Huemer's purpose with this book is a strange combination of ambitious and non-ambitious. The book is ambitious because it wishes to present a coherent picture of how to approach philosophizing about morality, and it tries to act out these lessons in the discussion of various views in metaethics. The book is also ambitious in that what it claims to establish is in some sense a quite robust metaphysical system which many contemporary authors shy away from. In other ways though, the book is not ambitious, many of the views that Huemer tries to make sound controversial and revolutionary are in fact, if not the consensus, at least less controversial than he tries to make it sound. Further, Huemer's attacks on his opponents rarely culminate in intriguing new objections, instead he tends to prefer Moorean shifts and psychologizing his opponents. Sometimes Huemer makes such low blows that one has to wonder whether he misunderstands his opponents, or if he is deliberately misrepresenting them.
The book, like many recent moral realist books in the metaethics literature, follows a simple schema: attack all opposing views, and then consolidate your position with strong defences against classical objections to moral realism, with a little bit of dialectical maneuvering along the way to set yourself as the default: an objective morality known through common sense indeed sounds like a strong pre-theoretic default.
So what are the roadblocks that Huemer finds in his way? The first is non-cognitivism, the second is subjectivism, and the third is naturalism (all construed broadly). Non-cognitivism, the view that moral statements don't have truth values (or on the non-descriptivist version, don't have representational contents), is dealt with in a couple prongs. He presents a very simple case against the majority of versions of non-cognitivism: namely, he says they simply do a bad job of describing our use of moral language. This objection I think is relatively straightforward and direct, and is a good example of the application of his common-sensical approach: does moral language sound non-cognitive or are things stated assertorically? They certainly sound assertoric, so it seems pretty weird to claim otherwise. Against the crude version of non-cognitivism, the best argument might be just to look at the linguistic facts and conclude the view is bizarre. The Embedding and Frege-Geach problems are treated as manifestations of this, but certainly they're not the sole component of this problem.
The first rough patch for me comes in his discussion of more sophisticated views within non-cognitivism, he discusses Hare, Gibbard, Blackburn, and Timmons. All philosophers with sophisticated versions of non-cognitivism that claim to address some of the problems described above. I'm less familiar with Gibbard and Blackburn, but the discussions of their views seem to be relatively fine. The discussion of Hare seems to be wrong, but perhaps only because he's trying to see what Hare might have say about his previous objection, which I don't know that Hare addressed in the form Huemer lays it out. The discussion of Timmons on the other hand seems to me to be a case where Huemer's directness seems to lead him off good philosophical habits. Timmons' view, namely that moral statements can be true, but don't purport to represent or describe some state of affairs in the world, is difficult to square. But rather than focusing on addressing this directly, which appears to be Huemer's strength, he indulges in a crude kind of mind-reading:
"We understand Timmons' real view to be that (a) there aren't actually any moral properties, but (b) we can still go around using the word 'property', because it's just one of the rules of moral language that you get to use that word even when there aren't any properties around for it to refer to." (p. 44)
Of course "Timmons' real view" is not something Timmons has ever actually said, it is simply Huemer's supposedly common-sensical retelling of Timmons' position. This is I think badly misleading, especially for a text such as Huemer's that supposedly is aimed at a popular audience who might not be familiar with Timmons' work. This kind of attempted explanation of what somebody really thinks strikes me as a disingenuous form of argumentation which has no place in academic philosophy. Unfortunately common-sensical retelling appears to be a popular weapon in Huemer's arsenal.
The second chapter on subjectivism doesn't do much better. Here Huemer describes three kinds of subjectivism that are apparently considered either representative or exhaustive. In either case I'm not confident this is true. He singles out four kinds of subjectivism: individualist subjectivism, ideal observer theories, cultural relativism, and divine command theory. The latter inclusion might strike some as odd, the theory that morality is whatever God commands hardly seems subjectivist, but the inclusion is more reasonable than it might sound at first glance. Divine command theory is often lumped in with other forms of constructivism because it posits something, and especially for Huemer, some mind, responsible for the existence of moral facts.
