Normative entanglement: A new name for an old rhetorical trick

Normative entanglement is a common rhetorical strategy moral realists employ when arguing for moral realism. It's akin in some ways to a loaded question. You're presented with a dichotomy that presents the superficial impression of a legitimate yes/no question. However, it's a setup. If you say "yes," this is taken as a concession to the realist. If you say "no," it's used as a bludgeon to imply you're an awful person with a permissive attitude towards moral atrocities. Here's how it works. The realist can ask a question like this:

"Do you think it's immoral to torture people for fun?"

They can insist this is a clear question, and that you should give a "yes" or "no" answer.

If you say "yes," they interpret this as a concession that you share the realist's *metaethical* intuitions, not merely their normative ones. Realism wins.

If you say "no," they imply, or explicitly suggest, that you are okay with, or in some cases support torturing people for fun. That is, you're an awful person with disgusting and horrible views. This is taken as a reductio of antirealism: the antirealist, after all, must concede that they're okay with torturing people! Realism wins.

This is a trick. Don't fall for it.

There are a few problems with this trick.

The first is that it relies on ambiguity. When they ask whether it's immoral to torture people for fun, note that it superficially appears to be merely asking a question about your concrete, first-order moral beliefs, that is, what you think is "right" or "wrong" morally. That is, it does not look like a question about your *metaethical* standards. Metaethical standards would concern what you think it means for it to be “morally wrong” to torture people for fun.

Even an antirealist can say and think that it’s morally wrong to torture people for fun. They just mean something different than the realist. As such, it is completely consistent with moral antirealism to respond:

“Yes, I think it is morally wrong to torture people for fun.”

However, if you say “Yes,” to this question, the realist will often treat this as a concession to realism. It is not. One’s normative moral stance has no necessary relation to their metaethical stance.

Note that if the moral realist merely intends to ask a normative question in the first place, this would make no sense. The question wouldn’t be probative of your metaethical stance. So if it is merely a normative question, it is an irrelevant question. So then why are they asking it? They’re asking it because they can strategically equivocate on, and fix the meaning of “immoral” *after you respond*.

If you respond by saying “yes,” they can interpret this as an implicit concession that you have the intuition not simply that it’s wrong, normatively, but that it’s wrong *in the way realists think things are wrong,* which they can then use to slap you with the charge that you share the realist intuition. This then gives them the edge in relying on the Presumptive Argument: realism seems true, it’s the “default” position, so the onus is on antirealists to argue against it, not for realists to argue for it. Realists rely on shifting the burden of proof onto antirealists to take the pressure off of them, so they don’t have to present arguments for moral realism. It’s a move designed to put the antirealist on the dialectical backfoot, and present realism as the dominant position.

If you say “no,” this is a mistake. What are you saying “no” to? The metaethical presupposition is implicit in the question, but the question looks like a normative question. So if you say “no,” it looks like you’re saying that you don’t oppose, or disapprove, or have a negative attitude towards, or think it is immoral, or whatever, to torture people for fun.

Imagine a person who says:

“I don’t think it’s immoral to steal.”

If you’re an antirealist, you could mean:

“I don’t think there is a stance-independent normative fact such that it is in violation of that fact to steal.”

However, that’s not what the statement looks like. It looks, instead, like you have a lax attitude towards stealing, that you think it’s morally permissible as a matter of first-order moral principle, not simply that you don’t think that there’s a stance-independent normative fact about the moral status of stealing.

What moral realists are doing is a trap. It’s a trap because it presents the antirealist with an ambiguous question that superficially appears to be a clear, straightforward, and reasonable question to ask, but is no such thing. Instead, it is a subtle rhetorical move that lets the realist either imply you’ve made a concession to realism when you have not, or if that fails to insinuate that you are an evil baby torturer.

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A second problem, which I didn’t mention earlier, is that it implicitly presupposes the intelligibility of the realist presupposition. That is, if the question is taken to actually reflect a question about moral realism, such that it is something like this:

“Do you think it’s [a stance-independent moral fact that it’s] immoral to torture people for fun?"

