i will briefly outline a little argument for moral anti-realism, or perhaps an argument that "companions in guilt" defences of moral realism are at least a bit misguided without the support of a good argument that these companions really are guilty.


i will take the realist to claim that we know at least a few moral facts, that these facts in some sense depend on the metaphysical structure of the world, and that our language in making moral claims is true or false on the basis of these states of the world. all this really boils down to in this context is that there are some categorical moral facts, which is to say that there are facts about what we ought or ought not to do irrespective of the beliefs and desires of the moral agent.

anti-realists, those who deny at least one of the core claims of realism i have mentioned, have often argued that moral facts are at least somewhat odd, in that they are purportedly intrinsically motivating even without relation to beliefs and desires, or that they would require a strange faculty of intuition to be known. most broadly, i think the anti-realist makes a claim that the idea of categorical normativity makes little sense; that facts-in-themselves, without a context that makes that fact morally relevant, are non-normative, giving no reason for action. one response is that categorical normativity is coherent in the realm of epistemic and logical norms, that the kind of categorical normativity these norms possess is like, in the relevant respects, moral normativity, and so moral realism is unproblematic in this respect (for my purposes here, i will suppose that there really is parity between such kinds of normativity).

this all depends on a kind of intuition, perhaps justified by phenomenal conservatism, that such epistemic and logical norms are categorical. after all, what would logic be if not something that applied to everything, irrespective of what relations of validity we want to hold? further, the language of epistemic norms is now so entrenched that it feels inescapable, supposedly applying always to all epistemic agents as the criteria of rationality.

however, if we suppose that such norms are hypothetical (that is, not categorical), a symmetric but opposing argument will stand. this argument would begin with the supposition that moral norms are hypothetical, applying differentially, challenging realist objections to the strangeness of such normativity. it would then show how this is similar to the unproblematic hypothetical normativity of logical and epistemic norms, and so conclude that anti-realism had been defended. such a hypothetical epistemic norm might look like: "you ought to proportion your belief to the evidence if you want to seek truth and shun error", and in logic: "you ought to believe P, P → Q ⊢ Q if you want not to offend your teacher." this discussion may be linked with order-words, and the silent threats of death that accompany the speech-acts of the authoritative. little can be done without context, and desire.

similarly, one could invert the argument still further, arguing that because moral facts possess a distinctive hypothetical normativity coherently, we ought not to object to hypothetical epistemic or logical norms. beginning from intuitions about the kind of normativity such facts imply leads to a dead end. this leads me to conclude that both the moral realist and anti-realist are in symmetric positions of weakness until they have good arguments that epistemic and logical norms are really what they say they are. i am inclined to the view that they are what the anti-realist says they are. nonetheless, this doesn't tell us anything until i can go beyond an apparent brute "seeming" to a position, at which point i have picked a side. it doesn't seem to me to be particularly easier to argue for one kind of categorical normativity than another, and so the companions in guilt argument seems slightly pointless.

i will finally note that it seems to me possible that there is no fact of the matter about the kinds of normativity which such realms display, perhaps because there is no such thing as the moral sphere.

open to criticism. i will read a bit about this eventually, i promise.


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