The Best Argument For Moral Realism? 

Assuming that you want to reduce categorical oughts to something like hypothetical oughts, what kind of status do you take hypothetical oughts to have? I mean, if they are themselves normative (and not descriptive), are they any less problematic or mysterious than their categorical counterparts?

@@Philosophy_Overdose I reduce them to descriptive claims, so I also reject hypothetical oughts. I don't believe in irreducible normativity. --- Longer explanation Hypothethical oughts might be *less* problematic and mysterious than categorical oughts , but they're still too problematic and mysterious for me. I don't think that hypothetical norms "provide us with reasons" or furnish us with conditional "oughts" that somehow "apply" to us. I tend to think of such language as conceptually confused, and unable to be cashed out that is intelligible (at the very least, *I* can't make sense of them). Currently, my preferred way of describing my position would be "normative quietism." My general take on the contemporary literature on moral realism is that it relies on what regard as the same flawed methods as much of analytic philosophy. As a result of their methods, I think philosophers end up generating a variety of pseudoproblems that that result from various conceptual and lingusitic errors and confusions, one of these being the mistaken notion that there is a substantive, meaningful account of normative realism. My preferred way of reducing or eliminating normativity is to redescribe normative claims as consistency relations: there are facts about what would be consistent and inconsistent with the pursuit of particular goals, but I don't think these facts "provide" us with oughts (I put this in scare quotes because I think it's unintelligible; it's the sort of language that e.g., Parfit uses and that other moral realists like Huemer might use). With respect to normative realist accounts, I tend to favor a kind of trilemma challenge: I maintain that all such accounts are trivial (e.g., naturalism), false (e.g., theistic realism), or unintelligible (non-naturalist realism), or a combination of these.

@@lanceindependent I thought you wanted to say that normativity was something stance dependent, not nonexistent and bunk. But if all purported normativity turns out to be something descriptive in the end, then it looks like there simply isn't anything normative to begin with. It's just a kind of illusion. And in that case, there are no reasons for doing anything, and there are no reasons for believing anything. But insofar as there are no reasons for believing anything, then that applies to that very view itself (i.e. there are no reasons for believing the view which itself tells us that there are no reasons for believing anything).

@@Philosophy_Overdose Yea, that’s a natural assumption to make: If someone goes around saying that there are no stance-independent normative facts, it’s natural to assume they think that there are stance-dependent ones. But I don’t think there are either. Not really. I just don’t typically bother talking about the absence of the latter. //But if all purported normativity turns out to be something descriptive in the end, then it looks like there simply isn't anything normative to begin with. It's just a kind of illusion. // It may be an illusion to normative realists. I don’t think I am subject to any kind of illusion. That’s going to depend on each person’s phenomenology. I don’t have realist phenomenology. //And in that case, there are no reasons for doing anything, and there are no reasons for believing anything// I’d agree there aren’t the kinds of reasons realists (and some antirealists) think that there are. I do have a notion of reasons, but it's cashed out descriptive terms. Specifically, I take my “reasons” for doing things to involve relations between means and ends, e.g., “If you want to X, it would be consistent with this goal to Y.” This is similar to but not exactly a hypothetical imperative; it retains the conditional element but converts the normative element into a descriptive one. So if I said I have a reason to reject normative realism, this could be understood as “it is consistent with my goal to have true beliefs (at least about normative realism) to reject normative realism.” I want to believe normative realism is true iff it is true. I would bet you do, too. I don’t think we need any special kind of reason to believe things. We need simply *want* to believe it. Ultimately, if normative realists are going to insist that, given their stipulative use of the term “reason,” that I don’t have any reasons for belief, I am inclined to simply shrug. I’m not concerned with whether my belief-forming practices conform to philosophical criteria that have nothing to do with the pursuit of my goals and interests. I could simply say that I am only interested in having “shmeasons” for belief, where “shmeasons” are facts about what is and isn’t conducive to achieving my goals. I could then go around having no “reasons” for my beliefs, but nevertheless achieving all my goals, having a highly predictively accurate model of the world around me, and so on. If a normative realist wants to balk at me for going around believing without any “reasons,” I think the best way to show how meaningless this is to just go ahead and believe things without their notion of reasons, and show them that nothing terrible happens when you do this. I just shared this quote from David Lewis with someone else, but I’ll share it again, because I think it perfectly captures the spirit of my objections to normative realism: “Why care about objective value or ethical reality? The sanction is that if you do not, your inner states will fail to deserve folk-theoretical names. Not a threat that will strike terror into the hearts of the wicked! But whoever thought that philosophy could replace the hangman?” It’s the same with epistemic realism. If my belief-forming practices don’t conform to philosophical notions of what a “reason” is, well, so what? The only apparent consequence to this is that, according to the labeling systems of academic philosophers, I don’t have “reasons” for my beliefs. This is not a concern that is going to strike terror in my heart. It won’t even make me blink.

