This is a very motte-and-bailey argument imo. Utilitarianism is not merely the claim that certain states of consciousness are preferable to individuals (e.g., that pleasure is preferable to pain), it is specifically the claim that, morally, what an individual *should do* is maximize total utility for all beings. I take Flo Bacus's position that a theory is not properly a moral theory unless it tells you what to do. If you just say "X is good" but you don't establish that "good" entails "you should take actions that produce more good things" then you haven't actually finished the job.
So if we are talking about "what you should do", then I think you need more than just the existence of and valance attributable to emotions. You are correct that to me as an individual, my experience of pleasure is preferable to my experience of pain. One is good (to me) and the other is bad (to me), and I should take actions that increase my pleasure and reduce my pain. But the bridge you need to cross is this: is *your* pleasure good *to me* and is *your* pain bad *to me*? Should I take actions that create pleasure or reduce pain for you even if they do not impact my own pleasure or pain? Without those you have only really have demonstrated hedonic egoism, not hedonic utilitarianism. And, look, I suppose someone could technically call hedonic egoism a form of moral realism, but I don't.
There are, of course, utilitarian answers to this problem (I find most of them kind of unsatisfying), but it's a pretty important bridge to cross.
This post is not an argument for utilitarianism, you need to make a leap to say caring about others is good for that, and indeed what actions do that for that. This is a post saying that the moral facts that utilitarian USES are very simple — it’s a post about moral realism, the moral facts of the universe required to build utilitarianism.
"You only need to agree that different conscious states are preferable to an individual to believe in hedonistic utilitarianism, as that’s all it assumes. You’re already a moral realist by this point, in that you’re already making all the real moral assumptions that I make! There’s nothing else!"
^ Except here you are making the claim that utilitarianism only requires this one assumption--that this is enough to establish moral realism. My point is that moral realism also requires 1) a connection from preference to action, and 2) an extension from a regard for one's own preferences to those of others (otherwise it's just egoism).
That’s fair, the word “believe” in that sentence means “the moral facts of the universe that utilitarianism rests on”. I’ll edit that to be more clear
My claim is that once you have those moral facts, you can build lots of stuff out of it. You can define “selfishness” to mean “only caring about myself”. The leap to utilitarianism from accepting these facts is saying “I want morality to be the things that lead to the best outcomes for ALL CONSCIOUS BEINGS, not just myself.”
You could make human only theories here if you wanted, earth only theories, whatever. So my jump to utilitarianism is saying the actions that lead to the best moral outcomes for all conscious perspectives is preferred, yes that needs a separate argument from establishing these moral facts with moral realism like I do in my post.
I'm confused about what moral realism is supposed to mean now. I thought that the Kantian moral philosophy was definitely supposed to be a variety of moral realism, and arguably also the Rawlsian. Kant definitely believed that moral facts existed objectively and were not mere matters of opinion. I don't think that your article is really a defense of moral realism, but is defending some other claim.
But "suffering is bad" isn't enough to get you to moral realism, let alone utilitarianism. When I say "suffering is bad", I may simply mean that my suffering is bad to me (i.e. I don't like it), and presumably you feel similarly about your suffering. This doesn't imply that I care about your suffering, or that I should care about your suffering as much as I care about my own. It doesn't imply any objective value to suffering at all.
As a matter of fact, we all naturally value our own suffering and the suffering of those we care about more than the suffering of others, and it's not at all clear why this might be objectively wrong.
It all seems like a large and pretty naïve leap from "I don't like this!" to "*the universe* doesn't like this, and *everyone in the universe* shouldn't like this!"
Another's suffering is different because it's theirs, not mine. What justifies treating it differently is that we have a different relationship to it. Like how I don't treat another's mother as if she were my mother, or another's wife as if she were my wife.
I don’t understand that distinction. Just as the outcome of 3 + 3 is not different for me just because I happen to think it, the to-be-preventedness of suffering is not different because it happens to be experienced in another mind.
Which part don't you understand? I dislike my own suffering almost by the definition of suffering. The same is not true for other's suffering.
I think there's no essential real quality of "to-be-preventedness" lurking within suffering. That sounds like a strange metaphysical fantasy I don't subscribe to.
A thing does not need to be objectively different for me to relate to it differently. I think that's the case for mothers, wives, and suffering. I treat my own differently because it is my own.
