A Second Response to Matthew Adelstein

            I recently wrote a response to an article on Matthew Adelstein's blog responding to moral realism. He has defended his piece on his blog, and here I make some comments on his defense.

Intuitions

            Matthew’s first complaint is that I did not address his arguments defending phenomenal conservatism. That’s true, but as I said in my original post, I never intended to. Rather, my intent was to caution the relative weight we should place on intuitions. In my view, intuitions are a weak defeasible starting point, and nothing more. Matthew made a few points in response to the research I cited in defense of this more modest aim. I think they are all misleading or untrue.

1. While visual seemings are far from infallible as this shows, this does nothing to undermine the fact that things tend to be how they appear.

The research I cited in my first post is often taken to imply that our perception of a detail-rich, colored visual world is illusory. Instead, our peripheral vision is far more limited than intuition suggests, only representing the rough summary statistics of areas outside what the fovea captures. So, this research implies that we are systematically mistaken about the richness of our vision. Obviously, there are many parts of our vision that must accurately map onto reality, but my point was never to say that nothing is as it appears, but there can be parts of our basic perceptual processes we are systematically mistaken about. And, in his initial article, Matthew claimed that beliefs about vision are not debunkable—full stop:

"Much like beliefs about vision aren’t debunkable, neither are beliefs about our mental states, given that beings who can form accurate beliefs about their mental states are more likely to survive. "

That is clearly false.

2. Pointing out a few cases of our intuitions being wrong doesn’t show that they aren’t generally justificatory.

This is true, as far as it goes, but I think there are many areas where our intuitions lead us astray. I simply picked one area I’m familiar with - perception. Psychological research also shows that our intuitions/seemings are poor in many other areas such as memory and reasoning. And, a brief survey of the history of folk theories will pretty clearly demonstrate that our intuitive, first-attempts to understand the world are failures. That is why we need science. To take another example, humans are highly intuitively inclined towards supernatural beliefs—dualism, theism, and other related ideas are very natural. Yet, both Matthew and I agree that they are mistaken.

3. Intellectual seemings can be evidence even if visual seemings aren’t.

When Matthew makes a divide between ‘intellectual’ seemings and ‘visual’ seemings I am not sure what he is getting at. The research I cited did not just show that our basic perceptual processes are more limited than they appear. It also showed that our reflective beliefs about our perception and visual abilities are mistaken.

Is Moral Realism Intuitive?

In my original post, I showed how the propositions Matthew used to support moral realism that are meant to be intuitive are ambiguous. On a reading on which they seem intuitive, they can be affirmed by anti-realists. Once the realist interpretation of those sentences is stated, they are no longer obviously intuitive. In response, Matthew denies that this was his approach. Instead, he says that he went through each form of moral anti-realism and highlighted problems with each one. 

However, when you look back at his article you’ll find that the ‘problems’ he cited with the different anti-realist theories were, with the exception of non-cognitivism, exclusively that he thinks have unintuitive implications. What are these unintuitive implications, you ask? Precisely that anti-realists will have to deny statements that Matthew thinks are intuitive. However, I deny that the realist interpretation of the statements Matthew adduces are intuitive, for the reasons I gave in my original post, and Matthew has still provided no defense that they are. I think in the places the statements were written in ambiguous ways, they were intuitive, but consistent with anti-realism. In the places where Matthew was explicit in stating his realist interpretation of those statements, I deny that they were intuitive.

This brings me to my most important point about intuitions, which Matthew did not address. If Matthew intends this to be an argument based on intuitions, for whom are these intuitions meant to hold? See again what I said in my first response article:

"If he intends to make an argument for moral realism that is persuasive, it cannot be just him. For, that he finds these sentences to be intuitive is an interesting psychological fact about him, but it does nothing to convince someone who does not find these sentences intuitive. So, he must be making a stronger claim: that these intuitions are widespread, and that the prevalence of these intuitions is some kind of evidence for realism. I have a few points to make about this.

