I haven’t given a full account of my views of realism anywhere, but briefly, I think that the realism the realists-at-heart want is a robust non-naturalist realism, a la David Enoch, and that this view implies:
an inflationary metaphysics that it just doesn’t seem like we have enough evidence for,
an epistemic challenge (why would we expect our normative beliefs to correlate with the non-natural normative facts?) that realists have basically no answer to except “yeah idk but maybe this is a problem for math and philosophy too?” (Enoch’s chapter 7 covers this issue; I also briefly point at it in this section, in talking about why the realist bot would expect its desires and intuitions to correlate with the the contents of the envelope buried in the mountain), and
an appeal to a non-natural realm that a lot of realists take as necessary to capture the substance and heft of our normative lives, but which I don’t think is necessary for this, at least when it comes to caring (i think moral “authority” and “bindingness regardless of what you care about” might be a different story, but one that “the non-natural realm says so” doesn’t obviously help with, either). i wrote up my take on this issue here.
Also, most realists are externalists, and I think that externalist realism severs an intuitive connection between normativity and motivation that I would prefer to preserve (though this is more of an “I don’t like that” than a “that’s not true” objection). I wrote about this here.
There are various ways of being a “naturalist realist,” too, but the disagreement between naturalist realism and anti-realism/subjectivism/nihilism is, in my opinion, centrally a semantic one. The important question is whether anything normativity-flavored is in a deep sense something over and above the standard naturalist world picture. Once we’ve denied that, we’re basically just talking about how to use words to describe that standard naturalist world picture. I wrote a bit about how I think of this kind of dialectic here:
This is a familiar dialectic in philosophical debates about whether some domain X can be reduced to Y (meta-ethics is a salient comparison to me). The anti-reductionist (A) will argue that our core intuitions/concepts/practices related to X make clear that it cannot be reduced to Y, and that since X must exist (as we intuitively think it does), we should expand our metaphysics to include more than Y. The reductionist (R) will argue that X can in fact be reduced to Y, and that this is compatible with our intuitions/concepts/everyday practices with respect to X, and hence that X exists but it’s nothing over and above Y. The nihilist (N), by contrast, agrees with A that it follows from our intuitions/concepts/practices related to X that it cannot be reduced to Y, but agrees with D that there is in fact nothing over and above Y, and so concludes that there is no X, and that our intuitions/concepts/practices related to X are correspondingly misguided. Here, the disagreement between A vs. R/N is about whether more than Y exists; the disagreement between R vs. A/N is about whether a world of only Y “counts” as a world with X. This latter often begins to seem a matter of terminology; the substantive questions have already been settled.
There’s a common strain of realism in utilitarian circles that tries to identify “goodness” with something like “valence,” treats “valence” as a “phenomenal property”, and then tries to appeal to our “special direct epistemic access” to phenomenal consciousness in order to solve the epistemic challenge above. i think this doesn’t help at all (the basic questions about how the non-natural realm interacts with the natural one remain unanswered—and this is a classic problem for non-physicalist theories of consciousness as well), but that it gets its appeal centrally via running through people’s confusion/mystery relationship with phenomenal consciousness, which muddies the issue enough to make it seem like the move might help. I talk about issues in this vein a bit in the latter half of my podcast with Gus Docker.
Re: your list of 6 meta-ethical options, I’d be inclined to pull apart the question of
(a) do any normative facts exists, and if so, which ones, vs.
(b) what’s the empirical situation with respect to deliberation within agents and disagreement across agents (e.g., do most agents agree and if so why; how sensitive is the deliberation of a given agent to initial conditions, etc).
With respect to (a), my take is closest to 6 (“there aren’t any normative facts at all”) if the normative facts are construed in a non-naturalist way, and closest to “whatever, it’s mostly a terminology dispute at this point” if the normative facts are construed in a naturalist way (though if we’re doing the terminology dispute, I’m generally more inclined towards naturalist realism over nihilism). Facts about what’s “rational” or “what decision theory wins” fall under this response as well (I talk about this a bit here).
With respect to (b), my first pass take is “i dunno, it’s an empirical question,” but if I had to guess, I’d guess lots of disagreement between agents across the multiverse, and a fair amount of sensitivity to initial conditions on the part of individual deliberators.
Re: my ghost, it starts out valuing status as much as i do, but it’s in a bit of a funky situation insofar as it can’t get normal forms of status for itself because it’s beyond society. It can, if it wants, try for some weirder form of cosmic status amongst hypothetical peers (“what they would think if they could see me now!”), or it can try to get status for the Joe that it left behind in the world, but my general feeling is that the process of stepping away from the Joe and looking at the world as a whole tends to reduce its investment in what happens to Joe in particular, e.g.:
Perhaps, at the beginning, the ghost is particularly interested in Joe-related aspects of the world. Fairly soon, though, I imagine it paying more and more attention to everything else. For while the ghost retains a deep understanding of Joe, and a certain kind of care towards him, it is viscerally obvious, from the ghost’s perspective, unmoored from Joe’s body, that Joe is just one creature among so many others; Joe’s life, Joe’s concerns, once so central and engrossing, are just one tiny, tiny part of what’s going on.
That said, insofar as the ghost is giving recommendations to me about what to do, it can definitely take into account the fact that I want status to whatever degree, and am otherwise operating in the context of social constraints, coordination mechanisms, etc.
an epistemic challenge (why would we expect our normative beliefs to correlate with the non-natural normative facts?) that realists have basically no answer to except “yeah idk but maybe this is a problem for math and philosophy too?”
i think this doesn’t help at all (the basic questions about how the non-natural realm interacts with the natural one remain unanswered—and this is a classic problem for non-physicalist theories of consciousness as well), but that it gets its appeal centrally via running through people’s confusion/mystery relationship with phenomenal consciousness, which muddies the issue enough to make it seem like the move might help.