The problem comes right from the start, individualist subjectivism is described for instance with the following formula: "x is good = The speaker believes that x is good". I think this kind of formulaic approach is misleading and it gets used to big effect, especially in Huemer's discussion of analytic reductionisms, among which he includes all kinds of subjectivism. According to Huemer, this is in some sense stating a definition, and so the fact that the words don't appear to have the same meaning (well-established due to Moore's open question argument), is decisive evidence that this is false.
My impression, especially for more interesting versions of what Huemer calls subjectivism (Kantian constructivism in particular, which Huemer doesn't address), is that they don't purport to be advancing a thesis about the appropriate analysis of the word "good". Rather they're arguing that in fact, the good-maker of something is something like a belief that it is good or a pro-attitude towards it, certain facts about the constitution of human reason, or facts about our attitudes. Otherwise I think subjectivism would have disappeared after Moore, and perhaps never would have appeared in the first place.
The second chapter as a whole includes many straightforward arguments against subjectivism, relativism, etc, for instance that they seem to have grotesque consequences for the morality of Nazis (that since they believed what they were doing was right, it was for them), and even worse ones for the behaviour of dissidents in Nazi Germany in the case of cultural relativism (if you live in a Nazi society, cultural relativism understood as a moral thesis would suggest that a dissident was in fact immoral for dissenting from supporting the Nazis). There are many variations in how he addresses the first-order normative considerations that count against subjectivism, for instance he also considers it in terms of how subjectivism might lead to unreasonable kinds of moral infallibility, and make it difficult to explain moral disagreement. Overall though, it reads like a very simple but effective set of considerations contributing to make the argument.
The third chapter covers analytic and synthetic reductionism, I've already discussed how he addresses analytic reductionism in relation to subjectivism. On the other hand, for synthetic reductionism, he makes the case that the only benefit of such a theory would be that it might allow us to understand moral knowledge as arising like scientific knowledge. He argues at length (I believe, correctly) that moral knowledge cannot be established through the same approach as scientific knowledge. The unfortunate thing for him though is that I do not believe this is the only theoretical merit to synthetic naturalism, and so by putting all his eggs in one basket by focusing on this, he seems to only manage an oblique attempt at objecting to synthetic naturalism, certainly not enough to really wound it.
That sums up the first part of the book. Moving onto the second half, we get the best chapter of the book to start us off.
The book is called ethical intuitionism for a reason. Huemer intends to defend the existence of intuitions about morality which are a correct guide to the facts about what is good and bad, and that these intuitions belong to a sui generis faculty of intuition. Naturally since this is more-or-less his specialty, he does a better job of making arguments in this area.
Much of what he says follows from what he calls the Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism, namely, if something seems to be true, then that is prima facie reason to believe it is true, unless we have reasons for believing that our intuitions on such topics would be systematically mistaken (and even then, only if our intuitions about morality are weaker than our intuitions about our reasons for thinking we're systematically mistaken). This principle is defended in the most natural way: ask whether there really is an alternative. If we cannot rely on intellectual seemings, then it doesn't seem like we can use logic, or evidence from perceptual experience, since those are known to us because of kinds of seemings. By vindicating the faculty of intuition, we get moral intuitions along with it that may qualify as justifications for our moral beliefs. Thus, we get moral epistemology. Along the way, he considers various senses in which we might think moral facts are difficult to justify or to know reliably, and does his best to refute them.
I must admit to finding much of this rather convincing, although perhaps because much of it is I think less controversial than he lets on. I don't think any major metaethical theory except outright nihilism denies the truth of our moral intuitions, rather some simply have tidier explanations for why our intuitions are a good guide to moral truth. Huemer undoubtedly has work to do because he has to defend that moral realism isn't left without a satisfying explanation, but it is much less work than you would think if your only source of information was Huemer since he goes to great lengths to say that moral intuitions have been treated with complete suspicion by philosophers.
