You say realism is the view that there are stance-independent moral truths. But if that's *all* it is, it's very hard to see why you'd expect it to have any consequences concerning the consistency of our moral intuitions.
Rather, it seems to me you're implicitly building into realism not just metaphysics, but epistemology too: there are stance-independent moral truths, *and* moral reasoning is a (somewhat?) reliable way of learning those truths. Maybe you think those are a natural package--why have realist metaphysics without optimistic epistemology?
Still, I think this is an important distinction because some familiar anti-realist strategies focus on just this gap. E.g., Sharon Street style reasoning involves arguing that if realism is true, then we shouldn't expect moral reasoning to be a good way of learning about the stance-independent truths. And in my view it's natural to see earlier anti-realist arguments (e.g., Harman) as mining a similar vein. (Very roughly, he argues that stance-independent moral truths form no part of the explanations for why we end up holding the moral views we do.)
Once we draw this distinction, it also makes me wonder why you don't take the appearance of irresolvable moral paradoxes to count primarily in favor of realism + skepticism--ie, there are stance-independent moral truths, but we're pretty hopeless at figuring out which ones they are--rather than taking it to support the bigger move to anti-realism.
Thanks for the reply! (Big admirer of yours generally, btw!) It could be moral realism is true but we don't know what the moral facts are - my thought was just that if we don't know what the stance-independent facts are, we shouldn't posit them, and if we shouldn't posit them, we should lean towards denying them for reasons of parsimony.
The reason nobody (as far as I know) defends realism + scepticism is that you need a sufficient reason to posit the existence of moral facts, and the only possible reason is moral intuition. If our intuitions are not at all accurate, this undercuts our motivation for moral realism in the first place, so it’s just an unnecessary posit.
I am a little confused on how moral naturalist epistemology works. Do they grant that you can know that an action causes pleasure (for example) without knowing that it is good (because we form these concepts independently)? If so, how does this work? It seems like someone shouldn’t be able to say “I know that my action causes pleasure but I don’t know if it’s good” if we these concepts refer to the same underlying nature and are both known about through empirical observation.
Also, it seems like intuition still has to be involved because you don’t somehow experience the normativity of pleasure - no part of our sense data includes normativity or value, just the basic phenomenal facts. Therefore, it seems like we must have intuitive knowledge of things like normativity and value and only after this can we identify it with the natural facts.
Also, the reason for reducing x to y should be that there is some data that is best explained by x being identical to y, but there is no possible data beyond moral intuition that could be better explained by goodness being pleasure or something, so there is no motivation for moral naturalism if not for our moral intuitions.
It may vary depending on the naturalist. If they're an analytic naturalist that might be more of a problem than if they're some kind of synthetic naturalist. In the latter case presumably one could be aware of all the relevant natural facts without recognizing that they're the moral facts.
Naturalists may drop certain elements of normativity, so that may be one way they address the point about not experiencing normativity of pleasure. If they don't want to get all reductive about it, I'm not sure what they'd do.
Not sure what naturalists would make of the purported need for intuitions. I'm pretty skeptical about contemporary intuition talk, so while I don't think moral naturalism is plausible, I think there'd be a lot to hash out before I accepted the centrality of moral or any other kind of intuitions.
I guess the point I’m raising about the intuitions is that we need some evidence to make a reduction. What possible evidence could there be for the naturalist to make their reduction?
I don't know, but I wish I did. That reveals a lacuna in my understanding of naturalism (which is quite limited). I think the best way to address this would be to ask a naturalist.
You’ve built a Cartesian element into your realism. Just as Descartes thought that god wouldn’t deceive us about our clear and distinct perceptions, you seem to think that the world wouldn’t give us inconsistent intuitions. It’s a dubious assumption, but a very common one among realists and rarely acknowledged.
The world might give us inconsistent intuitions, but I take intuitions to be the only way we have to know about morality, so insofar as our core moral intuitions are incompatible with one another, that’s evidence that morality isn’t internally coherent.
I'd be interested in what you think "intuitions" are. I question whether they reflect any genuine and distinct kind of mental states, and that the term isn't some weird and confused notion invented by philosophers that doesn't map onto human psychology very well.
What is an "intellectual appearance"? I understand if one construes intuitions to not be beliefs, or simply am inclination to believe something, and I also understand if an intuition isn't something one must infer. But that doesn't tell me much about what they are, or whether they reflect a distinct kind of mental state, or process, or event.
I know philosophers will happily describe some notion like an "intuition" by saying things like "it's an appearance" or "it's a seeming," but I, at least, don't find such explanations satisfactory. Like at all. Compare to if I asked a vision scientist what visual perception was. I sure hope they wouldn't say "it's when you see things" or "detection of visible light." It's too sparse an explanation. There are whole books on visual perception.
If philosophers are using a particular psychological tool, I want to know what that tool is and how it's supposed to work.
But the the books on visual perception are about the causes and biological mechanisms. A book on what a visual perception is like would be pretty short: if you need to ask, you’ll never know.
What kind of explanation would be satisfactory to you?
//A book on what a visual perception is like would be pretty short: if you need to ask, you’ll never know. //
I don't believe in phenomenal states, so this isn't going to be satisfactory to me. I don't think there is anything visual perception "is like" in a phenomenal sense (if that's what you're alluding to; I'm not sure, so please correct me if not).
