LanceSBush

Karma: 103

I study morality from an interdisciplinary perspective that draws on my background in philosophy and psychology. My primary research interests are:

Psychology

Moral psychology
Experimental philosophy
Psychology of metaethics
The evolution of morality

Philosophy

Moral realism & antirealism
Intuition & philosophical methodology
Metaphilosophy
Free will
Consciousness

My research focuses on the the psychology of metaethics, metaphilosophy, and methodological issues in experimental philosophy. Most of my research centers on whether nonphilosophers are moral realists, and the implications these empirical findings have for philosophy. I am intensely skeptical of the methods employed in both mainstream philosophy and psychology, and a great deal of my work also centers on critiquing the methods typically employed in both fields.

I also run a blog and YouTube channel that focus on metaethics, metaphilosophy, and metascience.

I am also active on TikTok where I mostly have live discussions with people about their philosophical views.

LanceSBush 1 Jul 2025 17:30 UTC
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in reply to: Arepo’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
I would characterise antirealism as something like ‘believing that there is no normative space, and hence no logical or empirical line of reasoning you could give to change someone’s motivations.’
I would not accept this characterization. Antirealism is the view that there are no stance-independent moral facts. I don’t think it logically entails any particular normative implications at all, so I do not think it has no “normative space” or “no logical or empirical line of reasoning” you could give to change someone’s motivations.
I would be interested to hear a counterexample that isn’t a language game. I don’t see how one can sincerely advocate someone else hold a position they think is logically indefensible.
I’m not sure what you have in mind by a language game, but you gave this as an example of something an antirealist has no access to: “Show me that their policies are more aligned with a moral view that we both in fact share.”
Why wouldn’t an antirealist have access to this? There’s a few obvious counterexamples to this. Here’s one: cultural relativism. If two people are cultural relativists and are members of the same culture, one of them could readily convince the other that a policy is more in line with the moral standards of the culture than some other policy. The same generalizes to other antirealist positions, such as various constructivist views.
Someone who believed in a moral realist view that valued a state whose realisation they would never experience—black ties at their own funeral, for instance—should be highly sceptical of a moral antirealist who claimed to value the same state even though they also wouldn’t experience it.
Why should they be skeptical? I am a moral antirealist and I have all kinds of preferences that are totally unrelated to my own experiences. I want my daughter to go on to live a happy life long after I am dead, and I would actively sacrifice my own welfare to ensure this would be the case even if I’d never experience it. I don’t believe I do this because I’d feel happy knowing the sacrifice was made; I’d do it because I value more than just my own experiences.
I see no legitimate reason for realists to be skeptical of antirealists who have values like this. There is nothing special about valuing experiences I’d realize that prioritizes them over ones I won’t.
To an antirealist it can only mean something like ‘pleasing to imagine’.
That isn’t what that means to me, so I do not think this is correct. If you think this is some kind of logical entailment of moral antirealism, I’d be interested in seeing an attempt at showing a contradiction were an antirealist to think otherwise, or some other means of demonstrating that this follows from antirealism.
But if they won’t be at the funeral, they won’t know whether the state was realised, and so they can get their pleasure just imagining it happen—it doesn’t otherwise matter to them whether it does.
When performing an action, my goal is to achieve the desired outcome. I don’t have to experience the outcome to be motivated to perform the action.
Not by coincidence I think, this arguably gives the antirealist access to a basically hedonistic quasi-morality in practice (though no recourse to defend it), but not to any common alternative.
I don’t endorse this view, and I deny as an antirealist I’d have any need to “defend” a moral standard. This to me sounds a bit like suggesting I’d be unable to defend what my favorite color is; which is true, I just don’t think my color preferences require any sort of defense.
If you start with the common belief that there is such some ‘objective’ morality and some set of steps of reasoning tools that would let us access it, you can potentially correct the other’s use of those tools in good faith. If one of you doesn’t actually believe that process is even possible, it would be disingenuous to suppose there’s something even to correct.
This still may or may not be connected to anyone’s motivations. I don’t care at all what the moral facts are. I only act based on my own preferences, and I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to do whatever is stance-independently moral.
***
I’d be happy to talk about the other claims in the sidebar as well but I’m not sure I understand some of them. Can you elaborate on these?
The uniquely non-evolutionarily explicability of utilitarianism (h.t. Joshua Greene’s argument in Moral Tribes) and how antirealists can explain this
The convergence of moral philosophers towards three heavily overlapping moral philosophies—given the infinite possible moral philosophies and how antirealists can explain this
What is it antirealists are supposed to explain, specifically?
Also, I don’t intend to be argumentative about literally everything, but some of us may find other aspects of these topics more interesting than you, so which of these topics is most interesting can vary.

