There are no Unconditional Pragmatic Reasons to be a Value Realist
A Critical Response to J.P. Andrew
1.0 Introduction
According to JPA, there are strong pragmatic reasons for the ordinary person to endorse value realism, the view that there are stance-independent values. JPA is mistaken. The ordinary person does not have any strong pragmatic reasons to endorse value realism. Doing so would yield few or no benefits, and they would not, in any way, be better off by endorsing value realism. My goal here is to offer a response to JPA’s dubious case for the alleged benefits of believing in value realism. You should first read JPA’s article here. If you leave a comment over there, be polite.
2.0 Value nihilism
According to JPA:
Whether one affirms Value Realism is of tremendous importance. It will determine, to a significant extent, (i) how one relates to other beings, (ii) how one conceives of oneself and the world more broadly, and (iii) how one structures and conducts one’s own life, in the very broadest sense.
These are big claims. But they are just that: claims. JPA has a lot of work to do to make a case that any of these claims are true. Unfortunately, what he offers does not provide any strong case for endorsing (i), (ii), or (iii). Some of his claims are shuffled off into endnotes. Here’s one associated with (i):
If one thinks, for example, that there are stance-independent reasons (deriving from stance-independent value) to care about the welfare of nonhuman animals and suffering children in far away places, this is more likely to lead one to make personal sacrifices (e.g., by abstaining from factory-farmed meat and by donating to effective charities) than if one denies the existence of stance-independent value and regards one’s desires as one’s only source of reasons. To anticipate: yes, avoid-anti-realists about value can be extremely generous. I think it’s likely that such people’s professed metaethical commitments fail to align with their actual commitments. Such a suggestion is apt to annoy these people, but it’s manifestly the case that we’re often confused about our own views — and that we often say things (and fool ourselves into thinking that we believe things) in the course of philosophical debate that don’t reflect our actual commitments.
The claim that realists are more likely to make personal sacrifices is an empirical claim about human psychology. There is no good evidence that it’s true. There are two papers testing the causal impact of manipulations of belief in moral realism and antirealism: Rai and Holyoak (2013) and Young and Durwin (2013). Both studies have such significant methodological shortcomings that neither provides substantive evidence for JPA’s claims. Both misoperationalize their attempts at prompting changes in metaethical beliefs and neither provides convincing evidence of a significant shift in belief. For instance, Rai and Holyoak explicitly acknowledge that metaethical relativism does not entail a normative commitment to tolerance, and that moral realism doesn’t entail a commitment to intolerance. Nevertheless, their priming conditions explicitly violated their own operationalizations of these concepts. They state:
In the moral relativism condition, participants were told that our moral values are subjective opinions and we cannot impose them on another group of people… (p. 996)
In the moral absolutism condition, participants were told that some moral values are objectively right or wrong and it is our duty to impose our values on other groups of people regardless of what they believe… (p. 997)
In short, their priming conditions include a massive normative confound that makes it impossible to isolate the causal impact of an exclusive manipulation of belief in realism or antirealism.
Such manipulations are typically transient, anyway, and are unlikely to reflect the psychological consequences of internalized commitment to a metaethical position, rather than (at best) the short-term consequences of an abrupt threat to one’s current beliefs. Priming someone to be slightly less confident in moral realism in the midst of a study and then immediately assessing behavior does not reflect the psychological processes associated with being a committed antirealist for much the same reason priming a Christian to doubt Christianity for a few minutes and measuring their behavior isn’t a good way to measure the behavior of people who’ve been atheists for years. Similar issues in operationalization and transience are applicable to Young and Durwin’s (2013) study as well.
These studies provide very little evidence of the prosocial benefits of endorsing moral realism and aside from these there isn’t much else. For what it’s worth, research by Fisher et al. (2017) purports to show that adopting a cooperative mindset increases moral antirealism, which may indicate a positive link between antirealism and certain aspects of moral behavior. However, this study too suffers significant methodological shortcomings. Nobody should take mixed, preliminary data like this to be especially conclusive in the social sciences, anyway. It takes a large, well-validated, converging body of data gathered over an extended period of time to establish broad and general psychological findings about human behavior. What we have at present barely scratches the surface.
At present, we just don’t have any good evidence that realists are more altruistic than antirealists. Also, most people probably don’t endorse either position (see Bush, 2023), so it’s probably moot which one has more of an impact (if any) on behavior. Nevertheless, given JPA’s wording (“this is more likely to lead one to…”) he appears to be making a causal claim: that belief in realism causes greater levels of personal sacrifice. There is no good evidence that it’s true, and JPA does not provide any evidence for this claim. He just…asserts it.
This is one of the most disappointing aspects of JPA’s writing. He often makes assertions but provides no arguments or evidence for them. Productive philosophy involves more than simply reporting what one thinks; it involves presenting arguments, reasoning, or considerations that help others to understand why you think that and what might serve as evidence or reasons for them to endorse the position in question. This is followed by yet another assertion:
I think it’s likely that such people’s professed metaethical commitments fail to align with their actual commitments.
This is also just a statement of what JPA thinks. JPA appears to believe that people who are altruistic, generous, and so on are implicitly committed to moral realism, even if they claim to be antirealists. This suggests a performative inconsistency. But what is inconsistent about being an antirealist and being generous or altruistic? JPA doesn’t state what the inconsistency is. We’re given nothing. Just a brute assertion, with no elaboration, argument, or evidence.
His suggestion is extremely dubious. For comparison, people tend to invest a great deal in their aesthetic preferences: they eat the food they like, listen to the music they enjoy, pursue romantic relationships with people they are attracted to. Do these behaviors imply that people believe there are stance-independent normative facts about what food is tasty, what music is good, and what people are attractive?
No. Acting on one’s preferences in these domains in no way implies or fits better with a realist interpretation. Likewise, a moral antirealist may desire to help others or want to be kind or have a strong normative moral commitment to doing what they consider good. Just as there is no inconsistency in choosing food you like over food you dislike because you want to, there is no inconsistency in an antirealist being altruistic instead of selfish because they want to. What’s the tension here? What’s the inconsistency?
He continues:
Such a suggestion is apt to annoy these people, but it’s manifestly the case that we’re often confused about our own views — and that we often say things (and fool ourselves into thinking that we believe things) in the course of philosophical debate that don’t reflect our actual commitments.
Of course we can be confused about our own views. This goes both ways. JPA could be confused about his own values. People who claim to be realists could just be committed to and act like antirealists, with their professed realism doing nothing but trailing along whatever their subjective values are, anointing them verbally with the status of being stance-independently true, when really such people are every bit as driven to rationalize and justify their personal values and preferences. Without empirical evidence, speculation in either direction doesn’t mean much.
JPA also suggests we may be annoyed by such a suggestion, but I’m not even annoyed by these remarks. I’m just bored by them. If I’m going to argue with an opposing side, I’d at least want them to attempt to make a case for their position. But JPA doesn’t do this. JPA does nothing to show that antirealists are confused about their commitment to antirealism. He thinks we are. If JPA wants to do philosophy he should present arguments and reasons, not just tell us what he thinks. That’s the kind of remark that belongs in a diary, not a philosophy article.
