As a moral antirealist, there’s an argument I often hear moral realists make that I’ve never seen serious treatment of in the philosophical literature. The argument is a kind of Pacal’s wager in defense of moral realism, and it goes something like this:
The moral antirealist is really just a moral nihilist. You, the antirealist, don’t think there’s any real reason to do anything. And given that you have some positive credence in moral realism (however tiny!), and moral realism does say that there is a reason to do something, in practice you should act as if moral realism is true. Antirealism gives you no reasons, so all of your reasons come from a positive probability of moral realism.
I should admit that I’m not exactly sure what “acting like a moral realist” is supposed to entail. Are there moral theories that are more favored given realism than given antirealism, that I should then come to accept? Given that the realist and the antirealist reason in exactly the same kind of way, engaging their moral sentiments and rational cognition to evaluate thought experiments and abstract arguments, I’m not sure. And it’s not like the moral realist has given some compelling account of how we’re supposed to know these moral facts that should change how I go about acquainting myself with morality. Moreover, acting like a moral realist doesn’t imply that I should go around telling people that moral realism is true, since I think it’s overwhelmingly likely to be false, even if action guiding. So I don’t know what exactly the implications of this argument are. But I hear it a lot, and I want to try to understand this argument and explain why I think it’s wrong.
I should say at the outset that I agree that if my two competing metaethical theories were moral nihilism and moral realism then Pascal’s wager would indeed bite, since my credence in nihilism would give me no reason to do anything and my credence in moral realism would give me reason to do things. My objection to the argument is that moral antirealism is actually consistent with the existence of moral reasons.
So why does the moral realist think that the moral antirealist doesn’t actually believe in normative, action-guiding reasons? At some level, it’s because the antirealist believes that morality is made out of physical stuff. As a naturalist, the antirealist believes that everything ultimately reduces to matter, and there’s no purely moral or normative stuff around at all. All of the normative stuff reduces to non-normative stuff. But for the realist, there exists some pure normative stuff. When the realist looks at the world-picture that the antirealist offers, they see only particles, void, and constructions that we make out of these things. They certainly don’t see anything that looks like a reason.
But the antirealist claims to believe in reasons. They think that they have reason to pursue their goals and achieve the things that they want. When I’ve explained this to realists, they ask “what reason do you have to act on your desires?” It appears that there is a missing link between a descriptive fact (my desires) and what I ought to do.
This kind of “is-ought” gap is known as an Open Question Argument. Whatever descriptive fact I point to, it’s still an open question what I ought to do. I can tell you some facts about my psychology and that doesn’t decisively settle what I should do. I can still ask — why should I do what I want to do and not something else?
So there are two main arguments I see the realist putting forward in their wager. First is an argument that the antirealist doesn’t believe in any normative stuff, the second is an open question argument.
Let’s start with the argument that the antirealist doesn’t believe in any normative stuff. The antirealist claims that they do believe in normative reasons. These reasons are simply not fundamental, and can be reduced to other things. There may be a complaint that this doesn’t do justice to the phenomenology or the deliberative role of reasons. Reasons present to us as fundamental and needing no further explanation. They present as a final explanans that is irreducible to anything non-normative. But I think the antirealist can do justice to this concern as well.
Here it’s worth taking a detour to talk about levels of explanation. When we attempt to describe the world, we can make various kinds of idealizations. We can describe it at the level of physics, for example, or at the level of chemistry, biology, and sociology. Sociological facts ultimately reduce to biological facts, biological facts ultimately reduce to chemical facts, and chemical facts ultimately reduce to physical facts. Nonetheless, there are still truths in each of these domains. It’s a truth of chemistry that sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid make a salt, and this claim is in perfectly good semantic standing. This is despite the fact that chemistry reduces to physics. How this works in chemistry is that when we start talking about sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid we switch into a conversational context where the idealizing laws of chemistry are assumed. It doesn’t matter that hydrochloric acid is actually just some protons with electrons in a probabilistic distribution around it that in some freak edge cases doesn’t act like an acid because we’ve rounded all of that off when we started talking about chemistry. And so in this conversational context HCl and NaOH makes NaCl and H2O.
