When discussing normative questions, many members of the rationalist community identify as anti-realists.
I wish when people did this kind of thing (i.e., respond to other people’s ideas, arguments, or positions) they would give some links or quotes, so I can judge whether whatever they’re responding to is being correctly understood and represented. In this case, I feel like there aren’t actually that many people who identify as normative anti-realists (i.e., deny that any kind of normative facts exist). More often I see people who are realist about rationality, but anti-realist, subjectivist, or relativist about morality. (See my Six Plausible Meta-Ethical Alternatives for a quick intro to these distinctions.)
Your footnote 1 suggests that maybe you think these distinctions don’t really exist (or something like that) and therefore we should just consider realism vs anti-realism, where realism means that all types of normative facts exist and anti-realism means that all types of normative facts don’t exist. If so, I think this needs to be explicitly spelled out and defended before you start assuming it.
I wish when people did this kind of thing (i.e., respond to other people’s ideas, arguments, or positions) they would give some links or quotes, so I can judge whether whatever they’re responding to is being correctly understood and represented.
Fair point!
It’s definitely possible I’m underestimating the popularity of realist views. In which case, I suppose this post can be take as a mostly redundant explanation of why I think people are sensible to have these views :)
I guess there are few reasons I’ve ended up with the impression that realist views aren’t very popular.
People are often very dismissive of “moral realism.” (If this doesn’t seem right, I think I should be able to pull up quotes.) But nearly all standard arguments against moral realism also function as arguments against “normative realism” as well. The standard concerns about ‘spookiness’ and ungrounded epistemology arise as soon as we accept that there are facts of the matter about what we should do and that we can discover these facts; it doesn’t lessen the fundamental metaphysical or epistemological issues whether these facts, for example, tell us to try to maximize global happiness or to try to fulfill the preferences of some particular idealized version of ourselves. It also seems to be the case that philosophers who identify as “moral anti-realists” are typically anti-realists about normativity, which I think partly explains why people seldom bother to tease the terms “moral realist” and “normative realist” apart in the first place. So I suppose I’ve been leaning on a prior that people who identify as “moral anti-realists” are also “normative anti-realists.”
(Edit) It seems pretty common for people in the community to reject or attack the idea of “shoulds.” For example, many posts in the (popular?) “Replacing Guilt” sequence on Minding Our Way seem to do this. A natural reading is a rejection of normative realism.
Small-n, but the handful of friends I’ve debated moral realism with have also had what I would tend to classify as anti-realist attitudes toward normativity more generally.
If normative realism is correct, then it’s at least conceivable that the action it’s most “reasonable” for us to take in some circumstance (i.e. the action that we “should’ take”) is different from the action that someone who tends to “win” a lot over the course of their life would take. However, early/foundational community writing seems to reject the idea that there’s any meaningful conceptually distinct sense in which we can talk about an action being “reasonable.” I take this Eliezer post on decision theory and rationality as an example.
It might also be useful to clarify that in ricraz’s recent post criticizing “realism about rationality,” several of the attitudes listed aren’t directly related to “realism” in the sense of this post. For example, it’s possible for there to be “a simple yet powerful theoretical framework which describes human intelligence” even if normative anti-realism is true. It did seem to me like the comments on ricraz’s post leaned toward wariness of “realism,” as conceptualized there, but I’m not really sure how to map that onto attitudes about the notion of “realism” I have in mind here.
It seems to me, rather, that people often talk about updating your credences in accordance with Bayes’ rule and maximizing the expected fulfillment of your current desires as the correct things to do.
It’s important to disentangle two claims:
1. In general, if you have the goal of understanding the world, or any other goal that relies on doing so, being Bayesian will allow you to achieve it to a greater extent than any other approach (in the limit of infinite compute).
2. Regardless of your goals, you should be Bayesian anyway.
Believing #2 commits you to normative realism as I understand the term, but believing #1 doesn’t - #1 is simply an empirical claim about what types of cognition tend to do best towards a broad class of goals. I think that many rationalists would defend #1, and few would defend #2 - if you disagree, I’d be interested in seeing examples of the latter. (One test is by asking “Aside from moral considerations, if someone’s only goal is to have false beliefs right now, should they believe true things anyway?”) Either way, I agree with Wei that distinguishing between moral normativity and epistemic normativity is crucial for fruitful discussions on this topic.
Another way of framing this distinction: assume there’s one true theory of physics, call it T. Then someone might make the claim “Modelling the universe using T is the correct way to do so (in the limit of having infinite compute available).” This is analogous to claim #1, and believing this claim does not commit you to normative realism, because it does not imply that anyone should want to model the universe correctly.
It might also be useful to clarify that in ricraz’s recent post criticizing “realism about rationality,” several of the attitudes listed aren’t directly related to “realism” in the sense of this post.
I would characterise “realism about rationality” as approximately equivalent to claim #1 above (plus a few other similar claims). In particular, it is a belief about whether there is a set of simple ideas which elegantly describe the sort of “agents” who do well at their “goals”—not a belief about the normative force of those ideas. Of course, under most reasonable interpretations of #2, the truth of #2 implies #1, but not vice versa.
Eliezer used some pretty strong normative language when talking about having false beliefs, e.g. in Dark Side Epistemology:
Steven Kaas said, “Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires.” Giving someone a false belief to protect—convincing them that the belief itself must be defended from any thought that seems to threaten it—well, you shouldn’t do that to someone unless you’d also give them a frontal lobotomy.
The quote from Eliezer is consistent with #1, since it’s bad to undermine people’s ability to achieve their goals.
More generally, you might believe that it’s morally normative to promote true beliefs (e.g. because they lead to better outcomes) but not believe that it’s epistemically normative, in a realist sense, to do so (e.g. the question I asked above, about whether you “should” have true beliefs even when there are no morally relevant consequences and it doesn’t further your goals).
In general, if you have the goal of understanding the world, or any other goal that relies on doing so, being Bayesian will allow you to achieve it to a greater extent than any other approach (in the limit of infinite compute).
Regardless of your goals, you should be Bayesian anyway.
Believing #2 commits you to normative realism as I understand the term, but believing #1 doesn’t - #1 is simply an empirical claim about what types of cognition tend to do best towards a broad class of goals. I think that many rationalists would defend #1, and few would defend #2 - if you disagree, I’d be interested in seeing examples of the latter.
I don’t necessarily think that #2 is a common belief. But I do have the impression that many people would at least endorse this equally normative claim: “If you have the goal of understanding the world, you should be a Bayesian.”
In general—at least in the context of the concepts/definitions in this post—the inclusion of an “if” clause doesn’t prevent a claim from being normative. So, for example, the claim “You should go to Spain if you want to go to Spain” isn’t relevantly different from the claim “You should give money to charity if you have enough money to live comfortably.”
