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Are Right and Wrong Real? (Episode 43)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
Are things really right or wrong? Is morality objective?
In this conversation, Caleb gives three arguments for thinking that it is. Michael questions each one. Along the way, they discuss the Stoic response to skepticism, why this issue matters, and how the ancient Stoics grounded their picture of the good life.
(06:51) What is Moral Realism?
(16:12) The Argument from Intuition
(26:47) The Argument from Practical Reason
(40:12) Epistemic Realism
***
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Transcript
Living for Pleasure: Rational or Not?
00:00:00
Speaker
One way to interpret that is you can have a extremely short time horizon and maximize the amount of pleasurable experiences as fast as you can. Basically, party hard until you expire. And of course, there are some people who do this. They take this life path. And the question is, is that
00:00:28
Speaker
a rational way to think about your values across time? Are you using practical reason well if you think that a fine way to live is just to satisfy whatever goals you have at that time? Or is there
00:00:52
Speaker
something deeper a question about what sorts of goals are worth pursuing.
Introduction to Stoa Conversations Podcast
00:00:59
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us, and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
00:01:16
Speaker
And we are going to be talking about moral realism today. So this conversation may be more philosophical in nature, more theoretical.
00:01:33
Speaker
But I think it's important and it's the sort of question that everyone, I think, asks themselves, questions about values, morality, ethics, you know, are these sorts of things, the judgments we make in these domains objective? And if so, or if not, what does that mean?
Meta-Ethics: Nature of Right and Wrong
00:01:55
Speaker
Welcome to another Stoa Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros.
00:02:00
Speaker
And I'm Michael Trombley. Yeah. And as you said, it's, it'll be a bit more abstract, bit more philosophical than a question of, of, you know, we had a discussion on euthanasia, which is maybe that, that most practical level, which is like policy.
00:02:16
Speaker
And you have general questions of what you should do in different kinds of situations. And this is in my philosophical education, we call it kind of a meta ethics question. So a foundational kind of bedrock question that you need an answer to before you can start doing ethics.
00:02:32
Speaker
You know, ethics is the question of what is right and wrong, assuming there is right and wrong. And moral realism is a meta-ethics question. It's a question of does right and wrong even exist? Or if it does, what kind of thing is it? Is it a thing we're just making up? Or is it a thing that is objective in the same way, you know, matter exists or people exist?
00:02:54
Speaker
Yeah, and to make it more concrete, you have this question, why does this sort of discussion matter? There is the argument that you need metaethics in order to talk about these other levels of ethics to begin with.
Subjectivity vs Objectivity in Moral Judgments
00:03:11
Speaker
I'm not so sure if that's right personally, but there are just important questions that arise naturally, I think, which is these sorts of questions like are value judgments arbitrary or are they relative, subjective,
00:03:27
Speaker
purely passionate things. You know, when I say something is wrong and I say something is better, is that just the sort of statement that is the exact same? Basically, you know, when I say ice cream does not taste as good as sorbet, that's a pure matter of taste. Is that the same kind of judgment as the stoic life is better than the Epicurean one?
00:03:53
Speaker
Is that a judgment that is grounded in any kind of fact or is it purely prejudice? So I think that sort of question arises, this issue, do our moral judgments refer to reality? We have these questions about the good life. Is there any sense in which what we might call a good life is good in an objective
00:04:18
Speaker
way are, is there such a thing as human nature, perhaps as a related question where many ancient philosophers believe that humans have a telos, a purpose. And that brings the question of, well, if judgments about telos are relative, subjective, arbitrary, then it seems like we can't make any such claim.
Cultural Relativism and Justice
00:04:49
Speaker
Yeah, totally. So there's this worry about, and the reason we had this conversation is I was even, well, myself, I've studied philosophy for a long time, but I feel sometimes a little shaky in moral realism. I feel a little shaky in the idea that ethics is something objective and it's not just me.
00:05:09
Speaker
communicating ick, or like, you know, I don't like it when somebody does that, or I do like it, just these kind of taste judgments, these subjective judgments. So, you know, if, if, Kayla, if you can present some compelling reasons for moral realism, I will be, I will, I will really love those. I think that would be really nice to have, would have a lot more confidence.
00:05:30
Speaker
Another reason to care about moral realism is it really gets around this cultural relativist concern as well. So this idea that we could actually say, well, this way of doing things is worse or this way of doing things is better.
00:05:48
Speaker
or this is progress, or this is not, we can make these large judgments, not just based on the culture we're in and the cultural values we have, but objectively, in Plato's Republic, they go through a lot of different definitions of justice. And by justice, they're talking about what's right to do or what people are owed. And one of the first definitions is justice is power. So justice is whatever the person who has the most power says is the case.
00:06:14
Speaker
And that's this kind of subjective reading of morality, which is morality is just the rules made by the people who run the political systems or have the most power.
00:06:26
Speaker
You know, maybe that's, maybe that's fine if the people in power or, you know, do something you agree with, but we would like, I would like some sort of foundation to push back against that. I would like some sort of foundation to say, no, you may have the power, but you're wrong, which is something that, you know, the Stoics and, and Plato try to do. And, but a question we'll be tackling kind of bigger picture here today as well.
