Despite occasional and important disagreements, most people are in rough agreement about what it means to be moral, to do the right thing. There’s much less agreement about why we should be moral, or even what kind of answer to that question could be convincing. Philosopher Russ Shafer-Landau is one of the leading proponents of moral realism — the view that objective moral truths exist independently of human choices. That’s not my own view, but ethics and meta-ethics are areas in which I think it’s wise to keep an open mind and listen to smart people who disagree. This conversation offers food for thought for people on either side of this debate.
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Russ Shafer-Landau received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Arizona. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Among his numerous books are Moral Realism: A Defense and Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? He is the editor of Oxford Studies in Metaethics, and is the founder and organizer of the annual Madison Metaethics Workshop.
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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. I think that many of us are interested in trying to do the right thing in various contexts, but as we learned from Spike Lee’s movie as well as elsewhere, it can be hard to know what it means to do the right thing. And that’s true both in a narrow sense and in a meta sense. In a literal sense, we don’t know which thing to do is the right one, that’s what Spike Lee investigated, but the meta sense is what does it mean to say that something is the right thing. So there literally is within philosophy, the study of ethics and moral philosophy, but then there’s a study of meta-ethics, what are the standards by which we defend a certain conception of what is morally right I myself subscribe to something called moral constructivism, where I think that what exists out there in the world is the natural world, stuff behaving in certain ways in accordance with the laws of physics.
0:00:58 SC: Morality, I think, is something that we human beings or presumably other conscious creatures out there in the cosmos talk about and construct ourselves. And then it’s very interesting to talk about well, what things should we construct, how should we decide to be moral, and different people disagree and so forth. But I think that my point of view there is a minority one. I think that most people, both on the street and professional thinkers about this, are what we call moral realists. They think that in addition to the physical stuff of the universe, there is something else, some way of judging what is right and wrong. It might come from God if you’re religious or it might come from philosophizing, from pure rationality, or it might just come from sort of introspecting about our intuitions about what is right and what is wrong. So today’s guest is Russ Shafer-Landau. He’s one of the best people to talk about these issues.
0:01:51 SC: He’s one of the leading defenders of moral realism, among his many books are called Moral Realism: A Defense, which is a long, scholarly, philosophical tome where you can really get into the weeds, but he’s also written a shorter book called Whatever Happened To Good and Evil? If you want sort of the immediate catchy version of this kind of argument. So Russ is a non-naturalist about morality, but not a theist about morality. In other words, he thinks that there is something to the world that is objectively there, which you can call morality, but not that it comes from God or anything like that. And as he articulates in the interview, he’s much more about understanding what our intuitions tell us, thinking that that gives us some access to something real, which helps us decide what is good and what is evil. So I don’t agree with that, but we had a great conversation because Russ is really, really good, both about understanding the opposite point of view and about understanding the weakness in his own point of view. I think that kind of approach actually makes it a lot more convincing to people who are skeptics.
0:02:54 SC: I’m not completely convinced, but I think this is a very, very important debate/discussion to have. Morality is something where a lot of people think that they can figure it out, given 10 minutes of careful contemplation, right? How hard can it be? I think it’s very hard, and I think it’s something that deserves careful contemplation, more careful than just sitting around for a few minutes deciding, “Oh, yeah, I got it. Now, I know what’s right and what’s wrong.”
0:03:19 SC: Let me also, before we dive into it, give a short plug for an organization that I actually… An organization here at Caltech, where I am the academic advisor for a student group called Caltech Letters. You can visit them at caltechletters.org, and it’s basically a journal, an online journal where they publish articles about science, but then also viewpoint articles, essays. And they started a couple of podcasts that I think are very interesting. So they have a podcast called Not My Thesis, where they explore the unpublished parts of the scientific process, the stuff that does not go in the technical journal articles, and there’s another new podcast they’re doing called Biosphere, which explores how we fit into the living world, especially from the perspective of Biology PhD students.
0:04:08 SC: They’re really, really sharply focused on not just putting something out there in the world at Caltech Letters, but really making it high quality. These are more than just off-hand remarks. They’re very highly polished edited pieces, which I think provoke a lot of thought in good ways. So give them a visit at caltechletters.org, and with that, let’s go.
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0:04:43 SC: Russ Shafer-Landau, welcome to Mindscape Podcast.
0:04:46 Russ Shafer-Landau: Happy to be here.
0:04:47 SC: So this is one in a tradition. It’s not like a hugely represented tradition, but I like to have people on the podcast who I disagree with, but I can disagree with in a way that I think that we have something to learn from them. So I don’t go for the flat-Earthers. I go for the people who are having respectable opinions that I disagree with. And my attitude in these episodes is that I am absolutely here to give you the chance to put the best foot forward for your case. I’ll try to let my objections be known and maybe you’ll even change my mind, who knows, but we’re mostly here to have you state your case, and so in this case, the case is moral realism, which is something… So I’m a moral anti-realist, I guess. But why don’t you, for the people who are not experts in the listening audience out there, how about the lay of the land. What is the landscape when it comes to what different possible attitudes one could have toward, I guess, meta-ethics is the right field that we’re in here?
0:05:45 RS: That’s right. So we are in meta-ethics, and just to situate folks at one remove, meta-ethics is not trying to… It is a branch of moral philosophy, but it’s not trying to answer questions about what actually is right or wrong, or good or bad, rather it’s trying to take a step back and ask about the nature of moral reality, if there is one, how we can know it if we can, what the nature of moral judgements are. Are they more like straight-up beliefs or are they more desire-like states? Questions like that. So within meta-ethics, there’s a bunch of different ways of carving up the terrain, but here’s one, and you might think there are three really big families of views.
0:06:36 RS: One’s a view that we can call nihilism. Philosophers don’t use that term that much, but it’s designed to cover all the views that say there’s no moral reality, really. Some versions of what nihilism say, most of us think there is, but we’re just mistaken in the way that an atheist, say, will diagnose religious belief and religious discourse. Lots and lots of folks out there believe in it, but there’s some fundamental presupposition that infects the whole picture and really there’s nothing to it. That’s one view you might have about morality.
0:07:17 RS: Another view is a view according to which there is a moral reality, but the reality is a constructed one. These folks are called constructivists, unsurprisingly, and the one analogy is between, say, morality and the law, or morality and etiquette, where you might say that really, if you drive 50 miles an hour in a 20-mile-an-hour zone, you’d say, “Yeah, that was really, that was illegal.” And if someone says, “That was illegal,” you could say, “Yeah, what that person just said is true.” And you can tell a story in epistemology about how you come to know that truth.
0:08:00 RS: And you might think, “Well, morality is more or less like the law, like the etiquette, in that before human beings came on the scene, there wasn’t any such thing. But for various reasons, and of course, different constructivists will tell different stories, it did come on the scene with us. And it’s a constructed, it’s social construction, basically. It can be quite complex, but at bottom, if you ask, “Where does morality come from?” The answer is it comes from the decisions or the attitudes of human beings, either singly, that’s a kind of subjectivism, or collectively, which typically yields to a form of relativism. It doesn’t have to, but it can.
0:08:46 RS: And then lastly, there is the family of views known as moral realism, which says there’s a moral reality out there, hence the moral realism, but the reality is not a constructed one. It’s not one that’s made up by human beings either singly or collectively, either by reference to their actual judgements or by reference to some cleaned-up, hypothetical, idealized version of the judgements that we would have. Rather, morality, moral principles, say moral standards are “out there” in a pretty robustly objective way. They await our discovery. We’ve invented the vocabulary to describe these things as good or bad, vicious or virtuous, things like that. But the truths that we are apprehending are not of our own making. And then within the moral realism, because we’re doing philosophy here, there are lots of other isms, sub-isms.
[chuckle]
0:09:49 SC: There are categories. Yeah.
0:09:51 RS: Yeah, lots of different versions of moral realism, but that’s basically the lay of the land.
0:09:58 SC: And you’re going to be in the moral realism camp there, just so we… Giving away the…
0:10:00 RS: I’m going to be in the moral realism camp, and within the moral realism camp, I’m going to be in what’s called the non-naturalist camp. So, within realism itself, there are a bunch of different divisions, but the main division, at least within the last, say, 120 years, has been between those who think of themselves as naturalists and those who don’t. A naturalist is someone who thinks of morality as on a par with other naturalistic disciplines, in particular the natural sciences. It may not be as advanced in its findings as the natural sciences, but the basic methodologies of discovering what’s right and wrong mirror the basic methodologies of the natural sciences. The reality that awaits our discovery is continuous with the reality, it’s a kind of natural scientific reality.
