I thought this post was great and really enjoyed it! My only major objection (besides wanting to stick up for virtue ethics as a powerful first-order theory, but I should just write a post about it myself sometime instead of derailing here) is that I don't think the contrast you make between the process of observation and experimentation in the empirical sciences and the process of reflexive equilibrium in ethics is actually a meaningful or important one. I think they're actually the same kind of general process, and that reflective moral reasoning should be seen as a form of abstract science in and of itself. I wrote a post about this a while ago if you're interested: https://bothsidesbrigade.substack.com/p/moral-realism-turns-ethics-into-a But otherwise, I look forward to seeing more posts!
Thanks for the feedback! And yeah, I did consider that I might've been too harsh on ol' virtue ethics--I do think it has value even if I find it frustrating as a first-order theory. Imo I see ethics as a lot closer to math than science, but I think it does share some overlap with each. Will check out your blog when I get a chance!
Great post! Fwiw, I do think there are a couple kinds of moral facts that can be studied empirically: 1. You can study which moral intuitions are biological and which are learned, what the allele frequency is for the biological ones, and what the historical roots are for the learned ones. This might help guide thinking about which intuitions to distrust. 2. You can study game theory, which (IMO) is pretty evidently where most of these intuitions (both biological and learned) come from.
Thank you! And yeah the game theory aspect is one I definitely want to mine further—though I tend to think of that as more of a theoretical analysis akin to math rather than an empirical one?
As for the biological / psychological aspects, this is an area where I’m frankly just not as knowledgeable as I’d like to be. I agree in principle, but I have a lot of reading to do…
Game theory can be thought of as category theory for social interactions. So it's theoretical in the sense that you have to construct valid/useful categories, but very empirical in the sense that instances of each type can be observed in the wild and in the historical record, and if you construct a valid/useful category (or set thereof) then you can also run large-N computer simulations. (Everything is computer, even morality maybe.)
I look forward to what you have to say about agent relativism! I'm unfamiliar with it and it's the least intuitive member of your lists, for me.
I also look forward to the grand objective of this blog! Good luck with it.
There is one member of the list that I disagree with, which is that utilitarianism always ends up weird at its extremes. I push back on one aspect of this here:
Interesting post. I liked that you covered a wide range of issues and presented your views on those matters. I don’t have much to add but I want to say something about moral relativism and virtue ethics.
You said that moral relativism is obviously false because according to has some implausible consequences such as the claim that human sacrifice by the Aztecs was morally acceptable because it was accepted in their culture.
But since it is clearly not true that human sacrifice in Aztecs was morally acceptable, therefore moral relativism is false. I think your argument works, it appears sound to me.
However I think that it only targets a certain kind of moral relativistic position. Only a moral relativism of a certain kind is committed to the thesis that if some culture C accepts some practice P, then it is morally acceptable that C engages in practice P.
But moral relativism in general doesn’t entail this thesis. We need to distinguish between two kinds of relativistic views:
1)agent relativism and
2)appraiser relativism.
According to agent relativism, whether an action is right or wrong is relative to the standards of the agent performing the action or the standards of the agent’s culture.
Whereas according to appraiser relativism, whether a moral claim is true or false is relative to the standards of the agent evaluating or making the moral claim.
I think your objection only works against a certain kind of agent relativistic view that is cultural relativism. Other relativistic views are immune to your objection for two reasons:
1)One can endorse moral relativism while rejecting culture relativism. So they can reasonably respond that it is not morally acceptable for Aztecs to engage in human sacrifice because whether something is morally acceptable doesn’t depend on a culture.
2)Or else, one can endorse appraiser cultural relativism and respond to your objection that it is not acceptable for Aztecs to engage in human sacrifice because it is not acceptable in my culture and whether an action is right or wrong depends on my culture not on some other culture.
On your statement about virtue ethics, I think I get what your objection is. Your worry is that virtue ethics doesn’t tell us what we should do when we face a moral dilemma.
For example it is unclear what virtue ethics prescribes for the trolley problem. It is not a useful guide for us to settle on what decisions we ought to make. I am sympathetic to your worry.
However, your worry reminds me of something else which is what is the purpose of normative ethics? Is the purpose of normative ethics practical or is it theoretical or both?
On the practical understanding, what normative ethics is about is that it is supposed to tell us what to do in our life, what kind of decisions we ought to make.
Whereas on the theoretical understanding of normative ethics, normative ethics is about providing us with the ground of moral properties. There is a set of actions which we will judge as wrong. And what normative ethics is supposed to tell us what common property these all actions share in common.
For example maybe what makes all wrong actions wrong is that they minimises well being. More formally, for all x, if x is an action, then x is wrong if and only if x is F. Here F could be minimisation of well being, non universalizability, etc. Normative ethics help us figure out F.
And this brings us back to virtue ethics, I think while virtue ethics might not be good ethical theory on the practical aspect, it is still possible that it is the correct metaphysical ground of moral properties under the theoretical understanding.
For example the claim an action is right if and only if it results from a virtuous disposition might be true even if practically it is not very useful.
To understand this more clearly, let us consider a thought experiment. Suppose you live in a world where a fruit or vegetable is good for your health can be determined by the fact about whether it floats in water or not.
