Lance Independent provides a remarkably clear taxonomy of moral anti-realism that bridges the gap between abstract metaethics and psychological reality. It is a rare piece of intellectual communication that prioritizes conceptual precision over academic pretension.
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Discussing metaethicsAdded:
for joining me this evening.
>> Hey, how's it going?
>> Good, good. I was trying to give you a proper introduction and what I was warming up to is I was describing your academic credentials which I I think you could describe better than I could. Uh, but then I think what I was gonna what I was warming up to saying but didn't get to is I have a strong suspicion that if people have heard the phrase stance dependent or moral anti-realism used in like YouTube philosophy circles, that's probably your fault. Is that a fair assessment?
>> There's a good chance that I've contributed to that, but I the term did not originate with me. It does come from the academic literature.
>> Yeah. So, um I I I was talking up your academic record, but maybe you could give yourself a uh more specific introduction about your work and what you do and where people can find you.
>> Yeah, sure. Okay. Well, as far as where people could find me, uh I have a YouTube channel called Lance Independent. I also have a blog called Lance Independent. You could check those out. Uh if you go over to my YouTube channel, you'll see links everywhere that will take you to all my stuff like my academic page and that that sort of thing. So, you can see all that stuff.
As far as academic background, um I am both a philosopher and a psychologist.
So I have a background in both disciplines. I did a bachelor's in both philosophy and psychology. Actually independent of each other. I have two separate bachelor's degrees. I don't recommend people do that. I just had a lot of credits. I was taking a lot of random courses. Um and that's a it's a long story how that happened, but I was kind of bouncing back and forth. Uh then I did a masterers in philosophy and then after that I did a PhD in psychology.
But I should say the PhD in psychology, um, you know, part of the reason that I was accepted to the program that I was in and work with the adviser that I did is because he was looking for somebody that had a more interdisciplinary approach and background. And my dissertation and the research that I do uh broadly falls within what's called um experimental philosophy which essentially uses the tools of the social sciences to address traditionally philosophical questions often by trying to figure out how non- philosophers or people that don't have formal training in philosophy think about philosophical issues. Uh and there are a number of reasons why you might want to do this.
This is often used to challenge philosophical methods. Sometimes it's just out of pure interest. Sometimes it's used to inform philosophical theories.
um to to a greater or lesser extent. So that's kind of the area that I work in.
And my primary area of research uh in psychology is specifically experimental metaeththics with the the primary question being are non- philosophers again people that are not formally trained in philosophy are they moral realists? Are they anti-realists? How do they think about these things? How do they speak about these things? How how to the extent that they have one of these views does it influence their behavior? That sort of thing. Uh so that's the main question that I look at and my dissertation work was basically a super extensive critique of virtually all of the existing empirical literature that tries to address that question and I take a very pessimistic outlook on that that research as I do towards philosophy and psychology more generally. So uh people people that are familiar with my work they'll know that I pretty much only criticize and that can often be unsatisfying for people.
I've just had people today telling me, "We really want to see some positive theories from you instead of trying to tear everybody else down. Why don't you tell us what you think is up?" So, maybe I'll start trying to do that today.
>> Yeah. Well, that's always the um that that's always a I don't want to I don't want to use the dreaded word postmodern, but in the in the realm of deconstruction, that's always the metacriticism, right? Is that it is it is on some level incredibly difficult to build a theory that withstands criticism. And criticizing a theory has a certain amount of like I would I would I I won't use the word rhetorical, but it has like a structural advantage, right? Where you because you're trying to find the holes. That's that is a little bit I don't want to say easier, but it it gives you I I do think it's different than trying to build a whole theory up from ground one. But of course, the problem with building a whole theory up from ground one is that you uh could very well be wrong and that's why people get to poke holes in it. hoods. It's kind of fair. It's kind of fair play at the end of the day. Um well, as for me, Lance, I'm a lawyer by profession and training. Uh this is mainly, I would say, a law, politics, debate channel. And um philosophy is not the meat and potatoes or the dessert.
It's the vegetables. So, I I'm trying to I try to work a lot of philosophy into the channel, but it's not my um it's not the hallmark of the channel. and I have a philosophy undergraduate degree, but I, you know, and I'm I'm a enthusiast, but don't have uh don't have advanced credentials in it. So, um, and we talked about this a little bit in our chat, but I I think that one of the things I'd like to do is try to, um, and by the way, for your chatters, but it's very cool that I love how Streamyard does this where we can co-stream, so I can see your chatters. That's very cool. So, welcome chatters to the natural law environment. It's good to see everybody chatting together. um for people on your side, some of the definitional like groundwork I'd like to lay might be hyper redundant and uh I apologize in advance for that, but I don't think I've actually done this on my channel. So, I think it's useful to just like do some really core definitional work to make sure people know what we're talking about before we leap into moral anti-realism versus moral realism.
Otherwise, it's it's going to be um a little jargony is I think the feedback I've gotten that like it doesn't actually it it doesn't actually advance the ball for someone who's not spending a lot of time reading into this area.
>> So, c can I start you with some like kind of leading questions and maybe just pick your brain on stuff. Um >> all right. So, let's start like huge huge meta question like what do you think philosophy is for and why do you engage in it?
>> Yeah. So I think that philosophy is kind of the theoretical stitching which holds all other areas of inquiry together and provides a cohesive story, narrative, grounding, justification. It does a lot of the the work of gal cells in the brain. I don't know if people know about neurons and gal cells, but they have this they have this big structural role.
So it can help build bridges between the sciences. It could help build uh connections between the sciences and the humanities. And you know how is the the phrasing I I heard somebody put it like basically how everything hangs together fundamentally that that I see as a significant role for philosophy. Another role I I see it as doing is conceptual ground clearing. So you know before you could plant a nice farm with neat little rows of of plants, you got to you got to get dig those rocks out. You got to make sure you got good soil. You got to till the soil. So you got to do I'm not a farmer but there's a lot of prep work you got to do. Maybe some farmer will correct me on what what exactly you have to do.
>> But I see philosophy as tackling big questions that we have where we're not quite sure how to get how how to make it tractable, how to get a handle on it and really address it. And the analogy would be before you could plant your seeds, you've got to clear the ground uh and make sure that you know everything is is set up. And philosophy can help clarify the categories, distinctions, and concepts. It can sort of set the stage for well, what are these problems that we're trying to answer? And one of the things that can happen is when it makes certain conceptual grounds sufficiently clear, it can often pass the baton over to the sciences for them to handle it.
What's interesting though is that it looks like a lot of that spinning off has already been done. And now the question uh might be okay what about the remainder the the are there any questions that remain outside the scope of the sciences and that's an ongoing battle in philosophy. So you are going to have naturalistically inclined philosophers that basically think no not really it's really just continuous with the sciences and ones that are going to say no there's this autonomous stuff that philosophy is there to do and a lot of them a lot of philosophers would want to more or less define philosophy in terms of its central tasks being that set of of fundamental questions that fall outside the scope of the sciences.
That's not my approach. I'm more in line with the naturalists dispositionally in seeing philosophy fundamentally as working as a sort of auxiliary role alongside the sciences. Yeah, it's it's a it's an interesting question to ask someone like you because of your approach, but also because at least from my layman's perspective as in philosophy, there is like a bit of a a split, right, where if you look at like the the Hume Kant developments, there was prior to them, you know, there was a sense that if you asked a philosopher, why are you doing philosophy? they would quickly answer something that would probably be more similar to my answer which is like to find out what's true right that that might have been the answer and but then there was a movement in analytic philosophy that started saying well actually is it can we ever resolve metaphysics is that really a question that philosophy is ever going to get to the bottom of one way or the other like are we ever going to be able to tell whether or not we prove that we're able to get out of our heads or should we just get do a contant sufficient reason sort of analysis this this sort of thing and I think the there people answer that question differently today depending what school of philosophy they have like and I don't want to put words in your mouth but what I'm hearing from you is that you almost view philosophy as a tool to clear the ground and engage in almost like a quietism where you're you're kind of making it so that like bad ideas are no longer interfering with um potential areas for progressing knowledge that sort of Yeah. So, I I very much see myself as working within the quietest tradition, but I'm not just a quietist. I do tend to lean in practice into the quietistic elements, but maybe that's just because the excesses of what I consider to be bad philosophy loom large in my mind and I want to tackle them.
>> Uh, but I'm also a pragmatist and so I'm both a pragmatist and a quietist. And if somebody if somebody said, "Okay, what's philosophy for?" Give you a little soundbite. I wouldn't say it's to figure out what's true. I'd say it's to figure out what to do. Uh, and in a certain sense that actually hearkens back to a more traditional view of the way that the maybe the Greeks thought of philosophy, which is more about living the good life and that sort of thing. I wouldn't view it quite the same way as them, but you know this there are, you know, Vickenstein himself um said something like he said, "My father was a businessman and I want philosophy to be business-like. I wanted to get something settled. I wanted to get something done." And so I see quietism and pragmatism working hand inand very synergistically in in my conception of things at least.
>> And the reason I wanted to ask you that question is just to not give uh the uh spoiler alert but I am reasonably confident that as we dive into the positions Lance and I are going to disagree about everything. Like I think we have fundamental disagreements on basically every level of the topics we're going to discuss tonight, which is a challenge for me because I've talked with philosophers on stream before, but not one who really disagreed with me.
Um, which is it's I'm actually been looking forward to this conversation for that reason. But it's I asked the question because I thought it was interesting to think about like I think our view of our kind of like different takes on what philosophy even is are also representative of some of our disagreements that we're going to get into down the road which I you know I I think that does it does make sense right there. Some of it's just kind of your worldview and the way you you view what this these explorations are for. Um so because this is important because I'm a lawyer and I I will get accused of this um or I get accused of this. I hope I don't get accused of this conversation.
What is the difference between philosophy and rhetoric and what are they each for?
>> Huh?
Well, I see I see rhetoric not as I mean you could treat rhetoric as a discipline. You could treat it as like the study of how to use rhetoric, but ultimately rhetoric I see as tools and strategies of persuasion or achieving one's conversational goals. U I don't philosophy strikes me as more open-ended. I guess someone that's doing philosophy could be a rhetoric or and they certainly do employ rhetoric here and there. Uh but philosophy is more open-ended in its goals. I mean, one of the things about philosophy is that it's it's it isn't or at least I would say shouldn't be dogmatic in terms of what it is. It it is itself. So different people have different conceptions about what philosophy is.
And I don't know that any of them are in a position to stipulate definitively here's what philosophy is. anybody that has a different conception is wrong. Uh so, you know, one of the things about it that I think is is interesting and cool and part of part of the reason I still like it even though I have misgivings about contemporary analytic philosophy is that one of the things it it fosters is an attitude of critical reflection on everything including all of your assumptions and what the very practices you're doing. Should you be doing them?
Why should you be doing them? And a lot of other disciplines uh you know take certain assumptions on board from the outset and then work within a particular network of assumptions that that narrow what you're doing. Now that has its value. Uh you know biologists are not going to get very far if they can't agree on what cells are or whether they exist. Uh so you know philosophy has that sort of question all the way down to the roots kind of vibe to it. And as long as you're preserving that I think I think that you're you're still capturing what philosophy is about. But I think different people are going to adopt more narrow conceptions of what it is and what it's for.
>> Well, it's a really it's a topic that's on my mind a lot because a I'm I'm a lawyer, right? So like law law is a weird mixed discipline where we do do rigorous academic style work and that's that's when you're developing a case theory, this sort of thing. But we also are writing briefs to persuade. I want the judge to agree with me and not the other guy, right? And when I'm in court, my job is for my client to win. So it would be like very bad form of me to show up and say like, "Oh, I'm I'm only doing analysis today. I'm not going to try to do anything that's convincing."
So there's certainly a lot of rhetoric in the profession as well. It's kind of a mix of um I would say it's like a mix of academia, public speaking, and theater camp.
That's kind of how law actually plays out. So it's um and doing philosophy on YouTube is to me a little bit the same because there's a there's certainly analysis and there's deep thought and there's deep conversations but there's also you know you're on YouTube you're posting videos are people watching your videos how are people you know how's the channel doing how's the channel growing and let's be honest YouTube rewards a performative element for sure like you know so there's a it's an interesting thing I think to do philosophy in the public space rather than in the academic space because you know what we're trying to do ultimately is speak to lay people more often than speak to philosophy professionals and that is inherently different. Um I don't know if that's influenced your approach to your blogging or your channels or how you view your work in terms of um you know kind of like doing philosophy for the people instead of doing philosophy purely for academia.
Yeah, I'm sure it has influenced me. Um, I don't I think that my disposition uh on online is a pretty organic representation of what I am like when I'm not online. And so I may be uniquely insulated against the degree of influence that being in like doing philosophy in public >> may have on other people. Uh I I don't want to hazard to say that people are are necessarily performative to to a questionable extent. Uh but uh certainly when like philosophy isn't typically done to quite the same extent in the spoken format in formal settings because as as you I'm sure you know it typically proceeds through academic journal publications and to some extent books.
But I will say there is uh there is a lot of room for talks and conferences.
So philosophers do gather and socialize and and give talks at conferences, but they definitely do have a different vibe than the online discourse. So if you ever go to a philosophy conference, they frequently give handouts. It's a it's a little old school, but like I go to psychology conferences, they don't really do that. Uh philosophy conferences, they get little handouts.
>> And uh it's it's a different kind of scene than the online scene. And if if you do the sort of thing I do, I don't you know some people that do philosophy online have uh scripted content and they it's like really high quality stuff and it's really great. Um like so there's people that do that sort of thing. And then there's also people that sort of get in the debate trenches and argue with anybody. They'll go on a live stream. They'll you know I've been in I've been in all the the recesses of the debate places in the internet where you could run into a random person that starts screaming at you or or using a bunch of profanity or whatever. Um, and when you do that, uh, to be able to handle that and perform effectively, see, I'm even using the term perform, it does require a different mindset. And, uh, I have had to adapt the way that I speak in the way that I think, >> um, in those contexts to be strategic.
And I will say, um, like the ability to think on your feet, the ability to quip uh, effectively and persuasively uh, can really help you a lot. and uh the ability to to track what someone's saying and not get lost like you you can end up misinterpreting somebody and running with that for too long. That could be a problem. This happened in one of my um recent debates where I kind of lost uh track of something and made some errors that I only saw on reviewing the discussion. It was a little frustrating and incidentally u that person is also a lawyer I or at least a professor of law.
I'm assuming they're a lawyer. Um so there is a lot of >> Oh, which debate was that?
>> Uh with David Enoch. Oh, I didn't know David Enoch was a lawyer. I I I I didn't know that. That's interesting.
>> Well, he's a professor of law. I don't know exactly. I'd never checked his credentials.
>> Yeah, that's that's interesting. Well, so I I find this and I know this is like kind of the warm-up to the topic, but I find this fascinating because and maybe this is an area of common ground between the two of us because like in law, for example, if you want to see the professors with the highest level of credential argue about living constitutionalism versus constitutional originalism. Every law school hosts these debates. They are incredibly white glove affairs. Each person talks for half an hour and then they pass. There's no blood sports at all. Um, and they're if you're if you're a nerd about it like I am, they're delightful. And if you really care about it, you can listen to Supreme Court oral arguments. They're free, right? But here's the thing. No one does except for people who are super nerdy in the field, right? So in it was an interesting thing for me in choosing to do a YouTube channel versus choosing to like spend time and like for example try to be pick up teaching at a law school or pick up some CL like I there was a fork in the road and what was it about for me and ultimately I wanted to spend time developing concepts and yes persuading people to my way of thinking in the public sphere rather than the academic sphere. But that does influence the way that you talk and the way that you think. And I I think you said like the way you quip and the way you process like because there's a balance there.
Like I you want to present the ideas in a way that is still defensible and that if someone was following it, it would lead them to the fully developed idea eventually. But you still but you have to present it in a way that is streamlined and simplified while not being incorrect which is I think actually quite I'm finding it rewarding because it's so challenging.
It's very very hard to create like a meme or a quip that is something you're happy to defend later and is still catchy and still gets people interested, right? Like it's much easier for me to write a 15-page paper because I I can take I can take all the time I want. The problem is if I write the 15-page paper, no one's going to read it.
>> Yeah, that is that is one of the weird paradoxes which is that some of the most respected and and like published and distinguished philosophers are publishing articles where only academics read it or very few other people read it. Uh whereas you know you could have a blog where you get thousands of views uh on your uh you know whatever it is that you write or a YouTube channel where you get just an insane amount of views. Uh you know somebody that has just tens of thousands of views is Kane B uh a uh he was a philosophy graduate student at the time and and finished his PhD. He's got one of the the bigger YouTube uh philosophy channels, but he's not prominent within academia, which is interesting because more people have heard what he has to say than they've heard uh you know what some of the most famous and distinguished philosophers have to say.
>> Exact. It's very interesting. Or even like um you know Thomas Nagel's like what is it like to be a bat, right? Like it's it's a very good paper. Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking it. I'm an NYU guy. I'm gonna I'm gonna stand Nagel whenever asked. But um part of the reason that everyone's read it is it's very catchy.
>> Like it's con it's conceptually gripping. It's not dry at all. And um you know and that's the one that he's known for. It's not like it's his only piece of work. But there's there's an interesting balancing act there especially because and this is kind of segueing into our main topic. I think that like in the realm of metaeththics you have a point of view that you are trying to persuade people is a good point of view. Right?
