David Enoch May Be An Objectivist About Ethics - But I'm Not

Responding to a David Enoch paper that purports to show I'm a moral realist

David Enoch wrote a whole paper about this kid.

In this article, I will be responding to a paper by David Enoch titled “Why I Am An Objectivist About Ethics (And Why You Are Too)”. Without any further ado, let’s get into the paper. 

Enoch starts off the paper by saying the following: 

You may think that you're a moral relativist or subjectivist - many people today seem to. But I don't think you are.

Well, I don’t consider myself a relativist/subjectivist in the sense of endorsing a semantic thesis about what people in general mean when using moral language - though I would consider myself a subjectivist in the sense that I personally use moral language to report my evaluative attitudes. If David Enoch wants to convince me that this is not the case, he will have quite a tall task ahead of him.

He continues: 

In fact, when we start doing metaethics - when we start, that is, thinking philosophically about our moral discourse and practice - thoughts about morality's objectivity become almost irresistible. 

Well, I’ve been thinking about meta-ethics for quite some time now and I’ve never found realism remotely plausible at all - let alone “irresistible”. But let’s hear him out. 

Now, as is always the case in philosophy, that some thoughts seem irresistible is only the starting point for the discussion, and under argumentative pressure we may need to revise our relevant beliefs. Still, it's important to get the starting points right. So it's important to understand the deep ways in which rejecting morality's objectivity are unappealing. What I want to do, then, is to highlight the ways in which accepting morality's objectivity is appealing, and to briefly address some common worries about it, worries that may lead some to reject - or to think they reject - such objectivity. 

Enoch starts out his case for realism with what he terms “the spinach test”. 

Consider the following joke (which I borrow from Christine Korsgaard): A child hates spinach. He then reports that he's glad he hates spinach. To the question "Why?" he responds: "Because if I liked it, I would have eaten it; and it's yucky!".

In a minute we're going to have to annoyingly ask why the joke is funny. For now, though, I want to highlight the fact that similar jokes are not always similarly funny. Consider, for instance, someone who grew up in the twentieth-century West, and who believes that the earth revolves around the sun. Also, she reports to be happy she wasn't born in the Middle Ages, "because had I grown up in the Middle Ages, I would have believed that the earth is in the center of the universe, and that belief is false!". To my ears, the joke doesn't work in this latter version (try it on your friends!). The response in the earth-revolves-around-the-sun case sounds perfectly sensible, precisely in a way in which the analogous response does not sound sensible in the spinach case.

We need one last case. Suppose someone grew up in the US in the late twentieth century, and rejects any manifestation of racism as morally wrong. He then reports that he's happy that that's when and where he grew up, "because had I grown up in the 18th century, I would have accepted slavery and racism. And these things are wrong!" How funny is this third, last version of the joke? To my ears, it's about as (un)funny as the second one, and nowhere nearly as amusing as the first. The response to the question in this last case (why he is happy that he grew up in the 20th century) seems to me to make perfect sense, and I suspect it makes sense to you too. And this is why there's nothing funny about it.

Personally I don’t find any of these jokes funny. I don’t know whether most people would find them funny or not. There is a certain sense in which I find the first statement about spinach to be absurd - but not the latter two statements about the Earth and racism. My guess is that Enoch would treat this asymmetrical attitude of mine toward the statements in question similarly to the reaction of finding the first statement funny but not the latter two - and I will too. Enoch’s points apply equally well (or poorly depending on how you look at it) regardless of whether I actually find the spinach joke funny or just find it absurd.

I’ll continue to talk about funniness in this article instead of absurdity because that’s what he talked about in the initial paper - but again I don’t think it really matters, the two can be switched out basically interchangeably and all the basic points remain the same.

Enoch proposes that the reason the spinach joke is funny whereas the jokes about the Earth being the center of the universe and racism are unfunny can be easily explained. According to him, the reason the spinach joke is funny is because claims about whether spinach is “yucky” are subjective - dependent on our attitudes - whereas claims about whether the Earth is located at the center of the universe or whether racism is acceptable are not - they report stance-independent facts about the world.¹

Me with a delicious healthy can of FRESH CUT LEAF SPINACH.

I think we can easily explain it in another way: the reason why the spinach joke is funny but the other two jokes aren’t funny is because we care much more about those things than our food preferences. I care much more about not having radically mistaken beliefs and not being a racist than retaining my distaste for some particular food.

Perhaps one may respond by claiming that the reason we care more about these two things is because there are stance-independent facts about them - whereas there aren’t any stance-independent facts about whether spinach is tasty or not. I don’t think this is the case.

I don’t think statements about the moral acceptability or unacceptability of racism purport to report stance-independent facts - at least they don’t when I make such statements.