LanceSBush 1 Jul 2025 17:14 UTC
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in reply to: Arepo’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
Why wouldn’t 6 be available to an antirealist? If I’m a utilitarian and they’re a utilitarian, I could convince them a course of action would maximize utility. This would be a bit like (1): convincing them that a course of action would be consistent with their values.
If by (7) what you mean by “correct” is demonstrating that a course of action is in line with the stance-independent moral facts, an antirealist couldn’t sincerely attempt to do that, but I don’t think this carries any significant practical implications.
And without those, the only honest/nonviolent option you have to persuade me is not going to be available to you the majority of the time, since usually I’m going to be better informed than you about what things are in fact good for me.
I don’t think I need to have better access to someone’s values to make a compelling case. For instance, suppose I’m running a store and someone breaks in with a gun and demands I empty the cash register. I don’t have to know what their values are better than they do to point out that they are on lots of security cameras, or that the police are on their way, and so on. It isn’t that hard to appeal to people’s values when convincing them. We do this all the time.
And, for what it’s worth, I think that in practice the vast majority of the time (in fact, personally, I suspect virtually all the time except for rare cases of weird philosophers) what people are doing is appealing to a person’s own values, not attempting to convince them that their values are misaligned with the stance independent moral facts.
Part of the reason for this is that I don’t think most people are moral realists, so it wouldn’t make sense for them to argue on behalf of moral realism or to appeal to others under the presumption that they are moral realists.
Another reason I think this is because I don’t think the move from convincing someone what the stance-independent moral facts are to them acting in any particular way is that straightforward. You’d have to make a separate case for motivational internalism to show that convincing them is enough to motivate them, while if you instead abandon this, it’s possible the people you’re convincing can be persuaded of what the stance-independent moral facts are, but simply not care.
Speaking for myself, arguing for moral realism would have absolutely no impact on me. I don’t simply reject moral realism. I also deny that if there were stance-independent moral facts, that I’d have any motivation to comply with them (of course, I could be wrong about that). If I’m right, and if I have accurately introspected on my own values, then merely knowing something is stance-independently wrong wouldn’t change what I do at all. I simply don’t care if something is stance-independently moral or immoral. So why would persuading me of that matter?
Whether or not antirealists must rely, in practice, any more so on threats or manipulation than moral realists is an open empirical question. I predict that they don’t. If I had to make predictions, I’d instead predict that moral realists are more likely to threaten or manipulate people to comply with whatever they take the stance-independent moral facts to be. That at least strikes me as a viable alternative hypothesis. Either way, this is an empirical question, and I don’t know of any evidence that antirealists are in a worse position than realists. As an aside: even if they were, that wouldn’t be a good reason to reject the truth of moral antirealism. Reality may simply not include stance-independent moral facts. Even if that foreclosed one mode of persuasion, well, too bad! That’s how reality is.
As an aside, I think this remark:
This isn’t to say that moral antirealists necessarily will manipulate/threaten etc—I know many antirealists who seem like ‘good’ people who would find manipulating other people for personal gain grossly unpleasant.
…carries the pragmatic implication that antirealists are more likely to be immoral people that threaten or manipulate others. Do you agree?
This isn’t supposed to be a substantial argument for moral realism, but I think it’s an argument against antirealism.
What exactly is the argument against antirealism? Antirealists cannot honestly appeal to stance-independent moral facts when persuading others. I agree with that. But I don’t know why that should be taken as an argument against moral antirealism.
As an antirealist it would nonetheless be far better for you to live in a world where the 6th and 7th options were possible.
Well, I think the 6th collapses into the first and that the 7th has no practical benefits, so I’m not persuaded this is true. I do not think we’d be better off in any way at all if moral realism is true, and I am not convinced you’ve shown that we would be.
More generally, I simply deny anything about antirealism leaves in an especially weak position to rely on threats or manipulation. Antirealists can appeal to people’s values. And I think moral realists would have to do exactly the same thing. If the person in question doesn’t care about what’s true or isn’t motivated by what’s moral, then the realist is going to be in the exact same boat as the antirealist. The only thing the realist does is saddle themselves with more steps.

