Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 107 | Russ Shafer-Landau on the Reality of Morality

Episode Date: July 27, 2020

Despite occasional and important disagreements, most people are in rough agreement about what it means to be moral, to do the right thing. There's much less agreement about why we should be moral, or even what kind of answer to that question could be convincing. Philosopher Russ Shafer-Landau is one of the leading proponents of moral realism — the view that objective moral truths exist independently of human choices. That's not my own view, but ethics and meta-ethics are areas in which I think it's wise to keep an open mind and listen to smart people who disagree. This conversation offers food for thought for people on either side of this debate. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Russ Shafer-Landau received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Arizona. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Among his numerous books are Moral Realism: A Defense and Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? He is the editor of Oxford Studies in Metaethics, and is the founder and organizer of the annual Madison Metaethics Workshop. Web site UW-Madison web page PhilPeople profile Amazon author page Talk on Moral Disagreement and Moral Intuitions Wikipedia

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For the moments that matter, get the score that matters, your FICO score. Visit MyFICO.com and get started for free today. Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. I think that many of us are interested in trying to do the right thing in various contexts, but as we learn from Spike Lee's movie as well as elsewhere, it can be hard to know what it means to do the right thing. And that's true both in a narrow sense and in a meta sense. In a literal sense, we don't know which thing to do is the right one. That's what Spike Lee investigated. But the meta sense is what does it mean. to say that something is the right thing. So there literally is within philosophy, the study of ethics, a moral philosophy, but then there's a study of meta-ethics. What are the standards by which we defend a certain conception of what is morally right? I myself subscribe to something called moral constructivism, where I think that what exists out there in the world is the natural world, stuff, behaving in certain ways, in accordance with the laws of physics. Morality, I think, is

something that we human beings, or presumably other conscious creatures out there in the cosmos, talk about and construct ourselves. And then it's very interesting to talk about, well, what things should we construct? How should we decide to be moral and different people disagree and so forth? But I think that my point of view there is a minority one. I think that most people, both on the street and professional thinkers about this, are what we call moral realists. They think that in addition to the physical stuff of the universe, there is something else, some way of judging what is right and wrong. It might come from God, if you're religious, or it might come from philosophizing, from pure rationality, or it might just come from sort of introspecting about our intuitions about what is right and what is wrong. So today's guest is Russ Schaefer Landau.

He's one of the best people to talk about these issues. he's one of the leading defenders of moral realism. Among his many books are called Moral Realism A Defense, which is a long scholarly philosophical tone where you can really get into the weeds. But he's also written a shorter book called Whatever Happened to Good and Evil, if you want sort of the immediate catchy version of this kind of argument.

So Russ is a non-naturalist about morality, but not a theist about morality. In other words, he thinks that there is something to the world that is objectively there, which you can call morality, but not that it comes from God or anything like that. And as he articulates in the interview, he's much more about understanding what our intuitions tell us, thinking that that gives us some access to something real,

which helps us decide what is good and what is evil. So I don't agree with that, but we had a great conversation because Russ is really, really good, both about understanding the opposite point of view and about understanding the weakness in his own point of view. I think that kind of approach, actually makes it a lot more convincing to people who are skeptics. I'm not completely convinced, but I think this is a very, very important debate slash discussion to have.

Morality is something where a lot of people think that, you know, they can figure it out given 10 minutes of careful contemplation, right? How hard can it be? I think it's very hard, and I think it's something that deserves careful contemplation, more careful than just sitting around for a few minutes deciding, oh, yeah, I got it. Now I know what's right and what's wrong. Let me also, before we dive into it, give a short plug for an organization that actually an organization here at Caltech, where I am the academic advisor for a student group called Caltech Letters. You can visit them at caltechletters.org. And it's basically a journal, an online journal where they publish articles about science, but then also viewpoint articles, essays. And they started a couple of podcasts that I think are very interesting. So they have a podcast called Notting. My Thesis, where they explore the unpublished parts of the scientific process, the stuff that does not go

into technical journal articles. And there's another new podcast they're doing called Biosphere, which explores how we fit into the living world, especially from the perspective of biology PhD students. They're really, really sharply focused on not just putting something out there in the world at Caltech letters, but really making it high quality. These are more than just offhand remarks. They're very highly polished, edited pieces, which I think provoke a lot of thought in good ways. So give them a visit at caltechletters.org. And with that, let's go. Rushay for Landau, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Happy to be here. So this is one in a tradition. It's not like a hugely represented tradition, but I like to have people on the podcast who I disagree

with, but I can disagree with in a way that I think that we have something to learn from them. So, you know, I don't go for the flat earthers. I go for the people who are, having respectable opinions that I disagree with. And my attitude in these episodes is that I am absolutely here to give you the chance to put the best foot forward for your case. I'll try to let my objections be known, and maybe you'll even change my mind. Who knows? But we're mostly here to have you state your case. And so in this case, the case is moral realism, which is something so I'm a moral anti-realist, I guess.

But why don't you, for the people who are not experts in the listening audience out there, how about the lay of the land? You know, what is the landscape when it comes to what different possible attitudes one could have toward, I guess, metaethics is the right field that we're in here? That's right. So we are in metaethics. And just to situate folks at one remove, metaethics is not trying to, it is a branch of moral philosophy, but it's not trying to answer. questions about what actually is right or wrong or good or bad. Rather, it's trying to take a step back and ask about the nature of moral reality, if there is one, how we can know it, if we can, what the nature of moral judgments are, are they more like straight up beliefs, or are they

more desire-like states? Questions like that. So within meta-ethics, there's a bunch of different ways of carving up to terrain, but here's one. And you might think there are three really big families of views. One's a view that we can call nihilism. Philosophers don't use that term that much, but it's designed to cover all the views that say there's no moral reality, really. Some versions of nihilism say, you know, most of us think there is, but we're just mistaken. in the way that an atheist say will diagnose religious belief and religious discourse. Lots and lots of folks out there believe in it, but there's some fundamental presupposition that infects the whole picture,

and really there's nothing to it. That's one view you might have about morality. Another view is a view according to which there is a moral reality, but the reality is a constructed one. These folks are called constructivists, unsurprisingly. And the one analogy is between, say, morality and the law or morality in etiquette where you might say that really, you know, if you drive 50 miles an hour in a 20 mile an hour zone, you'd say, yeah, that was really, that was illegal. And it's, you know,

and if someone says that was illegal, you could say, yeah, what that person just said is true. And there's, and you can tell a story in epistemology about how you come to know, that truth. And you might think, well, morality is more or less like the law or like the etiquette in that before human beings came on the scene, there wasn't any such thing. But for various reasons, and of course different constructivists will tell different stories. It did come on the scene with us. And it's a constructed, it's a social construction, basically. It can be quite complex, But at bottom, if you ask, where does morality come from? The answer is it comes from the decisions or the attitudes of human beings,

either singly, that's a kind of subjectivism or collectively, which typically yields a form of relativism. It doesn't have to, but it can. And then lastly, there's the family of views known as moral realism, which says there is a moral reality out there, hence moral realism, but the reality is not a constructed one. It's not one that's made up by human beings, either singly or collectively, either by reference to their actual judgments or by reference to some cleaned-up,

hypothetical, idealized version of the judgments that we would have. Rather, morality, moral principles say, moral standards are, quote, unquote, out there in a pretty robustly objective way. They await our discovery. We've invented the vocabulary to describe these things as good or bad, vicious or virtuous, things like that. But the truths that we are apprehending are not of our own making. And then within moral realism, because we're doing philosophy here, there are lots of other sub-isomies. Yeah.