I'm also not sure if it's analogous to what's under discussion here (it may be, that's going to turn on precisely the kinds of clarifications I'm asking for). Claims that people employ "intuitions" strike me as claims about people's psychology. And claims about people's psychological are empirical claims. Even if there were qualia/mental states, and they aren't amenable to empirical inquiry, I think intuitions are. And if they're not, then I'm not sure why I should grant that people have or employ intuitions of that kind, since they'd be relying on assumptions in philosophy of mind, epistemology, etc. that I probably don't agree to. I have no problem saying people have and use intuitions, but on my view, intuition involves specific psychological processes, and I want to know what those are.
//What kind of explanation would be satisfactory to you? //
Either an empirical account of what intuitions are and how they work, or a good explanation of why intuitions aren't subject to this kind of request.
Intuitions are the only way we have to know about anything since that’s where all inquiry begins. And if you try to analyze intuitions you’ll expose inconsistencies, whether they’re about morality or anything else. From the perspective of analysis every subject matter is internally incoherent.
Does it? I don't recall having intuitions as a child. I'm still not quite sure what an "intuition" in the philosophical sense of the term is supposed to be.
It’s a form of non-reductive, non-inferential knowledge. There’s the kind of knowledge that comes from reducing wholes to parts (analytic knowledge) and the kind that comes from grasping wholes without reducing them to parts (synthetic knowledge). Intuition is just another name for the latter.
As a child I’m sure you made many spontaneous holistic judgments (i.e. intuitions), like: friend or foe? Later on you might have analyzed those intuitions by trying to reduce them to parts. Like, you might have asked yourself: what part or aspect of that person led me to believe that they’re to be avoided? But the intuition that they’re to be avoided came first. Then came the analysis.
I do most of my learning outside class though! The main thing that’s good about it is access to philosophers, but you can get that online anyway if you find the right circles
That's my impression too. I'm arbiting a class on Maimonides now, and it feels much shallower in many respects to the reading group I've been running with my friends. Something about University Pedagogy I think. (Although St. James sounds like a real exception)
I'm an accountant and did a masters in philosophy at night school. Can strongly recommend it. No it didn't apply to my job directly. No it didn't necessarily get me a promotion. But nothing else has come close for helping me improve my writing and clarity of thinking and that has been invaluable to my job 100x.
Thanks Shadow. Yeah hugely, I've always been keen. Started reading Plato when I was 14 and just went down hill from there. :)
I don't think there's any 'right' answer so much as an assembly of good ones and some poorer options. Almost any position we think is solid turns out to be an assembly of odd assumptions and random ideas once we dig into it.
The challenge of having to defend my arguments against trained minds and understanding the broader context of the debates that you could only get from knowing which papers to read.
The feedback from the lecturers too. You cannot replicate the feedback on essays solo. My writing on Substack is done with a sense of diligence and focus but it's also a place to express humour and allow myself some freedom to wander.
A good quality teacher will pick essay questions that force student development. I can ask myself tough questions but who is really there to tell me I'm talking rubbish?
I think this shows that you should abandon naïve seems-plausibilism. An acquaintance-based moral realist view can accomodate the incoherence of extant moral intuitions, since people having them is best explained by an evolutionary process that doesn’t aim at truth. A lot of utilitarians already sort of already embrace this sort of quasi global error theory. I think they should go the extra mile and abandon intuitionism, just claim that we know that pain is bad when we experience it. The extra step towards altruism would be warranted on decision theoretic grounds (as all beliefs are in this model, since we’re not acquainted with epistemic normativity)
Acquaintance-based? Can you say a bit more about that?
I've experienced pain, but nothing about my experience suggests that it's "bad" in the realist's sense. If I were inclined to render a judgment on the matter, I'd say that I know it *isn't* bad in a realist sense when I experience it; it's bad in an antirealist sense.
Fun post, but it all seems quite wrong-headed to me!
> "The realist seems committed to denying at least one extremely plausible moral proposition, in each of these paradoxes, in order to hang on to the other extremely plausible moral propositions. But the anti-realist has a simpler story: none of the propositions in question are stance-independently true"
On its face, I would've thought that denying *all* the plausible claims was a greater cost than just denying *one* of the prima facie plausible claims?
> "The existence of apparently unsolvable moral paradoxes is only surprising on moral realism"
I don't think this should surprise anyone, realist or otherwise. Our moral intuitions are a result of natural processes (evolution and enculturation). There's no reason to expect them to be fully consistent or 100% reliable, even on a form of moral realism which has a sufficiently optimistic epistemology to think that we can (sometimes) have moral knowledge.
Compare: the existence of persistent visual illusions is not "surprising" or a "challenge" to realism about the external world. Even if there were some cases where there was persistent disagreement about which visual impression was illusory and which was veridical, that still wouldn't undermine realism. The fallibility of our perceptual apparatus just doesn't seem particularly relevant to the realism/anti-realism debate.
I don't think the claims realists make are plausible to begin with, so denying all of them not only isn't a cost, it's an advantage to antirealism. So antirealism is both simpler and strikes me as much more plausible. It's a double win for antirealism.
I suppose I would distinguish between the body and the clothes of morality: the body of morality is a partial ordering relation (probably not even well-ordered) of states and actions, while the clothes of morality are everything we do to encourage each other to choose the actions that lead to the good states, as best we can. The body (normativity, axiology) is real and the clothes (moral responsibility, desert, the obligatory/supererogatory distinction) are for convenience. This paradox, even if successful, only dissolves the latter end.
How do you see evolution playing into this? Is having a morality that is evolved relevant for realism vs anti-realism in your view? Maybe you've already written about this somewhere else.
