[I’m an anti-realist because I think morality is underdetermined]
I often find myself explaining why anti-realism is different from nihilism / “anything goes.” I wrote lengthy posts in my sequence on moral anti-realism (2 and 3) about partly this point. However, maybe the framing “anti-realism” is needlessly confusing because some people do associate it with nihilism / “anything goes.” Perhaps the best short explanation of my perspective goes as follows:
I’m happy to concede that some moral facts exist (in a comparatively weak sense), but I think morality is underdetermined.
This means that beyond the widespread agreement on some self-evident principles, expert opinions won’t converge even if we had access to a superintelligent oracle. Multiple options will be defensible, and people will gravitate to different attractors in value space.
I think if you concede that some moral facts exist, it might be more accurate to call yourself a moral realist. The indeterminacy of morality could be a fundamental feature, allowing for many more acts to be ethically permissible (or no worse than other acts) than with a linear (complete) ranking. I think consequentialists are unusually prone to try to rank outcomes linearly.
I read this recently, which describes how moral indeterminacy can be accommodated within moral realism, although it was kind of long for what it had to say. I think expert agreement (or ideal observers/judges) could converge on moral indeterminacy: they could agree that we can’t know how to rank certain options and further that there’s no fact of the matter.
Thanks for bringing up this option! I don’t agree with this framing for two reasons:
As I point out in my sequence’s first post, some ways in which “moral facts exist” are underwhelming.
I don’t think moral indeterminacy necessarily means that there’s convergence of expert judgments. At least, the way in which I think morality is underdetermined explicitly predicts expert divergence. Morality is “real” in the sense that experts will converge up to a certain point, and beyond that, some experts will have underdetermined moral values while others will have made choices within what’s allowed by indeterminacy. Out of the ones that made choices, not all choices will be the same.
I think what I describe in the second bullet point will seem counterintuitive to many people because they think that if morality is underdetermined, your views on morality should be underdetermined, too. But that doesn’t follow! I understand why people have the intuition that this should follow, but it really doesn’t work that way when you look at it closely. I’ve been working on spelling out why.
[I’m an anti-realist because I think morality is underdetermined]
I often find myself explaining why anti-realism is different from nihilism / “anything goes.” I wrote lengthy posts in my sequence on moral anti-realism (2 and 3) about partly this point. However, maybe the framing “anti-realism” is needlessly confusing because some people do associate it with nihilism / “anything goes.” Perhaps the best short explanation of my perspective goes as follows:
I’m happy to concede that some moral facts exist (in a comparatively weak sense), but I think morality is underdetermined.
This means that beyond the widespread agreement on some self-evident principles, expert opinions won’t converge even if we had access to a superintelligent oracle. Multiple options will be defensible, and people will gravitate to different attractors in value space.
I think if you concede that some moral facts exist, it might be more accurate to call yourself a moral realist. The indeterminacy of morality could be a fundamental feature, allowing for many more acts to be ethically permissible (or no worse than other acts) than with a linear (complete) ranking. I think consequentialists are unusually prone to try to rank outcomes linearly.
I read this recently, which describes how moral indeterminacy can be accommodated within moral realism, although it was kind of long for what it had to say. I think expert agreement (or ideal observers/judges) could converge on moral indeterminacy: they could agree that we can’t know how to rank certain options and further that there’s no fact of the matter.
Thanks for bringing up this option! I don’t agree with this framing for two reasons:
As I point out in my sequence’s first post, some ways in which “moral facts exist” are underwhelming.
I don’t think moral indeterminacy necessarily means that there’s convergence of expert judgments. At least, the way in which I think morality is underdetermined explicitly predicts expert divergence. Morality is “real” in the sense that experts will converge up to a certain point, and beyond that, some experts will have underdetermined moral values while others will have made choices within what’s allowed by indeterminacy. Out of the ones that made choices, not all choices will be the same.
I think what I describe in the second bullet point will seem counterintuitive to many people because they think that if morality is underdetermined, your views on morality should be underdetermined, too. But that doesn’t follow! I understand why people have the intuition that this should follow, but it really doesn’t work that way when you look at it closely. I’ve been working on spelling out why.