LanceSBush 30 Jun 2025 18:18 UTC
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in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
I don’t think I defended my remarks on the matter as well as I could have, and David Moss has brought to light some of what Bentham initially said and used that to make a good point. MichaelDickens, you’ve expressed a critical stance towards the post I wrote that uses the term “quackery” and is polemical.
But if you take a look, you will see from the tone and links provided that I am responding in an ongoing exchange that has spanned quite some time. During that time, Bentham has routinely made far more inflammatory and insulting remarks about antirealist views. For instance, this was a section heading he used in an early post on moral realism (one of the two I linked a response to here):
Cultural Relativism: Crazy, Illogical, and Accepted by no One Except Philosophically Illiterate Gender Studies Majors
You can find this here.
Bentham also repeatedly describes views like mine as “crazy”. Here’s one example:
Well, in this article, I’ll explain why moral anti-realism is so implausible — while one always can accept the anti-realist conclusion, it’s always possible to bite the bullet on crazy conclusions. Yet moral anti-realism, much like anti-realism about the external world, is wildly implausible in what it says about the world.
I worry that you drew a conclusion about my tone without taking into consideration Bentham’s own tone and what I was responding to.

LanceSBush 30 Jun 2025 15:37 UTC
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in reply to: Gustav Alexandrie’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
In fact, it seems to me and many (most?) people that underserved pain (in the aforementioned sense) is bad regardless of what attitudes other people have about such pain.
I’m a moral antirealist, and I myself think that undeserved pain is bad regardless of what attitudes other people have about such pain. The reason I think such pain is bad is because I disapprove of it. So what you’ve described is completely consistent with antirealism. For comparison, I think pineapple on pizza tastes good regardless of what other people have about it.
What would be required for a person’s stance about this scenario to suggest realism is if they thought that pain was bad regardless of what anyone thought about it, including themselves and the person experiencing the pain. That is, they’d need to think that the pain would be bad even if they didn’t think it was bad and even if the person experiencing the pain didn’t think it was bad. And I don’t think most people think this.
I’m familiar with phenomenal conservatism (I’ve directly discussed moral realism with one of its main proponents, Mike Huemer here, and have written a bit about the topic such as here). I don’t endorse it, but even if I did, I think its frequently misused and isn’t going to do much to support realism. At best, phenomenal conservatism provides one with a private, extra source of “justification” for one’s beliefs, but it has little dialectical force in an argument. The fact that something seems a certain way to you may matter to me a little bit to me, but if it doesn’t seem that way to me (or it seems that the contrary is the case), how things seem to you won’t count for much.

LanceSBush 30 Jun 2025 14:41 UTC
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in reply to: Tejas Subramaniam’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
My grounds for this are the relatively-basic ones: it certainly seems, for example, that some choices are plain irrational or that some states-of-affairs are bad in a stance-independent way
Seems that way to who? It does not seem that way to me. If I had to say how things “seemed,” I’d say it seems to me that this is not the case.
And of course, robust realists will always point to the partners-in-crime of moral facts, in other kinds of a priori domains.
They do, but I don’t find these arguments even a little convincing. I don’t see any good reasons to be a normative realist in any nonmoral domains, either.
Personally, I think there are very serious problems with people relying so heavily on how much things seem to them. Among other issues, I don’t think there are good ways to resolve conflicts if things seem differently to others.

