Ruling out Helium-Maximizing

Joe Carlsmith asks: is it possible you should maximize helium?  Robust realism per se places no constraints on what the normative truths might end up being.  So, in particular, there's no guarantee that what we objectively ought to do would hold any appeal whatsoever to us, even on ideal reflection -- the objective requirements could be anything!  (Or so you might assume.)

But I think that's not quite right.  Metaphysically, of course, the fundamental normative truths are non-contingent, so they could not really be anything other than what they in fact are. Epistemically, the fundamental normative truths are a priori (if knowable at all), so it's not clear that erroneous views are "possible" in any deep sense.  A somewhat wider range of views may be "possible" in the superficial sense that we don't currently know them to be false, but unless you're a normative skeptic, we can currently know that pain is bad and that maximizing helium is not the ultimate good.

Parsimony in Theories of Welfare

[I ended up cutting the 'simplicity' section from the introductory essay on 'Theories of Welfare' that I'm working on.  But I rather like the following little argument, so thought I'd share it here...]

It's an interesting question which kinds of simplicity have epistemic significance. Should hedonists think it more likely that there are fewer pleasures in the world, since that would entail fewer items of value?  Presumably not. Alternatively, once we have admitted a certain type of thing into our ontology, we may not need to worry too much about how many instances (or “tokens”) of that type exist.

If this latter understanding is correct, then pluralists could likewise argue that we have already admitted the property of being a welfare value into our ontology, so whether we attribute it to just one type of thing or to many types does not ultimately change our ontological commitments. Whatever our theory of welfare, we are all committed to the exact same array of natural and normative properties. We just dispute which natural properties the normative ones are attached to.

Is Objective List Theory "Spooky"?

[I'm currently working on a new introduction to theories of welfare for utilitarianism.net, and am wondering whether to include the following.  Two big questions: Do you agree that "spookiness" worries seem like a common basis (especially amongst students / non-specialists) for rejecting objective list theories?  And if so, do you find the substantive discussion here to be helpful?]

Resistance to objective list theories may sometimes stem from the sense that there is something metaphysically extravagant, disreputable, or “spooky” about the objective values that it posits. But competing theories of welfare are arguably in no better position with regard to such metaethical concerns. Wellbeing is an inherently normative notion: it is that which is worth pursuing for an individual’s sake. (If you are not describing something that matters in this way, then whatever it is that you are giving an account of, it cannot truly be welfare. A thoroughgoing normative skeptic or nihilist must deny that there is any such thing.)^[Expressivists may give an anti-realist gloss on what “mattering” amounts to. But then they can just as comfortably extend this gloss to the kind of first-order “objectivity” posited by objective list theories.]

The Parochialism of Metaethical Naturalism

I've previously suggested that naturalism can't account for substantive boundary disputes (and I mean to turn that into a proper paper sometime soon).  But as I've been working on my Moral 2-Dism paper I've found another sense in which metaethical naturalism entails a troubling kind of parochialism.  It's this: to avoid the Open Question Argument, naturalists now hold that there is an a posteriori identity between certain moral and natural properties (on the model of water and H2O).  This entails that moral terms are 2-D asymmetric, i.e. have differing primary and secondary intensions.  This in turn means that what our moral terms pick out at a world may differ depending on whether we consider the world 'as actual' or 'as counterfactual'. But this is objectionably parochial: (our assessments of) the moral facts should not differ depending on our location in modal space.

Ambiguously Normative Testimony

Suppose that a reliable Oracle tells us that there's a non-natural property shared by most but not all of the things we antecedently believed to be bad (and that no other non-natural property more closely tracks our beliefs about badness).  What's a non-naturalist to do?  Should we conclude that the Oracle is talking about badness, and revise our normative beliefs accordingly?  Or revise our belief in non-naturalism so that no normative revisions are necessary?  Presumably it depends upon the details, i.e. how confident we are in the normative belief that would be revised vs how confident we are in our non-naturalist metaethics.  I'd certainly sooner give up my non-naturalism than believe that torturing animals is okay, for example.  But I think there are at least some cases where it'd be reasonable to revise my moral beliefs instead (e.g. if the alternative view struck me as substantively plausible enough to be a serious contender for being the moral truth of the matter, even if it wasn't what I was antecedently inclined to believe).

