Btw, the podcast versions of my videos are FINALLY HERE! So far, 57 videos have been uploaded as podcasts; in the coming weeks, the other 43 will be, too!🥳🎊 The podcast is available on major podcast platforms, such as iTunes and: Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/4Nda5uNcGselvKphtKSKvH Google Podcasts: podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy82NGJlZDRiYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw
30:00 - When we say, "the sun rises", this language works for most people, even flat-earthers, even though most of us think the sun isn't actually the thing which moves to cause a sunrise. That's not deceptive, it's pragmatic.
Exactly. It's the same with aesthetics, which I think fully relates to morality. I use "that sunset is beautiful," or "that band sucks." People map things onto the world with language, including their feelings. Not only does it correlate with other externalizing language behaviors, for consistency, it also has the utility of being more persuasive. We expect to see this.
I dont take people to be saying "the sun rises" as a useful heuristic. They use it in the correspondence sense. That is, the sun does indeed rise. We can witness it rise daily. If we argue that its not really the case the dun rises, then were going to have to bite the bullet on a lot of other things that we probably wouldnt. For instance, you may argue that color isn't real. It becomes more akin to a hallucination. You could likewise argue that objects, including ourselves, never really come into contact anything due to atoms repelling one another.
Woooow, I haven't watched the video yet, but I'm surprised to see Michael Huemer in a RUclips video. While writing my MA paper (in French it's called a mémoire, but I don't know it's the same in English), his book about ethical intuitionism was my greatest inspiration. Can't wait to watch that video.
No one: Loeb: I don’t want to have moral inconsistencies in my nihilist stances because I don’t really want to have moral inconsistencies in my nihilist stances.
I recently purchased "Understanding Knowledge" by Huemer. I like what I have been reading so far, which means that it makes sense to me and I am learning something. However, in the discussion presented in this video I am impressed primarily by Don. He really brought new clarity to me about the relationship of meta ethics to ethics. I really thought he was sharp and insightful. Listening to this discussion between two people who have opposing viewpoints was especially nice because both of them were actually thoughtful and intelligent. Both are professional philosophers. Too many popular debates these days are between experts and idiots. For example, a highly regarded person who has studied and published in the field of climate science for the last forty years debates climate science with someone who may have many excellent credentials and accomplishments but none of them has anything to do with the study of climate science.
Great discussion. Always like to hear Don Loeb speak. I've heard him in discussion with Peter Railton before and I think he's one of the best anti-realists going.
Hi all, this is Lance. It looks like quite a few people were looking forward to what I had to say about this discussion. Let’s get into it. (1) Joe does a fantastic job setting up the flowchart-style way of presenting possible positions in metaethics. I want to raise a word of caution about these approaches. There is a distinction between (a) what people mean when they make moral claims and (b) whether or not there are moral facts of any particular kind. Conventional flowchart approaches focus on the former question, which concerns descriptive facts about how ordinary people use moral claims. However, such facts do not directly address the question of whether there are, in fact, moral facts of any particular kind. This semantic-centric approach to characterizing the metaethical landscape is a legacy of 20th century analytic philosophy. This approach to philosophy focuses on the analysis of “the meaning” of certain terms, concepts, and types of utterances. One problem with this flowchart method is that it presupposes the legitimacy of this approach, and often bakes in presumptions about the relation between language and meaning on the one hand, and questions of metaphysics on the other. That is, the flowchart taxonomy standardly used in metaethics presumes a particular metaphilosophical framework characteristic of mainstream contemporary analytic philosophy. However, there are philosophical positions that fall outside the scope of this framework, and that take a stance on metaethical questions that does not fit within any of these categories. My own position is one example of this. I will illustrate why. Let’s begin with the first question:: Do (some of) our moral judgments express propositions? This may seem nitpicky, but it isn’t: this question is ambiguous. What does it mean to ask if our judgments express propositions? I don’t technically think a judgment itself expresses propositions. Rather, I think that people themselves can express propositions. My slogan is that “words don’t mean things, people mean things.” I see language as a means for people to communicate, and it isn’t the words that mean things, but the people using those words to convey what they (the people themselves) mean. This is likely not a conventional view of language and meaning, since I deny externalist accounts or the notion that meaning “just ain’t in the head.” I don’t think words, sentences, utterances, and so on mean anything outside contexts of usage, and that technically it isn’t the words that mean things, but the people using those words. Why is this important? Why isn’t this just pedantry? Because if my view of language and meaning is correct, then what we’re really asking when we pose such questions is something like “What are people trying to express when they make moral claims?” The moment it becomes clear we are asking questions about the intentions or communicative goals of speakers, this brings into stark relief that what we are dealing with are empirical questions. And empirical questions cannot be adequately addressed using the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy. Addressing these questions calls for engaging in experimental philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, and so on. And if we are facing what amount to empirical questions, then some of the objections Huemer and others raise may be far weaker than they first appear. This is a point I will return to in a moment. The second point I want to raise about these empirical questions is that it could turn out that people’s communicative goals simply don’t include the goal to express propositions or not do so, to refer to stance-independent facts or to not do so, and so on. For comparison, when people say things like “I think it will rain tomorrow,” they are not required to communicate or presuppose any particular account of the nature of causal events at quantum level. As such, people need not intend to endorse the Copenhagen or Many Worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics. In other words, questions like: “Do ordinary people’s causal judgments presuppose the Copenhagen or Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?” The answer is “neither.” Sure, there may be a handful of people who do presuppose one or the other, but such noncentral cases are not what accounts of the central and primary uses of language are about, and no more threaten the indeterminacy of folk quantum mechanics than the fact that some people mistakenly use a particular word indicate that there is no generally shared meaning for that word. We don’t, for instance, deny the words “dog” and “cat” refer to different animals because children will on occasion point at a cat and say “dog.” Such indeterminacy may likewise capture the communicative intent of the central purpose of ordinary moral claims. That is, moral claims may just not be in the business of serving to communicate a particular metaethical account. If so, the flowchart method begins with a false dichotomy that is literally unanswerable. It may be that there is just no fact of the matter about whether people are committed to any particular metaethical account.
"It looks like quite a few people were looking forward to what I had to say about this" Really? Where did you get that idea from? I've never heard of you, and this is quite a pompous and narcissistic opening to a long-winded comment that adds nothing to the discussion.
@@squatch545 Hey Joe, just wanted to let you know that one of the other top comments on this video said “I’m trying to summon Lance Bush” and other people agreed, so that’s where he got that notion. I’m sorry you haven’t heard of Lance before, but other people have! In fact, I’m one of the people who was interested in hearing his perspective. Maybe this is your opportunity to learn about his very unique perspective from experimental philosophy that often gets overlooked, but I can’t and won’t tell you what to do!
@@squatch545 Does the proposition "...quite a few people were looking forward to what I had to say about this" require that you have heard of the person? I am one of the people who was looking forward to hearing Lance's input.
@@cloudoftime Yes it does, especially when Lance only has 83 youtube subscribers and makes a self-aggrandizing comment that seems to imply immense popularity.
57:57 - This is an excellent analogy. Is there an objective fact of the matter about what people perceive? Well, typically, if there is, we should be able to measure it independently of those perceptions. Or, at least, we should be able to check one perception against another. But we don't seem to be able to do that with morality.
Many realists point to moral agreement as a potential measure. However, the fail to note that modern moral intuitions are just that...modern. Things like murder and rape wernt necessarily seen as wrong for ancient peoples. For instance, many ancient pagan cultures would've been finw with murder and rape of people outside the tribe.
No. That's like saying you should be able to measure length regardless of length. Moreover whether there is the fact of a matter doesn't depend on whether it's possible to measure.
@@MrCmon113 unrealism isnt a position. That said, if there are no facts of the matter then disagreements make sense. You could adopt an emotivist position. Different people have different emotional responses to stimuli. This is caused by a host of reason, such as cultural upbringing. Thats an obvious reason for disagreements. Disagreements seem like a hige problem for the realist. If its the case there are moral facts, and we have an innate ability to attend to the facts, then why is there so much disagreement?
8:38 I’m not a student of philosophy of any degree, but it’s not clear to me how Huemer’s stated technical version of “intuition” is particularly distinct from intuition in the ordinary sense. The ordinary sense of intuition seems to have considerable overlap with this technical version, so that in the sense of a dialogue, it appears to map 1:1. What ordinary use of the basis of intuition is excluded from any technical use of the term, and what technical use of the term is unavailable in the colloquial usage? What are the markers by which we segregate the two?
In my mind, it isn't difficult to "grok" what Don Loeb is saying, and I say that with a bit of humility because Michael Huemer seemed to not grasp Loeb's position. I think once a paradigm is assumed, it may be difficult for most people to see things otherwise contrary to that paradigm.
It's disappointing when his argument against nihilism is "that's just absurd." I *feel* that torturing babies is wrong, but there are evplutionary explanations for why I experience that sensation of feeling. What is so absurd about denying that my intuitions are reflecting some sort of platonic, moral fact? Moral realism requires that there is an objective fact of the matter regarding how the world *should* be. Judgements without judges. More literate people than I have argued for realism and my only qualifications are access to RUclips and my Amazon reading list, but surely it's not hard to conceive that there are no moral facts. Huemer himself has wrote that, in the end, he simply can't bring himself to believe that something like the holocaust wasn't inherently wrong. That is the same argument from credulity that most theists, in their more honest moments, use. He is an intelligent man and I've read 2 of his books. I used to agree with him on nearly everything, but he's a good example of philosophy without science. There are many consistent ideas about how the world is that simply do not correspond with the empirical evidence, at least not in an intuitive way, as he would argue for.
1:12:48 without making any moral commitments, I question the concept of "the moral progress we've made in the last two millennia." What confuses me is: how do we know it is progress? Progress towards what? What if we haven't been progressing, but going backwards? how would we know?
I mean, I personally count much of the changes to social norms as "better", but the philosopher on my shoulder is asking, , "what if they aren't better?"
I think that there is some sort central premise that our morality is based on, and a lot of our "progress" is based around this central premise. The simplest, but most complete one I could think of is that everything is permissible as long as it does not directly and knowingly violate the rights and freedom of others without informed consent. Of course, this is still very incomplete. But it is a good start as there is not a single exception to "do not directly and knowingly violate the rights and freedom of others without their consent". From here, we know that acts like slavery and murder is wrong because it violates a person's rights, religious freedom and homosexuality is ok because a person has that freedom, fraud and pedophilia is wrong because informed consent is not present.
Do you think this question is a challenge to a subjectivist view? My position is just that moral progress would be in relation to my own moral values and my evaluation of the empirics based on them.
(2) There is also a question about whether “moral judgments” represent a distinct category that can be subject to categorical analyses of this kind. That is, the presumption here seems to be that we ought to have a position on whether moral judgments, as a category, are truth-apt or not truth-apt. But what exactly is a “moral” judgment? How do we distinguish moral judgments from nonmoral judgments? I think the answers are (a) it’s unclear whether there is any such thing as a distinctively moral judgment and (b) we don’t. I’m not the only person who makes such claims, and, to those who engage with the empirical literature on moral psychology, such claims are far less radical than they might appear at first glance. Here’s a brief summary of a few relevant articles on the matter: (a) Stich (2018) argues that decades of dedicated efforts by philosophers and psychologists to offer a principled distinction between moral and nonmoral norms have failed. Stich’s conclusion: our best explanation for this is that there is no moral domain. Stich suspects that the moral/nonmoral distinction is a kind of pseudocategorical distinction grounded in philosophical and religious traditions. (b) Machery (2018) argues that the concept of morality is a historical invention that arose in some cultures but is not present in others. Growing research supports this claim. (c) Sinnott-Armstrong and Wheatley (2012) review numerous ways that we could provide a principled distinction between moral and nonmoral norms and argue that all of them fail. They suggest that moral judgments are not a natural kind. If they aren’t, then the kinds of categorical and principled distinctions presupposed by the flowchart method may be mistaken, in which case such questions rest on faulty assumptions about the nature of moral judgments. References Machery, E. (2018). Morality: A historical invention. In K. J. Gray & J. Graham (Eds.), Atlas of moral psychology (pp. 259-265). New York, NY: The Guilford Press. Sinnott-Armstrong, W., & Wheatley, T. (2012). The disunity of morality and why it matters to philosophy. The Monist, 95(3), 355-377. Stich, S. (2018). The moral domain. In K. Gray & J. Graham (Eds.), Atlas of moral psychology (pp. 547- 555). New York, NY: Guilford Press. (3) When Joe gets to the third branch, we already encounter the central problem in metaethics: the notion of a stance-independent moral fact. What follows is a polemic. Here, I am simply stating my views on the matter, rather than providing a sustained argument for them. I am offering this view largely as a rough outline of an alternative perspective that is critical of the entire framework in which these conversations typically occur. This notion is, in a word, unintelligible. That is, it is literally meaningless. Proponents of this view are unable to articulate what it would mean for there to be a “stance-independent moral fact,” if such facts are construed as irreducibly normative or providing categorical reasons. Lurking behind this term, philosophers have concocted whole assemblies of technical terms and fancy-sounding jargon that, when you scratch the surface, philosophers are unable to explain or communicate. This has resulted in them insisting such concepts are “primitive” or “unanalyzable” - technical-sounding terms that are code for “we cannot communicate what we mean.” I encourage people not to be duped by this. They cannot communicate what these concepts mean not because they have bottomed out in their explanations, but because what they are presenting as “concepts” are not concepts at all, but pseudoconcepts, mere verbal ghosts masquerading as something meaningful. This retreat into the mysterious realm of the incommunicable is the last refuge of the failed methods of contemporary analytic philosophy, which rely on a residual (if often implicit) commitment to a strange kind of platonism about words and concepts, as though they have essences we can access with our minds. This way of thinking is a residue left over from the pernicious influence of Platonism on analytic philosophy, and it’s been a scourge undermining progress in the field for centuries. In short, I am suggesting that there are deep, pervasive, and fundamental problems with the methods (or the lack thereof, as it were) of analytic philosophy. Contemporary metaethics is framed in terms of the presumption of the legitimacy of these methods, but the past century has seen the rise (and in some cases, rumors of the fall) of traditions and approaches that challenge the dogmas of mainstream analytic philosophy. These challenges have come from pragmatists, such as James and Schiller, from logical positivists, whose views have fallen out of favor for many decades now, and of Ordinary Language Philosophers, who we are likewise told were defeated decades ago, and perhaps the most famous among them, the insights of Wittgenstein. Crude, awkward, and inaccurate formulations of these views have fallen by the wayside, but we should mistake contemporary incarnations of these views, or views inspired by them, for their fallen ancestors. A synthesis of pragmatic, empirical, and critical approaches drawing on the works of Wittgenstein have simmered at the periphery of mainstream analytic philosophy. I encourage everyone to go and have a look at such work. I think you’ll discover something rather terrifying about contemporary analytic philosophy: It’s unclear what its methods are, and how it’s supposed to work, but to the extent that those methods are clear enough for us to discuss them, they’ve been subjected to sustained criticism for decades. What has been mainstream analytic philosophy’s response? The intellectual equivalent of slamming the door in the face of such criticisms, covering its ears, and going “La la la la I can’t hear you.” There has never been any decisive refutation of the problems raised by Wittgenstein, for instance. Philosophers have just thrown a bunch of medals and accolades his way, declared him one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, and quietly tiptoed away from his later works, hoping nobody would notice the bright light he shined on the vacuity and absurdity of their methods. In short, the entire framework in which these discussions are taking place is deeply flawed and should probably be abandoned.
Huemer believes we have defeasible justification for believing that things are how they seem to us. Moral realism seems true to him. Yet when confronted with examples of people who claim that it seems to them that God exists, Huemer suggests that they may be disposed to think this way as a result of their enculturation and experiences. I agree. But we have a goose and gander situation here: if this is a reasonable defeater for theistic seemings, could it also be a reasonable defeater for moral realist seemings? Yes. In "Morality: A historical invention," Machery argues that the very concept of morality is a historical invention. Growing empirical research raises serious challenges about whether humanity possesses a shared, universal capacity for thinking in distinctively moral terms. Moral concepts may themselves be the product of particular cultures, and may thus be a parochial, idiosyncratic way of thinking about things. Here's the abstract: "According to the historicist view of morality presented in this chapter, morality is a learned, culturally specific phenomenon; the distinction between moral judgment and other normative judgments is not a product of evolution, but it is rather a historical invention that reuses a motley of evolved processes and must be relearned by children generation after generation." It may simply be that the vast majority of us are enculturated into moral thinking, and don't interact much with people who haven't been enculturated this way. So it seems less obvious to us that moral concepts are culturally parochial than the concept of God. I think Huemer should seriously consider the possibility that there is a rather significant defeater for realist intuitions: Realist intuitions are not the result of reliable belief-forming processes, but are due to an entrenched disposition to think in certain ways that are a byproduct of distinct cultural, historical, and linguistic circumstances, circumstances that are not universal, do not pick out features of the world apart from cultural institutions and ways of thinking constructed within it, and that should not be expected to reliably emerge independently among different populations.
2 года назад+4
Thanks for taking the time to leave these comments Lance !
Allright, I see your comments every video about Moral Realism and I just have an impression that you really have some strong Anti-Realist intuitions there boy, so lets go. "Huemer believes we have defeasible justification for believing that things are how they seem to us. Moral realism seems true to him. Yet when confronted with examples of people who claim that it seems to them that God exists, Huemer suggests that they may be disposed to think this way as a result of their enculturation and experiences. I agree. But we have a goose and gander situation here: if this is a reasonable defeater for theistic seemings, could it also be a reasonable defeater for moral realist seemings?" - I don't think Huemer takes those points he make to defeat seemings involving the connection with those experiences with the belief that people have about Models of God such as from Classical Theism or Neo-classical Theism, Huemer instead of this take the Religious Experiences to be prima facie Evidence for these kinds of Philosophical Models of Gods, the point about the aspects of Cognitive Bias involving enculturation or stuff like that he makes are to undermine the association/identification with this kinds of Models of the Divine/God as specific deities such as Yahweh, Vishnu, Krishna, Shiva, Allah and so on... Huemer is Agnostic about the existence of a Supreme Being, he is an Secularist Philosopher but not an Atheistic one, I think you knew that. "Yes. In "Morality: A historical invention," Machery argues that the very concept of morality is a historical invention. Growing empirical research raises serious challenges about whether humanity possesses a shared, universal capacity for thinking in distinctively moral terms. Moral concepts may themselves be the product of particular cultures, and may thus be a parochial, idiosyncratic way of thinking about things. Here's the abstract: "According to the historicist view of morality presented in this chapter, morality is a learned, culturally specific phenomenon; the distinction between moral judgment and other normative judgments is not a product of evolution, but it is rather a historical invention that reuses a motley of evolved processes and must be relearned by children generation after generation." It may simply be that the vast majority of us are enculturated into moral thinking, and don't interact much with people who haven't been enculturated this way. So it seems less obvious to us that moral concepts are culturally parochial than the concept of God. I think Huemer should seriously consider the possibility that there is a rather significant defeater for realist intuitions: Realist intuitions are not the result of reliable belief-forming processes, but are due to an entrenched disposition to think in certain ways that are a byproduct of distinct cultural, historical, and linguistic circumstances, circumstances that are not universal, do not pick out features of the world apart from cultural institutions and ways of thinking constructed within it, and that should not be expected to reliably emerge independently among different populations." - I think this point only seems(ironically) plausible when you don't consider some recent studies like the one who was referred by the News in the Oxford Website whose the annoucement title was "Seven moral rules found all around the world" in which were found in a survey of 60 cultures from all around the world, values like "help your family, help your group, return favours, be brave, defer to superiors, divide resources fairly, and respect others’ property", the paper was published in the University of Chicago Press Journals and the name of it is "Is It Good to Cooperate? Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies" - Oliver Scott Curry, Daniel Austin Mullins, and Harvey Whitehouse (2019) conducted by a team from Oxford’s Institute of Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology (part of the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography) who analysed ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies, comprising over 600,000 words from over 600 sources. I think if you take this kind of thing into consideration(taking seriously some Empirical Evidence on the Moral Realist side just like the Empirical Evidence in the Anti-Moral Realist side) you at least should be a little suspect of this kind of strong intuition that Huemer mentioned on the other side as well as this kind of explanation offered above, it seems like the confidence of the Moral Realist and the Moral Anti-Realist on their beliefs should be weakened a little(I think Don Loeb that kind of thing during the Debate and I appreciated it). I'm not saying that this is definitive stuff involving Moral Universalism, but is a thing for the Moral Anti-realist to take it seriously and consider if this kind of Moral Relativistic Cultural-Historical explanations are pretty accurate or if the Cognitive Bias explanation from Moral Realists and the Difficulty in obtaining Moral Knowledge are better ones in cases of explaining some divergences and preferences for the In-Group members in moral considerations for example(In-Group Bias that Huemer mentioned).
@@DavidRibeiro1 Thanks for the response I take empirical evidence from moral psychology very seriously. I’m glad you do, too. I am a little unsure what you take the evidence that you’re appealing to to demonstrate. Could you perhaps elaborate or clarify? Are you pointing to empirical evidence that supports moral realism, and if so, how does it do so? I’ll try to clarify my point regarding Huemer and defeaters: My claim is that the very notion that things are “morally” right or wrong is, I maintain, a product of enculturation. It is not the case that moral norms are some kind of discoverable type of norm that we would expect different populations to reliably discover without interacting with one another, the way we’d expect them to discover facts about chemistry or physics. Rather, it is parochial and distinct to particular cultures, like languages. That is, we wouldn’t expect aliens to have “moral” concepts for the same reason we wouldn’t expect them to play chess or speak the same languages as us. I don’t think Curry’s or anyone else’s work provides compelling evidence to the contrary. Demonstrating that societies have similar normative standards is not the same thing as demonstrating that they draw the same principled distinction between moral and nonmoral norms. The latter kind of evidence is addressed in cross-cultural research on e.g., the moral/conventional distinction, not cross-cultural research on shared normative standards. Regarding theistic seemings, I’d also be happy to reply to that portion of your comment but I was having a bit of trouble understanding whether you were raising objections or just commenting further.
What dies morality being an invention mean? There was a point in time in human history when we weren't moved into action or condemnation as a result of other people's behaviour? Doesn't seem possible.
Huemer makes yet another mistake here at 30:07. He says, “I think it’s at least misleading to say that you thinking something is valuable when what you actually mean is just that you have an attitude towards it” This is absurd. Imagine if I say “cake is tasty.” Does this imply that I must either be a gastronomic realist, or else I am saying something misleading and inappropriate? No. I do not have to be a gastronomic realist. I don’t have to think cake has the property of “tastiness,” and that its “tastiness” exists independently of how it tastes to me or anyone else. The problem with Huemer’s claim is the presumption that if someone says “X is valuable” that they’re necessarily making some kind of realist claim about the thing having the property of “valuableness” independent of the person valuing it. To say something is valuable can just mean that the speaker values it, or that it tends to be valued by people, or that it is valuable relative to some intersubjective or shared standard. If I say, for instance, that my currency is valuable, I can mean something about how it tends to be valued by others, or it functions in a set of institutional facts, without imagining that money has any kind of intrinsic value. There’s nothing misleading about speaking about things having various evaluative properties by saying the things in question are “good” or “valuable” or whatever. This doesn’t require us to presume realism in all of these normative and evaluative domains. For me to say something is valuable just is, in many cases, for me to say I have an attitude towards it, or that others have an attitude towards it. It’s not misleading. Huemer is helping himself to presumptions about what I and others would have to mean by such language that he isn’t entitled to presume.
