I’m a moral antirealist and routinely find myself defending antirealist positions from bad objections, even if I don’t endorse those antirealist positions. This is true of speaker relativism as it is of error theory and noncognitivism. So, thanks for the post, and it’s good to see more people expressing views yours. The original tweet asks if anyone is a speaker relativist. Such remarks are often unclear. But if the claim the one you offer:
“Statement about morality are really statements about one’s own values”
…these sorts of remarks trouble me. Which statements, exactly? Is this an empirical claim about what people in general mean when they engage in moral discourse? Or a psychological claim about what they think?
If not, and it is instead a kind of definition, e.g., “if something is a moral claim, then it is a statement about the speaker’s own values,” and we go out and observe people saying things like “murder is wrong,” then are these people making statements about their own values regardless of whether that is their intention? For instance, suppose someone is a moral realist and is not intending to communicate their own values, but is instead intending to communicate what they consider to be stance-independent moral facts. Are their intentions irrelevant, and their statement nevertheless purports to be a statement about their own values? Or, instead, is this person not actually making a moral statement?
The same holds for your second definition::
"Statements about morality are really statements about the values that a better version of you [better as defined by you] would hold."
I prefer accounts like this to realist accounts, since I can at least make more sense of this account than of realist accounts, but it’s again unclear to me which statements this kind of account applies to. This isn’t what I mean when I make moral claims, for instance. Unless what I say doesn’t express what I mean. You say:
"Rather the claim is that we should construe moral language as literally being about one’s values"
…This sounds more like a prescriptive than a descriptive claim. That is, it looks like a proposal that we use moral language this way, rather than a claim that we in fact do so. The remarks that follow seem to reinforce this. But if this is the intent, this wasn’t clear from the outset, so I’m a bit puzzled as to whether this a descriptive or prescriptive claim. If one’s position is “we should use language this way” it seems a bit strange to say that “moral statements mean X” rather than “I think it’s a good idea to use moral statements to mean X.”
Next, you mention some desiderata we might want to get out of moral language, including that it is objective (or “ersatz equivalents”), but your proposal “unfortunately” doesn’t give you this. Why is this unfortunate? I don’t find such accounts satisfactory myself, but I also don’t find anything unfortunate about their absence. I’m puzzled when people do grant that there’d be something good or desirable about objective moral values.
In addition, there are some other concerns I have with the advantages of your proposal. If it is a prescriptive proposal, some of the listed benefits wouldn’t make much sense, since they seem to be advantages in account for how people already speak and act when it comes to morality, e.g., “It explains why we debate morality and can do so profitably. We have enough common ground in our ethical feelings, and very possibly, our ideal selves have even more.”
I really enjoyed the remarks on indeterminacy at the end. I argue for descriptive folk metaethical indeterminacy in my dissertation, and marshal a number of theoretical points and empirical findings to make my case.
Great post, glad to see people discussing metaethics here in a thoughtful and substantive way.
Great comment: I've added your comment and my reply to the body of the post.
As you allude- this post is not a claim about what people think of themselves as meaning when they use moral terms. I guess I have this picture of semantics that works like this. Folk discourse presupposes the existence of a thing that fulfills a bunch of roles. To create the semantics for that discourse, we search for the thing that fills those roles. Only sometimes we find that there is nothing that fulfills all the roles in folk discourse- but there are some things that partially do. At that point, we have a choice- scrap the folk discourse, or, through a somewhat procrustean process, "squeeze" the folk discourse into whatever is it's 'best fit'. This is neither a fully prescriptive or a fully descriptive project- it's saying "hey, if we treat moral talk as being about this, then it kind of makes sense of many features of moral talk- even if it doesn't make sense of all them perfectly". It's in line with the general "Canberra plan" approach to philosophy I endorse. In the conclusion, I'm saying "hey, if we take this Canberra plan approach", the "right" way to reconstruct moral language might vary from person to person.
The reason the absence of an objective realm of moral truths is unfortunate is that if it existed, we would thereby have a semantics for moral talk that fully matched with how people use moral talk, and also aligned well with what people take themselves as doing. This would be a "better deserver" as a candidate for a semantics of moral language.
Thanks for the gracious reply. There's a good chance we approach these questions with different views about what we see our projects to be, and what presuppositions, views about language, and so on are best to bring to the table.
For instance, I don't think I understand what you mean when you say that folk discourse presupposes the existence of a thing that fulfills a bunch of roles. Who is doing the presupposing? The people using the discourse, or the discourse itself? If the former, it seems like an empirical question, if the latter, I must confess that I wouldn't know what that meant, since I don't typically think of discourses as having presuppositions. Or perhaps it's neither.
Regarding your last comment, do you take the way people use moral talk in a way that indicates there's an objective moral truth, and that people themselves take this to be what they're doing when they use moral language?