Hey, sorry for the late reply. The evolution of moral intuitions is relevant for the realism/anti-realism debate. There are examples of moral intuitions where we can give a precise and plausible account of why we'd have them for solely evolutionary reasons (e.g., the intuition that female promiscuity is worse than male promiscuity). In the absence of independent reasons to believe that claim (that is, reasons independent of that intuition), I think we have good grounds to doubt it. In other words, evolution "debunks" (or undermines the justification of) some moral intuitions.
Some moral anti-realists go further and say evolutionary psychology can give us an equally plausible debunking story for all of our moral intuitions, not just a select few, such that all of our intuitions are undermined by evolution. This is where I'm skeptical: I don't think these global "just so" stories are plausible enough to debunk every moral intuition we have.
I'd say evolution is a fact rather than a “stance”, but maybe that’s just semantics or I’m not understanding what you mean by stance correctly. But I think you raise a good question, if morality is “a property of reality“ then how exactly do we come to know what it is? Shouldn’t we be able to conclusively determine moral facts then, like we do other objective properties of reality? And conclude them based on something firmer than “it’s just obvious murder is wrong” etc? Is it a fact like 2+2 = 4 or is it a fact in some other way? It seems like there’s a lot of ways you could be a moral realist, some potentially compatible with evolutionary ideas of morality and some probably not.
I am trying to distinguish between something that came into being and developed as humans evolved and societies emerged; that is distinct from something which is simply a fact about the universe which seems less likely to change than the various physical constants like gravitation. Beings with a different evolutionary history might have a different stance as a result, but would live in the same universe. Would morality be different for them due to evolution, or the same due to whatever else we might imagine is the basis for morality?
Kant tried to base morality on rationality, which he thought did not change over time or due to context. A Kantian evolutionist might defend moral realism by saying that morality was a constant because rationality is a constant; evolution provided humans with the power to reason and learn about morality. If morality itself was a product of evolution, or more strictly a byproduct of human evolution, that would contradict moral realism, because humans might evolve further. That might change the fact of the matter if it depends on evolution.
Or would it? If morality was a byproduct of human evolution, it would be independent of any particular person's stance, but dependent upon a sort of collective human stance. Would that satisfy moral realists? I don’t think so. They want recreational puppy torture to be wrong even if all of humanity decided it was great. Would they put up with a possibility that we could have evolved to make puppy torture okay?
What is morality for a moral realist? I think it is an evaluation that could be made by an infallible omniscient impartial observer. Is that too strict? Infallibility and omniscience are not yet on the menu for us, if they ever could be, and even impartiality has deep difficulties. But what else could they mean, if they claim that there is a fact of the matter about moral questions? Just doing our best to be impartial won’t get us to the fact of the matter, if there is one.
Can there be a fact of the matter about morality that changes over time? That seems to violate moral realism.
If we stipulate moral realism, but also stipulate human fallibility, non-omniscience, and bias, do we end up in a different place compared to assuming that morality depends on stances? In both cases, we have to learn about morality, with no obvious endpoint where we can say we are finished, certain we have not made a mistake. So what is at stake in the debate?
The next question might be, can moral anti-realists act significantly differently compared to their hypothetical behavior if they believed in moral realism? Or do they have to act as if moral realism were true? Society depends on participants obeying social norms. Human psychology tends to moralize social norms. Can moral anti-realism ever provide a basis for doing something useful that moral realism can't (I mean besides making edgy arguments in a philosophical discussion)?
Is there a synthesis, a way to move forward that moral realists and anti-realists could share? If there is, it would involve ways of learning more about morality. In the case of moral realists, they would try to learn more about the fact of the matter. Moral anti-realists might try to learn more about the consequences of different social norms. For them, there could still be a fact of a different matter, e.g. what leads to flourishing, what they think counts as flourishing, etc.
Lot's to think about. I think it's hard to argue that our sense of morality is not evolved. What is moral or not depends on the kinds of creatures you're talking about. The whole "recreational puppy torture is wrong and that's a fact of the universe" seems like projecting one's own (perfectly reasonable) human intuitions onto the rest of the world. But I don't think the only two alternatives are "moral truths are written into the nature of reality" and "it's all made up".
“hard to argue that our sense of morality is not evolved. “
Sure. But our sense of morality is not morality itself, according to moral realists. It is a characteristic of reality that most organisms only barely grasp a portion of, if any at all. For MRs, morality was always what it is, and always will be; humans developed an ability to reason about it, and in that sense our sense of morality evolved, in the same way that a Platonist can accept that our ability to reason about mathematics evolved, while insisting that mathematics concerns ideal objects which are eternal and unchanging.
“What is moral or not depends on the kinds of creatures you're talking about. The whole "recreational puppy torture is wrong and that's a fact of the universe" seems like projecting one's own (perfectly reasonable) human intuitions onto the rest of the world.”
The MRs would disagree. They think they know that it is wrong to torture a puppy for no reason, even for aliens with a different evolutionary history. They would say it is wrong for any being that is a moral agent. Which leads immediately to the question, what makes a being into a moral agent?
“But I don't think the only two alternatives are "moral truths are written into the nature of reality" and "it's all made up".”
I think I agree, but that seems like a confusing way to put it. Is it possible for it to be very important and useful and something worth caring about, while still being “all made up”? Is the English language “all made up”? Are social norms “all made up”? In a sense, these are all made up, all phenomena caused by the decisions and actions of many persons, as opposed to being necessary and eternal properties of the universe. But they matter, and they are hard to change, and we don’t want to stop using them because they were made up. There is a fact of the matter concerning them, but in these cases, those facts are contingent and temporary, not universal and eternal.