"Huemer makes yet another mistake here at 30:07. He says, “I think it’s at least misleading to say that you thinking something is valuable when what you actually mean is just that you have an attitude towards it” This is absurd. Imagine if I say “cake is tasty.” Does this imply that I must either be a gastronomic realist, or else I am saying something misleading and inappropriate? No. I do not have to be a gastronomic realist. I don’t have to think cake has the property of “tastiness,” and that its “tastiness” exists independently of how it tastes to me or anyone else." - Like I said before in another comment, this point doesn't seem to undermine Huemers point, because intuitively, moral values are usually taken to be universalized and/or universalizable things in principle(seem like elements that have to be universalized in principle, that is what I mean by that), while that kind of thing can't be said about tasty or other thing like that. But anyway, I agree that Huemer could have been engaged more with the Moral Language points that Loeb brought for the discussion, they were pretty interesting and could've been explored a little more in the conversation. "The problem with Huemer’s claim is the presumption that if someone says “X is valuable” that they’re necessarily making some kind of realist claim about the thing having the property of “valuableness” independent of the person valuing it. To say something is valuable can just mean that the speaker values it, or that it tends to be valued by people, or that it is valuable relative to some intersubjective or shared standard. If I say, for instance, that my currency is valuable, I can mean something about how it tends to be valued by others, or it functions in a set of institutional facts, without imagining that money has any kind of intrinsic value." - Huemer says this based in some of the seemings about this subject matter involving normative moral questions and his Abductive Reasoning taking for example some insights about the notion of "Moral Progress" that is shared by most people intuitively and some of the Data obtained from the book of Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of our Nature" and other sorts of.
@@DavidRibeiro1 Even if moral values were typically universalized, and taste claims weren’t, I’m not sure what that has to do with my objection. Could you explain? I also didn’t understand your latter remark (where you mention abductive reasoning and moral progress). I’m also curious what you mean by this: //for example some insights about the notion of "Moral Progress" that is shared by most people intuitively// What is it that’s shared by most people intuitively?
Thank you for posting this debate. I understand that the topic is meta-ethical, but I think it would be worthwhile to invite the "interlocuters" to start from applied ethical debates like abortion, or even "child torture" to help reveal their contrasting positions. As with much philosophical debate, I feel a paucity of examples, and even a reluctance to engage at that level, that would really in the long run help elucidate the theory.
Thank you for arranging this : ), I love these sort of discussions, but the more i hear them, the more depressed i become about the possibility of making progress on these metaethical disagreements, how do you feel bout these discussions after having arranged a couple, and do they affect your credence on your own view considering how insoluble it seems to be amongst others ?
That’s a very understandable response - philosophy is extremely difficult, especially when professionals disagree and mount not-implausible considerations in favor of their respective views. For me, I don’t find them disheartening or significantly influencing my views, since I typically have responses I find plausible to the points raised against my view(s). Though, this isn’t *always* the case - the metaethical discussions do often influence my views in small ways (Eg, I come to find a consideration less plausible due to a response from an interlocutor, etc.)
@@MajestyofReason I would be very interested then; to hear from you developing a case for moral realism and letting us learn from the plausible responses you have to the strongest objections against moral realism. I strongly lean towards realism myself, but the debates always seem to end up in an insoluble clash of intuitions, where it appears that no progress can be made unless one person just happens to have their intuitions change arbitrarily.
These disagreements are still progress, especially if people learn and develop new ideas from it. Don't expect notable progress in your lifetime. It can take centuries for people to have a consistent set of beliefs on complex topics.
Even as an antirealist and noncognitivist I value consistency because it is apparently useful in accomplishing things in reality and communicating with others for similar goals. Consistency is easy to explain on subjective values. Huemer, like various other moral realists I have listened to (such as Eric Sampson and Richard Brown), starts out with prima facie "justification," appeal to emotion, and "common sense" arguments for his position. I find it interesting that people are convinced by these weak supports. It makes sense for the layperson, because those things superficially satisfy common human biases, but the fact that PhDs in the field are convinced by this is puzzling. We're talking about the issue itself, not relying upon rhetorical weight to convince a population of laypeople. The claim that there are many situations that arise in the English language that make sense when stated as propositions, does not entail those things are truth apt. You can make all kinds of statements about fantasy and nonsense that have a more recognizable form when phrased as a proposition, but that says nothing about the truth aptness of the components. This is akin to the Frege-Geach "Problem," which just seems to me to be a loaded framing with cognitivist presumptions. A noncognitivist would just phrase things differently ("I prefer when people don't steal"). Humans can map abstract concepts onto the world that aren't actually there, yes; we grant imagination. Huemer then merely asserted that it would still be wrong to torture babies even if everyone thought the opposite. That's a fine assertion, and it will pull on the heart strings of the vast majority of people (as it's an evolutionarily advantageous trait for humans), but we're still waiting for the substantiation of that assertion. What would make it stance independently "wrong"? How can something even be stance independently "wrong"? What does that mean and where does it exist? Then again, for his response to nihilism, he merely says, "uh, well that is obviously wrong." What does that mean? I don't understand how any philosopher can feel satisfied with making the argument (if you can call it that) "it's just obviously wrong," when the entire discussion is on the question of what wrongness is. He then says you can't explain good without other evaluative terms, such as "desirable," but notice the forced framing of that choice of word: desirable. That's still putting the value within the object or action itself rather than within the valuer. The object or action contains whatever properties it does, and the perceiver observes whatever properties of that object or action that the perceiver is able to observe, and, of those, the perceiver _feels_ value _for_ the object or action. This doesn't make the object or action itself generally "desirable," it means the perceiver desires those properties within the thing that the perceiver desires. The valuing occurs within the perceiver. So, yes, we still use evaluative terms, but those terms describe a different location for the existence of the experience of valuing, which is what it is (an experience). The follow-up to people having dissonant intuitions is that this shows the lack of reliability in intuitions as evidence, _especially_ in light of more complete and elegant explanations. If you want to say "my intuition is all I have for X, so I'm going with it because I have to act and am out of time," then that's what you have to do. That's a pragmatic necessity for action. That is not a reasonable approach to the ongoing metaethical discussion about alleged moral propositions. He tried to support this with saying that "everyone agrees you shouldn't take a new born baby and torture it to death." This claim is demonstrably untrue. He exaggerates here to support the point, but the support is a falsehood. The greater point here is that even _if_ everyone actually agreed on something, that wouldn't make it stance independently true. Also, this can all be sufficiently explained with aligning subjective preferences; no magical moral substance necessary. The simple explanation is that people apparently and constantly attempt to map language onto reality, and when things are framed as being an external and foundational part of reality, as opposed to subjective, they seem to persuade people more readily, usually. People see things in the world, so they comment on those properties they see with consistency as they do internally projected feelings assigned to the external properties. When someone says, "Nickleback sucks," is it true that Nickleback sucks stance independently? When someone says, "that sunset is beautiful," is the sunset stance independently beautiful? How is morality distinct from aesthetics here? It is evident that people tend to apply descriptions to things they observe, and describing feelings about those things in the same way not only makes it consistent, but is more persuasive. No one can explain sufficiently what "wrongness" is but alignment of subjective values, utility of persuasiveness, and action modulation can explain all of it.
It is almost scary how you so eloquently summarized all of my thoughts on this matter. I would just add that it might be unreasonable to expect consistency of feelings (and I believe this is the crux of the Frege-Geach Problem). However, this can easily be solved under non-cognitivism by pointing out that moral claims express, by definition, feelings of the _highest hierarchical level_ (for the one claiming them, that is) - hence all feelings which are inconsistent with it are automatically disregarded (otherwise contradicting the truth-apt claim that they are of the highest hierarchical level, by definition). Here, by "X has higher hierarchical level than Y" I mean that "X is inconsistent with Y and one acts in accordance with X in the presence of both X and Y" (and yes, this is a time-dependent statement). My reasoning behind this is the fact that, unlike other personal tastes (like chocolate preference), we expect people to _surely_ act on accordance with moral claims (not "maybe"). In this case, it would follow, in particular, that moral claims are consistent with one another (otherwise contradicting again the "highest hierarchical level" property, as an action in accordance with one would imply that the other is of a "lesser" level), so that applying logic to them would be perfectly coherent. This might be a naive approach, but it is what makes the most sense to me right now.
Imo every odd amounts of meta before ethics makes the discussion bogus. Ethics makes sense, meta ethics doesn't make sense, but meta meta ethics is sensible again.
(4) Beginning around 3:15 we start with Huemer’s claim that there are three main kinds of antirealism. I’m glad Huemer says “main,” but in his book, Ethical Intuitionism, he actually claims these are the only possible forms of antirealism. Notably, he later says at around 4:05 that none of these views are satisfying, and that therefore you should be a realist. So Huemer does seem to indicate that your options are: Moral realism Subjectivism, noncognitivism, or error theory Huemer is just wrong about this. It’s not true that if you reject (b), you must accept (a). This is a false dichotomy. You can reject all of them. In fact, I do reject all of them. Here’s a simple way to reject all three: What if you think the following: (i) It’s not the case that ordinary moral claims are subjective/relative (ii) It’s not the case that ordinary moral claims are nonpropositional (iii) it’s not the case that ordinary moral claims report stance-independent facts (iv) there are no stance-independent moral facts This view doesn’t fit any of Huemer’s categories. And yet there is nothing impossible about holding this view. There are at least three alternative accounts of folk or descriptive metaethics, which deals with questions about the meaning of moral claims: metaethical pluralism, metaethical incoherentism (Loeb’s position), and metaethical indeterminacy. In addition, there is at least one form of antirealism Huemer doesn’t mention: the unintelligibility thesis. According to the unintelligibility thesis, it isn’t that accounts of non-naturalist moral realism, such as the form of realism Huemer endorses, are false, but that they are meaningless. On this view, certain accounts of “stance-independent moral facts” are simply unintelligible. As a result, they do not reflect propositions, and cannot be evaluated as true or false. This view does not fit with any of the three standard categories. Huemer’s criticisms of the three common forms of antirealism are all inadequate. They’re the kind of quick pass objections you’d get in a short intro book for undergraduates, but do not reflect the scope of the dialectic actually available in the literature. Contemporary forms of expressivism are often integrated with more sophisticated and defensible accounts that avoid some of Huemer’s objections, for instance. Huemer’s criticisms would, at best, refute extremely crude versions of noncognitivism that are over a century old. It’s far more difficult to refute contemporary forms of expressivism. Let’s go through Huemer’s critiques of each: (a) Noncognitivism Note that Huemer describes noncognitivism as the few that moral statements “typically” or “generally” are neither true nor false. What does Huemer mean by typically or generally? Does he mean it’s the view that ordinary people typically or generally use moral claims to express nonpropositional attitudes (imperatives, emotions)? There’s a lack of specificity in the claim that makes it hard to evaluate, but I want to draw attention to this, because I believe the only reasonable way to make sense of noncognitivism is that it involves an empirical hypothesis about what people are doing when they make moral claims. Huemer’s objection is that you can use moral claims in ways that appear to be propositional. Of course he’s right. But how does this show that moral sentences aren’t typically or generally used to express emotions or attitudes? What if we conducted empirical research and found that, in real-world contexts in which people say things like “murder is wrong,” that 95% of the time they aren’t saying anything true or false? Merely because there are conceivable contexts in which you could use moral claims to express propositions doesn’t mean that their central or primary function is to do so, nor does it mean they are typically or generally employed to do so. Such usages could serve largely rhetorical purposes in everyday contexts, and may be largely abandoned under conditions of appropriate reflection. In any case, what Huemer is doing is considering toy sentences, or artificial or imaginary instances of moral language, pointing out that moral claims seem to be propositional in these imaginary cases, and then extrapolating to actual moral language. This is not an appropriate method for determining what people generally or typically are doing when they make moral claims. Such claims are empirical claims, and you need empirical evidence to assess them. Toy sentences aren’t actual moral sentences. An actual moral sentence is a sentence someone is actually using in an actual moral context. Asking us to imagine a sentence like “murder is wrong” doesn’t allow us to know what know what people are doing in real-world contexts when they actually make such claims. These claims are empirical, and cannot be resolved by Huemer’s armchair methods What Huemer is doing is the methodological equivalent of studying tigers by drawing pictures of tigers, then reaching conclusions about how many stripes real tigers have by studying the picture. It simply isn’t an appropriate method for addressing the question. In short, the mere fact that we can use moral language to make propositional claims in artificial contexts devised by philosophers doesn’t demonstrate that moral claims are typically or generally used to do so in everyday contexts. For what it’s worth, ordinary people frequently choose noncognitivism when it’s offered as a response option in questions surveying how nonphilosophers actually think about metaethics. For instance, Davis (2021) actually found that noncognitivism was the most common response out of any of the response options. References Davis, T. (2021). Beyond objectivism: New methods for studying metaethical intuitions. Philosophical Psychology, 34(1), 125-153.
(b) Huemer’s argument against subjectivism is weak. Huemer simply says it doesn’t seems like some moral claims are true in a non-subjective way. First, Huemer does the same thing I keep criticizing philosophers for: saying things “seem” some way or that they are “intuitive,” without being specific about who they seem this way to, or who they’re intuitive to. It may seem to Huemer that some things are true in a stance-independent way, but it’s not at all clear that this seems to be the case to everyone else. And why should we privilege how things seem to Huemer over how they seem to others? Huemer’s example is: “If everyone approved of torturing babies it would still be wrong to torture babies” Two things. First, this doesn’t seem true to me. So whose intuitions are correct here? Huemer’s or mine? Second, I don’t think what Huemer is claiming here is meaningful. As such, I’m not sure the notion of something being “wrong” in the way Huemer thinks thinks can be wrong even amounts to an intelligible propositional claim. As such, I don’t think there’s any proposition that could seem true in the first place, to Huemer or to anyone else. (c) We get a similarly weak almost non-argument against nihilism. Once again, Huemer’s objection is simply that it’s not correct because it doesn’t seem correct…to him. He says, “it’s extraordinary implausible.” Citation needed. What’s the argument for this? Nihilism strikes me as the most plausible of any of the accounts Huemer describes. What’s the argument for why it’s implausible? Huemer then employs a common rhetorical tactic when objecting to nihilism. He says: “you think about somebody like taking a baby and just like you know beating the crap out of the baby and then killing it and you're like um you know the nihilist says yeah there's nothing wrong with that okay well that's obviously false” This is a terrible argument. It’s a terrible argument because it relies on a kind of bait and switch, or pragmatic implication, to prompt the intuition that the nihilist has said something “false.” Imagine the nihilist says this: “I think beating and killing babies is a disgusting and horrible act. I deeply oppose it, and find it completely repugnant. I would want anyone who did this to be locked up for life. However, I cannot agree with moral realists that there are “stance-independent moral facts” such that we a “categorical reason” not to harm babies independent of our goals, standards, or values, because I think realists have confused and mistaken notions about “reasons” that are either conceptually confused or rely on implausible metaphysics. Nevertheless, I am equally outraged and disgusted by baby harm.” This is what a “nihilist” is likely to think about killing babies. But the way Huemer frames the matter, he makes it seem like the nihilist is indifferent to beating and killing babies. Huemer is engaged in normative entanglement. Normative entanglement occurs whenever metaethical claims are embedded inside normative claims. When this occurs, to reject the metaethical thesis pragmatically implies that one rejects the normative thesis, and may also imply that one lacks the appropriate reactive attitudes and prosocial emotions we expect and want others to have. Imagine this question: Realist: “Do you think it’s objectively wrong to beat and kill babies?” The problem with this question is that it’s asking two claims simultaneously, almost like a loaded question: Is it wrong to beat and kill babies (normative claim)? Is it objectively wrong to do so? (metaethical claim) If someone answers “Yes,” then they easily communicate that they agre with both (1) and (2). But what if they say “No”? The problem with saying “no” is there is no way to respond to one part of the question without implying a response to the other part. If you say “No,” are you saying no because you don’t think there are objective moral facts (a metaethical position), no because you don’t think it’s wrong to beat and kill babies (a normative claim), or both? There’s no way to respond to the metaethical portion of the question without implying that you don’t think it’s wrong to beat and kill babies. When Huemer poses questions like this, Huemer is leaving to the audience to feel the intuitive pull of how obvious it is that it is bad to beat and kill babies. But this is a normative claim, NOT a metaethical claim. A nihilist can think that it is bad to beat and kill babies. In fact, they can be more morally opposed, more disgusted, and more outraged by such actions than Huemer or any moral realist. And yet the way Huemer, and other moral realists frame these questions, whether they realize it or not they are taking advantage of the fact that the question they’re asking is very similar to a loaded question that gives the impression that if you deny the metaethical claim that you’re some kind of evil monster that doesn’t care of we kill babies. Once you realize this, you can see this maneuver for what it is: a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand that has gone unchallenged and unnamed. I am challenging, and I have named it. This is normative entanglement, and it is not an appropriate way to prompt metaethical intuitions. It is not legitimate to graft metaethical claims onto normative claims, and rhetorically piggyback on our attitudes towards the normative claim, in order to give the misleading impression that the metaethical claim gets to come along for the ride free. Alright, so that wraps up Huemer’s objections to noncognitivism, subjectivism, and error theory/nihilism. I don’t think Huemer has raised any good objections to any of these positions. Note that I do not even endorse these positions, and I think there are a variety of objections you could raise against them. But here, at least, Huemer doesn’t raise them. Huemer’s objections are not strong, and antirealists representing all three of these positions can and in some cases have offered rather substantive responses to these sorts of concerns. Huemer’s objections are at best superficial, and at worst, barely amount to a meaningful form of objection, since they rest almost entirely on straightforward appeals to realist intuitions.
@@lanceindependent I agree with most of your responses to Huemer's objections. Some things you said before that bugged me, though: As a non-philosopher I might be failing to see the nuance of the terms, but doesn't (i) contradict (iii) on your first comment? And is it not the case that the unintelligibility thesis entails non-cognitivism? I mean, you said it yourself that unintelligible claims cannot be true or false, and isn't that conclusion about moral claims precisely what non-cognitivism is, by definition?
@@EvilMatheusBandicoot (1) Do (i) and (iii) contradict each other? No, there’s no contradiction between (i) and (iii). There are two reasons. First, one could think the answer is “both” or that it’s indeterminate, and second, because the claims in question may presuppose a particular conception of a “moral claim” that we may reject. Regarding the first, onemight think that since stance-dependence and stance-independence are mutually exhaustive, that it’s going to be one or the other. But this is only true if whatever it is that you asked about was categorically either one or the other. But the answer to some questions may be “in some cases it’s one, and in some cases it’s the other.” For instance, if someone asked whether “fruit are bananas,” the answer isn’t “yes” or “no,” but “some are and some aren’t.” In other cases, someone’s belief about a given issue may be indeterminate because they don’t have a belief about it. For instance, we could ask whether someone thinks God’s favorite color is blue, or some color other than blue. But if that person doesn’t believe in God, then there’s no way to answer that question. Both of these sorts of options are available to us with respect to traditional metaethical distinctions. You could think some moral claims are subjective/relative and some aren’t. And you could think some report stance-independent facts. And, critically, you could think some report neither. Regarding the second, another problem with the traditional accounts is what, exactly, they are referring to by “moral claims.” Are they making an empirical claim about the meaning of ordinary moral claims? If so, what kind of claim? My view of language is that words and sentences don’t have any meaning at all; rather, they are tools used to convey the communicative intent of the person using them. (2) Does unintelligibility entail noncognitivism No, unintelligibility does not entail noncognitivism. Noncognitivism holds the following: (1) Moral claims are not propositions The unintelligibility thesis holds that: (2) Certain conceptions of moral realism are unintelligible. However, the unintelligibility thesis does include a claim about what ordinary people mean when they make moral claims. As such, it’s possible that various accounts of moral realism are unintelligible, but that these accounts aren’t a feature of ordinary moral thought and discourse. If we wanted to call this a kind of noncognitivism, it would be strained, since it isn't a claim about the meaning of ordinary moral claims, and that's typically a key component of noncognitivism. If we still wanted to call it a form of noncognitivism, we could; that would be a terminological choice, and there'd be no fact of the matter about it. One could say that anyone committed to unintelligible forms of moral realism is, technically, subject to a type of noncognitivism: their moral claims wouldn’t be propositional. However, if that were the case, we’d end up with a somewhat unusual position that would be hard to fit into the standard categories. It would be closer to something like Loeb’s incoherentism. What we’d have are cases where a subset of speakers would be using moral language in a way that was unintelligible, and thus nonpropositional. This would be similar in some ways to an error theory, but one that (a) didn’t attribute systematic error in terms of asserting false propositions to people, but instead saying things that aren’t meaningful and (b) didn’t apply to everyone or to ordinary moral claims. Strictly speaking, the unintelligibility thesis also does not entail that moral realism is false, though. There are different accounts of moral realism, and some of them aren’t unintelligible.
Argument for the Ontological Independence of Morality 1. Objective moral values and duties can be conceived coherently without positing a deity. 2. If it is logically possible for objective moral values and duties to exist independently of a deity, then objective morality doesn't depend on a deity. 3. Objective moral values and duties can be inherent/intrinsic to a person's nature 4. Therefore, objective morality does not depend upon the existence of a deity. Argument from Logical =/= Metaphysical Possibility 1. if it is logically possible that there is atleast one instance of suffering, then it is metaphysically possible for God to create a world with the greatest good 2. Logical Possibility does not entail Metaphysical Possibility 3. Therefore, p1 is not true Defense of p2. 1. The proposition of "a man can fly unassisted" is logically coherent (i.e., it is not self-contradictory), but it is metaphysically impossible in the actual world. 2. Philosophical Zombies can be considered logically coherent but metaphysically impossible 3. Possible Worlds can be considered logically coherent but metaphysically impossible Furthermore, a moral anti-realist rejects the existence of objective moral truths, while the Pyrrhonian moral skeptic doubts the possibility of ever reaching a certain moral knowledge due to the problem of moral disagreement and subjectivity. Argument for Functionalism 1: Mental states are identical to physical events. 2: Any entity that is identical to another is indistinguishable from it 3. Therefore, mental states are physical events. For a mental state to be coherent, it must involve a sequence of events or changes over time. For instance, the mental state of thinking requires the successive generation and processing of thoughts, which unfolds over time. Similarly, emotions arise in response to specific stimuli or events, and they also require time for their development and expression. Thus, the coherence of mental states inherently involves temporal unfolding, supporting the idea that mental states are not static entities but dynamic processes. Even if these events were defined as mental events, that would not entail they were distinct substances but merely manifestations of physicalism i.e. ways in which physical objects can be/change metaphysically. Under functionalism, the mind is a set of functions. Argument for Nominalism 1. Abstract, mind-independent entities exist. 2: If Abstract entities exist, then we can prove they exist via non-empirical means. 3. If Functionalism is true, then abstract entities are physical events 4. For Platonism to be coherent, it must show that abstract objects are distinct from physical events 5. It cannot be shown that abstract objects are distinct from physical events Conclusion: Therefore, Platonism is incoherent. Argument From Physicalism 1. Functionalism posits that mental states are defined by their functional roles or causal relationships rather than by their underlying physical properties. 2: Nominalism denies the existence of abstract entities and universals, asserting that only particular individual objects exist. 3: Mental states are instantiated in and realized by physical systems, such as the brain. 4: Physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that everything that exists is either physical in nature or can be explained by physical phenomena. Conclusion: Therefore, mental states are physical states, and physicalism is true. Argument For Necessitarianism P1. Things can be other than they are. P2. If things can be other than they are metaphysically, then it is possible for them to have different properties or exist differently in some possible worlds. P3. We cannot prove that things can be other than they are metaphysically. P4. If something is necessarily true, then it cannot be other than it is in any possible world. C1. It is possible that things cannot be other than they are metaphysically. C2. Necessarily, things cannot be other than they are metaphysically
Argument Against Contingent Substances P1: Ontologically independent substances are those that exist and have their properties independently of other entities. P2: Contingent entities are those whose existence or properties depend on something external to themselves. P3: If a substance is contingent, it relies on external factors for its existence or properties. P4: The concept of necessitarianism asserts that all events and states of affairs are necessary and could not have been otherwise. C1: Therefore, if substances are contingent, they would not be ontologically independent, which contradicts the concept of necessitarianism. C2: Hence, all substances must be necessary and have their properties necessarily, supporting the position of necessitarianism. Defense of P1: Ontological independence is a well-established philosophical concept that pertains to entities' existence and properties. It asserts that substances have their existence and properties intrinsically, rather than depending on other entities for them. This concept is compatible with various philosophical perspectives and provides a basis for understanding the necessary nature of substances in the context of necessitarianism. Defense of P2 and P3: Contingent entities, by definition, rely on external factors for their existence or properties. If a substance is contingent, it means that its existence or properties could have been otherwise, which implies a dependence on external factors. This aligns with the notion of contingency and supports the understanding that contingent entities are not ontologically independent. Defense of P4: The concept of necessitarianism posits that all events and states of affairs are necessary, meaning they could not have been different from what they are. This notion assumes that there are no contingent entities whose existence or properties depend on external factors. If substances were contingent, it would contradict the idea of necessitarianism, as it would introduce elements of contingency and non-necessity into the ontology of substances. Argument for Substance Monism P1: If the mental is reducible to the physical, then the mental is not a distinct substance p2 The mental is defined by the functional roles or causal relationships of physical phenomena P3: Physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that everything that exists is either physical in nature or can be explained by physical phenomena. P4: Mental states are physical events. P5: Therefore, mental states are physical phenomena, and physicalism is true. P6: Substance Monism is true. Defense of p4. P1. Mental states require the passage of time to be coherent. P2. Physical events, as part of the physical world, occur within the framework of time. C1. Therefore, mental states are identical to physical events because they share the common property of requiring the passage of time. Argument for Moral Anti-Realism 1. Objective moral facts or properties are posited to be external and independent of subjective human perspectives. 2. If objective moral facts or properties are external and independent, they cannot be reducible to or identical with physical events intrinsic to the nature of physical substances. 3. If objective moral facts or properties are not reducible to physical events, they would require an ontological status beyond the physical realm. 4. Physicalism posits that everything that exists is ultimately physical in nature, and there are no non-physical entities or substances. 5. If objective moral facts or properties exist and are not reducible to the physical, physicalism would be false. 6. The coherence of objective moral facts or properties, therefore, raises questions about the compatibility with physicalism, which is a well-supported and widely accepted ontological position. 7. The existence of objective moral facts or properties would require a non-physical realm, akin to a form of moral Platonism. 8. Moral Platonism, as a non-physical and abstract realm, may not be coherent with our current understanding of the natural world and the physical basis of reality. 9. The assumption of objective moral facts or properties as external and independent entities raises challenges regarding their interaction with the physical world and how they can impact human actions and moral judgments. 10. Therefore, the coherence of objective moral facts or properties becomes questionable if we consider the implications it has on our ontological commitments, such as physicalism and our understanding of the natural world. Argument from Pyrrhonian Moral Skepticism 1.Objective moral truths are sui generis moral facts or properties that exist independently of humans, independent of beliefs, opinions, or cultural norms. 2.If objective moral truths exist, they can be established to exist independently of human's mental states. 3.There are no ways of establishing objective moral truths exist independently of human's mental states. 4.Human mental states are physical events.(viz. functionalism and nominalism) 5.The Problem of the Criterion, when applied to the Münchhausen Trilemma, makes it impossible to establish ontological objective moral facts or properties via epistemological means. 6.Therefore, claiming ontological objective moral facts or properties exist commits a special pleading fallacy.
