I do not find Bentham’s case for realism even a little persuasive. I think he relies extensively on questionable methods and presuppositions and does little to advance any compelling argument for moral realism.
I’ve become increasingly confident that there are no good arguments for moral realism, that it is deliberatively and explanatorily redundant, that we can account for all observations without positing moral facts, that naturalist accounts of moral realism are trivial and fail to achieve the aspirations of any interesting and robust account of anything and largely “succeed” by terminological gerrymandering, and that non-naturalism relies almost entirely on questionable appeals to “intuitions.”
Furthermore, non-naturalist realism routinely appeals to notions such as external reasons and irreducible normativity that may not even be intelligible, and, at any rate, their proponents are unable to provide a satisfactory account of what these concepts even mean.
Like Tyler John, I chose the strongest level of disagreement. Tyler says that he has has a high (>.99) credence in antirealism. I do, too. There are few positions I am more confident about than antirealism. I’d be happy to discuss the matter with anyone who disagrees here or elsewhere.
The tone of the beginning of this article—putting “quackery” in the title, the insulting opening line “Bentham’s Newsletter is back at it with bad arguments for moral realism”—makes me think it’s not going to give a fair assessment of the arguments. I didn’t read it for that reason. If you want to persuade people like me, you should skip the insults.
I strongly prefer, and recommend, arguing dispassionately and hyper-charitably.
But, it seems relevant that Lance’s posts are responding to posts that also seem highly polemic[1] (Lance outlines why he views the posts as such at the start of his first post). It seems more appropriate (whether or not instrumentally advisable) to respond in kind if that’s the established norm of the space (different from Forum norms).
You’d be mistaken. If anyone thinks I said anything unfair in the article, they’re welcome to point it out. I engage comprehensively, explicitly, and directly with Bentham’s arguments for moral realism, and I do the same for many others. I don’t think anyone would be able to build a compelling case that I an unfair to Bentham or to moral realists in general. Bentham, on the other hand, rarely engages comprehensively and tends to be dismissive of his better critics on this topic, ignoring them outright or only engaging in a superficial or perfunctory manner.
See, for instance, my discussion just a few hours ago with Alex Malpass on my channel. I don’t think you’d come away with the impression that I am unfair to moral realists. I do think, however, that if you looked over the kinds of remarks I routinely engage with from moral realists, you’ll find many instances of moral realists being unfair towards moral antirealists. In fact, one of the primary things I do is document and respond to the constant misrepresentations of antirealism and the bad arguments directed against it. We antirealists are on the receiving end of the bulk of the unfair treatment, not moral realists.
I don’t think I defended my remarks on the matter as well as I could have, and David Moss has brought to light some of what Bentham initially said and used that to make a good point. MichaelDickens, you’ve expressed a critical stance towards the post I wrote that uses the term “quackery” and is polemical.
But if you take a look, you will see from the tone and links provided that I am responding in an ongoing exchange that has spanned quite some time. During that time, Bentham has routinely made far more inflammatory and insulting remarks about antirealist views. For instance, this was a section heading he used in an early post on moral realism (one of the two I linked a response to here):
Cultural Relativism: Crazy, Illogical, and Accepted by no One Except Philosophically Illiterate Gender Studies Majors
Bentham also repeatedly describes views like mine as “crazy”. Here’s one example:
Well, in this article, I’ll explain why moral anti-realism is so implausible — while one always can accept the anti-realist conclusion, it’s always possible to bite the bullet on crazy conclusions. Yet moral anti-realism, much like anti-realism about the external world, is wildly implausible in what it says about the world.
I worry that you drew a conclusion about my tone without taking into consideration Bentham’s own tone and what I was responding to.
Is being trivial and of low interest evidence that naturalist forms of realism are *false*? “Red things are red” is boring and trivial, but my credence in it is way above 0.99.
No, triviality doesn’t necessarily entail falsehood. But you can trivially establish anything as true if you gerrymander language. For example, I can define “God” as “this chair over here,” point to the chair, and then say “God exists.” It would be true that “God exists,” in the sense that I am using the terms, but this would be trivial. I’d be a “theist” in this respect.