If all you mean is, there must be more options than thinking morality is a property of the universe and thinking it is a waste of time or an illusion, I agree. I don’t think many of the moral anti-realists are suggesting that we should all just forget about morality, or that someone can make something good just by deciding it is good.
Any product of evolution could have been different, and may change in the future. Moral realists deny that morality has this characteristic. It could not be different and it will never change, in their view. When popular opinion about morality has changed, at least one of the contradictory ideas was just wrong.
Moral luck doesn’t affect the claim that good and bad states of affairs exist, which I think is all you need for moral realism. It does undermine claims of blameworthiness, but I don’t think you need those either in theory or in practice.
Moral luck doesn’t undermine morality, but the paradoxes that arise when considering things like moral luck—where our most basic and deeply held moral intuitions seem not to cohere with one another—is some evidence that we don’t have epistemic access to a coherent set of moral facts (which in turn is a reason to be a moral anti-realist).
Yes, that's fair. I think you're right that Mackie's "companions in guilt" is a strong response – you're hard pressed to find any field where our deeply held intuitions don't fall apart.
I've never really felt the bite of moral luck. It would make sense that our intuitions in gray areas depend on heuristics. A very good heuristic for how badly you acted is how bad the outcome was. It's hard to quantify how risky someone was when driving drunk, and therefore how badly they acted, but if they were drunk enough to hit a kid it makes sense to assume they were driving very recklessly and deserve to be judged harshly.
I doubt this completely eliminates the problem, but between that and some of our judgement coming from an emotional need for retribution for harm done, I feel like moral luck can be reconciled with the principle of choice.
That said I think moral realism is nuts and the anti-realists are very obviously right. 😜
Regarding your second point, about companions in guilt: I don't find normative realism any more plausible for logic than for morality. You don't need stance-independent normativity to employ logic. I'm puzzled as to why anyone thinks normative realism in *any* domain is remotely plausible.
I am a global normative antirealist: I deny there are any stance-independent normative facts. I don't believe this introduces literally any problems for me at all. There's an even deeper solution to all these paradoxes, though: classical pragmatism of the sort articulated by William James and F.C.S. Schiller.
Not a philosopher here so it's possible I'm missing something obvious, but (intuitively ;) it seems to me that moral realism cannot possibly be true unless we accept some other ideas about the world (chiefly, some form of creator/design which then would make it ALSO not stance independent, it's be just the creator's stance?).
On a psychological level, morality seems so OBVIOUSLY not really-real to me that I find it absolutely fascinating that there exist highly intelligent people who devoted their lives to thinking about that stuff who might think otherwise. And just to clarify, this intuition in no way implies I don't think there exists some form of fairly universal HUMAN mortality, or maybe even (tho I'm slightly less sure) "earthly living things universal morality". But it obviously seems to be either a direct result or spandrel of evolution.
What is at stake in the controversy? That is, how should a person who changes their position in the debate change their behavior as a result?
Even if the truth of moral realism is stipulated, that doesn’t provide a key to its content. The problems presented by its falseness would remain if it were true. People would struggle to find a way to agree on a shared basic moral orientation, or at the very least struggle to find a way to allow persons who disagree to coexist peacefully.
This reminds me of the free will debate. Stipulate whatever position you like, but it has no implications for changing personal or social behavior.
The failed exception that proves the rule is that some determinists claim we should change social policies involving punishment. But there are plenty of reasons for using or abolishing various sorts of punishment that have nothing to do with this controversy. If punishment works in reducing crime, it should be used; if it doesn’t, it shouldn’t; the issue of free will does not enter into it.
It seems like we might weight the interests of future humans and alien or A.I. superintelligences very differently contingent upon whether we expected them to have discovered many more moral truths than we have.
That assumes a very strong form of moral realism, where there is not only a fact of the matter, but these facts are transparent enough that we can easily judge that an alien race has made more moral discoveries. We could imagine that as soon as we learned to communicate with them, they might make very persuasive arguments defending novel moral principles. It seems much more likely that some parts of their philosophy would seem very familiar, others very strange, and none immediately universally persuasive to those who did not agree with the conclusion already before hearing the argument.
But even assuming that, the conclusion seems like a stretch. Do we weight the interests of other humans according to their stance on moral philosophy? If so, only very indirectly; perhaps if they act consistently according to their values, this will cause them to take actions that would place them in a category which gets more weight.
It also assumes utilitarianism, rather than deontology or virtue ethics, which would not weight others' interests so explicitly or perhaps at all.
Btw, I think the radical empiricism I have in mind also avoids anti-realism in those other domains, since the presumption of theoretical coherence stems from the same underlying meta epistemology, namely intuitionism. Seeing intuitions as dispositions to believe that were selected for reproductive fitness (and not truth) avoids thinking that the case for realism on those domains requires clear extant theoretical coherence
You say realism is the view that there are stance-independent moral truths. But if that's *all* it is, it's very hard to see why you'd expect it to have any consequences concerning the consistency of our moral intuitions.
Rather, it seems to me you're implicitly building into realism not just metaphysics, but epistemology too: there are stance-independent moral truths, *and* moral reasoning is a (somewhat?) reliable way of learning those truths. Maybe you think those are a natural package--why have realist metaphysics without optimistic epistemology?