If a fruit or vegetable floats in water it is healthy if it doesn’t it isn’t. Now this fact is very helpful for you to determine which fruits and vegetables you should eat.
If you come across a fruit P, then you can determine whether it is healthy by testing whether it floats in water.
Now, there is another explanation for why a fruit is healthy that it is contains certain basic nutrients required for your body. We have two principles here:
1)A fruit is healthy if and only if it floats in water.
2)A fruit is healthy if and only if it is constituted by certain basic nutrients required for your body.
While 1 maybe practically more useful for you than 2, we can see that 2 actually provides a deeper metaphysical explanation as to what makes a fruit healthy.
It is actually 2 which actually cites the facts which grounds the healthiness of a fruit. 2 is theoretically superior to 1.
I think there is possibility that virtue ethics is more like 2 than 1. While it is not practically superior, it might still provides the metaphysically accurate ground of moral properties, morality might be grounded in certain psychological dispositions. That’s all what I have to say. I wonder what you think about all of these.
On a sidenote, regarding the trolley case, my intuitive judgment is that it will be wrong to switch the lever to kill one to save five. Maybe my intuitive judgment is mistaken but this is what my initial reaction is, towards the trolley case.
Also I wanted to ask a further question, it is related to metaethics. What do you think of the following metaethical thesis:
Everything we describe using normative language can be described using non normative language without inventing any new language. For example if tomorrow all our normative vocabulary were to be removed from our language in such a way that we cannot use it again, there is nothing we will fail to describe.
Great point on moral relativism! I actually think I can answer both that point and the virtue ethics point at once: I take the fundamental question of ethics to be about what we ought to do. The theoretical questions are only relevant insofar as they are in service of the practical one.
For relativism, this means that what I think about the Aztecs doesn’t really matter to the fundamental question. The question is “what should they have done, given that they are in a society that accepts human sacrifice?” I cannot reasonably say that what they ought to have done is act according to my views, a person 1,000 years in the future—there is no way for my cultural views to impinge upon their actions. Even if they did know that other cultures did not share their views, there is no mechanism to articulate which other culture’s views they should have adopted (without appealing to some non-culturally relative standard).
Flo Bacus’s Against Intuitionism essay kinda gets at this point/objection from another angle.
As for your final question…uhhhh…idk. My gut says no? I think if we dropped the word ought, we would have trouble describing normative ethics. Though I suppose I do think that, with sufficient effort, you could describe the thing that we mean by ought. Like we could describe acts whose maxims can be universally warranted etc etc. So maybe? But I think we’d have trouble even talking about those things because I think normative language is inherently just some kind of ordinal ranking of world-states or actions according to a criteria. So we could describe the criteria, and we could then articulate the ranking, but the second you call the thing at the top of the ranking the “best” action, “most preferred” action, or that which we have “most reason” to do, it seems now you’re using normative language? But if you only want to know how to describe the thing and we don’t care that we can’t give it a label, then maybe.
"If an activity doesn’t affect you in any real way, then your preference about it is not a legitimate moral concern."
To me, this is the most interesting sentence because I've never been able to think about moral categories - and normative categories more generally - separately from preferences, at least not in a rigorous manner.
A maximally good state of affairs is one in which every individual's maximal preference (i.e., the state of affairs about the entire world that he ranks ordinally or cardinally above all others) is satisfied. Now, there are a lot of interesting problems with aggregating heterogeneous preferences - see the Condorcet paradox/Arrow's theorem. So, for our purposes, let's just assume that everyone has the same preferences, and that a state is maximally good or utilitous iff every individual prefers the state over all alternative states.
For example, let's consider a universe in which everyone has two sets of options to choose from to construct their preferences: {all cats, all dogs} and {no killing, some killing}. Taking the cartesian product of the two sets gives us our total set of alternatives, and our preference is simply how we rank them. And let's say everyone prefers over all alternative states a state of affairs in which (i) everyone has a cat instead of a dog and (ii) no individual intentionally kills another individual. And let's say that this state of affairs obtains.
(i) is usually treated as an arbitrary preference, whereas (ii) is seen as a moral or ethical imperative. The problem should be obvious: even though they're both seen as different kinds of judgments, they're both still normative and have to do with what people observably *do*. At least with respect to the maximally good state of affairs, 'preferences' and 'ethical imperatives' seem to work the same way.
With respect to individual behavior in the real world, the best I can come up with is that the difference between preferences and ethics/morals is justificatory standards. Preferences are self-justifying; e.g., I like cats because I like them. Ethical/moral directives seem to require an external reason; e.g., murder is bad because some EvoPsych just-so story, because god said so, because human rights, etc.
But even then, these justifications don't always seem to have the same effect on moral/ethical judgments. For example, it's not obvious that the proposition 'if you murdered someone, then you committed an immoral act' is *necessarily* true, i.e. true for all cases. It's pretty easy to think of contexts in which someone intentionally killing another person is not seen as morally wrong, but rather as morally correct or justified by a non-negligible portion of the population. Even if most people were to say it's immoral, they would not behave as though it is and might not actually believe that it's immoral. In this sense, morals/ethics seem to be more like heuristics for good behavior than 'real' universal laws.
