In the previous chapter I argued that it is not possible to give an epistemic reason in favor of Epistemic Anti-Realism. One way of putting the difficulty we encountered is in the following way: one is either challenging Epistemic Realism from within or without epistemology. The challenge can’t come from outside of epistemology, because there are no reasons to believe that are prior to epistemology. On the other hand, I argued that there is no way for the challenge to come from within epistemology either. This is because one is never able to challenge the legitimacy of a system of norms—an external accusation—from within that system of norms. There is something else that one can do, but this is a challenge for epistemology, not a challenge against it.
My motivation remains a desire to investigate the plausibility of Moral Realism, and the discussion towards the end of the last chapter applied the earlier discussion to an attempt to ground Moral Realism in Epistemic Realism. I argued that such accounts fail in a systematic way.
In this chapter my discussion will follow a similar pattern. As in the last chapter, I will investigate a foundational, basic question in epistemology. My concern will be whether the arbitrary can be completely eliminated from Epistemology, even from an Epistemic Realist’s perspective. I will enter into this difficult discussion through a paper by David Enoch and Joshua Shechter, “How are Basic Belief-Forming Methods Justified?” Engaging with their ideas has been very helpful in developing my own, and I believe that it will ease us into a consideration of whether the arbitrary can be eliminated from epistemology. I will argue that they fail to eliminate the arbitrary from epistemology, and for good reason—the arbitrary cannot be completely eliminated from the Epistemic Realist’s picture of epistemology.
There are two pressing concerns that I think deserve to be raised against this account. The first concern is that this picture predicts far too much disagreement between otherwise competent believers. How is there so much consensus? I will give an account of the restraints that believers face that can explain the consensus. A second concern follows quickly after this one: how is it possible for an Epistemic Realist to recognize that there is a degree of arbitrariness in our epistemology, that some things that we accept truly are basic? This is a serious question, and I wish to grapple with it at length in my final chapter.
If this argument is right, then here’s the picture that we emerge with: if we accept Epistemic Realism there is a certain arbitrariness in our epistemic beliefs that emerges. Nothing, epistemically speaking, can count either for or against our most basic epistemic beliefs. Quickly our epistemic beliefs pile up, and the way to understand the constraints on our epistemology is that epistemic beliefs pile up and can come in conflict with each other, forcing us to choose between competing principles.
Given this understanding, I will argue that the Moral Realist’s best option is to conceive of moral beliefs as justified by some epistemic principle that he might take as basic. There is nothing in epistemology that governs these basic choices, and so the Moral Realist cannot be epistemically criticized for this decision, as long as his Realism doesn’t conflict with any of his other principles. Of course, Anti-Realists contend that Realism does conflict with many other epistemic principles, and Realism cannot be defended without eliminating these objections. But such an approach gives the Realist a precise way to shift the burden of proof onto the Anti-Realist, something Realists often talk about imprecisely.
Finally, before beginning I need to make a confession: I am not up to the task of completely answering the questions that I am raising. The questions that I raise, I believe, are some of the deepest that can be asked, and answering them completely would involve a remarkable philosophical achievement. I don’t believe that I can do that, and I especially don’t think that I can do that in this space. So I will do my best, but even if I don’t succeed completely I will consider my project a success if I can convince the reader that an approach similar to mine is the right one for the Moral Realist.
Friday, March 12, 2010
I will fail in my thesis
To think that I could succeed in my thesis would be to have hubris beyond belief. Given my intellectual and other limitations, here's all that I can hope to do:
* Succeed in an unambitious project
* Fail in an ambitious project
I started thinking I was going to succeed in an unambitious project, yet here I am defending moral realism, grappling with Epistemic Realism!
Here's the only way that I can save myself from obvious failure: I need to hedge. I need to say something like, "This is a good way for the Moral Realist" instead of saying "I think that this is true." Expect a significant hedge, acknowledgment that I'm not up to the task of really defending all of the issues that I raise, to be an important theme in the introductory matter in my thesis.
* Succeed in an unambitious project
* Fail in an ambitious project
I started thinking I was going to succeed in an unambitious project, yet here I am defending moral realism, grappling with Epistemic Realism!
Here's the only way that I can save myself from obvious failure: I need to hedge. I need to say something like, "This is a good way for the Moral Realist" instead of saying "I think that this is true." Expect a significant hedge, acknowledgment that I'm not up to the task of really defending all of the issues that I raise, to be an important theme in the introductory matter in my thesis.
One more outline! Nothing new here.