So your claim is that naturalists are just stipulating a particular meaning of their own for moral terms? Can you say why you think this? Don’t some naturalists just defend the idea that moral properties could be identical with complex sociological properties without even saying *which* properties? How could those naturalists be engaging in stipulative definition, even accidentally?
I’d also say that this only bears on the truth/falsity of naturalism fairly indirectly. There’s no particular connection between whether naturalism is actually true and whether some group of naturalist thinkers happen to have stipulatively defined a moral term, although I guess if most defenses of naturalism did this, that would be evidence that naturalism couldn’t be defended in other ways, which is evidence against it’s truth.
No, sorry, I don’t think they’re just stipulating or at least I don’t think they take themselves to be doing so. That’s just an example of how terms can be trivial. Apologies for not being clear about that.
I don’t think naturalists are literally just stipulating terms in this way. But if all they are doing amounts to terminological relabeling, then their account would be trivial in the same respect. If they’re doing more than this, then they’re welcome to offer an account of what that is; it’s going to vary from one account to another but the triviality of naturalist accounts runs deep and takes multiple forms. For instance, if the realist’s account only furnishes us with descriptive facts, then it lacks the sort of normative authority non-naturalist realists try to retain. So we end up with “moral facts” that have no practical relevance. For example, suppose someone says “Moral facts are facts about what increases or decreases wellbeing.”
Even if I granted that this is true, what practical relevance does this have? As far as I can tell: none whatsoever. If naturalists disagree they’re welcome to explain how there is any practical relevance to making such a discovery.
Don’t some naturalists just defend the idea that moral properties could be identical with complex sociological properties without even saying *which* properties
Yes. And you have synthetic naturalist accounts that purport to identify the moral facts with various types of natural facts that aren’t reducible to some kind of analytic claim. This is how I take Sterelny and Fraser’s account. I reject those accounts not for the same reasons as analytic naturalist accounts but but for other reasons, e.g., empirical inadequacy and other forms of triviality.
I’d also say that this only bears on the truth/falsity of naturalism fairly indirectly.
I agree. I’m not necessarily going to insist naturalist accounts are false. I tend to argue for a trilemma: that all versions of moral realism are trivial, false, or unintelligible. I don’t think the worst thing a theory can be is necessary false; triviality can be a problem for an account as well. I should note, too, that I’m a pragmatist, so there’s a sense in which the triviality of an account can collapse into or play a role in its falsehood as well, on my view. But I try not to impose pragmatist preconceptions on others.
Personally I think naturalist accounts of realism “miss the point.” My concern is with rejecting irreducible normativity, external reasons, normative authority, and so on. Naturalist accounts don’t even seem to be in the business of trying to do this.
If you think there might well be forms of naturalism that are true but trivial, is your credence in anti-realism really well over >99%?
This forum probably isn’t the place for really getting into the weeds of this, but I’m also a bit worried about accounts of triviality that conflate a priority or even analyticity and triviality: Maths is not trivial in any sense of “trivial” on which “trivial” means “not worth bothering with”. Maybe you can get out of this by saying maths isn’t analytic and it’s only being analytic that trivializes things, but I don’t think it is particulary obvious that there is a sense making concept of analyticity that doesn’t apply to maths. Apparently Neo-Fregeans think that lots of maths is analytic, and as far as I know that is a respected option in the philosophy of math: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logicism/#NeoFre
I also wonder about exactly what is being claimed to be trivial: individual identifications of moral properties with naturalistic properties, if they are explicitly claimed to be analytic? Or the claim that moral naturalism is true and there are some analytic truths of this sort? Or both?
Also, do you think semantic claims in general are trivial?
Finally, do you think the naturalists whose claims you consider “trivial” mostly agree with you that their views have the features that you think make for triviality but disagree that having those features means their views are of no interest. Or do most of them think their claims lack the features you think make for triviality? Or do you think most of them just haven’t thought about it/don’t have a good-faith substantive response?
