## PhD If it’s true that belief in antirealism should have little to no effect on our ordinary moral judgments, this has the very positive consequence of allowing us to preserve **the things we want from morality—our moral convictions as well as the possibility of ongoing moral reflection, conversation, and improvement**—while allowing us to avoid the difficult metaphysical and epistemological problems that have always troubled moral realism. Embracing antirealism would seem to allow us to retain moral talk, moral attitudes, and moral social pressure, but do away with the philosophically embarrassing hypotheses of intuitional insight into a Platonic realm of moral truth, or moral particles which buzz around acts of torture and other instances of egregious evil. This no doubt forms a large part of antirealism’s appeal. The goal of this chapter, however, is to cast some doubt on whether antirealism really can give us all of the advantages of realism without its metaphysical and epistemological disadvantages. [...] I label “realist” any metaethical theory that asserts that our normative judgments are made true or false by some normative fact independent of facts about our normative judgments themselves, and “antirealist” any metaethical theory that does not assert this. [...] taking seriously the metaphysical and epistemological commitments of realism can actually have a positive effect on the evolution of one’s moral convictions, because they put normative as well as motivational pressure on one’s self-interested bias (as well as on other sorts of bias one may have) in a way that antirealist commitments do not. [...] Projectivism posits that we project our attitudes onto the natural world and that this justifies our talking about goodness and badness as if they were objective properties. [...] projectivism is still only quasi-realist, not fully realist, and this is because, though it uses all of the language of realism, it does so only after reinterpreting the metaphysical claims of realism as mere expressions of attitudes with no metaphysical implications. [...] I have purposely chosen not to talk about “mind-independence,” but rather about “judgment-independence.” The term ‘mind-independence’ is currently popular in metaethics, but I believe it ought to be understood as a shorthand for ‘judgment-independence’. That is, I believe ‘judgment-independence’ is a more precise term for what those who speak of “mind-independence” generally intend. I don’t myself use the term ‘mind-independence’ because, given what I take to be the most plausible form of realism—a theory based on the intrinsic value and disvalue of certain forms of phenomenology—to define moral realism as a claim about the “mindindependence” of moral facts would be misleading. 13On my view, moral facts are not mind-independent. They are quite dependent on whether people are in the mental states of pleasure or pain. And indeed, most mainstream realist views do take moral facts to be at least in part dependent on facts about pleasure and pain. However, on my view and on these other realist views, facts about the goodness of pleasure and the badness of pain (along with whatever other moral facts there may be) are judgmentindependent. 14 I believe this belief in judgment-independencenot mind-independence—is the crucial difference between realism and antirealism, the difference that has potentially important consequences for the evolution of one’s first-order normative judgments and the motivation one has to act on them. [...] Sharon Street: can I ever feel the same conviction about the value of family (or any other of my basic values that has a similar justification) if I am aware that its normativity stems merely from the contingent fact that I have this very strong unreflective tendency, combined with the fact that there’s no good reason to resist it and good reason to endorse and encourage it as judged from the standpoint of my other values? [...] Street’s answer is a firm “no.” She replies that, on constructivism, one’s having a strong unreflective tendency to take something to be valuable, combined with support for this tendency from one’s other normative judgments, is just what it is for something to be valuable. [...] {{Question: “Why should I take anything at all to be valuable?” is poorly formed.}} One cannot step back from the entire set of one’s interlocking normative judgments at once, and ask, from nowhere, whether this set is correct or incorrect. There are, and could be, no standards to fix an answer to this question. {{from this perspective, there are very definite answers as to what one ought and ought not to value, “such that you (at least if you’re anything like most of us) couldn’t not value your family members and not be making a mistake—not unless you suddenly became someone very different from who you are, someone you would barely recognize—someone with very different unreflective tendencies to value, and very different normative judgments of all kinds.”