Chapter One: Epistemic Realism
1.1 What is Epistemic Realism and Anti-Realism?
1.2 There can be no reason to believe Anti-Realism.
1.3 There can be no (good) reason to believe Realism.
1.4 Cuneo's "Companions in Guilt" argument relies on the possibility of reasons to believe Anti-Realism, and therefore the argument is undermined
Chapter Two: Basic Epistemic Beliefs
2.1 Eliminating the arbitrary for epistemology: Intro through Enoch and Shechter
2.2 Enoch and Shechter fail to eliminate the arbitrary from epistemology.
2.3 No matter what you say about the structure of justification, the arbitrary cannot be completely removed from epistemology.
2.4 An account of how the arbitrariness of epistemology is minimized.
2.5 Enoch's "Defense of Robust Meta-Ethical Realism" fails to cohere with the rest of a standard epistemology.
2.6 Since there is a built in arbitrariness to epistemology, the challenge for the Moral Realist is to show that Realism fits in well with the rest of his beliefs.
Chapter Three: The Objections to Moral Realism
3.1 A new parity argument.
3.2 Focusing on a specific argument: the epistemological challenge for ethics and epistemology.
3.3 Most efforts to deal with this objection to Moral Realism fail.
3.4 Focusing on the challenge this objection provides to epistemology shows us how best to deal with the objection. The way is to reject it as a skeptical concern, on par with Evil Demons, the Matrix and Brains in a Vat.
1.1 What is Epistemic Realism and Anti-Realism?
1.2 There can be no reason to believe Anti-Realism.
1.3 There can be no (good) reason to believe Realism.
1.4 Cuneo's "Companions in Guilt" argument relies on the possibility of reasons to believe Anti-Realism, and therefore the argument is undermined
Chapter Two: Basic Epistemic Beliefs
2.1 Eliminating the arbitrary for epistemology: Intro through Enoch and Shechter
2.2 Enoch and Shechter fail to eliminate the arbitrary from epistemology.
2.3 No matter what you say about the structure of justification, the arbitrary cannot be completely removed from epistemology.
2.4 An account of how the arbitrariness of epistemology is minimized.
2.5 Enoch's "Defense of Robust Meta-Ethical Realism" fails to cohere with the rest of a standard epistemology.
2.6 Since there is a built in arbitrariness to epistemology, the challenge for the Moral Realist is to show that Realism fits in well with the rest of his beliefs.
Chapter Three: The Objections to Moral Realism
3.1 A new parity argument.
3.2 Focusing on a specific argument: the epistemological challenge for ethics and epistemology.
3.3 Most efforts to deal with this objection to Moral Realism fail.
3.4 Focusing on the challenge this objection provides to epistemology shows us how best to deal with the objection. The way is to reject it as a skeptical concern, on par with Evil Demons, the Matrix and Brains in a Vat.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
People whose arguments mine resembles/is worse than
People who make arguments similar to mine:
1. Boghossian (Objective Reasons)
2. Dworkin (Objectivity and Truth)
3. Michael Lynch (not as well known as the others)
4. Wittgenstein, maybe?
5. Plantinga (Naturalism Defeated-style argument)
People who deal with the same issue, but who I think I disagree with:
1. Hartry Field
2. Gibbard
3. Sharon Street
4. Blackburn (though I can't find where he talks about epistemology directly. Somewhere in essays on quasi-realism, I suppose and will take another look).
1. Boghossian (Objective Reasons)
2. Dworkin (Objectivity and Truth)
3. Michael Lynch (not as well known as the others)
4. Wittgenstein, maybe?
5. Plantinga (Naturalism Defeated-style argument)
People who deal with the same issue, but who I think I disagree with:
1. Hartry Field
2. Gibbard
3. Sharon Street
4. Blackburn (though I can't find where he talks about epistemology directly. Somewhere in essays on quasi-realism, I suppose and will take another look).
What I'm arguing against
Here's exactly what I'm arguing against (lightly edited by me):
This is Sharon Street (who studied under Korsgaard who in turn was very influenced by Nagel's discussion of the Objective and Subjective standpoints). From this distinction between the practical and the theoretical, Street argues that if we're moral realists we won't be able to reconcile these two standpoints, and since we do need to reconcile these two standpoints, so much the worse for moral realism.
My thesis, in a nutshell, is to deny that the theoretical standpoint looks as she describes it. I start by noting that the theoretical standpoint is guided by norms as well. We, essentially, have to take an inner perspective when it comes to thinking about the theoretical standpoint, because the outer perspective is completely ungoverned. So as long as we're thinking and reasoning we're taking an inner view (like the one that she says is characteristic of the practical standpoint) in the theoretical standpoint. And this means that there's room for the practical standpoint in the theoretical world.
After I argue that there is such room, I have to argue that epistemology does something else for us, which is that it helps point to ways that ethics doesn't conflict internally with the world of belief and theory. But that's something else.
