This discussion continues to feel like the most productive discussion I’ve had with a moral realist! :)
However, I do think that normative anti-realism is self-defeating, assuming you start out with normative concepts (though not an assumption that those concepts apply to anything). I consider this argument to be step 1 in establishing moral realism, nowhere near the whole argument.
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So the wager argument for normative realism actually goes like this -
2) We have two competing ways of understanding how beliefs are justified. One is where we have anti-realist ‘justification’ for our beliefs, in purely descriptive terms of what we will probably end up believing given basic facts about how our minds work in some idealised situation. The other is where there are mind-independent facts about which of our beliefs are justified. The latter is more plausible because of 1).
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Either you think some basic epistemic facts have to exist for reasoning to get off the ground and therefore that epistemic anti-realism is self-defeating, or you are an epistemic anti-realist and don’t care about the realist’s sense of ‘self-defeating’. The AI is in the latter camp, but not because of evidence, the way that it’s a moral anti-realist (...However, you haven’t established that all normative statements work the same way—that was just an intuition...), but just because it’s constructed in such a way that it lacks the concept of an epistemic reason.
So, if this AI is constructed such that irreducibly normative facts about how to reason aren’t comprehensible to it, it only has access to argument 1), which doesn’t work. It can’t imagine 2).
I think I agree with all of this, but I’m not sure, because we seem to draw different conclusions. In any case, I’m now convinced I should have written the AI’s dialogue a bit differently. You’re right that the AI shouldn’t just state that it has no concept of irreducible normative facts. It should provide an argument as well!
What would you reply if the AI uses the same structure of arguments against other types of normative realism as it uses against moral realism? This would amount to the following trilemma for proponents of irreducible normativity (using section headings from my text):
(1) Is irreducible normativity about super-reasons?
(2) Is (our knowledge of) irreducible normativity confined to self-evident principles?
(3) Is there a speaker-independent normative reality?
I think you’re inclined to agree with me that (1) and (2) are unworkable or not worthy of the term “normative realism.” Also, it seems like there’s a weak sense in which you agree with the points I made in (3), as it relates to the domain of morality.
But maybe you only agree with my points in (3) in a weak sense, whereas I consider the arguments in that section to have stronger implications. The way I thought about this, I think the points in (3) apply to all domains of normativity, and they show that unless we come up with some other way to make normative concepts work that I haven’t yet thought of, we are forced to accept that normative concepts, in order to be action-guiding and meaningful, have to be linked to claims about convergence in human expert reasoners. Doesn’t this pin down the concept of irreducible normativity in a way that blocks any infinite wagers? It doesn’t feel like proper non-naturalism anymore once you postulate this link as a conceptual necessity. “Normativity” became a much more mundane concept after we accepted this link.
However, I think that we humans are in a situation where 2) is open to consideration, where we have the concept of a reason for believing something, but aren’t sure if it applies—and if we are in that situation, I think we are dragged towards thinking that it must apply, because otherwise our beliefs wouldn’t be justified.
The trilemma applies here as well. Saying that it must apply still leaves you with the task of making up your mind on how normative concepts even work. I don’t see alternatives to my suggestions (1), (2) and (3).
What I’m giving here is such a ‘partners-in-crime’ argument with a structure, with epistemic facts at the base. Realism about normativity certainly should lower the burden of proof on moral realism to prove total convergence now, because we already have reason to believe normative facts exist. For most anti-realists, the very strongest argument is the ‘queerness argument’ that normative facts are incoherent or too strange to be allowed into our ontology. The ‘partners-in-crime’/‘infinite wager’ undermines this strong argument against moral realism. So some sort of very strong hint of a convergence structure might be good enough—depending on the details.
Since I don’t think we have established anything interesting about normative facts, the only claim I see in the vicinity of what you say in this paragraph, would go as follows:
“Since we probably agree that there is a lot of convergence among expert reasoners on epistemic facts, we shouldn’t be too surprised if morality works similarly.”