"You only need to agree that different conscious states are preferable to an individual to believe in hedonistic utilitarianism, as that’s all it assumes. You’re already a moral realist by this point, in that you’re already making all the real moral assumptions that I make! There’s nothing else!"
This is like saying "the fact that you would rather not get a paper cut means that you must be both a moral realist and also a hedonistic utilitarian" which is a big leap.
Moral realism says that some actions are objectively good or bad. Hedonistic utilitarian builds on that and says that says that net happiness is the way to measure whether an action is objectively good or bad.
But recognizing that I prefer the conscious state of 'not having a paper cut' isn't even an action? I suppose your implication is that I would recognize that it would be worthwhile to take an action to avoid a paper cut. But even then, to find it worthwhile to take an action to improve my own life doesn't require either moral realism or utilitarianism.
Your critique of Rawls is *badly* off-base - like I mean to the point where ‘Kyle has misunderstood Rawls’ seems about as likely as ‘Kyle hasn’t actually read Rawls.’
People (such as Harsanyi )have offered fairly interesting arguments for the conclusion that the parties to the original position would choose a form of utilitarianism - but none of these arguments allege that the parties would select utilitarianism *because doing so maximizes utility* like you say.
The reason why they don’t do this is actually quite simple: Rawls stipulates that the parties do not make their selections on grounds of utility, thus, it’s structurally impossible for the parties to select utilitarianism on *those* grounds.
Now, you can of course challenge Rawls’s reasons for designing the original position in *that* way - or argue that the parties to it would select utilitarianism on *other* grounds - but those are very different criticisms than saying the parties to the original position *as Rawls describes it* would select utilitarianism because they care about maximizing utility.
“The statement “I wish that the world was good instead of having no value” is itself a value statement that has no meaning if nihilism is true! If that means anything, the world is ALREADY not nihilist.”
I’m struggling to understand this. Imagine I say “I wish that unicorns existed instead of being imaginary.” I assume you wouldn’t say “if that means anything, unicorns must already exist.” Why so for morality?
What's your point, though? Just that there are some states of consciousness that the being in question would prefer to another states/"pain exists"? I think it's generally non-controversial, but how it is moral realism? My understanding that moral realism would be claiming that pain is objectively bad, no matter what indiviidual feels, and I don't see how this follows.
While I agree that constructivism is in some sense a weaker argument than utilitarianism (in the sense that its basic axiom of imagining a rational person is harder to pin down vs ‘pain is bad’), it does have one virtue that utilitarianism lacks completely: it’s much closer to how morality actually seems to operate in real life. I’m personally much more interested in moral description than moral prescription. Fundamentally I think people like Rawls and my boy Scanlon are doing a different sort of thing than someone like Singer.
I’m claiming there are moral facts in the universe, not that everybody needs to care about other people. Plenty of people are selfish and dont care about other people, you can build “I only care about me and my future” into these moral facts and they function just fine
To get to utilitarianism after establishing this moral realism, I need to say that by “morality” I mean “the version of these moral facts that cares about other people instead of just myself”. This is another leap, but it’s semantic; I just happen to call the guy who cares about himself “selfish” and the guy who cares about all other people “moral”.
Of course good and bad existing isn’t a stance independent reason to be a good person; moral realism is about truth, not motivation
You're using the term "moral fact" differently from how at least some specialists in this area (Mackie, Huemer, etc.) use it. Based on my understanding of what "moral facts" are, (and what I think philosophers mean by the term), I wouldn't call your view "moral realism". I think Lance Bush has made the same point on here about your point of view, which seems to be a form of moral naturalism.
Hm. This comment is the most interesting on the post, for what it’s worth. I knew a little about moral naturalism but doing more research about the difference between it and realism I’m gonna have to get back to you. Firstly, moral naturalism is a subset of moral realism so they’re still moral realists, but I need to grapple more with normative authority.
I thought that having “good” and “bad” be stance independent truths based off of preferences of consciousnesses compared to others was enough to be a moral realist, and it is! But I see the difference between myself and a Huemer style definition.
I might do more research and write a post, or just write a few more paragraphs here about it to think about this more, if good and bad existing objectively is enough to be a reason for an agent beyond making their own life good. To be honest, I’m not even sure if my assumptions grant that an agent in the present cares about their own self in 50 years — I feel like I need to look into this. Thanks again for the comment.