@@lanceindependent Would you wanna come on the channel and discuss some of these things, if not with me, then with someone I choose to bring on? I've never hosted a debate or discussion before, but I've considering it....

Funny but I think according to age David would be impersonating Putnam

​@@bpatrickhoburgCorrect, but I think getting your facts straight isnt a rule in comedy

Other way around

Yeah, but I think the whole thing is that they are both stance independent in terms of axiology, as there is no way or no point of trying to seek out knowledge if knowledge is not stance independent.

@@irish_deconstruction Yes, knowledge is stance independente, you don't need to be a moral realist to agree with that. Knowledge isn't a value term, therefore, the fact that knowledge is stance independente does nothing to prove the existence of stance independente values.

The difference is that there really is a world out there and it places limits on what you can believe without experience supplying a correction. With morality, even the idea that the value of a moral system is judged by its consequences is itself done within the framework of the ethical theory called consequentialism. If we all become consequentialists, and if all agree on what makes a world good, then morality becomes empirical except that in that it would not any longer be morality but social science. And of course we don't agree on what a good world looks like. And we don't even agree on consequentialism. The stance of the moral anti-realist is merely that if we have moral differences, then we cannot settle the question in some neutral territory. It's a matter of taste

@bozdowleder2303 The real world can only impact your world view if you care about being consistent with empirical data. Ultimately it comes down to whether or not you value truth. I care about truth personally, but what could you actually say to a person that doesn't care about truth other than to appeal to other things they value personally? As for consequentialism I see no reason why I can't dabble in the the consequences of particular normative theories while rejecting the metaethical justifications. After thinking about it I think my original comment actually concedes too much. After all let's say you prove that empirical norms are categorical. So what? That doesn't mean mean all norms are categorical. People used to debate about aesthetics being objective yet most agree that isn't so. At best it shows that certain arguments for moral antirealism aren't convincing. It does nothing to show that moral realism is true.

​​@@jeremyhansen9197When we look for facts though, we have to be consistent. But with morality, it is not clear that good moral choices are those which have good consequences. And it is not clear that there is any objective standard of goodness we can measure those consequences by anyway. So there is a difference between facts and values. That's precisely the distinction Putnam is trying to blur here

Because it is... The lamest argument for moral realism i've ever heard.

It almost says that morality can be falsifiable because its compared to science which just isn't true. It's a really bad argument

Oh yeah, his voice is very similar :D

To be honest with you I don't think there need to be such a thing as arguments for moral antirealism beyond general skeptical arguments. antirealism seems to me the logical starting point as it assumes nothing, or at least the minimal necessary to have moral discussion, not to mention how it appeals to me intuitively. Moral realism on the other hand has always seemed a very difficult thing to believe in unless you take for granted the existence of the supernatural, which I try not to. I'd be interested to hear any "good form" of realism you know of as I have been trying for very long to find any convincing realist argument, even from atheist realists, and haven't found one.

@@Riskofdisconnect Well if you are predisposed to be against realism because of an a priori commitment to atheism, your intuitions will of course be different. I think that is an intuitional thing maybe. And I certainly don't know of any arguments you would accept. The ones I think are bad and for the reason I stated however doesn't make me an anti-realist.

​​@@RiskofdisconnectActually even the existence of the supernatural contributes nothing to the debate. If there were a deity with moral opinions, those are just as arbitrary as anybody else's unless you believe in the claim(which most people would reject if presented in this form) that might makes right

But even if you are a solipsist you still have to explain your perceptual reality. Solipsists and idealists may think they have evaded the problem of explaining the world But they have merely changed the semantics. There is still a world out there. Even if it's all in your head, its complexity, its organizing laws, the origin stories of various things you see - all need explanation

Excellent point.

No, the argument is that if you want to deny objective moral values for certain reasons, consistency requires that you also give up objective epistemic values, which is self-defeating for any argument because it means that it doesn't matter how rational, plausible or coherent an argument is because that wouldn't make the conclusion of an argument objectively true and that it doesn't have to be believed even if it is true, which is self-evidently absurd.