And I kind of agree with that, but I don’t know how much convergence I would expect in epistemology. (I think it’s plausible that it would be higher than for morality, and I do agree that this is an argument to at least look really closely for ways of bringing about convergence on moral questions.)
All I’ll say is that I don’t consider strongly conflicting intuitions in e.g. population ethics to be persuasive reasons for thinking that convergence will not occur. As long as the direction of travel is consistent, and we can mention many positive examples of convergence, the preponderance of evidence is that there are elements of our morality that reach high-level agreement.
I agree with this. My confidence that convergence won’t work is based on not only observing disagreements in fundamental intuitions, but also on seeing why people disagree, and seeing that these disagreements are sometimes “legitimate” because ethical discussions always get stuck in the same places (differences in life goals, which is intertwined with axiology). If one actually thinks about what sorts of assumptions are required for the discussions not to get stuck (something like: “all humans would adopt the same broad types of life goals under idealized conditions”), many people would probably recognize that those assumptions are extremely strong and counterintuitive. Oddly enough, people often don’t seem to think that far because they self-identify as moral realists for reasons that don’t make any sense. They expect convergence on moral questions because they somehow ended up self-identifying as moral realists, instead of them self-identifying as moral realists because they expect convergence.
(I’ll maybe make another comment later today to briefly expand on my line of argument here.)
(I say elements because realism is not all-or-nothing—there could be an objective ‘core’ to ethics, maybe axiology, and much ethics could be built on top of such a realist core—that even seems like the most natural reading of the evidence, if the evidence is that there is convergence only on a limited subset of questions.)
I also agree with that, except that I think axiology is the one place where I’m most confident that there’s no convergence. :)
Maybe my anti-realism is best described as “some moral facts exist (in a weak sense as far as other realist proposals go), but morality is underdetermined.”
(I thought “anti-realism” was the best description for my view, because as I discussed in this comment, the way in which I treat normative concepts takes away the specialness they have under non-naturalism. Even some non-naturalists claim that naturalism isn’t interesting enough to be called “moral realism.” And insofar as my position can be characterized as naturalism, it’s still underdetermined in places where it matters a lot for our ethical practice.)
Belief in God, or in many gods, prevented the free development of moral reasoning. Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.
When I read some similar passage at the end of Parfit’s Reasons and Persons (which may have even included a quote of this passage?), I shared Parfit’s view. But I’ve done a lot of thinking since then. At some point one also has to drastically increase one’s confidence that further game-changing considerations won’t show up, especially if one’s map of the option space feels very complete in a self-contained way, and intellectually satisfying.
This discussion continues to feel like the most productive discussion I’ve had with a moral realist! :)
Glad to be of help! I feel like I’m learning a lot.
What would you reply if the AI uses the same structure of arguments against other types of normative realism as it uses against moral realism? This would amount to the following trilemma for proponents of irreducible normativity (using section headings from my text)
...
(3) Is there a speaker-independent normative reality?
Focussing on epistemic facts, the AI could not make that argument. I assumed that you had the AI lack the concept of epistemic reasons because you agreed with me that there is no possible argument out of using this concept, if you start out with the concept, not because you just felt that it would have been too much of a detour to have the AI explain why it finds the concept incoherent.
I think I agree with all of this, but I’m not sure, because we seem to draw different conclusions. In any case, I’m now convinced I should have written the AI’s dialogue a bit differently. You’re right that the AI shouldn’t just state that it has no concept of irreducible normative facts. It should provide an argument as well!
