Looking forward to giving this a watch. I like Lance but I think his position lacks sufficient grounding which I believe Michael will bring to the surface. Personally, I'm a Hegelian so contest objectivity being mind independence so here's hoping that get's raised. Regardless, thank you for hosting this debate.
Why would anyone want to give a watch to a video? Wouldn't a CLOCK be more appropriate? Hegelian? So, do you ADMIT that you adhere to the flawed concepts of a full-time criminal, Mr. Socialist-dunce-who-considers-right-and-wrong-to-be-absolutes?
BANGER, Huemer’s rhetorics always rub me the wrong way but he’s very sharp (of course) and manages to follow everything Lance argues here and addresses most things fairly I thought. The best proponents of each side of the metaethical divide here, ive been waiting to hear these guys go at it for a long time, this was awesome 😊 I agree with Lance that the metaethical dispute probably just stems from their deeper linguistic, and knowledge/truth theory disputes.
It does seem odd when people assume that because we use a word like “moral” that it has to connect to some metaphysical essence which we are then tasked with discovering the true nature of; even worse when people make those assumptions without even being aware that they are making them.
I think the back and worth on Gettier cases was probably the most useful. I tend to by default have reactions to such cases that seem more similar to Lance's. It seems like the intuition for me is something like: this case doesn't seem to have an outcome where the agent had all of the relevant information and/or could have been using better criteria to come to true beliefs more frequently. Knowledge just seems to be a concept where we as a group decide that we prefer these criteria over other criteria. In everyday life these issues seem to be resolved in terms of pragmatic considerations. What causes more true beliefs seems to have a fact of the matter. What knowledge is seems to be constructed and seems to have no fact of the matter until one constructs an idea of what knowledge is.
This is correct. "There is no fact of the matter" is really, "there are many different facts about how people talk and what they mean." E.g., we use "know" in a fallibilistic sense all the time (because most of us recognize that we could be mistaken about things we are nonetheless confident about), but then when challenged with "but do you REALLY know?" we feel bullied into an infallibilistic sense and perhaps quickly admit that we don't know at all. Normal language is full of imprecisions, inconsistencies, and spontaneous & compelled shifts of criteria & meaning. We tend to neglect this (perhaps from a hope that it isn't true) and let expressive use cases guide our gut feelings, and before you know it, philosophers are building syllogisms on a premise's "intuitiveness." The right metaethic, by contrast, acknowledges conceptual pluralism, and will look as messy as the real world is, because it actually reflects the real world.
Hey, Curiosity Guy, I see that you're seeing all of these. Is there a reason I can't post a comment in the main thread? Am I partially banned or something? I don't know why I would be. Is that even a thing? Thanks. Sorry, for saying something irrelevant on this comment, but I needed to talk to Curiosity Guy and have no idea how to contact him otherwise.
I think Lance won the "debate" but it was more of a good discussion. I personally do not even think there is any reason to discuss moral realism is true given there is no question begging manner we have to define any moral fact or moral phenomena in such terms. People spew words and from that I have no idea how we can determine mind-independent facts about the world beyond psychology, language and tautologies. The world is comprised of what objects are made of and anything else is psychological projection.
@@colbyboucher6391 Because Lance does what he always does: push the definitional game in order to maintain an agenda. It's a grotesquely sophistic and boorishly unsophisticated propaganda ploy. Consider: let's say that I'm a restrictionist on immigration. Enter Lance Bust. "Yeah well, what exactly IS a border anyways?" I go on to define a border in the roughly colloquial terms in which most everyone would understand the concept. Lance Bust then says, "well, at what EXACT POINT can one be said to cross this so called border?" I explain in rough but understandable terms, along the lines of when one's physical person steps or climbs or otherwise travels over the line, as it were. Lance Bust then says, "Must it be the "whole person," and what exactly is a "person" anyways?" And so it goes. It's a stupid, redundant game and worse yet, dishonest.
I dunno, I feel like the situation is pretty disanalogous, because the whole field of metaethics is about adjudicating what concepts mean. If somebody pulled this definitional stuff in a discussion about normatove ethics, I do think it'd be totally illict, and more in line with the situation you outline. But if I had to go with the border analogy to describe metaethical conversations, I'd say it was more like a country debating where to draw its borders, and somebody asking "Hold on: what exactly are our laws governing borders and the legality of crossing thereof? What are the practical implications of being in or outside of this border?" Which I think is extremely reasonable.
@@moonsweater Reasonable to a point, after all, there is a sense in which two interlocutors need mutual understanding of terms if they're to discuss the same subject matter, but I don't think it accurate to reduce metaethics entirely to terms of linguistic clarity anymore than it'd be fair to reduce biology to evolution. That aside, often demand for conceptual unpacking is little else than obfuscation of sneaking in an affirmed negation through the back door. As Rorty said of truth, "we know how to use it we don't have to define it." I'm less than charitable and reject your analogy in favor of mine through the sheer force of familiarity with how Lance operates. He's a sophist, full stop.
Geology isn’t held back by “geology skeptics” because of the reality of the field. Geology actually does make progress, and doesn’t have many of its systems deconstructed with every new generation of geologists like philosophy does.
Because there's the philosophy of geology that gets into that. Science and philosophy are different in the sense that philosophy creates questions out of the foundations that a scientific field uses in its practice.
Yeah, Mike seems to like appealing to common sense as a general strategy, but that analogy set off my 'dodgy' senses straight away. Philosophy and the hard sciences just feel like significantly different endeavors with significantly divergent goals and assumptions.
I would have liked to see Huemer pressed more on his epistemology. Intuitions can be primed, biased by parents, and altered by one’s social group. That alone should be enough of a defeater to show they need to at least be supported by other evidence, which he can’t because there is none. 1:30:00 Couldn’t this just be explained by having an aversion to the act-type of breaking promises? Seems like that’s a sufficient explanation to me. 1:35:00 I’d also like to know what he means by “it’s harder to escape [objective moral facts]”, How?! How is it harder?! Doesn’t seem to be harder since billions of people escape them every day. If these facts exist, they are supposed to *have* this property of harder to escape. Why should it make a difference if people subjectively *believe* they exist? Like, why is that a criteria for their inescapably?!
Regarding the last point: Yes, I very much agree. What's so inescapable of stance-independent moral facts? You could just...ignore them. And what are the consequences? As far as I can tell, none at all.
@@lanceindependent You can’t have any pudding if you don’t [obey objective normative facts]! How can you have any pudding if you don’t [obey objective normative facts]!?
If objective means independent of the attitudes of observers, then what comes to my mind is something like: the earth revolves around the sun. This at least to me, is as objective a claim can be, assuming we take Huemer’s definition of ‘objective’. Even if there isn’t a single sentient creature in the universe, the earth would still revolve around the sun. However, when speaking about moral claims, it doesn’t seem to me that they are objective in that sense, because for one you’d have to assume that these moral claims are etched into the fabric of the universe; like the claim torturing people for fun is wrong came prepackaged with the world.
I think it’s more similar to a physical law like gravity. Even if there were no physical objects to experience gravitational attraction, the law itself would still exist as an abstract principle. This is more akin to what realists are claiming, I believe.
Even the physical claim that the Earth revolves around the sun is a matter of convention and perspective. They both orbit a shared barycenter, but because the sun is much larger, it dominates the interaction, and the situation is just easier to describe as the Earth orbiting the sun, even though it's not perfectly accurate.
Many moral realists think that moral laws are "necessary" abstract objects, so they would indeed be "prepackaged", they would also be true in every possible world. The details would vary, in a world where there are no humans you can't break the moral law by harming a human but there would still be the general principle. Maybe the general principle is something like: it's wrong to harm any conscious creatures if they exist. There are other similar views, for example you could think that mathematical objects exist necessarily and all the mathematical truths are also necessary, something like mathematical Platonism.
This was very interesting. I would be interested to hear more. I always find Huemer interesting and I have recently been catching up on Bush. In this case, I initially agreed with Bush, and did not change my mind, so maybe I am being biased. Huemer makes good objections to arguments Bush did not make. If he addressed Bush's basic point, I didn’t understand him. The question is not whether someone thinks baby torture is wrong, but what presuppositions are packed into that, and whether all of them are as a matter of fact stance-independent. He seemed to take the stance-independence of moral claims as uncontroversial, and assume that an anti-realist would have no grounds for objecting to baby torture, rather than trying to show that an objection to baby-torture can only be based on stance-independent reasons. Some of Bush's objections about the impossibility of analyzing language out of context seem extreme, and for me difficult to understand, but I don’t think that is essential to the challenge to moral realism.
Nice comment. I'd be happy to discuss the latter point about analyzing language out of context. I don't just endorse this view, I also deny that it is in any way extreme. I think analytic philosophers have done a lot to entrench the notion that views like mine are "extreme" and "radical" and "skeptical" but I don't think any of this is true. From my perspective, their views seem very extreme and radical, and in many cases profoundly implausible.
@@lanceindependent instead of extreme, I should say difficult for me to get a grip on, and addressing an issue that I was unaware of and that I am not convinced is relevant. You seem to be very concerned about how to interpret statements by ordinary persons. I would be satisfied with coming up with coherent interpretations of what particular philosophers say, or objections to interpretations that philosophers have used. These are different problems, and one or the other might seem more tractable or interesting. Do you agree that Huemer continued to the end as if a moral anti-realist cannot disapprove of baby torture? I was distracted from time to time during the discussion and I could have missed something. This seems like a strange position to take for him, as I usually find him to be more imaginative and charitable.
@@tdbtdbthedeadbunny The issue of language is not only relevant, it is of immense relevance to these discussions. Insofar as standard antirealist positions rely on semantic theses that are themselves based on false presuppositions about language, all traditional antirealist positions (and realist positions, for that matter), could have serious problems. Furthermore, many standard objections to antirealist positions turn on leveraging their semantic commitments and turning them against them...which is exactly what Huemer did in his opening statement. Huemer employs a process of elimination approach: He claims there are only three possible antirealist positions, and if you can show all three are wrong, realism wins by default. What I was arguing is that this is not true: there are not only three antirealist positions, so showing that those three are wrong would not demonstrate realism is true. >>You seem to be very concerned about how to interpret statements by ordinary persons. I'm not that concerned about it. It's analytic philosophers who are concerned about it. All standard analytic metaethical positions on the matter feature a semantic thesis as one of their central claims. A big part of my work is showing that this is a mistake and that how ordinary people think about such questions is not especially relevant. There were three reasons I brought up language at the outset: (1) Because it is necessary to do so to argue that my position does not fall into one of the three positions Huemer claims are the only possible positions (2) Because Huemer characterizes my own position as a radical skeptical position. This claim loses its force if it's not the case that his position is "commonsensical" or appeals to intuitions widely held among philosophers. (3) Because language-related problems are a key element in normative entanglement. >>Do you agree that Huemer continued to the end as if a moral anti-realist cannot disapprove of baby torture? That depends what you mean, but probably not. I don't think Huemer thinks I don't disapprove of baby torture. I don't know if Huemer or other realists accept my characterization of normative entanglement or my claim that it is driving a lot of the reactions they and others have to antirealist positions. My impression is that Huemer didn't think normative entanglement accounted for his own judgments.