However Huemer does go further, and so we're treated to a more general discussion of a priori knowledge which is also quite interesting. His account amounts to roughly the following: we come to know universals (e.g. properties, mathematical objects, moral concepts - all things that are not identical with any physical thing and are close to conceptual), and through that knowledge we develop a comfort with (or intuition for) them that allows us to learn new things about them that are not knowable by definition alone. Since the problem of how a priori knowledge is possible is, in the formulation Huemer gives it, first from philosophy of mathematics, he points to mathematics as the prime example of the discovery of a priori knowledge.
Here I have to quibble with him, coming from something in the vicinity of an intuitionist view (in the mathematical sense now - a roughly Kantian/Brouwerian account of mathematics). It seems to me that part of what makes mathematical knowledge possible is that certain metaphysical facts make mathematical facts the kinds of things that it is simple for us to know. I believe mathematical objects shape our experience (as a form of intuition), and in fact are nothing over & above that. I think a similar account is possible for morality, albeit not as (Kantian) intuition, but possibly through some similar faculty of practical reason. This simplifies the problem because we're not left to explain the correspondence of our beliefs to some external reality, but rather our intuitions (now in Huemer's sense) are always stirred by a direct confrontation in our experience and our exercise of reason. This account doesn't jettison the universality of mathematics, but it does undermine its objectivity in the contemporary philosophical sense of 'objective'.
Huemer tries to make a partners-in-crime argument from the possibility of knowledge of a domain of objective mathematical facts to the possibility of knowledge of an objective domain of ethical facts, but if one denies the objectivity (in the strong sense used by Huemer) of mathematical facts, then the argument fails. All that is left is whether his account of knowledge via universals sounds prima facie more reasonable, and I don't know that it does.
Huemer's discussions of other major topics are mostly fairly satisfactory. Disagreement objections to moral realism have always been weak, but Huemer does a good job of laying out why moral realism wouldn't entail that we'd know the right answers to moral questions, or that there'd be some method we could follow to figure out the answer with absolute certitude. Huemer addresses "Practical Reasons", although really the chapter could be more narrowly construed as a discussion of moral motivation objections to moral realism with a brief discussion of a hierarchy of what motivates humans. I find metaethical discussions of motivation not especially... motivating, so I will skip over his take-down of the Humean view and focus on his hierarchy of motivating considerations. He says we're motivated by (i) moral judgements/beliefs, (ii) prudential judgements/beliefs, and (iii) desires/appetites. He thinks that if all works well, they should be prioritized in that order since moral judgements have to take in prudential considerations but not vice versa, and the same for prudential judgments and desires.
Personally, I find the practice of trying to armchair psychology our way through these discussions unhelpful. Luckily for Huemer, his opponents are guilty of this as much or more than him, so I think the objections are still successfully neutralized. But hey, that's just my view.
After the discussion of motivation, there are a series of miscellaneous objections, most of which didn't have a very memorable discussion for me. I did enjoy his discussion of Blackburn's supervenience argument among the laundry list of grievances with moral realism that have appeared over the years.
The final chapter is the most irritating of the book. Having dispatched the opponents of moral realism and declared victory, he wonders why moral intuitionism has been so unpopular for so long. In order to combat the allegation that it might be due to a flaw in the theory, he claims instead that it is due to the winds of fashion, and he engages in a lengthy discussion of the causes. He identifies three: cynicism, apparently in our desire to demystify the world and paint it in terrible colours we're cynical of anything claiming the mantle of 'goodness', scientism, or the desire to leave out of our theories things that sound unscientific, and political correctness, which he thinks is responsible for the emergence of a popular relativism which is hegemonic in portions of philosophy. Frankly, I just don't buy it. It seems to me that there were reasons relating to how we understood language for the first half of the 20th century that led unanalyzable primitives such as "good" to fall out of favour on one hand, and a minimalism about metaphysics as a whole that led people to less metaphysically grandiose theories. Neither strikes me as a fashion particularly, and I especially don't think a naïve relativism based on a principle of political correctness exists within philosophy. As Huemer, and a million others have noted, it is trivially self-refuting to invoke a universal value of tolerance to justify moral relativism, since moral relativism would relativize the value of tolerance itself.
