So the anti realist can say, “I think x is wrong, and I cannot currently imagine believing the opposite. However, I also believe my believing in the wrongness of x is contingent on many influences, and I acknowledge that I could have had a different intuition given different influences”.
I don’t even see how people not having intrinsic value is entailed by anti-realism. When I say X is intrinsically valuable, I just mean I subjectively value X itself.
This is a fun series, if for no other reason than to show that people (including philosophy PhD candidates apparently) make some of the horrendous arguments you have spent time addressing. I might have thought the whole "antirealism means it's okay to slaughter innocents" line was something you only heard from untrained internet philosophy bros, but apparently it's something you can continue to say even after serious training in this stuff (though there's the possibility that Houston Christian University is not serious)
I don't think professional philosophers have good arguments for moral realism or against antirealism, and they occasionally make the same false and misleading remarks about the implications of antirealism as people without formal training.
I am genuinely baffled by what goes on in the field. Realists often fail to even make explicit their own presuppositions, asking others:
"Do you think X is wrong?"
And if the answer is "yes," they take this to indicate realism. This is deeply silly. It's not like antirealists can't or don't say "yes" to such questions, and it's not as if doing so isn't entirely consistent with many antirealist accounts: relativism, constructivism, expressivism, error theory + fictionalism, revisionist proprietary use of language, and views like my own...you know, almost all antirealists, other than a kind of flat-footed error theoretic account.
Moral realists should know better. And yet even professional philosophers routinely use this line of questioning. They should recognize this is rhetorically effective, but a vacuous and ridiculous way to engage in these discussions that completely fails to appreciate the conceptual resources available to antirealists.
This way of interacting with antirealism is so lazy, unsophisticated, and negligent that I can't help but feel people doing this are either catastrophically mistaken about the fundamentals of metaethics or simply despise moral antirealism so much they can't be bothered to be precise or to take it seriously as a rival position.
To me, it looks like the mistake here is a bit different.
Here's how I see it:
- On realism, actions are either permissible or impermissible. It's a genuine dichotomy if realism is true. So if a realist denies that something is impermissible, they will (on pain of inconsistency) think it's permissible.
- On anti-realism, actions are neither permissible nor impermissible--there just aren't facts of this sort.
- When we don't condition on the truth of realism, the denial that slaughter of innocents is impermissible tells us that either (1) realism is true and slaughter of innocents is permissible, or (2) realism is false and slaughter of innocents is neither permissible nor impermissible.
- I think that what's happening when realists make these claims that antirealism implies that slaughter of innocents is permissible, they're continuing to condition on the truth of realism (and so the genuine dichotomy of permissible/impermissible), not fully stepping into the antirealist paradigm. They're trying to hold fixed the dichotomy of permissible/impermissible while considering the fact that antirealism implies that slaughter of innocents is not impermissible.
Not really disagreeing with what you say, just offering a different take on the precise mistake Hunter makes here.
"I think that what's happening when realists make these claims that antirealism implies that slaughter of innocents is permissible, they're continuing to condition on the truth of realism (and so the genuine dichotomy of permissible/impermissible), not fully stepping into the antirealist paradigm."
This is exactly what I have in mind by the halfway fallacy:
...I think moral realists are quite literally reliably failing to even fathom the antirealist's point of view, and mistakenly thinking antirealists are somehow partially committed to or trapped within the confines of the realist's perspective. They're failing to appreciate just how much of their view we reject.
I find this failure of imagination remarkable. It comes from professional philosophers, who one would think would do a better job of being able to hold their own paradigms and perspectives in abeyance and imagine an alternative perspective. And yet I think they reliably, and quite magnificently, fail to do so. This is part of why I regard dogmatic and confident insistence of moral realism as an almost quasi-religious view, and one fundamentally at odds with the spirit of a more skeptical and cautious approach to philosophy.
What I suspect is going on is, in part, that philosophers are picking the conclusions they want, then marshaling the resources of philosophy to rationalize those conclusions, come hell or high water, and that this has been largely successful because they're so good at verbal shenanigans they can create a superficial appearance of intellectual sophistication around their rationalizations.
I'm not even sure what I said originally, since your characterization is one I endorse, and your way of putting it is concise and excellent.