This seems right to me. For example, as I understand it, a lot of philosophers include motivation in their definition of morality, such that what it means for a fact to be moral is that that fact provides a stance-independent reason for action. So they would say (and I think I would agree) that if the fact you believe in doesn't involve motivation, it cannot be a moral truth.
a good convention would be to entirely disentangle normative ethics from metaethics, just like how formal logic is studied via symbols with no relation to particular statements we may formalize in different contexts.
i am not a moral realist bc i think it’s incomprehensible (bc gibberish) that any particular state of affairs stance-independently should be the case or just is good in some simple, unexplainable way. moral realists posit the existence of some hidden reality which consists of information that governs or dictates the objective normativity of consensus reality; like a map, specifying what should happen at any instance in the separate consensus reality, based on allegedly irreducible, unexplainable properties like goodness, badness, permissibility, obligatoriness, the ideal order of things...
i reject this as unmotivated gibberish & likely a remnant of theological gibberish, which is a solution to coordination problems made up by tribal apes mostly constrained by replicator dynamics and hostile environments. it’s satisficing, not making use of understanding-based, sustained deliberate design informed by our best empirically grounded explanations.
overall, there’s no need to talk about utilitarianism or any other normative theory in discussions of metaethical views.
Do you think that positing a difference between normative and metaethics begs the question against the realist? What if there isn’t such a difference? How would we know?
there already is such a difference in the academic discussion. the literature & moral philosophers i've engaged with so far have been clear that the two kinds of views don't necessarily entail each other. this post read like 'anti-realism' means 'not real', and due to this lousy naming convention, several non-philosophers also think that realism = 'x is real', anti-realism is 'x isn't real'.
I have a bunch of issues with this article. For one thing, agreeing with the claim that “different conscious states are preferable to an individual” is not remotely sufficient to get you to hedonistic utilitarianism! If that was all hedonistic utilitarianism committed you to, it would not be nearly as rare a view as it is.
Hedonistic utilitarianism commits you to a whole host of far more contentious claims:
Consequentialism: That consequences are that all that matters morally
Welfarism: That welfare is the only consequence that matters morally
Prudential hedonism: That welfare is constituted solely of states of pleasure and pain
Impartiality: That the interests of each being count equally
The reason hedonistic utilitarianism is so widely rejected is that people reject one or more of *these* claims, not the claim that people prefer certain conscious states to others. Only 12% of philosophers, for instance, endorse prudential hedonism.
If I understand you correctly, you seem to be saying that stance-independent moral facts are natural facts about pain and pleasure. If so, then sure I affirm “stance-independent moral facts” exist and am then a “moral realist”, but my problem is that this is just a victory via stipulation.
No substantive philosophical claim has actually been demonstrated - it’s just taking a thing we all already agree exists and then slapping a label on it. It’s analogous to defining God as love and then saying that we’re all theists because we all agree love exists.
If you could show that this way of using the terms actually maps onto how people in general use moral language, that would be interesting - but I see no reason to accept such a thesis and lots of reason to reject it!
People routinely make moral proclamations radically at odds with hedonistic utilitarianism - so to suppose that when people voice moral judgments they’re really just making statements about pleasure and pain is quite implausible to say the least.
And if you’re going to say that you aren’t making any claims about how people in general use moral language…well again, that just leaves you in the same place before - no substantive philosophical claim has been demonstrated.
It’s not exactly clear to me how you’re differentiating between nihilism and error theory - but error theory at least doesn’t make the claim that consciousness isn’t real, or that hope isn’t real, or that fear isn’t real, or anything like that. Error theory is the view that moral statements presuppose stance-independent moral facts, and since there are no such facts, all moral statements are false.
It doesn’t follow from that that statements like “Timmy is afraid of rollercoasters” or “John hopes his lottery ticket is the winning ticket” are false - these aren’t moral statements! You seem to just be superimposing your view of what moral facts are onto the error theorist - when rejecting that conception of moral facts is constitutive of error theory!
To go back to the example I used previously, it’d be like saying that atheism entails that love doesn’t exist because God is love and atheism says God doesn’t exist.
While I appreciate your mention of my article on subjectivism and your agreement that many of the objections to it are rooted in misunderstanding the view, unfortunately I don’t think this problem is unique to objections to subjectivism. I think it generalizes to objections to anti-realist views across the board - and I think the remarks you make on error theory and expressivism are an indication of that.
“If you imagine a world with only Ted Bundy and his victim, you can't condemn his actions until there's a crowd to boo him - this strikes me as not really making sense.”