@@lanceindependent thanks for the clarification. It seemed to me that Huemer thought that if you disapprove of baby torture or condemn baby torturers, you’re being inconsistent. But as I said, I was not too certain that I had a strong grip on all his arguments.
@@tdbtdbthedeadbunny I'd have to review the whole discussion carefully but I doubt he thinks it's inconsistent with antirealism to disapprove of or condemn baby torturers. The question would turn more on what the moral antirealist is committed to saying, depending on their semantics. An error theorist couldn't fully and sincerely say, consistent with their position, "It's wrong to torture babies," but I don't see why they'd be unable to say, consistent with their position, to say "I don't like baby torture and I will try to stop it." I doubt Huemer would disagree, and if he did, that'd be very strange.
I salute and admire Lance for citing empirical research to back his claims. However I think one very important consideration is needed, that is for moral realism to be true, there just needs to be at least 1 moral fact (insert realist descriptors) which isn't a high bar. While I view survey data with a lot of skepticism especially since most of the survey done are not representive of the global population ( mostly done in Western, college students who are also mainly white) and to pose a very simialr question Lance like to ask "who are we?" I would argue that most of the surveys done DO NOT capture we/folk in the broad sense. However when we look at the research from Beebe than spans a larger sample size across Poland, Ecuador and China, there seems to be closer consensus on a moral realist position on harm related questions. This is similar to the research done by Davis where when it came to judging harm, realist and anti-realist positions were extremely close. This isn't to disprove that anti-realism is false, it simply shows that the current empirical research (even if I grant that the current research represent "folk" well) DOES NOT prove the moral realism is false.
I don’t think Lance would say that the empirical research does or even can prove any metaethical stance true or false. However, if an argument begins (like Huemer’s first argument does) with the premise that “most people think X”, but we don’t have any empirical evidence that most people actually do think X, then we have no reason to accept that premise. If moral realists have arguments that are not based on “it seems like X” or “most people think X” then that’s something we can debate as philosophers. But if that is a premise, we need to turn to empirical research to back it up.
@@KentrosaurusesAs I’ve mentioned above, all it seems moral realist needs to claim is there needs to be one X. Currently the empirical research shows that people have moral realist intuition in regards to acts relating to harm. That’s sufficient to justify saying that people have some moral realist intuition towards a particular act. Once again stating that I do not believe the current empirical research is representative of the global population, just like how I don’t believe a survey of philosophers represents the global population.
There just needing to be one of something doesn't make it a low bar. There just needing to be one incantation that can summon demons, or just one object that is both a square and a circle doesn't make the prospects of either a low bar. Most of the surveys don't capture folk usage. Note, however, that non-naturalist realists who do not appeal to survey data are in an even worse position. Armchair theorizing and analyzing English sentences outside their actual contexts of usage are far worse as methods for evaluating which view is "commonsense" than existing survey data. >>However when we look at the research from Beebe than spans a larger sample size across Poland, Ecuador and China, there seems to be closer consensus on a moral realist position on harm related questions. That study doesn't come anywhere close to showing a cross-cultural consensus on moral realism. The realist response rate averaged across items in the US was 0.47, which is less than half, and it was extremely variable across all items, with some items, with no single item approaching consensus. A similar pattern held in Poland, Ecuador, and China, realist response rates ranging from 0.27 to 0.78 across items, once again with fairly middling averages. The average across items in these countries ranged from 0.33 for donating money to 0.67 for hitting others. This is, yet again, nowhere close to a consensus. Their data simply doesn't show a consensus, or even something close to one. Those studies were also conducted prior to the methodological critiques leveled against early metaethics paradigms (from myself, Polzler, Wright, and others). Better-designed studies have led to even lower rates of realism, including Taylor Davis's work and in Polzler and Wright's work, such as a recent cross-cultural study with Polzler and several collaborators that found very low realist response rates (see "Lay People Deny Morality’s Objectivity across Cultures (to somewhat Different Extents and in somewhat Different Ways)". In other words: the data never even appeared to show a consensus ten years ago, and as methods have improved, rates of realism have only dropped further. The most methodologically rigorous methods tend to find very high rates of antirealism. The overall body of literature does not suggest there is any sort of consensus that nonphilosophers are realists. >> This is similar to the research done by Davis where when it came to judging harm, realist and anti-realist positions were extremely close. Noncognitivism was the modal response across all five moral foundations (including harm) in Davis's data, with antirealist responses being about even for harm and otherwise dominating across the other four foundations. Davis's findings are squarely in the "most people gave antirealist responses" camp. >>This isn't to disprove that anti-realism is false, it simply shows that the current empirical research (even if I grant that the current research represent "folk" well) DOES NOT prove the moral realism is false. This research isn't about whether realism is true or false. This is empirical research about whether nonphilosophers are moral realists or not. The data is not very representative of people in general.
@@lanceindependent The paper by Beebe stated that "It is true that participants gave strongly objectivist responses to some ethical claims-particularly those that involved inflicting unwanted and unjustified harm upon other individuals" and the paper by Taylor Davis also showed that realism and anti-realist position came close on harm. Based on this I can contend that when it comes to harm and only harm, "folk" people have strong moral realist intuition. As for "better methods" I would just deny this until there's a replication showing that it is actually better, one can claim different criteria were included but there needs to be some replication to say its better, especially in the world of survey/psychology research. If a method cannot produce realibilty when it comes to replication, I would not say it's better and based on the current literature I've not seen a replication done, however if I am wrong due to my ignorance of not being deep in the field and unawre of the latest study, please let me know and I will give it a read.
@@kedrick93 What matters is what Beebe et al’s data shows, not how they frame the data. Their data does not show anything like a consensus in favor of moral realism. Neither does Davis’s data. Have you seen the graphs for the harm domain? They don’t show anything that could be reasonably interpreted as “most of these people favor realist responses.” Noncognitivist responses were more common, and participants broke about even on harm in the realist/antirealist categories. It’s not even close to a consensus. Neither of those studies comes anywhere near establishing any kind of consensus. >>As for "better methods" I would just deny this until there's a replication showing that it is actually better The quality of a study’s methods aren’t reducible to whether the results of the study replicate or not. The main issues here have to do with validity and invalid studies can still be replicated. The reasons why earlier studies have worse methods are well established on both theoretical and empirical grounds, including my own research. Those issues of data quality have to do with validity, not replicability.
I thought I would have, too. I think the vibe was too positive and relaxed for me to feel inclined to do that. My vibe is heavily influenced by context and by the attitudes of the people I am interacting with.
@@lanceindependent Huemer could press you as well. I think the vibe was too positive and relaxed for him to feel inclined to do that. But, it feels odd that you allowed the vibe to prevent you from pulling out your rather intellectualy more aggressive points, when it was such a good occassion to do it. 'Good' meaning 'perfect' occassion to 'press' Huemer. You literally had a debate with him in person.
@@lanceindependent I'm usually all in favour of holding peoples feet to the fire, but I think you walked the line here perfectly. I didn't expect Huemer to be as open as he was. He struggled in the beginning but I think he started genuinely trying to understand where you were coming from. If you pushed any harder he likely would have closed off completely. All in all good discussion. Great job!
@@jimothy9943 he struggled because he saw that Lance will play his stupid game of half baked skepticism. I can challenge Lance in such a way that he's gonna concede the conclusion that he doesn't exist, and? Why we wouldn't just continue Lance's line of reasoning and concede ontological nihilism?
@@KlPop-x1o Chill out dude. I doubt you could challenge anyone without emotional outburst based on how you are handling what was an extremely civil discussion. If I were Lance I wouldn't want to debate you unless you changed your attitude right quick.
Huemer claims that moral statements do not depend on the attitude of observers, and to show this, he gives HIS attitude about certain moral situations, forgetting that he IS an observer, with a moral attitude, and that people with other attitudes might have different moral opinions. It is a very weird mistake. The mere fact that many agree with his moral attitude, of which I am likely one, does not mean that moral statements do not depend on the attitude of observers. Of course, they do. "Torturing babies" is only objectively wrong in the sense that 99% of humans would most likely share that personal moral attitude. This does not make it stance independent.
The easiest way to show why your point here is wrong is via an analogy. I believe that 'there are subatomic particles' is a true assertion about reality. Further, I take it that the statement is true regardless of whether anyone believes it. Obviously, I have to assess this from my own subjective epistemic position, as anyone does when they assess anything, but it does not make it the case that the statement's truth depends on my subjective epistemic position.
@@alastairbowyer7936 I think you missed his point. He wasn't saying that "there is disagreement therefore morality is stance dependent" he was saying "agreement is insufficient to prove stance independence."
@mind_onion ok that is somewhat fair based on the last thing he said. Nonetheless, part of the point of my example is to show that Huemer's style of reasoning is generally a legitimate way of testing whether a statement is stance dependent. I don't think its an infallible method, but it gives us evidence of objectivity
7:23 It will be difficult for him to avoid using relativistic language. Even in his current explanation, the word 'seeming' introduces a subjective element. 'Seeming' conveys his intuition or attitude toward the proposition, which is inherently non-objective. So, should we interpret this 'seeming' as an objective claim? He could remove the term from the discussion, but that would force him to make a more direct and definitive statement. In doing so, however, he would still need to express it in a way that avoids implying his personal stance on the proposition. I'm not sure he can achieve that without resorting to some form of relativistic language, which would inevitably imply a subjective relationship between his attitude and the proposition.
He doesn't need to use the language in a "non-relative way" but only in a discriminative way, I think the defense of moral realism doesn't require any "special technical sense" and/or merely "ordinary language sense" to keep the case going, specially in the defense of modest moral realism that Huemer defends.
I was underwhelmed despite normally liking both parties. In the end: Michael thinks realism is intuitive, most people are committed to realism, and the arguments for anti-realism are all terrible. Lance thinks realism isn't intuitive at all, most people are not committed to realism, and the arguments for realism are all terrible. Other than that, I'll say I thought Lance did (or was allowed to do) too much of the talking. Maybe I'm mistaken -- and I'm not going to watch again and count their speaking time -- but it felt as if he kept adding to his points when it would have been more beneficial to stop and let Michael respond. Oh well, better than no debate.
