I think one can take away an opposite conclusion from your discussion. As you probably know, scientific realism is a contested view. Pragmatists and instrumentalist agree with your discussion of science, but deny that scientific theories represent reality or are ‘true’ in a simple sense. What we know is that they are useful.
So the fact that there are structural similarities between science and ethics does little to establish realism. You need a separate argument. And the argument to establish moral realism is going to be much harder, because unlike science, the underlying theories are not based on predictive successes. No experiment ever has or will confirm whether our moral duty is to promote the greatest good for the greatest number.
Sure, I agree that someone could avoid moral realism by just accepting antirealism more broadly - but I think scientific antirealism is very implausible, and I'm confident that epistemic nihilism is *radically* implausible, so that's not really a concern for me. As long as people hold that moral theories can be "as real as" scientific ones, that's really what matters to me.
I think the issue is more that scientific realism needs an actual argument to establish it, and pretty much every argument for scientific realism leans very heavily on the predictive utility of the theory itself. So there's reason to doubt moral realism even if you think the argument for scientific realism is solid.
I think maybe a clearer way of putting the objection is: in the case of scientific theories, the theories entail or probabilify the predictions that are being tested. But in ethics that is not the case. So, in your example, utilitarianism is the theory that Eugene is using for his 'moral science'. Utilitarianism entails that the moral practice maximizes welfare. It does not predict anything: it does not predict that marriage will or will not enhance welfare. The only empirical question in Eugene's case is whether sex outside of marriage lowers welfare. And the hypothesis 'sex outside of marriage is wrong' is logically equivalent to that empirical question if you are a utilitarian. If Eugene decides to stop being a Utilitarian after he finds that sex outside of marriage raises welfare, it's a choice between intuitions.
By contrast, the theory, the hypothesis and the experiment for Julie are connected by empirical relations. The underlying theory tells Julie not just that igneous rocks should not have fossils, but also what an igneous rock is and how to identify them. So the theory empirically motivates both the hypothesis and the experiment. Consequently, a failure of the experiment offers empirical disconfirmation of the theory. Now, as you correctly observe, empirical disconfirmation does not require us to jettison the theory. But it is a pretty big difference that Eugene's experiment does not empirically disconfirm his theory at all. It can't in fact.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here - if Eugene does the experiment by measuring the welfare of societies that permit sex outside of marriage, and his appropriately rigorous result comes back showing that it doesn't lead to an overall reduction, how has that not falsified his hypothesis that sex outside of marriage is wrong? You're right that "sex outside of marriage is wrong" is logically equivalent to the empirical question, and that that's only the case because he's a utilitarian, but it's also true that "This rock is igneous" is logically equivalent to the empirical question of whether or not it has certain geological features, and that's only the case because Julie accepts the basic framework of the science of geology, right? I think the fact that utilitarianism is such a simplistic, straightforward associative theory might make the logical chain seem artificially simplistic, but there's no reason the same approach wouldn't be broadly applicable to, say, an objective list theory or something like that.
But Julie accepts the basic framework of the science of geology based on empirical reasons. Each part of the scientific theory is embedded in relations with observations of the world. The theory can be revised or replaced if our observations call aspects of it into question. Utilitarianism and other moral theories are not like that at all. The theory itself is connected only to our intuitions about right and wrong. It does not emerge out of attempts to explain and predict the world. It is fundamentally insulated from the results of the ‘experiment’ in a way that geological theory is not.
I think then the fundamental difference here is whether you think moral intuitions and broader moral judgments are part of the evidential base our theories have to account for. I definitely think they are, and I think drawing a principled line that excludes them but includes scientific observation is trickier than you might think. After all, someone who completely denied the existence of the external world entirely could also say all physical theories were just based on illusory intuitions about what our sense data appears to represent, right?
But moral intuitions are easy to account for in an empirical sense: we’re social apes that have evolved various moral intuitions that conduced to survival and reproduction in small groups. The idea that justice and morality are human-relative, and defined by our natures, is parsimonious and well supported and so forth. Relativism is easy to weave into a broader scientific account. Moral Realists need to make a case for why we need more of an account than relativism very easily provides.