These are good questions and reasonable concerns, and I share the sense that this forum may not be ideal for addressing these questions. So I’d be happy to move the discussion away from here. For now, I’ll say a few things. Regarding accounts of triviality conflating a priority or analyticity with triviality: I don’t think I am conflating anything; I do think they’re trivial in the relevant respects. Take a possible naturalist account: moral facts are facts about what increases or decreases wellbeing. Okay, well I already think there are facts about what increases or decreases wellbeing.
What difference does it make if those are moral facts? I have concerns about what that might even mean, but even if I set those aside, what practical difference would this make? As far as the synthetic accounts, I might just reject them on other grounds aside from triviality, but insofar as they also reduce moral claims to descriptive facts, there still looks to me like a kind of triviality there: no set of descriptive facts, in and of themselves, necessarily have any practical relevance to me. In other words, from a practical and motivational perspective, discovering that something is a “moral fact” simply doesn’t make any difference to me, and it’s not clear to me why it would make any difference to anyone else. Suppose, for instance, that someone like Oliver Scott Curry is correct, and that moral facts are facts about what promotes cooperations within groups. Okay. Now what? What do I do with this information?
Maths is not trivial in any sense of “trivial” on which “trivial” means “not worth bothering with”.
I’m not sure the comparison would be apt, given that I think of math as a kind of useful social construction. Math is extremely useful, but it’s useful in a way contingent on our goals and purposes. If we devised moral systems specifically to serve some purpose or goal in the way we did math, I might very well consider them nontrivial...but I’d also be an antirealist about them.
Maybe you can get out of this by saying maths isn’t analytic and it’s only being analytic that trivializes things, but I don’t think it is particulary obvious that there is a sense making concept of analyticity that doesn’t apply to maths
I’m an empiricist and a pragmatist and I think the mathematical systems we develop and use earn their keep through their application to our ends. I don’t think the same is true of naturalist accounts of moral realism. It’d be hard to do many things without math. Conversely, if there were no stance-independent moral facts of the sort naturalists believe in, I struggle to see what difference it would make in principle.
Also, do you think semantic claims in general are trivial?
I’m not sure quite what you have in mind, so I’m not sure.
Finally, do you think the naturalists whose claims you consider “trivial” mostly agree with you that their views have the features that you think make for triviality but disagree that having those features means their views are of no interest.
It depends on which objection I’m raising. That the moral facts are descriptive and lack some of the features non-naturalists claim moral facts have? Yea, probably. That they’re just engaged in a pointless activity of figuring out how English speakers use moral language? Probably not. Since we’re operating on different accounts of truth and probably have other differences in our views, there’s likely to be more fundamental differences, too. I’m not really sure. I should probably just talk to more naturalists and maybe read more contemporary work. FWIW, some of the more traditional antirealists I’ve spoken to don’t share my objections and don’t think they’re on the right track.
Or do you think most of them just haven’t thought about it/don’t have a good-faith substantive response?
I doubt that. Most naturalists have thought about their positions much more than I have, and would probably have a number of corrections to make of my characterization of their views.
>So your claim is that naturalists are just stipulating a particular meaning of their own for moral terms? Can you say why you think this?
In this instance, Bentham seems to be stipulating that “morally correct” means “agrees with Bentham’s intuitions”. I think this because he consistently says that things “seem” that way to him, without taking into account how they seem to other people.
I don’t think Bentham is stipulating that. I think he’s treating intuitions as providing epistemic access to the moral facts. For comparison, it’d be a bit like arguing that trees exist because you can see them, and so can most other people. This wouldn’t be the same as saying that, as a matter of stipulation, for a tree to “exist” means that “it appears to exist to you personally.”
I’ll note: someone suggested elsewhere in this thread that some of the terms and ways I frame my objections to Bentham suggest I wouldn’t be fair to him. I’ll note that here I am defending Bentham against what I take to be an inaccurate characterization.
I think he’s treating intuitions as providing epistemic access to the moral facts
I think he’s treating his intuitions that way. He does not seem to be treating intuitions in general that way, since he doesn’t address things like how throughout most people have had the intuition that treating the outgroup poorly is morally good, nor how I have the intuition that it is immoral to claim access to moral facts.
Presumably he has an answer to that; I still don’t think he’s stipulating things as you suggest, but I am sympathetic to the concern you raise, which to me appears to be the systematic and longstanding variation in normative moral intuitions.