On expressivism when we make moral judgment we’re expressing a negative attitude. My negative attitude toward Ted Bundy’s action can apply in scope to all possible worlds - whether there’s a crowd to boo him in those worlds or not.
Presumably the relevant facts on idealized subjectivism are going to be the ones which if known would alter your attitude. For example, suppose one lacks any negative attitude toward fishing. If this person was aware that fish feel pain, they would alter their attitude and have a negative outlook toward fishing. That fact would relevant. On the other hand, the fact that Donald Trump wore blue underwear on July 2, 1992 would not a relevant fact - presumably no one is going to change their stance on fishing based on this fact.
“If you're invoking informed observers to judge morality, and saying their preferences don't count if they don't know all the facts to make "suffering is wrong" come out true, doesn't it feel like some moral statements can be true regardless of whose attitudes are currently switched on?”
Idealized subjectivism doesn’t claim that people would converge on one set on moral conclusions. There very well could be some people who would still think suffering isn’t wrong under idealized conditions - and if so, their proclamation that suffering doesn’t matter would be true!
Idealized subjectivism is also only one form of subjectivism I mentioned that can escape the objection that actions one isn’t aware of can be immoral - I also mentioned a subjectivist view where to assert X is wrong is to X is out of accord with one’s terminal values. This form of subjectivism makes no reference to idealized observers, just one’s actual terminal values.
“Consciousness has good states and bad states.
States being different from one another in a way that matters to the subject imply things matter.
Things mattering means moral realism.”
Things matter doesn’t mean moral realism. Moral realism is the view that things matter *stance-independently*, not simply that they matter. This is like saying that things looking pretty means aesthetic realism. No! It makes a much more substantial claim than that! Same with moral realism.
I’m making a full post reframing my argument that will discuss the comments on this article, it’ll hopefully (??) be out by Sunday lol. Your comment is an important one, so do not fret!
This is a very motte-and-bailey argument imo. Utilitarianism is not merely the claim that certain states of consciousness are preferable to individuals (e.g., that pleasure is preferable to pain), it is specifically the claim that, morally, what an individual *should do* is maximize total utility for all beings. I take Flo Bacus's position that a theory is not properly a moral theory unless it tells you what to do. If you just say "X is good" but you don't establish that "good" entails "you should take actions that produce more good things" then you haven't actually finished the job.
So if we are talking about "what you should do", then I think you need more than just the existence of and valance attributable to emotions. You are correct that to me as an individual, my experience of pleasure is preferable to my experience of pain. One is good (to me) and the other is bad (to me), and I should take actions that increase my pleasure and reduce my pain. But the bridge you need to cross is this: is *your* pleasure good *to me* and is *your* pain bad *to me*? Should I take actions that create pleasure or reduce pain for you even if they do not impact my own pleasure or pain? Without those you have only really have demonstrated hedonic egoism, not hedonic utilitarianism. And, look, I suppose someone could technically call hedonic egoism a form of moral realism, but I don't.
There are, of course, utilitarian answers to this problem (I find most of them kind of unsatisfying), but it's a pretty important bridge to cross.
This post is not an argument for utilitarianism, you need to make a leap to say caring about others is good for that, and indeed what actions do that for that. This is a post saying that the moral facts that utilitarian USES are very simple — it’s a post about moral realism, the moral facts of the universe required to build utilitarianism.
"You only need to agree that different conscious states are preferable to an individual to believe in hedonistic utilitarianism, as that’s all it assumes. You’re already a moral realist by this point, in that you’re already making all the real moral assumptions that I make! There’s nothing else!"
^ Except here you are making the claim that utilitarianism only requires this one assumption--that this is enough to establish moral realism. My point is that moral realism also requires 1) a connection from preference to action, and 2) an extension from a regard for one's own preferences to those of others (otherwise it's just egoism).
That’s fair, the word “believe” in that sentence means “the moral facts of the universe that utilitarianism rests on”. I’ll edit that to be more clear
My claim is that once you have those moral facts, you can build lots of stuff out of it. You can define “selfishness” to mean “only caring about myself”. The leap to utilitarianism from accepting these facts is saying “I want morality to be the things that lead to the best outcomes for ALL CONSCIOUS BEINGS, not just myself.”
You could make human only theories here if you wanted, earth only theories, whatever. So my jump to utilitarianism is saying the actions that lead to the best moral outcomes for all conscious perspectives is preferred, yes that needs a separate argument from establishing these moral facts with moral realism like I do in my post.