How would this analogous argument go? I’ll take the AI’s key point and reword it to be speaking about epistemic facts instead of moral facts
AI: To motivate the use of irreducibly normative concepts, philosophers often point to instances of universal agreement on epistemic propositions. Sammy Martin uses the example “we always have a reason to believe that 2+2=4.” Your intuition suggests that all epistemic propositions work the same way. Therefore, you might conclude that even for propositions philosophers disagree over, there exists a solution that’s “just as right” as “we always have a reason to believe that 2+2=4” is right. However, you haven’t established that all epistemic statements work the same way—that was just an intuition. “we always have a reason to believe that 2+2=4” describes something that people are automatically disposed to believe. It expresses something that normally-disposed people come to endorse by their own lights. That makes it a true fact of some kind, but it’s not necessarily an “objective” or “speaker-independent” fact. If you want to show beyond doubt that there are epistemic facts that don’t depend on the attitudes held by the speakers—i.e., epistemic facts beyond what people themselves will judge to be what you should believe —you’d need to deliver a stronger example. But then you run into the following dilemma: If you pick a self-evident epistemic proposition, you face the critique that the “epistemic facts” that you claim exist are merely examples of a subjectivist epistemology. By contrast, if you pick an example proposition that philosophers can reasonably disagree over, you face the critique that you haven’t established what it could mean for one party to be right. If one person claims wehave reason to believe that alien life exists, and another person denies this, how would we tell who’s right? What is the question that these two parties disagree on? Thus far, I have no coherent account of what it could mean for an epistemic theory to be right in the elusive, objectivist sense that Martin and other normative realists hold in mind.
Bob: I think I followed that. You mentioned the example of uncontroversial epistemic propositions, and you seemed somewhat dismissive about their relevance? I always thought those were pretty interesting. Couldn’t I hold the view that true epistemic statements are always self-evident? Maybe not because self-evidence is what makes them true, but because, as rational beings, we are predisposed to appreciate epistemic facts?
AI: Such an account would render epistemology very narrow. Incredibly few epistemic propositions appear self-evident to all humans. The same goes for whatever subset of “well-informed” or “philosophically sophisticated” humans you may want to construct.
It doesn’t work, does it? The reason it doesn’t work is that the scenario in which the AI is written where it ‘concluded’ that ‘incredibly few epistemic propositions appear self-evident to all humans’ is unimaginable. What would it mean for this to be true, what would the world have to be like?
I think the points in (3) apply to all domains of normativity, and they show that unless we come up with some other way to make normative concepts work that I haven’t yet thought of, we are forced to accept that normative concepts, in order to be action-guiding and meaningful, have to be linked to claims about convergence in human expert reasoners.
I do not believe it is logically impossible that expert reasoners could diverge on all epistemic facts, but I do think that it is in some fairly deep sense impossible. For there to be such a divergence, reality itself would have to be unknowable.
The ‘speaker-independent normative reality’ that epistemic facts refer to is just actual objective reality—of all the potential epistemic facts out there, the one that actually corresponds to reality is the one that ‘sticks out’ in exactly the way that a speaker-independent normative reality should.
This means that there is no possible world where anyone with the concept of epistemic facts gets convinced, probabilistically, because they fail to see any epistemic convergence, that there are no epistemic facts. There would never be such a lack of convergence.
So my initial point,
The AI is in the latter camp, but not because of evidence, the way that it’s a moral anti-realist (...However, you haven’t established that all normative statements work the same way—that was just an intuition...), but just because it’s constructed in such a way that it lacks the concept of an epistemic reason.
So, if this AI is constructed such that irreducibly normative facts about how to reason aren’t comprehensible to it, it only has access to argument 1), which doesn’t work. It can’t imagine 2).
still stands—that the AI is a normative anti-realist because it doesn’t have the concept of a normative reason, not because it has the concept and has decided that it probably doesn’t apply (and there was no alternative way for you to write the AI reaching that conclusion).
The trilemma applies here as well. Saying that it must apply still leaves you with the task of making up your mind on how normative concepts even work. I don’t see alternatives to my suggestions (1), (2) and (3).
So I take option (3), where the ‘extremely strong convergence’ on claims about epistemic facts about what we should believe implies with virtual certainty that there is a speaker-independent normative reality, because the reality-corresponding collection of epistemic claims, in fact, stick out compared to all the other possible epistemic facts.
So, maybe the ‘normativity argument’ as I called it is really just another convergence argument, but just a convergence argument that is of infinite or near-infinite strength, because the convergence among our beliefs about what is epistemically justified is so strong that it’s effectively unimaginable that they couldn’t converge.
