Hello Lance! I'm interested to learn more in depth about your style of antirealism, as well as things you've discussed about being anti-normative, and language only having meaning in use unlike how analytic philosophers analyze language. I was hoping you might have a textbook of your own that I could learn from, but I see your publications are journal articles which are likely above my head. Are there any introductory textbooks that are pro-antirealism or for these other topics that you might have come across that you'd recommend? Also in general any introductory subjects that would help me better pick out where and why philosophers might be going wrong because of historical baggage of philosophical terms that are misguided in your view. Like for me to have skill in seeing where and why these mistakes occur when I read philosophy, do I need to have studied psychology, linguistics, anthropology? I get the feeling that it's your experience in other fields that has enlightened you to see these mistakes, so if I want to see them too, just learning more philosophy would be a mistake.
I don't have a textbook but I can make recommendations. Get in touch and we can talk about it. I think it'd be a bit tough to respond to this in a TH-cam comment so would prefer just to have a conversation.
@@lanceindependent Sorry I haven't responded yet. I decided I'm going to binge through your channel first while I build up a list of questions and refine my thoughts so I can come to you with better/clearer questions. So at some point in the future I will probably send you an email, but I'm only about one third through your content so it could be a while longer.
There are no specific books that defend my particular metaethical position, so that makes it difficult to recommend anything: whatever I recommend would be defending views I don't accept. Perhaps the closest may be Joyce's "The Myth of Morality," but I'm not an error theorist or fictionalist.
Your conceptions of moral realism confuse me. You say that moral realism requires stance-independence. So, take, for example, the proposition, "Jim is in pain". Is this stance-dependent or stance-independent. It is independent of my stance towards whatever Jim is experiencing. But it is very dependent on Jim's stance toward that sensation - it would not count as pain if he did not have a particular stance towards it. So, is there such a thing as pain realism? Does pain exist? It seems to me that pain is real - but it is not entirely stance-independent. Then there's the claim that a moral fact provides a person with a reason to do or not do something. I see no reason to accept that. When I was a child, and others told me that something was wrong, there was nothing in their use of moral language that would have suggested to me that the truth of the statement depended on my having or not having a reason to not do something. I can well imagine what would have happened if I had told my parents, "Well, I have no reason not to write on the walls. Therefore, your claim that it is wrong for me to do so is false." They would answer, "I'll give you a reason you little brat!" And that response is actually of great importance. "Wrong" does not mean that I have a reason not to do something. It means that others (in the case of moral wrongness - people generally or almost everybody) have reasons to give me (and everybody else) reasons not to do things of that type. To tell lies. To take property without consent. To break promises. To vandalize homes. To drive while drunk. And these "reasons to give other people reasons not to perform acts of type T" are not some strange non-natural entity. To have a reason to give other people reasons not to perform acts of type T is to have a desire that would be served by giving other people a reason not to perform acts of type T. Of course, one person's desire does not make something wrong - it is when the general population has reasons to give everybody a reason not to perform acts of type T that it becomes wrong to perform acts of type T. Oh, and, note that people can "give" others both external reasons (e.g., criminal punishment) and internal reasons (pride, guilt, shame, simple desires and aversions) to perform or not perform some types of action. So, this isn't just about punishment. This is about building into the character of people dispositions to want to perform or not perform certain types of actions for its own sake, and not for the sake. And how do we create internal reasons - how do we enforce and nurture cultural norms? We do so through moral praise and condemnation - by training people so as to attach pride to some acts and guilt to others. And, note, these reasons (both internal and external) always target an action TYPE, not an action TOKEN. So, Haidt's claim that an incest TOKEN can be permissible misses the point of morality. Is incest a TYPE that people generally have reasons to give other people internal and external reasons not to perform. It seems to me that it is. So . . . "drunk driving is wrong" means "people generally have reasons to give me, and everybody else, external and internal reasons not to drive while drunk". NOTE: I said "have a reason", not "believe they have a reason". So, people may believe that have a reason promote prayer in school because (because they believe that it will motivate God to protect us from hurricanes). The fact that people believe they have such reasons does not mean they actually have such reasons. (Is this stance-independence? So, would "people generally have reasons to give me and everybody else reasons not to drive while drunk" be a stance-independent fact? It is independent of my stance. It is independent of what anybody believes. But it depends very much on desires. "Others have reasons to give me (and everybody else) a reason not to drive while drunk" would be true even if I had no reason not to drive while drunk. If I were to tell people that I have no such reason to refrain from drunk driving - that I cared nothing about the risks imposed on others - their perfectly legitimate response would NOT be, "Well, then, it seems our claim that it is wrong is false, then. Drunk driving is not wrong for you." Their response would be, "I'll give you a reason you little brat!"