Furthermore, the closer we get to acts that are seen as categorically morally wrong regardless of the intention or context (e.g., torturing a baby, or something similarly vile), the less people try to justify them on the grounds of external reasons. Instead, such acts are maximally vile or ugly because they just are. What does that sound like? Sounds like a preference to me, except it's universal and much stronger than ordinary preferences.
Anyways, sorry for the wall-of-text comment, but this post caught me in a mood to work this out a bit more!
If we lived in a simulation where all our intended acts were inverted and resulted in bad consequences, then according to consequentialism, we would all be bad. According to intentionalism, this wouldn't matter. That's a ridiculous hypothetical, you say. Ok, well, in the real world, we all misperceive things and make mistakes which lead to harm. Harm being caused does not make an act immoral. Animals, for example, can cause harm, but animals are not moral agents capable of immorality. Morality only exists where intentionality is possible. Any consequentialist arguments around this?
Re: 1) I kind of gesture towards this issue of defining intuitions towards the end of section III before I jump into the actual list, but yes, I am using the word rather loosely to mean any strongly-held beliefs about ethics, whether they come in the form of some sort of brute intuition (e.g., torture "strikes me" as wrong), a more considered judgment based on ethics classes, or even political beliefs that overlap strongly with ethical issues.
I take it you mostly find the first kind to be especially alien? The Humean reductionist account--which you might be more sympathetic to--would ascribe many of them to a pure emotional response. For instance, my gf was watching the documentary on the OceanGate disaster, and the actions of the CEO did strike me as horrific--they induced a feeling of horror. Same goes for serial killers, con-men, and the like. I think my gut reaction to those things is something along the lines of "That's horrible. I can't believe a person would do that. It's wrong and unethical, and nobody should ever do something like that."
I imagine that someone like you would find the first half of that reasonable ("That's horrible"), but you'd object to the last sentence ("It's wrong and unethical...") as being more of a rationalization (?) rather than a true intuition? To me, I don't see the latter as all that different from my "intuition" about how water should settle in a container or how fast an object will fall (the source of these intuitions might be different, but the sensation is similar). And when I consider toy cases like the Trolley problem, I think I have a similar "intuition" that tells me "yeah, X is wrong" or "Y is right".
Where I am willing to differ a bit from some philosophers (particularly the consequentialists) is that I do take the blameworthiness of an action to be one of the primary drivers of that intuition. So if I try and trace the origin of an intuition that "X is wrong", often it seems to stem, at least in part, from instinctive notions of "I would feel guilty if I did that" or "I would blame someone or think less of someone who did that". But I'm not super up-to-date on the nuances of moral psychology and whether this is the case for others (I've read some of Haidt's stuff over a decade ago, but haven't kept tabs in a while).
Re: 2) As for intuitions about moral realism: while I fully admit that this list is just *my own* intuitions, and I am certainly a more hardcore moral realist than most, I do think that people generally believe that they mean something concrete and objective when they say "murder is wrong". For starters, truly religious people definitely believe in moral realism. And even non-religious people seem to believe and argue that racism is wrong, that infanticide is wrong, that genocide and rape are wrong, etc.
I don't think they think these things are advocated as purely matters of taste or vibes--and in my experience, most people don't talk about these subjects the way they talk about movies or music. Namely, if people truly believed that nothing is objectively morally wrong, then I don't think people would talk about punishment the same way (i.e., what punishment someone "deserves"). Idk though, it's certainly worth more reflection, and I do think that moral nihilism is quite popular among W.E.I.R.D. upper-middle class highly-educated types, but it tends to come with it a lot of cognitive dissonance that I would (boldly) claim is due to the received nihilism being in massive tension with an underlying moral realism that they can't quite give up.
>>Thinking things is wrong is consistent with antirealism. What we'd need to show is evidence that most people think these things are stance-independently wrong. And I don't think there's good evidence that people think this.
Hmmm, okay, I see what you mean. Good push. I think then I'd point to what I see as "most" people's base rejection of moral relativism--I don't think most people are willing to say something like "slavery was acceptable in the South because the people there thought it was okay". I'll admit that this does not perfectly answer your question though, since they can still use *their stance on the matter* to make the judgment even if the Southerners wouldn't have shared it. Tbh, I'm not sure how to precisely make the case one way or another because the distinction does get quite technical. I do think one method of approach would be via questions like "is it okay for a person to impose some moral beliefs on others?" that kind of naturally dig at a tension where people think that *some* of *their own* beliefs (e.g., no slavery) can be imposed on others, but not vice versa. The phrasing there would need to be delicate though given the baggage...
>>I think there's more overlap than you might expect (I just wrote a blog post arguing exactly this a few days ago), but I do think there is lots of nonoverlap; I just don't think it's best attributed to people being moral realists but antirealists about taste....[not going to quote the whole block here for the sake of brevity]
Interesting! I'll have to give that blog post a read. Per my comment above, I take the universal scope for some moral preferences to be prima facie evidence (though perhaps not conclusive) of some sort of moral realism belief--it seems a lot easier to account for a universal-scope preference as a belief about some stance-independent truth that you think people should *recognize* rather than a simple preference which also includes an additional meta-preference that everyone should *share* said preference. For example, if somebody does seriously think that everyone should share their taste in music, I find that they tend to talk about it in objective terms: e.g., "all EDM is garbage and objectively trash. how could anybody like this?"
