Taste the goodness

1.0 Introduction

“Goodness” is not objective. That is, it is not the case that anything is “good” or “bad” in some stance-independent way, i.e., independent of the goals, standards, or values of any individuals or groups, or in a way that isn’t relative to, one or another possible standard of evaluation. There is no “standard from nowhere,” a transcendent standard according to which things are “good” or “bad” in some nonrelative sense.

Recently, Both Sides Brigade published a blog post arguing that goodness is objective, hence the title. I’ve only read the metaethics articles on the blog, but it appears to be a thoughtful, high-quality, well-written blog, so go check it out. It’s great to see more opposition here on substack. It’s also terrible. Great and terrible: how is that possible? As I’ll address in this response, there is no tension at all in something being both great and terrible. This is because evaluative and normative terms like good, bad, should, shouldn’t, and so on can all be used in a flexible way: they can be indexed to one or another standards, goals, objectives, or evaluative standpoints in a seamless, smooth way. We never need to invoke the notion of any “absolute,” stance-independent perspective from which to evaluate things. It is great that more people are arguing for views contrary to my own, because it gives me something to write about, motivates me, and gets me thinking. It’s terrible in that I want everyone to agree with me. Like Wittgenstein, I’m all about philosophy getting things done and settling matters. While it may be personally satisfying to engage in this or that philosophical dispute, I would prefer they be resolved so we can move onto the next philosophical problem. 

Things can be great in some ways and terrible in others, not just relative to different people’s standards, but relative to an individual’s standards. Goodness, badness, greatness, terribleness: all of these terms can be used in such a way that they index one or another standards of evaluation, regardless of whether anyone in particular holds them. You can speak, for instance, of something being good relative to some goal, or purpose, even if nobody has that goal or purpose. Imagine we come across a giant stone chair. It might be useless for-the-purpose-of-normal-sized-humans-to-sit-on, but it could be useful for a giant, if that giant existed. We can speak, therefore, of the chair being good for this and bad for that, of it being good for-such-and-such-sorts-of-situations, and bad under-such-and-such-circumstances. 

In practice, when we speak of things being good or bad, we rarely explicitly lay all of this out. If someone asks me if the movie I saw was “good,” I would probably not say, “Yes. It was good with respect to the goal of providing me with entertainment consistent with my cinematic preferences, and it is also good with respect to exhibiting the qualities of a movie I anticipate would be generally enjoyable to a broad reference class of people that exhibit the following preferences…” before going on to catalog the precise population I had in mind in excruciating detail (I would probably exclude, for instance, babies, or people who dislike that genre of movie, or don’t like movies at all, or whatever). 

Why don’t we specify all of this? Language has to be thrifty. It takes time to communicate, and effort to focus. You need to get what you need to say out as quickly as possible. And human minds are highly efficient at processing what others mean based on context. Shared culture, experiences, goals, motives, biology, interests, experiences, and so on all contribute to narrowing the plausible range of meanings any given utterance is intended to convey. All of that operates in the background. As a result, much of what prompts is to infer what someone means happens automatically and dynamically unfolds as a person speaks: numerous presumptuous about the context in which another is communicating us serve to shape and narrow and disambiguate what others say so that they don’t have to say everything for us to understand what they (probably) intend to communicate. As a result, much of what is communicated goes unstated and is simply inferred from context.

Philosophers seem to have an allergy to this notion, and to the notion of pragmatics more generally. So much philosophical analysis of language seems to take place in an alien world where words have fixed and rigid meanings, where there are facts about what words and sentences mean in and of themselves, independent of how they’re used in actual contexts of usage. Philosophers will make claims about what words or phrases mean, or how they work, without consulting any empirical data on how the people using those words or phrases actually fucking use them. I rarely invoke profanity but I do so here to emphasize just how ridiculous this is. Language is a behavior. If you wanted to study any other behavior in any other species, it’d be ridiculous not to study that behavior by observing its natural behavior in its ordinary habitats without interfering or injecting yourself into the situation. 

For comparison, it would make almost no sense to try to understand chimpanzee behavior by thinking about chimpanzees and imagining how you think they behave. Even if you spent a lot of time at the zoo, or even living with a particular group of chimpanzees, this wouldn’t be adequate. In the first case, behavior in zoos may or may not reflect how members of a species act in their natural environment. In the latter case, (a) your presence may alter their behavior, and (b) the behavior of any given group may or may not reflect how members of other groups behave. Transposing this over to humans, the cultural and linguistic differences between people may be vast in any given domain (even if we exhibit many similarities). 

Talk of things being “good,” and “bad” can be used as shorthand for implicit presumptions about various evaluative standards that go unstated. I say can because I’m not making claims about how nonphilosophers actually use these terms: that’s an empirical question. I also spoke of indexes, so I’ll say a little about that.

People reading this are already familiar with: terms like “I,” and “you,” and “that.” These parts of speech allow what they refer to to vary based on the context: the speaker, what’s being pointed at, and so on. The statement “I am Lance” is true when I say it, but false when someone who is not Lance says it. This is because “I” refers to the person making the claim, and this varies based on who is making the claim. When I use “I” I refer to me, but whenever anyone else does, they refer to themselves.

Such terms make the indexical nature of the remarks clear enough. But indexicality need not be explicit. Suppose I say:

This cake is delicious!

I did not specifically mention myself. Yet I may mean what amounts to:

I find this cake to be delicious!

The remark, “This cake is delicious!” could be used with an implicit indexical reference to myself. There is nothing serious or philosophically troubling about such claims. People can and do simply report their food preferences. One could also simply do this for their moral standards. One can use language to communicate that they would prefer that people not steal for others, or hurt people just for fun, or lie indiscriminately. It is a trivial matter that people are at least capable of making such claims, and can do so without thereby saying something nonsensical or false. If it turns out people generally used terms like “good” and “bad” in this way, it would simply be a mundane fact about how a given language happened to work. There is no good reason to think this is impossible, or must be false based on a priori armchair considerations, much less (as some philosophers argue) that subjectivism would have terrible practical implications. If when people say something is “good” they happen to be reporting something about their attitudes or preferences, well, too bad. That’s how they use those words. Nothing of deep philosophical interest follows from this.