Still, I think this is an important distinction because some familiar anti-realist strategies focus on just this gap. E.g., Sharon Street style reasoning involves arguing that if realism is true, then we shouldn't expect moral reasoning to be a good way of learning about the stance-independent truths. And in my view it's natural to see earlier anti-realist arguments (e.g., Harman) as mining a similar vein. (Very roughly, he argues that stance-independent moral truths form no part of the explanations for why we end up holding the moral views we do.)
Once we draw this distinction, it also makes me wonder why you don't take the appearance of irresolvable moral paradoxes to count primarily in favor of realism + skepticism--ie, there are stance-independent moral truths, but we're pretty hopeless at figuring out which ones they are--rather than taking it to support the bigger move to anti-realism.
Thanks for the reply! (Big admirer of yours generally, btw!) It could be moral realism is true but we don't know what the moral facts are - my thought was just that if we don't know what the stance-independent facts are, we shouldn't posit them, and if we shouldn't posit them, we should lean towards denying them for reasons of parsimony.
The reason nobody (as far as I know) defends realism + scepticism is that you need a sufficient reason to posit the existence of moral facts, and the only possible reason is moral intuition. If our intuitions are not at all accurate, this undercuts our motivation for moral realism in the first place, so it’s just an unnecessary posit.
Why would the only possible reason be moral intuition? What about naturalist accounts of realism?
I am a little confused on how moral naturalist epistemology works. Do they grant that you can know that an action causes pleasure (for example) without knowing that it is good (because we form these concepts independently)? If so, how does this work? It seems like someone shouldn’t be able to say “I know that my action causes pleasure but I don’t know if it’s good” if we these concepts refer to the same underlying nature and are both known about through empirical observation.
Also, it seems like intuition still has to be involved because you don’t somehow experience the normativity of pleasure - no part of our sense data includes normativity or value, just the basic phenomenal facts. Therefore, it seems like we must have intuitive knowledge of things like normativity and value and only after this can we identify it with the natural facts.
Also, the reason for reducing x to y should be that there is some data that is best explained by x being identical to y, but there is no possible data beyond moral intuition that could be better explained by goodness being pleasure or something, so there is no motivation for moral naturalism if not for our moral intuitions.
It may vary depending on the naturalist. If they're an analytic naturalist that might be more of a problem than if they're some kind of synthetic naturalist. In the latter case presumably one could be aware of all the relevant natural facts without recognizing that they're the moral facts.
Naturalists may drop certain elements of normativity, so that may be one way they address the point about not experiencing normativity of pleasure. If they don't want to get all reductive about it, I'm not sure what they'd do.
Not sure what naturalists would make of the purported need for intuitions. I'm pretty skeptical about contemporary intuition talk, so while I don't think moral naturalism is plausible, I think there'd be a lot to hash out before I accepted the centrality of moral or any other kind of intuitions.
I guess the point I’m raising about the intuitions is that we need some evidence to make a reduction. What possible evidence could there be for the naturalist to make their reduction?
I don't know, but I wish I did. That reveals a lacuna in my understanding of naturalism (which is quite limited). I think the best way to address this would be to ask a naturalist.
You’ve built a Cartesian element into your realism. Just as Descartes thought that god wouldn’t deceive us about our clear and distinct perceptions, you seem to think that the world wouldn’t give us inconsistent intuitions. It’s a dubious assumption, but a very common one among realists and rarely acknowledged.
The world might give us inconsistent intuitions, but I take intuitions to be the only way we have to know about morality, so insofar as our core moral intuitions are incompatible with one another, that’s evidence that morality isn’t internally coherent.
I'd be interested in what you think "intuitions" are. I question whether they reflect any genuine and distinct kind of mental states, and that the term isn't some weird and confused notion invented by philosophers that doesn't map onto human psychology very well.
I think it’s a non-inferential intellectual appearance that’s distinct from (a) an inclination to belief something, or (b) a belief.
What is an "intellectual appearance"? I understand if one construes intuitions to not be beliefs, or simply am inclination to believe something, and I also understand if an intuition isn't something one must infer. But that doesn't tell me much about what they are, or whether they reflect a distinct kind of mental state, or process, or event.
I know philosophers will happily describe some notion like an "intuition" by saying things like "it's an appearance" or "it's a seeming," but I, at least, don't find such explanations satisfactory. Like at all. Compare to if I asked a vision scientist what visual perception was. I sure hope they wouldn't say "it's when you see things" or "detection of visible light." It's too sparse an explanation. There are whole books on visual perception.
If philosophers are using a particular psychological tool, I want to know what that tool is and how it's supposed to work.
But the the books on visual perception are about the causes and biological mechanisms. A book on what a visual perception is like would be pretty short: if you need to ask, you’ll never know.
What kind of explanation would be satisfactory to you?
//A book on what a visual perception is like would be pretty short: if you need to ask, you’ll never know. //
I don't believe in phenomenal states, so this isn't going to be satisfactory to me. I don't think there is anything visual perception "is like" in a phenomenal sense (if that's what you're alluding to; I'm not sure, so please correct me if not).
I'm also not sure if it's analogous to what's under discussion here (it may be, that's going to turn on precisely the kinds of clarifications I'm asking for). Claims that people employ "intuitions" strike me as claims about people's psychology. And claims about people's psychological are empirical claims. Even if there were qualia/mental states, and they aren't amenable to empirical inquiry, I think intuitions are. And if they're not, then I'm not sure why I should grant that people have or employ intuitions of that kind, since they'd be relying on assumptions in philosophy of mind, epistemology, etc. that I probably don't agree to. I have no problem saying people have and use intuitions, but on my view, intuition involves specific psychological processes, and I want to know what those are.
