Metaethics Doesn't Matter
Not for ethics, at least
Imagine there’re no stance-independent moral facts
It’s easy if you try
No good no evil
No moral reason why
Imagine alllll the people…
Yeah, well what would happen? What should you change about your thinking and how you act if it turns out moral realism is false? Nothing much, really. Despite the name “metaethics” suggesting some sort of relevance for ethics, I have a hard time seeing exactly where in our ethical reasoning it actually matters. (The wonderful has eloquently scooped me on this recently, but I swear I’m not plagiarizing.)
You’re speaking with your moral realist friend, Relinda. Although generally nice, Relinda horribly insists that there’s nothing wrong with keeping chickens in tiny cages. How would you convince her otherwise? Apart from threatening her with violence, a good start might be to try and find out which moral principles she finds plausible, or what judgements she holds about certain cases. Convincing her will then amount to finding tensions or contradictions in her beliefs, hopefully making her revise them to align with yours—this is just how arguments work in general.
After having successfully converted Relinda to your radical cause, you bump into your moral anti-realist friend Antoinette. She is similarly nice, though possessing the equally outrageous moral failing of not caring about plights of young substackers—i.e. not being subscribed to Wonder and Aporia.
How to convince her to see the light? Seeing as she’s pretty nice, the violent option seems out of bounds here too. On top of that, you can’t really figure out her moral beliefs, on account of her being an anti-realist and all that (assuming she’s consistent), so you’ll have to inquire about her other attitudes instead (in conjunction with descriptive beliefs). Perhaps she cares about grievous suffering in general, but for some reason doesn’t care much about being subscribed to the oversigned. Once you point out this glaring contradiction in her preferences, she will have to revise them, and subscribe.
What to Think
Wait a second. These two procedures seem strikingly similar: In the first you figure out someone’s beliefs and try to find inconsistencies, in the second you do the same but with non-belief attitudes. That seems to suggest that metaethical beliefs don’t actually matter when we’re doing first-order moral reasoning—either way we’re trying to weed out inconsistencies in our prior commitments.
Perhaps inconsistent beliefs somehow coerce revision more than inconsistent preferences or attitudes. Finding out that your beliefs are inconsistent shows that at least one of them is false, while finding out that you have inconsistent preferences just shows that you have… inconsistent preferences. Preferences are merely psychological and don’t need to correspond to some reality out there, while beliefs are directed towards the world, and inconsistent beliefs cannot possibly match a way the world is.
Regardless, I don’t actually see it mattering in any concrete ethical dispute. Suppose we’re considering whether it’s permissible to buy factory farmed chickens at the supermarket. Relinda has the beliefs that all sentient creatures matter, and that it’s okay to buy the chicken (and suppose these are inconsistent); while Antoinette has the attitudes boo(harming sentient creatures) and yay(buying chicken).
While at the supermarket both realize that these beliefs/attitudes are inconsistent. What should they do? Well, Relinda cannot do what she believes to be permissible until she makes her beliefs consistent, as she right now implicitly believes that it’s both impermissible and permissible to buy the chicken. But at the same time Antoinette cannot do anything she yays before making her preferences since she both boos and yays buying chicken. Hence both are forced to weed out inconsistencies before being able to make an informed choice.
This applies generally: You cannot possibly come to a single evaluation of any particular case where your preferences are contradictory. So while there isn’t any strict error per se on the anti-realist picture, the situation is equally bad—practically speaking—for the anti-realist and realist.
What Is True
I suspect you have a bit of an unease with the way I’ve approached this. I have only focused on how metaethical beliefs affect how you and others should reason ethically. But people can think what they will; what matters is what metaethical view is really true. So while Antoinette might think that all moral claims are false, or just emoting or whatever, perhaps moral realism is true, and she is just mistaken about what she is doing when thinking about ethics, hence why her and Relinda think and argue in structurally similar ways.
I don’t think this is right though. We can suppose that Relinda and Antoinette are both perfectly consistent within their respective positions, such that given that their meta-ethical views are right, each is conducting themselves in the appropriate way (though they of course might have inconsistent first-order ethical views). This seems perfectly consistent with the above story: neither Relinda nor Antoinette seem to be making any mistakes in their thinking and responding to arguments, given that their views are right.
But then seeing how they do their ethics can serve as a test for how ethics should be done given that realism and anti-realism are true respectively. And wouldn’t you know it, they are both pretty much indistinguishable in their thinking, until you ask them about what they take the status of ethical judgements to be—i.e. when you move into metaethics.
Real, Objective Wrongness!
Surely there is some relevant difference in the way the two do ethics, right? Namely Relinda can say that someone who disagrees with her is making an Objective Mistake, while Antoinette cannot. And it’s true that from the God’s-eye view there really is a difference—some have true ethical beliefs and some have false ones. But when it comes to how we actually do ethics, it doesn’t matter.
I hate to refer you to the same previous post of mine twice (not really), but even in descriptive cases where there clearly are right and wrong answers, the best we can do is work with our commitments and weed out inconsistencies (as well as get new evidence). If Relinda finds someone she disagrees so fundamentally with that their basic normative commitments are incompatible, there is just nothing she can do, other than stomp her feet. At least one of them might be wrong, but they’d have no way of telling who it is, and it would be practically identical to if they just had different preferences.
