I lean towards moral realism, but I think the reliance on intuition in a lot of arguments for moral realism is a deep methodological misstep. If a fact seems true to someone and false to someone else, the truth or falsity of that fact is not going to be enough, standing alone, to explain its intuitiveness.
If I say “X seems true, and the truth of X is a salient explanation for why it seems that way,” this isn’t actually a good or salient explanation until we can also offer some account of why it seems false to others. Perhaps their intuitive faculties are deficient—but really all we could say for sure is that at least one person, you or them, has deficient intuitive faculties. What I find is that, generally, this leads to weird, gerrymandered epistemologies and rhetorically inert positions which depend, for their success, on appeals to intuition which simply may not be there. By my lights, this is the wrong way to argue for a claim—even a true one!
To rely on intuitions regarding contested matters, we must prescribe some methodology of checking the quality of your intuitive faculties against theirs, and even if we can do this reliably, we then need some other methodology that rules out the possibility that both intuitive faculties are somehow broken. I don’t know how to do this, I’ve never met anyone who can, and in any case, I lack the instruments to pull it off.
But casting intuition aside entirely, within this context, I think moral realism can still be salvaged. I think people have normative experiences which can ground moral claims—even if we can’t trust our intuitions that “X is good” seems true, there are experiences we have which seem good directly—namely, enjoyment. And there are experiences we have which seem bad directly—suffering. This is more than just intuition. If I put my hand on a hot stove, regardless of what I might be contemplating at any given moment, I am going to have experiences which lend themselves to the conclusion “I should move my hand from the stove.” The apparent badness of a thing which causes us suffering shifts our normative beliefs and inclines us to dislike it—it shapes our wants, and can create new likes and dislikes where there were none before. If our experiences provided purely descriptive information, this would be wholly unexplainable.
But all we really know for sure is that enjoyment seems good, and suffering seems bad—and it then falls to our varying metaethical approaches to explain why these seem the way they do. It doesn’t follow, deductively, that suffering is bad because it seems to be. Lots of things we experience aren’t as they seem. But suffering seems bad to everyone (even if different things cause suffering in different people), and enjoyment seems good to everyone (with the same caveat) - so badness and goodness being universal properties of suffering and enjoyment, respectively, is a plausible, simple, and salient explanation of why they seem to be.
“Enjoyment is good,” then, is justified in a manner more akin to a scientific theory than a mathematical theorem. We need never attempt to cross the is-ought gap—we sidestep it entirely, the same way we do for claims about gravity or chairs. The goodness of enjoyment is a highly salient explanation for why it seems good. It is an excellent fit to the available evidence. The theory that enjoyment is good is simple and has predictive value—I can predict that future enjoyable experiences will incline me to believe that experiences of that sort should, all else being equal, happen more. And I can predict that future instances of enjoyment will seem good to others too.
At first glance, the main challenge to this approach is evolutionary debunking, which can be held out as an alternate hypothesis that better explains why we are seemed good and bad to. If evolution fully explains the apparent badness of suffering, positing that suffering also by coincidence happens to be bad is pointless and redundant. If I show that the image of a chair is explained by a hologram, there’s no point in also positing that there just by coincidence happens to be a chair where the hologram is.
But I don’t think that evolutionary debunking actually attacks this theory at all. Evolution has tremendous explanatory power and no inherent normative conclusions, but what it explains is why we enjoy and suffer from the things we do, rather than why enjoyment and suffering seem good and bad to us. Evolution explains why, for instance, our bodies are tuned to deliver enjoyment when we eat nutritious food and why we suffer from having our limbs destroyed. Evolution explains the wiring that governs what we enjoy and suffer from. It explains why there are slight variations in how different people are wired. And further, evolution debunks any claim that the set of wiring we presently have is in any sense “correct,” since how we are wired isn’t the result of any sort of virtue-tracking process.
If a conscious person were created from scratch, as a result of some process other than evolution, evolution would make no predictions about what this person would enjoy or suffer from, nor would it make any predictions about how good or bad enjoyment/suffering would seem to them. I predict that enjoyment would still seem good to this person (though I have no clue how we might build such a person) and that suffering would seem bad to them. I would also say that, regardless of what they are wired to enjoy or suffer from, it is good to give them the things they’re wired to enjoy, bad to give them the things they’re wired to suffer from, and good to shape their wiring in a manner which promotes their long-term wellbeing. And I would say the same is true of everything that can experience—you, me, shrimp, aliens—without exception.
