CHAPTER 7: Contemporary Moral and Epistemic Irrealisms
7.1. Introduction.
In this work, I have presented and explained the arguments that Ayer, Stevenson, Hare, Mackie and Harman give in favor of their moral irrealisms. Since nearly all contemporary work on moral realism and irrealism is done in reference to these positions, we might call these figures “classical” moral irrealists. I have argued that their arguments suggest analogous arguments for epistemic irrealisms. I have presented reasons to think that epistemic irrealisms are false and the arguments for them unsound. Since these arguments share major premises with arguments for moral irrealisms, I hope to have undercut the common arguments given against moral realism.
As far as I know, all these figures would have resisted (or, in Harman’s case, resist) the implications I argue follow from their premises, and they would not have accepted epistemic irrealisms of any kind. And most contemporary moral irrealists (most of whom are emotivists or expressivists of various kinds[1]) would resist also: they would claim that although moral judgments are never literally true, epistemic judgments are sometimes literally true. They would maintain that there are important differences in moral and epistemic judgments and so, despite possible appearance to the contrary, their reasons for moral irrealisms have no implications for the semantic, metaphysical and epistemic status of epistemic judgments.[2]
However, Russell Shafer-Landau and others have argued that this response is unsustainable and that, contrary to the judgment of many contemporary moral irrealists, their positions are subject to the same kinds of objections I have raised against classical irrealisms. Shafer-Landau has raised this objection to the contemporary moral irrealisms developed by Mark Timmons, Simon Blackburn, Crispin Wright and others.[3] Below I summarize his method of attack and conclusions on these positions. Both are similar to those that I have developed regarding the meta-ethical positions I have focused on in this work.
My focus of this final chapter, however, is to present and evaluate the views of two contemporary moral irrealists who, unlike most of their peers, accept epistemic irrealisms. These two philosophers are Allen Gibbard and Hartry Field.[4] They think that, given the moral and epistemic discourses’ similarities, i.e., they are both what they call “normative” or “evaluative” discourses, arguments for either position suggest comparable arguments for the other, or that the same kind of argument justifies a general kind of irrealism about the normative or evaluative. Gibbard is an epistemic expressivist, and Field is a kind of epistemic relativist, and they both explicitly endorse these positions and deny epistemic realisms. Since they think this, I do not need to summarize their arguments for their positions in great detail; unlike earlier figures who do not advocate epistemic irrealisms, I do not have to display Gibbard’s and Field’s premises to show that they suggest epistemically irrealists conclusions since they accept this implication.[5] I don’t need to convince them, or anyone, that their premises suggest epistemic irrealism, since they realize this.
For those who have reasons to think that some kind of epistemic realism is true, they will see that those reasons imply that epistemic expressivisms and relativisms are false. In my previous chapters, I developed some of these reasons. I argued that the hypothesis that epistemic judgments are, first, either true or false (i.e., cognitivism) is more plausible than its denial (i.e., non-cognitivism) and that, second, that there’s more reason to think that epistemic judgments are sometimes true than never true and, third, that the best candidates for these truth-makers are stance-independent epistemic facts. If these are good reasons, then there are good reasons to regard Gibbard’s and Field’s meta-ethics and meta-epistemologies as false, and their arguments for them as not strong. These reasons for these claims also can provide reasons to think that at least some of their arguments’ premises are false. In this chapter I will look at these arguments and evaluate them.
It’s possible that Gibbard and Field might not have given good positive reasons for their views: perhaps they haven’t offered enough in favor of their position to move a neutral observer. They might provide proposals for how things might be, but not much to think that this is how things are actually in the moral or epistemic realm. This is not a criticism I wish to directly make. This is because that criticism could have been raised to any of the moral irrealists I have discussed, since each position rested on, at least, doubtful arguments and assumptions: positivism for Ayer, motivational “magnetism” and a dubious phenomenology of moral judgments for Stevenson and Mackie, the assumption that moral properties are equally salient for Mackie and Harman, Hare’s assumptions about the value of consistency and rationality, and so on. If, for each theory, we responded merely that inadequate positive reasons were given on its behalf and then left it at that, we wouldn’t have found any positive reasons to reject these positions. I have tried to find positive reasons to reject these positions in terms of their, what many would regard as, false and unjustified implications for meta-epistemological concerns.