LanceSBush 30 Jun 2025 14:37 UTC
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in reply to: Gustav Alexandrie’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
I think pain is bad, but I don’t think pain is bad independently of what I or anyone thinks about it. I think pain is bad insofar as I don’t like being in pain and don’t want anyone else to be in pain (all else being equal). Why be a realist about the badness of pain, or anything else? While I agree arguments for moral antirealism are typically not very good, I also do not think there are any good arguments for moral realism, nor any particularly good reason to think moral realism is true.
You also say the view should be taken very seriously. Why should it be taken very seriously?

LanceSBush 30 Jun 2025 14:34 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Arepo’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
You suggest antirealism has undesirable properties, then say:
But moral antirealism is ultimately a doctrine of conflict—if reason has no place in motivational discussion, then all that’s left for me to get my way from you is threats, emotional manipulation, misinformation and, if need be, actual violence. Any antirealist who denies this as the implication of their position is kidding themselves (or deliberately supplying misinformation).
I am a moral antirealist. I don’t think I endorse a position that is a “doctrine of conflict.” However, it’s hard to assess why you think this. You suggest that antirealism entails that “reason has no place in motivational discussion.” I’m not quite sure what you mean by this, but I don’t think reason has no place. Why would I think that? Perhaps you are thinking of “reason” differently than I am? If you could elaborate on what you are claiming here, and how you are thinking of some of these notions, that would be helpful.
As an antirealist, I don’t rely on threats or emotional manipulation or misinformation any more than anyone else, and I don’t know why I would if I were an antirealist. I don’t think antirealism has anything to do with having to rely any more on any of these than moral realism does. Why would it?

LanceSBush 30 Jun 2025 3:27 UTC
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in reply to: Dave Banerjee 🔸’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
Why do you find emotivism convincing?

LanceSBush 30 Jun 2025 3:26 UTC
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in reply to: kingsleyeyes’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
Why would phenomenal conservatism imply some form of moral realism?

LanceSBush 30 Jun 2025 3:24 UTC
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in reply to: JackM’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
What is the reason not to eat the car that isn’t grounded in concern for wellbeing or some other value the person already holds?

Realists might just say you have a reason simpliciter. There’s nothing more to it than that. And they think this because it’s intuitive.

LanceSBush 30 Jun 2025 3:23 UTC
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in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
How does it work if you are a theist? I don’t think theism gets you realism for free, or even very easily. In fact, I think theists should probably be moral antirealists.

LanceSBush 30 Jun 2025 3:22 UTC
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in reply to: Ariel_ZJ’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
Moral realism is not about whether morality is real or not. It’s about whether there are stance-independent moral facts. Moral antirealists (like myself) think that morality is real.

LanceSBush 30 Jun 2025 3:17 UTC
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on: Contra Bentham’s Bulldog on Moral Realism
I’m glad to see others critiquing Bentham’s post. I think he presents a fairly underdeveloped case for realism and could have done a lot more to present a broader array of arguments and to more effectively anticipate and handle antirealist responses.
I’m a moral antirealist, and wanted to leave a few comments.
1. You agree moral antirealism is weird. Why do you think that it’s weird? I don’t find it weird myself.
2. You say
BB claims that because moral claims and factual claims are linguistically the same (they’re both propositions), therefore moral claims must be objective. I claim that this linguistic similarity might just be a weird quirk of English, without any deeper significance than that.
I am not sure Bentham would endorse precisely this characterization. I think the linguistic claim is intended to prompt people who consider the linguistic claim to endorse the metaethical view in question. In other words, Bentham prompts me (as a reader) to consider what I’m committed to. I consider whether I think moral claims can’t be true or false. I’m supposed to think: yea seems right. And it doesn’t seem they’re all false. And it doesn’t seem their truth depends on the attitudes of people or cultures. So whatever they are, they’re (a) not incapable of being true or false, (so noncognitivism is wrong), (b) they’re not all false (so error theory is wrong), and (c) their truth doesn’t depend on attitudes, so stance-dependent cognitivist accounts (e.g., standard forms of relativism, constructivism, etc.) are wrong. So the idea is that other people can triangulate on their own metaethical position by uncovering their commitments through analysis of and reaction to various thought experiments that reveal how they employ their concepts.
I don’t agree with Bentham anyway but I think you may be oversimplifying what he’s trying to do.
3. You say:
BB claims that moral realism is intuitive, and barring a good reason not to, we should believe in intuitive things. I claim that this is wrong because unlike most other human intuitions, moral intuitions are not testable.
I’m curious how Bentham would respond to this objection, but there’s another issue here: intuitive to who? I don’t have the same intuitions as Bentham.
4. You say:
Here’s the most plausible account, in my mind, for how moral realism could be true: There exists a God, and this God decided to establish a system of morality.
Why would this give you moral realism, even if there were a God that established a system of morality?