Of course if Antoinette ends in a similar disagreement, she can’t also say that the other person is wrong. But why should that matter when actually doing ethics? If she meets a society of slave-traders, she’ll be strongly against it, protest, argue with them, and so on, in exactly the same way that Relinda would. They wouldn’t be doing something objectively wrong, but they’d be doing something she thought was downright heinous, and she’d try her damn best to make them sympathetic to her viewpoint.
Despite disagreeing with
on some pretty fundamental things, this is a point where I agree very much with him. I often see him sharing people saying stupendously stupid things about anti-realism, claiming that anti-realists can’t object to mass murderers and Nazis. Sure they can! They can’t claim that they’re objectively in the wrong, but a realist saying that they are wouldn’t be doing any better job at convincing them, nor be more against what they do.Qualify, Qualify, Qualify
You have reached the part of the post where I lose my spine and walk back the thesis here. The title of this post just isn’t true in the sense that some possible meta-ethical positions would really affect how to do ethics. This will generally be due to their claims on the epistemic side of metaethics. For example if some sort relativism is true where moral truths depend on the conventions of society or something, then that should clearly inform how we do ethics—we should be much more interested in surveys. Also
’s view might put some weight in evolutionary history when doing ethics (if I understand him right).Another thing is that I’ve been a bit quick to lump anti-realist theories together in how they should conceive of our ethical reasoning. I haven’t specified what brand of anti-realist Antoinette is. I have talked in a way that would fit very well with her being a non-cognitivist, in which case I’m suggesting that she should be something along the lines of a quasi-realist (though what I suggested isn’t quite as strong).
If she’s an error-theorist, she might have more options. I was thinking something along the lines that she should conceive of ethics as consisting of hypothetical imperatives: She has some set of preferences (e.g. being against suffering and rights-violations), and acting rightly would just be doing what you should do if you want to conform with these preferences (I guess this would be some sort of revisionism). But she could also go for some sort of elimination of moral discourse.
My claim is then really more that most major anti-realist positions needn’t lead to particularly revisionary consequences once we go back down to first-order ethics. Anti-realists can favor radical revisions or elimination of our ethical discourse, but they can also just engage in ethics in exactly the same way as a realist might—and in fact I think this would be most natural.
One last point is that motivational internalism/externalism might matter. If motivational internalism is true, then it might be that Relinda and Antoinette differ in what they are motivated to do. Perhaps they both want to buy a new PlayStation, but Relinda thinks donating money to charity is really good (and she can’t do both), while Antoinette obviously doesn’t. Then it might turn out that they think they’re motivated to act differently. (Though this question cuts across the realist/anti-realist divide anyways.)
Where it Really Does Matter
If metaethics doesn’t matter WHATSOEVER at ALL when it comes to ethics (ignore the last section) then where does it make a difference? Basically it really seems to matter most in theism/atheism type debates. Whether or not moral realism is true, and if so how we come to moral knowledge, has big consequences for whether God might exist, what he might be like, etc.
It might also have consequences for the other issues it intersects with, like metaphysics and epistemology. If you think non-natural realism is very plausible, you should maybe be more ready to be a Platonist; and depending on how you think we get moral knowledge, you should maybe be some sort of rationalist—though the influence will probably mostly go the other way in most issues.
Anyways, that’s all!
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I think there are ways your views on metaethics can affect your views on normative ethics that aren't addressed here. The flaw in the argument is that it assumes everyone has some set of fundamental moral commitments that can't be changed by argument, unless they are shown to be inconsistent with other moral commitments. But that's not actually true - your views on metaethics could very easily affect what your baseline moral commitments are. Any theory about what moral facts are is probably also going to tell you a lot about what the contents of those moral facts is. In the article, you mentioned cultural relativism as an example of a metaethical view that also affects what you believe is right (since it implies that surveys could be used to determine what's right), but I think this is a much more general feature of almost all metaethical views.
There's also the problem that, if your moral commitments are shown to be inconsistent, you have to decide which way to update them. If there's no objective fact of the matter as to which view is correct, then you'll probably just update them in whatever way is most convenient to you - why not? - and you won't need to worry about having a weird and ad-hoc collection of moral commitments, with a bunch of unjustified exceptions. After all, your set of commitments isn't a theory about what's actually true, so you don't need to worry about factors like Occam's razor. You can just make them consistent in whatever way you feel like (unless you hold to something like societal relativism, but that affects your object-level moral views in other ways and also allows them to be ad-hoc as long as society follows ad-hoc rules, which it does).
On the other hand, moral realists are much more likely to have a theory as to exactly what makes an action right or wrong, since they actually believe there is a fact of the matter about this, and Occam's razor tells them the true theory is likely to be fairly simple. They're not going to accept new moral rules or ad-hoc exceptions if they don't think there's epistemic justification, and since convenience isn't a guide to truth, they won't change their moral beliefs to make them more convenient.
I think you're conflating preference inconsistencies and non-ethical belief inconsistencies in the case of Antoinette.
Suppose moral anti-realism is true. Then there's nothing inconsistent if Antoinette prefers (sentient creatures harmed & I eat chicken) > (sentient creatures not harmed) > (sentient creatures harmed & no chicken for me). It would only be inconsistent if Antoinette prefers (sentient creatures are not harmed) > (sentient creatures are harmed & I eat chicken), but she still eats the chicken. But pointing out this inconsistency is not in the domain of ethical reasoning! The operative question becomes whether or not chickens are sentient creatures.
On anti-realism, it appears any so-called preference inconsistency will ultimately reflect a mistaken belief about the natural world, leaving no space for ethical reasoning.