Really real mattering

The following is a response to J. P. Andrew’s blog post, Mattering.

1.0 What it means to matter

In the post Mattering, J. P. Andrew considers the question of what it means for something to matter. According to Andrew,

(M) something matters just in case it is an object of significance and, thus, merits concern.

This isn’t necessarily a bad start, provided we are given an account of what it means for something to be an “objective of significance” or for it to merit concern, but Andrew never provides anything amounting to a satisfactory account. I’m left with a sense that such definitions may appear to offer a substantive account, but really just trade one mysterious and underdeveloped phrase for another. What does it mean for something to be an objective of significance? Significance with respect to what evaluative standard? Significant to who? For what? I suspect we’ve been given another instance in which realists appeal to normative claims without adequately explaining what they mean.

There is something profoundly strange about realist conceptions of value. One of the central problems with realist conceptions of value is the notion of values that aren’t indexed to any evaluative standard. It’s like talking about winning points, but not in any game in particular. One can only break a rule, win a point, score a goal, and so on with respect to some specified set of rules. Just the same, nothing can matter or have significance or merit concern independent of it mattering, being significant, or meriting concern to someone or according to some standard (real or hypothetical). Of course, this is just a restatement of my objection. I don’t expect merely stating my views to persuade anyone. But this account sets the stage for the remarks that follow.

2.0 Realism is not the commonsense view

Many realists claim that their views are “commonsense,” often indicating that they reflect the views or commitments of ordinary people, or reflect the initial position people endorse prior to engaging in philosophical inquiry. This is Andrew’s very next claim:

What I will suggest here is that (a) the belief that some things matter is fundamental to what we might call the commonsense view of the world (i.e., the way in which we ordinarily think about things, prior to philosophical investigation)

This is an empirical claim. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence to support it. The best available empirical research on whether ordinary people are disposed towards moral realism is a paper from Pölzler and Wright (2020).

P&W explained the various metaethical positions to their participants, had them engage in various exercises to improve their understanding of the questions they would be asked, and then presented them with a variety of different paradigms all designed to assess their metaethical views. About 75% of the participants consistently favored antirealism.

Does this mean most people are moral antirealists? No. Their participants were sampled from college undergraduates and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. People in their late teens through their twenties are more likely to give antirealist responses, while participants on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk are less likely to be religious than the population as a whole (Lewis et al., 2015), and people who are less religious are less likely to endorse realism (Collier‐Spruel et al., 2019; Yilmaz & Bahçekapili, 2015).

The US population as a whole is likely to exhibit higher levels of realism. How much higher? I don’t know. It might be higher than 50%. Suppose it’s 70%. Does that mean realism is “the” commonsense view? No. It would mean ~70% of people in the US in 2022 appear to endorse moral realism when asked, given the specific stimuli used in a specific study. It would tell us very little about what people outside the United States think, or what people thought in the past. And we may have good reasons to question whether people interpreted the questions as intended (Bush & Moss, 2020).

Nevertheless, what these findings do suggest is that there may be no singular “commonsense” view. Rather, it may be that different populations exhibit different inclinations towards realism and antirealism, and there may be no uniform tendency for nonphilosophers to favor realism.

My own view is skepticism about these studies; I suspect many participants do not interpret questions the way researchers intend and that much of the variation we observe is a result of interpretative variation. This would still not vindicate the presumption of widespread folk realism, though.

Either way, there is little evidence that moral realism is “the” commonsense view. This is an empirical claim, and there simply isn’t much in the way of compelling empirical evidence to suggest that it’s true.

Next, Andrew states that:

(b) the notion of mattering to which we are pre-theoretically committed is one entailing that there is value really out in the world, to be discovered. This contrasts with views (which have become quite prominent, and embedded in much of modern culture) according to which value is merely projected, constructed, or imagined.

As I argued above, I deny we’re pretheoretically committed to such a view. This is fortunate, since I think this is the least plausible view of the list Andrew provides.

What I find remarkable about such remarks is their persistence and the lack of support given for such claims.

In the next section, Andrew repeats that:

From the view of commonsense, there is much that matters.

Once again, we’re told that this is the “commonsense” view. Antirealists have, historically, granted this (see e.g., Mackie), but argued that the commonsense view is mistaken. This is strange. Why was this ever granted without argument? Why didn’t anyone go out and ask people? Again, and I cannot stress this enough, whether or not nonphilosophers think anything in particular is a question about human psychology; it cannot be resolved by stipulation, declaration, speculation, or a priori analysis. It is an empirical question, and the only way to decisively settle the matter is to gather the appropriate empirical data.