0:11:02 RS: And then there’s on the other side, the so-called non-naturalists, not a very catchy term, but it’s… And that’s where I place myself. It’s folks who think that moral realism is true, there’s a robustly objective moral reality, but morality is not really like the sciences. No matter how much scientific investigation we do, we’re not going to be… We can be certainly aided in discovering what’s right and wrong by reference to that, but the truths aren’t scientific ones, the methodology is not… We don’t go to a lab. We don’t need to go to a lab. We don’t need to run actual controlled experiments on actual populations to make a determination about, say, the immorality of genocide.
0:11:54 RS: So folks in my little niche of the meta-ethical world are usually the ones who are subject to the most either ridicule, depending on your attitude at the time, or the most criticism among the realist camp because you could see the attraction of being a… There are issues to do with realism, about realism of course, in the first place that turn a lot of the people off. But if you’re tempted to the realist view, a lot of folks go naturalistic because they think it’s metaphysically respectable. If you think of morality as just another kind of natural phenomenon, then you don’t have to introduce these non-scientific features, properties in the world, and that leads to a more economical, metaphysically economical picture that’s quite attractive to a lot of the people.
0:12:52 SC: I definitely want to dig into the non-naturalism aspect of things in some detail here, but first, I’m sure that some of the people in the audience have mostly confronted or experienced the idea of non-naturalism as theism, right? You contrast naturalism with theism, but you’re doing something different here.
0:13:12 RS: Yeah, that’s a really good question, and you’re certainly right about the presuppositions in the canonical text, called Principia Epica by a British philosopher, GE Moore, that came out in 1903. He was the one who coined the term non-naturalism. And he distinguished naturalism from non-naturalism, but also from super-naturalism. And that distinction has been, within philosophy at least, pretty much pretty honored over the last roughly 120 years. There’s a very common thought among non-philosophers that if you’re going to take up with a view like mine, you’ve got to ground morality in some kind of divine command or some kind of divine agency, but that’s just a mistake, I think. And even for those who believe that the best version of realism is going to be one that is founded in some reference to God, they recognize at least the coherence and the intelligibility of a view of the sort that I hold, which is not a theistic one.
0:14:33 SC: Yeah. Okay, good. Maybe before actually explicating what that view is, you can give us a hint just so… I think that this… Let me back up a little bit. I know for a fact that when you talk about things like morality, one of the issues that the discourse runs into is that people have pre-existing ideas, right? [chuckle] It’s not like talking about the Higgs boson where I can just explain things and people will go, “Oh, yes,” but everyone has their own little idea. So why don’t you just give us a preview about why you believe this particular view called moral realism from the non-naturalist perspective?
0:15:12 RS: Sure. Well, I’ll take it in two steps. One is why do I believe moral realism, and then why do I favor the non-naturalism. Is that okay to put it like that?
0:15:21 SC: Yeah. Okay.
0:15:22 RS: So here’s why moral realism. Well, if you think back to the taxonomy I gave earlier, one way to see the attractions of moral realism is by seeing what’s problematic with the opponents. It’s not… This is not necessarily just an… It’s not necessarily an argument from elimination, but it helps to put the attractions of realism into sharp focus, I think. So if you’ve got a nihilist version, I myself think that’s a version of last resort. I would think that, of course, but I invite those who aren’t antecedently inclined the way I am, to just think about the implications of a view according to which we can take a big example, one I used earlier, according to which there really is nothing immoral about perpetrating genocide; or to take a smaller example, but one that hopefully is just as clear, a nihilist is committed to saying there’s nothing wrong with deliberately accosting a vulnerable little kid and then smacking the kid as hard as you can and laughing at the kid as he falls down a puddle of tears.
0:16:35 RS: To me, I think that when doing philosophy, there’s no alternative but to rely at various junctures on our intuitions. We can talk about that because that itself is a philosophically controversial claim, but that’s my view at least. And I think that some of our moral intuitions about cases like the two I’ve just described are as clear and as probative, actually, as any kind of evidence we can have in philosophy. So if you take a nihilistic kind of view, you’ve got to give up on that source of knowledge. And my thought is if you have to give it up when it comes to morality, you’re going to need to give it up all over the place in philosophy and that’s going to lead to an insuperable difficulty about gaining philosophical knowledge, insight, wisdom and understanding.
0:17:36 SC: So just to summarize, your main objection to nihilism is just that it is in conflict with our intuitions.
0:17:43 RS: That’s right. And the substance of our intuitions. So just invite someone to say with a straight face, there’s nothing wrong at all about perpetrating the sorts of acts I’ve just described. And I know a number of smart people who are also really nice people, by the way, [chuckle] who can say that with a straight face. I know most of those in the philosophical community who can do that, but I think that it comes at very high cost.
0:18:14 SC: Well, I guess I’m not a nihilist myself, I’m more of a constructivist, but just to do a little bit of standing up for them, could I restate your argument or try to put it in slightly different terms by saying it’s not that the fact that we seem to have intuitions that overrides them such as that they still are acting as if there is morality. Like you said, there are nice people, people who behave well, and therefore there must be some internal incoherence or inconsistency in a nice nihilism. Alex Rosenberg, who was a previous guest on the podcast, he proudly proclaims himself to be a nice nihilist.
[laughter]
0:18:56 RS: Yeah, I myself actually don’t think there’s any inconsistency in being a nice nihilist. That’s a charge I hear sometimes from my students when I introduce them to this idea, but in fact, I think you can be a perfectly coherent nice nihilist.
0:19:11 SC: Okay.
0:19:12 RS: And also, you can be a perfectly coherent nihilist and say, “Look, I think it’s a really terrible idea to perpetrate genocide or to smack kids just when you’re angry.” And that’s also coherent.
0:19:26 SC: Right.
0:19:27 RS: All they’re forbidden from saying, so to speak, so as to maintain consistency is to say that their preferences register some kind of genuine immorality or morality.
0:19:38 SC: Got it.
0:19:41 RS: So you can say, “Look, it would be a better thing for everybody, not morally better, but people would be happier or less unhappy if we acted this way.” And that’s a perfectly consistent thing for a nihilist to say.
0:19:52 SC: Got it. Okay. So let’s move on to knocking down constructivism then.
[chuckle]
0:19:56 RS: Well, might be, there are lots of forms of constructivism, but here is my big beef with constructivism and that is that I don’t think that I have… I don’t think that my say-so makes it so when it comes to morality. I don’t have that kind of authority. I’ve been doing moral philosophy for 30 years. I’m not terrible at it. I’m not the best at it, for sure, but… My say… But let’s take the person who is… Let’s focus on people who are among the very best moral philosophers ever. It’s still the case, I think, that their say-so doesn’t make it so. We are, each one of us, either individually or taken together, is fallible in a whole range of ways. We’re imperfect, we got our biases; sometimes, they’re known, sometimes, they’re unknown. In terms of processing information, we all are limited in various ways. We all have our tendentious prejudices, some of which we’re unaware, others of which we’re aware, but we can’t fully correct for. All these things come into play in making moral judgements. And I don’t see how it can be that any of us can have the requisite authority to be such that it’s our attitudes or our agreements or our judgements that are the ultimate source of morality.
0:21:27 RS: I guess I’d just say one more thing to back that up. I’d extend this argument all the way to a critique of so-called divine command theory, according to which you have God who’s perfect, all-knowing, at least, making the decisions about what’s right and wrong. So the divine command theory says, “What’s right is right if and only if and because God commands it; wrong if and only if and because God forbids it.” I think even that kind of view is problematic, even. So if even God… We could talk about reasons why, if you want, but if even God’s say-so doesn’t make it so, then surely, we, imperfect, puny, little, fallible human beings’ say-so isn’t going to make it so, either.
0:22:21 SC: Well, but as a constructivist, I don’t want to spend too much time, like I said, sort of defending my own point of view here, but my immediate feeling about that would be that somehow, it’s begging the question that your… That kind of analysis seems to rely on the idea that there is an objectively true statement about what morality is, and then I would agree that we fallible human beings, are not necessarily the right place to find that with perfect precision. But if you buy the analogy, the morality is more like the laws of speeding or the rules of playing basketball that are constructed, and there’s no such thing as the perfect rules for playing basketball, but there’s, nevertheless, what we make up.
0:23:05 RS: Great, that’s… You’re absolutely right. And then just to take it to the next level of analysis, I just invite you to think about the implications of that kind of view. So I don’t know what kind of constructivist you are, whether you think that moral principles, correct moral principles are ultimately founded in each individual’s attitudes or whether it’s a group effort. Do you want to say anything about that?
