Companions in guilt: ruclips.net/video/7HHBNU_gXP0/видео.html Deliberative indispensability: ruclips.net/video/bKFue3EqbxM/видео.html Moral convergence: ruclips.net/video/80L9ScBgMZc/видео.html The moral fixed points: ruclips.net/video/FlvXQ9tqdOw/видео.html Huemer's ontological argument: ruclips.net/video/02FaQ5arBAw/видео.html
You could have done it in paint. Save an empty tierlist image, then open it in paint, then use the text box tool. Super easy if you ever want to do it again.
@@KaneB I'm actually happy with that result as CIG caught me off guard first time and was the first and the only challenge for my anti-realist intuitions (aside from deliberation indespensibility, a little bit), and I still struggle with it. I don't find it so easy to bite the bullet, as there seems to be not much prospect for reduction of justification to truth-conduciveness. It always seemed to me that justification is some kind of self-sufficient game, so I guess I don't have answer what it is, especially if there's no such thing as non-relative rationality. It seems quite elusive to find some features of it that will be intelligible in reference to something outside it, not in itself. So maybe I had normative realist intuitions from the beginning, just quite latent and of strange kind.
@@exalted_kitharode I don't even think there's a bullet to bite. Why think there's anything even remotely implausible or undesirable about epistemic antirealism? I don't find anything any more appealing about epistemic realism than I do moral realism.
@@lanceindependent well I thought that moral realists(at least some of them) fail to be properly justified or rational in believing in those things, taking there to be things that we have no reason to suppose there are. And this phrasing cashed out in terms of reasons, or ground for believe in my mother tongue is basically what always predated my talk of evaluating positions. And my thought of reasonableness has always separated it from truthfulness, but I guess you can't do that in anti-realist account, which is basically try to translate all sentences about justification and rationality to subjective probabilities of their truth or truth-tracking or truth-conduciveness overall. This seems to me hopeless, I think I don't have any clue how to make this proposal work, how to assign some probabilites to beliefs according to their rationality, I'm not sure that rational belief at all have to align with truth. I feel like it's self-contained domain following its own rules, which can't be easily reduced to radically other class of sentences. That seems just handwaving before we made such account, and before it is shown to be Not extremely revisionist about first order epistemic commitments, which I suspect it would
@@lanceindependentand after all, it seems to me that evidence might be normative, that facts about supposed train departure Have to be my consideration in light of which I need to deliberate when I'm trying to find out when train will departure. It's not that when I'll lose interest in it, those facts will lose their status of considerations in light of which it is more reasonable to find out about train departure. So another impasse between realist and anti-realist seems to me that while being unintuitive in another aspects, realist wins in that he chooses to say that you can't drain some action of reasonableness just by changing your desires. It seems to me that some operations with evidence are unconditionally rational and it seems strange to try to reduce them to desires, something of very unepistemic kind. At some other level, for example, norms of inquiry, it might be ok to let pragmatic reasons to seep in(and some epistemic normative realist were so far as to even be error theorist about rules of inquiry), but at given time work with evidence have to be made irrespective of what I want now, that's just constutitive of me being rational being with intelligible discernible belief states
1:01:53 Amazing point by Lance. The intuitions are the thing that’s *causing* belief in realism. If they didn’t exist almost no one would be a realist. The arguments are post hoc rationalizations.
Great discussion here. I learned a lot about meta ethics. I spent a lot of time thinking about Phenomenal Conservatism and radical scepticism. I think that “seemings”, as they are understood by Huemer and co, just don’t exist (I told him this at my thesis defence, and he was incredulous!). He thinks they are a kind of Sui generis propositional mental state distinct from beliefs or inclinations, and I just don’t think I’ve ever had “seemings” in this sense, about moral realism or about anything. I’d like to think my cognitive faculties are pretty normal, and that I’m not missing a major element that everybody else has. You don’t see much talk of “seemings in psychology or neuroscience either, or indeed anywhere except defences of PC. So, I’d have been tempted to put an argument relying on PC in E.
Yeah, this is an interesting point. It's not clear to me exactly what seemings are supposed to be, especially if they are distinguished from beliefs and inclinations. Even if there are seemings in this sense, it's not obvious why they would have any epistemic force over beliefs and inclinations. So let's say that it seems to me that P, but that I am inclined to endorse ~P. Why shouldn't the inclination be what confers justification?
@@KaneB I agree with you. Some PC defenders say that seemings have a “ring of truth” or a special phenomenology that is supposed to do the trick. I guess you don’t have that phenomenology with inclinations. It isn’t really clear to me why the phenomenology would make any normative difference though, given that seemings are fallible and actually, from the viewers POV, might all be false.
Does he explicitly say anywhere that they're sui generis propositional mental states that are distinct from other states? I'd like to see that if so, since that's been my impression but I don't recall actually reading it. In any case, I, too, don't have seemings of this kind, and part of the reason I began studying psychology alongside philosophy was because of this. I think claiming to have, and feeling that one has intuitions is a learned behavior largely distinctive to analytic philosophy. I likewise suspect that there's no such thing.
@@lanceindependent I suggest Huemer’s “Ethical Intuitionism”, Chapter 5 “Moral Knowledge”. He goes at great length about what seemings are, their propositional character, how we can distinguish them from beliefs, inclinations, sensations, etc. He never uses the phrase “Sui generis”, but it is clear from the overall argument in that chapter. Places where you can explicitly find the Sui generis and propositional view of seemings are Culisons ‘What are seemings?’, Tucker’s ‘Seemings and Justification: New Essays’, Moretti’s “Phenomenal Conservatism”, and Skene’s “Seemings and the Possibility of Epistemic Justification”. I think for many at this point, you’re right that it is just learned behaviour. I also think intuition talk is encouraged by people wanting to see philosophy as about discovering stance-independent truths. Intuitions are thought of as ‘evidence’ for the truth. If intuitions don’t exist, we just have our opinions - but if we think philosophy is about discovering the truth, its silly to proceed just by exchanging opinions; intuitions are a vital piece of the modern Realist conception of philosophy.
After seeing your analysis of moral convergence I know kind of want to make arguments for gastronomic realism. I would start by going to a physiological view of taste being based on a mix of basic components + smell. Then argue that all people have common parameters on taste. (Discounting cases where someone can't smell or loses the ability to sense one of those as obvious exceptions) Then if you define good tasting food as being food that has a pleasing balance of those basic properties. Then I think you could work towards a view of taste realism at least. Although, that also isn't paying attention to nutrition. You could make some view of the "average taste" which would be food that would taste good to practically everyone. There might be a slim minority that doesn't though. Arguably the average is not the best because people's ideally preferences diverge. But, you can counter that by claiming the physiology of food leads to there being consistent standards and principles for what tastes good. I think you could probably make a food realism position that is roughly equivalent to virtue ethics applied specifically to food realism. Convergence could be used as a secondary argument. But to be effective I think you would need to start from physiology and science. It might even be able to create multiple sets of "perfect foods" that meet this hypothetical objective standard of taste Or alternatively, a rigorous model for taste that could be used to determine how to adapt a consistent standard to any particular context. (In a virtue theory perspective) The idea of too much or too little of something being bad or good based on context in a consistent way seems to make more sense when applied to food that morality at least. I haven't fully worked this out or anything though.
Hey, something Lance said reminded me of a belief I come accross ALL the time in economics. "I take the purpose of deliberation to be to figure out how to get what I want". (35:40) Economists like to spend a good deal of time turning over every stone to reveal the hidden selfish motives behind everything (except what they do, which is in pursuit of only the most noble of goals of course). (Not saying lance is a selfish jerk, I'm sure he wants very good things - but it just reminded me of this) Essentially all that humans do is in pursuit of self interest, giving to charity makes you feel better than if you spent that on chocolate, or watched TV instead of helping out at a soup kitchen. Doing favours is a form of "social capital", an investment of sorts. Being kind is to make the community like you, so they won't treat you unfavourably in the future etc I think it has its roots in a weird social-darwinist perspective where humans are seen as solitary creatures who have begrudingly come together to make use of the division of labour and that sort of thing, but it meshes really well with their overarching view of life as a search to maximise "utility". It seems enormously backwards from anthropological studies, but there's no doubt individualism and that sort of attitude is pushed in the neoliberal milieu - but, anyway, I find it very difficult to argue with, not because I think it's right, but it just seems like a very flexible lens through which to view the world through. All i find myself armed with is very scattershot responses like - Why did we evolve empathy or guilt, or the ability to use this detailed language if we weren't a social species ("Being a social species brought us more individual benefits") - Why have people laid down their life for their values, beliefs or even the lives of those they had never met before? (Some acts seem genuinely altruistic - "ah, they just wanted to be remembered as a hero!") I just find it a very slippery thing to argue with, just wondered if you had any thoughts on any of this?
My take on this kind of thing is that there is nothing more required for altruism than e.g. feeling good when helping others. I find it bizarre to say that, when a person gives money to charity and this makes them feel good, the fact that it makes them feel good reveals that really they had a hidden selfish motive. In my view, the fact that giving to charity makes them feel good is exactly what altruistic sentiment consists in. I don't know what more we could want. What's the alternative? A person gives to charity, but does it begrudgingly, and it makes them feel miserable? I suppose in some sense this person is making a greater sacrifice, so we might call that more altruistic. But I would rather focus on cultivating sympathy and compassion; I would rather have a world where people help each other because it brings them joy to see others flourishing.
@@KaneB Thanks man. I also would love to see an emphasis on that way of being. I don't know how the economists have won lol (Well, if I overlook all the oligarch money, anyway). The alternative isn't that we do so begrudingly, it's a think a bit more insidious - that humans are "naturally" selfish, competitive etc... that compassion and cooperation are a weakness, or "mind virus" sort of thing - all this lefty fluff is indoctrinating us out of our natural ways of being etc lol. There's always this drive to naturalise ideologies and social/economic systems, to say they're right as theyre rooted in an ancient and great tradition or how god/nature intended things to be. I think that's the significance of this belief (doesnt seem to qualify as an argument, but it's paraded around as a fact), to paint everything as self interest to show that humans are naturally selfish and competitive, and therefore our social and economic systems should reflect that (or, any system which does not use these natural drives is doooomed to fail). I rarely see this all kind of spelled out, more gestured towards with metaphors, phrases and pop-biology littered throughout the discourse (e.g competition is never used pejoratively in economics, despite it being a MASSIVE waste of time and resources - like multiple companies developing the same fucking drug, or having to make 2 trips to dispenseries, wasting fuel yada yada - it's link to the alleged role of competition in evolution is pretty palpable - survival of the fittest is a phrase I've seen many times, talking about companies) I know of some quite radical biologists and, well, most anthropologists who would challenge this view of humanity (economists like to make up little fairy tales and put their hands over their ears; e.g in textbooks they picture ancient humanity's economies as barter economies, when one bright spark invented money to make it easier - when that NEVER happened anywhere, and we did just about everything lol) - but, it just feels like a super childish / unwinnable... unfalsifiable argument. I feel a bit like Freudians, where anything can be evidence of something within the theory after a few good logic pretzels, there seems to be no disproving it.
I mean there being lots of hidden “selfish” or “personal” or “utility maximizing” reasons for people’s behavior just isn’t in any conflict with the existence of genuine altruism. I would agree with LanceIndependent here and also add that multiple motivations can comfortably co-exist together which is in fact the normal state of human psychology. A mother gets a warm loving “glow” from doing something that helps her baby, but she also directly values/wants the baby to actually flourish at the same time. In some instances such as when she plays with her baby perhaps the “glow” is a stronger motivation and in others such as if she sacrifices her life to save the baby it looks like the other is the stronger motivation. No conflict with just having both values, as well as myriad others like wanting to appear to be a good mother, avoid criticism for doing things socially unacceptable for a mother to do, maximize government support doled out to those with children, etc.
Moral realists try not to suggest that anti-realists are incapable of making judgments challenge: Impossible. 😉 More seriously, normative anti-realists claim that there are no stance-independent normative facts. They don't claim that people have no feelings or opinions. There is nothing stopping me from preferring one thing to another for pretty much whatever reasons I like (the only thing that's ruled out is preferring x over y because I take it that x is objectively better than y, or that there is stance-independent reason to desire x over y, or whatever).
@@KaneB I think the real question is this : what is the field of objects on the other side of the intensionality relation? It seems odd, to suppose that a judgment is "about" something, while at the same time holding that the field of objects open for the aboutness relation, is empty. Anti-realism appears to me to require the acceptance of a non-relational conception of mental states. Insofar as one supposes that mental states are necessarily intensional in character, that their intensionality is precisely what constitutes their identity as mental, one must reject anti-realism with regards to the other relata of the intensionality relation. Right?
I just find it odd to listen to two people spend over 3 hours stating, "Here are the reasons to deny the existence of reasons" Of course, one could say, "Here are the reasons of type A for denying the existence of reasons of type B" - that could make sense. But you first need to clearly distinguish reasons of type A from reasons of type B. AND it requires the existence of reasons of type A. On this matter, I hold that the only reasons that exist are desire-based reasons. My aversion to pain gives me a reason to avoid putting my hand on a hot stove. I deny the existence of desire-independent reasons. Of course, since I am not the only creature with desires, the premise that all reasons are based on desires is consistent with the belief that there are reasons based on desires that I do not have. We capture this distinction in the phrases "has a reason" (has a desire that would be served by doing X) and "there is a reason" (there is a desire that would be served by doing X). Both "have a reason" and "there is a reason" are natural facts. And, indeed, when it comes to moral reasons, I deny that the moral reasons to refrain from the torture of babies (for example) depends - not on any reasons that I have - but the reasons that other people have to create (manufacture) in the society a set of reasons not to engage in the torture of babies. I know for a fact that people generally have (internal desire-based) reasons to create external reasons for people not to engage in such activities (by creating legal and social penalties). And people generally have (internal desire-based) reasons to create in other people internal reasons not to engage in such activities (which is accomplished by expressions of condemnation, contempt, and disgust at those who would do such things; or, in other words, by praising or blaming them). And the proposition, "People generally have reasons to manufacture reasons for others not to engage in this type of activity" is a truth-apt claim that is entirely independent of anything that I believe or want to be true. So, it has stance-independence (at least insofar as they are independent of MY stances). And it is independent of anybody else's stances towards the truth of this proposition. People can have reasons to create external and internal reasons in others even though none of them are aware of this fact - even if they all believe it is false. And it is sometimes true. But all of this requires that one type of reason (desire-based reasons) are true and exist in the world. NOTE: Epistemic reasons (the "partners in crime" argument) are reasons grounded on the fact that, while we desire that some proposition P be true, we choose those actions that would make proposition P true if the universe were as we believed it to be. This gives us an instrumental reason to promote practices that yield true beliefs, which provides the normative force for epistemic oughts. So, Type A epistemic reasons exist.