I claim that ethical facts hold at a further level of explanation, the level of practical reason. When you enter moral deliberation as an agent, you immediately confront a host of perceptions, desires, memories, emotions, and also reasons. The reasons are just pure “to-be-done-ness” that emerge spontaneously as you’re considering your various options. At the level of practical reason, they are pure irreducible normative pull that compels us towards action. At the level of practical reason we don’t think “I want X therefore logically I ought to bring about X”, but instead reasons in favor of X-ing simply appear before us. Things present to us immediately as to-be-done and it makes no sense to ask why we ought to do what’s to-be-done. The to-be-done-ness itself serves as the final, irreducible explanation for what we ought to do.
So the antirealist can do full justice to the phenomenology and action-guiding role of reasons in normative inference in light of the fact that our normative psychology immediately presents things to us as to-be-done, no further questions, no further explanation. “Why should I do what I desire?” doesn’t admit of an answer, because at the level of practical reason we’re not engaged in scientific, mechanistic explanation, but a different kind of normative explanation.
If we’d like to we can then pivot to a different level of explanation and ask what in cognitive science explains the phenomenology of reasons. And we might there find that there is a non-cognitive normative concept in our brains that presents things immediately to us as to-be-done. But at the level of practical reason this is neither here nor there. We simply find certain considerations compelling and counting in favor of actions.
So the antirealist thinks there’s normative stuff. They just think that normative stuff is reducible to other stuff. But at the level of practical reason — the place where we live when we try to figure out what we should do — the normative stuff serves as a final explanation for what there is to do, rather than being something that needs further explanation. So the normative stuff plays the right ultimately action-guiding role in practical reason and makes sense of our normative phenomenology. The realist doesn’t have the moral high ground here.
Let’s turn to the second argument, the open question argument. The moral realist rightly complains that whatever descriptive facts we point to, it’s an open question what we ought to do. Here comes a problem: the moral realist doesn’t have an easy answer to this question either. What reason do you have to do what the Forms tell you to do? Whatever entity you point to in Platonic heaven that grounds the moral facts, we can ask why you should do that. These moral facts the realist likes also leave open the question what it is we should do.
Here the moral can pound the table and say “well that’s just what it is for something to be a reason. You can’t ask why we have a reason to do what the moral facts say, because the moral facts are reasons.” Here I think the antirealist should just look at them confused, wondering why they’ve taken a the phrase “moral reason” from our ordinary language and turned it into a technical term referring to a mysterious entity we can’t understand or explain. The moral realist is entitled to invent a new technical term “reason” that refers to a Platonic entity, but that doesn’t get us anywhere closer to thinking that they’ve resolved the open question argument: why should we do what is written in the stars?
By contrast I think the antirealist has a satisfying answer to the open question. The antirealist can say that “has a reason” is a non-cognitive normative concept that lives in our brains. What it is to have a reason is for the brain to point to something and say “do that!” This is the thing that plays the role of an irreducible, final normative explanation in our moral cognition and which we engage when we reflect in our moral cognition. The moral realist and the antirealist both have this cognitive machinery (moral realists aren’t literally aliens), but the antirealist identifies reasons with the thing that actually plays the role of psychological motivation rather than something that is totally external to our motivation or anything that could play any sort of causal role in our cognition or moral discourse.
There’s a good argument (made to me in a seminar by Justin Clarke-Doane) that the open question argument shows us that moral reasoning is non-cognitive. Whatever descriptive fact we point to leaves open what it is to do, so a part of morality must be pure, prescriptive to-be-done-ness. But non-cognitivist prescriptivism is not known to be a friend to moral realism.
The realist and the antirealist both accept that there are reasons which operate as a final, irreducible explanation for what it is that we should do when we engage in practical reason. The antirealist says these reasons are ultimately made out of brain stuff, while the realist says they’re made out of heaven stuff. But they play exactly the same role in normative explanation for both of us.
The realist might still make some further complaints. For example, they might complain that action-guiding normative reasons need to be completely irreducibly normative not just at the level of practical reason, but in every sense. But why should we think that? What argument could be made for that? Hume’s is-ought gap doesn’t show that you can’t make normative stuff out of non-normative matter (a conclusion that would have been disappointing to the father of reductionism!), just that in inference non-normative premises can’t derive a normative conclusion. And we’ve shown that at the level of practical reason we engage with purely normative premises.
The realist might also complain that their reasons are weightier than the antirealist’s reasons. Perhaps the antirealist has reasons to do things, but the realist has much better reasons, the kind that are so important as to be written in the stars!