There is a relevant difference between physical experimentation and moral experimentation: 1) A tree in the forest makes a mess (or basalt forms from magma) even if nobody is there to see it, whereas empirical consequences of moral wrongs suffer from observation bias insofar as we have no idea about the effects of moral wrongs committed in secrecy (this is an insurmountable confounder). There could be a difference in consequences for witnessed immoral acts vs those done in secret, which then could indicate that it is only our bias about what is immoral that is in fact immoral, not the acts that we consider immoral.
Moreover, quantifying the moral consequences in terms of “wellbeing” requires that it is standardised, and that standard proven as the ultimate and universal normative principle (the same for all agents and the highest for all agents), otherwise it is not a common measure but another bias.
Why do we not have knowledge about the effects of moral wrongs committed in secrecy? I'm not sure I follow. If I illegally dump toxic waste into a local lake without anyone knowing, people still get sick, right?
Here is an experiment that could work. 1) Give an already ultra-wealthy businessman an opportunity to steal 1 billion dollars from public funds, with the guarantee of the military/government that he will never be identified as the thief or otherwise held to account. 2) observe the businessman for a period of time to see whether their wellbeing has decreased. 3) repeat the experiment for all wealthy people, observe and calculate whether any statistically significant decrease of wellbeing occurred to this wealthy cohort due to getting richer by stealing. 4) conclude: is stealing with impunity morally wrong?
But obviously there *would* be a statistically significant decrease in welfare among those millions of people who depend on that state funding for various services and programs, right? I'm certainly not arguing that behaving immorally is necessarily bad *for the person who does it.* But they aren't the only one who matters here!
If being immoral is not bad for the person acting immorally then why be moral if you can profit from immorality? Why not cause harm to others if it can benefit you, especially if you are powerful enough to be untouchable by your victims? If the point of your experiment is to show that actions that are harmful to others cause harm to others then this is trivially, tautologically true (no need for an experiment); nothing follows from this that validates any view of morality. In order to demonstrate objective morality it is necessary to show that it is objectively wrong to do to others what you consider to be “harm”.
I think this objection is begging the question - of course someone who believes that you only ever have reason to do what you benefit from or desire will think that any other moral restraints are unjustified. But that's exactly the point being debated, right? I think opponents of moral realism should give actual arguments for why it is that only desires or personal interests can be reason-giving in that way.
Here is an example that may make it clear why general wellbeing is not an objective moral standard. Let us say that the majority believes that killing innocent people for the benefit of others is immoral and contrary to wellbeing. Nevertheless, a new, extremely virulent disease is discovered, and 5 individuals are tested as infected. The individuals are in quarantine, but experts know that the virus will eventually break out and will kill 50% of the population. The only way to prevent that outcome is to kill and incinerate the 5 innocent individuals in the quarantine. The experts in wellbeing calculus argue that the general wellbeing will suffer immensely unless these 5 individuals are murdered. According to the ‘more wellbeing’ calculus this murder is moral, but this conclusion contradicts the premise that killing innocent people for the benefit of others is immoral. Meanwhile, the financial elite understands that there is no valid reason why the wellbeing of the majority should be morally favoured over the wellbeing of the minority (this normative distinction is correctly identified as arbitrary, therefore normatively false), so they apply the moral judgement of the majority (that killing innocent people for the benefit of others is not in itself morally wrong) against the majority, concluding that killing innocent people for the benefit of the elite is morally right. On this account the elite are more logically consistent that the exploited majority, unless some other, logically consistent kind of moral realism can be proven.
You cannot account for moral wrongs you don’t know about as ‘moral wrongs’ that you empirically measure. That people get sick after swimming in the lake tells you nothing about any moral wrongs committed, and if through investigations you can determine that a moral wrong was committed (someone confessed), then you know about it, but there may be many possible cases that you don’t.
You are also assuming that making other people sick is invariably bad for the culprit’s wellbeing, even if he can get away with it and profit from it. This is what your proposed study is supposed to prove, not presume.
> you won’t find papers being published defending slavery or child sacrifice
If 99% of people today are against slavery, that doesn't mean that slavery is objectively bad, it just means that 99% of people right now are against slavery.
It's entirely possible that space aliens might think slavery is OK, as might people in 2000 years time. We just don't know.
Or are you making a stronger claim, e.g. that people in 2000 years time will think slavery is bad?
But you could make these same claims about, say, heliocentrism - "Just because 99% of astronomers believe the earth revolves around the sun doesn't mean it objectively does, it just means that 99% of astronomers right now are heliocentrists. It's entirely possible that space aliens might think the sun revolves around the earth, as might people in 2000 years' time." And I think in that case, it's clear that we would be making an error in thinking the mere possibility of divergence was evidence for the non-objectivity, right?