I tend to favour non-cognitive arguments, so I'd argue that the 'pull' you feel toward opposition to slavery, is an emotional reaction that is not universal. But it ties back into emotivism.
Re: epistemic humility, I take it to be the case that there exists at least one argument for moral realism which has never actually be proposed in writing, and there might be, in the set of arguments we've never even contemplated, one which is compelling. For all we know, someone may present a paper next year which convinces you or me to endorse moral realism (more likely me since I don't have the philosophical training to refute most arguments properly). ---- Re: phenomenal conservatism: I simply don't trust human intuition - we can't even get Newtonian physics right and we were evolved to survive in an environment where such basic physics can determine life or death. I don't even take "I perceive the cup in front me gives me some justification for believing there is a cup in front of me" as convincing because I've seen enough optical illusions to take human sensation to be unreliable. --- Re: moral fixed points: that seems awfully close to just defining moral realism into existence. A "Do you think torture is wrong?" B "What do you mean by torture?" A "The wrongful infliction of harm" B "well, I guess I think it's wrong then." It seems we could define the word without objective moral qualification instead (perhaps by referencing the victim's preferences or something) --- Overall, I question the project of trying to cover all morality with one blanket. We may take it that "a society that accepts chattel slavery is wrong even if everyone in it believes it to be acceptable." while also being complete relativists on, say, adultery or petty theft.
A slight rendition of Huemer's argument. If i understand it correctly, hes saying when in doubt, assume x is wrong (by recourse to our moral intuitions), to cover for the event that x is in fact wrong, despite not yet being determined. But couldn't we modify this a bit to say when in doubt, assume x is wrong, not because it could be wrong, but because it must be assumed wrong to promote the discovery of whether it's wrong. For instance, we might not be able to establish that murder is wrong, BUT if it's the case that an objective morality would be beneficial for everyone, including yourself, and it's the case that discovering as much would be profitable to you (to discover that murder is resolutely wrong), it holds that it would be in your best interest to negotiate with other agents to NOT murder, because allowing murder, would preclude the discovery of whether murder is wrong. (either me or you might be the discoverer of this 'truth' and so to kill me or you necessarily obstructs discovery of this truth). Which is ultimately a circular argument, but it seems to rest more in epistemology, wherein in the absence of information, to behave as though it doesn't exist merely because it's not visible, effectively prohibits it's discovery. So i'm not saying 'murder is wrong' i'm saying 'to do that which prevents the discovery of what is wrong, is wrong' because it's self defeating for the agent. But then the whole argument is also self affirming, because we assume murder is wrong apriori, to facilitate the discovery of whether murder is wrong, in which case to know murder is wrong, and to NOT know murder is wrong, results in the same agreement between agents - not murdering baselessly. ** This is more of just a fun argument, because of it's circularity i wouldn't put it forward too confidently.
Meta ethics in general is bullshit. Your epistemic stances are already a result of your implicit ethics. Figuring out your meta ethics is conditional on your ethics. Imo it's irrelevant whether one qualifies ethical statements among the "real" or not. My meta-meta ethics is sensible, contrary to meta ethics. Every 2n+1 meta ethic is nonsense and every even one sensible.
I was with lance until he started questioning pizza. That was just confusing. He's always been such a strong proponent of gastronomic realism - The one true realism. At least if we're talking about Italian food.
If one is a non-expert, then it makes sense to assume that the consensus view is correct. But that'a a pragmatic rule of thumb for laypersons... not something that philosophers should take seriously.
It seems to me that all of moral convergence can be explained by technology. Technology leading to the ability to sympathize with more people and humanize them and the democratization of power because of the distribution of technology.
21:19 - "I'm happy to just throw out justifications and truth and all that!" That can lead to some awfully dangerous places, though, as a doctor, I assume you are an experienced navigator of that layer. Still, I wish for your safety.
I would argue that the second argument doesn't have to apply to prayer if you also believe in placebos. Since you could argue that some prayers/rituals could be instrumentally useful even if someone doesn't believe in the existence of God. I do think it would generally apply for most definitions of prayer. Or if you want your prayer to affect anything other that yourself. But that kind highlights the holes in indispensability arguments.
The one argument you class as S tier is actually the worst, I think. People can all things considered converge on the wrong datum and draw the wrong moral from it [for any number of reasons]. Lance thinks convergence is the best because it tracks an empirical phenomenon, i.e. what people actually think about the issue based on their interests and goals. But that stance-dependence is precisely its insuperable weakness. Just because something is the most recent view of the majority, based on their own interests and goals, it doesn't follow that view is correct in principle or practice. Perhaps everyone needs to have different interests and goals than they now have; but, they'll never find out if the fact of the matter is independent of their stances and they're only committed to considering facts that are related in the relevant way to their [uninformed] interests and goals. As an example consider family estrangement: 30 years ago it used to be that people thought family is family and almost nothing justifies breaking ties with them. Now popular culture, and the vast majority of psychiatrists, therapists, and counselors agree that breaking ties with problematic family members is not only beneficial but failing to do so is harmful. Some, like Joshua Coleman, think differently. Now suppose he, along with others of his persuasion, is right. Then, the convergence of popular and expert opinion presents no evidence of the rightness of the current view [cutting family ties is good]. In fact, convergence actively precludes the recognition of the correct view [cutting family ties is bad].
I fear that the « expert » argument went off the rails. The expert argument is only relevant if we assume that the person appealing to this reason is a non-expert. Your whole discussion assumed expertise. The expert argument provides another expert with no reason to change their views. To a non expert, if 65% of the experts say that P is true then the non expert should give P a credence of 65%. A non-expert would have no reason to say that the experts are wrong. Most of the arguments are of the form, « the so-called experts are incompetent in their field » which one cannot say without being an expert. Much like the argument that people become atheists because they had poor relationships with their father, so their arguments and reasons can be ignored. And the argument that 70 years ago most philosophers were anti-realists is like the argument that 70 years ago scientists rejected plate tectonics.
Exactly what does objective mean with regard to morality? What is the criteria that allows a determination as to what is or is not a fact? (This would seem to be the basis as to why I am a moral antirealist.) My understanding of the term objective denotes a criteria of some sort by which an adjudication can be made independently. However, I never hear anything that allows for any adjudication and thus I am left with an idea being claimed wherein I find no grounding in the context of reality. The grounding that is being offered is "seemings" which registers as feelings insofar as I can determine.
1:05:52 I don't think this is true If we accept that intuitions are evidence for the proposition intuited, I don't see a great difference in where this seeming is located Sure, your own seemings to you have more epistemic weight, but I think others seemings give you some defeasable justification as well
That's fine, but then I would expect phenomenal conservatives to be doing a lot more empirical work to establish what people's intuitions actually are. A lot of them don't seem interested in that. Again, on this approach, there's a risk that phenomenal conservatism will backfire against the realist, given that the empirical research so far suggests that many people have anti-realist inclinations (as Lance discussed during the "face value of moral practice" section).
Of course Pizzas are objectively good (though Italian pizza is the most good)! 😊 Convergence is optimizing for species-wide best fit with regards to species-specific (evolving) desires/goals.
What do species have to do with anything? Species occuring in your account of ethics is a bit like panda bears occuring in your account of fundamental forces.
It seems to me that a moral realist argument needs to do two things: First, it must provide a calculus to decide if a moral proposition is right or wrong. Second it must provide a calculus as to why one ought to put right over wrong. These arguments seem to focus on the ought part alone, and they seem to appeal to either stance or the stances of others. Hardly a way to argue for stance independence.
So, overall I like your take on phenomenal conservatism. But, I do think that it might be possible for you to have someone convinced by another position without having feelings that pull them towards reality. For example, if we describe psychopaths as being people who don't have internal feelings of morality or empathy.(I now that is a likely wrong massive simplification) Then such a person might decide to adopt an ethical or moral framework without the influence of feelings. And I have seen any evidence that such people necessarily choose to be moral anti-realists vs. moral realists. To an extent I think you might also be implying that intuitions are inherently biasing someone as well? I can also think of situations where someone would have motivated reasoning against moral realism. For example, if someone wanted to do something that mostly people in their society or the world thinks is wrong. Or they even have an intuition that something they want to do is wrong. Then they might try to find and argument to dismiss that concern, so they don't have to feel guilt or they can argue publicly that what they do should be accepted because morality doesn't really exist. Now, to claim that all moral anti-realists thought that way would be a straw-man. It would be interesting if we had examples of someone who would be motivated to reject moral realism who ends up still supporting it after analyzing it. I do think intuition is a good starting point, but that intuitions can still be critically examined because they could and sometimes are wrong. I do think that intuition works decently well as support for the idea that morality is real. But, it is less sufficient for an idea that a particular thing is specifically immoral. Except perhaps in an egregious case. A cultural element against intuitive morals might say that intuition if just trained into us by our culture. If you do that, then you basically end up back on moral convergence. As one of you points out. It is an argument that most people have the intuition that this is true. Now if you believe that intuitions are inherently untrustworthy most of all of the time. Then, I don't see an issue too much by ignoring that. However, I think that we have empirical evidence that intuiting has value. But also that it is inherently not completely reliable. Most notably that people can learn skills as an intuition. And after a certain amount of training it can become pretty powerful. That is dependent on your more general view of epistemology. rejecting intuition entirely also requires a highly quantified approach to science and would jeopardize many but not all approaches to science. I would argue that if you have any intuitions that something is wrong. Then even if it doesn't seem intuitive that morality is "real" then you have to ignore or dismiss those intuitions. I think that it is likely that at least the vast majority of people have some form of intuition that something is wrong. However, it is also pretty clear that different cultures sometimes have conflicting views of morality. My hypothesis on the topic would be that everyone is born with some form of sense of morality. And that the particulars are shaped by their culture and community. And that people can choose to suppress their intuition of morality. (Which I would call a conscience). I do agree it is very arrogant to assume everyone else has the same intuitions. That everyone has some form of intuition is a more reasonable one in my view. From my understanding of the nature of intuition is is highly shaped by your experiences. So, it is better to assume that someone else's intuition is different then yours. Except perhaps if you come from pretty similar cultures. The intuition that "torturing babies is wrong" can coexist with moral anti-realism as you demonstrate. I am sort of curious if you can discern "why" you have an intuition that your moral intuition doesn't generalize. I don't think my perspective on intuitionism would necessarily backfire. But I could be wrong. Although, I do see the example of a person who doesn't believe in moral realism who still believes "torturing babies is wrong" as evidence that the belief "torturing babies is wrong" is true. I would agree that my personal intuition isn't sufficient evidence to make that sort of belief knowledge. I think my personal varient of that might be able to go up one letter grade. But it still isn't as firm as an argument as Moral Convergence or companions in guilt. Although, to an extent I think I would probably used a two pronged moral convergence and The points about what normal people think at 1:40 are interesting. To me that seems to be implying that normal people are using a crude version of virtue ethics, or some other form of situationally-relative ethics if they think two people can both be wrong because they are thinking of different situations. That does kind of rule out the possibility that they believe in immutable moral laws though As someone who recently has starting diving into the issue of anti-realism vs. realism. The training argument seems pretty plausible to me. Since there were a lot of arguments that I saw that seem to make a lot of sense and be obvious when the definitions are unclear. But, then when the definitions get clarified seem to conflict. Like it is pretty intuitive that people in different cultures would believe different things are right and wrong. As well as that morality is dependent on situations. When first heard of moral cultural relativism. It seemed like it was asking if the right thing might change depending on what my culture was. The manifestation of morality can change based on culture, even if there is moral truth or (realism). Semantics are really important, but are highly reliant on education and I do think that teaching people particular words can change what they think. Now that is only one data point. But to me that suggest that perhaps some of the ideas of moral anti-realism are intuitive but some aren't. Overall, I do agree the concerns you bring up bias the study. But it was a good attempt. I don't think I at all qualify as a normal person though. Since although, philosophy isn't my field of study. I have actively been thinking about ethical and philosophical issues for over 5 years. I would disagree that most arguments are co-ordination problems though. They are a subset of arguments though. The expert opinion is interesting. I kind of am more curious about what psychologists and sociologists. And that other group of "hyper-empiricists" that went for other disciplines think. I agree it isn't a good argument for moral realism right now though. Cool video. Overall, I mostly agree with the ordering of your list. I do think phenomenal conservatism along with moral convergence make a good 2 prong argument. Companions in guilt is really effective, but I agree it is mainly useful for eliminating "moderate" positions on the issue. It does bring the dialectic forward in an interesting way though. I think it is mostly useful against "psuedo-skeptics" who claim to be skeptics but are mostly focused on policing the line between what is pseudoscience and what is real science than actually applying skepticism philosophical with any rigor or large extent. They often have a pretty positivist view, and are have clear views about the normative way that people should come to their beliefs. Which I think is a decent idea. However, if they then go after Moral Realism despite their role as an inquisitor of the scientific orthodoxy then that argument is effective against them. Companions in guilt mainly makes sense as something that a normative realist might come across and use to move themselves into being a moral realist. Or as a way of critically analyzing if they really examined why they are a normative realist enough. Overall, I think that topic and argument serve as an important reminder that scientists should devote at least some time to studying the philosophy of science and epistemology more generally.