//What kind of explanation would be satisfactory to you? //
Either an empirical account of what intuitions are and how they work, or a good explanation of why intuitions aren't subject to this kind of request.
Intuitions are the only way we have to know about anything since that’s where all inquiry begins. And if you try to analyze intuitions you’ll expose inconsistencies, whether they’re about morality or anything else. From the perspective of analysis every subject matter is internally incoherent.
Does it? I don't recall having intuitions as a child. I'm still not quite sure what an "intuition" in the philosophical sense of the term is supposed to be.
It’s a form of non-reductive, non-inferential knowledge. There’s the kind of knowledge that comes from reducing wholes to parts (analytic knowledge) and the kind that comes from grasping wholes without reducing them to parts (synthetic knowledge). Intuition is just another name for the latter.
As a child I’m sure you made many spontaneous holistic judgments (i.e. intuitions), like: friend or foe? Later on you might have analyzed those intuitions by trying to reduce them to parts. Like, you might have asked yourself: what part or aspect of that person led me to believe that they’re to be avoided? But the intuition that they’re to be avoided came first. Then came the analysis.
The prospect of girls being named Peter is deeply unsettling. That’s my takeaway
Your writing makes me wish I had done a Uni Degree in philosophy
I do most of my learning outside class though! The main thing that’s good about it is access to philosophers, but you can get that online anyway if you find the right circles
That's my impression too. I'm arbiting a class on Maimonides now, and it feels much shallower in many respects to the reading group I've been running with my friends. Something about University Pedagogy I think. (Although St. James sounds like a real exception)
anyways,
Will you be my right circle?
Of course!
I'm an accountant and did a masters in philosophy at night school. Can strongly recommend it. No it didn't apply to my job directly. No it didn't necessarily get me a promotion. But nothing else has come close for helping me improve my writing and clarity of thinking and that has been invaluable to my job 100x.
Fascinating.
Were you heavy into philosophy before this in any ways?
Thanks Shadow. Yeah hugely, I've always been keen. Started reading Plato when I was 14 and just went down hill from there. :)
I don't think there's any 'right' answer so much as an assembly of good ones and some poorer options. Almost any position we think is solid turns out to be an assembly of odd assumptions and random ideas once we dig into it.
what did you get from the academic philosophical world that you didn't get from studying solo?
The challenge of having to defend my arguments against trained minds and understanding the broader context of the debates that you could only get from knowing which papers to read.
The feedback from the lecturers too. You cannot replicate the feedback on essays solo. My writing on Substack is done with a sense of diligence and focus but it's also a place to express humour and allow myself some freedom to wander.
A good quality teacher will pick essay questions that force student development. I can ask myself tough questions but who is really there to tell me I'm talking rubbish?
I think this shows that you should abandon naïve seems-plausibilism. An acquaintance-based moral realist view can accomodate the incoherence of extant moral intuitions, since people having them is best explained by an evolutionary process that doesn’t aim at truth. A lot of utilitarians already sort of already embrace this sort of quasi global error theory. I think they should go the extra mile and abandon intuitionism, just claim that we know that pain is bad when we experience it. The extra step towards altruism would be warranted on decision theoretic grounds (as all beliefs are in this model, since we’re not acquainted with epistemic normativity)
Acquaintance-based? Can you say a bit more about that?
I've experienced pain, but nothing about my experience suggests that it's "bad" in the realist's sense. If I were inclined to render a judgment on the matter, I'd say that I know it *isn't* bad in a realist sense when I experience it; it's bad in an antirealist sense.
Fun post, but it all seems quite wrong-headed to me!
> "The realist seems committed to denying at least one extremely plausible moral proposition, in each of these paradoxes, in order to hang on to the other extremely plausible moral propositions. But the anti-realist has a simpler story: none of the propositions in question are stance-independently true"
On its face, I would've thought that denying *all* the plausible claims was a greater cost than just denying *one* of the prima facie plausible claims?
> "The existence of apparently unsolvable moral paradoxes is only surprising on moral realism"
I don't think this should surprise anyone, realist or otherwise. Our moral intuitions are a result of natural processes (evolution and enculturation). There's no reason to expect them to be fully consistent or 100% reliable, even on a form of moral realism which has a sufficiently optimistic epistemology to think that we can (sometimes) have moral knowledge.
Compare: the existence of persistent visual illusions is not "surprising" or a "challenge" to realism about the external world. Even if there were some cases where there was persistent disagreement about which visual impression was illusory and which was veridical, that still wouldn't undermine realism. The fallibility of our perceptual apparatus just doesn't seem particularly relevant to the realism/anti-realism debate.
I don't think the claims realists make are plausible to begin with, so denying all of them not only isn't a cost, it's an advantage to antirealism. So antirealism is both simpler and strikes me as much more plausible. It's a double win for antirealism.
I suppose I would distinguish between the body and the clothes of morality: the body of morality is a partial ordering relation (probably not even well-ordered) of states and actions, while the clothes of morality are everything we do to encourage each other to choose the actions that lead to the good states, as best we can. The body (normativity, axiology) is real and the clothes (moral responsibility, desert, the obligatory/supererogatory distinction) are for convenience. This paradox, even if successful, only dissolves the latter end.
How do you see evolution playing into this? Is having a morality that is evolved relevant for realism vs anti-realism in your view? Maybe you've already written about this somewhere else.