This is, more or less, how I typically speak when I make moral claims. I may use them to express attitudes or emotions only, but I may also use them to inform others of my values. If I say, for instance, that “torturing babies for fun is morally wrong,” I am not ascribing the property of “moral wrongness” to actions, or claiming that there are stance-independent moral facts. I am telling you something about my values and preferences. I am, in other words, speaking like a subjectivist. This does not mean I endorse “subjectivism” as the “correct” metaethical theory. In its classical form, “subjectivism” involves a semantic thesis about the meaning of moral claims. It holds that the category moral claims consists exclusively of claims the truth of which depends on the standards of the speaker making the claim. “Classical subjectivism” thus holds that there is a category of claims, moral claims (technically, first-order moral claims), that share a uniform and determinate meaning such that they share the same semantic content in common: moral claims just are a category of assertions about the standards of the speaker.

I don’t endorse this. I don’t even think there is any clear category of moral claims over which one could generalize in this way, and I don’t think there is any uniform and determinate semantics shared across speakers, at least with respect to the question of whether moral claims refer to stance-dependent moral facts or not. I think this whole traditional approach is fundamentally misguided. I don’t think it captures how language works, or how human psychology works. Everyday moral claims probably don’t need to invoke any particular metaethical presuppositions with respect to the stance-independence or stance-dependence of their truth status.

2.0 Naive goodness subjectivism

I don’t want to digress too much though. My point here is simply that I, at least, speak like a subjectivist, and I think speaking like a subjectivist is a perfectly sensible way to speak that suffers no significant philosophical problems. It’s not incoherent. It’s not impossible. It doesn’t make you a monster. Having said all that, let’s get into what Both Sides Brigade (BSB) has to say.

The beginning of the article focuses largely on praising Judith Jarvis Thomson. I don’t have much to say for or against that, but this remark caught my attention:

Although Thomson’s treatment of goodness is both intuitively appealing and perfectly suited for resolving many important philosophical puzzles, it’s not one you’re likely to come across unless you engage with more specialized literature.

As always, I take issue with underspecified references to claims like “intuitively appealing.” Nothing about Thomson’s account strikes me as remotely intuitively appealing. It is much the opposite: it isn’t consistent with how I’m disposed to think or how I suspect most people are disposed to think, I don’t find anything appealing about it, and I don’t think it’s well-suited for solving any genuine philosophical puzzles. Antirealist accounts get the job done just fine, without all the overwrought assumptions about language and superfluous metaphysics.

The article begins by contrasting JJT’s account with subjectivism, and starts with “naive goodness subjectivism”:

The idea that goodness is not an objectively quality of objects at all, but rather a content-free endorsement that agents give on the basis of their own particular interests and values. 

This already strikes me as weird. Maybe this is a view a philosopher would endorse. Note that I’ve already established that I personally speak and think in a way much akin to a subjectivist. Yet I would not go so far as to claim that goodness isn’t something objective, but is instead something else: this already seems like it reifies “goodness” as though goodness were a specific thing about which one can have an account. I don’t think there is any such thing as “goodness” as such. I can regard things as good or bad, which is to say, I can find something I like or dislike, prefer or disapprove of, and so on, with respect to those things. And I can speak of things being good for this, or bad for that, in the sense that they can be conducive to this or that goal or activity (even if nobody in particular has that goal or is pursuing that activity). Maybe that’s an account of “goodness,” but I am very wary of “-nesses.” That suffix reeks of metaphysics. 

This conception of subjectivism may be insufficiently reductive or eliminativist. It may still retain vestiges of realism or overwrought analytic philosophical presuppositions, so long as it retains the notion that there is something, goodness, about which we need some account. I don’t think there is any such thing per se, and I don’t think the best forms of subjectivist must think there is, either. Of course, this could just be me being nitpicky about language, in which case the issue comes down to concerns about language and not metaphysics. If so, I’d simply favor caution about the wording of the view. The rest of the description looks good to me:

On this view, saying something is a good car just means it’s a car you, all told, approve of or find useful; on the other hand, saying someone is a bad president just means they’re a president you, all told, disapprove of, or a president whose actions aim to thwart some goal of yours. 

This looks more or less like how I use the language of goodness and badness, at least in specific contexts (I use it in other ways, too).

BSB’s next remark is a bit strange:

If you spend any time discussing philosophy online, or with friends and acquaintances who haven’t considered the question too closely, you’ll probably encounter this view pretty often. Unfortunately, it can’t possibly be correct!

I don’t know what, exactly, it is that can’t be correct. Is it a claim about the nature of “goodness”? If so, I probably wouldn’t endorse this form of subjectivism (and I may even agree it can’t be correct, but probably for different reasons than BSB). I’m also curious whether anyone endorses this view, in particular. I don’t encounter it often, and I spend far too much time engaging with people online. People’s actual antirealist views usually seem a lot more muddled and imprecise.

3.0 Predicative and attributive adjectives

BSB introduces a distinction between predicative and attributive adjectives. Go read the description over in BSB’s article. It’s too much to quote here and the explanation there is clear and straightforward. Take these phrases:

1. A red hat.

2. A big raspberry.

“Red” and “big” work a little differently here. The red hat is both red and a hat. But the raspberry isn’t necessarily both a big object and a raspberry. As BSB notes:

‘Big’ and ‘small’ are attributive adjectives whose meanings depend on the distinct nouns they’re attached to, while ‘red’ and ‘blue’ are predicative adjectives that make direct assertions about the whole of the object they describe. 

BSB draws on this distinction to make the following claim:

Circling back to the topic at hand, you’ll recognize by this standard that ‘good’ is pretty clearly attributive; no one thinks that a good piano player who is also a chef must therefore be a good chef. And of course in general, no one thinks that a good piano player in the first place is just a person who is good and who also plays piano. 

This isn’t clear to me at all. I don’t think “good” could be distinctively predicative or attributive in principle. Words don’t have fixed, intrinsic meanings or usages. Whether it’s used in a predicative or attributive manner would depend on a given context of usage. Maybe BSB would agree with me, in which case it’d be an empirical question how people tend to use terms like “good,” and it may or may not turn out to be used uniformly in one way or the other, or maybe we have different views about language. In the latter case, I wouldn’t agree that “‘good’ is pretty clearly attributive,” since this claim would rely on implicit assumptions about language that I reject, in which case I’d say this is isn’t true (though I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it is pretty clearly not true).

