Excellent post, Lionel. Very much agreed about Santa Claus fallacies and appeals to intuition being unproductive. I used to be an antirealist, but then I started getting curious why we talk about morality as if it were objective. It seems to me we have no good naturalist theory for why moral talk is objective if it’s not. Why do we need so much false talk? Wouldn’t evolution favor an accurate view of the kind of thing morality is? Then I realized that a good naturalist explanation for why moral talk is objective is that we are referring to objective things in the world: the objective triggers of our moral emotions, absent any biases, defects, or misinformation. This makes sense of our moral talk and explains why people who don’t share our moral judgments seem “inhumane,” like defective humans. Their moral emotions aren’t working properly—they’re psychopaths. Or they were fed bad information—they’re brainwashed. Curious what you think of this view. It is a weaker, more human-centric kind of moral realism than one typically sees, but it is a realism no less. And it requires no skyhooks.
Thanks David! I think the question of "why do we feel morality is objective" is a very interesting question. As you point out, it seems to conflict with a functional perspective which would require aspects of our cognition to be "right".
My take here is that Nature (evolution as the metaphor of a designer) faces a difficult problem designing organisms so that they make good decisions. On the one hand, rationality is good for making good decisions, but on the other hand, rationality can be detrimental in strategic situations: you lack the credibility to make crazy threats or promises of acting saintly. So Nature might benefit from locking in some beliefs and emotions that limit our purely rational behaviour. That is the argument from Robert Frank in Passions within Reason. Beliefs in the objectivity of morality can, in that perspective, be useful: they make you more trustworthy and therefore more worthy of being selected as a partner in social interactions. This is the topic of a post I'll publish after the next one (which is going to first develop that naturalistic view of morality).
This is an excellent, tough-minded demolition of moral realism, especially of the “Santa Claus” motivations behind it. The way you line up Parfit, Harris, Huemer, Enoch, etc., and show how much work is being done by a desire for moral objectivity rather than by argument, is both philosophically sharp and psychologically honest.
Coming from a broadly similar position, I’ve been thinking about one further step your piece almost reaches: if morality is an evolved device for coordinating behaviour in repeated social games, then “morality” is not only contingent on human nature – it is also, in principle, exportable beyond it. Once we drop the idea of objective moral truths “out there”, what remains is something like functional alignment: patterns of regulation that stabilise a system, given some target configuration (survival, flourishing, stability, growth, etc.).
Seen that way, moral norms are not so much “beliefs about value” as memetic control protocols: bundles of dispositions, narratives, sanctions and rewards that help a group approximate viable equilibria. They are engineering solutions discovered by cultural evolution. This has two consequences that your naturalism seems to invite:
A system composed solely of machines could, in principle, be “moral” in exactly the same naturalistic sense as humans are: if it implements stable regulatory patterns that minimise certain kinds of breakdown (analogues of conflict, collapse, exploitation, etc.) relative to its own architecture and aims.
The interesting question ceases to be “Are there objective moral truths?” and becomes “What kinds of regulatory architectures best sustain complex systems under different conditions?” – where human moral talk is one local, historically-specific vocabulary for such architectures.
In other words, your rejection of moral realism doesn’t only undercut metaphysics; it also opens the door to a post-human or at least post-anthropocentric ethics, where the key notion is not truth but functional design. I’d be very interested to see your game-theoretic approach pushed explicitly in that direction.
Thanks, this perspective is indeed not restricted to humans. What we call moral norms emerge from the gains from cooperation and the need to regulate and organise cooperation in order to tap into those gains. It’s reasonable to assume that any group of agentic units would have to converge on some version of these principles if they are to benefit from cooperation.
Humans are, in the end, also machines, just very complex ones that currently play the game of life far better than any other machines we can observe. So the features of morality that we find intuitive are, on this view, reflections of (approximate) optimal behaviour in social games, given our characteristics as a species (including our impressive but still limited processing power).
That suggests we should expect both fundamental commonalities and substantial differences in the rules adopted in equilibrium by other kinds of agentic units. Agents with very different lifespans, computational power, or cost–benefit structures in interaction would stabilise different rules of cooperation and require a different cognitive architecture to support them.
Something that always amuses me about moral realists: they assume that the "objective moral truths" that they hold so dearly just happen to correspond precisely to their own moral values.
But what if we (somehow) found out that the moral truth was that Genghis had it right: it is objectively best to slaughter one's enemies and rape their women? Would the moral realists all start saddling up the horses and riding out accordingly? Or would they perhaps start coming up with long-winded explanations as to why that can't really be the moral truth?
Kind of like how if you found out that Santa Claus wasn't coming down the chimney to give you presents, but to kill your parents... so you started trying to prove that Santa *has* to give out presents rather than gruesome endings.
A problem not faced by those of us who concluded that Santa doesn't exist.
Hi Paul, thanks for joining the discussion. I didn’t know about your book. I’ve just got it from the university library, and I think there is quite a bit of convergence with the view I’m developing here.
On the topic of equality, Binmore does not propose a historical theory of why societies became more egalitarian in outcomes (I offered a conjecture in my post on 28 October), but he has a very interesting explanation of why we have egalitarian intuitions in terms of morality. In short, egalitarianism emerges because social contracts are not enforceable, so the least favoured always need to be on board, otherwise they can drop out of the “contract”. This leads to a justification of Rawlsian egalitarianism following a logic that is, in my view, much more convincing than Rawls’s own arguments. You might find his book Natural Justice interesting. The view I develop in this series of posts largely walks in his footsteps on this question.