I do agree that there definitely are some other moral preferences that are explicitly not like this--i.e., moral issues where people talk about them more like personal codes--which I think does make for an interesting question both empirically and theoretically to see if there are any common threads between the types of moral issues that behave this way vs. the ones that seem to be treated more like objective facts. Is it a confidence thing? A scope of harm thing? Is it some conflict between higher ideals like individual liberty and privacy vs. particular harms?
By the way, not sure if this has come up in your research, but my guess is that if you asked people to pick which phrasing best aligns with their position on murder, more people would choose "I believe that murder is wrong" over "I prefer that people do not murder". I take the former to be a more "morality as objective fact" framing owing to the use of "is", while the latter is more a "universal preference" framing.
>>I am a moral antirealist, and I am totally fine with imposing my moral standards on others, e.g., I am fine with imposing my opposition to genocide or slavery onto anyone, anywhere, and I don’t care at all whether they personally are okay with either.
Are you fine with others imposing their moral standards on you?
____
As for the rest of what you said, I feel like we need to distinguish between:
1. Do laypeople talk about moral claims as if they are claims about some external, rigid facts? Or do they talk about them as if they are stance-dependent/personal preferences?
2. Do laypeople have a coherent or strongly-held view of what moral realism entails metaphysically?
3. Given #1 and #2, is there any meaningful sense in which laypeople have an intuition towards realism or anti-realism?
4. If the answer to #1 is that laypeople do seem to talk like moral realists, does that count as good evidence for moral realism being true?
5. If the answer to #2 is that they do not have a coherent view, is that good evidence that moral realism is false?
And ofc 6. Is moral realism true?
For 1), I do take the evidence to largely suggest that laypeople talk like moral realists. I agree that laypeople don’t use “objectivity” in the precise ways philosophers do, but I think the use of words like that surely has to point more towards moral realism as their rough underlying mental model than against it.
To clarify, when I said that “it seems a lot easier to account for a universal-scope preference…” I more meant that, at a linguistic level, the way that laypeople talk about (some) moral issues is very natural and expected if we imagine that those statements are attempting to be claims about external facts. For example: lots of ‘is’ statements, use of words like “objective”, attempts to justify claims to others, the accusation that those who disagree are defective rather than merely of a different persuasion, strong resistance to notions of “agree to disagree” and/or democratic dispute resolution, an insistence on imposing their norms on others even when the actions of those people don’t affect them. All of these are the sorts of behaviors you would expect to see if people thought moral facts have some stance-independent truth that they correctly recognize and which they believe others have failed to recognize. I would expect those same behaviors to be less common in a world where people thought morality was just a matter of preference. Sure, they might be universal scope preferences, and that helps make the likelihood gap less drastic, but I still take there to be a gap. And I think adding in universal scope + a meta-preference (which you are right to distinguish) does get a little clunky as a way of explaining the rhetorical behavior.
Note, this is not meant to be a claim about what is the more metaphysically simpler claim, just the linguistically simpler claim. The key distinction being that someone can talk about morality as if it’s a set of stance-independent facts, and they can even have a rough mental model of morality as a set of stance-independent facts, without them necessarily positing a specific metaphysical position on how they know said facts, how said facts could be motivating, etc. Those are definitely challenges that a philosopher needs to address, but we don’t have to suppose that laypeople have answers to those questions as a condition for them believing in moral realism or behaving/talking about morality as if moral realism were true.
And so for 2), I agree that most people don’t actually have any coherent moral metaphysics about what those external facts would “be” (with the exception of religious people—I’m still not sure how you can argue that people who think God’s word is the moral law don’t believe in moral realism. Is this a “God’s stance is still a stance” argument? If so, I’d still count that as moral realism tbh.)
For 3), because I don’t take 2) as a necessary condition for people having moral realist intuitions, I would tend to take 1) as the stronger evidence in favor here. I will grant that your “folk metaethical indeterminacy” account is plausible, though I do think even if it were broadly true, there would still be SOME nonphilosophers who would express some basic metaethical positions, even if those positions are not precise enough to delineate between stance-independence vs cultural-relativity. But perhaps more importantly, I don’t think that the question of whether laypeople have moral realist intuitions tells us much about the truth of moral realism vs antirealism.
Which brings us to 4) and 5), and here I think I agree with you that the answer to both of these is no.
For 6), this is ofc the tough one. And it’s only here that the metaphysical nature of moral facts would have to be sorted out. But yeah, that’s a much longer discussion.
Upon further reflection and perusing through your blog, I’ve realized I’m probably just rehashing arguments you’ve had elsewhere, so will probably just read up on some of your essays and maybe write up a more detailed essay of my own at some point. I will say that, overall, I am surprised by how strongly you commit to the idea that everyday moral language/discourse does *not* seem to imply a moral realist model. To me, the MUCH weaker link in moral realism is that the way we talk about something doesn’t actually constitute strong evidence that said thing exists and/or conforms to our language. But will need to read in more detail.
Also, as a heads up, I accidentally created two substack blogs and you were subscribed to the other one (which I have now deleted). So if you did want to follow me on here, subscribe to the other one! Would love to continue these (esp after I get more background on your views).