Yeah, lots of different versions of moral. realism. But that's basically the lay of the land. And you're going to be in the more realism camp there, just so we're giving away. I'm going to be in the moral realism camp. And within the moral realism camp, I'm going to be in what's called the non-naturalist camp. So within realism itself, there are a bunch of different divisions. But the main division, at least within the last, say, 120 years, has been between those who think of themselves as naturalists and those who don't. The naturalist is someone who thinks of morality as on a par with other naturalistic disciplines, in particular the natural sciences.

It may not be as advanced in its findings as the natural sciences, but the basic methodologies of discovering what's right and wrong mirror the basic methodologies of the natural sciences. The reality that awaits our discovery is continuing. with the reality. It's a kind of natural scientific reality. And then there's on the other side the so-called non-naturalist. It's not a very catchy term. And that's where I place myself. It's folks who think that moral realism is true. There's a robustly objective moral reality. But morality is not really like the sciences, no matter how much scientific investigation we do, we're not going to be, we can be certainly aided in discovering what's right and wrong

by reference to that. But the truths aren't scientific ones. The methodology is not, you know, we don't go to a lab, we don't need to go to a lab, we don't need to run actual controlled experiments on actual populations to make a determination about, say, the immorality of genocide. So, Folks in my little niche of the metaethical world are usually the ones who are subject to the most either ridiculed, depending on your attitude at the time, or the most criticism among the realist camp. Because you could see the attraction of being in that. There are issues to do with realism, about realism, of course, in the first place that turn a lot of people off. But if you're tempted to the realist view, a lot of folks go naturalistic because they think it's metaphysically respectable. If you think of morality as just another kind of natural phenomenon, then you don't have to introduce these non-scientificing features, properties in the world.

And that leads to a more economical, metaphysically economical picture that's quite attractive to a lot of people. I definitely want to, excuse me, dig into the non-naturalism aspect of things in some detail here, but first, I'm sure that some of the people in the audience have mostly confronted or experienced the idea of non-naturalism as theism, right? As that's the, you know, you contrast naturalism with theism, but you're doing something different here. Yeah, that's a really good question. And you're certainly right about the presuppositions. In the canonical text called Principia Ethica by a British philosopher G.E. Moore that came out in 1903, he was the one who coined the term non-naturalism, and he distinguished naturalism from non-naturalism, but also from supernaturalism. And that distinction has been, within philosophy at least, pretty much pretty honored over the last roughly 120 years. There's a very common thought among non-philosophers

that if you're going to take up with a view like mine, you've got to ground morality in some kind of divine command or some kind of divine agency. But that's just a mistake, I think. And even for those who believe that the best version of realism is going to be one that is founded in some reference to God, they recognize at least the coherence and the intelligibility of a view

of the sort that I hold, which is not a theistic one. Yeah, okay, good. I mean, maybe before actually explicating what that view is, you can give us a hint just so. I think that this is, let me back, up a little bit. I know for a fact that when you talk about things like morality, one of the issues

that the discourse runs into is that people have pre-existing ideas, right? So it's not like talking about the Higgs boson, where I can just explain things and people go, oh, yes, but everyone has their own little idea. So why don't you just give us a preview about why you believe this particular view called moral realism from the non-naturalist perspective? Sure. Well, I'll take it in two steps. One is why do I believe moral realism and then why do I favor the non-naturalism? Is that okay? Perfect.

Perfect. Yeah, okay. So here's why moral realism. Well, if you think back to the taxonomy I gave earlier, one way to see the attractions of moral realism is by seeing what's problematic with the opponents. It's not necessarily just an, it's not necessarily an argument from elimination, but it helps to put the attractions of realism into sharp focus, I think. So if you've got a nihilist version, I think, myself think that's a version of last resort.

I would think that, of course, but I invite those who aren't antecedently inclined the way I am to just think about the implications of a view according to which we can take a big example, one I used earlier, according to which there really is nothing immoral about perpetrating genocide, or to take a smaller example, but one that hopefully is just as clear, Anilus is committed to saying there's nothing wrong with deliberately accosting a vulnerable little kid and then smacking the kid as hard as you can and laughing at the kid as he falls down the puddle of tears. To me, I think that when doing philosophy, there's no alternative but to rely at various junctures on our intuitions. We can talk about that because that itself is a philosophically controversial claim.

But that's my view, at least. And I think that some of our moral intuitions about cases like the two I've just described are as clear and as probative, actually, as any kind of evidence we can have in philosophy. So if you've taken nihilistic kind of view, you've got to give up on that source of knowledge. And my thought is that if you have to give it up when it comes to morality, you're going to need to give it up all over the place in philosophy. And that's going to lead to an insuperable difficulty about gaining philosophical knowledge, insight, wisdom and understanding. So just to summarize, your main objection to nihilism is just that it is in conflict with our intuitions. That's right. And the substance of our intuitions. So I, you know,

just invite someone to say with a straight face, there's nothing wrong at all about perpetrating the sorts of acts I've done, you know, I've just described. And I know a number of smart people who are also really nice people, by the way, who can say that with the straight face. I know most of those in the philosophical community who can do that, but I think that it comes at very high cost. Well, I'm not, I guess I'm not an nihilist myself. I'm more of a constructivist,

but just to do a little bit of standing up for them, I mean, couldn't, can I restate your argument or try to put it in slightly different terms by saying it's not that the fact that we seem to have intuitions that overrides them, such as that they still are acting as if there is morality. Like you said, there are nice people, people who behave well, and therefore there must be some internal incoherence or inconsistency in a nice nihilism. Like Alex Rosenberg, who was a previous guest on the podcast,

he proudly proclaims himself to be a nice nihilist. Yeah, I myself actually don't think there's any inconsistency. and being a nice nihilist. That's a charge I hear sometimes from my students when I introduce them to this idea. But in fact, I think you can be a perfectly coherent, nice nihilist. Okay. And also you can be perfectly coherent nihilist and say,

look, I think it's a really terrible idea to perpetrate genocide or to smack kids, just be cut, you know, just when you're angry. And that's also coherent. Right. All they're forbidden from saying, to speak, so as to maintain consistency is to say that their preferences register some kind of genuine immorality or morality. So you can say, look, it would be a better thing for everybody,

not morally better, but people would be happier or less unhappy if we acted this way. And that's a perfectly consistent thing for Nylos to say. Got it. Okay. So let's move on to knocking down constructivism then. Well, my big, you know, there are lots of forms of constructivism, but here's big beef with constructivism and that is it I don't think that I have I don't think that my say say so makes it so when it comes to morality. I don't have that kind of authority. I mean, I've been doing moral philosophy for 30 years. I'm not terrible at it. I'm not the best at it for sure. But my say, but let's take the person who is, you know, let's focus on people who are among the very best moral philosophers ever.

