Three common objections to antirealism, a second response to Philosophy for the People redux

In a previous post, I raised a few objections to remarks made in this video. The video involves a discussion with Philosophy for the People, whose channel you can find here. And you can find that post here:

There are a few recurring themes to realist critiques of antirealism. I've outlined a few in one of my recent blog posts. I will describe these three main points here. Here I develop on each of the three replies I offered in the previous post and recast them as a more general critique of similar objections to antirealism from critics.

(1) Critiques of relativism consistently target agent but not appraiser relativism

Critiques of relativism often fail to distinguish appraiser and agent relativism. Agent relativism treats moral actions as right or wrong relative to the standards of the agent performing the action (or their culture). Appraiser relativism treats moral claims as true or false relative to the person evaluating (or making) the moral claim.

Critics of relativism often focus exclusively on agent relativism. If you're an agent relativism, and someone believes it is morally permissible to steal, then you would judge that it is morally permissible for them to steal, since doing so is consistent with that person's moral standards.

But if you're an appraiser relativist, you could judge that it is permissible for them to steal relative to their moral standards, but it is not permissible for them (or anyone) to steal relative to *your* moral standards. And since your normative positions are predicated on your moral standards, then your normative stance could be functionally identical to the moral realist's.

Unfortunately, critics of relativism, for whatever reason, will commonly insist that that relativists cannot raise objections to the actions of people or cultures with different moral standards. For instance, if the people in a particular nation consider it morally permissible to torture babies, you, as a relativist, must agree that it is morally permissible for them to torture babies. But this is only true if you’re an agent relativist, not an appraiser relativist.

Compare, for instance, to the question of whether pineapple on pizza is good. Suppose you dislike pineapple on pizza, but someone else likes it. Does that mean you must consider pineapple on pizza “good”? Must you personally eat it? Of course not. If you’re an appraiser relativist, you can simultaneously recognize that it is good relative to their preferences and bad relative to your own preferences. In the case of pineapple on pizza, most of us would probably not want to impose our taste preferences on others, and we’d be fine with other people eating pineapple on pizza.

However, whether or not one’s normative moral standards apply to others or don’t apply to others is a feature of the scope of those concerns, not whether they are true in a relative or nonrelative way: it has nothing at all to do with relativism! In principle, you could prefer that nobody have pineapple on pizza, and this could be an expression of your own preferences, i.e., it would be true that, relative to your standards, nobody should eat pineapple on pizza. In other words, *who* moral rules apply to is conceptually orthogonal to what makes rules true or false (i.e., stance-independent facts, or stance-dependent facts).

For some reason, people recognize a distinction between standard moral rules, where we are often inclined to want to impose at least some of those rules on other people, and standard taste preferences, where we typically don’t want to impose our taste preferences on others, and somehow conflate this with relativism and nonrelativism about the values in question.

A normative stance that encompasses how you think other people should act and not just yourself does not entail realism, nor does maintaining that moral standards apply to some but not other people entail antirealism.

In short: critiques of relativism often focus exclusively on the purportedly absurd implications of agent relativism, then leverage this as a reason for rejecting “relativism” without disambiguating different forms of relativism. Note that I am not the originator of these distinctions. They are sufficiently established that they are described in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on moral relativism:

“Appraiser relativism suggests that we do or should make moral judgments on the basis of our own standards, while agent relativism implies that the relevant standards are those of the persons we are judging (of course, in some cases these may coincide). Appraiser relativism is the more common position, and it will usually be assumed in the discussion that follows.” (Gowans, 2021)

I don’t know if appraiser relativism actually is the more common position, but if it is, why do critics of relativism focus so much on agent relativism?

(2) Critics of moral realism often insist that the view is “extreme,” “radical,” “skeptical,” and involves “biting bullets.” Extreme, radical, and skeptical according to what standard? How do we determine whether it is the antirealist who is biting bullets, or the realist?

Realists may insist that antirealists have to bite the bullet in “admitting” or “conceding” that, e.g. it’s not the case that “torturing babies for fun is objectively wrong.” Well, sure, we do agree with this, but I deny I’m “conceding” anything. Such language is often employed to make it seem like the antirealist is giving ground. But we can both deny realism and deny that we’re giving any ground in doing so. I don’t think there’s any ground to give, because I find realism to be absurd, and to not at all accord with my intuitions or my view of commonsense or what I think a reasonable person who was well-informed would believe on reflection. I’m no more biting a bullet or conceding anything in denying moral realism than I would be conceding anything or biting a bullet if I denied chocolate cake is “objectively tasty.”

Such language serves to derogate antirealism independently of articulating any actual flaws with the view. It is little more than rhetoric predicated on realists presuming that their views enjoy some kind of dialectical priority. I don’t think they do, and I don’t think realists have convincingly shown that they do. I’m not alone in thinking this, either. See Sinclair (2012) for an article that presents a sustained argument against presumptions in favor of realism.

(3) Epistemic antirealism doesn’t entail self defeat

Since the publication of Cuneo’s work on companions in guilt, people have increasingly argued that if we reject moral realism, we’d also have to reject epistemic realism, and if we did so, this would be self-defeating.

Such arguments only work insofar as they presuppose that a position is self-defeating if you there aren’t stance-independent epistemic facts that would justify or entail such a belief. A critic of the normative antirealist might argue, for instance, that if epistemic antirealism were true, then there’d be no stance-independent reason to endorse epistemic antirealism, and so epistemic antirealism is self-defeating.

Yet this would only follow if the epistemic antirealism both (a) denies there are stance-independent epistemic facts but (b) agrees with the epistemic realist that one is only justified in, and one would suffer self-defeat in the absence of, stance-independent epistemic reasons for belief.

Yet an epistemic antirealist can deny both (a) and (b). I do deny both (a) and (b). The only sense in which epistemic antirealism is “self-defeating” is with respect to a position on what conditions are necessary for beliefs or to avoid “self-defeat” that I reject. Proponents of the view that we must have stance-independent epistemic facts to avoid self-defeat are welcome to make such a claim, but I’m not obligated to accept it without an argument. I haven’t seen any convincing arguments for such a claim, but I welcome such arguments.

Another way to sustain such an argument is to simply stipulate that the conditions for self-defeat just are conditions in which one lacks stance-independent epistemic reasons for a position. And if the denial of stance-independent epistemic facts entails that there are no stance-independent epistemic reasons, then epistemic antirealism would entail that there are no stance-independent epistemic reasons for believing epistemic antirealism. Yet if this entails self-defeat by stipulation, then all “self-defeat” amounts to in this case is the empty reassertion that someone who denies that there are stance-independent epistemic reasons denies that there are stance-independent epistemic reasons.

Suppose I do so, and suppose that my position is therefore “self-defeating” as a result. What follows from this? As far as I can tell: nothing whatsoever. All such charges of “self-defeat” amount to would be to convict the epistemic antirealist of being guilty of holding an epistemic position that doesn’t abide by the linguistic and conceptual rules of the epistemic game the epistemic realist wants to play. And if that’s all the charge amounts to, then the only crime an epistemic antirealist has committed is refusing to comport their thoughts and speech in a technical philosophical context in accordance with a stipulated web of definitions and terms devised by the epistemic realist. As far as I can tell, this has few if any practical consequences, apart from whatever reaction this prompts in epistemic realists.

References

Gowans, C. (2021). Moral relativism. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2021 ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/moral-relativism/

Sinclair, N. (2012). Moral realism, face-values and presumptions. Analytic Philosophy, 53(2).