1:08:53 Im not sure if that's right If you agree with the for example non-naturalist realist semantic analysis, it seems like if it seems to you that "Slavery is wrong" then it seems to you that "One has stance independent reasons not to perform slavery"
No, I don't think that follows. You'd be assuming a closure principle along these lines: If it seems to S that P, and P logically entails Q, then it seems to S that Q. But per any ordinary understanding of "seeming", and indeed per any technical use of "seeming", I don't think this principle is at all plausible. A seeming is supposed to be a doxastic psychological state -- it's like a belief, or disposition, or appearance. Similar closure principles don't work for those cases. E.g.: If S believes that P, and P logically entails Q, then S believes that Q -- well, that's obviously not true, since people often fail to believe the logical entailments of their own beliefs. "Slavery is wrong" is the sort of judgment that any ordinary person might make. The non-naturalist realist semantic account is a much more sophisticated judgment; it's a theoretical account of what is involved in making the first-order judgment "slavery is wrong". Even if you find non-naturalism convincing -- indeed, even if it seems to you to be correct -- it would be a different claim that the seeming that "slavery is wrong" just is the seeming that "one has stance-independent reason not to perform slavery."
Similarly, suppose I believe that water is identical to H2O. Now consider: (1) It seems to me that there is water in my cup. (2) It seems to me that there is H2O in my cup. I take it that on the usual view of what seemings are, (1) is true and (2) is false. The reason why (2) is false is because, even though water really is H2O and even though I know that water is H2O (let's just stipulate this for the sake of argument), my knowledge that water is H2O is highly theoretical, not something revealed in my immediate visual experiences. It doesn't visually appear as if there are billions of H2O molecules jostling around in the cup in front of me.
@@KaneB Hm yes I think you are correct here I made a mistake there But it still seems to me like there is a tension between 1) having the seeming that "Slavery is wrong", 2) adopting the non-naturalist realist semantics and 3) not believing that there are any stance-independent moral facts Tension in the sense that 1) and 2) seem to count against 3) Do you see where I am coming from?
It was difficult. If I wasn't judging them relative to one another, they would all get E-tier. Every argument for moral realism is terrible. It's incredible the position is as popular as it is, and I remain completely unmoved by proponents of the view insisting it's "obvious." If they're comfortable insisting it's obvious, I will not be pressured by them into feeling embarrassed to say the opposite is obvious to me.
Maybe I don't understand your positions on epistemic anti-realism, but I'm not sure how this stance works. I understand how you could translate some epistemic normative statements into hypotheticals: "you should believe X if you want your beliefs to correspond to reality" but isn't this still in reference to some objective standard? You have to have standard by which to decide if a belief is likely to correspond to reality. Do you believe there is no "fact of the matter" about whether or not certain beliefs are justifiable? Is there no fact of the matter about whether or not it is justifiable to believe the earth is flat or believe evolution? Is it just up to the individual person to arbitrarily decide how much evidence they want for a certain belief? It would mean there is no sense in which a person who believes the earth is flat is believing something irrational - they just have a different standard of evidence than you.
//I understand how you could translate some epistemic normative statements into hypotheticals: "you should believe X if you want your beliefs to correspond to reality" but isn't this still in reference to some objective standard?// Could you maybe rephrase the question? When you say "in reference to some objective standard" what do you mean? //You have to have standard by which to decide if a belief is likely to correspond to reality.// Even if you do, that's consistent with normative antirealism. //Do you believe there is no "fact of the matter" about whether or not certain beliefs are justifiable?// There are no stance-independent epistemic facts. So maybe yes, depending on precisely what you mean. //Is there no fact of the matter about whether or not it is justifiable to believe the earth is flat or believe evolution? // There are no stance-independent epistemic facts. So maybe yes, depending on precisely what you mean. //Is it just up to the individual person to arbitrarily decide how much evidence they want for a certain belief?// I don't think normative antirealism is stuck with any substantive and objectionable kind of "arbitrariness," and I don't think people typically *decide* how much weight to put on evidence. So this is also going to turn on what you mean with this question. //It would mean there is no sense in which a person who believes the earth is flat is believing something irrational - they just have a different standard of evidence than you.// I only believe in instrumental rationality. If believing the earth is flat was completely consistent with a person's goals and interests, but believing it was not flat would undermine their goals and interests, do you think it'd be irrational to believe it was flat, and rational to believe it was not flat? If so, why? What conception of "rationality" are you working with in that regard? If being rational led me to fail at my goals, why on earth would I want to be rational?
We can now figure this out with machine learning. We just label a million things as real and non-real, train the neural network / decision tree / support vector machine etc with them and then we see what it predicts for morality. : 3
If both of you are not material realists then I would not expect you to relate to ethical realism. For those who are material realists (such as most practising scientists), they do not accept that the difficulty in characterising material reality is a reason for rejecting the existence of material reality. A similar argument can be applied to ethical realism: the difficulty in characterising an ethical reality is not a reason for abandoning the attempt to identify ethical truths or realities. Is this a version of 'companions in guilt' reasoning?
Thats fine, but it misses the point by insisting on metaphysics. Yes, scientist can do science without "characterizing material reality" in the exact same way that ethicist can do ethics without "characterizing an ethical reality." But this just shows that we can't tell the difference between "realism" and "anti-realism" to begin with, which is why insisting the difference matters just causes confusion. For both scientists and ethicists, its enough to justify beliefs based solely on the arguments made by other people and ignore metaphysics all together. See pragmatism.
There are various reasons why somebody might be a moral anti-realist; the motivation isn't always a "difficulty characterizing ethical reality." I am neither a material realist nor a moral realist, but in neither case would I say that my reasons merely have to do with a difficulty characterizing those two domains.
@@KaneB I think it would be strange to be a moral realist but not a material realist, though I guess this might be common amongst the religious. I am a causal determinist, I would argue that (potentially identifiable) prior physical causes are intrinsic to the concept of an event. This is a position that points towards realism, certainly material realism, but by implication ethical realism too. Perhaps my position does not have to imply ethical realism, but I think it makes it the default position. Pragmatically I also think that it is more productive to assume that there is a reality that we can try to unpick. Indeed there are various reasons for not being a moral realist, but I am sure that the issues with attempts to characterise moral value is likely to be a key factor for many. In any case, I have not yet finished your video, so may get back to the thread.
The point that seems lost on you both is that we don't need metaphysics, including ontology, at all. This whole conversation is evidence that we can't tell the difference between "realism" and "anti-realism." Which is why insisting the difference matters just leads to confusion. In all our deliberations, we can use a vocabulary that focuses only on human experience and human justifications. The utility of a beliefs is either obvious to the people who hold it or it isn't, which is to say they wouldn't hold it. There is no reason to insist on anything "deeper" than this.
Need for what? Matters to what? I happen to find these sorts of conversations interesting and enjoyable, and I don't feel any need to give a further justification for participating in them. People who are not interested don't have to watch. As for the difficulties distinguishing moral realism and moral anti-realism, it doesn't strike me as significantly more problematic than taxonomizing other philosophical positions, but it also doesn't really matter for the purposes of our discussion. We could just say: here are a bunch of arguments that have been given by people who label themselves "moral realists". We can then assess those arguments directly. Notice that very little of our discussion was about the realist/anti-realist distinction; we spent the vast majority of the time talking about the premises in the arguments, and raising objections to those specific arguments.
@@KaneB I meant no offense. I also enjoy these discussions and I enjoyed watching you have it as well. And I thank you for sharing that. "need" meaning "necessary as an explanatory feature in our epistemology." "matters" meaning "helps us reach some conclusion we couldn't already reach without it." My contribution, for what its worth, is that there seems to be no utility is trying to distinguish between "realism" and "anti-realism" in the first place. I'm sure you could make this same video for "the arguments for moral anti-realism," right? And then we would have a stack of arguments - and still no conclusion. And yet, even after all that, our behavior remains unchanged precisely because whether or not "morals are real" doesn't actually matter - it doesn't help us make any moral judgements. These kind of ontological metaphysics, for all their fun, don't actually make a difference to our epistemology, which is why we can safely ignore them and be none the worse for that.
@@MrCmon113 declaring metaphysics useless is not "meta," its demonstrable. If metaphysical questions, such as "whats the difference between real and not-real?" had useful answers, we wouldn't still be asking them.
Face-value practice strikes me as a compelling argument against noncognitivism and error theory. I don't think it's controversial to say (and none of the empirical work Lance cited denies) that our everyday moral language is premised on the assumption that moral statements are truth-apt propositions, and that at least some of these propositions are widely held to be true. Indeed, even Lance has no problem saying that "torturing babies is wrong" is true later in the video. To maintain noncognitivism or error theory, then, one does face the burden of having to disregard of ordinary moral discourse. Maybe there are compelling arguments for doing so, but it strikes me as a tall order. Now, of course, this doesn't get us all the way to moral realism. Ordinary moral discourse suggests that some moral statements are true, but it doesn't tell us what it is that *makes* them true, and whether their truth is "stance independent" or not. I agree with Lance that most people probably don't have a sufficient grasp of the relevant concepts to hold a clear view on the matter, and in most circumstances the question doesn't even come up. So, we are left with a moral discourse that is prima facie compatible with subjectivism, relativism, constructivism, naturalism, non-naruralist realism, etc. I just think that there should have been an acknowledgement that the theories that categorically deny the truth or truth-aptness of moral statements are on much shakier ground.
//I don't think it's controversial to say (and none of the empirical work Lance cited denies) that our everyday moral language is premised on the assumption that moral statements are truth-apt propositions// I do deny this, and I don't think the empirical evidence supports this conclusion. That is, I explicitly deny that we have good evidence ordinary moral discourse is cognitivistic. //Indeed, even Lance has no problem saying that "torturing babies is wrong" is true later in the video.// That's true, but I'm not a cognitivist and my use of moral language is not reflective of what I take to be ordinary usage, so this is moot. // To maintain noncognitivism or error theory, then, one does face the burden of having to disregard of ordinary moral discourse. // I don't think this has been established if one is relying on available empirical evidence.
@@lanceindependent I might be confused as to what cognitivism entails (I'm not a professional philosopher and I'm trying myself to get a solid grasp for the relevant concepts, partly through videos such as this one) but my understanding is that a noncognitivist account has to deny the truth-aptness of moral statements. If so, this would at least directly conflict with my own usage of moral language prior to encountering these concepts, as well as the usages I have most frequently encountered in conversation. Of course my experiences may not be representative, but if so, I would be curious to see empirical evidence to the contrary. Are people really not willing to deem certain moral statements true or false at all? Again, I'm willing to grant that they do not do so "stance independently", as that is a somewhat obscure philosophical concept. Truth and falsehood, however, are common terms of everyday language, so finding out whether they apply to moral statements should be fairly straightforward. As for your own use of moral language, whether it's reflective of ordinary language or not, it seems to commit _you personally_ to a certain stance toward moral language. To endorse the statement "it is true that torturing babies is wrong" is to implicitly endorse the statement "some moral statements are truth-apt and some of those statements are true". Unless you want to give a fictionalist account of your own statement and argue that it isn't _really_ true that torturing babies is wrong, but we have pragmatic reasons to act as if it is (as someone inclined toward pragmatic theories of truth in the first place, I'm not sure that there is a meaningful difference here, but I admit I'm only beginning to familiarize myself with these arguments and I might be missing something here).
Thanks for the engagement and sorry for the previously blunt reply. I don't think I discussed it at all (or if so, only minimally) in the video, but my research is not yet published. I take all empirical studies on folk metaethics to have significant methodological shortcomings, and my own take on the literature is metethical indeterminacy: that people don't have any determinate metaethical views, for the most part. This means that while I deny the evidence suggests people are noncognitivists, I also deny that it shows they're cognitivists, either. That may sound very strange, and it's not a common view, so I'll say more about that. It's understandable that it a noncognitivist account conflict with your own usage. It might even conflict with (at least some) of mine. But (as I think you acknowledge) how you and I speak isn't a good indication of how others speak. //Of course my experiences may not be representative, but if so, I would be curious to see empirical evidence to the contrary// My view is not that people are noncognitivists, but that they are neither cognitivists nor noncognitivists. I do not think it's the case that there is a determinate fact of the matter about whether ordinary moral claims express propositions or not. //Are people really not willing to deem certain moral statements true or false at all? // They might be willing to do so, but even if they were, that doesn't tell us what they thought or how they used moral statements prior to asking. For comparison, when people say things like "the total cost is $20.00," does this commit them to mathematical platonism? I don't think that it does. But I also don't think it commits them to anti-platonism. As Gill suggests, it may be that ordinary mathematical language just isn't in the business of expressing views one way or another about the metaphysics of math. Gill suggests the same may be true of ordinary moral language, and I agree. //Truth and falsehood, however, are common terms of everyday language, so finding out whether they apply to moral statements should be fairly straightforward.// It's not. We don't even know what people mean when they talk about truth and falsity, whether they mean the same thing as one another, whether they mean the same thing across contexts, or whether what they mean accords with any particular philosophical theories (there are a few studies on this with mixed or inconclusive results). //As for your own use of moral language, whether it's reflective of ordinary language or not, it seems to commit you personally to a certain stance toward moral language. To endorse the statement "it is true that torturing babies is wrong" is to implicitly endorse the statement "some moral statements are truth-apt and some of those statements are true". // If you set the bar this low for whether “cognitivism” is true, you end up with a form of cognitivism nobody would care to endorse and that would be completely trivial. I doubt any philosopher is going to be persuaded to adopt cognitivism exclusively on the grounds that it’s true that we can identify at least one person is willing to say that their personal way of using moral claims is sometimes propositional. First, no noncognitivist was unaware that they had cognitivist colleagues. If the mere existence of a single cognitivist were sufficient to prove cognitivism were true, there would be no nocognitivists. But there are. Historically speaking then, the cognitivist and noncognitivist dispute hasn’t turned on whether there were either (a) exactly zero or (b) at least one person willing to state that they sometimes used moral claims to express propositions. If it did, “cognitivism” would be a trivial and uninteresting position. If all that it took to make it true were facts about how Lance Bush stipulates he uses terms, then the substantive content of cognitivism could be little more than Cognitivism is true because Lance Bush says he’s willing to say “murder is wrong” is true. …that’s not a philosophically interesting form of cognitivism. Compare, for instance, to the following consideration. Someone may claim that, to them, God just is love, definitionally, and since love exists, God exists. If we were going with a similar approach to judging whether theism is true, we could say that at least some statements that assert God exists “are true,” and that, therefore, technically speaking, “theism is true.” But this would be a similarly uninteresting conception of theism. I suggest the same here. How I personally use language is not sufficient to establish any nontrivial notion of “cognitivism.”
