The Adam case works as an intuition pump, but it falls short of being an argument. For someone inclined to accept C, it's pretty easy to accept that Adam didn't make a mistake.
On the moral realism thing — it may be true that your normative claims can be separated from your moral realism, but your writing style is so pervaded by realist …
The Adam case works as an intuition pump, but it falls short of being an argument. For someone inclined to accept C, it's pretty easy to accept that Adam didn't make a mistake.
On the moral realism thing — it may be true that your normative claims can be separated from your moral realism, but your writing style is so pervaded by realist turns of phrase that it's easy to see why people keep picking up on that and assuming that your realism is central to your argument. For example:
>"it’s insane to deny this premise"
>"important moral insights"
>"any theory formulated in purely negative terms... cannot possibly be correct"
>"moral theorists have misgeneralized their intuitions"
Whether or not this matters depends, I suppose, on how persuasive you want your arguments to seem to readers who do not share your moral realism.
Hmm, I think it would be difficult to do normative ethics in a way that didn't sound at least superficially "realist". That's part of why anti-realists like Blackburn and Gibbard have put so much work into showing that their metaethics is compatible with "talking like a realist". So I think I'd rather just urge anti-realist readers to shed their unnecessary suspicion of objectively-tinged moral discourse.
I guess what strikes me as objectionable is the conjunction of realism with the sort of strong confidence in your own normative views (and dismissal of other views) that you express in this post.
Suppose I find myself in in the following situation:
(1) I believe there is a true, objectively correct axiology.
(2) I sometimes encounter otherwise reasonable-seeming people who have thought carefully about the relevant issues and concluded that there is no strong reason to prefer utopia over the barren rock.
(3) I am unable to imagine that the correct axiology could be indifferent between the barren rock and utopia, but also unable to offer any arguments supporting my own view.
What is the appropriate attitude to adopt in such a situation? I don't think there is anything wrong with saying "I am just going to take it as a premise that utopia is substantially better than the barren rock." This is just like assuming the parallel postulate and studying Euclidean rather than non-Euclidean geometry. But if I can't imagine how the parallel postulate could possibly be false, this does not justify me in calling non-Euclidean geometry "insane" or assuming I possess a fundamental insight into mathematical truth that non-Euclidean geometers lack; rather, I should take it as an opportunity to reflect on the limitations of my own geometric imagination.
The precise relevance of (1) here is a little difficult to pin down, but perhaps it is something like this: without something like (1), I would not be tempted to call the other views crazy, any more than I would be tempted to call someone crazy for thinking that tea tastes better than coffee. And if I do say "the claim that tea tastes better than coffee is insane, and any theory of hot beverages that implies this claim should be instantly disqualified," it would seem disingenuous, when encountering someone who objects that hot beverage preferences are a matter of personal taste, for me to urge them drop their needless suspicion of objectively tinged hot beverage discourse, since they can just interpret my claims merely as an expression of my own strong preference for coffee — that clearly wasn't what I thought I was saying (or doing) when I made the claim.
See 'Knowing What Matters' - https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAKWM - where I set out my normative epistemology, including an explanation of why actual disagreement is irrelevant. (You could have "otherwise reasonable-seeming people" who think that torture is the only good, so either moral realists can have default trust in their normative intuitions -- including about which other views are outright crazy -- or they're inevitably led to full-blown skepticism, which I think is plainly far worse.)
> without something like (1), I would not be tempted to call the other views crazy, any more than I would be tempted to call someone crazy for thinking that tea tastes better than coffee
Note that much of 20th century metaethics precisely involved anti-realists of various stripes showing how they can avoid being committed to the sort of simple subjectivism you seem inclined to attribute to them. Instead, they defend the claim that they can be just as firm as anyone in their moral conviction (e.g.) that the Holocaust was a moral *atrocity*. See: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#QuaRea
I'm not super-invested in defending the view, but I do think that the sophisticated non-cognitivist views developed by philosophers are far superior to the simple subjectivist views that non-philosophers too often fall into (and that end up diluting and distorting their normative views).
Whatever your metaethical views, we should all be appalled by the torture inflicted on factory-farmed animals. We should all be appalled by the claim that children dying overseas don't matter. And we should all be appalled by the view that everything good in life isn't really good at all: that an utterly empty universe is as good as it gets, and that the extinction of all life is a matter of (intrinsic) indifference. These are horrific claims, and any metaethical view worth taking seriously needs to be compatible with aptness of criticizing horrific moral views as such.
The section in that paper on "when actual disagreement matters" is a bit brief, so I'm not sure I fully understand the position you sketch there. It seems to be something like "disagreement matters when it is non-ideal, and we can hope to resolve it through clarifying arguments; but if there are fundamentally different worldviews, we can expect the arguments to be dialectically unsatisfying, so we don't need to worry about it too much."
