Moral Realism and The Horn-Destiny Abortion Debate.

Some thoughts on a debate I haven't watched.

I have not watched the abortion debate between Trent Horn and YouTuber Destiny, though I have received numerous requests for commentary. Given the length of the debate, and other priorities I am currently obligated to fulfill, this won’t happen anytime soon. Nevertheless, the common request was for me to critique Destiny’s moral anti-realism. Again, with the qualification of not having watched the debate, I offer some general thoughts on the matter, for it is not uncommon in abortion debates for the pro-choice party to embrace nihilism, denying there are any moral facts to begin with. Speaking personally — and please, do consider this an irrelevant aside, because it is — it is hard to see the adoption of moral anti-realism as anything but a victory for the pro-life position, in many instances. After all, if somebody is forced into nihilism to “justify” their take on abortion, that is probably because the pro-life side has some powerful argumentation behind it. In fact, there appears to be a parallel between the pro-choice party adopting moral anti-realism and the reductive naturalist embracing eliminativism, doesn’t there? Both seem like nuclear options, something the respective parties are forced to adopt because all other explanatory options available to their paradigm have been exposed as seriously defective, and for whatever reason they cannot embrace a paradigm shift.¹ But anyway.

Importantly, however, embracing anti-realism does not suddenly render abortion morally permissible in a world where other actions are prohibited or obligatory. Again, anti-realism is precluding the possibility of true or false moral judgment altogether. Nothing is “permissible” if moral anti-realism is true because permissibility presumes a background of normativity whereby one can ground such a judgment, and that background is just what is being denied. One must not miss the radicality of such a view – a view that is not the majority position among philosophers, as most philosophers, particularly ethicists, are moral realists. (This is an appeal to authority, obviously, but appeals to authority often have weight, even if not an overwhelming amount.)

OK, let’s back up.

Destiny said he cannot “observe” a moral fact (I saw a clip of this), so he embraces non-cognitivism, which is essentially the position that moral statements cannot be either true or false (apart, that is, from reporting a person’s preferences or emotional states), thus they do not properly fall within the domain of knowledge (for those interested, I offer a brief overview of positions in moral philosophy here).²

Whether Destiny has further reasons for embracing anti-realism, I cannot say, because I do not know. Nevertheless, what should we make of the idea that because one cannot observe a moral fact, this justifies anti-realism?

The answer is, not much.

Obviously, there are many things we cannot observe, at least in the empiricist sense that we can observe a bunny rabbit outside the window. However, this does not deter our embracing such “unobservables” as truths, including as profoundly obvious truths, and in many cases more obvious than the fact of the bunny rabbit outside (which may be an hallucination, for all I know).

For example, we cannot observe rational or epistemic norms, which is to say, rules guiding belief acquisition: i.e., that we ought to believe things that or true, or that we ought to seek justification for our beliefs, or that we ought to be consistent in our beliefs, etc. So, if one is going to resign moral norms to the nihilistic scrapheap because they are unobservable, one should resign epistemic norms as well, because there is not enough conceptual space to separate these domains. Yet almost nobody abandons epistemic norms because they are unobservable. Moreover, to abandon epistemic normativity would make rational argument impossible, including any argument for abandoning epistemic norms. We would quickly enter a scenario of catastrophic skepticism.

All that, of course, is just a hasty sketch of the “companions in guilty” approach to defending moral realism: If moral norms go, then epistemic norms go… yet, epistemic norms cannot go. For a book length treatment, I commend the work of Terrence Cuneo.

Speaking now more generally, I suggest the following strategy for defending moral realism, in addition, of course, to what has been said. I omit details, with my intent being merely to sketch the strategy, not to deploy it.

First, one should show that the arguments for moral anti-realism are either seriously weak or beg the metaphysical question in favor of Scientistic Naturalism, or both – particularly, that is, arguments from widespread disagreement (in short, if widespread disagreement is a problem for the moral domain then it is equally a problem for other domains, including scientific to epistemological) and arguments from evolutionary theory, including the suggestion that moral facts are “queer” entities and would require some unusual faculty for detection (in short, question begging, because such an intuitive faculty for detecting moral facts, even if evolved, is only unexpected or “queer” within a naturalistic framework, not a theistic one).