That's fair. I'm very talkative. One point I think it's worth making though is that it takes a more words to discuss empirical evidence that a concept isn't commonsense than it does to claim that itis commonsense. That puts someone with my approach and position in an asymmetric position with respect to how much we have to say to challenge another claim or position. Compare to someone claiming there's no even evidence for evolution vs. someone trying to discuss that evidence.
Yeah Lance can ramble because he wants to say everything he thinks is important in relation to a point; I don't at all think it's intentional. I actually think HE is better when he is constrained a bit more.
@@blamtasticful Yea, I have strong completionist tendencies and dislike short exchanges. It's very challenging to try to address any of this in 2 hours, or even 10. I do feel it makes for a better conversation when there's someone that constrains me; I've been in a few interviews where this happens and it goes well when someone can stop me or manage the flow of a conversation.
@@lanceindependent Maybe, and again I like you in general, but just consider that if someone says "moral realism is intuitive to many people" that your response doesn't need to contain any studies. You could simply indicate that the studies you've seen or conducted don't support that. At that point, you've done as much work as your opponent. Then you only need to do a tiny bit more to "beat" your opponent in this respect, like say a single line about what your research shows. Then what are they gonna do?
Lance defence for the claim that moral realism is not the common sense view seems to me to very poor. I don’t think empirical studies show that moral realism is not the common sense view. Lance seems to think that for moral realism to be the common sense view people need to explicitly endorse moral realism. Just because people didn’t endorse moral realism explicitly in the empirical research doesn’t show that moral realism is not the common sense view. Also note that the research is not so reliable as Lance thinks it is. Non philosophers doesn’t keep thinking about ethical issues and certainly they don’t think deeply about meta ethics, they are also not well equipped with philosophers’ vocabulary, in light of this, we should decrease our trust in such research to an extend. Keeping this point aside, even if we grant that the research is correct it doesn’t follow that moral realism is not the common sense view because people in general can be implicitly moral realists. Lance said nothing to refute this. If we follow Lance reasoning, we will have to conclude many things which we can take to be common sense views are not common sensical at all. For example, external world realism seems to be a common sense view but general people are not explicitly endorsing any version of non skeptical realism, does that shows according to Lance that people are not generally realists about the external world? According to me, it is not because people are still implicitly realists. Same can be true about moral realism. What did Lance said to rule this possibility? That’s my first worry with Lance position. I heard that Lance take moral non naturalism to be an unintelligible position, perhaps because of its commitment to external reasons, but Lance says nothing to defend his unintelligibility claim. Lance keeps saying how his meta philosophical views are different and how he takes an empiricist stance generally. But is Lance unintelligibility thesis supported by empirical study, by Lance own light empirical study doesn’t support any particular meta ethical theory, so then on the basis of what did he form his belief? He seems to give the impression that people who are moral realists are mistaken because they don’t take empirical study seriously however his own position is not based on empirical studies, if he can have a position why not the realists?
Lance Bust is a dishonest wretch willing to lie about his own moral intuitions, brandish about methodologically flawed "empirical studies" like a toddler swinging an axe, engage is endless semantic obfuscation, in order to maintain his silly nihilism.
I understand Michael’s insistence that intuitions are important and difficult to escape (4:40). But methodically I strongly dislike approaches that don’t seek to reduce our dependence on intuitions, or think “seemings” form a good basis for heavy duty metaphysical theorizing. I much prefer the meta philosophical approach of @lanceindependent that is reliant on the hard work of gathering empirical data, and getting clear about language; how it’s used and what its limitations are. (1:08:38) I also tend to find that pragmatists or people who are Wittgensteinians about language are very clear on what analytical philosophers are doing and exactly where they go wrong. Meanwhile analytical philosophers tend to struggle to wrap their heads around other perspectives. It was a pleasant and productive conversation on both sides, but I still couldn’t help but walk away with the impression that @owl235 was completely out classed.
@@niklasanzinger it’s fair to say I have not read any or listened to much of Huemer. I’m also not a professional philosopher or anywhere near as knowledgeable as Huemer on philosophy in general. That being said, the views I endorse fundamentally disagree with his approach to philosophy, and since the dispute is meta philosophical It doesn’t seem likely his writing on lower level issues will influence me or connect with the views I hold. Analytical rationalist L Pragmatic empiricist W
All a moral realist needs to claim is there needs to be one X. X being a moral fact.,Currently the empirical research shows that people have moral realist intuition in regards to acts relating to harm. That’s sufficient to justify saying that people have some moral realist intuition towards a particular act. Once again stating that I do not believe the current empirical research is representative of the global population, just like how I don’t believe a survey of philosophers represents the global population.
@@kedrick93 There is a distinction between it being true that people have _intuitions_ about moral notions and it being true that there are moral facts. Intuition about moral realism ≠ moral fact
“Naturalism counts as realism” - BOOO!!! Please help us make this a separate category! I don’t share the intuition, either. Torturing babies for fun is wrong comes out of natural realism based on its axioms.
@@ReverendDr.Thomasthey are universals. How would you know how to apply moral judgements if you wouldn't know what these universals stand for? How would all humans make evaluative judgements if they wouldn't possess universal knowledge of good and bad?
A question for Lance. If you had more "convensional" metaphilosophical views, how would that affect your position on moral realism? If for example you were not a pragmatist. I am 1 hour in so if that is answered my bad.
I used to have more conventional views and I was sympathetic to variations of standard antirealist views. I think moral non-naturalism is one of the least philosophically defensible positions prominent in the literature, in that I think there are no good arguments for it, antirealists have good responses to all of the arguments in favor of it, and there is on abductive grounds very little reason to inflate our ontology with autonomous moral properties or insist on the meaningfulness of ineffable, irreducibly normative facts, or external reasons, and so on.
@@lanceindependent if that's the case, then how come you struggle in your debate against Huemer here and, even more so in your debate against Enoch? I mean, if moral realism was so implausible as you describe it, you should easily be able to produce the objections that Huemer and Enoch struggle to respond to. But instead your main "responses" are typically formulated in terms of "well I don't have that intuition" or even more commonly "well I reject that..." where ... often = standard practices of analytic philosophy. This is then typically followed by you stating what your alternative view is but not arguing for it, or demonstrating it as a superior approach to the standard one.
@@inquiry6274 I didn't struggle in either conversation. I had pleasant conversations with both Huemer and Enoch, but I do not think either of them presented arguments in our conversations that I failed to adequately address (unless, at best, there were open threads I didn't get to due to time constraints). If you think either of them presented arguments you don’t think I could address, let me know. More generally, I’m familiar with their arguments outside our discussions (e.g., moral convergence, deliberative indispensability) and I likewise think antirealists can handle these arguments just fine. If you think moral realism is plausible, you are welcome to tell me what you think a good argument for moral realism is, and I'd be happy to discuss with you why I don't think it's a good argument. >>I mean, if moral realism was so implausible as you describe it, you should easily be able to produce the objections that Huemer and Enoch struggle to respond to I don’t agree. I don’t think any of us struggled in these discussions. A person struggling to respond is not a good indication of whether their position is a strong one or not, especially if you’re talking live debates. >>But instead your main "responses" are typically formulated in terms of "well I don't have that intuition" or even more commonly "well I reject that..." If someone presents arguments with premises I reject, I will reject the premises. That’s pretty standard practice. >>This is then typically followed by you stating what your alternative view is but not arguing for it, or demonstrating it as a superior approach to the standard one. My alternative view to what, exactly? Things seem some way to someone else. They don’t seem that way to me. What kind of alternative are you looking for?
@@lanceindependent “If you think moral realism is plausible, you are welcome to tell me what you think a good argument for moral realism is, and I'd be happy to discuss with you why I don't think it's a good argument. “ If I understand your correctly, you find my version of moral realism - something like Frank Jackson style naturalism - to be plausible, but trivial and thus uninteresting. So, if there was an argument with you regarding my view, it would have to be that its not trivial. “I don’t agree. I don’t think any of us struggled in these discussions. A person struggling to respond is not a good indication of whether their position is a strong one or not, especially if you’re talking live debates. “ You claimed that moral realism (the non-naturalist version) is one of the least philosophically defensible positions prominent in philosophy. For this to be true, two things must hold. One, that there are no good arguments in favor of it which cannot be easily addressed by the anti-realist. Two, that the anti-realist has strong knockdown arguments against this version of realism which the realist cannot adress. If this is the case, it should be very easy for you to produce such knockdown arguments in the debate. Knockdown arguments of those kinds should also clearly put the proponent of realism on the backfoot in the conversation. For example, I argue against any causal solution to moral overdetermination. I have strong knockdown arguments against such views. Whenever I present them in person to one of my opponents, they will be put on the backfoot, reaching for ways to respond. This is what we generally would expect to happen in a context where a person holds a view that cannot be defended and is presented with a strong knockdown argument against the view. Indeed, it happens in philosophy higher seminar and philosophy conferences all the time! “If someone presents arguments with premises I reject, I will reject the premises. That’s pretty standard practice. “ The way in which you do it does not seem like standard practice in analytic philosophy at all. Of course, we philosophers reject premises all the time, and sometimes we say things like “Well I reject that premise”. But that is then followed by the articulation of a reason for rejecting that premises. However, when you say things like “Well I reject that premise”, one of three things would often follow from that. 1) You would provide no further reason. 2) You would reject it based on not sharing the intuition. Or 3) you would say you don’t share the intuition and then provide your alternative view on subject-matter. But neither of above 3 moves are consiered good moves in analytic philosophy. The problem with 1) is that it does not provide a reason. The problem with the 2) is that it does not provide a good reason. To illustrate this: If I argue that I am allowed to switch the trolley, but not push the man, due to the principled distinction between letting die and killing. And I further support this principled distinction by pointing to how it helps us makes sense of a range of important cases, then in the context of a debate with someone who disagrees, it would not be sufficient for that someone to declare “well I don’t have that intuition”. We know this to be true within the practice of analytic philosophy, because no one can publish an article where the only “contribution” is the exclamation of “Well I don’t share that intuition”. The problem with 3) is that while you here do present an alternative view, which is good and allows the listners to decide which one they prefer, this falls FAR short of your claim that moral realism is one of the least defensible positions. If that was true, then you should very easily be able to argue that your alternative view is superior in a plethora of ways compared to the view held by the moral realist. But you dont produce such arguments (at least not in these two debates). “My alternative view to what, exactly? Things seem some way to someone else. They don’t seem that way to me. What kind of alternative are you looking for?” For example, in the Enoch debate you claimed to have this alternative view of language, according to which there is no general pretheoretical way of talking about wrongness in natural language due to the meaning of words always being context depended. Okay cool, so if your view was true, then Enochs attempt to setup the desiderata - which you seem to agree if valid would favor realism - is blocked. But you never provide reasons for believing your view of language is the correct one! Again, if realism and the semantic theory it relies upon to get its desiderata in place was SOOO indefensible, you should easily be able to produce reasons for why this is the case.
