The moral realist/antirealist dispute is more like rock paper scissors than a dichotomy
Twitter Tuesday #32
In a previous post, I discussed this tweet, which asks:
How do atheists explain the fact that we just happened to evolve emotional reactions that track the objective moral truths?
The question presumes that there are objective moral truths. That’s fine; there’s nothing wrong with a question with a presumption built into it. One response to this question is to reject the presumption: there are no objective moral truths, and we’re not able to track them.
Philip Goff proposed this article as a possible solution in response. I am not going to assess that article here, though I’d like to address claims about direct acquaintance or other forms of “access” to “intrinsic value” and related notions. I was part of a big discussion on this topic some years ago, so I should revisit that conversation at some point. At least part of the problem with such claims is that since the notion of “intrinsic value” is unintelligible, it’s not possible for anyone to have access to it. For now, I want to address Goff’s reaction to the replies to this tweet. Here are a few:
We didn't. There's no such thing as stance independent objective moral truths, numinous moral properties or similar. That's the anti-realist answer.
Huge assumption that morals are objective truths
By the fact that your so called “objective moral truths” are just constructed based on your emotions
Why assume that emotional reactions track objective moral truths? Why do so many of us spend inordinate amounts of time processing our emotional reactions such that our behaviour can be more pro-socially conforming if our knee-jerks track the truth to begin with?
These respondents are challenging the presumption behind the question. Goff had an odd reaction to the responses he received:
Reading responses to this, I'm shocked how many feel they can just assert no objective moral truths without any argument. This is a very contentious viewpoint among the relevant class of experts (i.e. philosophers) so you need to argue for it! https://t.co/IPEJRAGxl2
Goff replied to Respondent #2 above, which you can find here:
Huge assumption that they're not.
Is it, though? It’s at least not any more of a “huge assumption” than the assumption that realism is true. And, in any case, one need not assume moral realism isn’t true to not assume that it is. It’s totally reasonable to respond to a question that presumes moral realism is true by not accepting that moral realism is true.
This exchange then took place:
Dan M Kovacs: What is the argument that morals are objective truths?
Without invoking religion
Genuine question btw - I assume you are far more knowledgeable on this than me!Goff: What's the argument that they're not?
Dan M Kovacs: This isn’t an argument though
You are making the affirmative claim, so would you not have the burden of proof?
If it’s your belief I’m sure you would have at least a basic explanation as to why?
Goff: I haven't made any assertions. In contrast, you seem to be making an assertion that there are no objective moral truths, and not providing an argument for that assertion.
…it goes on, but I won’t repeat the entirety of this exchange here. Instead, I want to note that people who were rejecting the first tweet (“How do atheists explain the fact that we just happened to evolve emotional reactions that track the objective moral truths?”) were responding to a question that presumed moral realism. Those responses were directed at someone whose question was presuming realism was true; that Goff made no such assertion is irrelevant. At the very least, I would have thought one would regard realists and antirealists haven’t symmetrical explanatory burdens. I’m not sure how Goff is evaluating these exchanges such that there’s a distinctive burden on antirealists. Goff ends this exchange with this peculiar remark, in response to the question of whether Goff thinks there are objective moral truths:
I do, but I wasn't arguing for that here. For 'Why?' have a look at ch. 1 of my book 'Why?' Briefly: I think human motivation, both theoretical and practical, assumes objective value, and as such the denial of it is a radical skeptical scenario akin to saying we're in Matrix...
Denying moral realism is like a “radical skeptical scenario”? Why? What’s radical about denying moral realism? For what it’s worth, I address Goff’s remarks in the chapter he references here. Goff goes on to express sympathies for Enoch’s deliberative indispensability. I find Enoch’s claims on the matter completely unpersuasive. When I deliberate, I deliberate about how to achieve my goals. Nothing about deliberation presumes normative realism.