As human beings we are capable of viewing ourselves and our values from two very different standpoints. On the one hand is what I'll call (borrowing Kantian language), the practical standpoint...When I occupy the practical standpoint I think that judgments about normative reasons are true. On the other hand is what I'll call the theoretical standpoint. When we occupy this point of view on ourselves and our values I understand my normative judgments as being shaped by such causes as my upbringing, cultural background and inherited psychological tendencies."
This is Sharon Street (who studied under Korsgaard who in turn was very influenced by Nagel's discussion of the Objective and Subjective standpoints). From this distinction between the practical and the theoretical, Street argues that if we're moral realists we won't be able to reconcile these two standpoints, and since we do need to reconcile these two standpoints, so much the worse for moral realism.
My thesis, in a nutshell, is to deny that the theoretical standpoint looks as she describes it. I start by noting that the theoretical standpoint is guided by norms as well. We, essentially, have to take an inner perspective when it comes to thinking about the theoretical standpoint, because the outer perspective is completely ungoverned. So as long as we're thinking and reasoning we're taking an inner view (like the one that she says is characteristic of the practical standpoint) in the theoretical standpoint. And this means that there's room for the practical standpoint in the theoretical world.
After I argue that there is such room, I have to argue that epistemology does something else for us, which is that it helps point to ways that ethics doesn't conflict internally with the world of belief and theory. But that's something else.
The Master Argument
1. We have some beliefs that are necessarily neither justified nor unjustified.
1.1 A belief in Epistemic Realism cannot possibly be justified, and cannot possibly be unjustified.
1.11 That is, nothing could possibly count either for or against it.
1.12 Any justification of epistemic realism would beg the question against the nihilist, and any justification of epistemic nihilism would be self-defeating.
1.13 Since epistemology is a normative domain, Normative Realism follows from Epistemic Realism.
1.2 Our basic beliefs about what counts as justification, are like Epistemic Realism in this regard.
1.21 Anything may count as a basic belief
1.211 There's no significant difference if we talk about coherentism here. First, because the decision to believe in coherentism isn't basic--if we favor it over foundationalism, we favor it for some reason. Perhaps we don't take on beliefs as basic, though, and instead I should talk of taking coherent sets of beliefs as basic. Fine; that doesn't alter the problem significantly. Restated we would simply say "One must start with one set of beliefs, and there's no way to tell us which one to start with."
1.22 One might build an entire epistemology that looks entirely different from our own, and there would be nothing wrong with that. Nothing could possibly be wrong with that.
1.23 This includes an epistemology that allows one to believe in contradictions, or that doesn't require our beliefs to cohere.
1.24 If you do require your beliefs to cohere, then as you build up your epistemology various beliefs might come into tension. These pressures help form coherent belief systems. This is why we don't believe in ghosts, though we can imagine an epistemology that does require us to believe in ghosts.
1.241 There is legitimate epistemic disagreement, and it's a disagreement about what to take as basic.
1.3 Epistemology is what we use to recognize true features of the world.
1.31 Epistemology is how we discover facts about the world.
1.32 If Epistemology is false then we have no knowledge, since justification is part of knowledge.
1.33 What it means to believe in Epistemic Realism is that there are epistemic truths.
2. There is nothing wrong with someone who has a principle that supports Moral Realism as basic.
2.1 [Continue to fill in! Need way more detail to make this plausible.]
3. Given the above, parity arguments between moral and epistemic realism systematically fail.
4. Given the above, an argument like Enoch's is basically irrelevant, and likely to fail.
5. There is a different kind of parity argument that often works, one that deals with moral beliefs that are at the same level as moral realism. This is where we should focus our attention, because this is the real threat to moral realism. But since much of epistemology is implicated, the task is easier.
1.1 A belief in Epistemic Realism cannot possibly be justified, and cannot possibly be unjustified.
1.11 That is, nothing could possibly count either for or against it.
1.12 Any justification of epistemic realism would beg the question against the nihilist, and any justification of epistemic nihilism would be self-defeating.
1.13 Since epistemology is a normative domain, Normative Realism follows from Epistemic Realism.
1.2 Our basic beliefs about what counts as justification, are like Epistemic Realism in this regard.
1.21 Anything may count as a basic belief
1.211 There's no significant difference if we talk about coherentism here. First, because the decision to believe in coherentism isn't basic--if we favor it over foundationalism, we favor it for some reason. Perhaps we don't take on beliefs as basic, though, and instead I should talk of taking coherent sets of beliefs as basic. Fine; that doesn't alter the problem significantly. Restated we would simply say "One must start with one set of beliefs, and there's no way to tell us which one to start with."