@@lanceindependent, NEITHER of you have any fundamental understanding of morality, and at the risk of seeming pessimistic, you will never ever have any proper understanding of ethics. Ask me why.
@@lanceindependentpeople think you've performed bad. Are you tacitly assuming there's an objective fact of the matter in relation to quality of your performance?
12:02 I find it extremely relatable and refreshing that Mike acknowledges "I don't know what's going on [about disparity of opinions in this field]". I'm a subjectivist, I don't agree with his realism and I also don't know what's going on 😄
@Curiosity Am I partially blocked from posting? I can reply on people's comments but comments I leave myself are not posting. I don't know why I would be blocked.
@@cloudoftime I have deliberately chosen "No Moderation" for comments, so everybody could comment. Not sure why this is the case. Someone else mentioned that too. Hope it doesn't continue. The video has thankfully gotten good engagement..
@@CuriosityGuy Ok. Thank you for the response. I will try again later. And thank you for facilitating this conversation between Lance and Mike. I've been looking forward to this for a long time.
The approach I take is sufficiently uncommon that I wouldn't expect many people to be especially familiar with it, especially given that there are very few publications advocating views similar to my own in the current literature.
Wow, Huemer right off the bat abandons the debate topic and just starts slandering people who disagree with what "seems" to him. He doesn't give any reason to think moral facts are objective, he just asserts, without evidence, the deeply implausible claim that every one of the many who disagree with him thinks something, widely seen as immoral, is ok. That clearly doesn't follow from endorsing any particular metaethical view, and he then whines then people who disagree he's shown his view is true are somehow "holding people who study ethics back" as if the consequences of being unable to show his view is true have any bearing at all on the truth of his view. He actually says nothing to support his own position other than, essentially, "it seems that way to him". Lance brings up actual empirical data, or points out when it is necessary, Huemer just claims he knows what other people think, by some magic sense organ I guess. Lance has to really work hard towards the beginning just to get Huemer on topic.
I don't really get how Huemer can, in the very beginning, use the word "seems" and still think he's talking about stance-independent moral facts. I wonder if it's some kind of fundamental brain difference that makes those "seems" somehow objective in his mind, but in my mind, I only see an unresolvable contradiction. The primary reason I don't subscribe to realism is that to me, objective reality is fundamentally amoral; subjective experiences seem to be emergent phenomena that arise from the mechanics of the universe without involving any moral questions whatsoever, and only in reference to those subjective experiences does it make sense to speak of morality.
Notice how you call into question Huemer's "seems," but then turn around and use the very word just rejected (at least insofar as it is related to non perspectival reality) yourself in pondering the nature of consciousness.
@fireinthesky2333 Yes, I did notice that. I have no problem with it, though, since my position isn't really bothered by the subjectivity. It might be that subjective experiences are not emergent phenomena, and there's some other cause, but that wouldn't change anything about my perspective of morality unless you can establish a fundamental law of the universe that all beings who experience anything must follow in the same sense that everything must follow the "rules" of gravity. As long as a person is even able to say "I don't think so," of any given moral proposition, I don't think (stance-independent) moral facts can exist. Or, to put it another way, I can deny the existence of gravity all I want, but I *can not* avoid being affected by it. I don't know what a fundamental moral fact comparable to gravity could even in theory look like if one existed.
@@nio804 I want you to think about how absurd your position is: you're saying that intractability, or sustained disagreement, is cause to think that the phenomenon in question is "subjective," but as moral realists have pointed out time and again, this is hardly unique to the moral domain. Philosophers, scientists, etc disagree on a vast array of things: they disagree on theories of time, on mathematical realism vs constructivism, on the causes of global temperature patterns, on theories of mass extinction, on nominalism, on theories of consciousness, on and on. None of this seems to necessitate irrealism as regards said domains.
@fireinthesky2333 There's a difference between disagreeing what is and is not a fact and the interpretation of what those facts mean. Going back to gravity, if I demonstrate it by dropping a ball 20 times, it would be lunacy to disagree that the ball fell 20 times unless you have other facts to show that we're hallucinating. However, disagreeing on why the ball falls remains an option.
@@nio804 Trying to introduce a fact/interpretation dichotomy in order to save irrealism exclusive to the moral domain is entirely ad hoc and doesn't solve your issue: that is, if we suppose only facts can be "objective" we're immediately threatened with epistemic nihilism, as, first of all, there will be disagreement as to what constitutes a fact and what constitutes a mere interpretation of these purportedly more epistemically fundamental facts. After all, philosophers don't even agree on what "truth" is. But more to the point, what I strongly suspect is happening here is this: it's clear that your modus operandi will entail a much more expansive irrealism, but this isn't a comfortable place to be, so rather than bite the bullet, you have manufactured a completely silly belief forming arbiter which saves domain realism elsewhere but kills it relative to the domain of morality. Whatever it takes, I guess. 😔
lance just has this tendency to unpack EVERYTHING - which I guess causes some people trouble in keeping track of everything that is happening. But this exhaustiveness is one of the main reasons I would say he's extremely clear in his speech.
Lance constatntly throws red herrings, moves goalpoasts and plays his usual contrarian tactics. Not to mention appeals to empirical studies and so forth. The topic of the debate is "Do objective moral facts exists?" and not what Lance did for his PhD and what empirical studies show.
One of the reasons for bringing up empirical studies is that some realists make the claim that moral realism is the common sense position and maybe even the default position. How do we know that's actually true? You yourself are calling him a contrarian, but this seems to imply that moral anti-realism is some fringe position, when that isn't necessarily the case.
@@MsJavaWolf I am calling Lance contrarian because he's a behaving in a contrarian fashion generally, and not because moral realism is default position. The only reason why Lance appeals to these studies is to side step the debate.
@@KlPop-x1o The way I see the debate is somewhat like this: - Mike argues from his moral intuitions. - Lance doesn't have the same intuitions, so how do we resolve this? - Mike says that probably a lot of people have the same intuitions as he does. - Lance says that the empirical evidence doesn't support this. I see the empirical data as important (and therefore not side stepping), because so much of the realist argument seems to rely on a majority of people having those intuitions (although I know Mike also has some other arguments)
@@MsJavaWolfLance should know how deficient these empirical studies he and other experimentalists do, are. Empirical studies do not decide metaphysical issues. He admits it, so I don't see the relevance to the topic of the debate. It's clear that Lance is trying to sidestep the ontological or metaphysical questions by citing surveys. Putting trust into what people tell you, and using it to decide if people have these intuitions is as futile as it can get
@@lanceindependent Speaking for myself, I think of the 1935 film "The Raven." This was Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff's second collaboration. The unfortunate Karloff approaches Lugosi for plastic surgery in order to help his efforts to evade police capture. Sorrowfully, he opines, "maybe if a man looks ugly he does ugly things." Now, I don't have one of your "empirical studies" to back this up but my own experience is the type attracted to moral antitrealism is generally a lowly type, if not physically ugly, petty, spiteful, banal, childless, aesthetically displeasing in the order of their priorities, something like Nietzsche's Last Man. In other words, you yourself are a good reason to give up moral antirealism, ya dig? As everything about you deeply repulses me, I fear, like Agent Smith in the Matrix, being infected by it. I would then consider moral realism, which I see no good reason to relinquish, a kind of philosophic "social distancing" to the coronavirus of antirealism.
@@fireinthesky2333 Wow, what lewd nonsense. So, it is clear you can't give us the "good" reasons Huemer presented, because there are none, I suppose. You come across as "a lowly type, if not physically ugly, petty, spiteful, banal, childless, aesthetically displeasing in the order of your priorities".
@@fireinthesky2333 “You are ugly, therefore moral anti-realism is false”is not the argument I was expecting. Lol Lance I don’t think you are ugly and you seem like a nice person too. ❤ Edit: also you were talking about Agent Smith in the Matrix. Mr Anderson is Smith’s name for Neo.
Huemer is mistaken that "almost everybody" in epistemology shares the Gettier intuitions and accepts an alternate account of knowledge. The latest philpapers survey shows that 23.6% of philosophers and 17.6% of epistemologists still accept the JTB account while 30.6% of philosophers and 34.5% of epistemologists agree with Lance that there's no true account of knowledge. Huemer is in the minority here.
Looking forward to giving this a watch. I like Lance but I think his position lacks sufficient grounding which I believe Michael will bring to the surface. Personally, I'm a Hegelian so contest objectivity being mind independence so here's hoping that get's raised. Regardless, thank you for hosting this debate.
What should one ground their meta-ethical positions in?
What do you have in mind when you say "lack sufficient grounding"?
can you please start posting again?
Why would anyone want to give a watch to a video?
Wouldn't a CLOCK be more appropriate?
Hegelian? So, do you ADMIT that you adhere to the flawed concepts of a full-time criminal, Mr. Socialist-dunce-who-considers-right-and-wrong-to-be-absolutes?
I think in the context of these analytic metaethics debates, objectivity is simply defined as mind-independent and propositional.
BANGER, Huemer’s rhetorics always rub me the wrong way but he’s very sharp (of course) and manages to follow everything Lance argues here and addresses most things fairly I thought. The best proponents of each side of the metaethical divide here, ive been waiting to hear these guys go at it for a long time, this was awesome 😊
I agree with Lance that the metaethical dispute probably just stems from their deeper linguistic, and knowledge/truth theory disputes.
It does seem odd when people assume that because we use a word like “moral” that it has to connect to some metaphysical essence which we are then tasked with discovering the true nature of; even worse when people make those assumptions without even being aware that they are making them.
This was a really good conversation. Especially nice to see them go into the metaphilosophy, which IMO is where all the juicy stuff is.
I'm soo hyped!!! I was waiting for this conversation for awhile.
Wonderful to have two great minds on the same platform
I think the back and worth on Gettier cases was probably the most useful. I tend to by default have reactions to such cases that seem more similar to Lance's. It seems like the intuition for me is something like: this case doesn't seem to have an outcome where the agent had all of the relevant information and/or could have been using better criteria to come to true beliefs more frequently.