I'm confused about what moral realism is supposed to mean now. I thought that the Kantian moral philosophy was definitely supposed to be a variety of moral realism, and arguably also the Rawlsian. Kant definitely believed that moral facts existed objectively and were not mere matters of opinion. I don't think that your article is really a defense of moral realism, but is defending some other claim.
But "suffering is bad" isn't enough to get you to moral realism, let alone utilitarianism. When I say "suffering is bad", I may simply mean that my suffering is bad to me (i.e. I don't like it), and presumably you feel similarly about your suffering. This doesn't imply that I care about your suffering, or that I should care about your suffering as much as I care about my own. It doesn't imply any objective value to suffering at all.
As a matter of fact, we all naturally value our own suffering and the suffering of those we care about more than the suffering of others, and it's not at all clear why this might be objectively wrong.
It all seems like a large and pretty naïve leap from "I don't like this!" to "*the universe* doesn't like this, and *everyone in the universe* shouldn't like this!"
Do you think anyone could rationally value suffering? Do you think anyone does?
I'd say we all value our own suffering, and there's nothing to stop anyone rationally valuing other's suffering too
But when I value another’s suffering, do I imagine it to be qualitatively different from my suffering?
And if I imagine it to be the same, just what justifies that I desire it in one case and I don’t desire it in the other?
Another's suffering is different because it's theirs, not mine. What justifies treating it differently is that we have a different relationship to it. Like how I don't treat another's mother as if she were my mother, or another's wife as if she were my wife.
I don’t understand that distinction. Just as the outcome of 3 + 3 is not different for me just because I happen to think it, the to-be-preventedness of suffering is not different because it happens to be experienced in another mind.
Which part don't you understand? I dislike my own suffering almost by the definition of suffering. The same is not true for other's suffering.
I think there's no essential real quality of "to-be-preventedness" lurking within suffering. That sounds like a strange metaphysical fantasy I don't subscribe to.
A thing does not need to be objectively different for me to relate to it differently. I think that's the case for mothers, wives, and suffering. I treat my own differently because it is my own.
"You only need to agree that different conscious states are preferable to an individual to believe in hedonistic utilitarianism, as that’s all it assumes. You’re already a moral realist by this point, in that you’re already making all the real moral assumptions that I make! There’s nothing else!"
This is like saying "the fact that you would rather not get a paper cut means that you must be both a moral realist and also a hedonistic utilitarian" which is a big leap.
Moral realism says that some actions are objectively good or bad. Hedonistic utilitarian builds on that and says that says that net happiness is the way to measure whether an action is objectively good or bad.
But recognizing that I prefer the conscious state of 'not having a paper cut' isn't even an action? I suppose your implication is that I would recognize that it would be worthwhile to take an action to avoid a paper cut. But even then, to find it worthwhile to take an action to improve my own life doesn't require either moral realism or utilitarianism.
Your critique of Rawls is *badly* off-base - like I mean to the point where ‘Kyle has misunderstood Rawls’ seems about as likely as ‘Kyle hasn’t actually read Rawls.’
People (such as Harsanyi )have offered fairly interesting arguments for the conclusion that the parties to the original position would choose a form of utilitarianism - but none of these arguments allege that the parties would select utilitarianism *because doing so maximizes utility* like you say.
The reason why they don’t do this is actually quite simple: Rawls stipulates that the parties do not make their selections on grounds of utility, thus, it’s structurally impossible for the parties to select utilitarianism on *those* grounds.
Now, you can of course challenge Rawls’s reasons for designing the original position in *that* way - or argue that the parties to it would select utilitarianism on *other* grounds - but those are very different criticisms than saying the parties to the original position *as Rawls describes it* would select utilitarianism because they care about maximizing utility.
“The statement “I wish that the world was good instead of having no value” is itself a value statement that has no meaning if nihilism is true! If that means anything, the world is ALREADY not nihilist.”
I’m struggling to understand this. Imagine I say “I wish that unicorns existed instead of being imaginary.” I assume you wouldn’t say “if that means anything, unicorns must already exist.” Why so for morality?
What's your point, though? Just that there are some states of consciousness that the being in question would prefer to another states/"pain exists"? I think it's generally non-controversial, but how it is moral realism? My understanding that moral realism would be claiming that pain is objectively bad, no matter what indiviidual feels, and I don't see how this follows.