00:06:47
Speaker
Yeah, so we're going to, I'm going to be presenting some arguments for why you should think moral realism is true and we'll see what Michael thinks about them. So of course, whenever you're talking about the philosophical issues like this, it's important to be clear about what's at stake. So I think a good definition, the definition that I'll be using for
00:07:06
Speaker
moral realism is that on this moral side, we're concerned about value judgments, which are ultimately claims about what is right or wrong, good or bad.
Objective Facts vs Subjective Perceptions
00:07:22
Speaker
And I don't mean this merely in a narrow sense, but broadly, when people talk about the good life, is that an objective matter?
00:07:34
Speaker
And something is objective. On my account, moral realism, moral objectivity, basically the same thing. So moral realism, the view that there are morality is objective. And then of course the question is, what does it mean for something to be objective?
00:07:52
Speaker
And on my account, a fine definition of this is that something is objective if it's being so or not isn't determined by our attitudes towards it. So humor is not objective. Something being funny is just a matter of everyone else finding it funny.
00:08:18
Speaker
What it is to be funny is just for a number of people to judge something that's funny or not. Similarly, fashion. Is fashion an objective matter? No. Whether or not something is fashionable, that's just going to be determined by our attitudes towards people's clothing behavior, what have you.
00:08:41
Speaker
So those are examples of things that are not objective. On the objective side, we have scientific judgments. The idea that the earth is round, that idea is true, even if, and would be true, even if everyone thought it was flat.
00:09:01
Speaker
Similarly, 2 plus 2 equals 4. That idea would be true even if everyone for some reason was confused. So scientific judgments, mathematical judgments, these are common examples of things that are objective. Their being so isn't determined by our attitudes towards them. So the fundamental point here is that if something is objective, our judgments cannot make it.
00:09:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's really well put, and two things I wanted to say to that. The first is that there's kind of a vice if you go in either direction. So if you think something that is subjective is objective, you think something like humor or fashion is objective when it's not, that's the wrong call, right? And it kind of affects your life. If you go around being like, no, this is the only way to be funny, that person, even though everyone's laughing, that's not what is objectively funny.
00:09:54
Speaker
I don't know. It's kind of weird. It's just like that's kind of a low stakes example, but it's not the right thing to do. You don't want to think that subjective things are objective.
Stoicism: Understanding Reality
00:10:01
Speaker
Likewise, if you were to go around thinking some scientific judgments were subjective or mathematical judgments or the roundness of the world was subjective, you know, that would also be kind of a foolish thing to do.
00:10:12
Speaker
So there's something at stake either direction here. It's not like we can just, it's not like I can just say, well, I feel better if morality is objective. So I'm just going to pretend like it is objective. We want, you know, us as me, as someone who's training in stoicism, I want to get the truth of the matter. Right. I want to, I want to be, I want to see the world as it is. Right. Um, the second thing I was thinking, a nice way to frame this Plato has a dialogue called the youth of fro.
00:10:38
Speaker
This is where the famous Euthyphro dilemma comes from. In this dialogue, Socrates encounters somebody who is, I mean, I'll give the quick aspect of he encounters somebody who claims he knows what is pious, what is right, and he says, well, what even is piety? And they get in this argument about piety, which is, you know, I guess this kind of holy quality. And the argument comes, the argument centers around, well,
00:11:04
Speaker
Do gods call something pious because it is pious, or is it pious because the gods call it pious? And another way of framing that is, are gods value creators or are they value discoverers?
Discovering or Creating Values?
00:11:18
Speaker
And that's the same question we're asking about morality today, which is,
00:11:22
Speaker
Are human beings morality discoverers? Were archaeologists trying to figure out a fact about the world? Or are we value creators? Are we the ones creating ethical meaning in terms of that core right and wrong value? This moral realism question, it's one that was of concern back with Plato leading into the Stoics as well.
00:11:47
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, absolutely. Excellent. So the question is, why would you think moral realism is true, if at all? I think this first came up when we were chatting about Nietzsche. Nietzsche, the best reading of Nietzsche is probably as a moral anti-realist. And basically what he does is like these moral judgments, we can explain why we think equality is good.
00:12:13
Speaker
by reference to these different social factors. He has this whole account of slave morality and master morality. And this is, you can think of it as a explanation for why we believe the things we do about things like equality, suffering, pity. And there's no sense in which objective facts need to play a role. Morality, in a sense, just turns out to be a kind of
00:12:41
Speaker
more weighty form of fashion or humor, if you will. So of course there are arguments. As a reminder, could you go over the slave and master morality really quickly?
00:12:54
Speaker
Yeah, so he thinks something like, so his explanation of our moral judgments refers to what he calls slave morality, master morality. You can also think of it as priest morality versus warrior morality, essentially the slaves. You can think of them as peasants, lower classes, or
00:13:20
Speaker
Christians would be a group of people who decide to value equality. And why would they do that? They do that because the masters, the aristocrats, what have you, are more powerful than them. And equality advances their interests and it helps them
00:13:42
Speaker
you know, meet really what are essentially just selfish ends. Not selfish in the negative sense, but ends you can make sense of without needing to tell a story about objective morality. They want to stop being oppressed, so they'll tell a story that helps them band together and eventually bring down the master so they can live a better life.