"Pain" is nothing more than a description of an individual's personal experience. There are stance-independent facts about which actions tend to produce a sensation of pain, but there is not some physical property of painfulness outside that context. We can similarly define goodness in terms of people's subjective experience, but that doesn't really capture realist conceptions of morality (if anything, it would be closer to subjectivism or some kind of expressivism). Not all moral realists support categorical reasons for actions. It may be the case that there are stance-independent facts about what is good and bad, but no objective reason to do what is good independent of one's desires. If so, however, the concern is that this trivializes moral realism -- why should we care about the moral facts? It loses some motivation for realism since we can't just, for instance, point to a baby killer and tell them that they objectively ought not to kill babies (of course, we can still yell at the baby killer, and we may still have our own motivation to stop them, but we can do that anyways even if there are no moral facts).
To elaborate on the first point, there may be stance-independent facts about which actions tend to produce suffering, for example. But badness isn't just the same thing as suffering (even if utilitarianism is true), in the way H20 and water are different names for the same thing -- it's a judgment we make about suffering. Under moral realism, there are stance-independent facts about which such moral judgments are correct.
00:26 It was at this moment Lance realised that mon0 had confused him with a knight of the round table.
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Hello Lance! I'm interested to learn more in depth about your style of antirealism, as well as things you've discussed about being anti-normative, and language only having meaning in use unlike how analytic philosophers analyze language. I was hoping you might have a textbook of your own that I could learn from, but I see your publications are journal articles which are likely above my head. Are there any introductory textbooks that are pro-antirealism or for these other topics that you might have come across that you'd recommend?
Also in general any introductory subjects that would help me better pick out where and why philosophers might be going wrong because of historical baggage of philosophical terms that are misguided in your view. Like for me to have skill in seeing where and why these mistakes occur when I read philosophy, do I need to have studied psychology, linguistics, anthropology? I get the feeling that it's your experience in other fields that has enlightened you to see these mistakes, so if I want to see them too, just learning more philosophy would be a mistake.
I don't have a textbook but I can make recommendations. Get in touch and we can talk about it. I think it'd be a bit tough to respond to this in a TH-cam comment so would prefer just to have a conversation.
@@lanceindependent Sorry I haven't responded yet. I decided I'm going to binge through your channel first while I build up a list of questions and refine my thoughts so I can come to you with better/clearer questions. So at some point in the future I will probably send you an email, but I'm only about one third through your content so it could be a while longer.
I'm pretty new to metaethics, are there any good books defending some sort of anti-realism?
There are no specific books that defend my particular metaethical position, so that makes it difficult to recommend anything: whatever I recommend would be defending views I don't accept. Perhaps the closest may be Joyce's "The Myth of Morality," but I'm not an error theorist or fictionalist.
@@lanceindependent thanks, I'll check it out. Loving the videos too
Read Nietzsche. Ignore his bombast and concentrate on his deconstruction of moral realism.
Moral realism isn’t even coherent, let alone supportable.
Your conceptions of moral realism confuse me.
You say that moral realism requires stance-independence. So, take, for example, the proposition, "Jim is in pain". Is this stance-dependent or stance-independent. It is independent of my stance towards whatever Jim is experiencing. But it is very dependent on Jim's stance toward that sensation - it would not count as pain if he did not have a particular stance towards it.