In any case, I could still speculate about how English speakers tend to use the term “good”. Note that all such speculation must be qualified by (a) acknowledging that such claims are speculative hypotheses, and (b) how people happen to speak English in those populations I am familiar with in 2024 may or may not generalize to how people speak English in other populations, or how people speak other languages, or how people spoke in the past or they’ll speak in the future. I find it profoundly weird to try to resolve important questions in philosophy by speculating about how I think contemporary English speakers happen to talk, but that’s analytic philosophy for you.

Nevertheless, I grant that the attributive use makes more sense of what I’d expect people to use evaluative language to do, at least in English among populations I’m familiar with. If I seem to be being nitpicky but still conceding the point, I do so for a purpose: to flag that there may be unstated differences in how BSB and I view language, and there may also be differences in how we arrive at any particular conclusion, even if it is very similar.

So, let’s suppose, hypothetically, talk of things being “good” tends to be attributive rather than predicative. I couldn’t find a way to good way to intersperse a response between parts of the next paragraph, so I’ll have to throw the whole thing at you. BSB goes on to say:

But unfortunately, the sort of attitudes that naive goodness subjectivism centers are not attributive, but predicative. Let’s take ‘good,’ on this view, to be at least loosely equivalent to ‘goal-achieving’ or ‘approved-of.’ If this is the case, then it seems obvious a goal-achieving blender must be goal-achieving and a blender, just like an approved-of weatherman is both approved-of and a weatherman. And further, if a goal-achieving blender is also a product of Pakistan, then logic demands it be a goal-achieving product of Pakistan; whether or not it achieves your goals, all told, can’t depend on how you choose to consider it. Similarly, if you approve, all told, of a weatherman who is also a Republican, then you obviously approve of a Republican (even if you don’t approve of him as a Republican, of course, which we’ll get to in a moment). I think these quick examples are enough to show conclusively that, whatever goodness might be, it can’t plausibly reduce to generalized approval or utility.

This passage struck me as a bit too unclear (at least to me), so I’m not sure what it’s supposed to show or how it’s supposed to show it. I suppose I’ll flag this as a request for clarification: what is being argued here, and what is the argument? 

This looks like it’s attributing a very weird view to the subjectivist: that they think something like that a blender has the property of “goal-achievingness” in a way that isn’t indexed, and isn’t relative to some goal they have or others have or whatever. Why would a subjectivist speak that way? If I say that “that’s a good song,” and I mean to say “I approve of this song,” I am telling you something about my attitude towards the song. I’m not attributing “approved-of-ness” to the song. That’s just a weird and overwrought way of speaking and thinking that I find super bizarre. I’m not speaking in “generalized” terms, though I could do so. At least part of the issue with BSB’s way of framing this is as though the subjectivist must fixate on a specific way of using the term good: either they use it in this generalized form, or they use it in a more narrow form. To which my immediate thought is: why not both? One might only intend to report their own preferences in some contexts, and may wish to speak in more general terms in other contexts. Subjectivism doesn’t commit one to the view that terms like “good” and “bad” have fixed, rigid meanings: either general or non-general, but never one in some cases and the other in other cases.

4.0 Non-generalized subjectivism

BSB provides a response that a subjectivist may provide:

Okay, you’re right that ‘good’ can’t just mean generalized approval or utility at the object level; obviously, I’m not trying to pick out one big quality of usefulness or approved-of-ness that every good thing shares. What I really mean to say is that ‘a good X’ is an X that I approve of or find useful as an X - that is, I’m attributing approval or usefulness to that particular aspect of the object, not the object itself. So when I say something is a good hammer, I don’t just mean it’s a hammer that also happens to have the general quality of being approved of or being useful; I mean to attribute approval or utility to its ‘hammer-ness’ specifically.

This is a good response from the subjectivist. BSB does a strange thing here, which is to move from less defensible conceptions of subjectivism to more defensible ones. This creates the illusion of having presented substantive critiques of subjectivist views, when in reality it looks like it’s just knocking down straw versions of the position as it moves towards a more defensible one. This can create the impression that subjectivism is giving ground, retreating in the face of the anti-subjectivist onslaught. 

Nevertheless, BSB claims that the quote above reflects a more plausible position than the one that came before, but that it “still comes apart pretty quickly.” I’m not sure there are distinct positions here or that anything has been shown to come apart, but let’s look at what the issue BSB takes with this position.

Here’s the first one:

First, there’s the obvious objection that this view commits us to accepting some truly absurd judgments as at least not obviously false, which is a high cost for any normative theory.

Subjectivism isn’t necessarily a normative theory, so I’m not sure about the latter claim. Some form of agent relativism may include both a metaethical and normative account, but appraiser relativism doesn’t need to. This objection is unhelpful, though, because BSB doesn’t state what these absurd judgments are. I don’t grant that subjectivism pays any cost at all, or involves biting any bullets, but I’d be interested in knowing what those costs and bullets are. Subjectivists should stop granting that they bite any bullets or pay any costs. They have no obligation to grant any deference to realist accounts.

5.0 Good and bad hammers

Next, BSB says:

I’ll move on to looking at the specific internal contradictions that goodness subjectivism can generate.

Here is where I think BSB errs in the most definitive way. BSB fails to show any internal contradictions in goodness subjectivism at all. Let’s consider BSB’s first attempt:

Imagine a shop teacher who wants to show his students how important it is to have effective tools. He grabs a cheap, flimsy hammer and takes a few swings at a board until the handle snaps and the nail goes in sideways. In this scenario, was the hammer a good hammer? Any remotely plausible theory of goodness should say obviously not. But the hammer was definitely useful for the shop teacher to demonstrate the dangers of low-quality tools, and crucially it was useful in that respect as a hammer. According to goodness subjectivism, then, we should say not only that the hammer he used was a good hammer, but also that, bizarrely, a bad hammer in this situation would be one that pounded the nails in perfectly (because a hammer like that would have ruined the demonstration). 