Either way, I agree with Wei that distinguishing between moral normativity and epistemic normativity is crucial for fruitful discussions on this topic.
I agree there’s an important distinction, but it doesn’t necessarily seem that deep to me.
For example: We can define different “epistemic utility functions” that map {agent’s credences; state of the world} to real values and then discuss theories like Bayesianism in the context of “epistemicdecision theory,” in relatively close analogy with traditional (practical) decision theory.
It seems like some theories—e.g. certain theories that say we should have faith in the existance of God, or theories that say that we shouldn’t take into account certain traits when forming impressions of people—might also be classified as both moral and epistemological.
But I do have the impression that many people would at least endorse this equally normative claim: “If you have the goal of understanding the world, you should be a Bayesian.”
Okay, this seems like a crux of our disagreement. This statement seems pretty much equivalent to my statement #1 in almost all practical contexts. Can you point out how you think they differ?
I agree that some statements of that form seem normative: e.g. “You should go to Spain if you want to go to Spain”. However, that seems like an exception to me, because it provides no useful information about how to achieve the goal, and so from contextual clues would be interpreted as “I endorse your desire to go to Spain”. Consider instead “If you want to murder someone without getting caught, you should plan carefully”, which very much lacks endorsement. Or even “If you want to get to the bakery, you should take a left turn here.” How do you feel about the normativity of the last statement in particular? How does it practically differ from “The most convenient way to get to the bakery from here is to take a left turn”? Clearly that’s something almost everyone is a realist about (assuming a shared understanding of “convenient”) at Less Wrong and elsewhere.
In general—at least in the context of the concepts/definitions in this post—the inclusion of an “if” clause doesn’t prevent a claim from being normative. So, for example, the claim “You should go to Spain if you want to go to Spain” isn’t relevantly different from the claim “You should give money to charity if you have enough money to live comfortably.”
I think there’s a difference between a moral statement with conditions, and a statement about what is best to do given your goals (roughly corresponding to the difference between Kant’s categorical and hypothetical imperatives). “You should give money to charity if you have enough money to live comfortably” is an example of the former—it’s the latter which I’m saying aren’t normative in any useful sense.
Okay, this seems like a crux of our disagreement. This statement seems pretty much equivalent to my statement #1 in almost all practical contexts. Can you point out how you think they differ?
This stuff is definitely a bit tricky to talk about, since people can use the word “should” in different ways. I think that sometimes when people say “You should do X if you want Y” they do basically just mean to say “If you do X you will receive Y.” But it doesn’t seem to me like this is always the case.
A couple examples:
1. “Bayesian updating has a certain asymptoptic convergence property, in the limit of infinite experience and infinite compute. So if you want to understand the world, you should be a Bayesian.”
If the first and second sentence were meant to communicate the same thing, then the second would be totally vacuous given the first. Anyone who accepted the first sentence could not intelligibly disagree with or even really consider disagreeing with the second. But I don’t think that people who say things like this typically mean for the second sentence to be vacuous or typically regard disagreement as unintelligible.
Suppose, for example, that I responded to this claim by saying something like: “I disagree. Since we only have finite lives, asymptoptic convergence properties don’t have direct relevance. I think we should instead use a different ‘risk averse’ updating rule that, for agents with finite lives, more strongly reduces the likelihood of ending up with especially inaccurate beliefs about key features of the world.”
The speaker might think I’m wrong. But if the speaker thinks that what I’m saying constitutes intelligible disagreement with their claim, then it seems like this means their claim is in fact a distinct normative one.
2. (To someone with no CS background) “If you want to understand the world, you should be a Bayesian.”
If this sentence were meant to communicate the same thing as the claim about asymptotic convergence, then the speaker shouldn’t expect the listener to understand what they’re saying (even if the speaker has already explained what it means to be a Bayesian). Most people don’t naturally understand or care at all about asymptotic convergence properties.
1. “Bayesian updating has a certain asymptoptic convergence property, in the limit of infinite experience and infinite compute. So if you want to understand the world, you should be a Bayesian.”
If the first and second sentence were meant to communicate the same thing, then the second would be totally vacuous given the first.
I was a little imprecise in saying that they’re exactly equivalent—the second sentence should also have a “in the limit of infinite compute” qualification. Or else we need a hidden assumption like “These asymptotic convergence properties give us reason to believe that even low-compute approximations to Bayesianism are very good ways to understand the world.” This is usually left implicit, but it allows us to think of “if you want to understand the world, you should be (approximately) a Bayesian” as an empirical claim not a normative one. For this to actually be an example of normativity, it needs to be the case that some people consider this hidden assumption unnecessary and would endorse claims like “You should use low-compute approximations to Bayesianism because Bayesianism has certain asymptotic convergence properties, even if those properties don’t give us any reason to think that low-compute approximations to Bayesianism help you understand the world better.” Do you expect that people would endorse this?
Hmm, I think focusing on a simpler case might be better for getting at the crux.
Suppose Alice says: “Eating meat is the most effective way to get protein. So if you want to get protein, you should eat meat.”
And then Bob, an animal welfare person, responds: “You’re wrong, people shouldn’t eat meat no matter how much they care about getting protein.”
If Alice doesn’t mean for her second sentence to be totally redundant—or if she is able to interpret Bob’s response as an intelligible (if incorrect) statement of disagreement with her second sentence—then that suggests her second sentence actually constitutes a substantively normative claim. Her second sentence isn’t just repeating the same non-normative claim as the first one.
I definitely don’t think that all “If you want X, do Y” claims are best understood as normative claims. It’s possible that when people make claims of this form about Bayesianism, and other commonly discussed topics, they’re not really saying anything normative. But a decent chunk of statements of this form do strike me as difficult to interpret in non-normative terms.
If Alice doesn’t mean for her second sentence to be totally redundant—or if she is able to interpret Bob’s response as an intelligible (if incorrect) statement of disagreement with her second sentence—then that suggests her second sentence actually constitutes a substantively normative claim.
I don’t think you can declare a sentence redundant without also considering the pragmatic aspects of meaning. In this example, Alice’s second sentence is a stronger claim than the first, because it again contains an implicit clause: “If you want to get protein, and you don’t have any other relevant goals, you should eat meat”. Or maybe it’s more like “If you want to get protein, and your other goals are standard ones, you should eat meat.”
Compare: Alice says “Jumping off cliffs without a parachute is a quick way to feel very excited. If you want to feel excited, you should jump off cliffs without a parachute.” Bob says “No you shouldn’t, because you’ll die.” Alice’s first sentence is true, and her second sentence is false, so they can’t be equivalent—but both of them can be interpreted as goal-conditional empirical sentences. It’s just the case that when you make broad statements, pragmatically you are assuming a “normal” set of goals.
