Response to Mr. Homemaker (Part 1)
This is a response to Mr. Homemaker, who responded to one of my comments here.
Thanks for the response!
1.0 Clarifying the remarks about false dichotomies
A quick point of clarification regarding false dichotomies. While I do think that Pat presented a dichotomy in his discussion with you, I don’t think he said anything that would indicate a commitment to those two positions being the only possibilities. At best, only these two possibilities were mentioned, and he didn’t address other possibilities, such as that a person would think the action is wrong even if they’re an antirealist, which is position consistent with several forms of antirealism, including relativism, noncognitivism, quasi-realism, constructivists, proponents of ideal observer theory, and error theorists who endorse fictionalism. However, by presenting only these possibilities, listeners could mistakenly think only in terms of these possibilities and not consider other possibilities.
I typically see philosophers use the charge of a “false dichotomy” to refer to an explicit objection that someone has argued that there are only two possible positions. However, I did not intend to make such a claim. I am instead making a weaker criticism that only two possibilities are discussed and that these aren’t the only possibilities.
2.0 Characterizing appraiser relativism
Regarding appraiser relativism, I’m not sure I’d say that the appraiser relativist is committed to the view that “the only valid measuring stick of a person’s actions is the morality in their own (the appraiser’s) head.” It would depend on what you mean by “valid.” The appraiser relativist definitely does not think, for instance, that only their own moral standards are true. If by “valid” they mean something like “the only considerations directly relevant to deciding how to act themselves,” or something along those lines, then perhaps they might agree. However, they would still think other people’s moral standards are also true, relative to those people’s moral frameworks.
This is because an appraiser relativist treats moral claims as having an indexical element that allows the truth status of a statement to vary depending on which moral standard it is relativized towards.
This is how Joyce (2007) characterizes relativism:
Relativism holds that moral claims contain an essential indexical element, such that the truth of any such claim requires relativization to some individual or group. According to such a view, it is possible that when John asserts “Stealing is wrong” he is saying something true, but that when Jenny asserts “Stealing is wrong” she is saying something false. An individualistic relativism sees the vital difference as lying in the persons making the utterance; a cultural relativism sees the difference as stemming from the respective cultures that the speakers inhabit.
What does it mean for moral claims to have an indexical element? Indexical elements are already built into much of the rest of our language; we use indexicals every day. Indexical terms simply allow for variation in meaning depending on the context. For instance, an indexical may allow for the truth status of a claim to vary in accordance with who is making the claim. If I say
“My name is Lance”
…this statement would be true, while if someone who isn’t named Lance says “My name is Lance,” this statement would be false. My functions here as an indexical term that refers to whoever is making the claim. And since different people can use the term “My,” it will refer to different people when they make the claim. This is why the statement “My name is Lance,” can be true relative to some speakers (anyone named Lance) and false relative to others (anyone not named Lance). There is no single correct answer as to whether the statement “My name is Lance” is true or false, because “My” is indexed to whoever is making the statement, and the statement will turn out to be true for some speakers and false for others. Such indexical terms are already a common and established part of our speech. So there is nothing especially dubious, on the face of it, about suggesting that some category of terms or phrases are used indexically.
However, moral terminology doesn’t appear to uncontroversially or explicitly employ terms that are obviously indexical in this way, nor are moral claims typically accompanied by an explicit attempt to index those remarks to the standards of the speaker. That is, people don’t typically say things like “murder is wrong relative to my standards.”
Nevertheless, moral relativists treat moral claims as having an indexical component, only without the explicit use of indexical terms to indicate which standard is being indexed. In other words, the relativist treats moral claims as having implicit indexicals. Again, implicit indexicalation is already something people regularly employ when making evaluative remarks. If someone takes a bite of food, spits it out, and says, “that’s gross!” we would probably not imagine that they are making an objective evaluative claim that ascribes the property “grossness” to the food.
