I wish when people did this kind of thing (i.e., respond to other people’s ideas, arguments, or positions) they would give some links or quotes, so I can judge whether whatever they’re responding to is being correctly understood and represented.
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.
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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.”
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(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.
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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.
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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.
If there is anything that anyone should in fact do, then I would say that meets the standards of “realism.” For example, it could in principle turn out to be the case that the only normative fact is that the tallest man in the world should smile more. That would be an unusual normative theory, obviously, but I think it would still count as substantively normative.
I’m unsure whether this is a needlessly technical point, but sets of facts about what specific people should do also imply and are implied by facts about what everyone should do. For example, suppose that it’s true that everyone should do what best fulfills their current desires. This broad normative fact would then imply lots of narrow normative facts about what individual people should do. (E.g. “Jane should buy a dog.” “Bob should buy a cat.” “Ed should rob a bank.”) And we could also work backward from these narrow facts to construct the broad fact.
I interpret Eliezer’s post, perhaps wrongly, as focused on a mostly distinct issue. It reads to me like he’s primarily suggesting that for any given normative claim—for example, the claim that everyone should do what best fulfills their current desires or the claim that the tallest man should smile more—there is no argument that could convince any possible mind into believing the claim is true.
I agree with him at least on this point and think that most normative realists would also tend to agree.
Please let me know (either clone of saturn or Said) if it seems like I’m still not quite answering the right question :)