0:23:32 SC: I think it’s a balance. Yeah, and I very roughly think that there is a job for moral philosophy, namely to take the moral intuitions that individuals have, and to listen to individuals talk to each other and try to rationally describe what their goals are, and from that, to construct something that might not be objective and might not be settled and permanent, but is provisionally what we take to be good, moral behavior.
0:24:00 RS: Yeah, okay, so on that kind of view, to me, the problem is that what has seemed to a bunch of folks to be a cogent set of… A cogent moral outlook after reflection strikes me as deeply problematic. And you might say, “Well, Russ, isn’t that kinda arrogant? Why are you, Russ, the arbiter of what’s right and wrong?” And I want to, first, I want to claim my own fallibility here.
0:24:33 SC: Sure.
0:24:33 RS: But if you take a look at this kind of constructivist position, what it’s going to do is it’s going to say that in societies or among groups, when across societies, however you’re imagining this to go, if they were to make a determination after reflection that it’s okay to make women second-class citizens. It’s okay to enslave a certain portion of the population, either because of their skin color, or because of their beliefs, or because of their geographical… Whatever it is. Then constructivism says morally speaking, that’s right. And that’s an implication that I find I just can’t stomach.
0:25:18 SC: Right, and I think that that’s a perfectly fair… I think that as a constructivist, you have to bite that bullet and you have to say, “Yes, the process of constructing in different places and in different times might come up with things that I, Sean, who am also not the ultimate moral arbiter, think are horrible.” And so then, I would try to argue those people out of it based on whatever common moral intuitions we have. And I think that as a philosophical argument against constructivism, that argument really only works if, again, you assume there is an objective, ultimate right and wrong, and then you’re saying, “But this method isn’t getting it.” But if I don’t assume that there’s an objective right and wrong, then this is the method that we have.
0:26:00 RS: Yeah, well, I agree that this is… I agree, actually, that this is a method that we have, whether constructivism or realism is correct, where the method we have refers to how it is that we’re going to engage in discussions with people who don’t antecedently share our views. The only way you can try to make progress there, I think, is to appeal to things that your, that your discussion partner, some things that they’re already going to be, at least, open to hearing and ideally will accept. If you can find some shared bases from which to work, you’re much likelier to get to consensus at the end. And that’s true, whether constructivism is correct or whether realism is correct. But I also want to… I also think that this scenario is plausible, namely, and some people are mistaken and can’t be shown the error of their ways. I think that that’s a general truth. It’s true about flat-Earthers for instance, and it’s…
0:27:02 SC: You don’t need to tell me.
0:27:04 RS: Yeah, [chuckle] I’m sure I don’t, but I also think that’s the case in morality. I think that some people… We have examples in our public life right now. I’m not going to name names. We’ve got examples of people who just won’t see reality for what it is. Let’s forget about moral reality for right now. And there are a whole lot of explanations, plausible ones, for why that is, self-interest being among them but not the only one. Ideological indoctrination being another. And I think that these forces carry over into morality as well. It’s possible for someone to just be blind to the moral equality of a woman or an African-American and there’s nothing you can say. And furthermore, there might be no film they’re willing to watch, or memoir or narrative they’re willing to read. Even if they do read them, they may bring their blinder, what I’d call, what you’d say, I’d be tendentiously calling their blinders to the reading or to the film watching, and they may be unconvinced in the end.
0:28:14 RS: Now, there are two diagnoses to make from that. One is a constructivist one, which says, if at the end of the conversation, a person’s not persuaded, then there’s no moral reality that they’re missing. My view is that they might well be missing something, and furthermore, this is the flip side of the point I’ve just been making, it’s actually much harder on a constructivist view to maintain an attitude of fallibility than it is on the realist view. So it’s harder to say what you did. I know I’m doing all the talking, so I…
0:28:52 SC: No, you’re here to talk, please.
0:28:54 RS: Yeah, it’s harder to say what you said three or four minutes ago from a constructivist point of view than a realist point of view. And what I’m referring to is your profession, your admirable profession of fallibility and humility about things. If constructivism is true then, I’m not saying this is your view, but let’s just take a simple kind of relativist view about morality according to which morality is grounded in some kind of social or cultural consensus.
0:29:28 SC: Right.
0:29:28 RS: Whatever follows from the deep mores of a culture of society is what’s morally right. On that picture, here’s what you need in order to know what’s right and wrong. You need to know what your society stands for or what your culture stands for. As long as you do, and you’re not benighted about the relevant, empirical facts on the ground, then you’ve got moral knowledge. If your culture is built on a rejection of the equality of women and men, if your culture is built on the view that women are here to serve men, that’s one of the founding ideals of the culture, then so long as you know that and subscribe to it and can see how that plays out in the ordinary, say, domestic lives of women, and you… Then it turns out, you know a woman’s place morally speaking. You know a woman’s place and that is to serve her man or her men. I think that not only is the moral implication of that repugnant, but I think that it makes moral knowledge actually too easy to get.
0:30:43 RS: I think if you were to say, “Well, Russ, that assumes… That’s tendentious. That assumes that there’s an objective morality that these folks are straying from.” And it assumes that there’s an objective morality that might be more difficult to get than by means of the sort of sociological knowledge I’ve just described. That’s the consistent thing to say. And so I’m not going to say anything that’s going to indict constructivists on the grounds that they are necessarily… Have an inconsistent view. You can definitely, coherently, build up and construct any number of constructivist views. I’m just pointing to implications that make… Repugnant is a strong word. But with regard to that particular conclusion, it’s one that I do find repugnant, and I think there’s no easy way out of that conclusion, two conclusions really. One is that when you think about the actual substantive moral implications of a view like that kind of relativism, I think they’re very hard to stomach.
0:31:55 RS: The second conclusion, which is the one I should have really been focusing on is, the point that if you’re a constructivist, it makes, perhaps paradoxically, it makes moral knowledge too easy to get. Most people don’t think that that could be a problem with the moral view, but I do think it’s a problem with the moral view. I think that the intellectual virtues of modesty and humility, the recognition of your own fallibility, sit best with a realist view. You’re a physicist, what’s the right attitude for physicists to take about the cosmos? It’s humility and a recognition of fallibility and modesty and the explanation of why those are the appropriate attitudes to take is because you don’t get to make up the truth. You’re there to discover a truth not of your own making. I think the same is the case when it comes to morality. If you’re a moral realist, you ought to be humble about your moral opinions and modest in their expression because you hold the view that there is a moral reality out there that’s not of your own making.
0:33:08 SC: And yet some of my best friends are physicists and cosmologists, and not all of them are characterized by enormous amounts of humility, interestingly enough. No, I completely… I think that I more or less agree with everything you’re saying. As I said, I think that the constructivist has to bite the bullet about the fact that even in good faith we can come up with less repugnant versions of the fact that people thinking in good faith, either individuals or groups of individuals, societies, might end up constructing versions of morality that I find deeply distasteful, and that’s something that the constructivist has to live with. On the other side, the constructivist is going to say but… Well, so one version of constructivism might say, but the world is out there and it does things and I can do experiments on it, and morality is not out there. So you, moral realist, why don’t you make the positive case for something that is objectively true there?
0:34:04 RS: Oh, good. Thanks. So one, my naturalist realist brethren will do that in one way, and I’ll do it in a different way. The naturalist will go out and say, “Yeah, we can do experiments of a kind, because moral facts are just the species of natural fact,” and that’s not my kind of view. I think one important reason to hold the sort of non-naturalist view I do, and it’s the one that sets it up for criticism. I mean, there are a lot of elements in my view that sets it up for criticism, but this one is something that was just beneath the surface in the conversation we’ve been having over the last 10 or 15 minutes. And that is a commitment to what I’ll call the normative authority of morality, and the way I can, perhaps the best way to explain that is by contrast with the view that you’ve been advocating.
0:35:09 RS: So if you take, this is not to do down constructivism, but just to highlight what I regard as a feature of non-naturalism, and suppose you’ve got a view of constructivism, the sort that you’ve just been describing, and you’re led to say, “Well, yeah, some people do it this way, some people do it that way, these different ways are just different, they’re not better or worse than one another at least so long as they’re equally coherent, because there’s no objective measure by which to measure the superiority or inferiority of one coherent moral code over another.”
0:35:49 RS: And then that leads as you’ve forthrightly allowed, that leads you to say, well, so if you’ve got a morality that condones female inferiority or chattel slavery, I’m going to try to argue them out of it, but I can’t say that that moral view is inferior to mine, it’s just different from mine. I’m not now focusing on what I regard as the problematic nature of that implication, but instead a different one and that is if you’ve got a view like that, then it seems to sap morality of what I call normative authority, normative is just a fancy word that philosophers use to do with reason giving.