It's still the case, I think, that their say-so doesn't make it so. We are, each one of us, either individually or taken together, is fallible in a whole range of ways. We're imperfect. We've got our biases. Sometimes they're known. Sometimes they're unknown. In terms of processing information, we all are limited in various ways.

We all have our tendentious prejudices, some of which we're unaware, others of which we're aware, but we can't fully correct for. All these things come into play in making moral judgments. And I don't see how it can be that any of us can have the requisite authority to be such that it's our attitudes or our agreements or our judgments that are the ultimate source. of morality. I guess I just say one more thing to back that up. I'd extend this argument all the way to a critique of so-called divine command theory according to which you have God, who's perfect, all-knowing, at least making the decisions about what's right and wrong. So the divine command theory says what's right is right if and only if and because God commands it. wrong if and only if and because God forbids it. I think even that kind of view is problematic.

So if even God, I mean, we can talk about reasons why if you want, but if even God's say so doesn't make it so, then surely we imperfect, puny little, fallible human beings say so, isn't going to make it so either. Well, but as a constructivist, I don't want to spend too much time, like I said, sort of defending my own point of view here, but my immediate feeling about that would be that somehow it's begging the question, that you're, that kind of analysis seems to rely on the idea that there is an objectively true statement about what morality is, and then I would agree that we fallible human beings are not necessarily the right place to find that with perfect precision. But if you buy the analogy, that morality is more

like the laws of speeding or the rules of playing basketball that are constructed, then there's no such thing as the perfect rules for playing basketball, but there's nevertheless what we make up. Great. That's, you're absolutely right. And then, just to take it to the next level of analysis, I just invite you to think about the implications of that kind of view. So I don't know what kind of constructivist you are, whether you think that moral principles,

correct moral principles are ultimately founded in each individual's attitudes or whether it's a group effort? Do you want to say anything about that? I mean, I very roughly think that there is a job for moral philosophy, namely to take the moral intuitions that individuals have and to listen to individuals,

talk to each other and try to rationally describe what their goals are, and from that to construct something that might not be objective, and might not be settled and permanent, but is provisionally what we take to be good moral behavior. Yeah. Okay.

So on that kind of view, to me, the problem is that what seems, what has seemed to a bunch of folks to be a cogent set of, a cogent moral outlook after reflection strikes me as deeply problematic. And you might say, well, Russ, isn't that kind of? arrogant. You know, why are you, Russ, the arbiter of what's right and wrong? And I want to, first, I want to claim my own fallibility here. But if you take a look at this kind of constructivist position, what it's going to do is, is it's going to say that in societies or among groups across societies, you know, however you're imagining this to go, if they were to make a determination

after reflection that it's okay to make women second-class citizens. It's okay to enslave a certain portion of the population, either because they're skin color, because of their beliefs, or because they're geographical, whatever it is. Then constructivism says, morally speaking, that's right. And that's an implication that I find, I just can't stomach. If you're interested in learning new things, one great place to go is the Great Courses Plus, a streaming service that brings you high-level

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or all by yourself. So sign up for the Great Courses Plus today, and Mindscape listeners can get a free trial with unlimited access to the entire library. Start that free trial today at the Great courses plus.com slash mindscape. That's T-A-G-G-G-Courses-P-L-U-S-C-L-U-S-Minescape. Right, and I think that that's a perfectly fair, I think that as a constructivist, you have to bite that bullet,

and you have to say, yes, like the process of constructing in different places and in different times might come up with things that I, Sean, who am also not the ultimate moral arbiter, think are horrible. And so, and I would try to

argue those people out of it based on whatever common moral intuitions we have. And I think that the, as a philosophical argument against constructivism, that argument really only works if again, you kind of assume there is an objective, ultimate right and wrong, and then you're saying, but this method isn't getting it. But if I don't assume that there's an objective right and wrong, then this is the method that we have. Yeah. Well, I agree that this is the, I agree actually that this is the method that we have, whether constructivism or realism is correct. where the method we have refers to how it is that we're going to engage in discussions with people who don't antecedently share our views. The only way you can try to make progress there, I think, is to appeal to things that your discussion partner,

some things that they're already going to be at least open to hearing and ideally will accept. If you can find some shared bases from which to work, you're much likelier to get to consensus at the end. And that's true, like, you know, whether constructivism is correct or whether realism is correct. But I also want to think, I also think that this scenario is plausible, namely, that some people are mistaken and can't be shown the error of their ways. I think that that's a general truth. It's true about flat earthers, for instance. Don't need to tell me. Yeah, I'm sure I don't.

But I also think that's the case in morality. I think that some people, you know, we have examples in our public life right now. I'm not going to name names. We've got examples of people who just won't see reality for what it is. Let's forget about moral reality for right now. And there are a whole lot of explanations, plausible ones for why that is, self-interest being among them but not the only one, ideological indoctrination being another. And I think that these forces carry over into morality as well.

It's possible for someone to just be blind to the moral equality of a woman or an African American. And there's nothing you can say. And furthermore, there might be no film they're willing to watch or memoir or narrative they're willing to read. And even if they do read them, they may bring their blind, what I'd call it. what you'd say I'd be tendentiously calling their blinders to the reading or to the film watching and they may be unconvinced in the end. Now there are two diagnoses to make from that.

One is a constructivist one, which says, you know, if at the end of the conversation, the person is not persuaded, then there's no moral reality that they're missing. My view is that they might well be missing something. And furthermore, this is, this is the flip side of the point I've just been making, it's actually much harder on a constructivist view to maintain an attitude of fallibility

than it is on the realist view. So it's harder to say what you did say. I know I'm doing all the talking. No, you're here to talk, please. It's harder to say what you said three or four minutes ago from a constructivist point of view than a realist point of view. And what I'm referring to is your profession, your admirable profession of valability and humility about things. If constructivism is true, then I'm not saying this is your view, but let's just take a simple kind of relativist view about morality, according to which morality is grounded in some kind of social or cultural consensus.

whatever follows from the deep mares of a culture or society is what's morally right. On that picture, here's what you need in order to know what's right and wrong. You need to know what your society stands for or what your culture stands for. And so long as you do and you're not benighted about the relevant empirical facts on the ground, then you've got moral knowledge. If your culture is built on a rejection of the equality, of women and men. If your culture is built on the view that women are there, have been, have, are here to serve men, that's one of the founding ideals of the culture. Then so long as you know that

and subscribe to it and can see how that plays out in the ordinary, say, domestic lives of women, and you, then it turns out, you know a woman's place, morally speaking, you know a woman's place. and that is to serve her man or her men. I think that not only is the moral implication of that repugnant, but I think that it makes moral knowledge actually too easy to get. I think if you were to say, well, Russ, that assumes, that's tententious, that assumes that there's an objective morality that these folks are straying from, and it assumes that there's an objective morality that might be more difficult to get

than by means of the sort of sociological knowledge I've just described. That's the consistent thing to say. And so I'm not going to say anything that's going to indict constructivists on the grounds that they are necessarily have an inconsistent view. You can definitely coherently build up any number of constructivist views. I'm just pointed to implications that repugnant is a strong word, but with regard to that particular conclusion, it's one that I do find repugnant. And, you know, I think there's no easy way out of that conclusion, two conclusions, really. One is that when you think about the actual substantive moral implications of a view like that kind of relativism, I think they're very hard to stomach.