3.0 Realist and antirealist views of the world
Moving on to the (ii), the notion that our views on value realism significantly determine “how one conceives of oneself and the world more broadly”, we get this:
The view of the world as devoid of stance-independent value is very different from the view of the world as teaming [sic] with value which ought to be recognized by those beings capable of recognizing it. The former view is that of a world in which, ultimately, nothing matters; the latter is that of a world in which things really do matter, regardless of what anyone believes or desires (such that the world really would have been worse for the Nazis’ prevailing, even if the only people left living on the face of the earth believed otherwise).
This account makes antirealism sound dreadful and unpleasant: antirealism is the view that “nothing matters” while realism is the view that things “really do matter.” This might sound like a substantive difference, but it isn’t. At the outset of the article, JPA states:
[...] Value Realism: the view according to which value is real and objective (i.e., stance-independent); that at least something matters, as such.
Note the use of “real and objective.” JPA just smuggles “real” into his account alongside objective as part of the definition, then adds that the notion that “at least something matters, as such” is accompanied by an endnote explaining what this means:
Something matters as such just in case it matters intrinsically — due to its nature or one of its essential properties.
By “mattering” JPA just means mattering-in-a-realist-sense. So, when he says that antirealism holds that “nothing matters” while realism holds that “things really do matter,” all this consists in is a restatement of the definitions of the positions: antirealists deny things matter stance-independently, and realists affirm that they do. It is thus extremely misleading to describe the former view as holding that “nothing matters,” and the latter as the view “things really do matter.”
JPA just stipulates that by “nothing matters” he means that nothing matters in the realist’s sense and that by “actually mattering” he just means things matter in the realist’s sense. By dropping these explicit stipulative characterizations of the meanings of these terms, and presenting those terms without these meanings immediately present, his remarks can and probably do give the misleading impression to some readers that he’s drawing attention to a nontrivial difference, when all he’s done is just repackage a technical distinction and jam it into phrases that have ordinary language uses that have pragmatic content that isn’t entailed by the technical distinctions he’s drawing. “Nothing matters” in ordinary language carries pragmatic implications about one’s attitude and disposition that aren’t accurately captured by the technical position that nothing stance-independently matters.
For comparison, suppose there were two views of knowledge: knowledge realism, and knowledge antirealism.
According to knowledge realism, knowledge requires the mystical perception of the fundamental nature of reality that can only be obtained by opening the third eye, typically through extensive meditation or psychedelic drugs.
According to knowledge antirealism, it is not the case that knowledge requires the mystical perception of the fundamental nature of reality that can only be obtained by opening the third eye, typically through extensive meditation or psychedelic drugs. This could be because the antirealist thinks that knowledge is impossible, or it could be that knowledge is possible but doesn’t require what the knowledge realist says it does.
Suppose a knowledge realist writes a blog post defending their view and decides to take a similar approach to JPA. They could say this:
The view of the world as devoid of the perception of truth is very different from the view of the world as teeming with knowledge which ought to be recognized by those beings capable of recognizing it. The former view is that of a world in which, ultimately, knowledge is impossible; the latter is that of a world in which genuine knowledge is possible.
This depicts knowledge antirealism as absurd. It gives the impression that only the knowledge realist thinks knowledge is possible, but the antirealist doesn’t. In everyday contexts, a person who went around saying that we couldn’t know anything would imply that we’d be paralyzed, unable to make decisions, and have no basis for favoring any particular belief over another. It would, in other words, carry clear practical implications about how we navigate through the world. And yet denying knowledge realism as defined above wouldn’t commit one to any of this. It would consist merely in denying a bizarre technical conception of knowledge. Doing so carries no practical implications at all. Likewise, denying value realism carries absolutely no practical implications.
If we step outside this closed terminological framing in which “knowledge” is tied to weird ideas about opening one’s third eye, knowledge antirealists can and most probably do think knowledge of some kind is possible, they just don’t agree that it requires dropping acid and listening to a bunch of Tool.
But given the knowledge realist’s stipulative definition of knowledge realism, it is in fact the case that most of my readers would deny knowledge is possible. It’s just that most of us think “knowledge is impossible” is only true conditional on a particular perspective of what this entails. Those of us who’d reject knowledge realism as described here would probably also reject the knowledge realist’s stance on what is required for knowledge. But the knowledge realist can always define knowledge in terms of these requirements, then insist that if you deny their account of the requirements for knowledge, you deny knowledge altogether.
This is what JPA is doing. JPA is framing the dispute between realists and antirealists as though even if antirealists rejected value realism, they’d still somehow be obligated to grant that only value realism entails that anything “genuinely matters.” But this is itself something value antirealists can and probably would reject. You can stipulate that what you mean by the terms in question just entails that only value realism allows for things to “genuinely matter,” but stipulation comes at the cost of a hollow victory.
JPA is thus exhibiting all the hallmarks of the standard halfway fallacy and the magic beans fallacy. His objections are based almost entirely on assuming he’s partially correct, then exploiting the implications of tendentious and misleading framing of the dialectical space to make antirealism look unappealing without actually presenting any substantive arguments for his views. This is the halfway fallacy. And to the extent that he relies on rhetorically framing only his position as entailing that things “really” matter, this is achieved by stipulative fiat, is vacuous, and prompts people to conflate his account of value with value itself. This is the magic beans fallacy. In short, what JPA is doing is argument by presumption, stipulation, and rhetorical framing. There is no substance to it.
4.0 Mattering-to vs. Mattering intrinsically
Why should anyone find JPA’s claims about the difference between realism and antirealism/nihilism (I’ll use these interchangeably) to be practically relevant? I certainly don’t. I don’t care if things stance-independently matter. That doesn’t matter to me. Antirealists are free to conceive of and endorse other conceptions of things mattering or having value. Here’s one such distinction:
Mattering-to
Mattering intrinsically
Something can matter-to if it matters to me, or to you, or to anyone. All that’s required is that one cares about, values, wants, desires, or prefers it, or however else you’d like to frame it, as long as it’s cashed out in terms of stances. On such a view I can care about something, or value it, and so on. And in this respect, it can matter to me. For instance, my family matters to me. Mattering-to does not involve any notion of the target of my valuation, i.e., who or what matters to me, mattering in any intrinsic respect, i.e., mattering in virtue of its nature or essential properties, nor does mattering-to require that something matters independent of me or anyone else valuing it. For something to matter to me is for me to hold a certain stance towards it whereby I value it. This doesn’t require it to have the property of mattering, independent of whether I or anyone else cares about it (i.e., whether it matters-to us).
Given that the antirealist is entitled to defend their own conception of value, we stand in a symmetric relation to the realist when it comes to accusing the other of “value nihilism.” I could stipulate that mattering-to is the only sense in which things “really do matter,” then point out that actually only we antirealists think things “really do matter” insofar as realists deny this kind of mattering is “real” or “actual” mattering, and that value realists thus don’t believe things matter in the only respect in which they “really” do. In other words: value realists are in fact value nihilists. Only the values antirealist think real values are real. Seemingly paradoxically, then, only value antirealists believe in real values, while value realists are committed to values that aren’t real.