In his new paper, 'A Dilemma for Non-Naturalists', Bedke argues that this makes me immoral.  In this blog post I want to establish two things: (1) that some such moral belief revisions can be perfectly reasonable and innocuous, and (2) that the fundamental structure of the 'dilemma' has nothing to do with non-naturalism.  It can be generalized to apply regardless of one's metaethical view.

On Parfit on Knowing What Matters

If I had to pick a "favourite philosopher", it would be Derek Parfit.  His book Reasons and Persons is, in my view, the best there is -- containing striking insights and arguments on every page, and laying the groundwork for basically all subsequent work on the deepest puzzles surrounding consequentialism, personal identity, and population ethics.  So it was a great honour to have him respond to my paper 'Knowing What Matters' in his third volume of On What Matters.  I wish he were still around to be able to continue the conversation further, as I would have liked to prompt him to engage more closely with various claims (that he was instead initially inclined to reject by just re-asserting his antecedent view). Sadly, that's no longer possible.  But I guess I can at least continue my side of the conversation, and perhaps other readers will suggest further comments and responses that could be made on Parfit's behalf.

'Knowing What Matters' argues that Parfit concedes too much to the moral skeptic, and explores how the robust realist might defensibly take a less conciliatory line on moral epistemology.  In particular:

Intelligible Non-Natural Concerns

I've previously argued that -- even by non-naturalist lights -- what matters are various natural properties (e.g. causing pleasure or pain), and the role of the non-natural normative properties is instead to "mark" the significance of these natural properties.

But it's worth flagging that there are exceptions. While I take it that typically what matters are natural features of the world, this is not a universal restriction on what matters. After all, normative properties plausibly have the further normative property of being worthy of philosophical scrutiny. So I do not deny that there may be special cases when it is perfectly reasonable to take an interest in morality de dicto. (Responding to moral uncertainty may be another such case.) My claim was the more modest one that non-naturalism does not commit us to having non-natural properties take center stage in our moral lives.

The special cases where normative properties themselves are of legitimate interest are precisely cases in which it no longer seems perverse or unintelligible to take a special interest in a non-natural property. There's clearly nothing unintelligible about taking a philosophical interest in non-natural properties, after all. (They raise all sorts of interesting questions!) The case of moral uncertainty may be less obvious, so let me discuss that a bit further.

Possibly Wrong Moral Theories

In 'The Normative Irrelevance of the Actual', I explained why it doesn't matter whether a putative counterexample to a moral theory is actual or hypothetical in nature, on the grounds that first-order moral theories can be understood as (implying) a whole raft of conditionals from possible non-moral circumstances to moral verdicts.  But there's another, perhaps more intuitive, way to make the case, based on the idea that some counterfactually superior moral theory should be superior, simpliciter.

Attitudinal Pleasure and Normative Stance-Independence

David Sobel has an interesting post up at the revamped PEA Soup blog on 'Normative Stance Independence and Pleasure'.  He suggests that if pleasure is best understood in attitudinal terms (as per Parfit's hedonic likings) then this undermines Normative Stance Independence, the view that "normative facts are not made true by anyone’s conative or cognitive stance" or "by virtue of their ratification from within any given actual or hypothetical perspective."

But does it?  The distinction between stance-dependence and -independence is a slippery beast.  Even if pleasure could be said to involve "taking a stance" towards a base sensation by liking it, it's not so clear that the stance is what does the heavy lifting in explaining why pleasure is good.  More plausibly, I think, pleasure is good just because of how it feels, objectively speaking.  Again, this normative explanation remains untouched, it seems to me, no matter if the phenomenology of pleasure turns out to be inextricably tied up with the attitude of liking.  It could still be the objective phenomenology, rather than the "stance" per se, that matters.

(In support of this point, I take it that if knowledge, for example, has intrinsic value then this is uncontroversially objective or 'stance-independent' in nature, regardless of the fact that knowledge is (or involves) a cognitive state, and so might be considered part of the agent's "stance" in some sense.  So, why not the same for pleasure?)

The 2-D Argument Against Metaethical Naturalism

A few years back I noted that 2-D semantics provides a straightforward refutation of synthetic metaethical naturalism (SEN):  SEN implies that moral terms differ in their primary and secondary intensions, this is clearly false (moral terms are "semantically neutral", or exhibit 2-D symmetry, in that their application to a world does not vary depending on whether we consider it as actual or as counterfactual), and so SEN must be false.

As I've been developing this argument in my paper 'Moral Symmetry and Two Dimensional Semantics', it occurs to me that 2-D semantics enables an even broader argument against metaethical naturalism.