Have you read "quasi-realists" like Simon Blackburn, or Allan Gibbard? I'd be curious to hear what you'd make of them. Very roughly, the project is starting with a naturalistic picture like the one you're describing, and giving a largely non-revisionary account of moral thought and talk, including thought and talk about "objectivity".
Quasi-realism is a descendant of an earlier view called "emotivism", which said that claims like "it's wrong to kick puppies" were mere expressions of emotion, akin to "Boo to puppy-kicking!" Emotivists denied that moral claims could be true or false, or objective, or anything like that.
The first step from emotivism to quasi-realism is embracing deflationism about truth. In general, for declarative sentences, "p" and "it's true that p" say the same thing. So if "it's wrong to kick puppies" expresses disapproval of puppy-kicking, we shouldn't say "it's true that it's wrong to kick puppies" is confused or ill formed; rather, we should say that it *also* expresses disapproval of puppy kicking.
Quasi-realists are fine with talk of morality as objective, but they'll take "objectivity" talk to express features of our preferences; eg, some of my preferences I also prefer to be universally shared, and prefer to bind myself to keeping, while others I don't. What I'm doing when I call a value "objective" is expressing a preference of the former sort. Quasi-realism is also called "expressivism," since it explains moral talk, including talk about objectivity, in terms of the distinctive states of mind--maybe preferences, states of approval and disapproval, or plans--that it expresses.
This just gives the flavor, but I'm curious about whether the view, so described, still strikes you as too realist, or whether it's consistent with the picture you'll develop here.
Hi Daniel, thanks a lot for your thoughtful question/comment.
I am familiar with Blackburn/Gibbard-style quasi-realism. As you say, the project is to start from a non-cognitivist, naturalistic picture (emotivism/expressivism) and then recover as much as possible of ordinary moral thought and talk, including its logical structure and its “objectivity” rhetoric.
The core challenge they’re addressing is the Frege–Geach problem: if moral judgements are not truth-apt propositions but just expressions of attitudes (“boo!”, “hurrah!”, plans, etc.), then why do they behave in arguments as if they were? Why can we meaningfully use them in conditionals, negations, and valid inferences (“If murder is wrong, then getting your brother to murder is wrong; murder is wrong; therefore…”)? That problem arises specifically for non-cognitivist theories that come out of classic emotivism.
My own stance (and Binmore’s) is actually cognitivist. Moral statements, on our view, are truth-apt: they can be true or false within a moral code, where the code itself is a system of rules that sustains an equilibrium in the “game of life”. Those codes are shaped by the logic of game theory. A certain kind of consistency is therefore built into them. Consider the rules of football/soccer. They clearly do not refer to an external objective truth, but they are also not just personal statements of preferences. Because they implement an equilibrium of the game, they have some in-built consistency. You can get implications like:
if this is a penalty, then that similar case must also be a penalty
Similarly, in society, it makes sense to make such logical implications:
if murder is ruled out, then murder by proxy / robot / hired hitman must also be ruled out.
So when we see moral reasoning with conditionals and so on, there is no special mystery to be solved of the quasi-realist sort. We don’t start from “just attitudes” and then try to reconstruct logical structure. We start from descriptive claims about whether an action fits or breaks the rules of a morality game. Once you see moral rules that way, the logic comes for free: they have to feature some in-built consistency to work, just like the rules of any other game or practice. I am going to flesh out this naturalistic/cognitivist view in the next post.
Crucially, what is attractive about the quasi-realist perspective (and here it is really very much an evolution of the basic Humean take) is that it provides room for us to think that our moral values (whilst ultimately subjective) are importantly not reducible *simply* to their evolutionary origins. That is, they don't end up quasi-debunked simply because the evolutionary origins are acknowledged upfront. This strikes me as a significant advantage of the Blackburn style approach compared to the kind of error theory that overly simplistic evolutionary accounts of morality tend to end up with (e.g. Joyce).
Yes I also like it because I think it takes a lot of the wind out of the sails of the putative realist opponent. If you set things up the way most anti-realists do, you're stacking the deck against yourself. "I know you guys believe in things like motherhood, apple pie, and objective morality, but I'm here to tell you it's all bullshit!" No surprise people are skeptical. I don't think motherhood, apple pie, or objective morality are bullshit.
Instead, you get to say: "I believe in motherhood, apple pie, and objective morality too. But I don't think all this "objective morality" talk is nearly as spooky as you make it out to be. I'm going to give you what looks like a pretty modest, unassuming, naturalistically kosher account of what we're doing when we say that something is objectively morally wrong. Now, if you realist agree, great! (Though you'll have to stop treating the objectivity of morality as in tension with a broadly naturalist worldview.) On the other hand, if you think my account leaves something out, the ball is in your court to explain what talk about objective morality amounts to in a way that can't be made sense of in the way I suggest. And historically, your track record isn't great (ie, you tend to just resort to synonyms)..."
The drawback of the quasi-realist view is that it takes the realist view as the default, that which sets the parameters of debate...and casts the subjectivist in the role of showing they are able to match up to parameters set by people who, if the subjectivist is right, are not entitled to be setting the parameters. In the final instance, it is not clear why things should be this way round.
Having said that, I take what is essentially a quasi-realist view in my last book, but about basic equality, rather than morality as a whole:
My hesitation with the quasi-realist project is that it seems to breach discursive norms. When a quasi-realist says that morality is objective, or mind-independent, or beyond our sentiments, they mean it in a stipulated sense. Using conventional terms in unconventional ways seems distasteful. They could talk about quasi-objectivity, quasi-mind-independence, etc, but that might take away some of the force of the position.
I'd like something less critical than the error theoretic "all moral claims are false," and more critical than the quasi-realist "we should talk exactly as the realist does."