}} [...] the standards that determine the truth and falsity of normative judgments can only be set from within the standpoint of a valuing creature.” Simon Blackburn on people who think moral anti-realism entails nihilism: “such people have a defect elsewhere in their sensibilities—one that has taught them that things do not matter unless they matter to God, or throughout infinity, or to a world conceived apart from any particular set of concerns or desires, or whatever.” According to Blackburn, belief in antirealism does not itself cause people to feel a reduced sense of moral conviction. They will have a reduced sense of conviction only if they have the wrong sorts of attitudes: attitudes to respect only things they believe to be “objectively” valuable. The common thread running through the arguments of Hare, Street, and Blackburn is that loss of belief in things’ mattering independently of our caring about them doesn’t rationally prevent us from caring about them nonetheless. **If there is no judgment-independent normative standard, then there is no judgment-independent normative standard compelling us only to care about things that are judgment-independently valuable.** Thus there is no reason for us not to care about exactly those things that we cared about when we were realists. What I am going to argue is that coming to believe in antirealism removes a rational requirement on our values that’s given by a belief in realism: the requirement that one’s values reflect what is judgment-independently valuable. While the disappearance of this requirement does not itself compel any change in one’s values, it does mean that there is no longer one previously strong counterweight to the influence of perspectival bias on one’s values, and on one’s motivations in general. [...] our particular situation—our spatial, temporal, and emotional perspective—affects the way that the interests of different people at different times motivate us. The effect of our perspective on our motivations I call “perspectival bias.” in the absence of belief in realism, the most natural reason to value getting rid of it—the fact that getting rid of it will make one better at promoting something whose value doesn’t change with one’s perspective—is gone. And in the absence of this reason, if an antirealist doesn’t just happen to be motivated to get rid of perspectival bias, he has no reason to do so. What belief in judgment-independent moral facts is capable of doing, then, is taking someone who has no independent motivation to treat others’ interests equally with his own and causing him to perceive others’ interests in closer to the way that he perceives his own, simply because he has become convinced that their value is objectively similar, and this in turn causes him to come closer to being equally motivated by others’ interests and his own. [...] realists who examine the evidence for the probability that different motivations of theirs reflect judgment-independent value—and what we might call “dogmatic” realists: realists who rely on the mere strength of their motivations or the authority of a third party to tell them what is judgment-independently valuable. Realism held to in this way—without taking seriously the metaphysical and epistemological questions it poses—is not any more likely than antirealism to lead one to a less biased set of motivations and could very well lead to one’s being even more biased. [...] Whether we’re realists or antirealists, if we value treating all people’s interests equally—and it seems that all of us at least have reason to want others to treat our interests as equal to theirs—then this gives us reason to take it as a strike against antirealism that it is likely to exacerbate people’s tendencies to give preference to those people who are nearer to them in space or time and to those with whom they have emotional ties. On intutionism: What seems a more definitive strike against intuitionism (though it still doesn’t amount to making moral intuition an impossibility) are its difficulties in providing an explanation for the fact that people are often in great disagreement with one another on moral subjects (as well as in disagreement with themselves over time), an explanation that does not undermine the ability of intuition to justify realist moral belief. Phenomonal realism: Moral realism claims that normativity is a feature of the world independently of anyone’s thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes about it. This does not mean, however, that a realist must claim that normativity is primarily a feature of actions or physical states of affairs. My view denies this, and this separates my view from most other realist theories. Rather than claiming that normative phenomenology reveals to us the goodness or badness of actions or of physical objects or states of affairs, I claim that it reveals to us first and foremost the intrinsic goodness and badness of the phenomenology itself. I claim that intrinsic goodness and badness are phenomenal qualities of experience, and that it is facts about these qualities of experience which constitute all the normative facts there are. Rather than claiming that normative phenomenology reveals to us the goodness or badness of actions or of physical objects or states of affairs, I claim that it reveals to us first and foremost the intrinsic goodness and badness of the phenomenology itself. I claim that intrinsic goodness and badness are phenomenal