Great discussion! Thanks for hosting, Joe. While I like Don, and he seems like such a great guy, I do find Huemer’s overall position to be a bit more persuasive. Don made some great points though.
As a moral anti-realist, i constantly engage in moral debate and regularly claim moral truths, and i am conscious that i am actively engaging in deception, since all i want to accomplish is to convince people about my subjetive preferences. Psychologically, claiming moral truths is simply more effective, even though there are no moral truths.
Is it just me or were Huemer's considerations in favor of moral realism incredibly weak? A lot of the things he said kind of reminded me of some of the ways Christian apologists talk. For example, right at the beginning, he seems to be saying something to the effect of "all the other metaethical theories have flaws therefore one should adopt mine." Like, what? Also, intuitions? Really? If he's forced to say that intuitions prima facie justify a belief in a deity as long as there's a "religious experience" then I'm sorry but I'm out. I was surprised he wasn't pushed more on metaphysics of moral realism. For example, how exactly do our intuitions pick out these moral truths? What's the mechanism? Is it some kind of physical force? Probably not, right? Well, what is it then? I don't know, I've probably listened to too much Lance...
Haha. Your concerns aren’t unreasonable. There was *so* much we weren’t able to cover in the episode regarding (Eg) problems you adumbrate for the epistemology of non-naturalist intuitionism. Maybe I’ll get Huemer on later (in months) with Lance, or else get Huemer on to address these questions🙂
that was the thing that sprung to my mind - Christian apologists claiming objective morality because otherwise...Hitler. it could have been Frank Turek talking.
I mean, all that you did was state questions and then say "this isn't for me" rather than saying the actual problems with his logic. So, instead of just saying general statements like "I don't like intuition as a potential guide for logic" or saying "I don't understand how such a mechanism for knowing moral truths would operate," you should earnestly ask "Why don't I like intuition? Don't all humans have intuitions? Doesn't that also apply to philosophers that come to the conclusion of moral anti-realism? Does that apply to the intuition of logical and syllogistic reasoning, which relies on intuition?" And "Why could an immaterial mind/soul allow for the ability to know moral truths?" Be a bit more honest with your questions, and do not equate your "presence of personal questions" to "absence of objective answers."
It's not just you. They were incredibly weak. See my comments above where I address each individually. //he seems to be saying something to the effect of "all the other metaethical theories have flaws therefore one should adopt mine."// Yes, and also note that the main problem with this claim is that the three forms of antirealism he describes aren't the only views antirealists can take. // For example, how exactly do our intuitions pick out these moral truths? What's the mechanism? // Yea, it's a reasonable concern. I think philosophers think we have some kind of special a priori access to deep truths just by thinking about it. It sounds like magic to me, and extremely dubious. But that's how many of them seem to think.
Dr. Loeb's "non-moral" explanations of convergance (greater control, lower suffering etc.) strike me as similar to argumetns against, say, free will that would point to evidence that "something is happening in the brain" when we make decisions. Of course! We shouldn't expect moral judgement and convergence to be independent of worldly facts. Why not follow that thread? I think the explanation of moral facts is in that territory: the nebuluous network of mental states, interactive properties etc.
I've been arguing that pain, absent countervailing factors, is bad. Pleasure, absent countervailing factors, is good. And this just flows from what is like to experience pain and pleasure. And this can be a starting point for at least reaching some objective moral truths.
I am one of the few realists* about morality and science that I know. *I might qualify as a variety of anti-realist to some people, though I think it is in the same way a theist about a particular god is an atheist with respect to others. I am still figuring out how to articulate parts of my position, but I gravitate to a view that holds moral facts to be natural facts about experiencers and their experiences realized through the lens of experience. It is objective so far as any subject must be a variety of object within a network of objective relations. What I think about the mathematical corollary of my view, I am still piecing together.
I already commented on this video with a more thorough response elsewhere, but I wanted to revisit this discussion. That move exchange at 50:25 is beautiful to me: Dr. Loeb: "I would rely on the example of someone saying something like 'It seems to me that the tree has a spirit'." Dr. Huemer: "I would argue that this is probably caused by elements of culture, that you were taught certain things, and if you were raised in a different culture you would believe different things." Dr. Loeb: "You sound like me talking about moral intuitions." Wrecked.
Thinking something is valuable *just is* having a certain attitude towards it, and Huemer has offered no reason to think otherwise. What a strange conversation.
@@cloudoftime Actually it is a legit point because moral disagreement can be resolved which suggest we have moral intuition such as killing babies is wrong.
@@JohnSmith-bq6nf Moral intuition is just feeling. It's stance dependent. Moral disagreements can only be resolved internally, which requires something to be contingently relative. Wrongness is just an agreement in this way. All that's real there is a similarity in preference between agents.
@@cloudoftime No black person is going to say moral progress doesn’t exist since slavery was abolished. Most philosophers are moral realists because anti realists argument aren’t very convincing.
@@JohnSmith-bq6nf What someone from a specific group is inclined to say because their group has had movements they prefer in a set span of time is irrelevant. That does not entail or evidence stance independent moral facts. And moral progress begs the question. What we see is _movement_ in behaviors people refer to as "moral." Progress assumes an end which is derived from preference. A slim majority of philosophers are moral realists (~60%). And they aren't all specialists in moral philosophy. And it's because of bias. They find the semantics useful. Most people don't even question the concept, and it has utility, but that doesn't make it real. What source do you have showing the reason to be "antirealist arguments aren't very convincing"? And the antirealist position is mostly arrived at through a strict scrutiny of the lacking substantiation for moral realist arguments. What even is a stance independent moral fact? What could it even be?
Very interesting, you should have Aaron Robinowitz on this this topic. He has a podcast called Embrace the Void. He considers himself a moral realist. I think you guys would have a good conversation.
Nice, getting into anti-realism because of Kane B's channel. Not convinced of it as though I don't see any cosmic meaning I belive all earthly life as evolved from a common ancestor and hence hold universal earthly values. Those beings pain/ suffering/ discomfort is bad and pleasure or the lack of the former negetive stimuli is good. Though in the rest of the universe pain may not be a thing even for sentient beings so I make no judgment on pains value outside of earth, as It may not even be a concept outside of earth. But for us it matters, or at least it seems to. Anyways now I'll watch the video
We value our own pain, but we don't always value the pain of others equally. I think if all pain mattered equally to all of us then we could not survive. Therefore there has to be some sort of relativism, some sort of differences in the way that different living creatures deal with their pain and each other's pain. Ukrainians today are happy to see Russian soldiers in pain and that is a form of inequality and subjectivity and relativism.
@@turdferguson3400 idk I don't find the fact some people, myself included, get pleasure from other peoples suffering. Im naturally sadistic, I take great pleasure in others sufferings as well as the breaking of societal norms. But I don't belive my actions are right when I do them, I am aware that the reason I take pleasure is because the fact their is a harm befalling them. So I agree in the sense that I don't think when I punch someone from a "cosmic view I'm really punching myself" as their is a natural degree of separation, our minds are separate not linked in some panpsychist collectivist like view. But just because I can never feel what another feels, just relate and reflect my own experiences into them, doesn't mean that their sensations are alien to the point where I shouldn't care that their feelings are likely identical to my own.
What? The last common ancestor probably didn't feel pain. Unless you're a panpsychist - then you'd equally have to hold that anything might experience pain or pleasure. Honestly no clue what earth or common ancestry are supposed to have to do with anything.
I know this is a year old, but maybe someone will answer. I'm more partial to Huemer and moral realism. Still I'm halfway through this conversation and I don't really understand Loeb's view on morality? What does he think lol?
moral realism is a fluid glue that takes the shape of the dominant socio-economic framework in a society. It is used as justification for any/all actions no matter how altruistic or depraved to bind/fix/conserve the values/myths/raison d'etre/archetypes of the society & its institutions. there may exist some genetic memory from our primordial past yhat from time to time manifests in a psychological existential phenomenon in the collective conscience, i.e. the deep longing for cooperation, i.e. to both give & receive affection & protection, that finds expression in a social movement, which displaces the current moral reality, momentarily. as these longings can be satified locally/intimately are inherently idiosyncratic thus cannot be abstracted, codified, institutionalized & scaled. so are subsumes by the next moral reality.
One strange thing in this discussion was that at times Humeur spoke as though he was unaware of fairly standard responses to his arguments. For example, when he says that he doesn’t understand how Don can claim that the institution of morality is valuable, I find it hard to believe that he didn’t know what he meant. It comes out later on that his problem is that it’s misleading to speak that way, but the way he initially phrases his objection makes it sound like he has no idea what Don is getting at, which can’t be the case.
Huemer also often states that there are just three forms of antirealism, and implies that if you can reject these three forms of antirealism, that this entails realism. However, there are more ways to reject moral realism than to endorse one of these three positions, and it strikes me as strange Huemer either doesn't agree with this or perhaps hasn't heard some of these alternatives (which in some cases are admittedly fairly obscure).
This is one of those topics where someone's intuitions can totally bias the perception of the discussion. I always find moral nihilism very unconvincing. Good discussion anyway! 👌
I am an existential nihilist - I believe that there is no inherent meaning in life and that morality is not written into nature or beyond it; rather, it's merely a survival mechanism developed through evolution. Therefore, any action that exists cannot be inherently right or wrong, and we create moral descriptions only because we are capable of doing so. On the other hand, I am against moral relativism; I believe that we should seek the best ethical theory (or find a moral convergence point among ethical theories) that extrapolates concerns for survival and well-being to include all sentient beings, based on similarities not differences and self-evident principles like pain and pleasure. I believe in constructing coherent and collectively valuable ethical systems, rather than relying solely on individual values. I think of this as ethical mathematics. Is this contradictory? I'm not sure since I'm not an expert in philosophy, just an enthusiast, but I don't think it is.
I would still think of your opinion as some sort of relativism, which is not a critique. Relativism doesn't imply that your moral system is incoherent, or random, or that it doesn't have some pragmatic value. You base your ethical views on pain and pleasure, but there are people who could reasonably disagree, for example some people might say that God's word is above pain and pleasure and while I'm an atheist, this seems like a reasonable opinion. So for me the 'relativist' part of your view is, that relative to you as an agent, pain and pleasure are your basis of morality. But since you say that the principles of pain and pleasure are self evident, you might actually be a realist if you think 'self evident' implies a stance independent fact.
@@humesspoon3176 At some points in the discussion, Mike seems not to be familiar with certain very popular moves in the metaethical literature (27:39 is the example Don points out; 1:16:27 is another example) (also I am very sympathetic to Mike's view)
@@vaclavmiller8032 If you mean he's not familiar with how anti-realists try to make sense of engaging with moral discourse, that's false as he engaged with e.g. fictionalist accounts in his discussion with Emerson Green. He just didn't get to respond/just didn't do a good job of asserting himself/getting response time. Or he'd just let them move one without getting a turn. His objection to fictionalism is that it's like atheists participating in religion or taking it seriously. Like why would a moral anti-realist think people should go to war and risk their lives for moral values that don't exist? It's as strange as an atheist genuinely praying or sacrificing their lives for religion.
He's very familiar with the literature. It's pretty tricky to understand why a moral antirealist has any interest in thinking about normative ethics if they do not believe that there are any true moral beliefs. I don't really think Don explained that well enough at all
@@sunburststratocasterI don't think it's tricky at all. Surely you can understand someone being interested in thinking about aesthetic claims even if they don't think there is any stance-independent truth value assignable to them? I don't like it when people are treated in a way I perceive to be unjust, and might therefore try to convince others that a) the treatment is unjust and b) injustice is bad and should be reduced. If someone doesn't agree with me on either a) or b) I don't see how I am justified in claiming that they are objectively incorrect. I don't think this is an issue in practice with regards to b), aversion to injustice being near universal. But for a), regarding what is and isn't just, opinions differ wildly from person to person and from culture to culture. What is also highly variable is the perceived importance of justice relative to other moral "values". To confound the disagreement on a), it is not even universally uniform what "justice" means in an abstract sense, before we even get to concrete examples.
Hi Joe, Would it be in your interest to have a discussion/debate with another channel called 'Computing the Soul' on the primacy of existence? I know them personally and I think it would make for an interesting discussion.
The argument from linguistics is really unconvincing to me. When people talk about morality, they often don't realize the difference between seeing how people act and the question of how they should act. They, do, however, usually have an opinion on how people should act. Sometimes an act can be moral, immoral, or even amoral. It's not clear to me either how this argument dictates what exactly morality is or how we come to know it. In other words, it's not clear to me that it's actually metaethics because it's about how people use their language. It juts doesn't seem like it even is in the realm of philosophy.
9:00 - The refraction of a stick in water is a great example of judging one appearance/intuition against another. So the question is, can we do the same thing for *moral* appearances? Or do we only have one type of appearance that cannot be weighed against any other? I think it's the latter, so is there any way to know that this particular appearance is accurate? I don't think there is.
I agree, but I will also add that it's not just one type of appearance that cannot be weighed against any other: aesthetic appearances are the same. The distinction is that people seem to have more generally accepted the subjective nature of aesthetic judgments. This might just be due to the fact that variations in aesthetic judgements don't result in consequences of the same weight as moral judgements or expectations.
The following was my response to an uploaded question about whether or not we can objectively say that Hitler was wrong. I thought it might be relevant here. What we can objectively say about Hitler is that he had very little respect for human well-being. Whether or not that means Hitler was wrong depends on the definition of the word wrong. If the word wrong means something like “behaving in a way that disregards the well-being of others” then Hitler was wrong. Answers to questions like this depend on how we choose to define words. Of course, by their nature, words have arbitrary definitions as they are human inventions. Words mean what we decide they mean. Once we follow Voltaire’s advice and define our terms, things should become more clear. So where does all the confusion come from? When you ask someone to define what they mean by a term like “moral” for example, they usually respond by referring to a synonym like "good", "right”, “ethical", "ought". This exercise illuminates nothing if none of these “normative language” terms are being assigned a substantive definition and they all just vacuously refer to each other. If you try to suggest a substantive definition for a moral term like " the facilitation of well-being" or "obeying the commands of Allah", an interlocutor can (correctly) tell you that your definition is arbitrary and that they reject your definition, at which point, what’s left to say? Some brave thinkers seem to think they can pull moral philosophy up by the bootstraps by finding an objective way to justify definitions of moral terms such that the definitions are non arbitrary and substantive. The pitfall here is that they will inevitably end up needing to use the moral term (or one of its synonyms) they’re looking to define in the argument that intends to show that their suggested definition of that term is best. There is no way to soundly prove that your proposed definition of the word “moral” is the morally justifiable definition to choose, although that’s exactly what such a program would require. You would need to already have a definition of “moral” so you can use that definition as a prescription for how to define the word in the first place. The word would essentially need to define itself. It leads to a self referential and circular mess. I think most problems in meta ethics are pseudo problems. They come down to quibbles over how best to define words. It’s sort of like biologists arguing about whether or not viruses are alive or astronomers arguing about whether or not Pluto is a planet.
@@goldenalt3166 I think that’s what we do whether we realize it or not. The protection and improvement of well-being is probably the closest that we, as a species, get to an identifiable collective goal even if it goes unspoken. When I listen to people talk; their use of moral language is usually in the context of discussing well-being. I have no issue with defining moral words in terms of well-being. That’s usually what I have in mind when I use moral words in everyday speech. My suggestion would be, at least in the context of rigorous philosophical discourse or debate, that we discard moral language. For example, if my interlocutor and I both agree to define “moral” as that coarse of action that best facilitates well-being and we both agree that well-being is what we care about; instead of talking about what would be the moral thing to do in a certain situation, why not skip the moral language and talk directly about what coarse of action would best facilitate well-being? The moral language is an unnecessary middle step that obfuscates the discussion without adding anything of substance. Whatever we decide to do with moral language, it’s illogical to argue about how to define moral terms. Words are human inventions, they mean what we decide they mean. Words need to have definitions that are internally consistent and once they are defined, they need to be used the same way throughout an argument to avoid an equivocation fallacy. Those are the only restrictions. Telling someone that you have ethical concerns with how they are defining a term like “morally right” is essentially telling them that their definition of “morally right” is not morally right. You can’t use the meaning of the term “morally right” to decide what morally right should mean. It’s a self referential and circular objection. Words can’t define themselves. Moral words are no exception.
@@robh8024 Meaning is coeval with the usage in language. They are tantamount to the same thing: meaning = language = meaning. It's practically speaking, tautagory.
Dr Loeb just came across non sensical in this conversation. I’m using language that does not really mean what I’m saying:) To pass judgement upon anything would seem disingenuous. With that said, I also think that Michael struggles with the grounding question and it showed.
Dr Loeb, I think, makes perfect sense. People operate with two codes all the time. Tons of examples. You’re in a committee and you disagree with the consensus view, but you go along with it because you are functioning as a group, and then you earnestly work to realize it. Or you don’t want to hug all your relatives when they go home after Thanksgiving dinner, but you do because it’s part of convention, and you don’t want any friction. You smile and say thank you when the cashier gives you your receipt, but, though you don’t really care, you sincerely enact this pleasantry. You see what I mean? You can be an anti-realist, but you still have to live in the world among other people and fashion some kind of coherent moral structure, so I would say an eagerness to maintain civility is not disingenuous. One can think X is ultimately not important, but here, now, in this context it is.
@@peterg418 I get this but I personally don’t think it furthers any overarching narrative. Typically, you do something to cause less friction because you deem friction to be bad. My point would be that then you admit that you don’t think friction is bad or good, everything you say to the other person proclaiming the good and bad of friction is nonsensical.
@@joshwatson5561rather than nonsensical, you could say relative. Maybe it’s good that I argue for a raise, but not so good for my boss. Maybe it’s good that I confront my wife for leaving her dirty clothes around the room, but maybe she doesn’t want to hear it. Maybe my relatives want a hug at the end of Thanksgiving, but I don’t. And my position can change based on my mood. Error theorists might call those saying they have a fixed ground for a permanent moral claim the one taking a nonsense position. Though nonsense just means not based on the senses, which is different than, say, gibberish or unintelligible.
Good video. Don interrupted Michael too many times for me. It got super annoying and super rude. I wish he would have let Michael talk as much as he did.
Great discussion. I think Dr. Loeb did a great job of dealing with the subjectivity of this entire enterprise. And he was congenial and respectful Dr. Huemer seemed very much like a christian theist in his approach to the concepts. If you don't fit his categories, he smugly chuckled in a denigrating, dismissive matter. He just didn't have convincing substantiation for his claims. Assertions just don't do it.
I am against 'objective' morality for the very simple reason that concepts such as 'good' and 'bad' are entirely based around subjective experience of pain or pleasure. There is a certain naive realism involved in objective morality that we don't get when, for example, we point out that the sky is not 'really' the blue that we perceive. Thus I'd find it extremely suspicious if all our conscious experience is a subjective creation of the brain yet somehow morality gets to escape that and be 'real'. I don't see any difference at all between the illusory and subjective blue of the sky and the illusory and subjective sense of 'morality'.
I don't think moral agreement is really equivalent to moral disagreement. For moral realism to be truly undermined one would have to undermine something like the language or cognitive faculty being used. Any agreement implies there is something that is agreed upon. If that agreed upon thing is understood as being a moral proposition not up for debate then by definition it is no longer in the realm of disagreement. It is now being agreed upon as being a fact. If there is even one moral fact then moral disagreement in itself is not enough to undermine moral realism. To argue against there being even one moral fact just based on disagreement about other potential moral facts just isn't strong enough.
"It is now being agreed upon as being a fact." That is on a pragmatic account of facts. But AFAICS the kind of "moral facts" postulated by non-trivial moral-realism assertions cannot be satisfied by a pragmatic account of facts. "Moral facts" have to exist *independent* of people's stances in order for moral realism to stand, so this agreement[1] fails to assist moral realism. Personally, moral realism seems incoherent because I don't believe that 'people agree about stance-independent moral facts' is an assertion that could possibly be valid, because a) agreement is a stance, which throws doubt on whether the thing agreed upon could possibly be 'stance independent', b) I don't agree that stance independent moral facts are something that people (eg. Huemer) can think about in the first place. Manipulating the particles 'stance independent' 'moral' and 'fact' and observing this combination of concepts is logically possible and would have certain implications, doesn't mean this phrase grounds out in any distinct experience people actually have - it isn't 'like anything'. It's empirically toothless. (Huemer might respond 'But, seemings!' -- but 'seemings' are not identifiably and distinctly moral experiences as he defines them. You can accept seemings while still rejecting moral realism) [1] (more generally there is also the main problem with behaviourist appeals like 'people seem to agree'; it provides no indication of the underlying model. An emotivist and moral realist can outward appear to agree that 'murder is wrong', and also believe that they really do agree. But if they don't additionally discuss their _meta-_ ethical views (emotivism, moral realism) and agree that those are 'compatible enough' in this particular case, then that appearance of agreement is entirely deceptive -- to a fully-informed observer, it's just obvious that the 'is wrong' of moral realism and the 'is wrong' of emotivism are quite different predicates, so no actual agreement should be assumed to have taken place.) (I do agree with your observation that moral disagreement is not a strong-enough argument, FWIW)
@@vishtem33 Regarding your point a about agreement on stance-independent moral facts, how does agreement being a stance throw any doubt on whether the thing agreed about could possibly be stance-independent? My neighbor and I agree that there is a fence between our houses, but that doesn't make the fence stance-dependent. If we didn't agree, it would still be there; if we agreed that it wasn't there, it would still be there; and if we didn't ever look at it, it would still be there. No matter what our stances are or even whether we have stances, it is still there; that's stance-independence. Regarding b, I don't see why something should have to have an experiential quality to be a possible object of thought. It isn't "like anything" that 2+2=4, but we can still think about mathematical facts. It isn't "like anything" that rainfall is a form of precipitation, but it is a fact, I can think about it, we can come to know it, etc. I'm very unclear on what you're saying here.
