The key thing to understand about hypothetical imperatives, thus understood, is that they describe relations of normative inheritance. “If you want X, you should do Y,” conveys that given that X is worth pursuing, Y will be too. But is X worth pursuing? That crucial question is left unanswered. A view on which there are only hypothetical imperatives is thus a form of normative nihilism—no more productive than an irrigation system without any liquid to flow through it.
To get any real normativity out of hypothetical imperatives, you need to add some substantive claims about desirability, or what ends are categorically worth pursuing.
Until then, we’ve just got a huge array of possible normative systems channeled out. We can “hypothetically” predict and compare racist normative advice, anti-racist normative advice, and so on for infinitely many other possible ends. But we need something more to break the symmetry between them and yield actual reasons to do one thing rather than another. To get any concrete advice, we need to fill out just one of the possible channels as the one to follow.
“Nihilism” sounds bad but I think it’s smuggling in connotations I don’t endorse.
I’m far from a professional philosopher but I don’t see how you could possibly make substantive claims about desirability from a pure meta-ethical perspective. But you definitely can make substantive claims about desirability from a social perspective and personal perspective. The reason we don’t debate racist normative advice is because we’re not racists. I don’t see any other way to determine this.
Distinguish how we determine something from what we are determining.
There’s a trivial sense in which all thought is “subjective”. Even science ultimately comes down to personal perspectives on what you perceive as the result of an experiment, and how you think the data should be interpreted (as supporting some or another more general theory). But it would be odd to conclude from this that our scientific verdicts are just claims about how the world appears to us, or what’s reasonable to conclude relative to certain stipulated ancillary assumptions. Commonsense scientific realists instead take our best judgments to reflect fallible verdicts about a mind-independent truth of the matter. The same goes for commonsense moral realists.
People keep forgetting that meta-ethics was solved back in 2013.
fwiw, I think the view you discuss there is really just a terminological variant on nihilism:
“Nihilism” sounds bad but I think it’s smuggling in connotations I don’t endorse.
I’m far from a professional philosopher but I don’t see how you could possibly make substantive claims about desirability from a pure meta-ethical perspective. But you definitely can make substantive claims about desirability from a social perspective and personal perspective. The reason we don’t debate racist normative advice is because we’re not racists. I don’t see any other way to determine this.
Distinguish how we determine something from what we are determining.
There’s a trivial sense in which all thought is “subjective”. Even science ultimately comes down to personal perspectives on what you perceive as the result of an experiment, and how you think the data should be interpreted (as supporting some or another more general theory). But it would be odd to conclude from this that our scientific verdicts are just claims about how the world appears to us, or what’s reasonable to conclude relative to certain stipulated ancillary assumptions. Commonsense scientific realists instead take our best judgments to reflect fallible verdicts about a mind-independent truth of the matter. The same goes for commonsense moral realists.