Objectivity Matters

Why we shouldn't count on a hard dichotomy between first-order and second-order moral discourse

Pictured: The dark and dismal world of metaethics slowly bleeding into the pristine and untouched wilds of practical ethics

Whenever moral realists and moral antirealists debate their view, things often drift into a meta-discussion about whether the truth of realism even “matters” at all. Most moral realists are very insistent that yes, it does, and that antirealist conceptions of morality are missing something essential. (Many of those realists are exasperated by the idea that it would even be a question.) And while some of their opponents are ready to agree - error theorists who promote moral fictionalism, for example, or else a few edgy nihilists - most antirealists will confidently tell you that morality works just fine with a purely stance-dependent grounding. (And many of those antirealists are equally exasperated by the idea that anyone would question that.)

Although I’m sure I won’t be the one to finally settle the issue, I do think it would be useful to give a short explanation for why I side with realists here in rejecting a hard dichotomy between practical ethics and metaethics, and in seeing the structure of properly functioning first-order moral discourse as clear evidence for the stance-independence of moral facts. In doing so, I’ll rely heavily on the work of David Enoch, who I think has done more than any other recent philosopher when it comes to giving rigorous backing to realist intuitions. Anyone who finds the ideas I lay out here interesting should check out his 2011 book Taking Morality Seriously, which explores these sorts of arguments in much greater detail.

Before I begin in earnest, I just want to make two broad preliminary points: First, it’s obviously true that moral antirealists can engage in moral discourse, and generally do so just as appropriately and productively as realists do. Anyone who actually argues that antirealism automatically impinges on someone’s practical ethical character is being absurd. I’m also not disputing the idea that normative ethics and metaethics are distinct in a formal sense, or that productive moral discourse is possible between people with radically different metaethical frameworks. I think it’s just obviously true that antirealists and realists can talk about all sorts of pressing ethical conflicts in the real world and work through what our proper response should be without a single bit of metaethics even entering the picture.

And I’ll also admit that, yes, it’s obnoxious whenever realists think they can settle any metaethical dispute by just barging in and shouting that antirealists don’t think baby torture is “really wrong.” So no one should take me as saying that antirealists are ethically compromised or morally dissolute, or that moral discourse simply can’t take place without the assumption of objectivity. Instead, I’m more concerned with what assumptions would be required to justify those discourse practices and give them proper grounding.

The second preliminary point I’d like to make is that the firm line between practical ethics and metaethics that antirealists often take for granted isn’t actually obvious, or somehow guaranteed by more general facts about how different levels of discourse interact. In a purely a priori sense, we have absolutely no reason to think that radical changes to our second-order understanding of the terms and concepts involved in a particular discourse will have no impact whatsoever on whether our first-order discursive practices are justified; it would be absurd, for example, to say that whether the past objectively took place can’t possibly have anything to do with what sorts of claims it would be reasonable for a historian to make.

Further, we can survey a wide range of second-order conceptual revisions throughout history and see that their impact on the relevant first-order discourse has generally been mixed. (Take a look at debates over sex and gender today, where differing conceptions of what “man” and “woman” mean obviously have direct first-order implications for how we engage various social and political issues.) So it would be inappropriate for anyone, realist or antirealist, to just assert that any particular relationship between first- and second-order moral theorizing is an indisputable truth. Instead, we should see the impact of metaethics on everyday moral discourse as an open question with no clear null hypothesis, and figure out the answer through good old philosophical investigation.

With that preamble done, I can move on to my actual argument, which is basically just this: The essential features of moral discourse are best justified in other non-moral domains by reference to the objectivity of the facts involved, and this gives us good reason to believe that objectivity is what justifies those essential features in moral discourse as well. That is to say, when we look at the practices moral discourse relies on to function, and then look out at various other domains of discourse where those same practices are uncontroversially justified, we see they just are the domains that deal with stance-independent objective truths (and, conversely, that the domains where the essential features of moral discourse are not considered justified just are those domains that deal primarily with stance-dependent subjective truths).

