Moral realism and the florps that flerp

Agnosticism about the intelligibility of external reasons

I think that some realist concepts (e.g. "external reasons") are unintelligible.

At least one reason why I have arrived at this conclusion is inductive: After numerous discussions with moral realists (and even some antirealists) where I prompted them to convey what the relevant terms meant not only didn’t result in what I took to be an adequate explanation of what those terms mean, or an adequate explanation for why they weren’t able to communicate what the terms meant, these interactions also resulted in the consistent impression that there’s something deeply and irreparably broken, not only with the terms and the concepts they purport to refer to, but with the philosophical methods and presuppositions of those defending these views. 

Repeated, direct experience has given me the overwhelming impression that non-naturalist accounts of realism are profoundly mistaken in ways that strike me as about as obvious as anything. Of course, this turns on my assessment of my own competence at assessing the relevant arguments and engaging in the relevant sorts of discussions, and I of course could simply fail to have understood what people said or to appreciate the force of their arguments. I grant all that, but short of compelling reasons to believe I ought to defer to the judgments of others on this topic, I will, naturally, rely on my own judgments on the matter.

It is difficult to convey all of this in the form of a syllogism, much less one that would satisfy others. More generally, the claim that any prominent position in analytic philosophy is literally meaningless is extremely difficult to sustain. In the absence of a positive case against the intelligibility of the relevant terms, however, one may still ask those who employ such terms and consider these terms to be meaningful to give an account of what those terms mean or, if they are not able to do that, why the terms are meaningful even if they cannot explain what they mean. 

In other words, one might nevertheless raise a weaker (but, I think, still serious) challenge to the meaningfulness of certain concepts (e.g., irreducible normativity, external reasons, and so on) without a positive argument against their meaningfulness.

Essentially, we can simply ask why we should believe the terms in question are meaningful in the first place, and ask proponents of these terms to give a positive account of their own. Personally, I don’t think they’ll be able to do so.

The meaning of terms like "external reason" can either be communicable or incommunicable. If they are communicable, we can simply ask that their meaning be communicated. If they are incommunicable, we can ask why we should believe that the person who claims to "have" the concept really does have the concept, if we ourselves have no access to it, and if its meaning cannot be communicated. 

If one believes they already have the concept in question, one may find this whole exercise pointless. Yet for those of us who don’t, how are we to distinguish, from the outside, whether that person "has" the concept from them being conceptually confused? In the latter case, one may have a pseudoconcept: the false impression of having a meaningful concept picked out by the use of some term or terms. How does it feel to have a pseudoconcept? My suspicion is that it feels just like having a real concept. So if someone does mistakenly think they “have” a concept that they don’t really “have,” this may not be introspectively accessible.

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The situation I am in is strange. There are proponents of a view that they don’t seem to be capable of explaining. We’re told there are stance-independent moral facts. Okay, fine. But then we’re told that these facts “give us reasons” to do certain sorts of things. When I ask what this means, I am quickly directed to the notion that this means they “count in favor” of the action. But this isn’t any more helpful than saying they “give us reasons” in the first place. It’s a closed loop of a small handful of terms, each of which has a meaning no less inscrutable than the last. For those who haven’t been inducted into the special club of people who claim to “grasp” or “have” these concepts, the whole situation has the vibe of a prank pulled by a group of friends speaking a language you don’t speak:

Friend #1: “Ahh, yes, I think it’s a florp.”

”What’s a florp?” you ask.

Friend #2: “It’s a thing that flerps.”

”And what is flerping?”

Friend #3: “Why, it’s what a florp does, of course!”

No amount of inquiry ever reveals what they’re talking about, and any protestations that they appear to be talking complete nonsense is met with the reminder that you don’t speak the language, so if you don’t get it, that’s your problem. Maybe you’re conceptually impoverished. Maybe you get it, but don’t realize you do. Maybe you have “agflorpnosia,” a rare neurological anomaly that prevents you from acquiring knowledge of florps and flerps. This is wild speculation on their part, but what else are they to do? They know what a florp is: it’s something that flerps! it’s obvious!

Of course, what’s really going on is that language is a weird sort of invention: when we use words, and embed them in the rest of our language, and most of that language has recognizable patterns, virtually anything can superficially look like it’s meaningful, and since it’s generally rude to go around saying meaningless nonsense, and, in any case, there’s typically little incentive to do so, we all build up an experiential repertoire of experiences: when people say stuff that seems superficially meaningful, it’s probably meaningful.