LanceSBush 29 Jun 2025 15:13 UTC
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in reply to: Mikolaj Kniejski’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
By “suffering,” you can refer to states that agents consider undesirable, or you can refer to a state that an agent does not necessarily consider undesirable. If the former, at what point would you need to posit that the state involves some kind of “intrinsically undesirability”? You wouldn’t. The class of states would just consist of those states you desire not to have. If, instead, it’s not a state that you necessarily find undesirable, then it’s possible for you to not find it undesirable, or even to desire it.
At now point in any discussion of suffering does it ever make sense, nor do we ever benefit, from proposing that things can good or bad, desirable or undesirable, and so on, independent of our own attitudes or preferences with respect to those things. Philosophers will talk of things being “intrinsically bad” or and so on. I think this is all total nonsense.

LanceSBush 27 Jun 2025 17:36 UTC
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on: Morality Isn’t Objective
Thanks for writing this. I’m an antirealist and already agree with your conclusions, though I think we may arrive at similar conclusions for somewhat different reasons. I saw that you referenced a few other arguments for moral realism that Bentham didn’t present in the post. At least one criticism I’d make of Bentham’s argument for realism (at least as presented in the EA forum) is how narrow it is. There are plenty of arguments out there Bentham could have made but simply didn’t. In any case, I don’t think any other arguments for moral realism are any good, including the ones you mention.
I don’t think Enoch’s indispensability or wager arguments are persuasive at all. I think Kane B raises some excellent concerns with it in this video, towards the end (though the rest is worth listening to for greater familiarity with the argument). With respect to the form of argument presented in dialog form here, I think the mistake occurs here:
David: Idc. I like it and of course I should do my preferences; if not for my preferences, what else should I do?
I wouldn’t endorse that I “should” act on my preferences. This already involves a notion of normativity that I reject and that I see no good reason to accept. Even if I should, at least as described, whether or not I should would be dependent on my preferences so this wouldn’t get you to realism. Not sure how much this threatens Enoch’s argument as he presents, it, though. He’s concerned with minimizing arbitrariness and several other things you don’t explicitly address. I don’t think any of these other considerations favor realism either, though.
Regarding wagering on moral realism, I’ve addressed this at length here; incidentally, I do so in response to Bentham presenting this argument. I’ve also addressed it more recently here. I don’t think wager style arguments are very good at all, and I think antirealists have pretty straightforward ways to reject them.

LanceSBush 26 Jun 2025 20:56 UTC
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in reply to: McBrian16’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
Nothing prevents someone from saying that. But nothing would prevent someone from saying that even if epistemic realism were true.
Let’s say for a moment epistemic realism was false. What would you do? I’d do exactly what I currently do. It’s already important to care about what’s true, and there will be consequences for you if you ignore what’s true. The same is true for everyone else. Nothing would change. I don’t think the truth of epistemic realism would have practical consequences at all.