If you wish to deny that epistemic facts are needed to explain the convergence, I think that you end up in quite a strong form of pragmatism about truth, and give up on the notion of knowing anything about mind-independent objective reality, Kant-style, for reasons that I discuss here. That’s quite a bullet to bite. You don’t expect much convergence on epistemic facts, so maybe you are already a pragmatist about truth?
“Since we probably agree that there is a lot of convergence among expert reasoners on epistemic facts, we shouldn’t be too surprised if morality works similarly.”
And I kind of agree with that, but I don’t know how much convergence I would expect in epistemology. (I think it’s plausible that it would be higher than for morality, and I do agree that this is an argument to at least look really closely for ways of bringing about convergence on moral questions.)
Lastly,
My confidence that convergence won’t work is based on not only observing disagreements in fundamental intuitions, but also on seeing why people disagree, and seeing that these disagreements are sometimes “legitimate” because ethical discussions always get stuck in the same places (differences in life goals, which is intertwined with axiology).
I’ll have to wait for your more specific arguments on this topic! I did give some preliminary discussion here of why, for example, I think that you’re dragged towards a total-utilitarian view whether you like it or not. It’s also important to note that the convergence arguments aren’t (principally) about people, but about possible normative theories—people might refuse to accept the implications of their own beliefs.
This discussion continues to feel like the most productive discussion I’ve had with a moral realist! :)
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I think I agree with all of this, but I’m not sure, because we seem to draw different conclusions. In any case, I’m now convinced I should have written the AI’s dialogue a bit differently. You’re right that the AI shouldn’t just state that it has no concept of irreducible normative facts. It should provide an argument as well!
What would you reply if the AI uses the same structure of arguments against other types of normative realism as it uses against moral realism? This would amount to the following trilemma for proponents of irreducible normativity (using section headings from my text):
(1) Is irreducible normativity about super-reasons?
(2) Is (our knowledge of) irreducible normativity confined to self-evident principles?
(3) Is there a speaker-independent normative reality?
I think you’re inclined to agree with me that (1) and (2) are unworkable or not worthy of the term “normative realism.” Also, it seems like there’s a weak sense in which you agree with the points I made in (3), as it relates to the domain of morality.
But maybe you only agree with my points in (3) in a weak sense, whereas I consider the arguments in that section to have stronger implications. The way I thought about this, I think the points in (3) apply to all domains of normativity, and they show that unless we come up with some other way to make normative concepts work that I haven’t yet thought of, we are forced to accept that normative concepts, in order to be action-guiding and meaningful, have to be linked to claims about convergence in human expert reasoners. Doesn’t this pin down the concept of irreducible normativity in a way that blocks any infinite wagers? It doesn’t feel like proper non-naturalism anymore once you postulate this link as a conceptual necessity. “Normativity” became a much more mundane concept after we accepted this link.
The trilemma applies here as well. Saying that it must apply still leaves you with the task of making up your mind on how normative concepts even work. I don’t see alternatives to my suggestions (1), (2) and (3).
Since I don’t think we have established anything interesting about normative facts, the only claim I see in the vicinity of what you say in this paragraph, would go as follows:
“Since we probably agree that there is a lot of convergence among expert reasoners on epistemic facts, we shouldn’t be too surprised if morality works similarly.”
And I kind of agree with that, but I don’t know how much convergence I would expect in epistemology. (I think it’s plausible that it would be higher than for morality, and I do agree that this is an argument to at least look really closely for ways of bringing about convergence on moral questions.)
I agree with this. My confidence that convergence won’t work is based on not only observing disagreements in fundamental intuitions, but also on seeing why people disagree, and seeing that these disagreements are sometimes “legitimate” because ethical discussions always get stuck in the same places (differences in life goals, which is intertwined with axiology). If one actually thinks about what sorts of assumptions are required for the discussions not to get stuck (something like: “all humans would adopt the same broad types of life goals under idealized conditions”), many people would probably recognize that those assumptions are extremely strong and counterintuitive. Oddly enough, people often don’t seem to think that far because they self-identify as moral realists for reasons that don’t make any sense. They expect convergence on moral questions because they somehow ended up self-identifying as moral realists, instead of them self-identifying as moral realists because they expect convergence.