The second conclusion, which is the one I should have really been focusing on, is the point that if you're a constructivist, it makes, perhaps paradoxically, it makes moral knowledge too easy to get. Most people don't think that that could be a problem with a moral view, but I do think it's a problem with a moral view. but I do think it's a problem with a moral view. I think that the intellectual virtues of modesty and humility, the recognition of your own fallibility, sit best with a realist view. I mean, you're a physicist. What's the right attitude for a physicist to take about the cosmos?

It's humility and a recognition of fallibility and modesty and the explanation of why those are the appropriate attitudes to take is because you don't get to make up the truth. You're there to discover a truth, not of your own making. I think the same is the case when it comes to morality. If you're a moral realist, you ought to be humble about your moral opinions and modest in their expression because you hold the view that there is a moral reality out there that's not of your own making. And yet, some of my best friends are physicists and cosmologists, and not all of of them are characterized by enormous amounts of humility, interestingly, interestingly enough.

No, I completely, I think that I more or less agree with everything you're saying. As I said, I think that the constructivist has to bite the bullet about the fact that even in good faith, I mean, can come up with less repugnant versions of the fact that people thinking in good faith, either individuals or groups of individual societies might end up constructing versions of morality that I find deeply distasteful, and that's something that the constructivist has to live with. On the other side, the constructivist is going to say, but, well, so one version of constructivism might say, but the world is out there and it does things, and I can do experiments on it, and morality is not out there. So you, moral realist, why don't you make the positive case for something

that is objectively true there? Oh, good. Thanks. So one, uh, My naturalist realist brethren will do that in one way, and I'll do it in a different way. The naturalist will go out and say, yeah, we can do experiments of a kind because moral facts are just a species of natural fact. And that's not my kind of view. I think one important reason to hold the sort of non-naturalist view I do, and it's the one that sets it up for criticism. I mean, there are a lot of elements in my view that set it up for criticism, but this one is something that was just beneath the surface in the conversation we've been having over the last 10 or 15 minutes, and that is a commitment to what I'll call the normative authority of morality. And the way I can, perhaps the best way to explain that is by contrast with the view that you've been advocating. So if you take, this is not to do down constructivism, but just to highlight what I regard as a feature of non-naturalism.

And as suppose you've got a view of constructivism, the sort that you've just been describing, and you're led to say, well, yeah, some people do it this way. Some people do it that way. These different ways are just different. They're not better or worse than one another, at least so long as they're equally coherent because there's no objective measure by which to measure the superiority or inferiority of one coherent moral code over another. And then that leads, as you've forthrightly allowed, that leads you to say, well, so if you've got a morality that condones female inferiority.

or chattel slavery, I'm going to try to argue them out of it, but I can't say that that moral view is inferior to mine. It's just different from mine. I'm not now focusing on what I regard as the problematic nature of that implication, but instead a different one, and that is it, if you've got a view like that, then it seems to sap morality of what I call normative authority. Normative is just a fancy word that philosophers use to do with reason giving. I think that there are powerful reasons to comply with moral requirements and moral prohibitions. But if you have a view according to which morality is created by us and for us, then those reasons may be either strongly diminished or, in fact, non-existent.

If you think about it, think about the simple sort of cultural relativism that I was discussing earlier, according to which morality is a cultural byproduct. Morality is just that set of norms that are either directly endorsed by a culture or that are implied by those endorsements. Then you might say, well, imagine you're an iconoclast in the culture that is very inegalitarian, very intolerant, and you say, you know what? My parents believe that we should treat these other folks as inferiors.

is everybody, all my neighbors do, and that's what my teacher taught me. But I think that all human beings are at a fundamental level moral equals to one another. And their skin color, their sex, their gender, their religious beliefs, that's irrelevant in the determination of how much respect and dignity a person deserves. Suppose you had an iconoclast who believed something like that. On the version of relativism I'm describing that that person would be made. making a very deep moral error. Leave that now, leave that implication aside and focus on this authority point that I'm trying to highlight here.

What I would say is that if I were that sort of iconoclast or you or anybody else, I'd scratch my head and say, why should I do what my culture says? And someone might say, well, because that's what morality is. And I'd say, you know what? it seems then that I don't have any reason to adhere to morality because it's just, you know, it's an expression, it's a normative system that results from an expression of uninformed prejudices. And so I don't have any reason to comply with it. I mean, I might have a practical reason.

I'll get put in jail or otherwise condemned. But those sorts of reasons aside, what, you know, what non-self-interested reason might I have to comply with it? And I think the answer in that case is none. I want, the vision of morality that I would, I am hoping is correct, is one according to which if something is morally required of you, then that carries with a genuine non-self-interested kind of practical authority, the way they called normative authority there. There are genuine reasons to comply with that, even if you don't like it, even if it doesn't meet up with your expectations or hopes or your interests or needs, if something is morally

required of you, then there's a reason to do that. Naturalist realists, and in fact, naturalists of all stripes have had great difficulty making sense of that thought. I should say accounting for that thought within their theories. And some of them have tried gallantly to accommodate that thought, but most have been led to you know what, morality doesn't have any special authority over us after all. Let me just interject a little bit because I want to get two things on the table very, very quickly before we pass on to other more interesting things.

But number one, I should have said from the start that I entirely appreciate the attraction of moral realism in the sense that there are objective rules and that would be great if there were objective rules. So, you know, I feel sad that I'm not a moral realist, even though I think that's the right thing to do. But the other is that I do like, and I'm not sure if this is respectable or not, but I do hold this view, that there is a distinction between the kind of relativism that says, well, that culture over there has its own rules, they're not mine, but there's nothing I can say about them because they're theirs. And the kind of constructivism that says, each individual society. or culture, whatever, is constructing its own rules, but I have every right to judge the other ones by my standards.

I can say that your set of moral rules that you've constructed are not objectively wrong, but I still feel sincerely and honestly that they're not the ones you should have. And I'm not going to abandon my right or ability to either judge you badly or try to talk you out of them. Good. And I take it that the latter view is the one that you'd endorse. Yes, that's right.

Yeah. And good, because that's better than the first view, but still, I'd say problematic. No, sure, of course. I just want to let it know that that is a view. You don't have to just be a screaming relativist and say, well, whatever different societies want to say, that's fine. I can't judge them. I want to keep my ability to be judgy. That's all I want.

You got it. But the question, of course, is that when you make a judgment, you do a judgment, you do it by reference to some standard, and then if someone says, they could put it this way, who are you to judge? Sure. To which you have a great answer. I'm a person with a critical faculty and critical intelligence, who, you know, who's become acquainted with your culture and your ways, and on that basis, I'm judging you.