I thought this post was great and really enjoyed it! My only major objection (besides wanting to stick up for virtue ethics as a powerful first-order theory, but I should just write a post about it myself sometime instead of derailing here) is that I don't think the contrast you make between the process of observation and experimentation in the empirical sciences and the process of reflexive equilibrium in ethics is actually a meaningful or important one. I think they're actually the same kind of general process, and that reflective moral reasoning should be seen as a form of abstract science in and of itself. I wrote a post about this a while ago if you're interested: https://bothsidesbrigade.substack.com/p/moral-realism-turns-ethics-into-a But otherwise, I look forward to seeing more posts!
Thanks for the feedback! And yeah, I did consider that I might've been too harsh on ol' virtue ethics--I do think it has value even if I find it frustrating as a first-order theory. Imo I see ethics as a lot closer to math than science, but I think it does share some overlap with each. Will check out your blog when I get a chance!
Great post! Fwiw, I do think there are a couple kinds of moral facts that can be studied empirically: 1. You can study which moral intuitions are biological and which are learned, what the allele frequency is for the biological ones, and what the historical roots are for the learned ones. This might help guide thinking about which intuitions to distrust. 2. You can study game theory, which (IMO) is pretty evidently where most of these intuitions (both biological and learned) come from.
Thank you! And yeah the game theory aspect is one I definitely want to mine further—though I tend to think of that as more of a theoretical analysis akin to math rather than an empirical one?
As for the biological / psychological aspects, this is an area where I’m frankly just not as knowledgeable as I’d like to be. I agree in principle, but I have a lot of reading to do…
Game theory can be thought of as category theory for social interactions. So it's theoretical in the sense that you have to construct valid/useful categories, but very empirical in the sense that instances of each type can be observed in the wild and in the historical record, and if you construct a valid/useful category (or set thereof) then you can also run large-N computer simulations. (Everything is computer, even morality maybe.)
I look forward to what you have to say about agent relativism! I'm unfamiliar with it and it's the least intuitive member of your lists, for me.
I also look forward to the grand objective of this blog! Good luck with it.
There is one member of the list that I disagree with, which is that utilitarianism always ends up weird at its extremes. I push back on one aspect of this here:
https://ramblingafter.substack.com/p/the-repugnant-conclusion-is-easy
Anyhow, cheers~
Interesting post. I liked that you covered a wide range of issues and presented your views on those matters. I don’t have much to add but I want to say something about moral relativism and virtue ethics.
You said that moral relativism is obviously false because according to has some implausible consequences such as the claim that human sacrifice by the Aztecs was morally acceptable because it was accepted in their culture.
But since it is clearly not true that human sacrifice in Aztecs was morally acceptable, therefore moral relativism is false. I think your argument works, it appears sound to me.
However I think that it only targets a certain kind of moral relativistic position. Only a moral relativism of a certain kind is committed to the thesis that if some culture C accepts some practice P, then it is morally acceptable that C engages in practice P.
But moral relativism in general doesn’t entail this thesis. We need to distinguish between two kinds of relativistic views:
1)agent relativism and
2)appraiser relativism.
According to agent relativism, whether an action is right or wrong is relative to the standards of the agent performing the action or the standards of the agent’s culture.
Whereas according to appraiser relativism, whether a moral claim is true or false is relative to the standards of the agent evaluating or making the moral claim.
I think your objection only works against a certain kind of agent relativistic view that is cultural relativism. Other relativistic views are immune to your objection for two reasons:
1)One can endorse moral relativism while rejecting culture relativism. So they can reasonably respond that it is not morally acceptable for Aztecs to engage in human sacrifice because whether something is morally acceptable doesn’t depend on a culture.
2)Or else, one can endorse appraiser cultural relativism and respond to your objection that it is not acceptable for Aztecs to engage in human sacrifice because it is not acceptable in my culture and whether an action is right or wrong depends on my culture not on some other culture.
On your statement about virtue ethics, I think I get what your objection is. Your worry is that virtue ethics doesn’t tell us what we should do when we face a moral dilemma.
For example it is unclear what virtue ethics prescribes for the trolley problem. It is not a useful guide for us to settle on what decisions we ought to make. I am sympathetic to your worry.
However, your worry reminds me of something else which is what is the purpose of normative ethics? Is the purpose of normative ethics practical or is it theoretical or both?
On the practical understanding, what normative ethics is about is that it is supposed to tell us what to do in our life, what kind of decisions we ought to make.
Whereas on the theoretical understanding of normative ethics, normative ethics is about providing us with the ground of moral properties. There is a set of actions which we will judge as wrong. And what normative ethics is supposed to tell us what common property these all actions share in common.
For example maybe what makes all wrong actions wrong is that they minimises well being. More formally, for all x, if x is an action, then x is wrong if and only if x is F. Here F could be minimisation of well being, non universalizability, etc. Normative ethics help us figure out F.
And this brings us back to virtue ethics, I think while virtue ethics might not be good ethical theory on the practical aspect, it is still possible that it is the correct metaphysical ground of moral properties under the theoretical understanding.
For example the claim an action is right if and only if it results from a virtuous disposition might be true even if practically it is not very useful.
To understand this more clearly, let us consider a thought experiment. Suppose you live in a world where a fruit or vegetable is good for your health can be determined by the fact about whether it floats in water or not.
If a fruit or vegetable floats in water it is healthy if it doesn’t it isn’t. Now this fact is very helpful for you to determine which fruits and vegetables you should eat.