For this reason, we should assume that the justification of these essential features tracks with the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity across the board, rather than adopting a gerrymandered framework that justifies the essential features of moral discourse by reference to something other than what justifies those same features in every other domain (or else leaves them entirely unjustified in the case of moral discourse only). Put even more simply: If the reason I’m justified in speaking the way I do about (say) physics or history is because those subjects deal with objective facts, then, all else being equal, I should assume I’m justified in speaking the same way about morality for the same general reason. To argue otherwise is to introduce an arbitrary and unparsimonious distinction into my justificatory framework.

But what are these essential features of moral discourse, and why assume they’re only present in domains that deal with stance-independent objective facts? We can start to make our case by looking at a few examples of paradigmatically subjective disputes, like whether licorice candies taste better than gummy bears or whether knitting is more fun than woodworking. When we think about the discourse we engage in to resolve conflicts like these, it’s easy to see that there are some discursive practices that would be clearly inappropriate, in a first-order sense, for anyone involved. Here are the first three examples that come to mind for me:

Praise and Blame — While we might have a slight affinity for people who enjoy the same snacks or prefer the same hobbies, it would be unjustified for someone who held one view on these disputes to condemn or criticize someone else just because they endorse the opposite position.

Consistency — Since our tastes aren’t bound by any logical implications, it would be unjustified to demand that someone who takes a position in one particular instance also take that position in every single relevantly similar instance across the board.

Intransigence — In situations where only one outcome is possible and the relevant parties disagree, then some sort of compromise or impartial decision is called for, and it would be unjustified to just dig in your heels and demand that everyone else submit to whatever you want most.

To head off an obvious criticism, I’m not begging the question here by assuming these discursive practices are justified or unjustified in a specifically realist sense. I’m just speaking about the truth of general first-order judgments like “Scathing denunciation is an improper response to someone saying they don’t like gummy bears,” which is the sort of judgment that any plausible theory of justification should be able to return without an issue. (If anyone wants to stop the argument here by saying that isn’t the case in any sense, they’re welcome to, but I see that as basically the same as admitting defeat.) Still, with that said, here’s the big problem for antirealists: It isn’t just that discursive practices like these happen to be inappropriate for subjective disputes, but rather, it’s that the subjective nature of the dispute in question is what best explains their impropriety.

In other words, if you were asked why would be unreasonable to sincerely condemn someone for picking licorice over gummy bears, the proper response is to simply point out that neither option is objectively better; once it’s clear that an interlocutor’s views are just as valid as yours from an impartial perspective, the idea of ascribing praise or blame in a dispute like this should be automatically nonsensical. And the same goes for why someone would compromise when different people’s preferences conflict, or why it would be bizarre to expect that someone who chooses woodworking one day could never choose knitting the next. In all these cases, what’s primarily relevant to the first-order justification of a particular approach to discourse is the subjective nature of the claims under dispute.¹

We can see the same dynamic playing in reverse by taking a look at paradigmatic examples of objective disputes, like whether evolution through natural selection is true or whether nitrogen is a better fertilizer than gasoline. Here, it seems obvious (again, in a first-order sense) that the same discursive practices highlighted above are now not only appropriate, but arguably incumbent on rational agents. It’s totally justified to condemn people who adopt absurd and unsubstantiated beliefs about the world, or to expect that an opponent in debate will avoid arbitrarily dismissing what they’ve previously asserted, or to refuse to compromise on disputes where the other party is very clearly wrong. And the best explanation for why these discursive practices are suddenly acceptable just is that these disputes now relate to claims where there’s a fact of the matter as to which is correct; the switch from subjective to objective has opened up the possibility of legitimate error.