The reason for my asymmetrical reaction to the spinach joke vs. the racism joke isn’t because the claim “spinach is yucky” is subjective while the claim that “racism is wrong” is objective - it’s because I care much more about my moral preferences than I do about my food preferences. 

I don’t particularly care about retaining the food preferences I have. If you were to notify me that tomorrow I would suddenly start enjoying some food I dislike - I wouldn’t care about that. However if you were to tell me that tomorrow I would suddenly start approving of factory farming - I would care about that. 

In the case of my moral preferences, I also have a higher-order preference to retain those preferences. To the extent that I have such higher-order preferences about my food preferences, it’d be because of moral or health concerns (I wouldn’t want to find myself in a situation where the only food I like is factory-farmed animal products or junk food, for instance).

But I wouldn’t have any special attachment to continuing to dislike the particular foods I don’t enjoy. This is very different from the moral domain - where I very much want to retain my disapproval for the practices I abhor.

Even putting aside the moral domain, I think there are many cases where I would prioritize my own preferences over stance-independent facts. I suspect this is the case for others as well.

Suppose you gave people a choice: Going forward, they can have it such that the only type of media they’ll enjoy is Cocomelon. They would rather watch that than Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, or any other movie or television series. Or they can have a false belief about what time they ate lunch yesterday. Perhaps they’ll mistakenly believe they started eating lunch at 1:32PM instead of 1:33PM.

I suspect most people would prefer to have the false belief than have their aesthetic preferences so radically realigned. I don’t think this reaction would be limited to aesthetic realists and I don’t think this would be good evidence in favor of aesthetic realism.²

I suspect many people inclined toward aesthetic anti-realism would have the same reaction. I’m personally a strident aesthetic anti-realist and yet I shudder at being one of the aesthetic heathens who prefers Bugs Bunny’s design in Season 2 of The Looney Tunes Show over his Season 1 design. I’d probably sooner lose my moral opposition to murder than my aesthetic opposition to Bugs Bunny’s Season 2 The Looney Tunes Show re-design.

If I’m right, this gives us reason to doubt Enoch’s claim that our desire to retain our anti-racist views is indicative of an implicit belief in moral realism.

Next Enoch invites us to introspect on the phenomenology of different types of disagreement: 

Think of some serious moral disagreement - about the moral status of abortion, say. Suppose, then, that you are engaged in such disagreement. (It's important to imagine this from the inside, as it were - don't imagine looking from the outside at two people arguing over abortion; think what it's like to be engaged in such argument yourself, if not about abortion, then about some other issue you care deeply about). Perhaps you think that there is nothing wrong with abortion, and you're arguing with someone who thinks that abortion is morally wrong. What does such disagreement feel like? In particular, does it feel more like disagreeing over which chocolate is better, or like disagreeing over factual matters, like whether human actions contribute to global warming?

Because this question is a phenomenological one (that is, it's about what something feels like from the inside), I can't answer this question for you. You have to think about what it feels like for you when you are engaged in moral disagreement. But I can say that in my case such moral disagreement feels exactly like the one about global warming - it's about an objective matter of fact, that exists independently of us and our disagreement. It is in no way like disagreeing over the merits of different kinds of chocolate. And I think I can rather safely predict that this is how it feels for you too. 

Unfortunately Enoch’s prediction is wrong. To be fair to him, I thought that Joe Biden wouldn’t drop out - so my track record when it comes to predictions isn’t the best either. 

Whether the disagreement over abortion is more like the disagreement over chocolate or the disagreement over climate change is a bit hard to say - in some respects it does feel more like the former but in other ways it feels more like the latter. Hard to make an overall determination. 

What I can certainly say though is that it definitely doesn’t feel “exactly like the one about global warming”. It seems obvious to me that the disagreements about chocolate and abortion are both clashes of attitudes - self-evidently not about objective matters of fact. At the same time, it also seems clear that I care way more about the disputes over climate change and abortion than I do the dispute over chocolate. I don’t really care if you prefer a particular type of chocolate I’m not a fan of, but I do care if you condone a practice I consider morally abhorrent or vice versa. 

Enoch follows this up by asking us to consider another case: 

In fact, we may be able to take disagreement out of the picture entirely. Suppose there is no disagreement - perhaps because you're all by yourself trying to make your mind about what to do next. In one case, you're thinking about what kind of chocolate to get. In another, you're choosing between buying a standard car and a somewhat more expensive hybrid car (whose effect on global warming, if human actions contribute to global warming, is less destructive). Here too there's a difference: In the first case, you seem to be asking questions about yourself and what you like more (in general, or right now). In the second case, you need to make up your mind about your own action, of course, but you're asking yourself questions about objective matters of fact that do not depend on you at all - in particular, about whether human actions affect global warming. 