@@Nexus-jg7ev this sounds like the companions in guilt argument, which I don’t think works. I’ll try to keep my response brief but my main response is that just because one set of objective norms existing does not imply that other objective norms exist. Just because objective epistemic norms exist doesn’t imply that, for instance, objective norms about sanctity also exist. If a theist says “X is sacred” and the atheist replies “no it’s not, because sanctity values don’t exist”, nobody accuses the atheist of also threatening epistemic values. They seem to intuitively understand that what the atheist is denying is the source of the norms of sanctity. Similarly, I can accept the source of epistemic norms, while realizing that I have no reason to believe there is anything which establishes moral norms. I agree that, if you deny moral values for very specific reasons, you would also have to deny epistemic values. I think the CIG works as a response to a basic form of error theory. But my argument is simply that I see no epistemic reason or justification to believe that objective moral values exist, in the same way the atheist sees no reason to believe god exists. My argument is essentially: (1) an agent has a reason to X when Xing would promote or obtain their valuable state of affairs (2) value is, and can only be, an attitude of approval conferred onto things by each individual agent based on their subjective attitudes (3) so the states of affairs valuable for each agent are relative to that agents evaluative attitudes (4) so what each agent has reason to do is relative to their subjective evaluative attitudes. Edit: I should probably add that I think norms for action, aka what we have reason to to, are established by what we subjectively place value on, whereas epistemic norms don’t take ‘value’ into account at all

@@samadams1998 Yeah, I think that you are right about the CIG argument being a response against a more basic form of error theory that says that there are no objective values whatsoever. I think that it is also a response to the is-oght gap, as it shows that evaluative beliefs can give us reasons to take certain actions, for example the theory A being better than theory B giving us a strong reason to prefer theory A over theory B, where theory A is better because it is simpler and at least on par in terms of explanatory power. These values - being simpler and equal or better in terms of explanatory power - are an objective standard that makes theory A better than theory B. They need not be agreed upon by individuals and they do not depend on the attitudes of individuals. What you might be right about is that the CIG does not necessarily entail that moral values are also objective. I have been thinking about this myself, actually. I don't think that this is entailed. The best this argument can achieve is refute some anti-realist objections to general objectivity and is-ought derivation. Also, this argument shows that the common objections like disagreement, diversity, etc do not work against both epistemic and moral values. The anti-realist will need better arguments. I think that objective moral values will also require some things to have intrinsic moral value like the things that have intrinsic epistemic value. It is not implausible at least that some things might be values because they are valuable, rather than things being valuable because they are valued. It seems at least prima facie equiprobable that humans either superimpose value onto things, or that they detect value that is already in things. I actually think that in certain cases the latter is more probable. I do think that there are things that have intrinsic moral value. Disagreement can be explained with error and moral blindness just as it can be explained with moral value depending on the attitudes of observers.

@@samadams1998 Hmm, or am I too quick to agree with you? Perhaps I'll need to think more. Because there does seem to be at least one similarity between epistemic and moral facts - that they can be normative and action guiding.

ok, but what would inherently be wrong with abandoning value distinction?

Can you elaborate? I'm not sure what you mean by abandoning the distinction, or why there'd be nothing much left for antirealists like me to talk about. I've got a lot to talk about.

@@lanceindependent My bad, I didn't see this. If we give up on the distinction between fact and value, we are not eliminating values or facts. That is, we're not saying that everything is mind dependent (including that?! Yikes), or mind independent (including that?! Yikes), but that the distinction between mind dependence and independence is itself incoherent, ushering in a new post realist/antirealist discourse. That could be a controversial read, but it's what I mean by it. Such a discourse leaves no room for the ethical antirealist to deny ethical truths, because it denies them the very ground that they articulate their position upon.

@@Khuno2 What about the is-tree distinction?

@@Khuno2 I don't know what it means to give up the distinction between facts and values.

This type of argument actually has convinced many moral anti-realists, myself included.

I think Moral Realism is way more based than Cultural Relativism.

I agree. I don't even see the allegedly undesirable consequences as undesirable. I'm a global normative antirealist, and reject realism both objective moral and epistemic facts.

@@Philosophy_Overdose This convinced you?Why? Why not just reject epistemic realism, too?

I think the point is that whatever argument convinced you to reject moral realsim requires the belive in realism about epistimic values. So for example if your argument is that objective moral values must be proven empirically to exist before a belive in their existence is justified then you are saying that having empirical evidence for your believes is an epistimic value. You are basically saying that moral anti realists will reject both moral and epistimic values due to their commitment to epistimic values which they don't believe actually exist.

Binding laws for the general poor but not the ruling elite. Shakespeare was right. Before we can have civilisation we must shoot all the lawyers...

I said it come form both. Experience live is creative us. Before we recognise any things in this world, before we know the different between the right and wrong we find a system of moral in our society. After that when we start thinking in this society values we can make a new values, we will choose our morality. It’s dialectic.

Is this Lance? Also I agree. It always seemed like the anti-realist would just as readily deny epistemic norms as she would moral norms.

How do you have access to a stance-independent truth like that there is no stance-independent normativity without recourse to stance-independent epistemic norms? I would like to learn this trick.

So, is it true that these are versions of Companions in Guilt arguments?

@@77capr3 They're not formally presented as such but they seem to gesture in that direction.

@@MrLcowles No. That's not a position I endorse and it's not something I said. That also wouldn't be solipisim even if I did say that.

Moral values are falsifiable through assessments of human flourishing, both individually and collectively, no?