While I agree that constructivism is in some sense a weaker argument than utilitarianism (in the sense that its basic axiom of imagining a rational person is harder to pin down vs ‘pain is bad’), it does have one virtue that utilitarianism lacks completely: it’s much closer to how morality actually seems to operate in real life. I’m personally much more interested in moral description than moral prescription. Fundamentally I think people like Rawls and my boy Scanlon are doing a different sort of thing than someone like Singer.
How do you get from "babies don't want to be tortured" to a claim like "everyone has an objective, stance-independent reason not to torture babies"?
I’m claiming there are moral facts in the universe, not that everybody needs to care about other people. Plenty of people are selfish and dont care about other people, you can build “I only care about me and my future” into these moral facts and they function just fine
To get to utilitarianism after establishing this moral realism, I need to say that by “morality” I mean “the version of these moral facts that cares about other people instead of just myself”. This is another leap, but it’s semantic; I just happen to call the guy who cares about himself “selfish” and the guy who cares about all other people “moral”.
Of course good and bad existing isn’t a stance independent reason to be a good person; moral realism is about truth, not motivation
You're using the term "moral fact" differently from how at least some specialists in this area (Mackie, Huemer, etc.) use it. Based on my understanding of what "moral facts" are, (and what I think philosophers mean by the term), I wouldn't call your view "moral realism". I think Lance Bush has made the same point on here about your point of view, which seems to be a form of moral naturalism.
Hm. This comment is the most interesting on the post, for what it’s worth. I knew a little about moral naturalism but doing more research about the difference between it and realism I’m gonna have to get back to you. Firstly, moral naturalism is a subset of moral realism so they’re still moral realists, but I need to grapple more with normative authority.
I thought that having “good” and “bad” be stance independent truths based off of preferences of consciousnesses compared to others was enough to be a moral realist, and it is! But I see the difference between myself and a Huemer style definition.
I might do more research and write a post, or just write a few more paragraphs here about it to think about this more, if good and bad existing objectively is enough to be a reason for an agent beyond making their own life good. To be honest, I’m not even sure if my assumptions grant that an agent in the present cares about their own self in 50 years — I feel like I need to look into this. Thanks again for the comment.
This seems right to me. For example, as I understand it, a lot of philosophers include motivation in their definition of morality, such that what it means for a fact to be moral is that that fact provides a stance-independent reason for action. So they would say (and I think I would agree) that if the fact you believe in doesn't involve motivation, it cannot be a moral truth.
a good convention would be to entirely disentangle normative ethics from metaethics, just like how formal logic is studied via symbols with no relation to particular statements we may formalize in different contexts.
i am not a moral realist bc i think it’s incomprehensible (bc gibberish) that any particular state of affairs stance-independently should be the case or just is good in some simple, unexplainable way. moral realists posit the existence of some hidden reality which consists of information that governs or dictates the objective normativity of consensus reality; like a map, specifying what should happen at any instance in the separate consensus reality, based on allegedly irreducible, unexplainable properties like goodness, badness, permissibility, obligatoriness, the ideal order of things...
i reject this as unmotivated gibberish & likely a remnant of theological gibberish, which is a solution to coordination problems made up by tribal apes mostly constrained by replicator dynamics and hostile environments. it’s satisficing, not making use of understanding-based, sustained deliberate design informed by our best empirically grounded explanations.
overall, there’s no need to talk about utilitarianism or any other normative theory in discussions of metaethical views.
Do you think that positing a difference between normative and metaethics begs the question against the realist? What if there isn’t such a difference? How would we know?
there already is such a difference in the academic discussion. the literature & moral philosophers i've engaged with so far have been clear that the two kinds of views don't necessarily entail each other. this post read like 'anti-realism' means 'not real', and due to this lousy naming convention, several non-philosophers also think that realism = 'x is real', anti-realism is 'x isn't real'.
I have a bunch of issues with this article. For one thing, agreeing with the claim that “different conscious states are preferable to an individual” is not remotely sufficient to get you to hedonistic utilitarianism! If that was all hedonistic utilitarianism committed you to, it would not be nearly as rare a view as it is.
Hedonistic utilitarianism commits you to a whole host of far more contentious claims:
Consequentialism: That consequences are that all that matters morally
Welfarism: That welfare is the only consequence that matters morally
Prudential hedonism: That welfare is constituted solely of states of pleasure and pain
Impartiality: That the interests of each being count equally
The reason hedonistic utilitarianism is so widely rejected is that people reject one or more of *these* claims, not the claim that people prefer certain conscious states to others. Only 12% of philosophers, for instance, endorse prudential hedonism.
