Response to Gil Sanders of Thomistic Thinker (Part 2)

I continue my response to Gil here. In Part 2, I handle a variety of miscellaneous remarks.

Third, Lance objects that if the default position is realism, then this would entail that the default position “should be that all religions are true, that all paranormal phenomena are real, and so on.”

That’s not exactly what I said. Here is the full quote:

"Gil brings up the case where the skeptic doesn’t share the same seeming. Gil states:

‘I would just say that it seems to me you know whenever we’re confronted with being our default position is to take it in a realist sense.’

First, it doesn’t seem this way to me. That is, it does not seem to me that our default position should be realism about anything in particular.

But the second, and more serious problem, is that on the face of it this suggestion would commit us to being realists about how anything seems to anyone. If we were to do that, then this would suggest our default position should be that all religions are true, that all paranormal phenomena are real, and so on. That is, our default position should be realism about ghosts, alien abductions, unicorns, goblins, pixies, and so on.

I doubt this is what Gil has in mind. In which case, I’m not sure what is meant pending clarification. Why should our default position be realism about morality? Is there an argument for that?”

I was responding to a remark Gil made in the video, which I did my best to transcribe. Specifically, he said that *whenever* we’re confronted with (it wasn’t clear to me, it sounded like he said “being”) that our default position is to take it in the realist sense.

My point is that if this is supposed to be a general principle about which position to take on an issue, i.e., that our default position should be realism. I objected that if this were the case it would require us to be realists about all manner of absurd things. And since I don’t think that he endorses that, that I doubted this is what he meant to say. As a result, I said that I don’t know what he meant without you clarifying.

Gil continues:

But this does not follow at all because I defined common sense rather carefully. I said that any experience that is common to all of mankind, or fundamental to our natures, would alone warrant realism as the default position.

That wasn’t clear to me from the context. And Gil's remark is still strange even with that context. For at least some issues, our common experience would favor antirealism about certain things (e.g., dragons). Whether common sense favors realism or antirealism depends on the issue in question. So why say that our default position is realism, rather than that our default position is the common sense position (whether it’s realist or antirealist)?

Gil says:

But he doesn’t exactly explain what he takes issue with.

I’d be happy to explain at length. As you can see from my responses, I am enthusiastically capable of with explaining myself in excessive detail. Gil is welcome to ask me questions and I'll do my best to answer.

Does he deny that people engage in moral reasoning? That people act as if moral claims are true? That they take them as if they have some authority?

It's not clear what's meant by "people." All? Most? Some? I think some people don't engage in moral reasoning.

I don't know what it means to act "as if" a moral claim was "true." True in a stance-dependent or stance-independent way? Again, we have a conflation between a moral claim being "true" and it being true specifically in a realist sense.

I don't know what authority Gil has in mind, so I suspect it probably is the case that at least some people don't feel moral "authority."

He then objects that he just doesn’t share this experience.

Which experience?

The disagreement isn’t so much with the datum or the experience itself – as he very much engages in the same sort of moral reasoning and behavior as others

I don't think moral reasoning or moral behavior implies moral realism, so I'm not sure what Gil's point is.

Somewhere along the way, his natural disposition to believe in moral realism was underdeveloped or corrupted.

Gil has presented no evidence that I or anyone else has a natural disposition to believe moral realism. Not, also, that he's talking about believing moral realism here, but in other instances refers to moral experience. Does Gil think all or most people have a disposition to believe moral realism? If so, where's the evidence for this claim?

Probably in part muddled by modern philosophy.

This is baseless speculation. Most philosophers are moral realists. If anything, training in philosophy might very well have biased me in favor of moral realism.

Nor do I mean to dismiss his view by some psychological-historical assessment. I only point this out to say that my view can explain why cases like his exist without threatening my contention that moral realism is common sense.

Gil may not wish to dismiss my view about speculating on how I arrived at it, but does he think this speculation counts as some evidence against the view? Given the latter remark, it sure seems like it.

I'm not appealing to the fact that I'm a moral antirealist as evidence of how ordinary people think. Sure, Gil could attribute the fact that I'm an antirealist to my education (though it's not clear this is true, nor is it clear Gil is justified in thinking that it is). But what would that show? I'm not extrapolating from how I think to how others think. Gil is. Only one of us is making unjustified assumptions about how everyone else thinks in the complete absence of any actual evidence.

Only beliefs that are consistent with common sense itself count as common sense beliefs.

How do you determine what’s consistent with common sense?

We are without a doubt confronted with the reality (or being) of morality: in our every day discourse, the way we structure societies, in our behavior, and our rational appeals to it as if it is authoritative and true.

Who is "we"? I don't have these experiences. And Gil has, yet again, provided no evidence whatsoever that "we" have these experiences.

Throughout most of our discussion, Gil has simply made assertions, without doing any work to argue for or support the truth of those assertions.

You could interpret all moral being itself to be a human construct, but this wouldn’t be the most natural interpretation.

Again, a mere assertion. We're not told why this wouldn't be the most natural interpretation. For what it's worth, this does strike me as the most natural interpretation.

I could likewise interpret all my perceptions of the external world as constructs of the Matrix or Descartes’ Demon, but we don’t think that’s a natural interpretation.

I agree, but what's Gil's point? This looks like plausibility siphoning again.

No, we instead take being at face value: it is as it appears to be until proven otherwise.

Gil doesn't seem to be getting it: I'm denying that it appears to most people that moral realism is true. Even if it were true that we take "being at face value," simply because something seems a certain way to Gil doesn't mean it seems that way to all or most other people.

Because the intellect has a natural instinct to take fundamental being as real until proven otherwise, we should be moral realists.

Again, claims without evidence. This is also incredibly obscure. What is fundamental being? Does this include morality? If so, why?

I would challenge Lance Bush to show, using our rational faculty, how anti-realism is just as plausible (if not more so) than moral realism using just the moral datum itself.

I don't know what I'm being asked to do. What is "the moral datum"?

The reason I restrict it to just the moral datum is because we are working with what is most natural and common to human experience.

Again, I'm denying that moral realism is what is most natural and common to human experience.

If you introduce hyper specialized knowledge like quantum mechanics to claim external world skepticism is in fact the common sense view, then this would be to simply misunderstand what common sense is.

I agree. Yet I do not think the example supports Gil's case. Perhaps moral realism is also a product of specialized knowledge, and that it’s a mistake to think moral realism is any more a part of the common sense view than quantum mechanics.

Conclusion

There is a single, simple objection I keep raising. Almost everything Gil says consists of unjustified assertion after unjustified assertion. He makes many claims, but he doesn't do any of the work necessary to back them up.