The number of moral realists, and especially non-naturalist moral realists, both strike me as indications that there is something wrong with contemporary academic philosophy. It almost seems like philosophers reliably hold one of the less defensible positions across many issues.
We’ve talked about this a bit, but to restate my view on LW: I think there’s enormous variation in what people mean by “moral realism”, enough to make it a mostly useless term (and, as a corollary, I claim we shouldn’t update much about philosophers’ competence based on how realist or anti-realist they are).
Even ‘morality: subjective or objective?’ seems almost optimized to be confusing, for the same reason it would be confusing to ask “are the rules of baseball subjective, or objective?”.
Baseball’s rules are subjective in the sense that humans came up with them (/ located them in the space of all possible game rules), but objective in the sense that you can’t just change the rules willy-nilly (without in effect changing the topic away from “baseball” and to a new game of your making). The same is true for morality.
(Though there’s an additional sense in which morality might be called ‘subjective’, namely that there isn’t a single agreed-upon ‘rule set’ corresponding to the word ‘morality’, and different people favor different rule sets—like if soccer fans and American-football fans were constantly fighting about which of the two games is the ‘real football’.
And there’s an additional sense in which morality might be called ‘objective’, namely that the rules of morality don’t allow you to stop playing the game. With baseball, you can choose to stop playing, and no one will complain about it. With morality, we rightly treat the ‘game’ as one that everyone is expected to play 24⁄7, at least to the degree of obeying game rules like ‘don’t murder’.)
This is also why I don’t care how many philosophers think aesthetic value is subjective vs. objective. The case is quantitatively stronger for ‘aesthetic value is subjective’ than for ‘morality is subjective’ (because it’s more likely that Bob and Alice’s respective Aesthetics Rules will disagree about ‘Mozart is one of the best musicians’ than that Bob and Alice’s Morality Rules will disagree about ‘it’s fine to kill Mozart for fun’), but qualitatively the same ambiguities are involved.
It would be better to ask questions like ‘is it a supernatural miracle that morality exists / that humans happen to endorse the True Morality’ and ‘if all humans were ideally rational and informed, how much would they agree about what’s obligatory, impermissible, worthy of praise, worthy of punishment, etc.?‘, rather than asking about ‘subjective’, ‘objective’, ‘real’, or ‘unreal’.
I claim that there are basically four positions here:
1. Magical-thinking anti-realist: There’s nothing special about morality, it’s just like the rules of chess. So let’s stop being moral!
2. Reasonable anti-realist: There’s nothing special about morality, it’s just like the rules of chess. It’s important to emphasize that the magical-thinking realists are wrong, though, so let’s say ‘moral statements aren’t mind-independently true’, even though there’s a sense in which they are mind-independently true (eg, the same sense in which statements about chess rules are mind-independently true).
3. Reasonable realist: There’s nothing special about morality, it’s just like the rules of chess. It’s important to emphasize that the magical-thinking anti-realists are wrong, though, so let’s say ‘moral statements are mind-independently true’, even though there’s a sense in which they aren’t mind-independently true (eg, the same sense in which statements about chess rules aren’t mind-independently true).
4. Magical-thinking realist: Morality has to be incredibly magically physics-transcendingly special, otherwise (the magical-thinking anti-realist is right / God doesn’t exist / etc.). So I hereby assert that it is indeed special in that way!
Terminology choices aside, views 2 and 3 are identical, and the whole debate gets muddled and entrenched because people fixate on the ‘realism’ rather than on the thing anyone actually cares about.
Cf. people who say ‘we can’t say non-realism is true, that would give aid and comfort to crazy cultural relativists who (incoherently) think we can’t ban female genital mutilation because there are no grounds for imposing any standards across cultural divides’.
Whether you’re more scared of crazy cultural relativists or of crypto-religionists isn’t a good way of dividing up the space of views about the metaphysics of morality! But somehow here (I claim) we are.
My own view is the one endorsed in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s By Which It May Be Judged (roughly Frank Jackson’s analytic descriptivism). This is what I mean when I use moral language.
When it comes to describing moral discourse in general, I endorse semantic pluralism / ‘different groups are talking about wildly different things, and in some cases talking about nothing at all, when they use moral language’.
You could call these views “anti-realist” in some senses. In other senses, you could call them realist (as I believe Frank Jackson does). But ultimately the labels are unimportant; what matters is the actual content of the view, and we should only use the labels if they help with understanding that content, rather than concealing it under a pile of ambiguities and asides.