I lean towards moral realism, but I think the reliance on intuition in a lot of arguments for moral realism is a deep methodological misstep. If a fact seems true to someone and false to someone else, the truth or falsity of that fact is not going to be enough, standing alone, to explain its intuitiveness.
If I say “X seems true, and the truth of X is a salient explanation for why it seems that way,” this isn’t actually a good or salient explanation until we can also offer some account of why it seems false to others. Perhaps their intuitive faculties are deficient—but really all we could say for sure is that at least one person, you or them, has deficient intuitive faculties. What I find is that, generally, this leads to weird, gerrymandered epistemologies and rhetorically inert positions which depend, for their success, on appeals to intuition which simply may not be there. By my lights, this is the wrong way to argue for a claim—even a true one!
To rely on intuitions regarding contested matters, we must prescribe some methodology of checking the quality of your intuitive faculties against theirs, and even if we can do this reliably, we then need some other methodology that rules out the possibility that both intuitive faculties are somehow broken. I don’t know how to do this, I’ve never met anyone who can, and in any case, I lack the instruments to pull it off.
But casting intuition aside entirely, within this context, I think moral realism can still be salvaged. I think people have normative experiences which can ground moral claims—even if we can’t trust our intuitions that “X is good” seems true, there are experiences we have which seem good directly—namely, enjoyment. And there are experiences we have which seem bad directly—suffering. This is more than just intuition. If I put my hand on a hot stove, regardless of what I might be contemplating at any given moment, I am going to have experiences which lend themselves to the conclusion “I should move my hand from the stove.” The apparent badness of a thing which causes us suffering shifts our normative beliefs and inclines us to dislike it—it shapes our wants, and can create new likes and dislikes where there were none before. If our experiences provided purely descriptive information, this would be wholly unexplainable.
But all we really know for sure is that enjoyment seems good, and suffering seems bad—and it then falls to our varying metaethical approaches to explain why these seem the way they do. It doesn’t follow, deductively, that suffering is bad because it seems to be. Lots of things we experience aren’t as they seem. But suffering seems bad to everyone (even if different things cause suffering in different people), and enjoyment seems good to everyone (with the same caveat) - so badness and goodness being universal properties of suffering and enjoyment, respectively, is a plausible, simple, and salient explanation of why they seem to be.
“Enjoyment is good,” then, is justified in a manner more akin to a scientific theory than a mathematical theorem. We need never attempt to cross the is-ought gap—we sidestep it entirely, the same way we do for claims about gravity or chairs. The goodness of enjoyment is a highly salient explanation for why it seems good. It is an excellent fit to the available evidence. The theory that enjoyment is good is simple and has predictive value—I can predict that future enjoyable experiences will incline me to believe that experiences of that sort should, all else being equal, happen more. And I can predict that future instances of enjoyment will seem good to others too.
At first glance, the main challenge to this approach is evolutionary debunking, which can be held out as an alternate hypothesis that better explains why we are seemed good and bad to. If evolution fully explains the apparent badness of suffering, positing that suffering also by coincidence happens to be bad is pointless and redundant. If I show that the image of a chair is explained by a hologram, there’s no point in also positing that there just by coincidence happens to be a chair where the hologram is.
But I don’t think that evolutionary debunking actually attacks this theory at all. Evolution has tremendous explanatory power and no inherent normative conclusions, but what it explains is why we enjoy and suffer from the things we do, rather than why enjoyment and suffering seem good and bad to us. Evolution explains why, for instance, our bodies are tuned to deliver enjoyment when we eat nutritious food and why we suffer from having our limbs destroyed. Evolution explains the wiring that governs what we enjoy and suffer from. It explains why there are slight variations in how different people are wired. And further, evolution debunks any claim that the set of wiring we presently have is in any sense “correct,” since how we are wired isn’t the result of any sort of virtue-tracking process.
If a conscious person were created from scratch, as a result of some process other than evolution, evolution would make no predictions about what this person would enjoy or suffer from, nor would it make any predictions about how good or bad enjoyment/suffering would seem to them. I predict that enjoyment would still seem good to this person (though I have no clue how we might build such a person) and that suffering would seem bad to them. I would also say that, regardless of what they are wired to enjoy or suffer from, it is good to give them the things they’re wired to enjoy, bad to give them the things they’re wired to suffer from, and good to shape their wiring in a manner which promotes their long-term wellbeing. And I would say the same is true of everything that can experience—you, me, shrimp, aliens—without exception.