Another, related problem is variation in metaethical positions/”seemings.” Bentham makes all sorts of remarks about how things seem to him that only make sense if you’re a moral realist, but things don’t seem that way to me. If they seem any way at all, its the exact opposite.
I still don’t think he’s stipulating things as you suggest
That’s fair. I suppose that I was attempting to translate his statements into something that I could understand rather than taking them literally, as I should have.
This is mostly a repost from Bentham’s blog. I wrote an extensive rebuttal to that post here:
https://www.lanceindependent.com/p/moral-realist-quackery-another-response
Bentham also wrote an earlier, extensive post about moral realism. I offered a comprehensive critique of that here:
https://www.lanceindependent.com/p/benthams-blunder-full-post
I do not find Bentham’s case for realism even a little persuasive. I think he relies extensively on questionable methods and presuppositions and does little to advance any compelling argument for moral realism.
I’ve become increasingly confident that there are no good arguments for moral realism, that it is deliberatively and explanatorily redundant, that we can account for all observations without positing moral facts, that naturalist accounts of moral realism are trivial and fail to achieve the aspirations of any interesting and robust account of anything and largely “succeed” by terminological gerrymandering, and that non-naturalism relies almost entirely on questionable appeals to “intuitions.”
Furthermore, non-naturalist realism routinely appeals to notions such as external reasons and irreducible normativity that may not even be intelligible, and, at any rate, their proponents are unable to provide a satisfactory account of what these concepts even mean.
Like Tyler John, I chose the strongest level of disagreement. Tyler says that he has has a high (>.99) credence in antirealism. I do, too. There are few positions I am more confident about than antirealism. I’d be happy to discuss the matter with anyone who disagrees here or elsewhere.
The tone of the beginning of this article—putting “quackery” in the title, the insulting opening line “Bentham’s Newsletter is back at it with bad arguments for moral realism”—makes me think it’s not going to give a fair assessment of the arguments. I didn’t read it for that reason. If you want to persuade people like me, you should skip the insults.
I strongly prefer, and recommend, arguing dispassionately and hyper-charitably.
But, it seems relevant that Lance’s posts are responding to posts that also seem highly polemic[1] (Lance outlines why he views the posts as such at the start of his first post). It seems more appropriate (whether or not instrumentally advisable) to respond in kind if that’s the established norm of the space (different from Forum norms).
For example, though not the main focus of the essay, the BB’s first essay includes:
You’d be mistaken. If anyone thinks I said anything unfair in the article, they’re welcome to point it out. I engage comprehensively, explicitly, and directly with Bentham’s arguments for moral realism, and I do the same for many others. I don’t think anyone would be able to build a compelling case that I an unfair to Bentham or to moral realists in general. Bentham, on the other hand, rarely engages comprehensively and tends to be dismissive of his better critics on this topic, ignoring them outright or only engaging in a superficial or perfunctory manner.
See, for instance, my discussion just a few hours ago with Alex Malpass on my channel. I don’t think you’d come away with the impression that I am unfair to moral realists. I do think, however, that if you looked over the kinds of remarks I routinely engage with from moral realists, you’ll find many instances of moral realists being unfair towards moral antirealists. In fact, one of the primary things I do is document and respond to the constant misrepresentations of antirealism and the bad arguments directed against it. We antirealists are on the receiving end of the bulk of the unfair treatment, not moral realists.
I don’t think I defended my remarks on the matter as well as I could have, and David Moss has brought to light some of what Bentham initially said and used that to make a good point. MichaelDickens, you’ve expressed a critical stance towards the post I wrote that uses the term “quackery” and is polemical.
But if you take a look, you will see from the tone and links provided that I am responding in an ongoing exchange that has spanned quite some time. During that time, Bentham has routinely made far more inflammatory and insulting remarks about antirealist views. For instance, this was a section heading he used in an early post on moral realism (one of the two I linked a response to here):
You can find this here.
Bentham also repeatedly describes views like mine as “crazy”. Here’s one example:
I worry that you drew a conclusion about my tone without taking into consideration Bentham’s own tone and what I was responding to.