When it comes to describing moral discourse in general, I endorse semantic pluralism / ‘different groups are talking about wildly different things, and in some cases talking about nothing at all, when they use moral language’.
I agree, but this is orthogonal to whether moral realism is true. Questions about moral realism generally concern whether there are stance-independent moral facts. Whether or not there are such facts does not directly depend on the descriptive status of folk moral thought and discourse. Even if it did, it’s unclear to me how such an approach would vindicate any substantive account of realism.
You could call these views “anti-realist” in some senses. In other senses, you could call them realist (as I believe Frank Jackson does).
I’d have to know more about what Jackson’s specific position is to address it.
But ultimately the labels are unimportant; what matters is the actual content of the view, and we should only use the labels if they help with understanding that content, rather than concealing it under a pile of ambiguities and asides.
I agree with all that. I just don’t agree that this is diagnostic of debates in metaethics about realism versus antirealism. I don’t consider the realist label to be unhelpful, I do think it has a sufficiently well-understood meaning that its use isn’t wildly confused or unhelpful in contemporary debates, and I suspect most people who say that they’re moral realists endorse a sufficiently similar enough cluster of views that there’s nothing too troubling about using the term as a central distinction in the field. There is certainly wiggle room and quibbling, but there isn’t nearly enough actual variation in how philosophers understand realism for it to be plausible that a substantial proportion of realists don’t endorse the kinds of views I’m objecting to and claiming are indicative of problems in the field.
I don’t know enough about Jackson’s position in particular, but I’d be willing to bet I’d include it among those views I consider objectionable.
I think there’s enormous variation in what people mean by “moral realism”, enough to make it a mostly useless term
I disagree with this claim, and I don’t think that, even if there were lots of variation in what people meant by moral realism, that this would render my claim that the large proportion of respondents who favor realism indicates a problem in the profession. The term is not “useless,” and even if the term were useless, I am not talking about the term. I am talking about the actual substantive positions held by philosophers: whatever their conception of “realism,” I am claiming that enough of that 60% endorse indefensible positions that it is a problem.
I have a number of objections to the claim you’re making, but I’d like to be sure I understand your position a little better, in case those objections are misguided. You outline a number of ways we might think of objectivity and subjectivity, but I am not sure what work these distinctions are doing. It is one thing to draw a distinction, or identify a way one might use particular terms, such as “objective” and “subjective.” It is another to provide reasons or evidence to think these particular conceptions of the terms in question are driving the way people responded to the PhilPapers survey.
I’m also a bit puzzled at your focus on the terms “objective” and “subjective.” Did they ask whether morality was objective/subjective in the 2009 or 2020 versions of the survey?
It would be better to ask questions like ’is it a supernatural miracle that morality exists / that humans happen to endorse the True Morality
I doubt that such questions would be better.
Both of these questions are framed in ways that are unconventional with respect to existing positions in metaethics, both are a bit vague, and both are generally hard to interpret.
For instance, a theist could believe that God exists and that God grounds moral truth, but not think that it is a “supernatural miracle” that morality exists. It’s also unclear what it means to say morality “exists.” Even a moral antirealist might agree that morality exists. That just isn’t typically a way that philosophers, especially those working in metaethics, would talk about putative moral claims or facts.
I’d have similar concerns about the unconventionality of asking about “the True Morality.” I study metaethics, and I’m not entirely sure what this would even mean. What does capitalizing it mean?
It also seems to conflate questions about the scope and applicability of moral concerns with questions about what makes moral claims true. More importantly, it seems to conflate descriptive claims about the beliefs people happen to hold with metaethical claims, and may arbitrarily restrict morality to humans in ways that would concern respondents.
I don’t know how much this should motivate you to update away from what you’re proposing here, but I can do so here. My primary area of specialization, and the focus of my dissertation research, concerns the empirical study of folk metaethics (that is, the metaethical positions nonphilosophers hold). In particular, my focus in on the methodology of paradigms designed to assess what people think about the nature of morality. Much of my work focuses on identifying ways in which questions about metaethics could be ambiguous, confusing, or otherwise difficult to interpret (see here). This also extends to a lesser extent to questions about aesthetics (see here). Much of this work focuses on presenting evidence of interpretative variation specifically in how people respond to questions about metaethics. Interpretative variation refers to the degree to which respondents in a study interpret the same set of stimuli differently from one another. I have amassed considerable evidence of interpretative variation in lay populations specifically with respect to how they respond to questions about metaethics.