00:14:08
Speaker
Whereas master morality, they also tell us another kind of story to themselves, where what's good, the powerful warrior who is landed and has many servants and slaves, and that is what is honorable, say. And that serves their interests, of course, as well.
00:14:32
Speaker
You can think about this often we might want an account of why someone supports particular political positions and you could say, you know, you see some workers striking and you might think, oh, these workers who are striking for justice, they're just lazy or something like this.
Necessity of Moral Realism
00:14:52
Speaker
And then you might say, oh, the person who says that, they're just the business owner who wants their protesters to go back to work. And in both cases, you are coming up with some accounts of the behavior that does not make any reference to objective.
00:15:09
Speaker
facts. So that's the kind of thing that Nietzsche is involved in. And the master of slave morality is a more sophisticated version of what you might often see in disagreements over, say, workers' rights, or whenever you have these sorts of debates involving power struggles. That I think is a, I think Nietzsche, that's a pretty compelling example of if anti, because one of the questions we have is
00:15:38
Speaker
You know, if morality isn't real, why does everyone act like it's real all the time? And Nietzsche's picture is like, well, because it serves our interests to kind of come up with rules that reward our own behavior or limit the behavior of people that can hurt us. It's an explanation for why morality might seem the case, even if it's not. So I think that's a good anti-realism picture. And now we jump into the arguments for why realism would be true.
00:16:09
Speaker
Yeah, so one argument that people love or they hate, you know, some people love it, other people really don't find it all plausible is what's sometimes called the argument from intuition. And it's very simple. It's just that some things really seem like they have objective
00:16:26
Speaker
value. If the Germans won World War II and they brainwashed everyone into thinking that everything they did in World War II was totally fine, all the killing, torture, and so on, all of that was completely kosher, people would have false beliefs. They would be mistaken about the nature of morality and that to many people seems
00:16:54
Speaker
obviously true, so they have the intuition that moral realism accurately represents reality. Similarly, if in more ordinary cases you might see someone act with virtue that are exceptionally courageous or disciplined and you just immediately make the judgment, oh, that's a good trait and
00:17:21
Speaker
Well, typically when we see things in the world, you know, I see a chair in front of me, I'm justified in sumi and assuming that belief is correct. Suppose I went across the street and decide whether I'm safe. I just look both ways. Seems to me that I'm safe. Go ahead. And nearly always that judgment is going to be correct as long as I have adequately prepared. So there's this idea that
00:17:45
Speaker
We're justified in taking our appearances to reflect reality unless there is some defeater for the judgment, some reason why my judgment might be impaired. If I have, for whatever reason, taken a number of drugs before looking both ways and crossing the street, in that case, I might not want to trust appearances. I might want to be much more careful.
00:18:14
Speaker
But the idea is, well, it just seems to us like some things are truly good, other things are truly bad. And well, what's the defeater for that judgment? Of course, there are many different kinds of arguments we could cover, but the thought is none of them are any good. So we can conclude that more realism is true. Some things have objective value. So that's the first argument.
00:18:44
Speaker
I think it's a pretty bad argument for a couple of reasons. I mean, I'm not, I'm not an expert in this kind of stuff or anything, but one, the example I was thinking of is it seems for the majority of human history, it seemed very clear that the sun was rather small, maybe around like half the size of the earth and it rotated around the earth. And that seemed to be the case. And there was no defeater for it until we came up with a defeat.
00:19:08
Speaker
So it seems to me that it was a heuristic. We can just assume this until something comes up, but that's not really the truth that we're looking for. And the nice thing about the sun example is that it doesn't really make a difference how big the sun is. I still got to put my crops under there. I still got to watch out for a sunburn.
00:19:30
Speaker
But it makes a great deal of difference whether or not morality is true. So this kind of general assumption, like the intuition is good enough, we can rely on that. I guess the car example is a bit higher stakes, right? Makes a great deal of difference whether or not I can hit my cars. And I'm not gonna not cross the street in case an invisible car happens to exist. That's a bit of a more compelling, that's a more compelling example than the one that I just came up with. The other thing I would say to this from a stoic perspective is,
00:19:57
Speaker
When you're talking about intuition, what you're talking about is impressions. You're talking about pre-reflective, the way things seem. One thing that Stoicism teaches us is that impressions are wrong all the time. Actually, the Stoic argument is we don't accept impressions until there's counterarguments. We only accept impressions that we have evidence for.
00:20:24
Speaker
the stoic position is actually one of defaulting to skepticism until you have good evidence for it. And so you gave a car example. The good evidence for the car is that it's inference, really. It's that people that have looked both ways haven't got killed by cars, invisible cars, for all of human history up until this point.
00:20:42
Speaker
people that have sat in chairs, the chairs haven't disappeared for all of human history. So that inference, enough of those lets you trust that impression. But I don't think we have evidence for moral realism or evidence against moral realism and our intuition, and certainly nothing to infer from. So that would be my counter argument.