1.22 One might build an entire epistemology that looks entirely different from our own, and there would be nothing wrong with that. Nothing could possibly be wrong with that.
1.23 This includes an epistemology that allows one to believe in contradictions, or that doesn't require our beliefs to cohere.
1.24 If you do require your beliefs to cohere, then as you build up your epistemology various beliefs might come into tension. These pressures help form coherent belief systems. This is why we don't believe in ghosts, though we can imagine an epistemology that does require us to believe in ghosts.
1.241 There is legitimate epistemic disagreement, and it's a disagreement about what to take as basic.
1.3 Epistemology is what we use to recognize true features of the world.
1.31 Epistemology is how we discover facts about the world.
1.32 If Epistemology is false then we have no knowledge, since justification is part of knowledge.
1.33 What it means to believe in Epistemic Realism is that there are epistemic truths.
2. There is nothing wrong with someone who has a principle that supports Moral Realism as basic.
2.1 [Continue to fill in! Need way more detail to make this plausible.]
3. Given the above, parity arguments between moral and epistemic realism systematically fail.
4. Given the above, an argument like Enoch's is basically irrelevant, and likely to fail.
5. There is a different kind of parity argument that often works, one that deals with moral beliefs that are at the same level as moral realism. This is where we should focus our attention, because this is the real threat to moral realism. But since much of epistemology is implicated, the task is easier.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Ruminations on normative realism
One of the things that I came to appreciate over this project is that the real debate over moral realism is happening at a deeper level than I thought it was. I thought that debates about realism were primarily debates about ontology, but they're not. They're debates about frameworks and concepts primarily, and questions of ontology or metaphysics follow.
Everybody agrees that norms and values are an important part of human life and experience. The only question is what role do they play. Are they expressions of our deepest held plans and expectations? Or should we see them as law-making, ruling over ourselves and others?
The realist says that the best way to understand the role that norms play is most similar to the role that facts of any sort play. When someone accepts a norm, when they're doing is recognizing a feature of reality. The challenges to normative realism are challenges that this is not the right model for understanding moral realism. This challenge is fairly limited, when you think about it. A philosophical account that fails to explain the importance of morality in practice is worse off for it. The question is a fairly limited one: what is the proper model through which to understand our relationship with normativity.
This eases some of the pressure off both realism and anti-realism. On the one hand, anti-realism has nothing to do with being immoral, or saying that nothing matters (except in the technical sense, in which nothing objectively matters, or something like this). On the other hand, it eases some of the pressure off of realism, since realism should not be seen as the view that there are moral objects floating around in space that we access with our MoralVision that was given to us by God at Sinai. Or, at least, this is a point of contention. The anti-realist contends that the realist is committed to having an unexplainable MoralVision (just as bad as laser vision or the ability to fly). But the moral realist can defend his view by showing that the fact-model of understanding normativity doesn't need to be committed to all these things. It's primarily a question of how to model, justify and conceptualize human experience, and ontology and metaphysics only come in as a side-effect. But the goal is the former, not the latter.
So, can the moral realist meet this challenge? Well, can the epistemic realist meet this challenge? In order to really answer this one needs a theory of reasons and an epistemology of normative knowledge. But I think the point is that this is redundant; knowledge is normative. So you can't provide an argument against epitsemic realism, and it's worth giving an account of how that debate goes. I think that ultimately the only way to understand a challenge against normative realism generally is an urging to give up normativity. We lose our concepts, our ability to talk conceptually, when we give up normativity. So you need to keep norms, or you can't take anything seriously.
The question is not "What's out there?", at least not primarily. The question is how should we understand our lives, and I think that this requires norms.
In other words, maybe progress in this debate can be made by reflecting on how a discussion between a normative skeptic and a realist would go, and this can be aided by considering epistemic norms, because this is where things start to get crazy. Having reflected in this way, moral norms don't seem so bad. And this can be shown in the epistemic picture. Maybe. I'm losing the train of thought here. Lunch time, though.
Everybody agrees that norms and values are an important part of human life and experience. The only question is what role do they play. Are they expressions of our deepest held plans and expectations? Or should we see them as law-making, ruling over ourselves and others?
The realist says that the best way to understand the role that norms play is most similar to the role that facts of any sort play. When someone accepts a norm, when they're doing is recognizing a feature of reality. The challenges to normative realism are challenges that this is not the right model for understanding moral realism. This challenge is fairly limited, when you think about it. A philosophical account that fails to explain the importance of morality in practice is worse off for it. The question is a fairly limited one: what is the proper model through which to understand our relationship with normativity.