If I understand you correctly, you seem to be saying that stance-independent moral facts are natural facts about pain and pleasure. If so, then sure I affirm “stance-independent moral facts” exist and am then a “moral realist”, but my problem is that this is just a victory via stipulation.
No substantive philosophical claim has actually been demonstrated - it’s just taking a thing we all already agree exists and then slapping a label on it. It’s analogous to defining God as love and then saying that we’re all theists because we all agree love exists.
If you could show that this way of using the terms actually maps onto how people in general use moral language, that would be interesting - but I see no reason to accept such a thesis and lots of reason to reject it!
People routinely make moral proclamations radically at odds with hedonistic utilitarianism - so to suppose that when people voice moral judgments they’re really just making statements about pleasure and pain is quite implausible to say the least.
And if you’re going to say that you aren’t making any claims about how people in general use moral language…well again, that just leaves you in the same place before - no substantive philosophical claim has been demonstrated.
It’s not exactly clear to me how you’re differentiating between nihilism and error theory - but error theory at least doesn’t make the claim that consciousness isn’t real, or that hope isn’t real, or that fear isn’t real, or anything like that. Error theory is the view that moral statements presuppose stance-independent moral facts, and since there are no such facts, all moral statements are false.
It doesn’t follow from that that statements like “Timmy is afraid of rollercoasters” or “John hopes his lottery ticket is the winning ticket” are false - these aren’t moral statements! You seem to just be superimposing your view of what moral facts are onto the error theorist - when rejecting that conception of moral facts is constitutive of error theory!
To go back to the example I used previously, it’d be like saying that atheism entails that love doesn’t exist because God is love and atheism says God doesn’t exist.
While I appreciate your mention of my article on subjectivism and your agreement that many of the objections to it are rooted in misunderstanding the view, unfortunately I don’t think this problem is unique to objections to subjectivism. I think it generalizes to objections to anti-realist views across the board - and I think the remarks you make on error theory and expressivism are an indication of that.
“If you imagine a world with only Ted Bundy and his victim, you can't condemn his actions until there's a crowd to boo him - this strikes me as not really making sense.”
On expressivism when we make moral judgment we’re expressing a negative attitude. My negative attitude toward Ted Bundy’s action can apply in scope to all possible worlds - whether there’s a crowd to boo him in those worlds or not.
Presumably the relevant facts on idealized subjectivism are going to be the ones which if known would alter your attitude. For example, suppose one lacks any negative attitude toward fishing. If this person was aware that fish feel pain, they would alter their attitude and have a negative outlook toward fishing. That fact would relevant. On the other hand, the fact that Donald Trump wore blue underwear on July 2, 1992 would not a relevant fact - presumably no one is going to change their stance on fishing based on this fact.
“If you're invoking informed observers to judge morality, and saying their preferences don't count if they don't know all the facts to make "suffering is wrong" come out true, doesn't it feel like some moral statements can be true regardless of whose attitudes are currently switched on?”
Idealized subjectivism doesn’t claim that people would converge on one set on moral conclusions. There very well could be some people who would still think suffering isn’t wrong under idealized conditions - and if so, their proclamation that suffering doesn’t matter would be true!
Idealized subjectivism is also only one form of subjectivism I mentioned that can escape the objection that actions one isn’t aware of can be immoral - I also mentioned a subjectivist view where to assert X is wrong is to X is out of accord with one’s terminal values. This form of subjectivism makes no reference to idealized observers, just one’s actual terminal values.
“Consciousness has good states and bad states.
States being different from one another in a way that matters to the subject imply things matter.
Things mattering means moral realism.”
Things matter doesn’t mean moral realism. Moral realism is the view that things matter *stance-independently*, not simply that they matter. This is like saying that things looking pretty means aesthetic realism. No! It makes a much more substantial claim than that! Same with moral realism.
Thanks for the long comment Travis! I love philosophy on substack man.
Editing this comment to add more context, I accidentally sent LMAO
Not sure if you’re still busy writing it, but FYI you never sent the rest of your reply.
I’m making a full post reframing my argument that will discuss the comments on this article, it’ll hopefully (??) be out by Sunday lol. Your comment is an important one, so do not fret!