But then there's a next step, and that is to say, are the standards by reference to which you're rendering your judgments, are those standards in any way morally superior to the standards of my own society? And that's something that's, I think, going to be very hard for you to answer. I mean, you can say, yeah, they are superior, but you're saying that by reference to your society's own standards. And so that looks pretty question begging, which, you know, to the extent that claims are question begging, that's a problem. The realist, of course, does, doesn't face that, but the realist does, of course, face lots of other objections. Exactly. So I'm not even going to try to defend myself. I still want to get to your positive

realist. Okay, good. So there are lots of different ways of trying to defend realism. The way that I've come to do it is informed, I should say, by a years-long project and I'm still involved in with two other philosophers. My colleague at UW Madison and John Bankson and a colleague at the University of Vermont Terence Cuneo, we were writing three books. It started out as one big book and it's now three books and one of the books, a short one is on methodology and philosophy. And I'm one of the folks who's responsible for developing this

methodology and so in a nutshell what the methodology tells us is that the way to make progress in gaining understanding of a given area of philosophy is by first trying to identify the data within that domain and then constructing theories that have to meet various criteria of adequacy that attempt to account for that data. In ethics, there are a lot of data that we either have to account for or have to explain away. And of course, it's going to be a philosophically controversial matter. Which of these data stand the test and which of these data ought to be tossed aside. But one of the big benefits of moral realism, which has been recognized for a while, but it's never been, I don't

think, been put quite this way, is that when it comes to the data of ethics, moral realism does a fantastic job of accounting for them. So the data, have to do with things like our, the possibility that some moral views are true and some are false. The possibility that some people are morally wiser than the actuality that some people are morally wiser than others. That our moral judgments are given by beliefs that can be correct or incorrect, that there are reasons to do what's morally required of us and reasons against doing what's morally

prohibited of us, that in some way, morality's demands are inescapable. And yet, not yet, but in other ways, they enjoy a kind of priority over some considerations like those of self-interest, at least in a wide range of cases. These and other data are what I regard as quite plausible starting points for theorizing. and I'm not going to try to, you know, enumerate all the data in meta-ethics, but I think it's fairly uncontroversial that if you were to come to try to identify a long list of those claims that inquirers considered collectively have good reason to believe at the outset of inquiry. those claims would be handled really well by moral realism and less well by other views.

Now, again, that's just the start of the conversation. It's not necessarily the end of the conversation because it's always open to people, other theorists, to say, you know what, some of these data are misleading. That moral realism can account for them doesn't make it a superior kind of view because we should explain these data away. And that's, you know, if you take a look at the Nile list, they're going to say most of these data are maybe all of them depending on what your list looks like. Most of these data, at least, are bunk. They ought to be tossed. What are some of outdated thinking? What are some examples of the data we have in mind here?

Oh, ones I was, ones of the sort I was just mentioning, namely that it's possible that some, it's actual, rather, that some moral claims are true, others are false. But sorry, is that data? In what sense is that data, is that case what I'm asking, yeah. Oh, okay. It's data in this sense. The conception of data I'm working with is that of a claim that inquire is considered collectively have good reason to believe at the outset of inquiry. Okay.

That claim is, as we put it, as philosopher put it, defeasible. Right. It might not be true. It might be false. You know, it might be defeated, but you need some. at least equally strong justification for thinking that that datal claim, that piece of that datum is mistaken. If you can't provide that, then accounting for that datum is a constraint on the development

of a theory that's going to yield illumination of the domain in question. Okay, good. I guess what, if I have an objection, maybe this is the right time to say it, I'll advertise your books. You have a big book on moral realism and then a little book on what happened to good and evil, which is sort of like the baby version for those of us who are not going to become professional moral philosophers. And it's a great read. It's very, very readable for people who are interested in these questions. And you go through a lot of the possible objections to this kind of moral realism. And I didn't find my objection in there, in at least the words that

I would use to put it in. So I guess my objection is, you talk about it. You talk about it. the potential objection from disagreement, right? Just, you might imagine the fact that just because people disagree about morality, somehow that undermines the claim that there are objectively real moral statements. And that seems pretty easy to refute. I mean, people disagree about all sorts of things. But my worry is not that there exist disagreements, but that I don't know how to adjudicate the disagreements. Like if someone says one plus one equals two and someone else says one plus one equals three, I know how to sit down and check which one is correct. And if someone says the universe is expanding and someone else says the universe is contracting, likewise I knew, I know what experiments

or observations to make. But if someone says, you know, in the trolley problem, you should let the trolley hit the five people. And in another person says, no, no, you should take an action and just kill the one person. I don't know what experiments to do or what logical exercise to go through to figure out which one is correct. Is that a reasonable objection to realism? Absolutely. It's absolutely a reasonable objection. And it's one of the hardest, I think, for realists to handle. Once more, I want to be clear that realists have available to them a variety of different epistemological strategies for handling this, for handling this objection. I don't want to canvas them all because I

I don't take too much time, be tedious, and I don't endorse them all. Yeah, no, we don't need to get all of them. Let's get the good ones. That's right, yeah. But I want to back up, actually, and say something by way of preliminary. And that is that as I understand your objection, it's basically an epistemological objection. It's that in circumstances of disagreement, let's call it fundamental disagreement, where the disagreement is not owing to a mistake

right in some in in about some ancillary factual non-moral matter which is such that if if some if one of the parties to the disagreement were to come to realize their mistake about that then they'd agree with you about the morality yeah so let's not focus on that sort of disagreement in that case here's the worst here's the worst case scenario that there'd be no way of resolving that sort of disagreement. What I want to say is that even if there were no way to do that,

it's not clear to me why that would impugn realism. Realism is in the first instance of a metaphysical claim. It's a claim about what there is, namely a moral reality, not of our own creation. And I'd want to explore. the possibility that although here's worst case scenario again, we can't resolve these fundamental disagreements. They're just intractable, even in principle. So suppose that's right. It's not clear to me what that would tell us about the existence or non-existence of a moral reality.

You might think, well, if something is objectively real or objectively true, then in principle, there's got to be a way of convincing everybody of its truth. But unfortunately for realists, we see no possibility of convincing everyone of the truth of any given moral claim, no matter how obvious, Sean and Russ might find it. Nevertheless, there are going to be some outliers who disagree,

and even in principle, we can't get them over to our side. So suppose that's, maybe that's wrong. You know, that's the, you know, let's be really optimistic. That's wrong. We could get everybody over to our side. But I'm not optimistic like that. Yeah. You know, I think, you know, so let's assume that there really is such a thing as what I call

fundamental disagreement. Then the question is, what's the theoretical fallout? Now, there are two possibilities here. One is to say, you know what? There is an objective reality out there despite our inability to convince everyone of its nature. where it's content. And the other is to say, well, if we can't convince everyone in principle about this matter, then there can't be, where the best explanation is that there isn't an objective reality.

Now, I want to hear more about why we should go that latter route rather than the former, because I think, you know, if you look at other areas of philosophical disagreement, like whether there's a god or not, they're brilliant people on both sides. And I doubt, you know, I'm pessimistic myself about whether we're ever going to get consensus on that matter, no matter how informed about the empirical elements of our universe we are. And yet I think in that case, although I'm pessimistic about the possibility of resolving fundamental disagreement on this matter, I think it's, to me, it's very clear that, you should be a realist about this matter, namely whether God exists or not isn't up to us. I know there are some people who disagree who think that we create God in some way or whether there is a God has in some way to answer to our own beliefs about it.

