Like BiasedBayes, this article reads to me as putting forward a false dichotomy. Unlike BiasedBayes, I don’t think that “wellbeing” or “science” have much to do with why I’m unconvinced by the article.
To me the third alternative to the dichotomy is, unsurprisingly, my own view: moral facts don’t exist, and “right” & “wrong” are shorthand for behaviour of which I strongly approve or disapprove. My approvals & disapprovals can’t be said to be moral facts, because they depend solely on my state of mind, but I’m nonetheless not obliged to become a nihilist because my approvals & disapprovals carry normative import to me, so my uses of “right” & “wrong” are not just descriptive as far as I’m concerned.
I expect Boghossian has a rebuttal, but I can’t infer from the article what it would be. I can’t imagine a conversation between the two of us that doesn’t go in circles or leave me with the last word.
Me: Moral facts don’t real. And yet, no logic compels me to be a nihilist. Checkmate, perfessor!
Imagined extrapolation of Paul Boghossian: But if there are no moral facts, any uses of ideas like “right”, “wrong”, or “should” just become descriptions of what someone thinks or feels. This leaves you bereft of normative vocabulary and hence a nihilist.
Me: Uses of “right”, “wrong”, or “should” are descriptions of how someone thinks or feels, at least when I use them. Specifically, they’re descriptions of how I think or feel. But they aren’t just that.
IEPB: So what’s that extra normative component? Where does it come from?
Me: Well, it comes from me. I mentally promote certain actions (& non-actions) to the level of obligations or duties, or at least things which should be encouraged, whether or not I (or others) actually fulfil those obligations or duties.
IEPB: This is reminiscent of the example I gave in my article of etiquette, which derives its normative force from the hidden moral fact (absolute norm) that “we ought not, other things being equal, offend our hosts”.
Me: If that analogy works, there must be some moral fact hidden in my mental-promotion-to-duty conception of right & wrong. Suppose for a moment that that’s so. Start with the observation that my conception of right is basically “that is the right thing to do, in that it is something I approve of so strongly that I regard it as an obligation, or something approaching an obligation, binding on me/you”. Digging into that, what’s the underlying “moral fact” there? Presumably it’s something like “we ought to do things that satt strongly approves of, and not do things that satt strongly disapproves of”. But that’s obviously not a moral fact, because it’s obviously partial and dependent on one specific person’s state of mind.
IEPB: Which means it’s not normative, it’s just a description of someone’s mind. So you have no basis for normative judgements. You’re a nihilist in denial.
Me: If I’m incapable of making normative judgements, how do you explain my judgement that you shouldn’t make mediocre philosophical arguments, because I strongly disapprove of them?
IEPB: Har har. That’s not a normative judgement. That’s just a description of your state of mind.
Me: Not “just”! It’s an assertion that you’re obliged to not make mediocre philosophical arguments!
IEPB: Obliged in what way?
Me: Obliged in that I’m telling you you’re obliged!
IEPB: That’s not an obligation, that’s just you expressing your preferences.
Me: No, because there’s an explicit extra component to what I’m expressing. Your “just”ing would be correct if I were saying, for example, that I don’t like chocolate. But I’m not merely passively observing that I don’t approve of mediocre philosophical arguments. I’m telling you to desist from making them.
IEPB: I don’t disagree that you’re telling me that. Nor would any rational listener to this conversation. But “satt is telling me to desist” is “just a descriptive remark that carries no normative import whatsoever”, quoting my article, which you did read, right?
Me: As a matter of fact I did. But like I say, I’m not (just) making the bland descriptive claim which anyone with ears would agree with. I’m carrying out the first-order action of commanding you, in the earnest hope that you will listen & obey, to refrain from an action.
IEPB: Big whoop. Anybody can give an order.
Me: That you’re unmoved by my order doesn’t make it any less normative. Compare a realm where we both agree that there are facts: empirical investigation of reality. If I told you that gravity made things fall downwards, that would still have force (lol) as a positive, empirical claim, whether you agreed or not. Likewise, when I tell you to knock off some behaviour, that still has force as a normative claim, whether you agree or not.
