Who is "we"? & other tweets

Twitter Tuesday #30

This is more of a round-up of things said on Twitter than an essay. It’s much of the same, but it at least helps emphasize the frequency with which the same sorts of issues keep popping up. It’s also a bit of a purge of tweets I’d saved, but never commented on. Again, I have to stress: philosophy doesn’t only occur in academic articles, it occurs “in the wild,” and with much greater visibility. What people say in online spaces matters.

1.0 Who is “we”?

Over on Twitter, @ScepticalDoctor says:

We have strong intuitions that certain things are objectively wrong/right.

Perhaps this is a reason to embrace moral realism. I respect the argument to some extent: I'm just not convinced by it. 

I think we have better (naturalistric) explanations for these intuitions.

As always:

• Who is “we”?

• Claims about whether people have strong realist intuitions are empirical claims about human psychology.

• There is little evidence that most people have strong realist intuitions.

As long as people keep making these claims, I am going to keep raising objections.

2.0 Manifest evil

According to JPA:

When confronted with vivid examples of manifestly horrific acts — of evil — any veneer of plausibility that moral antirealism might have in the seminar room or in the armchair vanishes entirely.

This is absurd. As if antirealists aren’t already extremely familiar with “vivid examples of manifestly horrific acts.” If the position were so fragile that it would dissolve when confronted with such examples, nobody would endorse the position. And yet we do. JPA can flatter himself that antirealists wither when confronted with manifest evil. Maybe

What often happens is the seminar room or even the armchair is that realists leverage normative entanglement to give the false impression that antirealists are hold repugnant normative moral views, worse moral character, and less opposition to the horrific acts in question. In effect, many critics of antirealism leverage misleading or outright false implications about antirealism. Thus, this supposed vanishing of plausibility is typically a result of mischaracterizations of antirealism.

Nothing about antirealism prohibits the antirealist from regarding these examples as “manifestly horrific acts.” 

3.0 License to torture

Pete Mandik got these results from a poll:

I think this poll is brilliant and hilarious and sheds some light on a parallel route antirealists could take, if they wanted to be obnoxious, in critiquing moral realism. Whereas the antirealist can insist they’d act in accordance with their present, benign moral standards regardless of what the moral facts turned out to be, the moral realist outsources their conscience to the stance-independent moral facts. If those facts turned out to demand atrocities or absurdities, the realist is obliged to comply.

Realists may insist this is impossible, but unless they think that their normative moral judgments are infallible, it at least remains an open epistemic possibility that their moral judgments are wrong, and that it could be that the stance-independent moral facts require us to torture people for fun or spend all day screaming at tables.

4.0 Pretending to be realists

Someone makes the common claim that nobody actually believes relativism:

Nobody actually believes in moral relativism. Don’t pretend to.

Many people seem to think that nobody believes the positions they claim to believe, and that if they insist they do hold those positions, they’re pretending.

This is a very strong empirical claim. None of us have telepathic powers, so we can’t directly determine whether someone really believes what they say they do. Instead, we may attempt to infer their beliefs from their behavior. There is nothing wrong with this in principle, but in practice, what would a person claiming to be a relativist say or do that would indicate that they don’t really believe realism?

As far as I can tell: not much. Making moral judgments, caring about things, judging other people and cultures…all of this is consistent with moral relativism.

5.0 The spirit of Moore

This is an insightful remark from @AhmedDahshan_:

Kinda seems to me that if it hadn't been for G.E Moore, modern forms of Moral Realism-maybe aside from those with conceptual engineering e.g. Railton's-wouldn't have even been a thing.

The spirit of his infamous "shift" could be found almost always somewhere in each one of them.

I do wonder at the degree to which philosophical trends, categories, distinctions, terms, ways of framing disputes, and the popularity of competing positions is riddled with path dependencies: which figures become prominent in the field, which historical events unfold, how changes in culture and language accrue, and so on.

I suspect the content of contemporary philosophy at any given time is so culturally contingent that the conceit among philosophers that they have special faculties for grasping immutable truths is wildly overstated. Aside from the utility of conventional math and logic, I see very little that seems like it’d be discovered and rediscovered in its present form in the contemporary analytic landscape.

6.0 Not even propositions

I’m not the only one who thinks that the claims non-naturalist moral realists make may not even be meaningful. Consider this remark from Nick Hiebert:

I think I go a step further. I literally don't think many moral objectivists are even uttering propositions. I think it's just gibberish.

This position may not be popular among contemporary academic philosophers, but it exists outside of academia. It’s only a matter of time before someone publishes a paper defending this view.