Knowledge just seems to be a concept where we as a group decide that we prefer these criteria over other criteria. In everyday life these issues seem to be resolved in terms of pragmatic considerations. What causes more true beliefs seems to have a fact of the matter. What knowledge is seems to be constructed and seems to have no fact of the matter until one constructs an idea of what knowledge is.
This is correct. "There is no fact of the matter" is really, "there are many different facts about how people talk and what they mean." E.g., we use "know" in a fallibilistic sense all the time (because most of us recognize that we could be mistaken about things we are nonetheless confident about), but then when challenged with "but do you REALLY know?" we feel bullied into an infallibilistic sense and perhaps quickly admit that we don't know at all. Normal language is full of imprecisions, inconsistencies, and spontaneous & compelled shifts of criteria & meaning. We tend to neglect this (perhaps from a hope that it isn't true) and let expressive use cases guide our gut feelings, and before you know it, philosophers are building syllogisms on a premise's "intuitiveness." The right metaethic, by contrast, acknowledges conceptual pluralism, and will look as messy as the real world is, because it actually reflects the real world.
Kitchen vs green mountains debate
Im so hyped!
nice content -- thank you for bringing these two together
Hey, Curiosity Guy, I see that you're seeing all of these. Is there a reason I can't post a comment in the main thread? Am I partially banned or something? I don't know why I would be. Is that even a thing? Thanks.
Sorry, for saying something irrelevant on this comment, but I needed to talk to Curiosity Guy and have no idea how to contact him otherwise.
I can't believe he simply asserts the truth of statements like "there are good and bad pieces of artwork ". That is a real stretch
Having the hardest time comprehending beyond grammar & semantics 😂😅
Unfortunately it seemed to me that Mike didn’t seem to take Lance’s metaphilosohical concerns seriously.
Lance did phenomenally!
Sings: “It ain’t necessarily so...” 🎤
I think Lance won the "debate" but it was more of a good discussion. I personally do not even think there is any reason to discuss moral realism is true given there is no question begging manner we have to define any moral fact or moral phenomena in such terms. People spew words and from that I have no idea how we can determine mind-independent facts about the world beyond psychology, language and tautologies. The world is comprised of what objects are made of and anything else is psychological projection.
Lance didn't "win the debate." That's ridiculous.
@@fireinthesky2333OK, why not?
@@colbyboucher6391 Because Lance does what he always does: push the definitional game in order to maintain an agenda. It's a grotesquely sophistic and boorishly unsophisticated propaganda ploy. Consider: let's say that I'm a restrictionist on immigration. Enter Lance Bust. "Yeah well, what exactly IS a border anyways?" I go on to define a border in the roughly colloquial terms in which most everyone would understand the concept. Lance Bust then says, "well, at what EXACT POINT can one be said to cross this so called border?" I explain in rough but understandable terms, along the lines of when one's physical person steps or climbs or otherwise travels over the line, as it were. Lance Bust then says, "Must it be the "whole person," and what exactly is a "person" anyways?" And so it goes. It's a stupid, redundant game and worse yet, dishonest.
I dunno, I feel like the situation is pretty disanalogous, because the whole field of metaethics is about adjudicating what concepts mean. If somebody pulled this definitional stuff in a discussion about normatove ethics, I do think it'd be totally illict, and more in line with the situation you outline. But if I had to go with the border analogy to describe metaethical conversations, I'd say it was more like a country debating where to draw its borders, and somebody asking "Hold on: what exactly are our laws governing borders and the legality of crossing thereof? What are the practical implications of being in or outside of this border?" Which I think is extremely reasonable.
@@moonsweater Reasonable to a point, after all, there is a sense in which two interlocutors need mutual understanding of terms if they're to discuss the same subject matter, but I don't think it accurate to reduce metaethics entirely to terms of linguistic clarity anymore than it'd be fair to reduce biology to evolution. That aside, often demand for conceptual unpacking is little else than obfuscation of sneaking in an affirmed negation through the back door. As Rorty said of truth, "we know how to use it we don't have to define it." I'm less than charitable and reject your analogy in favor of mine through the sheer force of familiarity with how Lance operates. He's a sophist, full stop.
Yay! I've been looking forward to this !
Because?
Geology isn’t held back by “geology skeptics” because of the reality of the field. Geology actually does make progress, and doesn’t have many of its systems deconstructed with every new generation of geologists like philosophy does.
Because there's the philosophy of geology that gets into that. Science and philosophy are different in the sense that philosophy creates questions out of the foundations that a scientific field uses in its practice.
Yeah, Mike seems to like appealing to common sense as a general strategy, but that analogy set off my 'dodgy' senses straight away. Philosophy and the hard sciences just feel like significantly different endeavors with significantly divergent goals and assumptions.
I would have liked to see Huemer pressed more on his epistemology. Intuitions can be primed, biased by parents, and altered by one’s social group. That alone should be enough of a defeater to show they need to at least be supported by other evidence, which he can’t because there is none.
1:30:00 Couldn’t this just be explained by having an aversion to the act-type of breaking promises? Seems like that’s a sufficient explanation to me.
1:35:00 I’d also like to know what he means by “it’s harder to escape [objective moral facts]”, How?! How is it harder?! Doesn’t seem to be harder since billions of people escape them every day. If these facts exist, they are supposed to *have* this property of harder to escape. Why should it make a difference if people subjectively *believe* they exist? Like, why is that a criteria for their inescapably?!
Regarding the last point: Yes, I very much agree. What's so inescapable of stance-independent moral facts? You could just...ignore them. And what are the consequences? As far as I can tell, none at all.
@@lanceindependent
You can’t have any pudding if you don’t [obey objective normative facts]! How can you have any pudding if you don’t [obey objective normative facts]!?
I don't think he can... Ultimately his epistemology seems an intuition pump.
If objective means independent of the attitudes of observers, then what comes to my mind is something like: the earth revolves around the sun. This at least to me, is as objective a claim can be, assuming we take Huemer’s definition of ‘objective’. Even if there isn’t a single sentient creature in the universe, the earth would still revolve around the sun. However, when speaking about moral claims, it doesn’t seem to me that they are objective in that sense, because for one you’d have to assume that these moral claims are etched into the fabric of the universe; like the claim torturing people for fun is wrong came prepackaged with the world.
I think it’s more similar to a physical law like gravity. Even if there were no physical objects to experience gravitational attraction, the law itself would still exist as an abstract principle. This is more akin to what realists are claiming, I believe.
Even the physical claim that the Earth revolves around the sun is a matter of convention and perspective. They both orbit a shared barycenter, but because the sun is much larger, it dominates the interaction, and the situation is just easier to describe as the Earth orbiting the sun, even though it's not perfectly accurate.
Many moral realists think that moral laws are "necessary" abstract objects, so they would indeed be "prepackaged", they would also be true in every possible world.
The details would vary, in a world where there are no humans you can't break the moral law by harming a human but there would still be the general principle. Maybe the general principle is something like: it's wrong to harm any conscious creatures if they exist.
There are other similar views, for example you could think that mathematical objects exist necessarily and all the mathematical truths are also necessary, something like mathematical Platonism.
@@MsJavaWolf I figured so, but such a grand claim requires more than just bare assertions, it requires actual evidence to back up such a claim.
Just guys being dudes.
This was very interesting. I would be interested to hear more.
I always find Huemer interesting and I have recently been catching up on Bush. In this case, I initially agreed with Bush, and did not change my mind, so maybe I am being biased.
Huemer makes good objections to arguments Bush did not make. If he addressed Bush's basic point, I didn’t understand him. The question is not whether someone thinks baby torture is wrong, but what presuppositions are packed into that, and whether all of them are as a matter of fact stance-independent. He seemed to take the stance-independence of moral claims as uncontroversial, and assume that an anti-realist would have no grounds for objecting to baby torture, rather than trying to show that an objection to baby-torture can only be based on stance-independent reasons.
Some of Bush's objections about the impossibility of analyzing language out of context seem extreme, and for me difficult to understand, but I don’t think that is essential to the challenge to moral realism.
Nice comment. I'd be happy to discuss the latter point about analyzing language out of context. I don't just endorse this view, I also deny that it is in any way extreme. I think analytic philosophers have done a lot to entrench the notion that views like mine are "extreme" and "radical" and "skeptical" but I don't think any of this is true. From my perspective, their views seem very extreme and radical, and in many cases profoundly implausible.
@@lanceindependent instead of extreme, I should say difficult for me to get a grip on, and addressing an issue that I was unaware of and that I am not convinced is relevant. You seem to be very concerned about how to interpret statements by ordinary persons. I would be satisfied with coming up with coherent interpretations of what particular philosophers say, or objections to interpretations that philosophers have used. These are different problems, and one or the other might seem more tractable or interesting.
Do you agree that Huemer continued to the end as if a moral anti-realist cannot disapprove of baby torture? I was distracted from time to time during the discussion and I could have missed something. This seems like a strange position to take for him, as I usually find him to be more imaginative and charitable.
@@tdbtdbthedeadbunny The issue of language is not only relevant, it is of immense relevance to these discussions. Insofar as standard antirealist positions rely on semantic theses that are themselves based on false presuppositions about language, all traditional antirealist positions (and realist positions, for that matter), could have serious problems. Furthermore, many standard objections to antirealist positions turn on leveraging their semantic commitments and turning them against them...which is exactly what Huemer did in his opening statement. Huemer employs a process of elimination approach: He claims there are only three possible antirealist positions, and if you can show all three are wrong, realism wins by default.
What I was arguing is that this is not true: there are not only three antirealist positions, so showing that those three are wrong would not demonstrate realism is true.
>>You seem to be very concerned about how to interpret statements by ordinary persons.
I'm not that concerned about it. It's analytic philosophers who are concerned about it. All standard analytic metaethical positions on the matter feature a semantic thesis as one of their central claims. A big part of my work is showing that this is a mistake and that how ordinary people think about such questions is not especially relevant.
There were three reasons I brought up language at the outset:
(1) Because it is necessary to do so to argue that my position does not fall into one of the three positions Huemer claims are the only possible positions
(2) Because Huemer characterizes my own position as a radical skeptical position. This claim loses its force if it's not the case that his position is "commonsensical" or appeals to intuitions widely held among philosophers.
(3) Because language-related problems are a key element in normative entanglement.
>>Do you agree that Huemer continued to the end as if a moral anti-realist cannot disapprove of baby torture?
That depends what you mean, but probably not. I don't think Huemer thinks I don't disapprove of baby torture. I don't know if Huemer or other realists accept my characterization of normative entanglement or my claim that it is driving a lot of the reactions they and others have to antirealist positions. My impression is that Huemer didn't think normative entanglement accounted for his own judgments.