0:36:32 RS: I think that there are powerful reasons to comply with moral requirements and moral prohibitions, but if you have a view according to which morality is created by us and for us, then those reasons may be either strongly diminished or in fact non-existent. If you think about the simple sort of cultural relativism that I was discussing earlier, according to which morality is a cultural byproduct, morality is just that set of norms that are either directly endorsed by a culture or that are implied by those endorsements, then you might say, “Well, imagine you’re an iconoclast in the culture that is very in-egalitarian, very intolerant,” and you say, “You know what, my parents believe that we should treat these other folks as inferiors, all my neighbors do, and that’s what my teacher taught me. But I think that all human beings are at a fundamental level moral equals to one another, and their skin color, their sex, their gender, their religious beliefs, that’s irrelevant in the determination of how much respect and dignity a person deserves.”
0:37:47 RS: Suppose you had an iconoclast who believed something like that. On the version of relativism I’m describing, that person would be making a very deep moral error. Leave that now, leave that implication aside and focus on this authority point that I’m trying to highlight here. What I would say is that if I were that sort of iconoclast or you or anybody else, I’d scratch my head and say, “Why should I do what my culture says?” And someone might say, “Well, because that’s what morality is.” And I’d say, “You know what, it seems then that I don’t have any reason to adhere to morality, it’s a normative system that results from an expression of uninformed prejudices, and so I don’t have any reason to comply with it.” I might have a practical reason, I’ll get put in jail or otherwise condemned, but those sorts of reasons aside, what… What non-self-interested reasons might I have to comply with it? And I think the answer in that case is none.
0:38:53 RS: I want… The vision of morality that I would… I am hoping is correct is one according to which if something is morally required of you, then that carries with it a genuine non-self-interested kind of practical authority, what I called normative authority there. There are genuine reasons to comply with that. Even if you don’t like it. Even if it doesn’t meet up with your expectations or hopes or your interests or needs, if something is morally required of you, then there’s reason to do that. Naturalist realists and, in fact, naturalists of all stripes have had great difficulty making sense of that thought. I should say accounting for that thought within their theories, and some of them have tried gallantly to accommodate that thought, but most have been led to say, “You know what, morality doesn’t have any special authority over us after all.” It’s all…
0:39:52 SC: Let me just interject a little bit. Because I want to get two things on the table very, very quickly before we pass on to other more interesting things, but number one, I should have said from the start that I entirely appreciate the attraction of moral realism in the sense that there are objective rules and that would be great if there were objective rules. So I feel sad that I’m not a moral realist, even though I think that’s the right thing to do, but the other is that I do like, and I’m not sure if this is respectable or not, but I do hold this view, that there is a distinction between the kind of relativism that says, “Well, that culture over there has its own rules. They’re not mine, but there’s nothing I can say about them because they’re theirs,” and the kind of constructivism that says, each individual society or culture or whatever is constructing its own rules, but I have every right to judge the other ones by my standards. I can say that your set of moral rules that you’ve constructed are not objectively wrong, but I still feel sincerely and honestly that they’re not the ones you should have, and I’m not going to abandon my right or ability to either judge you badly or try to talk you out of them.
0:41:10 RS: Good, and I take it that the latter view is the one that you’d endorse.
0:41:15 SC: Yes, that’s right.
0:41:16 RS: Yeah, and good, because it’s better than the first few but it’s still, I’d say problematic.
[laughter]
0:41:20 SC: No, sure, of course. I just want to let it be known that that is a view. You don’t have to just be a screaming relativist and say, “Well, whatever different societies want to say, that’s fine. I can’t judge them.” I want to keep my ability to be judgy, that’s all I want.
[laughter]
0:41:36 RS: You got it. But the question, of course, is that when you make a judgement, you do it by reference to some standard, and then if someone says, they could put it this way, “Who are you to judge?”
0:41:49 SC: Sure.
0:41:49 RS: To which you have a great answer, “I’m a person of, with a critical faculty and critical intelligence who’s become acquainted with your culture and your ways and on that basis I’m judging you.”
0:42:04 SC: Right.
0:42:05 RS: But then there’s a next step, and that is to say, are the standards by reference to which you’re rendering your judgements, are those standards in any way morally superior to the standards of my own society, and that’s something that’s I think going to be very hard for you to answer. You can say, “Yeah, they are superior,” but you’re saying that by reference to your society’s own standards, and so that looks pretty question begging, which to the extent that claims are question begging, that’s a problem. The realist, of course, doesn’t face that, but the realist does, of course, face lots of other objections, like where is this…
0:42:45 SC: Exactly, so I’m not even going to try to defend myself. I still want to get to your positive realist point of view.
0:42:51 RS: Yeah, okay. Okay, good. So there are lots of different ways of trying to defend realism. The way that I’ve come to do it is informed, I should say, by a years-long project that I’m still involved in with two other philosophers, my colleague at UW Madison, John Bengson, and a colleague at the University of Vermont, Terence Cuneo. We’re writing three books. It started out as one big book, and it’s now three books, and one of the books, a short one, is on methodology and philosophy. And I’m one of the folks who’s responsible for developing this methodology, and so in a nutshell, what the methodology tells us is that the way to make progress in gaining understanding of a given area in philosophy is by first trying to identify the data within that domain, and then constructing theories that have to meet various criteria of adequacy in the attempt to account for that data.
0:44:00 RS: In ethics, there are a lot of data that we either have to account for or have to explain away, and of course, it’s going to be a philosophically controversial matter which of these data stand the test and which of these data ought to be tossed aside, but one of the big benefits of moral realism, which has been recognized for a while, but it’s never been, I don’t think been put quite this way, is that when it comes to the data of ethics, moral realism does a fantastic job of accounting for them. So the data have to do with things like our, the possibility that some moral views are true and some are false, the possibility that some people are morally wiser than, the actuality that some people are morally wiser than others, that our moral judgements are given by beliefs that could be correct or incorrect, that there are reasons to do what’s morally required of us and reasons against doing what’s morally prohibited of us, that in some way morality’s demands are inescapable and yet in other, and other… Not yet, but and in other ways, they enjoy a kind of priority over some considerations like those of self interest, at least in a wide range of cases.
0:45:23 RS: These and other data are what I regard as quite plausible starting points for theorizing. And I’m not going to try to enumerate all the data in meta ethics, but I think it’s fairly uncontroversial that if you were to come to try to identify a long list of those claims that inquirers considered collectively have good reason to believe at the outset of inquiry, those claims would be handled really well by moral realism and less well by other views. Now again, that’s just the start of the conversation, it’s not necessarily the end of the conversation, because it’s always open to people, other theorists to say, “You know what, some of these data are misleading. That moral realism can account for them doesn’t make it a superior kind of view because we should explain these data away,” and that’s… If you take a look at the nihilists they’re going to say most of these data are… Maybe all of them, depending on what your list looks like, most of these data at least are a bunk, they ought to be tossed. They’re the vestiges of outdated thinking.
0:46:45 SC: What are some examples of the data we have in mind here?
0:46:47 RS: Oh, ones of the sort I was just mentioning. It’s possible that some… It’s actual, rather, that some moral claims are true, others are false.
0:47:00 SC: But sorry, is that data? In what sense is that data I guess is what I’m asking, yeah.
0:47:05 RS: Oh, okay. It’s data in this sense. The conception of data I’m working with is that of a claim that inquirers considered collectively have good reason to believe at the outset of inquiry.
0:47:18 SC: Okay.
0:47:19 RS: That claim is, as we put it, as philosophers put it, de-feasible.
0:47:23 SC: Right, it might not be true.
0:47:24 RS: It might be be false. It might be defeated, but you need some at least equally strong justification for thinking that datal claim, that piece of… That datum is mistaken.
0:47:38 SC: Got it.
0:47:39 RS: If you can’t provide that, then accounting for that datum is a constraint on the development of a theory that’s going to yield illumination of the domain in question.
0:47:52 SC: Okay, good. I guess if I have a objection, maybe this is the right time to say it. I’ll advertise your books. You have a big book on moral realism, and then a little book on what happened to good and evil, which is sort of like the baby version for those of us who are not going to become professional moral philosophers. And it’s a great read. It’s very, very readable for people who are interested in these questions, and you go through a lot of the possible objections to this kind of moral realism. And I didn’t find my objection in there, in at least the words that I would use to put it in. So I guess my objection is, you talk about the potential objection from disagreement, right? Just you might imagine the fact that just because people disagree about morality somehow that undermines the claim that there are objectively real moral statements, and that seems pretty easy to refute. I mean, people disagree about all sorts of things, but my worry is not that there exist disagreements, but that I don’t know how to adjudicate the disagreements.