When Huemer is not poking at leftists for ruining metaethics, he does however give a brief summary of his arguments which may serve as a good quick reference. I would recommend the Moral Epistemology chapter to anybody, I might not recommend the book except to the true metaethics fanatic. There are much better starting points for contemporary non-naturalist moral realism, such as Shafer-Landau's Moral Realism: A Defence and David Enoch's Taking Morality Seriously, the latter of which I found thrilling to read.
The book, like many recent moral realist books in the metaethics literature, follows a simple schema: attack all opposing views, and then consolidate your position with strong defences against classical objections to moral realism, with a little bit of dialectical maneuvering along the way to set yourself as the default: an objective morality known through common sense indeed sounds like a strong pre-theoretic default.
So what are the roadblocks that Huemer finds in his way? The first is non-cognitivism, the second is subjectivism, and the third is naturalism (all construed broadly). Non-cognitivism, the view that moral statements don't have truth values (or on the non-descriptivist version, don't have representational contents), is dealt with in a couple prongs. He presents a very simple case against the majority of versions of non-cognitivism: namely, he says they simply do a bad job of describing our use of moral language. This objection I think is relatively straightforward and direct, and is a good example of the application of his common-sensical approach: does moral language sound non-cognitive or are things stated assertorically? They certainly sound assertoric, so it seems pretty weird to claim otherwise. Against the crude version of non-cognitivism, the best argument might be just to look at the linguistic facts and conclude the view is bizarre. The Embedding and Frege-Geach problems are treated as manifestations of this, but certainly they're not the sole component of this problem.
The first rough patch for me comes in his discussion of more sophisticated views within non-cognitivism, he discusses Hare, Gibbard, Blackburn, and Timmons. All philosophers with sophisticated versions of non-cognitivism that claim to address some of the problems described above. I'm less familiar with Gibbard and Blackburn, but the discussions of their views seem to be relatively fine. The discussion of Hare seems to be wrong, but perhaps only because he's trying to see what Hare might have say about his previous objection, which I don't know that Hare addressed in the form Huemer lays it out. The discussion of Timmons on the other hand seems to me to be a case where Huemer's directness seems to lead him off good philosophical habits. Timmons' view, namely that moral statements can be true, but don't purport to represent or describe some state of affairs in the world, is difficult to square. But rather than focusing on addressing this directly, which appears to be Huemer's strength, he indulges in a crude kind of mind-reading:
"We understand Timmons' real view to be that (a) there aren't actually any moral properties, but (b) we can still go around using the word 'property', because it's just one of the rules of moral language that you get to use that word even when there aren't any properties around for it to refer to." (p. 44)
Of course "Timmons' real view" is not something Timmons has ever actually said, it is simply Huemer's supposedly common-sensical retelling of Timmons' position. This is I think badly misleading, especially for a text such as Huemer's that supposedly is aimed at a popular audience who might not be familiar with Timmons' work. This kind of attempted explanation of what somebody really thinks strikes me as a disingenuous form of argumentation which has no place in academic philosophy. Unfortunately common-sensical retelling appears to be a popular weapon in Huemer's arsenal.
The second chapter on subjectivism doesn't do much better. Here Huemer describes three kinds of subjectivism that are apparently considered either representative or exhaustive. In either case I'm not confident this is true. He singles out four kinds of subjectivism: individualist subjectivism, ideal observer theories, cultural relativism, and divine command theory. The latter inclusion might strike some as odd, the theory that morality is whatever God commands hardly seems subjectivist, but the inclusion is more reasonable than it might sound at first glance. Divine command theory is often lumped in with other forms of constructivism because it posits something, and especially for Huemer, some mind, responsible for the existence of moral facts.
The problem comes right from the start, individualist subjectivism is described for instance with the following formula: "x is good = The speaker believes that x is good". I think this kind of formulaic approach is misleading and it gets used to big effect, especially in Huemer's discussion of analytic reductionisms, among which he includes all kinds of subjectivism. According to Huemer, this is in some sense stating a definition, and so the fact that the words don't appear to have the same meaning (well-established due to Moore's open question argument), is decisive evidence that this is false.