From there, one might propose something like Phenomenal Conservativism as our epistemological launch pad — perhaps even a necessary epistemological launch pad —where if something really seems to be the case, we are justified, absent defeater, for believing it actually is the case. And then make the following connection: that just as it really seems there is a bunny outside my window, it really seems like rape is impermissible. Thus, unless somebody gives me good reason to think otherwise (i.e., that they put hallucinogenic mushrooms on my pizza), I am quite justified in believing what seems to be the case. Michael Huemer, himself an agnostic philosopher, offers a respectable defense of PC here, which includes his application in defense of moral realism.

There are, of course, other moves one can make (see the two linked books, along with my post on moral relativism) but let me finish with the note that it is not illegitimate to tease out the consequences of the moral anti-realist position — consequences that will strike most everyday audience members as absurd. After all, not all debates in philosophy can be won by exposing contradiction – that is quite difficult, in fact. Often, the best case one can make is cumulative insofar as they draw out an increasing number of costs, particularly by showing how someone, to maintain their position, must accept other positions that are counter intuitive, in tension with other commitments, or that just seem almost certainly false. For the anti-realist, this means making it clear that there is no moral fact of the matter about so many things where the majority of people believe there is definitely some moral fact of the matter: that rape is wrong, that slavery is wrong, that the holocaust was wrong, and so on.

Again, it is often worthwhile to have the anti-realist go “on the record” about these things, since if they want to be consistent with their position, they will have to say what no human person should ever want to say concerning matters of rape, slavery, genocide, or what have you. All the better if you can find instances where they themselves have made bold moral proclamations, which is hardly difficult, for virtually no anti-realist lives consistently with their position, especially when it comes to politics (if they’re a public figure, Google whatever they’ve had to say about Donald Trump. Almost every time it’ll be an enormous quarry of quotes more forceful in their condemnatory moral certitude than a fevered street preacher). The point of all this? Simply that you are not always expecting to change the mind of your opponent in debate, but instead hoping to win the mind and heart of the audience, so while the opposition may already be quite aware of these implications, the audience may not be, hence the utility of making them explicit.

From there, one should explain how a theistic perspective – particularly one that accommodates a natural law virtue ethic – can ground normativity, offering a principled way to distinguish moral judgments from statements of food preference, if only to highlight the explanatory advantages of that paradigm. Of course, it then becomes important — in this context, anyway — to explain how that paradigm itself entails, or strongly implies, the pro-life position. Which it does.

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1. Another the problem with “going nihilistic” in the abortion debate is this dramatically shifts the conversation from ethical theory or applied ethics to meta ethics. And that is really a debate on an entirely difference score. Of course, such matters are deeply interwoven, since ethical theory, I believe, demands metaphysical support, but for debates to be productive, it is important to have some shared, even if exceedingly broad, assumptions (moral realism, scientific realism, external world realism, etc.) coming into the dialogue. Otherwise, who the hell knows where the conversation will go.

2. For the moral anti-realist, there are no objective (as in, stance or attitude-independent) moral facts. How people feel about moral matters is thus on all fours with how people feel about flavors of yogurt, which is to say, these are matters grounded solely in the subject and their preferences, of which there is no independent measure to adjudicate disputes insofar as someone thinks what they are reporting is something more than, as Hume called it, mere sentiment. It is true that Ben thinks vanilla yogurt is best, but that is just saying something about Ben. For many an anti-realist, the same is said about — heaven help us — rape. It is true that Ben thinks rape is wrong, but that is (again, according to the anti-realist) just to say Ben does not approve of it, which ultimately translates to Ben finding rape personally distasteful. But again, that is just saying something about Ben. Somebody else might find the action entirely suitable to their tastes; unfortunately, many people do. The anti-realist says the conversation effectively ends there, for there is no independent criteria by which we could possibly say that Ben is correct and the rapist wrong, and that their preferences have nothing to do with it. Naturally, the traditional moralist will say there is an objective criteria, and that is human nature and its inherent, determinate ends, but all that is a debate for another time…