Hey, sorry for the late reply. The evolution of moral intuitions is relevant for the realism/anti-realism debate. There are examples of moral intuitions where we can give a precise and plausible account of why we'd have them for solely evolutionary reasons (e.g., the intuition that female promiscuity is worse than male promiscuity). In the absence of independent reasons to believe that claim (that is, reasons independent of that intuition), I think we have good grounds to doubt it. In other words, evolution "debunks" (or undermines the justification of) some moral intuitions.
Some moral anti-realists go further and say evolutionary psychology can give us an equally plausible debunking story for all of our moral intuitions, not just a select few, such that all of our intuitions are undermined by evolution. This is where I'm skeptical: I don't think these global "just so" stories are plausible enough to debunk every moral intuition we have.
Evolution is a stance. Did morality evolve, or did our ability to understand it evolve, but it has always been a property of reality?
I'd say evolution is a fact rather than a “stance”, but maybe that’s just semantics or I’m not understanding what you mean by stance correctly. But I think you raise a good question, if morality is “a property of reality“ then how exactly do we come to know what it is? Shouldn’t we be able to conclusively determine moral facts then, like we do other objective properties of reality? And conclude them based on something firmer than “it’s just obvious murder is wrong” etc? Is it a fact like 2+2 = 4 or is it a fact in some other way? It seems like there’s a lot of ways you could be a moral realist, some potentially compatible with evolutionary ideas of morality and some probably not.
I am trying to distinguish between something that came into being and developed as humans evolved and societies emerged; that is distinct from something which is simply a fact about the universe which seems less likely to change than the various physical constants like gravitation. Beings with a different evolutionary history might have a different stance as a result, but would live in the same universe. Would morality be different for them due to evolution, or the same due to whatever else we might imagine is the basis for morality?
Kant tried to base morality on rationality, which he thought did not change over time or due to context. A Kantian evolutionist might defend moral realism by saying that morality was a constant because rationality is a constant; evolution provided humans with the power to reason and learn about morality. If morality itself was a product of evolution, or more strictly a byproduct of human evolution, that would contradict moral realism, because humans might evolve further. That might change the fact of the matter if it depends on evolution.
Or would it? If morality was a byproduct of human evolution, it would be independent of any particular person's stance, but dependent upon a sort of collective human stance. Would that satisfy moral realists? I don’t think so. They want recreational puppy torture to be wrong even if all of humanity decided it was great. Would they put up with a possibility that we could have evolved to make puppy torture okay?
What is morality for a moral realist? I think it is an evaluation that could be made by an infallible omniscient impartial observer. Is that too strict? Infallibility and omniscience are not yet on the menu for us, if they ever could be, and even impartiality has deep difficulties. But what else could they mean, if they claim that there is a fact of the matter about moral questions? Just doing our best to be impartial won’t get us to the fact of the matter, if there is one.
Can there be a fact of the matter about morality that changes over time? That seems to violate moral realism.
If we stipulate moral realism, but also stipulate human fallibility, non-omniscience, and bias, do we end up in a different place compared to assuming that morality depends on stances? In both cases, we have to learn about morality, with no obvious endpoint where we can say we are finished, certain we have not made a mistake. So what is at stake in the debate?
The next question might be, can moral anti-realists act significantly differently compared to their hypothetical behavior if they believed in moral realism? Or do they have to act as if moral realism were true? Society depends on participants obeying social norms. Human psychology tends to moralize social norms. Can moral anti-realism ever provide a basis for doing something useful that moral realism can't (I mean besides making edgy arguments in a philosophical discussion)?
Is there a synthesis, a way to move forward that moral realists and anti-realists could share? If there is, it would involve ways of learning more about morality. In the case of moral realists, they would try to learn more about the fact of the matter. Moral anti-realists might try to learn more about the consequences of different social norms. For them, there could still be a fact of a different matter, e.g. what leads to flourishing, what they think counts as flourishing, etc.
Lot's to think about. I think it's hard to argue that our sense of morality is not evolved. What is moral or not depends on the kinds of creatures you're talking about. The whole "recreational puppy torture is wrong and that's a fact of the universe" seems like projecting one's own (perfectly reasonable) human intuitions onto the rest of the world. But I don't think the only two alternatives are "moral truths are written into the nature of reality" and "it's all made up".
“hard to argue that our sense of morality is not evolved. “
Sure. But our sense of morality is not morality itself, according to moral realists. It is a characteristic of reality that most organisms only barely grasp a portion of, if any at all. For MRs, morality was always what it is, and always will be; humans developed an ability to reason about it, and in that sense our sense of morality evolved, in the same way that a Platonist can accept that our ability to reason about mathematics evolved, while insisting that mathematics concerns ideal objects which are eternal and unchanging.
“What is moral or not depends on the kinds of creatures you're talking about. The whole "recreational puppy torture is wrong and that's a fact of the universe" seems like projecting one's own (perfectly reasonable) human intuitions onto the rest of the world.”
The MRs would disagree. They think they know that it is wrong to torture a puppy for no reason, even for aliens with a different evolutionary history. They would say it is wrong for any being that is a moral agent. Which leads immediately to the question, what makes a being into a moral agent?
“But I don't think the only two alternatives are "moral truths are written into the nature of reality" and "it's all made up".”
I think I agree, but that seems like a confusing way to put it. Is it possible for it to be very important and useful and something worth caring about, while still being “all made up”? Is the English language “all made up”? Are social norms “all made up”? In a sense, these are all made up, all phenomena caused by the decisions and actions of many persons, as opposed to being necessary and eternal properties of the universe. But they matter, and they are hard to change, and we don’t want to stop using them because they were made up. There is a fact of the matter concerning them, but in these cases, those facts are contingent and temporary, not universal and eternal.