So there it's it's there is like both an academic goal but also there is a rhetorical goal like you you would like people to believe that moral anti-realism is a good worldview.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. Okay. Um so let's segue into that then like what so we're going to be talking about metaeththics. H how do you differentiate metaeththics from ethics?
>> Yeah. So, you know, one thing to keep in mind about these categories, or at least my perspective on the categories, is that they're not they're not like analytic or these conceptually distinct categories that are true independent of us. I see them more as conventions that we've opted to split things up in a certain sort of way. And people sometimes challenge the porousness of the boundaries between metaeththics and other areas of ethics and that sort of thing. And so that's just something to keep in mind is that this is I see this largely as a constructive process uh rather than it being like we've discovered metaeththics is is distinct.
But in any case uh what meta ethics is is it deals with the most abstract and fundamental questions about the nature of morality. So it deals with questions about what is morality even about what is morality? Are there are there moral truths and if so what is their nature?
Um, and one of the things that happens when you deal with something that's super abstract and fundamental like that is that metaeththics ends up spanning and being influenced by it, there's like a a tributaries from pretty much every major area of philosophy. Uh, primarily epistemology, philosophy of language and metaphysics. Um, but you know that already covers the two other major areas besides ethics. Both feed directly into it. And then there's a big there's a big dose due to the way 20th century meta ethics panned out of philosophy of language in there uh, as well. But, you know, my approach touches heavily on psychology. One of those prominent um literatures over the the past uh decade or so has been evolutionary debunking arguments. So, uh often one of the things I've been critical of is that people talking in that space often don't actually know that much about evolution.
Um so, it can it can touch on the sciences. uh it just it it brings in a lot of stuff but really it's asking those fundamental questions whereas normative and and applied ethics are dealing with questions like okay set aside those more fundamental questions what is the correct normative moral theory that what are the correct set of principles guidelines standards or more foundational bases for determining what is right or wrong or good or bad and then applied ethics says okay given one of these theories deontology consequentialism something like that how do we apply it in this case how do we apply it in that case you know like how do we apply it to the instances of abortion. How do we apply it to instances of euthanasia? That sort of thing. Um so that's typically the division. It's a tripartate division.
One is really concrete. It's applied ethics. One is intermediary. That's normative ethics. And then the more abstract one is meta ethics.
>> And and I should have done this before I asked you the substantive question, but I'm going to do it now because I'm a terrible host. Uh chatters, if you have questions for Lance or questions for me, feel free to put them in chat. I will star them or pin them. or if you feel like donating, they will obviously get starred and pinned. I'm not going to interrupt me and Lance to read them on the fly every time, but I will find times to read them. Um, so fe please feel free to put your your stuff in chat if you have questions or comments. We are delighted to get you involved in the conversation. And with that in mind, Lance, I know you um I don't want to talk about your uh personal information online unless you do unless you share that information publicly, but I have reason to believe that you would probably not want to be online all night. So, if we go for like two hours, is that uh like a reasonable >> I'll Yeah, I'll go until I'm too tired.
Uh I can I can handle um you know, people on my channel know that I just had a daughter, so I've been >> Okay. I'd want to say >> very very uh sleep deprived before, so I'm I'm pretty used to it. Uh and I've got a good bank of good sleep the past couple days, so I'm okay.
>> There you go. Well, this is the thing.
It it gets easier and then it gets harder and then it gets it's it's uh it's all cycles, but yeah. Um it's congratulations, by the way. That's really wonderful. Um, okay. So, please do get your questions and comments in.
So, uh, you are an anti-realist and I think if I if I these definitions get really slippery really fast. So, I think we're going to have to like play with them a little bit and then um maybe just assume it while noting some dis that there's some potential disagreements, but uh just so that we can have a functional conversation. But to be you're an anti-realist certainly about metaeththics and I think you're also an anti-realist about u normative values.
Is that also correct?
>> That's right. Yeah. So normative anti-realism.
>> Okay. So can you maybe explain like what do you mean by being an anti-realist and how does that apply to both you know morality and also to normative values?
>> Sure. So, the first thing to clear up because this this has been coming up a lot lately is that anti-realism is not the view that morality isn't real. Now, an anti-realist could think morality isn't real, but that's not like what it's not by definition what the position is. So, realism and anti-realism, those those labels are misleading. It's not really about whether morality is real or not because an anti-realist could have a a disagreement about whether or not the sense in which realists think morality is real is the only sense in which they could be real. Anyway, so setting that aside, what is it? Well, anti-realism doesn't really make sense unless you define it in contrast to realism. Kind of the way if somebody said, "Well, what is atheism?" You got to talk about theism. Yeah. So, I got to talk about what moral realism is. So, moral realism, uh, you know, different people have used different definitions over the past few decades. But the one in the contemporary metaeththics literature uh, that people seem to be converging on is framed in these terms. Typically, it's it's framed as the position that there are stance independent moral facts. So, there are these facts and they're stance independently true. So, there's these truths that their truth does not depend on stances. So, what does that mean?
>> Yeah. C can I ask you two quick questions there and I just because I think this is very this is going to get rich very fast. So, the first question is there are these truths meaning there are at least one.
>> There's at least one.
>> Yeah. Because I think one misconception I often hear is that moral realists are committed to believing that everything is a stance independent moral truth which I don't think is entailed by the position. And then no what is a stance because you say it's a stance dependent.
So what is a stance?
>> Yeah. So this is this is the thing about that. I don't think there's been a whole lot of philosophical discussion in the literature about what exactly a stance is. So that term stance independent I'll say a little bit about where I understand it comes from because it's its origins are a little murky. So where I've traced it back to is uh it was it started to be used as far as I could tell by Russ Schaefer Landau. He's a prominent non-naturalist moral realist.
Um and uh he was using this term back in the 1990s in some of his work. And I traced it back to some earlier work that I think he he drew it from. Uh and then the the the trail ran cold for me. I didn't really keep pursuing. I wasn't going to be like I'm not a historian of meta ethics. Uh so there are probably historians of meta ethics that know more than me. But that term um I've started to use it and I believe other people started to use it uh in lie of other similar terms that often are used interchangeably or very similarly. Some other terms people use for the position moral realism uh in terms of defining it. Um these days people say it's the view that they're stance independent moral truths but in the past and still today some people say mind independent moral truths some people say objective moral truths. And uh Mike Humer who might be the most popular uh contemporary moral realist uses the term observer independent. And so already you could see that um unlike some of the sciences where people more or less go all right here's we're going to settle on this terminology. This is what this is called. U philosophers haven't done this. Philosophers often uh argue about what the terminology itself ought to be or they just use kind of proprietary terminology. I know that's complicating things, but unfortunately the reality is it's kind of a terminological mess and nobody's really consistent. Um, so that already is going to be a problem. Um, so in any case, what is a stance? Uh, I have my own view on what a stance is.
Other people might have a different view. What I take a stance to be is any real or actual standpoint or vantage from which one could in principle evaluate a normative standard. And the reason I say real or hypothetical is that I don't want to give the impression that stances must be construed in psychological terms. So, you know, I have stances on things like I like I'm drinking tea. I like tea. Now, that's a psychological fact about me. But I also think that you could talk about what is morally right or wrong relative to the stance of say the Bible. Now, the Bible doesn't have a state of mind. The Bible is is not a physical sorry it's the Bible is not like a mental uh entity.
It's it may represent the mental states of some entity but it's not it it's not itself uh an entity. You could even like have chatbt spit out a set of rules and in principle you could ask is this action consistent with a set of rules CHPT just spit out random rules or not.
Uh and so I take a stance to be just any evaluative standard regardless of whether it's actually held by anybody or not. That's how I use the term. Other people may use the term differently. I don't know if that clarifies or adequately.
>> Yeah. And I I I think it does, but I think I just want to drill on it a little bit because it it is I I was struck by the same thing when getting into like the moral realism versus anti-realism because typically people online spend more time arguing about objective versus subjective. But the zeitgeist is switching a little bit and realism versus anti-realism is becoming a little bit more popular. And this phrase stance is somewhat nebulous I think as you you well described. Um I I I the way I think of it and maybe this is overly simplified is it would be like essentially a set of standards, values or preferences, right? Like and um and candidly values and standards might boil down to preferences. Like I might I might if I was gonna if I was going to try to do this in one word, I think the word I would pick is preferences because there's you know like I don't think well let me put this let me maybe I can tease this out. Maybe this is a better way of asking on your on your view as an anti-realist. There are there is no way for a stance to be stance independently wrong.
Like a stance couldn't be wrong except in the light of another stance.
Uh if you mean something like like a person has a preference. Yeah. I don't think preferences could be incorrect.
>> Yeah. So like for example, if someone said uh you know like if we're lost and you know someone says like it would be really good if we had a compass. It's like well that's it's good because you have expressed a preference for not being lost anymore. But if I would prefer to stay lost then I actually might disagree about the compass thing.
And there's no way to unpack preferring to be lost or preferring not to be lost on moral anti-realism except in light of other stances, right? So it's not like it's not like being lost or being not lost. One is independently a better stance than the other.
>> Yeah. You're not going to have any any privileged stances uh with with a caveat that certain kinds of anti-realism will privilege some stances and these would be constructivist positions. So unfortunately things do get a little bit complicated. Uh so there are non-relativist stance dependent accounts which will say that there's like a correct uh you could kind of put it as they some anti-realist views would say that there's a correct stance to take.
>> Yeah.
>> Some of them would do. I don't think that but some of them hold that view.
>> I I was curious to ask you about this because I think this bleeds into the normative anti-realism a little bit.
Right. Because if you if you're a norm because I could imagine I've never spoken to one, but I could imagine someone who says that they're a normative realist and a moral anti-realist and they would say something like uh and just give you chat because I know these are not terminology you guys hear me saying all the time. A normative realist would say something like one ought hold beliefs that are better supported by the argument and evidence, right? and well something along the lines of like uh you know one ought not uh act in a way that is logically inconsistent. So if you if your argument is disproven, you ought abandon it. You know like things like that that are not necessarily moral but are more about like the way that you interact with others and interact in discussions. Um but you're you are an anti-realist about those as well, right?
>> Yes. But just to be clear, those would be specifically epistemic. And you might want to distinguish those from logical norms. So a normative realist would just be somebody that is a realist about at least one normative fact. Uh regardless of what domain it it's in. Uh but uh as far as being a normative realist or anti-realist, normativity just refers to the entire sort of supercategory. Um think of it like a mammals versus specific species, right? So, a moral anti-realist would be like somebody that doesn't believe specifically in one type of animal. A normative anti-realist would be somebody that like rejects all mammals. Yeah, that would that would be a a closer analogy. But a person could believe in some mammals and not other mammals. And then it's each one could somebody could believe in bears but not tigers or they could believe in tigers but not bears. So, it could quickly get very complicated. the domains you referenced would be epistemic norms and those would be norms related to knowledge and justification and then norms in logic which I don't know if someone would want to include those within epistemic norms or not but there are other normative domains uh there there are like credential norms um which are like norms about what would be practical or serve the your self-interest like uh it would violate credential norms to like touch a hot stove and burn yourself without a good reason uh is that immoral it doesn't seem like that would be immoral I think by most people's It's it's not like an epistemic. It's not like a norm about related to knowledge.
It's just that's kind of a goofy thing to do. Uh examples I like to give is that um you know it's it's it's not prudent to jump out of a plane without an airplane. It's not prudent to try climbing a mountain without securing your your climbing equipment like your harnesses and whatever. Um and so there there are normative questions in those domains. There's like good and bad ways to tie a knot. There's good and bad ways to oh there's uh gastronomic norms or culinary norms. So there's norms about good and bad food. Uh so uh there's and music norms and aesthetic norms. So there are all these different categories as a normative anti as a really if I want to be very specific I would say I'm a global normative anti-realist meaning that I'm an anti-realist about all of them. It doesn't matter what the normative domain is because the reasons why I'm a normative anti-realist aren't contingent on the specific content of any particular norm or or category of norms. It's fundamental to the very idea of normativity itself. That's why I'm a normative anti-realist. And so if you showed me a whole new normative domain, I'd still I'm an anteriorist about that too.
>> And do does logic or rationality fall within those norms in your mind or those are those external? So So you don't you don't think that people >> necessarily ought be logical or rational?
>> No. Yeah. So what I I would think whether they ought to or ought not to would be contingent on some stance.
>> Okay. That's interesting. that makes um well I think we're gonna this this might be a theme that we're going to touch on later on because I think that there's a there's an interesting issue there with um the conversation we have with philosophy and rhetoric like if people aren't if people ought don't have an ought to be rational rhetoric would become increasingly important I would I would imagine because uh you know like you can rhetoric can work when logic doesn't if that makes sense like I can I can manipulate your preferences through effective rhetoric even if logically you're uninterested in anything I have to say and don't care to follow the logic. Right.
>> Yeah. There it could be. But uh you know one point I like to stress as an anti-realist is that people can have personal moral convictions or personal convictions to epistemic norms or something like that and they can operate within the exact same framework as a realist. um they might not think that they have an obligation to independent of their stances, but it might just be what their stances are.
>> Yeah. So then so then if someone said if someone if someone made an I guess like can I just tease this out because this is this is interesting. Like if somebody made an argument that was essentially like a P not P like they just violated core laws of logic a law of identity, right? Like a non-contradiction excluded middle pick any of the the classics, right? Um, I assume that would irritate you or you would at least not if it doesn't irritate you, you would certainly point it out like your argument is terrible. It's illogical, right? But you don't feel like they have an obligation to be logical.
>> Yeah, I would I would very likely point it out if I noticed it. Um, if that person said, "Oh, I know uh that I'm not, you know, I'm violating uh, you know, transitivity or the law of non-contradiction or something and I don't care." Um, if they continued to do that, if it wasn't, if it was a one-off thing, maybe I keep talking to them. But if it was clear the person just did not care about abiding by the same principles of logic, at that point, it's effectively like trying to, you know, the the classic like trying to play chess with somebody that's not following the rules. They're just moving the pawns all kind of which ways. They're they're jumping their their rooks like they're a knight. You're not playing the same game anymore. And there's no point in continuing that conversation. Uh, and that's how I would view it. I would view it as like a sort of practical or or social faux paw. really wouldn't be that I think that they're making like a necessarily a factual mistake.
>> Interesting. That see and and I think that that's kind of the that that last bit is probably the distinction between a realist and an anti-realist here where I think a realist like about logic for example, a realist would probably say something along the lines of uh logic is a correct description of the nature of reality and one ought that one ought with reality in this way because it is correct. If you like if you're being illogical, you're being wrong and one ought not be wrong, especially if one can avoid it, right? Um but I I but I don't know like but I think that last bit is the thing that you don't think is necessarily a given. Like there's no there's no uh that people ought to avoid being wrong. In fact, it might I it it might be the case that you just don't think that there is such thing as wrong in the way I'm using the phrase.
>> Well, it would just depend on whether you mean stance independently wrong. If you do, then I don't think that's a thing.
>> Okay. Um, and then before we dive in, just like just I think get the breadth of our disagreement, I think I know the answer to these questions, but um, so you don't since you don't believe in stance independent moral facts, you certainly don't believe that we intuit it or perceive them. I would assume.
>> Okay. Um, I would assume you also don't believe in free will. maybe maybe some form of limited compatibilism, but certainly not like a robust articulation of free will, right?
>> It's a it's a pretty good inference.
Yeah. So, I I would tend to say that I'm a free will quietist. So, I think that the free will dispute once you disentangle what people are arguing about. I don't think there's a a >> a fundamental I don't think there's a substantive question there. Well, the reason I approach it this way is because I've often found when people ask me like, "Oh, you talk about theism, like what's your favorite argument uh for theism?" And that the actual correct answer is not to give my favorite argument. The qu the correct the best approach is to figure out what their other beliefs are because like if I start making the moral argument and they're a moral anti-realist, like this is not going to be a useful conversation, at least rhetorically.
Maybe philosophically, but not rhetorically. Um and you know similarly if I make an argument from free will and they don't believe in free will that you know like it but it I think the other thing that it goes to show is uh for whatever reason um and we might get we might diagnose this or not though I don't find I don't find conversations about intuitions get to a useful place typically uh but we might we might go there uh we certainly have very different intuitions about um the human experience which is interesting uh because we had different we had different takes on intuitions and different takes on like the purpose of philosophy and I suspect that those two are um not on I don't think that's random. That seems like a probably a tight correlation. It would be would be my guess. I can't prove it but that seems likely. Um okay. So stances are preferences, values, etc. There's no stance independent moral truth. Um, now you wrote a article recently which I did have cause to read about theism and divine command theory and moral realism and it seemed like you were taking the position that a lot of theism is not actually moral realist though they would probably describe themselves that way.
Is that right?