I don't think Blackburn would concede that. That is, I don't think he'd say: "there's the way everybody already uses these terms, and then there's this novel way I'm stipulating we should use them instead." (Though that is, roughly, what Mackie does.)
Rather, I think Blackburn would say: "I think this is the best account of how we *already* use the terms. It's the realist who has the unrealistically inflated picture of the kinds of metaphysical commitments they involve."
I guess I'm confused on that point. Some of Blackburn's work is highly technical. If it's meant as the best account of everyday practice, is the claim that everyone is implicitly committed to the naturalistic and Humean picture that Blackburn paints? *I* like naturalistic and Humean analyses, but many are motivated to argue with me over these things. Or maybe their self-conception doesn't matter, and the project is more *if* we can explain the realist appearances of first order discourse, then that shows that first order moral practice need not be comitted to non-naturalist metaphysics?
I can't remember how much of this he actually says, and how much is the vague recollection I have, but I suspect he'd like the picture that the "man on the street" does not have super determinate meta-ethical inclinations, and is much more committed to saying it's "really wrong" to kick puppies, or torture people, or what have you, than he is to any particular meta-ethical account of what sort of speech act that is.
So it's not exactly that they're *already* committed to the Humean picture, but they're also not committed to rejecting it.
Yes, an evolutionary perspective seems to clarify the question. It’s true that “blue” exists, but only in brains adapted to concocting that perception and not out there in the external world of light waves. Yes, “right & wrong” exist, but again only in brains selected to concoct that perception.
Or else when in our evolutionary history did objective morality appear, and how?
You say "One specific aspect of morality is that we tend to experience moral norms as objective and externally imposed, rather than as mere personal preferences."
I’m broadly sympathetic to your aims but I don’t think this is true, and don’t think Stanford demonstrated that it was true (I’m familiar with the article in question). Stanford relied primarily on Goodwin and Darley’s (2008; 2012) studies, which have significant methodological shortcomings. David Moss and I critique them here:
Bush, L. S., & Moss, D. (2020). Misunderstanding metaethics: Difficulties measuring folk objectivism and relativism. Diametros 17(64): 6-21.
I also include an extensive critique of Stanford’s other sources, such as Nichols and Folds-Bennett (2003) in my dissertation. Others, including Beebe, Davis, Pölzler, and Wright have identified methodological shortcomings with earlier studies as well.
The best available empirical evidence does not support the conclusion that most people tend to experience morality as objective or externally imposed. As the methods used to assess how nonphilosophers think about metaethics have improved, we find a shift towards increasingly larger proportions favoring antirealist response options and those responses have become more consistent. You can see this in some of Pölzler and Wright’s work (which I see was mentioned).
I don’t think this means most people are antirealists. Rather, I believe variation across studies reveals deep and pervasive methodological shortcomings with the methods used to assess how nonphilosophers think about moral realism/antirealism, and that at present we don’t have valid measures. My dissertation consisted in part of a comprehensive critique of the methods used in these studies and I argue, and gather a wealth of empirical evidence, that there are no valid metaethics paradigms. I then argue that the best explanation for this is that in general people are neither realists nor antirealists, but rather have no determinate metaethical positions.
At best, we just don’t have strong evidence that people experience morality in any particular way. However, I think there are a number of studies that hint at a disposition towards objectivism/realism not being universal. People struggle to understand metaethical distinctions and they may simply not be necessary for facilitating the sociofunctional role ordinary moral discourse plays in our societies. At the same time, there is some evidence that cultures conceptualize morality differently from WEIRD populations and that some populations may have no cognate terms for morality at all, and instead have quite different conceptions of normativity. Efforts to offer an adequate conceptual distinction between moral and nonmoral norms have also proven largely unsuccessful. As such, it's unclear there is any universal, shared capacity for distinctively moral cognition, much less one that is a product of natural selection, that would even be a reasonable candidate for a universal tendency towards moral realism.
Instead, I and some others suspect the very notion of morality is culturally constructed and historically contingent, and that it is not the case that a capacity for distinctive moral cognition is a product of natural selection and is universally shared by all human populations. In other words, I don't just deny that most people are moral realists; I'm skeptical that historical populations consistently even thought in distinctively moral terms at all.
This is a structural pattern in philosophy: find a thing you hope is real (morality, teleology, intentionality, free will) & dedicate your considerable research & argumentative skill to defending it ingeniously. It’s completely natural & understandable, but I think it’s a huge exercise in Santa Clause fallacy-ing. & people are open about it. They often disclose somewhere in their writing that they believe in the importance of some concept — as you note with Huemer et al. It’s telling that no one goes the other way: hoping that something isn’t real but reluctantly accepting that the evidence says there is free will, morality, etc.
1) As someone who rejects moral realism, do you think that the statement "There exist stance-independent moral facts" is false, or incoherent? I lean towards the latter, but that's just because I don't understand what they would look like.
2) My "lay person" understanding is that we can (and perhaps should) define morality in such a way that we assume moral truths (just as we have facts in models of economics, law, sports etc.), but we shouldn't pretend that this is metaphysically privileged in any way. Apparently these are called "institutional facts" (Searle) - is this relevant to the discussion, do you think?
3) I'm not sure I'm with you on the Sam Harris "skyhook" claim. He's simply making the conditional statement: "If there is value in the world, it must be tied to consciousness"; he's not (in this line at least) rejecting the absence of value (nihilism). I feel I agree with all your other points, but agree with Sam here. I think that I define "moral value" in such a way that it can only be measured with regards to conscious experience.
I would never have a conversation on morality before discussing conciousness and philosophy of mathematics.
I am not exactly a moral realist, but it is obvious that minimalistic moral postulates can produce complete moral valuations. Before moral realism, how real are theorems?