So, is there such a thing as pain realism? Does pain exist? It seems to me that pain is real - but it is not entirely stance-independent.
Then there's the claim that a moral fact provides a person with a reason to do or not do something. I see no reason to accept that.
When I was a child, and others told me that something was wrong, there was nothing in their use of moral language that would have suggested to me that the truth of the statement depended on my having or not having a reason to not do something. I can well imagine what would have happened if I had told my parents, "Well, I have no reason not to write on the walls. Therefore, your claim that it is wrong for me to do so is false."
They would answer, "I'll give you a reason you little brat!"
And that response is actually of great importance.
"Wrong" does not mean that I have a reason not to do something. It means that others (in the case of moral wrongness - people generally or almost everybody) have reasons to give me (and everybody else) reasons not to do things of that type. To tell lies. To take property without consent. To break promises. To vandalize homes. To drive while drunk.
And these "reasons to give other people reasons not to perform acts of type T" are not some strange non-natural entity. To have a reason to give other people reasons not to perform acts of type T is to have a desire that would be served by giving other people a reason not to perform acts of type T. Of course, one person's desire does not make something wrong - it is when the general population has reasons to give everybody a reason not to perform acts of type T that it becomes wrong to perform acts of type T.
Oh, and, note that people can "give" others both external reasons (e.g., criminal punishment) and internal reasons (pride, guilt, shame, simple desires and aversions) to perform or not perform some types of action. So, this isn't just about punishment. This is about building into the character of people dispositions to want to perform or not perform certain types of actions for its own sake, and not for the sake. And how do we create internal reasons - how do we enforce and nurture cultural norms? We do so through moral praise and condemnation - by training people so as to attach pride to some acts and guilt to others.
And, note, these reasons (both internal and external) always target an action TYPE, not an action TOKEN. So, Haidt's claim that an incest TOKEN can be permissible misses the point of morality. Is incest a TYPE that people generally have reasons to give other people internal and external reasons not to perform. It seems to me that it is.
So . . . "drunk driving is wrong" means "people generally have reasons to give me, and everybody else, external and internal reasons not to drive while drunk".
NOTE: I said "have a reason", not "believe they have a reason". So, people may believe that have a reason promote prayer in school because (because they believe that it will motivate God to protect us from hurricanes). The fact that people believe they have such reasons does not mean they actually have such reasons. (Is this stance-independence?
So, would "people generally have reasons to give me and everybody else reasons not to drive while drunk" be a stance-independent fact? It is independent of my stance. It is independent of what anybody believes. But it depends very much on desires.
"Others have reasons to give me (and everybody else) a reason not to drive while drunk" would be true even if I had no reason not to drive while drunk. If I were to tell people that I have no such reason to refrain from drunk driving - that I cared nothing about the risks imposed on others - their perfectly legitimate response would NOT be, "Well, then, it seems our claim that it is wrong is false, then. Drunk driving is not wrong for you." Their response would be, "I'll give you a reason you little brat!"
"Pain" is nothing more than a description of an individual's personal experience. There are stance-independent facts about which actions tend to produce a sensation of pain, but there is not some physical property of painfulness outside that context. We can similarly define goodness in terms of people's subjective experience, but that doesn't really capture realist conceptions of morality (if anything, it would be closer to subjectivism or some kind of expressivism).
Not all moral realists support categorical reasons for actions. It may be the case that there are stance-independent facts about what is good and bad, but no objective reason to do what is good independent of one's desires. If so, however, the concern is that this trivializes moral realism -- why should we care about the moral facts? It loses some motivation for realism since we can't just, for instance, point to a baby killer and tell them that they objectively ought not to kill babies (of course, we can still yell at the baby killer, and we may still have our own motivation to stop them, but we can do that anyways even if there are no moral facts).
To elaborate on the first point, there may be stance-independent facts about which actions tend to produce suffering, for example. But badness isn't just the same thing as suffering (even if utilitarianism is true), in the way H20 and water are different names for the same thing -- it's a judgment we make about suffering. Under moral realism, there are stance-independent facts about which such moral judgments are correct.