>> Yeah. Although I do think it's it's highly contention on the specifics of the particular position. There's certainly kind of crude divine command theory that would pretty much be a type of anti-realism uh by default, but I certainly think that divine command theorists have the conceptual resources to move away from that and characterize the position in a way that makes it um either a genuinely realist position by the by the mainstream definition or something very close to it. A and I I want to do this and I kind of actually one of the things I wanted to do was was test out whether my theism falls or I guess my theism bear theism passes Lance the Lance Bush standard for moral realism which I think is an interesting thing to do since I had the occasion to talk to somebody like you tonight. But I before we go further, I'd like to cash out that question about definitions because it is interesting. I I have seen a lot of theists get upset when they're described as moral anti-realists. like visibly upset, like they get emotionally upset uh because it does seem very contrary to their core beliefs. And one of the odd things about it is that you could resolve the problem by saying stance independent means independent of human stances, right? And then suddenly all the non-naturalists are moral realists almost by not all of them, but a huge chunk of them overnight. And I I don't know that there's a firm definition of stance. So I guess one one question is like is it even are we sure that the definition is right? you know, like to the extent it could be right because because there does seem to be to me a huge difference between someone who says like I'm a moral realist because I think evolution gives universal human norms or I'm Sam Harris and I think that like touching hot stoves is bad and living in heaven is good and there's a scale between the two of them that is descriptively true in some way and someone who says like you know I believe in the platonic form of the good you know like these are not the same thing in some real sense. So, how do you how do you feel about like the current state of the definition and the fact that and how it applies to natural realists and non-natural realists?
>> Yeah, I don't like the definition. Uh I I have an article on my blog where I say that the well, first of all, I don't like the names of the positions. I think I've already uh made that clear. I think real and anti-real is not a very useful uh framing. In fact, I think it's actively misleading and tendentious and it makes I I think it makes anti-realism sound like stupid and bad. uh which it it shouldn't but it also a lot of people really gravitate I think uh whether consciously or unconsciously towards realism because it it sounds appealing and it you know people really recoil at the suggestion that their particular theistic conception of morality could be an anti-realist conception uh I don't think they should be even a little bit threatened by that I mean first of all these the this realism anti-realism debate uh it arose in 20th century meta ethics an analytic tradition that was like almost self-consciously secular in its functionality and the way that it was trying to operate. Even Christian philosophers uh operating within analytic philosophy often the Christianity is very much or theism more broadly but it would be usually be some type of Christianity sort of kind of pushes its way into the background because of the structure format norms and expectations of the field. the arguments usually have a secular quality to them. And within the contemporary 20th century uh analytic meta ethics um well sorry I should say 20th century analytics analytic meta ethics and contemporary analytic meta ethics which is the next 25 years or so since then.
Um it it just theism wasn't that big of a deal. Uh it's starting to come back a bit more within academia uh within this particular area but it wasn't it wasn't a big deal. So this terminology uh there's a certain extent to which I see it and you know I'm not a historian of of metaeththics so someone could fault me on this and I would I would gladly accept the correction. Uh there might be a degree of anacronism in worrying too much about the labels. Uh the other thing is that these labels are sort of socially navigated and I don't really think that there is a correct definition of realism or anti-realism. We can carve up the space however we really see fit.
I do see saying it's the view that moral facts are are dependent on uh so like think of it this way. It looks really ad hoc when you say anti-realism is the view that moral facts uh depend on stances unless there are certain kinds of stances and then it's not and then realism is the view that moral facts don't depend on stances except for some kinds of stances like a god stance. uh that strikes me as an untidy way of carving up the space because it's almost like instead of there being a line and it's all the stance independent is over here, all the stance dependent is over here, you've got this little this little culde-sac that's carved out where it's all the stance independent views and then also some stances are included.
>> Yeah. and and I I think that we'll probably I don't think I we for the sake of tonight I think it's better just to keep the definition as you've been using it and because I think that it's actually a helpful area to probe in the conversation later but I just wanted to flag the oddity there because you know like you know when I when this first came across my like desk as it were and I was like you people were like oh that that sounds like anti-realism my first response was like oh no when people mean like stances, they they mean human stances obviously like they don't mean like they they don't mean God when they're talking about stances. That would be that. But I've learned that that's not necessarily um how it's being used in the literature, which is interesting that my my instinct was to create that untidiness uh that you're referring to. um maybe for the reasons that you described, but I I I think that's that's a it's an interesting ambiguity because it creates some odd bedfellows. Like I think that like non non-naturalist realists and naturalist realists probably don't have a lot in common in terms of their >> Yeah.
>> Yeah. They don't. And in fact, I I've said before and I have I have um one of my blogs has a picture of like rock paper scissors where really I see the dispute as more like rock paper scissors where naturalist realists have some things in common with the anti-realist and some things in common with the realists. And uh incidentally uh and of course naturalist non-naturalists have something in common. They're both moral realists. They both think their stance independent moral facts. But also non-naturalist realists and anti-realists have something in common which is that they really don't like the naturalist conception of of realism. not anti-real. Anti-realists typically uh I you know what I shouldn't say typically um but um anti-realists at least like myself and quite a few other anti-realists would think that it's you know if it's going to be realism it's going to be non-naturalism that naturalism just doesn't have a lot going for it and so a lot of us actually see at least some affinities with non-naturalist realism over naturalism and it's very easy to say what it is um naturalism really struggles to maintain the normativity of morality uh it really really struggles with it and like that's the whole shebang. If you don't have that, you don't really have the, you know, if you have a morality that's is dead. It's inert. It doesn't tell me what to do. Uh, that's not something I care about. At least non-naturalism tries to deliver the goods.
>> Yeah. I'm going to delight in our temporary agreement on something before we get into all the areas we disagree on. Uh, because the the the theme of the channel is called natural law. And though I do a lot of law and politics, the reason I do philosophy awesome is I do a a lot of American founding philosophy, which is, you know, heavily influenced by Thomas Reed and common sense realism and a whole bunch of stuff that is uh I would say as different from your the philosophy I've heard you espouse as I could imagine. But the uh one of the things that people on my channel often ask for because I'm not an atheist is they're like, "Oh, well, how can you update these ideas so that the concept of natural law works for atheists and I've been working on it. I I'm not an atheist, but I I work on it. I'm trying to come up with arguments for them because I want to fold them into the American project as I see it. But it is, I will admit, a it's been a uphill struggle for me because, you know, gun to my head, I actually I agree with you.
I I don't think that you it's very very hard to develop an a from an is on a naturalist framework. I just don't it doesn't it doesn't occur to me that there's an easy way to do that, right?
And if you're trying to say that there's some transcendental, you know, transcendental moral rule, some obligation that, you know, ins upon you regardless of what you think about it.
It's hard to get there on naturalism. I It's, you know, even if you call it an evolutionary imperative, I'm not entirely sure that I buy that. That doesn't seem like that's moral. That seems like it's useful to me, which does seem like a distinction. But in any event, I I'm I'm trying. If I if I if I think I crack the code, I'll have you test it one day. But I have not I have I personally have never cracked that code.
Um, so let me Okay, let me let me lay something on you and you can tell me how you would respond to it. If I if I said the following, one ought prefer the greater good. Is that a moral statement? Is that a normative statement? Is that is that something you agree with or disagree with? And is that stance independent?
>> Well, I certainly don't think it's stance independent. uh it sounds like a moral claim, but you know, I don't really think that there's any principal distinction between whether something is moral, quote unquote, or not. Uh I think that's another one of these cases where I think it's largely a cultural and conventional matter what we consider moral or not. And in fact, there is some interesting survey research that when you ask like lay people uh to categorize things as moral or not, they don't agree with each other and they just people will consider things in weird way not be moral issues. So I don't know that that of course that it doesn't follow from that fact that there isn't a principal distinction. It could be there is one and people that aren't very good at they're not very competent at judging it. Um yeah I would consider that to be a moral uh issue. I wouldn't consider it to be stance independent. And if someone said do you think like we ought to to favor the greater good? I would say like yes up to a point with a lot of qualifiers. Uh I certainly would not think that we should favor the greater good uh unequivocally and without qualification because I think that there is uh you know there are there would certainly be instances in which I would prioritize the welfare of like family members over the greater good to at least some extent. I don't know that I would save my family if it came at the cost of like everybody else on earth dies. Uh but I certainly put more weight on family members and non-family members. And so you know in that sense I don't operate or act as a strict utilitarian. I used to be a utilitarian.
I actually call myself Okay. Um a retired utilitarian.
>> Oh, because I was a utilitarian for so long it feels weird. Uh and I still have sympathies. I think it's a very defensible view within normative ethics.
It's more defensible than people give it credit for. Um I think someone that defends it very well. Uh and he's a he's a non-naturalist uh realist uh is Richard Yedder Chapel. I think he does an excellent job on uh on uh utilitarianism. So, so I guess what I pushed you a little bit here is, you know, I left good undefined. So, on the assumption that you get to fill in what you think good is, you still think one ought prefer the greater good isn't like a universal that everybody ought ascribe to. Because I'm not even telling you what good necessarily is. I'm just saying on your own system, you ought prefer the greater good. Like that doesn't mean you're utilitarian. Like, you know, if you're a, you know, if you're a Christian, you ought prefer the divine command over something else that you think is good for other reasons. If you're a utilitarian, you ought do the thing that does the maximum utility versus a lesser amount of utility. If you're a virtue ethicist, you ought pursue the greater virtue rather than the lesser virtue, right? Like it I think you can fill in the blanks and it would still work. Is like wouldn't that be stance independent? because I don't I think everybody can fill in the blanks how they want, but they would still they still ought pursue the greater good rather than the lesser good.
>> Well, you you just have to get very clear in advance about what you mean. If you're leaving it to the person to fill in the blank, they could always fill in the blank in a stance dependent way or in some other type of anti-realist way.
Uh so um if you if one of one thing you could try to do is say okay but isn't a st isn't it a stance independent fact that even if you uh are a subjectivist or whatever that you still think one ought to do what's good whatever that is um and it ends up in something being kind of trivial about that it's like it you know you could say don't I think that I I ought to do what I ought to do and I would say yes to that um but in a certain sense that becomes kind of reflexive and it ends up not really being a substantive first order normative claim in the first place. So, I don't think that you're going to be able to squeeze a stance independent normativity out of an anti-realist commitments in in those sorts of cases.
I think it it has the kind of ephemeral appearance that you might be able to do that, but I don't think it ends up working once you unpack exactly what the anti-realist is committed to.
>> So, if I hear you right, it's kind of like because good in moral terms is typically defined as something like what you ought do. So, you know, like that that's almost like the definition of good, right? So, if I say you ought pursue the greater good, you're saying that that's uh trivial because of course, if I get to define what I ought do and there's two things and one of them's greater good than the other, that's the one I ought.
>> Yeah. Well, there's there's a few issues there. I mean one is that I'm not sure that I would necessarily analyze evaluative facts like good or bad like or evaluative terminology in terms of it uh being analyzed in a way that in has some sort of uh norm or like deontic entailment. In other words that something is good. I don't think logically entails that therefore one ought in accord with it. I don't know that that necessarily follows. I think it's it might be possible to maintain the view that something is in evaluative terms is good but that it doesn't have entailments about what one ought to do in relation to it.
>> Okay.
>> I don't know that's like part of the concept of it or not.
>> Yeah. Because I I I guess that that what that pushes on is the idea is whether that's actually a normative rule and not a maybe that maybe not even an ethical rule but a normative rule that you know but however you define good you ought pursue it because that's what good means and you ought prioritize greater goods over lesser goods which actually doesn't strike me as completely trivial. Like the I I've picked that one because if I said you ought you ought do what's good I think that actually is like um almost a tautology. uh if you if you're allowed to fill in the blank, but you ought pursue the greater good. I'm not sure that's totally topological. Like there's it it presupposes a situation where you're picking between two things and you ought at least be consistent um amongst your own stances and preferences and pursue the one that you value more highly, which I don't I I don't know that that's um that doesn't seem trivial. That actually does seem like a norm. Uh but I don't think I don't see how it's a norm that anybody could rationally reject. Like if they rejected that, I think they I' I'd be attempt to say like you're you're wrong. Like you couldn't possibly rationally reject that norm.
>> If it's a sense independent norm, I would. So I don't like if I have two if there's two things, right? And I and I have a stronger preference for one over the other. I would not say that I ought to prefer the thing that I have a stronger preference for over the other independent of my preferences. It's that I just prefer it more. And there's no further fact of the matter. And so there is a sense in which you could ask well ought you favor like prefer the the thing you prefer more than the the thing you prefer less. And at that point I would say that the question doesn't really make a whole lot of sense because it's almost trying to force a a sense of ought onto my deliberations and my way of reasoning that it's outside the scope of my own preferences. But since my own preferences are constitutive of how I analyze ought claims the question itself doesn't make sense. It's it's almost like a loaded question. Does that make sense?
>> I'm not sure. Let's tease that out a little bit because certainly if you had two preferences and one was stronger than the other, you would I would assume follow the stronger preference or else being equal. Um, so then saying you ought follow your stronger preference over your weaker preference, that that that strikes you as something that's that that's stance dependent that people ought follow their better preference over their weaker preference.
>> If somebody asked me that, I would ask them what they mean like what because you know I'm not obligated to grant that that is a legitimate question in the relevant context. So uh what I would say is if I have a stronger preference than a weaker preference, all else being equal, I will act in accordance or act so as to pursue uh the stronger preference than the weaker preference.
What I would say at that point is that there are no further normative questions to ask here about what I should or shouldn't or ought or ought not do. If someone were to say, okay, but ought you prefer the stronger preference over the weaker preference, what exactly are they asking me? Because in my framework, it's like asking me, um, do you prefer the stronger preference more strongly than you prefer the weaker preference, which would be trivially true. If they try to analyze it in any other way, I would say either no, either no, I don't I I ought not, I don't have that, it's not applicable here. Uh, this the like the statement you ought to prefer the stronger preference over the weaker preference would be false. Or it might not even be intelligible. I it would just depend on how they're they're unpacking what they mean by that. and and your preferences, I take it, are irreducible. Like there there's no they're like a I hesitate to use the word brute fact, but they're there's no there's no way to reduce them further.
Uh it depends on what kind of reduction you're talking about. So I would take my preferences to these psychological facts about me. Um now psychological facts depending on what sort of metaphysics I'm in the mood for giving psychological facts could be reducible to certain brain states or certain functional states or something like that. And then we would have to shift into like a question in philosophy of mind and then we would have to get into a whole bunch of other questions. So there's a certain sense in which like the sort of onlogical structure of the con like what it is for something to be a preference that might be reducible but there wouldn't be a further normative >> consideration on the table on my view.
You could call it normative eliminativism or normative reductionism or something like that. the normative facts end up being discharged as a sort of explained in terms of or constitutive of certain types of descriptive facts and once they're cashed out in terms of those descriptive facts, there's no further fact uh within that particular discourse. Like in other words, if you're asking what is like what is this reduced to? It reduces to a preference.
But if you then wanted to say what is the preference reduced to if anything, I wouldn't just say at that point the preference is a brute fact. Like I'm not a like substance dualist that thinks that there's like specific mental states that that can't be reduced. You could have that view that'd be consistent with it. Um but at that point you're just shifting the discourse towards a separate question which is like what's the metaphysics of my view like what's my philosophy of mind.
>> Okay. Okay. I see I think I think I see where you're going now. That makes sense. And then I think the question a lot of people are gonna want me to ask and I just want to make sure to make sure I ask it. Though I think to be candid with you this is more fan service than anything else. I think here I actually do know your answer, but I I'm going to make sure I I go through the exercise. Um there are kind of like the cannon of standard questions moral realists ask moral anti-realists and typically what they start with is um the most obvious moral case imaginable, right? And then they pick their favorite drowning child, sexual abuse of an infant, you know? So you you so let's pick the most obvious moral case imaginable and let's say that the most obvious moral case imaginable has something like a 99.9999% acceptance rate cross-culturally everybody basically agrees this is true.
Um, and the people who don't agree that it's true are typically moral monsters that we execute or imprison because of a whole bunch of antisocial reasons, right? Where we typically wouldn't, you know, take the advice of an Austrian painter on moral issues going forward.
That that sort of thing. I I take it that the most obvious moral case imaginable is still stance dependent in your view.
>> Yes, it would be.
>> Okay. Yeah. And because the fact that basically everyone agrees on it other than people who are morally defective in some way um still universal agreement does not make it not stance dependent.
>> Right? That's just a separate distinction. Like if everybody in the world likes French fries, it doesn't mean that it's it's like it's not subjective whether French fries are good or bad.
>> Okay? So even if every human agreed on a moral fact as an anti-realist, you'd say like that that is still stance dependent. Though there the subset might be you know like we talk about like subjective like personally subjective we talk about the interubjective and then you have to give like the subset like what does interubjective mean is it my family is it my culture but if we said like it's intersubjective and the subset is all humans who have ever existed that would still count as stance dependent in the framework we're using. Yeah, I would I just don't think that the proportion or percentage of like people that endorse a position, it's just orthogonal to the question of whether it's dependent on a stance or not. It's just a separate question.
>> Yeah.
>> So like in other words, just to make the extreme case, if everyone ever in the entire history of all universes held this exact same moral position on a particular moral issue, I still that wouldn't entail that it's it stance independent. It might be evidence of it, but it would be kind of indirect evidence.
So then potentially unfair question, but then what is the utility of this definition?
Like if if like we if we're getting to the point now where we said like in a hypothetical world where if every human being who ever existed agreed on it, it would still be st it would still be stance dependent. What does that like what does that get us? Like what are we what are we cashing out in this categorization?