It seems that you have a tendency to take “X’ists don’t have an answer to question Y” as strong evidence for “Y has no answer, assuming X” and therefore “not X”, whereas I take it as weak evidence for such because it seems pretty likely that even if Y has an answer given X, humans are just not smart enough to have found it yet. It looks like this may be the main crux that explains our disagreement over meta-ethics (where I’m much more of an agnostic).
but my general feeling is that the process of stepping away from the Joe and looking at the world as a whole tends to reduce its investment in what happens to Joe in particular
This doesn’t feel very motivating to me (i.e., why should I imagine idealized me being this way), absent some kind of normative force that I currently don’t know about (i.e., if there was a normative fact that I should idealize myself in this way). So I’m still in a position where I’m not sure how idealization should handle status issues (among other questions/confusions about it).
I haven’t given a full account of my views of realism anywhere, but briefly, I think that the realism the realists-at-heart want is a robust non-naturalist realism, a la David Enoch, and that this view implies:
an inflationary metaphysics that it just doesn’t seem like we have enough evidence for,
an epistemic challenge (why would we expect our normative beliefs to correlate with the non-natural normative facts?) that realists have basically no answer to except “yeah idk but maybe this is a problem for math and philosophy too?” (Enoch’s chapter 7 covers this issue; I also briefly point at it in this section, in talking about why the realist bot would expect its desires and intuitions to correlate with the the contents of the envelope buried in the mountain), and
an appeal to a non-natural realm that a lot of realists take as necessary to capture the substance and heft of our normative lives, but which I don’t think is necessary for this, at least when it comes to caring (i think moral “authority” and “bindingness regardless of what you care about” might be a different story, but one that “the non-natural realm says so” doesn’t obviously help with, either). i wrote up my take on this issue here.
Also, most realists are externalists, and I think that externalist realism severs an intuitive connection between normativity and motivation that I would prefer to preserve (though this is more of an “I don’t like that” than a “that’s not true” objection). I wrote about this here.
There are various ways of being a “naturalist realist,” too, but the disagreement between naturalist realism and anti-realism/subjectivism/nihilism is, in my opinion, centrally a semantic one. The important question is whether anything normativity-flavored is in a deep sense something over and above the standard naturalist world picture. Once we’ve denied that, we’re basically just talking about how to use words to describe that standard naturalist world picture. I wrote a bit about how I think of this kind of dialectic here:
There’s a common strain of realism in utilitarian circles that tries to identify “goodness” with something like “valence,” treats “valence” as a “phenomenal property”, and then tries to appeal to our “special direct epistemic access” to phenomenal consciousness in order to solve the epistemic challenge above. i think this doesn’t help at all (the basic questions about how the non-natural realm interacts with the natural one remain unanswered—and this is a classic problem for non-physicalist theories of consciousness as well), but that it gets its appeal centrally via running through people’s confusion/mystery relationship with phenomenal consciousness, which muddies the issue enough to make it seem like the move might help. I talk about issues in this vein a bit in the latter half of my podcast with Gus Docker.
Re: your list of 6 meta-ethical options, I’d be inclined to pull apart the question of
(a) do any normative facts exists, and if so, which ones, vs.
(b) what’s the empirical situation with respect to deliberation within agents and disagreement across agents (e.g., do most agents agree and if so why; how sensitive is the deliberation of a given agent to initial conditions, etc).
With respect to (a), my take is closest to 6 (“there aren’t any normative facts at all”) if the normative facts are construed in a non-naturalist way, and closest to “whatever, it’s mostly a terminology dispute at this point” if the normative facts are construed in a naturalist way (though if we’re doing the terminology dispute, I’m generally more inclined towards naturalist realism over nihilism). Facts about what’s “rational” or “what decision theory wins” fall under this response as well (I talk about this a bit here).
With respect to (b), my first pass take is “i dunno, it’s an empirical question,” but if I had to guess, I’d guess lots of disagreement between agents across the multiverse, and a fair amount of sensitivity to initial conditions on the part of individual deliberators.
Re: my ghost, it starts out valuing status as much as i do, but it’s in a bit of a funky situation insofar as it can’t get normal forms of status for itself because it’s beyond society. It can, if it wants, try for some weirder form of cosmic status amongst hypothetical peers (“what they would think if they could see me now!”), or it can try to get status for the Joe that it left behind in the world, but my general feeling is that the process of stepping away from the Joe and looking at the world as a whole tends to reduce its investment in what happens to Joe in particular, e.g.:
That said, insofar as the ghost is giving recommendations to me about what to do, it can definitely take into account the fact that I want status to whatever degree, and am otherwise operating in the context of social constraints, coordination mechanisms, etc.
It seems that you have a tendency to take “X’ists don’t have an answer to question Y” as strong evidence for “Y has no answer, assuming X” and therefore “not X”, whereas I take it as weak evidence for such because it seems pretty likely that even if Y has an answer given X, humans are just not smart enough to have found it yet. It looks like this may be the main crux that explains our disagreement over meta-ethics (where I’m much more of an agnostic).
This doesn’t feel very motivating to me (i.e., why should I imagine idealized me being this way), absent some kind of normative force that I currently don’t know about (i.e., if there was a normative fact that I should idealize myself in this way). So I’m still in a position where I’m not sure how idealization should handle status issues (among other questions/confusions about it).