@@lanceindependent thanks for the clarification. It seemed to me that Huemer thought that if you disapprove of baby torture or condemn baby torturers, you’re being inconsistent. But as I said, I was not too certain that I had a strong grip on all his arguments.
@@tdbtdbthedeadbunny I'd have to review the whole discussion carefully but I doubt he thinks it's inconsistent with antirealism to disapprove of or condemn baby torturers.
The question would turn more on what the moral antirealist is committed to saying, depending on their semantics. An error theorist couldn't fully and sincerely say, consistent with their position, "It's wrong to torture babies," but I don't see why they'd be unable to say, consistent with their position, to say "I don't like baby torture and I will try to stop it." I doubt Huemer would disagree, and if he did, that'd be very strange.
I salute and admire Lance for citing empirical research to back his claims. However I think one very important consideration is needed, that is for moral realism to be true, there just needs to be at least 1 moral fact (insert realist descriptors) which isn't a high bar.
While I view survey data with a lot of skepticism especially since most of the survey done are not representive of the global population ( mostly done in Western, college students who are also mainly white) and to pose a very simialr question Lance like to ask "who are we?" I would argue that most of the surveys done DO NOT capture we/folk in the broad sense.
However when we look at the research from Beebe than spans a larger sample size across Poland, Ecuador and China, there seems to be closer consensus on a moral realist position on harm related questions. This is similar to the research done by Davis where when it came to judging harm, realist and anti-realist positions were extremely close. This isn't to disprove that anti-realism is false, it simply shows that the current empirical research (even if I grant that the current research represent "folk" well) DOES NOT prove the moral realism is false.
I don’t think Lance would say that the empirical research does or even can prove any metaethical stance true or false. However, if an argument begins (like Huemer’s first argument does) with the premise that “most people think X”, but we don’t have any empirical evidence that most people actually do think X, then we have no reason to accept that premise.
If moral realists have arguments that are not based on “it seems like X” or “most people think X” then that’s something we can debate as philosophers. But if that is a premise, we need to turn to empirical research to back it up.
@@KentrosaurusesAs I’ve mentioned above, all it seems moral realist needs to claim is there needs to be one X. Currently the empirical research shows that people have moral realist intuition in regards to acts relating to harm. That’s sufficient to justify saying that people have some moral realist intuition towards a particular act.
Once again stating that I do not believe the current empirical research is representative of the global population, just like how I don’t believe a survey of philosophers represents the global population.
There just needing to be one of something doesn't make it a low bar. There just needing to be one incantation that can summon demons, or just one object that is both a square and a circle doesn't make the prospects of either a low bar.
Most of the surveys don't capture folk usage. Note, however, that non-naturalist realists who do not appeal to survey data are in an even worse position. Armchair theorizing and analyzing English sentences outside their actual contexts of usage are far worse as methods for evaluating which view is "commonsense" than existing survey data.
>>However when we look at the research from Beebe than spans a larger sample size across Poland, Ecuador and China, there seems to be closer consensus on a moral realist position on harm related questions.
That study doesn't come anywhere close to showing a cross-cultural consensus on moral realism. The realist response rate averaged across items in the US was 0.47, which is less than half, and it was extremely variable across all items, with some items, with no single item approaching consensus. A similar pattern held in Poland, Ecuador, and China, realist response rates ranging from 0.27 to 0.78 across items, once again with fairly middling averages. The average across items in these countries ranged from 0.33 for donating money to 0.67 for hitting others. This is, yet again, nowhere close to a consensus. Their data simply doesn't show a consensus, or even something close to one.
Those studies were also conducted prior to the methodological critiques leveled against early metaethics paradigms (from myself, Polzler, Wright, and others). Better-designed studies have led to even lower rates of realism, including Taylor Davis's work and in Polzler and Wright's work, such as a recent cross-cultural study with Polzler and several collaborators that found very low realist response rates (see "Lay People Deny Morality’s Objectivity across Cultures (to somewhat Different Extents and in somewhat Different Ways)".
In other words: the data never even appeared to show a consensus ten years ago, and as methods have improved, rates of realism have only dropped further. The most methodologically rigorous methods tend to find very high rates of antirealism. The overall body of literature does not suggest there is any sort of consensus that nonphilosophers are realists.
>> This is similar to the research done by Davis where when it came to judging harm, realist and anti-realist positions were extremely close.
Noncognitivism was the modal response across all five moral foundations (including harm) in Davis's data, with antirealist responses being about even for harm and otherwise dominating across the other four foundations. Davis's findings are squarely in the "most people gave antirealist responses" camp.
>>This isn't to disprove that anti-realism is false, it simply shows that the current empirical research (even if I grant that the current research represent "folk" well) DOES NOT prove the moral realism is false.
This research isn't about whether realism is true or false. This is empirical research about whether nonphilosophers are moral realists or not.
The data is not very representative of people in general.
@@lanceindependent The paper by Beebe stated that "It is true that participants gave strongly objectivist responses to some ethical claims-particularly those that involved inflicting unwanted and unjustified harm upon other individuals" and the paper by Taylor Davis also showed that realism and anti-realist position came close on harm. Based on this I can contend that when it comes to harm and only harm, "folk" people have strong moral realist intuition.
As for "better methods" I would just deny this until there's a replication showing that it is actually better, one can claim different criteria were included but there needs to be some replication to say its better, especially in the world of survey/psychology research. If a method cannot produce realibilty when it comes to replication, I would not say it's better and based on the current literature I've not seen a replication done, however if I am wrong due to my ignorance of not being deep in the field and unawre of the latest study, please let me know and I will give it a read.
@@kedrick93 What matters is what Beebe et al’s data shows, not how they frame the data. Their data does not show anything like a consensus in favor of moral realism. Neither does Davis’s data. Have you seen the graphs for the harm domain? They don’t show anything that could be reasonably interpreted as “most of these people favor realist responses.” Noncognitivist responses were more common, and participants broke about even on harm in the realist/antirealist categories. It’s not even close to a consensus. Neither of those studies comes anywhere near establishing any kind of consensus.
>>As for "better methods" I would just deny this until there's a replication showing that it is actually better
The quality of a study’s methods aren’t reducible to whether the results of the study replicate or not. The main issues here have to do with validity and invalid studies can still be replicated. The reasons why earlier studies have worse methods are well established on both theoretical and empirical grounds, including my own research. Those issues of data quality have to do with validity, not replicability.
I thought Lance would have pressed Huemer a little harder. Otherwise good convo
I thought I would have, too. I think the vibe was too positive and relaxed for me to feel inclined to do that. My vibe is heavily influenced by context and by the attitudes of the people I am interacting with.
@@lanceindependent Huemer could press you as well. I think the vibe was too positive and relaxed for him to feel inclined to do that. But, it feels odd that you allowed the vibe to prevent you from pulling out your rather intellectualy more aggressive points, when it was such a good occassion to do it. 'Good' meaning 'perfect' occassion to 'press' Huemer. You literally had a debate with him in person.
@@lanceindependent I'm usually all in favour of holding peoples feet to the fire, but I think you walked the line here perfectly. I didn't expect Huemer to be as open as he was. He struggled in the beginning but I think he started genuinely trying to understand where you were coming from. If you pushed any harder he likely would have closed off completely. All in all good discussion. Great job!
@@jimothy9943 he struggled because he saw that Lance will play his stupid game of half baked skepticism. I can challenge Lance in such a way that he's gonna concede the conclusion that he doesn't exist, and? Why we wouldn't just continue Lance's line of reasoning and concede ontological nihilism?
@@KlPop-x1o Chill out dude. I doubt you could challenge anyone without emotional outburst based on how you are handling what was an extremely civil discussion. If I were Lance I wouldn't want to debate you unless you changed your attitude right quick.
Finally
Huemer claims that moral statements do not depend on the attitude of observers, and to show this, he gives HIS attitude about certain moral situations, forgetting that he IS an observer, with a moral attitude, and that people with other attitudes might have different moral opinions. It is a very weird mistake.
The mere fact that many agree with his moral attitude, of which I am likely one, does not mean that moral statements do not depend on the attitude of observers. Of course, they do.
"Torturing babies" is only objectively wrong in the sense that 99% of humans would most likely share that personal moral attitude. This does not make it stance independent.
The easiest way to show why your point here is wrong is via an analogy. I believe that 'there are subatomic particles' is a true assertion about reality. Further, I take it that the statement is true regardless of whether anyone believes it. Obviously, I have to assess this from my own subjective epistemic position, as anyone does when they assess anything, but it does not make it the case that the statement's truth depends on my subjective epistemic position.
@@alastairbowyer7936 That analogy does not work at all.
Please explain why
@@alastairbowyer7936 I think you missed his point. He wasn't saying that "there is disagreement therefore morality is stance dependent" he was saying "agreement is insufficient to prove stance independence."
@mind_onion ok that is somewhat fair based on the last thing he said. Nonetheless, part of the point of my example is to show that Huemer's style of reasoning is generally a legitimate way of testing whether a statement is stance dependent. I don't think its an infallible method, but it gives us evidence of objectivity
7:23 It will be difficult for him to avoid using relativistic language. Even in his current explanation, the word 'seeming' introduces a subjective element. 'Seeming' conveys his intuition or attitude toward the proposition, which is inherently non-objective. So, should we interpret this 'seeming' as an objective claim? He could remove the term from the discussion, but that would force him to make a more direct and definitive statement. In doing so, however, he would still need to express it in a way that avoids implying his personal stance on the proposition. I'm not sure he can achieve that without resorting to some form of relativistic language, which would inevitably imply a subjective relationship between his attitude and the proposition.
He doesn't need to use the language in a "non-relative way" but only in a discriminative way, I think the defense of moral realism doesn't require any "special technical sense" and/or merely "ordinary language sense" to keep the case going, specially in the defense of modest moral realism that Huemer defends.
I was underwhelmed despite normally liking both parties. In the end:
Michael thinks realism is intuitive, most people are committed to realism, and the arguments for anti-realism are all terrible.
Lance thinks realism isn't intuitive at all, most people are not committed to realism, and the arguments for realism are all terrible.
Other than that, I'll say I thought Lance did (or was allowed to do) too much of the talking. Maybe I'm mistaken -- and I'm not going to watch again and count their speaking time -- but it felt as if he kept adding to his points when it would have been more beneficial to stop and let Michael respond. Oh well, better than no debate.
That's fair. I'm very talkative. One point I think it's worth making though is that it takes a more words to discuss empirical evidence that a concept isn't commonsense than it does to claim that itis commonsense. That puts someone with my approach and position in an asymmetric position with respect to how much we have to say to challenge another claim or position. Compare to someone claiming there's no even evidence for evolution vs. someone trying to discuss that evidence.