This has resulted in us generally giving people the benefit of the doubt. Yet there are circumstances where we start to become suspicious. The flerping florp scenario might quickly descend into a flurry of questions: can you show me a florp? Does anything else flerp? Are you all playing a stupid prank on me again? Depending on how your friends respond, it may become apparent they are, in fact, pulling a prank. Yet there are many possible outcomes that wouldn’t result in this conclusion. Perhaps, if you insist on knowing what a florp is, they show you this:

If the creature proceeds to let out a “fleeeeeerp!” sound, well, there, you have your answer. A florp that flerps. Some concepts are not so easy to demonstrate. They are more abstract. But we might still expect those employing those concepts, and referencing them by some particular set of terms, to be able to sync their use of the concept with the rest of their concepts—concepts you share—that they can convey what they mean by explaining how the concept fits in with the rest of their concepts (again, concepts you share). Instead, what I find with realists invoking various notions of reasons or ought claims is a closed loop: a set of mutually interdefining terms that never seem to interact with any familiar terms or concepts in a sufficiently close way for my conceptual wifi to pick up a signal and establish a connection.

Your mileage might vary. Some people claim to acquire or “have” the relevant concepts. I confess I’m deeply puzzled as to what they think they’ve acquired, if they, too, can’t explain what the terms mean. Somehow ostension and analogies and the like are supposed to be adequate for others, or they just claim to find the concepts in question “intuitive” from the outset. The whole thing strikes me as profoundly mysterious and to turn on dubious psychological assumptions.

I think that I am, at the very least, justified in being suspicious, absent some very good reasons why I ought not to be; why I ought to think the people who claim to have these concepts have some special faculty I lack (I know of no serious evidence of this), that language is replete with incommunicable concepts, that there are some standards or criteria for picking out which concepts can’t be analyzed, and the terms they use refer to such concepts, and so on. Any number of such considerations could convince me that those who use the terms in question are on the right side of things…but I have yet to encounter any of this.

And, rather than people drawing attention to this and raising objections, they object to me for pointing this out and suggesting that maybe they can’t explain what they mean because there isn’t anything to explain: the view is vacuous and rests on a foundation of empty words.

Nobody seems to be able to explain what terms like “external reason” actually mean, including Parfit himself (see page 272 of OWM, vol. 2):

When Williams argues that there are no such reasons, his main claim is that Externalists cannot explain what it could mean to say that we have some external reason. I admit that, when I say that we have some reason, or that we should or ought to act in a certain way, what I mean cannot be helpfully explained in other terms. I could say that, when some fact gives us a reason to act in some way, this fact counts in favour of this act. But this claim adds little, since ‘counts in favour of’ means, roughly, ‘gives a reason for’. Williams suggests that the phrase ‘has a reason’ does not have any such intelligible, irreducibly normative external sense. When he discusses statements about such external reasons, Williams calls these statements ‘mysterious’ and ‘obscure’, and suggests that they mean nothing. Several other writers make similar claims.

As you can see, I’m not alone in drawing attention to this issue. Williams explicitly and directly drew attention to it. Yet this concern, and I think it is a very serious one, has received almost no attention in the academic literature. I find this to be a strange and inexcusable lacuna, and I intend to rectify it.

When pressed for an explanation, proponents of the meaningfulness of the terms in question tend to insist this isn’t a problem: the terms in question have the property of being inexplicable, so of course they can’t explain them! How foolish of you to expect an explanation! This, apparently, isn’t a problem at all, though for…reasons?

What I’m typically told is that there are other concepts like this, and that I should grant this. However (a) I don’t grant this. Why should we grant that there are incommunicable but meaningful concepts? (b) Even if there are concepts like this, how do we know these terms refer to such concepts? How do we determine which concepts cannot be analyzed?

With respect to (a), this is especially weird because a lot of people will insist that there are “primitive concepts” that cannot be broken down into more fundamental concepts. Okay, maybe there are. But I never asked for people to break down the concept of an external reason into more fundamental concepts. I asked them to convey what it means. Is “primitive” a synonym for “incommunicable”? Does it logically entail incommunicability? I take it the answer to both of these is “no,” so why are people responding by claiming the concept is “primitive”? This seems irrelevant.

If the term is being used to allude to its incommunicability, why not just say it’s incommunicable? Why the weird language? Primitive? Is the term going to stumble out of a cave in a loincloth? Why invoke all this ridiculous technical language when it’s completely unnecessary?

A couple reasons why people might do this: (a) they misunderstand what I’m asking, or (b) they are pattern-matching, recall a primitive/non-primitive distinction, this sounds like a close fit to the sort of concern I’m raising, and they presume (mistakenly) that I’m supposing all concepts can be broken down into more fundamental concepts, and am demanding they do so in this case…apparently because I’m so stupid I don’t realize this would lead to an infinite regress. So I just have to accept that some concepts can’t be broken down further. And this is just one such atomic concept…never mind that one could always just claim a concept can’t be broken down further; no account is given of how we know when we’ve hit bedrock and discovered another primitive concept huddled around a fire in mammoth hides. I suspect, if I pressed for standards, I’d be hit with the omnipresent “intuition.” We just use intuitions to find out which terms can or cannot be analyzed. Because intuition is super reliable. Why? Because you can’t reason without them. Of course. Because if you can’t build a house without a hammer, then every problem can be solved with one.