Furthermore, when it comes to what I care about, the only things I care about are things that matter to me. This is the kind of mattering that motivates me to act, that prompts me to feel happy or sad. That influences me. It is, in other words, the only practically relevant kind of value. What about mattering intrinsically? I don’t care what matters intrinsically. That doesn’t matter to me. If you were to tell me that while my family matters to me, some other family matters intrinsically, I would not care. The fact that something matters intrinsically is completely motivationally and practically irrelevant.
If it doesn’t matter to you whether something matters intrinsically, then the fact that something matters intrinsically would have no practical significance for you. If it does matter to you whether something matters intrinsically, then the fact that something matters intrinsically would have practical significance, but that practical significance would still be based on what matters to you. So it could be that value realism has conditional practical relevance: whether it has practical relevance turns on whether any given individual cares about whether it’s true or not. Critically, though, it’s worth noting that it isn’t things mattering to you that would cause you to act, but your beliefs about what things mattered. Things mattering wouldn’t really be in the practical or motivational driver’s seat on its own; it must be mediated through beliefs, which in turn only become motivationally relevant if we have the right set of goals whereby those beliefs are motivationally relevant.
Does it matter to you whether something matters intrinsically? I think most people would find on reflection that it doesn’t, and that it is therefore not the case that value realism would be practically significant for most people. But I don’t know. That, too, is an empirical question.
Let’s say we set aside mattering-to entirely. Some things matter intrinsically and some things don’t. Now what? What do we do? What would move you to pursue what matters intrinsically rather than what doesn’t matter intrinsically? I would love to hear from realists who believe they have a good answer to this question. I don’t think that they will. I think the whole idea of disconnecting value from motivation, goals, and desires is utterly nonsensical and that the entire foundation on which value realism is based is utter madness. It is tantamount to insisting that nobody should ever eat anything based on how it tastes to them, but should instead exclusively make gastronomic decisions (decisions about what to eat, in terms of the flavor or other culinary aspects of consumption of food and drink, independent of moral, prudential, financial, and other considerations) on the basis of the intrinsic tastiness of different foods. Do you find mushrooms disgusting? Well, if they’re intrinsically tasty then too bad, you should eat them even if you find yourself sputtering and gagging the whole time. To what end, goal, or purpose should you do this? Apparently not your own.
To me, I am utterly baffled at the notion that anyone would care about things “mattering” in the realist sense, that is, of mattering intrinsically. If this is something you care about, reach out to me. I’d like to hear from you. Why do you care about whether things matter independent of your goals, values, and desires? If you don’t care, then I’d still like to hear from you. I’d find it fascinating if there was someone who thinks that some things matter intrinsically but doesn’t care whether they do.
5.0 Life plans
Finally, we have this, following (iii):
One’s life plan is apt to look different if one thinks that value is not merely a function of one’s own beliefs and preferences.
I doubt it. It wouldn’t for me, at least. Even if there was intrinsic value, i.e., value that was not merely a function of my own beliefs and preferences, I still believe that, as a matter of descriptive fact, I only act on my personal values, i.e., what matters to me, and that insofar as this is reflected by my beliefs and preferences, and I don’t care if something is intrinsically valuable, even if I were convinced that some things had intrinsic value, this would make no practical difference to me at all. My life plans would be utterly unchanged. If this would matter to anyone else: why? Why change your life plans?
Again, though, one’s plans might change if one believes in intrinsic value and one is also motivated to comply with those values, even if they don’t matter-to that person. But they’d still only matter insofar as it matters-to someone to comply with whatever matters stance-independently. Mattering-to is still in the motivational driver’s seat (unless the realist denies this, too, which they may). But this would at best suggest that life plans would differ only in a contingent way, conditional on human psychology. Regardless of whether one endorsed motivational internalism i.e., the view that a belief that something is stance-independently valuable necessarily but defeasibly motivates us to act accordingly, or externalism, which denies this, it becomes an empirical matter as to the extent to which belief in stance-independent value actually prompts any significant change in people’s behavior.
In practice, what might actually cause changes in behavior wouldn’t be a belief in stance-independent value, but would be downstream of a broader, comprehensive worldview change in which one came not only to believe in stance-independent value but adopted a host of other views about epistemology, intuition, motivation, and so on. Few philosophical positions as derivative and specific as value realism are likely to emerge in isolation of a host of surrounding views that render such a position coherent and stable, which is to be expected of just about any view. Accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior is unlikely to occur in isolation, while you retain a firm commitment to naturalism, or a denial of revelation or miracles or sin. In practice, then, it would be difficult to demonstrate that value realism is, itself, causally responsible for significant changes in behavior. In practice, it will tend to be massively confounded with other beliefs, attitudes, and commitments.
Given this, JPA’s central thesis, that there are practical benefits to endorsing value realism, is a thoroughly empirical claim. It’s strange to focus so much on psychology and yet not engage with any empirical work relevant to one’s hypothesis.
JPA continues:
According to Nihilism, nothing matters as such (i.e., in-itself). On this view, there are no ends which we ought, objectively, to pursue; reason cannot be practical (i.e., it can’t tell us what we ought to do); and there is no possibility of speaking sensibly in terms of our being more or less reasonable in our selection of ends.
I dislike much of the framing here, but this is all correct. “Nihilism” is a loaded term that carries negative connotations, and likewise saying that if you’re a value nihilist that you think “reason cannot be practical” sounds pretty bad. But these are all loaded ways of saying that if you don’t think there are stance-independent values then you don’t think there are stance-independent values, only with the use of terms that carry ordinary, colloquial meanings, which gives the misleading impression that the “nihilist” denies more than they in fact deny. A “nihilist” could think that “reason is practical” in the sense that reason can facilitate goal success.
JPA continues to slap various labels onto nihilism that are only applicable in a narrow way that presumes realism:
Nihilism entails that all of our acts are, ultimately, arational (i.e., not subject to rational evaluation or scrutiny).
A nihilist may agree that our stances cannot be subject to rational evaluation, i.e., it wouldn’t be irrational to hold any particular set of values. I do think this. But I don’t think this means our actions are “arational.” This is because I am fine with instrumental conceptions of rationality according to which one judges the degree to which an action is rational on the basis of its relation to the goals of the agent in question. For instance, if someone desires to quench their thirst, and has no other relevant desires, I’d consider them irrational if they chose to drink a glass of sand instead of a glass of water.
The term “ultimately” and JPA’s subsequent remarks acknowledge instrumental conceptions of rationality, but that only makes his initial claim all the more perplexing. Once again, JPA’s ways of framing things is superficial and misleading. The only sense in which we don’t think our actions are “ultimately” rational is in the non-instrumental sense. Yet saying we think actions are ultimately “arational” gives the impression that we’d go further than this. As you can see, this implication is attenuated by the very next remark, which clarifies:
If Nihilism is true, then although our acts could be more or less conducive to the ends which we happen to have set for ourselves (i.e., more or less instrumentally rational), all of those ends would, in the final analysis, be arbitrary — and everything pointless and meaningless in the deepest possible sense.