0:48:53 SC: If someone says, “One plus one equals two,” and someone else says, “One plus one equals three,” I know how to sit down and check which one is correct. And if someone says, “The universe is expanding,” and someone else says, “The universe is contracting,” likewise, I know what experiments or observations to make. But if someone says, “In the trolley problem, you should let the trolley hit the five people,” and another person says, “No, no, you should take an action and just kill the one person.” I don’t know what experiments to do or what logical exercise to go through to figure out which one is correct. Is that a reasonable objection to realism?
0:49:28 RS: Absolutely. It’s absolutely a reasonable objection, and it’s one of the hardest, I think, for realists to handle. Once more, I want to be clear that realists have available to them a variety of different epistemological strategies for handling this, for handling this objection. I don’t want to canvas them all because that would take too much time, be tedious, and I don’t endorse them all.
[laughter]
0:50:01 SC: Yeah. No, we don’t need to get all of them. Let’s get the good ones.
0:50:03 RS: Yes, that’s right, yeah. But I want to back up actually and say something by way of a preliminary. As I understand your objection, it’s basically an epistemological objection. It’s that in circumstances of disagreement, let’s call it fundamental disagreement, where the disagreement is not owing to a mistake about some ancillary, factual, non-moral matter, which is such that if one of the parties to the disagreement were to come to realize their mistake about that, then they’d agree with you about the morality.
0:50:43 SC: Yeah.
0:50:46 RS: So let’s not focus on that sort of disagreement. In that case, here’s the worst-case scenario, that there’d be no way of resolving that sort of disagreement. What I want to say is that even if there were no way to do that, it’s not clear to me why that would impugn realism, ’cause realism is in the first instance a claim, a metaphysical claim. It’s a claim about what there is, namely moral reality, not a form of creation. And I want to explore the possibility that although… Here’s the worst-case scenario again. We can’t resolve these fundamental disagreements. They’re just intractable even in principle. So suppose that’s right. It’s not clear to me what that would tell us about the existence or non-existence of a moral reality. You might think, “Well, if something is objectively real or objectively true, then in principle, there’s got to be a way of convincing everybody of its truth.”
0:51:57 RS: But unfortunately for realists, we see no possibility of convincing everyone of the truth of any given moral claim, no matter how obvious Sean and Russ might find it. Nevertheless, there are going to be some outliers who disagree, and even in principle, we can’t get them over to our side. So suppose that’s… Maybe that’s wrong. That’s the… Let’s be really optimistic, that’s wrong, we could get everybody over to our side, but I’m not optimistic like that.
0:52:28 SC: Yeah. I know.
0:52:30 RS: So let’s assume that there really is such a thing as what I call fundamental disagreement. Then the question is, “What’s the theoretical fallout?” Now, there are two possibilities here. One is to say, “You know what, there is an objective reality out there, despite our inability to convince everyone of its nature or its content.” And the other is to say, “Well, if we can’t convince everyone in principle about this matter, then there can’t be… Or the best explanation of that is that there isn’t an objective reality.”
0:53:06 RS: Now, I want to hear more about why we should go that latter route rather than the former, because I think if you look at other areas of philosophical disagreement like whether there’s a God or not, there are brilliant people on both sides and I doubt… I’m pessimistic myself about whether we’re ever going to get consensus on that matter, no matter how informed about the empirical elements of our universe we are. And yet, I think in that case, although I’m pessimistic about the possibility of resolving fundamental disagreement on this matter, I think it’s… To me, it’s very clear that you should be a realist about this matter, namely: Whether God exists or not isn’t up to us. I know there’s some people who disagree, who think that we create God in some way, or whether there is a God, has, in some way, to answer to our own beliefs about it, but I think that’s really an implausible view.
0:54:11 RS: I think either there is… Let’s just, let’s fix our target here, an omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent creator of the universe, or there isn’t. And it doesn’t, our say-so doesn’t make one answer or another the right answer. So that’s a case in which I think it’s pretty clear that we should accept realism about the matter, either really, theism is true or really, atheism is true. But I’m really pessimistic about the possibility of resolving fundamental disagreement. If that’s…
0:54:49 SC: Yeah, I…
0:54:50 RS: Yeah, go ahead.
0:54:50 SC: Sorry, I do absolutely appreciate that there is a distinction here between the metaphysical questions and the epistemological questions, and I guess the way that I phrased the worry was more epistemological, but I don’t think that they’re completely independent from each other, either. If we go, if we switch from the God example to, let’s say the cosmological multiverse. Let’s imagine there are parts of the universe very, very far away that we can never observe, but we think that there is a fact of the matter about whether or not they’re there. Whether or not I can convince anyone else is less important to me than how do I even decide for myself what to think about this, or how could I, in principle, decide, if I were granted omniscience, if I were granted the ability to see things that are further away than the speed of light lets me look? Then I could actually answer the question about how do I decide whether or not there’s a multiverse or not.
0:55:45 SC: Well, with the moral questions, I don’t even see an in principle way of adjudicating these, even just amongst myself, forget about convincing anyone else. How do I know when my intuitions point in different ways? How do I know, objectively and definitively, what the right answer is? How could I possibly know, not realistically, but in potential, how could I know?
0:56:06 RS: Good, I like that way of phrasing the worry. So if I could just maybe tweak it just a little bit to see if I’m aligned with what you’re really worried about. The thought is this: If moral realism is true, there’s got to be some plausible epistemology that explains how it is that we get access to objective moral truths, but there is no such epistemology, and therefore, moral realism is false. Is that a good way of stating it objectively?
0:56:35 SC: I will tentatively go with that, yes, provisionally. [chuckle]
0:56:37 RS: Yeah, okay. So yeah, so taken that way, it’s an invitation for the realist to explain how it is… Or sorry, my kind of realist, non-naturalism, because the naturalist realist actually has an answer to you that’s, at least in principle, quite straightforward. But for someone like me who thinks that morality is really, moral features are discontinuous from scientific features of the world, then the whatever standard scientific means of gaining access to the natural world are, they’re not going to be sufficient. They can be enlisted to help, but they’re not going to be sufficient to get us not moral knowledge, so we need some other way of gaining moral knowledge.
0:57:26 SC: Right.
0:57:29 RS: And again, there are different epistemologies. There’s, for instance, a coherentist epistemology, which I’m not a fan of, but which shares a lot of similarity with a view that you offered maybe 20, 25 minutes ago, according to which the way we gain knowledge is try to shape our views at various levels of generality from judgements about concrete cases to very large abstract principles and everything in between to get them to cohere with one another in as mutually-supportive a belief network as possible. That’s a view that was called reflective equilibrium that is very likely the… Well, it’s the default methodology in morality, it’s not one that I’m a fan of myself, and it’s got a clear epistemological correlate in the coherence tradition. What I would say is here’s where you start in answering questions of the sort that you’re asking, and that is, you start with your intuitions, you start with the clearest cases like genocide’s immoral.
0:58:43 SC: Yup.
0:58:45 RS: But then, where do you go from there? I guess there are two questions. One is, “Where do you go from there?” And two is, “How can you… Why should you… ” Not, “How can?” that’s easy enough, but, “Why should you trust your intuitions?” And both of these are really good, both of these are really good questions. Sorry, that was self-flattery ’cause I asked those questions. [chuckle]
0:59:07 SC: Well, you were mentioning they were questions, you didn’t necessarily invent the questions.
0:59:13 RS: Okay, and there… So…
0:59:17 SC: Parenthetically, this is the big problem with being a professional, moral philosopher, you have to be constantly on guard for people saying, “Well, that’s not very moral of you, you moral philosopher.”
0:59:28 RS: Well, one thing I always hear, not from fellow philosophers, but from other people, like at bars, or on, used to be airplanes, when people would find out what I did, and then they’d find out… I’d give them, in a nutshell, what my view is about moral realism, they’d say, “That’s so arrogant, that’s so dogmatic,” and… You gotta distinguish between, on the one hand, affirming the existence of an objective morality, and then, on the other, affirming that you’ve got all of its contents. So, we do the first, but not the latter.
1:00:00 SC: Good. Anyway, sorry I interrupted.
1:00:02 RS: No. There are… What I want to do is, I want to be… Start by being concessive and say that, although I think that intuitions, as I’ve said a few times now, play ineliminable, vital roles in our moral… In any plausible moral epistemology and any plausible philosophical epistemology, I think, I want to be concessive, and allow that a number of our intuitions kind have been distorted by any number of factors, by prejudices that we’ve imbued from our culture, or from our parents, or friends, various relevant… Morally relevant kinds of factual ignorance that we have, as a result of the time in which we live, or the education we’ve received, or just lack of candle power up there.
