Discussion of My New Brand of Moral Anti-Realism

Apparently, Nat is no longer the only reader of my blog. I guess that's a good thing. Yesterday, I received the following email from Daniel G. about my new brand of moral anti-realism:

"So, I read your blog. I think your idea about distinguishing moral from other facts is interesting. There's more than a good chance that I'm not totally getting your idea, but here are some thoughts that came to mind.

"Surely you want in a situation where someone comes to appreciate some moral fact for that fact to be part of the cause of the person *coming* to believe that fact. If so, then it looks like the moral fact is causally efficacious in a way not dissimilar to the rock - just as the rock is part of the story of how someone who denied that there is a rock comes to believe there is rock, so too with the case of someone who comes to see that such and such is the case morally. What seems important is that the rock can causally interact with a person without that person coming to have any belief about the rock, whereas the same does not appear to be true in the case of moral facts (though it is probably too limiting to restrict the kind of effect the fact can have to domain of belief only). My point is simply that you don't want it to be the case that someone must already have beliefs about the moral fact in order for that fact to be causally efficacious, otherwise it looks like the fact itself must be left out of an explanation of how someone comes to believe the fact. Also - I'm wondering how this idea is different from the kind of stuff McDowell and Wiggins have to say about secondary qualities. In this case too, it seems that the thing in question cannot be causally efficacious without reference to the subject who effected. But (and I take it this is McDowell's and Wiggins' point) this doesn't impugn the idea that the things doing the effecting are as real as we want them to be. I'm not saying that you're denying this. I'm just not sure that you've really switched camps so much as renamed something. But maybe not."

Here's the response I sent back to him:

Two points:

(1) McDowell and Wiggins don't have a substantive story about what distinguishes secondary qualities from primary qualities, so their invocation of secondary qualities as a model for what's distinctive about moral facts (and other "subject involving" facts) is empty. If you look at what they say, you'll find plenty of hand waving about the constitutive role our subjectivity plays in the make-up of moral facts, but this ceases to be a means to distinguish moral from other facts when you find out that they say all the same things about non-moral facts as well. (To be thorough: McDowell does make one proposal for distinguishing moral judgments: namely, at times he suggests that he accepts a version of judgment internalism--the view that sincerely making a moral judgment is necessarily connected up with being motivated to act. But on any serious construal of his comments on this topic, the specific formulation of judgment internalism he proposes is straightforwardly false. Michael Smith's criticisms of McDowell in this regard are definitive. On a less than fully serious construal of his comments, it is possible to water them down enough so that some form or another of judgment internalism turns out to be true of any kind of judgment. But then invoking judgment internalism ceases to be a means of distinguishing moral judgments and we're back where we started from.) And when it turns out that they offer no non-circular account of the constitutive role our subjectivity plays (in either case), my interest really starts to wane. At the end of the day, it's somehow supposed to be a quietist platitude that the constitution of the world depends on us! (If that's not global anti-realism, or idealism, I don't know what is. Yes, I've heard of Kant. And yes, I'm familiar with a way of reading Kant such that his transcendental idealism turns out to be just what McDowell's defending. But the tendency to waffle between talking about the constitutive dependence of the world on us and talking about how anti-realism is an illusion still strikes me as irresolute.)

The crux of my argument is that there is an important difference between the rationality of being consoled by the existence of non-moral, natural facts, and the irrationality of being consoled by the existence of moral facts. And I have a substative way of accounting for this difference: the reason it's rational to be consoled by the one but not the other is because the one is causally efficacious independently of what anyone believes about it. I think this suffices to separate my camp from theirs. (It's not essential to me that I be in some other camp. But, as far as I can tell, their camp's account of what's distinctive about moral facts is empty. And I hope that's not true of my account as well.)

(2) I don't know if your worry about the causal efficacy of moral facts poses a problem for my account. At worst, I need to qualify what I say (I just need there to be some dissimilarity or another in the area I'm pointing to, in spite of all the similarities--which I'm more than happy to grant), but I don't know if I even need to do that. In the case you imagine, I assume that someone else teaches you about the moral facts, and they do so by training you adhere to them even when you are not already aware of them yourself. (Think about Burnyeat's "Aristotle on Learning to be Good".) So one need not invoke the causal efficacy of the moral facts themselves on you, the unbeliever. All one needs is the causal efficacy of the facts on the believer and his effect on you. (Remember my claim: realism about x = x is causally efficacious independently of what anyone believes about x.) But you're probably right to suggest that such cases of other people bringing one into the space of morals can't exhaust our access to this space or the causal efficacy of it. You've given me something to think about.