If she is able to interpret Bob’s response as an intelligible (if incorrect) statement of disagreement with her second sentence
It’s not entirely unintelligible, because Alice is relying on an implicit premise of “standard goals” I mentioned above, and the reason people like Bob are so outspoken on this issue is because they’re trying to change that norm of what we consider “standard goals”. I do think that if Alice really understood normativity, she would tell Bob that she was trying to make a different type of claim to his one, because his was normative and hers wasn’t—while conceding that he had reason to find the pragmatics of her sentence objectionable.
Also, though, you’ve picked a case where the disputed statement is often used both in empirical ways and in normative ways. This is the least clear sort of example (especially since, pragmatically, when you repeat almost the same thing twice, it makes people think you’re implying something different). The vast majority of examples of people using “if you want..., then you should...” seem clearly empirical to me—including many that are in morally relevant domains, where the pragmatics make their empirical nature clear:
A: “If you want to murder someone without getting caught, you should plan carefully.”
B: “No you shouldn’t, because you shouldn’t murder people.”
A: “Well obviously you shouldn’t murder people, but I’m just saying that if you wanted to, planning would make things much easier.”
Upon further thought, maybe just splitting up #1 and #2 is oversimplifying. There’s probably a position #1.5, which is more like “Words like “goals” and “beliefs” only make sense to the extent that they’re applied to Bayesians with utility functions—every other approach to understanding agenthood is irredeemably flawed.” This gets pretty close to normative realism because you’re only left with one possible theory, but it’s still not making any realist normative claims (even if you think that goals and beliefs are morally relevant, as long as you’re also a moral anti-realist). Maybe a relevant analogy: you might believe that using any axioms except the ZFC axioms will make maths totally incoherent, while not actually holding any opinion on whether the ZFC axioms are “true”.
However, early/foundational community writing seems to reject the idea that there’s any meaningful conceptually distinct sense in which we can talk about an action being “reasonable.”
I think there’s a distinction (although I’m not sure if I’ve talked explicitly about it before). Basically there’s quite possibly more to what the “right” or “reasonable” action is than “what action that someone who tends to ‘win’ a lot over the course of their life would take?” because the latter isn’t well defined. In a multiverse the same strategy/policy would lead to 100% winning in some worlds/branches and 100% losing in other worlds/branches, so you’d need some kind of “measure” to say who wins overall. But what the right measure is seems to be (or could be) a normative fact that can’t be determined by just looking at or thinking “who tends to ‘win’ a lot’.
ETA: Another way that “tends to win” isn’t well defined is that if you look at the person who literally wins the most, they might just be very lucky instead of actually doing the “reasonable” thing. So I think “tends to win” is more of an intuition pump for what the right conception of “reasonable” is than actually identical to it.
I think there’s a distinction (although I’m not sure if I’ve talked explicitly about it before). Basically there’s quite possibly more to what the “right” or “reasonable” action is than “what action that someone who tends to ‘win’ a lot over the course of their life would take?” because the latter isn’t well defined. In a multiverse the same strategy/policy would lead to 100% winning in some worlds/branches and 100% losing in other worlds/branches, so you’d need some kind of “measure” to say who wins overall. But what the right measure is seems to be (or could beLW) a normative fact that can’t be determined by just looking at or thinking “who tends to ‘win’ a lot’.
I agree with you on this and think it’s a really important point. Another (possibly redundant) way of getting at a similar concern, without evoking MW:
Due to randomness/uncertainty, an agent that tries to maximize expected “winning” won’t necessarily win compared to an agent that does something else. If I spend a dollar on a lottery ticket with a one-in-a-billion chance of netting me a billion-and-one “win points,” then I’m taking the choice that maximizes expected winning but I’m also almost certain to lose. So we can’t treat “the action that maximizes expected winning” as synonymous with “the action taken by an agent that wins.”
We can try to patch up the issue here by defining “the action that I should take” as “the action that is consistent with the VNM axioms,” but in fact either action in this case is consistent with the VNM axioms. The VNM axioms don’t imply that an agent must maximize the expected desirability of outcomes. They just imply that an agent must maximize the expected value of some function. It is totally consistent with the axioms, for example, to be risk averse and instead maximize the expected square root of desirability. If we try to define “the action I should take” in this way, then, as another downside, the claim “your actions should be consistent with the VNM axioms” also becomes a completely empty tautology.
So it seems very hard to make non-vacuous and potentially true claims about decision theory without evoking some additional non-reducible notion of “reasonableness,” “rationality,” or what an actor “should” do. Assuming that normative anti-realism is true pretty much means assuming that there is no such notion or assuming that the notion doesn’t actually map onto anything in reality. And I think anti-realist views of these sort are plausible (probably for roughly the same reasons Eliezer seems to). But I think that adopting these views would also leave us with very little to say about decision theory.
I wouldn’t expect lesswrongians to be keen on Platonic style moral realism, where moral facts correspond to supernatural objects, but there are other classes of morally realistic theories’ where moral facts depend on analytical truths or natural states of affairs. Lesswrongians are definitely keen utilitarianism, where ethical claims depend on natural facts about preferences, and is therefore, arguably, a naturalistic form of moral realism.
The is-ought gap remains a problem which I touch on below.
But nearly all standard arguments against moral realism also function as arguments against “normative realism”
If normative realism is just the claim that there are meaningful and true statements about what you should do if you want to achieve some X, then they are abundant.. things like game theory and engineering, actually any kind of methodology, have plenty of them.
What are the problems with normative realism about moral claims, then?Maybe that they are categorical, lacking an “if you want to do X” condition.
If normative realism is correct, then it’s at least conceivable that the action it’s most “reasonable” for us to take in some circumstance (i.e. the action that we “should’ take”) is different from the action that someone who tends to “win” a lot over the course of their life would take.
This seems wrong to me. Could you say more about why you think this?
Seconding this—my strong impression is that a substantial percentage of the rationality community rejects moral realism, not normative realism (as you say—what would the point of anything be?).
I’m curious where this impression came from. The only place I can imagine anything similar to an argument against normative realism cropping up would be in a discussion of the problem of induction, which hasn’t seen serious debate around here for many years.
It sounds as though you’re expecting anti-realists about normativity to tell you some arguments that will genuinely make you feel (close to) indifferent about whether to use Bayesianism, or whether to use induction. But that’s not how I understand anti-realism. The way I would describe it, the primary claim that anti-realism about normativity entails is of a more trivial kind. More something like this:
If anti-realism about normativity is true, then in a hypothetical world where your mind worked in some strange way such that you found induction or Bayesianism dumb, then it’s impossible to point out and justify the exact sense in which you would be mistaken by some “universally approved standard.” So the question shouldn’t be “Have I ever seen someone give a an argument to start doubting induction?” Rather, I would ask “Have I ever seen someone give a convincing and non-question-begging account of what aliens who don’t believe in induction are doing wrong?”
