein.