Response to Fodor and Ormond on “Is God the Best Explanation for Morality?”
This is a response to a video you can seen here
Introduction.
What follows is a critique of James and Nathan’s remarks only until about 45 minutes into the video. This has been edited and expanded on since it was initially written.
My apologies for the imperfection of my transcriptions. Please take all quotes as attempts at clear quotation that may contain errors or simply omit irrelevant utterances (e.g. “like” or “um”). I am happy to update any transcriptions/quotes if they are inaccurate or I misread them.
I’m a moral antirealist. While some antirealists may give a bit of ground to realism, I find moral realism to have almost nothing going for it. On top of the problems realists face providing an adequate conceptual, metaphysical, and epistemological account (I believe realism fails on all three fronts), I don’t accept that it’s commonsense, or the ‘default’ position, or that it best accounts for moral discourse generally. Rather, I think it is an idiosyncratic position distinctive to some communities within WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) populations (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010).
As an aside, I also enjoy James and Nathan’s videos a lot, and have listened all the way through several multi-hour videos. I have a lot of respect for both of them, and my critique of their remarks on realism is intended only to express disagreement with realism.
1. Presumption of cognitivism.
Nathan says:
“There's a data point we’re trying to explain here, which is moral discourse that humans engage in.”
Nathan goes on to provide several examples of what appear to me to be everyday moral discourse. The data points in question strike me as largely empirical in nature, though. They don’t simply strike me this way; philosophers who study metaethics have on occasion made this point, and I haven’t seen any satisfactory reason to reject the claim that facts about the content of ordinary moral discourse are empirical questions. They are, after all, questions about how people use words. Such questions don’t strike me as the sort of thing one could handle using a priori reasoning. At best, philosophical armchair methods could be taken as a kind of crude empirical approach where one extrapolates from their own linguistic intuitions to how others think. Such an effort would merely be bad psychology, where one conducts a study with a sample size of one: themselves, or at best loosely and informally gathers anecdotal evidence by thinking about the views of their colleagues, typically philosophers who aren’t representative of the populations of their own linguistic communities or of humanity more generally.
I’m not the only one to stress the empirical side of evaluating the folk metaethical presuppositions implicit in ordinary moral discourse. The philosopher Don Loeb, who specializes in metaethics:
The claim that moral language is relevant to metaethical inquiry is not new. What is not often appreciated, however, is that the matter to be investigated consists largely of empirical questions. In saying this I do not mean to claim that empirical science can easily discover the answers, or even to presuppose that the answers can be uncovered at all. That remains to be seen. But an inquiry into what, if anything, we are talking about when we employ the moral vocabulary must at least begin with an inquiry into the intuitions, patterns of thinking and speaking, semantic commitments, and other internal states (conscious or not) of those who employ it. (Loeb, 2009)
Likewise, Gill (2009) refers to the task of figuring out what people think/mean when they use moral language as descriptive metaethics, and mentions that empirical evidence weighing in on his account, which suggests Gill likewise takes such questions to be amenable to empirical inquiry (See footnote 5, page 220).
I am consistently puzzled at the tendency for people who study moral philosophy to not engage with or pursue the empirical study of folk metaethics. If we are to answer these questions, what are the appropriate methods? Strangely, philosophers have generally thought that their armchair intuitions, and often how they (and the few people they non-systematically consult’s intuitions) are sufficient to make judgments about how people, in general, speak and think about morality. This is just bad non-systematic psychology and linguistics. Why not do actual empirical research on how people think and speak about morality? Or study people who do? Over the past 20 years, a growing number of papers have sought to directly address questions about how nonphilosophers think and speak about morality. Why not look at this research? I’ve provided a reference list below of empirical papers on the topic.
Nathan claims that the members of the discussion fall under a “cognitivist theory.” If everyone in the discussion agrees on this, it is perhaps not worth disputing it. However, it is not at all obvious that cognitivism is the correct account of ordinary moral discourse. Again, this is an empirical question. At least one recent study by Davis (2021) found that the most common metaethical position favored by respondents was noncognitivism. Others have found high rates of antirealism among their participants , such as Pölzler and Wright (2020b). More importantly, most studies find high rates of variability across participants and across moral issues, suggesting a potentially high degree of moral variability. My own research suggests that a significant number of people may consistently interpret questions about metaethics in unintended ways (Bush & Moss, 2020). I believe the best explanation for this is metaethical indeterminacy. To the extent that people do or may have determinate metaethical commitments, those commitments may be inconsistent with one another and not fit neatly into the theoretical boxes that philosophers use to place each other in one camp or another.
As a result, something like Gill’s (2009) metaethical indeterminacy-variability thesis, and Loeb’s (2009) moral incoherentism seem more consistent with available data on actual moral discourse than uniform and determinate accounts like cognitivism.
2. Idiosyncratic usage
James states, to the best of my approximation:
“For me, what morality is ultimately about is about doing good. By doing good I mean something like bringing about things of value. In a lot of cases that is going to involve helping people, promoting the wellbeing of people, may include animals, aesthetic value.”
Members of some populations may appeal to their own parochial cultural moral standards, without necessarily recognizing that people from other cultures may moralize different issues. For instance, some members of WEIRD populations tend to emphasize harm (and fairness) as central to moral considerations. Yet both other members of WEIRD populations, and members of less-WEIRD and non-WEIRD societies, exhibit a wider array of moral concerns (see Graham et al., 2013).
James’s moral standards may be culturally parochial in ways which are not reflective of humanity as a whole. This undermines many of the claims made throughout the discussion, where James appeals to human nature and how humans are. How humans are is (and I may end up saying this a lot) an empirical question, and I do not believe that the empirical data vindicates the harm-centric and broadly egalitarian views James espouses as simply being constitutive of what morality is “about.”
Morality is “about” this to James, and to many people from similar cultural backgrounds. However, empirical data suggests that morality is “about” different things to different people, and for many isn’t exclusively about helping or harm reduction.
Even if there were general agreement among the people that happened to exist today, this would not provide strong grounds for concluding that what people refer to as good “just is” what good is, or that they were detecting what actually was good, or whatever. It could simply be a contingent fact that there was high homogeneity in what people referred to as good. For example, suppose it just so happened that a plague wiped out everyone except people who thought pistachio ice cream was the best.
Now when people referred to “good ice cream” 100% of people mean pistachio ice cream. Would this mean that “good ice cream” just referred to pistachio ice cream? No. And would it mean that pistachio ice cream is in fact the correct or only good ice cream? No, it would not. The fact that a particular linguistic community all happens to use evaluative language like “good” to refer to similar things does not by itself provide strong evidence that what they’re referring to is in fact “good,” or that anyone from another linguistic community that thinks something else is good is incorrect.
3. Odd notion of objectivity
James says something like
“Because whether or not someone is suffering or experiencing joy isn’t really dependent on your opinion, in that sense I think it’s objective.”
This seems like an odd notion of “objective” in the context of moral realism. The antirealist isn’t denying that there are facts about whether people are suffering or experiencing joy. They’re denying that there are stance-independent moral facts about whether suffering or experiencing joy are morally good or bad.
You could say that it’s a fact that people find their own suffering bad and their own joy good. That is certainly capable of being stance-independently true. But what antirealists like me deny is that someone’s suffering is bad or their joy good simpliciter, or unconditionally good, or good independent of it being good-to-that-person or bad-to-that-person.
4. Chopped up and eaten response
At one point, Rebekah asks whether, if 80% of humans enjoyed chopping up people and eating them, would that make it good?
James responds with:
“I don’t think so because presumably people don’t enjoy being chopped up and eaten.”
People can both believe that it is good to chop people up and eat them, and that it is not good to be chopped up and eaten. Rebekah was asking about the former, not the latter. James’s response seems to presume that whether people wouldn’t want something to happen to them must play some role in whether they could (or would) think that it was good to do that thing to others. I’m not sure that’s the case.
We could live in a society where we are all highly competitive and all agree that it’s good to chop up and eat your defeated enemies, but not good to be chopped up and eaten. It’s not that it’s good-for-you to be chopped up and eaten, but that it is good to chop up people and eat them. Nothing about morality entails that all people subject to it must regard its outcomes as good.
Consider if someone said
“Suppose we believe it is morally good [or at least justified] to imprison serial killers who torture and murder people. Would that make it good [justified]?”
Imagine saying “I don’t think so because presumably serial killers who torture and kill people don’t enjoy being imprisoned.”
Would this be a legitimate reason to say it’s not morally good (or justified) simply because some of the people subjected to the moral rule wouldn’t like it?
This wouldn’t strike me as a compelling response in the serial killer case, and it likewise does not strike me as compelling in response to the question about chopping people up and eating them.
5. Stance-independent values and intelligibility
James claims that helping people isn’t valuable because it’s what he himself cares about. Rather, he claims that it would be valuable even if he didn’t care about it.
What would it mean to say it’s valuable even if you (or even if nobody) cared about it? This notion of free-floating value strikes me as unintelligible. It’s like saying something could be “non-indexically north-facing” or that something could be “tasty” independent of how it tastes to anyone in particular.
I’m not simply suggesting that moral realism is false. I am saying that the claims moral realists make may be literally unintelligible; it’s not clear that it is meaningful to talk about intrinsic value, or irreducible normativity, or stance-independent normative facts, or “reasons” that have nothing to do with our goals or desires; these all may be ways of speaking that superficially resemble meaningful remarks, but they may fail to have any substantive content.
James’s suggestion here seems to be that something is valuable because “that’s what morality is about.” ...Again, it’s completely obscure to me what this could mean. As far as I can tell from the discussion, what morality is “about” seems to be entirely a linguistic, social, and cultural matter.
6. Moral realism seems superfluous
Later on, James says something like
“It’s not so much whether anyone values helping others, it’s the fact that helping others is helpful...it improves their wellbeing and helps them to live a better life. That is what makes it good.”
Why does that make it good? Why can’t we just say that helping people is helpful? Why add that it’s “good”?
7. “You could ask this question of any theory.”
At a couple points within the first 45 minutes, both Nathan and James point out that a question Rebekah asks could be raised against any theory.
This is a strange comment to make. That’s true, but I’m not sure what’s achieved by pointing this out. Is this supposed to reduce the credibility of these objections? If so, how?
The implication may be: "Because you could ask this of any theory, therefore it isn't appropriate to ask it of this theory." If so that wouldn’t follow, so perhaps that isn’t what is intended. After all, this is never made explicit, but the fact that a challenge could be raised against any theory does not thereby make the challenge illegitimate. For instance, someone could ask this about any theory: “Are there compelling reasons to accept this theory? If not, why should I accept it?” If someone asked me that about a position I held, I could not avoid the question by pointing out that someone could ask this of any theory.
When pressed, pointing out that the same challenges could be raised against other accounts of morality does not show that the challenge is illegitimate: if none of these accounts can meet the challenge, then we have no satisfactory account of morality. That’s exactly what I think is the case. So sure: you could ask the same of other views, but whereas I think some other views could withstand such questioning, I don’t think moral realism can. While I think moral non-naturalism is absurd, it is a live option for philosophers to take to simply insist that moral concepts are unanalyzable. If James and Nathan cannot offer a satisfactory analysis, nor can anyone else, perhaps this is because there isn’t one.
8.1 Ferengis, language, and reference
My biggest contention with the discussion begins around the 23:30 mark, when Rebekah clarifies that she is asking something along the lines of why James is correct about what morality is about, and Ferengis are not. In response, James draws an analogy to trees.
James says something like this:
“So what makes helping people good? Well I sort of think that’s what good is. Right?
Suppose I say, “Hey look there’s a tree.”
And you ask “How do you know that’s a tree?”
“It’s got a trunk, there’s branches and leaves”
...And then you ask me, “Sure, but how do you know that’s what trees are? How do you know trees have trunks and branches and leaves and all of that stuff.”
And I say “Well, that’s just what a tree is. Those things are the properties of trees. At some point it’s not clear what better answer I could give.”
The comparison between “tree” and “good” has some problems. In the case of trees, we have an ostensive definition. You can point at the thing and ask “What’s that? What are its properties?” There are stance-independent facts about its properties. But more importantly, there’s a specific thing to which you are referring.
This isn’t the case when it comes to morality. One of the things that’s disputed when it comes to morality is what it is that we’re referring to. The person with a different set of normative moral values than you have, or an antirealist, is not granting that there’s anything equivalent to a tree, that is, a singular thing to which moral claims are incontestably referring to, or that, if they are referring to such a thing, that it exists.
So such an analogy doesn’t seem to work. Fodor isn't in a position of pointing to a thing and it being beyond question that this is the thing that we’re both referring to. Rather, the very thing that we’re disagreeing about is what moral terms are referring to.
Two people can both point at the tree and argue about what its properties are. But if one uses the word “tree” to refer to things with branches and leaves, and the other disagrees about what “trees” are, and maintain that actually “tree” refers to something else entirely, and then I go on to describe the properties of rocks or chairs, how would you respond? That I’m just wrong about what the word means? Well, I might be wrong about how you and your linguistic community use the word “tree,” but me and my linguistic community may very well use the word “tree” to refer to rocks or chairs. Presumably, you would think that this is irrelevant, and that the dispute isn’t about what particular linguistic communities contingently use words to refer to. Rather, you think there is really some fact of the matter about what is “moral” or “morally good” or whatever. Well, fine, but then you need to demonstrate that there is any such thing as something being “moral” or “morally good” independent of and beyond the mere disposition to apply linguistic labels to particular phenomena. And I don’t think you’ll be able to do that.
I think Fodor’s position comes down to little more than the acquired disposition to apply specific linguistic tags to specific phenomena. It may or may not be the case that particular linguistic communities share a tendency to apply these terms in similar ways, but all that leaves you with is a trivial association between words and whatever it is those words are used by particular people, and groups of people, to refer to. This has no substantively normative or philosophical implications. It’s just a rather boring fact about how you and people like you use certain words.
James goes on:
“You sort of think about the concept and how we use it and what it refers to. We’re talking about words here. Morality is a word. We have to work out how we use it and what it refers to.”
Again, what a word refers to is a largely empirical question. And it’s strange that James seems to consistently presume that it has a shared referent across all speakers. People could (and I would bet a lot of money that they do) use moral and normative language about what’s “good” or “bad” to refer to different things. Yet James’s comments consistently suggest that moral discourse has a shared referent, no matter who is engaging in it. It’s unclear why we should think that this is the case. Indeed, this is the very thing philosophers dispute.
In other words, someone could respond to James by saying “I agree. Yet we disagree about how we use the word, how we should use the word, and/or what it does in fact refer to.”
To the Ferengi, “good” refers to something else.
James states:
“How do you know that trees have branches and trunks and leaves?”
“That’s just what a tree is. That’s how we use the term. That’s what it refers to.”
James goes on to make a number of descriptive claims about how people speak and what they mean when they use moral terms such as:
“That’s how we use the term. That’s what it refers to.”
“Obviously, we could look at moral discourse.”
“Broadly speaking, that’s how people use the term.”
Who is “we”? How does James know this is how people use these terms? Which people? All humans? Is this a non-contingent sort of fact? Would humans think this way more or less regardless of our cultural or evolutionary history, the way we presumably would about the facts of chemistry or math? Or could “we” have ended up valuing very different things? If so, then is what’s morally good dependent on historical contingencies? If not, why not?
8.2 The dispute is about what moral/normative terms refer to, not to the meaning of the moral terms
In any case, the real dispute here is not a simple descriptive one about what James or people in general are referring to when they call certain things good. The Ferengi (or myself, or anyone else) could happily acknowledge that James and others use the term “good” to refer to helping or wellbeing. The real dispute is about what “good” refers to.
The Ferengi and others can consistently both accept that you use the term “good” to refer to helping and wellbeing but also contend that they are using the term “good” to refer to selfishness or profit or whatever. It is not at all plausible nor did either James offer anything approaching a convincing reason for why someone who uses the term “good” to refer to something other than helping or wellbeing is just confused about what the term refers to.
There are others, myself included, who would disagree with James about what the term refers to. It’s incredibly implausible that these people are just confused about how words work. No, they disagree about which things are, in fact, good or not. They may contend that “good” or “morally good” actually refers to something else other than helping or wellbeing, or at least isn’t reducible to the narrow set of moral concerns that James cares about (e.g., they might care about a broader range of moral foundations). Consider, for instance, Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). Haidt and colleagues have offered at least some evidence that people from a range of distinct populations may moralize issues that aren’t reducible to those James moralizes (see Graham et al., 2013). Likewise, studies show that the nomological cluster of traits common to many WEIRD populations that facilitate distinctions between moral and nonmoral norms (such as social conventions) vary across cultural groups, and in some cases are absent altogether from such groups (see e.g., Fessler et al., 2015).
Such findings suggest that WEIRD populations have distinctive and idiosyncratic conceptions of morality that don’t reflect how non-WEIRD populations think not only about which actions are morally right or wrong, they don’t even reflect how many populations conceptualize morality itself. Indeed, more recent research hints at the possibility that there is no principled distinction between moral and nonmoral norms (Stich, 2018), and some have appealed to findings like these to argue that the notion of distinctively moral concepts is culturally parochial, historically contingent, and only arose in some populations, and, as such, is not a pancultural domain recognized by all historical and extant populations (Machery, 2018). In other words, I’m not simply suggesting that populations differ in the kinds of normative issues they moralize: I’m suggesting that the very notion of morality itself may not be shared across populations.
Moral foundations theory represents one major line of critique of Fodor’s account. Moral foundations theory purports that there are at least five major moral foundations: harm fairness, loyalty, respect, and purity, which vary in their relative degree of emphasis across populations. It would be unsurprising if we discovered that James tends to emphasize harm to a greater extent, relative to other moral concerns, than other populations. If so, James’s intuitions about what morality is about may be parochial and idiosyncratic, and thus may fail to reflect which issues other cultures moralize (which isn’t even addressing whether they conceptualize morality itself in the same way; I suspect, and there is evidence to suggest, that they don’t). Indeed, even religious affiliation may influence how people conceptualize the moral domain, leading to intracultural variation. Consider this abstract from Levine et al. (2021):
What is the relationship between religious affiliation and conceptions of the moral domain? Putting aside the question of whether people from different religions agree about how to answer moral questions, here we investigate a more fundamental question: How much disagreement is there across religions about which issues count as moral in the first place? That is, do people from different religions conceptualize the scope of morality differently? Using a new methodology to map out how individuals conceive of the moral domain, we find dramatic differences among adherents of different religions. Mormon and Muslim participants moralized their religious norms, while Jewish participants did not. Hindu participants in our sample did not seem to make a moral/non-moral distinction of the same kind. These results suggest a profound relationship between religious affiliation and conceptions of the scope of the moral domain. (p. 139)
These findings suggest that religious groups don’t even agree on which issues count as moral issues. This could be because they disagree about whether a shared set of metanormative characteristics accurately apply to the relevant issues, or it could be that they have different conceptualizations of morality itself. That’s a matter for further empirical investigation, and the answer is likely that it’s a combination of both. Critically, such findings reveal how one’s religious beliefs can shape their views about what morality itself is about, and not merely which issues are morally right or wrong. This is important to emphasize: Fodor wants to center morality on wellbeing, but this already presupposes that we all agree on what morality is, and that if we have any disputes, those disputes concern which considerations morality is about. That is, we agree on what morality is, and, it would seem, Fodor thinks we also agree on its contents. I am arguing not only that we don’t agree on its concepts (see moral foundations theory), but that we don’t even agree on what morality itself is. Taken together, both considerations seriously undermine the account Fodor offers.
MFT has its critics, and I am not endorsing MFT in particular. But there are a range of pluralistic theories and empirical studies that challenge the notion that people’s moral concerns are so uniform and homogenous that one can blithely and without much argument simply declare anyone who doesn’t refer to what James refers to as mistaken or confused about what these terms refer to in the respective linguistic communities these people grew up in.
In short, the tree analogy just doesn’t work. That morality just is about whatever you think morality is about is the very thing being challenged. I can simply not think that morality is about wellbeing or helping people, and I can be part of a community that simply does not use the word that way. I can even say it’s not merely how I use a word, but that I have a concept that some things are “morally good,” and me and my community all agree that stealing and not caring about others is morally good, and that easing the suffering of others and helping is not morally good. You have given me no reason whatsoever for thinking I am incorrect about these things being good - the only thing you’ve done is suggested that you and some unspecified “we” use words differently than me and my community, and/or don’t agree with us about which things are morally good. But the mere fact that you use a word to refer to something else cannot and does not, by itself, make you correct about what is, in fact, supposedly described by that word.
8.3 Conflating language with concepts
I believe the heart of the problem is that James is conflating giving a descriptive analysis of how people use the word “good” with discovering what is, in fact, good.
If people, broadly speaking, use the word “good” to refer to helping others, wellbeing, etc… does it therefore follow that helping others, wellbeing, etc. are in fact good? If so, how does that follow?
The Ferengi have a reply available to them with respect to the tree example:
“We completely understand and accept that you use the word ‘good’ to refer to particular things that you consider to be good. However, the fact that you use the word ‘good’ to refer to particular things does not, itself, make it the case that the things which you consider good are, in fact, good. There are facts about what you regard as good, but it doesn’t follow that the things you think are good are good independent of you thinking them so. In any case, we aren’t even disputing with you how you and members of your linguistic community use the word ‘good.’ In fact, we’d go further and say that we acknowledge and agree that you use the word ‘good’ to refer to harm reduction, helping, and so on. Our disagreement is not about how the word is used; it is about what things are in fact good or not. And we do not think harm reduction and helping others is good. We are not objecting to how you use the word ‘good’, we are objecting to what it is you think is good."
Perhaps this analogy would be better than James’s tree analogy. Suppose two populations, the Ferengi and the Humans, both agree that dark matter is composed of a particular type of particle. Humans believe it is made of WIMPs, while the Ferengi believe that dark matter is composed of geons. The term “dark matter” is more of a placeholder term for a referent whose properties and nature is itself the subject of dispute. While humans believe that dark matter is composed of something with properties {XYZ}, Ferengis believe it is composed of particles with properties {WXY}. It makes no sense to say that the word ‘dark matter’ just means WIMPs, when the very thing we are disputing is what in fact dark matter is. You cannot win an argument about what dark matter is by definitional fiat. You’d actually have to demonstrate that dark matter is in fact composed of WIMPs, and not geons. Just saying that you and other human physicists use the term ‘dark matter’ that way doesn’t show that dark matter is in fact composed of WIMPs. All it shows is that you all speak as though this is the case, and perhaps believe this to be the case.
9. Intrinsic goodness
James claims that the
“[positive] experiences of human beings are intrinsically good. They’re not good in virtue of anything further.”
They’re “intrinsically” good? What does that mean?
10. Epistemic objection
James says something along the lines of what’s morally good or bad has
“nothing to do with what I value. This would be true even if I didn’t value it.”
Alright. So suppose no Humans existed in the universe. Only Ferengi. The Ferengi don’t believing helping others or that the promotion of wellbeing is good. Suppose that they simply do not care about these things and do not regard them as valuable.
What could they do to discover the fact that helping others and increasing wellbeing is good?
I suspect the answer to this is “nothing.” And I think the reason for this is that James’s use of “good” is a parochial, culturally-acquired tendency to apply a word in a particular way. and/or in addition to or instead of this that James is simply expressing a subjective attitude about what he regards as good, or possibly some noncognitive attitude about what’s good/bad. What James has not provided in the way of an adequate account is how he has access to any special set of stance-independent facts.
11. The way people are
Rebekah asks
“If 80% thought chopping up and eating people is good how would your view that helping people is good actually matter?”
James responds with
“Well, because it would be true”
and that this truth comes from
“the way people are.”
What, specifically, would be true? That it’s “good” to help people? What does that mean?
James later adds it’s
“not dependent on any particular person’s opinion.”
First, I suspect James is inadvertently appealing to his own subjective moral values when making these claims. I would like to highlight a prediction: That what James personally morally values happens to line up more or less with how he thinks people use moral language. I’d venture to offer a simple explanation for this: James unconsciously considers his own subjective moral values, then mistakenly infers that this is how other people speak and think about morality.
This isn’t even getting to the wildly divergent array of values nonhumans could potentially exhibit. And it would be remarkable to imagine that humans somehow have distinctive and special access to what’s “morally good” and if we met an alien civilization who had not simply divergent but radically opposed values to ours that they just “don’t get it” or don’t understand how words or concepts work. They could say the exact same about humans, and it’s unclear why James or Nathan would be in a privileged position to simply assert that they’re incorrect by declarative fiat.
Rebekah (after some modification) asks a great question:
“Where do I get the idea that humans, their desire to not be chopped up, is actually something worth considering?”
Nathan asks
“isn’t that the datapoint we have?”
I wasn’t sure what this meant. We have the datapoint that most people prefer not to be chopped up. It does not follow that therefore it is in fact bad to chop them up. We don’t need this additional fact to explain the data. The data is just that people, by and large, prefer not to be chopped up. What else is there to explain?
Nathan then suggests that the way we go about figuring these things out is the other way around. We may think about or see someone getting chopped up and think “That’s wrong.” Sure. We might.
…But we might not. If we’re Ferengis, or some sadistic or xenophobic alien species that doesn’t care about humans, we might not. We might even think that it’s morally good. We could then proceed to explain that it is in fact morally good to chop up and eat humans by the exact process James and Nathan seem to be appealing to explain why it isn’t. These sadistic aliens could point to the fact that it’s in their nature, that this is just how they use the word “good,” and so on. What could, in principle, demonstrate that these aliens are “incorrect” about the “fact” that it’s bad to chop up and eat people? I don’t think there are any such facts we can appeal to.
In my estimation, all James seems to be able to say is that he and some humans wouldn’t use the word “good” to describe this. But this would be a far cry from showing that it is in fact “bad.” But let’s suppose the aliens just agreed that it would be “bad” according to the linguistic conventions of James and whoever else agrees with James.
...And? So what? Does this have any practical implications? Why should these aliens (or anyone, for that matter) care about how James (and people who use the word “good” the way he does) use a word?
Speaking for myself, I don’t care at all how anyone uses words. I care about my goals and values. If it turned out that the linguistic community I was in used the word “good” to refer to boiling babies or kicking puppies...well, so much for being “good.” I wouldn’t want to be “good” and the word used would be inconsequential for me.
In any case, all of this “data” seems better explained by subjective judgments about what is good or bad stemming from the speaker’s own preferences, (or expressions of approval or disapproval, or some other antirealist position).