>> Well, so the the question would still be I mean you could still ask a hypothetical question. What if we created a machine intelligence and you could ask uh you know would it automatically recognize the same facts as us? That would be something like you know a potential question. Um maybe I'm not quite understanding what you're trying to get at here. I mean I don't know that the definition has to serve a particular function. It's just there's the question of whether things are dependent on stances or not. Well, be because I think we agree I I I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think we agreed earlier that the there it's not like this is a uh this is a distinction that academics are drawing to categorize theories, >> right? So it's not exactly something where we're saying that there's some line in the sand where we're drawing it and you know and in fact I think both of us have some quibbles with the terminology in the definitions and think it could be drawn in different ways. I'm wondering if we get to the point where we're saying if every human that ever existed agreed on a moral fact that's still anti-realism.
Are we using terms in a way that's like counterintuitive or sufficiently odd that it doesn't it's not actually serving a useful purpose?
>> No, I don't think so. So, there would be one question which is like an empirical question about how many people hold a view or not. But whether something is stance dependent or not is is a is a conceptual question that is just a it's just a different question. Uh it may or may not have massive implications. I actually think it doesn't really have significant uh implications because of my other views. Uh so I think uh for instance I endorse a view it's not a human view u of motivation but basically I think that people only ever act on their preferences. Uh so uh because of that I think that even realists only comply with stance independent moral facts to the extent that they value subjectively complying with these stance independent moral facts. And if the stance independent moral facts turned out to be radically misaligned with their preferences, I think as a matter of empirical fact, at least among humans on earth today, they would just not comply with facts. They go, "Well, to hell with morality, then I'll just not be be moral." Now, realists hold a bunch of views in many cases, especially not naturalists, where they'll say, "Well, the moral facts are necessary and they have a certain kind of necessary content, and so they couldn't be radically misaligned with what we take them to be due the the type of epistmic access we take ourselves to have to them." And so they might think it's impossible for it to be like a moral fact that you should go >> genocide people or whatever. Um so uh because of that they would say we don't face those challenges but what I'm talking about is how I think about it relative to or sorry against the backdrop of the rest of my own views. Uh and in that sense I don't think that there's a big practical difference. I think realist and anti-realists more or less act the same in practice and that there is is no substantive difference in terms of like sort of practical deliberation or what they end up doing.
And this is one of the things that I push as as an anti-realist is that I think there is a sort of auxiliary set of facts about the way human psychology operates and the way that the world is where whether a person is a realist or not actually doesn't really matter very much. Uh and so ultimately it's not a very important uh distinction. Um, another thing I will note though is that the utility of the distinction is partially contingent on what the actual world is like. And so I wouldn't cash out the realism anti-realism distinction that value in terms of a counterfactual of like what if everybody agreed then would it still be useful? Well, let's say it wouldn't be even if that were true. Like it wouldn't be useful in that situation where everybody agrees. That doesn't mean it's not useful in the situation we're actually in where people do disagree quite a bit. So uh and I would say the same thing for say the atheism theism distinction. I'm not sure how helpful atheism as a concept would be if everybody for all time and everywhere always was and always would be a theist. I don't like it wouldn't be like we could talk it could be like a toy case. Imagine there was a person.
But then people go but that's ridiculous. There never was and there never will be. Uh and so it might end up being like that. But notice that the fact that atheism would not be a useful concept in a universe in which everybody was always a theist and always would be.
The same could be true of the realism anti-realism distinction, but it still wouldn't mean it doesn't have value here and now for the same reason atheism as a concept still has value here and now.
>> You said a lot there, so forgive me for picking on the thread. No, no, forgive me because sometimes when people say a lot, I want to respond point by point, but I'm like also that's more of like a debate thing and I don't I don't view this as a debate. the the thread that I wanted to pick on there was um uh you said that in practice atheists sorry not atheists um anti-realists and realists kind of behave the same way and I think that's probably true uh I I have no empirical date on this of course but uh I would I would suspect and you can correct me if I'm wrong that as an anti-realist you are willing to impose your preferences on others because they are your preferences Right.
>> Well, I'm willing to impose them on other people, but it's not because they're my preferences. I have preferences I wouldn't impose on other people, like food preferences.
>> Okay.
>> But some of the preferences are constituted by a desire for other people to act a certain way. Like I prefer other people not do horrible things, but I don't have a preference for like what flavor of ice cream they eat.
>> Got it. Okay. Yeah. So certain preferences uh and then and when you were imposing or attempting to impose those preferences on others, if you were trying to be rhetorically effective, I assume you wouldn't shy away from realist language like it's wrong or you know like everyone thinks it's wrong or is you know like uh the example that often comes up in these in my circle is the Nermberg trials where they were attempting to uh justify prosecuting the Nazis or the Austrian painter enthusiast I should say for YouTube reasons. Sorry about that. I we're deep in the video so I don't think it's going to be a problem. Um and you know one of the problems they had there is the problem in law. It's called you know exx expost law. You can't uh you can't try someone for something that wasn't a crime at the time. So under the laws of Germany the Holocaust was legal. So there was no crime and there was no international crime had genocide hadn't been invented yet. So what you know what they did at the beginning of the Nurman trials is they invoked the concept of natural law.
They said like any human all humans understand that there's something here that's just intrinsically wrong. And this was a rhetoric device that allowed them to justify trying someone for a crime when technically there had been no legal legality about this issue prior.
And under most legal theories that would be otherwise impossible. And I I bring it up because I suspect, but please correct me if I'm wrong, I suspect you would say that in the same position, you would probably have done something similar uh because it was useful and a way to get your preferences across regardless of whether or not it you you actually believed in your heart of heart that like natural law exists in some kind of objective stance independent way.
>> Okay. A few things to say there. Uh, one is that I think some of the things you gave as examples of like realist language. I would just I don't consider them examples of realist language. Like I don't think saying something is wrong >> is using realist language. Like I I like I say food is good or bad. I say actions are right or wrong, good or bad. Uh, first order normative language I think is consistent with both realism and anti-realism. So that at least I would I don't think is any sort of of inconsistency issue when it comes to saying something like there's a law above the law or invoking this idea of transcendent or or culturally and individually transcendent rules to justify punishment. Um, what I would say about that is that if I judge that to be the only way to get uh people on trial to be held accountable that were doing the bad things they were doing, uh, then yeah, I would like I I'm more interested in really horrible people that have committed crimes against humanity facing justice. I'm more interested than that, sorry, in getting that done than I am in like being a a a perfectly consistent with my philosophical views. like whi which one of those is more important at the end of the day. Uh making sure people face justice is more important. But I'm not sure that I would actually think that that would be necessary in that in that sort of case. Uh I at least am entirely comfortable saying that I would punish them for doing what they did because it's monstrous and horrifying and terrible and awful and repugnant and disgusting and and evil. Uh and I would just say yeah, you don't need realism to do any of that. I mean, one thing to point out is let's say uh like we were all convinced of anti-realism. I at least wouldn't just shrug and go, "Oh, well, I guess what they did with it's not against the law." I would I don't care if it's against the law or not. So, I don't think there's any there wouldn't be any inconsistency as an anti-realist with punishing punishing them for what they did. I mean, certain anti-realist views like an ancient culture relativist maybe. Um, but as far as like the rhetoric I would use, it would be highly situationally dependent. But uh you know I I've made this example before like if you're a politician and someone says hey do you think it's objectively wrong to and then they just say the most horrible thing in the world. Um if you're a pol if you're running for office and you're a moral anti-realist um and that's not public knowledge. Uh it would be very stupid to say no. That's not objectively wrong because you're going to sound like a monster. Like people are going to think you're horrible. Um, so yeah, there's going to be situations where political or practical expedience and honesty run up against each other and you have to make make a call in those cases. If it's if it's a matter of your integrity as a politician, then maybe you could compromise and you'll lose the race. Uh, if it's if it's horrible people escaping justice, I could I'd probably go for the justice. Yeah, it's interesting because the justice is certainly part of it, but like at Nerburgg it the other goal was to say that there really was something morally problematic here that there like this that we are not engaging, you know, in post hawk law. We're not doing a might makes right exercise. We are actually saying something bad happened here and something that the people who were involved even if it was sanctioned by their government, even if it was blessed by their culture, e all of this notwithstanding, they should have known better. They ought to have known better and in their hearts they probably did on some level because what happened was so repugnant that it um it transcends cultural boundaries. And like I guess the the question with Nerburgg that I always ask myself when I look back on it is they had already won the war. If they wanted to, they just could have lined up all the al the Nazis and alleys and shot them, right? You know, like what what what's the trial for? Like why why are you having the trial and the the purpose of the trial was to show that something truly wrong occurred, right? which is why natural law was invoked because like you know at the end of the day it's like well your preferences the Nazis preferences were clearly not the not our preferences. We vanquished them which I view as a good thing. I'm glad we vanquished them. And in the might makes right exercise we have now won. So if you if all you want to do is exterminate the ideology you could just shoot them.
>> Yeah. I mean you could I I'm in favor of the trials. uh but you know I think that they serve a a symbolic thing you know it's the sort of thing that we are discussing today uh because of that if they had lined them up and shot them I think we would discuss that a lot less u but all of that I take to be entirely consistent with anti-realism I don't know that anti-realism might have some contingent rhetorical shortcomings like it might be that publicly if you tried to do to justify what you're doing from a in an explicitly anti-realist register or or way of framing things like if if someone said We're putting these people on trial because as you know uh might makes right. We won. We're in charge.
We're the bosses. We get to call the shots and so we're going to punish them because that's what we feel like doing.
U that's not going to sound very satisfying to people. So to to that extent, I would agree with that. U but I do think that that's a a a very unappealing and unnecessary framing of of anti-realism that makes it sound worse than it is. uh an anti-realist can ver could if they wanted to thread the needle. I mean, first of all, I just don't think we need meta ethics to to punish people. You could just say, "Look, what they did is bad. Hey, do you agree it's bad? Hey, do you agree it's bad? Yeah, we all agree it's pretty bad.
Uh good enough for me." And punish them.
Uh the same reason restaurants don't have to convince you that their food is objectively good to tell you why the food is good. Let's look, we we uh we fry our our French fries. They're nice and crisp. You like crisp French fries.
You like crisp French fries. you don't like nasty old oil. Uh you like the kitchen not to be full of rats, right?
So, um intersubjective agreement between the parties that are involved, I think, is is sufficient on its own. But that that needle can be threaded by appealing to the sentiments, the attitudes, and the values of people. Yeah. Without having to invoke any sort of external authority to sort of to anoint the actions that you're you're engaged in.
>> Yeah. See, it's interesting because like I don't know and can't know, by the way, whether the prosecutor who gave those remarks and invoked natural law at the beginning of the trials uh believed that in his heart of hearts, right? Like I have no access to his mind. But one I think interesting difference between your view and mine and I, you know, I'm holding your feet to the fire and you're going to get a chance to um hold mine to the fire in a second. So I don't I I want to flag I'm being fair about that.
Um, one interesting difference would be that if I was tasked as a lawyer with giving those remarks, I would believe them, right? Because like I believe in natural law, which is convenient because if you ask me to articulate some other moral principle, I might not believe in it, right? There's it's there's that this happens to be it lines up with my beliefs. But in that moment of like uh extraordinary moral conflict and this extraordinary need to articulate I think as you put it well a symbol and a moral righteousness and to lay down a marker for future generations about what is and is not right and wrong. this was what was appealed to and throughout American history um you know in the abolition movement in the anti- in the civil rights movement women's suffrage natural law conceptually was appealed to again and again and again Martin Luther King Jr. Abraham Lincoln, everybody was they all appealed to this concept at these like seinal you know really really I I forgot I don't even have the the best word for it the really really important moral moments right when they had to be when there was a fork in the road this was the the language that was appealed to and um I don't know that that means it's true and I don't know that that means that one ought believe in natural law for that reason, but it does strike me as a advantage of moral realism over if you're doing like just a theory comparison over moral anti-realism that you know at the the language that is used at those moments seems to line up better with a moral realist perspective.
Yeah, I think I think realist sounding language and perhaps even a genuine or seemingly genuine commitment to realism will have rhetorical and social advantages in certain social contexts. I do think that there are contexts where an anti-realist view uh has its own advantages rhetorically. I mean you'll people if anybody's taught a class where the topic of moral relativism comes up they they may find I mean depending on the the university if it's a Bible college maybe not uh tons of students tend to endorse relativism and I think what people often find >> especially college students I would imagine like undergrad students yeah but the the the weird students is they're going to be rel like very relativist I would imagine >> I've had I've had unonymity in multiple classes where it's literally 100% of the students at the start and the end of the class and uh you So if pressed, I think part of what's going on here is that people don't want to come off as intolerant or judgmental or or dogmatic.
Uh and so in certain social contexts, relativism has a certain social edge.
And in other contexts, realist sounding language is going to have a certain rhetorical advantage. I do think that that advantage is contingent. Like I don't think it's like a necessary feature of realism that it's always going to have that kind of advantage. If everybody in the audience is a committed anti-realist, they're going to go, "Ah, we don't buy that nonsense." Um, but that language, I think, can be quite effective on on lay people that don't have the conceptual resources to potentially recognize that the intellectual underpinnings of that may or may not be on on fairly shaky foundations. C >> can I advance a theory here that I completely halfbaked? It just occurred to me. I have so this maybe won't work at all. But you were talking about comparative advantages and the situations in which one is advantaged over the other. And I think that's probably right. I think that if you were trying to be in a situation where you were trying to like be a social butterfly or maximize social utility or connections, being non-judgmental has uh real advantages. And language that comes across as nonjudgmental has real languages has real advantages. And in situations where you are trying to convince a group of people to make what appears to be a very consequential moral choice that's very hard and is going to be costly in you know lives or you know whatever the like you know we're going to go to war men right that that sort of thing. We need to we need to kill our brothers and sisters in the south to free the slaves. like this is like these are very consequential moral moments. That's those are the moments where I feel like moral realism tends to have a rhetoric advantage if not a philosophic advantage. Does that sound right?
>> It does. But I want to give a converse case and it's an example I like to give.
Uh which is, you know, suppose you're walking through a dark alleyway and a mugger comes out and they're like, "Hand over your wallet." Um I very much doubt anybody has typically done this where they're like, "Well, hold on. Uh don't you know that it's objectively wrong to mug people?" Uh, so what you're doing is against what the stance independent moral facts are. I doubt that's going to be very persuasive. But if you said things that appeal to their own interests or values, their subjective values, like if you said, "Listen, I have a family. I have a daughter." What if they go, "I have a daughter, too."
You know, you could tug on their heartstrings. Or you could point to So that would be like appealing to their sentiments. You could also appeal to practical questions like, "Uh, there's a security camera right there. You're on camera. You probably not a good idea because you'll get caught." Uh, where you're you're appealing to practical considerations. those are the things that are most likely to be effective uh to persuade them. And so, you know, whereas realism might have an advantage in say motivating your side, it it might not have much of an advantage at all in in persuading an opposing side where in fact um anti-realist considerations that appeal directly to those people's own subjective values would have a much more effective persuasive uh role to play there.
>> That's a very interesting counter example. I I again I'm doing this off the seat of my pants, so I'm not sure I have this fully fleshed out, but there does seem to be something interesting there about when you're appealing to the emotions or social aspects of of people around you versus when you're trying to create some kind of like tribal or societal action. like there there actually does seem to be a distinction there that with enough thought maybe could be teased out in a more meaningful way that I'm doing it.
But that there I think we actually might be on to something because that intuitively the examples you're giving I think that is what people would do. They would they would appeal to the robbers humanity or personal interests or like hey you know don't mug me I dropped $100 over there. You know some something like this. Uh you know you wouldn't say like don't don't you know Jesus is going to judge you? you figure they probably already know. Uh but on the flip side, you know, if you were going to war being like, "Hey, we really want that oil that they hold and we prefer that we have it and they don't have it anymore."
>> It's probably not the language that you would use in that moment, right? Even if it, you know, so it's that's interesting. I don't know what to make of it, but it's rhetorically interesting.
>> All right. Um we got a bunch of comments that I would like to do. I can save them for the end, Lance. Uh, but the other thing I wanted to do tonight was to lay out why I'm a moral realist. Uh, because I I very rarely have the advantage of somebody who's a knowledgeable anti-realist to poke at me and uh see if I get the realist stamp of approval from the toughest possible audience, which I presume would be you. I haven't met a tougher audience for this particular pitch. Um, but I don't know if you want to do that first or if you want to look at some comments first.
>> We could we could do that. I It's up to you.
>> Okay. Uh, look, I think some of these will be pretty quick. I'll get through a few of them, but it'll get too delayed.
>> So, uh, one of my mods, Trapingo, congrats, Lance. This is in reference to your daughter. Uh, yeah, very much.
Congratulations. We're a family-friendly stream here.
>> Um, Missile, I think it's Missile. Have you ever reviewed a moral realist that has not disrespected the boundaries of ethics and metics as you understand them? I think that's probably for you.