If you come across a fruit P, then you can determine whether it is healthy by testing whether it floats in water.
Now, there is another explanation for why a fruit is healthy that it is contains certain basic nutrients required for your body. We have two principles here:
1)A fruit is healthy if and only if it floats in water.
2)A fruit is healthy if and only if it is constituted by certain basic nutrients required for your body.
While 1 maybe practically more useful for you than 2, we can see that 2 actually provides a deeper metaphysical explanation as to what makes a fruit healthy.
It is actually 2 which actually cites the facts which grounds the healthiness of a fruit. 2 is theoretically superior to 1.
I think there is possibility that virtue ethics is more like 2 than 1. While it is not practically superior, it might still provides the metaphysically accurate ground of moral properties, morality might be grounded in certain psychological dispositions. That’s all what I have to say. I wonder what you think about all of these.
On a sidenote, regarding the trolley case, my intuitive judgment is that it will be wrong to switch the lever to kill one to save five. Maybe my intuitive judgment is mistaken but this is what my initial reaction is, towards the trolley case.
Also I wanted to ask a further question, it is related to metaethics. What do you think of the following metaethical thesis:
Everything we describe using normative language can be described using non normative language without inventing any new language. For example if tomorrow all our normative vocabulary were to be removed from our language in such a way that we cannot use it again, there is nothing we will fail to describe.
Great point on moral relativism! I actually think I can answer both that point and the virtue ethics point at once: I take the fundamental question of ethics to be about what we ought to do. The theoretical questions are only relevant insofar as they are in service of the practical one.
For relativism, this means that what I think about the Aztecs doesn’t really matter to the fundamental question. The question is “what should they have done, given that they are in a society that accepts human sacrifice?” I cannot reasonably say that what they ought to have done is act according to my views, a person 1,000 years in the future—there is no way for my cultural views to impinge upon their actions. Even if they did know that other cultures did not share their views, there is no mechanism to articulate which other culture’s views they should have adopted (without appealing to some non-culturally relative standard).
Flo Bacus’s Against Intuitionism essay kinda gets at this point/objection from another angle.
As for your final question…uhhhh…idk. My gut says no? I think if we dropped the word ought, we would have trouble describing normative ethics. Though I suppose I do think that, with sufficient effort, you could describe the thing that we mean by ought. Like we could describe acts whose maxims can be universally warranted etc etc. So maybe? But I think we’d have trouble even talking about those things because I think normative language is inherently just some kind of ordinal ranking of world-states or actions according to a criteria. So we could describe the criteria, and we could then articulate the ranking, but the second you call the thing at the top of the ranking the “best” action, “most preferred” action, or that which we have “most reason” to do, it seems now you’re using normative language? But if you only want to know how to describe the thing and we don’t care that we can’t give it a label, then maybe.
Great essay!
A few thoughts:
"If an activity doesn’t affect you in any real way, then your preference about it is not a legitimate moral concern."
To me, this is the most interesting sentence because I've never been able to think about moral categories - and normative categories more generally - separately from preferences, at least not in a rigorous manner.
A maximally good state of affairs is one in which every individual's maximal preference (i.e., the state of affairs about the entire world that he ranks ordinally or cardinally above all others) is satisfied. Now, there are a lot of interesting problems with aggregating heterogeneous preferences - see the Condorcet paradox/Arrow's theorem. So, for our purposes, let's just assume that everyone has the same preferences, and that a state is maximally good or utilitous iff every individual prefers the state over all alternative states.
For example, let's consider a universe in which everyone has two sets of options to choose from to construct their preferences: {all cats, all dogs} and {no killing, some killing}. Taking the cartesian product of the two sets gives us our total set of alternatives, and our preference is simply how we rank them. And let's say everyone prefers over all alternative states a state of affairs in which (i) everyone has a cat instead of a dog and (ii) no individual intentionally kills another individual. And let's say that this state of affairs obtains.
(i) is usually treated as an arbitrary preference, whereas (ii) is seen as a moral or ethical imperative. The problem should be obvious: even though they're both seen as different kinds of judgments, they're both still normative and have to do with what people observably *do*. At least with respect to the maximally good state of affairs, 'preferences' and 'ethical imperatives' seem to work the same way.
With respect to individual behavior in the real world, the best I can come up with is that the difference between preferences and ethics/morals is justificatory standards. Preferences are self-justifying; e.g., I like cats because I like them. Ethical/moral directives seem to require an external reason; e.g., murder is bad because some EvoPsych just-so story, because god said so, because human rights, etc.
But even then, these justifications don't always seem to have the same effect on moral/ethical judgments. For example, it's not obvious that the proposition 'if you murdered someone, then you committed an immoral act' is *necessarily* true, i.e. true for all cases. It's pretty easy to think of contexts in which someone intentionally killing another person is not seen as morally wrong, but rather as morally correct or justified by a non-negligible portion of the population. Even if most people were to say it's immoral, they would not behave as though it is and might not actually believe that it's immoral. In this sense, morals/ethics seem to be more like heuristics for good behavior than 'real' universal laws.