…only to end with even more loaded language. First, if the nihilist rejects non-instrumental conceptions of rationality and endorses instrumental ones, why would they agree that our actions are “arational”? They wouldn’t. They would agree that they’re not non-instrumentally rational, but JPA opts to use the term “ultimately” instead of non-instrumentally (or stance-independently, or some other equivalent). Once again, JPA employs ordinary language terms that often serve as intensifiers and carry practical implications as a stand-in for technical conceptions of terms. This allows technical positions JPA endorses, like non-instrumental rationality, to benefit from being reframed in non-technical terms that carry pragmatic implications that wouldn’t accompany the technical terms, thereby leeching rhetorical force from those terms.
This adds nothing to the case for value realism, since this can work equally well in reverse. If JPA rejects instrumental conceptions of rationality and only endorses non-instrumental ones, and if only instrumental conceptions of rationality are correct (or at least denies their relevance to how we conceive of value and mattering), then nothing is rational or irrational in the respects JPA thinks it is, and thus we could say from this antirealist perspective that the value realist thinks that we are “ultimately arational.” That sounds bad, but all it means is that value realists reject instrumental rationality as the proper conception of value for capturing the relation between value and rationality. And if that’s what someone means, they could just say that instead of an unhelpful and misleading remark about realists being committed to people being arational.
This misleading use of language doesn’t end here. The term “arbitrary” is also misleading. Is it arbitrary for me, all else being equal, to prefer foods I like over foods I don’t like? Is it arbitrary for me to prefer listening to music I like versus music I don’t like? Is it arbitrary for me to prefer the company of people I want to be around rather than the company of violent strangers who want to torture me? If so, then much of what I do is “arbitrary,” but…well, so what? JPA’s goal here is to show that value realism is somehow pragmatically relevant. If the notion of acting on the basis of what promotes my own goals and values is somehow “arbitrary,” then JPA must be operating on notion of “pragmatic” quite alien to my own. I take things to be pragmatically relevant because they promote my goals and values! JPA characterizes pragmatic reasons as:
A pragmatic reason to affirm some proposition P is a reason relating to the practical benefits of affirming P.
Just what exactly is a “practical benefit” if it isn’t a benefit from my point of view, and with respect to promoting my instrumental aims? JPA wants to convince us there are “pragmatic reasons” and thus “practical benefits” to endorsing value realism, but then criticizes views which construe rationality in such terms. This isn’t necessarily inconsistent. JPA can endorse the view that rationality is distinct from pragmatic considerations, but his own way of framing the matter suggests that pragmatic reasons, or practical benefits, insofar as these are themselves reducible to something instrumental, would be “arbitrary.” If this is supposed to be objectionable or bad, what is objectionable or bad about it? And if it is bad to pursue “arbitrary” ends, why should any of us care about the “practical benefits” of value realism? Wouldn’t these be arbitrary? If, on the other hand, it is arbitrary but this isn’t a problem, then why is JPA pointing out that on value nihilism our ends would be “arbitrary”? In any case, the value nihilist need not grant that on the mattering-to view that one’s values are “arbitrary.” Our values are simply given. They’re no more “arbitrary” then our hair color or our shoe size. To call our values arbitrary is just a category mistake.
Realists often employ this term, “arbitrary,” as a kind of sneer word that makes antirealist views sound bad. Yet it does so not by demonstrating the antirealist is committed to anything misguided, objectionable, or unappealing, but by relying on the negative connotations associated with the term. The term “arbitrary” in ordinary language typically means something held on the basis of whim or chance, rather than reason or principle. That sounds bad. But all arbitrariness amounts to in this context is that the antirealist (or “nihilist”) endorses only the view that we have values and that what’s rational or not can only be judged with respect to what’s conducive to those values. Values are taken as a given, and no set of values is any better or worse, or more rational or irrational than the others. It is this latter perspective that is taken to support or constitute the claim that on antirealist views our values are “arbitrary.” There’s no principled reason why I should hold any given set of values. And it is true that there isn’t on the antirealist view. But does this make such values arbitrary? I don’t see why it should. This would render all subjective stances towards anything “arbitrary.” When you choose what to eat, what shoes to buy, what music to listen to, who to spend your time with, and so on, these decisions are all based on your subjective preferences. They are “arbitrary” in the relevant sense. But are any of these decisions “arbitrary” in a way that should be remotely troubling to you? No, not at all. Of course any given set of food preferences is as good as any other (setting aside extraneous practical considerations like cost or nutrition). When it comes to what shoes to buy, there are aesthetic questions, like the color of the shoe, and practical questions, like whether the shoe is good for running or working in a factory. While your preferences are still relevant in the latter case, in that upstream of your desire to buy a pair of running or work shoes is some subjective goal or preference to run or to work at a factory, these preferences are always entangled with stance-independent facts about what the world is like. Suppose you want to eat healthy. Is it arbitrary what food you buy? To the extent that whether you “should get healthy” is subjective, what food you eat is “arbitrary” in JPA’s sense, since on an antirealist view there’s no stance-independent fact about what your goals should be. But it’s not arbitrary what you eat conditional on those goals. And this is the kind of arbitrariness I care about, and perhaps that you care about, too.
Does this in any way threaten or undermine the degree to which you’d prefer to choose in accord with your values, desires, preferences, and so on than not do so? Antirealists should reject the claim that on our view value is “arbitrary.” I consider this an inappropriate and presumptuous way of extending a notion to considerations where it isn’t applicable, and in any case the term carries misleading pragmatic implications. It makes it seem like the antirealist conception of value bottoms out in mere whims. And this simply isn’t true.
Yet realists continue to employ such terms to give the false impression the antirealist opting to pursue some goal or value is doing so in a way that is baseless, or intellectually indefensible, or misguided, or confused, or pointless. Is it pointless to pursue what you want? If you want to marry the person you love, is that pointless? If you want to become a doctor, or be happy, or enjoy a day at the beach, regardless of whether these pursuits are intrinsically valuable, but entirely because you care about these things, would this be meaningless in the deepest possible sense? Consider if you want to have children. If you want to have a girl rather than a boy, or vice versa, must there be some stance-independent normative truth about whether you ought to? And if there isn’t, and if your preference is based entirely on what you want, then does it undermine your desire to be told that it’s “arbitrary” or “arational”? Apparently JPA thinks so. Once you unpack the use of this sneer word, and see how it is deployed against antirealists, it can be exposed for exactly what it is: a term that may be true in some technical sense, but the only respects in which it could be said to be true fail to capture the pragmatic features of the ordinary language uses of the term.
At this point, JPA is exhibiting a consistent pattern of equivocating between technical uses of terms that lack the desired pragmatic implications of their ordinary language counterparts and those ordinary language counterparts, stipulating and defining the former in terms of the latter, in such a way as to try to depict the value antirealist in an unappealing light. No substantive objections or points have been made at all. It’s all just vacuous verbal legerdemain masquerading as philosophy. It very much seems like trying to win votes by gerrymandering alone, without convincing a single person to switch their vote from one candidate to another. If you can redistrict the language just right, and draw a stipulative line around that particular set of words, presto! You win by the stroke of the congressman’s pen, without having to lift a finger to convince your constituent of your policies.
The point here is that the only meaningful sense in which the nihilist’s ends are “arbitrary” is in the sense that there is no principled reason why one has their particular set of values rather than some other set of values. Well, so what?
Yet JPA leverages this to go on to say that nihilism entails that “everything pointless and meaningless in the deepest possible sense.” This is extremely loaded language and a highly misleading way of saying that the nihilist does not think anything stance-independently has a point, or stance-independently has any meaning. As far as “in the deepest possible sense,” it’s not clear what that even means, unless it’s yet another instance of employing ordinary language phrases that convey intensity and practical relevance when if pressed one would have to fall back on this having some technical meaning that one simply stipulates is what one means by the ordinary language phrase.
I don’t agree that stance-independent value or meaning is deeper than stance-dependent value and meaning, so I think I just do not share JPA’s position on what constitutes the “deepest possible sense.” The deepest (and, indeed, only) sense in which I think things have a point or matter is in an antirealist way: they have a point to me or have meaning to me.
JPA then says:
Given the nature of the psyche, the typical person will be better off subjectively (i.e., by the person’s own lights) by virtue of affirming Value Realism — provided that this person truly understands the bleakness of the alternative (as many do quite clearly do not).
Regular readers will know exactly what I will say next: whether people would be better off by their own lights by affirming value realism is an empirical question. Does JPA present any empirical evidence to support this claim? No. So we have, once again, a completely unsubstantiated claim. Nothing JPA has said up to this point illustrates that there are any practical benefits at all to endorsing value realism. Let’s see if JPA will say anything to substantiate this claim.
6.0 Psychoanalyzing the nihilist
In the next section of JPA’s post, he suggests the nihilist is saddled with a predicament:
Many nihilists will be worse off, subjectively, to the extent that their nihilism negatively impacts their thought patterns and affective states. These people might well find their nihilistic outlook dispiriting, demoralizing, and depressing; that it saddles them with a deep and pervasive sense of meaninglessness, forlornness, and general existential angst.
If belief in nihilism does have these consequences, then all else being equal the nihilist would be worse off. But once again, it’s an open empirical question whether any of this would follow from believing in nihilism. There’s a critical distinction here, though:
Logical entailments
These are the necessary implications of the truth of nihilism.Contingent psychological consequences
These are the consequences that belief in nihilism has on any given individual.
The first of these isn’t empirical, but none of what JPA describes is a logical entailment of being an antirealist/nihilist about value. So appealing to these is a non-starter. Thus, we are only left with an empirical question about the psychological consequences of adopting value nihilism/antirealism.
It is possible that someone is psychologically constituted in such a way that they only care to do what is stance-independently valuable. If they became convinced nothing was stance-independently valuable, they’d be unable to act on what they want. That could lead to despair. But it would still be an empirical question whether this is true of any one in particular, and without empirical evidence that most people do think this way and would fall into despair if they came to believe there were no stance-independent values, JPA’s claims are at best speculative.
JPA seems to believe that the negative consequences of belief in nihilism stem from correctly understanding its implications. This is hinted at by JPA’s remark that a typical person is better off affirming value realism:
provided that this person truly understands the bleakness of the alternative (as many do quite clearly do not [...]
This is more than a little puzzling. Whether something is “bleak” is the sort of thing I’d have thought depends on a person’s individual psychology, i.e., how they react to affirming nihilism. How bleak we find things is a subjective matter that depends on our stances. I simply do not find anything bleak about antirealism at all.
JPA’s way of framing the situation almost seems as though he’s smuggling in some auxiliary realist-like assumptions into his framing of the situation, as if there were a stance-independent fact of the matter about how one ought to react to the implications of nihilism. But I don’t think there is, and in any case JPA hasn’t shown that there is.
In an endnote, JPA elaborates on this remark, adding that:
I have an error theory about this: most people are so full of desire, motivation, and concern — and so locked into their own perspective on reality — that the idea that nothing matters is almost psychologically impossible for them to entertain; things matter to them, and they’re generally unreflective about whether those things ought to matter to them (but on Nihilism, nothing ought, objectively, to matter to anyone). That human beings would be like this makes good evolutionary sense: it would have been highly maladaptive for Paleolithic humans to sit around wondering whether it really mattered, objectively, whether they starved to death or managed to find a mate and reproduce; thus, plausibly, we evolved to be relatively bad at thinking clearly about metaethics and, in particular, the entailments of metaethical anti-realism.
Once again, we have idle armchair speculation about people’s psychology. JPA presents no evidence to support this claim. I don’t see any reason to take it seriously. I don’t think most people would find value nihilism all that distressing. I embraced it long ago, and it had few consequences, because I recognized that value realism is a nonsensical position and that it wouldn’t matter-to-me at all if things “mattered” in the sense JPA thinks things matter. I do agree with this part:
[...] things matter to them, and they’re generally unreflective about whether those things ought to matter to them (but on Nihilism, nothing ought, objectively, to matter to anyone).
I do think people are generally unreflective about whether things ought to matter to them. Which is good, because it’s a nonsensical consideration. They’d be wasting their time. Finally, JPA engages in a bit of evolutionary psychological speculation:
That human beings would be like this makes good evolutionary sense: it would have been highly maladaptive for Paleolithic humans to sit around wondering whether it really mattered, objectively, whether they starved to death or managed to find a mate and reproduce; thus, plausibly, we evolved to be relatively bad at thinking clearly about metaethics and, in particular, the entailments of metaethical anti-realism.
There’s nothing plausible about this. JPA seems to be suggesting that we may suffer from an evolved, localized cognitive impairment that prevents us from thinking effectively about metaethics because if we did, we might question value realism, and that could undermine our wellbeing (and presumably decrease our reproductive fitness). I doubt over the course of most human evolutionary history these sorts of considerations arose in any considerable quantity and if so that they had enough of an impact on our evolution that we share a genetic predisposition for being bad at metaethics.
However, if, for whatever reason, this is the case, this could be a fantastic evolutionary debunking argument against moral realism. JPA’s claims, if true, would suggest that we have an evolved predisposition for shying away from nihilism and embracing value realism not because it is true but because doing so promotes our wellbeing. But I don’t think JPA’s proposal is very likely. People are generally bad at thinking about metaethics, but I don’t see any good reason to suppose this is some adaptive safeguard against doubting value realism. A far simpler theory is that things matter to people relative to their stances, that this is completely adequate for everyday life, and that questioning whether their values “really matter” was historically a boring and pointless waste of time.
Personally, I don’t find anything bleak about antirealism. Does this mean I’ve misunderstood its implications? JPA hasn’t provided much reason for me to think so. I’d be curious to know from JPA what, exactly, he means by a person truly understanding the bleakness of nihilism. Does one only truly understand the bleakness of nihilism if they react in the ways JPA thinks they would? That is, if they are demoralized, dispirited, depressed, and so on? If so, I’d want to see the argument for that. If instead understanding nihilism but not having a negative reaction is a possible response, then this severs the link between understanding and any particular response, and again opens us up to the possibility that we’re dealing with an open empirical question: whether belief in nihilism (accompanied by truly understanding it and its implications) actually has any negative impact on anyone’s welfare.
In any case, I’m a value nihilist. I agree with JPA that conditional on what JPA means by the terms in question, that everything is arbitrary, pointless, and meaningless in the deepest possible sense, but these are all notions I don’t care at all about because they don’t matter to me. Would JPA insist I am failing to appreciate the implications of nihilism? Or is it that I do recognize its implications and I simply don’t care?
JPA recognizes the contingency of the nihilist’s reaction to believing in nihilism:
This is not to say we should expect all nihilists to be miserable. Many — I daresay most — will not understand the entailments of their own view or be psychologically affected by them even if they do understand those entailments; thus, subjectively, such people will be none-the-worse for being nihilists.
The only “entailment” of the view is that there are no stance-independent values, which is simply the definition of the position. JPA has added nothing to that in this article. All he’s done is repackage that definition in various ways through ordinary language locutions, but all he’s managed to achieve is replacing the meanings of all these phrases with the definitions of the conflicting positions over and over. JPA’s entire article is a convoluted way of repeatedly stating that the implication of views which deny stance-independent value is that they deny stance-independent value.
JPA has presented no good reasons to think antirealists/nihilists misunderstand the implications of their views. Is it that nothing matters “in the deepest possible sense”? Well, so what? Sure, that sounds bad. But sounding bad and being bad are not the same. If it’s so bleak and terrible, JPA should be able to tell us why. I don’t think he has. Personally, I think the kind of value JPA believes in, intrinsic value, life having a “meaning” and a “point” independent of what I or anyone else cares about, is barking mad nonsense; I’ve never encountered even the whiff of a decent reason to care if my life has a “meaning” independent of what it means to me and the meaning I create for myself. There’s nothing terrible about the universe not having this kind of value in it. It is a ghostly value; a value disconnected from me and from everyone else. Value that isn’t ours isn’t any value I care about.
At least JPA believes most people may not be negatively impacted, though. I’m just very skeptical that the proportion who are represents a large enough population to advocate for endorsing value realism. I do grant, though, that value realism may be beneficial for some people, but the reverse may also be true: insofar as value realism could encourage some people to be malicious, it might cause others to be wracked with guilt or to otherwise suffer in ways that on net are bad for them. Which proportion outweighs the other isn’t something we could readily determine and may even be a moving target, changing depending on the population in question.
JPA goes on to say:
Particularly malevolent or anti-social individuals might even enjoy their nihilistic outlook, feeling freed from the pangs of conscience and the bonds of normative constraint.
This is the sort of perverse speculation I see from Christian apologists. Sure, they might. But I think remarks like these are a little irresponsible. People often incorrectly associate nihilism with psychopathy, antisocial tendencies, selfishness, and in general malevolence and evil. Playing around with armchair psychological speculation about how some of us might be malevolent monsters can plant the seeds of suspicion in readers about all nihilists. Also, if JPA is comfortable indulging in a bit of armchair psychoanalysis, we can, too. I often wonder whether people who say these sorts of things are engaging in projection. I sometimes hear theists say that if they didn’t believe in God or obey God’s moral rules, they’d be out manipulating people, cheating on their spouses, or otherwise doing horrible things. I think (or at least hope) most of them are wrong, but some probably would do more of those things. I think this says more about what kinds of people these are (hint: bad people) than it says about the implications of atheism.
Likewise, perhaps at least some moral realists are themselves “particularly malevolent or anti-social individuals” who wish they could be “freed from the pangs of conscience and the bonds of normative constraint” and are just projecting their own malevolent desires onto others. We can also flip this speculation on its head and suggest similarly nefarious motives for endorsing value realism:
Particularly malevolent or anti-social individuals might even enjoy their realist outlook, imposing their standards on others free of a guilty conscience, or appealing to realism to justify bigotry, violence, coercion, or otherwise terrible actions under the guise of moral righteousness.
Is this so implausible? Have we not heard of countless cases of religious leaders exploiting their positions of authority to coerce, exploit, and manipulate others? And have they not appealed to their own righteousness to grease the wheels of their malice, lust, and greed? The rhetorical advantages of framing one’s personal desires as stance-independent truths may be extremely powerful. What makes this possibility all the more disturbing isn’t simply that evil people could disingenuously exploit other people’s belief in value realism to justify their actions, but could even convince themselves, and thereby come to genuinely believe in the moral acceptability of actions they’d never accept as an antirealist.
Perhaps value realism would turn out, to the extent that it has been present among people historically, to be more closely associated with bigotry, coercion, and violence than with kindness, compassion, and altruism. This, too, is an empirical question, and one we’re probably not able to answer. Yet it is true that value realists could exploit belief in value realism to convince people to commit atrocities or to act against their own interests, thus serving as a tool of exploitation, manipulation, oppression, and violence. Value realism, like theism, outsources what’s right and wrong to a third party. And we’re all familiar with the potential to appeal to God to motivate people to commit atrocities (to be clear, I am not suggesting theism has historically done more harm than good; just that it can be leveraged to do so). Value realism could be the secular form of getting otherwise good people to do bad things.
I’m mostly being tongue-in-cheek here. What I said could be true. Even JPA’s own commentary, a bit later in the article, hints at this possibility:
One could, despite being correct about the existence of stance-independent value, be utterly mistaken about what has value; if one has a perverse theory of value, then it is likely that one will be actively motivated to behave as one ought not. Thus, if anything matters, it might matter that would-be fanatics are nihilists.
But I think it’d be irresponsible to casually suggest that a drive for moral realism might be motivated by malevolence. It wouldn’t take much to suggest the realist philosophers I was responding to might be psychopaths and monsters. But I don’t think that. I just think they’re mistaken about obscure philosophical matters. I don’t think any of these views have much of an impact on everyday behavior. My point is simply that one can readily conjure up just-so stories or plausible-sounding hypotheses about the behavioral consequences of philosophical views. What ultimately matters is how people actually respond in practice to affirming these views. And that, of course, is an empirical question.
JPA continues:
So too a certain kind of non-malevolent slacker (insofar as affirming Nihilism conduces to feeling unbothered by any sense that a life might be wasted) and those with a particularly weak will who are perpetually unable to act on moral reasons (or what they take to be moral reasons).
At this point, JPA appears to be engaging in a bit of armchair speculation about the various subspecies of nihilists:
Ignorant nihilists: Confused fools who don’t understand that the proper response to nihilism should be misery and ennui.
Malevolent nihilists: Evil nihilists who revel in the freedom to act without guilt or shame.
Slacker nihilists: Lazy nihilists who just don’t care if nothing matters.
Weak-willed nihilists: Nihilists who just can’t help but do bad things despite what they take to be moral reasons to do otherwise.
Not the most flattering taxonomy. This looks more like the fevered fantasies of someone who hates nihilism and wants to denigrate nihilists than someone seriously interested in analyzing the psychology of nihilists. If JPA is genuinely curious about the prognosis of embracing nihilism, I would encourage him to engage in empirical research, rather than engage in what appears to me to be little more than disdainful armchair speculation, like he’s trying to psychoanalyze people with a mental illness. JPA does conclude that some of us might be happy:
But happy nihilists, or would-be happy nihilists, surely are few in number.
This is a great opportunity to drag this quip from Dennett (2023) out of the shed:
[...] whenever you see the word “surely,” a little bell should ring—ding!—and you should pause to scrutinize what follows, since this is typically the weakest spot in the author’s case. It doesn’t “go without saying,” since the author feels the need to say it, but the author hopes a nudge (“surely”) can take the place of a supporting argument.
This applies to JPA’s remark. JPA is merrily trotting out a host of empirical claims for which he provides exactly no empirical evidence whatsoever. “Surely” is no substitute for data. Another strange thing about JPA’s remark that happy nihilists are surely few in number is that he initially said:
This is not to say we should expect all nihilists to be miserable. Many — I daresay most — will not understand the entailments of their own view or be psychologically affected by them even if they do understand those entailments; thus, subjectively, such people will be none-the-worse for being nihilists.
There’s some tension between supposing most people won’t be negatively impacted by nihilism and then concluding at the end of that paragraph that there aren’t many happy nihilists. It might even be inconsistent.
Another problem with JPA’s overall approach here is that the psychoanalytic claims put him in a perfect position to appeal to unfalsifiable claims. Since JPA comfortably proposes that self-professed antirealists are really crypto-realists who act in a way inconsistent with their public commitments, he could argue that if evidence showed us most self-professed antirealists were happy, that many of them aren’t really antirealists to begin with, and that their crypto-realism is what’s behind their happiness. True antirealists would be miserable nihilists.
Given some widely-shared assumptions about what would matter, given Value Realism, it’s likely that nihilists (mistaken or not) will be disposed to act in ways that it matters one ought not, and to value things which ought not be valued.
Again, there simply isn’t any empirical evidence for this claim. Even if value realism is true, there is no guarantee that value nihilists will be significantly less likely to comply with whatever the stance-independent moral facts are than the realist. One would first have to show that belief in nihilism actually results in substantially different behavior in the first place. We don’t have any good data to support this claim. But even if we did, what you’d also have to show is that the deviations nihilists are disposed to make from complying with stance-independent values are greater than the deviations of value realists. It’s possible that value realists are more disposed to rationalize their personal values, or to be caught up in religious views or ideologies that are misaligned with what’s stance-independently valuable, or are more rigid and inflexible in their thinking and more likely to hold conservative views that fail to converge on the moral truth at the same pace as value nihilists do. There are a variety of reasons why the psychology of those disposed towards value realism might ironically cause them to be less inclined to comply with what’s stance-independently valuable. Do I think this is the case? No, but again, how value nihilists and realists actually behave, and the degree to which their values comport with whatever the moral truth turns out to be, is an open empirical question.
Nevertheless, I’m happy to grant for the sake of argument that it’s more likely value nihilists would act in ways inconsistent with stance-independent truths about what’s valuable than value realists. JPA offers some reason to think this would be the case:
For on our best moral theories, our desires are unreliable guides to stance-independent value; thus, one who regards one’s desires as one’s only reasons for action will tend to be disinclined towards what matters (if anything matters).
Even if this is true, there are a host of other potential causal factors associated with endorsement of value nihilism and realism that could drag nihilists and realists alike further or closer to acting in accord with whatever stance-independently matters. This isn’t a matter that can be settled from the armchair. Even so, I find it plausible that value realists would be more inclined to care about what’s stance-independently valuable and adjust their actions accordingly. Let’s grant this, then, for the sake of argument.
So what? If value realism is true, I would still have no interest in complying with what’s stance-independently valuable. So this is hardly a criticism. If belief in value nihilism is going to make me miserable or undermine my goals, I’d care about that, but that’s a very different sort of outcome.
So JPA can claim that value nihilists will not be disposed to act in ways that “it matters one ought not” and that value nihilists will “value things which ought not be valued.” Even if this were true, again, why should anyone care? I certainly don’t. Do you care? If so, why?
This is where things get weird. JPA then states:
Insofar as we have pragmatic reason to mitigate the risk of becoming agents disposed to wrong action, we have such reason not to be nihilists.
Okay, but I don’t think we do have pragmatic reasons of this kind. Is this “pragmatic reason” some fact about what would be conducive to our goals and interests? If so, why would it be in my interests or promote my goals to abstain from stance-independently wrong action and to engage in stance-independently good action? Isn’t the whole point that such actions aren’t necessarily aligned with my goals and interests?
If it is in my interests to do what is stance-independently valuable, then it is also stance-dependently valuable. And if it is stance-dependently valuable, then this is sufficient to motivate me and everyone else to act accordingly. If so, then the fact that it’s stance-independently valuable is superfluous: I’d perform the actions in question because they serve my interests, not because they’re intrinsically valuable. If, on the other hand, the actions in question don’t serve my interests, then I don’t have pragmatic reasons to comply with them.
So JPA’s suggestion here either renders value realism practically superfluous, or he’s just incorrect. I will dub this the motivational superfluity dilemma. The dilemma is that all stance-independent facts about what we should do are either:
(a) Something we’d already want to do anyway, so value realism is superfluous
(b) Something we wouldn’t want to do anyway, so value realism is not in our pragmatic interests
You can thread this needle by describing a person who wants to do whatever it is that they stance-independently ought to do, regardless of the content of what that turns out to be. But this still makes the pragmatic value of complying with value realism subordinate to our subjective values, and it’s an open empirical question who actually does value complying with whatever stance-independently matters.
And how plausible is it that there are people who have the following psychological disposition:
I have a personal, subjective desire to comply with whatever it is that turns out to be valuable independent of whether I have a personal, subjective desire for it. In other words, what matters to me is what matters intrinsically, independent of the degree to which the content of what matters intrinsically would be consistent with what matters to me other than the fact that it matters to me what matters intrinsically. For instance, it matters to me what matters intrinsically, and it matters to me that I value my family more than strangers. But if it turned out that I should be an impartial utility maximizer, I’d be motivated to suppress my partiality towards my family and act towards the greater good.
Are there people like this? I think there probably are. Maybe JPA is one of them. Maybe there are a lot of them. Who knows. Personally, I think this sounds profoundly bizarre and if I had to put bets on it, I suspect almost nobody actually thinks this way. Time, or rather data, will tell.
7.0 Some objections
JPA ends by considering objections. He rightly notes that many common responses to Pascal’s wager won’t work for the Realist’s wager. For instance, one can’t object to endorsing value realism on pragmatic grounds by appealing to stance-independent normative considerations if one is a value nihilist, since if one is a value nihilist this resource won’t be available. And since JPA isn’t making any claims about infinite value, common concerns about infinities won’t apply. JPA considers a few other weak objections and dispenses with them. Maybe something could be made of them, but I have little interest in objecting to minimal doxastic voluntarism or some analogue of the many gods objection.
My objection is simple: JPA has not presented any compelling arguments or evidence that there’d be significant practical benefits to endorsing value realism. Whether there would be benefits of this kind would be (a) an empirical question and (b) contingent on the values and interests of each individual. If I am correct that it doesn’t matter to me whether value realism is true, then I’d obtain few if any practical benefits from endorsing value realism. I suspect the same is true for the typical person as well, but this is an empirical question that awaits future research.
JPA’s concluding remarks put no dent in this objection. JPA recaps his argument as follows:
To recount: I have argued that, first, most of us have a broadly pragmatic interest in affirming Value Realism. There are three reasons for this. With respect to the ordinary person, S, (i) S’s life likely to go best, subjectively, if S is a value realist; (ii) S reduces S’s moral risk by being a value realist (being thereby less apt to act wrongly), and (iii) S has the best chance of being acquainted with real value by being a value realist.
JPA presents no substantive arguments for (i). Even if (ii) and (iii) are true (and they very well may be), it’s not clear why I or anyone else should (on subjective grounds) care. I don’t care if I risk acting stance-independently wrongly, and don’t care about being acquainted with “real” (i.e., stance-independent) value. There are no subjective benefits to either of these.
As a value “nihilist” (as per JPA’s definition), I don’t just believe that nothing stance-independently matters, I also don’t care if anything stance-independently matters. I don’t have a name for this additional view, but JPA’s claims regarding (ii) and (iii) only carry weight if someone is disposed towards nihilism but would care if realism were true. What JPA has not done is make a strong appeal to our interests. The latter two concerns would only matter if one cared to reduce their “moral risk” with respect to the stance-independent moral truths and if they had any interest in being “acquainted with real value.” I have absolutely no interest in either of these objectives.
8.0 Conclusion
As JPA brings his article to a close, he hits us with this oft-repeated but misguided remark:
In the end, The Value Realist’s Wager simply gives formal statement to a natural, but rarely-expressed, thought: namely, that there could be no reason to be a nihilist — because if Nihilism is true, then nothing matters.
This is not true unless it is disambiguated in such a way that the remark becomes vacuous. There can be no stance-independent reason to be a nihilist if nihilism is true for the trivial reason that if nihilism is true there are no stance-independent reasons for anything. Antirealists can offer antirealism-consistent accounts of reasons and reason discourse without appealing to the stance-independent reasons, so it does not follow that if nihilism is true one would have “no reason” to be a nihilist. This remark is highly misleading and whatever rhetorical force it has is obtained by suppressing the modifier “stance-independent,” to conceal how vacuous the claim is. What JPA is saying here amounts to saying this:
If there are no stance-independent facts about what you ought to believe, then it would not be the case that one stance-independently ought to believe that there are no stance-independent facts about what one ought to believe.
This is true, and it is completely trivial. Of course this is true. But conceptions of “reasons” that presuppose realism aren’t the only accounts one could endorse. I “have a reason” to be a nihilist: because I want to believe what’s true, and I think nihilism is true. My “reasons” are reducible to facts about the relation between my desires and facts about how to act in accord with those desires. Technically, I don’t think anyone has reasons for anything, but this can give the misleading impression that I’d agree that I “have no reason” to be a nihilist/antirealist. This is false. I don’t take such language to require presupposing one literally has reasons, but rather that such discourse can be meaningfully employed to capture means-end relations. Doing so doesn’t require reifying reasons and treating them as having autonomous ontological status. JPA’s remark that “nothing matters” likewise misleadingly suppresses the fact that the only sense in which “nothing matters” in JPA’s above passage is in the sense of things mattering intrinsically. He might as well say:
In the end, The Value Realist’s Wager simply gives formal statement to a natural, but rarely-expressed, thought: namely, that there could be no stance-independent reason to be a nihilist (i.e., to deny that there are stance-independent reasons)— because if Nihilism is true, then nothing matters intrinsically (such that it gives us stance-independent reasons for doing things).
Suppressing their specific, narrow usage of specific terms like “reason” and “matters” in phrases like these is a common practice among realists. It incidentally has the effect of making nihilism look really loathsome and awful, when all these remarks typically amount to are vacuous restatements of the logical implications of nihilism, which consist merely in denying the metaphysical and conceptual overreach of realist accounts without carrying any practical consequences at all. There isn’t any pragmatic reason to care about realism unless one happens to already care about it, which makes JPA’s whole thesis redundant. JPA’s remark is about as vacuous as making this move:
Step 1: Stipulate a notion of “mattering” which means “Is prescribed by God,” and a notion of “love” which means “A relationship blessed by God,” such that your distinctive use of each term requires the existence of God by definition.
Step 2: Make a remark like this: If atheism is true, then nothing matters and love is impossible.
If anyone challenges you on this, point out that “nothing matters” just means that nothing is prescribed by God, and that love would be impossible by definition on your account because love is a relationship blessed by God. If God doesn’t exist, clearly nothing matters and love is impossible in this respect! Therefore,
If atheism is true, then nothing matters and love is impossible.
Wow, that sure does make atheism look awful, doesn’t it? But of course, this is a completely misleading way to describe the implications of atheism.
What JPA is doing is no different than this. JPA takes his narrow, realist-only conception of terms like “reason” and “matters,” which have technical meanings in philosophical contexts, then surreptitiously imposes them onto what appear to be ordinary language constructions; yet ordinary language terms like “reason” and “matters” have a host of pragmatic features such that, if one were to insist that nihilism involves the denial or rejection of reasons and mattering in the ordinary sense, it would involve a rejection of these various pragmatic associations, not just (if at all) JPA’s narrow technical conception of the meaning of these terms. Critically, nihilism doesn’t actually entail the denial of these pragmatic associations, so the claim that nihilists think that “nothing matters” is misleading in almost any ordinary context. For whatever reason, JPA and others persist in making highly misleading remarks that give the false impression that nihilism carries terrible, practically relevant implications. Analytic philosophers routinely do the same for a variety of skeptical positions, such as illusionism, as well.
JPA and other analytic philosophers should be more attentive to pragmatics. If they were, they may perhaps start to realize how much of what they say may unintentionally function as highly misleading rhetoric. Unfortunately, I suspect that they don’t realize this because they are too blinded by the rhetorical force of their own conflations between their semantically-distilled use of terms like “reason” and their ordinary language analogues.
Value realism has no direct or unconditional pragmatic value, insofar as the latter is construed in terms of stance-dependent value. Simply put: stance-independent value only has stance-dependent value if you have the relevant stance. I don’t have such a stance. I suspect most people don’t.
References
Bush, L. S. 2023. Schrödinger’s categories: The indeterminacy of folk metaethics (Publication No. 30318258) [Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. https://www.proquest.com/docview/2827166985
Dennett, D. C. (2023). I’ve been thinking. W. W. Norton & Company.
Fisher, M., Knobe, J., Strickland, B., & Keil, F. C. (2017). The influence of social interaction on intuitions of objectivity and subjectivity. Cognitive Science, 41(4), 1119-1134.
Rai, T. S., & Holyoak, K. J. (2013). Exposure to moral relativism compromises moral behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(6), 995-1001.
Young, L., & Durwin, A. J. (2013). Moral realism as moral motivation: The impact of meta-ethics on everyday decision-making. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(2), 302-306.