@@lanceindependent No problem, and thank you for the thorough response. I really appreciate the opportunity to have this discussion with someone with academic expertise on the topic, and I apologize for having misunderstood your arguments somewhat. I have watched quite a few of Kane's videos but I'm fairly new to your content (though I plan to fix that!). I am looking forward to the empirical evidence you plan to publish. Now I think you might be misunderstanding part of my argument, so I hope I can clarify it. I completely agree that people generally don't have any determinate metaethical views. I did not have any myself until I first came across the relevant philosophical debates. I don't think metaethics is something most of us have much reason to think about unless we happen to find these questions interesting. My argument is merely that moral language as we commonly employ it is _prima facie_ incompatible with certain metaethical positions (while still, I should note, being compatible with several others). This does not imply that those who speak this language have all actively considered and ruled out those positions, but merely that a philosopher interested in making a positive claim for them has a high burden to overcome in doing so. They must either reject ordinary moral language altogether and insist that it be eliminated or radically reformed to conform to their metaethical views, or commit to a fictionalist account that strikes me as just cognitivism by another name. I think this is basically the "now what?" problem that was briefly alluded to in the video, and I find all the options I've come across deeply unsatisfying. I understand that this is not your position, as you do not endorse noncognitivism or error theory. Still, I wanted to make clear my stance on those two, since they are both fairly popular metaethical positions that Kane has argued for in the past. As for your own position, if I now understand it correctly, I don't think I necessarily disagree with it. I can appreciate that there is a great deal of semantic ambiguity to moral statements, and this ambiguity means that we frequently talk past each other when engaged in moral debates. All I would say is that it seems to me that this ambiguity is best analyzed as pertaining, not to the truth-value of moral statements, but to their truth-_maker_. Judging by the way we talk, it would seem we all agree that some moral statements are true and others false, but we cannot agree on whether what makes them true or false is God, nature, some free-floating non-natural moral facts, or simply our own values and desires. Now, to respond to your pointed objections: // For comparison, when people say things like "the total cost is $20.00," does this commit them to mathematical platonism? // It does not. Nor does ordinary moral language commit one to moral realism. What it would do however is cast doubt on "mathematical noncognitivism" or "mathematical error theory" if either such theory was being seriously entertained in philosophy. The fact that neither is (at least to my knowledge) strikes me as evidence for my argument. Both platonism and nominalism are compatible with the possibility of making true statements using numbers, and so it seems to me the same should apply to any metaethical theory that aspires to make sense of ordinary language rather than overturn it. // It's not. We don't even know what people mean when they talk about truth and falsity, whether they mean the same thing as one another, whether they mean the same thing across contexts, or whether what they mean accords with any particular philosophical theories (there are a few studies on this with mixed or inconclusive results). // Here we are rapidly veering into the question of the indeterminacy of all meaning. It is a serious problem in philosophy, and not one that I'm sufficiently knowledgeable to address. All I can say is that it seems to me that we share enough of an implicit understanding of what truth and falsity mean to be able to productively use these concepts in everyday speech, and that's good enough to me. That said, I appreciate that you find appeals to seemings uncompelling, so I don't think we can proceed further here. // If you set the bar this low for whether “cognitivism” is true, you end up with a form of cognitivism nobody would care to endorse and that would be completely trivial. I doubt any philosopher is going to be persuaded to adopt cognitivism exclusively on the grounds that it’s true that we can identify at least one person is willing to say that their personal way of using moral claims is sometimes propositional. // This strikes me as an uncharitable reading of what I said. My point is not that any single person making a propositional moral claims is definitive evidence against noncognitivism. Obviously plenty of people use language in unconventional ways. However, in supplementing my claim (which I understand you dispute) that most people do in fact use _prima facie_ propositional language when making moral statements, I thought it relevant to point out that even someone skeptical of the propositional content of moral language is still willing to couch their own moral language in explicitly propositional terms in at least some circumstances. This seems to me to be evidence, at the very least, of the high semantic cost involved in endorsing noncognitivism.
Companions and guilt arguments are the favourite for authoritarian political community, and empirically position the individual within a schema of having no moral voice because the individual is not community and so by default moral realism is true. If companions are political community then guilt is an epiphenomenon that acts like a moral gravitational pull, somewhat akin to Newton's gravitational force or space time relatively distortion of its it's fabric due to the weak force which is akin to morality in political power realism due to morality emerges as stance independent facts that are extracted from an ideologically construed prototype of the idiosyncratic good. However on the flip side of the relativistic manifest image an individual is like a graviton in a quantum field. If so then a persons moral stance is similar to a sub atomic state prior to decoherence entailing it's not real but subjectivly feels to have unique moral properties, like believing giving icecream to the destitute persons is most morally justified because ephemeral taste is a primordial good which to a nutritionist is absurd. However once a person emerges from a unique moral universe within an infinite magnitude of moral positions then morality becomes real. Real as an observable within a community of discourse, and therefore a person is compelled to act as an interdependent agent within a community of moral agents. This suggests a beneficiary must give destitute persons super foods and not ice cream because of moral realism qua political community. However the realism is up for grabs due to quantum decoherence. The beneficiary could sneakily give ice cream believing taste is a greater good than contributing to utilitarian organ functionalism. The convergence argument in a sense scaffolds onto authoritarianism through the emergence of ideology (liberalism, anarchism, socialism, fascist, conservative) bootstrapped by token of superpowers who have intergovernmental organisations to implement aid projects that has strings attached to the benefits which happen to bias moral opinion embedded in institutional formation through the function of the state. In this sense convergence is not only through non state actors who through capital go on vacation but also on institutions whom construct political moral community within weaker nation states. The example of an indigenous elite who show the way to their fellows. An example is the cargo cult who developed a new morality due to the convergence with modernisation within a decade. The realism here could be taken as a offshoot of international realist theory. So moral intuitions from political realism is not intrinsically real but contingently can supervene on political functional power. Although a weaker power is social power within a polity that guides first person intuitions by token of guilt and more profoundly fear. An analogy from non humans is a flock of birds who act in flight as one system, where a single bird that does not keep up is left circling in confusion. So fear in human community is of being ostracised from the tribe. This arguably brings about nativist moral sentiments. It feels universally real due to minimally being in-group but not a morality of other groups. This social fact is once a person is situated as a member of a super power it can take on global dimensions and more so if that person is an agent of the state. It appears that from a competitive group function moral realism stance, the individual gets tough love unless they play by the moral code book embedded within the structure of the nation state, at least if you happen to be in modernity. So in this sense within modernisation subordinates to the group leader by necessity are intuitively fearful of their moral authority and experience panic guilt attacks if other subordinates appear to gain more moral approval. The argument for moral realism is that it really does structure group formation. An analogy of group formation is that of the transformation of hydrogen to helium in a star so as to prevent gravitational collapse into a white dwarf or neutron star if not a black hole. So moral realism is like hydrogen being converted to helium where consciousness is like quantum field that allows morality to flit into existence. This is not trivial by token of being an observable that can acquire class membership within a human group aka society. A person whom is deemed conscious can hold a position of moral significance through title and capital. The companions are abstract entities like the titles and cash in the bank. So their morality is embedded in group formation entailing a persons capacity consciously moral is contingent on real groups. So if the moral self is an instance of consciousness then that self consumes moral properties of the group which appear real as language appears real, and like spent hydrogen turns into a byproduct of social power to stop group collapse. Eventually the self implodes into a moral artefact. The moral artefact exists if and only if civilisation reproduces itself. So why I am not a moral relativist is due to my belief that quantum fields have greater aesthetic sense than Newton's mechanics or general relativity which entails morality is a human aesthetic akin to a painting but which if co opted my an elite becomes normative and politically real for those governed through force. Quantum moral realism has a flavour of moral contingency and to a degree may be placed in the category of being a moral skeptic given the individual is a byproduct of the social formation and within high modernisation that individual tends to be tossed around with the winds of capitalism and institutional folly embedded within one or another nation state. So in this sense moral realism is a byproduct of the nation state as in more so in say prior to the development of the national identity because of political power required to create moral equivalents to quantum particles needs a field which in this case happens to be brains. So similar to the Hadron collider that creates novel particles upon the collision of known particles so to the nation simulates this phenomenon but crudely through imagined community. So course grained morality like kinship altruism is a prototype moral real created by even a couple of brains but modes of capitalist consumption require more brains to moral prototypes into existence that exist emotionally as to supervene primordial prototypes like guilt and fear. The brief history of homo sapiens is one of scaffolding prototypes of moral Real's through group formation by hook or by crook for survival not of the species but the group, be that hunter gather's or modernists. In this context a black hole may be explained as an invasion of giant Gravitons from Anti-de Sitter Space or the invasion of giant moral tons from inflationary social space. Moral realism becomes plausible with the convergence of theoretical particle physics. So it seems giant moral tons exist if and only if Gravitons do too.
I don't think you've understood the companions in guilt argument. Can you repeat your point without needlessly invoking physics aesthhetics and being more precise in how the CIG argument applies exactly?
@@vallewabbel9690 thanks, I have extended the analysis through use of social sciences and physics general knowledge to bring a few of the candidates in alignment. Appreciate your interest.
Yes we proved philosophical expertise is legitimate by proving that it isn't. Note that if we're expects, we're likely correct, in which case we're wrong about antirealism, in which case maybe we're not experts, which means we're mistaken about whether the argument from expertise is good, in which case perhaps it isn't, which means we were correct in putting it in E in the first place, which means we are experts, which means we are correct about antirealism, but it also means we're correct in judging the expertise argument to be bad, which means that since it did worse but isn't proposed by experts than realists are experts, which means they're correct about realism, which means we're incorrect about realism, which means we're not experts, which means...
I don't think there is any distinct thing, a "reason," such that as an antirealist I have an account or must think about "reasons." I think reason-talk in everyday discourse doesn't presuppose or commit one to realism or irreducible normativity, and that if we want to try to regiment reason-talk in accordance with some theory antirealist accounts handle the matter better than realist accounts. One way to construe reasons is as consistency relations between means and ends, e.g., there is a fact about whether drinking water is consistent with the goal of being less thirsty. One could use reason talk to describe facts of this kind. No irreducible normativity is needed.
I don't really have a "theory of reasons" -- I think there are lots of different ways of using the term "reasons"; in any particular case, I could explain what I have in mind when I use the term, but I doubt that any account will successfully capture all the ways that people use it. I think Lance is right that a lot of this talk can be reduced to claims about consistency relations between means and ends. Often, those ends will be the goals and desires of specific individuals, but not always.
Companions in guilt:
ruclips.net/video/7HHBNU_gXP0/видео.html
Deliberative indispensability:
ruclips.net/video/bKFue3EqbxM/видео.html
Moral convergence:
ruclips.net/video/80L9ScBgMZc/видео.html
The moral fixed points:
ruclips.net/video/FlvXQ9tqdOw/видео.html
Huemer's ontological argument:
ruclips.net/video/02FaQ5arBAw/видео.html
We should have included "If you're not a moral realist you have to think baby torture is okay" as S-tier.
underrated comment
😅
the true defeater to anti realism
You can joke around all you want but if you don't believe in fairies then fairies WILL die and it will be YOUR fault.
Tinkerbellian realism proven.
@@thefizzyfeebas9891
Wait but I have a defeater-defeater-defeater-defeater!
I typed in meta ethics in RUclips, this was recommended first. Been watching for 5 hours, am 6 minutes in, trying to understand each word. Awesome
Woohoo! I can't wait to watch this. I've been wanting to see another Collab for months!!!
Hope you enjoy it!
Let's gooooo! The two best philosophy RUclipsrs together in one place? Yes, please!
You could have done it in paint. Save an empty tierlist image, then open it in paint, then use the text box tool. Super easy if you ever want to do it again.
That's a good point. I'll keep that in mind if I ever do one of these again.
great video!
can we have the naturalism version please ^^
yeah we might do that at some point
@@KaneB I'd love that too! :D
Oh the fact that CIG argument kept crawling up and up all the time despite Lance's and Kane's reluctance I think is hilarious!
It was very distressing 😬
@@KaneB I'm actually happy with that result as CIG caught me off guard first time and was the first and the only challenge for my anti-realist intuitions (aside from deliberation indespensibility, a little bit), and I still struggle with it. I don't find it so easy to bite the bullet, as there seems to be not much prospect for reduction of justification to truth-conduciveness. It always seemed to me that justification is some kind of self-sufficient game, so I guess I don't have answer what it is, especially if there's no such thing as non-relative rationality. It seems quite elusive to find some features of it that will be intelligible in reference to something outside it, not in itself. So maybe I had normative realist intuitions from the beginning, just quite latent and of strange kind.