This was a typically well-articulated piece on your part.
However, I don't recognize a granular enough view of what kind of moral skepticism is being discussed in your arguments. It's not that I find my arguments to be super granular, to be clear, but the moral skeptic doesn't need to write off the possibility of moral empiricism in practice; they just reserve the right to dissent on what the results will mean to the extremely rarefied conversations that take place in meta-ethics. You can analogize moral experimentation to scientific experimentation, but the moral skeptic (of my nontrivial branch) says right off that something is janky in the framing (again, only to the extent that the results of moral experimentation will be said to settle meta-ethical arguments between realists and skeptics).
Early in our discussions on twitter, it seemed that you conceived of moral skepticism and moral non-cognitivism as completely overlapping. Starting from that base, you've described error theory as a gray area. But error theory (which is a form of cognitivism) is a leading form of moral skepticism.
Among philosophers subscribing to error theory, virtually all have categoricity as one of their sticking points with realists. It's true that many of them also (mistakenly in my view) list the irreducibility of the normative as a general concern, but even if you got past this, you'd have a widespread belief among moral skeptics that categoricity is a big problem left to address. Throw in that philosophers are starting to explicitly separate these two considerations (François Jaquet's paper on Prudential Parity Objections), and we're left noticing that leaving categoricity out of the discussion leaves a huge chunk of moral skepticism aside.
The thing about scientific experiments and normative action-guidance is that there's enough rough similarity to do the comparison. This isn't the case with categorically overriding considerations. There is nothing like this in science. Half the time when we debate it seems like you're willing to leave categoricity aside and accept some kind of more minimal moral realism, the other half it seems like you want to rescue categoricity and go robust. If you took the minimal route, we could just chalk our disagreement up to something foundational about the meaning of moral discourse and agree at least that moral experimentation could be productive.
As we seem to agree on a great number of other, actually pressing things, it does make me curious what's under the rock of our respective approaches.
I think one can take away an opposite conclusion from your discussion. As you probably know, scientific realism is a contested view. Pragmatists and instrumentalist agree with your discussion of science, but deny that scientific theories represent reality or are ‘true’ in a simple sense. What we know is that they are useful.
So the fact that there are structural similarities between science and ethics does little to establish realism. You need a separate argument. And the argument to establish moral realism is going to be much harder, because unlike science, the underlying theories are not based on predictive successes. No experiment ever has or will confirm whether our moral duty is to promote the greatest good for the greatest number.
Sure, I agree that someone could avoid moral realism by just accepting antirealism more broadly - but I think scientific antirealism is very implausible, and I'm confident that epistemic nihilism is *radically* implausible, so that's not really a concern for me. As long as people hold that moral theories can be "as real as" scientific ones, that's really what matters to me.
I think the issue is more that scientific realism needs an actual argument to establish it, and pretty much every argument for scientific realism leans very heavily on the predictive utility of the theory itself. So there's reason to doubt moral realism even if you think the argument for scientific realism is solid.
I think maybe a clearer way of putting the objection is: in the case of scientific theories, the theories entail or probabilify the predictions that are being tested. But in ethics that is not the case. So, in your example, utilitarianism is the theory that Eugene is using for his 'moral science'. Utilitarianism entails that the moral practice maximizes welfare. It does not predict anything: it does not predict that marriage will or will not enhance welfare. The only empirical question in Eugene's case is whether sex outside of marriage lowers welfare. And the hypothesis 'sex outside of marriage is wrong' is logically equivalent to that empirical question if you are a utilitarian. If Eugene decides to stop being a Utilitarian after he finds that sex outside of marriage raises welfare, it's a choice between intuitions.