"For instance, I don't think I understand what you mean when you say that folk discourse presupposes the existence of a thing that fulfills a bunch of roles. Who is doing the presupposing? The people using the discourse, or the discourse itself? If the former, it seems like an empirical question, if the latter, I must confess that I wouldn't know what that meant, since I don't typically think of discourses as having presuppositions. Or perhaps it's neither."
There are deep and difficult questions here, but I think the the way people talk about morality, and other aspects of moral practice- have a bunch of presuppositions embedded about its object and you can infer these by looking at what their linguistic and other practices needs to make sense. For example, the way people talk about morality would make no sense if nothing could be known about morality- people would be willfully violating epistemic norms all the time by just stating stuff as if it was true even though it's unknowable- people would be basing their actions on something they had no epistemic access to. Hence we can infer from this aspect of the discourse that whatever moral truths are, they must be knowable in order to meet the requirements of moral practices and discourse. We generate a list of things morality "must be", and we see if anything fits them all, and if nothing fits them all, we have to make a choice- 1) junk moral talk, 2) keep moral talk, but as a fiction or 3) Find the thing that 'comes closest' to meeting all of our criteria. I think construing moral talk as really about the moral attitudes of an idealized version of ourselves is our best shot at 3.
"Regarding your last comment, do you take the way people use moral talk in a way that indicates there's an objective moral truth, and that people themselves take this to be what they're doing when they use moral language?"
It's complicated, especially among educated lay people who often have some awareness of these problems themselves, but I think at the deepest level, moral discourse presupposes these commitments, even if some individual lay people might be skeptics, and even if skeptical views may be increasingly fashionable in the public.
I’ve never really understood why people find the reasons stuff so attractive. I’m an anti-realist myself but don’t see why the realists should have to explain how moral reasons work. Why is it not coherent for the realist to just admit that moral considerations aren’t motivating? To complain that moral considerations don’t provide reason to act seems like just a less clear way of stating the better objection, that it’s not clear where moral considerations are supposed to get their “objective” bite in the first place. But if the realists somehow succeeded at showing that moral statements can be true in some universal sense, I don’t think they need to show that their truth provides motivation for action or anything like that
Can you explain speaker subjectivism a little bit more because it doesn’t sound like you’re just saying “I don’t like stealing” the way you describe it.
It's something very close to that, but it won't be purely an attitude of disliking, it's going to depend on a theory of what attitudes are moral attitudes per section the section: "The other catch: What kind of values". The literature on this is very complex.
I’m a moral antirealist and routinely find myself defending antirealist positions from bad objections, even if I don’t endorse those antirealist positions. This is true of speaker relativism as it is of error theory and noncognitivism. So, thanks for the post, and it’s good to see more people expressing views yours. The original tweet asks if anyone is a speaker relativist. Such remarks are often unclear. But if the claim the one you offer:
“Statement about morality are really statements about one’s own values”
…these sorts of remarks trouble me. Which statements, exactly? Is this an empirical claim about what people in general mean when they engage in moral discourse? Or a psychological claim about what they think?
If not, and it is instead a kind of definition, e.g., “if something is a moral claim, then it is a statement about the speaker’s own values,” and we go out and observe people saying things like “murder is wrong,” then are these people making statements about their own values regardless of whether that is their intention? For instance, suppose someone is a moral realist and is not intending to communicate their own values, but is instead intending to communicate what they consider to be stance-independent moral facts. Are their intentions irrelevant, and their statement nevertheless purports to be a statement about their own values? Or, instead, is this person not actually making a moral statement?
The same holds for your second definition::
"Statements about morality are really statements about the values that a better version of you [better as defined by you] would hold."
I prefer accounts like this to realist accounts, since I can at least make more sense of this account than of realist accounts, but it’s again unclear to me which statements this kind of account applies to. This isn’t what I mean when I make moral claims, for instance. Unless what I say doesn’t express what I mean. You say:
"Rather the claim is that we should construe moral language as literally being about one’s values"
…This sounds more like a prescriptive than a descriptive claim. That is, it looks like a proposal that we use moral language this way, rather than a claim that we in fact do so. The remarks that follow seem to reinforce this. But if this is the intent, this wasn’t clear from the outset, so I’m a bit puzzled as to whether this a descriptive or prescriptive claim. If one’s position is “we should use language this way” it seems a bit strange to say that “moral statements mean X” rather than “I think it’s a good idea to use moral statements to mean X.”
Next, you mention some desiderata we might want to get out of moral language, including that it is objective (or “ersatz equivalents”), but your proposal “unfortunately” doesn’t give you this. Why is this unfortunate? I don’t find such accounts satisfactory myself, but I also don’t find anything unfortunate about their absence. I’m puzzled when people do grant that there’d be something good or desirable about objective moral values.
In addition, there are some other concerns I have with the advantages of your proposal. If it is a prescriptive proposal, some of the listed benefits wouldn’t make much sense, since they seem to be advantages in account for how people already speak and act when it comes to morality, e.g., “It explains why we debate morality and can do so profitably. We have enough common ground in our ethical feelings, and very possibly, our ideal selves have even more.”