7.0 Needless torture

This tweet from @sibaburck consisted of a poll about people’s metaethical views:

As you can see, moral realism won this poll by a substantial margin, though antirealism remained a popular choice. 25.9% is very close to the rate of antirealism among academic philosophers in the 2020 PhilPapers survey: 26.1%!

Unfortunately, the question presented here is not a valid measure of people’s metaethical views.

First, moral antirealism is not the view that “There are no moral facts.” It is the view that there are no stance-independent moral facts. Some moral antirealists believe there are stance-dependent moral facts, including cultural relativists, individual subjectivists, and constructivists of various kinds. 1@NotTravisTalks did point this out:

Out of these two options, #2, but just to be clear, moral anti-realism doesn’t entail the view that there are no moral facts.

On my view there are moral facts, it’s just they’re stance-dependent rather than stance-independent.

Second, the questions include loaded, normative language that could plausibly bias respondents against the antirealist option, e.g., “needless.” In addition, there is language that inappropriately suggests a kind of frivolousness and lack of seriousness to the antirealist view, with the use of “It is my subjective opinion.” Opinion often carries epistemic connotations of uncertainty and a practical openness to views to the contrary, which could suggest both that the antirealist isn’t as committed to their normative moral standards and they’re they’re more tolerant of people who don’t agree, neither of which are entailed by antirealism. Of course, such phrasing also risks normative entanglement.

Some of the follow-ups to this were interesting, as well. @sibaburck stated

It doesn’t scare me to consider, I just don’t trust people who compare morality to ice cream. I think there’s a fundamental lack of seriousness given to the topic. Happening inside the mind does not make something less empirical. The quality of experience is the only fact we know

This reaction reflects what I suspect is a common mistake when evaluating comparisons. When you compare two things, you are typically comparing them with respect to one or more features of interest, but are not comparing them with respect to other features of interest. If I say “that apple and that car are both red,” I am comparing the color of the two objects. This does not mean that I am comparing their mass, value, usefulness for traveling, or anything else. Here, the author states that they don’t trustpeople who compare morality to ice cream, because this suggests a “lack of seriousness.”

This is absurd. When people compare ethics to food, they’re typically comparing them exclusively in terms of their metanormative characteristics, such as whether claims like:

• “It’s immoral to hurt people for fun”

• “Chocolate cake is very tasty.”

An antirealist who regards these claims as similar in metanormative terms may hold that both such claims express a speaker’s attitudes, or issue imperatives, or describe their substantive moral and gastronomic standards, respectively. That is, the antirealist holds that such claims should be understood to be conveying utterances in their respective domains (moral and gastronomic) that share a similar metanormative profile.

This has nothing to do with how serious you are about morality and ice cream. It doesn’t mean you think that genocide is of equal importance to ice cream.

8.0 Most humans

This is an interesting tweet from @DanKellyFreedom:

Most humans: “It is objectively wrong to punch me in the face for no reason. This is a fact.”

Also most humans: “It’s only my subjective opinion that punching someone else for no reason is okay, but I can see why the punched feel differently.”

This looks like a pair of empirical claims about how most people think. This is followed by a laughing emoji, presumably intended to illustrate some kind of inconsistency between these views. Perhaps the notion is that relativists aren’t relativists about how other people treat them, and you can see how a relativist is inconsistent. If so, this wouldn’t be true. In any case, there’s little good evidence that most people are moral realists or antirealists, but if people were, I’d find it more plausible they held conflicting views like this than that they held coherent and defensible metaethical views.

The actual state of ordinary moral discourse looks both like a mess and one that is likely strategic and functional in its putative “inconsistencies.” That is, to the extent that people seem inconsistent because they say both realist-ish things and antirealist-ish things, this may be due to such language serving proximal argumentative functions. In any case, I don’t think superficially metaethical-sounding language is a good indication of any substantive commitment to a metaethical view.

9.0 The great split

I’ll end these with a funny tweet from Liam Kofi Bright:

One thing that is interesting about the analytic-Continental split is that one side are serious intellectuals making actual contributions to human knowledge whereas the other are jumped up pseudo intellectual whose esoteric technical jargon masks a fundamental lack of thought.

This serves as a devious rabbit-duck for fans of analytic and continental philosophy. I suppose my take is a bit more pessimistic, in that I think that while both sides have made some contributions, as a proportion of the amount of work done neither has achieved as much as it could or should have were philosophers to employ better methods and foundational assumptions.