You’re selling me a horse and you tell me “this horse is fast”. I look at the horse and say “yeah, it looks like it would be a pretty fast runner compared to other horses”. To which you reply “no, no, it’s not about what you think makes it fast. This horse is fast. Fact. It would be fast even if it were the only horse ever. Even if nobody thought it was fast… it would be.”
And you go on to tell me that because the horse looks fast, I should believe it is “objectively” fast.
Now I do presume that the horse is fast, in that it appears likely to be what I and most everybody would consider to be fast for a horse. But that’s not the meaning that your words convey. Which is instead that I should regard the horse as “fast” based on what the word “fast” signifies and, I can only assume, by reference to some unspecified basis, something which is of a kind that doesn’t rely upon our personal views or values, and which universally governs what counts as “fast” in this context. But if there is such a basis… it is not making any appearances.
BB’s intuitions
What’s with the horse thing? Well, if I understand BB’s underlying pro-realism argument correctly, he’s suggesting that we should presume that there are stance-independent moral facts, that we should maintain that belief unless we have cause to update our beliefs, and that there isn’t sufficient cause for an update.
I may presume that the horse is fast based on my conception of what “fast” should mean for a horse, but there’s no reason to presume that the horse is fast in the stance-independent sense without first seeing even a hint of something that might lead to an objective standard for horse fastness (which doesn’t exist).
It appears that torture is wrong? Ok, I can accept that as the basis for an initial presumption that torture is morally bad. That’s not the same thing as a presumption that it is stance-independently morally bad. Does torture appear stance-independently wrong? No! The opposite. We might even say that it seems extremely intuitive that torture appears wrong precisely because we already have some stance about the infliction of pain without good cause being wrong (or the like).
Particular responses
But this means that moral anti-realists must think that you can never have a reason to care about something independent of what you actually do care about.
Kinda. I only care about reducing suffering (etc.) because I already actually do care about whether people suffer (etc.) and other factors relevant to people’s opportunities for fulfillment. If I didn’t have those stances… then I wouldn’t place a high value on reducing suffering unless I had some *other* stances that led me to value reducing suffering.
1. A person wants to eat a car. … On moral anti-realism, they’re not being irrational. They have no reason to take a different action.
Irrationality doesn’t come into it unless the person is proceeding in a way that is at odds with their objectives. You don’t have to enjoy something to prefer it over something else. Maybe eating the car would save a billion lives.
Wanting to eat a car would be irrational if I valued not going through that ordeal more than I valued my motivation(s) to eat the car.
General responses
All it would take to conclusively establish moral realism would be to identify a single moral statement that can be demonstrated to be true without reliance upon any person’s stance. That would be setting the bar unfairly high though… let’s lower our expectations to merely showing that at least one such statement appears likely to be true to a similar standard as what we apply for other kinds of facts that we regard as established facts.
For example, if you say there’s a table then we might presume that it’s true but we’re not going to treat it as an established fact just because you say you saw it. But we don’t need very much before we will regard it as a fact.
That should be doable, if the following is correct:
Moral realists aren’t special pleading. We believe in moral facts for the same reason that we believe in any other basic kind of fact.
You can say “torturing babies for fun is wrong” and we can easily establish that in the stance-dependent sense so long as we have adopted a suitable stance, e.g., that causing suffering without critical need is morally bad. One thing follows from the other (more or less).
But how do you establish that to a suitable standard without employing any basic stance about what moral conduct should or shouldn’t entail?
That’s the case that I think moral realists need to make.
Analogies
Say that everybody agrees that there is a table in a room and it is blue. The colour of the table could be regarded as an established fact. There is a colour-categorisation-stance involved as everybody must first have at least some idea about what shades/wavelengths “blue” can correspond to.
But… there are some shades that are so clearly within the bounds of what we mean by “blue” that if you didn’t consider them “blue” then you’d have to be referring to a different concept than everybody else. For those shades, the stance is inherent to the concept we have in mind. We woudn’t have to import any of our own stances. We can have “real” facts about “blue” propositions.
Is the table reflecting light within the range that humans regard as “blue”? Yes. It really is doing that. Is there really a concept called “blue”? Yes. Does it correlate directly with some phenomenon that occurs separately to human perception? No, it’s not real in that sense. It’s a human construct. There is no “blue” unless we conceive of it, there are only things with characteristics that for some values universally fit what we refer to as blue.
In the same way, if “morally bad” had a universal connotation that necessarily meant that, say, the act of dashing infants against rocks must always fit the definition otherwise you couldn’t possibly be referring to same thing that everybody else means when they say “morally bad”, then that would be an example of a stance independent moral fact… Alas, that’s not the case.
If a religion says that dashing infants is not always morally bad, they’re still talking about the same idea. Our conception of “morally bad” is more abstract than “blue”.
Which rules out any examples based solely on definitions, like we can have for “blue” and for numbers.