There are several problems here. First, this is a serious problem:

In this scenario, was the hammer a good hammer? Any remotely plausible theory of goodness should say obviously not

This question smuggles in the realist’s preconceptions about normativity. What does it even mean to ask whether the hammer was a “good” hammer? Good in what respect? Stance-independently good, or good in a way consistent with subjectivism? If the question presupposes the reformer, then the answer is “no,” not because the hammer is not good in some way consistent with subjectivism, but because nothing is stance-independently good or bad. 

If, instead, the question doesn’t presuppose realism, then it’s ambiguous. Suppose I’m a subjectivist, and I think whether or not pineapple on pizza is good depends on the evaluative standards of whoever is appraising the taste of pineapple on pizza. I happen to like pineapple on pizza, but many other people don’t. Now suppose you asked me, in a philosophical context, “Is pineapple on pizza good?”  I emphasize a philosophical context for a reason. If someone asked me this question in an everyday situation, I would probably infer in such contexts that they’re asking me whether I like pineapple on pizza, to which my answer would be “yes.” But in a philosophical context, it’s not clear this is what someone is asking, and it may even be clear that this isn’t what they're asking. So we must then address the question: well, if they’re not asking me if I like pineapple on pizza, what are they asking me? 

They could be asking me if it’s good in a stance-independent way. In which case, the answer is no. If they’re not, and they’re instead asking me if it’s good in a stance-dependent way, or are asking me to answer in some neutral-between-realism-and-antirealism way, then the question doesn’t make much sense. Here’s why. If I think that claims like “pineapple on pizza is good,” are only true or false when they are judged relative to various standards (such as mine or yours), then I need some indication of which standard the question is indexed to. That is, if you ask me “Do you think pineapple on pizza is good?” in a philosophical context, and you don’t indicate which standard is being indexed, the question is literally unanswerable. Good according to whose standard? Mine? Yours? The typical person in the United States? The typical person in Italy? Unless, and only unless, you indicate which standard the question is indexing “goodness,” to, the question has no determinate answer at all. 

I suspect BSB’s remarks evidence a fundamental failure to adopt the subjectivist’s point of view, and that this failure manifests in the framing of their exchange with the subjectivist in a way that subtly presupposes a realist or partially realist conception of value. When we’re told:

In this scenario, was the hammer a good hammer? Any remotely plausible theory of goodness should say obviously not.

…I don’t agree. The subjectivist can say that whether the hammer was good or bad depends on which standard, goal, value, etc. that the evaluation of its goodness or badness is being indexed to, and that whether it is good or bad can thus vary. The hammer is neither good nor bad in any absolute sense; it’s good-relative-to-some-standards and bad-relative-to-some-standards. There is no single, definitive answer as to whether the hammer is “good” or “bad.” That the hammer is neither “good” nor “bad” in any stance-independence respect is the whole point. And that hammers are neither good nor bad in such a respect strikes me as one of the most obvious things I can possibly imagine. That is, the subjectivist’s take on the goodness or badness of hammers strikes me as so obvious, intuitive, plausible, and without any serious problems, that I see almost no point in even considering any alternatives; they strike me as just that superfluous and misguided. The reason I engage with such views is that I am in a perpetual state of incredulity and frustration that realists are so disposed to think that their perspective, which strikes me as completely absurd and totally pointless, are so confident that only their way of thinking about normativity makes sense. 

BSB goes on to say:

But the hammer was definitely useful for the shop teacher to demonstrate the dangers of low-quality tools, and crucially it was useful in that respect as a hammer. According to goodness subjectivism, then, we should say not only that the hammer he used was a good hammer, but also that, bizarrely, a bad hammer in this situation would be one that pounded the nails in perfectly (because a hammer like that would have ruined the demonstration). 

There is absolutely nothing bizarre about this. I take it we’re supposed to think it’s bizarre that a hammer that is good at pounding in nails would be a “bad hammer” in this situation, and that it’s bizarre or implausible or whatever to think that such a hammer is bad. What is bizarre about this? A hammer-that-is-good-at-pounding-in-nails is a “bad hammer” in this situation only insofar as it is not a good hammer for demonstrating the dangers of low-quality tools. That’s the only relevant respect in which it’s a “bad hammer” in this situation, and it definitely is a “bad hammer,” in that respect, because this is a hypothetical scenario and BSB has stipulated that it’s not useful for that purpose. It takes thinking like a realist to think there’s anything bizarre about this. The mistake is to conflate the notion of what in most other contexts would be described as a “good hammer” (a hammer that’s good at pounding in nails) as a bad hammer in some other contexts by elevating the designation of being a “bad hammer” in the sense of being bad-for-demonstrating-the-dangers-of-low-quality-tools to the status of it being a “bad hammer” in some deeper, or more fundamental sense. We can draw a distinction here between being bad-simpliciter and bad-for. Things can be bad-for-this or bad-for-that, without thereby being bad-simpliciter. A hammer can be bad-for-demonstrating-the-dangers-of-low-quality-tools or bad-for-pounding-in-nails without thereby being bad in the other respect, or being bad-simpliciter. We can then substitute these phrases in, in place of “bad hammer” and see how “bizarre” the subjectivist’s appraisal of this situation is:

Imagine a shop teacher who wants to show his students how important it is to have effective tools. He grabs a cheap, flimsy hammer and takes a few swings at a board until the handle snaps and the nail goes in sideways. In this scenario, was the hammer [good for hammering in nails effectively without breaking]? Any remotely plausible theory of goodness should say obviously not. But the hammer was definitely useful for the shop teacher to demonstrate the dangers of low-quality tools, and crucially it was useful in that respect as a hammer. According to goodness subjectivism, then, we should say not only that the hammer he used was [a good hammer for demonstrating the dangers of low-quality tools], but also that, bizarrely, a bad hammer in this situation would be one that pounded the nails.

What’s bizarre about this? Absolutely nothing. The subjectivist’s characterization of this scenario makes much more sense than any realist’s appraisal would. The hammer in question is good for demonstrating the dangers of low-quality tools and bad for pounding in nails effectively. It is neither a good nor bad hammer in any nonrelative sense; it is good-for-x and bad-for-y.