qualities of experience, and that it is facts about these qualities of experience which constitute all the normative facts there are. It is extremely important that it be understood that **I am not suggesting that our normative phenomenology represents some further realm of normativity**, that it somehow acquaints us with normative properties that also exist detached from phenomenal experience, perhaps in actions or in non-mental states of affairs. I believe experiencing felt goodness provides us with the basic qualitative content of our concept of intrinsic moral goodness. Felt goodness is moral goodness of the most basic kind; it is the basic objective value that gives meaning to moral discussion and action [...] This division of the experience of pain into at least two basic parts is widely accepted by scientists because of the existence of cases in which the sensations of nociception are separated from the feeling of badness. This separation occurs, for instance, under the influence of certain painkillers: namely, opiates such as oxycodone and morphine. Users of these drugs relate that they don’t make the pain go away so much as they make one no longer care about it. [...] since realism itself entails the denial of this sort of reasons internalism. By asserting that normative facts are judgmentindependent, realism excludes a necessary connection between normativity and anyone’s subjective motivational set. It posits instead that normative force originates from something besides motivation: in the case of my view, from the intrinsic felt nature of certain phenomenal qualities. ## Gus Docker interview note for 80K This interview with Sharon Hewlett-Rawlette was the best ~1 hour case for a hedonistic theory of value that I've heard. Some bits that stood out: 1. Pluralistic conception of positive and negative experiences, i.e. experiences differ in intensity but also in character (so we can recognise fundamental differences between bodily pleasure, love, laughter, understanding, etc). 2. Hedonism can solve the epistemic problem that haunts moral realism, by saying that we directly experience value and disvalue as a phenomenal quality. 3. We attribute intrinsic value to non-experiential states of affairs because we recognise them as direct or indirect causes of experiential value. This is a cognitive shortcut, it works pretty well. 4. Experience of pleasure from e.g. torture is *pro tanto* good, but it is not all things considered good because of the instrumental effects (i.e. lots of disvalue). 5. Best argument against hedonistic utilitarianism is that it is too abstract. It's not actually helpful for people to think in these terms. We need nearly-absolute respect for rights—projecting intrinsic value into the world works well for us. 6. Strong realism vs anti-realism (as in: total mind-independence vs mind-dependence) matters: only the strong realist can deeply care about self-interested perspectival bias, e.g. can think of their deepest values as perhaps radically wrong, can worry that an AGI with idealised human values might still be an existential catastrophe. For some reason, it hadn't occurred to me that a hedonist could do (1). It might be that I think of hedonists as aiming for a very tidy theory, and adding pluralism back in messes that up a bit (e.g. comparability and aggregation remain hard). Anyway... "pluralistic hedonism" seems quite promising to me! https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/utilitarian/the-feeling-of-value-sharon-tU23oLpJbZe/ Her PhD was supervised by Thomas Nagel and she thanks Parfit for input. I'm looking forward to reading it: https://www.stafforini.com/docs/Hewitt%20-%20Normative%20qualia%20and%20a%20robust%20moral%20realism.pdf -- In other news: after writing that, she quit academia and now she’s writing about weird paranormal stuff on the lunatic fringe. She sounded very sane to me in the Gus Docker interview, but in this interview, given a few months later, she’s calmly making inferences that seem _extremely dubious_ given my priors.  [https://soundcloud.com/themysticalunderground/sharon-hewitt-rawlette-the-source-and-significance-of-coincidences](https://soundcloud.com/themysticalunderground/sharon-hewitt-rawlette-the-source-and-significance-of-coincidences) https://sharonrawlette.wordpress.com/philosophy/ ## Gus Docker interview Moral realism or anti-realism? Prefers "judgement dependence" vs "judgement independence" distinction. Way that metaethics matters: pluralism vs just one true theory. How wrong could our individual judgements be? Core thesis: there are judgement independent facts about ethics. And we can know them. Claim: value and disvalue are phenomenal properties of conscious experience. The only thing that is of terminal value or disvalue is phenomenal experience pleasure and pain. We often get confused because we very often have to evaluate things for their instrumental effects. Phenomenal pleasure from torture is pro tanto good, but it is not all things considered good because of the instrumental effects (lots of disvalue). Best argument against utilitarianism is that it is too abstract. It's not actually helpful for people to think in utiitarian terms. We need nearly-absolute respect for rights.