@@exalted_kitharode I don't even think there's a bullet to bite. Why think there's anything even remotely implausible or undesirable about epistemic antirealism?
I don't find anything any more appealing about epistemic realism than I do moral realism.
@@lanceindependent well I thought that moral realists(at least some of them) fail to be properly justified or rational in believing in those things, taking there to be things that we have no reason to suppose there are. And this phrasing cashed out in terms of reasons, or ground for believe in my mother tongue is basically what always predated my talk of evaluating positions. And my thought of reasonableness has always separated it from truthfulness, but I guess you can't do that in anti-realist account, which is basically try to translate all sentences about justification and rationality to subjective probabilities of their truth or truth-tracking or truth-conduciveness overall. This seems to me hopeless, I think I don't have any clue how to make this proposal work, how to assign some probabilites to beliefs according to their rationality, I'm not sure that rational belief at all have to align with truth. I feel like it's self-contained domain following its own rules, which can't be easily reduced to radically other class of sentences. That seems just handwaving before we made such account, and before it is shown to be Not extremely revisionist about first order epistemic commitments, which I suspect it would
@@lanceindependentand after all, it seems to me that evidence might be normative, that facts about supposed train departure Have to be my consideration in light of which I need to deliberate when I'm trying to find out when train will departure. It's not that when I'll lose interest in it, those facts will lose their status of considerations in light of which it is more reasonable to find out about train departure. So another impasse between realist and anti-realist seems to me that while being unintuitive in another aspects, realist wins in that he chooses to say that you can't drain some action of reasonableness just by changing your desires. It seems to me that some operations with evidence are unconditionally rational and it seems strange to try to reduce them to desires, something of very unepistemic kind. At some other level, for example, norms of inquiry, it might be ok to let pragmatic reasons to seep in(and some epistemic normative realist were so far as to even be error theorist about rules of inquiry), but at given time work with evidence have to be made irrespective of what I want now, that's just constutitive of me being rational being with intelligible discernible belief states
Totally agree with the pointlessness of trying to "solve" the Frege-Geach problem.
1:01:53 Amazing point by Lance. The intuitions are the thing that’s *causing* belief in realism. If they didn’t exist almost no one would be a realist. The arguments are post hoc rationalizations.
Can you explain in more detail what you guys mean?
Great discussion here. I learned a lot about meta ethics. I spent a lot of time thinking about Phenomenal Conservatism and radical scepticism. I think that “seemings”, as they are understood by Huemer and co, just don’t exist (I told him this at my thesis defence, and he was incredulous!). He thinks they are a kind of Sui generis propositional mental state distinct from beliefs or inclinations, and I just don’t think I’ve ever had “seemings” in this sense, about moral realism or about anything. I’d like to think my cognitive faculties are pretty normal, and that I’m not missing a major element that everybody else has. You don’t see much talk of “seemings in psychology or neuroscience either, or indeed anywhere except defences of PC. So, I’d have been tempted to put an argument relying on PC in E.
Yeah, this is an interesting point. It's not clear to me exactly what seemings are supposed to be, especially if they are distinguished from beliefs and inclinations. Even if there are seemings in this sense, it's not obvious why they would have any epistemic force over beliefs and inclinations. So let's say that it seems to me that P, but that I am inclined to endorse ~P. Why shouldn't the inclination be what confers justification?
@@KaneB I agree with you. Some PC defenders say that seemings have a “ring of truth” or a special phenomenology that is supposed to do the trick. I guess you don’t have that phenomenology with inclinations. It isn’t really clear to me why the phenomenology would make any normative difference though, given that seemings are fallible and actually, from the viewers POV, might all be false.
Does he explicitly say anywhere that they're sui generis propositional mental states that are distinct from other states? I'd like to see that if so, since that's been my impression but I don't recall actually reading it.
In any case, I, too, don't have seemings of this kind, and part of the reason I began studying psychology alongside philosophy was because of this.
I think claiming to have, and feeling that one has intuitions is a learned behavior largely distinctive to analytic philosophy. I likewise suspect that there's no such thing.
@@lanceindependent I suggest Huemer’s “Ethical Intuitionism”, Chapter 5 “Moral Knowledge”. He goes at great length about what seemings are, their propositional character, how we can distinguish them from beliefs, inclinations, sensations, etc. He never uses the phrase “Sui generis”, but it is clear from the overall argument in that chapter.
Places where you can explicitly find the Sui generis and propositional view of seemings are Culisons ‘What are seemings?’, Tucker’s ‘Seemings and Justification: New Essays’, Moretti’s “Phenomenal Conservatism”, and Skene’s “Seemings and the Possibility of Epistemic Justification”.
I think for many at this point, you’re right that it is just learned behaviour. I also think intuition talk is encouraged by people wanting to see philosophy as about discovering stance-independent truths. Intuitions are thought of as ‘evidence’ for the truth. If intuitions don’t exist, we just have our opinions - but if we think philosophy is about discovering the truth, its silly to proceed just by exchanging opinions; intuitions are a vital piece of the modern Realist conception of philosophy.
After seeing your analysis of moral convergence I know kind of want to make arguments for gastronomic realism.
I would start by going to a physiological view of taste being based on a mix of basic components + smell.
Then argue that all people have common parameters on taste. (Discounting cases where someone can't smell or loses the ability to sense one of those as obvious exceptions)
Then if you define good tasting food as being food that has a pleasing balance of those basic properties. Then I think you could work towards a view of taste realism at least. Although, that also isn't paying attention to nutrition.
You could make some view of the "average taste" which would be food that would taste good to practically everyone. There might be a slim minority that doesn't though.
Arguably the average is not the best because people's ideally preferences diverge.
But, you can counter that by claiming the physiology of food leads to there being consistent standards and principles for what tastes good.
I think you could probably make a food realism position that is roughly equivalent to virtue ethics applied specifically to food realism.
Convergence could be used as a secondary argument. But to be effective I think you would need to start from physiology and science.
It might even be able to create multiple sets of "perfect foods" that meet this hypothetical objective standard of taste
Or alternatively, a rigorous model for taste that could be used to determine how to adapt a consistent standard to any particular context. (In a virtue theory perspective)
The idea of too much or too little of something being bad or good based on context in a consistent way seems to make more sense when applied to food that morality at least.
I haven't fully worked this out or anything though.
Great overview. Nicely summarises much of the debate
Hey, something Lance said reminded me of a belief I come accross ALL the time in economics.
"I take the purpose of deliberation to be to figure out how to get what I want". (35:40)
Economists like to spend a good deal of time turning over every stone to reveal the hidden selfish motives behind everything (except what they do, which is in pursuit of only the most noble of goals of course).
(Not saying lance is a selfish jerk, I'm sure he wants very good things - but it just reminded me of this)
Essentially all that humans do is in pursuit of self interest, giving to charity makes you feel better than if you spent that on chocolate, or watched TV instead of helping out at a soup kitchen. Doing favours is a form of "social capital", an investment of sorts. Being kind is to make the community like you, so they won't treat you unfavourably in the future etc
I think it has its roots in a weird social-darwinist perspective where humans are seen as solitary creatures who have begrudingly come together to make use of the division of labour and that sort of thing, but it meshes really well with their overarching view of life as a search to maximise "utility".
It seems enormously backwards from anthropological studies, but there's no doubt individualism and that sort of attitude is pushed in the neoliberal milieu - but, anyway, I find it very difficult to argue with, not because I think it's right, but it just seems like a very flexible lens through which to view the world through. All i find myself armed with is very scattershot responses like
- Why did we evolve empathy or guilt, or the ability to use this detailed language if we weren't a social species ("Being a social species brought us more individual benefits")
- Why have people laid down their life for their values, beliefs or even the lives of those they had never met before? (Some acts seem genuinely altruistic - "ah, they just wanted to be remembered as a hero!")
I just find it a very slippery thing to argue with, just wondered if you had any thoughts on any of this?
My take on this kind of thing is that there is nothing more required for altruism than e.g. feeling good when helping others. I find it bizarre to say that, when a person gives money to charity and this makes them feel good, the fact that it makes them feel good reveals that really they had a hidden selfish motive. In my view, the fact that giving to charity makes them feel good is exactly what altruistic sentiment consists in. I don't know what more we could want. What's the alternative? A person gives to charity, but does it begrudgingly, and it makes them feel miserable? I suppose in some sense this person is making a greater sacrifice, so we might call that more altruistic. But I would rather focus on cultivating sympathy and compassion; I would rather have a world where people help each other because it brings them joy to see others flourishing.
@@KaneB Thanks man. I also would love to see an emphasis on that way of being. I don't know how the economists have won lol (Well, if I overlook all the oligarch money, anyway).
The alternative isn't that we do so begrudingly, it's a think a bit more insidious - that humans are "naturally" selfish, competitive etc... that compassion and cooperation are a weakness, or "mind virus" sort of thing - all this lefty fluff is indoctrinating us out of our natural ways of being etc lol.
There's always this drive to naturalise ideologies and social/economic systems, to say they're right as theyre rooted in an ancient and great tradition or how god/nature intended things to be.
I think that's the significance of this belief (doesnt seem to qualify as an argument, but it's paraded around as a fact), to paint everything as self interest to show that humans are naturally selfish and competitive, and therefore our social and economic systems should reflect that (or, any system which does not use these natural drives is doooomed to fail).
I rarely see this all kind of spelled out, more gestured towards with metaphors, phrases and pop-biology littered throughout the discourse (e.g competition is never used pejoratively in economics, despite it being a MASSIVE waste of time and resources - like multiple companies developing the same fucking drug, or having to make 2 trips to dispenseries, wasting fuel yada yada - it's link to the alleged role of competition in evolution is pretty palpable - survival of the fittest is a phrase I've seen many times, talking about companies)
I know of some quite radical biologists and, well, most anthropologists who would challenge this view of humanity (economists like to make up little fairy tales and put their hands over their ears; e.g in textbooks they picture ancient humanity's economies as barter economies, when one bright spark invented money to make it easier - when that NEVER happened anywhere, and we did just about everything lol) - but, it just feels like a super childish / unwinnable... unfalsifiable argument. I feel a bit like Freudians, where anything can be evidence of something within the theory after a few good logic pretzels, there seems to be no disproving it.
I mean there being lots of hidden “selfish” or “personal” or “utility maximizing” reasons for people’s behavior just isn’t in any conflict with the existence of genuine altruism. I would agree with LanceIndependent here and also add that multiple motivations can comfortably co-exist together which is in fact the normal state of human psychology.
A mother gets a warm loving “glow” from doing something that helps her baby, but she also directly values/wants the baby to actually flourish at the same time. In some instances such as when she plays with her baby perhaps the “glow” is a stronger motivation and in others such as if she sacrifices her life to save the baby it looks like the other is the stronger motivation. No conflict with just having both values, as well as myriad others like wanting to appear to be a good mother, avoid criticism for doing things socially unacceptable for a mother to do, maximize government support doled out to those with children, etc.
Can you justify making a ranking system when you reject the judgemental basis upon which a ranking system depends?
I would reject that ranking systems rely on the notion that one's judgmental basis depends on some type of normative realism.
Could you please elaborate on why you think that they reject basis for ranking systems? Which judgemental basis? Thanks in advance
Moral realists try not to suggest that anti-realists are incapable of making judgments challenge: Impossible. 😉
More seriously, normative anti-realists claim that there are no stance-independent normative facts. They don't claim that people have no feelings or opinions. There is nothing stopping me from preferring one thing to another for pretty much whatever reasons I like (the only thing that's ruled out is preferring x over y because I take it that x is objectively better than y, or that there is stance-independent reason to desire x over y, or whatever).
@@KaneB I think the real question is this : what is the field of objects on the other side of the intensionality relation? It seems odd, to suppose that a judgment is "about" something, while at the same time holding that the field of objects open for the aboutness relation, is empty.
Anti-realism appears to me to require the acceptance of a non-relational conception of mental states. Insofar as one supposes that mental states are necessarily intensional in character, that their intensionality is precisely what constitutes their identity as mental, one must reject anti-realism with regards to the other relata of the intensionality relation.
Right?
2:56
It's form video gaming culture meaning "Super"
I just find it odd to listen to two people spend over 3 hours stating, "Here are the reasons to deny the existence of reasons"
Of course, one could say, "Here are the reasons of type A for denying the existence of reasons of type B" - that could make sense. But you first need to clearly distinguish reasons of type A from reasons of type B. AND it requires the existence of reasons of type A.
On this matter, I hold that the only reasons that exist are desire-based reasons. My aversion to pain gives me a reason to avoid putting my hand on a hot stove.
I deny the existence of desire-independent reasons.
Of course, since I am not the only creature with desires, the premise that all reasons are based on desires is consistent with the belief that there are reasons based on desires that I do not have.
We capture this distinction in the phrases "has a reason" (has a desire that would be served by doing X) and "there is a reason" (there is a desire that would be served by doing X).
Both "have a reason" and "there is a reason" are natural facts.
And, indeed, when it comes to moral reasons, I deny that the moral reasons to refrain from the torture of babies (for example) depends - not on any reasons that I have - but the reasons that other people have to create (manufacture) in the society a set of reasons not to engage in the torture of babies. I know for a fact that people generally have (internal desire-based) reasons to create external reasons for people not to engage in such activities (by creating legal and social penalties). And people generally have (internal desire-based) reasons to create in other people internal reasons not to engage in such activities (which is accomplished by expressions of condemnation, contempt, and disgust at those who would do such things; or, in other words, by praising or blaming them).
And the proposition, "People generally have reasons to manufacture reasons for others not to engage in this type of activity" is a truth-apt claim that is entirely independent of anything that I believe or want to be true. So, it has stance-independence (at least insofar as they are independent of MY stances).
And it is independent of anybody else's stances towards the truth of this proposition. People can have reasons to create external and internal reasons in others even though none of them are aware of this fact - even if they all believe it is false.