This question can only be answered with a “yes” or a “no” if the question is intelligible. I don’t think it is. Rather, I think the notion of a stance-independent normative fact (if it isn’t trivialized by naturalists) is unintelligible. So I have no way to answer the question. Yet again, the trick is that the question won’t typically make the metaethical presupposition explicit. This makes the question *look* like a reasonable one, because it isn’t using technical jargon. Imagine a realist had to ask the question clearly:

“Do you think it’s a stance-independent normative moral fact that it’s wrong to torture people for fun?”

Saying “no” here has a lot less rhetorical blowback.

Here’s the thing. If this is what moral realists actually intend to ask, why don’t they ask it this way? Why drop all the metaethical terms and ask using plain language that buries their presuppositions?

Yet there’s a problem. Even if the question was made more explicit, saying “no” can still have a certain taint to it. It *still* seems like the antirealist might be okay to torture people for fun.

Unfortunately, the pragmatic elements in the question are inescapable. Any response which involves saying “no” to a question about torturing people could be perceived to carry some implication that you have a permissive or supportive attitude towards torture.

Even if you say “No, but…” and go on to clarify that you are really super duper against torturing people for fun, it can *still* make you seem a little sketchy to people.

As such, I want to call for a moratorium on presenting this kind of question in crude form. Whether intentional or not, even if it is framed carefully and the antirealist is permitted to respond not just with a yes or a no, but to elaborate, there is still an inescapable “pragmatic residue,” a kind of stench that accompanies asking the question.

And antirealists have no way to completely remove the stench. Even if you hand us a bucket of bleach and a swimming pool full of philosophical Phibreze, the mere suggestion that we may be totally okay with torturing people for fun* will haunt us, forever casting a pall of suspicion over moral antirealists as the coterie of people who maybe…just maybe, have a secret underground chamber full of bones and screams.

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Thus, there are two problems with normative entanglement, and the standard “entanglement question” I’ve presented. First, it’s ambiguous, and this ambiguity allows for all kinds of sophistic mischief. Sophischief, if you will.

Second, the realist is implicitly appealing to concepts the antirealist is in a position to reject. So it relies on dubious concepts that may not be intelligible. If so, then there’s no way to provide a straightforward yes or no answer, even if the question weren’t ambiguous.

For comparison, imagine a parallel argument that employed both tricks, from the antirealist perspective, but where the tricks are made extremely clear. Imagine the antirealist asked a moral realist this question:

“Do you think it’s florp to torture people for fun?”

Suppose you were presented with this question in a public discussion, and your interlocutor *insisted* you provide either a “yes” or a “no.” No prevarications. No stalling. Answer. The. Question. What would you say? Yes? Or no?

If you’re like me, you’ll see this question for what it is: someone insisting you play a custom Minesweeper map they designed, where every square is a mine. It doesn’t matter how lightly you step. If you play, you lose.

In fact, the antirealist can be so assured of victory, they could just tell you how they’ll respond to a “yes” or a “no.”

If you say “yes”, you concede antirealism is the intuitive, commonsense position. Now the burden of proof shifts to you, realist. HA!

If you say “no,” then you are in favor of torturing people for fun. That’s a reductio of realism. Antirealism wins! Ha!

Now that that’s out of the way, your choice is to simply pick which way you want to lose.

In short, moral realists often employ a rhetorical trick. For some reason, I have never seen anyone clearly lay out and describe this trick in detail. I hope my impromptu efforts to detail the maneuver in a Facebook post will go some way in spreading awareness of the trap.

However, I have a few more tasks to complete:

(1) The first, and most important task is to provide evidence that this is a move moral realists actually employ. Concrete examples in forums, live discussions, and even published articles will be imperative. There’s no point in devising a solution to something that isn’t an actual problem. If you have examples of this, or can point me to where I might find them, let me know.

(2) Empirical evidence for the claim regarding pragmatics. That is, I predict nonphilosophers will judge someone who responds to the kinds of questions I discuss here by judging the antirealist response of “no” to imply that they’re a bad person, etc.

(3) Effective strategies for responding to this kind of rhetorical move. Hopefully this will become unnecessary as moral realists recognize the move for what it is and stop employing it.