I consider myself a pretty strong anti-realist, but I find myself accepting a lot of the things you take to be problems for anti-realism. For instance:
But lots of moral statements just really don’t seem like any of these. The wrongness of slavery, the holocaust, baby torture, stabbing people in the eye—it seems like all these things really are wrong and this fact doesn’t depend on what people think about it.
I think that these things really are wrong and don’t depend on what people think about it. But I also think that that statement is part of a language game dictated by complex norms and expectations. The significance of thought experiments. The need to avoid inconsistency. The acceptance of implications. The reliance on gut evaluations. Endorsement of standardly accepted implications. Etc. I live my life according to those norms and expectations, and they lead me to condemn slavery and think quite poorly of slavers and say things like ‘slavery was a terrible stain on our nation’. I don’t feel inclined to let people off the hook by virtue of having different desires. I’m quite happy with a lot of thought and talk that looks pretty objective.
I’m an anti-realist because I have no idea what sort of thing morality could be about that would justify the norms and expectations that govern our thoughts about morality. Maybe this is a version of the queerness argument. There aren’t any sorts of entities or relations that seem like appropriate truth-makers for moral claims. I have a hard time understanding what they might be such that I would have any inclination to shift what I care about were I to learn that the normative truths themselves were different (holding fixed all of the things that currently guide my deployment of moral concepts). If my intuitions about cases were the same, if all of the theoretical virtues were the same, if the facts in the world were the same, but an oracle were to tell me that moral reality were different in some way—turns out, baby torture is good! -- I wouldn’t be inclined to change my moral views at all. If I’m not inclined to change my views except when guided by things like gut feelings, consistency judgments, etc. then I don’t see how anything about the world can be authoritative in the way that realism should require.
//I think that these things really are wrong and don’t depend on what people think about it. But I also think that that statement is part of a language game dictated by complex norms and expectations.//
To me this sounds a bit like moral naturalism. You don’t think morality is something non-physical and spooky but you think there are real moral facts and these don’t depend on our attitudes.
I guess I don’t quite see what your puzzlement is with morality. There are moral norms which govern what people should do. Now, you might deny there in fact are such things, but I don’t see what’s so mysterious.
I think of moral naturalism as a position where moral language is supposed to represent things, and it represents certain natural things. The view I favor is a lot closer to inferentialism: the meaning of moral language is constituted by the way it is used, not what it is about. (But I also don’t think inferentialism is quite right, since I’m not into realism about meaning either.)
I guess I don’t quite see what your puzzlement is with morality. There are moral norms which govern what people should do. Now, you might deny there in fact are such things, but I don’t see what’s so mysterious.
Another angle on the mystery: it is possible that there are epistemic norms, moral norms, prudential norms, and that’s it. But if you’re a realist, it seems like it should also be possible that there are hundreds of other kinds of norms that we’re completely unaware of, such that we act in all sorts of wrong ways all the time. Maybe there are special norms governing how you should brush your teeth (that have nothing to do with hygiene or our interests), or how to daydream. Maybe these norms hold more weight than moral norms, in something like the way moral norms may hold more weight than prudential norms. If you’re a non-naturalist, then apart from trust in a loving God, I’m not sure how you address this possibility. But it also seems absurd that I should have to worry about such things.
I consider myself a pretty strong anti-realist, but I find myself accepting a lot of the things you take to be problems for anti-realism. For instance:
I think that these things really are wrong and don’t depend on what people think about it. But I also think that that statement is part of a language game dictated by complex norms and expectations. The significance of thought experiments. The need to avoid inconsistency. The acceptance of implications. The reliance on gut evaluations. Endorsement of standardly accepted implications. Etc. I live my life according to those norms and expectations, and they lead me to condemn slavery and think quite poorly of slavers and say things like ‘slavery was a terrible stain on our nation’. I don’t feel inclined to let people off the hook by virtue of having different desires. I’m quite happy with a lot of thought and talk that looks pretty objective.
I’m an anti-realist because I have no idea what sort of thing morality could be about that would justify the norms and expectations that govern our thoughts about morality. Maybe this is a version of the queerness argument. There aren’t any sorts of entities or relations that seem like appropriate truth-makers for moral claims. I have a hard time understanding what they might be such that I would have any inclination to shift what I care about were I to learn that the normative truths themselves were different (holding fixed all of the things that currently guide my deployment of moral concepts). If my intuitions about cases were the same, if all of the theoretical virtues were the same, if the facts in the world were the same, but an oracle were to tell me that moral reality were different in some way—turns out, baby torture is good! -- I wouldn’t be inclined to change my moral views at all. If I’m not inclined to change my views except when guided by things like gut feelings, consistency judgments, etc. then I don’t see how anything about the world can be authoritative in the way that realism should require.
//I think that these things really are wrong and don’t depend on what people think about it. But I also think that that statement is part of a language game dictated by complex norms and expectations.//
To me this sounds a bit like moral naturalism. You don’t think morality is something non-physical and spooky but you think there are real moral facts and these don’t depend on our attitudes.
I guess I don’t quite see what your puzzlement is with morality. There are moral norms which govern what people should do. Now, you might deny there in fact are such things, but I don’t see what’s so mysterious.
Richard Chappell had a nice post about the last kind of objection https://www.philosophyetc.net/2021/10/ruling-out-helium-maximizing.html
I also wrote something about this a while ago https://benthams.substack.com/p/contra-bush-on-moral-fetishism?utm_source=publication-search
I think of moral naturalism as a position where moral language is supposed to represent things, and it represents certain natural things. The view I favor is a lot closer to inferentialism: the meaning of moral language is constituted by the way it is used, not what it is about. (But I also don’t think inferentialism is quite right, since I’m not into realism about meaning either.)
Another angle on the mystery: it is possible that there are epistemic norms, moral norms, prudential norms, and that’s it. But if you’re a realist, it seems like it should also be possible that there are hundreds of other kinds of norms that we’re completely unaware of, such that we act in all sorts of wrong ways all the time. Maybe there are special norms governing how you should brush your teeth (that have nothing to do with hygiene or our interests), or how to daydream. Maybe these norms hold more weight than moral norms, in something like the way moral norms may hold more weight than prudential norms. If you’re a non-naturalist, then apart from trust in a loving God, I’m not sure how you address this possibility. But it also seems absurd that I should have to worry about such things.