>> Yeah. So, they may be making a reference to a concept. Uh, and this is one of the things if we're going to speak of rhetoric, uh, on my blog and on my my channel, I coin a lot of terminology to to pick out certain sorts of recurring themes and patterns. So, I'll brief I'll try to very briefly mention what this is. It's a concept I call normative entanglement. And here's here's how it's set up. And I actually have I've run one sort of pilot study on this. Um, so imagine somebody asks another person, hey, do you think it's objectively wrong too? And then it's, you know, do some terrible thing. Um now the person's options because it's framed as a yes or no question are yes it's objectively wrong or no it's not objectively wrong but imagine you know a person says yes to that like do you think it's objectively wrong to really bad thing and they go yeah people are fine that okay yeah they think it's wrong but imagine they say no um if they say no what's weird about that is that could actually mean one of three different positions so what's happening here is that when someone says do you think it's objectively wrong to x to perform an action they're actually asking a normative question and a metaethical question at the same time. Is it objectively wrong? Right? And so if you say yes, you think it's both wrong and it's objectively wrong. But if you say no, you could think it's wrong, but it's not objectively wrong. You could think there are objective moral truths, but that's not one of them. Or you could think there are no objective moral truths and it's not wrong. And so, uh, it actually makes it unclear why you said no. And a couple of those responses might be quite bad. If it's a very bad thing and you think nothing's objectively wrong, including that, I don't think that that's wrong in any sense, objective or otherwise, that's bad. Um, if you think, uh, look, there are objectively wrong things, but that's not one of them. Maybe that's not wrong at all. That's really bad. So, now you're a moral realist, but then, you know, whatever the horrible thing is, you don't think that's wrong, you're going to sound like a monster. It's only when you think, look, there aren't objectively wrong things. Uh, and the reason why I don't think that's objectively wrong is because nothing's objectively wrong. But I do think normatively speaking, it is wrong. Uh, so your answer to one is yes and the other is no. Um, that's the only one that threads the needle in a way where it's not totally off-putting. But if you just say no, no one knows which of the three that you're in. And so I ran a study where I gave three different versions of this this scenario.
>> Do you think it's objectively wrong to do this really horrible thing? Person just says yes. People are fine with that person. Do you think it's objectively wrong to do the horrible thing? No.
People do not like this person. That's a bad person.
>> And then the third category is what's called pragmatic cancellation. Do you think it's objectively wrong to do this very bad thing? No. But uh that's only because I don't think anything is objectively wrong, but I do think it is morally wrong. I think it's repugnant and horrible and nobody should do it.
When you're able to cancel out the implication that you don't think it's normatively wrong, then that pushes you very close to the way that people respond to the person that says yes. So the yes and the no, but uh are actually pretty similar. And it's only the one that says no without qualification that people see as bad. So, what this person is probably referencing is that in in one of the rhetorical things, whether it's intentional or not, that realists frequently do in conversations, at least with me and what I see online, is they often give the impression, again, it doesn't have to be intentional. I'm not saying they're being dishonest or manipulative, but they often give the impression that anti-realists have compromised normative moral standards.
That anti-realists are less opposed to World War II, that anti-realists care less about the suffering of children.
Uh, and that impression is often unearned. Like it could be true that a anti-realist cares less, but it's often just leveraged that the mere fact that they're an anti-realist entails that they care less. And that doesn't follow and that's not appropriate. And so, one of the ways that that realists often gain a rhetorical advantage is by implying that anti-realists are horrible, awful people. Um, as far as have I encountered realists that don't do that? Yeah, a couple times. Uh, I don't think Philip Goff does that. Uh, and I would have to think through to think if there's other philosophers that don't do that, but most of the realists I've seen do in fact do this. They do.
>> I don't think I don't think I've done it in this conversation. I I I wouldn't say I wouldn't do it. Um, I I I'm not above being rhetorically effective, but the um it's an interesting point because the thing the thing I was thinking about when you were saying it is like what is the what is objective doing? And earlier we were talking about like the Nermberg trials and rhetoric. I think one of the things that they're asking when they say objectively there is like are you willing to kill this person? You know, because oftentimes you're describing the the most heinous moral thing imaginable. And um one of the one of the criticisms of subjectivity or relativism or you know postmodern there's a there's so many terms I'm not going to list them all. You get you get what I'm getting at. the the constellation of anti-realism and relativist terms that sometimes get lumped together is the the concern that like it leads to an infinite permissiveness or a near infinite permissiveness because if it's if everything is just a matter of preferences and there's no way to judge whether one preference is better or worse than another by any objective metric then when it comes time to do the Nermberg trials or when it comes time to do something that is going to be contrary to a lot of people's preferences but the speaker believes needs to be done. Are you going to be willing to do it right? And I I think that's part of what's being driven out there when someone says like it is objectively wrong to murder an innocent child for fun. You know what they're kind of getting at is a you could say philosophically or is that what it is? also like there is no justification. There is nothing they will be able to say. There is no there is there is no we've reached a point of no return. Um and I that that's also does seem like it's it's part of it. And I don't know how that cashes out in in your worldview. I would assume that you would and please correct me. I assume I assume you'd say there are some preferences you hold so strongly that you would feel comfortable doing that uh taking an extreme stance if they were violated.
>> Yeah. I'm not going to be functionally any different from a realist on this.
So, if there's some people doing horrible things, I'm going to have a pretty similar attitude to the realist.
Nothing about anti-realism commits me to being any less willing to act on my values than than a realist. Now, what what's important about this is to notice that there's a difference between the sort of abstracted academic philosophical position anti-realism.
Anti-realism is a bunch of subcategories. I fall within a subcategory where I could act exactly like a realist and there would be no inconsistency. The only inconsistency would be if I went around saying I'm a realist or saying moral realism is true.
Then I that would be inconsistent. Um but I could like do the same things. An anti-realist could be like literally in the process of throwing every single bad person in prison or flying around like Superman like punching every villain in the face. And it's totally consistent.
They could say this is what I prefer.
Boom. Like there's no there's no inconsistency there. um where I think people perceive a problem is not anti-realism in principle but the way many anti-realists especially sort of postmodernist relativists operate in practice. In practice, many people that people associate with and genuinely are a type of anti-realist also advocate on normative grounds a type of normative complacency uh where they we shouldn't impose ourselves. We have to tolerate everything. And you know there's that paradox of tolerance where they become so tolerant of other cultures that they would say oh well I know that they're they're running a concentration camp or I know that they're committing human rights violations but who are we to judge? Um I I'm the kind of anti-realist that says uh judge away. Yeah, get them.
Stop them. Uh so but there are people like that and because of the history of where like cultural immoral relativism emerge, it is very strongly associated with uh to put it in just very loose terms, a kind of kumbaya uh leave people alone kind of attitude that can often foster a kind of frustrating unwillingness to act to impose one's standards on others. even in really really egregious cases where I'm typically going to be on the page of the standard realist that would say we have to stop that injustice. Um I care much more about stopping injustice than I do about academic philosophical positions.
>> Yeah. And it's interesting because there's um you know in America we have this history of at least being founded on the premise of unalienable god-given rights which would be transcendental objective we could argue stance independent or not. um norms, but certainly would not be would not be up for human interpretation. And people have um people's views on that have varied tremendously over time. The the famous example is um the ACLU defending the KKK, right? where it's like um I think if you ask most of them, I don't know, of course, but like I've I've only known one or two of my professors were of big wigs in the ACLU, so I can only go off what they said, but like they believed in free speech as a essentially transcendental category.
Like there's like this is a it is a it is I mean maybe you can call it a preference, but like it is a norm. It is an aspect of natural law. is an aspect of liberty that is god-given and unalienable and if a government were to restrict it, the government would be wrong for doing so. It's not it's not up for grabs, right? So then that and that's how they came to the point where they're like, well, we're going to defend the KKK on free speech grounds even though they all hated the KKK and hope they would go to prison. right now.
It's an interesting I do I I I I I take your point that you could probably get there on anti-realist grounds, but it does strike me as somewhat different like if you're say if you're saying the in inside the person's head like a person who says I believe this category is universal and binding and therefore I'm going to um I'm going to follow this principle and defend the KKK even though I hate them and wish they'd go to prison versus someone who's like, I have two preferences. Free speech is the greater preference and therefore I follow my greater preference to use the language I used earlier.
Therefore, I'm going to defend the KKK even though I hate them. Though there does seem to be a difference there. Um even if even if it's just one of internal psychology, I don't I don't know how how that how that example strikes you. Yeah, I actually think that the latter difference um is doing pretty much all of the work even for realists.
Uh you know, at the end of the day, I just don't think I don't like when people are making these sorts of decisions, I think that they actually are, as a matter of psychological fact, acting on what they're they're drawn more towards. Uh they're drawn what they're more motivated towards. Uh I find something very strange about realist motivation. So, you have these facts out there that are not reducible to or constituted by your preferences.
Why follow them? Now, if you think that the facts are like God's mandates and those, you know, my preference is if there was a God, they wouldn't be the same as like I mean, I guess they could in principle, but there would be what God wants and then what I want. Uh I think there'd be pretty good reasons to seriously consider doing what God wants.
Uh but to me, they're practical reasons.
Uh God's probably in a better position to know what's best for me and and God uh can enforce rules. If I don't follow these rules, there might be consequences. Uh, so there's all sorts of reasons to outsource my motivation and say, "All right, if God says it, then maybe I should do it." U, but if you're a secular moral realist and you just think there are these these rules, um, and those rules don't align with your values, why follow them? Uh, so, you know, if you happen to think, uh, okay, well, the stance independent moral facts say free speech more important than one's loathing for the KKK, therefore act on free speech. Why do that as a realist? That's something that has very much puzzled me about secular moral realists, especially naturalists, why one would care at all to comply.
Whereas, um, if it's a weighing of your preferences, uh, there's no further fact that you need to consider. I prefer this more than this. Okay. Well, then I'm going to act on this. That's just that's just what it is for something to to prefer it more. at the risk of psychologizing, which is not my strength at all, but um you know like in the like aa like submitting to a higher power is like one of the steps and it's actually a big part of the program in part because if you're in a world where you're examining your preferences as like an alcoholic or a substance abuser, your preferences are kind of shitty. That's the that's the whole problem. Like your preferences don't do the work you want them to do. And whether I I think we would probably disagree about whether you can actually do this or if it describes reality in any way, but psychologically being in service of a higher power and being in service of something that is um your preferences are subordinate to has a lot of utility in that way. I guess this is something I'm sensitive to because like as an attorney I often have to put my interest subordinate to my client's interests and there's a um there's a big psychological import there that's very important right because like I don't necessarily like what my client is doing and I don't necessarily like you know in all else being equal I'm not always going to think that like they should win but my job is not to import my preferences onto their out their actions. My job is to help them succeed in what they are doing and to give them the best advice I can because I have a fiduciary duty to them. Right? So it creates a hierarchy. Um which is I think psychologically very useful. Like if you're a free speech advocate like you need psychologically free speech to be in a category because this is Jake by I put his comment up. He's one of your commenters. It's not commendable at all.
I I I think they thought the same thing, right? Like they thought the same thing.
it was not commendable uh to support the KKK. They didn't like the KKK. I can tell you I've talked to people who did it. They did not like the KKK. They wanted them in jail. Um but in their mind there was a obligation higher than their preferences which in cover which changed their perspective whether or not we would agree on that actually being like an a good description of the fact.
I think that's the way they would describe it, right? That the free speech is this overarching obligation which I does I do think influences their psychology.
>> Okay. I I don't know if there was something to that's interesting. I don't know if there's something for me to address there.
>> That's fine. I we we were just riffing on comments, so uh >> Yeah. No, no, fair enough.
>> Yeah. Um Okay. I I do want to get into the example, but uh let's see. This just struck me as funny, so please don't take it as a as an insult. Lance Bush is a porn name. It it it is I don't know if you've heard this, but it's a very good one.
>> Yeah, it's unfortunate. Yeah, especially because like my website is my middle initial is S, so it's Lances Bush. It's >> Oh, nice. That's that's really good. No wonder you switched to Lance Independent. That's >> Yeah, it's it's uh >> Okay. Well, just to get I got one, too.
Uh oh, this guy with his deest BS, which is a perfect segue to my deest BS. So, um, okay. Uh, I I think I think this is a good segue to me trying to lay out, you know, my worldview and why I would categorize myself as a moral realist. And we can see whether we agree on that because you did write an interesting article recently about uh whether theists are in fact moral realists. So I would categorize myself as a deist or baretheist meaning um I believe in God.
I believe that God is omnisient and omni benevolent. Um I believe that God's essence is eternal and unchanging. Um I am agnostic as to any particular claims of revelation or miracle because up till now I have been unable to overcome my Beijian priors. I like I I I don't I don't I don't think it didn't happen, but I I struggle to get to the point where I could take seriously somebody else telling me that they had a revelation as a epistemic matter. It just doesn't it doesn't seem to work for me. Um now that leaves me in the somewhat awkward position of uh compared to most theists where I don't have scripture to work on. But in my worldview as I laid out there would be at least one moral fact that is stance independent which is God is good almost definitionally right if God is omni benevolent God is good so there is a correct index for morality it's that one you could index it something else but you'd be wrong because there's an omni benevolent being and his essence is perfectly good so I should index. I ought index to that because that is the correct index.
Does that strike you as morally as a moral realist position?
>> It would have to be unpacked. It sounds like realism. Uh just from what you've said. Uh but we'd have to unpack what it means to say God is good. Uh and if that ends up being something obscure, then I would just say I don't know. It's uh but you know if you're stipulating that the sense in which God is good is independent of any stances including God's own stance then you've got a type of realism just definitionally. Uh but there you know I don't I would have to ask like what does it mean for God to be good on this account and then that would have to be a discussion and we'd have to unpack it.
>> Yeah. Okay. So I I think that makes sense because if God is is is good and is perfectly good, you know, um I was trying to think about how to frame this with you and and one of the things I was thinking about was like what could people index morality to that would be stance independent and obviously so and you know I think uh you'd have to pick something that's um like if we pick something arbitrary like uh your you know it couldn't be favorite color because that's still stance dependent.
Uh I mean I I guess you could pick like your age or like your birth month or astrological sign or like something like this like it's not it's just a fact about reality and then you index you index morality to that you that that probably is an idiotic thing to do but it would be stance independent. It would be. Yeah. This is actually uh astrology is an example I give where relativism and stance dependence come apart where let's say that there's like 12 different sets of moral rules and it's whether you're Gemini, it's one and you're Leo or Scorpio, it's another. Technically, it's a type of relativism because there's 12 different moral systems, but they're all true independent of anybody's stances. Uh yeah, it's idiotic. In fact, one of my upcoming blog posts, I I give that as an example and I say, "Can you do this?" Yes. Is it ridiculous? Also, yes. Uh but yeah, that's a very clear type of of realism that conceptually does in fact make sense. I can make sense of that.
>> And by the way, for your chatter might be another kung fu is perfectly good.
Karate is just fine. Uh but yeah, uh since we're indexing into martial arts now, but yeah, I I think that okay, that makes sense. So then if there are multiple things you could index too, but one of them is perfectly good, right?
that would be the correct index is I think the the inference I'm making.
>> Yeah. Well, I mean the problem is what do you mean by perfectly good? Uh so like and in what sense does that make it correct and the other's incorrect? Like if you're saying look there are a moral facts and they're correct when they're indexed to God and they're incorrect when they're indexed to some other standard then fine you could just >> I mean it's your system. You could say that's that's what the system is.
>> Yeah. I think foundationally, right, if you're if you're saying that there is a perfectly good, if there is perfect good, then other things are going to be imperfectly good to some extent, right?
They might be a little good, they might be a lot good, they might be terrible, right? Um, but the existence of perfect good means that that's the correct index point. Like look for example because I I I do I am not a normative anti-realist but like if someone said like I believe in a perfectly good God and I also believe in astrological signs and I have chosen to index my morality to the astrological signs rather than the perfectly good God. That was that would just strike me as an error at that point. Right? Like you you like it's one thing to do that if you don't believe there's a perfectly good thing to index to. But if you do think there's a perfectly good thing to index to and you choose to index to Capricorn like that that just is at that point you're just make you're just be making a mistake.
>> Well, there would be some conceptual and possibly metaphysical question about in the world in which that like on this person's worldview and whether it's in fact true or not, does one's astrological sign make propositions of a certain kind true or not? So like philosophers typically deal with this in terms of propositions. So let's say the person says euthanasia is morally wrong.
If you unpack what they say and they say something like euthanasia is inconsistent with the dictates of a set of standards attributed to Capricorn.
>> Um okay well now we can ask is there ontologically speaking what's grounding that is like Capricorn a real metaphysical yeah thing that can ground more and the answer is no then the person just has a weird metaphysical view. They think Capricorn isn't a legitimate truthmaking source for propositional claims within the moral domain and they're just wrong about that.