The Basic Reason to Reject Naturalism: Substantive Boundary Disputes

I've been trying to work out what I think the most basic reason to reject naturalism (about mind and morality) is.  Sometimes it's suggested that normativity is just "too different" from matter to be reducible to it.  (Enoch and Parfit both say things along these lines.)  But that seems a fairly weak reason: plants and stars seem very different from atoms, after all, but that doesn't stop them from being wholly reducible to atoms.  Granted, mind and morality are even more different, being non-concrete and all, but still.  I think the non-naturalist can do better.

Normative vs Metaethical (constitutive) Wrong-making

Melis Erdur, in 'A Moral Argument Against Moral Realism', asks "whether it makes moral sense to take the dictates of some independent reality to be the ultimate reason why genocide is wrong." (p.7) She continues:

[S]urely, the existence of an independently issued verdict – if there were such a verdict – that genocide is wrong would not be the main or ultimate reason why it is wrong. Genocide is wrong mainly and ultimately because of the pain and suffering and loss that it involves – regardless of whether or not the badness of such suffering and loss is confirmed by an independent reality.

It's a mistake to think that moral realism implies that possession of the mind-independent property of moral wrongness is the "ultimate reason why" an act is wrong, in the ordinary (normative) sense of "reason why".  It's a common mistake, though.  Matt Bedke writes something similar (though I gather from correspondence that he doesn't really intend it to be read this way) in 'A Menagerie of Duties?': "Is it because they are causing [...] pain that the action normatively matters in the way it does, or because there is some non-natural property or relation at play? Surely the former." (p.197)

Self-Undermining Skepticisms

Radical skepticism has a curious tendency to undermine itself:  If you can know (or justifiably believe) nothing at all, then you cannot know (or justifiably believe) even that.  So it seems that one cannot coherently take oneself to be incapable of forming justified beliefs.

More limited forms of skepticism might hope to avoid this fate. But it can prove difficult to halt the slide once you've started down that route.  Consider Sharon Street's epistemic argument against moral realism, which we might reconstruct as follows:

Cancelling Schroeder's "Implicature" Response to Parfit's Trivality Objection

According to Parfit's Triviality Objection, metaethical naturalism can't adequately capture our ability to make substantive positive normative claims.  For example, suppose a subjectivist naturalist wants to hold both:

Normative Subjectivism: You have reasons for action just when that act would fulfill one of your desires; and

Reductive Thesis: What it is to have a reason for action just is for that action to be such as to fulfill one of your desires.

Parfit responds that, if the Reductive Thesis were true, Normative Subjectivism could no longer state a positive substantive normative fact, since it would not be attributing any further normative property to acts that fulfill one of your desires.  It would just be to re-attribute that same property under another guise, and so the only real normative fact in the vicinity would be the negative one that there is no further normative property of being a reason that acts may have when they have the property of being such as to fulfill your desires (or whatever).

Schroeder responds, in 'What Matters about Metaethics' (forthcoming, pp.7-8), that on his view positive normative claims are still possible because the attribution of reasons pragmatically implicates that the reasons in question are relatively weighty ones.  And the property of being a weighty reason is a further normative property, just as Parfit asked for.

I have a couple of worries about this response.  Firstly, Schroeder is relying on pragmatic implicatures from normative claims in order to explain their status as positive substantive normative claims, but implicature is cancellable.  So consider the following putatively positive substantive normative claim:

Information and Parfit's Fact Stating Argument

In Chapter 26 of On What Matters (vol 2), Parfit sets out his (comparatively neglected) 'Fact-Stating Argument' against non-analytical moral naturalism.  This begins by distinguishing the referential and informational senses of "same fact".  Consider the following three claims:

(J) Shakespeare is Shakespeare
(K) Shakespeare and the writer of Hamlet are one and the same person.
(L) Shakespeare wrote Hamlet.

Parfit explains:

In the referential sense, (J) and (K) state the same fact, since both claims refer to Shakespeare and tell us that Shakespeare has the property of being numerically identical to himself.  In the informational sense, however, (J) and (K) state different facts. Unlike (J), (K) refers to Shakespeare in a way that also tells us that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. In the informational sense, it is (K) and (L) that state the same fact.

Parfit then goes on to consider the moral naturalist's thesis:

(Q) moral rightness is the same as some particular natural property

Normative Concepts

How do we get to have normative concepts?  What does it take for a concept to be the concept of ought, or of good, say?