But I think that's really an implausible view. I think either there is, let's just, let's fix our target here, an omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent creator of the universe or there isn't. And it doesn't, you know, or say so doesn't make one answer or another the right answer. So that's a case in which I think it's pretty clear that we can, we can, we should accept realism about the matter. Either really theism is true or really atheism is true. But I'm, I'm really pessimistic about the possibility of resolving fundamental disagreement. Yeah, I mean, sorry, I do absolutely appreciate that there is a distinction here between

the metaphysical questions and the epistemological questions, and I guess the way that I phrased the worry was more epistemological, but I don't think that they're completely independent from each other either. You know, if we go, if we switch from the God example to, let's say, the cosmological multiverse, right? Let's imagine there are parts of the universe very, very far away that we can never observe, but we think that there is a fact of the matter about whether or not they're there. Whether or not I can convince anyone else is less important to me than how do I even decide for myself what to think about this? Or how could I in principle decide? If I were granted omniscience, if I were granted the ability to see things that are further away, then the speed

of light lets me look, then I could actually answer the question about how do I decide whether not there's a multiverse or not. But with the moral questions, I don't even see an in-principle way of adjudicating these, even just amongst myself. We forget about convincing anyone else. Like, how do I know when my intuitions point in different ways? How do I know objectively and definitively what the right answer is? How could I possibly know? Not realistically, but in potential. Good. I like that way of phrasing the worry. So if I could just maybe tweak it just a little bit to see if I'm aligned with what you're really worried about. The thought is this, if moral realism is true, there's got to be some plausible epistemology that explains

how it is that we get access to objective moral truths, but there is no such epistemology, and therefore moral realism is false. Is that a good way of stating the objection? I will tentatively go with that, yes, provisionally. So, yeah, so taking that way, it's an invitation for the realist to explain how it is, sorry, my kind of realist, non-naturalism, because the not naturalist realist actually has an answer to you that's, at least in principle, quite straightforward. But for someone like me who thinks that morality is really, more features are discontinuous from scientific features of the world, then the, whatever standard scientific, means of gaining access to the natural world are they're not going to be sufficient.

They can be enlisted to help, but they're not going to be sufficient to get us not moral knowledge. So we need some other way of gaining moral knowledge. And again, there are different epistemologies. There's, for instance, a coherentist epistemology, which I'm not a fan of, but which shares a lot of similarity with a view that you offered, maybe 20, 25 minutes ago, according to which the way we gain knowledge is try to shape our views at various levels of generality from judgments about concrete cases to very large abstract principles and everything

in between, to get them to cohere with one another in as mutually supportive a belief network as possible. That's a view that was called reflective equilibrium that is very likely the, well, it's the default methodology in morality. It's not one that I'm a fan of myself, and it's got a clear epistemological correlate in the coherence tradition. What I would say is here's where you start in answering questions of the sort that you're asking, and you start with your intuitions. You start with the clearest cases, like genocides immoral. Yep. But then where do you go from there? I guess there are two questions. One is, where do you go from

there? And two is, how can you, why should you, not how can, that's easy enough, but why should you trust your intuitions? And both of these are really good, both of these are really good questions. Sorry, that was self-flattery because I asked those questions. You mentioned that they were questions. You didn't necessarily invent the questions. Okay. And there, so. Paranthetically, this is the big problem of being a professional moral philosopher, right?

You have to be constantly on guard for people saying, well, that's not very moral of you, you moral philosopher. Well, you know, the one thing I always hear, not from fellow philosophers, but from other people, like at bars or on, used to be airplanes. when people would find out what I did. And then they'd find out, you know, I'd give them in a nutshell what my view is about moral realism. They say, that's so arrogant. That's so dogmatic. And, you know, you got to distinguish between, on the one hand, affirming the existence

of an objective morality, and then on the other, affirming that you've got all of its contents. That's right. So I do the first, but not the latter. Good. Anyway, sorry, I interrupted. No. There are, what I want to do is I want to be, start by being. concessive and say that although I think that intuitions, as I've said a few times now, play

ineliminable vital roles in any plausible moral epistemology and any plausible philosophical epistemology, I think. I want to be concessive and allowed that a number of our intuitions can have been distorted by any number of factors, you know, by prejudices that we've imbued from our culture or from our parents or friends. various morally relevant kinds of factual ignorance that we have as a result of the time in which we live or the education we've received or are just lack of candle power up there. So there are reason one always needs to do a check on whether one's intuitions have been formed in a good environment in reliable ways. The problem, though, I'm just going to anticipate a worry on your part. The problem is that when you do those sorts of checks, you're doing them by reference to other intuitions that you have rather than some external world that's going to give you.

If you're a skeptic about the external world, all you got to do is walk into a table and see, oh, well, maybe I shouldn't be so skeptical anymore. There does seem to be something out there like that. There's nothing out there like that, if I'm right, if my picture of morality. is right when it comes to the moral world. There's no, there's no, nothing that's going to impinge on your senses directly or necessarily that's going, that's going to give you the sort of check you get to indicate that your moral intuitions or your moral view more generally is mistaken. So I want to allow that that's, that's a quite serious challenge to my kind of epist, to a moral realist, non-naturalist,

epistemology. If you've got a naturalist view, you're going to, as I said before, you're going to try to assimilate the gaining of moral knowledge to the ways in which we acquire non-moral knowledge empirically. So I don't, I don't, I wish I had an elevator speech in which I could address all worries about reliance on our intuitions here. I guess what I want to say is that to the question, where should we start? The answer is with our intuitions that strike us as most sure about which we are most confident in, all the while allowing that these could be mistaken. How is it that we go on to use, not the word that you've used, but I think you've had in mind, how do we calibrate these intuitions? The answer is we can never calibrate them in a way

such that we can be guaranteed that we are, to use your word, decisively in the no. We always have to be, we always have to have a kind of second order, higher order recognition of our fallibility, that even the things that we feel, that's actually the wrong way to put it, even the moral views that strike us as so clearly true,

we have to have a background, open-mindedness about the possibility that, you know what, we could be off on the wrong foot here. But that's not the place to start. The place to start is with our very strong moral convictions and then trying to build from them a coherent network of moral beliefs, all the while being open to the possibility that we're mistaken and open to hearing from those with whom we disagree, some. reasons why we should abandon our view. If in the end, having heard that, we say, you know what, my view still, it seems to weather the storm there. I think I can handle this. Then you're justified

in believing what you believe. And if you've, if your beliefs are true and if you've come to those beliefs on the basis of the adequate reasons that support them, you've got knowledge. Can we be certain that we've ever got such knowledge? No. But that doesn't distinguish moral knowledge from knowledge in any other sphere. I think that, you know, operationally, what you just described is incredibly close to my version of constructivism as well. So it's interesting that the metaphysics underlying, it might be very different, but the boots on the ground actions might be the same. Yeah. But I do, I think maybe it'll be helpful for the audience if we clarify a little bit about that metaphysics, because maybe we skipped over too quickly the distinction between the

naturalist and non-naturalist. And I even go so far as to talk about the physicalist way of thinking about the world. You know, I had Ned Hall on the podcast, and we talked about humianism versus anti-humianism about the laws of nature. And there's this humian view that all that exists is the universe happening over and over again, right? You know, whatever happens in the universe, that's it. And everything else is commentary.