Stoicism and Irresistible Truths
00:21:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think to make this argument work, you need to show that we're sort of in a similar position
00:21:11
Speaker
as we are when it comes to other foundational questions, say when it comes to physical realism. So the Stoics were, of course, physical realists. They thought they were physical bodies, material bodies in the universe. And then the question is, well, what's the evidence for thinking that we have, of course, impressions that there are these material physical things?
00:21:40
Speaker
And one way to come to justify our beliefs that there are chairs, cars, other physical people, organisms, and so on is just that we get these impressions and there are no defeaters for them. There's no very good skeptical argument. So we can be justified in believing that
00:22:03
Speaker
there are in fact physical bodies. That's the sort of move this argument from intuition is making. And now if you want to say
00:22:13
Speaker
Actually, the stoic position is that we have evidence beyond our impressions that there is a physical world. The question, of course, is, well, what is that evidence? You might say that it's some argument from inference or something of this sort. But of course, your data is just other impressions, most likely.
00:22:41
Speaker
I know the Stoic play here, so we're going to get a bit into the nitty gritty here, but the Stoic move, because the Stoics were debating with skeptics, the academic skeptics, and the academic skeptics made this line against the intuition. They were saying, look, all you have is intuition, all you have is impressions.
00:23:03
Speaker
And you're just relying on other impressions to construct a worldview of impressions. None of this is ever touching the world as it really is, right? It's only touching your representation of the world. And the skeptic, the stoic solution to this is almost like a leap of faith. It might not be that satisfying to listeners.
00:23:21
Speaker
But it's to say, well, there's a kind of way that true things feel. There's a kind of way that when something's really the case, it just feels different. And that was called a cataleptic impression. And the idea of the cataleptic impression where these were things that you couldn't help but assent to.
00:23:39
Speaker
Evictetus uses the example, believe that it is night when it's daylight, you just can't. You can like pretend like you're a brain in a vax, you can pretend you're plugged into the matrix, but you can't act on it with confidence because your body as a natural thing connected to the natural universe is compelled by the clarity of these impressions and the actual difference of sensation of those impressions.
00:24:07
Speaker
That's the Stoic argument. The skeptics of course go, that's silly. Why would you believe one impression just because it seems a bit more intense than another one? But that's really, that's the Stoic move. It's not, I guess I'm just having trouble with your idea of like, well, if nothing defeats it, it's good. And I know that's not your idea. I just think that fails because the Stoic argument isn't even that. Stoic argument is not nothing defeats it. The Stoic argument is
00:24:35
Speaker
This is different in type. The difference when I'm touching a chair, when I'm sitting in a chair and looking at it, really focusing on this beautiful chair. It's really focusing on it. That's a different kind of experience than when, you know, I think I thought I saw something in the dark.
00:24:53
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Their argument from catalepsis or something like this for moral realism would be something like we cannot help in situations that really matter being moral realists.
Practical Reason and Moral Realism
00:25:09
Speaker
Sure, on a podcast and some discussion with your mates, you might defend moral nihilism.
00:25:16
Speaker
the idea that nothing's really wrong or bad. This is basically talk of fictions. But if you see someone insult your friends, if you witness an extreme form of injustice or alternatively see someone acting positively heroically, you cannot help but see that there are truly
00:25:39
Speaker
good and bad things in the world. That would be the stoic gloss on this, which wouldn't make reference to appearances as initial evidence. But the fact that we cannot help in these certain cases that are qualitatively different from many other forms of our perception. That's a good way of putting it. I agree. I agree that that's what the Stokes would think. Yeah, yeah. That would be a stoic way of saying it.
00:26:09
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I think that argument and the argument from intuition seem pretty similar to me. The modern argument from intuition is not terribly modern, but relatively aesthetics, I suppose, modern. They seem similar, both about as strong.
00:26:25
Speaker
So we can spend some more time, but we've got two other arguments. So let's, let's cover those. So all of you know how to defend more realism after this podcast. If you meet someone at a bar who has a philosophy undergrad, you're well prepared to push back against their nihilism.
00:26:43
Speaker
That's right. That's right. The other argument is the argument from practical reason, or you can also think of it as sort of brought to mind because of how we think about ourselves moving through time.
00:27:08
Speaker
So, suppose, you know, you're an Epicurean when you are younger and not just in the philosophical, sophisticated sense I had a talk with Emily. Austin, she defends Epicureanism, which was a rival school to the Stoics. They thought that the good life was a matter of
00:27:32
Speaker
pleasure of feeling good. And, you know, one way to interpret that is you can have a extremely short time horizon and maximize the amount of pleasurable experiences as fast as you can, basically party exceptionally hard until you expire. And of course, there are some people who
00:28:01
Speaker
do this, they take this life path. And the question is, is that
00:28:08
Speaker
a rational way to think about your values across time? Are you using practical reason well if you think that a fine way to live is just to satisfy whatever goals you have at that time? Or is there something deeper, a question about what sorts of goals are worth?
