I would not accept this characterization. Antirealism is the view that there are no stance-independent moral facts.
I don’t understand the difference, which is kind of the problem I identified in the first place. It’s difficult to reject the existence of a phenomenon you haven’t defined. (the concept of ignosticism applies here). ‘Moral facts’ sound to me something like ‘the truth values behind normative statements’ (though that has further definitional problems relating to both ‘truth values’ - cf my other most recent reply—and ‘normative statements’)
If you reject that definition, it might be more helpful to define moral facts by exclusion from seemingly better understood phenomena. For example, I think more practical definitions might be:
Nonphysical phenomena
Nonphysical and nonexperiential phenomena
Obviously this has the awkwardness of including some paranormal phenomena, but I don’t think that’s a huge cost. Many paranormal phenomena obviously would be physical, were they to exist (as in, they can exert force, have mass etc), and you and I can probably agree we’re not that interested in the particular nonexistences of most of the rest.
I have all kinds of preferences that are totally unrelated to my own experiences
I wrote a long essay about the parameters of ‘preference’ in the context of preference utilitarianism here, which I think equally applies to supposedly nonmoral uses of the word (IIRC I might have shown it to you before?). The potted version is that people frequently use the word in a very motte-and-bailey-esque fashion, sometimes invoking quasi magical properties of preferences, other times treating them as an unremarkable part of the physical or phenomenal world. I think that’s happening here:
> {cultural relativism … daughter} examples
There’s a relatively simple experientialist account of these, which goes ‘people pursue their daughter’s/culture’s wellbeing because it gives them some form of positive valence to do so’. This is the view which I accuse of being a conflict doctrine (unless it’s paired with some kind of principled pursuit of such positive valence elsewhere).
You seem to be saying your view is not this: ‘I’d do it because I value more than just my own experiences’.
If this is true, then I think many of my criticisms don’t apply to you—but I also think this is a very selective notion of antirealism. Specifically, it requires a notion of ‘to value’, which you’re saying is *not* exclusively experiential (and presumably isn’t otherwise entirely physical too—unless you say its nonexperiential components are just a revealed preference in your behaviour?).
Perhaps you just mean a more expansive notion of experiential value than the word ‘happiness’ implies. I use the latter to mean ‘any positively valenced experience’, fwiw—I don’t think the colloquial distinction is philosophically interesting. But that puts you back in the ‘doctrine of conflict’ camp, if you aren’t able to guide someone, through dispassioned argument, to value your daughter/culture the way you do if they don’t already.
For the record, I am not claiming that a large majority of persuasion falls into the 6th/7th groups. I think it’s a tiny minority of it in fact—substiantially less than the amount which is e.g. demonstrating how to think logically or understand statistics, or persuading someone to change their mind with logic or statistical data, both of which are already miniscule.
But the difference between antirealism and exclusivism/realism is that antirealism excludes the possibility of such interactions entirely.
When performing an action, my goal is to achieve the desired outcome. I don’t have to experience the outcome to be motivated to perform the action.
But you have no access to whether the outcome is achieved, only to your phenomenal experience of changing belief that it will/won’t be or has/hasn’t been. So if you don’t recognise the valence of that process of changing belief as the driver of your motivation and instead assert that some nonphysical link between your behaviour and the outcome is driving you, then under the exclusionary definition of moral facts you appear to be invoking one.
Can you elaborate on these?
The uniquely non-evolutionarily explicability of utilitarianism (h.t. Joshua Greene’s argument in Moral Tribes) and how antirealists can explain this
The convergence of moral philosophers towards three heavily overlapping moral philosophies—given the infinite possible moral philosophies and how antirealists can explain this
What is it antirealists are supposed to explain, specifically?
When we see a predictable pattern in the world, we generally understand it to be the result of some underlying law or laws, such that if you knew everything about the universe you could in principle predict the pattern before seeing it.
It seems basically impossible to explain the convergence towards the philosophies above by any law currently found in physical science. Evolutionary processes might drive people to protect their kin, deter aggressors etc, but there’s no need for any particular cognitive or emotional oattachment to the ‘rightness’ of this (there’s no obvious need for any emotional state at all, really, but even given that we have them they might have been entirely supervenient on behaviour, or universally tended towards cold pragmatism or whatever). And evolutionary process have no ability to explain a universally impartial philosophy like utiltiarianism, which is actively deleterious to its proponents’ survival and reproductive prospects.