And I'm kind of sympathetic to that, although Ned did, you know, raise some doubts in my minds. And then there's this anti-humane view that the laws of nature have some umph to them, that they're not simply descriptions of what happens, that in some sense bring about what is happening. And I can't necessarily get my mind around that, but I maybe dimly see an analogy with your version of moral non-naturalist realism, because it's, you would agree, I think, that the moral status of a situation does supervene on what's physically happening. In other words, if two situations arise at different parts of the universe, but they're physically exactly the same, the same collection of atoms assembled into people is doing exactly the same kind of thing,

you would say that inevitably, by moral stance towards those two things, will be the same. There's no extra distinction I can draw. But nevertheless, you're going to say that there is something important. There is some moral status that is, even though it supervenes on the physical things happening, it's not identical with them. Is that a right construal? Yeah, that's exactly right. That's a really nice way to put it. So the so-called supervenience of the moral on the natural or the non-moral is just what you said, namely that if two situations are identical in all non-moral ways, then morally speaking, they have to be identical. I believe that, and so does almost almost every other moral philosopher.

It's come under some challenges recently, but it seems to me to be correct. And then the question is, there are lots of questions to ask about this, but let's just focus on the one that you've asked, and that is it the case that in addition to all that non-moral stuff, maybe it's physical, maybe it's not just physical,

is there also some moral realm that sort of sits on top of it, as you will? And my view is, yeah, there is. It's not the naturalist realist says, no. It's not that there's another layer on top of the non-moral or the natural. It's all natural, top to bottom. It's just we can carve that up in different ways. Some of the natural has to do with our psychological states, for instance.

Some of the natural has to do with economic phenomena. Some of the natural has to do with chemistry, and some has to do with subatomic particles. And morality is in there, too. But it's all a seamless concatenation of natural features that together make up the universe. I think there is a huge concatenation of natural features and substances that make up the universe. But I also think on top of that, so to speak, there's morality that can't be redactation. to any of that. It does depend on it. To me, it just wouldn't make sense to say that an action was wrong if you couldn't also point to some natural features of the action in virtue of which

the action was wrong. So there is a dependence relation between moral reality and non-moral reality. But it's not exactly the same reality there. And that's long been a worry. about my kind of view. Why, if we can explain everything that needs explaining just by reference to naturalistic, naturalistic areas of investigation, then why add this extra layer, this moral, features to the universe? And my thought is, that's a great question, but it presupposes that you can explain everything that needs explaining just by naturalistic means. And that's, And that's something I reject. Well, I guess, yeah, and this is where we are definitely going to differ, I think,

because in my book The Big Picture, I tried to make exactly this case that it's kind of a causal closure argument, that if I am allowed in principle to describe the universe in the language of fundamental physics, right, bosons and fermions are quantum wave functions obeying some equations, and that description is in principle complete. Like it does not need any extra information to tell me what will happen within that language, right? I will tell you what all the fermions and bosons are going to do. Then how can it be possible that there is some reality to extra stuff if that reality has no influence on what happens in the world? Oh, that's a great question.

I thought you were going in a slightly different direction. So I'm a little worried about causal closure arguments or causal. exclusion arguments because I think they're going to in the end exclude too much if we think that everything can ultimately be explained, everything that happens in the world can ultimately be explained by fermions and bosons, then that leaves little room for beliefs and desires, for instance, to do in explaining, unless you think that a belief is nothing other than an arrangement to fermions and bosons. And that's a view that's that some people have held in the philosophy of mind, but not many people hold.

And that's not, I don't mean to argue by, you know, by appeal to the majority. That's not. Sure. Yeah. It's just saying there might be some worrying implications of arguing, of that sort of causal exclusion argument that, on the one hand, you jettison moral features from the, from the metaphysics, but you might have to jettison a lot more that you're less comfortable. jettisoning. That's one point.

Yes, I have a response to that, but I wanted you to keep going before I give it. Okay. But the other is that I guess the question indicates a presupposition, which is that everything in the universe actually can be explained by reference to fundamental physics. and that's just the assumption that I'm calling it to question. Now, the last part of your question said, well, if things, how can we explain what's going on, or maybe put it this way, I think this is not the way you put it, but why should we posit a realm of features, moral features,

if they are unnecessary to explain what's happening in the world? because why are they unnecessary? Because fundamental physics can explain all that. Right. So either fundamental physics can explain morality, in which case you're a naturalist about things, or it can't, but if it can't, then why positive anything that fundamental physics can't explain?

But what I would say is that this seems to be expressive of what I'll call a scientific view of the world. I don't mean that to be prejudicial. No, I get it. That's fine. Just want to call you to which all the truths that there are are in principle given by science of one kind or another. It doesn't have to be physical.

It could be social scientific as well as natural scientific. I want to leave that open to be as ecumenical as possible. But that kind of view is perhaps obviously not one to which I'm attracted And I think there is this fundamental problem with it, which is that the core scientific claim, namely that all the truths there are can be explained by science. It's not itself a truth that can be explained by science. It's not or it can't be confirmed by science. It's one that it can be, if it's confirmable, which I hope it's not,

is to be confirmed by philosophy, actually. I know that sounds very imperial. But it doesn't seem to be that any science is in a position to pronounce on it. Well, I think, so let me take my turn at giving your side of the argument in the way that I'm able to understand it. The part of your shorter book, whatever happened to good and evil, that I found most persuasive, is the idea that we should take morality seriously as real because it plays an explanatory role. when we talk about at least what happens in the world at the human level, right? And that's why we take other things to be real, because they play some explanatory role.

And this is what I was biting my tongue about before, because the way that I would put it is, I wouldn't say that things like beliefs or purposes or morals and judgments are equated with certain arrangements of fermions and bosons. but I would say that they are ways of talking about certain classes of arrangements of fermions and bosons. They are emergent in that weak sense. In the same, in almost exactly, sorry, there is a difference between morals and purposes, let's say. I think that purposes can be straightforwardly scientific and descriptive of what happens in the world. The most compact way of describing what the physical things going on in the world might be in terms of purposes.

Whereas I think that morals are more subjective than that, but both of them, I think, have this character that they can play an explanatory role at some level of description, but not at another one, and therefore you wouldn't call them fundamental pieces of the architecture of reality. Yeah, so it's not clear to me why there's a lot to discuss about what is to be fundamental.

if what it is to be fundamental is to be in some way not equatable, identical to, or reducible to something else, then I think morality is fundamental in that respect. Right. But I want to, but people have different views about what fundamentally amounts to. I want to allow at the same time that when something possesses a moral feature, it does so in virtue. of having various non-moral features. So in that sense, some people think, well, then morality isn't fundamental after all, because it's not at the very bottom of the explanatory chain, so to speak.

I think it's very far down at the bottom. Well, I guess that's good. I mean, let's just, I want to give you a chance to defend that, but let's just dwell or at least emphasize how crucial that statement is. I mean, you're saying that on the one hand, morality is completely tied to the physical situation in some very real sense. And on the other hand, it is absolutely fundamental and necessary to describe what's going on. Yeah, that's right. I mean, think about chemistry, for instance.