Furthermore, the closer we get to acts that are seen as categorically morally wrong regardless of the intention or context (e.g., torturing a baby, or something similarly vile), the less people try to justify them on the grounds of external reasons. Instead, such acts are maximally vile or ugly because they just are. What does that sound like? Sounds like a preference to me, except it's universal and much stronger than ordinary preferences.
Anyways, sorry for the wall-of-text comment, but this post caught me in a mood to work this out a bit more!
If we lived in a simulation where all our intended acts were inverted and resulted in bad consequences, then according to consequentialism, we would all be bad. According to intentionalism, this wouldn't matter. That's a ridiculous hypothetical, you say. Ok, well, in the real world, we all misperceive things and make mistakes which lead to harm. Harm being caused does not make an act immoral. Animals, for example, can cause harm, but animals are not moral agents capable of immorality. Morality only exists where intentionality is possible. Any consequentialist arguments around this?
Before reading; there are ethical universals to the extent we share priorities:
https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/the-mandate-of-libertarian-fascist
Thank you, Lance!
Re: 1) I kind of gesture towards this issue of defining intuitions towards the end of section III before I jump into the actual list, but yes, I am using the word rather loosely to mean any strongly-held beliefs about ethics, whether they come in the form of some sort of brute intuition (e.g., torture "strikes me" as wrong), a more considered judgment based on ethics classes, or even political beliefs that overlap strongly with ethical issues.
I take it you mostly find the first kind to be especially alien? The Humean reductionist account--which you might be more sympathetic to--would ascribe many of them to a pure emotional response. For instance, my gf was watching the documentary on the OceanGate disaster, and the actions of the CEO did strike me as horrific--they induced a feeling of horror. Same goes for serial killers, con-men, and the like. I think my gut reaction to those things is something along the lines of "That's horrible. I can't believe a person would do that. It's wrong and unethical, and nobody should ever do something like that."
I imagine that someone like you would find the first half of that reasonable ("That's horrible"), but you'd object to the last sentence ("It's wrong and unethical...") as being more of a rationalization (?) rather than a true intuition? To me, I don't see the latter as all that different from my "intuition" about how water should settle in a container or how fast an object will fall (the source of these intuitions might be different, but the sensation is similar). And when I consider toy cases like the Trolley problem, I think I have a similar "intuition" that tells me "yeah, X is wrong" or "Y is right".
Where I am willing to differ a bit from some philosophers (particularly the consequentialists) is that I do take the blameworthiness of an action to be one of the primary drivers of that intuition. So if I try and trace the origin of an intuition that "X is wrong", often it seems to stem, at least in part, from instinctive notions of "I would feel guilty if I did that" or "I would blame someone or think less of someone who did that". But I'm not super up-to-date on the nuances of moral psychology and whether this is the case for others (I've read some of Haidt's stuff over a decade ago, but haven't kept tabs in a while).
Re: 2) As for intuitions about moral realism: while I fully admit that this list is just *my own* intuitions, and I am certainly a more hardcore moral realist than most, I do think that people generally believe that they mean something concrete and objective when they say "murder is wrong". For starters, truly religious people definitely believe in moral realism. And even non-religious people seem to believe and argue that racism is wrong, that infanticide is wrong, that genocide and rape are wrong, etc.
I don't think they think these things are advocated as purely matters of taste or vibes--and in my experience, most people don't talk about these subjects the way they talk about movies or music. Namely, if people truly believed that nothing is objectively morally wrong, then I don't think people would talk about punishment the same way (i.e., what punishment someone "deserves"). Idk though, it's certainly worth more reflection, and I do think that moral nihilism is quite popular among W.E.I.R.D. upper-middle class highly-educated types, but it tends to come with it a lot of cognitive dissonance that I would (boldly) claim is due to the received nihilism being in massive tension with an underlying moral realism that they can't quite give up.
>>Thinking things is wrong is consistent with antirealism. What we'd need to show is evidence that most people think these things are stance-independently wrong. And I don't think there's good evidence that people think this.
Hmmm, okay, I see what you mean. Good push. I think then I'd point to what I see as "most" people's base rejection of moral relativism--I don't think most people are willing to say something like "slavery was acceptable in the South because the people there thought it was okay". I'll admit that this does not perfectly answer your question though, since they can still use *their stance on the matter* to make the judgment even if the Southerners wouldn't have shared it. Tbh, I'm not sure how to precisely make the case one way or another because the distinction does get quite technical. I do think one method of approach would be via questions like "is it okay for a person to impose some moral beliefs on others?" that kind of naturally dig at a tension where people think that *some* of *their own* beliefs (e.g., no slavery) can be imposed on others, but not vice versa. The phrasing there would need to be delicate though given the baggage...
>>I think there's more overlap than you might expect (I just wrote a blog post arguing exactly this a few days ago), but I do think there is lots of nonoverlap; I just don't think it's best attributed to people being moral realists but antirealists about taste....[not going to quote the whole block here for the sake of brevity]
Interesting! I'll have to give that blog post a read. Per my comment above, I take the universal scope for some moral preferences to be prima facie evidence (though perhaps not conclusive) of some sort of moral realism belief--it seems a lot easier to account for a universal-scope preference as a belief about some stance-independent truth that you think people should *recognize* rather than a simple preference which also includes an additional meta-preference that everyone should *share* said preference. For example, if somebody does seriously think that everyone should share their taste in music, I find that they tend to talk about it in objective terms: e.g., "all EDM is garbage and objectively trash. how could anybody like this?"