In practice, the difference between realism and anti-realism only matters in cases where the answer doesn’t feel like the straightforward thing to do anyway. If Bayesianism and induction feel like the straightforward thing for you to do, you’ll use them whether you endorse realism or not. I’d argue that realists therefore shouldn’t use example propositions that provoke universal agreement (at least not as standalone examples) when they want to explain what constitutes an objective reason. Because by using examples that evoke universal agreement, they’re only pointing at reasons that we can already tell will feelconvincing to people. The interesting question I want to know, as an anti-realist, is what it means for there to be irreducibly normative reasons that go beyond what I personally find convincing. The realists seem to think that just like in cases where we’re inclined to call a proposition “right” because it feels self-evident to everyone, there’s just as much of a fact of the matter for other propositions about which people will be in seemingly irresolveble disagreements. But I have yet to see how that’s a useful concept to introduce. I just don’t get it.
Edit:
then it’s impossible to point out and justify the exact sense in which you would be mistaken by some “universally approved standard.”
I was strawmanning realism a bit here. Realists readily point out that the sense in which this is a mistake cannot be “explained” (at least not in non-question-begging terminology, i.e., not without the use of normative terminology). So in one sense, realism is simply a declaration that the intuition that some standards apply beyond the personal/subjective level is too important to give up on. But by itself, that declaration doesn’t yet make for a specific position, and it depends on further assumptions whether the disagreement will be only semantic, or also substantive.
It sounds as though you’re expecting anti-realists about normativity to tell you some arguments that will genuinely make you feel (close to) indifferent about whether to use Bayesianism, or whether to use induction.
Hm, this actually isn’t an expectation I have. When I talk about “realists” and “anti-realists,” in this post, I’m thinking of groups of people with different beliefs (rather than groups of people with different feelings). I don’t think of anti-realism as having any strong link to feelings of indifference about behavior. For example: I certainly expect most anti-realist philosophers to have strong preferences against putting their hands on hot stoves (and don’t see anything inconsistent in this).
But I have yet to see how that’s a useful concept to introduce. I just don’t get it.
I guess I don’t see it as a matter of usefulness. I have this concept that a lot of other people seem to have too: the concept of the choice I “should” make or that it would be “right” for me to make. Although pretty much everyone uses these words, not everyone reports having the same concept. Nonetheless, at least I do have the concept. And, insofar as there is any such thing as the “right thing,” I care a lot about doing it.
We can ask the question: “Why should people care about doing what they ‘should’ do?” I think the natural response to this question, though, is just sort of to evoke a tautology. People should care about doing what they should do, because they should do what they should do.
To put my “realist hat” firmly on for a second: I don’t think, for example, that someone happily abusing their partner would in any way find it “useful” to believe that abuse is wrong. But I do think they should believe that abuse is wrong, and take this fact into account when deciding how to act, because abuse is wrong.
I’m unfortunately not sure, though, if I have anything much deeper or more compelling than that to say in response to the question.
Another (significantly more rambling and possibly redundant) thought on “usefulness”:
One of the main things I’m trying to say in the post—although, in hindsight, I’m unsure if I communicated it well—is that there are a lot of debates that I personally have trouble interpretting as both non-trivial and truth-oriented if I assume that the debaters aren’t employing irreducably normative concepts. A lot of debates about decision theory have this property for me.
I understand how it’s possible for realists to have a substantive factual disagreement about the Newcomb scenario, for example, because they’re talking about something above-and-beyond the traditional physical facts of the case (which are basically just laid out in the problem specification). But if we assume that there’s nothing above-and-beyond the traditional physical facts, then I don’t see what there’s left for anyone to have a substantive factual disagree about.
If we want to ask “Which amount of money is the agent most likely to receive, if we condition on the information that it will one-box?”, then it seems to me that pretty much everyone agrees that “one million dollars” is the answer. If we want to ask “Would the agent get more money in a counterfactual world where it instead two-boxes, but all other features of the world at that time (including the contents of the boxes) are held fixed?”, then it seems to me that pretty much everyone agrees the answer is “yes.” If we want to ask “Would the agent get more money in a counterfactual world where it was born as a two-boxer, but all other features of the world at the time of its birth were held fixed?”, then it seems to me that pretty much everyone agrees the answer is “no.” So I don’t understand what the open question could be. People may of course have different feelings about one-boxing and about two-boxing, in the same way that people have different feelings about (e.g.) playing tennis and playing soccer, but that’s not a matter of factual/substantive disagreement.
So this is sort of one way in which irreducably normative concepts can be “useful”: they can, I think, allow us to make sense of and justify certain debates that many people are strongly inclined to have and certain questions that many people are strongly inclined to ask.
But the above line line of thought of course isn’t, at least in any direct way, an argument for realism actually being true. Even if the line of thought is sound, then it’s still entirely totally possible that these debates and questions just actually aren’t non-trivial and truth-oriented. Furthermore, the line of thought could also just not be sound. It’s totally possible that the debates/questions are non-trivial and truth-oriented, without evoking irreducably normative concepts, and I’m just a confused outside observer not getting what’s going on. Tonally, one thing I regret about the way I wrote this post is that I think it comes across as overly skeptical of this possibility.
Hm, this actually isn’t an expectation I have. When I talk about “realists” and “anti-realists,” in this post, I’m thinking of groups of people with different beliefs (rather than groups of people with different feelings). I don’t think of anti-realism as having any strong link to feelings of indifference about behavior.
Yeah, that makes sense. I was mostly replying to T3t’s comment, especially this part:
The only place I can imagine anything similar to an argument against normative realism cropping up would be in a discussion of the problem of induction, which hasn’t seen serious debate around here for many years.
Upon re-reading T3t’s comment, I now think I interpreted them uncharitably. Probably they meant that because induction seems impossible to justify, one way to “explain” this or come to terms with this is by endorsing anti-realism. (That interpretation would make sense to me!)
I guess I don’t see it as a matter of usefulness. I have this concept that a lot of other people seem to have too: the concept of the choice I “should” make or that it would be “right” for me to make. Although pretty much everyone uses these words, not everyone reports having the same concept. Nonetheless, at least I do have the concept. And, insofar as there is any such thing as the “right thing,” I care a lot about doing it.