1:00:52 RS: So there are reason… One always needs to do a check on whether one’s intuitions have been formed in a good environment, in reliable ways. The problem, though, I’m just going to anticipate a worry on your part, the problem is that, when you do those sorts of checks, you’re doing them by reference to other intuitions that you have, rather than some external world that’s going to give you a… If you’re a skeptic about the external world, all you gotta do is walk into a table and say, “Oh, well, maybe I shouldn’t be so skeptical anymore, there does seem to be something out there, like that.” There’s nothing out there, like that, if I’m right, if my picture of morality is right. When it comes to the moral world, there’s no… Nothing that’s going to impinge on your senses directly, or necessarily, that’s going… That’s going to give you the sort of check, you get to indicate that your moral intuitions or your moral view, more generally, is mistaken.
1:01:57 RS: So, I want to allow that, that’s a quite serious challenge to my kind of the… To a moral realist, non-naturalist epistemology. If you’ve got a naturalist view, you’re going to, as I said before, you’re going to try to assimilate the gaining of moral knowledge, to the ways in which we acquire non-moral knowledge empirically. So, I don’t… I wish I had an elevator speech, in which I could address all worries about reliance on our intuitions here. I guess, what I want to say is that, to the question, “Where should we start?” The answer is, “With our intuitions, that strike us as most sure, about which we are most confident in, all the while allowing that these could be mistaken.”
1:02:51 RS: Now, how is it that we go on to use… Not a word that you’ve used, but I think you’ve had in mind, how do we calibrate these intuitions? The answer is, we can never calibrate them in a way such that we can be guaranteed that we are, to use your word, decisively in the know. We always have to be… We always have to have a kind of second order, or higher order recognition of our fallibility, that even the things that we feel… That’s actually the wrong way to put it. Even the moral views that strike us as so clearly true, we have to have a background open-mindedness about the possibility that, “You know what, we could be off on the wrong foot here,” but that’s not the place to start.
1:03:42 RS: The place to start is with our very strong moral convictions and then, trying to build from them a coherent network of moral beliefs, all the while being open to the possibility that we’re mistaken, and open to hearing from those with whom we disagree, some reasons why we should abandon our view. If in the end, having heard that, we say, “You know what, my view still… It seems to weather the storm there. I think I can handle this.” Then you’re justified in believing what you believe, and if your beliefs are true, and if you’ve come to those beliefs on the basis of the adequate reasons that support them, you’ve got knowledge. Can we be certain that we’ve ever got such knowledge? No. But that doesn’t distinguish moral knowledge from knowledge in any other sphere.
1:04:33 SC: I think that, operationally, what you just described, is incredibly close to my version of constructivism as well, so it’s interesting that the metaphysics underlying it might be very different, but the boots on the ground actions might be the same. But I do… I think, maybe it’ll be helpful for the audience, if we clarify a little bit about that metaphysics, because maybe we skipped over too quickly the distinction between the naturalist and non-naturalist, and I would even go so far as to talk about the physicalist way of thinking about the world. I had Ned Hall on the podcast, and we talked about Humeanism versus anti-Humeanism, about the laws of nature, and there’s this Humean view that all that exists is the universe happening over and over again, whatever happens in the universe, that’s it, and everything else is commentary.
1:05:24 SC: And I’m kind of sympathetic to that, although Ned did raise some doubts in my mind, and then there’s this anti-Humean view that the laws of nature have some oomph to them, that they’re not simply descriptions of what happens, that in some sense bring about what is happening. And I can’t necessarily get my mind around that, but I maybe dimly see an analogy with your version of moral, non-naturalist realism, because you would agree, I think, that the moral status of a situation does supervene on the… What’s physically happening. In other words, if two situations arise at different parts of the universe, but they’re physically exactly the same, the same collection of atoms assembled into peoples doing exactly the same kind of thing, you would say that inevitably, by moral stance towards those few things will be the same. There’s no extra distinction I can draw, but nevertheless, you’re going to say that there is something important, there is a moral status that is, even though it supervenes on the physical things happening, it’s not identical with them, is that the right construal?
1:06:38 RS: Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s a really nice way to put it. So the so-called supervenience of the moral on the natural or the non-moral is just what you said, namely that if two situations are identical in all non-moral ways, then morally speaking, they have to be identical. I believe that, and so does almost every other moral philosopher, it’s come under some challenges recently, but it seems to me to be correct.
1:07:06 RS: And then the question is… There are lots of questions to ask about this, but let’s just focus on the one that you’ve asked and that is, is it the case that in addition to all that non-moral stuff, maybe it’s physical, maybe it’s not just physical, is there also some moral realm that sits on top of it, as you will. And my view is, yeah, there is. It’s not… The naturalist realist says, no, it’s not that there’s another layer on top of the non-moral or the natural, it’s all natural, top to bottom, it’s just we can carve that up in different ways, some of the natural has to do with our psychological states, for instance, some of the natural has to do with economic phenomena, some of the natural has to do with chemistry, and some has to do with subatomic particles. And morality is in there too, but it’s all a seamless concatenation of natural features that together make up the universe.
1:08:13 RS: I think there is a huge concatenation of natural features and substances that make up the universe, but I also think on top of that, so to speak, there’s morality that can’t be reduced to any of that. It does depend on it. To me, it just wouldn’t make sense to say that an action was wrong if you couldn’t also point to some natural features of the action, in virtue of which the action was wrong.
1:08:41 SC: Right.
1:08:42 RS: So it is a dependence relation between moral reality and non-moral reality. But it’s not exactly the same reality there. And that’s long been a worry about my kind of view, why, if we can explain everything that needs explaining just by reference to naturalistic, naturalist areas of investigation, then why add this extra layer, this layer of moral features to the universe. And my thought is, that’s a great question, but it presupposes that you can explain everything that needs explaining just by naturalistic means, and that’s something I reject.
1:09:27 SC: Well, I guess, yeah, and this is where we are definitely going to differ, I think, because in my book, The Big Picture, I try to make exactly this case that it’s kind of a causal closure argument that if I am allowed in principle to describe the universe in the language of fundamental physics, right, bosons and fermions or quantum wave functions obeying some equations. And that description is in principle complete. It does not need any extra information to tell me what will happen within that language, right? I will tell you what all the fermions or bosons are going to do. Then how can it be possible that there is some reality to extra stuff if that reality has no influence on what happens in the world?
1:10:14 RS: That’s a great question. I thought you were going in a slightly different direction, so I’m a little worried about causal closure arguments or causal exclusion arguments, because I think they’re going to, in the end, exclude too much if we think that everything can ultimately be explained. Everything that happens in the world can ultimately be explained by fermions and bosons, then that leaves little room for beliefs and desires, for instance, do in explaining, unless you think that a belief is nothing other than an arrangement of fermions and bosons, and that’s a view that some people have held in the philosophy of mind, but not many people hold, and…
1:10:56 SC: Well…
1:10:57 RS: That’s not… I don’t mean to argue by appeal to the majority. That’s not…
1:11:02 SC: Sure.
1:11:03 RS: Yeah, it’s just saying there might be some worrying implications of arguing, of that sort of causal exclusion argument that on the one hand, you jettison moral features from the metaphysics, but you might have to jettison a lot more that you’re less comfortable jettisoning. That’s one point, but…
1:11:25 SC: Yes, I have a response to that, but I want you to keep going before I give it.
1:11:28 RS: Yeah. Okay, but the other is that, I guess, the question indicates a presupposition, which is that everything in the universe actually can be explained by reference to fundamental physics, and that’s just the assumption that I’m calling into question. Now, the last part of your question, said, well, if things… How can we explain what’s going on, or maybe put it this way, I think this is not the way you put it, but why should we posit a realm of features, moral features, if they are unnecessary to explain what’s happening in the world? Because… Why are they unnecessary? Because fundamental physics can explain all that.
1:12:22 SC: Right.
1:12:22 RS: So either fundamental physics can explain morality, in which case you’re a naturalist about things or it can’t, but if it can’t, then why posit anything that fundamental physics can’t explain. But what I would say is that this seems to be expressive of what I’ll call a scientistic view of the world. I don’t mean that to be prejudicial…
1:12:49 SC: Nope, I get it, that’s fine, we’ll allow it.