Of course, exactly how much praise and blame we should ascribe, or exactly when and where we’re justified in expecting consistency, or under what exact conditions we should be willing to stand our ground all depend on a wide variety of other complex factors beyond just the bare objectivity of the facts being disputed. But that same bare objectivity is still what best explains why any of these approaches are even on the table to begin with, when they would otherwise be considered clearly inappropriate by any plausible first-order theory of justification.

This, for the record, is a big part of why I’m so unsympathetic to a lot of antirealist language policing. You’ll often hear that saying things like “just a stance” or “mere preference” is somehow prejudicial, and that realists should avoid implying that stance-dependent justifications are necessarily weaker than stance-independent ones. But as we’ve seen above, we generally distinguish between the justificatory power of objective and subjective groundings, and further, juxtaposing them with words like ‘just’ or ‘merely’ is a common feature of discourse in any domain.

Here’s one quick example: Just last week, I was in a meeting at work to discuss a fairly major change in operations requested by a coworker; my manager’s response, verbatim, was “Is there an actual reason to change things, or is it just a preference?” Their sentiment wasn’t perfectly put into philosopher-speak, obviously. But still, the idea that it would matter whether someone in a dispute had any objective grounding for their position was totally uncontroversial, as was the idea that a phrase like ‘just a preference’ properly expressed the relative weight of an ungrounded stance. Of course, I understand why antirealists find this kind of implicit normative hierarchy uncomfortable, but it’s by no means an inappropriate or underhanded realist trick - it’s just how normal people talk!

I’ll pause here for a moment and say that moral antirealists are, of course, free to reject everything I’ve said so far and deny that a subjective/objective distinction is the best explanation for why our discursive practices diverge the way they do (and why they’re justified in doing so). But if they do reject it, then it’s incumbent on them to actually provide an alternate account for the divergence, one with both explanatory and justificatory power. It isn’t enough to just take a survey of our discursive practices as they happen to be and then reverse-engineer whatever set of rules are required to make those practices work; antirealists should be expected to provide a foundational normative framework that explains and justifies the divergence, in such a way that we not only understand why we treat the disputes in question differently but also why that disparate treatment is valid. (As before, I’ll say that denying its validity in a first-order sense is equivalent to admitting defeat.)

It’s obviously beyond the scope of this piece to do a full survey of every alternative explanation that isn’t grounded in the distinction between subjective and objective, but I will say I’ve generally found the most common candidates to be very unconvincing. For example, one alternative - that we just care more about the issues involved in moral discourse, and are therefore more willing to “commit” to our stances - is vulnerable to serious counterexamples, and either way fails to justify the commitment. The same goes for evolutionary and social frameworks that can only ever (imperfectly) explain, in a descriptive sense, why it is that human beings happen to act the way they do. At every point, the realist can simply ask why it is that these habits and impulses are justified; if the antirealist has no answer, then their theory is necessarily weaker than what it’s meant to supplant.

Antirealists might also be tempted to adopt a more radical approach that denies the need to justify these features of discourse entirely. They can just say these sorts of discursive practices are appropriate in one domain but not another, and that’s just the way it is. But a move like this imposes a major theoretical cost, in that it reduces all questions of justification to mere social convention or else renders the entire project incomprehensible. To say that something is justified, after all, just is to say that it isn’t arbitrary, or ungrounded, or without proper basis. But if the standard by which those evaluations are made displays in itself the qualities it’s meant to indicate against, then what exactly is the point of justification in the first place?

And regardless, it has to be emphasized again that we’re comparing the virtues of two distinct explanations for a particular practice we observe in the world around us. So even if the antirealist has some method for salvaging the importance of justifying discursive acts, it’s still the case that even a vaguely functional realist account will be better than an antirealist one with nothing to say on the matter at all (just like even an incomplete or partially erroneous physical theory would be better than the idea that objects just move, and that’s that).