I see. I think I understand the motivation to introduce irreducibly normative concepts into one’s philosophical repertoire. Therefore, saying “I don’t see the use” was a bit misleading. I think I meant that even though I understand the motivation, I don’t actually think we can make it work. I also kind of see the motivation behind wanting libertarian free will, but I also don’t think that works (and probably you’d agree on that one). So, I guess my main critique is that irreducibly normative concepts won’t add anything we can actually make use of in practice, because I don’t believe that your irreducibly normative concepts can ever be made coherent. I claim that if we think carefully about how words get their meaning, and then compare the situation with irreducibly normative concepts to other words, it’ll become apparent that the irreducibly normative concepts have connotations that cannot go together with each other (at least not under the IMO proper account of how words get their meaning).
So far, the arguments for my claim are mostly just implicitly in my head. I’m currently trying to write them up and I’ll post them on the EA forum once it’s all done. (But I feel like there’s a sense in which the burden of proof isn’t on the anti-realists here. If I was a moral realist, I’d want to have a good sense of how I could, in theory under ideal conditions, figure out normative truths. Or, if I accept the interpretation that it’s conceivable that humans are forever incapable of figuring out normative truths, I’d at least need to have *some sense* of what it would mean for someone to not be forever incapable of figuring things out. Otherwise, how could I possibly believe that I understand my own concept well enough for it to have any meaning?)
But if we assume that there’s nothing above-and-beyond the traditional physical facts, then I don’t see what there’s left for anyone to have a substantive factual disagree about.
I think it’s true that there’d be much fewer substantive disagreements if more people explicitly accepted anti-realism. I find it good because then things feel like progress (but that’s mostly my need for closure talking.) That said, I think there are some interesting discussions to be had in an anti-realist framework, but they’d go a bit differently.
So this is sort of one way in which irreducably normative concepts can be “useful”: they can, I think, allow us to make sense of and justify certain debates that many people are strongly inclined to have and certain questions that many people are strongly inclined to ask.
Sure. In this sense, I’m an error theorist (as you point out as a possibility in your last paragraph). But I think there’s a sense in which that’s a misleading label. When I shifted from realism to anti-realism, I didn’t just shrug my shoulders thinking “oh no, I made an error” and then stopped being interested in normative ethics (or normative decision theory). Instead, I continued to be very interested in these things, but started thinking about them in different ways. So even though “error theory” is the appropriate label in one way, there’s another sense in which the shift is about how to handle ontological crises.
In this case, I feel like there aren’t actually that many people who identify as normative anti-realists (i.e., deny that any kind of normative facts exist).
What do you mean by a normative fact here? Could you give some examples?
The “morally normative” and “epistemically normative” examples in our conversation over on EAF are the kinds of things I’m referring to. ETA: Another example of a normative fact is if there is a right prior for a Bayesian.
I wish when people did this kind of thing (i.e., respond to other people’s ideas, arguments, or positions) they would give some links or quotes, so I can judge whether whatever they’re responding to is being correctly understood and represented. In this case, I feel like there aren’t actually that many people who identify as normative anti-realists (i.e., deny that any kind of normative facts exist). More often I see people who are realist about rationality, but anti-realist, subjectivist, or relativist about morality. (See my Six Plausible Meta-Ethical Alternatives for a quick intro to these distinctions.)
Your footnote 1 suggests that maybe you think these distinctions don’t really exist (or something like that) and therefore we should just consider realism vs anti-realism, where realism means that all types of normative facts exist and anti-realism means that all types of normative facts don’t exist. If so, I think this needs to be explicitly spelled out and defended before you start assuming it.
Fair point!
It’s definitely possible I’m underestimating the popularity of realist views. In which case, I suppose this post can be take as a mostly redundant explanation of why I think people are sensible to have these views :)
I guess there are few reasons I’ve ended up with the impression that realist views aren’t very popular.
People are often very dismissive of “moral realism.” (If this doesn’t seem right, I think I should be able to pull up quotes.) But nearly all standard arguments against moral realism also function as arguments against “normative realism” as well. The standard concerns about ‘spookiness’ and ungrounded epistemology arise as soon as we accept that there are facts of the matter about what we should do and that we can discover these facts; it doesn’t lessen the fundamental metaphysical or epistemological issues whether these facts, for example, tell us to try to maximize global happiness or to try to fulfill the preferences of some particular idealized version of ourselves. It also seems to be the case that philosophers who identify as “moral anti-realists” are typically anti-realists about normativity, which I think partly explains why people seldom bother to tease the terms “moral realist” and “normative realist” apart in the first place. So I suppose I’ve been leaning on a prior that people who identify as “moral anti-realists” are also “normative anti-realists.”
(Edit) It seems pretty common for people in the community to reject or attack the idea of “shoulds.” For example, many posts in the (popular?) “Replacing Guilt” sequence on Minding Our Way seem to do this. A natural reading is a rejection of normative realism.
Small-n, but the handful of friends I’ve debated moral realism with have also had what I would tend to classify as anti-realist attitudes toward normativity more generally.
If normative realism is correct, then it’s at least conceivable that the action it’s most “reasonable” for us to take in some circumstance (i.e. the action that we “should’ take”) is different from the action that someone who tends to “win” a lot over the course of their life would take. However, early/foundational community writing seems to reject the idea that there’s any meaningful conceptually distinct sense in which we can talk about an action being “reasonable.” I take this Eliezer post on decision theory and rationality as an example.
It might also be useful to clarify that in ricraz’s recent post criticizing “realism about rationality,” several of the attitudes listed aren’t directly related to “realism” in the sense of this post. For example, it’s possible for there to be “a simple yet powerful theoretical framework which describes human intelligence” even if normative anti-realism is true. It did seem to me like the comments on ricraz’s post leaned toward wariness of “realism,” as conceptualized there, but I’m not really sure how to map that onto attitudes about the notion of “realism” I have in mind here.
It’s important to disentangle two claims:
1. In general, if you have the goal of understanding the world, or any other goal that relies on doing so, being Bayesian will allow you to achieve it to a greater extent than any other approach (in the limit of infinite compute).
2. Regardless of your goals, you should be Bayesian anyway.
Believing #2 commits you to normative realism as I understand the term, but believing #1 doesn’t - #1 is simply an empirical claim about what types of cognition tend to do best towards a broad class of goals. I think that many rationalists would defend #1, and few would defend #2 - if you disagree, I’d be interested in seeing examples of the latter. (One test is by asking “Aside from moral considerations, if someone’s only goal is to have false beliefs right now, should they believe true things anyway?”) Either way, I agree with Wei that distinguishing between moral normativity and epistemic normativity is crucial for fruitful discussions on this topic.
Another way of framing this distinction: assume there’s one true theory of physics, call it T. Then someone might make the claim “Modelling the universe using T is the correct way to do so (in the limit of having infinite compute available).” This is analogous to claim #1, and believing this claim does not commit you to normative realism, because it does not imply that anyone should want to model the universe correctly.