A lot of categorization here. Agreed with desire to show the path of reasoning as flawed, but the proof is actually not holding on, because a couple of leaps are made. Whether or not Porfitt (who I didn’t read yet) or Harris (maybe a regular listener) make this statement explicitly, I will make it anyway: “value”’is absolutely real and natural, and is not a skyhook or reach for divine. Value is the loop mechanism when things as they become more complex (big bang thru physicochemical cascade into life, society, persistent cultures, maybe AGI next…) they stay engaged and interlinked so that complexity can reach finer and finer levels on the edges of the fractal.
The Development.
Using this value as a wide brush direction we can see evolution of life or indeed universe itself (Gough) as a primary tool in moving reality towards this horizon.
In a given state an entity - individual, group, society, species, ecosystem - have a value on this directional map as well.
Our human organs and neurological structure inherited from evolutionary pressure has given us indeed some senses of what things feel like. They are good guides on some scales but obsolete in others, as they start to hold us back, because culture is a bigger player in the consciousness game than a bio-individual sometimes.
I would agree that THE absolute moral law does not exist. But at any turn of the path of the development, systems and at this moment - us - have to have a direction that we use and refine as we do. It’s the soft truth that is necessary for things to always keep moving, growing and sometimes mutating to further the fractal.
Impressive in the range of quotes, truly, but disappointing in the poverty of the arguments made.
You again start from a position (atheistic mechanistic naturalism) that presupposes the non-existence of anything non-physical, thereby begging the question of whether objective morality exists by effectively asserting that is does not and cannot right in your premise. You don't strike me as "tough minded" here so much as committing your own Santa Claus fallacy because you personally dislike and reject any alternative to this premise being true.
You move from there into your warrant, where you again put the reasoning precisely in reverse order, rejecting the stronger argument that a thing clearly perceived should be presumed to actually exist in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, but you do not offer any strong evidence to the contrary, you instead use your a priori presumption that it does not exist as your evidence that your "understanding" of evolution is to be preferred as an explanation. This seems to be your own Santa Claus fallacy again. I've read your previous articles and the arguments that evolution explains moral intuition are weak ones, "potentially plausible" at best, not "proven". Even if you managed to prove that evolution and objective morality coincides independently (which you have not and do not seem likely to do), that would not prove that objective morality does not exist, merely that there is more than one "Side of the Mountain" as Parfit put it by which one may theoretically reach the same peak.
Your conclusion then ends up boiling down to you arriving at the same circular reasoning you started with: You don't believe in objective anything and have preemptively ruled out any form of argument or evidence which might theoretically persuade you otherwise or contradict your faith in naturalism and evolution, therefore you remain unconvinced by them. I don't see "tough minded" here in your approach, I see dogmatic faith and confirmation bias.
I do appreciate though that you did make more effort this time to be clear about what "morality" meant as each speaker meant it and avoid fallacies of equivocation in general. I strongly disagree with you and still find many issues with your arguments here, but the improvement in clarity is welcome. You seem to have rather painted yourself into a corner on avoiding moral subjectivity, so I look forward to seeing how you attempt to square that circle in the next article. Have a Nice Day!
I think you’re right that if someone says, “objective morality is true because of the supernatural (ie, ‘magic’)”, then that’s rock-solid (for everyone who believes in the same supernatural reality)
The burden of proof is rather very much on the people who claim that a thing widely perceived is, contrary to all perception and repeated observation, non-existent, and then use that strong claim of non-existence as their "proof" that other claims must be true because that is the only alternative they acknowledge.
The goalposts have rather drifted from an initial soft claim that morality doesn't REQUIRE religion and alternative explanations (including evolution) are possible to a very hard claim that ONLY naturalism and evolution explains morality and anything else may be dismissed for that reason. There's something of a Motte and Bailey character to this. I know very few people who would outright state that they think essentially all of humanity are delusional and that that somehow makes perfect sense because being delusional in this way must theoretically be more adaptive than perceiving reality accurately, but that is very much the summary of this argument.
"I know very few people who would outright state that they think essentially all of humanity are delusional and that that somehow makes perfect sense because being delusional in this way must theoretically be more adaptive than perceiving reality accurately, but that is very much the summary of this argument."
Does all of humanity have to be delusional or could they merely be limited by their ecologically and socially evolved senses?
"limited by their... senses" would only explain a failure to perceive something that IS really there, like our inability to see certain wavelengths of light that animals can. Much like your apparently defective perception of the divine. To pervasively perceive what ISN'T actually there is by definition a delusion.
Delusion:
characterized by or holding false beliefs or judgments about external reality that are held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, as a symptom of serious mental illness.
"hospitalization for schizophrenia and delusional paranoia"
based on or having faulty judgment or perception; severely mistaken.
If you honestly believe that incontrovertible evidence exists that there is neither God nor objective morality and yet the majority of humans falsely believe in these non-existent things based on faulty perceptions you have necessarily put yourself in the position of arguing that pretty much all of humanity for all our history have been clinically, diagnosably, severely mentally ill and that evolution is the cause of our insanity.
Yep, pretty much like the color blue or the stink of sulfur dioxide. You need evidence to convince people that these phenomena exist only in brains, and even then plenty of people swear that these perceptions are objective (true outside of brains).