My impression, especially for more interesting versions of what Huemer calls subjectivism (Kantian constructivism in particular, which Huemer doesn't address), is that they don't purport to be advancing a thesis about the appropriate analysis of the word "good". Rather they're arguing that in fact, the good-maker of something is something like a belief that it is good or a pro-attitude towards it, certain facts about the constitution of human reason, or facts about our attitudes. Otherwise I think subjectivism would have disappeared after Moore, and perhaps never would have appeared in the first place.
The second chapter as a whole includes many straightforward arguments against subjectivism, relativism, etc, for instance that they seem to have grotesque consequences for the morality of Nazis (that since they believed what they were doing was right, it was for them), and even worse ones for the behaviour of dissidents in Nazi Germany in the case of cultural relativism (if you live in a Nazi society, cultural relativism understood as a moral thesis would suggest that a dissident was in fact immoral for dissenting from supporting the Nazis). There are many variations in how he addresses the first-order normative considerations that count against subjectivism, for instance he also considers it in terms of how subjectivism might lead to unreasonable kinds of moral infallibility, and make it difficult to explain moral disagreement. Overall though, it reads like a very simple but effective set of considerations contributing to make the argument.
The third chapter covers analytic and synthetic reductionism, I've already discussed how he addresses analytic reductionism in relation to subjectivism. On the other hand, for synthetic reductionism, he makes the case that the only benefit of such a theory would be that it might allow us to understand moral knowledge as arising like scientific knowledge. He argues at length (I believe, correctly) that moral knowledge cannot be established through the same approach as scientific knowledge. The unfortunate thing for him though is that I do not believe this is the only theoretical merit to synthetic naturalism, and so by putting all his eggs in one basket by focusing on this, he seems to only manage an oblique attempt at objecting to synthetic naturalism, certainly not enough to really wound it.
That sums up the first part of the book. Moving onto the second half, we get the best chapter of the book to start us off.
The book is called ethical intuitionism for a reason. Huemer intends to defend the existence of intuitions about morality which are a correct guide to the facts about what is good and bad, and that these intuitions belong to a sui generis faculty of intuition. Naturally since this is more-or-less his specialty, he does a better job of making arguments in this area.
Much of what he says follows from what he calls the Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism, namely, if something seems to be true, then that is prima facie reason to believe it is true, unless we have reasons for believing that our intuitions on such topics would be systematically mistaken (and even then, only if our intuitions about morality are weaker than our intuitions about our reasons for thinking we're systematically mistaken). This principle is defended in the most natural way: ask whether there really is an alternative. If we cannot rely on intellectual seemings, then it doesn't seem like we can use logic, or evidence from perceptual experience, since those are known to us because of kinds of seemings. By vindicating the faculty of intuition, we get moral intuitions along with it that may qualify as justifications for our moral beliefs. Thus, we get moral epistemology. Along the way, he considers various senses in which we might think moral facts are difficult to justify or to know reliably, and does his best to refute them.
I must admit to finding much of this rather convincing, although perhaps because much of it is I think less controversial than he lets on. I don't think any major metaethical theory except outright nihilism denies the truth of our moral intuitions, rather some simply have tidier explanations for why our intuitions are a good guide to moral truth. Huemer undoubtedly has work to do because he has to defend that moral realism isn't left without a satisfying explanation, but it is much less work than you would think if your only source of information was Huemer since he goes to great lengths to say that moral intuitions have been treated with complete suspicion by philosophers.
However Huemer does go further, and so we're treated to a more general discussion of a priori knowledge which is also quite interesting. His account amounts to roughly the following: we come to know universals (e.g. properties, mathematical objects, moral concepts - all things that are not identical with any physical thing and are close to conceptual), and through that knowledge we develop a comfort with (or intuition for) them that allows us to learn new things about them that are not knowable by definition alone. Since the problem of how a priori knowledge is possible is, in the formulation Huemer gives it, first from philosophy of mathematics, he points to mathematics as the prime example of the discovery of a priori knowledge.