If you accept that the justificatory relevance of the subjective/objective distinction is at least plausible, then the path forward for the rest of my argument should be clear. All that’s left is to show that the features of discourse identified above - ascribing praise and blame, expecting consistency, and allowing intransigence - are essential for the proper functioning of moral discourse, and that moral discourse as it commonly takes place is, in fact, justified. I’d rather not take the time to defend either one of these premises, since I think a denial of either is radically implausible, or at least it indicates a general approach to ethics that this piece isn’t meant to address.

But briefly, I would just say that moral discourse obviously can’t function if speakers are unable to evaluate the actions of others in responsive moral terms and unwilling to hold consistent moral judgments across relevantly similar scenarios, or if speakers are committed to considering their moral views impartially in cases of disagreement (as they would have to in order to compromise in the relevant way). I don’t know of anyone who has ever tried to engage in moral discourse without these features, and I certainly can’t imagine how they would succeed. But I’m also happy to just say that the argument I’m giving only works on people who agree that properly functioning moral discourse requires more tools than what we use to decide between licorice and gummy bears. Hopefully, that’s everybody.

We now have all the groundwork in place to lay out the argument itself, which is just the brief summary I gave at the start in more precise premise form:

1. We are generally justified in engaging in moral discourse.

2. Moral discourse requires a certain set of discursive practices to function properly.

3. Therefore, we are (at least sometimes) justified in engaging in these discursive practices in the context of moral discourse.

4. Our best analysis of the principles governing our first-order normative practices shows we are justified in engaging in these discursive practices in the context of non-moral discourse only when that non-moral discourse involve disputes over stance-independent facts.

5. Therefore, all else being equal, it is reasonable to believe that we are justified in engaging in these discursive practices in the context of moral discourse for the same reason, i.e. it is reasonable to believe that moral discourse involves disputes over stance-independent facts, and that we would not be justified in engaging in it otherwise.

I want to stress here that my argument is not meant to be a deductive proof that we can be certain stance-independent moral facts exist. (The argument itself is obviously structurally deductive, but only for a conclusion about what it’s reasonable to believe, and not what has to be the case.) Instead, it’s just an attempt to show that, under a very plausible analysis of entirely non-moral domains of discourse, we can learn things about the justificatory grounding of various discursive practices that have clear implications for the nature of specifically moral discourse, implications that we can dismiss only at the cost of introducing arbitrary and post hoc distinctions into our normative theory or else blowing up the whole enterprise.

It also shows, if nothing else, that there are plausible justificatory conditions for first-order discourse that would make the propriety of various first-order claims dependent in an important way on second-order beliefs about the terms and concepts involved, which shows the assumption of a hard dichotomy between first-order and second-order discourse in any domain is unwarranted. These sorts of implications might be surprising, or even distressing, to someone who’s already assumed that no metathical theory could have direct implications for practical ethics. But if that’s the situation you find yourself in, the correct response is to give an equal or better theory of normative justification that maintains the separation, or else give up on the assumption that the separation exists.

1. There is obviously a huge amount of work left to do to defend this analysis in its entirety, but I’ll make one quick clarification down here in a footnote: It’s undeniably true that we sometimes speak as if the features of discourse I’ve identified are appropriate in subjective disputes, or use them “in quotation marks.” (Just look at people online discussing pineapple on pizza like it’s the moral issue of our age.) But I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of people, when pushed to affirm the actual claim that someone who enjoys a particular food is blameworthy for it, would admit that they don’t really think so - and those who would stand their ground are likely just those who believe that the goodness and badness of a particular food really is objective. Similarly, I’m aware that people often speak about other seemingly subjective domains like art and music in the sorts of terms that we normally associate with objectivity - but, with apologies for the Moorean shift, this just seems to me great evidence that those domains really do intersect with some objective considerations! Either way, in general, I’m confident that the number of people who would affirm these discursive practices to be totally justified in non-moral disputes where the claims in question are acknowledged to be completely and totally subjective is extremely small, and that almost all of them would be doing so on the basis of prior antirealist commitments.