Excellent post, Lionel. Very much agreed about Santa Claus fallacies and appeals to intuition being unproductive. I used to be an antirealist, but then I started getting curious why we talk about morality as if it were objective. It seems to me we have no good naturalist theory for why moral talk is objective if it’s not. Why do we need so much false talk? Wouldn’t evolution favor an accurate view of the kind of thing morality is? Then I realized that a good naturalist explanation for why moral talk is objective is that we are referring to objective things in the world: the objective triggers of our moral emotions, absent any biases, defects, or misinformation. This makes sense of our moral talk and explains why people who don’t share our moral judgments seem “inhumane,” like defective humans. Their moral emotions aren’t working properly—they’re psychopaths. Or they were fed bad information—they’re brainwashed. Curious what you think of this view. It is a weaker, more human-centric kind of moral realism than one typically sees, but it is a realism no less. And it requires no skyhooks.
Thanks David! I think the question of "why do we feel morality is objective" is a very interesting question. As you point out, it seems to conflict with a functional perspective which would require aspects of our cognition to be "right".
My take here is that Nature (evolution as the metaphor of a designer) faces a difficult problem designing organisms so that they make good decisions. On the one hand, rationality is good for making good decisions, but on the other hand, rationality can be detrimental in strategic situations: you lack the credibility to make crazy threats or promises of acting saintly. So Nature might benefit from locking in some beliefs and emotions that limit our purely rational behaviour. That is the argument from Robert Frank in Passions within Reason. Beliefs in the objectivity of morality can, in that perspective, be useful: they make you more trustworthy and therefore more worthy of being selected as a partner in social interactions. This is the topic of a post I'll publish after the next one (which is going to first develop that naturalistic view of morality).
This is an excellent, tough-minded demolition of moral realism, especially of the “Santa Claus” motivations behind it. The way you line up Parfit, Harris, Huemer, Enoch, etc., and show how much work is being done by a desire for moral objectivity rather than by argument, is both philosophically sharp and psychologically honest.
Coming from a broadly similar position, I’ve been thinking about one further step your piece almost reaches: if morality is an evolved device for coordinating behaviour in repeated social games, then “morality” is not only contingent on human nature – it is also, in principle, exportable beyond it. Once we drop the idea of objective moral truths “out there”, what remains is something like functional alignment: patterns of regulation that stabilise a system, given some target configuration (survival, flourishing, stability, growth, etc.).
Seen that way, moral norms are not so much “beliefs about value” as memetic control protocols: bundles of dispositions, narratives, sanctions and rewards that help a group approximate viable equilibria. They are engineering solutions discovered by cultural evolution. This has two consequences that your naturalism seems to invite:
A system composed solely of machines could, in principle, be “moral” in exactly the same naturalistic sense as humans are: if it implements stable regulatory patterns that minimise certain kinds of breakdown (analogues of conflict, collapse, exploitation, etc.) relative to its own architecture and aims.
The interesting question ceases to be “Are there objective moral truths?” and becomes “What kinds of regulatory architectures best sustain complex systems under different conditions?” – where human moral talk is one local, historically-specific vocabulary for such architectures.
In other words, your rejection of moral realism doesn’t only undercut metaphysics; it also opens the door to a post-human or at least post-anthropocentric ethics, where the key notion is not truth but functional design. I’d be very interested to see your game-theoretic approach pushed explicitly in that direction.
Thanks, this perspective is indeed not restricted to humans. What we call moral norms emerge from the gains from cooperation and the need to regulate and organise cooperation in order to tap into those gains. It’s reasonable to assume that any group of agentic units would have to converge on some version of these principles if they are to benefit from cooperation.
Humans are, in the end, also machines, just very complex ones that currently play the game of life far better than any other machines we can observe. So the features of morality that we find intuitive are, on this view, reflections of (approximate) optimal behaviour in social games, given our characteristics as a species (including our impressive but still limited processing power).
That suggests we should expect both fundamental commonalities and substantial differences in the rules adopted in equilibrium by other kinds of agentic units. Agents with very different lifespans, computational power, or cost–benefit structures in interaction would stabilise different rules of cooperation and require a different cognitive architecture to support them.
Something that always amuses me about moral realists: they assume that the "objective moral truths" that they hold so dearly just happen to correspond precisely to their own moral values.
But what if we (somehow) found out that the moral truth was that Genghis had it right: it is objectively best to slaughter one's enemies and rape their women? Would the moral realists all start saddling up the horses and riding out accordingly? Or would they perhaps start coming up with long-winded explanations as to why that can't really be the moral truth?
Kind of like how if you found out that Santa Claus wasn't coming down the chimney to give you presents, but to kill your parents... so you started trying to prove that Santa *has* to give out presents rather than gruesome endings.
A problem not faced by those of us who concluded that Santa doesn't exist.
Hi Paul, thanks for joining the discussion. I didn’t know about your book. I’ve just got it from the university library, and I think there is quite a bit of convergence with the view I’m developing here.
On the topic of equality, Binmore does not propose a historical theory of why societies became more egalitarian in outcomes (I offered a conjecture in my post on 28 October), but he has a very interesting explanation of why we have egalitarian intuitions in terms of morality. In short, egalitarianism emerges because social contracts are not enforceable, so the least favoured always need to be on board, otherwise they can drop out of the “contract”. This leads to a justification of Rawlsian egalitarianism following a logic that is, in my view, much more convincing than Rawls’s own arguments. You might find his book Natural Justice interesting. The view I develop in this series of posts largely walks in his footsteps on this question.
Have you read "quasi-realists" like Simon Blackburn, or Allan Gibbard? I'd be curious to hear what you'd make of them. Very roughly, the project is starting with a naturalistic picture like the one you're describing, and giving a largely non-revisionary account of moral thought and talk, including thought and talk about "objectivity".
Quasi-realism is a descendant of an earlier view called "emotivism", which said that claims like "it's wrong to kick puppies" were mere expressions of emotion, akin to "Boo to puppy-kicking!" Emotivists denied that moral claims could be true or false, or objective, or anything like that.