00:28:38
Speaker
pursuing. So that's the initial case. If you wanted to make this into an argument form, the idea would be someone who chooses to suffer, perhaps use a suffering case for an arbitrary reason, is acting irrationally. They can only be acting irrationally. If moral realism is true, the conclusion moral realism is true. So if you think that
00:29:07
Speaker
it would be irrational for someone to take on the sort of extreme, epicurean way of life. You can only make that claim properly if you are a moral realist. And you might say, well, that's fine. They can live their own life. There's nothing wrong with that. If someone chooses to do that, you know, that's just a preference. There are many kinds of preferences in the world.
00:29:35
Speaker
But if you think about your own life, my sense is that very few people think about themselves this way. They would not think that if they woke up the next day and found themselves with the values of the extreme Epicurean, that they would be pleased. They wouldn't just say, oh, these are just some preferences like any other.
00:30:03
Speaker
rather they would think that these sorts of goals are, in some real sense, flawed. They would be missing the mark of what a good life would be. And the best way to account for this, I think, is with more realism. So that's the first pass at this argument for practical realism.
00:30:25
Speaker
Okay, let me take a swing at that. I don't know if I can talk about this without bringing in some teleology. So it's going to be two concepts in a row. But see the argument here, I like it. It makes more sense to me from the negative conception, as you put it, someone who chooses to suffer for arbitrary reason. I think of the person who just, you know, puts their hand on the stove is acting irrationally.
00:30:47
Speaker
They can only be acting irrationally if more realism is true, more realism is true. And so when I read that, I think, well, they're only acting irrationally if they're acting against what's in their best interests or acting against what they take to be the plan for their own life. If someone's plan is to burn their hand, then they're acting at least in one sense quite rationally.
00:31:12
Speaker
That's the best way to do it is to put your hand on the stove. So you have to be acting against what makes sense in some kind of larger sense. And you're probably referring there to what makes a good life or a bad life. And then by there you're kind of smuggling ethics in, or at least teleological ethic. So the Stoics.
00:31:30
Speaker
believed in teleology, which was the idea that there was a better or there was a proper, so telos is the Greek word for the end. So it means that we're all kind of on a journey, we're all kind of progressing towards an end state or an earlier state, we kind of have a function, we have a purpose, we have a way to be, that is the best way to be.
00:31:50
Speaker
And human beings all share this in common. The Stoics think that's to act rationally. The Epicureans think it's to have as much pleasure and as little pain as possible. Most of the Greeks believe in teleology and think we have an end. So when you say someone who suffers for an arbitrary reason,
00:32:07
Speaker
is acting irrationally, the stoics would agree with that statement because they would say, well, unless you're doing that for some other purpose, maybe you're, maybe you're protecting your child who's walking too close to the stove and you burn yourself back or something like this, right? Unless you're acting for some other reason, you're just, you're doing something that goes against your end. You're, you're doing something that goes against what is best for you, which is to maintain your body unless you have a different reason. And so that's irrational. So yeah, given if we believe
00:32:37
Speaker
I'm just not persuaded by this argument because the argument seems to me to say that like, if there is a way to act better or worse, and that means good or bad, that means to be living a good life or a bad life, then to do something bad for no reason is irrational. And then if that's the case, the moral realism is true. But I feel like we're smuggling that teleology into there. That's me putting my really skeptical hat on. I do find this quite compelling.
00:33:05
Speaker
Yeah, so I think if you don't find what I call the extreme Epicurean person a useful example of someone choosing suffering for an arbitrary reason. Sorry to all our Epicurean listeners out there.
00:33:22
Speaker
not doing any justice to your view.
Rational Decision-Making: Short-term vs Long-term
00:33:26
Speaker
I think one kind of move, the sorts of move that philosophers like David Hume would make is, well, reason is really just means and reasoning. Most people don't find
00:33:41
Speaker
the, what I call the extreme epicurean, the person who puts their hand on the hot stove to be acting rationally because we have ends, we have goals that are inconsistent with those life plans. And that is what explains our judgments about their behavior, just the fact that we have those ends. There's no question about are those ends themselves justified.
00:34:09
Speaker
And then, so the next move then in this argument is to think about, well, suppose we had someone who did not have those ends. With those sorts of judgments, would we still say that they are acting rashly or not? So, you know, you can imagine, suppose someone
00:34:30
Speaker
They have an exceptionally short time horizon. All they want to do is have fun for the next day, and they will make decisions to decide that they will have fun for the next day, even if it results in extreme physical suffering and emotional suffering after the following day.
00:34:55
Speaker
Why will they do that? Well, all they care about, all that's in their means end system is the next day. And I think if you are a dedicated human, the person who thinks that all we can say about reason has to do with means ends, in these hypothetical cases, you'll say that that person
00:35:18
Speaker
is acting rationally for the most part, if they choose to have fun for the next day, even if it results in extreme suffering for the rest of their life. But that doesn't seem like the right judgment to me. It seems like now we've that suggests that the union is making a mistake. What do you think about that way of advancing the dialectic? Yeah, again, so the argument I'm taking here is
00:35:46
Speaker
If what it means to act rationally is just to act in a way that pursues the thing you want or gets you towards the thing you want. So if you say.
