Recently, randoSigma3002 on Twitter has said “moreal anti-realism, lmao, that view is unintuitive and implies nothing is really wrong.” In today’s article, I will explain why this, like so many of the 35,000 Tweets I have criticized, that attack anti-realism, is wrong and misrepresents the position.First of all, randoSigma3002 says that anti-realism is unintuitive. But what does he mean by unintuitive? Unintuitive to whom? Maybe it’s unintuitive to him, but it’s not unintuitive to me. And why should anti-realists care what’s unintuitive to randoSigma3002? It’s not even clear what an intuition is, or whether it represents a distinct kind of mental state. What does he mean by intuition? And what does he mean by nothing? And what does he mean by is? And what does he mean by lmao?These claims that something is “just unintuitive” are common among realists but they’re not coherent. Something can’t just be unintuitive. It must be unintuitive to someone. Certainly it’s not unintuitive to me or to a lot of people.Maybe randoSigma3002 is suggesting that it’s unintuitive to people in general. But that’s an empirical question. You need empirical evidence for it. As I’ve explained at length, in my articles “no good reason to think the folk are realists,” “no seriously, there’s no good reason to think the folk are realists,” “still no reason to think the folk are anti-realists,” “still still no reason to think the folk are realists,” and “come on guys, I really mean it this time, I’m not f*&king around, there’s really truly no reason to think the folk are realists,” the empirical evidence doesn’t actually show that the folk are anti-realists. In fact, evidence from Pozler and Wright seems to indicate otherwise, though there are, of course, serious methodological uncertainties in the studies that have been done.
>>18006627In fact, it’s not even clear that moral realism is coherent. What is a stance-independent reason? When you ask realists to explain it, they’ll explain it in light of synonyms like “a desire independent item that counts in favor.” But what does it mean to count in favor? It’s all just a circular language game played by philosophers, utterly alien to the way the common folk talk. Just like qualia talk!I don’t know what people mean by stance-independent reasons. I don’t think they do either. When people say things like “torture is wrong, and this isn’t because any group of people feels it’s wrong,” they’re just talking nonsense. I can’t even begin to fathom what they might be saying. Are they, like, speaking Spanish or something? What’s going on? I literally cannot comprehend their utterance? It’s a Chomsky-esque “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” sentence—grammatically, well-formed but totally incoherent. (Unless, of course, they’re just being appraiser relativists, and saying that they have a negative evaluative attitude towards torture, even of the kind that people approve of, but realists aren’t saying that. So what the hell are they saying?)Now, randoSigma3002 says that on anti-realism nothing is “really wrong.” But what does it mean to be “really wrong?” I think things are really wrong—I don’t approve of them! I don’t like it when people murder, and that’s what I mean when I say that murder is really wrong!
>>18006629Maybe “really” just means “stance-independently.” But then the argument has no force (absent corrupting intuitions via normative entanglement!) https://www.lanceindependent.com/p/normative-entanglement-the-linguistic It’s just saying if anti-realism is true, then there aren’t stance-independent wrongs. But that’s what anti-realism is. This just has no persuasive force, other than in making it seem like anti-realists are bad guys who can’t denounce murder enough—who can’t say it’s “really wrong.” None of us should be moved by this!Thus, randoSigma3002 has NOT given a good argument for moral realism, just like the other 47 Tweets that I have REBUTTED! We should not be moved. Realism isn’t even coherent, much less true!Note, this is intended in jest and good humor. Here’s Lance S. Bush’s blog if you want to read it! I intend this to be funny not to be critical of Lance! https://open.substack.com/users/2736376-lance-s-bush?utm_source=mentions