I would characterise “realism about rationality” as approximately equivalent to claim #1 above (plus a few other similar claims). In particular, it is a belief about whether there is a set of simple ideas which elegantly describe the sort of “agents” who do well at their “goals”—not a belief about the normative force of those ideas. Of course, under most reasonable interpretations of #2, the truth of #2 implies #1, but not vice versa.
Eliezer used some pretty strong normative language when talking about having false beliefs, e.g. in Dark Side Epistemology:
The quote from Eliezer is consistent with #1, since it’s bad to undermine people’s ability to achieve their goals.
More generally, you might believe that it’s morally normative to promote true beliefs (e.g. because they lead to better outcomes) but not believe that it’s epistemically normative, in a realist sense, to do so (e.g. the question I asked above, about whether you “should” have true beliefs even when there are no morally relevant consequences and it doesn’t further your goals).
I don’t necessarily think that #2 is a common belief. But I do have the impression that many people would at least endorse this equally normative claim: “If you have the goal of understanding the world, you should be a Bayesian.”
In general—at least in the context of the concepts/definitions in this post—the inclusion of an “if” clause doesn’t prevent a claim from being normative. So, for example, the claim “You should go to Spain if you want to go to Spain” isn’t relevantly different from the claim “You should give money to charity if you have enough money to live comfortably.”
I agree there’s an important distinction, but it doesn’t necessarily seem that deep to me.
For example: We can define different “epistemic utility functions” that map {agent’s credences; state of the world} to real values and then discuss theories like Bayesianism in the context of “epistemic decision theory,” in relatively close analogy with traditional (practical) decision theory.
It seems like some theories—e.g. certain theories that say we should have faith in the existance of God, or theories that say that we shouldn’t take into account certain traits when forming impressions of people—might also be classified as both moral and epistemological.
Okay, this seems like a crux of our disagreement. This statement seems pretty much equivalent to my statement #1 in almost all practical contexts. Can you point out how you think they differ?
I agree that some statements of that form seem normative: e.g. “You should go to Spain if you want to go to Spain”. However, that seems like an exception to me, because it provides no useful information about how to achieve the goal, and so from contextual clues would be interpreted as “I endorse your desire to go to Spain”. Consider instead “If you want to murder someone without getting caught, you should plan carefully”, which very much lacks endorsement. Or even “If you want to get to the bakery, you should take a left turn here.” How do you feel about the normativity of the last statement in particular? How does it practically differ from “The most convenient way to get to the bakery from here is to take a left turn”? Clearly that’s something almost everyone is a realist about (assuming a shared understanding of “convenient”) at Less Wrong and elsewhere.
I think there’s a difference between a moral statement with conditions, and a statement about what is best to do given your goals (roughly corresponding to the difference between Kant’s categorical and hypothetical imperatives). “You should give money to charity if you have enough money to live comfortably” is an example of the former—it’s the latter which I’m saying aren’t normative in any useful sense.
This stuff is definitely a bit tricky to talk about, since people can use the word “should” in different ways. I think that sometimes when people say “You should do X if you want Y” they do basically just mean to say “If you do X you will receive Y.” But it doesn’t seem to me like this is always the case.
A couple examples:
1. “Bayesian updating has a certain asymptoptic convergence property, in the limit of infinite experience and infinite compute. So if you want to understand the world, you should be a Bayesian.”
If the first and second sentence were meant to communicate the same thing, then the second would be totally vacuous given the first. Anyone who accepted the first sentence could not intelligibly disagree with or even really consider disagreeing with the second. But I don’t think that people who say things like this typically mean for the second sentence to be vacuous or typically regard disagreement as unintelligible.
Suppose, for example, that I responded to this claim by saying something like: “I disagree. Since we only have finite lives, asymptoptic convergence properties don’t have direct relevance. I think we should instead use a different ‘risk averse’ updating rule that, for agents with finite lives, more strongly reduces the likelihood of ending up with especially inaccurate beliefs about key features of the world.”
The speaker might think I’m wrong. But if the speaker thinks that what I’m saying constitutes intelligible disagreement with their claim, then it seems like this means their claim is in fact a distinct normative one.
2. (To someone with no CS background) “If you want to understand the world, you should be a Bayesian.”
If this sentence were meant to communicate the same thing as the claim about asymptotic convergence, then the speaker shouldn’t expect the listener to understand what they’re saying (even if the speaker has already explained what it means to be a Bayesian). Most people don’t naturally understand or care at all about asymptotic convergence properties.
I was a little imprecise in saying that they’re exactly equivalent—the second sentence should also have a “in the limit of infinite compute” qualification. Or else we need a hidden assumption like “These asymptotic convergence properties give us reason to believe that even low-compute approximations to Bayesianism are very good ways to understand the world.” This is usually left implicit, but it allows us to think of “if you want to understand the world, you should be (approximately) a Bayesian” as an empirical claim not a normative one. For this to actually be an example of normativity, it needs to be the case that some people consider this hidden assumption unnecessary and would endorse claims like “You should use low-compute approximations to Bayesianism because Bayesianism has certain asymptotic convergence properties, even if those properties don’t give us any reason to think that low-compute approximations to Bayesianism help you understand the world better.” Do you expect that people would endorse this?
Hmm, I think focusing on a simpler case might be better for getting at the crux.
Suppose Alice says: “Eating meat is the most effective way to get protein. So if you want to get protein, you should eat meat.”
And then Bob, an animal welfare person, responds: “You’re wrong, people shouldn’t eat meat no matter how much they care about getting protein.”
If Alice doesn’t mean for her second sentence to be totally redundant—or if she is able to interpret Bob’s response as an intelligible (if incorrect) statement of disagreement with her second sentence—then that suggests her second sentence actually constitutes a substantively normative claim. Her second sentence isn’t just repeating the same non-normative claim as the first one.
I definitely don’t think that all “If you want X, do Y” claims are best understood as normative claims. It’s possible that when people make claims of this form about Bayesianism, and other commonly discussed topics, they’re not really saying anything normative. But a decent chunk of statements of this form do strike me as difficult to interpret in non-normative terms.
I don’t think you can declare a sentence redundant without also considering the pragmatic aspects of meaning. In this example, Alice’s second sentence is a stronger claim than the first, because it again contains an implicit clause: “If you want to get protein, and you don’t have any other relevant goals, you should eat meat”. Or maybe it’s more like “If you want to get protein, and your other goals are standard ones, you should eat meat.”
Compare: Alice says “Jumping off cliffs without a parachute is a quick way to feel very excited. If you want to feel excited, you should jump off cliffs without a parachute.” Bob says “No you shouldn’t, because you’ll die.” Alice’s first sentence is true, and her second sentence is false, so they can’t be equivalent—but both of them can be interpreted as goal-conditional empirical sentences. It’s just the case that when you make broad statements, pragmatically you are assuming a “normal” set of goals.