00:35:56
Speaker
I want to walk or I want to fly to Mexico. You're, you're acting irrationally. If you fly to the UK, you're just not advancing it, but you're acting rationally. If you fly to Mexico, if you're saying, if you're saying acting rationally is just the satisfaction of the ends, then we have no way of explaining the irrationality or the seeming risk that the seemingly is that it doesn't make sense. Or it's not the right way to act for someone who's satisfying their ends, even if those are really weird ends, even if their end is, is.
00:36:26
Speaker
very short term, very short sighted, or their end is, you could even use more extreme example involving the suffering of others or something like that. We have no way to push back against that.
00:36:37
Speaker
But it seems like we should be able to push back against that. It seems like it's a totally reasonable thing to say that person is acting irrationally, they're acting poorly, so moral realism is true. And the point I was trying to make is that the thing that grounds, there's two kinds of ends, right? There's the end that is the thing that you want in the moment, and then there's the end that is the thing that's actually good for you.
00:37:01
Speaker
And what I feel like this argument is doing and what the Stoics would agree is the Stoics would say, look, there is something that's actually good for you.
00:37:08
Speaker
So when you act poorly, you're acting irrationally because you're going against what's actually good for you. If you cause yourself, your body unnecessarily suffering, if you engage in, even if you engage for them, all kind of unethical behavior, right? If you cheat, if you lie, if you hurt other people, you're acting against your own best interest, which is to be virtuous and to be happy, right?
00:37:32
Speaker
So everything, you might be satisfying this kind of personal subjective short term end, which is I want that fancy thing, so I'm going to steal it, but you're acting irrationally in reference to your human end. And I agree with that. I'm compelled by that. I think that's the stoic argument.
00:37:49
Speaker
But I guess I'm not sure how it gets sick. We can move on from this, but I guess I'm not sure how it gets around just that, again, that skeptical push of, yeah, but I don't endorse that end. The Nietzschean point, you've just been conditioned to view that as the human end, but you haven't really transcended that. That's no more a real thing than it is kind of a shared cultural conception or something like this. That's my take.
00:38:19
Speaker
Yeah, I think the, there's some more discussion I think around can the anti-realist handle these, can they either explain away why someone choosing to suffer for an arbitrary reason is these sorts of cases we gave? Can they come up with some anti-realist explanation for why this is a rational behavior?
00:38:45
Speaker
That's one kind of move they can make. Or they can say, that's not irrational. You just describe a case that's not irrational, and I will, as philosophers, sometimes say, bite the bullet. You know, I don't think that the extreme Epicurean is doing anything irrational. I don't think that the person who literally only cares about their happiness for one day is irrational, if you've described that case correctly. There's no way in which we can say they are irrational. And then the next move here for the realist
00:39:14
Speaker
I think is to question whether that's how people think about their ends through time.
00:39:24
Speaker
really subject to this condition that, oh, you could have turned out to be just like the extreme Epicurean, and there would be no sense in which you would be justified in wishing that your life had turned out otherwise. I think that's where the argument will go next.
00:39:49
Speaker
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Epistemic and Moral Realism
00:39:52
Speaker
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00:40:08
Speaker
Well, the last argument we have here, it has a similar structure, but has to do with epistemology as opposed to practical reason. So epistemology that concerns knowledge, the study of knowledge, ideas about is this claim justified? Does this belief amount to knowledge? These are the sorts of things that are epistemic matters.
00:40:35
Speaker
And this argument is just that if moral realism is false, epistemic realism is false. But we know that epistemic realism is true, so that entails that moral realism is true.
00:40:52
Speaker
And the reason to believe that epistemic realism is true is that some beliefs are justified. Our judgments are not sufficient to make a belief reasonable or justified. Our judgments alone are not what determine whether something is evidence or not, whether it's good evidence or not.
00:41:21
Speaker
There is such a thing as thinking well, and it's not like thinking fashionably. It's when we think about excellence in thought, we're not defining excellence sort of as a matter of taste, but as something that properly gets at describing the world, describing the way things are, and there's a way we ought to think.
00:41:51
Speaker
And I think the important move here is, well, why would you think this?
00:41:56
Speaker
That's the case for why you would think epistemic realism is true, but why would you think that moral realism and epistemic realism are tied together? And the one reason to think this is that all the arguments against moral realism apply to epistemic realism. You can say that our judgments about what beliefs are justified or what it is to think well, you know, they have to do with these sociological factors. You know, you can pick your favorite kind of explanation.
00:42:25
Speaker
They are thinking well, it's just a matter of what is in fashion and what is in fashion. Well, maybe that's determined by some political factors, some social factors, what have you. Also, you know, some common arguments against some moral realism is, well, what are these moral facts? Where is goodness in the world? It doesn't seem like it's some physical thing, some people say. It doesn't seem like it's a mathematical
00:42:51
Speaker
fact, but you can make the same sorts of claims about epistemic matters. You know, what really is good thinking or thinking well, where are these facts about how one ought to think? That seems like a normative matter. It is a normative matter. And it's, you know, is that located somewhere in the brain? You know,
00:43:17
Speaker
Maybe not, someone might say. But the thought, of course, is then most of these arguments too many to cover in the time we have now are no good. So we should continue to be epistemic realists. But if we should continue to be epistemic realists, then we should be moral realists as well. That's the quick version of this argument. Yeah, that one's kind of fun. My initial thoughts on that are twofold. First is you get this interesting thing in stoicism where
00:43:46
Speaker
And for the Stoics, virtue is knowledge. We almost do a whole episode on that. But the view for Stoics, that is that to think well is to act well.