I think BSB and other realists create the illusory impression of inconsistency or internal incoherence by failing to track which standards of evaluations terms “good” and “bad” are being indexed to on the subjectivist account, presenting “good” and “bad” alongside one another, then imagining there’s an inconsistency when there isn’t one, perhaps because they mistakenly think that when the subjectivist says that the hammer is both good and bad, that they mean that it is good-simpliciter and bad-simpliciter. The subjectivist doesn’t think anything is good or bad simpliciter. There is just no way for them to be contradicting themselves or subject to some kind of incoherence here.

To further illustrate why I think objections like these are so weak, compare to how we use indexical language when referring to ourselves. Take the phrase “I am Lance.” Most readers are probably not named Lance. 

So, is the phrase “I am Lance” true?

This is a bad question. The answer is, of course, it depends who says it. If I say, it’s true. If you say it, it’s false, unless you are also named Lance. The only way to evaluate whether this claim is true or false is to know who the claim is being indexed to. Subjectivism treats evaluative claims about what’s good or bad in the same way. Whether a hammer is good or bad depends on what standard we’re indexing it to. Since all such evaluative claims are implicitly indexed, and each claim must be evaluated as true or false relative to that standard, the idea that a subjectivist would simultaneously think a hammer is both good and bad would only result in inconsistency or contradiction if they were doing so with respect to the same standard. But why the hell would they do that? (If they did, that would be a problem for that subjectivist, not for subjectivism, for the same reason it wouldn’t be a problem for a moral realist if a particular realist claimed that murder was both permissible and permissible at the same time and in the same respect). 

And, as this scenario makes clear, the standards were stipulated to not be the same: one standard is about demonstrating the dangers of low-quality tools, and the other is about pounding in nails effectively. Those are two different standards. There is absolutely no contradiction or conflict in something being a “good hammer” for one and a “bad hammer” for the other.

BSB continues:

Clearly, this can’t be right. The shop teacher’s goals were achieved through the use of the hammer, but that doesn’t mean the hammer was a good one. 

The subjectivst does not think the hammer was a good one simpliciter. They think it was good for demonstrating the dangers of low-quality tools. Since this was stipulated to be true, what the subjectivist says when saying it was a good hammer is not only true, it’s trivially true. In other words, we have a scenario where we’re told:

1. This hammer is good for demonstrating the dangers of low-quality tools.

2. The subjectivist says it’s a good hammer.

3. By this, the subjectivist means that the hammer is good for demonstrating the dangers of low-quality tools.

The subjectivist is clearly correct here, and isn’t saying anything that “can’t be right.” In fact, it must be right, because we’re created a fictional scenario where we’ve declared it to be right.

If, instead, by “a good one,” in the phrase, “but that doesn’t mean the hammer was a good one,” BSB means in some non-subjectivist way, a subjectivist would simply agree: it isn’t good or bad in some non-subjectivist way. Note that BSB next says:

It just means what the shop teacher needed, in that moment, was a bad hammer, which is something goodness subjectivism struggles to express.

Goodness subjectivism doesn’t struggle to express this; it denies that this is what one is or ought to express, because it denies that the hammer was a “bad hammer” in some non-subjective sense. I think this remark, more than any, reveals that BSB is continuing to impose realist preconceptions onto their analysis of this scenario. The hammer was neither good nor bad in a non-subjective way on the subjectivist’s view, so why on earth would it be a problem if they struggled to express that the hammer was a “bad hammer,” in some non-subjective respect, when this is the very thing such positions deny?

5.1 Good and bad thieves

BSB presents another example but it doesn’t strike me as any more successful:

The same issue pops up if we see goodness in terms of approval, rather than utility. Imagine a thief breaks into my home, cracks my bedroom safe, and sneaks away while I sleep. Was he a good thief? Again, any plausible theory of goodness should say that yes, he was a very good thief; if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to successfully fleece me. But of course I don’t approve of him, either (presumably) as a person or specifically as a thief. Once again, goodness subjectivism is committed to the bizarre position that the thief who was capable of pulling off such a perfect heist was not only a bad thief, but also that a good thief here would be one who was bumbling, inept, and unsuccessful. This is another very bad result. A thief who can’t manage to steal anything might be the sort of thief I would prefer to have target me, but that doesn’t mean I want to be targeted by a good thief. Exactly the opposite - I would obviously prefer to be targeted by a bad one. 

Once again, BSB has not demonstrated anything bizarre about the subjectivist’s evaluation of this scenario. The thief was good with respect to stealing and bad with respect to what I’d prefer the thief did. There is no issue here at all. BSB seems to me to be getting tripped up over language here, and mistakenly thinking that they’re identifying substantive problems with subjectivism when they seem to me to perhaps instead be conflating realist and antirealist conceptions of normativity, trying to impose both on the same scenario at the same time, and running into interpretative problems as a result. I think the mistake in their evaluation here is to not fully grok the subjectivist’s perspective and way of speaking.

5.2 Good and bad roots

BSB next addresses a problem that arises when dealing with judgments that don’t relate to our own goals or values. BSB gives the example of describing a tree with “strong, healthy roots” and another with “withered roots.” BSB says:

Obviously, we should be able to say that the first tree has good roots and the other tree has bad roots. But no one approves or disapproves of particular oak trees, and most people have no goals that are furthered or thwarted by oak tree roots. And even if they did, it shouldn’t matter; it makes perfect sense for someone who wants to dig up the first tree to say, “Damn, it’s a shame this tree has good roots.” 

First, people do approve of and disapprove of particular oak trees. So that’s a weird remark. People may find one tree pretty, and another ugly, or one to be in their way, and the other a useful source of shade. People often have to have trees removed because their roots cause problems. So the notion that oak trees don’t relate in many ways to people’s goals is really strange: of course they do. This isn’t supposed to matter though, because of the last remark. I addressed this in the comments, and I see no need to rewrite what I wrote, so I’ll share that:

A subjectivist need not construe all evaluative claims exclusively in terms of the actual preferences, goals, or standards of themselves or other actual agents. They can always make hypothetical appraisals relative to goals or standards even if nobody has those goals or standards. This simply isn’t a problem for subjectivists. It might only appear to be a problem if one has an overly narrow and constrained form of subjectivism.