Is that a fair summary? I so, I think it's a pragmatically reasonable approach to adopt (nobody wants to waste time coming up with arguments against the view that torture is the only good), but it seems difficult to reconcile with a strong commitment to metaethical realism. (In other words, your treatment of the skeptical argument from disagreement leaves me uncertain whether you think you have a counterargument to the skeptic or are just claiming that you don't need one.)
>"we should all be appalled by the view that everything good in life isn't really good at all, and that the extinction of all life is a matter of (intrinsic) indifference"
I agree with the other normative claims in your last paragraph, but this last one (which comes back to the original topic of your post here) I think is just wrong, quite independently of any metaethical disagreements. I could just as easily say that "we should all be appalled" by the view that it is worth risking an eternal dystopia merely in order to ensure humanity's continued existence. On either side, prematurely rejecting ideas that deserve serious consideration represents a failure of moral imagination that risks denying us access to the actual moral truth (if such a thing exists) or preventing us from satisfactorily clarifying the structure of our own moral attitudes (if it does not).
Yep, fair summary! In general (including, e.g., external world skepticism) I don't think it's possible to present non-question-begging counterarguments against radical skepticism. We can just explain why we reject some of the skeptic's premises (as I do in response to Street earlier in the paper -- see especially my discussion of the "moral lottery"), and hence why we aren't ourselves committed to sharing their skepticism. For more on my generally anti-skeptical approach to philosophy, see: https://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/02/skepticism-rationality-and-default.html
> I think [anti-nihilism about positive value] is just wrong, quite independently of any metaethical disagreements
Fair enough! There I was just wanting to stress the point that you shouldn't let metaethical qualms prevent you from making full-blooded moral judgments.
> prematurely rejecting ideas...
Sure, no-one wants to do that. I'm very much a fallibilist, and think even our verdicts about which claims are crazy/disqualifying must always be held somewhat tentatively and open to revision. I'm always interested to read arguments for nihilism, solipsism, radical skepticism, or whatever. But still, in the meantime, I think it's right to treat the fact that a view implies nihilism (or whatever) as disqualifying, and so we should be prompted to rethink some distinctions in the way I propose in the OP. (It's fine if you have a different list of claims you currently regard as disqualifying.) After all, there are also downsides to being too indecisive or philosophically non-committal.
Regarding skepticism, I think Moorean responses fail pretty hard in the face of moral disagreement. It is as if I say "here is one hand, here is another," and my apparently good-faith interlocutor replys "I agree the first thing is a hand, but the second is obviously an octopus; but don't worry, you really do have another hand, it's right there!" [points at my shoe] — enough experiences of this type, would (and perhaps should?) push me towards skepticism concerning the existence and knowability of an external material world.
So, hooray for fallibilism! (But also: Boo for indecisiveness!)
The Adam case works as an intuition pump, but it falls short of being an argument. For someone inclined to accept C, it's pretty easy to accept that Adam didn't make a mistake.
On the moral realism thing — it may be true that your normative claims can be separated from your moral realism, but your writing style is so pervaded by realist turns of phrase that it's easy to see why people keep picking up on that and assuming that your realism is central to your argument. For example:
>"it’s insane to deny this premise"
>"important moral insights"
>"any theory formulated in purely negative terms... cannot possibly be correct"
>"moral theorists have misgeneralized their intuitions"
Whether or not this matters depends, I suppose, on how persuasive you want your arguments to seem to readers who do not share your moral realism.
Hmm, I think it would be difficult to do normative ethics in a way that didn't sound at least superficially "realist". That's part of why anti-realists like Blackburn and Gibbard have put so much work into showing that their metaethics is compatible with "talking like a realist". So I think I'd rather just urge anti-realist readers to shed their unnecessary suspicion of objectively-tinged moral discourse.
I guess what strikes me as objectionable is the conjunction of realism with the sort of strong confidence in your own normative views (and dismissal of other views) that you express in this post.
Suppose I find myself in in the following situation:
(1) I believe there is a true, objectively correct axiology.
(2) I sometimes encounter otherwise reasonable-seeming people who have thought carefully about the relevant issues and concluded that there is no strong reason to prefer utopia over the barren rock.
(3) I am unable to imagine that the correct axiology could be indifferent between the barren rock and utopia, but also unable to offer any arguments supporting my own view.
What is the appropriate attitude to adopt in such a situation? I don't think there is anything wrong with saying "I am just going to take it as a premise that utopia is substantially better than the barren rock." This is just like assuming the parallel postulate and studying Euclidean rather than non-Euclidean geometry. But if I can't imagine how the parallel postulate could possibly be false, this does not justify me in calling non-Euclidean geometry "insane" or assuming I possess a fundamental insight into mathematical truth that non-Euclidean geometers lack; rather, I should take it as an opportunity to reflect on the limitations of my own geometric imagination.