1.1 Asserting one’s views without arguments is totally fine in many contexts
Goff seems concerned that people felt fine asserting moral realism is true without presenting an argument. I find this concern extremely strange. Why would people who have a position on a matter need to present an argument for it? Why would it matter if the position is contentious? So what? Simply because I hold a contentious position doesn’t mean people have some special obligation to present an argument for it. There may be certain contexts where there’s a reasonable assumption that if you present a contentious claim, that you have some responsibility to argue for your position, but the context of this tweet exchange doesn’t seem like a good candidate for such a situation. What you have is something like this:
Realist: How is it we can detect the objective moral facts?
Antirealists: I don’t think we can detect objective moral facts because I don’t think there are any.
Goff: Antirealists, where are your arguments?
If a realist asks a question that presumes realism, and an antirealist rejects the presumption, why does the antirealist have any special burden to accompany their rejection of the presumption with arguments, if the realist didn’t have an obligation to present arguments for realism in the first place? Goff seems to be making an asymmetric demand of antirealists in a context where their goal appears to involve rejecting a presumption and voicing their position on the matter. Nothing about that context suggests they’re helping themselves to their position being true without arguments, and it certainly doesn’t suggest (as Goff implies) that they don’t think they need arguments for their position.
But let’s dwell on that latter point for a moment: even if there is some context where you’re asserting a “contentious” position, and others would normally expect you to have arguments for your view, do you need to present an argument for it? No. I don’t find it necessary to present arguments for my views. I can just…have my views. I don’t owe philosophers anything. I don’t care about their norms or expectations. Participating in the philosophical dialectic is entirely voluntary. We don’t owe academic philosophers an explanation for anything.
Given this, my initial, glib reaction to this is that of course people can “just assert” that there are no objective moral truths without argument. Watch:
There are no objective moral truths.
See? No argument. I’m sure Goff didn’t intend this to be taken literally, and there’s likely a normative assumption implicit in the remark. But even then, I don’t see that much of a problem. I don’t think there’s anything objectionable about asserting one’s position without an argument. If someone asks if I believe in God, and I say “no, I’m an atheist,” it’d be a bit silly to say “I’m shocked you think you can just assert there’s no God without an argument.” What’s there to be shocked about? Whether there’s some appropriate expectation that one presents an argument depends on the social context. Nothing about the context of the tweets under discussion suggests that people who respond to a question that presumes realism is true by saying that their answer is that realism isn’t true makes the respondents any more inappropriately presumptuous than the person who posed the question in the first place. For comparison, suppose I asked:
Given that Christians believe us atheists will burn in hell forever, how do they reconcile the fact that this is obviously evil?
If Christians responded by stating that they don’t believe atheists will burn in hell forever, or don’t believe this is “obviously evil,” it’d be a bit weird to object that they didn’t argue for this. There’s nothing inappropriate about responding to a question that presupposes something about other people’s views by saying “I reject the presuppositions behind this question.” You don’t have to argue for why. Of course anyone else could come along and say “okay, well, why do you reject those presumptions?” but there’s nothing wrong with not immediately providing arguments. There’s also nothing wrong with opting not to respond to the question.
There’s also an extraordinary irony here. I don’t even grant that the antirealists responding to Goff said things that consistently suggested that “they can just assert no objective moral truths without any argument.” But let’s suppose they were so confident they didn’t think they needed arguments.
The primary reason moral realists tend to have for thinking realism is true is that it’s “obvious” or “self-evident” or just “seems so true” to them. In short, they simply appeal to their own intuitions, take their intuitions to be prima facie justification for realism, maintain that there’s a presumption in favor of their position, and that if anyone disagrees, the onus is on them to show otherwise. As if everyone else has an obligation to defer to their intuitions. This is often accompanied by the insistence that their position is “intuitive” or “commonsense.” It’s not intuitive to me, and I don’t agree that it’s a commonsense position.
Advocacy for moral realism may be accompanied by one of the most presumptuous, I-just-know-I'm-right-dammit attitudes in all of philosophy…and Goff is shocked antirealists would have the audacity to express their view without accompanying it with an argument? You’ve got to be kidding me.