>> Oh, hey, hey, Nonp. Good to see you in chat, buddy. Uh, thanks for putting this together. Um, okay. No, that that makes a lot of sense. I think that makes a lot of sense to me. So then all right so we have this framework that sounds at least so far as uh moral realism and it assuming I do believe this which in fact I do which makes it easier to explain that this would explain why I would be a moral realist because if that's my metaphysical belief system it would be very hard for me to then say you know I I think well actually it would be illogical for me to say there's no stance independent moral facts because I definitely believe in at least on >> yeah one one thing to be uh to draw apart here is that there's a difference between evaluative terminology like good and bad and then sort of deontic terminology like should shouldn't obligated prohibited um and there would still be a question on this view of okay so if you if you think that there are stance independent evaluative moral truths like God is perfectly good and that's true independent of anybody's stances including God's own stance you have a type of moral realism already right you've already gotten to your moral realism But you could end up having like a like a lacuna in it where you'd still have to give an account if you wanted to of the deontic terminology like you should uh pray to God or you should not harm people. You still have to give an account of what it is that makes them true. And what you'd have to do is show how those are made true in some way connected to God's goodness that they're not made true by God's stance. Like it can't be that you shouldn't um do bad things because God thinks they're bad >> and that's it because then you're still going to get you're going to have your evaluative realism but then you're going to have like I guess deontic anti-realism and that'd be you could have that view. It's kind of a weird view but you could have that view.
>> So so this is where I get into the weeds a little bit and I might be the the wrong messenger but I think I have a take on this that might be helpful. So because I'm a bear theist/deist, I'm not sure whether God has given any commands.
That's that which makes my epistemics really really hard. It makes my philosophy really really easy, which is one of the weird weird situations that I find myself in. Like if you think about all the arguments in favor of God, they all work much better if you're a deist, right? You don't because you you're you have a weaker case to prove. I don't need to prove the trinity. I don't need to prove like I it's you know I I I some guy from Utah who's a guy in my chat I apologize I know that you're Mormon. I'm not picking fun at you, but like proving Mormonism is true is much harder than proving Christianity is true because Mormonism has all these extra features, right? Like theism is such a broad case that it's just it's just easier to prove disism than it is to prove specifically, you know, Pentecostal Christianity or something like this, right? Um, so that's advantage >> just to say I'm certainly on board with that and I'm sure my my viewers are. I mean basically it's just like the larger the string of conjunctions for a given claim the the like the lower ones prior would be like >> exactly I have epistemic disadvantages because I don't get to point to scripture and say I have solved this problem which then leaves me open to people being saying like oh so you're a deist that's nice so what and that the so what is actually much harder for me to answer than a Christian so that it it's not like it has its own disadvantages um in terms of divine command theory I've seen two versions.
I think one of them is moral realism for sure, but let's do the one that I think you might pick at. If somebody said, "God appeared to me in a dream and he told me that I should free the slaves because he wants me to." I assume that you you would say that's classic moral anti-realism at that point.
>> I I actually wouldn't. Um it would depend on it would depend on why God's giving you that command. um and how you would cash that out. Now, if someone says you you should do that because God commanded it, that's still not going to give you anti-realism because even if those normative uh moral facts are stance dependent, there could still be at least one evaluative moral fact like that God is good stands independently.
So, I don't I don't think that that's going to entail anti-realism. I might give you like a little a little touch of anti-realism, but it's also possible that someone could cash that out in some way that doesn't appeal to God's stances.
>> Okay? So like for example, if I was going to try to like we're granting that there's one moral fact of theism, but then we're going to say there's now we're going to try to make the commands themselves stance independent. If somebody said, well, God is omnisient and omni benevolent.
So when God tells you to do something because it's good, he is reporting his perfect knowledge of what good is. And because he's omnib benevolent, he can't lie. So he's telling you he he is telling you a fact about what is good.
He's not telling you his preference.
He's he's giving you a stance at which point the divine command would be I I think a moral fact.
>> Yeah, it would be. And that that's where that's was going to be uh well no way to prove it, but that's what I was going to say next. Like look, God could just tell you what the moral facts are and you don't if you're in a situ a particular situation, God could say, "Look, in this particular situation, the stance independently right thing to do is this.
I'm just telling you what it is." Now, that could be issued as a command, but what makes it true that you should do it is not that God commanded you and that it's God's stance that you do it. It's that it stands independently good and God's just the messenger.
>> Yeah. So then I think from like the moral realism versus anti-realism perspective to the extent this is a perspective that people care about uh in broader the theological circles which maybe they do. It would seem that theologies that cash out divine command that way, like it it's about omniscience and reporting of a fact rather than cashing it out as um God is telling you what he wants or prefers of you would have like at least they would have a a tighter philosophical uh argument there. they they would leave themselves less open to speculation about whether um a divine command was in fact a preference.
>> Yeah, that sounds right. I should I should uh flag though that because of my background training and education, I am almost exclusively familiar with secular uh accounts of realism and and more non-naturalist ones than naturalist ones. And I'm a lot less familiar with uh theistic approaches to meta ethics.
It's just not something I've read much about. And so I >> I just want to to clarify that's not my area of specialization or even competence. And there are going to be people that know a lot more about theistic approaches to meta ethics. Uh and in fact on these sorts of questions I would have to consult people that have greater knowledge. Like I've had to reach out to Joe Schmid who runs a channel Majesty of Reason before to ask him like what are what's going on with all these divine command theory accounts. A lot of them insist they're realists. Uh what what's the deal with that? and he's given me some pretty good explanations for why they could defensively constru themselves as realists. And >> that's a case where I just have to defer to people that have greater knowledge than me until until I could have the time to investigate the matter more myself. But um >> I love Joe and I'm gonna I'm going to hit you up for that connection because I I love Joe's content. He's a really smart guy.
>> Joe is amazing. Um I I would not if if there was somebody I'd be uh worried about having to do a debate with, he would be one of those people. He it it's not just that he's very sharp and thinks well on his feet.
He also has an incredible ability to do an extraordinary amount of homework and preparation for things in in in a very efficient way. He's he's very very impressive.
>> Yeah.
>> Uh yeah, he's great. U so basically what I'm saying is my impression is to what limited extent I understand theistic approaches to meta ethics and I've only even really engaged with Christian ones too. So, I'm not even familiar with I don't know how I don't know how Christians outside sort of mainstream Protestant and Catholicism would address. I don't know what Eastern Orthodox people think. I don't know what Mormons think. I don't know what Muslims think. I don't know what Jews think. Uh I don't know any other views on meta ethics. Um and then I don't I know a tiny little smidgen of what uh Christians uh think. Uh and then I guess there'd be Dist. I just don't know enough about this. So, I just take their word for it. If they say they're realists, I'll grant that until I I dig in and have a look. There have been times when I've heard Christians say that they're realists and then I go and have a look at what they say and they sure as heck sound like anti-realists to me. So, this has happened before. Um, oh, at least one example would be that, um, some stuff I've read from William Lane Craig, the way he ends up cashing his views out. really a lot of it starts sounding like I don't know if he's carving out the realist anti-realism distinction the way I would but you know I wouldn't take him to be super representative of of you know Christian philosophy of religion type stuff.
>> Yeah. And I pulled up this comment from Palunteer Lover which by the way that's a hell of a name. Uh I think Ryan is granting attributes of God he hasn't demonstrated to be the case. I'm not saying God doesn't exist but I see theism essentially as atheism. Well obviously I disagree with you. Uh but beyond the my mere disagreement I think what I would say just to explain some of the norms of the discussion that Lance and I are having we're having a metaethical discussion I advanced the p the position that as a matter of foundational belief God exists and has these traits in order to and we're restricting ourselves to metaethics and I think Lance was uh very good faith in conceding that like on that metaphysic moral realism would be true. I don't think met I don't think Lance ascribes to that metaphysic but we're talking metaeththics and then if we wanted to broaden into like why I think God exists that would be a totally different conversation. Um but the the problem the problem then is that now you're talking about everything everywhere all at once and that becomes kind of untenable. So I I'm not I'm not saying that Lance has conceded that moral realism is true because he's saying that on my metaphysic moral realism would be true.
He's just conceding that on my metaphysic moral realism, which is true, which is of course fine because I don't think he ascribes to my metaphysic. In fact, you said earlier you did not. So, you know, that it's not really it it's all Lance is saying is that I'm consistent in my views, not that my views are correct. Is that fair?
>> If you're asking me then, yeah.
>> Yeah. I I haven't demonstrated to you that God exists. Certainly, >> I don't think that's a contention on the table. Yeah. It's a whole different discussion.
>> Nor would I, to be honest with you, even try. Like it's one of those like sometimes I it's always funny when people talk about this but they're like what's the knockdown argument for the existence of God and I was like if there was a knockdown argument for the existence of God philosophy would be such a short discipline like we would have solved everything a long time ago.
It's one it's one of those a lot of philosophy was about whether or not God exists and then it branched out into a whole bunch of other stuff. um phil you know philosophy of religion is one of those crazy multi-disiplinary areas where you have to basically cover >> yeah even more so than meta ethics you know I don't know if it was Joe who who said this but I mean if somebody wants to get a crash course in the whole rest of philosophy philosophy of religion is a great place to start you just get bombarded with every field all all smashing into one another at the same time it is a a beautiful chaos to enter into if you want to get uh up to speed on philoshy very quickly in a fascinating area and unfortunately it's one that I just have had so little exposure to. Uh what I can say from what minimal experience I have with arguments for theism is that in spite of being an atheist, the case for theism strikes me as quite a bit better than the case for moral realism just because I I think the case for moral realism is so weak. And that might sound really weird that I actually think the existence of God is more likely than moral realism being true. Uh but I actually think that that's the case. Well, I again I I'm torn here because as a practical matter, I am I would very much would like to create moral realist arguments for natural law that appeal to non-theists and atheists. Um I really struggle with it. Um Benjamin Speed, is it Watkins? Yeah. Speed, he did it. He he talks about this a lot. He makes an argument where he says that basically reasons are brute facts as I understand it and that like one ought things because there are better reasons. And that it's it's tricky. I I have a hard time defending reasons as brute facts absent a reasoner. Like that that that's always struck me as hard to do. And when people talk about a perfect observer, I'm always like, "Oh, well, you mean a perfect observer who's like going to tell you the truth about everything and is always good and but not but not just that. A perfect observer who has all the useful information, maybe one that's omnisient. You're just you're describing God like that like like you're you're you're you're creating a secular version of God. That's what you're saying. So maybe maybe let's just say that." Um I struggle with those accounts. So like one of the one of the issues when like when Nonf raised this conversation I was trying to think about what to do with it. I was trying like do we do a debate and I was like would I debate that moral realism is true? And I don't know how that I would because I could only defend it by arguing for my metaphysic right like I I don't know that I would be well positioned to defend moral like naturalist accounts of moral realism.
Like I think Sam Harris is completely wrong. like I I I don't I don't think he makes any sense. So like I don't know that I'm in a position to defend that worldview.
>> Yeah. I I mean you might want to defend it for rhetorical reasons, but I I don't think there's much to it. Uh uh Harris, as far as I understand, is something like a naturalist realist. I think Watkins is a is a non-naturalist. that Watkins uh in talking about reasons is echoing the sort of Derek Parfett or the perfidian line uh which is a very popular conrle of contemporary non-naturalist moral realism which castes out cashes out what one ought to do in terms of what one has reason or most reason or um what is the phrase that uh the parfait uses I can't I external reasons uh reasons external to one's own stances effectively um and that those accounts are the ones I actually have the most issue with. Uh so I think those accounts literally don't even make any sense. Uh so they appeal to a notion of reasons that I think has no content. I think it's like literally meaningless. So they'll say you have a reason to do this and you say, "Well, what is a reason?" And they say, "A reason is something that counts in favor." And you say, "What's that?" And they're like, >> "There's no further thing to say. It's brute. It's it's unanalyzable. There's nothing further to say." Um I don't think that makes any sense.
>> Yeah.
>> And you know, I I will flag and I even give people the reference. It's page 272 of volume two of Parfett's on what matters where he has a whole little discussion about this where he talks about Bernard Williams and he says this about Bernard Williams but I haven't gleaned this from what Bernard Williams has actually said in his own writing but he says Bernard Williams says that this isn't even meaningful. It's not intelligible. He doesn't know what I'm talking about. Uh and lots of other people do but he doesn't name names in the text. So I don't know which philosophers Parfett spoke to. Parfett traveled a lot and he talked to a lot of people. So apparently, according to Parfett, there's people out there that agree with me about this, but I don't know who they are and they haven't come forward. But I endorse a view that's like super duper controversial, which I call the unintelligibility thesis, which is that a view like Watkins is isn't even false. Like it's not even that it's right or wrong. Uh it's it's it's not even a candidate. It's not intelligible.
And a lot of people have a very uh apoplelectic reaction to that. They really really hate that. It's the stupidest uh suggestion anyone's ever made. as if it's somehow not possible for philosophers to be confused and say things that are are not meaningful.
>> Well, this is what I mean about this the strange bedfellows drawn on this issue because like I um a friend of m friend of mine uh Daniel who goes by the name of Darwin to Jesus on X and basically does he he's basically mastered the art of um like meme to debate because he did a debate uh with Watkins and it was hyper cordial. They exchanged opening statements. It was like really well thought out. It It took them months to set it up because they were writing out all their statements and rebuttals. Like it was hyper hyper cordial. And then he'll post like really spicy kind of rageba theistic memes um to draw people into his content, you know? So he he's kind of figured out how to do this in this particular way. And they they debated this topic. And I had a similar reaction to you when I was listening to the arguments where like yeah the whole time they were debating I was just like well what are the reasons like what what like absent a re like there was another guy on X who went by secular outpost he he no longer is on X which is a shame but he hates Elon Musk so he switched to blue sky um and he was like a uh a physicalist platonist so he believed in the platonic forms at least that I don't I understand where you're going. You're saying like there is a platonic form and then like through reason you could determine whether or not you're aligning or participating in the good. So reasons would then be indexed to the platonic form of the good. That might have other problems. But I I I understand what you're doing when you say there are reasons but there's no reasoner and there's no like I I just I I do struggle with that. like are you saying they're abstract objects like numbers or pi or the good like what what are we what are we saying they are and they they never I never really felt satisfied with the justification it felt like it was um asserted and then went to brute fact but there was a missing step somewhere I don't know maybe that's just me >> there's not even a missing step there are no steps they just assert that this is the case they claim that they they have the concept of a reason and if you don't have it then too Uh too bad that's it's very sad that you don't have the concept that they have it and if you don't then you're just conceptually deficient. I've actually had people suggest that I am conceptually deficient when I say what are these reasons? Um you know because on this view they are literally like reasons simplicity. Uh so if you say but what is the reason like let me give some examples because I could tell you a bit about how I talk about reasons. I have a blog post. I was trying to pull up the blog post so I could throw a link but it's going to be too hard for me to find it. I have my own account of reasons on my blog where I talk about this. I got to publish a paper on this at some point. Um I have this kind of reductive quietest view of reasons. Um but you know if someone said what was the reason you went to the store and I could say oh to buy some milk. Now you could keep asking questions. Why did you want to buy some milk? Well I ran out of it. Okay well why did you run out of it? Because I use it for my coffee. You can keep asking questions. Uh and it would bottom out in something like for me my preferences or my values. I want to have milk. So that's why I went and got some milk. Uh and so it would bottom out in that fact.
it would it would terminate the inquiry the normative inquiry would terminate in a fact about my preferences. Now, does that mean that it's a brute fact? No.
It's just that you've terminated that line of inquiry and the final fact, the final normative fact is just a fact.
It's just identical to my preferences.
Like it just ultimately I got milk because I wanted to. That's the reason I got milk. And so if you said what is the reason, I would say because I wanted to.
So you could actually say what the reason is. The reason is a preference.
It's a desire. That's what it is. Reason that what the reason is is now discharged. Like imagine I have a box and I say there's an animal in it. And you say, "What what animal is in the box?" And I go, "No, no, no. It's just an animal simplicity. It's not any particular kind of animal." What the hell? That that doesn't make any sense.
Like nothing is just an animal in particular. It's a cat or a dog or a lizard. Nothing can just be an undifferentiated animal. It might be an animal no one's ever heard of before.
could be an exotic animal from an alien world, but it's still like a particular kind of animal. It's not just an animal simplicitor. That doesn't make sense.
And so when people talk about like when when uh Ben Watkins talks about reasons and when Parfett and others talk about them to me, it almost sounds like a like almost like a grammatical error. Um it'd be similar to someone saying imagine I said this um Joe is intrinsically taller. And you you say, "Okay, taller than what or than who?" And I go, "No, no, no. He's not taller than anything.
He's just intrinsically taller. I actually think that like that I think is a clear case of nonsense because tallness is inherently relativized. Like you can't you can be tall like tallerness I guess you could say.
Something can only be taller than something. It has like the sentence taller like it has to take an object.
Another example I like to give is like you can't just put things. You have to put things somewhere. You you can't just put the shoes. You have to put the shoes in the box or put the shoes on the table. You can't just put shoes. like that's just not how the word the word works. And so it's the same thing I think when Ben and others talk about reasons they I don't think it makes sense to say you just have reasons and then if I say what are the reasons and they go no no no no the qu that's an inappropriate question there's no content to the reasons you just have the reason what that's nonsense >> there's a guy I'd love to talk to on another YouTube philosopher but uh Dr. Nathan Hawkins who um he as I understand it he's a theist idealist right and like that's the worldview where this sort of argument makes a lot of sense to me where you're like oh there's reasons well what are the reasons so it's like well as if you're a theist idealist you believe that like we basically exist within God's mind so the reasons would be reflective of God's nature and then the whole thing has like an internal coherence but to say that there's reasons and they're just brute facts. Uh that that that does seem to be I don't want to say begging the question. That's probably unfair, but it's like um your animal box was a good one. Or like another one would be like if you were uh what's the famous example? If you were lined up and you were going to get shot by a firing squad and there's 12 men there and they all misfire or miss and then you live and someone says like and you go, "Oh my god, what happened?" And they're like, "They all misfired or missed." And you're like, "Yeah, but I was going to die." And they're like, "What? What happened?" They're like, "They all misfired or missed?" It's like, "Well, that I I feel like I'm Yes, you are describing what happened, but I feel like there's a missing there's a missing piece here. Like, why did they misfire or miss? Like, why are these reasons reasons? Why are they things that I ought to care about?" Right? And I I do find that um an inherently unsatisfying answer, which I actually do think counts for something like if your answer is deeply deeply unsatisfying that is that is a problem because you know why would anyone if only rhetorically why would anyone believe it? But also like how does it even cohhere if it doesn't seem to answer the question that I was really getting at when I asked?
