10 good reasons to take moral realism seriously

Twitter Tuesday #8

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This week on Twitter Tuesday I review a thread from Hunter Kallay purporting to provide reasons to endorse moral realism:

Is moral realism correct?

Even if one is not totally convinced, here are 10 good reasons to take moral realism seriously:

Reason #1: Moral experience

1.Moral experience and the principle of credulity: Our sensory experience gives us reason to take the empirical world seriously. So why doesn’t our moral experience give us good reason to take morality seriously?

Kallay begins by noting that our sensory experience gives us reason to take the empirical world seriously, then asks (presumably rhetorically) why our moral experience doesn’t give us reason to take morality seriously.

There are a number of problems with this. First, it’s probably not ideal to imply a reason for endorsing moral realism in the form of a (again, presumably, it’s not clear) rhetorical question. It seems we’re expected to think that we should take our moral experience seriously.

It’s not clear why this should follow from the first remark though. Suppose our sensory experiences do give us reason to take the empirical world seriously. Does it follow that therefore our moral experience also gives us reason to take morality seriously? If so, why? Why would the latter follow from the former? Perhaps it does, but we’re not told why.

Suppose we should take morality seriously. Okay. What does that entail? I’m a moral antirealist, and I take morality seriously. I study it for a living. But taking morality seriously doesn’t require endorsing moral realism. Perhaps that is what Kallay sought to imply, but why not just say so? Overall, the remark is just too unclear to work with.

My main concern, however, is with the use of therms like “our” and “us.” Even if we grant that Kallay intends to imply that (a) we experience morality in a way that indicates moral realism is true and (b) we should take this seriously, it’s still worth asking: who is “we”? I don’t have these experiences, and claims about the proportion of people who have such experiences are empirical. 

Often moral realists appeal to the way they experience morality (i.e., in some realist-promoting way), but presume all or most other people share those experiences. Maybe they do, but you’d need to provide data to support such claims. At present, there is little data to support the notion that “we” in any general sense experience morality in a way that would indicate realism were true.

Reason #2: Steep costs

2.Think of the steep cost of disbelieving in moral realism. People don’t have intrinsic value? Slaughtering innocent people is morally okay? There is a great cost of denying moral realism.

There are no steep costs to rejecting realism. In fact, there are no costs at all. Yes, I don’t believe people have intrinsic value. So what? How is that a steep cost? Kallay doesn’t tell us, and I’d be curious to know. 

It is not an implication of moral antirealism that slaughtering innocent people is “morally okay.” It certainly isn’t morally okay in the realist sense, since antirealists deny anything is okay in a realist sense. This is, at best, an ambiguous and probably false remark, and at worst, it’s downright the opposite of true.

Reason #3: Reid’s defense

3.Thomas Reid's defense: Human experiences presuppose the reality of morality. Moral realism provides the best explanation for evident features of human life. We ought to accept such evidence on pain of inconsistency or some other rational failure.

This is an awful defense. Which human experiences presuppose the reality of morality? And how do they do so? Which “evident features of human life” are best explained by moral realism? This is a tweet, so I don’t expect it to be a well-developed account, but perhaps that’s simply an indication that Twitter isn’t a great forum for making these sorts of claims.

At any rate, I deny anything about human experience or features of human life are best explained by realism, and I especially deny that they presuppose realism.

Reason #4: Skepticism about epistemic norms

4.Skepticism about moral truths may well lead to skepticism about other normative considerations, including the very epistemic norms used to justify rejecting moral realism.

There are no stance-independent normative facts of any kind, including epistemic norms. I deny there is any cost to thinking this way. It’s how I already thought, and I have yet to encounter any costs or problems with global normative antirealism. The latter part of this remark, however, is a mistake:

including the very epistemic norms used to justify rejecting moral realism.

This is an instance of the halfway fallacy. Normative antirealists can both reject epistemic realism and reject that an appeal to stance-independent epistemic facts are necessary to justify rejecting moral realism (or epistemic realism). Antirealists are not obligated to agree that realist conceptions of normativity are prerequisites for justification, nor are we required to accept any other particular conceptions of what conditions are necessary for belief (e.g., “justification”). We can (and I do) reject those notions as well. 

Reason #5: Conscience

5.The role of our conscience: It doesn’t have to be epistemically indulgent to take conscience seriously; it still may well be highly evidential. The phenomenology of conscience is a fascinating phenomenon, often pointing to beliefs of deep ingression for us.

This is too unclear to evaluate.

Reason #6: Sense of duty and guilt

6.Sense of duty and guilt: though defeasible, and though resistible, this remains hard to repress altogether.

Senses of duty and guilt are completely consistent with antirealism. This is simply not a reason to favor moral realism.

Reason #7: Making excuses

7.Making excuses: Why would we bother unless we felt we needed to?

Feeling a need to make excuses is consistent with antirealism. This is not a reason to favor moral realism.

Note how these reasons for realism are getting increasingly obscure and weak as I move through them. This is disappointing.

Reason #8: Practical justification

8. A practical justification comes about as a result that it is impracticable to live as if moral realism is false. There might be theoretical justification here too. Isn’t the very impracticality of living as if moral realism is false evidence to some measure that it is true?

How is it “impracticable” to live as if moral realism is false? How does one’s behavior differ in any practically relevant way if one believes moral realism is false, as opposed to believing it’s true? I think the answer, personally, is that virtually nothing of significance changes about one’s behavior, any more than one’s behavior would change if one were a moral platonist or antiplatonist about mathematics. You aren’t going to add up tips in a restaurant or pay your bills any different if you’re a mathematical antiplatonist. Just the same, being a moral antirealist leaves one’s attitudes and behavior unchanged outside of academic and formal discussions, which may have little or no practical relevance to everyday life.

#9: Companions in guilt arguments

9. Cuneo’s argument:

(1)If moral facts do not exist, then epistemic facts do not exist.
(2)Epistemic facts exist.
(3)So, moral facts exist.
(4)If moral facts exist, then moral realism is true.
(5)So, moral realism is true.

This is not a good argument. First, it doesn’t make clear whether the facts in question are stance-independent or not. If “moral facts” and “epistemic facts” in these premises aren’t, by definition, stance-independent, then an antirealist can reject premise 4, since it would not follow that if moral facts exist, then moral realism is true. If “epistemic facts exist” means that stance-independent epistemic facts exist, an antirealist can just reject premise 2.

#10: Moorean shift

10.There are better reasons to believe in moral realism than to doubt it. As Louise Antony said, "Any argument for moral skepticism will inevitably be based on premises which are less obvious than the existence of objective moral values and duties themselves."

Claims aren’t just obvious or non-obvious. A claim can only be obvious from some point of view. It may be that from the point of view of some realists that any argument for moral skepticism is less obvious than the existence of objective moral values and duties, but so what? That’s not obvious to me. In fact, I think it’s obvious that there are no objective moral values and duties.

Realists seem to reliably fail to distinguish between a claim being “obvious” in some unspecified sense and it being obvious to them. This is so frequent that I should come up with a name for this, too.

All of these reasons for endorsing moral realism rely on bad arguments, mischaracterize the implications of antirealism, or are so unspecified that they can’t be evaluated.