I do agree that there definitely are some other moral preferences that are explicitly not like this--i.e., moral issues where people talk about them more like personal codes--which I think does make for an interesting question both empirically and theoretically to see if there are any common threads between the types of moral issues that behave this way vs. the ones that seem to be treated more like objective facts. Is it a confidence thing? A scope of harm thing? Is it some conflict between higher ideals like individual liberty and privacy vs. particular harms?
By the way, not sure if this has come up in your research, but my guess is that if you asked people to pick which phrasing best aligns with their position on murder, more people would choose "I believe that murder is wrong" over "I prefer that people do not murder". I take the former to be a more "morality as objective fact" framing owing to the use of "is", while the latter is more a "universal preference" framing.
>>I am a moral antirealist, and I am totally fine with imposing my moral standards on others, e.g., I am fine with imposing my opposition to genocide or slavery onto anyone, anywhere, and I don’t care at all whether they personally are okay with either.
Are you fine with others imposing their moral standards on you?
____
As for the rest of what you said, I feel like we need to distinguish between:
1. Do laypeople talk about moral claims as if they are claims about some external, rigid facts? Or do they talk about them as if they are stance-dependent/personal preferences?
2. Do laypeople have a coherent or strongly-held view of what moral realism entails metaphysically?
3. Given #1 and #2, is there any meaningful sense in which laypeople have an intuition towards realism or anti-realism?
4. If the answer to #1 is that laypeople do seem to talk like moral realists, does that count as good evidence for moral realism being true?
5. If the answer to #2 is that they do not have a coherent view, is that good evidence that moral realism is false?
And ofc 6. Is moral realism true?
For 1), I do take the evidence to largely suggest that laypeople talk like moral realists. I agree that laypeople don’t use “objectivity” in the precise ways philosophers do, but I think the use of words like that surely has to point more towards moral realism as their rough underlying mental model than against it.
To clarify, when I said that “it seems a lot easier to account for a universal-scope preference…” I more meant that, at a linguistic level, the way that laypeople talk about (some) moral issues is very natural and expected if we imagine that those statements are attempting to be claims about external facts. For example: lots of ‘is’ statements, use of words like “objective”, attempts to justify claims to others, the accusation that those who disagree are defective rather than merely of a different persuasion, strong resistance to notions of “agree to disagree” and/or democratic dispute resolution, an insistence on imposing their norms on others even when the actions of those people don’t affect them. All of these are the sorts of behaviors you would expect to see if people thought moral facts have some stance-independent truth that they correctly recognize and which they believe others have failed to recognize. I would expect those same behaviors to be less common in a world where people thought morality was just a matter of preference. Sure, they might be universal scope preferences, and that helps make the likelihood gap less drastic, but I still take there to be a gap. And I think adding in universal scope + a meta-preference (which you are right to distinguish) does get a little clunky as a way of explaining the rhetorical behavior.
Note, this is not meant to be a claim about what is the more metaphysically simpler claim, just the linguistically simpler claim. The key distinction being that someone can talk about morality as if it’s a set of stance-independent facts, and they can even have a rough mental model of morality as a set of stance-independent facts, without them necessarily positing a specific metaphysical position on how they know said facts, how said facts could be motivating, etc. Those are definitely challenges that a philosopher needs to address, but we don’t have to suppose that laypeople have answers to those questions as a condition for them believing in moral realism or behaving/talking about morality as if moral realism were true.
And so for 2), I agree that most people don’t actually have any coherent moral metaphysics about what those external facts would “be” (with the exception of religious people—I’m still not sure how you can argue that people who think God’s word is the moral law don’t believe in moral realism. Is this a “God’s stance is still a stance” argument? If so, I’d still count that as moral realism tbh.)
For 3), because I don’t take 2) as a necessary condition for people having moral realist intuitions, I would tend to take 1) as the stronger evidence in favor here. I will grant that your “folk metaethical indeterminacy” account is plausible, though I do think even if it were broadly true, there would still be SOME nonphilosophers who would express some basic metaethical positions, even if those positions are not precise enough to delineate between stance-independence vs cultural-relativity. But perhaps more importantly, I don’t think that the question of whether laypeople have moral realist intuitions tells us much about the truth of moral realism vs antirealism.
Which brings us to 4) and 5), and here I think I agree with you that the answer to both of these is no.
For 6), this is ofc the tough one. And it’s only here that the metaphysical nature of moral facts would have to be sorted out. But yeah, that’s a much longer discussion.
Upon further reflection and perusing through your blog, I’ve realized I’m probably just rehashing arguments you’ve had elsewhere, so will probably just read up on some of your essays and maybe write up a more detailed essay of my own at some point. I will say that, overall, I am surprised by how strongly you commit to the idea that everyday moral language/discourse does *not* seem to imply a moral realist model. To me, the MUCH weaker link in moral realism is that the way we talk about something doesn’t actually constitute strong evidence that said thing exists and/or conforms to our language. But will need to read in more detail.
Also, as a heads up, I accidentally created two substack blogs and you were subscribed to the other one (which I have now deleted). So if you did want to follow me on here, subscribe to the other one! Would love to continue these (esp after I get more background on your views).