By contrast, the theory, the hypothesis and the experiment for Julie are connected by empirical relations. The underlying theory tells Julie not just that igneous rocks should not have fossils, but also what an igneous rock is and how to identify them. So the theory empirically motivates both the hypothesis and the experiment. Consequently, a failure of the experiment offers empirical disconfirmation of the theory. Now, as you correctly observe, empirical disconfirmation does not require us to jettison the theory. But it is a pretty big difference that Eugene's experiment does not empirically disconfirm his theory at all. It can't in fact.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here - if Eugene does the experiment by measuring the welfare of societies that permit sex outside of marriage, and his appropriately rigorous result comes back showing that it doesn't lead to an overall reduction, how has that not falsified his hypothesis that sex outside of marriage is wrong? You're right that "sex outside of marriage is wrong" is logically equivalent to the empirical question, and that that's only the case because he's a utilitarian, but it's also true that "This rock is igneous" is logically equivalent to the empirical question of whether or not it has certain geological features, and that's only the case because Julie accepts the basic framework of the science of geology, right? I think the fact that utilitarianism is such a simplistic, straightforward associative theory might make the logical chain seem artificially simplistic, but there's no reason the same approach wouldn't be broadly applicable to, say, an objective list theory or something like that.
But Julie accepts the basic framework of the science of geology based on empirical reasons. Each part of the scientific theory is embedded in relations with observations of the world. The theory can be revised or replaced if our observations call aspects of it into question. Utilitarianism and other moral theories are not like that at all. The theory itself is connected only to our intuitions about right and wrong. It does not emerge out of attempts to explain and predict the world. It is fundamentally insulated from the results of the ‘experiment’ in a way that geological theory is not.
I think then the fundamental difference here is whether you think moral intuitions and broader moral judgments are part of the evidential base our theories have to account for. I definitely think they are, and I think drawing a principled line that excludes them but includes scientific observation is trickier than you might think. After all, someone who completely denied the existence of the external world entirely could also say all physical theories were just based on illusory intuitions about what our sense data appears to represent, right?
But moral intuitions are easy to account for in an empirical sense: we’re social apes that have evolved various moral intuitions that conduced to survival and reproduction in small groups. The idea that justice and morality are human-relative, and defined by our natures, is parsimonious and well supported and so forth. Relativism is easy to weave into a broader scientific account. Moral Realists need to make a case for why we need more of an account than relativism very easily provides.
There is a relevant difference between physical experimentation and moral experimentation: 1) A tree in the forest makes a mess (or basalt forms from magma) even if nobody is there to see it, whereas empirical consequences of moral wrongs suffer from observation bias insofar as we have no idea about the effects of moral wrongs committed in secrecy (this is an insurmountable confounder). There could be a difference in consequences for witnessed immoral acts vs those done in secret, which then could indicate that it is only our bias about what is immoral that is in fact immoral, not the acts that we consider immoral.
Moreover, quantifying the moral consequences in terms of “wellbeing” requires that it is standardised, and that standard proven as the ultimate and universal normative principle (the same for all agents and the highest for all agents), otherwise it is not a common measure but another bias.
Why do we not have knowledge about the effects of moral wrongs committed in secrecy? I'm not sure I follow. If I illegally dump toxic waste into a local lake without anyone knowing, people still get sick, right?
Here is an experiment that could work. 1) Give an already ultra-wealthy businessman an opportunity to steal 1 billion dollars from public funds, with the guarantee of the military/government that he will never be identified as the thief or otherwise held to account. 2) observe the businessman for a period of time to see whether their wellbeing has decreased. 3) repeat the experiment for all wealthy people, observe and calculate whether any statistically significant decrease of wellbeing occurred to this wealthy cohort due to getting richer by stealing. 4) conclude: is stealing with impunity morally wrong?
But obviously there *would* be a statistically significant decrease in welfare among those millions of people who depend on that state funding for various services and programs, right? I'm certainly not arguing that behaving immorally is necessarily bad *for the person who does it.* But they aren't the only one who matters here!
If being immoral is not bad for the person acting immorally then why be moral if you can profit from immorality? Why not cause harm to others if it can benefit you, especially if you are powerful enough to be untouchable by your victims? If the point of your experiment is to show that actions that are harmful to others cause harm to others then this is trivially, tautologically true (no need for an experiment); nothing follows from this that validates any view of morality. In order to demonstrate objective morality it is necessary to show that it is objectively wrong to do to others what you consider to be “harm”.
I think this objection is begging the question - of course someone who believes that you only ever have reason to do what you benefit from or desire will think that any other moral restraints are unjustified. But that's exactly the point being debated, right? I think opponents of moral realism should give actual arguments for why it is that only desires or personal interests can be reason-giving in that way.