Yeah Lance can ramble because he wants to say everything he thinks is important in relation to a point; I don't at all think it's intentional. I actually think HE is better when he is constrained a bit more.
@@blamtasticful Yea, I have strong completionist tendencies and dislike short exchanges. It's very challenging to try to address any of this in 2 hours, or even 10. I do feel it makes for a better conversation when there's someone that constrains me; I've been in a few interviews where this happens and it goes well when someone can stop me or manage the flow of a conversation.
@@lanceindependent Maybe, and again I like you in general, but just consider that if someone says "moral realism is intuitive to many people" that your response doesn't need to contain any studies. You could simply indicate that the studies you've seen or conducted don't support that. At that point, you've done as much work as your opponent. Then you only need to do a tiny bit more to "beat" your opponent in this respect, like say a single line about what your research shows. Then what are they gonna do?
@@blamtasticful I don't think he's "rambling." Just adding new, also interesting points when it'd beneficial to stop and allow a response.
Lance defence for the claim that moral realism is not the common sense view seems to me to very poor. I don’t think empirical studies show that moral realism is not the common sense view. Lance seems to think that for moral realism to be the common sense view people need to explicitly endorse moral realism. Just because people didn’t endorse moral realism explicitly in the empirical research doesn’t show that moral realism is not the common sense view. Also note that the research is not so reliable as Lance thinks it is. Non philosophers doesn’t keep thinking about ethical issues and certainly they don’t think deeply about meta ethics, they are also not well equipped with philosophers’ vocabulary, in light of this, we should decrease our trust in such research to an extend. Keeping this point aside, even if we grant that the research is correct it doesn’t follow that moral realism is not the common sense view because people in general can be implicitly moral realists. Lance said nothing to refute this. If we follow Lance reasoning, we will have to conclude many things which we can take to be common sense views are not common sensical at all. For example, external world realism seems to be a common sense view but general people are not explicitly endorsing any version of non skeptical realism, does that shows according to Lance that people are not generally realists about the external world? According to me, it is not because people are still implicitly realists. Same can be true about moral realism. What did Lance said to rule this possibility? That’s my first worry with Lance position. I heard that Lance take moral non naturalism to be an unintelligible position, perhaps because of its commitment to external reasons, but Lance says nothing to defend his unintelligibility claim. Lance keeps saying how his meta philosophical views are different and how he takes an empiricist stance generally. But is Lance unintelligibility thesis supported by empirical study, by Lance own light empirical study doesn’t support any particular meta ethical theory, so then on the basis of what did he form his belief? He seems to give the impression that people who are moral realists are mistaken because they don’t take empirical study seriously however his own position is not based on empirical studies, if he can have a position why not the realists?
Lance Bust is a dishonest wretch willing to lie about his own moral intuitions, brandish about methodologically flawed "empirical studies" like a toddler swinging an axe, engage is endless semantic obfuscation, in order to maintain his silly nihilism.
I understand Michael’s insistence that intuitions are important and difficult to escape (4:40). But methodically I strongly dislike approaches that don’t seek to reduce our dependence on intuitions, or think “seemings” form a good basis for heavy duty metaphysical theorizing.
I much prefer the meta philosophical approach of @lanceindependent that is reliant on the hard work of gathering empirical data, and getting clear about language; how it’s used and what its limitations are.
(1:08:38) I also tend to find that pragmatists or people who are Wittgensteinians about language are very clear on what analytical philosophers are doing and exactly where they go wrong. Meanwhile analytical philosophers tend to struggle to wrap their heads around other perspectives.
It was a pleasant and productive conversation on both sides, but I still couldn’t help but walk away with the impression that @owl235 was completely out classed.
I've read Huemer for years, it must be really frustrating to him that people just don't read or refer to his actual arguments about intuition
@@niklasanzingerWhy doesn't he offer them?
@@niklasanzinger it’s fair to say I have not read any or listened to much of Huemer. I’m also not a professional philosopher or anywhere near as knowledgeable as Huemer on philosophy in general.
That being said, the views I endorse fundamentally disagree with his approach to philosophy, and since the dispute is meta philosophical It doesn’t seem likely his writing on lower level issues will influence me or connect with the views I hold.
Analytical rationalist L
Pragmatic empiricist W
All a moral realist needs to claim is there needs to be one X. X being a moral fact.,Currently the empirical research shows that people have moral realist intuition in regards to acts relating to harm. That’s sufficient to justify saying that people have some moral realist intuition towards a particular act.
Once again stating that I do not believe the current empirical research is representative of the global population, just like how I don’t believe a survey of philosophers represents the global population.
@@kedrick93 There is a distinction between it being true that people have _intuitions_ about moral notions and it being true that there are moral facts.
Intuition about moral realism ≠ moral fact
I’ve noticed that my rhetorical capability dwarfs both interlocutors
dwarfsploitation
Nobody cares or knows who you are though
@@appleseedsix4523 im sorry please forgive me
@@theafricanassasin☠️
@@theafricanassasin, just as THEIR rhetorical abilities dwarf that of the current World Teacher Himself.
Have you watched his RUclips channel?
What a poor defence of moral realism! I don’t blame the speaker, every argument for moral realism is sophistry.
No it isn't. You haven't read the relevant material and you should feel bad for being a dumbo.
“Naturalism counts as realism” - BOOO!!!
Please help us make this a separate category!
I don’t share the intuition, either. Torturing babies for fun is wrong comes out of natural realism based on its axioms.
Right and wrong are RELATIVE. ;)
@@ReverendDr.Thomas
Is this in response to what I said?
@@ReverendDr.Thomasno. Your judgement about what's good or bad might be relative, but good and bad are universal notions, innate to all moral agents.
@@KlPop-x1o, you mean that they are ABSOLUTES? 😬
@@ReverendDr.Thomasthey are universals. How would you know how to apply moral judgements if you wouldn't know what these universals stand for? How would all humans make evaluative judgements if they wouldn't possess universal knowledge of good and bad?
A question for Lance. If you had more "convensional" metaphilosophical views, how would that affect your position on moral realism? If for example you were not a pragmatist. I am 1 hour in so if that is answered my bad.
I used to have more conventional views and I was sympathetic to variations of standard antirealist views. I think moral non-naturalism is one of the least philosophically defensible positions prominent in the literature, in that I think there are no good arguments for it, antirealists have good responses to all of the arguments in favor of it, and there is on abductive grounds very little reason to inflate our ontology with autonomous moral properties or insist on the meaningfulness of ineffable, irreducibly normative facts, or external reasons, and so on.
@@lanceindependent if that's the case, then how come you struggle in your debate against Huemer here and, even more so in your debate against Enoch? I mean, if moral realism was so implausible as you describe it, you should easily be able to produce the objections that Huemer and Enoch struggle to respond to. But instead your main "responses" are typically formulated in terms of "well I don't have that intuition" or even more commonly "well I reject that..." where ... often = standard practices of analytic philosophy. This is then typically followed by you stating what your alternative view is but not arguing for it, or demonstrating it as a superior approach to the standard one.
@@inquiry6274 I didn't struggle in either conversation. I had pleasant conversations with both Huemer and Enoch, but I do not think either of them presented arguments in our conversations that I failed to adequately address (unless, at best, there were open threads I didn't get to due to time constraints). If you think either of them presented arguments you don’t think I could address, let me know. More generally, I’m familiar with their arguments outside our discussions (e.g., moral convergence, deliberative indispensability) and I likewise think antirealists can handle these arguments just fine.
If you think moral realism is plausible, you are welcome to tell me what you think a good argument for moral realism is, and I'd be happy to discuss with you why I don't think it's a good argument.
>>I mean, if moral realism was so implausible as you describe it, you should easily be able to produce the objections that Huemer and Enoch struggle to respond to
I don’t agree. I don’t think any of us struggled in these discussions. A person struggling to respond is not a good indication of whether their position is a strong one or not, especially if you’re talking live debates.
>>But instead your main "responses" are typically formulated in terms of "well I don't have that intuition" or even more commonly "well I reject that..."
If someone presents arguments with premises I reject, I will reject the premises. That’s pretty standard practice.
>>This is then typically followed by you stating what your alternative view is but not arguing for it, or demonstrating it as a superior approach to the standard one.
My alternative view to what, exactly? Things seem some way to someone else. They don’t seem that way to me. What kind of alternative are you looking for?
@@lanceindependent “If you think moral realism is plausible, you are welcome to tell me what you think a good argument for moral realism is, and I'd be happy to discuss with you why I don't think it's a good argument. “
If I understand your correctly, you find my version of moral realism - something like Frank Jackson style naturalism - to be plausible, but trivial and thus uninteresting. So, if there was an argument with you regarding my view, it would have to be that its not trivial.
“I don’t agree. I don’t think any of us struggled in these discussions. A person struggling to respond is not a good indication of whether their position is a strong one or not, especially if you’re talking live debates. “
You claimed that moral realism (the non-naturalist version) is one of the least philosophically defensible positions prominent in philosophy. For this to be true, two things must hold. One, that there are no good arguments in favor of it which cannot be easily addressed by the anti-realist. Two, that the anti-realist has strong knockdown arguments against this version of realism which the realist cannot adress. If this is the case, it should be very easy for you to produce such knockdown arguments in the debate. Knockdown arguments of those kinds should also clearly put the proponent of realism on the backfoot in the conversation. For example, I argue against any causal solution to moral overdetermination. I have strong knockdown arguments against such views. Whenever I present them in person to one of my opponents, they will be put on the backfoot, reaching for ways to respond. This is what we generally would expect to happen in a context where a person holds a view that cannot be defended and is presented with a strong knockdown argument against the view. Indeed, it happens in philosophy higher seminar and philosophy conferences all the time!
“If someone presents arguments with premises I reject, I will reject the premises. That’s pretty standard practice. “
The way in which you do it does not seem like standard practice in analytic philosophy at all. Of course, we philosophers reject premises all the time, and sometimes we say things like “Well I reject that premise”. But that is then followed by the articulation of a reason for rejecting that premises. However, when you say things like “Well I reject that premise”, one of three things would often follow from that. 1) You would provide no further reason. 2) You would reject it based on not sharing the intuition. Or 3) you would say you don’t share the intuition and then provide your alternative view on subject-matter.
But neither of above 3 moves are consiered good moves in analytic philosophy. The problem with 1) is that it does not provide a reason. The problem with the 2) is that it does not provide a good reason. To illustrate this: If I argue that I am allowed to switch the trolley, but not push the man, due to the principled distinction between letting die and killing. And I further support this principled distinction by pointing to how it helps us makes sense of a range of important cases, then in the context of a debate with someone who disagrees, it would not be sufficient for that someone to declare “well I don’t have that intuition”. We know this to be true within the practice of analytic philosophy, because no one can publish an article where the only “contribution” is the exclamation of “Well I don’t share that intuition”.