IEPB: Nuh uh. The two cases are disanalogous. In the gravity case I can only disagree with you on pain of being objectively incorrect. In the knock-it-off case I can disagree with you however I please.
Me: No, you disagree on pain of being quasi-objectively wrong, according to my standard.
IEPB: Oh, come on. Quasi-objectively? By your standard? Really?
Me: Yes; any observer would agree that you’d violated my standard.
IEPB: But that’s purely a descriptive claim!
Me: That’s the descriptive component, and as a descriptive claim it’s objectively correct. The normative claim is that your disagreement and violation mean you’re in the wrong, as defined by my disapproval of your behaviour. And that normative claim is subjectively correct.
IEPB:
And at this point I have to break off this made-up conversation, because I don’t see what new rebuttal Boghossian could/would give. Here endeth the philosopher fanfiction.
Edit, 4 days later: correct “normative important” misquotation to “normative import”.
Im curious about your view. Do you think that we cant say its a moral fact that its better (1) to feed newborn baby with milk from its mother and sooth it tenderly so it stops crying compared to (2) chop its fingers of one by one slowly with a dull blade and then leave it bleeding? And this moral evaluation depends on your state of mind?
Do you think that we cant say its a moral fact that [...]
Correct, I would call that a category error.
And this moral evaluation depends on your state of mind?
One’s view of the wrongness of torturing a newborn versus soothing it depends on one’s state of mind, yes.
If I were confronted with someone who insisted that “torturing a newborn instead of soothing it is good, actually”, I could say that was “wrong” in the sense of evil, but there is no evidence I could present which, in itself, would show it to be “wrong” in the sense of incorrect.
Actually, I don’t know if you and Boghossian really disagree here. I think Boghossian is trying to argue that your normative preferences arise from your opinions about what the moral facts are. So I think he’d say:
IEPB: “People ought to do X” is your preference because you are assuming “People ought to do X” is a moral fact. It’s a different issue whether your assumption is true or false, or justified or unjustified, but the assumption is being made nevertheless.
For example, when you exhort IEPB to not make mediocre philosophy arguments, and say that that’s your preference, it’s because you are assuming that the claim, “philosophy professors ought not to make mediocre philosophy arguments”, is in fact, true.
IEPB: “People ought to do X” is your preference because you are assuming “People ought to do X” is a moral fact. It’s a different issue whether your assumption is true or false, or justified or unjustified, but the assumption is being made nevertheless.
If my mental model of moral philosophers is correct, this contravenes how moral philosophers usually define/use the phrase “moral fact”. Moral facts are supposed to (somehow) inhere in the outside world in a mind-independent way, so the origin of my “People ought to do X” assumption does matter. Because my ultimate justification of such an assumption would be my own preferences (whether or not alloyed with empirical claims about the outside world), I couldn’t legitimately call “People ought to do X” a moral fact, as “moral fact” is typically understood.
Consequently I think this line of rebuttal would only be open to Boghossian if he had an idiosyncratic definition of “moral fact”. But it is possible that our disagreement reduces to a disagreement over how to define “moral facts”.
For example, when you exhort IEPB to not make mediocre philosophy arguments, and say that that’s your preference, it’s because you are assuming that the claim, “philosophy professors ought not to make mediocre philosophy arguments”, is in fact, true.
Introspecting, this feels like a reversal of causality. My own internal perception is that the preference motivates the claim rather than vice versa. (Not that introspection is necessarily reliable evidence here!)
I agree that any disagreement might come down to what we mean by moral claims.
I don’t know Boghossian’s own particular commitments, but baseline moral realism is a fairly weak claim without any metaphysics of where these facts come from. I quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia:
Moral realism is not a particular substantive moral view nor does it carry a distinctive metaphysical commitment over and above the commitment that comes with thinking moral claims can be true or false and some are true.
A simple interpretation that I can think of: when you say that you prefer that people do X, typically, you also prefer that other people prefer that people do X. This, you could take as sufficient to say “People ought to do X”. (This has the flavor the Kantian categorical imperative. Essentially, I’m proposing a sufficient condition for something to be a moral claim, namely, that it be desired to be universalized. But I don’t want to claim that this a necessary condition.)