Here is an example that may make it clear why general wellbeing is not an objective moral standard. Let us say that the majority believes that killing innocent people for the benefit of others is immoral and contrary to wellbeing. Nevertheless, a new, extremely virulent disease is discovered, and 5 individuals are tested as infected. The individuals are in quarantine, but experts know that the virus will eventually break out and will kill 50% of the population. The only way to prevent that outcome is to kill and incinerate the 5 innocent individuals in the quarantine. The experts in wellbeing calculus argue that the general wellbeing will suffer immensely unless these 5 individuals are murdered. According to the ‘more wellbeing’ calculus this murder is moral, but this conclusion contradicts the premise that killing innocent people for the benefit of others is immoral. Meanwhile, the financial elite understands that there is no valid reason why the wellbeing of the majority should be morally favoured over the wellbeing of the minority (this normative distinction is correctly identified as arbitrary, therefore normatively false), so they apply the moral judgement of the majority (that killing innocent people for the benefit of others is not in itself morally wrong) against the majority, concluding that killing innocent people for the benefit of the elite is morally right. On this account the elite are more logically consistent that the exploited majority, unless some other, logically consistent kind of moral realism can be proven.
I am not an opponent of moral realism; i am its foremost proponent. The question you asked and many other concerns are addressed here: https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Ontology-thesis-interdependence-integrity/dp/1763717216/
You cannot account for moral wrongs you don’t know about as ‘moral wrongs’ that you empirically measure. That people get sick after swimming in the lake tells you nothing about any moral wrongs committed, and if through investigations you can determine that a moral wrong was committed (someone confessed), then you know about it, but there may be many possible cases that you don’t.
You are also assuming that making other people sick is invariably bad for the culprit’s wellbeing, even if he can get away with it and profit from it. This is what your proposed study is supposed to prove, not presume.
> you won’t find papers being published defending slavery or child sacrifice
If 99% of people today are against slavery, that doesn't mean that slavery is objectively bad, it just means that 99% of people right now are against slavery.
It's entirely possible that space aliens might think slavery is OK, as might people in 2000 years time. We just don't know.
Or are you making a stronger claim, e.g. that people in 2000 years time will think slavery is bad?
But you could make these same claims about, say, heliocentrism - "Just because 99% of astronomers believe the earth revolves around the sun doesn't mean it objectively does, it just means that 99% of astronomers right now are heliocentrists. It's entirely possible that space aliens might think the sun revolves around the earth, as might people in 2000 years' time." And I think in that case, it's clear that we would be making an error in thinking the mere possibility of divergence was evidence for the non-objectivity, right?
This was a typically well-articulated piece on your part.
However, I don't recognize a granular enough view of what kind of moral skepticism is being discussed in your arguments. It's not that I find my arguments to be super granular, to be clear, but the moral skeptic doesn't need to write off the possibility of moral empiricism in practice; they just reserve the right to dissent on what the results will mean to the extremely rarefied conversations that take place in meta-ethics. You can analogize moral experimentation to scientific experimentation, but the moral skeptic (of my nontrivial branch) says right off that something is janky in the framing (again, only to the extent that the results of moral experimentation will be said to settle meta-ethical arguments between realists and skeptics).
Early in our discussions on twitter, it seemed that you conceived of moral skepticism and moral non-cognitivism as completely overlapping. Starting from that base, you've described error theory as a gray area. But error theory (which is a form of cognitivism) is a leading form of moral skepticism.
Among philosophers subscribing to error theory, virtually all have categoricity as one of their sticking points with realists. It's true that many of them also (mistakenly in my view) list the irreducibility of the normative as a general concern, but even if you got past this, you'd have a widespread belief among moral skeptics that categoricity is a big problem left to address. Throw in that philosophers are starting to explicitly separate these two considerations (François Jaquet's paper on Prudential Parity Objections), and we're left noticing that leaving categoricity out of the discussion leaves a huge chunk of moral skepticism aside.
The thing about scientific experiments and normative action-guidance is that there's enough rough similarity to do the comparison. This isn't the case with categorically overriding considerations. There is nothing like this in science. Half the time when we debate it seems like you're willing to leave categoricity aside and accept some kind of more minimal moral realism, the other half it seems like you want to rescue categoricity and go robust. If you took the minimal route, we could just chalk our disagreement up to something foundational about the meaning of moral discourse and agree at least that moral experimentation could be productive.
As we seem to agree on a great number of other, actually pressing things, it does make me curious what's under the rock of our respective approaches.
Hmm, I'm not sure if you're commenting on the right post. What paper are you looking for?