The precise relevance of (1) here is a little difficult to pin down, but perhaps it is something like this: without something like (1), I would not be tempted to call the other views crazy, any more than I would be tempted to call someone crazy for thinking that tea tastes better than coffee. And if I do say "the claim that tea tastes better than coffee is insane, and any theory of hot beverages that implies this claim should be instantly disqualified," it would seem disingenuous, when encountering someone who objects that hot beverage preferences are a matter of personal taste, for me to urge them drop their needless suspicion of objectively tinged hot beverage discourse, since they can just interpret my claims merely as an expression of my own strong preference for coffee — that clearly wasn't what I thought I was saying (or doing) when I made the claim.
See 'Knowing What Matters' - https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAKWM - where I set out my normative epistemology, including an explanation of why actual disagreement is irrelevant. (You could have "otherwise reasonable-seeming people" who think that torture is the only good, so either moral realists can have default trust in their normative intuitions -- including about which other views are outright crazy -- or they're inevitably led to full-blown skepticism, which I think is plainly far worse.)
> without something like (1), I would not be tempted to call the other views crazy, any more than I would be tempted to call someone crazy for thinking that tea tastes better than coffee
Note that much of 20th century metaethics precisely involved anti-realists of various stripes showing how they can avoid being committed to the sort of simple subjectivism you seem inclined to attribute to them. Instead, they defend the claim that they can be just as firm as anyone in their moral conviction (e.g.) that the Holocaust was a moral *atrocity*. See: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#QuaRea
I'm not super-invested in defending the view, but I do think that the sophisticated non-cognitivist views developed by philosophers are far superior to the simple subjectivist views that non-philosophers too often fall into (and that end up diluting and distorting their normative views).
Whatever your metaethical views, we should all be appalled by the torture inflicted on factory-farmed animals. We should all be appalled by the claim that children dying overseas don't matter. And we should all be appalled by the view that everything good in life isn't really good at all: that an utterly empty universe is as good as it gets, and that the extinction of all life is a matter of (intrinsic) indifference. These are horrific claims, and any metaethical view worth taking seriously needs to be compatible with aptness of criticizing horrific moral views as such.
The section in that paper on "when actual disagreement matters" is a bit brief, so I'm not sure I fully understand the position you sketch there. It seems to be something like "disagreement matters when it is non-ideal, and we can hope to resolve it through clarifying arguments; but if there are fundamentally different worldviews, we can expect the arguments to be dialectically unsatisfying, so we don't need to worry about it too much."
Is that a fair summary? I so, I think it's a pragmatically reasonable approach to adopt (nobody wants to waste time coming up with arguments against the view that torture is the only good), but it seems difficult to reconcile with a strong commitment to metaethical realism. (In other words, your treatment of the skeptical argument from disagreement leaves me uncertain whether you think you have a counterargument to the skeptic or are just claiming that you don't need one.)
>"we should all be appalled by the view that everything good in life isn't really good at all, and that the extinction of all life is a matter of (intrinsic) indifference"
I agree with the other normative claims in your last paragraph, but this last one (which comes back to the original topic of your post here) I think is just wrong, quite independently of any metaethical disagreements. I could just as easily say that "we should all be appalled" by the view that it is worth risking an eternal dystopia merely in order to ensure humanity's continued existence. On either side, prematurely rejecting ideas that deserve serious consideration represents a failure of moral imagination that risks denying us access to the actual moral truth (if such a thing exists) or preventing us from satisfactorily clarifying the structure of our own moral attitudes (if it does not).
Yep, fair summary! In general (including, e.g., external world skepticism) I don't think it's possible to present non-question-begging counterarguments against radical skepticism. We can just explain why we reject some of the skeptic's premises (as I do in response to Street earlier in the paper -- see especially my discussion of the "moral lottery"), and hence why we aren't ourselves committed to sharing their skepticism. For more on my generally anti-skeptical approach to philosophy, see: https://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/02/skepticism-rationality-and-default.html
> I think [anti-nihilism about positive value] is just wrong, quite independently of any metaethical disagreements
Fair enough! There I was just wanting to stress the point that you shouldn't let metaethical qualms prevent you from making full-blooded moral judgments.
> prematurely rejecting ideas...
Sure, no-one wants to do that. I'm very much a fallibilist, and think even our verdicts about which claims are crazy/disqualifying must always be held somewhat tentatively and open to revision. I'm always interested to read arguments for nihilism, solipsism, radical skepticism, or whatever. But still, in the meantime, I think it's right to treat the fact that a view implies nihilism (or whatever) as disqualifying, and so we should be prompted to rethink some distinctions in the way I propose in the OP. (It's fine if you have a different list of claims you currently regard as disqualifying.) After all, there are also downsides to being too indecisive or philosophically non-committal.
Regarding skepticism, I think Moorean responses fail pretty hard in the face of moral disagreement. It is as if I say "here is one hand, here is another," and my apparently good-faith interlocutor replys "I agree the first thing is a hand, but the second is obviously an octopus; but don't worry, you really do have another hand, it's right there!" [points at my shoe] — enough experiences of this type, would (and perhaps should?) push me towards skepticism concerning the existence and knowability of an external material world.
So, hooray for fallibilism! (But also: Boo for indecisiveness!)