@@thejimmymeister Your first response is certainly fair and I admit that I made a bad argument there. Regarding the second, I would argue that "2+2=4" and "rainfall is a form of precipitation" are both grounded in experience: you can experience having more or less of a resource, then you can want to quantify that, basic arithmetic formalizes that; '2+2=4' is like, say, lining apples up on a countertop. You can also experience rainfall and other forms of precipitation. These are analytic facts that are grounded in something real. In the case of 2+2=4 we can also clearly leverage them to achieve real things, like mixing drinks consistently, or managing supply chains. Conversely, stance-independent moral facts seem to me to depend on the existence of some kind of distinct faculty -- let's say for the sake of argument that most people have this faculty; that doesn't help moral realism because moral realists -- and to be fair I am concerned more with non-naturalist moral realists like Huemer -- merely gesture towards this supposed faculty with terms like 'seemings'. I don't accept seemings as grounding anything that is *distinctly* moral. Considering 'pain is bad' and 'the sky is blue' as fairly obvious instances of seemings, I would assert that absent any specific evidence that these are different in kind, they should be considered to be similar in kind. (them 'seeming' to be different in kind would be an attempt at circular justification IMO; justification should come from outside the domain under question). Until this distinction can be made, it seems to me appropriate to classify ''stance independent moral facts' as described by Huemer and other non-naturalist moral realists as simply failing to refer to anything. (FWIW I think on a naturalist account 'stance-independent moral facts' can be grounded in something -- for example pain induces stress response which has various negative consequences for physical and mental health. But as far as I can see non-naturalists are non-naturalists at least in part because this kind of primarily descriptive account is not enough for them.)
One thing I do not understand about Huemer's position is that he considers himself to be a realist who is thereby not a relativist, but he also considers himself to be an intuitionist. To do all that together, doesn't one have to suppose that moral intuitions would not be relative, that they would experience some large cross-cultural agreement on matters of moral fact? If we zoom out and make our statements vague enough, sure, everyone shares an intuition that murder is wrong. But if we zoom in any closer, it will be clear that our intuitions about what counts as murder (wrong killing) varies. And I suspect it not only varies by culture, but possibly by individual temperment, context, and even sometimes the way we phrase questions. I'd ask him in cases where folks have deep disagreements in their intuitions about moral facts, what then? Frankly it was one of the most fatal and pervasive problems with his book Problem of Political Authority where he tried to convince us with fictional examples why libertarianism accords with "our" intuitions. The entire book presupposes a very freedom-minded and individualistic set of intuitions which he wrongly assumes all readers would share and that is not itself culturally relative.
10:45 - If our direct perceptions of reality disagree with each other, that's usually a sign of delusion. If I see and feel a tree, but you don't, then one or both of us is delusional: that's a disagreement about our direct perceptions. So when it comes to *moral* perceptions, which you claim are perceptions of an objective reality outside our own opinions, disagreement should raise a similar red flag. Have you never heard this explained? Is this objection really so unclear? You actually show that you do understand this principle at 48:18, incompatible perceptions are a problem.
@@eapooda - When it comes to perceptions of objects we all agree are concrete, objective things, this is how we reason. But when someone argues that moral claims are, in a sense, just as real and objective as trees and rocks... he doesn't understand the reasoning? Disproof by contradiction? The problem of conflicting direct perceptions? Surely he does instant l understand this. That's what I don't get.
So far, the strangest part of this discussion occurs around 31:00. At 30:56, Huemer asks, “And what is a normative matter? If there aren’t any normative properties…” I don't know why Huemer thinks there need to be normative properties. I have normative stances towards food. I think cake is tasty. I don’t think cake has normative properties. One can be a normative reductionist, and recognize that normative claims, like “x is good,” can describe conditional relations between goals or values and means of acting in accordance with those goals or values. For me to say that cake is tasty can mean a variety of things: (1) I find cake tasty (2) Most people find cake tasty (3) Many people find cake tasty …And so on. I don’t have to believe in “normative properties” to make these claims. You don’t need bizarre metaphysics to like cake. And you don’t need bizarre metaphysics to oppose baby torture. Then Huemer expresses incredulity at 31:18: “I don’t understand what it is that you’re trying to figure out.” What is Huemer confused about? Huemer’s tone makes it seem like Loeb has said something bonkers: trying to figure things out, but you're a nihilist? How is that even possible? Of course it’s possible. We try to figure things out literally every day without there being any fact of the matter. I try to figure out what I’m going to wear to work and what I’m going to make for dinner. People can want to figure things out without think there’s an objective fact of the matter. Suppose you and some friends are ordering pizza. You want to decide what pizza toppings to get. So you discuss your various preferences, and decide to get mushrooms. People can try to figure out how to coordinate, negotiate, and navigate various practical decisions without thinking there’s an objective fact about what they ought to do independent of their goals and values. Not all deliberation is directed at figuring out what’s true. Much of it is directed at figuring out what to do.
"So far, the strangest part of this discussion occurs around 31:00. At 30:56, Huemer asks, “And what is a normative matter? If there aren’t any normative properties…” I don't know why Huemer thinks there need to be normative properties. I have normative stances towards food. I think cake is tasty. I don’t think cake has normative properties. One can be a normative reductionist, and recognize that normative claims, like “x is good,” can describe conditional relations between goals or values and means of acting in accordance with those goals or values. For me to say that cake is tasty can mean a variety of things: (1) I find cake tasty (2) Most people find cake tasty (3) Many people find cake tasty …And so on. I don’t have to believe in “normative properties” to make these claims. You don’t need bizarre metaphysics to like cake. And you don’t need bizarre metaphysics to oppose baby torture. Then Huemer expresses incredulity at 31:18: “I don’t understand what it is that you’re trying to figure out.” What is Huemer confused about? Huemer’s tone makes it seem like Loeb has said something bonkers: trying to figure things out, but you're a nihilist? How is that even possible?" - First thing to say is that Huemer isn't expressing incredulity in 31:18, he's expressing his lack of understanding of what is mean to "try to figure it out" in terms of moral issues(while normative judgements are taken to be Universalizable and/or Universalized instances of judgements) while there are no "normative properties" to propiciate this Universalization element pertaining what we call "Morallity". I think while you think about this, Huemer's points start to make more sense, but ok.
"Of course it’s possible. We try to figure things out literally every day without there being any fact of the matter. I try to figure out what I’m going to wear to work and what I’m going to make for dinner. People can want to figure things out without think there’s an objective fact of the matter. Suppose you and some friends are ordering pizza. You want to decide what pizza toppings to get. So you discuss your various preferences, and decide to get mushrooms. People can try to figure out how to coordinate, negotiate, and navigate various practical decisions without thinking there’s an objective fact about what they ought to do independent of their goals and values. Not all deliberation is directed at figuring out what’s true. Much of it is directed at figuring out what to do." - Looks like you're talking about Instrumental Rationality here instead of Epistemic Rationality. Yeah, I agree that much of the deliberation that we usually do is directed through trying to find out what to do in terms of our own personal values and goals but there are some situations were those deliberations are mediated by some insights about seemings that really strikes us like contradicting our own personal values and goals and yet even while we're trying to resist that it just seems that we ought to do that thing, those cases are the ones in which there are real Moral Dillemas that you get faced with, and some of those things doesn't seem to allign properly with personal values and goals of any person at all(including you in a case you're a person that value in terms of deontological considerations, utilitarian considerations or virtue ethics considerations), so I think in a Phenomenal Conservative view like Huemer's it isn't so surprising about what he is talking when he say that "try to figure out" in terms of moral considerations only makes sense in a Moral Realist view.
@@DavidRibeiro1 I've seen the term "univeralization" used in a variety of ways (and it is used in both philosophy and psychology). Could you clarify what you mean by that?
"And you don’t need bizarre metaphysics to oppose baby torture." One what basis would you opposite it? Say everyone in your country were moral anti-realists... and everyone in the country except you start liking baby torture. Would you try to tell them that baby torture is wrong. So on the anti-realist stance... you have a preference against baby torture... the rest of the country prefers baby torture. You all agree there's no fact of the matter on the issue at hand. What is there to debate about? If anti-realists are simply talking about personal preferences when debating moral issues... then I'd say the anti-realist is being deceptive by using moral language... When people engage in a debates on a moral issue, the discussion isn't like a discussion on "which color is my favorite". It's a different kind of discussion. And if the anti-realist uses the standard kind of moral language, then it seems like a form of deception to me. He should be discussing slavery, torture as if there were matters of personal preferences... not using the standard moral terminology. But this isn't how they discuss it... Why are moral anti-realists using moral language at all? There exists perfectly good language we use for discussing personal preferences. Seems like on any issue... the moral anti-realist if being honest should say, "this is my personal preference. here's the stuff I like, here's the stuff I don't like." etc. It would be purely descriptive of personal preferences. But this is not the language they use. There's some deception going on imo. Do you think a public debate on "which flavor ice tastes best" makes sense at all? Some people prefer one taste, some people prefer another. Taste expresses a personal satisfaction level. What is there to debate about? This is how I feel when I hear an anti-realist debating moral positions.
Dr Huemer's unreasonably confident opinion is a very strong demonstration of error theory 😹 Shouldn't the existence of moral controversy undercut one's confidence in the more obvious moral "facts"?
In a real-world discussion, the person saying "x is morally wrong" will sound more convincing and sure of themselves than the person saying "I believe x to be wrong." Trying to play gotcha with moral antirealists over this is obtuse.
Well, he should’ve gotten into it more because in his book he lays out the actual force of such language in more detail. Statements like “I hope I did the right thing” don’t really make much sense on the non cognitivist view, but we are totally able to understand the statement nonetheless. Maybe I misunderstood which portion of the conversation you were referring to.
lol I think in Huemer’s summary we realize what the huge tradeoff between the two views is. In order to buy moral realism, you have to buy into some really weird epistemic practices like accepting intuitions. Then it would just come back to people’s attitudes towards things. But he really doesn’t want it to so he calls it irreducible from evaluative statements. It’s a lot of mental gymnastics just to say “well it appears moral realism is true so I’m right”. Well to me it appears as if moral realism is false, so where does that get us? Nowhere
Wasn't really impressed with him wanting to act as if his talk of values, moral facts, and reasons must be considered in the stance independent notion. This is just question begging against the anti realist, they don't take any of those things to be stance independent, but rather stance dependent. Huemer, and all realists, have a burden to prove; stance independent moral facts or reasons to act. We both agree reasons make since from a stance dependent context, but the realist takes a step further. They add extra ontology into their theory, one that isn't even coherent. I have no idea what it means for me to have a reason to X independent of my stances. That's as absurd as saying I have a reason to eat an objectivly tastier food (one I might not like or want) divorced from my taste buds.
@@jmike2039 Just curious how does the anti-realists account for moral progress like banning slavery? Is it just a random event or something? Doesn't make much sense. It seems intuitively wrong.
@@JohnSmith-bq6nf To me there is nothing weird about that. I think that, as a social species, we evolved certain emotions like empathy which are beneficial for our survival, but we also evolved the capacity for war and subjugation, which are also sometimes beneficial for survival, as sad as this might be. We might tend towards one strategy (cooperation) or the other (subjugation) depending on the circumstances and one thing that changed our circumstances was the technological advancement in the past few centuries. There is no big reason for using slave labour in a post industrial revolution world (and some of the labourers *during* the industrial revolution were not treated much better than slaves). You could say that still, even if we don't *need* slavery, it could still offer some small economic benefit, but I just think that at some point the benefit is so small, that natural empathy or willingness to cooperate trumps it. I would also look at this from the other perspective and ask myself, why this happened *only* in the past 200 or so years. If morality was so self evidently objective, why didn't it happen much earlier? I think you wouldn't even need moral philosophers if it were that obvious. But let's assume, that you actually do need moral philosophy to make progress, moral philosophy already existed in Plato's times 2500 years ago and some other forms of moral philosophy (often entangled with religion) most likely existed much earlier than that. So if slavery was always objectively wrong, why did it take so long to discover that?
I wanted the discussion Huemer had with Graham was longer on Parker's channel. I like what he said here, but I don't agree with his views on the finite past/future.
@@lanceindependent thats what would expect especially from a vid like this, I hope u get a chance to converse with Huemer at some point, that would be a very interesting Convo.
@@lanceindependent hmm, that seems plausible, there's also a difference in conversational tempo or like dynamic, I feel like he wouldn't be as aggressive as you would. Your Ben Watkins debate was amazing because there was a good dynamic between the two of you but I feel it might be like the graham oppy v Swinburne debate which I think didn't have a good dynamic.
I'm reminded of a time (quite a long time, actually) when artists of various stripes were convinced that aesthetic statements had a truth value; for example, that a rectangle whose proportions were based on the Golden Mean is more aesthetically pleasing than a square. I've had one or two professors who believed such things, but it always struck me as errant nonsense. The problem with this stance, it seemed to me, is that there is no standard criteria one can appeal to when asserting that one thing is more beautiful than another. Aesthetic statements are not self-evidently true, they cannot be proved true by logical deduction, nor is their truth grounded in empirical fact. Moreover, there is widespread disagreement as to what makes a thing more or less beautiful. I have exactly the same reaction when I hear someone assert that moral claims have a truth value, and for pretty much the same reasons. The fact that there seems to be only a handful of moral claims which compel our assent (eg: that murder is wrong), and that these convictions are invariably accompanied by strong emotions, seems to militate forcefully against the belief that moral claims are objective.
“Talking about x, but not mentioning that you don’t think x exists”. What’s the problem? I can talk all day about god, without mentioning that I don’t think god exists. I can talk all day about free will without mentioning that I don’t think it exists (also gender, race, morality). Even if I don’t believe that these concepts objectively exist and are socially constructed, why wouldn’t I be able to talk about them?
Moral Realism is used when one lacks evidence. And would want to justify their claims to True moralism, but it was false then you have to provide evidence.
For what it is worth, I have come to look at morality much the way as I look at the rules of language. Morality has obvious social uses. WE are a cultural species and norms - on moral and non-moral matters, assuming a distinction can be made - are useful in helping us collectively survive and cooperate. Same with norms about language, where we can't speak and understand without them. That doesn't mean that rules about subject-object-verb order or whether language should be gendered are objective. It means they are intersubjective. And the matter gets trickier when we realize that just as different folks will speak differently and put different variations on the rules of language - or even speak wholly different language in their own communities - that's the way I suspect morality works. There may be broad objective rules we can come up with for what renders a language unspeakable (or a moral code unworkable), but those will be broad. Within those broad rules, however, there will be a LOT of variation, and (a) when there is variation, there are probably no facts of the matter we can appeal to for an objective resolution, and (b) the enterprise still works AS LONG AS folks either don't vary TOO much in their moral thinking and if they do, there are mechanisms to mitigate or assuage those disagreements.
This is why I personally have found sociology of morality way more illuminating than metaethics. Morality is a social process , and a lot of metaethics seems to me to either misunderstand or not draw enough consequence from that.
32:36 This sounds oddly like a religious fundamentalist. The idea that a professional philosopher CAN'T even seen to fathom the concept of value without moral realism seems almost disingenuous. Loeb even right before that point have very clear example of how that works. But Huemer either seems to refuse to engage with terms the way Loeb had stated he's using them, or else is completely closed to disagreement (both of which don't seem accurate, so I stand confused).
Michael said that subjectivism would mean that at some point it was 'good' to be a nazi, and so we should reject subjectivism. But that seems like a really weak argument that falls victim of the very position he's denouncing. It's basically saying - we should reject that idea because I don't like it. I don't think you can say moral realism is true because otherwise there would be no agreement - it seems like trying to insert morality into a category it isn't suited to be in - confusing personal preference with actual truth. I didn't like the dismissive way he brushed aside the issue of disagreement. If there are moral facts, or if some thing is a moral fact - then disagreement about that fact is a massive problem. If you're going to claim that mere consensus supports the idea that moral realism is true, then you cannot ignore disagreement suggesting it isn't. I didn't really understand his definition of intuition either. He seemed to say it entailed (in the philosophical realm) an intellectual evaluation of some sort - but then rejected the idea that it was to do with arguments.... butting in on my own thought here - I am frustrated when philosophers (or anyone else for that matter) claim they are going to give you an explanation for how two concepts differ, but then only describe what one of the concepts consists of, as Michael did here. ....it's not at all clear how this is different to the colloquial definition of intuition, nor did it seem like a definition without some contradictory elements in it (unless by 'argument' he meant formal logical syllogism, in which case there is some room for compatibility, I suppose).
@@jongtrogers seriously, if his presentation of his ideas about morality here was a distillation of his paper - then I'm not sure reading it would help.
It is unfortunate that we cannot get off the starting line and run with the discussion because Don is having a personal debate with himself and cannot commit to trusting his left brain or his right brain. So unfortunate..... Philosophical discussions are personal. If you do not have the balls to expose yourself, do not agree to the discussion.
@@rosesmitty1206 he didn't present any argument on why it's false, so how is that supposed to move the error theorist? You could never progress from this point if someone's just like yeah it's just obvious that your view is false. Error theorist: oh now that you said that I change my mind.
@@lanceindependent I call myself an error theorist but I'm somewhere between that and an expressivist. I think moral judgments express projected attitudes, but people (sometimes) mistakenly think that those projected attitudes are independent properties of the states of affairs that they're about. I think this misunderstanding is partly psychological and partly a linguistic artifact. I do think there's an incoherency in the concept of "stance-independent moral value" or "stance-independent reasons", etc.
@@theoutsiderhumanist8159 Cool, thanks for clarifying. Have you seen Gill's work on metaethical indeterminacy and variability? I think there are issues with presuming that moral claims are used to express the same sorts of things - they may in some cases be used to express propositional attitudes, in others to express imperatives, and perhaps in others there may be no determinate fact about how people are using them (given your remarks it seems like you think people sometimes use language one way, and sometimes another, so perhaps this isn't new or surprising to you). More importantly, I don't think we need to endorse any particular account about how people use words to discuss whether there are stance-independent moral facts. If it turned out that 100% of ordinary people always used moral claims to express emotions, would that mean moral realism was false? I don't see why it would. //I do think there's an incoherency in the concept of "stance-independent moral value" or "stance-independent reasons", etc.// Yea, I agree, though I don't think this is the kind of incoherentism Loeb has in mind. Loeb's incoherentism is people expressing both a proposition and not expressing a proposition with the same utterance, a bit like saying you believe in square circles. My main concern with moral realism is what I call the unintelligibity thesis: I think the concept of irreducible normativity is nonsensical, and that the notion of a stance-independent moral fact is either trivial, false, or unintelligible.
It seems like a leap to go from reflecting on one's own moral intuitions and making those a basis for one's evaluations and choices, to the much stronger claim that our moral intuitions can be the basis for making objective moral statements about reality. Given how often Huemer use's qualifiers like "seems" or "feels like to me", it sounds like he never breaks out of ethical subjectivism. Am I missing something? Intuitions aren't objective facts about the nature of reality, they're subjective states of feeling or belief about the world. They say something about a person's own psychology, not moral reality.
He uses intuition in a different sense, it's the mental state in which you intellectually realize that something is true. When you read that 2 + 2 = 4, or when you learn about the laws of classical logic, your intellectual intuition tells you that those are self evidently true, in an objective sense. It's a part of his view on epistemology, which he calls phenomenal conservatism. If things seem to you a certain way, it's reasonable to assume that they are true, until someone raises a convincing objection. This is a way to get out ob global scepticism, otherwise it would be hard to get any system of thought going, as for example you can't just prove the laws of classical logic by using classical logic etc. I disagree with Huemer, because I think moral intuitions are a different thing, but after reading some of his stuff I hope this is a fair representation of his views.
Well, a subjectivist would reject the existence of objective, stance-independent, moral facts. An intuitionist believes there are objective facts about morality that can be discovered, and that intuition is the means by which we discover these facts.
Take a drink everytime Mike scoffs at ideas that he doesn't agree with or whenever he is trying to make a "point" and you'll be drunk by the tenth minute.
Btw, the podcast versions of my videos are FINALLY HERE! So far, 57 videos have been uploaded as podcasts; in the coming weeks, the other 43 will be, too!🥳🎊
The podcast is available on major podcast platforms, such as iTunes and:
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/4Nda5uNcGselvKphtKSKvH
Google Podcasts: podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy82NGJlZDRiYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw
Rss link?
Yes!
30:00 - When we say, "the sun rises", this language works for most people, even flat-earthers, even though most of us think the sun isn't actually the thing which moves to cause a sunrise. That's not deceptive, it's pragmatic.
Yes, absolutely. Many philosophers seem to downplay the importance of pragmatics in ordinary language. I think this is a very serious mistake.
Exactly. It's the same with aesthetics, which I think fully relates to morality. I use "that sunset is beautiful," or "that band sucks." People map things onto the world with language, including their feelings. Not only does it correlate with other externalizing language behaviors, for consistency, it also has the utility of being more persuasive. We expect to see this.
I dont take people to be saying "the sun rises" as a useful heuristic. They use it in the correspondence sense. That is, the sun does indeed rise. We can witness it rise daily.
If we argue that its not really the case the dun rises, then were going to have to bite the bullet on a lot of other things that we probably wouldnt.
For instance, you may argue that color isn't real. It becomes more akin to a hallucination. You could likewise argue that objects, including ourselves, never really come into contact anything due to atoms repelling one another.
😅😅😅😅😅😅@@lanceindependent88😮88o 49:42 😅oo
😅0 49:38 😅0
We don't have a visceral reaction to the sun rising as we do to someone being tortured. Bad analogy.
Woooow, I haven't watched the video yet, but I'm surprised to see Michael Huemer in a RUclips video. While writing my MA paper (in French it's called a mémoire, but I don't know it's the same in English), his book about ethical intuitionism was my greatest inspiration. Can't wait to watch that video.
He has quite a bit of RUclips videos.
This was such a good video. I'm a moral realist but I really appreciated Loeb's arguments. And Michael Huemer was fantastic as always.
MORAL REALISM MORAL REALISM MORAL REALISM MORAL REALISM (in trying to summon lance bush)
If you say that three times in the dark while looking in a mirror, Lance's ghost appears.
@@DarwinsGreatestHits My ghost?! I'm still alive!
Not necessary. I summon myself.
@@lanceindependent Well it did work :D
@@Catofminerva My responses appear above.
No one:
Huemer: it's false because it's obviously false.
No one:
Loeb: I don’t want to have moral inconsistencies in my nihilist stances because I don’t really want to have moral inconsistencies in my nihilist stances.
If you read his books he explains a bit more. It's unfortunate that Huemer is a better writer than a speaker.
@@LarryRuffin-vy7hx difference being loeb never said that and huemer basically did lol
Great talk and speakers, always very interesting to see very influential philosophers engaging with each other.
Loeb did a great job here. Civil discussion too.
Huemer already started with a banger.
I recently purchased "Understanding Knowledge" by Huemer. I like what I have been reading so far, which means that it makes sense to me and I am learning something. However, in the discussion presented in this video I am impressed primarily by Don. He really brought new clarity to me about the relationship of meta ethics to ethics. I really thought he was sharp and insightful.
Listening to this discussion between two people who have opposing viewpoints was especially nice because both of them were actually thoughtful and intelligent. Both are professional philosophers. Too many popular debates these days are between experts and idiots. For example, a highly regarded person who has studied and published in the field of climate science for the last forty years debates climate science with someone who may have many excellent credentials and accomplishments but none of them has anything to do with the study of climate science.
Great discussion. Always like to hear Don Loeb speak. I've heard him in discussion with Peter Railton before and I think he's one of the best anti-realists going.
Hi all, this is Lance. It looks like quite a few people were looking forward to what I had to say about this discussion. Let’s get into it.
(1) Joe does a fantastic job setting up the flowchart-style way of presenting possible positions in metaethics. I want to raise a word of caution about these approaches.