LanceSBush 26 Jun 2025 1:38 UTC
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in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
These are good questions and reasonable concerns, and I share the sense that this forum may not be ideal for addressing these questions. So I’d be happy to move the discussion away from here. For now, I’ll say a few things. Regarding accounts of triviality conflating a priority or analyticity with triviality: I don’t think I am conflating anything; I do think they’re trivial in the relevant respects. Take a possible naturalist account: moral facts are facts about what increases or decreases wellbeing. Okay, well I already think there are facts about what increases or decreases wellbeing.
What difference does it make if those are moral facts? I have concerns about what that might even mean, but even if I set those aside, what practical difference would this make? As far as the synthetic accounts, I might just reject them on other grounds aside from triviality, but insofar as they also reduce moral claims to descriptive facts, there still looks to me like a kind of triviality there: no set of descriptive facts, in and of themselves, necessarily have any practical relevance to me. In other words, from a practical and motivational perspective, discovering that something is a “moral fact” simply doesn’t make any difference to me, and it’s not clear to me why it would make any difference to anyone else. Suppose, for instance, that someone like Oliver Scott Curry is correct, and that moral facts are facts about what promotes cooperations within groups. Okay. Now what? What do I do with this information?
Maths is not trivial in any sense of “trivial” on which “trivial” means “not worth bothering with”.
I’m not sure the comparison would be apt, given that I think of math as a kind of useful social construction. Math is extremely useful, but it’s useful in a way contingent on our goals and purposes. If we devised moral systems specifically to serve some purpose or goal in the way we did math, I might very well consider them nontrivial...but I’d also be an antirealist about them.
Maybe you can get out of this by saying maths isn’t analytic and it’s only being analytic that trivializes things, but I don’t think it is particulary obvious that there is a sense making concept of analyticity that doesn’t apply to maths
I’m an empiricist and a pragmatist and I think the mathematical systems we develop and use earn their keep through their application to our ends. I don’t think the same is true of naturalist accounts of moral realism. It’d be hard to do many things without math. Conversely, if there were no stance-independent moral facts of the sort naturalists believe in, I struggle to see what difference it would make in principle.
Also, do you think semantic claims in general are trivial?
I’m not sure quite what you have in mind, so I’m not sure.
Finally, do you think the naturalists whose claims you consider “trivial” mostly agree with you that their views have the features that you think make for triviality but disagree that having those features means their views are of no interest.
It depends on which objection I’m raising. That the moral facts are descriptive and lack some of the features non-naturalists claim moral facts have? Yea, probably. That they’re just engaged in a pointless activity of figuring out how English speakers use moral language? Probably not. Since we’re operating on different accounts of truth and probably have other differences in our views, there’s likely to be more fundamental differences, too. I’m not really sure. I should probably just talk to more naturalists and maybe read more contemporary work. FWIW, some of the more traditional antirealists I’ve spoken to don’t share my objections and don’t think they’re on the right track.
Or do you think most of them just haven’t thought about it/don’t have a good-faith substantive response?
I doubt that. Most naturalists have thought about their positions much more than I have, and would probably have a number of corrections to make of my characterization of their views.