The first step from emotivism to quasi-realism is embracing deflationism about truth. In general, for declarative sentences, "p" and "it's true that p" say the same thing. So if "it's wrong to kick puppies" expresses disapproval of puppy-kicking, we shouldn't say "it's true that it's wrong to kick puppies" is confused or ill formed; rather, we should say that it *also* expresses disapproval of puppy kicking.
Quasi-realists are fine with talk of morality as objective, but they'll take "objectivity" talk to express features of our preferences; eg, some of my preferences I also prefer to be universally shared, and prefer to bind myself to keeping, while others I don't. What I'm doing when I call a value "objective" is expressing a preference of the former sort. Quasi-realism is also called "expressivism," since it explains moral talk, including talk about objectivity, in terms of the distinctive states of mind--maybe preferences, states of approval and disapproval, or plans--that it expresses.
This just gives the flavor, but I'm curious about whether the view, so described, still strikes you as too realist, or whether it's consistent with the picture you'll develop here.
Hi Daniel, thanks a lot for your thoughtful question/comment.
I am familiar with Blackburn/Gibbard-style quasi-realism. As you say, the project is to start from a non-cognitivist, naturalistic picture (emotivism/expressivism) and then recover as much as possible of ordinary moral thought and talk, including its logical structure and its “objectivity” rhetoric.
The core challenge they’re addressing is the Frege–Geach problem: if moral judgements are not truth-apt propositions but just expressions of attitudes (“boo!”, “hurrah!”, plans, etc.), then why do they behave in arguments as if they were? Why can we meaningfully use them in conditionals, negations, and valid inferences (“If murder is wrong, then getting your brother to murder is wrong; murder is wrong; therefore…”)? That problem arises specifically for non-cognitivist theories that come out of classic emotivism.
My own stance (and Binmore’s) is actually cognitivist. Moral statements, on our view, are truth-apt: they can be true or false within a moral code, where the code itself is a system of rules that sustains an equilibrium in the “game of life”. Those codes are shaped by the logic of game theory. A certain kind of consistency is therefore built into them. Consider the rules of football/soccer. They clearly do not refer to an external objective truth, but they are also not just personal statements of preferences. Because they implement an equilibrium of the game, they have some in-built consistency. You can get implications like:
if this is a penalty, then that similar case must also be a penalty
Similarly, in society, it makes sense to make such logical implications:
if murder is ruled out, then murder by proxy / robot / hired hitman must also be ruled out.
So when we see moral reasoning with conditionals and so on, there is no special mystery to be solved of the quasi-realist sort. We don’t start from “just attitudes” and then try to reconstruct logical structure. We start from descriptive claims about whether an action fits or breaks the rules of a morality game. Once you see moral rules that way, the logic comes for free: they have to feature some in-built consistency to work, just like the rules of any other game or practice. I am going to flesh out this naturalistic/cognitivist view in the next post.
Crucially, what is attractive about the quasi-realist perspective (and here it is really very much an evolution of the basic Humean take) is that it provides room for us to think that our moral values (whilst ultimately subjective) are importantly not reducible *simply* to their evolutionary origins. That is, they don't end up quasi-debunked simply because the evolutionary origins are acknowledged upfront. This strikes me as a significant advantage of the Blackburn style approach compared to the kind of error theory that overly simplistic evolutionary accounts of morality tend to end up with (e.g. Joyce).
Yes I also like it because I think it takes a lot of the wind out of the sails of the putative realist opponent. If you set things up the way most anti-realists do, you're stacking the deck against yourself. "I know you guys believe in things like motherhood, apple pie, and objective morality, but I'm here to tell you it's all bullshit!" No surprise people are skeptical. I don't think motherhood, apple pie, or objective morality are bullshit.
Instead, you get to say: "I believe in motherhood, apple pie, and objective morality too. But I don't think all this "objective morality" talk is nearly as spooky as you make it out to be. I'm going to give you what looks like a pretty modest, unassuming, naturalistically kosher account of what we're doing when we say that something is objectively morally wrong. Now, if you realist agree, great! (Though you'll have to stop treating the objectivity of morality as in tension with a broadly naturalist worldview.) On the other hand, if you think my account leaves something out, the ball is in your court to explain what talk about objective morality amounts to in a way that can't be made sense of in the way I suggest. And historically, your track record isn't great (ie, you tend to just resort to synonyms)..."
The drawback of the quasi-realist view is that it takes the realist view as the default, that which sets the parameters of debate...and casts the subjectivist in the role of showing they are able to match up to parameters set by people who, if the subjectivist is right, are not entitled to be setting the parameters. In the final instance, it is not clear why things should be this way round.
Having said that, I take what is essentially a quasi-realist view in my last book, but about basic equality, rather than morality as a whole:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691255347/basic-equality?srsltid=AfmBOoqebfPrQo4xpPVCeXrQ-IBiwszyzFJMGmti8WgBpCe--3L2o4z-
My hesitation with the quasi-realist project is that it seems to breach discursive norms. When a quasi-realist says that morality is objective, or mind-independent, or beyond our sentiments, they mean it in a stipulated sense. Using conventional terms in unconventional ways seems distasteful. They could talk about quasi-objectivity, quasi-mind-independence, etc, but that might take away some of the force of the position.
I'd like something less critical than the error theoretic "all moral claims are false," and more critical than the quasi-realist "we should talk exactly as the realist does."
I don't think Blackburn would concede that. That is, I don't think he'd say: "there's the way everybody already uses these terms, and then there's this novel way I'm stipulating we should use them instead." (Though that is, roughly, what Mackie does.)