Is there some other way that the moral realist can get from the abstract concept of “bad” to a specific “this is bad” without presupposing that some things are bad or presupposing anything about what makes things bad?
You’re selling me a horse and you tell me “this horse is fast”. I look at the horse and say “yeah, it looks like it would be a pretty fast runner compared to other horses”. To which you reply “no, no, it’s not about what you think makes it fast. This horse is fast. Fact. It would be fast even if it were the only horse ever. Even if nobody thought it was fast… it would be.”
And you go on to tell me that because the horse looks fast, I should believe it is “objectively” fast.
Now I do presume that the horse is fast, in that it appears likely to be what I and most everybody would consider to be fast for a horse. But that’s not the meaning that your words convey. Which is instead that I should regard the horse as “fast” based on what the word “fast” signifies and, I can only assume, by reference to some unspecified basis, something which is of a kind that doesn’t rely upon our personal views or values, and which universally governs what counts as “fast” in this context. But if there is such a basis… it is not making any appearances.
BB’s intuitions
What’s with the horse thing? Well, if I understand BB’s underlying pro-realism argument correctly, he’s suggesting that we should presume that there are stance-independent moral facts, that we should maintain that belief unless we have cause to update our beliefs, and that there isn’t sufficient cause for an update.
I may presume that the horse is fast based on my conception of what “fast” should mean for a horse, but there’s no reason to presume that the horse is fast in the stance-independent sense without first seeing even a hint of something that might lead to an objective standard for horse fastness (which doesn’t exist).
It appears that torture is wrong? Ok, I can accept that as the basis for an initial presumption that torture is morally bad. That’s not the same thing as a presumption that it is stance-independently morally bad. Does torture appear stance-independently wrong? No! The opposite. We might even say that it seems extremely intuitive that torture appears wrong precisely because we already have some stance about the infliction of pain without good cause being wrong (or the like).
Particular responses
Kinda. I only care about reducing suffering (etc.) because I already actually do care about whether people suffer (etc.) and other factors relevant to people’s opportunities for fulfillment. If I didn’t have those stances… then I wouldn’t place a high value on reducing suffering unless I had some *other* stances that led me to value reducing suffering.
Irrationality doesn’t come into it unless the person is proceeding in a way that is at odds with their objectives. You don’t have to enjoy something to prefer it over something else. Maybe eating the car would save a billion lives.
Wanting to eat a car would be irrational if I valued not going through that ordeal more than I valued my motivation(s) to eat the car.
General responses
All it would take to conclusively establish moral realism would be to identify a single moral statement that can be demonstrated to be true without reliance upon any person’s stance. That would be setting the bar unfairly high though… let’s lower our expectations to merely showing that at least one such statement appears likely to be true to a similar standard as what we apply for other kinds of facts that we regard as established facts.
For example, if you say there’s a table then we might presume that it’s true but we’re not going to treat it as an established fact just because you say you saw it. But we don’t need very much before we will regard it as a fact.
That should be doable, if the following is correct:
You can say “torturing babies for fun is wrong” and we can easily establish that in the stance-dependent sense so long as we have adopted a suitable stance, e.g., that causing suffering without critical need is morally bad. One thing follows from the other (more or less).
But how do you establish that to a suitable standard without employing any basic stance about what moral conduct should or shouldn’t entail?
That’s the case that I think moral realists need to make.
Analogies
Say that everybody agrees that there is a table in a room and it is blue. The colour of the table could be regarded as an established fact. There is a colour-categorisation-stance involved as everybody must first have at least some idea about what shades/wavelengths “blue” can correspond to.
But… there are some shades that are so clearly within the bounds of what we mean by “blue” that if you didn’t consider them “blue” then you’d have to be referring to a different concept than everybody else. For those shades, the stance is inherent to the concept we have in mind. We woudn’t have to import any of our own stances. We can have “real” facts about “blue” propositions.
Is the table reflecting light within the range that humans regard as “blue”? Yes. It really is doing that. Is there really a concept called “blue”? Yes. Does it correlate directly with some phenomenon that occurs separately to human perception? No, it’s not real in that sense. It’s a human construct. There is no “blue” unless we conceive of it, there are only things with characteristics that for some values universally fit what we refer to as blue.
In the same way, if “morally bad” had a universal connotation that necessarily meant that, say, the act of dashing infants against rocks must always fit the definition otherwise you couldn’t possibly be referring to same thing that everybody else means when they say “morally bad”, then that would be an example of a stance independent moral fact… Alas, that’s not the case.
If a religion says that dashing infants is not always morally bad, they’re still talking about the same idea. Our conception of “morally bad” is more abstract than “blue”.
Which rules out any examples based solely on definitions, like we can have for “blue” and for numbers.
Is there some other way that the moral realist can get from the abstract concept of “bad” to a specific “this is bad” without presupposing that some things are bad or presupposing anything about what makes things bad?