00:43:57
Speaker
Because action is determined by our value judgments. If we know the right thing to do, we'll do it. If we value the right things, we'll live in accordance with those values. And to live a good life is to just be the kind of person that makes the right decisions. So it's to identify the right decisions, to value them, and to do them.
00:44:16
Speaker
So for the Stoics, virtue is knowledge. So these things actually collapse on each other. Epistemic realism, moral realism kind of merge, right? If there's a right way to think, for the Stoics, the right way to think is the right way to be. They're the same thing. You couldn't say, you couldn't say, wow, that's a great person. They're kind of a bad thinker though. And you couldn't say that's a great thinker. I'm kind of a bad person. Two things, the two things wouldn't make sense in Stoicism. So interesting there. The second thought I had was.
00:44:47
Speaker
to do charitable to this, the view is kind of if we can say that anything about being a person has a way there ought to be, then we, then we can smuggle in these ideas of a good life or a better or worse way to live. So that was the way I was taking the argument was that if there's a right way to think and you're thinking worse, when you commit fallacies, when you ignore evidence, when you believe things that don't deserve, don't have sufficient evidence,
00:45:17
Speaker
If you can say that you're a worse thinker than somebody else, then you can presumably say you're a worse person, at least, if that's the only thing we have on the table so far, we just have epistemics, right? And then from there, if there's better or worse people, you can build in there's better or worse ways to live. And then from there, you kind of, you kind of build up to this moral realism. That's, that's the way I was thinking about it. And I think that's, I had never heard that one before. I had to think about it some more, but I think that's kind of a compelling or interesting picture is that
00:45:43
Speaker
You know, if there's a better or worse way to be in one case, then the whole domino kind of falls. And then there's a better or worse way to be in all cases. If we can admit it for anything, we can admit it for all these kind of should-ought claims. And one way where the should-ought claim seems the most compelling is around these kind of epistemic questions or these kind of factors, better or worse thinking. That's a good way to put it.
00:46:09
Speaker
Ultimately, I think this argument is similar to the previous one in the sense that the moves that the best moves for the anti-realist to make are the same, I think. So they might say that.
00:46:23
Speaker
One way to deny this argument is to say that if the first premise, if more realism is false, epistemic realism is false, and sort of take those apart. I don't think that's what you should do. I think they're actually tied together tightly for some stoic reasons, but also just because, in fact, all the arguments against more realism do part over nicely to epistemic realism.
00:46:47
Speaker
So I think they should deny epistemic realism. And the way they'll do that, the best way to do that, is to say that our epistemic judgments, again, are grounded in the ends we in fact have. So typically, we say someone is a good thinker because
00:47:04
Speaker
their thought aligns with what it takes to come to the accurate views of the world. And we care about coming to the accurate views of the world generally because that aligns with happiness and all our other desires. If you take the crossing the street example again,
00:47:24
Speaker
It's important for me to have justified beliefs about whether cars are crossing the street or not, because I have many desires, like the desire to have a wonderful dinner later on that will be frustrated if I don't have accurate beliefs and get bumped by a car. Yeah, totally. Or just to add something to that, you might also make the kind of play where you'd say that sometimes it's beneficial to think poorly.
00:47:52
Speaker
Like for some kinds of lives, it's better to be the kind of person that doesn't question too much. So, you know, the mind of a scientist might be different than the mind of a lawyer, which might be different than the way of thinking if you're a salesperson or a politician, or maybe in a position where questioning or being skeptical doesn't benefit you, right? It's like, it's like you, it would be this view of just looking at reasoning as a tool. And generally speaking, you want to be as good of a reasoner as possible, but for some people, maybe people in,
00:48:23
Speaker
I'm thinking of people in particularly bad situations. It might actually be better for them to believe, you know, maybe you're ill and you want to believe in an afterlife, for example, there might not be compelling evidence for that. Or, you know, I don't know, somebody, or people that think there's any reason to believe lies, you know, somebody that you were close to actually said really mean, hurtful things about you. And you're not going to really ask about it too much or learn about it because it'll just hurt your feeling.
00:48:53
Speaker
Reasoning just becomes this kind of preservation tool to pursue these other ends, as you're saying, and in some cases, can actually be good to be a poor reasoner.
00:49:01
Speaker
Yeah, that might be right. I think you had this discussion with Julia Galef and you always chat about the case of overconfidence or confidence of entrepreneurs and there's this debate. Is it reasonable for entrepreneurs to be overconfident in their success or should they instead aim to have accurate beliefs? There's one way of
00:49:25
Speaker
handling that objection, which is to say that that's not so much an argument against epistemic realism. It's just the fact that some epistemic facts might combat or be inconsistent with other kinds of goals we have. There's some amount of tension. You know, famously there's this debate about
00:49:45
Speaker
moral, how demanding is morality, and are we demanded to be a moral saint, or is it okay to be someone who lives a balanced life of some mix of selfishness and altruism?