And it is sometimes true.
But all of this requires that one type of reason (desire-based reasons) are true and exist in the world.
NOTE: Epistemic reasons (the "partners in crime" argument) are reasons grounded on the fact that, while we desire that some proposition P be true, we choose those actions that would make proposition P true if the universe were as we believed it to be. This gives us an instrumental reason to promote practices that yield true beliefs, which provides the normative force for epistemic oughts. So, Type A epistemic reasons exist.
Have you the time to discuss your moral realism... Desirism with this youtuber? It would be interesting.
I tend to favour non-cognitive arguments, so I'd argue that the 'pull' you feel toward opposition to slavery, is an emotional reaction that is not universal. But it ties back into emotivism.
The companions in guilt argument is strong. It's an attack on materialism/physicalism/naturalism as well.
Why do you think it's strong?
@lanceindependent it calls into question the existence of other invariant, absolute universals. Laws of logic, for example.
@@jamespierce5355 How so?
Oh my gosh, my two faves!
Re: epistemic humility, I take it to be the case that there exists at least one argument for moral realism which has never actually be proposed in writing, and there might be, in the set of arguments we've never even contemplated, one which is compelling. For all we know, someone may present a paper next year which convinces you or me to endorse moral realism (more likely me since I don't have the philosophical training to refute most arguments properly).
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Re: phenomenal conservatism: I simply don't trust human intuition - we can't even get Newtonian physics right and we were evolved to survive in an environment where such basic physics can determine life or death. I don't even take "I perceive the cup in front me gives me some justification for believing there is a cup in front of me" as convincing because I've seen enough optical illusions to take human sensation to be unreliable.
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Re: moral fixed points: that seems awfully close to just defining moral realism into existence.
A "Do you think torture is wrong?"
B "What do you mean by torture?"
A "The wrongful infliction of harm"
B "well, I guess I think it's wrong then."
It seems we could define the word without objective moral qualification instead (perhaps by referencing the victim's preferences or something)
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Overall, I question the project of trying to cover all morality with one blanket. We may take it that "a society that accepts chattel slavery is wrong even if everyone in it believes it to be acceptable." while also being complete relativists on, say, adultery or petty theft.
Finally a good use of tier lists
Alright, let's go anti realism dawg gang!
A slight rendition of Huemer's argument. If i understand it correctly, hes saying when in doubt, assume x is wrong (by recourse to our moral intuitions), to cover for the event that x is in fact wrong, despite not yet being determined. But couldn't we modify this a bit to say when in doubt, assume x is wrong, not because it could be wrong, but because it must be assumed wrong to promote the discovery of whether it's wrong.
For instance, we might not be able to establish that murder is wrong, BUT if it's the case that an objective morality would be beneficial for everyone, including yourself, and it's the case that discovering as much would be profitable to you (to discover that murder is resolutely wrong), it holds that it would be in your best interest to negotiate with other agents to NOT murder, because allowing murder, would preclude the discovery of whether murder is wrong. (either me or you might be the discoverer of this 'truth' and so to kill me or you necessarily obstructs discovery of this truth). Which is ultimately a circular argument, but it seems to rest more in epistemology, wherein in the absence of information, to behave as though it doesn't exist merely because it's not visible, effectively prohibits it's discovery. So i'm not saying 'murder is wrong' i'm saying 'to do that which prevents the discovery of what is wrong, is wrong' because it's self defeating for the agent. But then the whole argument is also self affirming, because we assume murder is wrong apriori, to facilitate the discovery of whether murder is wrong, in which case to know murder is wrong, and to NOT know murder is wrong, results in the same agreement between agents - not murdering baselessly.
** This is more of just a fun argument, because of it's circularity i wouldn't put it forward too confidently.
Meta ethics in general is bullshit. Your epistemic stances are already a result of your implicit ethics. Figuring out your meta ethics is conditional on your ethics.
Imo it's irrelevant whether one qualifies ethical statements among the "real" or not.
My meta-meta ethics is sensible, contrary to meta ethics. Every 2n+1 meta ethic is nonsense and every even one sensible.
I was with lance until he started questioning pizza. That was just confusing. He's always been such a strong proponent of gastronomic realism - The one true realism. At least if we're talking about Italian food.
Great video guys 👏👏👏
If one is a non-expert, then it makes sense to assume that the consensus view is correct.
But that'a a pragmatic rule of thumb for laypersons... not something that philosophers should take seriously.
It seems to me that all of moral convergence can be explained by technology. Technology leading to the ability to sympathize with more people and humanize them and the democratization of power because of the distribution of technology.
21:19 - "I'm happy to just throw out justifications and truth and all that!" That can lead to some awfully dangerous places, though, as a doctor, I assume you are an experienced navigator of that layer. Still, I wish for your safety.
Absurd.
Thanks for the time stamps
I have a seeming that phenomenal conservatism should have been in S tier. Unfortunately this seeming only provides private justification.
I have access to the same seeming! So it must be true.
I would argue that the second argument doesn't have to apply to prayer if you also believe in placebos. Since you could argue that some prayers/rituals could be instrumentally useful even if someone doesn't believe in the existence of God. I do think it would generally apply for most definitions of prayer. Or if you want your prayer to affect anything other that yourself.
But that kind highlights the holes in indispensability arguments.
The one argument you class as S tier is actually the worst, I think. People can all things considered converge on the wrong datum and draw the wrong moral from it [for any number of reasons]. Lance thinks convergence is the best because it tracks an empirical phenomenon, i.e. what people actually think about the issue based on their interests and goals. But that stance-dependence is precisely its insuperable weakness. Just because something is the most recent view of the majority, based on their own interests and goals, it doesn't follow that view is correct in principle or practice. Perhaps everyone needs to have different interests and goals than they now have; but, they'll never find out if the fact of the matter is independent of their stances and they're only committed to considering facts that are related in the relevant way to their [uninformed] interests and goals.
As an example consider family estrangement: 30 years ago it used to be that people thought family is family and almost nothing justifies breaking ties with them. Now popular culture, and the vast majority of psychiatrists, therapists, and counselors agree that breaking ties with problematic family members is not only beneficial but failing to do so is harmful. Some, like Joshua Coleman, think differently. Now suppose he, along with others of his persuasion, is right. Then, the convergence of popular and expert opinion presents no evidence of the rightness of the current view [cutting family ties is good]. In fact, convergence actively precludes the recognition of the correct view [cutting family ties is bad].
Well, looks like I’m not getting any work done today!
I fear that the « expert » argument went off the rails. The expert argument is only relevant if we assume that the person appealing to this reason is a non-expert. Your whole discussion assumed expertise. The expert argument provides another expert with no reason to change their views.
To a non expert, if 65% of the experts say that P is true then the non expert should give P a credence of 65%. A non-expert would have no reason to say that the experts are wrong.
Most of the arguments are of the form, « the so-called experts are incompetent in their field » which one cannot say without being an expert. Much like the argument that people become atheists because they had poor relationships with their father, so their arguments and reasons can be ignored.
And the argument that 70 years ago most philosophers were anti-realists is like the argument that 70 years ago scientists rejected plate tectonics.
Exactly what does objective mean with regard to morality? What is the criteria that allows a determination as to what is or is not a fact? (This would seem to be the basis as to why I am a moral antirealist.)
My understanding of the term objective denotes a criteria of some sort by which an adjudication can be made independently. However, I never hear anything that allows for any adjudication and thus I am left with an idea being claimed wherein I find no grounding in the context of reality. The grounding that is being offered is "seemings" which registers as feelings insofar as I can determine.
1:05:52
I don't think this is true
If we accept that intuitions are evidence for the proposition intuited, I don't see a great difference in where this seeming is located
Sure, your own seemings to you have more epistemic weight, but I think others seemings give you some defeasable justification as well
That's fine, but then I would expect phenomenal conservatives to be doing a lot more empirical work to establish what people's intuitions actually are. A lot of them don't seem interested in that. Again, on this approach, there's a risk that phenomenal conservatism will backfire against the realist, given that the empirical research so far suggests that many people have anti-realist inclinations (as Lance discussed during the "face value of moral practice" section).
@@KaneB
Yeah I think that's a problem for their position
Of course Pizzas are objectively good (though Italian pizza is the most good)! 😊
Convergence is optimizing for species-wide best fit with regards to species-specific (evolving) desires/goals.
What do species have to do with anything?
Species occuring in your account of ethics is a bit like panda bears occuring in your account of fundamental forces.
@@MrCmon113 I'm not a moral realist nor absolutist, so species-specific goals and desires can surely matter.
Would have been way more interesting if you had a realist to talk to.
I'd be up for doing another version of this with a realist.
Thanks!
Thanks very much! Really appreciate it!
It seems to me that a moral realist argument needs to do two things: First, it must provide a calculus to decide if a moral proposition is right or wrong. Second it must provide a calculus as to why one ought to put right over wrong. These arguments seem to focus on the ought part alone, and they seem to appeal to either stance or the stances of others. Hardly a way to argue for stance independence.
Companions in guilt? Don't threaten me with a good time!
So, overall I like your take on phenomenal conservatism. But, I do think that it might be possible for you to have someone convinced by another position without having feelings that pull them towards reality.
For example, if we describe psychopaths as being people who don't have internal feelings of morality or empathy.(I now that is a likely wrong massive simplification)
Then such a person might decide to adopt an ethical or moral framework without the influence of feelings. And I have seen any evidence that such people necessarily choose to be moral anti-realists vs. moral realists.
To an extent I think you might also be implying that intuitions are inherently biasing someone as well? I can also think of situations where someone would have motivated reasoning against moral realism. For example, if someone wanted to do something that mostly people in their society or the world thinks is wrong. Or they even have an intuition that something they want to do is wrong.
Then they might try to find and argument to dismiss that concern, so they don't have to feel guilt or they can argue publicly that what they do should be accepted because morality doesn't really exist. Now, to claim that all moral anti-realists thought that way would be a straw-man. It would be interesting if we had examples of someone who would be motivated to reject moral realism who ends up still supporting it after analyzing it.
I do think intuition is a good starting point, but that intuitions can still be critically examined because they could and sometimes are wrong. I do think that intuition works decently well as support for the idea that morality is real. But, it is less sufficient for an idea that a particular thing is specifically immoral. Except perhaps in an egregious case. A cultural element against intuitive morals might say that intuition if just trained into us by our culture. If you do that, then you basically end up back on moral convergence. As one of you points out. It is an argument that most people have the intuition that this is true.
Now if you believe that intuitions are inherently untrustworthy most of all of the time. Then, I don't see an issue too much by ignoring that. However, I think that we have empirical evidence that intuiting has value. But also that it is inherently not completely reliable. Most notably that people can learn skills as an intuition. And after a certain amount of training it can become pretty powerful. That is dependent on your more general view of epistemology.
rejecting intuition entirely also requires a highly quantified approach to science and would jeopardize many but not all approaches to science.
I would argue that if you have any intuitions that something is wrong. Then even if it doesn't seem intuitive that morality is "real" then you have to ignore or dismiss those intuitions. I think that it is likely that at least the vast majority of people have some form of intuition that something is wrong. However, it is also pretty clear that different cultures sometimes have conflicting views of morality. My hypothesis on the topic would be that everyone is born with some form of sense of morality. And that the particulars are shaped by their culture and community. And that people can choose to suppress their intuition of morality. (Which I would call a conscience).
I do agree it is very arrogant to assume everyone else has the same intuitions. That everyone has some form of intuition is a more reasonable one in my view.
From my understanding of the nature of intuition is is highly shaped by your experiences. So, it is better to assume that someone else's intuition is different then yours. Except perhaps if you come from pretty similar cultures.
The intuition that "torturing babies is wrong" can coexist with moral anti-realism as you demonstrate. I am sort of curious if you can discern "why" you have an intuition that your moral intuition doesn't generalize.
I don't think my perspective on intuitionism would necessarily backfire. But I could be wrong.
Although, I do see the example of a person who doesn't believe in moral realism who still believes "torturing babies is wrong" as evidence that the belief "torturing babies is wrong" is true.
I would agree that my personal intuition isn't sufficient evidence to make that sort of belief knowledge.
I think my personal varient of that might be able to go up one letter grade. But it still isn't as firm as an argument as Moral Convergence or companions in guilt.
Although, to an extent I think I would probably used a two pronged moral convergence and
The points about what normal people think at 1:40 are interesting. To me that seems to be implying that normal people are using a crude version of virtue ethics, or some other form of situationally-relative ethics if they think two people can both be wrong because they are thinking of different situations. That does kind of rule out the possibility that they believe in immutable moral laws though
As someone who recently has starting diving into the issue of anti-realism vs. realism. The training argument seems pretty plausible to me. Since there were a lot of arguments that I saw that seem to make a lot of sense and be obvious when the definitions are unclear. But, then when the definitions get clarified seem to conflict.
Like it is pretty intuitive that people in different cultures would believe different things are right and wrong. As well as that morality is dependent on situations. When first heard of moral cultural relativism. It seemed like it was asking if the right thing might change depending on what my culture was. The manifestation of morality can change based on culture, even if there is moral truth or (realism). Semantics are really important, but are highly reliant on education and I do think that teaching people particular words can change what they think.
Now that is only one data point. But to me that suggest that perhaps some of the ideas of moral anti-realism are intuitive but some aren't. Overall, I do agree the concerns you bring up bias the study. But it was a good attempt.
I don't think I at all qualify as a normal person though. Since although, philosophy isn't my field of study. I have actively been thinking about ethical and philosophical issues for over 5 years.
I would disagree that most arguments are co-ordination problems though. They are a subset of arguments though.
The expert opinion is interesting. I kind of am more curious about what psychologists and sociologists. And that other group of "hyper-empiricists" that went for other disciplines think. I agree it isn't a good argument for moral realism right now though.