Now consider a third case, in which you're tying to make up your mind about having an abortion, or advising a friend who is considering an abortion. So you're wondering whether abortion is wrong. Does it feel like asking about your own preferences, or like an objective matter of fact? Is it more like the chocolate case or like the hybrid car case? If, like me, you answer that it's much more like the hybrid car case, then you think, like me, that the phenomenology of deliberation too indicates that morality is objective.  

I find this to be a bit of a strange example. In none of these cases do I think there’s some sort of stance-independent fact about what you should do or what the best decision is. 

Enoch notes that in the car case we’re considering objective matters of fact (such as which car causes more environmental damage) – which is true, but ultimately what the best decision is depends on my values - which do I care about more, paying less money or emitting less carbon? 

The same applies to the abortion case. Of course stance-independent facts are relevant to my evaluation of the permissibility of abortion - at what point the fetus develops the ability to feel pain, how painful abortion would be for a sentient fetus, etc. are all morally relevant considerations - but ultimately the moral status of abortion is a question about my values. 

What kind of beings do I care about? How do I prioritize the bodily autonomy of the mother vs. the life of the fetus? These are the kinds of questions that I think determine whether abortion is permissible or not. 

Next Enoch invites us to consider whether it’d still be the case that top hats are out of fashion if everyone happened to wear top hats. How about this: would it still be true that smoking caused cancer if we all believed it didn’t cause cancer? Or this: would sexism still be wrong if we all approved of sexism?

I actually have a whole video about this objection (which the stance-independent moral facts command you watch!). In short: a relativist can in fact consistently say that sexism would still be wrong even if everyone (including themselves) approved of it. There’s nothing stopping a relativist from endorsing unconditional anti-sexism norms - a relativist’s negative evaluation of sexism can apply in scope to all possible worlds. 

Just because you present a hypothetical version of me that approves of sexism that doesn’t mean I have to actually be okay with him being sexist. All I - as someone who uses moral language in a subjectivist manner - would be committed to saying is that sexism is permissible relative to the moral standards of this 2nd Dimension version of me. There’s nothing at all stopping me from saying that sexism would still be wrong relative to my actual standards though.  

The problem with these sorts of questions is that on a relativist view, things can only right or wrong indexed to some sort of evaluative standard. Nothing is right or wrong simpliciter. When you ask me whether sexism would still be wrong if everyone approved of it, it’s ambiguous whether this is meant to be indexed to my actual evaluative standards or the evaluative standards of the version of me that lives within this hypothetical society.

If the question is meant to evoke a sense that there is something wrong simpliciter with sexism - I simply do not have this reaction.

Now I am inclined to say that top hats would be out of fashion if no one wore them and I feel should like I should explain the discrepancy between my answer here and my answer in the sexism case. Personally when I think about statements about what’s in or out of fashion - I tend to think of these as being statements about a group’s stances. I’m probably inclined toward agent cultural relativism when it comes to what’s in or out of fashion - it seems like if I were to talk about what’s in fashion in Japan I wouldn’t be talking about my individual attitudes or the attitudes of those in America - but rather about the attitudes of those in Japan.

If we were to alter the question to be about something I am inclined toward appraiser relativism about - say whether pink hoodies would still look good even if everybody hated how they looked, my answer would be the same as in the sexism case. It depends on what evaluative standards we’re indexing the claim to. Relative to my actual aesthetic standards, sure. Relative to the aesthetic standards of the hypothetical version of me that lives within this society, no.

I don’t think if this sexist, pink hoodie-hating version of me went around saying things like “Oppressing women is based af” or “Pink is an AWFUL color”, he would be saying anything false. If I’m supposed to have this intuition about the former statement, I don’t.

In my estimation, none of these tests are very persuasive at all. 

Enoch states: 

What no metaethical theory can do, however, is ignore the very strong appearance that morality is objective. 

Whether there’s a “very strong appearance that morality is objective” depends on the person of course. If the claim is just that this is the way it appears to most people, then such a claim seems dubious at best in light of the available empirical evidence available on the topic - which casts doubt on the claim that most people are moral realists.

Speaking for myself, I began this paper with the strong appearance that morality is subjective. I come away from it with the exact same evaluation – completely unmoved by anything Enoch has said.

So - did David Enoch succeed in what he set out to do with this paper - showing that contrary to what I previously thought, my moral utterances don’t actually aim at reporting my attitudes but rather stance-independent facts? 

Yes. He also convinced me to become a mathematical platonist.

1. Enoch uses the term “response-independent” in his paper. I use the term “stance-independent” instead as it is the more commonly used term.

2. One may respond to this by just accepting that this is good reason to think that the people in question actually are aesthetic realists. I personally find this highly implausible, but in any case, there are other examples one could utilize instead. I suspect many people would prefer to retain their current sexual orientation rather than have it suddenly changed - even if they claim to not think there’s any stance-independent fact about which sexuality is better. I don’t think this would be good reason to believe that such people are actually mistaken about being anti-realists about what sexuality is better.