At any rate, whether the above definition stands or falls, you can see that it doesn’t have any metaphysical commitment to some free-floating, human-independent (to be be distinguished from mind-independent) facts embedded in the fabric of the universe. Hopefully, there are other ways of parsing moral claims in such ways so that the metaphysics isn’t too demanding.
I might’ve been influenced too much by people speaking to me (in face-to-face conversation) as if moral realism entails objectivity of moral facts, and maybe also influenced too much by the definitions I’ve seen online. Wikipedia’s “Moral realism” article starts outright with
Moral realism (also ethical realism or moral Platonism) is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world (that is, features independent of subjective opinion), some of which may be true to the extent that they report those features accurately. This makes moral realism a non-nihilist form of ethical cognitivism with an ontological orientation, standing in opposition to all forms of moral anti-realism and moral skepticism, including ethical subjectivism (which denies that moral propositions refer to objective facts),
and the IEP’s article on MR has an entire section, “Moral objectivity”, the beginning of which seems to drive at moral facts and MR relying on a basis beyond (human) mind states. The intro concludes,
Neither subjectivists nor relativists are obliged to deny that there is literal moral knowledge. Of course, according to them, moral truths imply truths about human psychology. Moral realists must maintain that moral truths —and hence moral knowledge—do not depend on facts about our desires and emotions for their truth.
At the same time, the SEP does seem to offer a less narrow definition of MR which allows for moral facts to have a non-objective basis.
I wonder whether I’ve anchored too much on old-fashioned, “classic” MR which does require moral facts to have objective status (whether that’s a mind-independent or human-independent status), while more recent moral realist philosophies are content to relax this constraint. Maybe I’m a moral realist to 21st century philosophers and a moral irrealist to 20th century philosophers!
“Moral facts” (i.e. _facts_ about _morality_) are overall neither objective nor subjective; they’re intersubjective, in that they are shared at least throughout a given community and moral code, and to some extent they’re even shared among most human communities. (Somewhat paradoxically, when talking about the most widely-shared values—precisely those values that are closest to being ‘objective’, if only in an everyday sense! - we don’t even use the term “morals” or “morality” but instead prefer to talk about “ethics”, which in a stricter sense is rather the subject of how different facets of morality might interrelate and balance each other, what it even means to argue about morality, and the practical implications of these things for everyday life.)
Whether “moral facts” are human-independent is an interesting question in itself. I think one could definitely argue that a number of basic moral facts that most human communities share (such as the value of ‘protection’ and ‘thriving’) are in fact also shared by many social animals. If true, this would clearly imply a human-independent status for these moral facts. Perhaps more importantly, it would also point to the need to attribute some sort of moral relevance and personhood at least to the most ‘highly-developed’ social animals, such as the great apes (hominids) and perhaps even dolphins and whales.
Like BiasedBayes, this article reads to me as putting forward a false dichotomy. Unlike BiasedBayes, I don’t think that “wellbeing” or “science” have much to do with why I’m unconvinced by the article.
To me the third alternative to the dichotomy is, unsurprisingly, my own view: moral facts don’t exist, and “right” & “wrong” are shorthand for behaviour of which I strongly approve or disapprove. My approvals & disapprovals can’t be said to be moral facts, because they depend solely on my state of mind, but I’m nonetheless not obliged to become a nihilist because my approvals & disapprovals carry normative import to me, so my uses of “right” & “wrong” are not just descriptive as far as I’m concerned.
I expect Boghossian has a rebuttal, but I can’t infer from the article what it would be. I can’t imagine a conversation between the two of us that doesn’t go in circles or leave me with the last word.
Me: Moral facts don’t real. And yet, no logic compels me to be a nihilist. Checkmate, perfessor!
Imagined extrapolation of Paul Boghossian: But if there are no moral facts, any uses of ideas like “right”, “wrong”, or “should” just become descriptions of what someone thinks or feels. This leaves you bereft of normative vocabulary and hence a nihilist.
Me: Uses of “right”, “wrong”, or “should” are descriptions of how someone thinks or feels, at least when I use them. Specifically, they’re descriptions of how I think or feel. But they aren’t just that.
IEPB: So what’s that extra normative component? Where does it come from?