While I am confident there is interpretative variation in how philosophers responded to the questions in the PhilPapers survey, I’m skeptical that such variation would encompass such radically divergent conceptions of moral realism that the number of respondents who endorsed what I’d consider unobjectionable notions of realism would be anything more than a very small minority.
I say all this to make a point: there may be literally no person on the planet more aware of, and sensitive to, concerns about how people would interpret questions about metaethics. And I am still arguing that you are very likely missing the mark in this particular case.
I also wanted to add that I am generally receptive to the kind of approach you are taking. My approach to many issues in philosophy is roughly aligned with quietists and draws heavily on identifying cases in which a dispute turns out to be a pseudodispute predicated on imprecision in language or confusion about concepts. More generally, I tend to take a quietist or a “dissolve the problem away” kind of approach. I say this to emphasize that it is generally in my nature to favor the kind of position you’re arguing for here, and that I nevertheless think it is off the mark in this particular case. Perhaps the closest analogy I could make would be to theism: there is enough overlap in what theism refers to that the most sensible stance to adopt is atheism.
The number of moral realists, and especially non-naturalist moral realists, both strike me as indications that there is something wrong with contemporary academic philosophy. It almost seems like philosophers reliably hold one of the less defensible positions across many issues.
We’ve talked about this a bit, but to restate my view on LW: I think there’s enormous variation in what people mean by “moral realism”, enough to make it a mostly useless term (and, as a corollary, I claim we shouldn’t update much about philosophers’ competence based on how realist or anti-realist they are).
Even ‘morality: subjective or objective?’ seems almost optimized to be confusing, for the same reason it would be confusing to ask “are the rules of baseball subjective, or objective?”.
Baseball’s rules are subjective in the sense that humans came up with them (/ located them in the space of all possible game rules), but objective in the sense that you can’t just change the rules willy-nilly (without in effect changing the topic away from “baseball” and to a new game of your making). The same is true for morality.
(Though there’s an additional sense in which morality might be called ‘subjective’, namely that there isn’t a single agreed-upon ‘rule set’ corresponding to the word ‘morality’, and different people favor different rule sets—like if soccer fans and American-football fans were constantly fighting about which of the two games is the ‘real football’.
And there’s an additional sense in which morality might be called ‘objective’, namely that the rules of morality don’t allow you to stop playing the game. With baseball, you can choose to stop playing, and no one will complain about it. With morality, we rightly treat the ‘game’ as one that everyone is expected to play 24⁄7, at least to the degree of obeying game rules like ‘don’t murder’.)
This is also why I don’t care how many philosophers think aesthetic value is subjective vs. objective. The case is quantitatively stronger for ‘aesthetic value is subjective’ than for ‘morality is subjective’ (because it’s more likely that Bob and Alice’s respective Aesthetics Rules will disagree about ‘Mozart is one of the best musicians’ than that Bob and Alice’s Morality Rules will disagree about ‘it’s fine to kill Mozart for fun’), but qualitatively the same ambiguities are involved.
It would be better to ask questions like ‘is it a supernatural miracle that morality exists / that humans happen to endorse the True Morality’ and ‘if all humans were ideally rational and informed, how much would they agree about what’s obligatory, impermissible, worthy of praise, worthy of punishment, etc.?‘, rather than asking about ‘subjective’, ‘objective’, ‘real’, or ‘unreal’.
Copying over a comment I left on Facebook:
My own view is the one endorsed in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s By Which It May Be Judged (roughly Frank Jackson’s analytic descriptivism). This is what I mean when I use moral language.
When it comes to describing moral discourse in general, I endorse semantic pluralism / ‘different groups are talking about wildly different things, and in some cases talking about nothing at all, when they use moral language’.
You could call these views “anti-realist” in some senses. In other senses, you could call them realist (as I believe Frank Jackson does). But ultimately the labels are unimportant; what matters is the actual content of the view, and we should only use the labels if they help with understanding that content, rather than concealing it under a pile of ambiguities and asides.
I agree, but this is orthogonal to whether moral realism is true. Questions about moral realism generally concern whether there are stance-independent moral facts. Whether or not there are such facts does not directly depend on the descriptive status of folk moral thought and discourse. Even if it did, it’s unclear to me how such an approach would vindicate any substantive account of realism.
I’d have to know more about what Jackson’s specific position is to address it.
