I came across this NDPR review of Brian Weatherson's new book, Normative Externalism, and wanted to share a few thoughts on the methods of normative reasons externalists. The thoughts that follow are prompted in part by the review, but also by a reaction to it that I came across on social media and previous work defending normative reasons externalism by Derek Parfit, TM Scanlon, and others.
For those of you not familiar with this literature, normative reasons externalism is, very roughly, the idea that the reasons we ought to do particular things are not 'mind-dependent.' That is, the reasons we should act (or believe, etc.) do not depend on what any particular person values or prefers–but rather, on features of the world outside of our minds. To take one example I've heard commonly given, a normative reasons externalist may say that when I step on your foot, the pain I cause you is a reason why I shouldn't keep stepping on it…regardless of whether I actually care.
I think normative reasons is a completely bizarre (and false) view–and, when I gave a paper at a recent interdisciplinary conference, every scientist in attendance seemed to be totally taken aback by it (they often said as much during their talks). From their perspective, it seemed just obvious that the reasons why someone should do something or other have to depend on whether the person has any psychological interest or values favoring the thing in question. I think those scientists are right, and want to briefly say why by discussing concerns I have about the methods of normative externalists.
Although book reviews are not always accurate, one notable thing stands out to me about the review of Weatherson's book–the way in which it notes that Weatherson evidently argues by way of counterexamples:
Weatherson's defense of his view has three parts: (1) He argues via counterexample against radical subjectivism, which is a form of internalism that says that what is most important is following your principles whatever they may be. (2) He argues via a dilemma against rational internalism that says what is most important is following standards it is rational to accept. His argument is that rational internalism is either driven to radical subjectivism to answer objections it raises against externalism (e.g., that it offers no guidance when it merely tells us to do the right thing!) or it becomes a form of externalism if it tells us to accept the principles that the evidence supports (not what a person thinks it supports)…
Now let us look at the kinds of counterexamples the book apparently gives:
Weatherson offers several counterexamples to radical subjectivism, some actual, some hypothetical. Robespierre, the architect of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror where "heads rolled like cabbages," is his central example of an actual case of someone who followed his principles (6-7, 10, 13). In Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction, Vincent Vega (John Travolta) thinks a person who keys another person's car should be killed. Weatherson's hypothetical Antoine thinks that a prankster should be killed who threatens to prank 101 people if he doesn't prank a particular person among those 101 (76-77). He calls Antoine a villain (77) and Robespierre a moral fanatic and monster (6-7). It seems obvious that what is most important is not following your principles whatever they may be. It is more important that Robespierre and Antoine do the right thing.
If memory serves me right, other externalists (such as Parfit and Scanlon) also often argue by way of cases and counterexamples. Yet, I have to confess that I find this general methodology deeply problematic. Notice, first of all, that Weatherson seems to be appealing what 'seems obvious' to us. There seem to me to be least four related problems here. First, what Weatherson claims 'seems obvious' doesn't even seem at all obvious to at least some readers his book: specifically, internalists like me who think that unless a person has some interest that would be advanced by X, they have no normative reasons to do it. Second, Weatherson's argument simply doesn't address the way that people like Antoine, Robespierre, and Vincent Vega see things. It may 'seem obvious' to (some?) of us that they shouldn't do such dastardly things–but it certainly isn't obvious to them. Third, as Korsgaard argued decades ago in The Sources of Normativity, there are ample reasons to think that any adequate theory of normativity has to address the first-personal perspective of deliberators, not merely our external perspective on what we think others' reasons are.
Let me now explain why I think all three of these things should trouble us, and why Korsgaard's point about the first-person is so important. I began my 2016 book, Rightness as Fairness, by raising the concern that unlike the scientific method, standard philosophical methods are incapable of reliably distinguishing what is true from what merely 'seems true' or what we might want to be true. Why is it important for philosophy to reliably distinguish these things? The answer, of course, is bias. As all of recorded human history and everyday life amply attest, human beings are wonderfully good at convincing themselves the world is a way that it isn't–usually in ways that reflect our interests. In the case of morality, the temptation is obvious: we want to believe that morality isn't just subjective, that there really are objective moral laws, etc. But this in turn presents a problem: how we do we know, when doing normative theorizing, that we aren't just reading what we want normative reality to be into 'normative reality itself'? To see what the problem is, consider this wonderfully evocative passage from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals:
There is nothing very odd about lambs disliking birds of prey, but this is no reason for holding it against large birds of prey that they carry off lambs. And when the lambs whisper among themselves, 'These birds of prey are evil, and does this not give us a right to say that whatever of the opposite of a bird of prey must be good?', there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument – though the birds of prey will look somewhat quizzically and say, 'Wehave nothing against these good lambs; in fact, we love them; nothing tastes better than a tender lamb. (Sections 13-17)
Nietzsche's point here is simple. Of course we want to say that villains like Vincent Vega and Robespierre shouldn't behave the way they do. They are trying to kill us lambs. We have a strong interest in them not doing so, and for condemning their behavior as immoral. But, for all that, these are just normative reasons that we are imputing to them–and we are not exactly unbiased observers!
The point then is this: in failing to address the first personal perspective of those of us who are skeptical of reasons externalism (problem 1) and the perspective of villains (problem 2), normative reasons externalism fails to show that from a first-personal deliberative perspective (problem 3, Korsgaard's point), people really have the normative reasons we want to ascribe to them. Normative reasons externalism thus seems to me to be methodologically question-begging in an epistemically suspect way (problem 4). It involves us, as outside observers, simply stating that other people have normative reasons that they don't in any sense recognize from a first-personal perspective given their own perspective or interests (for a humorous take on this methodological issue, see here). Which brings me to a comment I saw on social media in response to the review of Weatherson's book. The comment, to paraphrase, went as follows: "I like Weatherson's account because it is extreme. I think we need an externalist account of reasons to make sense of categorical moral reasons." However, (note: I've edited the following to better capture my intended thought) this seems to me precisely the problem with the approach: proponents of the view may want it to turn out that we have categorical moral reasons and they may think that externalism is the only way to make sense of them…and so they may infer on spurious grounds that there really are external reasons. But this seems to run a very serious risk of motivated reasoning, the kind of thing we shouldn't want philosophy to do.
I mentioned a while back that my own research program changed radically over time. In early drafts of my first book, I defended Rightness as Fairness on Kantian grounds, arguing that we have categorical moral reasons and that these reasons commit us to my normative theory. In the final draft, however, I ended up rejecting that approach in favor of a very different one–one that aims to derive moral normativity from purely instrumental (means/end) reasoning and empirical moral psychology. These methodological issues are the reason why. I became convinced that attempts to defend categorical reasons always end up begging important normative questions in methodologically suspect ways. Is the alternative approach I defend better? I believe it is, but I guess we'll have to wait and see. 😉
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