If you mean “compelling” in the sense of “convincing” or “motivating,” then I actually don’t mean to suggest there are any “universally compelling normative statements.” I think it’s totally possible for there to be something that somone “should” do (e.g. being vegetarian), without this person either believing they should do it or acting on their belief.
This doesn’t seem too problematic to me, though, since most other kinds of statements also fail to be at least universally convincing. For example, I also think that the statement “the universe is billions of years old” is both true and not-universally-convincing. Some philosophers do still argue, though, that the failure of normative beliefs to consistently motivate people is a serious challenge for normative realism.
Fair point!
It’s definitely possible I’m underestimating the popularity of realist views. In which case, I suppose this post can be take as a mostly redundant explanation of why I think people are sensible to have these views :)
I guess there are few reasons I’ve ended up with the impression that realist views aren’t very popular.
People are often very dismissive of “moral realism.” (If this doesn’t seem right, I think I should be able to pull up quotes.) But nearly all standard arguments against moral realism also function as arguments against “normative realism” as well. The standard concerns about ‘spookiness’ and ungrounded epistemology arise as soon as we accept that there are facts of the matter about what we should do and that we can discover these facts; it doesn’t lessen the fundamental metaphysical or epistemological issues whether these facts, for example, tell us to try to maximize global happiness or to try to fulfill the preferences of some particular idealized version of ourselves. It also seems to be the case that philosophers who identify as “moral anti-realists” are typically anti-realists about normativity, which I think partly explains why people seldom bother to tease the terms “moral realist” and “normative realist” apart in the first place. So I suppose I’ve been leaning on a prior that people who identify as “moral anti-realists” are also “normative anti-realists.”
(Edit) It seems pretty common for people in the community to reject or attack the idea of “shoulds.” For example, many posts in the (popular?) “Replacing Guilt” sequence on Minding Our Way seem to do this. A natural reading is a rejection of normative realism.
Small-n, but the handful of friends I’ve debated moral realism with have also had what I would tend to classify as anti-realist attitudes toward normativity more generally.
If normative realism is correct, then it’s at least conceivable that the action it’s most “reasonable” for us to take in some circumstance (i.e. the action that we “should’ take”) is different from the action that someone who tends to “win” a lot over the course of their life would take. However, early/foundational community writing seems to reject the idea that there’s any meaningful conceptually distinct sense in which we can talk about an action being “reasonable.” I take this Eliezer post on decision theory and rationality as an example.
It might also be useful to clarify that in ricraz’s recent post criticizing “realism about rationality,” several of the attitudes listed aren’t directly related to “realism” in the sense of this post. For example, it’s possible for there to be “a simple yet powerful theoretical framework which describes human intelligence” even if normative anti-realism is true. It did seem to me like the comments on ricraz’s post leaned toward wariness of “realism,” as conceptualized there, but I’m not really sure how to map that onto attitudes about the notion of “realism” I have in mind here.