A person who makes this claim [“Damn, it’s a shame this tree has good roots”] can construe it exclusively in descriptive or relativized, indexed evaluative terms without any issue at all. Trees are living things, and we can talk about what is good or bad “for the tree.” Trees don’t have actual goals or desires, but since they are adapted via natural selection so as to act in a quasi-intentional way, i.e., they “try” to live, we come to recognize that there are trees that flourish relative to their “goal” of living and those that fail to do so. When we speak of good roots, we can simply speak of roots being good relative to the “goal” of a tree. We need not think that the roots are good in some non-relative sense.

In other words, we’re familiar with what a tree is typically like and what would “further the interests of the tree,” so to speak. When we speak of trees having good roots, we could simply be referencing what is typically good “for a tree” with respect to what would cause the tree to thrive. BSB considers this:

Should goodness subjectivism be taken, then, to say we’re ascribing goodness to the roots from the perspective of the tree? Are they good roots because they serve the tree’s “goal” of growing? 

Something like that, yes. Though one need not do so in such a way so as to think that trees have literal goals or perspectives. Such attributions work perfectly fine in a metaphorical sense. Sure, we anthropomorphize trees and other living things a bit, even when we don’t think they’re conscious and don’t have literal goals. This is an artifact of these things being products of natural selection and acting in a quasi-goal-like respect. There’s nothing deep or mysterious about it, and we can always cash such language out in descriptive turns if necessary. We need not suppose anything genuinely spooky. BSB simply reintroduces the same mistake that appeared in the hammer and thief cases, though:

But even this is vulnerable to counterexamples in the exact same way. If the groundwater four feet below the surface is seriously polluted, then the tree with strong, healthy roots might be poisoned and die while the tree with withered roots would survive. But that doesn’t mean the withered roots are good roots, just that - one more time - it happened to be good for the tree to have roots that were bad.

BSB’s example does not highly a problem for subjectivism. The subjectivist can hold that having strong, deep roots is useful in most circumstances, but not at all. The use of “good” and “bad’ in the last remark once again seem to invoke non-subjectivist conceptions of goodness and badness, which is not needed to describe whether the tree is good or bad. It simply turns out that some descriptive feature of a tree (or a person, or whatever) that is useful or good for some purpose or end or with respect to some standard evaluation won’t always be in all circumstances. If I say it’s good for me to eat pineapple on pizza, and by this I mean that it’s good for me to eat something I like, pointing out that someone could poison a particular pizza with pineapple on it, and if I ate that pizza, I’d die, is no counterexample to subjectivism, and in no way demonstrates that if I am a subjectivist and say “pineapple on pizza is good,” that I’m saying something absurd or indefensible or subject to counterexamples. Having a preference for pineapple on pizza does not require you to think that in any conceivable situation in which one could eat pineapple on pizza, that it would achieve their goals to do so. BSB has not presented a legitimate counterexample here.

6.0 Good and bad everything

BSB next says:

I hope these examples show that goodness subjectivism is hopelessly lost when it comes to discussing situations where you prefer a bad X or a good X would be harmful.

They do not. A subjectivist has no problem with saying they prefer a bad pizza or that a good gun would be harmful or bad. Their construal of these situations is fairly straightforward: in both cases, a claim to prefer something bad or to judge something”good” to be “bad” simply index different standards at the same time. I’ll illustrate both with an example.

Many people are familiar with greasy, cheap pizza from low-quality restaurants. This is often considered “bad pizza,” and people may refer to it as such. I happen to like this kind of pizza: the kind with that oily cheese that soaks the pizza box it’s in and that drips all over the place. Without even having to invoke a hypothetical scenario, I actually have said “I like bad pizza.” What I mean is that I like pizza of this sort. It is “bad” with respect to broad and general preferences, or with respect to some culturally-acquired shared knowledge of “bad” pizza that meets certain descriptive qualities, but I prefer it (and find it good) in that I enjoy the taste of it and like eating it. 

As something of a subjectivist, I don’t struggle to make sense of saying that I prefer a bad pizza. I find the suggestion that people like me would struggle at all to handle these scenarios to be quite strange. Not only are we not even close to “hopelessly lost,” when it comes to handling these scenarios, doing so is very easy and poses almost no challenge at all.

BSB provides more examples of things people say that subjectivism allegedly struggles to accommodate:

Here’s a short list of relatively benign statements that we would all immediately understand, but that goodness subjectivism has trouble interpreting coherently: I hope the team I bet against isn’t very good; I’m glad he finally did a bad job so I could fire him; I’m sure it’s a good book, but I have no desire to read it; I was lucky my opponent chose a bad lawyer; the painting is too good to be a useful example; the terrorist’s failed plan showed seriously bad planning

Let’s go through a few of these:

1. I hope the team I bet against isn’t very good

Subjectivism has no trouble interpreting this. This person hopes the team they bet against doesn’t have the qualities that would dispose of it towards winning. They hope it’s a “good team” with respect to their desire that it fails and loses so they win the bet, and a “bad team” with respect to it having the qualities that would cause it to win the game.

2. I’m glad he finally did a bad job so I could fire him.

Subjectivism has no trouble interpreting this. The person had the goal of firing the person in question. There are certain performance standards this person would need to meet such that if they fail them, they did a bad job with respect to those standards. In failing to meet those standards, the person did something bad relative to those standards, and good relative to the goals of the person who wanted to fire them.

3. I’m sure it’s a good book, but I have no desire to read it.

Subjectivism has no trouble interpreting this. A person who says this may simply intend to be polite, and have no idea whether the  book is good or not. Alternatively, they may mean that the book is good with respect to commonly-shared standards about what constitutes good prose, or entertaining storytelling, or informativeness, or whatever, but bad with respect to their own desires, goals, standards, or current interests. They could also mean that the book is good in such a way that it has the qualities they’d ordinarily desire in a book, but that they presently have no desire to read it. For comparison, if I eat a bunch of delicious cake at a bakery, and someone offers me a slice of another type of cake, I may judge that it is exactly the kind of cake I’d find delicious on entirely subjective grounds, but that I’d be unable to enjoy it at the moment and therefore don’t desire it. I might say, “I’m sure it’s a good cake, but I have no desire to eat it.” This remark doesn’t only make sense if we presume gastronomic realism. The subjectivist about food has no problem making sense of this.

