William Payne

Some of the biggest contributions to philosophy as an academic discipline comes from philosophers examining the role and use of language in human thought, communication, and understanding. Wittgenstein is probably the best example of this, though Chomsky is arguably more (and perhaps ironically so) accessible.

Hi,

I was wondering where the photo of the bicycle was taken.

Regards,
Alexander

I’m also on board with McBrayer’s condemnation of teaching facts and opinions as a dichotomy in K-12 education. As he points out, this mushes together metaphysics and epistemology, more specifically truth and justification. Not a very promising intellectual foundation for critical thinking.

I can see how McBrayer’s presumption of moral realism touches a nerve here. And I appreciate your complaint that moral realism is too often invoked as necessary for justifying accountability and retribution. That, I think, is a naive realism. Retributivism, the justification for punishment on the grounds that the wrong doer deserves it, does require something like moral realism. But moral realism doesn’t automatically justify retributivism.

Like many contemporary philosophers, I’m partial to compatibilism about free will. That is, I think any viable conception of free will will have to be compatible with causal determinism. But if determinism is true, then the murderer could not have simply chosen to act differently under the specific circumstances where he committed a murder. But if he wasn’t free to choose against murdering, this will undermine our usual justification for retributive punishment. The upshot is that moral realism isn’t enough to justify retributive punishment, you also need classical liberation free will and the prospects for this view aren’t good.

But even if we lack free will and retributive punishment is unjustifiable, it can still be a plain fact that murder is morally wrong, or that torturing kittens just for fun is bad. Moral realism doesn’t depend on or entail retributive punishment. So, I’d agree that the attraction to moral realism for the sake of accountability and judgment of wrongdoers is misguided. Underlying this is the concern that the desire for accountability would be a purely instrumental rationale for moral realism. What we should want is a theoretical foundation for moral truths. Some feature of reality that grounds moral truth. Here I do think the realist project is viable and consciousness is key. But I’ll leave the defense of realism there.

I would, however, take this opportunity to open space for a kind of anti-realism about morality that doesn’t throw us back onto the hazards of moral relativism (which still looks like a hazard for your approach to subjectivism).

A central insight of Hume’s is that moral evaluations don’t appear to be claims about how things are. This is the famous “is/ought” divide. There is no collection of claims about how things are (which are truth assessable) that entail any claim about how things ought to be (for instance, about what is right or wrong). Even Kant, a presumed moral realist, doesn’t take issue with this. Rather Kant takes the moral law to be an imperative, a command of the autonomous will. Commands aren’t the kinds of sentences we can evaluate for truth or falsity. The drill sergeant that yells “March” isn’t asserting some claim to truth we can evaluate against the evidence, he’s telling the new recruits to do something. Morality is cleanly in the realm of practical reason for Kant.

This suggests one way to be an anti-realist about morality and still take morality seriously (for instance, taking some moral commands to apply universally, and in a way that makes judgment and even punishment rational). Descriptive claims say something about how things are and so can be evaluated for truth. But this isn’t the role of moral commands. Moral attitudes just aren’t about how things are and for this reason we should expect them to be evaluated as true or false. But they can still be evaluated as good or bad, permissible or prohibited, right or wrong. On this view truth is just the wrong evaluative metric for moral attitudes and judgements. The appropriate metrics are goodness, rightness, permissibility. We should take moral judgement just as seriously as judgments about what is true, we just shouldn’t treat them as judgements about what is true. This sort of anti-realist metaethics make no difference to normative ethics. We can still take the categorical imperative, for instance, to be the moral law, we should just avoid the confusions that follow when we think of moral laws as truths.

Here we have a kind of anti-realism about morality that rejects the call for truth makers for moral truths as simply missing the nature of moral attitudes, but still supports our usual moral intuition that murder is wrong, that it is wrong to torture innocent kittens just for fun, etc. It’s just a philosophical error to think taking these moral claims seriously depend on treating them as normal truth assessable subject predicate assertions. Moral claims aren’t descriptive claims; they are the commands of practical rationality that hold no matter what your ends are.

You are sounding kind of realist curious right there at the end.

Good worry here. I find the structural analogies in the theoretical foundations of ethics and epistemology very informative. It bothers me too that these don’t extend as neatly to meaning in life. Maybe we can find something like a non-subjective foundational principle in the idea that it’s good to care about things. We have lots of lee way in what to care about in leading a meaningful life. Perhaps cultures have a similar leeway in how they express respect for persons.

“On the Basis of Morality” is where Schopenhauer really goes after Kant. Not quite as big a commitment as “World as will and idea”