There is a distinction between (a) what people mean when they make moral claims and (b) whether or not there are moral facts of any particular kind. Conventional flowchart approaches focus on the former question, which concerns descriptive facts about how ordinary people use moral claims. However, such facts do not directly address the question of whether there are, in fact, moral facts of any particular kind.
This semantic-centric approach to characterizing the metaethical landscape is a legacy of 20th century analytic philosophy. This approach to philosophy focuses on the analysis of “the meaning” of certain terms, concepts, and types of utterances. One problem with this flowchart method is that it presupposes the legitimacy of this approach, and often bakes in presumptions about the relation between language and meaning on the one hand, and questions of metaphysics on the other.
That is, the flowchart taxonomy standardly used in metaethics presumes a particular metaphilosophical framework characteristic of mainstream contemporary analytic philosophy.
However, there are philosophical positions that fall outside the scope of this framework, and that take a stance on metaethical questions that does not fit within any of these categories.
My own position is one example of this. I will illustrate why. Let’s begin with the first question:: Do (some of) our moral judgments express propositions?
This may seem nitpicky, but it isn’t: this question is ambiguous. What does it mean to ask if our judgments express propositions? I don’t technically think a judgment itself expresses propositions. Rather, I think that people themselves can express propositions. My slogan is that “words don’t mean things, people mean things.” I see language as a means for people to communicate, and it isn’t the words that mean things, but the people using those words to convey what they (the people themselves) mean. This is likely not a conventional view of language and meaning, since I deny externalist accounts or the notion that meaning “just ain’t in the head.” I don’t think words, sentences, utterances, and so on mean anything outside contexts of usage, and that technically it isn’t the words that mean things, but the people using those words.
Why is this important? Why isn’t this just pedantry? Because if my view of language and meaning is correct, then what we’re really asking when we pose such questions is something like
“What are people trying to express when they make moral claims?”
The moment it becomes clear we are asking questions about the intentions or communicative goals of speakers, this brings into stark relief that what we are dealing with are empirical questions. And empirical questions cannot be adequately addressed using the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy. Addressing these questions calls for engaging in experimental philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, and so on.
And if we are facing what amount to empirical questions, then some of the objections Huemer and others raise may be far weaker than they first appear. This is a point I will return to in a moment.
The second point I want to raise about these empirical questions is that it could turn out that people’s communicative goals simply don’t include the goal to express propositions or not do so, to refer to stance-independent facts or to not do so, and so on.
For comparison, when people say things like “I think it will rain tomorrow,” they are not required to communicate or presuppose any particular account of the nature of causal events at quantum level. As such, people need not intend to endorse the Copenhagen or Many Worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics. In other words, questions like:
“Do ordinary people’s causal judgments presuppose the Copenhagen or Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?”
The answer is “neither.” Sure, there may be a handful of people who do presuppose one or the other, but such noncentral cases are not what accounts of the central and primary uses of language are about, and no more threaten the indeterminacy of folk quantum mechanics than the fact that some people mistakenly use a particular word indicate that there is no generally shared meaning for that word. We don’t, for instance, deny the words “dog” and “cat” refer to different animals because children will on occasion point at a cat and say “dog.”
Such indeterminacy may likewise capture the communicative intent of the central purpose of ordinary moral claims. That is, moral claims may just not be in the business of serving to communicate a particular metaethical account. If so, the flowchart method begins with a false dichotomy that is literally unanswerable. It may be that there is just no fact of the matter about whether people are committed to any particular metaethical account.
"It looks like quite a few people were looking forward to what I had to say about this"
Really? Where did you get that idea from? I've never heard of you, and this is quite a pompous and narcissistic opening to a long-winded comment that adds nothing to the discussion.
@@squatch545 I don't know bruh, read the comments or something? It's hard not to interpret your accusations of narcissism as projection
@@squatch545 Hey Joe, just wanted to let you know that one of the other top comments on this video said “I’m trying to summon Lance Bush” and other people agreed, so that’s where he got that notion. I’m sorry you haven’t heard of Lance before, but other people have! In fact, I’m one of the people who was interested in hearing his perspective. Maybe this is your opportunity to learn about his very unique perspective from experimental philosophy that often gets overlooked, but I can’t and won’t tell you what to do!
@@squatch545 Does the proposition "...quite a few people were looking forward to what I had to say about this" require that you have heard of the person? I am one of the people who was looking forward to hearing Lance's input.
@@cloudoftime Yes it does, especially when Lance only has 83 youtube subscribers and makes a self-aggrandizing comment that seems to imply immense popularity.
Congratulations Joe !
This is your 100th video .
Awesome discussion, hope to see more of these in the future ❤️
I support Don's point of view!
Well if that was a debate, dr Loeb got this one. With facts and logic, spot on.
How? What facts and what logic? Maybe by interrupting quite a bit:)
57:57 - This is an excellent analogy. Is there an objective fact of the matter about what people perceive? Well, typically, if there is, we should be able to measure it independently of those perceptions. Or, at least, we should be able to check one perception against another. But we don't seem to be able to do that with morality.
Many realists point to moral agreement as a potential measure. However, the fail to note that modern moral intuitions are just that...modern.
Things like murder and rape wernt necessarily seen as wrong for ancient peoples. For instance, many ancient pagan cultures would've been finw with murder and rape of people outside the tribe.
No.
That's like saying you should be able to measure length regardless of length.
Moreover whether there is the fact of a matter doesn't depend on whether it's possible to measure.
@@crushinnihilism
No.
Moral realists point to moral DISagreements, which are much harder to describe under un-realism.
@@MrCmon113 unrealism isnt a position. That said, if there are no facts of the matter then disagreements make sense.
You could adopt an emotivist position. Different people have different emotional responses to stimuli. This is caused by a host of reason, such as cultural upbringing. Thats an obvious reason for disagreements.
Disagreements seem like a hige problem for the realist. If its the case there are moral facts, and we have an innate ability to attend to the facts, then why is there so much disagreement?
Wow, Dr. Don Loeb is awesome!!!
8:38 I’m not a student of philosophy of any degree, but it’s not clear to me how Huemer’s stated technical version of “intuition” is particularly distinct from intuition in the ordinary sense. The ordinary sense of intuition seems to have considerable overlap with this technical version, so that in the sense of a dialogue, it appears to map 1:1.
What ordinary use of the basis of intuition is excluded from any technical use of the term, and what technical use of the term is unavailable in the colloquial usage? What are the markers by which we segregate the two?
In my mind, it isn't difficult to "grok" what Don Loeb is saying, and I say that with a bit of humility because Michael Huemer seemed to not grasp Loeb's position. I think once a paradigm is assumed, it may be difficult for most people to see things otherwise contrary to that paradigm.
It's disappointing when his argument against nihilism is "that's just absurd." I *feel* that torturing babies is wrong, but there are evplutionary explanations for why I experience that sensation of feeling. What is so absurd about denying that my intuitions are reflecting some sort of platonic, moral fact?
Moral realism requires that there is an objective fact of the matter regarding how the world *should* be. Judgements without judges.
More literate people than I have argued for realism and my only qualifications are access to RUclips and my Amazon reading list, but surely it's not hard to conceive that there are no moral facts.
Huemer himself has wrote that, in the end, he simply can't bring himself to believe that something like the holocaust wasn't inherently wrong. That is the same argument from credulity that most theists, in their more honest moments, use. He is an intelligent man and I've read 2 of his books. I used to agree with him on nearly everything, but he's a good example of philosophy without science. There are many consistent ideas about how the world is that simply do not correspond with the empirical evidence, at least not in an intuitive way, as he would argue for.
@@dakotacarpenter7702 What are the evolutionary reasons for experiencing wanting to t*rture babies?
Here before Lance Bush!
Haha there's so many of these.
I have started a set of responses to the video
@@lanceindependent I’m curious as to what you think of the companions in guilt argument.
1:12:48 without making any moral commitments, I question the concept of "the moral progress we've made in the last two millennia." What confuses me is: how do we know it is progress? Progress towards what? What if we haven't been progressing, but going backwards? how would we know?
I mean, I personally count much of the changes to social norms as "better", but the philosopher on my shoulder is asking, , "what if they aren't better?"
what does making moral progress or backsliding morally even *mean* without a commitment to what the "goal" is?
Why can’t I apply that to knowledge as such?
I think that there is some sort central premise that our morality is based on, and a lot of our "progress" is based around this central premise. The simplest, but most complete one I could think of is that everything is permissible as long as it does not directly and knowingly violate the rights and freedom of others without informed consent. Of course, this is still very incomplete. But it is a good start as there is not a single exception to "do not directly and knowingly violate the rights and freedom of others without their consent". From here, we know that acts like slavery and murder is wrong because it violates a person's rights, religious freedom and homosexuality is ok because a person has that freedom, fraud and pedophilia is wrong because informed consent is not present.
Do you think this question is a challenge to a subjectivist view? My position is just that moral progress would be in relation to my own moral values and my evaluation of the empirics based on them.
Great host and great discussion.
(2) There is also a question about whether “moral judgments” represent a distinct category that can be subject to categorical analyses of this kind. That is, the presumption here seems to be that we ought to have a position on whether moral judgments, as a category, are truth-apt or not truth-apt.
But what exactly is a “moral” judgment? How do we distinguish moral judgments from nonmoral judgments?
I think the answers are (a) it’s unclear whether there is any such thing as a distinctively moral judgment and (b) we don’t.
I’m not the only person who makes such claims, and, to those who engage with the empirical literature on moral psychology, such claims are far less radical than they might appear at first glance. Here’s a brief summary of a few relevant articles on the matter:
(a) Stich (2018) argues that decades of dedicated efforts by philosophers and psychologists to offer a principled distinction between moral and nonmoral norms have failed. Stich’s conclusion: our best explanation for this is that there is no moral domain. Stich suspects that the moral/nonmoral distinction is a kind of pseudocategorical distinction grounded in philosophical and religious traditions.
(b) Machery (2018) argues that the concept of morality is a historical invention that arose in some cultures but is not present in others. Growing research supports this claim.
(c) Sinnott-Armstrong and Wheatley (2012) review numerous ways that we could provide a principled distinction between moral and nonmoral norms and argue that all of them fail. They suggest that moral judgments are not a natural kind. If they aren’t, then the kinds of categorical and principled distinctions presupposed by the flowchart method may be mistaken, in which case such questions rest on faulty assumptions about the nature of moral judgments.
References
Machery, E. (2018). Morality: A historical invention. In K. J. Gray & J. Graham (Eds.), Atlas of moral psychology (pp. 259-265). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
Sinnott-Armstrong, W., & Wheatley, T. (2012). The disunity of morality and why it matters to philosophy. The Monist, 95(3), 355-377.
Stich, S. (2018). The moral domain. In K. Gray & J. Graham (Eds.), Atlas of moral psychology (pp. 547- 555). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
(3) When Joe gets to the third branch, we already encounter the central problem in metaethics: the notion of a stance-independent moral fact. What follows is a polemic. Here, I am simply stating my views on the matter, rather than providing a sustained argument for them. I am offering this view largely as a rough outline of an alternative perspective that is critical of the entire framework in which these conversations typically occur.
This notion is, in a word, unintelligible. That is, it is literally meaningless. Proponents of this view are unable to articulate what it would mean for there to be a “stance-independent moral fact,” if such facts are construed as irreducibly normative or providing categorical reasons. Lurking behind this term, philosophers have concocted whole assemblies of technical terms and fancy-sounding jargon that, when you scratch the surface, philosophers are unable to explain or communicate. This has resulted in them insisting such concepts are “primitive” or “unanalyzable” - technical-sounding terms that are code for “we cannot communicate what we mean.”
I encourage people not to be duped by this. They cannot communicate what these concepts mean not because they have bottomed out in their explanations, but because what they are presenting as “concepts” are not concepts at all, but pseudoconcepts, mere verbal ghosts masquerading as something meaningful. This retreat into the mysterious realm of the incommunicable is the last refuge of the failed methods of contemporary analytic philosophy, which rely on a residual (if often implicit) commitment to a strange kind of platonism about words and concepts, as though they have essences we can access with our minds. This way of thinking is a residue left over from the pernicious influence of Platonism on analytic philosophy, and it’s been a scourge undermining progress in the field for centuries.
In short, I am suggesting that there are deep, pervasive, and fundamental problems with the methods (or the lack thereof, as it were) of analytic philosophy.
Contemporary metaethics is framed in terms of the presumption of the legitimacy of these methods, but the past century has seen the rise (and in some cases, rumors of the fall) of traditions and approaches that challenge the dogmas of mainstream analytic philosophy. These challenges have come from pragmatists, such as James and Schiller, from logical positivists, whose views have fallen out of favor for many decades now, and of Ordinary Language Philosophers, who we are likewise told were defeated decades ago, and perhaps the most famous among them, the insights of Wittgenstein. Crude, awkward, and inaccurate formulations of these views have fallen by the wayside, but we should mistake contemporary incarnations of these views, or views inspired by them, for their fallen ancestors. A synthesis of pragmatic, empirical, and critical approaches drawing on the works of Wittgenstein have simmered at the periphery of mainstream analytic philosophy. I encourage everyone to go and have a look at such work. I think you’ll discover something rather terrifying about contemporary analytic philosophy:
It’s unclear what its methods are, and how it’s supposed to work, but to the extent that those methods are clear enough for us to discuss them, they’ve been subjected to sustained criticism for decades. What has been mainstream analytic philosophy’s response?
The intellectual equivalent of slamming the door in the face of such criticisms, covering its ears, and going “La la la la I can’t hear you.” There has never been any decisive refutation of the problems raised by Wittgenstein, for instance. Philosophers have just thrown a bunch of medals and accolades his way, declared him one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, and quietly tiptoed away from his later works, hoping nobody would notice the bright light he shined on the vacuity and absurdity of their methods.
In short, the entire framework in which these discussions are taking place is deeply flawed and should probably be abandoned.
Thinking is a poison,...and you've demonstrated that. [...]
Huemer believes we have defeasible justification for believing that things are how they seem to us. Moral realism seems true to him.
Yet when confronted with examples of people who claim that it seems to them that God exists, Huemer suggests that they may be disposed to think this way as a result of their enculturation and experiences.
I agree. But we have a goose and gander situation here: if this is a reasonable defeater for theistic seemings, could it also be a reasonable defeater for moral realist seemings?
Yes. In "Morality: A historical invention," Machery argues that the very concept of morality is a historical invention. Growing empirical research raises serious challenges about whether humanity possesses a shared, universal capacity for thinking in distinctively moral terms. Moral concepts may themselves be the product of particular cultures, and may thus be a parochial, idiosyncratic way of thinking about things. Here's the abstract:
"According to the historicist view of morality presented in this chapter, morality is a learned, culturally specific phenomenon; the distinction between moral judgment and other normative judgments is not a product of evolution, but it is rather a historical invention that reuses a motley of evolved processes and must be relearned by children generation after generation."
It may simply be that the vast majority of us are enculturated into moral thinking, and don't interact much with people who haven't been enculturated this way. So it seems less obvious to us that moral concepts are culturally parochial than the concept of God.
I think Huemer should seriously consider the possibility that there is a rather significant defeater for realist intuitions:
Realist intuitions are not the result of reliable belief-forming processes, but are due to an entrenched disposition to think in certain ways that are a byproduct of distinct cultural, historical, and linguistic circumstances, circumstances that are not universal, do not pick out features of the world apart from cultural institutions and ways of thinking constructed within it, and that should not be expected to reliably emerge independently among different populations.
Thanks for taking the time to leave these comments Lance !
@ Sure! Thanks for thanking me! I have no idea if anyone is actually reading these, given how many there are.
Allright, I see your comments every video about Moral Realism and I just have an impression that you really have some strong Anti-Realist intuitions there boy, so lets go.
"Huemer believes we have defeasible justification for believing that things are how they seem to us. Moral realism seems true to him.
Yet when confronted with examples of people who claim that it seems to them that God exists, Huemer suggests that they may be disposed to think this way as a result of their enculturation and experiences.
I agree. But we have a goose and gander situation here: if this is a reasonable defeater for theistic seemings, could it also be a reasonable defeater for moral realist seemings?"
- I don't think Huemer takes those points he make to defeat seemings involving the connection with those experiences with the belief that people have about Models of God such as from Classical Theism or Neo-classical Theism, Huemer instead of this take the Religious Experiences to be prima facie Evidence for these kinds of Philosophical Models of Gods, the point about the aspects of Cognitive Bias involving enculturation or stuff like that he makes are to undermine the association/identification with this kinds of Models of the Divine/God as specific deities such as Yahweh, Vishnu, Krishna, Shiva, Allah and so on... Huemer is Agnostic about the existence of a Supreme Being, he is an Secularist Philosopher but not an Atheistic one, I think you knew that.
"Yes. In "Morality: A historical invention," Machery argues that the very concept of morality is a historical invention. Growing empirical research raises serious challenges about whether humanity possesses a shared, universal capacity for thinking in distinctively moral terms. Moral concepts may themselves be the product of particular cultures, and may thus be a parochial, idiosyncratic way of thinking about things. Here's the abstract:
"According to the historicist view of morality presented in this chapter, morality is a learned, culturally specific phenomenon; the distinction between moral judgment and other normative judgments is not a product of evolution, but it is rather a historical invention that reuses a motley of evolved processes and must be relearned by children generation after generation."
It may simply be that the vast majority of us are enculturated into moral thinking, and don't interact much with people who haven't been enculturated this way. So it seems less obvious to us that moral concepts are culturally parochial than the concept of God.
I think Huemer should seriously consider the possibility that there is a rather significant defeater for realist intuitions:
Realist intuitions are not the result of reliable belief-forming processes, but are due to an entrenched disposition to think in certain ways that are a byproduct of distinct cultural, historical, and linguistic circumstances, circumstances that are not universal, do not pick out features of the world apart from cultural institutions and ways of thinking constructed within it, and that should not be expected to reliably emerge independently among different populations."
- I think this point only seems(ironically) plausible when you don't consider some recent studies like the one who was referred by the News in the Oxford Website whose the annoucement title was "Seven moral rules found all around the world" in which were found in a survey of 60 cultures from all around the world, values like "help your family, help your group, return favours, be brave, defer to superiors, divide resources fairly, and respect others’ property", the paper was published in the University of Chicago Press Journals and the name of it is "Is It Good to Cooperate? Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies" - Oliver Scott Curry, Daniel Austin Mullins, and Harvey Whitehouse (2019) conducted by a team from Oxford’s Institute of Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology (part of the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography) who analysed ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies, comprising over 600,000 words from over 600 sources. I think if you take this kind of thing into consideration(taking seriously some Empirical Evidence on the Moral Realist side just like the Empirical Evidence in the Anti-Moral Realist side) you at least should be a little suspect of this kind of strong intuition that Huemer mentioned on the other side as well as this kind of explanation offered above, it seems like the confidence of the Moral Realist and the Moral Anti-Realist on their beliefs should be weakened a little(I think Don Loeb that kind of thing during the Debate and I appreciated it). I'm not saying that this is definitive stuff involving Moral Universalism, but is a thing for the Moral Anti-realist to take it seriously and consider if this kind of Moral Relativistic Cultural-Historical explanations are pretty accurate or if the Cognitive Bias explanation from Moral Realists and the Difficulty in obtaining Moral Knowledge are better ones in cases of explaining some divergences and preferences for the In-Group members in moral considerations for example(In-Group Bias that Huemer mentioned).
@@DavidRibeiro1 Thanks for the response
I take empirical evidence from moral psychology very seriously. I’m glad you do, too. I am a little unsure what you take the evidence that you’re appealing to to demonstrate. Could you perhaps elaborate or clarify? Are you pointing to empirical evidence that supports moral realism, and if so, how does it do so?
I’ll try to clarify my point regarding Huemer and defeaters: My claim is that the very notion that things are “morally” right or wrong is, I maintain, a product of enculturation. It is not the case that moral norms are some kind of discoverable type of norm that we would expect different populations to reliably discover without interacting with one another, the way we’d expect them to discover facts about chemistry or physics.
Rather, it is parochial and distinct to particular cultures, like languages. That is, we wouldn’t expect aliens to have “moral” concepts for the same reason we wouldn’t expect them to play chess or speak the same languages as us. I don’t think Curry’s or anyone else’s work provides compelling evidence to the contrary. Demonstrating that societies have similar normative standards is not the same thing as demonstrating that they draw the same principled distinction between moral and nonmoral norms. The latter kind of evidence is addressed in cross-cultural research on e.g., the moral/conventional distinction, not cross-cultural research on shared normative standards.
Regarding theistic seemings, I’d also be happy to reply to that portion of your comment but I was having a bit of trouble understanding whether you were raising objections or just commenting further.
What dies morality being an invention mean? There was a point in time in human history when we weren't moved into action or condemnation as a result of other people's behaviour? Doesn't seem possible.
Huemer makes yet another mistake here at 30:07. He says, “I think it’s at least misleading to say that you thinking something is valuable when what you actually mean is just that you have an attitude towards it”
This is absurd. Imagine if I say “cake is tasty.” Does this imply that I must either be a gastronomic realist, or else I am saying something misleading and inappropriate?
No. I do not have to be a gastronomic realist. I don’t have to think cake has the property of “tastiness,” and that its “tastiness” exists independently of how it tastes to me or anyone else.
The problem with Huemer’s claim is the presumption that if someone says “X is valuable” that they’re necessarily making some kind of realist claim about the thing having the property of “valuableness” independent of the person valuing it. To say something is valuable can just mean that the speaker values it, or that it tends to be valued by people, or that it is valuable relative to some intersubjective or shared standard.
If I say, for instance, that my currency is valuable, I can mean something about how it tends to be valued by others, or it functions in a set of institutional facts, without imagining that money has any kind of intrinsic value.
There’s nothing misleading about speaking about things having various evaluative properties by saying the things in question are “good” or “valuable” or whatever. This doesn’t require us to presume realism in all of these normative and evaluative domains. For me to say something is valuable just is, in many cases, for me to say I have an attitude towards it, or that others have an attitude towards it. It’s not misleading. Huemer is helping himself to presumptions about what I and others would have to mean by such language that he isn’t entitled to presume.
"Huemer makes yet another mistake here at 30:07. He says, “I think it’s at least misleading to say that you thinking something is valuable when what you actually mean is just that you have an attitude towards it”
This is absurd. Imagine if I say “cake is tasty.” Does this imply that I must either be a gastronomic realist, or else I am saying something misleading and inappropriate?
No. I do not have to be a gastronomic realist. I don’t have to think cake has the property of “tastiness,” and that its “tastiness” exists independently of how it tastes to me or anyone else."
- Like I said before in another comment, this point doesn't seem to undermine Huemers point, because intuitively, moral values are usually taken to be universalized and/or universalizable things in principle(seem like elements that have to be universalized in principle, that is what I mean by that), while that kind of thing can't be said about tasty or other thing like that. But anyway, I agree that Huemer could have been engaged more with the Moral Language points that Loeb brought for the discussion, they were pretty interesting and could've been explored a little more in the conversation.
"The problem with Huemer’s claim is the presumption that if someone says “X is valuable” that they’re necessarily making some kind of realist claim about the thing having the property of “valuableness” independent of the person valuing it. To say something is valuable can just mean that the speaker values it, or that it tends to be valued by people, or that it is valuable relative to some intersubjective or shared standard.
If I say, for instance, that my currency is valuable, I can mean something about how it tends to be valued by others, or it functions in a set of institutional facts, without imagining that money has any kind of intrinsic value."
- Huemer says this based in some of the seemings about this subject matter involving normative moral questions and his Abductive Reasoning taking for example some insights about the notion of "Moral Progress" that is shared by most people intuitively and some of the Data obtained from the book of Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of our Nature" and other sorts of.
@@DavidRibeiro1 Even if moral values were typically universalized, and taste claims weren’t, I’m not sure what that has to do with my objection. Could you explain?
I also didn’t understand your latter remark (where you mention abductive reasoning and moral progress). I’m also curious what you mean by this:
//for example some insights about the notion of "Moral Progress" that is shared by most people intuitively//
What is it that’s shared by most people intuitively?