4.  I was lucky my opponent chose a bad lawyer

Subjectivism has no trouble interpreting this. It is good for a person who wants to beat an opponent in a legal case that that person have a lawyer who is bad at winning cases. That the lawyer isn’t effective at winning cases is good-for-the-person-who-wants-to-win and bad-for-the-person-who-hired-them.

Similar analyses could be presented for the other examples. BSB has not shown that subjectivists struggle in any way to coherently interpret these remarks. In fact, I think only something like a subjectivist (or at least antirealist) account makes sense of these remarks, and that it is in fact the realist whose account of these scenarios makes very little sense of them.

To be clear: I am not simply saying that BSB has presented substantive challenges to subjectivism, but that subjectivists can overcome those challenges. I think BSB has fundamentally failed to present any significant challenge at all. I think the alleged incoherence that the subjectivist supposedly struggles with is a figment of BSB’s own distorted conception of these scenarios. Nevertheles, BSB says:

In every one of these cases - as well as uncountably many more you could think up - replacing ‘good’ or ‘bad’ with reference to approval or utility creates bizarre, contradictory assertions that have nothing to do with the straightforward meaning they originally had. This is, in my mind, enough to say that goodness subjectivism is false. 

BSB’s conception of subjectivism is a weird, rigid, and narrow conception that fails to capture how those who speak and think like subjectivists can and do use evaluative language like “good” and “bad.” I am not merely speaking hypothetically: I speak this way, and nothing about what I mean when I say “Pineapple on pizza is good” results in any incoherence. BSB’s characterization of subjectivism seems to me to rely on a caricature of a subjectivist who cleaves too closely to contemporary analytic philosophy’s often warped and weird relationship with language, where one opts to substitute out this or that alleged string of ordinary language with some technical jargon, and to do so in a way that rigidly quantifies over an arbitrarily large number of cases, as though the subjectivist is committed to a rigid, inflexible semantic thesis. 

Subjectivists are committed to no such thing, and can adopt a far more flexible way of speaking that, I suspect, probably matches how nonphilosophers speak much more closely than the weird way philosophers depict ordinary thought and language. Maybe it doesn’t. Either way, if some specific form of subjectivism does result in incoherence, so much for that form of subjectivism. That doesn’t entail subjectivism is false, any more than if some specific moral realist account is false that therefore moral realism is false. BSB has, as far as I can tell, either misdescribed subjectivism or narrowly specified a particular form that, almost as a matter of stipulation, would commit its proponent to internal incoherence. But even if that were true, subjectivists aren’t obligated to endorse that specific conception of subjectivism.

7.0 Thomson’s non-subjectivist account

BSB next presents Thomson’s proposed alternative. Allegedly, Thomson can provide us with:

a perfectly naturalistic account of goodness that doesn’t rely on anything other than basic facts about what kind of thing an object is.

This is not true. Thomson’s account invokes the same spooky and confused notions as other realist accounts. Thomson’s account reveals its troubling features in BSB’s very next remark:

Thomson starts her account with an obvious yet underappreciated observation: There are some kinds of things that can be meaningfully described as good or bad, and some kinds of things that can’t be. 

This isn’t an observation, it’s a claim. To call it an “observation” treats it as though it’s some piece of data we’re all obliged to accept at the outset of inquiry. But I don’t accept this, much less find it obvious. In fact, I find it obviously false, even ridiculous. Anything can be meaningfully described as good or bad. To insist otherwise would beg the question against views like mine from the outset. This is no observation. It is precisely the sort of claim those of us on the antirealist side of things can (and that I do) reject, and that we’d want to see arguments or demonstrations in favor of. BSB goes on to give an example:

A knife, for instance, can be a good knife or a bad knife, but (to use an example from Thomson herself) a puddle is just a puddle. The reason for this divergence is that a knife can be meaningfully described as defective or exemplary, while a puddle can’t be.

This simply begs the question against antirealist perspectives like mine. Puddles can be good or bad relative to some standard of evaluation or other. A puddle can be good for splashing in, or bad for drowning someone. It can be good for hiding something (if its cloudy) or bad for hiding something (if it’s very clear). It can be good or bad for a bird to take a bath, or for a mosquito or a frog to use. The notion that puddles “can’t” be good or bad strikes me as one of the most obviously false things I’ve ever heard someone say. 

When I brought this up in a discussion, one of the first responses I received was someone mentioning their children discussing whether a particular puddle was good. The children apparently wanted to splash in the puddle, but didn’t want the puddle to be so deep as to soak their shoes. They could and did speak meaningfully about whether a particular puddle was good or bad for that purpose. A puddle could be defective or exemplary for that purpose. A puddle is not “just a puddle.” 

On a subjectivist view, anything can be good or bad, exemplary or defective, relative ot some standard of evaluation. There is absolutely no reason to think that a puddle couldn’t be good or bad relative to some goal or purpose.

Unfortunately, I see no arguments for why knives can be good or bad but puddles can’t. We’re treated to a summary of Thomson’s account, which includes remarks like this:

Thomson refers to the kinds of things that are capable of being defective or exemplary in some way as normative or good-fixing kinds, and it’s these kinds specifically that goodness relates to

Why are some things capable of being defective or exemplary? How do we determine which things are like this and which aren’t? What the is goodness? The examples we’re given remain just as baffling and bizarre to me as the rest:

A car that handles well and gets good gas mileage is a good car, because ‘car’ is a good-fixing kind and this particular one exemplifies the qualities that are central to making a car a car. But it’s also a hunk of metal, and neither a good one or a bad one, because ‘hunk of metal’ is not a good-fixing kind in the first place.

Let’s say you’re a metal-eating space alien from planet Chromatron. Some hunks of metal provide adequate sustenance and taste good, while others don’t. So why couldn’t some cars be better or worse hunks of metal with this consideration in mind? To take a page out of BSB’s book, subjectivism doesn’t struggle with explaining such situations at all: something could be a good or bad hunk of metal, relative to the dietary needs of the Chromatronian. But if being a hunk of metal isn’t good-fixing, how can we make sense of this? Apparently, we can’t! Thomson’s account therefore fails. 