It’s not entirely unintelligible, because Alice is relying on an implicit premise of “standard goals” I mentioned above, and the reason people like Bob are so outspoken on this issue is because they’re trying to change that norm of what we consider “standard goals”. I do think that if Alice really understood normativity, she would tell Bob that she was trying to make a different type of claim to his one, because his was normative and hers wasn’t—while conceding that he had reason to find the pragmatics of her sentence objectionable.
Also, though, you’ve picked a case where the disputed statement is often used both in empirical ways and in normative ways. This is the least clear sort of example (especially since, pragmatically, when you repeat almost the same thing twice, it makes people think you’re implying something different). The vast majority of examples of people using “if you want..., then you should...” seem clearly empirical to me—including many that are in morally relevant domains, where the pragmatics make their empirical nature clear:
A: “If you want to murder someone without getting caught, you should plan carefully.”
B: “No you shouldn’t, because you shouldn’t murder people.”
A: “Well obviously you shouldn’t murder people, but I’m just saying that if you wanted to, planning would make things much easier.”
Upon further thought, maybe just splitting up #1 and #2 is oversimplifying. There’s probably a position #1.5, which is more like “Words like “goals” and “beliefs” only make sense to the extent that they’re applied to Bayesians with utility functions—every other approach to understanding agenthood is irredeemably flawed.” This gets pretty close to normative realism because you’re only left with one possible theory, but it’s still not making any realist normative claims (even if you think that goals and beliefs are morally relevant, as long as you’re also a moral anti-realist). Maybe a relevant analogy: you might believe that using any axioms except the ZFC axioms will make maths totally incoherent, while not actually holding any opinion on whether the ZFC axioms are “true”.
I think there’s a distinction (although I’m not sure if I’ve talked explicitly about it before). Basically there’s quite possibly more to what the “right” or “reasonable” action is than “what action that someone who tends to ‘win’ a lot over the course of their life would take?” because the latter isn’t well defined. In a multiverse the same strategy/policy would lead to 100% winning in some worlds/branches and 100% losing in other worlds/branches, so you’d need some kind of “measure” to say who wins overall. But what the right measure is seems to be (or could be) a normative fact that can’t be determined by just looking at or thinking “who tends to ‘win’ a lot’.
ETA: Another way that “tends to win” isn’t well defined is that if you look at the person who literally wins the most, they might just be very lucky instead of actually doing the “reasonable” thing. So I think “tends to win” is more of an intuition pump for what the right conception of “reasonable” is than actually identical to it.
I agree with you on this and think it’s a really important point. Another (possibly redundant) way of getting at a similar concern, without evoking MW:
Due to randomness/uncertainty, an agent that tries to maximize expected “winning” won’t necessarily win compared to an agent that does something else. If I spend a dollar on a lottery ticket with a one-in-a-billion chance of netting me a billion-and-one “win points,” then I’m taking the choice that maximizes expected winning but I’m also almost certain to lose. So we can’t treat “the action that maximizes expected winning” as synonymous with “the action taken by an agent that wins.”
We can try to patch up the issue here by defining “the action that I should take” as “the action that is consistent with the VNM axioms,” but in fact either action in this case is consistent with the VNM axioms. The VNM axioms don’t imply that an agent must maximize the expected desirability of outcomes. They just imply that an agent must maximize the expected value of some function. It is totally consistent with the axioms, for example, to be risk averse and instead maximize the expected square root of desirability. If we try to define “the action I should take” in this way, then, as another downside, the claim “your actions should be consistent with the VNM axioms” also becomes a completely empty tautology.
So it seems very hard to make non-vacuous and potentially true claims about decision theory without evoking some additional non-reducible notion of “reasonableness,” “rationality,” or what an actor “should” do. Assuming that normative anti-realism is true pretty much means assuming that there is no such notion or assuming that the notion doesn’t actually map onto anything in reality. And I think anti-realist views of these sort are plausible (probably for roughly the same reasons Eliezer seems to). But I think that adopting these views would also leave us with very little to say about decision theory.
I wouldn’t expect lesswrongians to be keen on Platonic style moral realism, where moral facts correspond to supernatural objects, but there are other classes of morally realistic theories’ where moral facts depend on analytical truths or natural states of affairs. Lesswrongians are definitely keen utilitarianism, where ethical claims depend on natural facts about preferences, and is therefore, arguably, a naturalistic form of moral realism.
The is-ought gap remains a problem which I touch on below.
If normative realism is just the claim that there are meaningful and true statements about what you should do if you want to achieve some X, then they are abundant.. things like game theory and engineering, actually any kind of methodology, have plenty of them.
What are the problems with normative realism about moral claims, then?Maybe that they are categorical, lacking an “if you want to do X” condition.
This seems wrong to me. Could you say more about why you think this?
I left a sub-comment under Wei’s comment (above) that hopefully unpacks this suggestion a bit
Seconding this—my strong impression is that a substantial percentage of the rationality community rejects moral realism, not normative realism (as you say—what would the point of anything be?).
I’m curious where this impression came from. The only place I can imagine anything similar to an argument against normative realism cropping up would be in a discussion of the problem of induction, which hasn’t seen serious debate around here for many years.
It sounds as though you’re expecting anti-realists about normativity to tell you some arguments that will genuinely make you feel (close to) indifferent about whether to use Bayesianism, or whether to use induction. But that’s not how I understand anti-realism. The way I would describe it, the primary claim that anti-realism about normativity entails is of a more trivial kind. More something like this:
If anti-realism about normativity is true, then in a hypothetical world where your mind worked in some strange way such that you found induction or Bayesianism dumb, then it’s impossible to point out and justify the exact sense in which you would be mistaken by some “universally approved standard.” So the question shouldn’t be “Have I ever seen someone give a an argument to start doubting induction?” Rather, I would ask “Have I ever seen someone give a convincing and non-question-begging account of what aliens who don’t believe in induction are doing wrong?”
In practice, the difference between realism and anti-realism only matters in cases where the answer doesn’t feel like the straightforward thing to do anyway. If Bayesianism and induction feel like the straightforward thing for you to do, you’ll use them whether you endorse realism or not. I’d argue that realists therefore shouldn’t use example propositions that provoke universal agreement (at least not as standalone examples) when they want to explain what constitutes an objective reason. Because by using examples that evoke universal agreement, they’re only pointing at reasons that we can already tell will feel convincing to people. The interesting question I want to know, as an anti-realist, is what it means for there to be irreducibly normative reasons that go beyond what I personally find convincing. The realists seem to think that just like in cases where we’re inclined to call a proposition “right” because it feels self-evident to everyone, there’s just as much of a fact of the matter for other propositions about which people will be in seemingly irresolveble disagreements. But I have yet to see how that’s a useful concept to introduce. I just don’t get it.