@@Dgilstrapnature You just discovered the guiding principle of ethics: flourishing. Now, we only need to find an answer to questions like "does flourishing include the right to bear battle-grade semi-automatic rifles? "

@@cpolychreona Indeed we must, but the point still stands.

I do not think you are right about that: even statements of emotive dispositions are falsifiable if it is accepted that emotive dispositions are the outcome of neurobiology.

⁠@@martinbennett2228this doesn’t make much sense to me. How are emotive dispositions falsifiable just because they derive from a common source (neurobiology). Even deriving from a common objective material source doesn’t universalize emotive dispositions. We all conjure up moral beliefs from our brain. But does this mean that just because we all have brains, that there is some objective moral disposition? The mere existence of two different moral dispositions both coming from a common source (a human brain) immediately invalidates this theory. If I said that killing was good, would you say that this is falsifiable because we both have brains?

We will!

This is all so useless. Go outside and have a life, don't worry wether your opinions are 'objectively' true or not bruv

I don't think it's really saying that. Epistemic realism is simply the claim that there are stance-independent epistemic facts about which epistemic practices we should employ. You don't have to be an epistemic realist to endorse truth (or "Truth" with a capital T). For instance, you could be an epistemic relativist, and believe that there are no categorical epistemic norms, but that there are hypothetical epistemic norms. If so, you could say something like this: "If you want to have true beliefs, then you ought to accept the conclusions of valid arguments with true premises." If you construe all epistemic claims as conditional claims where, given some goal, you ought to employ a particular practice, one can simply point to that set of epistemic practices that are truth-conducive and, presto, you can have true beliefs. I'm a normative antirealist, and thus also an epistemic antirealist, and one of my goals is to raise awareness about how all forms of normative realism are at best trivial or false, but in most cases are simply unintelligible. Realists often frame their views as being more "commonsense" but this isn't true. See Polzler and Wright's Antirealist Pluralism paper, and Taylor Davis's Beyond Objectivism paper. Our best and most recent studies tend to find that most participants in studies reject moral realism. There isn't similar research on epistemic realism, but we may find much the same: philosophers make assumptions about how people think without any empirical evidence to support those claims. Yet they'll also imply that there's something self-defeating or impossible about not accepting various forms of realism. I don't think their arguments are convincing.

@@lanceindependent After reading your response, I think we are in agreement on antirealism. You seem to take issue with me conflating the phrase "Truth with a capital T" with objective normative epistemic and moral claims? I would say the example of arriving at truth you gave isnt my idea of "Truth with a capital T." I was talking about the foundationalist approach where there is thought to be some objective Truth independent of our perception that is discovered, not invented. I dont think normative/moral/value claims exist objectively, apart from our minds. That's why I didnt find Putnam's argument particularly persuasive in favor of moral realism.

@@joshtooze7698 Not too much issue. Just not sure exactly what you meant by that. Thanks for clarifying. I don't find his argument persuasive for a reason that doesn't seem to have gained much attention in the academic literature: I don't think there are any nontrivial notions of moral realism that are even intelligible. If you ask realists to explain what they mean by a stance-independent normative factL (1) Naturalists are going to identify it with some kind of natural fact, which is going to look descriptive, and strips it of all the normativity I take as essential for it to be nontrivial (2) Or they're going to go the non-naturalist route, and things immediately become very obscure. Parfit talks of object-given reasons, and others similarly speak of external reasons, but I have no idea what these are, and I suspect it's because the whole concept is meaningless. When asked to explain, I'll get unsatisfying accounts, e.g., they're things that "count in favor" of an action. This just trades one meaningless term for another. Or I'll be told the concepts are "primitive" and thus cannot be explained. I find this highly suspicious, and, at the very least, I do not appear to have such primitive concepts.

@Bagpuss Bagpuss Thanks! Are you presenting that with any metaethical presuppositions in mind? I endorse the normative stance that, all else being equal, one ought to keep promises. But insofar as that's a "moral fact," it's a moral fact about my personal moral standards. It might be a fact about other people's moral standards, but I don't take it to be something that is true independent of and without being relativized to any particular standard.

Nonsense. It's culturally acceptable to enslave children and then kill young girls who refuse an arranged marriage in some countries. Wrong in any eternity, society or planet...

Cool. What does this have to do with the video?

How exactly is it self-evident? What exactly is self-evident? Tastes in food exist certainly but nobody claims there is an objective correct taste. Similarly just because people have morals doesn't mean there is an objective morality

​@@bozdowleder2303since conscious rational creatures are moral agents, it follows that morality is true by definition, and since moral agents are real, it is true that morals are objective facts. Due to all of us having immediate experience of moral consciousness, it is self evident that this is our reality. Self evident means it is true by observation, namely, we directly experience morals so it is true that morals are evident

Then read John Mackies works on anti realism and then you see how it isn‘t a straw man