Moral Demands and Realism
00:50:07
Speaker
So there's a famous paper by a woman named Susan Wolf, who's debating with another philosopher, Peter Singer, called Moral Saints. And it's about this question. And you could interpret that as a question about normative ethics that doesn't have any bearing on
00:50:26
Speaker
metaethics as it were. It's just trying to sort out of these different demands which one wins out in this case. So that might be one way to evade your move but then the question is I think for the realist, well once you've made that
00:50:46
Speaker
evasion, how strong are the sorts of examples you're giving of epistemic realism? Have you sort of undercut the judgments or cases that you're given to defend that second premise of epistemic realism? It's true. Yeah, that's a compelling point. Because I often think about this
00:51:11
Speaker
So just to use that in different words, the idea was, you know, I might believe morality is true. I believe it's better to help people, but I don't go around donating all my money all the time. I don't get a job only for the explicit purpose of making as much money as possible so that I can donate more money.
00:51:30
Speaker
I don't do these things. I do things that are not actively helpful. I don't reach the level of saint and that's fine. That doesn't mean morality is false. That means sometimes I'm just choosing to be less moral to pursue other ends like watching Netflix on my couch.
00:51:45
Speaker
And so to flip that over, sometimes we might reason poorly or sometimes we might have reasons to reason poorly. That doesn't mean there's no such thing as thinking well. It doesn't mean these facts of how to think go away. It just means sometimes I might choose not to put my critical thinking hat on in a certain situation if it doesn't benefit me. I think that's a pretty compelling counterexample.
00:52:08
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. But then I think the move from the anti realizes to say, well, you've explained why epistemic realism makes sense of that case by reference to some other realism that I don't believe in. Yeah, fair enough. Right. So there's that.
00:52:22
Speaker
Yeah, I'd say for me personally, I actually think the first two arguments are pretty good. The last one about epistemic realism probably ends up looking pretty similar to the second after a number of more argumentative moves are made. But I think the case for something that is more realism, more effectively very close to more realism is a good one. Whether or not you think the same is up for you to decide.
00:52:53
Speaker
Yeah, interested in what people listening think as well. I think the second one is pretty compelling about revealing facts about human psychology and maybe even facts about human nature. And I think if we can get facts about human psychology and human nature, they were most of the way there to telos. I think if most people can agree somebody's acting irrationally when they burn their hand for no reason, then we, we're getting pretty clear to a picture of a better or worse way to live.
00:53:22
Speaker
And once we get into claims about better or worse ways to live, then I think we're most of the way there. Yep. Yeah. You could, one reading of that is that, well, we share enough of the ends. We have enough of the ends both in our own lives and in common across time.
00:53:44
Speaker
I want to be an excellent person. That was true of me when I was 10. That's going to be true of me when I'm 60. So that's some reason to reason consistently about it. Similarly, other people have the same, most other people have the same end. That's one thought. And that's enough for us to be doing a philosophy, be thinking about a philosophy of life and apply that in our own lives.
00:54:14
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. Cool. Anything you want to end with? I guess I want to bring it back to the stoic position a bit on here or do my best to run up the stoic view around this.
Stoic Ethics and Universal Truths
00:54:26
Speaker
The stoic view would be that there's certain physical facts about human nature. So we have a teleology and that there's better or worse ways for humans to live.
00:54:36
Speaker
Those facts are physical, but those facts are also physical and kind of the big physics world name, which is that they're grounded in kind of facts about the universe itself and facts about the divine or the stoic God, or this kind of conception of the way the world should be. And so that's morality right there. And just morality, you're doing good when you are the way you should be.
00:55:02
Speaker
and you're doing bad when you're not the way you should be. For them, they say again, to live a happy life and to be happy is to be virtuous and to be good is to live in accordance with nature, accordance with your nature and accordance with the nature of the universe. To be unhappy, to live bad, is to desire, to put yourself out of line with nature. And often that looks like wanting things that are impossible.
00:55:27
Speaker
Often that looks like trying to control things that aren't up to you, trying to make the world into something it's not, by force and then being frustrated, angry, sad when it's not, trying to make other people act in ways they don't want to act, or not considering other people, not acknowledging the fact that you're part of a community or these kinds of facts of the world.
00:55:50
Speaker
So we get a robust ethical picture, all the stoics, we talk about all this idea of stoic ethics that all comes from just this view, this meta ethical grounding, that there are facts about the natural world, about the way that it should be. And in terms of how they get there, you can do these kind of extreme skeptical arguments against that.
00:56:13
Speaker
You know, you're, you're most of the way there, as I said before, the stoic view of, of moral realism. If you think things can go better or worse or, or things can be more in line with how they should be or, or less. That's my understanding of the extent of the claim. I could probably go back and read some more stoic theology or some more stoic, how stoic, the stoic God grounds that a bit more, but that's really what they're working from. I said, perfect. That's a, I think a good way to end.
00:56:43
Speaker
Awesome. Thanks, Gil. All right. Ciao later. Thanks for listening to Store Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use, and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
00:57:02
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.