Rather, I think Blackburn would say: "I think this is the best account of how we *already* use the terms. It's the realist who has the unrealistically inflated picture of the kinds of metaphysical commitments they involve."
I guess I'm confused on that point. Some of Blackburn's work is highly technical. If it's meant as the best account of everyday practice, is the claim that everyone is implicitly committed to the naturalistic and Humean picture that Blackburn paints? *I* like naturalistic and Humean analyses, but many are motivated to argue with me over these things. Or maybe their self-conception doesn't matter, and the project is more *if* we can explain the realist appearances of first order discourse, then that shows that first order moral practice need not be comitted to non-naturalist metaphysics?
I can't remember how much of this he actually says, and how much is the vague recollection I have, but I suspect he'd like the picture that the "man on the street" does not have super determinate meta-ethical inclinations, and is much more committed to saying it's "really wrong" to kick puppies, or torture people, or what have you, than he is to any particular meta-ethical account of what sort of speech act that is.
So it's not exactly that they're *already* committed to the Humean picture, but they're also not committed to rejecting it.
Yes, an evolutionary perspective seems to clarify the question. It’s true that “blue” exists, but only in brains adapted to concocting that perception and not out there in the external world of light waves. Yes, “right & wrong” exist, but again only in brains selected to concoct that perception.
Or else when in our evolutionary history did objective morality appear, and how?
You say "One specific aspect of morality is that we tend to experience moral norms as objective and externally imposed, rather than as mere personal preferences."
I’m broadly sympathetic to your aims but I don’t think this is true, and don’t think Stanford demonstrated that it was true (I’m familiar with the article in question). Stanford relied primarily on Goodwin and Darley’s (2008; 2012) studies, which have significant methodological shortcomings. David Moss and I critique them here:
Bush, L. S., & Moss, D. (2020). Misunderstanding metaethics: Difficulties measuring folk objectivism and relativism. Diametros 17(64): 6-21.
I also include an extensive critique of Stanford’s other sources, such as Nichols and Folds-Bennett (2003) in my dissertation. Others, including Beebe, Davis, Pölzler, and Wright have identified methodological shortcomings with earlier studies as well.
The best available empirical evidence does not support the conclusion that most people tend to experience morality as objective or externally imposed. As the methods used to assess how nonphilosophers think about metaethics have improved, we find a shift towards increasingly larger proportions favoring antirealist response options and those responses have become more consistent. You can see this in some of Pölzler and Wright’s work (which I see was mentioned).
I don’t think this means most people are antirealists. Rather, I believe variation across studies reveals deep and pervasive methodological shortcomings with the methods used to assess how nonphilosophers think about moral realism/antirealism, and that at present we don’t have valid measures. My dissertation consisted in part of a comprehensive critique of the methods used in these studies and I argue, and gather a wealth of empirical evidence, that there are no valid metaethics paradigms. I then argue that the best explanation for this is that in general people are neither realists nor antirealists, but rather have no determinate metaethical positions.
At best, we just don’t have strong evidence that people experience morality in any particular way. However, I think there are a number of studies that hint at a disposition towards objectivism/realism not being universal. People struggle to understand metaethical distinctions and they may simply not be necessary for facilitating the sociofunctional role ordinary moral discourse plays in our societies. At the same time, there is some evidence that cultures conceptualize morality differently from WEIRD populations and that some populations may have no cognate terms for morality at all, and instead have quite different conceptions of normativity. Efforts to offer an adequate conceptual distinction between moral and nonmoral norms have also proven largely unsuccessful. As such, it's unclear there is any universal, shared capacity for distinctively moral cognition, much less one that is a product of natural selection, that would even be a reasonable candidate for a universal tendency towards moral realism.
Instead, I and some others suspect the very notion of morality is culturally constructed and historically contingent, and that it is not the case that a capacity for distinctive moral cognition is a product of natural selection and is universally shared by all human populations. In other words, I don't just deny that most people are moral realists; I'm skeptical that historical populations consistently even thought in distinctively moral terms at all.
So, we ought not believe in moral realism eh? Okey dokey
This is a structural pattern in philosophy: find a thing you hope is real (morality, teleology, intentionality, free will) & dedicate your considerable research & argumentative skill to defending it ingeniously. It’s completely natural & understandable, but I think it’s a huge exercise in Santa Clause fallacy-ing. & people are open about it. They often disclose somewhere in their writing that they believe in the importance of some concept — as you note with Huemer et al. It’s telling that no one goes the other way: hoping that something isn’t real but reluctantly accepting that the evidence says there is free will, morality, etc.
I agree. Please read this: https://reflexionesmarginales.com/blog/category/numero78/page/2/
Any IA can traduce it, but the second part is enough.
Nice piece, I especially like the appeal to consequences section!
Oddly, I was arguing about moral realism on another post (https://ibrahimdagher.substack.com/p/there-are-no-arguments-for-moral/comment/181836502) , and this post came up on my feed!
A few questions:
1) As someone who rejects moral realism, do you think that the statement "There exist stance-independent moral facts" is false, or incoherent? I lean towards the latter, but that's just because I don't understand what they would look like.
2) My "lay person" understanding is that we can (and perhaps should) define morality in such a way that we assume moral truths (just as we have facts in models of economics, law, sports etc.), but we shouldn't pretend that this is metaphysically privileged in any way. Apparently these are called "institutional facts" (Searle) - is this relevant to the discussion, do you think?
3) I'm not sure I'm with you on the Sam Harris "skyhook" claim. He's simply making the conditional statement: "If there is value in the world, it must be tied to consciousness"; he's not (in this line at least) rejecting the absence of value (nihilism). I feel I agree with all your other points, but agree with Sam here. I think that I define "moral value" in such a way that it can only be measured with regards to conscious experience.