This eases some of the pressure off both realism and anti-realism. On the one hand, anti-realism has nothing to do with being immoral, or saying that nothing matters (except in the technical sense, in which nothing objectively matters, or something like this). On the other hand, it eases some of the pressure off of realism, since realism should not be seen as the view that there are moral objects floating around in space that we access with our MoralVision that was given to us by God at Sinai. Or, at least, this is a point of contention. The anti-realist contends that the realist is committed to having an unexplainable MoralVision (just as bad as laser vision or the ability to fly). But the moral realist can defend his view by showing that the fact-model of understanding normativity doesn't need to be committed to all these things. It's primarily a question of how to model, justify and conceptualize human experience, and ontology and metaphysics only come in as a side-effect. But the goal is the former, not the latter.
So, can the moral realist meet this challenge? Well, can the epistemic realist meet this challenge? In order to really answer this one needs a theory of reasons and an epistemology of normative knowledge. But I think the point is that this is redundant; knowledge is normative. So you can't provide an argument against epitsemic realism, and it's worth giving an account of how that debate goes. I think that ultimately the only way to understand a challenge against normative realism generally is an urging to give up normativity. We lose our concepts, our ability to talk conceptually, when we give up normativity. So you need to keep norms, or you can't take anything seriously.
The question is not "What's out there?", at least not primarily. The question is how should we understand our lives, and I think that this requires norms.
In other words, maybe progress in this debate can be made by reflecting on how a discussion between a normative skeptic and a realist would go, and this can be aided by considering epistemic norms, because this is where things start to get crazy. Having reflected in this way, moral norms don't seem so bad. And this can be shown in the epistemic picture. Maybe. I'm losing the train of thought here. Lunch time, though.
Free association rant on epistemology
So there's this well known argument against moral realism that focuses on moral epistemology. Mackie presents one version of it, and he puts it like this: the moral realist is going to have to be an intuitionist, and intuitionism is spooky and mysterious and we have reason to doubt that such a capacity to grasp moral truths exists, and so moral realism is false. Why is the moral realist going to have to end up with intuitionism?
Here's one way of telling the story: there's no way to justify our moral beliefs. The idea is that we justify our beliefs through empirical observation or deduction, and ethical beliefs seem to be neither. Of course, if this is the challenge then it seems to take on all of our a priori knowledge (and Mackie notes this). The challenge then becomes an attempt to provide an empirical foundation for those a priori beliefs, probably deflating them so that they're no longer really a priori, but just particularly abstract parts of our empirical theory (ala Quine).
If this is the challenge, then moral realists think that they have an answer. For example, Shafer-Landau offers a moral epistemology. Sayre-McCord offers one. Scanlon does too. The realist will probably want to employ a coherentist theory of justification, since a foundationalist picture seems to force one to rely on non-obvious intuitions (or not, whatever). This will involve a lot of bickering, point scoring about what justification is and how it applies to ethics. Fine.
But this probably doesn't satisfy anyone who's worried about the prospects for moral knowledge. We want a story about how our moral knowledge matches up with the world. After all, our empirical knowledge certainly does.
As Enoch points out, there's a version of the argument that seems to get closer to what's bothering people (and Sharon Street's Darwinian Dilemma is very close to it). It turns out to be a version of Field's improvement of Beneceraff's argument against mathematical realism. It goes like this: suppose that there are moral facts that we know. Then a lot of the time when we have moral beliefs, they turn out to be true. There is a correlation between our beliefs and the truth. The question is, what explains this correlation? It seems to be a mysterious fact. (Field's improvement reminds me of Blackburn's improvement of Mackie's metaphysical side of the argument from queerness, the supervenience problem. I wonder if this suggests that they rise and fall together?)
Some sort of coherentist (or internalist) theory of justification won't help much here. This is because (following Enoch) your moral beliefs will not cohere (or will be defeated) by your belief that there is no reliability to your moral beliefs. The reason why this argument is an improvement is because it gives up on justification. "You want to tell me that justification might not be about the connection between the truth and the belief? Fine, you can have justification. But I still want what we have with our empirical beliefs, which is some sort of story of how my brain matches up with that truth."
Now, how could this be answered? This is what pushes realists to intuitionism, and pushes naturalists to evolutionary arguments (see Enoch, Copp, Alston, and SB who is working on her dissertation here at Harvard, here's the link to her current draft). And we can give a similar story for anything with practical consequences. The story will roughly go like this: if we didn't have a reliable rational faculty for forming intuitions about math/logic/ethics/epistemology(/religion?) then this would have nasty consequences for a biological creature. And so we have good reason to think that our intuitions are pretty reliable (but not too reliable! otherwise we lose our crucial capacity for being totally misguided by intuitions).