No, typically no further reason is given. One simply declares a concept primitive. Shut up. Please stop asking questions. Sigh. We all get it. If you don’t, maybe you should go sit at the kid’s table.

Maybe the concept isn’t primitive, and the people using it just haven’t thought hard enough about the issue. Why not? A priori reasoning is supposed to be capable of resolving fundamental philosophical questions, including the analysis of concepts. Existing problems in the field presumably remain unresolved due to lack of adequate intellectual attention. It’s at least possible that some concepts only appear primitive or unanalyzable because philosophers haven’t given them enough attention. Perhaps the concept of an external reason is analyzable, but nobody put enough effort into analyzing it. There’s only a few dozen, or at most a few hundred people working on this topic. There are problems tens of thousands of physicians or engineers have spent decades on, where the solutions are much more well-defined, and they still have yet to succeed. Why should we think that if a couple dozen philosophers haven’t analyzed a term yet that the term is unanalyzable? Perhaps we shouldn’t draw conclusions about the fundamental nature of reality on the basis of a few dozen people throwing up their hands and saying “it’s unanalyzable!” Oh wait, never mind: we can just recognize the concepts are unanalyzable using intuition. The great panacea for every problem in philosophy: just claim to feel the truth with your extrasensory powers, and mock anyone who questions you by insisting they also rely intuition. The whole thing looks remarkably similar to the penchant Christians have for insisting atheists also rely on faith.

Here’s another possibility. Maybe “external reason” is analyzable, but the people who claim that it isn’t are conceptually impoverished. After all, if they are so quick to suggest I’m conceptually impoverished, why not suggest their own failures may result from their own conceptual impoverishment? Why are they so quick to speculate that I suffer from brain lesions, but not consider that maybe they do, too?

I’m being a little glib, but to a point: very little is asked or expected of the non-naturalist realist position. Many of its central claims are supported by superficially straightforward looking arguments, but many of these arguments appeal to obscure and questionable uses of technical terms. And the legitimacy of appealing to these terms seems to rely on further claims that strike me, at least, as highly questionable, and inadequately defended. Why isn’t there more attention directed at these claims? Why are they given a pass to just claim to have unanalyzable concepts? I suspect it is mostly status inertia: these views are expressed by high profile people at high profile universities. This presumably counts for something, but I suspect, in practice, it often confers undue confidence in the views in question.

Given the difficulties of developing a positive case, I suspect my efforts will be best directed at focusing more on these questionable presuppositions, and asking: why should we believe them?

• Why should we believe there are incommunicable concepts?

• How do we know these concepts are incommunicable rather than meaningless?

• Why are realists so confident?

• If their intuitions are evidence, how much evidence are those intuitions? Is one's confidence in their intuitions a moderator that can increase the evidential weight of one's intuitions? If so, by how much? Is it arbitrarily high? Do intuitions have unlimited veto power to override any potential defeaters?

• If many nonphilosophers aren't moral realists and don't have realist intuitions, does this count against realism? If not, why not? If so, why, and how much does it count?

It strikes me that there are many important questions to ask, and I get the impression that many proponents of non-naturalist realism or at least people sympathetic to moral realism are impatient with these questions, finding them tedious or unimportant or unlikely to yield answers that would seriously challenge moral realism.

I suspect almost all of this rests on one simple fact: a handful of writers are just that confident moral realism is true. Much of the dialectic plays out with a kind of omnipresent aura of disdain for moral antirealists. 

Moral antirealists seem to be regarded as just another manifestation of the “skeptic,” the imaginary punching bag philosophers knock down as an exercise to help clarify their views. But the skeptic isn’t someone to take seriously, or to worry about too much. We’re supposed to be imaginary, at least. It’s as though realists can’t fathom any of us are serious, so they regard moral antirealists as though we’re method actors, so deep into our role as skeptics that we forgot we were just performing for their benefit.

It’s as if we’re the philosophical equivalent of Jared Leto playing that awful version of the Joker. We’ve got a fake “nihilist” tattoo on our foreheads, and ridiculous clown makeup. But at the end of the day, we wipe all that shit off, go home, and act like everyone does: like a moral realist.

I want to challenge this self-satisfaction. I think philosophers limit too much of the ongoing disputes in the field to a host of considerations downstream of more foundational assumptions, and that if there are serious problems in the field, they are going to turn on more foundational assumptions and problems with their methods.