So the anti realist can say, “I think x is wrong, and I cannot currently imagine believing the opposite. However, I also believe my believing in the wrongness of x is contingent on many influences, and I acknowledge that I could have had a different intuition given different influences”.
I don’t even see how people not having intrinsic value is entailed by anti-realism. When I say X is intrinsically valuable, I just mean I subjectively value X itself.
Realists are going to mean "intrinsically valuable" in some realist way.
This is a fun series, if for no other reason than to show that people (including philosophy PhD candidates apparently) make some of the horrendous arguments you have spent time addressing. I might have thought the whole "antirealism means it's okay to slaughter innocents" line was something you only heard from untrained internet philosophy bros, but apparently it's something you can continue to say even after serious training in this stuff (though there's the possibility that Houston Christian University is not serious)
I don't think professional philosophers have good arguments for moral realism or against antirealism, and they occasionally make the same false and misleading remarks about the implications of antirealism as people without formal training.
I am genuinely baffled by what goes on in the field. Realists often fail to even make explicit their own presuppositions, asking others:
"Do you think X is wrong?"
And if the answer is "yes," they take this to indicate realism. This is deeply silly. It's not like antirealists can't or don't say "yes" to such questions, and it's not as if doing so isn't entirely consistent with many antirealist accounts: relativism, constructivism, expressivism, error theory + fictionalism, revisionist proprietary use of language, and views like my own...you know, almost all antirealists, other than a kind of flat-footed error theoretic account.
Moral realists should know better. And yet even professional philosophers routinely use this line of questioning. They should recognize this is rhetorically effective, but a vacuous and ridiculous way to engage in these discussions that completely fails to appreciate the conceptual resources available to antirealists.
This way of interacting with antirealism is so lazy, unsophisticated, and negligent that I can't help but feel people doing this are either catastrophically mistaken about the fundamentals of metaethics or simply despise moral antirealism so much they can't be bothered to be precise or to take it seriously as a rival position.
To me, it looks like the mistake here is a bit different.
Here's how I see it:
- On realism, actions are either permissible or impermissible. It's a genuine dichotomy if realism is true. So if a realist denies that something is impermissible, they will (on pain of inconsistency) think it's permissible.
- On anti-realism, actions are neither permissible nor impermissible--there just aren't facts of this sort.
- When we don't condition on the truth of realism, the denial that slaughter of innocents is impermissible tells us that either (1) realism is true and slaughter of innocents is permissible, or (2) realism is false and slaughter of innocents is neither permissible nor impermissible.
- I think that what's happening when realists make these claims that antirealism implies that slaughter of innocents is permissible, they're continuing to condition on the truth of realism (and so the genuine dichotomy of permissible/impermissible), not fully stepping into the antirealist paradigm. They're trying to hold fixed the dichotomy of permissible/impermissible while considering the fact that antirealism implies that slaughter of innocents is not impermissible.
Not really disagreeing with what you say, just offering a different take on the precise mistake Hunter makes here.
"I think that what's happening when realists make these claims that antirealism implies that slaughter of innocents is permissible, they're continuing to condition on the truth of realism (and so the genuine dichotomy of permissible/impermissible), not fully stepping into the antirealist paradigm."
This is exactly what I have in mind by the halfway fallacy:
https://lanceindependent.substack.com/p/the-halfway-fallacy
...I think moral realists are quite literally reliably failing to even fathom the antirealist's point of view, and mistakenly thinking antirealists are somehow partially committed to or trapped within the confines of the realist's perspective. They're failing to appreciate just how much of their view we reject.
I find this failure of imagination remarkable. It comes from professional philosophers, who one would think would do a better job of being able to hold their own paradigms and perspectives in abeyance and imagine an alternative perspective. And yet I think they reliably, and quite magnificently, fail to do so. This is part of why I regard dogmatic and confident insistence of moral realism as an almost quasi-religious view, and one fundamentally at odds with the spirit of a more skeptical and cautious approach to philosophy.
What I suspect is going on is, in part, that philosophers are picking the conclusions they want, then marshaling the resources of philosophy to rationalize those conclusions, come hell or high water, and that this has been largely successful because they're so good at verbal shenanigans they can create a superficial appearance of intellectual sophistication around their rationalizations.
I'm not even sure what I said originally, since your characterization is one I endorse, and your way of putting it is concise and excellent.