Nathan goes on to make the same error I believe James is making. He says that he came across particular cases of morality, and that it’s “been appropriate” to use language this way (i.e., to refer to certain things as good and others as bad). It seems like Nathan is inferring from the fact that his linguistic community uses moral language a certain way to the conclusion that there are stance-independent moral facts corresponding to their linguistic practices.
In other words, because a linguistic community says X is good, and Y is bad, X is in fact stance-independently good, and Y is in fact stance-independently bad. If facts about what is good or bad are supposed to be substantive, meaningful phenomena that matter, have any special type of properties, and are such that we have an obligation to care about them, it's unclear linguistic practices can actually generate or create facts of this kind, nor is it clear what relation they have to such properties.
If, instead, all moral facts consist in a roundabout way of redescribing whatever it is X and Y are, then they’re just empty tautologies. It would be like saying “good” just means “helping people,” so when you say that helping people “is good” what are you saying? That helping people is helping people? This is completely trivial.
It would appear that either James and Nathan have a much more complicated and difficult story to tell if we’re actually going to believe in some substantive account of what’s good or bad, or they’re saying something completely trivial and vacuous.
One way to tell a story like this is the way naturalists proceed: to just say that the moral facts just are whatever obvious, transparent natural facts people are referring to. So if people say it’s “morally good” to “help people” or to “increase wellbeing,” then morality just is “about” helping people and increasing wellbeing. So there are moral facts: moral facts are facts about what “helps people” and “increases wellbeing.”
This does not demonstrate that helping people or increasing wellbeing actually have any substantive stance-independent properties (such as “goodness”). Quite the contrary, it would seem that to the extent that these things are “good,” their “goodness” is little more than a culturally constructed linguistic label that just trivially means that these things are referred to as “good” in a particular language by a particular community of speakers. One can try to construct some trivial, ephemeral form of “stance-independence” out of such linguistic practices, but it would be a paltry thing that lacks the power to motivate, lacks the kinds of practical oomph, inescapability, authority, etc. that non-naturalist moral realists typically argue for. Instead, what you are left with is an anemic linguistic association between terms and whatever it some community has opted to use those terms to refer to. This seems completely trivial. We could just redescribe what people are saying in nonmoral terms, and we get empty, tautological claims: “Helping people helps people” or “Increasing wellbeing increases wellbeing.”
To see why I think this is so trivial, just imagine what the implications would be if everyone agreed to use the word “good” to refer to helping people and increasing wellbeing.
Now what?
What do we do with this information? If my personal values were not aligned with helping others or increasing wellbeing in some egalitarian way, would the fact that everyone on earth used the word “good” in this way rationally compel me to be “good”? Would I be making some kind of mistake if I said “that’s fine, but I don’t care about being good. I care about doing what I want”? If so, what would that mistake be?
All James’s account seems to offer is an implausible hypothesis about how some unspecified linguistic community uses words. It doesn’t seem to me to have any theoretically or practically significant implications at all. Naturalist accounts of realism have always struck me as being on possibly even worse footing than non-naturalist accounts for precisely this reason. Whatever accounts they appear to be offering don’t even seem like they aspire to give a satisfactory account of what the non-naturalist is grasping at: actual facts about what people should or shouldn’t do, independent of those people’s goals, standards, or values.
My apologies if the tone conveyed here sounds very critical; my intent isn’t to attempt to rake James or Nathan over the coals. I have a great deal of respect for both of them as I said at the outset. My problem is with moral realism. I see moral realism as an impediment to making progress on addressing practical questions of coordination and problem solving, and am motivated by a desire to set aside what I take to be misguided metaethical positions. At the same time, I am an enthusiastic proponent of metaethicists actively engaging with empirical research on moral psychology, as I believe doing so has the power both to shake us out of our parochial ways of thinking about normativity and because it has direct philosophical implications. I’d be delighted to receive a response either in print or to discuss this by video! Cheers!
Last updated: 12/16/2022
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