If all you mean is, there must be more options than thinking morality is a property of the universe and thinking it is a waste of time or an illusion, I agree. I don’t think many of the moral anti-realists are suggesting that we should all just forget about morality, or that someone can make something good just by deciding it is good.
Any product of evolution could have been different, and may change in the future. Moral realists deny that morality has this characteristic. It could not be different and it will never change, in their view. When popular opinion about morality has changed, at least one of the contradictory ideas was just wrong.
Moral luck doesn’t affect the claim that good and bad states of affairs exist, which I think is all you need for moral realism. It does undermine claims of blameworthiness, but I don’t think you need those either in theory or in practice.
Moral luck doesn’t undermine morality, but the paradoxes that arise when considering things like moral luck—where our most basic and deeply held moral intuitions seem not to cohere with one another—is some evidence that we don’t have epistemic access to a coherent set of moral facts (which in turn is a reason to be a moral anti-realist).
Yes, that's fair. I think you're right that Mackie's "companions in guilt" is a strong response – you're hard pressed to find any field where our deeply held intuitions don't fall apart.
There is no free will but we may feel free to the extent we are ignorant of causality.
Morality is a personal understanding of best practices when dealing with other creatures. Ethics is formalized, usually shared, ethics.
Ethical solutions are always contingent on the priorities of everyone involved. Here are ethical universals:
a) survival is a prerequisite for all meaningful goals
b) truth is a prerequisite for all non-arbitrary goals
c) sustainability is a prerequisite for all non-temporary goals
d) reciprocity is a prerequisite for civilization
--
bonus: paradox only exists in language, never in reality
I've never really felt the bite of moral luck. It would make sense that our intuitions in gray areas depend on heuristics. A very good heuristic for how badly you acted is how bad the outcome was. It's hard to quantify how risky someone was when driving drunk, and therefore how badly they acted, but if they were drunk enough to hit a kid it makes sense to assume they were driving very recklessly and deserve to be judged harshly.
I doubt this completely eliminates the problem, but between that and some of our judgement coming from an emotional need for retribution for harm done, I feel like moral luck can be reconciled with the principle of choice.
That said I think moral realism is nuts and the anti-realists are very obviously right. 😜
Regarding your second point, about companions in guilt: I don't find normative realism any more plausible for logic than for morality. You don't need stance-independent normativity to employ logic. I'm puzzled as to why anyone thinks normative realism in *any* domain is remotely plausible.
I am a global normative antirealist: I deny there are any stance-independent normative facts. I don't believe this introduces literally any problems for me at all. There's an even deeper solution to all these paradoxes, though: classical pragmatism of the sort articulated by William James and F.C.S. Schiller.
Not a philosopher here so it's possible I'm missing something obvious, but (intuitively ;) it seems to me that moral realism cannot possibly be true unless we accept some other ideas about the world (chiefly, some form of creator/design which then would make it ALSO not stance independent, it's be just the creator's stance?).
On a psychological level, morality seems so OBVIOUSLY not really-real to me that I find it absolutely fascinating that there exist highly intelligent people who devoted their lives to thinking about that stuff who might think otherwise. And just to clarify, this intuition in no way implies I don't think there exists some form of fairly universal HUMAN mortality, or maybe even (tho I'm slightly less sure) "earthly living things universal morality". But it obviously seems to be either a direct result or spandrel of evolution.
What is at stake in the controversy? That is, how should a person who changes their position in the debate change their behavior as a result?
Even if the truth of moral realism is stipulated, that doesn’t provide a key to its content. The problems presented by its falseness would remain if it were true. People would struggle to find a way to agree on a shared basic moral orientation, or at the very least struggle to find a way to allow persons who disagree to coexist peacefully.
This reminds me of the free will debate. Stipulate whatever position you like, but it has no implications for changing personal or social behavior.
The failed exception that proves the rule is that some determinists claim we should change social policies involving punishment. But there are plenty of reasons for using or abolishing various sorts of punishment that have nothing to do with this controversy. If punishment works in reducing crime, it should be used; if it doesn’t, it shouldn’t; the issue of free will does not enter into it.
It seems like we might weight the interests of future humans and alien or A.I. superintelligences very differently contingent upon whether we expected them to have discovered many more moral truths than we have.
That assumes a very strong form of moral realism, where there is not only a fact of the matter, but these facts are transparent enough that we can easily judge that an alien race has made more moral discoveries. We could imagine that as soon as we learned to communicate with them, they might make very persuasive arguments defending novel moral principles. It seems much more likely that some parts of their philosophy would seem very familiar, others very strange, and none immediately universally persuasive to those who did not agree with the conclusion already before hearing the argument.
But even assuming that, the conclusion seems like a stretch. Do we weight the interests of other humans according to their stance on moral philosophy? If so, only very indirectly; perhaps if they act consistently according to their values, this will cause them to take actions that would place them in a category which gets more weight.
It also assumes utilitarianism, rather than deontology or virtue ethics, which would not weight others' interests so explicitly or perhaps at all.
Btw, I think the radical empiricism I have in mind also avoids anti-realism in those other domains, since the presumption of theoretical coherence stems from the same underlying meta epistemology, namely intuitionism. Seeing intuitions as dispositions to believe that were selected for reproductive fitness (and not truth) avoids thinking that the case for realism on those domains requires clear extant theoretical coherence