1:12:51 RS: Yeah, just want to [1:12:51] ____ through which all the truths that there are are in principle given by science of one kind or another, it doesn’t have to be physical. It could be social scientific as well as natural scientific. I want to leave that open to be as ecumenical as possible. But that kind of view is obviously not… Perhaps obviously not one to which I’m attracted, and I think there is this fundamental problem with it, which is that the core scientistic claim, namely that all the truths there are can be explained by science is not itself a truth that can be explained by science, it’s not… It can’t be confirmed by science. It’s one that, it can be… If it’s confirmable, which I hope it’s not, [chuckle] is to be confirmed by philosophy, actually. I know that sounds very imperialistic, but it doesn’t seem to be that it’s going to… That any science is in the position to pronounce on it.
1:13:54 SC: Well, I think… So let me take my turn at giving your side of the argument in the way that I’m able to understand it. The part of your shorter book, Whatever Happened to Good and Evil, that I found most persuasive is the idea that we should take morality seriously as real because it plays an explanatory role when we talk about, at least what happens in the world at the human level. And that’s why we take other things to be real because they play some explanatory role, and so… And this is what I was biting my tongue about before because the way that I would put it is, I wouldn’t say that things like beliefs or purposes or morals and judgements are equated with certain arrangements of fermions and bosons, but I would say that there are ways of talking about certain classes of arrangements of fermions and bosons. They’re emergent in that weak sense, in the same… Almost exactly…
1:14:56 SC: Sorry, there is a difference between morals and purposes, let’s say. I think that purposes can be straightforwardly scientific and descriptive of what happens in the world. The most compact way of describing what the physical things going on in the world might be in terms of purposes, whereas, I think that morals are more subjective than that. But both of them I think have this character that they can play an explanatory role at some level of description, but not at another one and therefore you wouldn’t call them fundamental pieces of the architecture of reality.
1:15:34 RS: Yeah, so it’s not clear to me why it’s… There’s a lot to discuss about what it is to be fundamental. If what it is to be fundamental is to be in some way not equatable, identical to or reducible to something else, then I think morality is fundamental in that respect. But people have different views about what fundamentality amounts to, I want to to allow at the same time that when something possesses a moral feature, it does so in virtue of having various non-moral features. So in that sense, some people think, well, then, morality isn’t fundamental after all because it’s not at the very bottom of the explanatory chain, so to speak. I think it’s very far down at the bottom, but…
1:16:32 SC: Well, I guess that’s good, let’s just… I want to give you a chance to defend that, but let’s just dwell or at least emphasize how crucial that statement is. I mean, you’re saying that on the one hand, morality is completely tied to the physical situation in some very real sense and on the other hand, it is absolutely fundamental and necessary to describe what’s going on.
1:16:54 RS: Yeah, that’s right. Think about chemistry, for instance. You might say chemistry is… You might say… You might be a realist about chemistry and say, “We have identified all these different kinds of molecules, we’ve given them names, but we didn’t invent them. We did a few, but the things early on in the periodic table, we didn’t invent those things.”
1:17:21 SC: No.
1:17:24 RS: And so, they’re real in the realist sense. And yet you might say, “Nevertheless, chemical reality is not fundamental because whenever you’ve got a molecule of hydrogen, for instance, you’ve got an arrangement of atomic material, subatomic material, those arrangements might be different in different circumstances. But nevertheless, you might at least in principle be able to go all the way down, so to speak, to the physical… To the atomic, subatomic level when citing some chemical fact.” You might be able to do that with regard to morality, but I want to distinguish two things. One is, matters of specific fact as instantiations of properties, so the realization of certain features at a given time from the existence of those features themselves.
1:18:26 RS: Now, what I want to allow is that when a given action, say, or when a given… Is wrong or when a given intention or motive is morally admirable, there’s going to be some physical stuff going on in that scenario. You might be able to describe that scenario entirely at the physical level, but if you were to do that, my claim is that you wouldn’t capture the morality of the action, so that at… This is a different way of insisting on an ontological, if you will, an ontological division between moral features and physical features or in any event natural features, that’s my view about the relation, there, whether then you want… Whether you want to then say, given that for any particular moral fact about that occurs at a given time, at a given place, that there’s some physical realization of that fact, if that’s sufficient to show that moral features are non-fundamental, I can live with that, if that’s your conception of fundamentality, but what I want to insist on is that what it is to be something like, to be morally admirable or to be morally required, it’s not a physical thing, it’s not a physical feature of things.
1:19:46 SC: Okay, yeah, I think I understand that. I think that’s fair. Maybe to bring the plane in for a landing here, we can step outside the meta-ethical discussion we’ve been having about how one decides or how one conceptualizes what morality is, and let me ask whether or not the particular point of view you have on that, of your realist but not naturalism, does affect your actual moral system, does that point us in a direction of deontology or consequentialism or virtual ethics or whatever other system you might want to make?
1:20:21 RS: No, that’s the short answer.
1:20:25 SC: Oh, no.
1:20:26 RS: That’s the meta-ethics, the meta…
1:20:29 SC: Meta.
1:20:29 RS: In meta-ethics. That’s a great question, though. Most moral realists have tried deliberately to be as neutral as possible about the so-called normative ethical issues on the thought that… Here’s the animating thought, no matter what moral system is correct, we realists are not in the business of trying to answer that question, but rather talking about… Are instead in the business of trying to talk about the status of that system, and to say that that system obtained independently of our attitude towards it. That said, my own view is that if you were to endorse a kind of what I call immoralist position according to which you’re celebrating things like genocide and oppression, and you’re denigrating things like compassion and kindness, that’s not the sort of picture that moral realists have ever wanted to vindicate.
1:21:41 RS: So I actually do think, this is why I think your question is so interesting, I think that at bottom, there really has been, though realists have not fessed up to it, there really have been some implicit assumptions about the con… What I’ll call the content rather than the status of morality that have been driving realists to defend the views that they have done and in work that I’m doing with my collaborators, John Bengson and Terence Cuneo, we are… Among the other things we’re doing is we’re setting out a view of moral realism that builds into it the idea that there are certain substantive constraints on what morality, moral reality can look like, that have to obey these sort of paradigmatic moral verdicts about, say, the wrongness of genocide and the rightness of compassion.
1:22:32 SC: Well, it does seem… I certainly see conceptually the distinction between the meta-ethical question and the question of actually choosing how to be moral, but on the other hand, doesn’t it seem a little bit… Wouldn’t it seem weird to say that two completely different notions of what morality is nevertheless have no impact on the morals we think they are actually the correct ones, that would… That would just seem weird.
1:23:01 RS: It would seem very weird from a constructivist point of view, because what a constructivist is going to say… I don’t mean that as any sort of criticism.
1:23:09 SC: Got it.
1:23:10 RS: Just what a constructivist will say is that the ultimate source of morality is us in some way or other, right, and so then you’ve got a way of nicely pinpointing how it is that we can extract, if you will, or we can infer the substance, the content of morality from the meta-ethic. If, for instance, what morality is at bottom is that set of norms that are mutually agreed on by some group, say some society or some culture, then given that understanding of the nature and the status of morality, you’ll be able to pretty readily read off with some sociological knowledge what actually is right or wrong in a given culture or a given society, but you can’t make that move with realism. With realism, it’s like, we didn’t make it up. And so from that, that leaves everything open as to what the substance or the content of morality might be. Nevertheless, as I said, if you drilled down a bit, more realists, whether naturalists or non-naturalists would be aghast if the morality whose reality they were trying to vindicate was, as I described earlier, one that celebrated oppression and genocide, for instance.
1:24:39 SC: Well, that does make sense to me. I think maybe you’re not even going as far as you could go, if you think that our evidence for what is and is not moral comes largely from our intuitions, then you could say, well, that’s going to lead us to certain kinds of conclusions about what is moral, right?
1:25:00 RS: It will do, that’s right, but once again, people will have different intuitions, and we’ve got to recognize the fallibility of our own, so I was distinguishing between two views, one of which says that given a meta-ethical view that actually entails some so-called first order or normative ethical commitments, whereas on a realist view, it wouldn’t entail the truth of any normative ethical view at all. It would just leave it open as to how we glean, get our evidence for that. And just one other caveat, and that is that my intuition-based epistemology is again only one of a variety of different kinds of epistemologies, most of which we haven’t touched on in this conversation, that’s available to realists.
1:25:54 SC: Yeah. Okay, maybe then final question, sort of a slight variation on that one. If moral realists have available in principle various different moral systems, depending on what they discover through this kind of thing, does your kind of moral realism suggest any way of people talking to each other about morality, or the ways in which, if we’re not sure what morality to pick, how we can learn from others and communicate? Or is it, again, sort of any possible answer to that question is in principle compatible with your realism?