You might say chemistry is, you might say, you might be a realist about chemistry and say, we have identified all these different kinds of molecules. given them names, but we didn't invent them. I mean, we did a few. But the things early on in the periodic table, we didn't invent those things. No. And so they're real in the realist sense. And yet you might say, nevertheless, chemical reality is not fundamental because whenever

you've got a molecule of hydrogen, for instance, you've got an arrangement of atomic material or subatomic material. Those arrangements might be different in different circumstances, but nevertheless, you might, at least in principle, be able to go all the way down, so to speak, to the physical, to the atomic, subatomic level when citing some chemical fact. You might be able to do that with regard to morality, but I want to distinguish two things. one is matters of specific fact as instantiations of properties or the realization of certain features at a given time from the existence of those features themselves now what I want to allow is that when a given action say

or when it is wrong or when a given intention or motive is morally admirable there's going to be some physical stuff going on in that scenario. You might be able to describe that scenario entirely at the physical level. But if you were to do that, my claim is that you wouldn't capture the morality of the action. So that this is a different way of insisting on an ontological, if you will, an ontological division between moral features and physical features or in any event natural features. That's my view about the relation there, whether then you want, whether you want to then say, given that for any particular moral fact about, you know, that occurs at a given time,

at a given place, that there's some physical realization of that fact, if that's sufficient to show that moral features are non-fundamental, I can live with that, if that's your conception of fundamentality. But what I want to insist on is that what it is to be something

like to be morally admirable or to be morally required is not a physical thing. It's not a physical feature of things. Okay.

Yeah, I think I understand that. I think that's fair. I mean, maybe to bring the plane in for a landing here, we can step outside the metaethical

discussion we've been having about how one decides or how one conceptualizes what morality is. And let me ask whether or not the particular

point of view you have on that of your realist but non-naturalism does affect your actual moral system. I mean, does that point us in a direction of deontology or consequentialism or virtual ethics or whatever other system you might want to make?

No. That's the short answer. Oh, no. That's the meta-ethics. The meta-in meta-ethics. That's a great question, though. most moral realists have tried deliberately to be as neutral as possible about the so-called normative ethical issues.

On the thought that, here's the animating thought, no matter what moral system is correct, we realists are not in the business of trying to answer that question, but rather talking about, or instead in the business of trying to talk about the status of that system. And to say that that system obtained independently of our attitudes towards it. That said, my own

view is that if you were to endorse a kind of a kind of immoralist position, according to which you're celebrating things like genocide and oppression and you're denigrating

things like compassion and kindness, that's no that's not the sort of picture that moral realists have ever wanted to vindicate so I actually do think this is why I think your question is so interesting I think that at bottom

there really has been though realists have not fessed up to it there really have been some implicit assumptions about the content rather than the status of morality that have been driving realists to defend the views that they have done

And in work that I'm doing with my collaborators, John Banks and Terrence Cuneo, we are, among the other things we're doing is we're setting out a view of moral realism that builds into it the idea that there's certain substantive constraints on what morality, moral reality can look like. They have to obey these sort of paradigmatic moral verdicts about, say, the wrongness of genocide and the rightness of compassion. Well, it does seem, I mean, I certainly see conceptually the distinction between the, the, the, the, the question of actually choosing how to be moral. But on the other hand, doesn't it seem a little bit, wouldn't it seem weird to say that two completely different notions of what morality is, nevertheless have no impact on the morals we think are actually the correct ones? That would just seem weird. it would seem very weird from a constructivist point of view because what a constructivist is going to say, I don't mean that as any sort of criticism. What a constructivist would say is that the ultimate source of morality is us in some way or other, right? And so then you've got a way of nicely pinpointing how it is that we can

we can extract, if you will, or we can infer the substance, the content of morality from the meta-ethic. If, for instance, what morality is at bottom is that set of norms that are mutually agreed on by some group, say some society or some culture, then given that understanding of the nature and the status of morality, you'll be able to pretty readily read off, you know, know, with some sociological knowledge, what actually is right or wrong in a given culture, a given society. But you can't make that move with realism. You know, with realism, it's like we didn't make it up.

And so from that, that leaves everything open as to what the substance or the content of morality might be. Nevertheless, as I said, if you drill down a bit, moral realists, whether naturalist or non-naturalist, would be aghast if the reality, if the morality they were trying to vindicate was, as I described earlier, one that celebrated oppression and genocide, for instance. Well, I mean, that does make sense to me. I think maybe you're not even going as far as you could go. If you think that our evidence for what is and is not moral comes largely from our intuitions, then you could say, well, that's going to lead us to certain kinds of conclusions about what is moral, right? It will do. That's right. But once again, people will have different intuitions

and we've got to recognize the fallibility of our own. So I was distinguishing between two views, one of which says that given a meta-ethical view that actually entails some so-called first order or normative ethical commitments, whereas on their realist view, it wouldn't entail the truth of any normative ethical view at all. It would just leave it open as to how we glean, get our evidence for that. And just one other caveat, and that is that my intuition-based epistemology is, again, only one of a variety of different kinds of epistemologies, most of which we haven't touched on in this conversation. It's available to realists. Yeah.

Okay. I mean, maybe then final question, sort of a slight variation on that one. If moral realists are, you know, have available them in principle, various different moral systems, depending on what they discover through this kind of thing, does your kind of moral realism suggest any way of people talking to each other about morality or, you know, the ways in which, if we're not sure what morality to pick, how we can learn from others and communicate, or is it, again, sort of any possible answer to that question is in principle compatible with your realism? Well, the answer I would give is the way people ought to talk to one another is respectfully.

That's the snarky unilluminating answer. I don't think that there is a a determinate method by which we can always make progress in our discussions with one another about what's morally right or wrong I mean people you think think over in your area people talk about the scientific method

I mean you're a scientist I'm not but I'm skeptical that there really is any such thing that's characterizable. Yeah, I'm on your side. It's completely crazy. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

I mean, we can toss out, you know, very vague generalities and things like that on which we can all agree, but they're not in a given instance of conflict among scientists. They're not going to, reliance on that kind of method is not going to be sufficient to resolve disagreement. There's not a simple algorithm. Yeah, exactly. And there's nothing like that in philosophy generally, much less moral philosophy in particular. But so.

I can say sort of anodyne things, you know, keep your, keep an open mind, acquaint yourself with relevant facts, make sure that you're having this conversation in a way that isn't triggering really strong emotions that are likely to cloud your judgment, things like that. But I don't have anything remotely algorithm like to offer by way of getting from the intuitions you currently have to getting to a settled view about which you can have very, very strong confidence. Yeah, I mean, I think that that's probably a general lesson epistemologically that algorithms are hard to get and maybe not even the right thing to be striving for in some of

these situations. Yeah. You're absolutely right about that. All right. Rush Day for Landau, this was extremely helpful. I think that much like when I talk about foundations, of quantum mechanics, and I have my own point of view, but I say, like, really, my big goal is not to have people agree with my point of view, but for people to care about the foundations of quantum mechanics, I think the same thing about morality. I think that, you know, it would just be good if people really sat down and carefully, really thought about where morality comes from, rather than agreeing with my ideas about it, you know, let's just take the question seriously, and I think that you're doing great work and helping people do exactly that. Thanks. I love that attitude.

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