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Oct 24, 2022·edited Oct 24, 2022Liked by Richard Y Chappell

>"We should be open to considering scenarios in which nihilism turns out to be true..."

I find this paragraph confusing. "Scenario" to me seems to imply something like a "possible world" - but uncertainty about ethics (for a moral realist) seems to me quite different from uncertainty about which of a number of possible worlds we happen to be living in. It is more closely analogous to something like mathematical uncertainty (e.g. uncertainty about whether the Riemann hypothesis is true).

So your proposed "datum" that suffering is bad is something like the "datum" that some integers are prime. You would never say "we should be open to considering scenarios in which no integers are prime," and if you did encounter someone who said this, your response would not be to say "that's an interesting idea, let's explore the implications!", but to ask for clarification about what they think those words mean, since they are obviously using them differently from the way you would use them.

To put it slightly differently: "would suffering still matter, even if suffering didn't matter?" is the moral realist's equivalent of "would you still love me even if i was a worm?" Once you have accepted the question, any possible answer you can give is just going to get you in trouble.

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Oct 23, 2022Liked by Richard Y Chappell

Thanks for this. The realism argument strikes me as phenomenological—I.e. regardless of what’s true, I would be lying to myself if I were to claim suffering wasn’t bad.

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Nov 6, 2022Liked by Richard Y Chappell

I wasn't sure about the following claim: 'It could be a serious moral error for one’s moral vision to be too restricted, whereas it’s harder to see such grave moral risks to being too self-sacrificing or having an otherwise expansive moral view.' What if realism is true and the true ethical theory features some sort of partiality or agent-relative reasons? Then by doing things like focusing on insect suffering or the welfare of people trillions of years in the future, we could be neglecting our communities or the near and dear, which might turn out to be wrong.

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Oct 26, 2022Liked by Richard Y Chappell

Thanks this is very interesting. I have a question about this bit: "Realists don’t hold that normative properties are what matter; their role is instead to mark which natural properties matter, objectively distinguishing them from the others that don’t."

Your point is that it is suffering (or pleasure) that matters, and not the fact that suffering is bad (pleasure is good). And you say that the property of being bad (good) marks the things that matter.

But don't you also want to say that it is because suffering is bad that something's involving suffering matters? And it is because pleasure is good that something's being pleasant matters.

Those normative properties don't just mark what matters, they explain why those things matter. No?

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As a matter of logic, the answer is still yes.

As far as classical logic goes, any conditional with necessarily false antecedents or necessarily true consequents is necessarily true. If P is necessarily true, then "If not-P, then P" is also necessarily true.

Hence since necessarily suffering matters, then even if suffering did not matter, it would still matter.

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Consider a more modest version of the wager. Suppose you're 50% confident in moral realism. Someone offers you 5 dollars if moral realism is true, but if it's not, you'll have to pay 5 dollars and one cent. It seems like you should take the deal.

I disagree with Carlsmith about the wager -- though, given uncertainty, it would depend on the stakes. If suffering isn't really bad, then we're mistaken about its badness properties. This means we have no reason to care about suffering -- in the wager, we have some reason to care about money conditional on realism, but no reason to care about suffering conditional on anti-realism. I think that the reason this seems unintuitive is the sheer obviousness of the badness of suffering. But if our pain is really not bad (somehow!) then it's more analogous to things that only seem bad. If a person thinks that what happens after death matters, but it really doesn't, then that would give no genuine reasons -- the same would be true in this case about pain.

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//I’ve long been sympathetic to the argument that one “might as well” be a normative realist, as it can’t very well be a normative fault to believe in normative facts.//

Perhaps there’s more nuance to this, but this seems potentially false on the face of it. If you’re a normative subjectivist it could be inconsistent with your subjective normative standards to endorse normative realism, in which case you could be (by your own lights) at fault for believing in normative facts. But even if you aren’t a normative subjectivist (I’m not a normative subjectivism), I wouldn’t want to be a normative realist unless I thought it served my goals to be a normative realist (and even then, if I didn’t think it was true, I’m not sure I could just opt to believe it). So why should I “might as well” be a realist?

The next remark is where I take more serious issue:

//(Either you’re right, or it doesn’t matter that you’re wrong.) //

This doesn't seem right to me. I’m a normative antirealist, and it does matter to me whether I’m wrong. I have an antirealist conception of things “mattering.” If normative realism is false, it only doesn’t stance-independently matter whether normative realism is false, it doesn’t just not matter, full stop, unless one presumes that things can only “matter” in a realist sense, which would seem a bit question-begging.

It almost looks like there's an equivocation here between normative claims about things mattering and metanormative claims about the way in which they matter (i.e., stance-independently). For instance, it does not follow that if normative realism is false that “nothing matters.” It only fails to matter specifically in the way in which realists think things matter. An antirealist need only deny the latter, not the former.

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Can you clarify what you mean by a "moral datum"?

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