Firstly, as I pointed out earlier, folk intuition is a pretty bad guide to truth. But, secondly, Matthew provided no good evidence that these intuitions are widespread (a twitter poll is terrible evidence, for obvious reasons: it’s unsystematic, unrepresentative, etc.) . The relatively new field of experimental philosophy has spent a lot of time studying what the ‘folk’ consensus is on metaethics, and as far as I am aware those studies have very mixed results. There is no consensus that the way the ‘folk’ use moral statements is generally realist in nature; on the contrary, it seems that the ‘folk’ tend to be metaethical pluralists [12-14]. Perhaps instead Matthew intends to appeal to the consensus of academic philosophers. Approximately 62% of philosophers appear to be moral realists according to the latest philpapers survey, hardly an overwhelming consensus [15]. Ironically about 80% of philosophers are non-utilitarians according to the latest survey, showing that the very position Matthew endorses has a greater academic consensus against it than moral anti-realism! I don’t think either of these findings is significant evidence against the minority position, but if we are going to play that game Matthew is losing it. I think if the relevant experts agree on a position that is some evidence for the position, but at best it again establishes a defeasible presumption in favor of that position, not an overwhelming case. And, 62% is really not a very strong consensus."

Matthew still provides no clear answer to this argument. He says he does not intend to appeal to the folk. Then, he goes on to claim that he thinks the folk would affirm a set of three statements. So, which is it? Does what the folk believe intuitively matter or not? It’s starting to seem that Matthew thinks it matters when they would affirm statements in line with what he believes, but not when they wouldn’t. Irrespective, Matthew again provided no evidence that the folk would be moral realists; I, on the other hand, provided the empirical evidence showing that the folk are not.

He also said he thinks we shouldn’t defer to our philosophical peers, but only that they should shift our opinion a little bit. Then, at best, the meager majority favoring moral realism is only a small bit of totally non-conclusive evidence for the position. Besides, there’s no evidence that the reason that most moral realist philosophers affirm moral realism is because of their intuitions. Perhaps they were persuaded by other arguments for the position.

So, I'm still left wondering how Matthew's argument from intuition is meant to work.

Phenomenal Introspection

I still don’t understand what Matthew thinks phenomenal introspection is, or what it reveals. What does he mean when he says that pain ‘feels bad’ in a way that supports realism? I genuinely do not understand what this sentence means: “If pain feels bad, that refutes error theory, even if it’s stance dependently bad.” Notice that the judgment that pain feels bad is itself a propositional attitude, and so cannot be solely the result of phenomenal introspection.

As I said, realism relies on a belief that something is stance-independently bad or good. The way something feels before we assign any attitude towards it is non-propositional, so it can’t support realism on its own except in the way it leads one to form some propositional view on it. The second that you put any linguistic label on your feelings (such as ‘that is bad’) and form any attitude about it you’re no longer phenomenally introspecting. Since this is important, let me say the same thing a different way: the moment you move from your pre-linguistic non-propositional ‘feeling’ to making some judgments or affirming some proposition about that feeling, you are no longer directly phenomenally introspecting. You can say that you are making an inference based on a feeling you have phenomenally introspected to support realism, but since you are no longer phenomenally introspecting as you make that inference and affirm a proposition, you no longer have any special direct epistemic relationship to the process leading to your belief, and so it’s no longer un-debunkable.

Maybe I am confused about what Matthew thinks ‘phenomenal introspection’ is. I take it that this is just when you have an immediate acquaintance with your qualia. Perhaps Matthew thinks we also have such an immediate acquaintance with other mental states, like the propositional attitudes. However, as this stands this is an undefended position, one which I think is completely false for reasons I gave in my original post. The propositional attitudes are a conception of our mental states that assign them all sorts of properties, and so any observation of them is not theory-neutral—it is laden with a particular conceptual framework.

As it stands, Matthew has not explained how it is that we could be ‘mistaken’ or ‘unmistaken’ about our phenomenal states. To assign a truth-value to such a thing, we need to be forming judgements/concepts about our phenomenal states. What does it mean for some non-propositional, pre-linguistic feeling to be truth-apt? Before we can even assess whether Matthew is right that phenomenal introspection is undebunkable or infallible, we need to learn what he even means by it.

Evolutionary Debunking

“I do not think that our vision beliefs are “radically mistaken” — they’re certainly not infallible but that seems like a bit of an overstatement.”