The remark may instead express some nonpropositional attitude, or it may express a subjective evaluation of the food: I find this to be gross. If someone else tries the food, and thinks it’s delicious, this person would not say “there’s a logical contradiction here. The food cannot be both gross and delicious,” because they would recognize that it could be gross relative to their standards and delicious relative to another person’s standards. Remarks such as “That is gross” and “That is delicious,” can be used to implicitly index the standards of the speaker. This is part of the reason we don’t have to constantly go around saying “I think it’s raining” or “I think that 2+2=4.” Asserting such propositions already implies that we’re the ones making the assertion. Sentences that report our beliefs don’t become unintelligible if we don’t explicitly reference ourselves with indexical terms like “I” or “me.”
I say all this to address the question of whether the appraiser relativist thinks only their own moral standards are “valid.” I’m not sure that they would hold any position like this. Mr. Homemaker describes the appraiser relativist as holding the view that:
Since the appraiser’s own morality is the only valid measuring stick of their own actions, if the appraiser feels justified in judging others then he is justified in judging others.
Whether the appraiser relativist would agree or disagree with this will turn on what is meant by “valid.” If, again, valid is a proxy for something like “true,” then they would disagree. The appraiser relativist would, instead, think that their own moral standards are a valid measuring stick of their own actions relative to their own standards, but they’d also agree that anyone else’s claims about their actions are also valid relative to those people’s standards.
Thus, while it is true that the appraiser relativist, if they endorse individual subjectivism, may consider themselves justified in performing an action so long as they feel that the action is justified, they would simultaneously acknowledge that their actions may not be justified relative to other moral standards according to which the action isn’t justified. The action can simultaneously be both good and bad, right and wrong, claims about it can be both true and false, and the action in question can be both justified and unjustified, without any contradiction at all, since all such seemingly conflicting claims are true relative to different standards or frameworks.
I recognize this is a somewhat complicated way of clarifying what appraiser relativism and relativism more generally entails. Sometimes the reaction to these sorts of remarks is to object that such considerations move us too far from practical considerations about everyday life. When people raise these concerns, I tend to agree with them. I don’t raise all these points about various metaethical positions because I think they’re practically relevant, but because critics often want to insist that one of these views is correct or has important implications, while other views are false and have terrible implications. However, I think almost all of these views have little practical relevance to everyday life.
Most of my concerns in metaethics center on criticizing the dispute itself. It seems to me to be far too abstract, removed from everyday consideration, and centered on abstract and obscure considerations that often devolve into impractical squabbling over terminology or appeals to terms whose meaning has been so thoroughly removed from everyday life that it’s no longer clear if the terms mean anything at all. In that respect, you could characterize my focus on specificity about metaethical positions as motivated not by a desire to prioritize their relevance, but to point out that different metaethical positions often don’t have the sorts of implications people think they have.
I am not arguing that antirealism entails better practical outcomes than realism. I am arguing that realism is irrelevant, and most forms of it are either trivial or meaningless. I think we can dismiss realism with little or no meaningful practical implications. I don’t think that antirealism inherits meaningful and practical implications as a result. Rather, I think the whole dispute could be avoided in its entirety at no substantive cost.
3.0 Moral antirealism and trust
Mr. Homemaker presents an interesting concern about moral antirealism. According to Mr. Homemaker, realism is a necessary condition for certain kinds of interpersonal relationships. Mr. Homemaker appeals to a variety of remarks about the importance of trust as an important element in healthy relationships. For instance, we must trust that other people’s intentions are good, and we must be confident that others won’t exploit us by taking advantage of our vulnerabilities.
Mr. Homemaker then states that:
Moral Realism - and our belief that our spouse has a conscience and/or belief in a higher power that will impose consequences for wrongdoing - gives substance to what would otherwise be hollow rituals and contracts
It’s not clear to me how moral realism gives substance to rituals or contracts. Perhaps it is possible that the other considerations that are mentioned are doing all of the work: our belief that the people those we have relationships with have good intentions, have a conscience, and are responsive to positive and negative feedback in terms of the praise, blame, and sanction of others. These seem sufficient to me to do all the work to ground our trust in others.
Should we trust people less if moral realism isn’t true? I don’t think so. Whether or not moral realism is true doesn’t seem relevant to how that person is disposed to behave. Perhaps, instead, what matters is whether that person believes moral realism is true. However, whether believing moral realism makes a person more trustworthy is an empirical question, and I don’t think there is strong empirical evidence that it’s true.
