Rhetoric in Robes (Part 2)
Twitter Tuesday #26
This post is part of a series. For previous entries in the series see:
1.0 Metaethical normative entanglement
In my previous entry, I discussed broader aspects of the sociology of public philosophical debate, which includes the commentary disputes among both professional philosophers in online spaces (rather than at e.g., conferences or in published journal articles), and of people who are not professional philosophers but engage in such debates. Here, I want to return to a discussion of normative entanglement in the context of metaethics, which is where I am most animated by the misuse of this rhetorical technique.
Metaethical normative entanglement occurs whenever metaethical and normative considerations are conflated in a way that gives a misleading impression that a moral antirealist has objectionable normative moral standards or repugnant moral character, e.g., a critic may imply that the antirealist isn’t opposed to genocide.
The prototypical case occurs when realists embed metaethical claims inside normative claims in such a way that to reject the realist’s metaethical presuppositions carries misleading or false implications about the normative moral standards or moral attitudes of the antirealist. It is similar in some ways to a complex question, and exploits the pragmatics of ordinary language to falsely imply that there are significant normative and practical implications to rejecting moral realism.
However, metaethical normative entanglement doesn’t require the standard question-answer setup I’ve used in the past. My go-to example is simply an illustration of a particularly clear case. Metaethical normative entanglement occurs in almost any context where a person leverages language in misleading ways to give people the impression that an antirealist has repugnant or absurd views that are not genuine entailments.
1.1 Strong entanglement
Note that there are at least two ways that someone employing normative entanglement can imply something bad about the antirealist’s views. First, they may suggest that antirealism logically entails certain philosophical commitments or practical beliefs. You could call this strong entanglement. Strong entanglement holds that if you endorse antirealism, then on pain of inconsistency or contradiction you must also hold certain other philosophical views, or you may be required to act in certain ways such that, if you do not, you are engaged in a performative contradiction, i.e., your actions are inconsistent with your stated views, and may reveal you are not genuinely committed to antirealism.
If antirealism really did entail certain unacceptable conclusions, this could serve as a legitimate objection in principle, though one must be careful not to reject a position merely because one doesn’t like its consequences. Rejecting a view because of its consequences isn’t necessarily a fallacy, though. One may think that a certain view is intuitive or appealing or accords with one’s views, only to discover that if it were true, certain absurd or unacceptable conclusions would follow. On discovering this, one might lose the sense that the view was plausible in the first place. Strong entanglement could in principle ground a legitimate objection to antirealism. The challenge would be in establishing that antirealism really did entail the absurd or unappealing implications that critics claim that it does. In practice, this is almost never the case.
1.2 Weak entanglement
Weak entanglement doesn’t suggest that antirealism logically entails any particular implications. Instead, weak entanglement makes claims about the contingent connection between belief in antirealism and certain other views or behavior. Someone may claim that if you endorse antirealism, this will tend to cause or at least expose you to high risk of engaging in immoral behavior, losing interest in moral philosophy, caring less about others, having less empathy, being more selfish or egoistic, becoming depressed or nihilistic, and so on.
Whether or not such consequences follow from a belief in moral antirealism is an empirical question and may vary from one individual to another. Those who appeal to weak entanglement aren’t entitled to the presumption that any particular implication is true of any particular individual. Nevertheless, it’s possible that such implications could follow in general for people or for any particular individual. Thus, weak entanglement need not be an error. It would be reasonable to expect those who make such claims to provide the appropriate empirical support for these claims, though. There’s nothing wrong with hypothesizing that belief in antirealism could reduce empathy or make someone depressed. There is something wrong with helping oneself to the presumption that if people endorse antirealism they’ll become evil or depressed without doing any of the work to actually support this claim.
The biggest problem with weak entanglement is that it has little to do with whether antirealism is false. Suppose atheism is true. Now suppose that belief in atheism makes people less happy than belief in theism. This is largely irrelevant to whether or not atheism is true. Just so, if belief in moral antirealism makes people evil or sad, this is not a good reason to think it’s false. Nevertheless, it would matter to me. I think antirealism is true, and I think it’s probably not harmful for people to believe that it’s true. If I discovered that belief in antirealism tended to have negative consequences, I would probably shut up about it, and I would at least be much more cautious about what I said about it.
Both strong and weak entanglement thus could, in principle, raise genuine concerns with moral antirealism. The problem isn’t that entanglement can’t reveal troubling features of antirealism. The problem in practice is usually that those who employ entanglement rarely put the effort into supporting the supposed strong or weak implications of antirealism.
2.0 Implications of error theory
I don’t think antirealism entails any particular set of practical implications at all: it is consistent with moral antirealism to hold all the same attitudes, values, preferences, and dispositions as a moral realist. An antirealist could act in ways that are virtually indistinguishable from a realist, aside from very minor and practically irrelevant differences. In other words, there’d be no way in practice to determine whether a person was a moral realist or an antirealist simply by observing their behavior. The only exception would be certain kinds of linguistic practices that have little practical significance. Just about the only genuine indicator of a person’s metaethical views is whether they say things like “I am a moral realist” or “there are no stance-independent moral facts.” The main consequence of being a moral antirealist is that you’d say things like “I’m a moral antirealist,” in philosophical contexts, but you’d act exactly the same as a realist in every other context. For practical purposes, this just doesn’t matter very much. If you think this is a problem for antirealism, consider why: why would it be a problem if rejecting a view doesn’t change anything about your behavior? If anything, I see that as more of a problem for endorsing the view. If the truth of realism would make no difference at all, that may not make realism false, but it would at least make it irrelevant. Realists will likely object that it’s highly contentious to claim realism is practically irrelevant or superfluous. They are welcome to object. Maybe it has some practical relevance; I’m not sure what that might be, but even supposing it does, I would still maintain (pending additional arguments) that there is (a) no logical inconsistency in an antirealist acting, for all practical purposes, just like a realist and (b) no particularly good reasons to think that antirealism is likely to have significant, undesirable psychological consequences.
