2.0 Introduction
This week I continue addressing comments to a comment from Emerson Green. Here, I address a remark from Dominik:
I mean... it's basically impossible to have a productive discussion with Bush because he either lacks concepts which every normal being has or he pretends not to have them. while at the same time being so arrogant to assume that the majority of ethicists are deeply confused
There are a few problems with this remark which I will address in upcoming posts:
Productive discussions: It’s unclear why one can’t have a productive discussion with someone because they don’t have a concept. Also, if I’m correct, at least one form of progress would involve recognizing that I’m correct. If so, engaging with views like mine would be critical for at least one form of progress.
Folk realism: I deny “every normal being” has the concepts in question. Quite the contrary: I argue that it is moral realists who are the outliers here. There is little empirical evidence to suggest all or even a significant number of people are moral realists.
Pretending: I’m not pretending to not have the concepts in question. If I were, one would have to explain why I keep up the lie privately with my wife, family, and friends.
Arrogance: There’s nothing arrogant about thinking one common philosophical position is mistaken because it is the result of conceptual or linguistic confusions. On the contrary, if you think your colleagues are mistaken even when they’re not confused, this is, if anything, an even less flattering characterization of their intellectual abilities. That is, if the error in their reasoning is located at a more proximal point in the argumentative chain, one would presumably think their colleagues are employing the correct methods and have the resources available to get the correct answer, but consistently fail anyway. Insofar as we’re going to describe views as “arrogant,” that seems more arrogant to me. But I don’t think any of these views are “arrogant” and I think this is a misuse of the term.
2.1 Productive discussions
The claim that no productive discussion can be had is probably false, or, if true, is to my credit: perhaps a productive discussion cannot be had because there is nothing substantive to discuss, and progress is made insofar as one recognizes this and abandons a useless dispute over philosophical pseudoproblems. This is one of the central points Wittgenstein stressed in his later work, and my position on these matters is largely in line with and motivated by such concerns. I am, after all, an antirealist quietist about the relevant concepts. If productive discussion cannot be had, perhaps the fault is with contemporary analytic philosophers, rather than with me.
I’m not so pessimistic that productive discussion can take place between those with my metaphilosophical inclinations and contemporary analytic philosophers. I sure hope productive discussion can occur, given how much I engage in discussions on these topics. Note, too, that I was educated in analytic philosophy and was eventually convinced by the sorts of critiques raised by Wittgenstein and others. This included productive interaction with other people's written work as well as productive conversations. It's not like my views evolved in a vacuum, nor did I invent my position from scratch. If the presumption is that the gulf between myself and others in the field is too wide for us to productively discuss matters that seems too pessimistic, and I myself seem to serve as a living counterexample to that presumption. Also, Christians and atheists routinely have productive discussions, and their worldviews are, in many ways, far more different than the differences between myself and mainstream analytic philosophers. Nevertheless, we could wonder whether productive discussion can occur between those with my views and mainstream analytic philosophy.
I suspect they can. Were Wittgenstein’s contributions productive? If not, then why do so many of the philosophers who responded to the 2020 PhilPapers survey identify with Wittgenstein? When asked to describe which non-living philosophers they identified with, Wittgenstein came in 5th place, after Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and Lewis. And why, in particular, do philosophers favor Wittgenstein’s later work (57.5%) over his early work (24.6%), where such views were promulgated? Is the field riddled with unproductivity?
Incidentally, I’m inclined to think the answer is probably yes, but that’s because I think Wittgenstein isn’t popular enough. I think quietistic views are generally correct. Most philosophical disputes in mainstream analytic philosophy are, in my view, pseudoproblems that we should abandon to pursue more productive questions. If anything, suggesting that I think the majority of ethicists think something is intelligible doesn’t even come close to capturing the scope of what I take to be the problems in the field; moral realism is the tip of a much larger iceberg of what I regard as fundamental and pervasive misconceptions and misuses of language that reverberate across the entire field of analytic philosophy. I don’t just think most metaethicists are mistaken, I think most analytic philosophers are mistaken.
If Dominik thinks that’s mistaken, why? Because I’m disagreeing with the experts or authorities on these topics? If so, while I grant philosophers have expertise in a great many things (logic, analyzing arguments, drawing clear distinctions, and so on), I do not recognize their expertise or authority in being correct about philosophical questions. If Dominik thinks I should, I’d be happy to entertain arguments to that effect. If it turns out, however, that it’s questionable whether philosophers do have the relevant form of expertise to adjudicate which philosophical positions are correct, then it’s no more arrogant to dispute any given consensus within the field than it is to disagree with theologians about the existence of God.
In other words, Dominik is, if anything, understating the scope of the mistakes I am attributing to the field. So heap that on the plate of charges of “arrogance.” I think the charges are ridiculous: I don’t think analytic philosophy has done much to earn so much acclaim that there’s anything “arrogant” about raising metaphilosophical objections that have implications for the field as a whole. Quite the contrary, as I’ll argue in this and subsequent posts, while many analytic philosophers are happy to entertain a range of metaphilosophical perspectives critical of the field, such as my own, those that aren’t, are, if anything, acting like entitled dogmatists leaning on their expertise to dismiss rival views, rather than doing the work to show why we’re wrong.
Suppose, for a moment, I am correct: certain philosophical positions are not meaningful and many (perhaps most) of the central disputes in analytic philosophy are pseudoproblems. If productive discussion cannot occur between myself and those engaged in addressing these problems, why is that? I’m open to their views: they could readily convince me that the disputes in question are not pseudoproblems, and are worth pursuing. This holds for moral realism just as it does any other position, such as the hard problem of consciousness. Yet if they are unwilling to entertain my metaphilosophical position, then the impediment is their own dogmatic insistence on the substantiveness of their philosophical views or the methods they use to address them.
If, for instance, Dominik were to persist in believing that “every normal being” has a concept of e.g., an irreducibly normative reason, despite the total absence of any decent evidence this is true, Dominik’s questionable and unsupported beliefs would be a central barrier to productive discussion, not my refusal to share that belief based on insufficient grounds.
In addition, note the irony here: we’re being told that a productive discussion can’t take place with me because of my conceptual deficiencies by someone who seems completely okay with publicly accusing me of pretending to hold the views that I say that I hold. Publicly accusing people who disagree with you of outright lying is a far greater barrier to productive discussion than my metaethical position.
Contra Dominik, I believe the position I take on this matter is one of the most productive contributions to the metaethical landscape, and one sorely missing from contemporary discussions, which seem to have been largely taken over by an extremely narrow dispute between a resurgent non-naturalism and a handful of error theorists. Advocates for a variety of other positions are sparse, and I very much doubt it's because no productive discussion could be had with proponents of these views.
More generally, skeptical views are so important to the way philosophers operate that many philosophical papers contend with skeptical accounts as a foil even if there’s no particular person defending those views, including arguments for moral realism. For instance, Case (2018) remarks that:
Error theory does not have to be widely accepted to be worthy of philosophical attention, however. Few people accept Pyrrhonian scepticism. Arguably, no one can accept it. Nonetheless, radical scepticism is an appropriate subject of philosophical curiosity. We are rightly interested in finding the strongest grounds for rejecting it even if we know that it must be false. Likewise, people who are not sceptical of normative properties might want to know why positing them is unavoidable. (p. 93)
Skeptical perspectives offer a kind of maximal opposition against which one can seek to ground their accounts. As such, the presence of an actual skeptic or nonbeliever in some widespread belief or attitude is in no way a threat to the productivity of philosophical discourse. We are, if anything, a boon: even if we are completely wrong, we can still serve as a radical perspective against which one can refine their own views and articulate that case to an audience.
Philosophy goes all the way to the roots of human thought, and it strikes me as absurd to suggest productive discussion cannot occur unless someone buys into some putative set of beliefs from the outside. I suggest the reverse: that it is Dominik’s dismissive attitude towards views like mine, and Dominik’s excessive regard for those working within mainstream analytic philosophy that are genuine impediments to productive discussion, not my critical perspective on mainstream analytic philosophy.
Also, suppose I’m correct. Any attitude towards the discourse that ruled views like mine out of court by fiat would necessarily be unproductive insofar as it was ruling out the correct view. As such, dismissing my view as an impediment to productive exchanges may reflect a presumption that my view is mistaken from the outset, and would at least in that respect be tantamount to begging the question against my view.
References
Case, S. (2020). The normative error theorist cannot avoid self-defeat. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 98(1), 92-104.