What is one to make of these biological arguments? Is evolution really of any help here? Let me focus on concerns about epistemic realism. We're supposed to use our epistemic faculties to determine that evolution is true, and once we have that as our pivot point we're supposed to understand that evolution being true supports our belief that our epistemic faculties are reliable. This seems odd, and the reason it seems odd to me sounds similar to an argument made by Alvin Plantinga. If we have knowledge of evolutionary theory, it seems that we have such knowledge only if we have justification, evidence and the other normative stuff of epistemology. So how could that offer us any more support for our confidence in epistemology?
(It also seems odd for purely biological reasons. There are all sorts of reasons that organisms end up the way that they do, and the idea that all of an organisms are reliable isn't something that you can just toss off. You need evidence. Do we know that it's not due to random drift? Can we show that there is any advantage in reliably representing the world in belief? How would that experiment work?)
How about another method of attack: let's be expressivists about normativity. In short, I think that this just means that we should agree that we don't take our knowledge or beliefs very seriously. This is my opinion as of this moment--I haven't studied others with enough depth to really make this intelligently, but it just seems to me that the common criticism of expressivism is right--it's either realism or nihilism, and you've gotta take one or the other. In this case, either you are part of the human world or you're part of the animal world, and you can make that choice, but let's not kid ourselves about what it means to choose to be human.
(Another option: deny that begging the question is bad. See Boghossion. This discussion could go in Chapter 1.)
I'm not going to solve this question, because this is one of the perennial questions in philosophy. This would be a refutation of skepticism, if it could be done.
Here's what one can start to say: if there are epistemic facts, then this is how moral facts could look like. We start by taking certain things for granted--because we're biological creatures, our environment effects us in some way but we really don't have any idea what the effect was (similar to the problem of talking about before the Big Bang). And then we simply build off of them. We might start with a foundationalist principle that guides our justification, or we might end up with a coherentist one, and this is a matter for debate. But the point is that this is how it would have to work.
And, then, what can one say to the normative skeptic? Nothing really. One doesn't have to accept epistemic realism--in fact, there's nothing that could possibly justify epistemic realism, and this is exactly what the normative skeptic would want. So it's better not to think about half answers, or even to worry about it at all.
All the objections can do is make it unpleasant for you to be a normative realist.
Hmm..I think i'm out of steam. I guess that I'll try some other argument, then write this one up tonight in a fit of caffeine. I wonder if there is any more perspective that I could offer. How does this move the discussion forward? I don't think that it does. Well, maybe it does. I think what it shows is that I really do need to reread the stuff on epistemic expressivism.
Here's one way of telling the story: there's no way to justify our moral beliefs. The idea is that we justify our beliefs through empirical observation or deduction, and ethical beliefs seem to be neither. Of course, if this is the challenge then it seems to take on all of our a priori knowledge (and Mackie notes this). The challenge then becomes an attempt to provide an empirical foundation for those a priori beliefs, probably deflating them so that they're no longer really a priori, but just particularly abstract parts of our empirical theory (ala Quine).
If this is the challenge, then moral realists think that they have an answer. For example, Shafer-Landau offers a moral epistemology. Sayre-McCord offers one. Scanlon does too. The realist will probably want to employ a coherentist theory of justification, since a foundationalist picture seems to force one to rely on non-obvious intuitions (or not, whatever). This will involve a lot of bickering, point scoring about what justification is and how it applies to ethics. Fine.
But this probably doesn't satisfy anyone who's worried about the prospects for moral knowledge. We want a story about how our moral knowledge matches up with the world. After all, our empirical knowledge certainly does.
As Enoch points out, there's a version of the argument that seems to get closer to what's bothering people (and Sharon Street's Darwinian Dilemma is very close to it). It turns out to be a version of Field's improvement of Beneceraff's argument against mathematical realism. It goes like this: suppose that there are moral facts that we know. Then a lot of the time when we have moral beliefs, they turn out to be true. There is a correlation between our beliefs and the truth. The question is, what explains this correlation? It seems to be a mysterious fact. (Field's improvement reminds me of Blackburn's improvement of Mackie's metaphysical side of the argument from queerness, the supervenience problem. I wonder if this suggests that they rise and fall together?)
Some sort of coherentist (or internalist) theory of justification won't help much here. This is because (following Enoch) your moral beliefs will not cohere (or will be defeated) by your belief that there is no reliability to your moral beliefs. The reason why this argument is an improvement is because it gives up on justification. "You want to tell me that justification might not be about the connection between the truth and the belief? Fine, you can have justification. But I still want what we have with our empirical beliefs, which is some sort of story of how my brain matches up with that truth."