In this chapter, I will do attempt to do this for Gibbard and Field’s theories. I will ask what would follow, logically, if this theory of the nature of epistemic and intellectual judgments were true. I will argue that rationally unacceptable consequences follow and, therefore, that their views constitute a false and rationally unacceptable understanding of the nature of epistemic judgment and reasoning itself. Thus, their views about the nature of epistemic judgments ought to be rejected. Since these views about the nature of moral judgments follow from the same considerations, this shows that their meta-ethic ought to be rejected also. Thus, moral and epistemic realisms are again defended from the most direct attacks against them yet.
7.2. Summary of the Arguments Against Classical Moral Irrealism.
Before I turn to Gibbard and Field, I wish to summarize the main strategy of argument I have used against classical moral irrealists. I then note that other philosophers have used a similar strategy against many contemporary moral irrealists. I will then see if a comparable strategy will work against Gibbard’s and Field’s epistemic irrealisms.
For each classical moral irrealist, I have observed that we can understand him, most simply, as arguing that, because moral judgments have certain features, his preferred version of moral irrealism is true. So, although each figure had more reasons than these, we might recall some of the main features of moral judgments that these philosophers focused on: e.g., Ayer observes that moral judgments are neither analytic nor empirically verifiable; Stevenson observes that moral discourse often has a “dynamic,” emotionally-engaging quality and suggests, along with Mackie and Hare, that moral judgments have a motivational “magnetism” about them; Hare claims that moral terms’ meanings are not adequately captured by descriptive theories of meaning; Mackie and Harman observe that there are fundamental moral disagreements; and Harman argues that moral facts do not explain any non-moral facts.
From each of these kinds of premises, each irrealist concludes, either deductively or non-deductively, that moral judgments are never literally true, that moral realism is false. For each of these arguments, however, there were typically unstated premises that are essential to logically link up what we might even concede as true premises stated in the preceding paragraph to the various moral irrealist conclusions. I have suggested that the obvious candidate for this kind of premise is the universal claim that any judgment with these features is never literally true.[6] Combine this premise with the claims above and we can conclude that moral judgments are never true.
However, I have argued that epistemic judgments – judgments about what’s reasonable, justified, known, should or ought to be believed, must be concluded given one’s other beliefs, and so on – have these features identified above also. Clearly, particular epistemic judgments are neither analytic nor empirically verifiable; epistemic discourse often has a “dynamic,” emotionally-engaging quality to it; epistemic terms are not analytically equivalent to empirical terms; and there are fundamental epistemic disagreements. More controversially, I have argued that its plausibleto think that epistemic judgments also have a motivational “magnetism,” that they also do not refer to sui generis terms, and that epistemic facts do not explain any non-moral facts either, especially if it is plausible to accept the analogous claim about moral judgments (although I have stated my doubts about some of these claims about the nature of moral judgments).
If we combine premises that state these features of epistemic judgments with the major, general premises used, or presupposed, in arguments for moral irrealisms, these sets of premises yield comparable epistemic irrealisms on which no epistemic judgments are ever literally true either. This, however, is just a fact about the logic of the arguments for epistemic irrealisms. Those who accept epistemic realism (and think they are justified and doing so) might immediately reject these arguments against moral realism on recognition of this fact, since they believe that these premises yield false conclusions. On standard assumptions about reasoning and argumentation, this might be the proper response: if you see that a proposition that you justifiably believe is false, but that it follows from some principle, then that principle ought to be rejected as false also.
But an important, and interesting, question is whether there is any way we ought to respond to these arguments, as an intellectual matter, once they are understood. Should we accept them? Would anyone be justified in believing that they are sound or unsound, strong or weak? If a moral irrealist rejected my arguments them, must he then, at least, revise his major premises orreject some of my claims about the nature of epistemic judgments so that his beliefs do not validly imply epistemic irrealisms? If he did not, would that somehow be bad or worthy of some kind of criticism or disappointment? To answer any of these questions is to make an epistemic judgment, and epistemic irrealisms have interesting implications here.
Each question above can be answered affirmatively or negatively. Negative answers have a surprising implication. Suppose there are no truths about what’s reasonable or justified or what you ought to believe.[7] If that’s true, then it’s not true that anyone ought to accept moral irrealisms. This result undercuts any epistemic support for moral irrealisms; at least none of the moral irrealists I have discussed have wanted to admit that their views are not reasonable, not justified, and not such that they should be accepted, from an intellectual point of view.[8] All seem to want to maintain that there are such epistemic properties or facts and so that judgments about what has these properties can be literally true. And they maintain that their position about what’s a reasonable view about the nature of moral morality is the reasonable, justified one, not the views of moral realists. Perhaps what they say here is true, and evaluative epistemic judgments are never true, but I have argued that we have good reasons to reject that view. These reasons are stronger than the reasons to think that they, and even moral judgments, are never true.