Here I have to quibble with him, coming from something in the vicinity of an intuitionist view (in the mathematical sense now - a roughly Kantian/Brouwerian account of mathematics). It seems to me that part of what makes mathematical knowledge possible is that certain metaphysical facts make mathematical facts the kinds of things that it is simple for us to know. I believe mathematical objects shape our experience (as a form of intuition), and in fact are nothing over & above that. I think a similar account is possible for morality, albeit not as (Kantian) intuition, but possibly through some similar faculty of practical reason. This simplifies the problem because we're not left to explain the correspondence of our beliefs to some external reality, but rather our intuitions (now in Huemer's sense) are always stirred by a direct confrontation in our experience and our exercise of reason. This account doesn't jettison the universality of mathematics, but it does undermine its objectivity in the contemporary philosophical sense of 'objective'.
Huemer tries to make a partners-in-crime argument from the possibility of knowledge of a domain of objective mathematical facts to the possibility of knowledge of an objective domain of ethical facts, but if one denies the objectivity (in the strong sense used by Huemer) of mathematical facts, then the argument fails. All that is left is whether his account of knowledge via universals sounds prima facie more reasonable, and I don't know that it does.
Huemer's discussions of other major topics are mostly fairly satisfactory. Disagreement objections to moral realism have always been weak, but Huemer does a good job of laying out why moral realism wouldn't entail that we'd know the right answers to moral questions, or that there'd be some method we could follow to figure out the answer with absolute certitude. Huemer addresses "Practical Reasons", although really the chapter could be more narrowly construed as a discussion of moral motivation objections to moral realism with a brief discussion of a hierarchy of what motivates humans. I find metaethical discussions of motivation not especially... motivating, so I will skip over his take-down of the Humean view and focus on his hierarchy of motivating considerations. He says we're motivated by (i) moral judgements/beliefs, (ii) prudential judgements/beliefs, and (iii) desires/appetites. He thinks that if all works well, they should be prioritized in that order since moral judgements have to take in prudential considerations but not vice versa, and the same for prudential judgments and desires.
Personally, I find the practice of trying to armchair psychology our way through these discussions unhelpful. Luckily for Huemer, his opponents are guilty of this as much or more than him, so I think the objections are still successfully neutralized. But hey, that's just my view.
After the discussion of motivation, there are a series of miscellaneous objections, most of which didn't have a very memorable discussion for me. I did enjoy his discussion of Blackburn's supervenience argument among the laundry list of grievances with moral realism that have appeared over the years.
The final chapter is the most irritating of the book. Having dispatched the opponents of moral realism and declared victory, he wonders why moral intuitionism has been so unpopular for so long. In order to combat the allegation that it might be due to a flaw in the theory, he claims instead that it is due to the winds of fashion, and he engages in a lengthy discussion of the causes. He identifies three: cynicism, apparently in our desire to demystify the world and paint it in terrible colours we're cynical of anything claiming the mantle of 'goodness', scientism, or the desire to leave out of our theories things that sound unscientific, and political correctness, which he thinks is responsible for the emergence of a popular relativism which is hegemonic in portions of philosophy. Frankly, I just don't buy it. It seems to me that there were reasons relating to how we understood language for the first half of the 20th century that led unanalyzable primitives such as "good" to fall out of favour on one hand, and a minimalism about metaphysics as a whole that led people to less metaphysically grandiose theories. Neither strikes me as a fashion particularly, and I especially don't think a naïve relativism based on a principle of political correctness exists within philosophy. As Huemer, and a million others have noted, it is trivially self-refuting to invoke a universal value of tolerance to justify moral relativism, since moral relativism would relativize the value of tolerance itself.
When Huemer is not poking at leftists for ruining metaethics, he does however give a brief summary of his arguments which may serve as a good quick reference. I would recommend the Moral Epistemology chapter to anybody, I might not recommend the book except to the true metaethics fanatic. There are much better starting points for contemporary non-naturalist moral realism, such as Shafer-Landau's Moral Realism: A Defence and David Enoch's Taking Morality Seriously, the latter of which I found thrilling to read.
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