Andrew makes yet more claims about how ordinary people think (i.e., psychological claims) without presenting any empirical evidence for an empirical claim:

However, whatever our disagreements, that we generally believe some things to matter is at least suggested by the apparent truth that we ordinarily regard some objects as giving us, or themselves constituting, reasons for action.

Who is “we”? I don’t believe this. Is Andrew claiming most people believe this? If so, how does Andrew know this? And why does Andrew think this? No attempt is made at supporting or justifying these claims. They’re just asserted. This is a common theme I see in quite a lot of philosophy: philosophers will make assertion after assertion, without providing much in the way of support. Such claims, if you were one writing the literature review for an empirical paper, typically include references to previously published studies that supported the claims in question. Nobody expects every empirical paper to report studies the authors conducted for every claim they make that motivated the study. So long as someone else did the work, all you have to do is reference them.

Philosophers often skip this process, instead making claims about how ordinary people speak or think that seem reasonable to them (and oftentimes seem reasonable to me). But the past few decades of research in psychology have shown that such assumptions are not consistent or reliable. Among other issues, we may reason from a particular cultural vantage or make judgments about how people speak or think with limited insight into the ways in which language and culture can yield variation in the way people speak and think.

As such, we may ask: if most people do generally regard some objects as giving us or constituting “reasons for action,” how do we know this is true? Did we conduct studies to discover that this is how people think? If so, I’m not aware of them.

Andrew makes a variety of other claims, again without providing much in the way of evidence or argument for them. And that’s fine. Perhaps this post was intended merely as a position statement, to lay out what the view is, with subsequent posts serving to bolster the case. Be that as it may, I still find such remarks unsatisfying. Consider the next remark:

For example, that we view our family and friends as mattering is what explains the fact that we take ourselves to have reasons to help them when they are in need

This is pitched in an unnecessarily realist framework. Sure, it could be that people think this way. But the fact that we value our family and friends, desire their wellbeing, and are motivated to pursue their interests can explain why we think we have reasons to help them when they are in need: in other words, our valuing of them need not presuppose that they “have value”, intrinsically or stance-independently or whatever.

Antirealists can explain the same motivations, desires, and attitudes, without positing realism. Realism is explanatorily superfluous in this case, and it seems to me to be superfluous as an explanation in every other context as well.

Andrew clarifies:

Of course, it is one thing to say that something is believed to matter and quite another to say that it actually does matter. It could well be the case that many of the things that the average person believes to matter in fact do not. Perhaps nothing matters, as Nihilism holds. I have meant only to motivate the thought that a complete explanation of our actions in everyday life must invoke the thought that we believe some things to matter.

Andrew has not demonstrated this, nor made any substantive case for such a claim. I think this claim is false, and I don’t think Andrew has done anything to demonstrate that a complete explanation must invoke the notion that we believe some things matter. The claim that we believe some things matter depicts ordinary thought in a distinctively realist way, without doing the work to show that a realist account is necessary.

I don’t think it is necessary, because we can explain the same observations without taking a stance on metaethics at all. This isn’t to say antirealism necessarily offers a better explanation, but that we need not take a side at all on metaethics to explain why people value things.

This is because a complete explanation only needs to invoke the thought that things matter to us. That is, accounting for why people treat their friends and family one way, and strangers another, need only take account of psychological facts such as that people care more about their friends and family, and other such mundane psychological facts. It need not take any stance at all on whether they do so because they value friends and family in a distinctively realist or antirealist way. In sum: the observations Andrew suggests can only be explained via realism do not require that we “believe” that the things in question “matter,” independent of the degree to which they matter to us.

For comparison, a complete explanation of why people prefer some foods over others need only invoke the notion that they, e.g., enjoy the taste of some foods over others. This is consistent with both realism and antirealism about taste: it could be that people prefer some tastes over others because they believe those tastes are stance-independently better, and it could be that people prefer some tastes over others because they are taste subjectivists, or taste expressivists, or whatever. Or it could be that they have no determinate metanormative stance at all about taste.