(I’ll maybe make another comment later today to briefly expand on my line of argument here.)
I also agree with that, except that I think axiology is the one place where I’m most confident that there’s no convergence. :)
Maybe my anti-realism is best described as “some moral facts exist (in a weak sense as far as other realist proposals go), but morality is underdetermined.”
(I thought “anti-realism” was the best description for my view, because as I discussed in this comment, the way in which I treat normative concepts takes away the specialness they have under non-naturalism. Even some non-naturalists claim that naturalism isn’t interesting enough to be called “moral realism.” And insofar as my position can be characterized as naturalism, it’s still underdetermined in places where it matters a lot for our ethical practice.)
When I read some similar passage at the end of Parfit’s Reasons and Persons (which may have even included a quote of this passage?), I shared Parfit’s view. But I’ve done a lot of thinking since then. At some point one also has to drastically increase one’s confidence that further game-changing considerations won’t show up, especially if one’s map of the option space feels very complete in a self-contained way, and intellectually satisfying.
Glad to be of help! I feel like I’m learning a lot.
Focussing on epistemic facts, the AI could not make that argument. I assumed that you had the AI lack the concept of epistemic reasons because you agreed with me that there is no possible argument out of using this concept, if you start out with the concept, not because you just felt that it would have been too much of a detour to have the AI explain why it finds the concept incoherent.
How would this analogous argument go? I’ll take the AI’s key point and reword it to be speaking about epistemic facts instead of moral facts
It doesn’t work, does it? The reason it doesn’t work is that the scenario in which the AI is written where it ‘concluded’ that ‘incredibly few epistemic propositions appear self-evident to all humans’ is unimaginable. What would it mean for this to be true, what would the world have to be like?
I do not believe it is logically impossible that expert reasoners could diverge on all epistemic facts, but I do think that it is in some fairly deep sense impossible. For there to be such a divergence, reality itself would have to be unknowable.
The ‘speaker-independent normative reality’ that epistemic facts refer to is just actual objective reality—of all the potential epistemic facts out there, the one that actually corresponds to reality is the one that ‘sticks out’ in exactly the way that a speaker-independent normative reality should.
This means that there is no possible world where anyone with the concept of epistemic facts gets convinced, probabilistically, because they fail to see any epistemic convergence, that there are no epistemic facts. There would never be such a lack of convergence.
So my initial point,
still stands—that the AI is a normative anti-realist because it doesn’t have the concept of a normative reason, not because it has the concept and has decided that it probably doesn’t apply (and there was no alternative way for you to write the AI reaching that conclusion).
So I take option (3), where the ‘extremely strong convergence’ on claims about epistemic facts about what we should believe implies with virtual certainty that there is a speaker-independent normative reality, because the reality-corresponding collection of epistemic claims, in fact, stick out compared to all the other possible epistemic facts.
So, maybe the ‘normativity argument’ as I called it is really just another convergence argument, but just a convergence argument that is of infinite or near-infinite strength, because the convergence among our beliefs about what is epistemically justified is so strong that it’s effectively unimaginable that they couldn’t converge.
If you wish to deny that epistemic facts are needed to explain the convergence, I think that you end up in quite a strong form of pragmatism about truth, and give up on the notion of knowing anything about mind-independent objective reality, Kant-style, for reasons that I discuss here. That’s quite a bullet to bite. You don’t expect much convergence on epistemic facts, so maybe you are already a pragmatist about truth?
Lastly,
I’ll have to wait for your more specific arguments on this topic! I did give some preliminary discussion here of why, for example, I think that you’re dragged towards a total-utilitarian view whether you like it or not. It’s also important to note that the convergence arguments aren’t (principally) about people, but about possible normative theories—people might refuse to accept the implications of their own beliefs.