I agree with all that. I just don’t agree that this is diagnostic of debates in metaethics about realism versus antirealism. I don’t consider the realist label to be unhelpful, I do think it has a sufficiently well-understood meaning that its use isn’t wildly confused or unhelpful in contemporary debates, and I suspect most people who say that they’re moral realists endorse a sufficiently similar enough cluster of views that there’s nothing too troubling about using the term as a central distinction in the field. There is certainly wiggle room and quibbling, but there isn’t nearly enough actual variation in how philosophers understand realism for it to be plausible that a substantial proportion of realists don’t endorse the kinds of views I’m objecting to and claiming are indicative of problems in the field.
I don’t know enough about Jackson’s position in particular, but I’d be willing to bet I’d include it among those views I consider objectionable.
I disagree with this claim, and I don’t think that, even if there were lots of variation in what people meant by moral realism, that this would render my claim that the large proportion of respondents who favor realism indicates a problem in the profession. The term is not “useless,” and even if the term were useless, I am not talking about the term. I am talking about the actual substantive positions held by philosophers: whatever their conception of “realism,” I am claiming that enough of that 60% endorse indefensible positions that it is a problem.
I have a number of objections to the claim you’re making, but I’d like to be sure I understand your position a little better, in case those objections are misguided. You outline a number of ways we might think of objectivity and subjectivity, but I am not sure what work these distinctions are doing. It is one thing to draw a distinction, or identify a way one might use particular terms, such as “objective” and “subjective.” It is another to provide reasons or evidence to think these particular conceptions of the terms in question are driving the way people responded to the PhilPapers survey.
I’m also a bit puzzled at your focus on the terms “objective” and “subjective.” Did they ask whether morality was objective/subjective in the 2009 or 2020 versions of the survey?
I doubt that such questions would be better.
Both of these questions are framed in ways that are unconventional with respect to existing positions in metaethics, both are a bit vague, and both are generally hard to interpret.
For instance, a theist could believe that God exists and that God grounds moral truth, but not think that it is a “supernatural miracle” that morality exists. It’s also unclear what it means to say morality “exists.” Even a moral antirealist might agree that morality exists. That just isn’t typically a way that philosophers, especially those working in metaethics, would talk about putative moral claims or facts.
I’d have similar concerns about the unconventionality of asking about “the True Morality.” I study metaethics, and I’m not entirely sure what this would even mean. What does capitalizing it mean?
It also seems to conflate questions about the scope and applicability of moral concerns with questions about what makes moral claims true. More importantly, it seems to conflate descriptive claims about the beliefs people happen to hold with metaethical claims, and may arbitrarily restrict morality to humans in ways that would concern respondents.
I don’t know how much this should motivate you to update away from what you’re proposing here, but I can do so here. My primary area of specialization, and the focus of my dissertation research, concerns the empirical study of folk metaethics (that is, the metaethical positions nonphilosophers hold). In particular, my focus in on the methodology of paradigms designed to assess what people think about the nature of morality. Much of my work focuses on identifying ways in which questions about metaethics could be ambiguous, confusing, or otherwise difficult to interpret (see here). This also extends to a lesser extent to questions about aesthetics (see here). Much of this work focuses on presenting evidence of interpretative variation specifically in how people respond to questions about metaethics. Interpretative variation refers to the degree to which respondents in a study interpret the same set of stimuli differently from one another. I have amassed considerable evidence of interpretative variation in lay populations specifically with respect to how they respond to questions about metaethics.
While I am confident there is interpretative variation in how philosophers responded to the questions in the PhilPapers survey, I’m skeptical that such variation would encompass such radically divergent conceptions of moral realism that the number of respondents who endorsed what I’d consider unobjectionable notions of realism would be anything more than a very small minority.
I say all this to make a point: there may be literally no person on the planet more aware of, and sensitive to, concerns about how people would interpret questions about metaethics. And I am still arguing that you are very likely missing the mark in this particular case.
I also wanted to add that I am generally receptive to the kind of approach you are taking. My approach to many issues in philosophy is roughly aligned with quietists and draws heavily on identifying cases in which a dispute turns out to be a pseudodispute predicated on imprecision in language or confusion about concepts. More generally, I tend to take a quietist or a “dissolve the problem away” kind of approach. I say this to emphasize that it is generally in my nature to favor the kind of position you’re arguing for here, and that I nevertheless think it is off the mark in this particular case. Perhaps the closest analogy I could make would be to theism: there is enough overlap in what theism refers to that the most sensible stance to adopt is atheism.