Me: Well, it comes from me. I mentally promote certain actions (& non-actions) to the level of obligations or duties, or at least things which should be encouraged, whether or not I (or others) actually fulfil those obligations or duties.
IEPB: This is reminiscent of the example I gave in my article of etiquette, which derives its normative force from the hidden moral fact (absolute norm) that “we ought not, other things being equal, offend our hosts”.
Me: If that analogy works, there must be some moral fact hidden in my mental-promotion-to-duty conception of right & wrong. Suppose for a moment that that’s so. Start with the observation that my conception of right is basically “that is the right thing to do, in that it is something I approve of so strongly that I regard it as an obligation, or something approaching an obligation, binding on me/you”. Digging into that, what’s the underlying “moral fact” there? Presumably it’s something like “we ought to do things that satt strongly approves of, and not do things that satt strongly disapproves of”. But that’s obviously not a moral fact, because it’s obviously partial and dependent on one specific person’s state of mind.
IEPB: Which means it’s not normative, it’s just a description of someone’s mind. So you have no basis for normative judgements. You’re a nihilist in denial.
Me: If I’m incapable of making normative judgements, how do you explain my judgement that you shouldn’t make mediocre philosophical arguments, because I strongly disapprove of them?
IEPB: Har har. That’s not a normative judgement. That’s just a description of your state of mind.
Me: Not “just”! It’s an assertion that you’re obliged to not make mediocre philosophical arguments!
IEPB: Obliged in what way?
Me: Obliged in that I’m telling you you’re obliged!
IEPB: That’s not an obligation, that’s just you expressing your preferences.
Me: No, because there’s an explicit extra component to what I’m expressing. Your “just”ing would be correct if I were saying, for example, that I don’t like chocolate. But I’m not merely passively observing that I don’t approve of mediocre philosophical arguments. I’m telling you to desist from making them.
IEPB: I don’t disagree that you’re telling me that. Nor would any rational listener to this conversation. But “satt is telling me to desist” is “just a descriptive remark that carries no normative import whatsoever”, quoting my article, which you did read, right?
Me: As a matter of fact I did. But like I say, I’m not (just) making the bland descriptive claim which anyone with ears would agree with. I’m carrying out the first-order action of commanding you, in the earnest hope that you will listen & obey, to refrain from an action.
IEPB: Big whoop. Anybody can give an order.
Me: That you’re unmoved by my order doesn’t make it any less normative. Compare a realm where we both agree that there are facts: empirical investigation of reality. If I told you that gravity made things fall downwards, that would still have force (lol) as a positive, empirical claim, whether you agreed or not. Likewise, when I tell you to knock off some behaviour, that still has force as a normative claim, whether you agree or not.
IEPB: Nuh uh. The two cases are disanalogous. In the gravity case I can only disagree with you on pain of being objectively incorrect. In the knock-it-off case I can disagree with you however I please.
Me: No, you disagree on pain of being quasi-objectively wrong, according to my standard.
IEPB: Oh, come on. Quasi-objectively? By your standard? Really?
Me: Yes; any observer would agree that you’d violated my standard.
IEPB: But that’s purely a descriptive claim!
Me: That’s the descriptive component, and as a descriptive claim it’s objectively correct. The normative claim is that your disagreement and violation mean you’re in the wrong, as defined by my disapproval of your behaviour. And that normative claim is subjectively correct.
IEPB:
And at this point I have to break off this made-up conversation, because I don’t see what new rebuttal Boghossian could/would give. Here endeth the philosopher fanfiction.
Edit, 4 days later: correct “normative important” misquotation to “normative import”.
Im curious about your view. Do you think that we cant say its a moral fact that its better (1) to feed newborn baby with milk from its mother and sooth it tenderly so it stops crying compared to (2) chop its fingers of one by one slowly with a dull blade and then leave it bleeding? And this moral evaluation depends on your state of mind?
Correct, I would call that a category error.
One’s view of the wrongness of torturing a newborn versus soothing it depends on one’s state of mind, yes.
If I were confronted with someone who insisted that “torturing a newborn instead of soothing it is good, actually”, I could say that was “wrong” in the sense of evil, but there is no evidence I could present which, in itself, would show it to be “wrong” in the sense of incorrect.
Actually, I don’t know if you and Boghossian really disagree here. I think Boghossian is trying to argue that your normative preferences arise from your opinions about what the moral facts are. So I think he’d say:
IEPB: “People ought to do X” is your preference because you are assuming “People ought to do X” is a moral fact. It’s a different issue whether your assumption is true or false, or justified or unjustified, but the assumption is being made nevertheless.
For example, when you exhort IEPB to not make mediocre philosophy arguments, and say that that’s your preference, it’s because you are assuming that the claim, “philosophy professors ought not to make mediocre philosophy arguments”, is in fact, true.
If my mental model of moral philosophers is correct, this contravenes how moral philosophers usually define/use the phrase “moral fact”. Moral facts are supposed to (somehow) inhere in the outside world in a mind-independent way, so the origin of my “People ought to do X” assumption does matter. Because my ultimate justification of such an assumption would be my own preferences (whether or not alloyed with empirical claims about the outside world), I couldn’t legitimately call “People ought to do X” a moral fact, as “moral fact” is typically understood.
Consequently I think this line of rebuttal would only be open to Boghossian if he had an idiosyncratic definition of “moral fact”. But it is possible that our disagreement reduces to a disagreement over how to define “moral facts”.
Introspecting, this feels like a reversal of causality. My own internal perception is that the preference motivates the claim rather than vice versa. (Not that introspection is necessarily reliable evidence here!)
I agree that any disagreement might come down to what we mean by moral claims.
I don’t know Boghossian’s own particular commitments, but baseline moral realism is a fairly weak claim without any metaphysics of where these facts come from. I quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia:
A simple interpretation that I can think of: when you say that you prefer that people do X, typically, you also prefer that other people prefer that people do X. This, you could take as sufficient to say “People ought to do X”. (This has the flavor the Kantian categorical imperative. Essentially, I’m proposing a sufficient condition for something to be a moral claim, namely, that it be desired to be universalized. But I don’t want to claim that this a necessary condition.)
At any rate, whether the above definition stands or falls, you can see that it doesn’t have any metaphysical commitment to some free-floating, human-independent (to be be distinguished from mind-independent) facts embedded in the fabric of the universe. Hopefully, there are other ways of parsing moral claims in such ways so that the metaphysics isn’t too demanding.
I might’ve been influenced too much by people speaking to me (in face-to-face conversation) as if moral realism entails objectivity of moral facts, and maybe also influenced too much by the definitions I’ve seen online. Wikipedia’s “Moral realism” article starts outright with
and the IEP’s article on MR has an entire section, “Moral objectivity”, the beginning of which seems to drive at moral facts and MR relying on a basis beyond (human) mind states. The intro concludes,
At the same time, the SEP does seem to offer a less narrow definition of MR which allows for moral facts to have a non-objective basis.
I wonder whether I’ve anchored too much on old-fashioned, “classic” MR which does require moral facts to have objective status (whether that’s a mind-independent or human-independent status), while more recent moral realist philosophies are content to relax this constraint. Maybe I’m a moral realist to 21st century philosophers and a moral irrealist to 20th century philosophers!
“Moral facts” (i.e. _facts_ about _morality_) are overall neither objective nor subjective; they’re intersubjective, in that they are shared at least throughout a given community and moral code, and to some extent they’re even shared among most human communities. (Somewhat paradoxically, when talking about the most widely-shared values—precisely those values that are closest to being ‘objective’, if only in an everyday sense! - we don’t even use the term “morals” or “morality” but instead prefer to talk about “ethics”, which in a stricter sense is rather the subject of how different facets of morality might interrelate and balance each other, what it even means to argue about morality, and the practical implications of these things for everyday life.)
Whether “moral facts” are human-independent is an interesting question in itself. I think one could definitely argue that a number of basic moral facts that most human communities share (such as the value of ‘protection’ and ‘thriving’) are in fact also shared by many social animals. If true, this would clearly imply a human-independent status for these moral facts. Perhaps more importantly, it would also point to the need to attribute some sort of moral relevance and personhood at least to the most ‘highly-developed’ social animals, such as the great apes (hominids) and perhaps even dolphins and whales.