Now, how could this be answered? This is what pushes realists to intuitionism, and pushes naturalists to evolutionary arguments (see Enoch, Copp, Alston, and SB who is working on her dissertation here at Harvard, here's the link to her current draft). And we can give a similar story for anything with practical consequences. The story will roughly go like this: if we didn't have a reliable rational faculty for forming intuitions about math/logic/ethics/epistemology(/religion?) then this would have nasty consequences for a biological creature. And so we have good reason to think that our intuitions are pretty reliable (but not too reliable! otherwise we lose our crucial capacity for being totally misguided by intuitions).
What is one to make of these biological arguments? Is evolution really of any help here? Let me focus on concerns about epistemic realism. We're supposed to use our epistemic faculties to determine that evolution is true, and once we have that as our pivot point we're supposed to understand that evolution being true supports our belief that our epistemic faculties are reliable. This seems odd, and the reason it seems odd to me sounds similar to an argument made by Alvin Plantinga. If we have knowledge of evolutionary theory, it seems that we have such knowledge only if we have justification, evidence and the other normative stuff of epistemology. So how could that offer us any more support for our confidence in epistemology?
(It also seems odd for purely biological reasons. There are all sorts of reasons that organisms end up the way that they do, and the idea that all of an organisms are reliable isn't something that you can just toss off. You need evidence. Do we know that it's not due to random drift? Can we show that there is any advantage in reliably representing the world in belief? How would that experiment work?)
How about another method of attack: let's be expressivists about normativity. In short, I think that this just means that we should agree that we don't take our knowledge or beliefs very seriously. This is my opinion as of this moment--I haven't studied others with enough depth to really make this intelligently, but it just seems to me that the common criticism of expressivism is right--it's either realism or nihilism, and you've gotta take one or the other. In this case, either you are part of the human world or you're part of the animal world, and you can make that choice, but let's not kid ourselves about what it means to choose to be human.
(Another option: deny that begging the question is bad. See Boghossion. This discussion could go in Chapter 1.)
I'm not going to solve this question, because this is one of the perennial questions in philosophy. This would be a refutation of skepticism, if it could be done.
Here's what one can start to say: if there are epistemic facts, then this is how moral facts could look like. We start by taking certain things for granted--because we're biological creatures, our environment effects us in some way but we really don't have any idea what the effect was (similar to the problem of talking about before the Big Bang). And then we simply build off of them. We might start with a foundationalist principle that guides our justification, or we might end up with a coherentist one, and this is a matter for debate. But the point is that this is how it would have to work.
And, then, what can one say to the normative skeptic? Nothing really. One doesn't have to accept epistemic realism--in fact, there's nothing that could possibly justify epistemic realism, and this is exactly what the normative skeptic would want. So it's better not to think about half answers, or even to worry about it at all.
All the objections can do is make it unpleasant for you to be a normative realist.
Hmm..I think i'm out of steam. I guess that I'll try some other argument, then write this one up tonight in a fit of caffeine. I wonder if there is any more perspective that I could offer. How does this move the discussion forward? I don't think that it does. Well, maybe it does. I think what it shows is that I really do need to reread the stuff on epistemic expressivism.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Could our account help deal with the epistemic access/reliability problem for ethics?
I think it might. I don't have time to go through the idea carefully now, but here's the idea. I'll begin by quoting Cuneo:
"The fourth argument in the antirealist repertoire can be stated briefly. This argument starts with the observation that we don't have any explanatorily informative story about how we could gain epistemic access to moral facts. That is, we do not have any informative account of how facts about what morally ought to be the case impinge on our cognitive faculties so as to produce the corresponding states of knowledge. And it is difficult to imagine what type of story could be told. In light of this failure, it is best to conclude that there is no explanation available. But on the assumption that, if moral facts were to exist, then some explanation would be available, it follows that moral facts do not exist."
"I think that it should be admitted that this argument poses a serious challenge to moral realism. But I take it to be fairly plain that the argument poses an equally serious challenge to epistemic realism. For if it is the normative nature of moral facts that is supposed to debar us from an informative story about how we grasp them, then the same holds for epistemic facts. And if it is the lack of an informative story of how we grasp moral facts that implies that we ought not to admit them into our ontology then the same holds for epistemic facts. Considerations of the same sort counsel against the acceptance of the existence of both moral and epistemic facts."
The first hint that there is something strange here is that what's being asked for is an epistemology for epistemic realism. And I think that the story that I've been telling can tell the story of how we come to know epistemic facts--if epistemic realism is taken, etc.--and that this might be able to help moral realism in the same way. But I need to think more seriously about this and the other arguments.
"The fourth argument in the antirealist repertoire can be stated briefly. This argument starts with the observation that we don't have any explanatorily informative story about how we could gain epistemic access to moral facts. That is, we do not have any informative account of how facts about what morally ought to be the case impinge on our cognitive faculties so as to produce the corresponding states of knowledge. And it is difficult to imagine what type of story could be told. In light of this failure, it is best to conclude that there is no explanation available. But on the assumption that, if moral facts were to exist, then some explanation would be available, it follows that moral facts do not exist."