We can also take the subjectivist’s analysis to BSB’s account of scenarios like this:

The person who says a car is exemplary if it bursts into flames when you turn the key, or defective if it has spacious, comfortable seating, isn’t just idiosyncratic or peculiar - they’ve fundamentally misunderstood basic facts about what a car is.

What if the person wants the car to set on fire? What if the person prefers cozy, compact cars with hard seating? A subjectivist can make sense of people making these claims: these people are idiosyncratic or peculiar. There’s no need to suppose they’ve “misunderstood basic facts about what a car is.” People can simply want different things out of a car, or want to use a car for different purposes. 

Imagine an assassin said, “That would be an excellent car to give to the diplomat. It is rigged with explosives and will burst into flames when they turn the key.”

If you ask them what they mean when they say it’s excellent, they mean “well, it is excellent with respect to the goal of assassinating the diplomat.” This is a perfectly sensible thing for an assassin to say. Once again, to take a page out of BSB’s book, the Thomson account does worse in accounting for this: what would we say? That the assassin is speaking in a weird or idiosyncratic way? Well, that doesn’t seem right to me. This seems to me like a perfectly coherent and normal thing for them to say, given the context. Would we say they’re incorrect? If so, why? I don’t see any reason to attribute error to this assassin. They know what they want and their description and remarks match the intended meaning they wish to convey. Subjectivism makes perfect sense of this person’s remark. Thomson’s account doesn’t. Once again, subjectivism not only doesn’t result in incoherence or error, it makes better sense of these situations.

BSB then says:

Looking back over this post, we can see how Thomson’s analysis diffuses some of the major issues that goodness subjectivism struggled with. First off, it nails the attributive nature of goodness as an adjective, in that it not only accommodates, but explains, the fact that a good piano player who is also a chef is not automatically a good chef.

Subjectivism never struggled with this in the first place. BSB presents Thomson’s account as a solution to something that was never a problem. 

Next, BSB says:

Secondly, it renders the exact sorts of judgments we’d want it to with the hammer, the thief, and the oak trees

Speak for yourself. These are not the judgments I’d want. This claim amounts to stating that Thomson’s realist account is better because it results in construing ordinary language in realist terms, which we allegedly “want.” BSB repeatedly stated that “plausible” accounts more or less should result in rendering judgments in such a way either doesn’t favor realism or that, if it does, results in begging the question, or simply setting as the criterion for a “plausible” theory that it result in us speaking or thinking like realists. Lastly, BSB says:

Finally, the long list of statements I provided that goodness subjectivism mangles are also all perfectly coherent when viewed through Thomson’s lens, with their analyzed meaning aligning exactly in all cases with the plain intent of the ordinary language. 

Subjectivism doesn’t mangle any of these statements, while Thomson’s account is as weird and mysterious as most other realist accounts.

BSB closes with an anecdote from Michio Kaku that leads to the remark that:

[...] a good theory needs to do more than just solve the trickiest edge cases you can think of. A good theory also needs to produce reliable, commonsense results when applied to the “boring” stuff too. This is, I think, what goes wrong with goodness subjectivism. Turning judgments about goodness and badness into purely linguistic expressions of approval or utility is an appealing solution for the few notable areas where people have intense, seemingly irreconcilable disagreements about whether some things are good. But a broad theory of normativity can’t just account for the most intractable conflicts, which you’ll always be capable of solving if you’re willing to blow up the whole enterprise. It should also be expected to render straightforward, commonsense judgments about countless other statements no one would ever give a second thought, like “Bad planes fall out of the sky” or “Good laundry detergent gets rid of tough stains.”  

Everything about this seems strange to me. Subjectivism about goodness isn’t especially good at handling disagreements. It handles all evaluative claims regarding goodness just fine, including the examples that BSB provides. It simply does not have the problems BSB thinks it does. So when BSB says this:

If your theory explains why no one can agree on the death penalty, that’s definitely a plus. But if, in doing so, you find yourself having to put an asterisk on statements like “good cold medicine doesn’t immediately kill you,” then I think that’s a bit of a Pyrrhic victory. 

…subjectivists should simply reject that they have to put any asterisks on these remarks at all. Note, too, that there’s still something strange going on here. What is subjectivism supposed to be a theory of? If it’s a theory that is intended to make sense of how ordinary people are disposed to think or act, why are we trying to solve that via exclusively armchair considerations? Whether people speak or think or endorse some type of subjectivism is an empirical question. 

With respect to “straightforward, commonsense judgments,” well, what are we talking about here? Is Thomson’s proposal supposed to be “commonsense”? It doesn’t strike me as a very plausible account of how nonphilosophers speak or think. And in any case, just what does “commonsense” mean here? Are we dealing with empirical claims or something else? If they’re empirical claims, why not look at the empirical evidence? If claims that a given position is “commonsense” isn’t an empirical claim about the psychology of nonphilosophers, what kind of claim is it? And what if I don’t accept whatever presuppositions would lead one to presuppose a non-empirical notion of commonsense?

BSB’s remarks do make it appear like there’s something empirical at work here. BSB next remarks:

In short: Rather than letting the hard cases of normative disagreement convince us to radically revise how we understand our commonsense judgments [...]

What are commonsense judgments? Are they the sorts of judgments nonphilosophers actually make? If so, this is squarely in empirical territory, so again, why no empirical data?

At present, empirical data provides no succor for the notion that realism is a commonsense view. I’ve discussed this at length numerous times on this blog, such as in this recent post where I show this table:

My goal had been to highlight cultural relativism there, but note that individual subjectivism is the second most popular position. Combined, they make up more than half the respondents across multiple paradigms. Of course, this is just one study, and maybe the results aren’t valid. The overall body of literature, however, does not support the conclusion that most nonphilosophers are moral realists. I see very little evidence that would suggest realism about goodness and badness is a commonsense view. I think we’re not seeing good evidence of this because various forms of normative realism aren’t commonsense views. Quite the contrary: I suspect various forms of normative realism are philosophical inventions that have little to do with ordinary thought and language.

Here, though, my primary goal has been to raise objections to BSB’s critique of subjectivism. I do not think BSB’s objections are successful, and I still believe we haven’t been given any good reason to think goodness realism is true, or that Thomson’s approach is a good one. While I think we can taste the goodness of the biscuit, I believe doing so is an entirely subjective matter: