Responding to Dominik (Part 2)

Twitter Tuesday #3

This week is a continuation of my response to this tweet 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

2.2.1 Some philosophers don’t have the concepts

Dominik also does not make clear which concepts I purportedly lack. In the context of moral realism, the concepts that I claim are unintelligible include irreducible normativity, categorical reasons, and the notion of something being “intrinsically” good or bad, among others, though perhaps the biggest target of my ire is how many contemporary analytic philosophers talk about “reasons.” I do not think naturalist accounts of stance-independent moral facts are necessarily unintelligible, and have different objections to these accounts.

Dominik states that the concepts in question are ones that “every normal being has.” That is a very strong claim. First, some prominent philosophers describe realist conceptions of morality as nonsensical or claim not to understand what realists mean. For instance, we have this remark from the second volume of Parfit’s On What Matters:

When Williams argues that there are no such reasons, his main claim is that Externalists cannot explain what it could mean to say that we have some external reason. I admit that, when I say that we have some reason, or that we should or ought to act in a certain way, what I mean cannot be helpfully explained in other terms. I could say that, when some fact gives us a reason to act in some way, this fact counts in favour of this act. But this claim adds little, since ‘counts in favour of’ means, roughly, ‘gives a reason for’. Williams suggests that the phrase ‘has a reason’ does not have any such intelligible, irreducibly normative external sense. When he discusses statements about such external reasons, Williams calls these statements ‘mysterious’ and ‘obscure’, and suggests that they mean nothing. Several other writers make similar claims." (2011, p. 272)

We also have this remark from Mackie (1977/1990), commenting on R. M. Hare:

R. M. Hare has said that he does not understand what is meant by ‘the objectivity of values’, and that he has not met anyone who does. (p. 21)

R. M. Hare is one of the most prominent metaethicists of the 20^th century. If R. M. Hare purportedly claimed to not understand what the terms in question meant, I am in good company. Note Mackie’s remark as well: that Hare believed nobody else understood the concepts in question, either. This hints at a time in living memory when what realists say as unintelligible may have been common, or even the norm, within at least some philosophical circles. 

The present tendency for people, including professional philosophers, to dismiss my view as some kind of outlandish outlier are apparently suffering from a strange case of amnesia: charging various metaphysical positions with being literally meaningless were common throughout the 20th century. Perhaps they’re not so common now, but philosophy is hardly a discipline for which older perspectives are forever relegated to ignominy. Consider, e.g., the 20^th century revival of virtue ethics. Should we dismiss Anscombe, Foot, and MacIntyre on the grounds that their views are old?

Another interesting element of these discussions is Parfit’s explanation for why some of his colleagues did not accept his account of realism (precisely one of those accounts I charge with unintelligibility): that they lacked the concepts. Take Schroeder’s (2011) characterization of what Parfit says of his colleagues in On What Matters:

But if Parfit's arguments in part 6 are successful, then he hasn't actually succeeded in locating any metaethical theories which cast the possibility of moral progress into doubt. On the contrary, according to him, few people who have ever contributed to the literature on metaethics even have the conceptual resources required to disagree with him.

Bernard Williams, for example, turns out to lack the concept of a reason. John Mackie turns out to fail to have thoughts about morality, rather than to believe that nothing is wrong. Christine Korsgaard lacks normative concepts. Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard's disagreement with Parfit? That's superficial, too -- they don't have normative concepts either. I'm flattered to report that I am among the few metaethicists whom Parfit credits as sharing the required conceptual repertoire to disagree with him. But unfortunately for me, it turns out that we don't disagree either, because, according to Parfit, I don't believe my own view. His sole evidence for this? That I acknowledge the intuitive force of apparent counterexamples.

Williams, Mackie, Korsgaard, Blackburn, Gibbard: these are some of the biggest names in metaethics. Either Parfit is correct that some or all of the greatest luminaries in metaethics lacked the concepts I likewise claim to lack, in which case I am in quite good company, or they didn’t lack the concept, in which case…Parfit was mistaken, but nevertheless thought it reasonable to propose, as an explanation, that disagreement could be attributed to the absence of the relevant concepts. Either way, one of the most prominent and revered proponents of moral realism saw little difficulty in suggesting that some of the most central figures in metaethics lacked the concepts in question. Why, then, is it so outlandish for me to agree with Parfit?

Dominik suggests every normal being has these concepts. So is Parfit wildly mistaken in diagnosing the source of disagreement, or are Williams, Mackie, Korsgaard, Blackburn, Gibbard not normal beings? Perhaps they do lack the concepts, and perhaps I enjoy the benefit of hindsight in coming to recognize this.

I, for one, am very skeptical that, were you lay out precisely what Parfit and some other non-naturalists have in mind that you would secure something approximating unanimity in the field about the intelligibility of the concepts in question. Moral realism is a big tent, and there are more naturalist realists than non-naturalists. And analytic philosophy is an even bigger tent: there are numerous philosophers who have little direct engagement with contemporary metaethics. Perhaps many of them would find non-naturalist’s views to not merely be mistaken, but conceptually confused. We don’t have data on the matter, and I think it’d be hard to collect. Speaking anecdotally, quite a few of my colleagues are sympathetic to the unintelligibility thesis (despite, as it happens, disagreeing with me on many other issues). With time, I suspect I will win over others with my perspective on the matter. How many people do I need to convince before we’re taken seriously? I’d be curious to know, and it’s always a good idea to set clear goals.

References

Mackie, J. L. (1990). Ethics: Inventing right and wrong. Penguin books.

Parfit, D. (2011). On What Matters (vol. 2), S. Scheffler (Ed.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.