Thank you for posting this debate. I understand that the topic is meta-ethical, but I think it would be worthwhile to invite the "interlocuters" to start from applied ethical debates like abortion, or even "child torture" to help reveal their contrasting positions. As with much philosophical debate, I feel a paucity of examples, and even a reluctance to engage at that level, that would really in the long run help elucidate the theory.
Thank you for arranging this : ), I love these sort of discussions, but the more i hear them, the more depressed i become about the possibility of making progress on these metaethical disagreements, how do you feel bout these discussions after having arranged a couple, and do they affect your credence on your own view considering how insoluble it seems to be amongst others ?
That’s a very understandable response - philosophy is extremely difficult, especially when professionals disagree and mount not-implausible considerations in favor of their respective views. For me, I don’t find them disheartening or significantly influencing my views, since I typically have responses I find plausible to the points raised against my view(s). Though, this isn’t *always* the case - the metaethical discussions do often influence my views in small ways (Eg, I come to find a consideration less plausible due to a response from an interlocutor, etc.)
@@MajestyofReason I would be very interested then; to hear from you developing a case for moral realism and letting us learn from the plausible responses you have to the strongest objections against moral realism.
I strongly lean towards realism myself, but the debates always seem to end up in an insoluble clash of intuitions, where it appears that no progress can be made unless one person just happens to have their intuitions change arbitrarily.
These disagreements are still progress, especially if people learn and develop new ideas from it. Don't expect notable progress in your lifetime. It can take centuries for people to have a consistent set of beliefs on complex topics.
I'm a meta-ethics anti-realist. I don't think metaethics exists.
Even as an antirealist and noncognitivist I value consistency because it is apparently useful in accomplishing things in reality and communicating with others for similar goals. Consistency is easy to explain on subjective values.
Huemer, like various other moral realists I have listened to (such as Eric Sampson and Richard Brown), starts out with prima facie "justification," appeal to emotion, and "common sense" arguments for his position. I find it interesting that people are convinced by these weak supports. It makes sense for the layperson, because those things superficially satisfy common human biases, but the fact that PhDs in the field are convinced by this is puzzling. We're talking about the issue itself, not relying upon rhetorical weight to convince a population of laypeople.
The claim that there are many situations that arise in the English language that make sense when stated as propositions, does not entail those things are truth apt. You can make all kinds of statements about fantasy and nonsense that have a more recognizable form when phrased as a proposition, but that says nothing about the truth aptness of the components. This is akin to the Frege-Geach "Problem," which just seems to me to be a loaded framing with cognitivist presumptions. A noncognitivist would just phrase things differently ("I prefer when people don't steal"). Humans can map abstract concepts onto the world that aren't actually there, yes; we grant imagination.
Huemer then merely asserted that it would still be wrong to torture babies even if everyone thought the opposite. That's a fine assertion, and it will pull on the heart strings of the vast majority of people (as it's an evolutionarily advantageous trait for humans), but we're still waiting for the substantiation of that assertion. What would make it stance independently "wrong"? How can something even be stance independently "wrong"? What does that mean and where does it exist?
Then again, for his response to nihilism, he merely says, "uh, well that is obviously wrong." What does that mean? I don't understand how any philosopher can feel satisfied with making the argument (if you can call it that) "it's just obviously wrong," when the entire discussion is on the question of what wrongness is.
He then says you can't explain good without other evaluative terms, such as "desirable," but notice the forced framing of that choice of word: desirable. That's still putting the value within the object or action itself rather than within the valuer. The object or action contains whatever properties it does, and the perceiver observes whatever properties of that object or action that the perceiver is able to observe, and, of those, the perceiver _feels_ value _for_ the object or action. This doesn't make the object or action itself generally "desirable," it means the perceiver desires those properties within the thing that the perceiver desires. The valuing occurs within the perceiver. So, yes, we still use evaluative terms, but those terms describe a different location for the existence of the experience of valuing, which is what it is (an experience).
The follow-up to people having dissonant intuitions is that this shows the lack of reliability in intuitions as evidence, _especially_ in light of more complete and elegant explanations. If you want to say "my intuition is all I have for X, so I'm going with it because I have to act and am out of time," then that's what you have to do. That's a pragmatic necessity for action. That is not a reasonable approach to the ongoing metaethical discussion about alleged moral propositions. He tried to support this with saying that "everyone agrees you shouldn't take a new born baby and torture it to death." This claim is demonstrably untrue. He exaggerates here to support the point, but the support is a falsehood. The greater point here is that even _if_ everyone actually agreed on something, that wouldn't make it stance independently true. Also, this can all be sufficiently explained with aligning subjective preferences; no magical moral substance necessary.
The simple explanation is that people apparently and constantly attempt to map language onto reality, and when things are framed as being an external and foundational part of reality, as opposed to subjective, they seem to persuade people more readily, usually. People see things in the world, so they comment on those properties they see with consistency as they do internally projected feelings assigned to the external properties. When someone says, "Nickleback sucks," is it true that Nickleback sucks stance independently? When someone says, "that sunset is beautiful," is the sunset stance independently beautiful? How is morality distinct from aesthetics here? It is evident that people tend to apply descriptions to things they observe, and describing feelings about those things in the same way not only makes it consistent, but is more persuasive.
No one can explain sufficiently what "wrongness" is but alignment of subjective values, utility of persuasiveness, and action modulation can explain all of it.
Yeah I guess you make a good point. Like when we talk about philosophy we have to be clear about what terms we use.
@@azophi Yeah. Ambiguation and equivocation are two common issues I see in this area.
It is almost scary how you so eloquently summarized all of my thoughts on this matter.
I would just add that it might be unreasonable to expect consistency of feelings (and I believe this is the crux of the Frege-Geach Problem). However, this can easily be solved under non-cognitivism by pointing out that moral claims express, by definition, feelings of the _highest hierarchical level_ (for the one claiming them, that is) - hence all feelings which are inconsistent with it are automatically disregarded (otherwise contradicting the truth-apt claim that they are of the highest hierarchical level, by definition).
Here, by "X has higher hierarchical level than Y" I mean that "X is inconsistent with Y and one acts in accordance with X in the presence of both X and Y" (and yes, this is a time-dependent statement).
My reasoning behind this is the fact that, unlike other personal tastes (like chocolate preference), we expect people to _surely_ act on accordance with moral claims (not "maybe"). In this case, it would follow, in particular, that moral claims are consistent with one another (otherwise contradicting again the "highest hierarchical level" property, as an action in accordance with one would imply that the other is of a "lesser" level), so that applying logic to them would be perfectly coherent.
This might be a naive approach, but it is what makes the most sense to me right now.
Imo every odd amounts of meta before ethics makes the discussion bogus.
Ethics makes sense, meta ethics doesn't make sense, but meta meta ethics is sensible again.
@@MrCmon113 I apologize, I'm not sure I understand your meaning. Would you mind expanding on what you mean by "meta ethics is sensible again"?
(4) Beginning around 3:15 we start with Huemer’s claim that there are three main kinds of antirealism. I’m glad Huemer says “main,” but in his book, Ethical Intuitionism, he actually claims these are the only possible forms of antirealism. Notably, he later says at around 4:05 that none of these views are satisfying, and that therefore you should be a realist. So Huemer does seem to indicate that your options are:
Moral realism
Subjectivism, noncognitivism, or error theory
Huemer is just wrong about this. It’s not true that if you reject (b), you must accept (a). This is a false dichotomy. You can reject all of them. In fact, I do reject all of them.
Here’s a simple way to reject all three: What if you think the following:
(i) It’s not the case that ordinary moral claims are subjective/relative
(ii) It’s not the case that ordinary moral claims are nonpropositional
(iii) it’s not the case that ordinary moral claims report stance-independent facts
(iv) there are no stance-independent moral facts
This view doesn’t fit any of Huemer’s categories. And yet there is nothing impossible about holding this view.
There are at least three alternative accounts of folk or descriptive metaethics, which deals with questions about the meaning of moral claims: metaethical pluralism, metaethical incoherentism (Loeb’s position), and metaethical indeterminacy.
In addition, there is at least one form of antirealism Huemer doesn’t mention: the unintelligibility thesis. According to the unintelligibility thesis, it isn’t that accounts of non-naturalist moral realism, such as the form of realism Huemer endorses, are false, but that they are meaningless.
On this view, certain accounts of “stance-independent moral facts” are simply unintelligible. As a result, they do not reflect propositions, and cannot be evaluated as true or false. This view does not fit with any of the three standard categories.
Huemer’s criticisms of the three common forms of antirealism are all inadequate. They’re the kind of quick pass objections you’d get in a short intro book for undergraduates, but do not reflect the scope of the dialectic actually available in the literature. Contemporary forms of expressivism are often integrated with more sophisticated and defensible accounts that avoid some of Huemer’s objections, for instance. Huemer’s criticisms would, at best, refute extremely crude versions of noncognitivism that are over a century old. It’s far more difficult to refute contemporary forms of expressivism.
Let’s go through Huemer’s critiques of each:
(a) Noncognitivism
Note that Huemer describes noncognitivism as the few that moral statements “typically” or “generally” are neither true nor false.
What does Huemer mean by typically or generally? Does he mean it’s the view that ordinary people typically or generally use moral claims to express nonpropositional attitudes (imperatives, emotions)? There’s a lack of specificity in the claim that makes it hard to evaluate, but I want to draw attention to this, because I believe the only reasonable way to make sense of noncognitivism is that it involves an empirical hypothesis about what people are doing when they make moral claims.
Huemer’s objection is that you can use moral claims in ways that appear to be propositional.
Of course he’s right. But how does this show that moral sentences aren’t typically or generally used to express emotions or attitudes? What if we conducted empirical research and found that, in real-world contexts in which people say things like “murder is wrong,” that 95% of the time they aren’t saying anything true or false?
Merely because there are conceivable contexts in which you could use moral claims to express propositions doesn’t mean that their central or primary function is to do so, nor does it mean they are typically or generally employed to do so. Such usages could serve largely rhetorical purposes in everyday contexts, and may be largely abandoned under conditions of appropriate reflection.
In any case, what Huemer is doing is considering toy sentences, or artificial or imaginary instances of moral language, pointing out that moral claims seem to be propositional in these imaginary cases, and then extrapolating to actual moral language.
This is not an appropriate method for determining what people generally or typically are doing when they make moral claims. Such claims are empirical claims, and you need empirical evidence to assess them.
Toy sentences aren’t actual moral sentences. An actual moral sentence is a sentence someone is actually using in an actual moral context. Asking us to imagine a sentence like “murder is wrong” doesn’t allow us to know what know what people are doing in real-world contexts when they actually make such claims. These claims are empirical, and cannot be resolved by Huemer’s armchair methods
What Huemer is doing is the methodological equivalent of studying tigers by drawing pictures of tigers, then reaching conclusions about how many stripes real tigers have by studying the picture. It simply isn’t an appropriate method for addressing the question.
In short, the mere fact that we can use moral language to make propositional claims in artificial contexts devised by philosophers doesn’t demonstrate that moral claims are typically or generally used to do so in everyday contexts. For what it’s worth, ordinary people frequently choose noncognitivism when it’s offered as a response option in questions surveying how nonphilosophers actually think about metaethics. For instance, Davis (2021) actually found that noncognitivism was the most common response out of any of the response options.
References
Davis, T. (2021). Beyond objectivism: New methods for studying metaethical intuitions. Philosophical Psychology, 34(1), 125-153.
(b) Huemer’s argument against subjectivism is weak. Huemer simply says it doesn’t seems like some moral claims are true in a non-subjective way.
First, Huemer does the same thing I keep criticizing philosophers for: saying things “seem” some way or that they are “intuitive,” without being specific about who they seem this way to, or who they’re intuitive to.
It may seem to Huemer that some things are true in a stance-independent way, but it’s not at all clear that this seems to be the case to everyone else. And why should we privilege how things seem to Huemer over how they seem to others?
Huemer’s example is: “If everyone approved of torturing babies it would still be wrong to torture babies”
Two things. First, this doesn’t seem true to me. So whose intuitions are correct here? Huemer’s or mine?
Second, I don’t think what Huemer is claiming here is meaningful. As such, I’m not sure the notion of something being “wrong” in the way Huemer thinks thinks can be wrong even amounts to an intelligible propositional claim. As such, I don’t think there’s any proposition that could seem true in the first place, to Huemer or to anyone else.
(c) We get a similarly weak almost non-argument against nihilism. Once again, Huemer’s objection is simply that it’s not correct because it doesn’t seem correct…to him.
He says, “it’s extraordinary implausible.”
Citation needed. What’s the argument for this? Nihilism strikes me as the most plausible of any of the accounts Huemer describes. What’s the argument for why it’s implausible?
Huemer then employs a common rhetorical tactic when objecting to nihilism. He says:
“you think about somebody like taking a baby and just like you know beating the crap out of the baby and then killing it and you're like um you know the nihilist says yeah there's nothing wrong with that okay well that's obviously false”
This is a terrible argument. It’s a terrible argument because it relies on a kind of bait and switch, or pragmatic implication, to prompt the intuition that the nihilist has said something “false.”
Imagine the nihilist says this:
“I think beating and killing babies is a disgusting and horrible act. I deeply oppose it, and find it completely repugnant. I would want anyone who did this to be locked up for life. However, I cannot agree with moral realists that there are “stance-independent moral facts” such that we a “categorical reason” not to harm babies independent of our goals, standards, or values, because I think realists have confused and mistaken notions about “reasons” that are either conceptually confused or rely on implausible metaphysics. Nevertheless, I am equally outraged and disgusted by baby harm.”
This is what a “nihilist” is likely to think about killing babies. But the way Huemer frames the matter, he makes it seem like the nihilist is indifferent to beating and killing babies.
Huemer is engaged in normative entanglement. Normative entanglement occurs whenever metaethical claims are embedded inside normative claims. When this occurs, to reject the metaethical thesis pragmatically implies that one rejects the normative thesis, and may also imply that one lacks the appropriate reactive attitudes and prosocial emotions we expect and want others to have.
Imagine this question:
Realist: “Do you think it’s objectively wrong to beat and kill babies?”
The problem with this question is that it’s asking two claims simultaneously, almost like a loaded question:
Is it wrong to beat and kill babies (normative claim)?
Is it objectively wrong to do so? (metaethical claim)
If someone answers “Yes,” then they easily communicate that they agre with both (1) and (2).
But what if they say “No”?
The problem with saying “no” is there is no way to respond to one part of the question without implying a response to the other part. If you say “No,” are you saying no because you don’t think there are objective moral facts (a metaethical position), no because you don’t think it’s wrong to beat and kill babies (a normative claim), or both?
There’s no way to respond to the metaethical portion of the question without implying that you don’t think it’s wrong to beat and kill babies.
When Huemer poses questions like this, Huemer is leaving to the audience to feel the intuitive pull of how obvious it is that it is bad to beat and kill babies. But this is a normative claim, NOT a metaethical claim. A nihilist can think that it is bad to beat and kill babies. In fact, they can be more morally opposed, more disgusted, and more outraged by such actions than Huemer or any moral realist. And yet the way Huemer, and other moral realists frame these questions, whether they realize it or not they are taking advantage of the fact that the question they’re asking is very similar to a loaded question that gives the impression that if you deny the metaethical claim that you’re some kind of evil monster that doesn’t care of we kill babies.
Once you realize this, you can see this maneuver for what it is: a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand that has gone unchallenged and unnamed. I am challenging, and I have named it. This is normative entanglement, and it is not an appropriate way to prompt metaethical intuitions.
It is not legitimate to graft metaethical claims onto normative claims, and rhetorically piggyback on our attitudes towards the normative claim, in order to give the misleading impression that the metaethical claim gets to come along for the ride free.
Alright, so that wraps up Huemer’s objections to noncognitivism, subjectivism, and error theory/nihilism.
I don’t think Huemer has raised any good objections to any of these positions. Note that I do not even endorse these positions, and I think there are a variety of objections you could raise against them. But here, at least, Huemer doesn’t raise them. Huemer’s objections are not strong, and antirealists representing all three of these positions can and in some cases have offered rather substantive responses to these sorts of concerns. Huemer’s objections are at best superficial, and at worst, barely amount to a meaningful form of objection, since they rest almost entirely on straightforward appeals to realist intuitions.
@@lanceindependent I agree with most of your responses to Huemer's objections. Some things you said before that bugged me, though:
As a non-philosopher I might be failing to see the nuance of the terms, but doesn't (i) contradict (iii) on your first comment?
And is it not the case that the unintelligibility thesis entails non-cognitivism? I mean, you said it yourself that unintelligible claims cannot be true or false, and isn't that conclusion about moral claims precisely what non-cognitivism is, by definition?
@@EvilMatheusBandicoot (1) Do (i) and (iii) contradict each other?
No, there’s no contradiction between (i) and (iii). There are two reasons. First, one could think the answer is “both” or that it’s indeterminate, and second, because the claims in question may presuppose a particular conception of a “moral claim” that we may reject.
Regarding the first, onemight think that since stance-dependence and stance-independence are mutually exhaustive, that it’s going to be one or the other. But this is only true if whatever it is that you asked about was categorically either one or the other. But the answer to some questions may be “in some cases it’s one, and in some cases it’s the other.” For instance, if someone asked whether “fruit are bananas,” the answer isn’t “yes” or “no,” but “some are and some aren’t.” In other cases, someone’s belief about a given issue may be indeterminate because they don’t have a belief about it. For instance, we could ask whether someone thinks God’s favorite color is blue, or some color other than blue. But if that person doesn’t believe in God, then there’s no way to answer that question.
Both of these sorts of options are available to us with respect to traditional metaethical distinctions. You could think some moral claims are subjective/relative and some aren’t. And you could think some report stance-independent facts. And, critically, you could think some report neither.
Regarding the second, another problem with the traditional accounts is what, exactly, they are referring to by “moral claims.” Are they making an empirical claim about the meaning of ordinary moral claims? If so, what kind of claim? My view of language is that words and sentences don’t have any meaning at all; rather, they are tools used to convey the communicative intent of the person using them.
(2) Does unintelligibility entail noncognitivism
No, unintelligibility does not entail noncognitivism. Noncognitivism holds the following:
(1) Moral claims are not propositions
The unintelligibility thesis holds that:
(2) Certain conceptions of moral realism are unintelligible.
However, the unintelligibility thesis does include a claim about what ordinary people mean when they make moral claims. As such, it’s possible that various accounts of moral realism are unintelligible, but that these accounts aren’t a feature of ordinary moral thought and discourse. If we wanted to call this a kind of noncognitivism, it would be strained, since it isn't a claim about the meaning of ordinary moral claims, and that's typically a key component of noncognitivism. If we still wanted to call it a form of noncognitivism, we could; that would be a terminological choice, and there'd be no fact of the matter about it.
One could say that anyone committed to unintelligible forms of moral realism is, technically, subject to a type of noncognitivism: their moral claims wouldn’t be propositional. However, if that were the case, we’d end up with a somewhat unusual position that would be hard to fit into the standard categories. It would be closer to something like Loeb’s incoherentism.
What we’d have are cases where a subset of speakers would be using moral language in a way that was unintelligible, and thus nonpropositional. This would be similar in some ways to an error theory, but one that (a) didn’t attribute systematic error in terms of asserting false propositions to people, but instead saying things that aren’t meaningful and (b) didn’t apply to everyone or to ordinary moral claims. Strictly speaking, the unintelligibility thesis also does not entail that moral realism is false, though. There are different accounts of moral realism, and some of them aren’t unintelligible.
@Lance Independent how can you maintain that there are both subjective and objective moral claims?
Argument for the Ontological Independence of Morality
1. Objective moral values and duties can be conceived coherently without positing a deity.
2. If it is logically possible for objective moral values and duties to exist independently of a deity, then objective morality doesn't depend on a deity.
3. Objective moral values and duties can be inherent/intrinsic to a person's nature
4. Therefore, objective morality does not depend upon the existence of a deity.
Argument from Logical =/= Metaphysical Possibility
1. if it is logically possible that there is atleast one instance of suffering, then it is metaphysically possible for God to create a world with the greatest good
2. Logical Possibility does not entail Metaphysical Possibility
3. Therefore, p1 is not true
Defense of p2.
1. The proposition of "a man can fly unassisted" is logically coherent (i.e., it is not self-contradictory), but it is metaphysically impossible in the actual world.
2. Philosophical Zombies can be considered logically coherent but metaphysically impossible
3. Possible Worlds can be considered logically coherent but metaphysically impossible
Furthermore, a moral anti-realist rejects the existence of objective moral truths, while the Pyrrhonian moral skeptic doubts the possibility of ever reaching a certain moral knowledge due to the problem of moral disagreement and subjectivity.
Argument for Functionalism
1: Mental states are identical to physical events.
2: Any entity that is identical to another is indistinguishable from it
3. Therefore, mental states are physical events.
For a mental state to be coherent, it must involve a sequence of events or changes over time. For instance, the mental state of thinking requires the successive generation and processing of thoughts, which unfolds over time. Similarly, emotions arise in response to specific stimuli or events, and they also require time for their development and expression. Thus, the coherence of mental states inherently involves temporal unfolding, supporting the idea that mental states are not static entities but dynamic processes. Even if these events were defined as mental events, that would not entail they were distinct substances but merely manifestations of physicalism i.e. ways in which physical objects can be/change metaphysically. Under functionalism, the mind is a set of functions.
Argument for Nominalism
1. Abstract, mind-independent entities exist.
2: If Abstract entities exist, then we can prove they exist via non-empirical means.
3. If Functionalism is true, then abstract entities are physical events
4. For Platonism to be coherent, it must show that abstract objects are distinct from physical events
5. It cannot be shown that abstract objects are distinct from physical events
Conclusion: Therefore, Platonism is incoherent.
Argument From Physicalism
1. Functionalism posits that mental states are defined by their functional roles or causal relationships rather than by their underlying physical properties.
2: Nominalism denies the existence of abstract entities and universals, asserting that only particular individual objects exist.
3: Mental states are instantiated in and realized by physical systems, such as the brain.
4: Physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that everything that exists is either physical in nature or can be explained by physical phenomena.
Conclusion: Therefore, mental states are physical states, and physicalism is true.
Argument For Necessitarianism
P1. Things can be other than they are.
P2. If things can be other than they are metaphysically, then it is possible for them to have different properties or exist differently in some possible worlds.
P3. We cannot prove that things can be other than they are metaphysically.
P4. If something is necessarily true, then it cannot be other than it is in any possible world.
C1. It is possible that things cannot be other than they are metaphysically.
C2. Necessarily, things cannot be other than they are metaphysically
Argument Against Contingent Substances
P1: Ontologically independent substances are those that exist and have their properties independently of other entities.
P2: Contingent entities are those whose existence or properties depend on something external to themselves.
P3: If a substance is contingent, it relies on external factors for its existence or properties.
P4: The concept of necessitarianism asserts that all events and states of affairs are necessary and could not have been otherwise.
C1: Therefore, if substances are contingent, they would not be ontologically independent, which contradicts the concept of necessitarianism.
C2: Hence, all substances must be necessary and have their properties necessarily, supporting the position of necessitarianism.
Defense of P1:
Ontological independence is a well-established philosophical concept that pertains to entities' existence and properties. It asserts that substances have their existence and properties intrinsically, rather than depending on other entities for them. This concept is compatible with various philosophical perspectives and provides a basis for understanding the necessary nature of substances in the context of necessitarianism.
Defense of P2 and P3:
Contingent entities, by definition, rely on external factors for their existence or properties. If a substance is contingent, it means that its existence or properties could have been otherwise, which implies a dependence on external factors. This aligns with the notion of contingency and supports the understanding that contingent entities are not ontologically independent.
Defense of P4:
The concept of necessitarianism posits that all events and states of affairs are necessary, meaning they could not have been different from what they are. This notion assumes that there are no contingent entities whose existence or properties depend on external factors. If substances were contingent, it would contradict the idea of necessitarianism, as it would introduce elements of contingency and non-necessity into the ontology of substances.
Argument for Substance Monism
P1: If the mental is reducible to the physical, then the mental is not a distinct substance
p2 The mental is defined by the functional roles or causal relationships of physical phenomena
P3: Physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that everything that exists is either physical in nature or can be explained by physical phenomena.
P4: Mental states are physical events.