LanceSBush 25 Jun 2025 23:15 UTC
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in reply to: Richard Y Chappell🔸’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
I am tempted to write an even lengthier explanation for why I think it matters, but I’ll try to keep it shorter. The sense in which I am talking about what most people think is with respect to what they mean by what they say when they make moral claims. And I take what people mean by what they say to be relevant to the assessment of the meaning of ordinary moral language. So, if, for instance, most people speak, think, or act like moral antirealists, or at least not like realists, this would be relevant to the respective plausibility of realism and antirealism in various ways.
At least one way this would be relevant is that it would undercut claims from moral realists that moral realism is a “common sense” view. Many moral realists appeal to the presumptively realist features of moral discourse. If they are mistaken about this, then this undercuts at least some appeals to a presumption in favor of moral realism. Others claim that people generally experience morality in ways more in line with realism. If this isn’t true, this would undercut such claims as well.
Generally speaking, then, realists often appeal to a presumption in favor of realism predicated on the allegedly realist-features of ordinary moral discourse, realist features of ordinary moral experience, and so on. This is sometimes leveraged to shift the burden of proof onto antirealists. Antirealists are described as having “radically skeptical” views, for instance.
If it turns out that realist inclinations and realist construals of moral claims are idiosyncratic, not representative of ordinary thought and language, and largely parochial features of the way academic philosophers are inclined to speak and think, this would undercut these sorts of appeals.
I don’t think moral realism relies on presumptive arguments, but they fairly common. A couple quick comments related to this:
First, I think the most plausible interpretation of Bentham’s remarks about how things seem, what’s counterintuitive, and especially the claim that views contrary to his are “crazy” hints at least a bit in the direction that Bentham doesn’t merely mean to report how things seem to him, or that he’s simply reporting his own proprietary use of moral language. The notion that those who disagree are “crazy” carries connotations that anyone who doesn’t react the way he does is making an error of some kind. But if he is just reporting how things seem, I do wonder why he so often opts to describe contrary views or intuitions as “crazy.”
Second, realists may dispute whether what people “think” is relevant to what those people mean, or relevant to the armchair analysis of the meaning of moral sentences. In that case, I’d likely disagree with whatever account of language and/or whatever methodological approach they’re taking to addressing these questions, in which case any positions they take that are downstream of this disagreement rely on contested views about language, meaning, and methods. In that case, what people think is indirectly relevant insofar as its relevant to my views, at least, and if they don’t agree that what people think is relevant then we disagree on a more fundamental matter.
There’s a lot more I could say, e.g., about the descriptive metaethics project of the 20th century and the seemingly close historical connection between ordinary moral language and judgment and the typical construal of metaethical positions, but I’ll leave it there for now. I’d be happy to discuss the matter more with you any time!
> Arguments are invitations; if the premises don’t speak to you, you’re free to decline the invitation. But that no more makes it a “bad argument” than does failing to appeal to you (or even a majority of people) mean that a party is a “bad party”.
My reasons for thinking Bentham’s arguments are bad are not exclusively based on the fact that appeals to how things seem may or may not reflect how they seem to me or to people in general. I present a variety of other objections in the post I referenced, and it is this set of objections taken together that are the basis for my claim that Bentham’s arguments are not good.
As far as them not being sophisticated: I stand by that. Bentham does not present well-developed arguments as far as cases for moral realism go. His arguments aren’t very clear or well-organized, he doesn’t unpack what he means by much of what he says, he doesn’t bring up many of the standard or some of the more obscure arguments one might bring up in favor of moral realism (so we don’t get much of a cumulative case that appeals to multiple independent arguments), and he doesn’t do much to anticipate or respond to the kinds of objections one might receive from antirealists. In short, his arguments are narrow and underdeveloped. I say this as someone who regularly reads his blog and has seen him present far more compelling arguments on other topics (even though I frequently disagree with him). So I know Bentham is more than capable of making a stronger case than he has here.

LanceSBush 25 Jun 2025 20:21 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: ThomasEliot’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
Presumably he has an answer to that; I still don’t think he’s stipulating things as you suggest, but I am sympathetic to the concern you raise, which to me appears to be the systematic and longstanding variation in normative moral intuitions.
Another, related problem is variation in metaethical positions/”seemings.” Bentham makes all sorts of remarks about how things seem to him that only make sense if you’re a moral realist, but things don’t seem that way to me. If they seem any way at all, its the exact opposite.

LanceSBush 25 Jun 2025 20:09 UTC
4 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: ThomasEliot’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
I don’t think Bentham is stipulating that. I think he’s treating intuitions as providing epistemic access to the moral facts. For comparison, it’d be a bit like arguing that trees exist because you can see them, and so can most other people. This wouldn’t be the same as saying that, as a matter of stipulation, for a tree to “exist” means that “it appears to exist to you personally.”
I’ll note: someone suggested elsewhere in this thread that some of the terms and ways I frame my objections to Bentham suggest I wouldn’t be fair to him. I’ll note that here I am defending Bentham against what I take to be an inaccurate characterization.