Is being trivial and of low interest evidence that naturalist forms of realism are *false*? “Red things are red” is boring and trivial, but my credence in it is way above 0.99.
No, triviality doesn’t necessarily entail falsehood. But you can trivially establish anything as true if you gerrymander language. For example, I can define “God” as “this chair over here,” point to the chair, and then say “God exists.” It would be true that “God exists,” in the sense that I am using the terms, but this would be trivial. I’d be a “theist” in this respect.
So your claim is that naturalists are just stipulating a particular meaning of their own for moral terms? Can you say why you think this? Don’t some naturalists just defend the idea that moral properties could be identical with complex sociological properties without even saying *which* properties? How could those naturalists be engaging in stipulative definition, even accidentally?
I’d also say that this only bears on the truth/falsity of naturalism fairly indirectly. There’s no particular connection between whether naturalism is actually true and whether some group of naturalist thinkers happen to have stipulatively defined a moral term, although I guess if most defenses of naturalism did this, that would be evidence that naturalism couldn’t be defended in other ways, which is evidence against it’s truth.
No, sorry, I don’t think they’re just stipulating or at least I don’t think they take themselves to be doing so. That’s just an example of how terms can be trivial. Apologies for not being clear about that.
I don’t think naturalists are literally just stipulating terms in this way. But if all they are doing amounts to terminological relabeling, then their account would be trivial in the same respect. If they’re doing more than this, then they’re welcome to offer an account of what that is; it’s going to vary from one account to another but the triviality of naturalist accounts runs deep and takes multiple forms. For instance, if the realist’s account only furnishes us with descriptive facts, then it lacks the sort of normative authority non-naturalist realists try to retain. So we end up with “moral facts” that have no practical relevance. For example, suppose someone says “Moral facts are facts about what increases or decreases wellbeing.”
Even if I granted that this is true, what practical relevance does this have? As far as I can tell: none whatsoever. If naturalists disagree they’re welcome to explain how there is any practical relevance to making such a discovery.
Yes. And you have synthetic naturalist accounts that purport to identify the moral facts with various types of natural facts that aren’t reducible to some kind of analytic claim. This is how I take Sterelny and Fraser’s account. I reject those accounts not for the same reasons as analytic naturalist accounts but but for other reasons, e.g., empirical inadequacy and other forms of triviality.
I agree. I’m not necessarily going to insist naturalist accounts are false. I tend to argue for a trilemma: that all versions of moral realism are trivial, false, or unintelligible. I don’t think the worst thing a theory can be is necessary false; triviality can be a problem for an account as well. I should note, too, that I’m a pragmatist, so there’s a sense in which the triviality of an account can collapse into or play a role in its falsehood as well, on my view. But I try not to impose pragmatist preconceptions on others.
Personally I think naturalist accounts of realism “miss the point.” My concern is with rejecting irreducible normativity, external reasons, normative authority, and so on. Naturalist accounts don’t even seem to be in the business of trying to do this.
If you think there might well be forms of naturalism that are true but trivial, is your credence in anti-realism really well over >99%?
This forum probably isn’t the place for really getting into the weeds of this, but I’m also a bit worried about accounts of triviality that conflate a priority or even analyticity and triviality: Maths is not trivial in any sense of “trivial” on which “trivial” means “not worth bothering with”. Maybe you can get out of this by saying maths isn’t analytic and it’s only being analytic that trivializes things, but I don’t think it is particulary obvious that there is a sense making concept of analyticity that doesn’t apply to maths. Apparently Neo-Fregeans think that lots of maths is analytic, and as far as I know that is a respected option in the philosophy of math: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logicism/#NeoFre
I also wonder about exactly what is being claimed to be trivial: individual identifications of moral properties with naturalistic properties, if they are explicitly claimed to be analytic? Or the claim that moral naturalism is true and there are some analytic truths of this sort? Or both?
Also, do you think semantic claims in general are trivial?
Finally, do you think the naturalists whose claims you consider “trivial” mostly agree with you that their views have the features that you think make for triviality but disagree that having those features means their views are of no interest. Or do most of them think their claims lack the features you think make for triviality? Or do you think most of them just haven’t thought about it/don’t have a good-faith substantive response?