Here the problem comes in trying to compare the weight of different kinds of reasons. From what perspective can we say that these different sources of reasons are commensurable and that the realist’s reasons are better than the antirealist’s reasons? In (perhaps metaphysically counterpossible) worlds where moral realism is true, realist reasons are the only kinds of reasons, and the antirealist’s reasons are nothing more than a cheap imitation. And in worlds where moral antirealism is true, antirealist reasons are the only kinds of reasons, with the realist’s reasons being nothing more than “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”, a completely meaningless string. There is no neutral world where there are both realist and antirealist reasons and we can compare the weight of them against one another. Either realism is true (and necessary) or it’s not (and incoherent). How could there be facts out in fact-space comparing the weight of necessary and contradictory reasons against one another?
Now maybe I am claiming victory too easily. The realist could be a pluralist about reasons, claiming that there are both the Platonic form of reasons and the antirealist form of reasons. This would be to admit defeat on our previous questions, about whether antirealism really gives us reasons to do anything at all. But it would mean that there would be worlds where both kinds of reasons exist and are perhaps commensurable. And they could then claim that in such worlds the moral reasons fully trump the cognitive reasons. After all, who are puny humans to think that their motivations compare with the reasons that are woven into the fabric of the universe?
I haven’t heard this position articulated before but perhaps it’s plausible. If it is, then I begrudgingly admit that there could be a Pascal’s wager’s argument for moral realism.
But how is the antirealist supposed to respond to this? The realist has just articulated a view that the antirealist finds literally incoherent and meaningless, and which they begrudgingly place more than zero credence in because they are not fully certain it is entirely meaningless. (Along with more than zero credence in square circles and “colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”) However plausible the realist finds this view, the antirealist literally can’t make sense of it. And for all the antirealist knows, there could be all kinds of reasons out in impossibility space. Why should the reasons the moral realist implausibly articulates be the ultimate, shiniest, best kind of reasons? Could alien species present to us other, different concepts we don’t understand and claim that they are better than human morality? Is it possible that God exists, and that as THE GROUND OF BEING God’s commands make the reasons of the Demiurge look like a shadow of a reason by comparison? How would we adjudicate these kinds of claims? And should the antirealist really go full Pascalian, banking (to do I don’t know what) on a small probability that something they think is literally meaningless is actually true? That’s a hard pill to swallow.
Or — perhaps the antirealist thinks that they can make sense of the view, but also that the realist facts are entirely inaccessible, due to (e.g.) evolutionary debunking arguments, and not something we could ever figure out. What do you do if there’s super-reasons that you have no epistemic access to and could not possibly figure out how to get epistemic access to? I’ve heard people say “maybe we can just let superintelligence figure it out”, but superintelligence needs to make inferences based on its training data just like any human does. And we need to have a way to verify whether the thing the superintelligence is proposing is anything like our morality or just something completely random. To do this we have to have at least some grip on morality, pace evolutionary debunking arguments. Here again, the antirealist could place some credence on the moral realist somehow having access to morality in a way they don’t understand. But man, it sure feels like a dangerous policy to do what someone else says just because they seem really confident that their seeming crackpot conspiracy theory you literally can’t make semantic sense of has all of the authority of the divine.
EDITED TO ADD:
Richard Chappell argues that the core idea of normative non-reductionism is that there exist some properties that are normativity as such, and as a consequence the moral realist does not face an open question argument. There is no question why one should do what the non-reductionist normative facts say, since the non-reductionist normative facts just are reasons to do things.
If the core argument that the antirealist doesn’t accept the existence of real reasons depends on an argument over what normativity actually refers to, and with the stark disagreement between what the realist thinks normativity is and what the antirealist thinks normativity is in mind, I think what the realist gets wrong is failing to account for metasemantic uncertainty in practical deliberation. From the epistemic perspective of a metaethicist, it’s possible that the antirealist metasemantics is right, and the thing that plays the normative role in our psychology just is normativity. It’s also possible that the realist metasemantics is right, reference magnets take our sentences to the non-reductive normative properties, and normativity is pure. But once we account for metasemantic uncertainty, it can be both true that from the perspective of moral realism’s metasemantics the antirealist has no normativity in the picture, and that from the perspective of an epistemically reasonable person it is genuinely undecided whether the antirealist has normativity in the picture. If this is true, when reasoning about what to do we should condition on some chance that the antirealist reasons are there and some chance that the realist reasons are there. Each has (probabilistic) normative force under metasemantic uncertainty about what normativity is, and we would need an argument separate from the realist’s assertions about metasemantics to infer that realism dominates under uncertainty.
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