Cool video. Overall, I mostly agree with the ordering of your list. I do think phenomenal conservatism along with moral convergence make a good 2 prong argument.
Companions in guilt is really effective, but I agree it is mainly useful for eliminating "moderate" positions on the issue. It does bring the dialectic forward in an interesting way though. I think it is mostly useful against "psuedo-skeptics" who claim to be skeptics but are mostly focused on policing the line between what is pseudoscience and what is real science than actually applying skepticism philosophical with any rigor or large extent. They often have a pretty positivist view, and are have clear views about the normative way that people should come to their beliefs. Which I think is a decent idea. However, if they then go after Moral Realism despite their role as an inquisitor of the scientific orthodoxy then that argument is effective against them. Companions in guilt mainly makes sense as something that a normative realist might come across and use to move themselves into being a moral realist. Or as a way of critically analyzing if they really examined why they are a normative realist enough.
Overall, I think that topic and argument serve as an important reminder that scientists should devote at least some time to studying the philosophy of science and epistemology more generally.
1:08:53
Im not sure if that's right
If you agree with the for example non-naturalist realist semantic analysis, it seems like if it seems to you that "Slavery is wrong" then it seems to you that "One has stance independent reasons not to perform slavery"
No, I don't think that follows. You'd be assuming a closure principle along these lines: If it seems to S that P, and P logically entails Q, then it seems to S that Q. But per any ordinary understanding of "seeming", and indeed per any technical use of "seeming", I don't think this principle is at all plausible. A seeming is supposed to be a doxastic psychological state -- it's like a belief, or disposition, or appearance. Similar closure principles don't work for those cases. E.g.: If S believes that P, and P logically entails Q, then S believes that Q -- well, that's obviously not true, since people often fail to believe the logical entailments of their own beliefs.
"Slavery is wrong" is the sort of judgment that any ordinary person might make. The non-naturalist realist semantic account is a much more sophisticated judgment; it's a theoretical account of what is involved in making the first-order judgment "slavery is wrong". Even if you find non-naturalism convincing -- indeed, even if it seems to you to be correct -- it would be a different claim that the seeming that "slavery is wrong" just is the seeming that "one has stance-independent reason not to perform slavery."
Similarly, suppose I believe that water is identical to H2O. Now consider:
(1) It seems to me that there is water in my cup.
(2) It seems to me that there is H2O in my cup.
I take it that on the usual view of what seemings are, (1) is true and (2) is false. The reason why (2) is false is because, even though water really is H2O and even though I know that water is H2O (let's just stipulate this for the sake of argument), my knowledge that water is H2O is highly theoretical, not something revealed in my immediate visual experiences. It doesn't visually appear as if there are billions of H2O molecules jostling around in the cup in front of me.
@@KaneB
Hm yes I think you are correct here
I made a mistake there
But it still seems to me like there is a tension between 1) having the seeming that "Slavery is wrong", 2) adopting the non-naturalist realist semantics and 3) not believing that there are any stance-independent moral facts
Tension in the sense that 1) and 2) seem to count against 3)
Do you see where I am coming from?
@@justus4684 oh yeah, I agree with that.
I really love the deliberation about which tier to put the different sorts of arguments. It’s so difficult when they’re all so bad 🤣
It was difficult. If I wasn't judging them relative to one another, they would all get E-tier. Every argument for moral realism is terrible. It's incredible the position is as popular as it is, and I remain completely unmoved by proponents of the view insisting it's "obvious." If they're comfortable insisting it's obvious, I will not be pressured by them into feeling embarrassed to say the opposite is obvious to me.
Rate explanatory indispensability.
I think this is covered by the moral convergence and face value parts. Both of those can be construed as inferences to the best explanation.
Maybe I don't understand your positions on epistemic anti-realism, but I'm not sure how this stance works. I understand how you could translate some epistemic normative statements into hypotheticals: "you should believe X if you want your beliefs to correspond to reality" but isn't this still in reference to some objective standard? You have to have standard by which to decide if a belief is likely to correspond to reality. Do you believe there is no "fact of the matter" about whether or not certain beliefs are justifiable? Is there no fact of the matter about whether or not it is justifiable to believe the earth is flat or believe evolution? Is it just up to the individual person to arbitrarily decide how much evidence they want for a certain belief? It would mean there is no sense in which a person who believes the earth is flat is believing something irrational - they just have a different standard of evidence than you.
//I understand how you could translate some epistemic normative statements into hypotheticals: "you should believe X if you want your beliefs to correspond to reality" but isn't this still in reference to some objective standard?//
Could you maybe rephrase the question? When you say "in reference to some objective standard" what do you mean?
//You have to have standard by which to decide if a belief is likely to correspond to reality.//
Even if you do, that's consistent with normative antirealism.
//Do you believe there is no "fact of the matter" about whether or not certain beliefs are justifiable?//
There are no stance-independent epistemic facts. So maybe yes, depending on precisely what you mean.
//Is there no fact of the matter about whether or not it is justifiable to believe the earth is flat or believe evolution? //
There are no stance-independent epistemic facts. So maybe yes, depending on precisely what you mean.
//Is it just up to the individual person to arbitrarily decide how much evidence they want for a certain belief?//
I don't think normative antirealism is stuck with any substantive and objectionable kind of "arbitrariness," and I don't think people typically *decide* how much weight to put on evidence. So this is also going to turn on what you mean with this question.
//It would mean there is no sense in which a person who believes the earth is flat is believing something irrational - they just have a different standard of evidence than you.//
I only believe in instrumental rationality. If believing the earth is flat was completely consistent with a person's goals and interests, but believing it was not flat would undermine their goals and interests, do you think it'd be irrational to believe it was flat, and rational to believe it was not flat? If so, why? What conception of "rationality" are you working with in that regard? If being rational led me to fail at my goals, why on earth would I want to be rational?
2:39:26
If something is E Tier, this is in there!!!
To me that argument is totally bonkers
Lmfao Kane cmon man make the list on tiermaker
1:44
Most nasty click bait on the channel I have seen so far
😈
I'm an anti moral antirealism realist
The "S" stands for SUPER!!!!
We can now figure this out with machine learning.
We just label a million things as real and non-real, train the neural network / decision tree / support vector machine etc with them and then we see what it predicts for morality. : 3
Will we agree on what to label the training data? Is economy real according to all of us?
If both of you are not material realists then I would not expect you to relate to ethical realism.
For those who are material realists (such as most practising scientists), they do not accept that the difficulty in characterising material reality is a reason for rejecting the existence of material reality. A similar argument can be applied to ethical realism: the difficulty in characterising an ethical reality is not a reason for abandoning the attempt to identify ethical truths or realities.
Is this a version of 'companions in guilt' reasoning?
Thats fine, but it misses the point by insisting on metaphysics. Yes, scientist can do science without "characterizing material reality" in the exact same way that ethicist can do ethics without "characterizing an ethical reality." But this just shows that we can't tell the difference between "realism" and "anti-realism" to begin with, which is why insisting the difference matters just causes confusion. For both scientists and ethicists, its enough to justify beliefs based solely on the arguments made by other people and ignore metaphysics all together. See pragmatism.
@@ericb9804 I don't think scientists get
There are various reasons why somebody might be a moral anti-realist; the motivation isn't always a "difficulty characterizing ethical reality." I am neither a material realist nor a moral realist, but in neither case would I say that my reasons merely have to do with a difficulty characterizing those two domains.
@@KaneB I think it would be strange to be a moral realist but not a material realist, though I guess this might be common amongst the religious. I am a causal determinist, I would argue that (potentially identifiable) prior physical causes are intrinsic to the concept of an event. This is a position that points towards realism, certainly material realism, but by implication ethical realism too. Perhaps my position does not have to imply ethical realism, but I think it makes it the default position. Pragmatically I also think that it is more productive to assume that there is a reality that we can try to unpick.
Indeed there are various reasons for not being a moral realist, but I am sure that the issues with attempts to characterise moral value is likely to be a key factor for many.
In any case, I have not yet finished your video, so may get back to the thread.
The point that seems lost on you both is that we don't need metaphysics, including ontology, at all. This whole conversation is evidence that we can't tell the difference between "realism" and "anti-realism." Which is why insisting the difference matters just leads to confusion. In all our deliberations, we can use a vocabulary that focuses only on human experience and human justifications. The utility of a beliefs is either obvious to the people who hold it or it isn't, which is to say they wouldn't hold it. There is no reason to insist on anything "deeper" than this.
Need for what? Matters to what? I happen to find these sorts of conversations interesting and enjoyable, and I don't feel any need to give a further justification for participating in them. People who are not interested don't have to watch. As for the difficulties distinguishing moral realism and moral anti-realism, it doesn't strike me as significantly more problematic than taxonomizing other philosophical positions, but it also doesn't really matter for the purposes of our discussion. We could just say: here are a bunch of arguments that have been given by people who label themselves "moral realists". We can then assess those arguments directly. Notice that very little of our discussion was about the realist/anti-realist distinction; we spent the vast majority of the time talking about the premises in the arguments, and raising objections to those specific arguments.
@@KaneB I meant no offense. I also enjoy these discussions and I enjoyed watching you have it as well. And I thank you for sharing that.
"need" meaning "necessary as an explanatory feature in our epistemology."
"matters" meaning "helps us reach some conclusion we couldn't already reach without it."
My contribution, for what its worth, is that there seems to be no utility is trying to distinguish between "realism" and "anti-realism" in the first place. I'm sure you could make this same video for "the arguments for moral anti-realism," right? And then we would have a stack of arguments - and still no conclusion. And yet, even after all that, our behavior remains unchanged precisely because whether or not "morals are real" doesn't actually matter - it doesn't help us make any moral judgements.
These kind of ontological metaphysics, for all their fun, don't actually make a difference to our epistemology, which is why we can safely ignore them and be none the worse for that.
Yes, meta ethics is bogus.
Meta-meta ethics on the other hand is correct and based.
@@MrCmon113 declaring metaphysics useless is not "meta," its demonstrable. If metaphysical questions, such as "whats the difference between real and not-real?" had useful answers, we wouldn't still be asking them.
is "god said so god is morality" on here?
No. Would be nice to include those kinds of appeals.
I'd probably put that in D tier.
I find that a lot less persuasive than "philosopher X said so".
Face-value practice strikes me as a compelling argument against noncognitivism and error theory. I don't think it's controversial to say (and none of the empirical work Lance cited denies) that our everyday moral language is premised on the assumption that moral statements are truth-apt propositions, and that at least some of these propositions are widely held to be true. Indeed, even Lance has no problem saying that "torturing babies is wrong" is true later in the video. To maintain noncognitivism or error theory, then, one does face the burden of having to disregard of ordinary moral discourse. Maybe there are compelling arguments for doing so, but it strikes me as a tall order.
Now, of course, this doesn't get us all the way to moral realism. Ordinary moral discourse suggests that some moral statements are true, but it doesn't tell us what it is that *makes* them true, and whether their truth is "stance independent" or not. I agree with Lance that most people probably don't have a sufficient grasp of the relevant concepts to hold a clear view on the matter, and in most circumstances the question doesn't even come up. So, we are left with a moral discourse that is prima facie compatible with subjectivism, relativism, constructivism, naturalism, non-naruralist realism, etc. I just think that there should have been an acknowledgement that the theories that categorically deny the truth or truth-aptness of moral statements are on much shakier ground.
//I don't think it's controversial to say (and none of the empirical work Lance cited denies) that our everyday moral language is premised on the assumption that moral statements are truth-apt propositions//
I do deny this, and I don't think the empirical evidence supports this conclusion. That is, I explicitly deny that we have good evidence ordinary moral discourse is cognitivistic.
//Indeed, even Lance has no problem saying that "torturing babies is wrong" is true later in the video.//
That's true, but I'm not a cognitivist and my use of moral language is not reflective of what I take to be ordinary usage, so this is moot.
// To maintain noncognitivism or error theory, then, one does face the burden of having to disregard of ordinary moral discourse. //
I don't think this has been established if one is relying on available empirical evidence.
@@lanceindependent I might be confused as to what cognitivism entails (I'm not a professional philosopher and I'm trying myself to get a solid grasp for the relevant concepts, partly through videos such as this one) but my understanding is that a noncognitivist account has to deny the truth-aptness of moral statements. If so, this would at least directly conflict with my own usage of moral language prior to encountering these concepts, as well as the usages I have most frequently encountered in conversation. Of course my experiences may not be representative, but if so, I would be curious to see empirical evidence to the contrary. Are people really not willing to deem certain moral statements true or false at all? Again, I'm willing to grant that they do not do so "stance independently", as that is a somewhat obscure philosophical concept. Truth and falsehood, however, are common terms of everyday language, so finding out whether they apply to moral statements should be fairly straightforward.
As for your own use of moral language, whether it's reflective of ordinary language or not, it seems to commit _you personally_ to a certain stance toward moral language. To endorse the statement "it is true that torturing babies is wrong" is to implicitly endorse the statement "some moral statements are truth-apt and some of those statements are true". Unless you want to give a fictionalist account of your own statement and argue that it isn't _really_ true that torturing babies is wrong, but we have pragmatic reasons to act as if it is (as someone inclined toward pragmatic theories of truth in the first place, I'm not sure that there is a meaningful difference here, but I admit I'm only beginning to familiarize myself with these arguments and I might be missing something here).
Thanks for the engagement and sorry for the previously blunt reply. I don't think I discussed it at all (or if so, only minimally) in the video, but my research is not yet published. I take all empirical studies on folk metaethics to have significant methodological shortcomings, and my own take on the literature is metethical indeterminacy: that people don't have any determinate metaethical views, for the most part. This means that while I deny the evidence suggests people are noncognitivists, I also deny that it shows they're cognitivists, either. That may sound very strange, and it's not a common view, so I'll say more about that.
It's understandable that it a noncognitivist account conflict with your own usage. It might even conflict with (at least some) of mine. But (as I think you acknowledge) how you and I speak isn't a good indication of how others speak.