The problem with 3) is that while you here do present an alternative view, which is good and allows the listners to decide which one they prefer, this falls FAR short of your claim that moral realism is one of the least defensible positions. If that was true, then you should very easily be able to argue that your alternative view is superior in a plethora of ways compared to the view held by the moral realist. But you dont produce such arguments (at least not in these two debates).
“My alternative view to what, exactly? Things seem some way to someone else. They don’t seem that way to me. What kind of alternative are you looking for?”
For example, in the Enoch debate you claimed to have this alternative view of language, according to which there is no general pretheoretical way of talking about wrongness in natural language due to the meaning of words always being context depended. Okay cool, so if your view was true, then Enochs attempt to setup the desiderata - which you seem to agree if valid would favor realism - is blocked. But you never provide reasons for believing your view of language is the correct one! Again, if realism and the semantic theory it relies upon to get its desiderata in place was SOOO indefensible, you should easily be able to produce reasons for why this is the case.
Amazing Job by Huemer , took hold of the whole convo, props to both of them
Took hold how?
@@lanceindependent, NEITHER of you have any fundamental understanding of morality, and at the risk of seeming pessimistic, you will never ever have any proper understanding of ethics.
Ask me why.
@@lanceindependentpeople think you've performed bad. Are you tacitly assuming there's an objective fact of the matter in relation to quality of your performance?
@@ReverendDr.Thomas Good grief
@ReverendDr.Thomas, I'll bite. Why?
12:02 I find it extremely relatable and refreshing that Mike acknowledges "I don't know what's going on [about disparity of opinions in this field]".
I'm a subjectivist, I don't agree with his realism and I also don't know what's going on 😄
@Curiosity Am I partially blocked from posting? I can reply on people's comments but comments I leave myself are not posting. I don't know why I would be blocked.
It seems this comment has posted though, oddly.
@@cloudoftime I have deliberately chosen "No Moderation" for comments, so everybody could comment. Not sure why this is the case. Someone else mentioned that too. Hope it doesn't continue. The video has thankfully gotten good engagement..
@@CuriosityGuy Ok. Thank you for the response. I will try again later.
And thank you for facilitating this conversation between Lance and Mike. I've been looking forward to this for a long time.
@@cloudoftime My pleasure! Stay tuned and stay curious for more ;)
I would recommend the book "The abolition of man" by C.S. Lewis to know more about objective morality and its implications for society.
wow, michael huemer looked so philosophically sheltered from lance’s positions… kind of embarrassing…
The approach I take is sufficiently uncommon that I wouldn't expect many people to be especially familiar with it, especially given that there are very few publications advocating views similar to my own in the current literature.
ILY MICHAEL HUEMER
Meaning? You love him?
@@ReverendDr.Thomas YES SIR
Wow, Huemer right off the bat abandons the debate topic and just starts slandering people who disagree with what "seems" to him. He doesn't give any reason to think moral facts are objective, he just asserts, without evidence, the deeply implausible claim that every one of the many who disagree with him thinks something, widely seen as immoral, is ok. That clearly doesn't follow from endorsing any particular metaethical view, and he then whines then people who disagree he's shown his view is true are somehow "holding people who study ethics back" as if the consequences of being unable to show his view is true have any bearing at all on the truth of his view. He actually says nothing to support his own position other than, essentially, "it seems that way to him". Lance brings up actual empirical data, or points out when it is necessary, Huemer just claims he knows what other people think, by some magic sense organ I guess. Lance has to really work hard towards the beginning just to get Huemer on topic.
👍🏻
Why Humer doesn't use hair band? Why Lance has no hair at all? Imagine Huemer being bald and Lance having a long hair
I don't really get how Huemer can, in the very beginning, use the word "seems" and still think he's talking about stance-independent moral facts.
I wonder if it's some kind of fundamental brain difference that makes those "seems" somehow objective in his mind, but in my mind, I only see an unresolvable contradiction.
The primary reason I don't subscribe to realism is that to me, objective reality is fundamentally amoral; subjective experiences seem to be emergent phenomena that arise from the mechanics of the universe without involving any moral questions whatsoever, and only in reference to those subjective experiences does it make sense to speak of morality.
Notice how you call into question Huemer's "seems," but then turn around and use the very word just rejected (at least insofar as it is related to non perspectival reality) yourself in pondering the nature of consciousness.
@fireinthesky2333 Yes, I did notice that. I have no problem with it, though, since my position isn't really bothered by the subjectivity. It might be that subjective experiences are not emergent phenomena, and there's some other cause, but that wouldn't change anything about my perspective of morality unless you can establish a fundamental law of the universe that all beings who experience anything must follow in the same sense that everything must follow the "rules" of gravity.
As long as a person is even able to say "I don't think so," of any given moral proposition, I don't think (stance-independent) moral facts can exist.
Or, to put it another way, I can deny the existence of gravity all I want, but I *can not* avoid being affected by it. I don't know what a fundamental moral fact comparable to gravity could even in theory look like if one existed.
@@nio804 I want you to think about how absurd your position is: you're saying that intractability, or sustained disagreement, is cause to think that the phenomenon in question is "subjective," but as moral realists have pointed out time and again, this is hardly unique to the moral domain. Philosophers, scientists, etc disagree on a vast array of things: they disagree on theories of time, on mathematical realism vs constructivism, on the causes of global temperature patterns, on theories of mass extinction, on nominalism, on theories of consciousness, on and on. None of this seems to necessitate irrealism as regards said domains.
@fireinthesky2333 There's a difference between disagreeing what is and is not a fact and the interpretation of what those facts mean. Going back to gravity, if I demonstrate it by dropping a ball 20 times, it would be lunacy to disagree that the ball fell 20 times unless you have other facts to show that we're hallucinating. However, disagreeing on why the ball falls remains an option.
@@nio804 Trying to introduce a fact/interpretation dichotomy in order to save irrealism exclusive to the moral domain is entirely ad hoc and doesn't solve your issue: that is, if we suppose only facts can be "objective" we're immediately threatened with epistemic nihilism, as, first of all, there will be disagreement as to what constitutes a fact and what constitutes a mere interpretation of these purportedly more epistemically fundamental facts. After all, philosophers don't even agree on what "truth" is. But more to the point, what I strongly suspect is happening here is this: it's clear that your modus operandi will entail a much more expansive irrealism, but this isn't a comfortable place to be, so rather than bite the bullet, you have manufactured a completely silly belief forming arbiter which saves domain realism elsewhere but kills it relative to the domain of morality. Whatever it takes, I guess. 😔
Yeah the Huemer
Lance’s speech is convoluted, Huemer‘s is precise & clear
I think the opposite.
lance just has this tendency to unpack EVERYTHING - which I guess causes some people trouble in keeping track of everything that is happening. But this exhaustiveness is one of the main reasons I would say he's extremely clear in his speech.
It “seems” we don’t share this “intuition.”
Lance constatntly throws red herrings, moves goalpoasts and plays his usual contrarian tactics. Not to mention appeals to empirical studies and so forth. The topic of the debate is "Do objective moral facts exists?" and not what Lance did for his PhD and what empirical studies show.
One of the reasons for bringing up empirical studies is that some realists make the claim that moral realism is the common sense position and maybe even the default position. How do we know that's actually true? You yourself are calling him a contrarian, but this seems to imply that moral anti-realism is some fringe position, when that isn't necessarily the case.
@@MsJavaWolf I am calling Lance contrarian because he's a behaving in a contrarian fashion generally, and not because moral realism is default position. The only reason why Lance appeals to these studies is to side step the debate.
@@KlPop-x1o The way I see the debate is somewhat like this:
- Mike argues from his moral intuitions.
- Lance doesn't have the same intuitions, so how do we resolve this?
- Mike says that probably a lot of people have the same intuitions as he does.
- Lance says that the empirical evidence doesn't support this.
I see the empirical data as important (and therefore not side stepping), because so much of the realist argument seems to rely on a majority of people having those intuitions (although I know Mike also has some other arguments)
@@MsJavaWolfLance should know how deficient these empirical studies he and other experimentalists do, are. Empirical studies do not decide metaphysical issues. He admits it, so I don't see the relevance to the topic of the debate. It's clear that Lance is trying to sidestep the ontological or metaphysical questions by citing surveys. Putting trust into what people tell you, and using it to decide if people have these intuitions is as futile as it can get
@@KlPop-x1o
Do you understand what is a "moral fact"?
Bush is a clown, providing no good reasons whatsoever to give up moral realism. Im glad Huemer clanked on this fool.
What good reasons do you think Huemer presented to give up on moral antirealism?
You're either deeply dull or we haven't watched the same video
@@lanceindependent Speaking for myself, I think of the 1935 film "The Raven." This was Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff's second collaboration. The unfortunate Karloff approaches Lugosi for plastic surgery in order to help his efforts to evade police capture. Sorrowfully, he opines, "maybe if a man looks ugly he does ugly things."
Now, I don't have one of your "empirical studies" to back this up but my own experience is the type attracted to moral antitrealism is generally a lowly type, if not physically ugly, petty, spiteful, banal, childless, aesthetically displeasing in the order of their priorities, something like Nietzsche's Last Man. In other words, you yourself are a good reason to give up moral antirealism, ya dig? As everything about you deeply repulses me, I fear, like Agent Smith in the Matrix, being infected by it. I would then consider moral realism, which I see no good reason to relinquish, a kind of philosophic "social distancing" to the coronavirus of antirealism.
@@fireinthesky2333 Wow, what lewd nonsense. So, it is clear you can't give us the "good" reasons Huemer presented, because there are none, I suppose. You come across as "a lowly type, if not physically ugly, petty, spiteful, banal, childless, aesthetically displeasing in the order of your priorities".
@@fireinthesky2333 “You are ugly, therefore moral anti-realism is false”is not the argument I was expecting. Lol
Lance I don’t think you are ugly and you seem like a nice person too. ❤
Edit: also you were talking about Agent Smith in the Matrix. Mr Anderson is Smith’s name for Neo.
Huemer is mistaken that "almost everybody" in epistemology shares the Gettier intuitions and accepts an alternate account of knowledge. The latest philpapers survey shows that 23.6% of philosophers and 17.6% of epistemologists still accept the JTB account while 30.6% of philosophers and 34.5% of epistemologists agree with Lance that there's no true account of knowledge. Huemer is in the minority here.
Nice, thanks for pointing that out.