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.
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.