Matthew says this, yet he has no response to the research I cited, he just shrugs it off. Besides, to show that the idea that our beliefs about vision are ‘not debunkable’ is false (Matthew's original claim), all I needed to show is that some of our beliefs about vision are in fact false, which I showed. Matthew still has yet to explain why our beliefs about our basic conscious states are undebunkable, especially in light of this research that reveals this claim to be false.

"I’ll explain the argument because I don’t think that Panth’s responses are successful. If our belief that pain is bad could be debunked that would mean that we could have evolved with inverted qualia — having the type of responses we have to pain instead to pleasure and vice versa. But this doesn’t seem at all plausible — it doesn’t seem like beings could have evolved to feel exactly as they do when they’re in pain but to seek out that pain. The intrinsic bad feeling of misery (used more broadly than pain) seems like the type of thing that couldn’t be debunked."

This again conflates our feelings of pain and our beliefs about pain. It’s the latter that directly supports realism, not the former, and the latter definitely could have evolved differently than it did. 

Suppose that we evolved to still have the same feelings of pain, but that we instead formed different beliefs about pain (ie. that pain is not morally bad). Then, the ‘feelings’ we have about pain would clearly not be leading to an inference to realism, and so would fail to support it. 

“I don’t see the inconsistency. On my account pain feels bad and then by reflecting about it we can realize it is mind independently bad. However, evolution might explain why we don’t like pain but it wouldn’t explain why through reasoning we conclude that it is mind independently bad.”

If Matthew concedes this, then why in the world does he keep insisting that the feeling itself is all you need to support realism? Obviously, the part that gets you to realism is the reflective part where you come to judge that it is mind-independently bad. Either the feeling itself on its own (somehow) directly supports realism, in which case evolution is directly responsible for the relevant support for realism, or the feeling does not directly support realism and you need the beliefs, in which case Matthew should stop insisting that he directly phenomenally introspects the relevant support for realism.

“But we could evolve to just not like when we and others inflict pain. No part of this reasoning requires that we hold the judgment that it’s mind independently bad to inflict pain or that our pain is mind independently bad.”

It’s evolutionarily useful to create a system of normative judgements that allow you to condemn certain people, convince others to act in line with the ‘correct’ morality, etc.. Merely relying on appealing to desires doesn’t have the kind of force that a fully realized normative system would have. Why? Because it couldn’t get you to prescriptions for how others should act independent of their desires.

“No — I’m talking about our belief that suffering is bad….I am directly acquainted with my mental states and through direct acquaintance I know that being in extreme agony is very bad.”

Matthew, here, insists that he has direct acquaintance with his ‘mental states’ where those mental states refer to his beliefs. However, as I pointed out in my original post, there is no neutral, non-theory laden observation of your beliefs: to even form a belief you need to implicitly adopt a particular theory of your mental states and then form an internal representation of a particular mental state. Obviously, you can go wrong in this representational process.

“If our moral beliefs were the type of thing that wasn’t arrived at through reason and was just evolutionarily hypnotized into us we wouldn’t expect to be able to change our moral beliefs through careful reasoned reflection. Yet we plainly can.”

Evolution doesn’t work by hypnotizing people. It works by disposing people in particular directions. We can change our beliefs about God and the supernatural. Does this show that evolution had nothing to do with the formation of these supernatural beliefs? Obviously not.

Conclusion

           Most of Matthew's argument for moral realism relies on how things seem, intuitively, to him. For instance, one of the sections of Matthew's argument I did not respond to on irrational desires relies entirely on his intuitions. Since I (and I reckon, most anti-realists) do not share his intuitions, his argument is not convincing to me.

           Secondly, much of Matthew's case relies on this idea that we have some infallible, direct access to our conscious states and that this introspection supports realism. As I have pointed out, we all implicitly use a conceptual framework—that of our folk psychology—when we introspect. Since we use this framework, any introspective judgement we make is laden with that theory. This is an important topic, and one I have spent a lot of time on lately, so I may write another post fully examining this issue, since I have only touched the surface of it here.

            This will probably be my last piece going back and forth with Matthew. Response pieces back and forth indefinitely aren't my style. However, I'll continue the debate in his comments section (if he writes another piece), or we might make a video discussing the argument, who knows. Stay tuned.