Edit:
I was strawmanning realism a bit here. Realists readily point out that the sense in which this is a mistake cannot be “explained” (at least not in non-question-begging terminology, i.e., not without the use of normative terminology). So in one sense, realism is simply a declaration that the intuition that some standards apply beyond the personal/subjective level is too important to give up on. But by itself, that declaration doesn’t yet make for a specific position, and it depends on further assumptions whether the disagreement will be only semantic, or also substantive.
Hm, this actually isn’t an expectation I have. When I talk about “realists” and “anti-realists,” in this post, I’m thinking of groups of people with different beliefs (rather than groups of people with different feelings). I don’t think of anti-realism as having any strong link to feelings of indifference about behavior. For example: I certainly expect most anti-realist philosophers to have strong preferences against putting their hands on hot stoves (and don’t see anything inconsistent in this).
I guess I don’t see it as a matter of usefulness. I have this concept that a lot of other people seem to have too: the concept of the choice I “should” make or that it would be “right” for me to make. Although pretty much everyone uses these words, not everyone reports having the same concept. Nonetheless, at least I do have the concept. And, insofar as there is any such thing as the “right thing,” I care a lot about doing it.
We can ask the question: “Why should people care about doing what they ‘should’ do?” I think the natural response to this question, though, is just sort of to evoke a tautology. People should care about doing what they should do, because they should do what they should do.
To put my “realist hat” firmly on for a second: I don’t think, for example, that someone happily abusing their partner would in any way find it “useful” to believe that abuse is wrong. But I do think they should believe that abuse is wrong, and take this fact into account when deciding how to act, because abuse is wrong.
I’m unfortunately not sure, though, if I have anything much deeper or more compelling than that to say in response to the question.
Another (significantly more rambling and possibly redundant) thought on “usefulness”:
One of the main things I’m trying to say in the post—although, in hindsight, I’m unsure if I communicated it well—is that there are a lot of debates that I personally have trouble interpretting as both non-trivial and truth-oriented if I assume that the debaters aren’t employing irreducably normative concepts. A lot of debates about decision theory have this property for me.
I understand how it’s possible for realists to have a substantive factual disagreement about the Newcomb scenario, for example, because they’re talking about something above-and-beyond the traditional physical facts of the case (which are basically just laid out in the problem specification). But if we assume that there’s nothing above-and-beyond the traditional physical facts, then I don’t see what there’s left for anyone to have a substantive factual disagree about.
If we want to ask “Which amount of money is the agent most likely to receive, if we condition on the information that it will one-box?”, then it seems to me that pretty much everyone agrees that “one million dollars” is the answer. If we want to ask “Would the agent get more money in a counterfactual world where it instead two-boxes, but all other features of the world at that time (including the contents of the boxes) are held fixed?”, then it seems to me that pretty much everyone agrees the answer is “yes.” If we want to ask “Would the agent get more money in a counterfactual world where it was born as a two-boxer, but all other features of the world at the time of its birth were held fixed?”, then it seems to me that pretty much everyone agrees the answer is “no.” So I don’t understand what the open question could be. People may of course have different feelings about one-boxing and about two-boxing, in the same way that people have different feelings about (e.g.) playing tennis and playing soccer, but that’s not a matter of factual/substantive disagreement.
So this is sort of one way in which irreducably normative concepts can be “useful”: they can, I think, allow us to make sense of and justify certain debates that many people are strongly inclined to have and certain questions that many people are strongly inclined to ask.
But the above line line of thought of course isn’t, at least in any direct way, an argument for realism actually being true. Even if the line of thought is sound, then it’s still entirely totally possible that these debates and questions just actually aren’t non-trivial and truth-oriented. Furthermore, the line of thought could also just not be sound. It’s totally possible that the debates/questions are non-trivial and truth-oriented, without evoking irreducably normative concepts, and I’m just a confused outside observer not getting what’s going on. Tonally, one thing I regret about the way I wrote this post is that I think it comes across as overly skeptical of this possibility.
Yeah, that makes sense. I was mostly replying to T3t’s comment, especially this part:
Upon re-reading T3t’s comment, I now think I interpreted them uncharitably. Probably they meant that because induction seems impossible to justify, one way to “explain” this or come to terms with this is by endorsing anti-realism. (That interpretation would make sense to me!)
I see. I think I understand the motivation to introduce irreducibly normative concepts into one’s philosophical repertoire. Therefore, saying “I don’t see the use” was a bit misleading. I think I meant that even though I understand the motivation, I don’t actually think we can make it work. I also kind of see the motivation behind wanting libertarian free will, but I also don’t think that works (and probably you’d agree on that one). So, I guess my main critique is that irreducibly normative concepts won’t add anything we can actually make use of in practice, because I don’t believe that your irreducibly normative concepts can ever be made coherent. I claim that if we think carefully about how words get their meaning, and then compare the situation with irreducibly normative concepts to other words, it’ll become apparent that the irreducibly normative concepts have connotations that cannot go together with each other (at least not under the IMO proper account of how words get their meaning).
So far, the arguments for my claim are mostly just implicitly in my head. I’m currently trying to write them up and I’ll post them on the EA forum once it’s all done. (But I feel like there’s a sense in which the burden of proof isn’t on the anti-realists here. If I was a moral realist, I’d want to have a good sense of how I could, in theory under ideal conditions, figure out normative truths. Or, if I accept the interpretation that it’s conceivable that humans are forever incapable of figuring out normative truths, I’d at least need to have *some sense* of what it would mean for someone to not be forever incapable of figuring things out. Otherwise, how could I possibly believe that I understand my own concept well enough for it to have any meaning?)
I think it’s true that there’d be much fewer substantive disagreements if more people explicitly accepted anti-realism. I find it good because then things feel like progress (but that’s mostly my need for closure talking.) That said, I think there are some interesting discussions to be had in an anti-realist framework, but they’d go a bit differently.
Sure. In this sense, I’m an error theorist (as you point out as a possibility in your last paragraph). But I think there’s a sense in which that’s a misleading label. When I shifted from realism to anti-realism, I didn’t just shrug my shoulders thinking “oh no, I made an error” and then stopped being interested in normative ethics (or normative decision theory). Instead, I continued to be very interested in these things, but started thinking about them in different ways. So even though “error theory” is the appropriate label in one way, there’s another sense in which the shift is about how to handle ontological crises.
What do you mean by a normative fact here? Could you give some examples?
The “morally normative” and “epistemically normative” examples in our conversation over on EAF are the kinds of things I’m referring to. ETA: Another example of a normative fact is if there is a right prior for a Bayesian.