I really enjoyed the remarks on indeterminacy at the end. I argue for descriptive folk metaethical indeterminacy in my dissertation, and marshal a number of theoretical points and empirical findings to make my case.
Great post, glad to see people discussing metaethics here in a thoughtful and substantive way.
Great comment: I've added your comment and my reply to the body of the post.
As you allude- this post is not a claim about what people think of themselves as meaning when they use moral terms. I guess I have this picture of semantics that works like this. Folk discourse presupposes the existence of a thing that fulfills a bunch of roles. To create the semantics for that discourse, we search for the thing that fills those roles. Only sometimes we find that there is nothing that fulfills all the roles in folk discourse- but there are some things that partially do. At that point, we have a choice- scrap the folk discourse, or, through a somewhat procrustean process, "squeeze" the folk discourse into whatever is it's 'best fit'. This is neither a fully prescriptive or a fully descriptive project- it's saying "hey, if we treat moral talk as being about this, then it kind of makes sense of many features of moral talk- even if it doesn't make sense of all them perfectly". It's in line with the general "Canberra plan" approach to philosophy I endorse. In the conclusion, I'm saying "hey, if we take this Canberra plan approach", the "right" way to reconstruct moral language might vary from person to person.
The reason the absence of an objective realm of moral truths is unfortunate is that if it existed, we would thereby have a semantics for moral talk that fully matched with how people use moral talk, and also aligned well with what people take themselves as doing. This would be a "better deserver" as a candidate for a semantics of moral language.
Thanks for the gracious reply. There's a good chance we approach these questions with different views about what we see our projects to be, and what presuppositions, views about language, and so on are best to bring to the table.
For instance, I don't think I understand what you mean when you say that folk discourse presupposes the existence of a thing that fulfills a bunch of roles. Who is doing the presupposing? The people using the discourse, or the discourse itself? If the former, it seems like an empirical question, if the latter, I must confess that I wouldn't know what that meant, since I don't typically think of discourses as having presuppositions. Or perhaps it's neither.
Regarding your last comment, do you take the way people use moral talk in a way that indicates there's an objective moral truth, and that people themselves take this to be what they're doing when they use moral language?
"For instance, I don't think I understand what you mean when you say that folk discourse presupposes the existence of a thing that fulfills a bunch of roles. Who is doing the presupposing? The people using the discourse, or the discourse itself? If the former, it seems like an empirical question, if the latter, I must confess that I wouldn't know what that meant, since I don't typically think of discourses as having presuppositions. Or perhaps it's neither."
There are deep and difficult questions here, but I think the the way people talk about morality, and other aspects of moral practice- have a bunch of presuppositions embedded about its object and you can infer these by looking at what their linguistic and other practices needs to make sense. For example, the way people talk about morality would make no sense if nothing could be known about morality- people would be willfully violating epistemic norms all the time by just stating stuff as if it was true even though it's unknowable- people would be basing their actions on something they had no epistemic access to. Hence we can infer from this aspect of the discourse that whatever moral truths are, they must be knowable in order to meet the requirements of moral practices and discourse. We generate a list of things morality "must be", and we see if anything fits them all, and if nothing fits them all, we have to make a choice- 1) junk moral talk, 2) keep moral talk, but as a fiction or 3) Find the thing that 'comes closest' to meeting all of our criteria. I think construing moral talk as really about the moral attitudes of an idealized version of ourselves is our best shot at 3.
"Regarding your last comment, do you take the way people use moral talk in a way that indicates there's an objective moral truth, and that people themselves take this to be what they're doing when they use moral language?"
It's complicated, especially among educated lay people who often have some awareness of these problems themselves, but I think at the deepest level, moral discourse presupposes these commitments, even if some individual lay people might be skeptics, and even if skeptical views may be increasingly fashionable in the public.
I’ve never really understood why people find the reasons stuff so attractive. I’m an anti-realist myself but don’t see why the realists should have to explain how moral reasons work. Why is it not coherent for the realist to just admit that moral considerations aren’t motivating? To complain that moral considerations don’t provide reason to act seems like just a less clear way of stating the better objection, that it’s not clear where moral considerations are supposed to get their “objective” bite in the first place. But if the realists somehow succeeded at showing that moral statements can be true in some universal sense, I don’t think they need to show that their truth provides motivation for action or anything like that
Can you explain speaker subjectivism a little bit more because it doesn’t sound like you’re just saying “I don’t like stealing” the way you describe it.
It's something very close to that, but it won't be purely an attitude of disliking, it's going to depend on a theory of what attitudes are moral attitudes per section the section: "The other catch: What kind of values". The literature on this is very complex.
OK, thanks. I have a bunch more questions but I will try to read this again later and think about them some more before I ask any of them!