"I think that it should be admitted that this argument poses a serious challenge to moral realism. But I take it to be fairly plain that the argument poses an equally serious challenge to epistemic realism. For if it is the normative nature of moral facts that is supposed to debar us from an informative story about how we grasp them, then the same holds for epistemic facts. And if it is the lack of an informative story of how we grasp moral facts that implies that we ought not to admit them into our ontology then the same holds for epistemic facts. Considerations of the same sort counsel against the acceptance of the existence of both moral and epistemic facts."
The first hint that there is something strange here is that what's being asked for is an epistemology for epistemic realism. And I think that the story that I've been telling can tell the story of how we come to know epistemic facts--if epistemic realism is taken, etc.--and that this might be able to help moral realism in the same way. But I need to think more seriously about this and the other arguments.
A shift in Frege's thoughts about epistemology and ethics?
"Like ethics, logic can also be called a normative science. How must I think in order to reach the goal, truth? We expect logic to give us the answer to this question, but we do not demand of it that it should go into what is peculiar to each branch of knowledge and its subject matter. On the contrary, the task we assign logic is only that of saying what holds with the utmost generality for all thinking, whatever its subject matter. We must assume that the rules for our thinking and for our holding something to be true are prescribed by the laws of truth....Logic is the science of the most general laws of truth."
Frege, Logic. In contrast to (Early) Wittgenstein's specification of logic as dealing entirely with tautologies, it seems to me that it doesn't hurt to think of Frege as just an epistemic realist, someone who thinks that there really are general norms about what to believe. In this essay, Frege seems to be putting these two sorts of norms on the same page. But look at this quote from "Thought."
"The word 'law' is used in two senses. When we speak of moral or civil laws we mean prescriptions , which ought to be obeyed but with which actual occurrences are not always in conformity. Laws of nature are general features of what happens in nature, and occurrences in nature are always in accordance with them. It is rather in this sense that I speak of laws of truth...I assign to logic the task of discovering the laws of truth, not the laws of taking things to be true or thinking."
The second essay is later by about 20 years. He does think that laws governing thought follow from the laws of logic, but that these are quite separate. Here's another passage from Thought:
"From the laws of truth there follow prescriptions about asserting, thinking, judging, inferring. And we may very well speak of laws of thought in this way too. But there is at once a danger here of confusing things. People may very well interpret the expression 'law of thought' by analogy with 'law of nature' and then have in mind general features of thinking as a mental occurrence..."
His point is that he doesn't want someone to think that logic should be identified with those things that guide thought, because that would eliminate the objectivity of logic, giving it a psychologistic explanation. But how should we understand him here, then? If logic itself does not contain norms governing thought, and is rather a part of our description of the most general features of the universe, how do we end up with norms from logic? There seems to be an is/ought gap here.
Frege, Logic. In contrast to (Early) Wittgenstein's specification of logic as dealing entirely with tautologies, it seems to me that it doesn't hurt to think of Frege as just an epistemic realist, someone who thinks that there really are general norms about what to believe. In this essay, Frege seems to be putting these two sorts of norms on the same page. But look at this quote from "Thought."
"The word 'law' is used in two senses. When we speak of moral or civil laws we mean prescriptions , which ought to be obeyed but with which actual occurrences are not always in conformity. Laws of nature are general features of what happens in nature, and occurrences in nature are always in accordance with them. It is rather in this sense that I speak of laws of truth...I assign to logic the task of discovering the laws of truth, not the laws of taking things to be true or thinking."
The second essay is later by about 20 years. He does think that laws governing thought follow from the laws of logic, but that these are quite separate. Here's another passage from Thought:
"From the laws of truth there follow prescriptions about asserting, thinking, judging, inferring. And we may very well speak of laws of thought in this way too. But there is at once a danger here of confusing things. People may very well interpret the expression 'law of thought' by analogy with 'law of nature' and then have in mind general features of thinking as a mental occurrence..."
His point is that he doesn't want someone to think that logic should be identified with those things that guide thought, because that would eliminate the objectivity of logic, giving it a psychologistic explanation. But how should we understand him here, then? If logic itself does not contain norms governing thought, and is rather a part of our description of the most general features of the universe, how do we end up with norms from logic? There seems to be an is/ought gap here.
Something I've learned in this process
I never learn anything--not really--by reading philosophers. Rather, they can help me think through things, but there is nothing to be gained only from reading. That's like listening to someone else think through things, but they can't do that for you. I only make progress when I try to think through the issues, and then they can have a conversation with me.
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