Moral antirealists should stop feeling we’re under the boot of moral realists. If moral realists are entitled to be so confident, so are we. I do not grant that there is any presumption in favor of moral realism. I think moral realism is a profoundly implausible position, somewhere between Bigfoot and the earth being flat.
On top of this, moral realists routinely engage in browbeating and social pressure, insinuating that moral antirealists are stupid or evil. If, like me, an antirealist denies that they have realist intuitions, we’re often told that we’re lying, or that the only way we’d lack such intuitions is if we were psychopaths or suffered from brain damage. Realists have seriously suggested that since they have functional moral faculties, but I don’t, that I ought to defer to them on matters of morality. The conceit that if one would dare to reject both realism and the presumption in favor of realism, that we must be lying, evil, or insane, is as ridiculous as it is embarrassing. No, I don’t have “realist intuitions.” No, I don’t think I ever did. And no, that does not mean I’m a psychopath or that there’s something wrong with my brain. I grant that these are all technically possible, but seriously proposing them in a discussion with someone is obnoxious and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
This kind of browbeating has probably prompted many moral antirealists to be hesitant to be confident about our views. As though we’re allowed to be antirealists, but we have to be submissive and constantly acknowledge we’re “biting the bullet” by accepting a view with allegedly “counterintuitive” and “unpalatable” implications. I completely reject this framing, and it’s time other moral antirealists did so as well.
1.2 Asserting one’s views without presenting an argument doesn’t entail that one doesn’t think they don’t need arguments for those views
Note that the original question presumed moral realism, rather than arguing for it. Yet when people challenged this presumption, Goff is shocked that they would “just assert” that there are no objective moral truths without argument? What about the person who posed the question? It’s not like they presented arguments for moral realism. Is Goff shocked that they’d just presume moral realism is true (and that we can track moral truths with our emotions) without an argument? If not, why not?
I went through the exchanges that took place under Goff’s tweet, and I didn’t see any indication from any of the tweets above that the people who provided those responses think that they have no need to argue for an antirealist position. At least one of them did present an argument for antirealism. So I’m not really sure who Goff is referring to. Maybe I missed it, but even if there was an example, this wouldn’t establish a pattern, and I don’t think there is a pattern here.
1.3 You don’t have to argue for contentious positions
The last part of Goff’s post is interesting. Goff says:
This is a very contentious viewpoint among the relevant class of experts (i.e. philosophers) so you need to argue for it!
So if it wasn’t contentious, you wouldn’t need to argue for it? About a quarter of philosophers are non-naturalists, about a third are naturalist realists, and about a quarter are moral antirealists. And that’s not even breaking down the different subcategories within these positions.
All major metaethical positions are “contentious,” and none commands a substantial majority of assent among philosophers. Even if you collapse naturalist and non-naturalist realists together, you only get 62% of philosophers. That’s nothing close to an established consensus. But I’m puzzled as to how Goff goes about deciding who “needs” to argue for their positions: Do you need to argue for a position if more than 50% of philosophers would disagree? If so, why?
And what level of abstraction is necessary? The arguments for non-naturalist realism and naturalist realism are not the same as one another, nor are the positions, themselves, the same. While 62% of philosophers endorse moral realism, this is an extremely misleading figure. The 2020 PhilPapers survey also includes a question that provides more specific information about the metaethical views of respondents:
As you can see, no position comes anywhere close to exceeding 50%. Non-naturalist realists make up 26.6%. The other survey question about realism vs. antirealism found that 26.1% of philosophers endorse moral antirealism. Then we have about 31.6% that endorse naturalism. Why lump naturalism and non-naturalism in together? Naturalists share many affinities with antirealists, in that naturalists tend to reject much of what antirealists find objectionable about realism, e.g., irreducible normativity and the like. The 62% figures a misleading and artificial figure. One could add up antirealists and naturalists, call the collective positions “Anti-Moorean,” and argue that non-naturalist views are “contentious,” noting, ironically, that there’s almost exactly as many non-naturalist realist respondents as there are antirealists. In light of this, perhaps we should insist that non-naturalist realism is a similarly contentious position and that people therefore need to argue for it!