This is obvious when you consider that both our rituals and contracts routinely invoke a higher power.
I am an atheist myself, and my rituals and contracts don’t invoke higher powers. However, I again am unsure as to what role moral realism would play in lending weight to such rituals and contracts even when they do invoke a God. If there were a God, and people would be sanctioned for violating contracts, such sanctions could be levied against people regardless of whether moral realism were true.
Furthermore, people could be aware of these sanctions, and value the rituals and contracts in virtue of their belief that fulfilling their rituals and abiding by their contracts would be rewarded, and violating them would be punished. All that seems necessary for contracts and rituals to have weight seems to me to be bound up in people’s personal dedication to them, along with the external assurances of praise and sanction contingent on their actions.
4.0 The practicality relativism of realism and antirealism
Lance criticizes Moral Realism and defends Anti-Realism in the academic arenas of rhetoric and debate - and he has demonstrated real talent for those games. It would be a grave error, however, for any of us dedicated to cultivating human flourishing for real people in the real world and in real time to suppose that merely because something seems plausible in a theoretical context it will bear fruit in application.
I appreciate the kind remarks. I also don’t disagree with the latter point. I think philosophy resides far too much in a theoretical context and is far less grounded in a concern for actually having an impact on the world than it should be. I am much more concerned with what, to borrow your phrasing, bears fruit in application. This may seem to conflict with my emphasis on theory, but note that my approach to theoretical and philosophical topics is largely critical: I consider many such disputes to be due to conceptual and linguistic confusions, and I consider much of academic philosophy to be intractable because the disputes turn on mistaken notions about how language and meaning work that have resulted in the construction of pseudoproblems, pseudodistinctions, and pseudoconceptions.
Next, Mr. Homemaker states
We should regard the arguments for Anti-Realism in much the same way: as entertainment that uses some terms and concepts from the real world, but that doesn't actually provide any lessons that would be rational to employ in the real world.
I almost agree with this. My own antirealist stance reflects a repudiation of the entire dispute between moral realists and antirealists present in the academic literature on metaethics. That is, I not only reject all of the moral realist positions on offer, but I also reject all the antirealist positions. I see the entire dispute as fundamentally misguided and unfruitful, and I believe it should be abandoned. In that respect, my antirealist position falls within the broader category of quietism towards the metaethical dispute in question.
Quietism is a general term to refer to a variety of stances towards particular philosophical disputes that are unified in rejecting those disputes as fundamentally misguided, irrelevant, indeterminate, irresolvable, or in some other misguided in their efforts to reach a decisive resolution (Kremm & Schafer, 2018). The classical antirealist positions are relativism, noncognitivism, and error theory, and some philosophers have even argued that these are the only possible antirealist positions (Huemer, 2017). This is not true. One can reject the presuppositions behind the framing of these disputes, such that one rejects all of the realist and antirealist positions on offer.
Yet in doing so, by default I end up not believing that there are any such thing as stance-independent moral facts. As a result, I am left with antirealism by default: my position is not so much that there is some substantive, alternative, “correct” antirealist position that falls within the scope of the traditional academic dispute between moral realists and antirealists, and that comports with the categories on offer within the field, but that all of the positions are mistaken in some way or another.
For comparison, suppose there was a dispute about a dragon’s favorite type of treasure. Realists would be those who argued that dragons like treasure, and have a favorite type. Antirealists would be those who deny that dragons have a favorite type of treasure at all. Yet there is a third position: there are no dragons.
My position towards the realism/antirealism dispute is somewhat analogous to the latter. I simply do not think the concerns that motivated this dispute made much sense to begin with, and that the whole enterprise is a complete waste of time.