P5: Therefore, mental states are physical phenomena, and physicalism is true.
P6: Substance Monism is true.
Defense of p4.
P1. Mental states require the passage of time to be coherent.
P2. Physical events, as part of the physical world, occur within the framework of time.
C1. Therefore, mental states are identical to physical events because they share the common property of requiring the passage of time.
Argument for Moral Anti-Realism
1. Objective moral facts or properties are posited to be external and independent of subjective human perspectives.
2. If objective moral facts or properties are external and independent, they cannot be reducible to or identical with physical events intrinsic to the nature of physical substances.
3. If objective moral facts or properties are not reducible to physical events, they would require an ontological status beyond the physical realm.
4. Physicalism posits that everything that exists is ultimately physical in nature, and there are no non-physical entities or substances.
5. If objective moral facts or properties exist and are not reducible to the physical, physicalism would be false.
6. The coherence of objective moral facts or properties, therefore, raises questions about the compatibility with physicalism, which is a well-supported and widely accepted ontological position.
7. The existence of objective moral facts or properties would require a non-physical realm, akin to a form of moral Platonism.
8. Moral Platonism, as a non-physical and abstract realm, may not be coherent with our current understanding of the natural world and the physical basis of reality.
9. The assumption of objective moral facts or properties as external and independent entities raises challenges regarding their interaction with the physical world and how they can impact human actions and moral judgments.
10. Therefore, the coherence of objective moral facts or properties becomes questionable if we consider the implications it has on our ontological commitments, such as physicalism and our understanding of the natural world.
Argument from Pyrrhonian Moral Skepticism
1.Objective moral truths are sui generis moral facts or properties that exist independently of humans, independent of beliefs, opinions, or cultural norms.
2.If objective moral truths exist, they can be established to exist independently of human's mental states.
3.There are no ways of establishing objective moral truths exist independently of human's mental states.
4.Human mental states are physical events.(viz. functionalism and nominalism)
5.The Problem of the Criterion, when applied to the Münchhausen Trilemma, makes it impossible to establish ontological objective moral facts or properties via epistemological means.
6.Therefore, claiming ontological objective moral facts or properties exist commits a special pleading fallacy.
Great discussion! Thanks for hosting, Joe. While I like Don, and he seems like such a great guy, I do find Huemer’s overall position to be a bit more persuasive. Don made some great points though.
bro didnt even watch the debate LOL
As a moral anti-realist, i constantly engage in moral debate and regularly claim moral truths, and i am conscious that i am actively engaging in deception, since all i want to accomplish is to convince people about my subjetive preferences. Psychologically, claiming moral truths is simply more effective, even though there are no moral truths.
Is it just me or were Huemer's considerations in favor of moral realism incredibly weak? A lot of the things he said kind of reminded me of some of the ways Christian apologists talk. For example, right at the beginning, he seems to be saying something to the effect of "all the other metaethical theories have flaws therefore one should adopt mine." Like, what? Also, intuitions? Really? If he's forced to say that intuitions prima facie justify a belief in a deity as long as there's a "religious experience" then I'm sorry but I'm out.
I was surprised he wasn't pushed more on metaphysics of moral realism. For example, how exactly do our intuitions pick out these moral truths? What's the mechanism? Is it some kind of physical force? Probably not, right? Well, what is it then? I don't know, I've probably listened to too much Lance...
Haha. Your concerns aren’t unreasonable. There was *so* much we weren’t able to cover in the episode regarding (Eg) problems you adumbrate for the epistemology of non-naturalist intuitionism. Maybe I’ll get Huemer on later (in months) with Lance, or else get Huemer on to address these questions🙂
that was the thing that sprung to my mind - Christian apologists claiming objective morality because otherwise...Hitler. it could have been Frank Turek talking.
@@absolutelyoptimistictheology platonism is even more ridiculous than moral realism, but I do agree that they go hand-in-hand
I mean, all that you did was state questions and then say "this isn't for me" rather than saying the actual problems with his logic. So, instead of just saying general statements like "I don't like intuition as a potential guide for logic" or saying "I don't understand how such a mechanism for knowing moral truths would operate," you should earnestly ask "Why don't I like intuition? Don't all humans have intuitions? Doesn't that also apply to philosophers that come to the conclusion of moral anti-realism? Does that apply to the intuition of logical and syllogistic reasoning, which relies on intuition?" And "Why could an immaterial mind/soul allow for the ability to know moral truths?" Be a bit more honest with your questions, and do not equate your "presence of personal questions" to "absence of objective answers."
It's not just you. They were incredibly weak. See my comments above where I address each individually.
//he seems to be saying something to the effect of "all the other metaethical theories have flaws therefore one should adopt mine."//
Yes, and also note that the main problem with this claim is that the three forms of antirealism he describes aren't the only views antirealists can take.
// For example, how exactly do our intuitions pick out these moral truths? What's the mechanism? //
Yea, it's a reasonable concern. I think philosophers think we have some kind of special a priori access to deep truths just by thinking about it. It sounds like magic to me, and extremely dubious. But that's how many of them seem to think.
Dr. Loeb's "non-moral" explanations of convergance (greater control, lower suffering etc.) strike me as similar to argumetns against, say, free will that would point to evidence that "something is happening in the brain" when we make decisions. Of course! We shouldn't expect moral judgement and convergence to be independent of worldly facts. Why not follow that thread? I think the explanation of moral facts is in that territory: the nebuluous network of mental states, interactive properties etc.
I've been arguing that pain, absent countervailing factors, is bad. Pleasure, absent countervailing factors, is good. And this just flows from what is like to experience pain and pleasure.
And this can be a starting point for at least reaching some objective moral truths.
That's called ethical hedonism, you are 2300 years too late for this to be novelty
@@Samura1313 Thanks! I didn't think I invented it.
Should people stop arguing for the existence of God because it is an old idea?
Yeah, I think we should torture anti-realists to force them to admit that pain is bad. 🤔
Loeb got nothing when he said “couldn’t have said it better myself” in response to an excerpt from his book. Banger line clearly his view is better
?
I am one of the few realists* about morality and science that I know.
*I might qualify as a variety of anti-realist to some people, though I think it is in the same way a theist about a particular god is an atheist with respect to others. I am still figuring out how to articulate parts of my position, but I gravitate to a view that holds moral facts to be natural facts about experiencers and their experiences realized through the lens of experience. It is objective so far as any subject must be a variety of object within a network of objective relations.
What I think about the mathematical corollary of my view, I am still piecing together.
I already commented on this video with a more thorough response elsewhere, but I wanted to revisit this discussion. That move exchange at 50:25 is beautiful to me:
Dr. Loeb: "I would rely on the example of someone saying something like 'It seems to me that the tree has a spirit'."
Dr. Huemer: "I would argue that this is probably caused by elements of culture, that you were taught certain things, and if you were raised in a different culture you would believe different things."
Dr. Loeb: "You sound like me talking about moral intuitions."
Wrecked.
Thinking something is valuable *just is* having a certain attitude towards it, and Huemer has offered no reason to think otherwise. What a strange conversation.
Huemer slays
Heumer is solid 💪🏾
I found his arguments to be anything but solid. Appeal to popularity? Really?
@@cloudoftime Actually it is a legit point because moral disagreement can be resolved which suggest we have moral intuition such as killing babies is wrong.
@@JohnSmith-bq6nf Moral intuition is just feeling. It's stance dependent. Moral disagreements can only be resolved internally, which requires something to be contingently relative. Wrongness is just an agreement in this way. All that's real there is a similarity in preference between agents.
@@cloudoftime No black person is going to say moral progress doesn’t exist since slavery was abolished. Most philosophers are moral realists because anti realists argument aren’t very convincing.
@@JohnSmith-bq6nf What someone from a specific group is inclined to say because their group has had movements they prefer in a set span of time is irrelevant. That does not entail or evidence stance independent moral facts. And moral progress begs the question. What we see is _movement_ in behaviors people refer to as "moral." Progress assumes an end which is derived from preference.
A slim majority of philosophers are moral realists (~60%). And they aren't all specialists in moral philosophy. And it's because of bias. They find the semantics useful. Most people don't even question the concept, and it has utility, but that doesn't make it real.
What source do you have showing the reason to be "antirealist arguments aren't very convincing"?
And the antirealist position is mostly arrived at through a strict scrutiny of the lacking substantiation for moral realist arguments. What even is a stance independent moral fact? What could it even be?
Very interesting, you should have Aaron Robinowitz on this this topic. He has a podcast called Embrace the Void. He considers himself a moral realist. I think you guys would have a good conversation.
Nice, getting into anti-realism because of Kane B's channel.
Not convinced of it as though I don't see any cosmic meaning I belive all earthly life as evolved from a common ancestor and hence hold universal earthly values. Those beings pain/ suffering/ discomfort is bad and pleasure or the lack of the former negetive stimuli is good.
Though in the rest of the universe pain may not be a thing even for sentient beings so I make no judgment on pains value outside of earth, as It may not even be a concept outside of earth. But for us it matters, or at least it seems to.
Anyways now I'll watch the video
We value our own pain, but we don't always value the pain of others equally. I think if all pain mattered equally to all of us then we could not survive. Therefore there has to be some sort of relativism, some sort of differences in the way that different living creatures deal with their pain and each other's pain. Ukrainians today are happy to see Russian soldiers in pain and that is a form of inequality and subjectivity and relativism.
@@turdferguson3400 idk I don't find the fact some people, myself included, get pleasure from other peoples suffering. Im naturally sadistic, I take great pleasure in others sufferings as well as the breaking of societal norms. But I don't belive my actions are right when I do them, I am aware that the reason I take pleasure is because the fact their is a harm befalling them.
So I agree in the sense that I don't think when I punch someone from a "cosmic view I'm really punching myself" as their is a natural degree of separation, our minds are separate not linked in some panpsychist collectivist like view.
But just because I can never feel what another feels, just relate and reflect my own experiences into them, doesn't mean that their sensations are alien to the point where I shouldn't care that their feelings are likely identical to my own.
What?
The last common ancestor probably didn't feel pain.
Unless you're a panpsychist - then you'd equally have to hold that anything might experience pain or pleasure.
Honestly no clue what earth or common ancestry are supposed to have to do with anything.
I know this is a year old, but maybe someone will answer.
I'm more partial to Huemer and moral realism. Still I'm halfway through this conversation and I don't really understand Loeb's view on morality? What does he think lol?
Dr. Loeb presented his position very clearly. I'm eager to learn more. I'm disappointed with Huemer's attitude; he was weirdly dismissive.
moral realism is a fluid glue that takes the shape of the dominant socio-economic framework in a society. It is used as justification for any/all actions no matter how altruistic or depraved to bind/fix/conserve the values/myths/raison d'etre/archetypes of the society & its institutions.
there may exist some genetic memory from our primordial past yhat from time to time manifests in a psychological existential phenomenon in the collective conscience, i.e. the deep longing for cooperation, i.e. to both give & receive affection & protection, that finds expression in a social movement, which displaces the current moral reality, momentarily. as these longings can be satified locally/intimately are inherently idiosyncratic thus cannot be abstracted, codified, institutionalized & scaled. so are subsumes by the next moral reality.
One strange thing in this discussion was that at times Humeur spoke as though he was unaware of fairly standard responses to his arguments. For example, when he says that he doesn’t understand how Don can claim that the institution of morality is valuable, I find it hard to believe that he didn’t know what he meant. It comes out later on that his problem is that it’s misleading to speak that way, but the way he initially phrases his objection makes it sound like he has no idea what Don is getting at, which can’t be the case.
Huemer also often states that there are just three forms of antirealism, and implies that if you can reject these three forms of antirealism, that this entails realism.
However, there are more ways to reject moral realism than to endorse one of these three positions, and it strikes me as strange Huemer either doesn't agree with this or perhaps hasn't heard some of these alternatives (which in some cases are admittedly fairly obscure).
Joe should have placed Dr. Michael Huemer side by side with Dr. Don Loeb and himself at the bottom. ⚖🙂
I didn’t have control of that - blame Zoom!🙂
@@MajestyofReason was kidding! 😄 Thank you for the discussion. 😇
This is one of those topics where someone's intuitions can totally bias the perception of the discussion. I always find moral nihilism very unconvincing. Good discussion anyway! 👌
7:57 - IDK Huemer, that really sounds like the ordinary definition of "intuition" to me...
Enjoyed the video, but it's a shame we didn't get to see the two of them in a gladiator match
This debate needed more moderation. Shouldn't need it with two philosophers, but Loeb was constantly interrupting and was talking most of the time.
good Joe, video.
I am an existential nihilist - I believe that there is no inherent meaning in life and that morality is not written into nature or beyond it; rather, it's merely a survival mechanism developed through evolution. Therefore, any action that exists cannot be inherently right or wrong, and we create moral descriptions only because we are capable of doing so. On the other hand, I am against moral relativism; I believe that we should seek the best ethical theory (or find a moral convergence point among ethical theories) that extrapolates concerns for survival and well-being to include all sentient beings, based on similarities not differences and self-evident principles like pain and pleasure. I believe in constructing coherent and collectively valuable ethical systems, rather than relying solely on individual values. I think of this as ethical mathematics. Is this contradictory? I'm not sure since I'm not an expert in philosophy, just an enthusiast, but I don't think it is.
I would still think of your opinion as some sort of relativism, which is not a critique. Relativism doesn't imply that your moral system is incoherent, or random, or that it doesn't have some pragmatic value. You base your ethical views on pain and pleasure, but there are people who could reasonably disagree, for example some people might say that God's word is above pain and pleasure and while I'm an atheist, this seems like a reasonable opinion.
So for me the 'relativist' part of your view is, that relative to you as an agent, pain and pleasure are your basis of morality. But since you say that the principles of pain and pleasure are self evident, you might actually be a realist if you think 'self evident' implies a stance independent fact.
Mike is brilliant (one of my faves) but it's clear that his main interest isn't engaging with the broad range of scholarly opinion.
I'm curious what you mean here. Could you expand more?
@@humesspoon3176 At some points in the discussion, Mike seems not to be familiar with certain very popular moves in the metaethical literature (27:39 is the example Don points out; 1:16:27 is another example)
(also I am very sympathetic to Mike's view)
@@vaclavmiller8032 If you mean he's not familiar with how anti-realists try to make sense of engaging with moral discourse, that's false as he engaged with e.g. fictionalist accounts in his discussion with Emerson Green. He just didn't get to respond/just didn't do a good job of asserting himself/getting response time. Or he'd just let them move one without getting a turn.
His objection to fictionalism is that it's like atheists participating in religion or taking it seriously. Like why would a moral anti-realist think people should go to war and risk their lives for moral values that don't exist?
It's as strange as an atheist genuinely praying or sacrificing their lives for religion.
He's very familiar with the literature. It's pretty tricky to understand why a moral antirealist has any interest in thinking about normative ethics if they do not believe that there are any true moral beliefs. I don't really think Don explained that well enough at all
@@sunburststratocasterI don't think it's tricky at all. Surely you can understand someone being interested in thinking about aesthetic claims even if they don't think there is any stance-independent truth value assignable to them?
I don't like it when people are treated in a way I perceive to be unjust, and might therefore try to convince others that a) the treatment is unjust and b) injustice is bad and should be reduced.
If someone doesn't agree with me on either a) or b) I don't see how I am justified in claiming that they are objectively incorrect.
I don't think this is an issue in practice with regards to b), aversion to injustice being near universal. But for a), regarding what is and isn't just, opinions differ wildly from person to person and from culture to culture.
What is also highly variable is the perceived importance of justice relative to other moral "values".
To confound the disagreement on a), it is not even universally uniform what "justice" means in an abstract sense, before we even get to concrete examples.
Hi Joe,
Would it be in your interest to have a discussion/debate with another channel called 'Computing the Soul' on the primacy of existence? I know them personally and I think it would make for an interesting discussion.
The argument from linguistics is really unconvincing to me. When people talk about morality, they often don't realize the difference between seeing how people act and the question of how they should act. They, do, however, usually have an opinion on how people should act. Sometimes an act can be moral, immoral, or even amoral.
It's not clear to me either how this argument dictates what exactly morality is or how we come to know it. In other words, it's not clear to me that it's actually metaethics because it's about how people use their language. It juts doesn't seem like it even is in the realm of philosophy.
9:00 - The refraction of a stick in water is a great example of judging one appearance/intuition against another. So the question is, can we do the same thing for *moral* appearances? Or do we only have one type of appearance that cannot be weighed against any other? I think it's the latter, so is there any way to know that this particular appearance is accurate? I don't think there is.
I agree, but I will also add that it's not just one type of appearance that cannot be weighed against any other: aesthetic appearances are the same. The distinction is that people seem to have more generally accepted the subjective nature of aesthetic judgments. This might just be due to the fact that variations in aesthetic judgements don't result in consequences of the same weight as moral judgements or expectations.
The following was my response to an uploaded question about whether or not we can objectively say that Hitler was wrong. I thought it might be relevant here.
What we can objectively say about Hitler is
that he had very little respect for human well-being. Whether or not that means Hitler was
wrong depends on the definition of the word wrong. If the word wrong means something like “behaving in a way that disregards the well-being of others” then Hitler was wrong. Answers to questions like this depend on how we
choose to define words. Of course, by their nature, words have arbitrary definitions as they are human inventions. Words mean what we decide they mean. Once we follow Voltaire’s advice and define our terms, things should become more clear. So where does all the confusion come from?
When you ask someone to define what they
mean by a term like “moral” for example, they usually respond by referring to a synonym like "good", "right”, “ethical", "ought". This exercise illuminates nothing if none of these “normative language” terms are being assigned a substantive definition and they all just vacuously refer to each other.
If you try to suggest a substantive definition for a moral term like " the facilitation of well-being" or "obeying the commands of Allah", an interlocutor can (correctly) tell you that your definition is arbitrary and that they reject your definition, at which point, what’s left to say?
Some brave thinkers seem to think they can pull moral philosophy up by the bootstraps by finding an objective way to justify definitions of moral terms such that the definitions are non arbitrary and substantive. The pitfall here is that they will inevitably end up needing to use the moral term (or one of its synonyms) they’re looking to define in the argument that intends to show that their suggested definition of that term is best. There is no way to soundly prove that your proposed definition of the word “moral” is the morally justifiable definition to choose, although that’s exactly what such a program would require. You would need to already have a definition of “moral” so you can use that definition as a prescription for how to define the word in the first place. The word would essentially need to define itself. It leads to a self referential and circular mess.
I think most problems in meta ethics are pseudo problems. They come down to quibbles over how best to define words.
It’s sort of like biologists arguing about whether or not viruses are alive or astronomers arguing about whether or not Pluto is a planet.
It seems like you could constrain the definition by applying a practical criteria, like "what we determine is moral will become our collective goal".
@@goldenalt3166 I think that’s what we do whether we realize it or not. The protection and improvement of well-being is probably the closest that we, as a species, get to an identifiable collective goal even if it goes unspoken. When I listen to people talk; their use of moral language is usually in the context of discussing well-being.
I have no issue with defining moral words in terms of well-being. That’s usually what I have in mind when I use moral words in everyday speech. My suggestion would be, at least in the context of rigorous philosophical discourse or debate, that we discard moral language. For example, if my interlocutor and I both agree to define “moral” as that coarse of action that best facilitates well-being and we both agree that well-being is what we care about; instead of talking about what would be the moral thing to do in a certain situation, why not skip the moral language and talk directly about what coarse of action would best facilitate well-being? The moral language is an unnecessary middle step that obfuscates the discussion without adding anything of substance.
Whatever we decide to do with moral language, it’s illogical to argue about how to define moral terms. Words are human inventions, they mean what we decide they mean. Words need to have definitions that are internally consistent and once they are defined, they need to be used the same way throughout an argument to avoid an equivocation fallacy. Those are the only restrictions. Telling someone that you have ethical concerns with how they are defining a term like “morally right” is essentially telling them that their definition of “morally right” is not morally right. You can’t use the meaning of the term “morally right” to decide what morally right should mean. It’s a self referential and circular objection. Words can’t define themselves. Moral words are no exception.
@@robh8024 Meaning is coeval with the usage in language. They are tantamount to the same thing: meaning = language = meaning. It's practically speaking, tautagory.
wow! Top content!
Dr Loeb just came across non sensical in this conversation. I’m using language that does not really mean what I’m saying:)
To pass judgement upon anything would seem disingenuous.
With that said, I also think that Michael struggles with the grounding question and it showed.
Dr Loeb, I think, makes perfect sense. People operate with two codes all the time. Tons of examples. You’re in a committee and you disagree with the consensus view, but you go along with it because you are functioning as a group, and then you earnestly work to realize it. Or you don’t want to hug all your relatives when they go home after Thanksgiving dinner, but you do because it’s part of convention, and you don’t want any friction. You smile and say thank you when the cashier gives you your receipt, but, though you don’t really care, you sincerely enact this pleasantry. You see what I mean? You can be an anti-realist, but you still have to live in the world among other people and fashion some kind of coherent moral structure, so I would say an eagerness to maintain civility is not disingenuous. One can think X is ultimately not important, but here, now, in this context it is.
@@peterg418 I get this but I personally don’t think it furthers any overarching narrative. Typically, you do something to cause less friction because you deem friction to be bad.
My point would be that then you admit that you don’t think friction is bad or good, everything you say to the other person proclaiming the good and bad of friction is nonsensical.
@@joshwatson5561rather than nonsensical, you could say relative. Maybe it’s good that I argue for a raise, but not so good for my boss. Maybe it’s good that I confront my wife for leaving her dirty clothes around the room, but maybe she doesn’t want to hear it. Maybe my relatives want a hug at the end of Thanksgiving, but I don’t. And my position can change based on my mood. Error theorists might call those saying they have a fixed ground for a permanent moral claim the one taking a nonsense position. Though nonsense just means not based on the senses, which is different than, say, gibberish or unintelligible.
Good video. Don interrupted Michael too many times for me. It got super annoying and super rude. I wish he would have let Michael talk as much as he did.
Totally agree.
I came in as a moral realist, but damn Dr. Don Loeb destroyed Huemer here!
Great discussion. I think Dr. Loeb did a great job of dealing with the subjectivity of this entire enterprise. And he was congenial and respectful Dr. Huemer seemed very much like a christian theist in his approach to the concepts. If you don't fit his categories, he smugly chuckled in a denigrating, dismissive matter. He just didn't have convincing substantiation for his claims. Assertions just don't do it.
yes, I've thought that huemer seems to display a kind of apologetic's rhetoric
I am against 'objective' morality for the very simple reason that concepts such as 'good' and 'bad' are entirely based around subjective experience of pain or pleasure. There is a certain naive realism involved in objective morality that we don't get when, for example, we point out that the sky is not 'really' the blue that we perceive. Thus I'd find it extremely suspicious if all our conscious experience is a subjective creation of the brain yet somehow morality gets to escape that and be 'real'. I don't see any difference at all between the illusory and subjective blue of the sky and the illusory and subjective sense of 'morality'.
Seems like Huemer had relatively little time to talk during this discussion
I don't think moral agreement is really equivalent to moral disagreement. For moral realism to be truly undermined one would have to undermine something like the language or cognitive faculty being used. Any agreement implies there is something that is agreed upon. If that agreed upon thing is understood as being a moral proposition not up for debate then by definition it is no longer in the realm of disagreement. It is now being agreed upon as being a fact. If there is even one moral fact then moral disagreement in itself is not enough to undermine moral realism. To argue against there being even one moral fact just based on disagreement about other potential moral facts just isn't strong enough.
Exactly
@@contactpinacolada Agreed. My point was that the existence of moral disagreement itself does not undermine the existence of moral realism.
"It is now being agreed upon as being a fact."
That is on a pragmatic account of facts. But AFAICS the kind of "moral facts" postulated by non-trivial moral-realism assertions cannot be satisfied by a pragmatic account of facts. "Moral facts" have to exist *independent* of people's stances in order for moral realism to stand, so this agreement[1] fails to assist moral realism.