It seems neither necessary nor sufficient that one be disposed to apply the concept to just the things that are actually good. On the one hand, you could be mistaken about what things are good whilst still possessing the concept.  On the other hand, you could have a non-normative concept which picks out the good items under some other, non-normative guise. (Suppose hedonism is true: the concept pleasure then picks out all the good things, but that doesn't make it the concept good.)

Fittingness and Normativity

My old post on 'Reasons-Talk and Fitting Attitudes' [along with my PQ paper] sets out the basic case for taking fittingness (or fitting reasons, in contrast to either value or value-based reasons) as our sole normative primitive.  My follow-up post on  state-given "reasons" explains how the fittingness view accommodates the datum that it's more important to (say) prevent the world from exploding than it is to possess fitting attitudes.  This importance claim is itself a first-order normative claim that can be understood in terms of fitting attitudes: it's appropriate to prefer, and to care more about, saving the world over having true beliefs (say).

So that addresses one kind of worry that one might have about the normative force of fittingness claims. However, Helen recently drew my attention to another interesting worry in this vein.  One might worry that fittingness relations themselves are too "thin", "weak", or lacking in normative "substance" or force.  That's fine for the normativity of beliefs and other attitudes, since getting those "right" isn't all that big a deal.  But to account for the sheer atrociousness of gratuitous torture, say, using the same kind of metaphysical relation that accounts for the inappropriateness of believing grass to be purple, just seems awfully weak and unsatisfying.

Non-Normative Epistemology?

I've previously cited epistemic nihilism as an example of an intellectual black hole -- a view that rational agents must reject in order to preserve their capacity for rationality.  But the normative nihilist might seek to avoid this implication by offering up a non-normative account of rationality (and epistemology more broadly). One could just stipulate a certain extensional account of "rationality" -- perhaps consisting in conformity to norms of parsimony, logical validity, certain inductive/abductive norms, etc. -- without requiring these norms to be backed by irreducibly normative properties, or to give rise to categorical "oughts".  This modest nihilist says, in effect, "Here are my recommendations if you wish to join me in the game of truth-seeking.  But if truth is not your goal, I have no grounds on which to criticize you."

My main concern about this move is that it isn't clear how the nihilist can consistently regard her own preferred epistemic norms as more truth-conducive than any others (at least so far as non-deductive norms are concerned). I've previously noted that anti-skepticism requires us to regard some possible worlds as (a priori) objectively more likely than others, and that to explain rational induction (e.g. the projectability of "green" but not "grue") requires positing objective structure (something empiricist-inclined nihilists may also regard as unacceptably mysterious or metaphysically "queer"). If all possible epistemic norms are metaphysically on a par, as the epistemic nihilist seems committed to, then why regard any particular set of norms as more likely to lead to truth than any other?

The Moral Relevance of Non-Natural Properties

I've been thinking about the "ethical idlers" objection to non-naturalism recently, especially in light of Matt Bedke's really interesting forthcoming paper “A Menagerie of Duties?: Normative Judgments are not Beliefs about Non-Natural Properties”.  As Bedke introduces the problem:

What things are like non-naturally is not relevant to our normative judgments in the way we would expect them to be if such judgments were beliefs about those sorts of properties. Non-natural properties would belong to a menagerie of curiosities if we could map and catalog them, but our deepest normative convictions do not hang on how they are arranged.

The Argument from Intelligibility for Moral Realism

I've previously suggested that the non-contingency of moral realism can help to undermine parsimony-based objections to the view.  I'm now wondering whether it can further help us to provide a positive argument in favour of the view.  Consider:

P1. Moral realism is intelligible -- even Mackie grants that moral claims are “not meaningless but false.”
P2. To be truly meaningful, there must be some (metaphysically) possible property (whether or not it is actually instantiated) that moral claims are about.
C1: So, moral properties are metaphysically possible (and some fundamental moral claims are possibly true).
P3: Fundamental moral claims are non-contingent: they are necessarily true if actually true, and necessarily false if actually false.
C2: So some moral claims are actually true. There are actually instantiated moral properties.

I'm guessing that P2 will be the most controversial premise here.  But it seems at least prima facie plausible to me.  Can you suggest any obvious counterexamples?  Or other considerations that might count either for or against this key premise?

Also, has an argument along these lines been proposed before?  References welcome!