Specific intuitions as support for realism
Mike Huemer is one of the most prominent contemporary moral realists. Huemer also frequently appears online to discuss moral realism.
This short clip from Huemer (just 1:59) focuses on a few brief comments on intuitions about moral realism and, in particular, not on the direct intuition that moral realism is true, but on intuitions in response to specific cases that purportedly support realism or cast doubt on specific antirealist theses. Huemer’s point is to emphasize that the way we arrive at the conclusion that moral realism seems true is not by having the direct intuition “moral realism seems true,” but by considering specific examples or considerations that, when considering one’s intuitive response to them, either suggest that realism is true or suggest that some form of antirealism is false.
Despite just two minutes of remarks, I found a surprising number of disagreements, and only a handful of points on which I agree.
What I agree with
(1) It also seems to me that most antirealists find realism intuitive
At 0:45 Huemer says “it appears to me that most antirealists agree that realism is intuitive.”
It also appears that way to me, at least if we’re talking about how realism is discussed in the recent literature on metaethics. That is, my impression is that most philosophers who openly endorse antirealism and publish on the topic also believe that moral realism is intuitive, but they reject realism in spite of this. I don’t know for sure, though. It would be great to assess this question with a survey of metaethicists.
However, we could disambiguate this remark a little bit more, and emphasize two ways in which most antirealists could agree that moral realism “is intuitive”:
(1) The moral antirealist finds moral realism intuitive, or at initially found it to be intuitive
(2) The moral realist believes most ordinary people find moral realism intuitive, even if they don’t find it intuitive themselves.
I’m wary of remarks that something “is intuitive,” because this leaves unspecified who it's supposed to be intuitive to. Philosophers should be more precise when making remarks like this. Such a remark could actually be disambiguated in a variety of ways. To say that something is intuitive could mean, for instance, that a given view is something all or most people are pretheoretically inclined to endorse. But it could also mean that the view in question is one we’d endorse under certain specifiable conditions.
Kauppinen (2007) provides one example. Kauppinen draws a distinction between surface and robust intuitions, and argues that when philosophers make conceptual claims about what people find intuitive only imply claims about what intuitions people would have under a particular set of conditions. Namely, when they are (i) competent with the concepts in question, (ii) free from performance errors and (iii) responsive only to semantic and not pragmatic considerations.
At the very least, then, one could disambiguate whether something is “intuitive,” to reflect surface or robust intuitions of this kind, though this is just one way of carving up the space of possible types of intuitions.
I don’t actually know if most moral antirealists would report finding realism intuitive, and if so, whether they’d mean (a) they find it intuitive, (b) they found it intuitive but don’t anymore and (c) whether they think most people find it intuitive. I suspect we’d get a fair bit of variation but I think most would endorse (a) or (b) and (c). I would like to put together a survey with questions like these (and many other questions) to assess how philosophers would respond to them.
Huemer mentions me by name at 0:56, which is great! He states that I claim not to have realist intuitions, which is also true. He states,
“Lance Bush is different” adding that “he’s always saying he doesn’t find it intuitive” and adds that he thinks “there’s a fair number of people who say they don’t find it intuitive.”
Note the use of the term “say.” Huemer doesn’t say that we don’t find it intuitive. He says that we say that we don’t find it intuitive. This is an interesting choice of words, since it hints at the possibility that Huemer thinks that those of us who claim not to find realism intuitive are saying something false. I would be interested in hearing from Huemer whether he thinks this is (or at least may) be the case.
However, the interesting part of Huemer’s comments follow afterwards. Huemer says:
“When I defend moral realism I don’t generally just say moral realism is intuitive [...] I appeal to more specific intuitions.” The rest of this commentary will focus on those specific intuitions.
Intuition #1:
If most of society approved of torturing babies, would it be alright torture babies?
The intuition we’re supposed to have in response to this is to say “no.” To say “no,” in turn casts doubt on (at least some forms of) subjectivism.
However, saying "no" to this is consistent with antirealism. An antirealist doesn't have to think the rightness or wrongness of actions are determined by what most people think. That would imply a specific form of cultural agent relativism. Responding “no” to that doesn't entail a realist intuition, nor does it demonstrate that all forms of subjectivism are counterintuitive. One could endorse a variety of positions that fall within the scope of how Huemer appears to use the term “subjectivism,” including constructivist accounts, relativist accounts, which identify moral acts with the standards of individuals rather than with society as a whole, and include appraiser relativist accounts according to which this question would be too ambiguous to give a straightforward answer, as wel as ideal observer theory and other relation-designating accounts that identify the proper procedures for determining stance-dependent (and thus nonrealist) moral facts with something other than what a majority of society approves of. In other words, there are a variety of metaethical positions that fall within the scope of Huemer’s apparent conception of “subjectivism” for which an intuition in response to this question is irrelevant.
In fact, this doesn't even show that cultural relativism is wrong. It would, at best, suggest that the person responding to the question doesn't endorse a specific form of agent cultural relativism whereby the rightness or wrongness of an action is determined by the majority, but:
(a) Agent cultural relativists can think that moral claims are true or false relative to the standards of different cultures, but not think that those facts are determined by the majority of people within that culture
(b) They could endorse agent individual subjectivism, in which case moral facts are determined by each individual's standards, not what most people think
(c) They could endorse appraiser relativism, in which case the question doesn't even make sense and remains ambiguous: the action in question could be right or wrong relative to the standards of that society, but it wouldn't follow that it would be "alright" relative to person responding to the question's standards, or the standards of their own culture.
Part of the issue with Huemer's question is that an appraiser relativist could judge that, even if an action would be alright relative to the standards of some society, that does not mean that it's alright relative to the appraiser relativist's standards. Yet the question doesn't specify which standard is being indexed, so there is no way to answer the question without disambiguation.
For comparison, imagine if I asked, "If most people thought pineapple on pizza is tasty, would pineapple on pizza be tasty?"
Such a question is ambiguous: tasty relative to which standard? Most people's, or the person responding to the question? If the former, the answer would be true by definition, and would amount to saying that "If most people thought pineapple on pizza is tasty, then pineapple on pizza would be tasty according to most people." If the latter, the answer could be "no," but this wouldn't entail realism or demonstrate that subjectivism is wrong.
There are multiple forms of relativism, and relativists have a variety of ways of responding to the question Huemer asks, including finding it unanswerable or saying "no," without this suggesting realism is true or entailing subjectivism is false.
Intuition #2
Is it false that torturing babies is wrong?
Once again, we’re given a statement that isn’t adequately disambiguated. This leaves the error theorist’s account of the meaning of the question implicit. Once we make it explicit, we get a statement like this:
“Is it false that it’s a stance-independent moral fact that torturing babies is wrong?”
Now the error theorist could say “yes,” without this as readily implying that they are indifferent to torturing babies. They could even say, without contradiction, “yes, but only because there are no such thing as stance-independent moral facts; we can still oppose such an action, find it repugnant, favor laws against it, and so on, it’s just that doing so doesn’t require us to hold weird metaphysical or conceptual positions.”
An error theorist can be just as opposed to baby torture as a realist, find it just as repugnant, be just as motivated to oppose it, and so on. All the realist does is tack on superfluous metaphysical baggage that amounts to, in the case of naturalists, a trivial descriptive account of how some group of people use some set of words, or in the case of non-naturalists, an obscure and (I suspect) unintelligible metaphysical or conceptual account of what it means for it to be the case that baby torture is wrong. References
Kauppinen, A. (2007). The rise and fall of experimental philosophy. Philosophical explorations, 10(2), 95-118.