Explaining people’s taste preferences simply doesn’t require any account of metanormativity at all. It can be fully accounted for by normative theory, psychology, and so on, unless, and only unless, there were some distinctive elements of people’s speech patterns or other behavior that would call for a distinctively realist or antirealist explanation. It’s not clear to me that there is, or that, if there is, that it decisively favors realism or antirealism in particular, to the exclusion of the other. It may instead be that there is a certain ineliminable degree of pluralism and indeterminacy in the way people think and speak about taste (Gill, 2009).

3.0 Persuasive definitions and biased framing

Andrew continues:

If we believed nothing mattered, then while we might still act as if the objects of our own desires (whatever those might be) mattered, we would lack any sense of having ends that ought to be pursued, or obligations that ought to be met; nor would we have any sense of there being truly, objectively better and worse desires to harbor.

This passage is important for reinforcing that Andrew is appealing to the explanatory necessity of realism in particular with respect to accounting for ordinary thought and practice, a claim I’ve challenged above.

Note, also, the conflation realists make between saying that realist conceptions of value are “real” or “true” and them being objective or stance-independent: Andrew states that without the realist presupposition, we wouldn’t have any sense of things being “truly”, objectively better. Why “truly”? What is that adding? I prefer some tastes over others, some music over others, and some moral standards over others. My preference for this is true, and I truly value them. Nothing about antirealism requires us to grant that only realist conceptions of value and mattering are “true” valuing and mattering. Quite the contrary, I think only antirealist conceptions of valuing and mattering involve things truly mattering and truly being valuable, since I think realist conceptions of value are false or unintelligible.

Realists seem to think that both realists and antirealists must agree that only the realist’s conception of mattering and value involves “truly” or “really” mattering and valuing, and that the only question is whether things “truly” matter or “really” matter, with the antirealist committed to denying this. This is not the case. An antirealist can both deny that anything matters in a stance-independent way, and deny that this is the only sense in which something could “truly” matter.

Antirealists are not required to accept the realist’s framing of the debate, but disagree with their conclusions. We can deny both their conclusions and their framing, which strikes me as smuggling in persuasive definitions and framing the dialectic in a way that is biased against antirealism, since it results in the misleading implication that antirealists don’t think anything “truly” matters: we just have phony, “pseudomattering”. Antirealists can and should reject this.

4.0 Not so few, and not so far between

Next, Andrew states that:

Some people of course do not seem to have any sense of such things being the case, but these people are few and far between; Nihilism is not the view of commonsense.

Once again, an empirical claim, but little empirical evidence for this claim. PhilPapers 2020 survey found that around 26% of the philosophers surveyed endorsed moral antirealism, while around 62% favored realism. 26% is not “few and far between.” Empirical research on nonphilosophers shows that antirealist views are strikingly common, often reflecting a majority of respondents. Available empirical data simply does not support the claim that people who don’t speak and think like realists are “few and far between.” On the contrary, there’s very little compelling empirical evidence that most people do speak or think in the way Andrew proposes.

5.0 Doing justice to mattering

Next, Andrew is helpfully explicit about the relevant ways in which things can matter. Andrew distinguishes between stance-independent mattering, and stance-dependent mattering:

Stance-Independent Mattering (SIM): the facts concerning mattering are fixed by some fact (or set of facts) independent of anyone’s beliefs, preferences, emotions, or attitudes

Stance-Dependent Mattering (SDM): the facts concerning mattering are fixed entirely by the beliefs, preferences, and/or attitudes of agents.

According to Andrew,

only (SIM) which truly does justice to the concept of mattering

This is one of the central disputes between realists and myself. I think stance-independent mattering is literally unintelligible. I don’t think it means anything to speak of something “mattering,” in a non-indexed way, any more than it makes sense to describe something as being “intrinsically north-facing” or to describe food as tasty independent of how it tastes to any real or hypothetical evaluator. I think things can only matter to someone or according to some standard, they can’t just “matter” simpliciter. To be clear: I’m not saying that it’s false that anything matters in this respect, I’m saying that SIM doesn’t even make sense.

Andrew states that:

[...] as is implicit (but not, I believe, presupposed) in my statement of (M), I think that whether something, x, matters to someone is a question distinct entirely from that of whether x in fact matters.

Recall that (M) is the claim that:

(M) something matters just in case it is an object of significance and, thus, merits concern.