I would never have a conversation on morality before discussing conciousness and philosophy of mathematics.
I am not exactly a moral realist, but it is obvious that minimalistic moral postulates can produce complete moral valuations. Before moral realism, how real are theorems?
https://www.amazon.com/Morality-Mathematics-Justin-Clarke-Doane/dp/019889886X
The link between between the ontology of mathematics and morality is essential to discuss this.
A lot of categorization here. Agreed with desire to show the path of reasoning as flawed, but the proof is actually not holding on, because a couple of leaps are made. Whether or not Porfitt (who I didn’t read yet) or Harris (maybe a regular listener) make this statement explicitly, I will make it anyway: “value”’is absolutely real and natural, and is not a skyhook or reach for divine. Value is the loop mechanism when things as they become more complex (big bang thru physicochemical cascade into life, society, persistent cultures, maybe AGI next…) they stay engaged and interlinked so that complexity can reach finer and finer levels on the edges of the fractal.
The Development.
Using this value as a wide brush direction we can see evolution of life or indeed universe itself (Gough) as a primary tool in moving reality towards this horizon.
In a given state an entity - individual, group, society, species, ecosystem - have a value on this directional map as well.
Our human organs and neurological structure inherited from evolutionary pressure has given us indeed some senses of what things feel like. They are good guides on some scales but obsolete in others, as they start to hold us back, because culture is a bigger player in the consciousness game than a bio-individual sometimes.
I would agree that THE absolute moral law does not exist. But at any turn of the path of the development, systems and at this moment - us - have to have a direction that we use and refine as we do. It’s the soft truth that is necessary for things to always keep moving, growing and sometimes mutating to further the fractal.
Impressive in the range of quotes, truly, but disappointing in the poverty of the arguments made.
You again start from a position (atheistic mechanistic naturalism) that presupposes the non-existence of anything non-physical, thereby begging the question of whether objective morality exists by effectively asserting that is does not and cannot right in your premise. You don't strike me as "tough minded" here so much as committing your own Santa Claus fallacy because you personally dislike and reject any alternative to this premise being true.
You move from there into your warrant, where you again put the reasoning precisely in reverse order, rejecting the stronger argument that a thing clearly perceived should be presumed to actually exist in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, but you do not offer any strong evidence to the contrary, you instead use your a priori presumption that it does not exist as your evidence that your "understanding" of evolution is to be preferred as an explanation. This seems to be your own Santa Claus fallacy again. I've read your previous articles and the arguments that evolution explains moral intuition are weak ones, "potentially plausible" at best, not "proven". Even if you managed to prove that evolution and objective morality coincides independently (which you have not and do not seem likely to do), that would not prove that objective morality does not exist, merely that there is more than one "Side of the Mountain" as Parfit put it by which one may theoretically reach the same peak.
Your conclusion then ends up boiling down to you arriving at the same circular reasoning you started with: You don't believe in objective anything and have preemptively ruled out any form of argument or evidence which might theoretically persuade you otherwise or contradict your faith in naturalism and evolution, therefore you remain unconvinced by them. I don't see "tough minded" here in your approach, I see dogmatic faith and confirmation bias.
I do appreciate though that you did make more effort this time to be clear about what "morality" meant as each speaker meant it and avoid fallacies of equivocation in general. I strongly disagree with you and still find many issues with your arguments here, but the improvement in clarity is welcome. You seem to have rather painted yourself into a corner on avoiding moral subjectivity, so I look forward to seeing how you attempt to square that circle in the next article. Have a Nice Day!
I think you’re right that if someone says, “objective morality is true because of the supernatural (ie, ‘magic’)”, then that’s rock-solid (for everyone who believes in the same supernatural reality)
The burden of proof is rather very much on the people who claim that a thing widely perceived is, contrary to all perception and repeated observation, non-existent, and then use that strong claim of non-existence as their "proof" that other claims must be true because that is the only alternative they acknowledge.
The goalposts have rather drifted from an initial soft claim that morality doesn't REQUIRE religion and alternative explanations (including evolution) are possible to a very hard claim that ONLY naturalism and evolution explains morality and anything else may be dismissed for that reason. There's something of a Motte and Bailey character to this. I know very few people who would outright state that they think essentially all of humanity are delusional and that that somehow makes perfect sense because being delusional in this way must theoretically be more adaptive than perceiving reality accurately, but that is very much the summary of this argument.
"I know very few people who would outright state that they think essentially all of humanity are delusional and that that somehow makes perfect sense because being delusional in this way must theoretically be more adaptive than perceiving reality accurately, but that is very much the summary of this argument."
Does all of humanity have to be delusional or could they merely be limited by their ecologically and socially evolved senses?
"limited by their... senses" would only explain a failure to perceive something that IS really there, like our inability to see certain wavelengths of light that animals can. Much like your apparently defective perception of the divine. To pervasively perceive what ISN'T actually there is by definition a delusion.
Delusion:
characterized by or holding false beliefs or judgments about external reality that are held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, as a symptom of serious mental illness.
"hospitalization for schizophrenia and delusional paranoia"
based on or having faulty judgment or perception; severely mistaken.
If you honestly believe that incontrovertible evidence exists that there is neither God nor objective morality and yet the majority of humans falsely believe in these non-existent things based on faulty perceptions you have necessarily put yourself in the position of arguing that pretty much all of humanity for all our history have been clinically, diagnosably, severely mentally ill and that evolution is the cause of our insanity.
Yep, pretty much like the color blue or the stink of sulfur dioxide. You need evidence to convince people that these phenomena exist only in brains, and even then plenty of people swear that these perceptions are objective (true outside of brains).