Yet in rejecting the traditional dispute between realists and antirealists, I don’t think that realism wins by default, and that we should go about our lives operating under the assumption that it’s true. Rather, I think a kind of antirealism wins by default: simply put, there are no stance-independent moral facts; the very notion of a stance-independent moral fact is either used in a way that trivializes it, by identifying it with inert descriptive facts that have no practical implications in the case of moral naturalism, or using it in a way that is unintelligible, which is my assessment of moral non-naturalist accounts. It isn’t so much antirealism, which denies that there are facts of this kind, that could be properly described with the line:
“For entertainment purposes only”
…rather, it is realism that fits this description. Every account of realism is at best trivial, and at worst isn’t even intelligible. In criticizing antirealism, you say that it “uses some terms and concepts from the real world,” but these terms and concepts don’t “provide any lessons that would be rational to employ in the real world.” I agree. I don’t think there are any practical implications to antirealism, simply because I take antirealism to be the view that some other view isn’t correct. And since I don’t think that other view has any practical implications, all denying it amounts to is denying that some other view “provides any lessons that would be rational to employ in the real world.” In other words, I take moral realism to be a view that some might claim would provide us with lessons that would be rational to employ in the real world, but it fails to do so. There are no lessons to be obtained from realism, because it is either trivial and has no practical relevance (in the case of moral naturalism), or isn’t even meaningful (in the case of non-naturalism). Objecting to antirealism, which in my case is completely consistent with denying that realism has any practical significance, by arguing that antirealism lacks such significant may miss the mark on my particular view: my view isn’t intended, in and of itself, to lessons for the real world. Rather, it is a position predicated on objecting to the claims of other philosophers, which purport to provide such lessons.
In short: if the objection to antirealism is that it has no practical relevance, then I agree. It has none. But I also maintain that moral realism has no practical relevance, either, and that it likewise does not “provide any lessons that would be rational to employ in the real world.” In fact, I would go further than your remarks. While philosophers may use many of the same terms as people outside philosophical contexts, I suspect such terms are often used in ways that refer to concepts that aren’t present, or at least not present in exactly the same form, in nonphilosophical contexts. In other words, I think philosophers often end up using terms that may seem familiar in ways that do not reflect how those terms are used outside of academic philosophy.
5.0 Sound positions
Because what it all really boils down to is Lance arguing that Anti-Realism is at least as logically sound as Realism. The implication is that we should regard both Realism and Anti-Realism as equally valid mindsets and strategies for conducting our lives and organizing society.
That’s not how I’d characterize my view. Rather, I’d say that moral realism is practically irrelevant, so we can ignore it and do what we already intended to do without troubling ourselves with it. My antirealist position simply involves a rejection of realism, and doesn’t, by itself, reflect any positive thesis at all. As such, I don’t think either reflect a mindset of strategy for conducting our lives or organizing society since I don’t think realism and antirealism are relevant to conducting our lives or organizing society.
And I would go so far as to concede that Anti-Realism is as sound to an Anti-Realist as Realism is to a Realist.
I’m not sure what you mean by sound, or, earlier, by logically sound. If you could clarify what you mean by this I could address where we may agree or disagree.
Some of your remarks seem to imply claims, but do not explicitly come out and say them. For instance, you also say:
But humans are not cold logic calculators; and advocating for mindsets and strategies that fail to account for our actual human nature is - dare I say - irrational.
I agree, but I am not sure how you intend for this to relate to the dispute between realism and antirealism. Are you implying that antirealism cannot account for human nature, but realism can?
6.0 Conclusion
For these reasons, I implore all real-life Homemakers and aspiring Homemakers to embrace Moral Realism as an indispensable ingredient of adopting a mindset and strategy that will lead to healthy and fruitful human relationships.
It would be helpful if you could make more explicit what they argument for this is. What is the argument for the claim that moral realism is important for promoting healthy relationships? It seemed to get bundled in with conscience and concern about punishment, but it wasn’t clear what distinct role realism or a belief in realism was playing. A few points that I think would help clarify the matter:
(1) Is the claim that the truth of moral realism is important for healthy relationships? Or is it the belief that moral realism is true? Or both?
(2) Why is it important for relationships that moral realism is true / that people believe moral realism?
References
Huemer, M. (2007). Ethical intuitionism. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kremm, D., & Schafer, K. (2018). Metaethical Quietism. In T. McPherson & D. Plunkett (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of metaethics (pp. 643-658). New York, NY: Routledge.
Joyce, R. (2007). Moral subjectivism versus moral relativism. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2012 edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/Archives/Fall2012/entries/moral-anti-realism/moral-subjectivism-versus-relativism.html