>> Yeah, I think you might even be granting too much to be asking why. I mean, I think uh the first question should be what what do they mean by reason? And something very weird about the way that u they use reason is that they're not actually able to tell you what they mean. And this is something that Parfett says in that passage on uh page 272 if I got it right where he says, you know, there's no there's no way to tell you what this means. I could just give you synonyms. Um and I find something I that should raise a red flag for people. And one of the things I found in conversations is that it typically does not raise a red flag for a lot of people. And I'm very puzzled by this. I think it's very strange for someone to be employing a concept. Now, it's one thing if I would struggle to tell you what the word the means or the word uh and means or because or something. This is challenging on the spot to give an account of parts of speech. Uh I would struggle to do that. But if there's a concept that's central to your entire theoretical framework and it's not like an ordinary language concept that's like really weirdly used and and embedded in everyday discourse, it's a theoretical concept you thought up. I would expect you to be able to tell me what it means.
Um and so it's kind of weird when you can't. It's kind of like if a scientist said, "Look, I spent years and years thinking about this and I have a theory." And you go, "What's the theory?" And they go, "I can't I can't tell you. It's just my theory is X and X explains things." And you go, "But what is the explanation?" And they say, "I literally can't tell you."
No scientists are going to take that seriously. And yet, for whatever reason, people are fine with philosophers just saying, "Well, I have this concept of an external reason. I'm sorry. I can't tell you what it means. You have it or you don't. If you don't, too bad. It's like jazz. If you have to ask, you're never going to know. Um, you're just deprived.
I'm very sorry, but I have it and my buddies have it, so we get it. And so, we know it's meaningful and they can't tell you what it means. That doesn't raise any red flags for people that people are going around having this mysterious ineffable concept that no one can describe. Um, that's weird because let's say that there are concepts like that. How did they figure that out? How did they figure out that there's ineffable concepts? And how did they figure out that one is one of them? Like how do how do you distinguish between the reason you can't explain it is because you don't know what you're talking about and the reason you can't explain it is because it's deeply meaningful but it's uniquely ineffable.
How did they determine that? That it's not like they have an argument for that.
They just say that I >> if I had a gun to my head and I was going to be unfair and I'm not I am not going to be unfair because I think he's a good guy and I enjoy his content and his conversations. If I was going to put a gun to my head, it would be that I don't think I think it's it is a really tough road to hoe to get to moral realism from naturalism. That that's like I think metaphysical naturalism and realism border on incompatible. It's it's like if somebody tells me that they believe in like broadly defined free will and they're like a physicalist determinist naturalist. I'm like well how like how did how like it I'm open to you connecting these dots to me but they do it does seem like there's a severe tension between your views. Um, and I think that people would like oftentimes would like to be objectivists and realists when it comes to morality. Um, but are not nec but are not theists for whatever reason. And I think that I honestly I I I think it's a struggle.
It's it's really really tough, especially if you're like a hardline metaphysical naturalist, you know, like I don't know.
I don't know how to connect those dots in a meaningful way and I haven't read an account that I loved. I haven't read that much. So, it's possible somebody has some brilliancancy that I I unaware of, but I suspect if I'm psychologizing that's the issue that they they have um they have commitments that don't line up. Well, >> point of clarity here, uh they're actually non-naturalists.
Really?
>> I don't know if Ben Watkins is, but if he's drawing on Parfett, Parfett is definitely a non-naturalist.
>> Okay. So, if Parfett says, "I have reasons."
>> Yeah.
>> He's saying those are >> non natural facts. Yeah. He's a non-naturalist.
>> Interesting. So, he's saying like the re This is what I didn't get from Benjamin that I wanted to hear was like, "What are the reasons?" Like, metaphysically, not metically, metaphysically, what are they?
>> Oh, I see. Yeah. But like, what's what are they metaphysically speaking? Yeah.
>> Yeah. Like are are are you claiming that they are like you know like like I believe for example like I'm a realist about numbers like I think math is discovered not invented right so like I you know like when someone tells me if they believe in like abstract objects and that numbers are abstract objects I'm in like that actually works for me so if somebody said like I'm a realist I think reasons exist I'm like oh okay I get you but aren't you kind of just advocating for neoplatinism at that point like isn't that what you're doing like but I didn't get that account from him and I wasn't sure what he meant.
>> Yeah, I don't know exactly. So I don't know what Watkins's view is but Parfett and Scanland and some others are going to think that the non-natural moral facts that give us reasons. So the facts, this is another weird thing that they say is that they'll say that the moral facts give you reasons. And that certainly sounds like some sort of of metaphysical relation, but they actually maintain that these facts they're they're I don't know exactly what Parfett and Scandal themselves uh would say like precisely, but the views that have emerged out of some of this thinking are are minimal realism. Uh there are types of realism where the moral truths they don't have truth makers. There isn't any there isn't something that makes them true. uh and some of them would phrase it as saying that there a certain kind of conceptual truth and they would they would reject plonism. They would not think that the moral facts uh like reflect or correspond or constituted by some sort of a autonomous ontological entities that ground them. They would say, "No, no, no. I'm not making that strong metaphysical claim. I'm making a claim about a certain kind of conceptual truth." kind of the um I don't know because they're not here to speak on their own behalf and uh I'm not going to be able to do a good job representing their views because I don't understand their views well enough to articulate them. But let's say somebody said look it's a conceptual truth that bachelors are unmarried men men. It'd be a little weird to say like, "Wait, so are you saying there's like the Platonic form of the Bachelor and it has to exist in the Nah, that's just what the term means."
And so some people are going to try to get at um certain kinds of truths in a way that would be analogously um I I guess I I there's not going to be deep metaphysical commitments. They're going to say, "Look, these these uh you have these reasons, you have these moral truths, but there isn't you don't have to be a Platonist. You don't have to uh go further and and and have this really robust metaphysics for that to be the case.
>> Yeah. Okay. I mean I Yes. This is I I've heard that argument be made before. Um yes. I I I it's funny. This is the strange bedfellows thing because like I said and I I think this is by I hope for our respective audiences this is a useful example of productive disagreement because I I as much as Lance and I are getting along on this stream I I will tell you that if we did a ven diagram of philosophic beliefs it barely overlaps you know like it's going to be this tiny little subsection because most of our beliefs are quite different in terms of um how the how these play out but I think on this we we do seem to agree like I that that's so unsatisfying that it I unintelligible might be the correct term. Like it it does it I I struggle with the idea like because minimally then you're going to get stuck in the world of like where does the come from? You know like min minimally that's a problem.
>> I don't think you're going to have good answers. Can I actually say dispositionally there might be a reason why. So, if someone's imagining the the dialectic here, I think the reason that we're not disputing things with each other is because you've got this vin diagram here. I've got this one over here. They barely overlap. And then we're talking about this third vin diagram that only marginally overlaps and we're both positioning ourselves in opposition to that. Uh but the thing is part of the reason I think we're finding that point of of conjunction is because dispositionally I don't spend a lot of my time arguing against like theistic or theistic views. I spend most of my time arguing against contemporary secular analytic philosophy which I really I think uh there is a there's a sort of um >> ideological or historical reason why we're finding alignment here which is that I take a lot of what they're doing to be basically saying okay well we let go of God uh you know it's niche the death of God that all happened >> now what and so as we as as analytic philosophers um shifted through the that existential spirit. Not that they necessarily went through it because it's more continental, but whatever. Um, >> now they're trying to have their cake uh and eat it. Yeah.
>> Without having God, without having the original foundations that they once were able to appeal to to sustain what they have. They're trying to come up with like the replacements uh for it. And I think that they really struggle with that. And I think that what they have is a it's you know Nietze says uh God is dead but his shadow will be cast on the wall for for many ages after. I think what analytic philosophy a lot of them are dealing with are those shadows.
They're trying to get a god out of the shadows and it's not working very well for them.
>> Well and I think it's fun again I I I want them to succeed on some level. So I I and and my chat really wants them to succeed because my chat is not particularly theistic. Uh so I'm always talking about theism as a basis for my philosophy, but they are not on board with it and they're always kind of be like, "Hey, could you do this in a could you do this in a atheist friendly way?"
And my answer is like, "I'm trying." Uh but I do think that's right. I I think that there's a certain extent to which um I find your position I don't I don't want to call them dishonest. that's too mean. Um, I'm I'm just going to say refreshingly honest and hope that people understand the caveat I'm drawing just because like I I think that some of their views really they probably if they're going to take metaphysical naturalism theor seriously probably should agree with you is I think is I think what you know like >> I I don't have to put it nicely. I think they're coping with the fact that they don't have God. Well, or or they should be like more and again not to be offensive, but like moral anti-realism is a sufficient problem that I have that I believe in God because it I now accept the moral argument, right? Like I think what they're doing for those of you who I think my chat knows with the moral argument basically is basically saying objective moral facts exist but for God objective moral facts could not exist therefore God exists. And I think they're stuck in, you know, the second premise where they're like, I'd really like to come up with a way for objective moral facts to exist absent God. Um, which is, I think, quite difficult. One of the things that's interesting about this conversation is I in prepping for it was like, ah, I wonder what kind of innovative push back Lance is going to lay on my theistic framework as a meta ethic. And the answer was very little to be from in from the conversation. And I think that that does sum up the difference on some level, right? Where it's like if I had said, "Lance, I believe that there are reasons and the reasons tell me what's good." I think you would have had significant push back on what I said.
>> Oh, I would be like frothing at the mouth.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Um ju just because like one is a hell of a lot easier to defend as a meta ethic. The metaphysic we could is separate of course, but as a meta ethic like one I think is a lot easier to defend. Huh. Okay. So, I guess the question is Oh, we got I've got a lot more questions for you and I should be I should be nice to my chat and read them and your chat and read them.
>> Yeah, I'm happy to try to give as quick of answers I could give. You could even cut me off and try to get people answered to >> Yeah. Yeah. audience.
>> The the other debate is we could do the really contentious thing, but I it's so it never goes anywhere useful, which is the int the moral intuition point. I've never actually seen that conversation play out in a useful way, so I'm not sure it's worth doing. Uh but we could we could give it a go if we wanted to.
>> We could we could uh put a pin in that.
I mean, I'm not going to have time to do that and answer the question. So, maybe we should we can up the question.
>> So, we'll save that we'll save that for another time. The TL the TLDDR is we will both be like, I can't believe that you don't understand what I'm talking about. That's that's how that's how the conversation will go.
>> Well, I just wanted to flag um I'm going to have a blog post, a really big one about intuitions coming out fairly soon.
And I'm also going to be talking to at least two different people about intuitions fairly soon just because I've been very aggressively posting about intuitions on Substack. So that could give you some material to work with before we reconvene to discuss.
>> Yeah. Oh, and can I can I give you one other bit of material to work with just because I found it really interesting.
Um, one of the because I'm a big fan of Thomas Reed. One of Thomas Reed's responses to uh David Hume's famous argument that we can't observe causation and that we're not justified in drawing the inductive inference uh was Thomas Reed responded by saying well actually we wouldn't be justified but for the fact that we all observe ourselves as causal agents. So having had that experience of being a causal agent, Hume's problem no longer exists because we are now justified in inferring it on the evidence presented to us. Which is very interesting because as a new father, his argument is is essentially grounded out in the strange experience that young children have of figuring out which body parts belong to them and how to make them work, right? Where they're looking at their arms and they're going like, "Oh, yes, I can do this, right? I can grab my foot like I am the one who makes this happen but I am not the one who makes that happen. Right. And that is I think um deeply intuitive appealing to me. You have a kid of the perfect age for observation on this. So as you write your blog post uh I don't know whether free will is going to come into it or causation but that might be an interesting thing to weave in.
>> Yeah. I was just observing her today like she'll hold her hand out and then like turn it and then be like whoa like I can watch that in real time. It's great.
>> Yeah. And and when this is the example I because when people talk to me about like free will for example I I I'm I'm open about this. my basians are so high on free will that I am almost not open to evidence to the contrary because my intuition of it is so strong that like I would almost run into like a like Planaga's evolutionary argument against naturalism where it's like if I if I'm if I'm if I'm this wrong about something I could be very wrong about a whole bunch of other stuff that I'm a lot less certain of and I don't know how I would stop that cascade of defeaters it like it's it's too embedded but the reason it's so embedded is a how I observe my own life, but then b my experience of both being a father and before I was a lawyer, I was a I taught elementary school. So like teaching young young children and watching them kind of go through this de developmental process of just like being like I am the one who raises my hand, right? There's like it the the intuition got so buttress that it's hard for me to let it go. But I I'll look out for your blog post. That sounds very interesting.
Um, all right. So, rapid fires.
Bass Eddie Lance. Does this logically, philosophically follow? Necessarily. If God exists, God necessarily exists.
Possibly. God doesn't exist. Therefore, God doesn't exist. I can't I think he's making fun of me, but that's all right.
>> Are they I mean, I would I would have to like sit down and pack. I don't want to try to work out a syllogism in real time. I'm not fine. I I I made the error of present. This is the modal ontological argument for God though it's framed as the symmetry break. It's it's framed as the symmetry objection >> and I presented it to chat without doing a lot of work unpacking what modal logic is and now they make fun of me for it.
So I think that's I think that's them making fun of me to be honest with you.
I I'll just flag something is that I I typically uh my typical attitude towards uh syllogisms is that they're they're I I don't know if I want to say always or almost always trivial because once you unpack uh what one is committed to in virtue of the meanings of the terms and the and the uh premises, you're going to end up having at least one of at least one of them is going to be something that's going to cash out in a way that is trivial or question begging. So I don't tend to think that much work is achieved by presenting syllogisms.
>> Interesting. That's a very that's that's a pretty I'm not sure chat is following that but for a philosopher and someone who teaches philosophy that's a super hot take that that super hot take within phil philosophic circles.
>> It it is yeah it's doesn't originate with me. Uh so if you want to see someone that make that has this take uh check out FCS Schiller. He was a classical classical pragmatist and a contemporary of William James. He talks about this in his in his own work. So yeah, it is a hot take.
>> Yeah. Okay. Uh NWAD. Uh so when should one not follow the laws of logic? Ryan, if I'm interpreting his answer correctly, I don't know, Lance. uh if you're because you said that you were you did you you were an anti-realist about normative a normative anti-realist including about having opts connected to rules of laws of logic etc. So on your view is there a time when you shouldn't follow the laws of logic? Uh well there might not be any interests I have that would ever be served by not following the laws of logic but I will say that you know laws of logic has to be qualified by the fact that there are different systems of logic and they're not always going to yield the same uh outcomes or implications and uh there might be a reason to say programming a computer in a way that doesn't follow one particular logic. It uses a different kind of logic. Uh there might be some practical reason to do that.
There might be some practical reason for a person in practice to abide by some non-class form of logic. I I don't know if I could think in real time what one of those reasons might be. Uh the cheap answer would be that there might be some indirect reasons, but I wouldn't find that satisfactory. Like if someone prioritizes enjoying themselves more than they care about logical consistency and they enjoy rejecting logic, then it would make sense for them to reject logic. But that's that's a pretty indirect and goofy way to to answer the the question. So, um, when should one not follow the laws of logic? Sort of trivially when it wouldn't be conducive to their interest to do so.
>> Yeah. And I think this was almost answered by the the line we had about like what if there was a norm or a moral that was universally true.
>> Yeah.
>> Right. where it's like, okay, even if we assume that all humans would be better served by doing this, uh, the way you're using the phrase stance independent, even if it would be true that all humans should follow the laws of logic, that wouldn't really meaningfully interact with the way the phrase stance independent is being used. Um, which we again we can quibble about the definition, but accepting the definition as offered, I don't think it would matter very much.
>> Yeah. Just very quickly, it would just be there could be a situation in which it would turn out to be the case that in practice it would never be in anybody's interest to not follow the laws of logic. It wouldn't make them sense independent though.
>> Yeah. Got it. Okay. Uh Duck, this isn't for you, Lance, but uh since he paid me, I'm going to read it. Uh my last six bucks, first of all, Duck, I appreciate it, but don't give me your last six bucks. Uh Ryan hosting on the line anytime soon? Uh yes, I will do call-in shows soon. This is not a call-in show, but I will do call-in shows. And thank you, Duck, for the support. And if you I will I am a capitalist. I will read anything you pay me to read, but don't give me your last six bucks. Uh just quite frankly, if it's your last six bucks, please keep it. Um Oh, this is one of yours, Lance. Lance, does he think you don't think anything is wrong?
The line of questions was a bit weird.