These are good questions and reasonable concerns, and I share the sense that this forum may not be ideal for addressing these questions. So I’d be happy to move the discussion away from here. For now, I’ll say a few things. Regarding accounts of triviality conflating a priority or analyticity with triviality: I don’t think I am conflating anything; I do think they’re trivial in the relevant respects. Take a possible naturalist account: moral facts are facts about what increases or decreases wellbeing. Okay, well I already think there are facts about what increases or decreases wellbeing.
What difference does it make if those are moral facts? I have concerns about what that might even mean, but even if I set those aside, what practical difference would this make? As far as the synthetic accounts, I might just reject them on other grounds aside from triviality, but insofar as they also reduce moral claims to descriptive facts, there still looks to me like a kind of triviality there: no set of descriptive facts, in and of themselves, necessarily have any practical relevance to me. In other words, from a practical and motivational perspective, discovering that something is a “moral fact” simply doesn’t make any difference to me, and it’s not clear to me why it would make any difference to anyone else. Suppose, for instance, that someone like Oliver Scott Curry is correct, and that moral facts are facts about what promotes cooperations within groups. Okay. Now what? What do I do with this information?
I’m not sure the comparison would be apt, given that I think of math as a kind of useful social construction. Math is extremely useful, but it’s useful in a way contingent on our goals and purposes. If we devised moral systems specifically to serve some purpose or goal in the way we did math, I might very well consider them nontrivial...but I’d also be an antirealist about them.
I’m an empiricist and a pragmatist and I think the mathematical systems we develop and use earn their keep through their application to our ends. I don’t think the same is true of naturalist accounts of moral realism. It’d be hard to do many things without math. Conversely, if there were no stance-independent moral facts of the sort naturalists believe in, I struggle to see what difference it would make in principle.
I’m not sure quite what you have in mind, so I’m not sure.
It depends on which objection I’m raising. That the moral facts are descriptive and lack some of the features non-naturalists claim moral facts have? Yea, probably. That they’re just engaged in a pointless activity of figuring out how English speakers use moral language? Probably not. Since we’re operating on different accounts of truth and probably have other differences in our views, there’s likely to be more fundamental differences, too. I’m not really sure. I should probably just talk to more naturalists and maybe read more contemporary work. FWIW, some of the more traditional antirealists I’ve spoken to don’t share my objections and don’t think they’re on the right track.
I doubt that. Most naturalists have thought about their positions much more than I have, and would probably have a number of corrections to make of my characterization of their views.
>So your claim is that naturalists are just stipulating a particular meaning of their own for moral terms? Can you say why you think this?
In this instance, Bentham seems to be stipulating that “morally correct” means “agrees with Bentham’s intuitions”. I think this because he consistently says that things “seem” that way to him, without taking into account how they seem to other people.
I don’t think Bentham is stipulating that. I think he’s treating intuitions as providing epistemic access to the moral facts. For comparison, it’d be a bit like arguing that trees exist because you can see them, and so can most other people. This wouldn’t be the same as saying that, as a matter of stipulation, for a tree to “exist” means that “it appears to exist to you personally.”
I’ll note: someone suggested elsewhere in this thread that some of the terms and ways I frame my objections to Bentham suggest I wouldn’t be fair to him. I’ll note that here I am defending Bentham against what I take to be an inaccurate characterization.
I think he’s treating his intuitions that way. He does not seem to be treating intuitions in general that way, since he doesn’t address things like how throughout most people have had the intuition that treating the outgroup poorly is morally good, nor how I have the intuition that it is immoral to claim access to moral facts.
Presumably he has an answer to that; I still don’t think he’s stipulating things as you suggest, but I am sympathetic to the concern you raise, which to me appears to be the systematic and longstanding variation in normative moral intuitions.
Another, related problem is variation in metaethical positions/”seemings.” Bentham makes all sorts of remarks about how things seem to him that only make sense if you’re a moral realist, but things don’t seem that way to me. If they seem any way at all, its the exact opposite.
That’s fair. I suppose that I was attempting to translate his statements into something that I could understand rather than taking them literally, as I should have.