I agree that whether something matters to someone is distinct from whether it “in fact matters”: my view is that things can matter to someone, but they cannot “in fact matter” in the sense Andrew supposes. Things can matter-to, but they can’t matter simpliciter. Once again, Andrew repeats that this is the commonsense view:

Insofar as the commonsense view of the world entails that there are indeed such things, then it entails commitment to (SIM); so, anyone who rejects (SIM) is, to that extent, rejecting the viewpoint of commonsense (at least in this respect).

As I’ve argued, there’s no good reason to think this is “the” commonsense view. I’m not even sure there is any singular commonsense view. It’s also worth noting that rejecting commonsense views isn’t an especially hefty theoretical cost, anyway. I don’t take the philosopher’s job to be to preserve commonsense thought no matter what. Sometimes commonsense thought is just wrong. If my position on antirealism were incorrect, and Andrew were correct about this being the commonsense view, then the correct position would be error theory, not realism.

Here we have an explicit remark from Andrew that establishing realism as the commonsense view offers some support for realism:

This is, of course, not a decisive reason to affirm (SIM); however, it is some reason to do so, given the fairly standard philosophical assumption that the commitments of the commonsense view of the world enjoy prima facie justificatory support.

This is why it is important for realists to insist that realism is the commonsense view. This claim can be leveraged to shift the burden of proof onto antirealists to show the commonsense view is mistaken. Antirealists have, historically, for no reason I can fathom, granted this to the realist. It’s time we start taking this presumption away from realists as well:

Moral realism is not the commonsense view. If realists think it is, the onus is on them to demonstrate that it is, a burden they have yet to successfully meet, or even come close to meeting.

6.0 Acting as if things matter

In Andrew’s concluding remarks, we’re presented with another claim realists make that strikes me as obscure and almost certainly false. According to Andrew:

We all believe, or at least act as if we believe, that some things matter.

Note the strength of the claim here: Andrew seems to be suggesting that everyone endorses realism in some way: if not outright, they at least act as if realism were true. No citations, evidence, or arguments are presented. This is a very bold claim about human psychology, and it is not one realists have done the work to justify.

But the most interesting element of this remark is the claim that we “act as if we believe” that some things matter (in the realist sense).

I’ve heard realists make this claim numerous times, but it’s not clear what they mean. What actions do people perform that suggest they think things matter in a distinctively realist sense? Acting on one’s goals, values, and preferences can explain people’s normative moral standards, moral attitudes, moral behavior, and so on without invoking distinctively realist notions of mattering. It’s not clear what it is about people’s actions that would indicate realism. I’ve seen this claim repeated many items, but never in a way that seemed to clearly explain why people’s actions point towards endorsing realist conceptions of mattering in particular.

7.0 Conclusion

Moral realists often claim that realism is a commonsense view, and frame the dispute between realists and antirealists as one in which antirealists are saddled with the burden of making a case against realism. The ball, realists often suppose, is in the antirealist’s court: it is our job to make a case against realism.

Yet this claim is predicated on presumptions about the way ordinary people speak. Such claims are empirical hypotheses about psychology and linguistics. There is little evidence that such claims are true, and some evidence that they’re false. If realists want to insist that realism is the commonsense view, they’re going to have to make a substantive case for this claim.

References

Beebe, J. R., & Sackris, D. (2016). Moral objectivism across the lifespan. Philosophical Psychology, 29(6), 912-929.

Gill, M. B. (2009). Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics. Philosophical studies, 145(2), 215-234.

Bush, L. S., & Moss, D. (2020). Misunderstanding Metaethics: Difficulties Measuring Folk Objectivism and Relativism. Diametros, 17(64), 6-21.

Collier‐Spruel, L., Hawkins, A., Jayawickreme, E., Fleeson, W., & Furr, R. M. (2019). Relativism or tolerance? Defining, assessing, connecting, and distinguishing two moral personality features with prominent roles in modern societies. Journal of personality, 87(6), 1170-1188.

Lewis, A. R., Djupe, P. A., Mockabee, S. T., & Su‐Ya Wu, J. (2015). The (non) religion of Mechanical Turk workers. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 54(2), 419-428.

Pölzler, T., & Wright, J. C. (2020). Anti-realist pluralism: A new approach to folk metaethics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(1), 53-82.

Yilmaz, O., & Bahçekapili, H. G. (2015). Without God, everything is permitted? The reciprocal influence of religious and meta-ethical beliefs. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 58, 95-100.