Some specific antirealist positions may have certain implications. Error theorists are going to face challenges with employing moral language. Agent relativism will probably have unappealing normative moral commitments. Note, though, that these are implications of these specific views, not of “antirealism.”
Some religions worshiped gods that demanded human sacrifice. It would be misleading to say “theism has the implication that we must engage in human sacrifice.” Criticism should be directed at that religion, not theism. Just so, if critics of error theory or agent relativism think these positions have objectionable practical implications, that’s fine: then they should say error theory or agent relativism have this or that implication, not “antirealism.” Unless all antirealist positions have these objectionable implications, pointing out that this or that antirealist view has any particular implication no more indicts antirealism than the fact that some people believe we must disembowel the weak to appease Kazarakh the Defiler indicts theism.
Even in cases where there may appear to be significant practical implications, there really aren’t. Consider error theory. An error theorist is committed to affirming that claims like “it’s morally wrong to torture babies” is false. This looks bad. However, this is because error theory is a view, in part, about what people mean by such phrases. All the error theorist is committed to is thinking something like this:
Ordinary first-order moral claims contain one or more false presuppositions.
As a result, all such claims are false.
These commitments do not commit the error theorist to any further, practically significant positions at all. I’ll illustrate why with a comparison.
Suppose ordinary people believed that water was magical, and this was a non-negotiable feature of their everyday concept of “water.” That is, suppose people insist it is simply part of the definition of water that it is magical. When they say “There is some water over there,” part of what this entails is that there is something magical over there. If so, then strictly speaking, water doesn’t exist. The stuff we drink and that falls from clouds and fills our rivers and oceans isn’t magical. So if “water” means water, and water is magical by definition, then there’s no such thing as water.
How absurd! Our bodies are mostly composed of water, we drink water, we see water every day. Of course water exists! Anyone who would deny this is a complete idiot!
However, this would not require the “water error theorist” to deny that the wet stuff that composes our bodies, and is made up of hydrogen and oxygen, that we must drink, and that fills our rivers and oceans, is real. Of course that is real. The water theorist is simply recognizing that a certain term in everyday discourse falsely characterizes this stuff as magical. So as long as “water” = water and water = something magical, then statements like “I have a glass of water” are equivalent to saying something like “I have a glass of something that, in addition to its other properties, is magical.” And such statements would be false. What wouldn’t be false is that the person has something in their glass. It’s just not, technically speaking, water. It’s something else. This doesn’t require the person who denies water exists that water* exists, where water* is that same thing we’ve all been pointing to, drinking, taking showers in, that fills our oceans, etc., accompanied by the denial that it is magical. One might characterize these concepts by depicting them as clusters of properties, where p1, p2, etc. denote properties of the concept
water = {p1 = magical, p2, p3, p4, p5 …}
water* = {p2, p3, p4, p5, …}
Someone who believes in water* can believe water has all the properties of water except the property of being magical. And they can think our everyday experiences involve interactions with water* rather than water. Error theorists with respect to morality simply grant the realist’s claim about moral discourse. There really are no first-order moral truths on such a view because moral truths include some unacceptable property in their set of properties. But the error theorist isn’t barred from endorsing the reality of a close analog, moral truth* where moral truths* are like water* minus the magic.
Error theory turns on a close connection between the meaning of certain propositions and the truth of those propositions. But it doesn’t muzzle the error theorist’s practical deliberations in any meaningful way. The error theorist can do anything they want apart from sincerely employ certain sentences in a certain linguistic context. That is, pretty much the only thing an error theorist couldn’t sincerely do is claim that there are stance-independent moral facts. That’s it. It really just doesn’t have any meaningful practical implications.
Error theorists tangle themselves up in all kinds of trouble by ceding so much territory to realists. Why do they grant that the properties they reject are a non-negotiable feature of ordinary discourse in the first place? The would-be error theorist is free to reject that the realist has any claim on ordinary language. Yet error theorists cede this ground to realists, and this saddles them with a host of dialectical burdens they never needed to take on. One can deny that there are stance-independent moral facts without having to take a stance on ordinary language. Call this “Antirealist semantic agnosticism”: One can hold that:
There are no stance-independent moral facts
One does not know the correct thesis (if any) of folk metaethical semantics
Historically, antirealists have based their metaphysical theses largely on semantic theses. But they ever needed to do this in the first place. The standard framing of the positions available to antirealists is an outdated legacy of 20th century presumptions about the relation between language and metaphysics. It is time to retire it, and retire, along with it, the unnecessary strictures limiting the scope of viable antirealist positions. These strictures have done antirealists no good, and have played into the rhetorical hands of realists hellbent on depicting antirealists as deplorable or self-deluded.
References
Gill, M. B. (2009). Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics. Philosophical studies, 145, 215-234.
Kahane, G. (2013). Must metaethical realism make a semantic claim?. Journal of moral philosophy, 10(2), 148-178.
Loeb, D. (2008). Moral incoherentism: How to pull a metaphysical rabbit out of a semantic hat. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology: The cognitive science of morality (Vol. 2, pp. 355-386). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.