//Of course my experiences may not be representative, but if so, I would be curious to see empirical evidence to the contrary//
My view is not that people are noncognitivists, but that they are neither cognitivists nor noncognitivists. I do not think it's the case that there is a determinate fact of the matter about whether ordinary moral claims express propositions or not.
//Are people really not willing to deem certain moral statements true or false at all? //
They might be willing to do so, but even if they were, that doesn't tell us what they thought or how they used moral statements prior to asking. For comparison, when people say things like "the total cost is $20.00," does this commit them to mathematical platonism? I don't think that it does. But I also don't think it commits them to anti-platonism. As Gill suggests, it may be that ordinary mathematical language just isn't in the business of expressing views one way or another about the metaphysics of math. Gill suggests the same may be true of ordinary moral language, and I agree.
//Truth and falsehood, however, are common terms of everyday language, so finding out whether they apply to moral statements should be fairly straightforward.//
It's not. We don't even know what people mean when they talk about truth and falsity, whether they mean the same thing as one another, whether they mean the same thing across contexts, or whether what they mean accords with any particular philosophical theories (there are a few studies on this with mixed or inconclusive results).
//As for your own use of moral language, whether it's reflective of ordinary language or not, it seems to commit you personally to a certain stance toward moral language. To endorse the statement "it is true that torturing babies is wrong" is to implicitly endorse the statement "some moral statements are truth-apt and some of those statements are true". //
If you set the bar this low for whether “cognitivism” is true, you end up with a form of cognitivism nobody would care to endorse and that would be completely trivial. I doubt any philosopher is going to be persuaded to adopt cognitivism exclusively on the grounds that it’s true that we can identify at least one person is willing to say that their personal way of using moral claims is sometimes propositional. First, no noncognitivist was unaware that they had cognitivist colleagues. If the mere existence of a single cognitivist were sufficient to prove cognitivism were true, there would be no nocognitivists. But there are. Historically speaking then, the cognitivist and noncognitivist dispute hasn’t turned on whether there were either (a) exactly zero or (b) at least one person willing to state that they sometimes used moral claims to express propositions. If it did, “cognitivism” would be a trivial and uninteresting position. If all that it took to make it true were facts about how Lance Bush stipulates he uses terms, then the substantive content of cognitivism could be little more than
Cognitivism is true because Lance Bush says he’s willing to say “murder is wrong” is true.
…that’s not a philosophically interesting form of cognitivism. Compare, for instance, to the following consideration. Someone may claim that, to them, God just is love, definitionally, and since love exists, God exists. If we were going with a similar approach to judging whether theism is true, we could say that at least some statements that assert God exists “are true,” and that, therefore, technically speaking, “theism is true.” But this would be a similarly uninteresting conception of theism. I suggest the same here. How I personally use language is not sufficient to establish any nontrivial notion of “cognitivism.”
@@lanceindependent No problem, and thank you for the thorough response. I really appreciate the opportunity to have this discussion with someone with academic expertise on the topic, and I apologize for having misunderstood your arguments somewhat. I have watched quite a few of Kane's videos but I'm fairly new to your content (though I plan to fix that!). I am looking forward to the empirical evidence you plan to publish.
Now I think you might be misunderstanding part of my argument, so I hope I can clarify it. I completely agree that people generally don't have any determinate metaethical views. I did not have any myself until I first came across the relevant philosophical debates. I don't think metaethics is something most of us have much reason to think about unless we happen to find these questions interesting. My argument is merely that moral language as we commonly employ it is _prima facie_ incompatible with certain metaethical positions (while still, I should note, being compatible with several others). This does not imply that those who speak this language have all actively considered and ruled out those positions, but merely that a philosopher interested in making a positive claim for them has a high burden to overcome in doing so. They must either reject ordinary moral language altogether and insist that it be eliminated or radically reformed to conform to their metaethical views, or commit to a fictionalist account that strikes me as just cognitivism by another name. I think this is basically the "now what?" problem that was briefly alluded to in the video, and I find all the options I've come across deeply unsatisfying.
I understand that this is not your position, as you do not endorse noncognitivism or error theory. Still, I wanted to make clear my stance on those two, since they are both fairly popular metaethical positions that Kane has argued for in the past. As for your own position, if I now understand it correctly, I don't think I necessarily disagree with it. I can appreciate that there is a great deal of semantic ambiguity to moral statements, and this ambiguity means that we frequently talk past each other when engaged in moral debates. All I would say is that it seems to me that this ambiguity is best analyzed as pertaining, not to the truth-value of moral statements, but to their truth-_maker_. Judging by the way we talk, it would seem we all agree that some moral statements are true and others false, but we cannot agree on whether what makes them true or false is God, nature, some free-floating non-natural moral facts, or simply our own values and desires. Now, to respond to your pointed objections:
// For comparison, when people say things like "the total cost is $20.00," does this commit them to mathematical platonism? //
It does not. Nor does ordinary moral language commit one to moral realism. What it would do however is cast doubt on "mathematical noncognitivism" or "mathematical error theory" if either such theory was being seriously entertained in philosophy. The fact that neither is (at least to my knowledge) strikes me as evidence for my argument. Both platonism and nominalism are compatible with the possibility of making true statements using numbers, and so it seems to me the same should apply to any metaethical theory that aspires to make sense of ordinary language rather than overturn it.
// It's not. We don't even know what people mean when they talk about truth and falsity, whether they mean the same thing as one another, whether they mean the same thing across contexts, or whether what they mean accords with any particular philosophical theories (there are a few studies on this with mixed or inconclusive results). //
Here we are rapidly veering into the question of the indeterminacy of all meaning. It is a serious problem in philosophy, and not one that I'm sufficiently knowledgeable to address. All I can say is that it seems to me that we share enough of an implicit understanding of what truth and falsity mean to be able to productively use these concepts in everyday speech, and that's good enough to me. That said, I appreciate that you find appeals to seemings uncompelling, so I don't think we can proceed further here.
// If you set the bar this low for whether “cognitivism” is true, you end up with a form of cognitivism nobody would care to endorse and that would be completely trivial. I doubt any philosopher is going to be persuaded to adopt cognitivism exclusively on the grounds that it’s true that we can identify at least one person is willing to say that their personal way of using moral claims is sometimes propositional. //
This strikes me as an uncharitable reading of what I said. My point is not that any single person making a propositional moral claims is definitive evidence against noncognitivism. Obviously plenty of people use language in unconventional ways. However, in supplementing my claim (which I understand you dispute) that most people do in fact use _prima facie_ propositional language when making moral statements, I thought it relevant to point out that even someone skeptical of the propositional content of moral language is still willing to couch their own moral language in explicitly propositional terms in at least some circumstances. This seems to me to be evidence, at the very least, of the high semantic cost involved in endorsing noncognitivism.
Companions and guilt arguments are the favourite for authoritarian political community, and empirically position the individual within a schema of having no moral voice because the individual is not community and so by default moral realism is true. If companions are political community then guilt is an epiphenomenon that acts like a moral gravitational pull, somewhat akin to Newton's gravitational force or space time relatively distortion of its it's fabric due to the weak force which is akin to morality in political power realism due to morality emerges as stance independent facts that are extracted from an ideologically construed prototype of the idiosyncratic good. However on the flip side of the relativistic manifest image an individual is like a graviton in a quantum field. If so then a persons moral stance is similar to a sub atomic state prior to decoherence entailing it's not real but subjectivly feels to have unique moral properties, like believing giving icecream to the destitute persons is most morally justified because ephemeral taste is a primordial good which to a nutritionist is absurd. However once a person emerges from a unique moral universe within an infinite magnitude of moral positions then morality becomes real. Real as an observable within a community of discourse, and therefore a person is compelled to act as an interdependent agent within a community of moral agents.
This suggests a beneficiary must give destitute persons super foods and not ice cream because of moral realism qua political community. However the realism is up for grabs due to quantum decoherence. The beneficiary could sneakily give ice cream believing taste is a greater good than contributing to utilitarian organ functionalism.
The convergence argument in a sense scaffolds onto authoritarianism through the emergence of ideology (liberalism, anarchism, socialism, fascist, conservative) bootstrapped by token of superpowers who have intergovernmental organisations to implement aid projects that has strings attached to the benefits which happen to bias moral opinion embedded in institutional formation through the function of the state. In this sense convergence is not only through non state actors who through capital go on vacation but also on institutions whom construct political moral community within weaker nation states. The example of an indigenous elite who show the way to their fellows. An example is the cargo cult who developed a new morality due to the convergence with modernisation within a decade.
The realism here could be taken as a offshoot of international realist theory. So moral intuitions from political realism is not intrinsically real but contingently can supervene on political functional power. Although a weaker power is social power within a polity that guides first person intuitions by token of guilt and more profoundly fear. An analogy from non humans is a flock of birds who act in flight as one system, where a single bird that does not keep up is left circling in confusion. So fear in human community is of being ostracised from the tribe. This arguably brings about nativist moral sentiments. It feels universally real due to minimally being in-group but not a morality of other groups. This social fact is once a person is situated as a member of a super power it can take on global dimensions and more so if that person is an agent of the state.
It appears that from a competitive group function moral realism stance, the individual gets tough love unless they play by the moral code book embedded within the structure of the nation state, at least if you happen to be in modernity.
So in this sense within modernisation subordinates to the group leader by necessity are intuitively fearful of their moral authority and experience panic guilt attacks if other subordinates appear to gain more moral approval. The argument for moral realism is that it really does structure group formation. An analogy of group formation is that of the transformation of hydrogen to helium in a star so as to prevent gravitational collapse into a white dwarf or neutron star if not a black hole. So moral realism is like hydrogen being converted to helium where consciousness is like quantum field that allows morality to flit into existence.
This is not trivial by token of being an observable that can acquire class membership within a human group aka society. A person whom is deemed conscious can hold a position of moral significance through title and capital. The companions are abstract entities like the titles and cash in the bank. So their morality is embedded in group formation entailing a persons capacity consciously moral is contingent on real groups. So if the moral self is an instance of consciousness then that self consumes moral properties of the group which appear real as language appears real, and like spent hydrogen turns into a byproduct of social power to stop group collapse.
Eventually the self implodes into a moral artefact. The moral artefact exists if and only if civilisation reproduces itself. So why I am not a moral relativist is due to my belief that quantum fields have greater aesthetic sense than Newton's mechanics or general relativity which entails morality is a human aesthetic akin to a painting but which if co opted my an elite becomes normative and politically real for those governed through force. Quantum moral realism has a flavour of moral contingency and to a degree may be placed in the category of being a moral skeptic given the individual is a byproduct of the social formation and within high modernisation that individual tends to be tossed around with the winds of capitalism and institutional folly embedded within one or another nation state. So in this sense moral realism is a byproduct of the nation state as in more so in say prior to the development of the national identity because of political power required to create moral equivalents to quantum particles needs a field which in this case happens to be brains. So similar to the Hadron collider that creates novel particles upon the collision of known particles so to the nation simulates this phenomenon but crudely through imagined community. So course grained morality like kinship altruism is a prototype moral real created by even a couple of brains but modes of capitalist consumption require more brains to moral prototypes into existence that exist emotionally as to supervene primordial prototypes like guilt and fear. The brief history of homo sapiens is one of scaffolding prototypes of moral Real's through group formation by hook or by crook for survival not of the species but the group, be that hunter gather's or modernists. In this context a black hole may be explained as an invasion of giant Gravitons from Anti-de Sitter Space or the invasion of giant moral tons from inflationary social space. Moral realism becomes plausible with the convergence of theoretical particle physics. So it seems giant moral tons exist if and only if Gravitons do too.
I don't think you've understood the companions in guilt argument.
Can you repeat your point without needlessly invoking physics aesthhetics and being more precise in how the CIG argument applies exactly?
@@vallewabbel9690 thanks, I have extended the analysis through use of social sciences and physics general knowledge to bring a few of the candidates in alignment. Appreciate your interest.
I think equal charges repulse each other, because they think this is morally good.
They do so uniformly, because all electrons share the same opinion.
3:17:30
This is genius I would have never thought about that 😂😂
Watch out Lance or your brain will become so massive that it forms a black hole🕳️
Yes we proved philosophical expertise is legitimate by proving that it isn't. Note that if we're expects, we're likely correct, in which case we're wrong about antirealism, in which case maybe we're not experts, which means we're mistaken about whether the argument from expertise is good, in which case perhaps it isn't, which means we were correct in putting it in E in the first place, which means we are experts, which means we are correct about antirealism, but it also means we're correct in judging the expertise argument to be bad, which means that since it did worse but isn't proposed by experts than realists are experts, which means they're correct about realism, which means we're incorrect about realism, which means we're not experts, which means...
"Companions in guilt"
You mean the Catholic Church?
Moral convergence is just philosophers refusing to read anything on sociology, anthropology, politics and history.
I don’t think that there could be another video which makes moral realism look more embarrassing.
what exactly is an antirealist way of thinking about reasons?
I don't think there is any distinct thing, a "reason," such that as an antirealist I have an account or must think about "reasons." I think reason-talk in everyday discourse doesn't presuppose or commit one to realism or irreducible normativity, and that if we want to try to regiment reason-talk in accordance with some theory antirealist accounts handle the matter better than realist accounts.
One way to construe reasons is as consistency relations between means and ends, e.g., there is a fact about whether drinking water is consistent with the goal of being less thirsty. One could use reason talk to describe facts of this kind. No irreducible normativity is needed.
I don't really have a "theory of reasons" -- I think there are lots of different ways of using the term "reasons"; in any particular case, I could explain what I have in mind when I use the term, but I doubt that any account will successfully capture all the ways that people use it. I think Lance is right that a lot of this talk can be reduced to claims about consistency relations between means and ends. Often, those ends will be the goals and desires of specific individuals, but not always.