Personally, moral realism seems incoherent because I don't believe that 'people agree about stance-independent moral facts' is an assertion that could possibly be valid, because
a) agreement is a stance, which throws doubt on whether the thing agreed upon could possibly be 'stance independent',
b) I don't agree that stance independent moral facts are something that people (eg. Huemer) can think about in the first place. Manipulating the particles 'stance independent' 'moral' and 'fact' and observing this combination of concepts is logically possible and would have certain implications, doesn't mean this phrase grounds out in any distinct experience people actually have - it isn't 'like anything'. It's empirically toothless. (Huemer might respond 'But, seemings!' -- but 'seemings' are not identifiably and distinctly moral experiences as he defines them. You can accept seemings while still rejecting moral realism)
[1] (more generally there is also the main problem with behaviourist appeals like 'people seem to agree'; it provides no indication of the underlying model. An emotivist and moral realist can outward appear to agree that 'murder is wrong', and also believe that they really do agree. But if they don't additionally discuss their _meta-_ ethical views (emotivism, moral realism) and agree that those are 'compatible enough' in this particular case, then that appearance of agreement is entirely deceptive -- to a fully-informed observer, it's just obvious that the 'is wrong' of moral realism and the 'is wrong' of emotivism are quite different predicates, so no actual agreement should be assumed to have taken place.)
(I do agree with your observation that moral disagreement is not a strong-enough argument, FWIW)
@@vishtem33 Regarding your point a about agreement on stance-independent moral facts, how does agreement being a stance throw any doubt on whether the thing agreed about could possibly be stance-independent? My neighbor and I agree that there is a fence between our houses, but that doesn't make the fence stance-dependent. If we didn't agree, it would still be there; if we agreed that it wasn't there, it would still be there; and if we didn't ever look at it, it would still be there. No matter what our stances are or even whether we have stances, it is still there; that's stance-independence.
Regarding b, I don't see why something should have to have an experiential quality to be a possible object of thought. It isn't "like anything" that 2+2=4, but we can still think about mathematical facts. It isn't "like anything" that rainfall is a form of precipitation, but it is a fact, I can think about it, we can come to know it, etc. I'm very unclear on what you're saying here.
@@thejimmymeister Your first response is certainly fair and I admit that I made a bad argument there.
Regarding the second, I would argue that "2+2=4" and "rainfall is a form of precipitation" are both grounded in experience: you can experience having more or less of a resource, then you can want to quantify that, basic arithmetic formalizes that; '2+2=4' is like, say, lining apples up on a countertop. You can also experience rainfall and other forms of precipitation. These are analytic facts that are grounded in something real. In the case of 2+2=4 we can also clearly leverage them to achieve real things, like mixing drinks consistently, or managing supply chains.
Conversely, stance-independent moral facts seem to me to depend on the existence of some kind of distinct faculty -- let's say for the sake of argument that most people have this faculty; that doesn't help moral realism because moral realists -- and to be fair I am concerned more with non-naturalist moral realists like Huemer -- merely gesture towards this supposed faculty with terms like 'seemings'. I don't accept seemings as grounding anything that is *distinctly* moral. Considering 'pain is bad' and 'the sky is blue' as fairly obvious instances of seemings, I would assert that absent any specific evidence that these are different in kind, they should be considered to be similar in kind. (them 'seeming' to be different in kind would be an attempt at circular justification IMO; justification should come from outside the domain under question). Until this distinction can be made, it seems to me appropriate to classify ''stance independent moral facts' as described by Huemer and other non-naturalist moral realists as simply failing to refer to anything.
(FWIW I think on a naturalist account 'stance-independent moral facts' can be grounded in something -- for example pain induces stress response which has various negative consequences for physical and mental health. But as far as I can see non-naturalists are non-naturalists at least in part because this kind of primarily descriptive account is not enough for them.)
Is huemer using a green screen 💀
One thing I do not understand about Huemer's position is that he considers himself to be a realist who is thereby not a relativist, but he also considers himself to be an intuitionist. To do all that together, doesn't one have to suppose that moral intuitions would not be relative, that they would experience some large cross-cultural agreement on matters of moral fact? If we zoom out and make our statements vague enough, sure, everyone shares an intuition that murder is wrong. But if we zoom in any closer, it will be clear that our intuitions about what counts as murder (wrong killing) varies. And I suspect it not only varies by culture, but possibly by individual temperment, context, and even sometimes the way we phrase questions.
I'd ask him in cases where folks have deep disagreements in their intuitions about moral facts, what then?
Frankly it was one of the most fatal and pervasive problems with his book Problem of Political Authority where he tried to convince us with fictional examples why libertarianism accords with "our" intuitions. The entire book presupposes a very freedom-minded and individualistic set of intuitions which he wrongly assumes all readers would share and that is not itself culturally relative.
Would love to see you talk to Aaron Rabinowitz about this. He has a few podcasts about moral realism that are quite engaging.
10:45 - If our direct perceptions of reality disagree with each other, that's usually a sign of delusion. If I see and feel a tree, but you don't, then one or both of us is delusional: that's a disagreement about our direct perceptions. So when it comes to *moral* perceptions, which you claim are perceptions of an objective reality outside our own opinions, disagreement should raise a similar red flag.
Have you never heard this explained? Is this objection really so unclear? You actually show that you do understand this principle at 48:18, incompatible perceptions are a problem.
there's disagreement about whether disagreement gives us reasons to suspend judgment. See quite the dilemma here? It sounds self defeating
@@eapooda - When it comes to perceptions of objects we all agree are concrete, objective things, this is how we reason. But when someone argues that moral claims are, in a sense, just as real and objective as trees and rocks... he doesn't understand the reasoning? Disproof by contradiction? The problem of conflicting direct perceptions? Surely he does instant l understand this. That's what I don't get.
Yeah, those are delusions.
On the other hand under anti-realism, it's hard to say what the disagreement is about.
I think Don was more convincing but damn I wish he'd let Mike make his damn point every once in a while.
So far, the strangest part of this discussion occurs around 31:00.
At 30:56, Huemer asks,
“And what is a normative matter? If there aren’t any normative properties…”
I don't know why Huemer thinks there need to be normative properties. I have normative stances towards food. I think cake is tasty. I don’t think cake has normative properties. One can be a normative reductionist, and recognize that normative claims, like “x is good,” can describe conditional relations between goals or values and means of acting in accordance with those goals or values. For me to say that cake is tasty can mean a variety of things:
(1) I find cake tasty
(2) Most people find cake tasty
(3) Many people find cake tasty
…And so on. I don’t have to believe in “normative properties” to make these claims. You don’t need bizarre metaphysics to like cake. And you don’t need bizarre metaphysics to oppose baby torture.
Then Huemer expresses incredulity at 31:18: “I don’t understand what it is that you’re trying to figure out.”
What is Huemer confused about? Huemer’s tone makes it seem like Loeb has said something bonkers: trying to figure things out, but you're a nihilist? How is that even possible?
Of course it’s possible. We try to figure things out literally every day without there being any fact of the matter. I try to figure out what I’m going to wear to work and what I’m going to make for dinner. People can want to figure things out without think there’s an objective fact of the matter.
Suppose you and some friends are ordering pizza. You want to decide what pizza toppings to get. So you discuss your various preferences, and decide to get mushrooms.
People can try to figure out how to coordinate, negotiate, and navigate various practical decisions without thinking there’s an objective fact about what they ought to do independent of their goals and values.
Not all deliberation is directed at figuring out what’s true. Much of it is directed at figuring out what to do.
"So far, the strangest part of this discussion occurs around 31:00.
At 30:56, Huemer asks,
“And what is a normative matter? If there aren’t any normative properties…”
I don't know why Huemer thinks there need to be normative properties. I have normative stances towards food. I think cake is tasty. I don’t think cake has normative properties. One can be a normative reductionist, and recognize that normative claims, like “x is good,” can describe conditional relations between goals or values and means of acting in accordance with those goals or values. For me to say that cake is tasty can mean a variety of things:
(1) I find cake tasty
(2) Most people find cake tasty
(3) Many people find cake tasty
…And so on. I don’t have to believe in “normative properties” to make these claims. You don’t need bizarre metaphysics to like cake. And you don’t need bizarre metaphysics to oppose baby torture.
Then Huemer expresses incredulity at 31:18: “I don’t understand what it is that you’re trying to figure out.”
What is Huemer confused about? Huemer’s tone makes it seem like Loeb has said something bonkers: trying to figure things out, but you're a nihilist? How is that even possible?"
- First thing to say is that Huemer isn't expressing incredulity in 31:18, he's expressing his lack of understanding of what is mean to "try to figure it out" in terms of moral issues(while normative judgements are taken to be Universalizable and/or Universalized instances of judgements) while there are no "normative properties" to propiciate this Universalization element pertaining what we call "Morallity". I think while you think about this, Huemer's points start to make more sense, but ok.
"Of course it’s possible. We try to figure things out literally every day without there being any fact of the matter. I try to figure out what I’m going to wear to work and what I’m going to make for dinner. People can want to figure things out without think there’s an objective fact of the matter.
Suppose you and some friends are ordering pizza. You want to decide what pizza toppings to get. So you discuss your various preferences, and decide to get mushrooms.
People can try to figure out how to coordinate, negotiate, and navigate various practical decisions without thinking there’s an objective fact about what they ought to do independent of their goals and values.
Not all deliberation is directed at figuring out what’s true. Much of it is directed at figuring out what to do."
- Looks like you're talking about Instrumental Rationality here instead of Epistemic Rationality. Yeah, I agree that much of the deliberation that we usually do is directed through trying to find out what to do in terms of our own personal values and goals but there are some situations were those deliberations are mediated by some insights about seemings that really strikes us like contradicting our own personal values and goals and yet even while we're trying to resist that it just seems that we ought to do that thing, those cases are the ones in which there are real Moral Dillemas that you get faced with, and some of those things doesn't seem to allign properly with personal values and goals of any person at all(including you in a case you're a person that value in terms of deontological considerations, utilitarian considerations or virtue ethics considerations), so I think in a Phenomenal Conservative view like Huemer's it isn't so surprising about what he is talking when he say that "try to figure out" in terms of moral considerations only makes sense in a Moral Realist view.
@@DavidRibeiro1 I've seen the term "univeralization" used in a variety of ways (and it is used in both philosophy and psychology). Could you clarify what you mean by that?
"And you don’t need bizarre metaphysics to oppose baby torture."
One what basis would you opposite it? Say everyone in your country were moral anti-realists... and everyone in the country except you start liking baby torture. Would you try to tell them that baby torture is wrong. So on the anti-realist stance... you have a preference against baby torture... the rest of the country prefers baby torture. You all agree there's no fact of the matter on the issue at hand. What is there to debate about?
If anti-realists are simply talking about personal preferences when debating moral issues... then I'd say the anti-realist is being deceptive by using moral language... When people engage in a debates on a moral issue, the discussion isn't like a discussion on "which color is my favorite". It's a different kind of discussion. And if the anti-realist uses the standard kind of moral language, then it seems like a form of deception to me. He should be discussing slavery, torture as if there were matters of personal preferences... not using the standard moral terminology. But this isn't how they discuss it... Why are moral anti-realists using moral language at all? There exists perfectly good language we use for discussing personal preferences.
Seems like on any issue... the moral anti-realist if being honest should say, "this is my personal preference. here's the stuff I like, here's the stuff I don't like." etc. It would be purely descriptive of personal preferences. But this is not the language they use. There's some deception going on imo.
Do you think a public debate on "which flavor ice tastes best" makes sense at all? Some people prefer one taste, some people prefer another. Taste expresses a personal satisfaction level. What is there to debate about? This is how I feel when I hear an anti-realist debating moral positions.
Moral claims aren't fact claims, actually they are interchangeable.
Both are value claims and pretty indistinguishable.
Dr Huemer's unreasonably confident opinion is a very strong demonstration of error theory 😹
Shouldn't the existence of moral controversy undercut one's confidence in the more obvious moral "facts"?
In a real-world discussion, the person saying "x is morally wrong" will sound more convincing and sure of themselves than the person saying "I believe x to be wrong." Trying to play gotcha with moral antirealists over this is obtuse.
Well, he should’ve gotten into it more because in his book he lays out the actual force of such language in more detail. Statements like “I hope I did the right thing” don’t really make much sense on the non cognitivist view, but we are totally able to understand the statement nonetheless. Maybe I misunderstood which portion of the conversation you were referring to.
lol I think in Huemer’s summary we realize what the huge tradeoff between the two views is. In order to buy moral realism, you have to buy into some really weird epistemic practices like accepting intuitions. Then it would just come back to people’s attitudes towards things. But he really doesn’t want it to so he calls it irreducible from evaluative statements. It’s a lot of mental gymnastics just to say “well it appears moral realism is true so I’m right”. Well to me it appears as if moral realism is false, so where does that get us? Nowhere
Huemer made a lot of sense.
Huemer constantly impresses me. Well done
Wasn't really impressed with him wanting to act as if his talk of values, moral facts, and reasons must be considered in the stance independent notion. This is just question begging against the anti realist, they don't take any of those things to be stance independent, but rather stance dependent. Huemer, and all realists, have a burden to prove; stance independent moral facts or reasons to act.
We both agree reasons make since from a stance dependent context, but the realist takes a step further. They add extra ontology into their theory, one that isn't even coherent. I have no idea what it means for me to have a reason to X independent of my stances. That's as absurd as saying I have a reason to eat an objectivly tastier food (one I might not like or want) divorced from my taste buds.
He disappointed me. Does that mean we can say he is stance independently impressive or disappointing?
@@jmike2039 maybe make it a debate sometime. I’d enjoy hearing that. I’m not sure he was attempting to provide some sort of argument though
@@jmike2039 Just curious how does the anti-realists account for moral progress like banning slavery? Is it just a random event or something? Doesn't make much sense. It seems intuitively wrong.
@@JohnSmith-bq6nf To me there is nothing weird about that. I think that, as a social species, we evolved certain emotions like empathy which are beneficial for our survival, but we also evolved the capacity for war and subjugation, which are also sometimes beneficial for survival, as sad as this might be.
We might tend towards one strategy (cooperation) or the other (subjugation) depending on the circumstances and one thing that changed our circumstances was the technological advancement in the past few centuries. There is no big reason for using slave labour in a post industrial revolution world (and some of the labourers *during* the industrial revolution were not treated much better than slaves). You could say that still, even if we don't *need* slavery, it could still offer some small economic benefit, but I just think that at some point the benefit is so small, that natural empathy or willingness to cooperate trumps it.
I would also look at this from the other perspective and ask myself, why this happened *only* in the past 200 or so years. If morality was so self evidently objective, why didn't it happen much earlier? I think you wouldn't even need moral philosophers if it were that obvious. But let's assume, that you actually do need moral philosophy to make progress, moral philosophy already existed in Plato's times 2500 years ago and some other forms of moral philosophy (often entangled with religion) most likely existed much earlier than that. So if slavery was always objectively wrong, why did it take so long to discover that?
oh boy, I'm eagerly waiting to watch Lance have a field day in the comments
I will certainly have something to say.
I have started a whole series of responses.
me after seeing the notification: nice another video by Joe :))
me 5 seconds later after clicking on it: fuck I already saw this on patreon :(
12 min in. Saying X is obvious and Y is obvious aren’t really arguments. And validating intuition by consensus, is that the best we can do?
great discussion but now I still don't know whether moral realism is true
Welcome to philosophy.
I wanted the discussion Huemer had with Graham was longer on Parker's channel. I like what he said here, but I don't agree with his views on the finite past/future.
Waiting for the Lance comment
Took the thought right outta my head haha, he's probably already here tbh
@@Lojak-exe It took me a while because I ended up writing very extensive responses.
@@lanceindependent thats what would expect especially from a vid like this, I hope u get a chance to converse with Huemer at some point, that would be a very interesting Convo.
@@Lojak-exe I'm concerned we would not have a productive conversation. Our approaches to philosophy may be too divergent.
@@lanceindependent hmm, that seems plausible, there's also a difference in conversational tempo or like dynamic, I feel like he wouldn't be as aggressive as you would. Your Ben Watkins debate was amazing because there was a good dynamic between the two of you but I feel it might be like the graham oppy v Swinburne debate which I think didn't have a good dynamic.
I'm reminded of a time (quite a long time, actually) when artists of various stripes were convinced that aesthetic statements had a truth value; for example, that a rectangle whose proportions were based on the Golden Mean is more aesthetically pleasing than a square. I've had one or two professors who believed such things, but it always struck me as errant nonsense. The problem with this stance, it seemed to me, is that there is no standard criteria one can appeal to when asserting that one thing is more beautiful than another. Aesthetic statements are not self-evidently true, they cannot be proved true by logical deduction, nor is their truth grounded in empirical fact. Moreover, there is widespread disagreement as to what makes a thing more or less beautiful. I have exactly the same reaction when I hear someone assert that moral claims have a truth value, and for pretty much the same reasons. The fact that there seems to be only a handful of moral claims which compel our assent (eg: that murder is wrong), and that these convictions are invariably accompanied by strong emotions, seems to militate forcefully against the belief that moral claims are objective.
“Talking about x, but not mentioning that you don’t think x exists”. What’s the problem? I can talk all day about god, without mentioning that I don’t think god exists. I can talk all day about free will without mentioning that I don’t think it exists (also gender, race, morality). Even if I don’t believe that these concepts objectively exist and are socially constructed, why wouldn’t I be able to talk about them?
Moral Realism is used when one lacks evidence. And would want to justify their claims to True moralism, but it was false then you have to provide evidence.
For what it is worth, I have come to look at morality much the way as I look at the rules of language. Morality has obvious social uses. WE are a cultural species and norms - on moral and non-moral matters, assuming a distinction can be made - are useful in helping us collectively survive and cooperate. Same with norms about language, where we can't speak and understand without them.
That doesn't mean that rules about subject-object-verb order or whether language should be gendered are objective. It means they are intersubjective. And the matter gets trickier when we realize that just as different folks will speak differently and put different variations on the rules of language - or even speak wholly different language in their own communities - that's the way I suspect morality works. There may be broad objective rules we can come up with for what renders a language unspeakable (or a moral code unworkable), but those will be broad. Within those broad rules, however, there will be a LOT of variation, and (a) when there is variation, there are probably no facts of the matter we can appeal to for an objective resolution, and (b) the enterprise still works AS LONG AS folks either don't vary TOO much in their moral thinking and if they do, there are mechanisms to mitigate or assuage those disagreements.
This is why I personally have found sociology of morality way more illuminating than metaethics. Morality is a social process , and a lot of metaethics seems to me to either misunderstand or not draw enough consequence from that.
32:36 This sounds oddly like a religious fundamentalist. The idea that a professional philosopher CAN'T even seen to fathom the concept of value without moral realism seems almost disingenuous. Loeb even right before that point have very clear example of how that works. But Huemer either seems to refuse to engage with terms the way Loeb had stated he's using them, or else is completely closed to disagreement (both of which don't seem accurate, so I stand confused).
hell yea 😎
Michael said that subjectivism would mean that at some point it was 'good' to be a nazi, and so we should reject subjectivism.
But that seems like a really weak argument that falls victim of the very position he's denouncing. It's basically saying - we should reject that idea because I don't like it.
I don't think you can say moral realism is true because otherwise there would be no agreement - it seems like trying to insert morality into a category it isn't suited to be in - confusing personal preference with actual truth.
I didn't like the dismissive way he brushed aside the issue of disagreement. If there are moral facts, or if some thing is a moral fact - then disagreement about that fact is a massive problem. If you're going to claim that mere consensus supports the idea that moral realism is true, then you cannot ignore disagreement suggesting it isn't.
I didn't really understand his definition of intuition either. He seemed to say it entailed (in the philosophical realm) an intellectual evaluation of some sort - but then rejected the idea that it was to do with arguments....
butting in on my own thought here - I am frustrated when philosophers (or anyone else for that matter) claim they are going to give you an explanation for how two concepts differ, but then only describe what one of the concepts consists of, as Michael did here.
....it's not at all clear how this is different to the colloquial definition of intuition, nor did it seem like a definition without some contradictory elements in it (unless by 'argument' he meant formal logical syllogism, in which case there is some room for compatibility, I suppose).
@@jongtrogers
seriously, if his presentation of his ideas about morality here was a distillation of his paper - then I'm not sure reading it would help.
It is unfortunate that we cannot get off the starting line and run with the discussion because Don is having a personal debate with himself and cannot commit to trusting his left brain or his right brain.
So unfortunate.....
Philosophical discussions are personal.
If you do not have the balls to expose yourself, do not agree to the discussion.
Loeb was terrific, but I continue to be quite underwhelmed by Michael Huemer. I have yet to see a performance in which I found him convincing.
Wait you don't think the question begging response of 'its obviously false' towards error theory is compelling?!
@@jmike2039isn't that the same way we ground logic? That's his argument, that ethics are true due to intuition, just like how logic is.
@@rosesmitty1206 he didn't present any argument on why it's false, so how is that supposed to move the error theorist? You could never progress from this point if someone's just like yeah it's just obvious that your view is false.
Error theorist: oh now that you said that I change my mind.
@@jmike2039 he gave the companions in guilt argument and the moral convergence argument.
@@rosesmitty1206 none of that shows the falsity of error theory.
Very refreshing to hear Dr. Loeb on here communicating the correct metaethical position.
Incoherentism in particular, or antirealism more generally?
@@lanceindependent I call myself an error theorist but I'm somewhere between that and an expressivist. I think moral judgments express projected attitudes, but people (sometimes) mistakenly think that those projected attitudes are independent properties of the states of affairs that they're about. I think this misunderstanding is partly psychological and partly a linguistic artifact. I do think there's an incoherency in the concept of "stance-independent moral value" or "stance-independent reasons", etc.
@@lanceindependent But I guess antirealism about normativity in general.
Wack
@@theoutsiderhumanist8159 Cool, thanks for clarifying. Have you seen Gill's work on metaethical indeterminacy and variability?
I think there are issues with presuming that moral claims are used to express the same sorts of things - they may in some cases be used to express propositional attitudes, in others to express imperatives, and perhaps in others there may be no determinate fact about how people are using them (given your remarks it seems like you think people sometimes use language one way, and sometimes another, so perhaps this isn't new or surprising to you).
More importantly, I don't think we need to endorse any particular account about how people use words to discuss whether there are stance-independent moral facts.
If it turned out that 100% of ordinary people always used moral claims to express emotions, would that mean moral realism was false? I don't see why it would.
//I do think there's an incoherency in the concept of "stance-independent moral value" or "stance-independent reasons", etc.//
Yea, I agree, though I don't think this is the kind of incoherentism Loeb has in mind. Loeb's incoherentism is people expressing both a proposition and not expressing a proposition with the same utterance, a bit like saying you believe in square circles.
My main concern with moral realism is what I call the unintelligibity thesis: I think the concept of irreducible normativity is nonsensical, and that the notion of a stance-independent moral fact is either trivial, false, or unintelligible.
It seems like a leap to go from reflecting on one's own moral intuitions and making those a basis for one's evaluations and choices, to the much stronger claim that our moral intuitions can be the basis for making objective moral statements about reality. Given how often Huemer use's qualifiers like "seems" or "feels like to me", it sounds like he never breaks out of ethical subjectivism. Am I missing something? Intuitions aren't objective facts about the nature of reality, they're subjective states of feeling or belief about the world. They say something about a person's own psychology, not moral reality.
He uses intuition in a different sense, it's the mental state in which you intellectually realize that something is true. When you read that 2 + 2 = 4, or when you learn about the laws of classical logic, your intellectual intuition tells you that those are self evidently true, in an objective sense.
It's a part of his view on epistemology, which he calls phenomenal conservatism. If things seem to you a certain way, it's reasonable to assume that they are true, until someone raises a convincing objection. This is a way to get out ob global scepticism, otherwise it would be hard to get any system of thought going, as for example you can't just prove the laws of classical logic by using classical logic etc.
I disagree with Huemer, because I think moral intuitions are a different thing, but after reading some of his stuff I hope this is a fair representation of his views.
Well, a subjectivist would reject the existence of objective, stance-independent, moral facts. An intuitionist believes there are objective facts about morality that can be discovered, and that intuition is the means by which we discover these facts.
Common Huemer W
please dont only ask all questions to one guest
Take a drink everytime Mike scoffs at ideas that he doesn't agree with or whenever he is trying to make a "point" and you'll be drunk by the tenth minute.
yes he wasn't very cooperative some of the time in my opinion