1:26:35 RS: Well, the answer I would give is, the way people ought to talk to one another is respectfully, [chuckle] but that’s the snarky un-illuminating answer. I don’t think that there is a determinant method by which we can always make progress in our discussions with one another about what’s morally right or wrong. Think over in your area. People talk about the scientific method. You’re a scientist, I’m not, but I’m skeptical that there really is any such thing that’s characterizable…
1:27:16 SC: Yeah, I’m on your side. It’s completely crazy. [chuckle]
1:27:18 RS: Yeah, okay. I mean, we can toss out very vague generalities and things like that, on which we can all agree, but they’re not in the given instance a sign of conflict among scientists. They’re not reliant on that kind of method is not going to be sufficient to resolve disagreements.
1:27:36 SC: It’s not a simple algorithm.
1:27:38 RS: Yeah, exactly, and there’s nothing like that in philosophy generally, much less moral philosophy in particular. So I can say sort of anodyne things, “Keep an open mind. Acquaint yourself with relevant facts. Make sure that you’re having this conversation in a way that isn’t triggering really strong emotions that are likely to cloud your judgement,” things like that, but I don’t have anything remotely algorithm-like to offer by way of getting from the intuitions you currently have to getting to a settled view about which you can have very, very strong confidence.
1:28:21 SC: Yeah, I think that it’s probably a general lesson epistemologically that algorithms are hard to get, and maybe not even the right thing to be striving for in some of these situations.
1:28:32 RS: Yeah, you’re absolutely right about that.
1:28:37 SC: Alright. Russ Shafer-Landau, this was extremely helpful. I think that much like when I talk about foundations of quantum mechanics, and I have my own point of view, but I say, “Really, my big goal is not to have people agree with my point of view, but for people to care about the foundations of quantum mechanics.” I think the same thing about morality. I think that it would just be good if people really sat down and carefully, really thought about where morality comes from. Rather than agreeing with my ideas about it, let’s just take the question seriously, and I think that you’re doing great work in helping people do exactly that.
1:29:09 RS: Thanks, I love that attitude. It’s been a real pleasure talking to you.
1:29:13 SC: Alright, thanks.
1:29:14 RS: Take it easy.
[music][/accordion-item][/accordion]
I know very little about philosophy so came to this podcast interested to hear what the moral realist position is. But I still don’t get it. I felt like the guest spent a lot of time slipping & sliding around articulating a positive conception of the realist position. Surely if you’re a moral realist the question of its ‘non-construction’, i.e. its a priory fact, needs to be articulated. But I just couldn’t get it from what he was saying. Still, super enjoyable podcast….as always
Exactly, Peter – I was waiting for an explanation of his actual argument, but I didn’t get anything satisfying. Also, someone or some group still has to be artibers of what is right and wrong under a realist view, even if it exists outside of us. Someone still needs to describe it, so how is that different from an “authoritative” constructionist? The argument that only constructivism has resulted in moral repugnance is weird, as surely constructivism is the more recent viewpoint, and a lot of bad things that happened in the past are a result of an idea of a concrete morality, either theism, pure intuitions or an idea of “natural laws”. At least with constructivism things can change, or at least be updated, as they are always in flux. With realism you need to be very sure you pin it down correctly the first time. But I feel like I can only argue against his refutation of constructivism because I didn’t get a strong grasp of what he was actually positing. I have listened to all of the awesome Mindscape episodes, and am usually in agreement with the guests’ arguments even if I disagree with the substance, but I really struggled with this one. I kept wanting to jump in and say ‘hang on…!”
Yup, I agree with Peter and Rob, I spent the whole podcast waiting for an argument to support the moral realism Russ was advocating, or even a clear and unambiguous description of it, but all I heard were some rather weak arguments against the alternatives, based on intuition – as Sean said, it sounded very much like moral constructivism with an unsupported realist assertion appended.
I wonder what the moral realist has to say about the natural world – we don’t say the lion is morally wrong to kill the cubs of his rival when he takes over the harem, or that a parasitic wasp is wrong to lay its eggs in a caterpillar so it is eaten alive, or that even the extinction of a whole species by some predator is wrong; did the ‘moral realm’ exist before metacognitive creatures evolved that can consider the bigger picture beyond their behavioural predispositions? What about other primates, with their complex social rules and apparent understanding of compliance and transgression?
If we can find plausible evolutionary explanations for our moral fundamentals, e.g. the concept of fairness, and the seemingly moral behaviours seen in other animals, such as altruism (perhaps explicable in terms of game theory), how would such explanations fit with moral realism?
I kept hoping that Sean would ask, “OK, enough about the epistemology, what about the ontology of moral values? Where and in what form do they exist? If stored in human (and maybe other) minds, in what form? Neural networks?” I guess Russ would reply that the question is another symptom of scientism…But having said that I am sympathetic with the idea that fermions, bosons and the wave function cannot fully EXPLAIN our moral intuitions or lack thereof. It raises very similar questions to the podcast with Philip Goff on panpsychism.
I wish Sean would’ve raised an objection to the guest’s conflation of moral relativism and constructivism. As I understand it, one can approach constructivism with a set of axioms that constrain what is desirable and essentially provide grounds to abjudicate some disagreements whereas relativism is bit more of a free for all.
Also I find this treatment of intuition as a serious foundation bewildering. It’s a complete non-answer to explain a moral principles this way because intuitions are themselves complex products of evolution, individual experience, cultural norms etc. and vary considerably. Intuitions are certainly useful, can inform what our goals should be, and often coincide with moral determinations that we can reason into but they have no explanatory power in themselves. Russ was eager to use genocide as an example… I’d wager that every genocide in history has tapped into people’s intuitions, it’s just that a modern, highly liberally educated man in a time of peace and relative prosperity may not be in touch with those intuitions.
Although I partly agree with the commenters above I still think this podcast was incredibly interesting. Moral realism is simply a very hard to characterize and ontologically mysterious view (but still respectable). I think Shafer-Landau did an excellent job of explaining his view and arguments, despite what I think is an inherent limitation and mysteriousness of moral realism.
About halfway he gave an argument against constructivism that I initially thought was the most convincing one: that it removes the normative authority that moral claims seem to have. If morality is constructed, then why should we do what it asks us to do? What reasons are there, beside self-interested reasons of avoiding jail or personal preferences to adhere to a constructed morality, not to kill people? The answer to the rhetorical question is: none. However, thinking about this problem, it is not clear why moral realism, or any other metaethical view, does not suffer from the same problem. Presumably, it is possible for people to act immorally, and have preferences to act immorally, even if moral realism is true. What reasons can you give to a person who rejects morality and has preferences to act immorally, to nevertheless act morally in accordance to a realist morality? The answer might still be ‘none’; it very much depends on what this realist morality IS and why and how it is able to have the normative authority that it is posited to have. This makes it all the more frustrating that Shafer-Landau does not really give us his positive theory. It seems to me the mysteriousness of moral realism is used to avoid talking about the problem of normative authority rather than solve it.
Lennart, what ontological thing allows for a person to create rules enforceable by physical violence just because enough people colored in a box next to their name? Why are you willing to spend nearly half of your life working in exchange for the flipping of some bits on hard drives in some data center hundreds of miles away? Pretty much all of human civilization is a series of constructions that have no fundamental ontology behind them. Does this mean governments, financial systems etc. have no normative authority? They have authority because in one way or another we decided and agreed that they do. How does some illusive moral ontology have any authority when we have not clue where to even look for it after 10s of thousands of years as a species?
I’ve noticed some people are really drawn to ths idea of deferring moral responsibility to something “real and definitely true” out there in the universe. Until any evidence for this is presented we’ll have to continue devising normative systems ourselves.
To find the common ground id refer back to the axioms of our constructed morality. It’s hard going here as well but we could try to suggest general things like “morality operates on the scale of the individual,” and “for currently extant sentient entities life is preferable to death,” and “maximal mental, emotional, physical well-being of the largest proportion of sentient entities is preferable.” How we come to them isn’t critical (one may agree that these are ontologically true or simply out of self-interest) we just need to agree to abide by them and consider them to be important.
This is one of the interviews I couldn’t get through. The argument that there must be a real morality because the alternative is unthinkable struck me like Penrose’s argument that the mind must be logically sound because the alternative is unthinkable. I listened a few more minutes to see if there was anything behind that assertion, but nothing came. I remember one of Richard Posner’s books (_The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory_?) offering an argument for the morality of slavery in Antiquity as an argument against imputing late 20th Century mainstream American morals to the universe as a whole. Posner vs. Shafer-Landau might be an interesting debate.