So what are the underlying laws by which one could have predicted the convergence of moral philosophies, rather than just virtue signalling and similar behaviours, in particular to a set including utilitarianism?
I don’t understand the difference, which is kind of the problem I identified in the first place. It’s difficult to reject the existence of a phenomenon you haven’t defined. (the concept of ignosticism applies here). ‘Moral facts’ sound to me something like ‘the truth values behind normative statements’ (though that has further definitional problems relating to both ‘truth values’ - cf my other most recent reply—and ‘normative statements’)
If you reject that definition, it might be more helpful to define moral facts by exclusion from seemingly better understood phenomena. For example, I think more practical definitions might be:
Nonphysical phenomena
Nonphysical and nonexperiential phenomena
Obviously this has the awkwardness of including some paranormal phenomena, but I don’t think that’s a huge cost. Many paranormal phenomena obviously would be physical, were they to exist (as in, they can exert force, have mass etc), and you and I can probably agree we’re not that interested in the particular nonexistences of most of the rest.
I wrote a long essay about the parameters of ‘preference’ in the context of preference utilitarianism here, which I think equally applies to supposedly nonmoral uses of the word (IIRC I might have shown it to you before?). The potted version is that people frequently use the word in a very motte-and-bailey-esque fashion, sometimes invoking quasi magical properties of preferences, other times treating them as an unremarkable part of the physical or phenomenal world. I think that’s happening here:
> {cultural relativism … daughter} examples
There’s a relatively simple experientialist account of these, which goes ‘people pursue their daughter’s/culture’s wellbeing because it gives them some form of positive valence to do so’. This is the view which I accuse of being a conflict doctrine (unless it’s paired with some kind of principled pursuit of such positive valence elsewhere).
You seem to be saying your view is not this: ‘I’d do it because I value more than just my own experiences’.
If this is true, then I think many of my criticisms don’t apply to you—but I also think this is a very selective notion of antirealism. Specifically, it requires a notion of ‘to value’, which you’re saying is *not* exclusively experiential (and presumably isn’t otherwise entirely physical too—unless you say its nonexperiential components are just a revealed preference in your behaviour?).
Perhaps you just mean a more expansive notion of experiential value than the word ‘happiness’ implies. I use the latter to mean ‘any positively valenced experience’, fwiw—I don’t think the colloquial distinction is philosophically interesting. But that puts you back in the ‘doctrine of conflict’ camp, if you aren’t able to guide someone, through dispassioned argument, to value your daughter/culture the way you do if they don’t already.
For the record, I am not claiming that a large majority of persuasion falls into the 6th/7th groups. I think it’s a tiny minority of it in fact—substiantially less than the amount which is e.g. demonstrating how to think logically or understand statistics, or persuading someone to change their mind with logic or statistical data, both of which are already miniscule.
But the difference between antirealism and exclusivism/realism is that antirealism excludes the possibility of such interactions entirely.
But you have no access to whether the outcome is achieved, only to your phenomenal experience of changing belief that it will/won’t be or has/hasn’t been. So if you don’t recognise the valence of that process of changing belief as the driver of your motivation and instead assert that some nonphysical link between your behaviour and the outcome is driving you, then under the exclusionary definition of moral facts you appear to be invoking one.
When we see a predictable pattern in the world, we generally understand it to be the result of some underlying law or laws, such that if you knew everything about the universe you could in principle predict the pattern before seeing it.
It seems basically impossible to explain the convergence towards the philosophies above by any law currently found in physical science. Evolutionary processes might drive people to protect their kin, deter aggressors etc, but there’s no need for any particular cognitive or emotional oattachment to the ‘rightness’ of this (there’s no obvious need for any emotional state at all, really, but even given that we have them they might have been entirely supervenient on behaviour, or universally tended towards cold pragmatism or whatever). And evolutionary process have no ability to explain a universally impartial philosophy like utiltiarianism, which is actively deleterious to its proponents’ survival and reproductive prospects.
So what are the underlying laws by which one could have predicted the convergence of moral philosophies, rather than just virtue signalling and similar behaviours, in particular to a set including utilitarianism?