Positive answers to these epistemic questions about what’s reasonable and justified, however, might undercut the arguments for moral irrealism. Positive answers show that a major premise akin to the above claim that any judgment with these features is never literally true is a false premise: if there are true epistemic evaluations, then it’s neither true nor reasonable to believe that any judgment with these features is never literally true because epistemic judgments have these features and they are literally true. This result undercuts the crucial premise in arguments for moral irrealism.
And suppose the existence of epistemic facts and properties shows a premise like this (that any judgment with these features is never literally true) is false, and false because there is an “epistemic reality” that makes our epistemic judgments true, when they are true. If there is an epistemic reality, i.e., objective facts and properties that make it such that we ought to believe certain things (given our experiences, and context, and so forth) and should reason in other ways, and, especially, if it is reasonable to believe that there is an epistemic reality, then it seems that there can be a moral reality also, i.e., objective facts and properties that make it such that we ought to do some things and not others and some states of affairs are more valuable than others, and so on. If it is reasonable to believe that there are evaluative or normative truths pertaining to belief and one’s mental operations, there is little reason why there are not evaluative or normative truths pertaining to all that morality encompasses (e.g., moral evaluation of actions, states of affairs, characters, motives, and so on).
I am not denying that this epistemic reality is semantically, metaphysically, psychologically and epistemologically mysterious and hard to understand. If, e.g., we epistemically ought to believe what, and only what, we have good evidence for, what makes this the case is, I think, not at all clear. I am only arguing that if we acknowledge, and should acknowledge, such an epistemic reality, then there is no reason to not acknowledge a moral reality also: each is mysterious and hard to understand in similar ways. So if epistemic facts and properties that make epistemic evaluations true are, at least, ontologically, semantically, psychologically and epistemically tolerable, there is little reason to think that moral facts and properties are not tolerable.[9]
I have tried to develop these kinds of objections throughout my discussion of the arguments for the various classical moral irrealisms. I have argued that the main arguments for each position, in their own ways, suggest a rationally unacceptable and irrealistic understanding of the nature of epistemic and intellectual judgments. We have better reason to reject these understandings than accept them. Also, these epistemic irrealisms seem to be self-undermining: they undercut their own epistemic support in terms of it being true that anyone ought to believe it, or is justified in believing it or any other view, including moral irrealisms. If some epistemic irrealist said that her does not undercut its own epistemic support because, e.g., to say that something has support is just to express preferences or desires, we should agree that that might be true, but resist until strong reasons have been given to think that. I suspect that there are no such strong reasons.
I have also sometimes argued that each moral irrealist presupposes a realistic understanding of such epistemic and intellectual judgments that is not easily reconciled with the premises used to argue for moral irrealism. I have tried to force a dilemma: either go irrealist all around (which has unacceptable implications, even from their points of view), or resist my arguments by rejecting the major premises used to defend moral irrealism. This latter response is to reject current arguments for moral irrealism, to concede that they are weak, which, for those who wish to defend moral realism, is an acceptable concession.
7.3. Shafer-Landau on Some Contemporary Moral Irrealisms.
I wish to now note that these kinds of objections have been leveled against many contemporary moral irrealists, like Simon Blackburn, Mark Timmons, and Crispin Wright. Despite their innovations, the position has not been improved in this regard. In a thorough study of the contemporary arguments for moral irrealism, Shafer-Landau has (independently) argued for conclusions very similar to mine. I provide an extended quote from him to illustrate how our strategies and insights are similar. This is not intended as an argument from authority but rather to show that someone else who has thought at length about these issues has argued in similar ways as I have. He writes, specifically in response to arguments for contemporary non-cognitivisms:
The ontological motivations that prompt the development of non-cognitivism should incline the non-cognitivist to be suspicious of all normative claims. If brute normativity is a problem in ethics, it should be a problem anywhere else. And this means the non-cognitivist must either try to [naturalistically] reduce such normative notions as reasons, rationality, legitimacy, justification, relevance, appropriateness, and warrant, or supply a non-cognitivist analysis of them.[10]