For what it’s worth, if we consider constructivism, expressivism, and error theory to all technically be a form of antirealism, then even if some of the respondents to the direct realism/antirealism question may have eschewed the “antirealist” label, it may, in fact, be the case that some form of antirealism is the most common response if one divides responses into naturalist realism, non-naturalist realism, and some form of antirealism. The weird lumping together of naturalism and non-naturalism as some super-bloc is leveraged by realists to depict antirealism as some kind of weird minority position. It isn’t. The actual situation is far closer to rock paper scissors.
In any case, I’m still puzzled by Goff’s suggestion: you have to argue for a position if the position is “contentious”? Why? Which positions aren’t contentious, and therefore don’t need to be argued for? Does this include realism? If so, realism in general, or some form in particular? Why hold that you don’t need to argue for a position if you are in the majority at a higher level of abstract (“realism”) but not in a majority if you’re more specific (“non-naturalist realism”)? Which level of abstraction do we use to determine how contentious a position is? The whole thing strikes me as weird and arbitrary.
1.4 Expertise
I won’t say much about this here, but I question whether philosophers have the relevant kind of “expertise” that we should consider their judgments on whether realism is true to be especially reliable. I criticize appeals to philosophical expertise here. I should note that there’s also some empirical literature challenging (with some success) the alleged “expertise” of philosophers. I’ve seen little by way of good argument or compelling evidence that would lead me to think we should put much stock in what most philosophers think.
2.0 Further replies
One person responded to Goff’s shock by saying:
These regular appeals to authority and majority opinion among philosophers are really not convincing, Philip. It's perfectly possible for a majority of philosophers to be wrong about something.
According to Goff, this response misses the point:
You've misunderstood my point. Of course it's possible for a majority to be wrong; I didn't suggest otherwise. It's perfectly respectable to defend moral anti-realism. My point is that you can't just state something so contentious among experts *without argument*. Imagine if…
...people just felt fine asserting something very contentious among neuroscientists as though it were obviously true and didn't need argument. The point I keep making is important, because, in contrast to other academic expertise, this class of experts is not taken seriously.
Again, I’m really puzzled. Why is Goff so shocked people stated their views without arguments?
The last part is interesting:
[...] in contrast to other academic expertise, this class of experts is not taken seriously.
It’s not clear philosophers have established that they have expertise specifically on whether moral realism is true.
Conclusion
I want to emphasize three main takeaways:
Philosophers may sometimes insist people have some obligation to argue for their positions. They don’t. Participating in philosophical dialectic is voluntary and people are entitled to have positions and not argue for them. Whether or not, and to what extent, we pressure anyone into presenting arguments is a practical and social question. If a policymaker wanted to implement a new policy, the rest of us may demand they present arguments or reasons for this. This is an appropriate situation for demanding arguments. There are many practical contexts where it’s appropriate to demand an argument (e.g. a courtroom). I don’t regard Twitter discussions about abstract philosophical issues to be one of those situations.
Moral antirealists have no special burden to present arguments for their position that (at the very least) realists don’t share.
Moral antirealism isn’t significantly more contentious than common realist positions. The 62% figure from the 2020 PhilPapers survey is extremely misleading. It lumps all naturalists and non-naturalists together. Yet naturalists and non-naturalists are so different that in many ways naturalists are more like antirealists. Once you split the 62% of realists up, the total number of non-naturalist realists is almost identical to the number of antirealists. All three positions are contentious, and none commands a majority. Collapsing naturalism and non-naturalism together is just one way to carve up the dialectical space. You could make a reasonable case for lumping naturalists and antirealists together, too.