Did I Did I Was it an off-putting line of questions, Lance?
>> I don't recall that specific part of the conversation, but I haven't been off-put, so I guess I guess not. I don't know. Yeah, I was I was I don't I don't I don't think I was uh loading it up too hard. Even even when I went with the um the maximally disagreeable moral act, I kind of kept it vague instead of loading up the >> distance too from yourself. Uh yeah, I I I will I will not promise that that's how I would debate the term, but in a conversation like this, I don't think it's uh you know, like it it does it behooves nothing to kind of like maximally load up the term. Uh it is rhetorically effective. Like I will totally admit that like moral realists do that because it's rhetorically effective.
>> Yeah. I just a thing to flag on the rhetoric. One of the things I like to do in my writing and would do in a debate is if somebody is employing recognizable rhetorical patterns, Yeah. I will point them out and explain the rhetorical patterns and I kind of see it as diffusing bomb like oh look at the rhetorical strategy this person is trying to employ. Let's talk about why it's tricky and doesn't actually work.
So it would be pretty risky for someone to try rhetoric on me in a meta ethics debate because it might end up making them look bad if I start making them look like they're >> they're using tricks.
>> Well, it's funny too because it's you know there's a it's kind of why I started with like what is philosophy and why do we do it right? Because like a one of the questions that uh my my friend Rob No uh he's you know really smart guy uh in in terms of this where he he the advice he gave me is like whenever you have an internet conversation because you're talking publicly the first question you should ask yourself is why am I doing this right and and that's a serious point because like if you're going to if the goal is to convince people that moral anti-realism is True. I think you could have been more aggressive with me than you were right in this conversation rhetorically.
I don't think that would be great philosophically. I don't think it would be great in terms of bridge building.
And I don't like there's a lot of other reasons not to do it. But if the goal was to be like I'm going to maximally advocate for moral anti-realism there there you could have been more rhetorically aggressive as I could have been for moral realism. Um, but it's kind of a question of why are you having the conversation, which is a little meta, we're doing meta ethics now. I'm doing meta rhetoric, but like that I think it is a useful thing to do because a lot of times I see people on the internet go into conversations and they haven't thought about why they're having the conversation and then they leave and they're very upset with how it went.
>> No, I'm just I'm just not that makavelian. I just don't think what's my strategy here? what are my goals and how can I how can I win? I just like talking about this stuff and so >> yeah. Well, I mean I I I try to be honest about this like I'm a trial attorney. Like this is a 100% of what I do with my day day in and day out is it's like how do we have this argument in a way that will convince the jury of X or the judge of Y. Like this is you know everything that we do is persuasive writing ultimately no matter how analytic it gets. So that it's a part of my DNA at this point. One of when I went to law school, it was really funny. This uh great great very venerable judge was giving our opening remarks uh on the first day and he said uh when you go to law school, everyone talks about learning to think like a lawyer and you're all wondering how you can accomplish this and at the end of my career I'm asking is it reversible? And uh I thought it was a good it was a good line because it it it is you know uh it becomes a habit pretty quickly. Um, but natural law in this case was actually a magic proxy for agreement.
Well, I I think Lance might agree with that and I think I would probably disagree with that. Uh, but I think that's downstream of our metaphysics.
That sound fair.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. Um, philosophers always debate these big ideas, but I think it's actually small little decisions that matter more. Am I a better person for watching and commenting the stream or cleaning the house? that's actually more relevant to our actual lives. But philosophers ignore these day-to-day choices. This is a very interesting comment.
Why?
Okay, this might be a really unfair question, but I'm going to ask it because it's it just struck me. It's very interesting on moral anti-realism.
So, assuming more for the sake of the question that moral anti-realism is true, why spend your time the way you do? like what what is the what what is it that you're trying to accomplish by writing and talking and teaching about moral anti-realism?
>> Yeah, it's just going to depend on the anti-realist view in question.
>> Well, for you >> Yeah. Yeah. I there's a difference between what I would do and that like you know there's a difference between how I represent myself and then how I represent an umbrella category. Uh I do stuff because it's it aligns with my goals and values and interests. Like >> but but what are those? That's what I'm getting at. like what like what you know like be >> Oh, that's a good question.
>> Yeah. No, because like the answer is like this is what's weird to me. Okay, there is like what someone asked me why do I spend so much time talking about natural law? Because I believe it's true.
>> That's the act, right? That there's a very obvious answer there. So like if you >> on moral anti-realism, it all boils down to preferences. Fair enough. But why do you prefer to talk about moral anti-realism given that it's it's almost talking about what doesn't exist rather than what does?
>> Yeah, sure. But I mean, you could give a good explanation for why an atheist would argue for atheism if they think belief in the existence of God is like socially harmful if they're, oh, it promotes religious violence or whatever kind of thing atheists would want to say.
>> Sure.
>> Um, yeah. So I don't think that uh or like realism is some massive existential threat to human civilization or something. And so there's not a lot of like oomph a lot of of really substantive practical value in arguing against realism because I mean notice recall what I said earlier is I don't even think realists act very differently. Yeah.
>> Um in fact I mean the main thing I wrote about my dissertation is I don't even think most people are realist. I think it's mostly uh like an a position largely of academic interest. And so I could say a few things. Uh one is that uh I don't think that we always know why we do what we do. Uh so people have asked me like how did I get into doing what I do and why do I do it? And you know we can weave retroactive narratives that tell a plausible cohesive story about what's motivating us. But I actually see those as as sort of um reconstructive fiction. And I think that there's good reasons to believe that our own motivations are often relatively opaque to us or um they're so improvised and so transient that there's not really any hope of us having an accurate recollection of the con of some consistent stream of motivation for why we do what we do because there actually literally wasn't one. Um so you know I take a page from Nick Chader's work uh he has a book called the mind is flat and uh he talks in there about how people today frequently operate under the presumption that there is a deep wellspring of unconscious goals values beliefs attitudes dispositions and motivations and that that deep unconscious is motivating our actions argues it's not actually the case and that the human mind is far shallower than people realize. uh there are I think cognitive and and other sorts of theoretical reasons for thinking that that's the case and I very much fall in line with that. And so I think that our our narrative histories are are largely fictionalized. And so at a certain in a certain sense I'm uncomfortable saying here's why I do what I do because I don't literally believe whatever story I'm telling you. I would need basically I think I would be theorizing about myself in the same way that you would.
You could psychize why you think what I'm doing. I would be doing much the same. Now I have better access to facts about my history but I'm still engaged in a narrative reconstruction process.
Um I don't actually have access to my state of mind 10 or 20 years ago. So having caveed sorry >> no that's what's fascinating about this is with old with that explanation I think I now have a better understanding of why our the way we would discuss intuitions would be different than if we had had the intuition discussion because if you're uncomfortable unpacking your own preferences with any level of certainty you're certainly not going to be comfortable unpacking your intuitions with any level of certainty right like like like it would that would seem to be a radically different view of your internal internal access to yourself as I guess >> yeah my my way of viewing the way that the mind works and the way that language works is not mainstream it's quite a bit different from the mainstream views in philosophy and it has massive downstream consequences in terms of the overarching metaphosy having said all that there are enough recurring patterns in what I'm disposed to do that I could point to some things that I would guess I would predict are probably accurate. Um, one of them is that >> and as again as far as I could recall and this could be inaccurate. Um, I really get ticked off at certain kinds of overconfidence and dogmatism. And one of the things that I encountered when I encountered advocacy for moral realism was a kind of smug derision towards anti-realists. And this is a throughine throughout my life. I've always hated bullies. I didn't like them when I was a kid. I would fight bullies. I didn't I didn't like bullies. Um, and what I see in academia, and this is both true inside of philosophy and outside of philosophy, is that there are sociological and tribal forces at play that reinforce uh conformity and the status quo through social jockeying in ways that I find, especially when it comes to philosophy, repugnant.
philosophy. I aspired when I got into it to to be a part of this discipline that was somehow pure. It was above the the fray. It was it was striving to be something that's that allowed us to step outside the socioultural paradigms in which we're we're we're raised to really question everything. And what I found with analytic philosophers as I pursued my education is that they weren't doing this. that there were certain dogmas and presuppositions that I was expected to conform to and comply with and any tendency I had to question or doubt them was treated not with curiosity by every sometimes by some people but was frequently treated with dismissal, disinterest, not even necessarily hostility or or smuggness or or a sense of superiority, but just a dis like well if you're not basically the attitude would be look if you're not going to abide by the way that we do philos philosophy. Why are you I've had people ask me this when I was in grad school.
Why are you even here? I don't even know what you're doing here. What's the point of being here if you're going to challenge things? Wait a minute. This is a philosophy program. Isn't that the point? Why aren't you challenging them?
And so what I encountered was a kind of unquestioning presuppositional dogmatism lurking within contemporary analytic philosophy. and metaeththics became the kind of wedge issue that I tend to be representative of an underlying dogmatism that suffuses the whole field and that's what I'm really after really metaeththics is not ultimately my my big thing my big thing is analytic philosophy itself I think it has underlying problems and that's what I I really want to get to the heart of >> so you're you're almost doing a uh a critical theory of analytic philosophy is kind of >> something like that yeah >> okay That that that's interesting because that as and now we're just psychologizing but uh as a motivator for the work that you do that that that makes sense to me like you know because one of the questions that I had when I when I was like uh when Nonf was describing you and when I kind of looked you up I was like huh if I if I believe if I didn't if I was an anti-realist why would I spend a lot of time talking about it >> was like actually one of the interesting questions because like if you don't believe that something exists. Why do you spend a lot of time talking about?
And yes, like with atheists, I agree with you. A a lot of them do it because they were personally hurt by religion or they think religion is a corrosive force in the world or some something along these lines. Um because it's always kind of strange like as an atheist, why do you spend all your time talking about God? Why why wouldn't you just like move on with your day? Would be like another approach, right? Um so for an anti-re spend a lot of time talking about morality is interesting. Um I think that that was a pretty good explanation of why though I think that I found I found that illuminating certainly. Um the other problem with it is and I to get into like the the critique of analytic philosophy.
My mod Chapingro and I were having this discussion the other day and we we hit the same impass that I think you and I would hit if we were talking about intuitions where I I asked him like we were talking about infinence and I was like do can you picture in your mind actually picture a chicken with an infinite number of feathers a specifically infinite number of feathers which I assumed he would say no that's impossible and he said yes and I was like well I now I'm stuck like I don't really know what to do with this because to me the idea that you could picture an infinite number of feathers is absurd.
Like clearly like you can't count to infinite. So there's no way that there's an infinite number of feathers in your mind's eye. Right? So whatever you mean by this is not something that I mean by this. Um but it's actually very hard to progress the conversation beyond that point when you're because because if I say to you like well do you have this intuition? You say no I don't. And I say yes I do. like, okay, well, great. Now what? Um, so I could see that being very frustrating to your advisor, for example, if that if that was the way those conversations played out when you were in grad school, like leading to like the why are you here comment? So you think that there's a underlying structure that needs to be unpacked or deconstructed in some way. What what would it look like if you succeeded?
What's the goal?
>> Yeah. So uh the goal I think would be to to base the future of philosophy on a more pragmatic uh approach, a more pragmatic and empiricist approach. And uh the the kind of empiricism that I favor is not one that is fundamentally antagonistic to the opriorisms uh that rationalists like. I think that there is an empiricism friendly analog to them that is per that is perfectly functional and does what it needs to do. And this is this is very much in the the Jamesian spirit uh the William James uh spirit of pragmatism.
>> Um and I think that that would be rooted in a more fundamental reorientation about what it is that we're trying to do. And um I I do think that part of that it requires a recognition that we need to take a step back and ask what the heck we're doing with the kinds of questions that we're trying to ask and how we're trying to ask them.
>> And part of that I think should be very heavily informed by constantly updating ourselves as philosophers with the best available contemporary understanding of the relevant sciences. So there are certainly going to be um things people do in philosophy where certain sciences are not going to be very important. If somebody's doing logic, maybe they don't need science. If somebody's doing history of philosophy and they just really want to talk about what Aristotle was up to and they just want to look at his texts and and do, you know, some sort of interpretation of them, maybe they don't need to do science. But if you're doing metaeththics and you want to say something like most people are realists or we have intuitions about this um an intuition by almost any description, I've never heard of anybody describing an intuition in a way where they would deny that it's a mental state. Uh mental states are the province of psychology. So I I find something profoundly strange about the primary tool of philosophers being a psychological tool. And yet those philosophers frequently if not usually don't know anything about psychology.
They don't study it. They don't think about it. They don't engage with it or they do so in the most prefuncter manner possible. Now I wanted to pursue philosophy from a psychological lens so much I literally went and got a PhD in psychology. And so you know I am practicing what I preach. Um I put the leg work in to to do psychology so that I could do philosophy. Now I also do philosophy so I could do psychology.
Like I have papers on psychology and I do psychology too. But I mean the primary tool is a psychological tool and you don't care how the tool works. I mean this is a bit like um somebody being a blacksmith and they don't want to know anything about metal and they don't want to know anything about heat.
This is weird. Uh why would you not want to know what the tools you're using are like?
>> Can I ask you a see a seemingly tangential question but I think it's going to be relevant. Are epistemically are you a foundationalist or a coherentist or how do you do epistemics?
I'm I'm not any of those. I'm a pragmatist.
>> You're a pragmatist. Okay. I think I can't speak for everybody, but I think for a lot of people who do epistemics from like a foundationalist perspective, like for example, like the way that my world view works and the way the philosophy like stacks on itself, I actually don't super care what your intuitions are, if that makes sense. but I need to use mine to get my epistemics off the ground.
Right? So then at a certain point it's like when you when you when if in a conversation if you're like well I don't think we have the ability to perceive any moral facts or I don't think we have the ability to perceive free will in ourselves or at least I don't. Right? I I can hear that. But it's like, well, if my options are some cartesian hellscape or being like, well, okay, I guess you don't or you're reporting that you don't, big I'm probably going to pick big right?
Because, um, you know, I think a lot of I don't know everybody, but a lot of philosophers build their epistemics up from particular foundations. And some of those are ones that are like I think ones that you would deny, right? So like which leads you in the you know are there infinite feathers trap but but now very high stakes if that makes sense, right? Like because like how do we even if like for me it's like okay if we're going to deny that there are that there's at least one real external object or that there's one or that I have any internal ability to do free will. How do I even get epistemically to the point where I can look at psychological data? You know, like I like I had like the the the philosophy never gets off the ground. I don't know if that's a helpful observation or not, but I would imagine that you probably run into that. Yeah.
Well, you know, I I actually think that it could turn out to be the case and probably is the case that I simply have different fundamental goals and priorities than some other people in academic philosophy. And I don't think there's a resolution. I don't think I think that there is no reconciliation.
we will not be able to effectively communicate and we just have irreconcilable goals and that's unfortunate. Uh we just it's like you know you sit down at the the game table and you want to play a game of chess and someone wants to play a game of blackjack or whatever or >> poker and you just don't want to and there's no further discussion to have.
Um and I suspect that that is the case with the degree of impass the chasm I have with like somebody like Michael Huer. I just I think that we have such radically different worldviews. There is not and could not practically be any genuine reconciliation.
>> Yeah.
>> Oh well, we got to go our separate ways.
>> Well, it's interesting. Yeah, it I I appreciate the insight because like these were the questions I had. I was like, huh, he doesn't believe in free will, but he spends a lot of time talking about morality. That's that's an interesting tension. like there's like there are some interesting tensions there, but I think the the broader goal you have regarding philosophy as a whole, I think I think I better understand your motivation and where you're coming from. So, that's useful.
Um, it is approaching 11. You have a young young child. I don't want to keep you up all night. Um, Lance, are there any like where can people find you? Any parting shots? Uh, words of wisdom you want to give to the natural law enthusiasts in chat? Yeah, I don't know if I have anything in particular uh for them. Uh so you can find me on uh my blog, Lance Independent, or my YouTube channel, Lance Independent. They're the same. I don't know if you're going to put links in the description or something, but people should >> Oh, I I I I can do that. And if my moderator my moderators have been putting the link in chat, which I should have pinned but didn't because I was paying attention to you and I probably should have been doing a little bit more internety stuff as well. Uh but I I'll put I'll be happy to put those in the video. And for uh Lance's PE fans watching me, I'm Ryan Mali. I am a former teacher, current lawyer. I've uh litigated at every level of the US uh judicial system up to and including the US Supreme Court and I have a little YouTube channel that's growing called Natural Law with Ryan Mali. We do a little philosophy. We do a lot of politics and a lot of legal analysis.
And if you want to come enjoy my takes or tell me how terrible they are, feel free to navigate over. I have a strong intuition, for lack of a better word, that you're probably going to disagree with a lot of my political and legal takes, but that can be part of the fun.
Uh, but Lance, it was great having you on and we should uh do this again sometime.
>> Yep. Sounds good. And uh last thing, I do engage in the comments and people are welcome to come over to my channel channel and uh throw questions at me. I try to I try to answer people so I can try to do that, too. But yeah, thanks for having me. This was a blast. I had a lot of fun.
>> Great. Talk soon.
>> All right. Take care.
Okay, gang. Okay. Uh, let me figure out how to remove Lance. Oh, yeah. There he goes. Okay.
Uh, and then I can remove
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