The Conservative Dilemma: Charles Murray's Two Conceptions of Human Nature

I want to talk about Stephen Harper's venture into the "Whither Conservatism?" sub-genre. But first I want to talk about Charles Murray's excellent contribution earlier this month.

It's hardly an original thought, but much of the American right in the age of Obama resembles the liberal-left in the era of Reagan. Back in those days, the conservative intellectual elite understood leftist arguments, while the left basically just assumed that conservatives must be stupid and evil. They could not really comprehend that their might be an argument on the other side, or that it could be adopted by someone who understood their own perspective and was not wholly malevolent. Right-wing intellectuals like Milton Friedman were the ones who were trying to shake their opponents into seeing things differently. They knew they'd win the argument if they could get a hearing. But even when they took power, they still couldn't be taken seriously. The Reagan/Thatcher revolution must just be a terrible burst of atavistic primitivism, rather than a rival set of ideas.

Obviously, there are still people like that on the left today, and there were unthinking partisans on the right back in 1980. But my sense is that today it is the right that talks to itself, and is blinded by its own certainty that it is always right. There are exceptions, but they tend to be moderates -- the kind who are easily praised by the New York Times.

Murray, as co-author of The Bell Curve and a bona fide movement neoconservative/libertarian, can hardly be accused of the same. In his March speech, he gave an uncompromising defence of fusionism and left no doubt that he expects advances in genetics to falsify left-wing assumptions about human equality. But he did so while making serious arguments and without pretending that mild social democracy and Stalinism are exactly the same. He does not pretend that Obama is Mugabe, but makes a fairly appealing argument against what Obama wants to do.

Murray's speech has two parts, and the division between them is, as Ross Douthat has noted, rather stark.

*In the first part, Murray makes a deep argument against European/Canadian-style social democracy and in favour of the Red State American model. Murray adopts Aristotle's idea that happiness (the good life) consists not in pleasure and the avoidance of pain, but in a life of "deep satisfactions" -- hard but important things:

I'm talking about the kinds of things that we look back upon when we reach old age and let us decide that we can be proud of who we have been and what we have done. Or not.

To become a source of deep satisfaction, a human activity has to meet some stringent requirements. It has to have been important (we don't get deep satisfaction from trivial things). You have to have put a lot of effort into it (hence the cliché "nothing worth having comes easily"). And you have to have been responsible for the consequences.

There aren't many activities in life that can satisfy those three requirements. Having been a good parent. That qualifies. A good marriage. That qualifies. Having been a good neighbor and good friend to those whose lives intersected with yours. That qualifies. And having been really good at something--good at something that drew the most from your abilities. That qualifies. Let me put it formally: If we ask what are the institutions through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life, the answer is that there are just four: family, community, vocation, and faith.

The most important objection to the European social democratic model is that it denies these four to huge swathes of people. The model citizen of Canada or the EU cohabits, but does not marry, and does not have children. S/he avoids atavistic attachments to tribal identity. S/he is probably a spiritual seeker or at least believes in UFOs and ghosts, but does not belong to a church. And if s/he does not have the skills to be a knowledge worker, s/he doesn't work at all.

Murray does not seem optimistic that the hard things will survive if there are easy ways to avoid them.

Last April I had occasion to speak in Zurich, where I made some of these same points. After the speech, a few of the twenty-something members of the audience approached and said plainly that the phrase "a life well-lived" did not have meaning for them. They were having a great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and saw no voids in their lives that needed filling.

In this part of the speech, "human nature" has a teleological meaning. It consists in proper ends for a human life, ends that can be lost sight of by whole cultures.

But in the next part of the speech, "human nature" gets a scientific, measurable, even positivistic meaning. He expects (undoubtedly correctly) major advances in the biological understanding of human psychology, and he expects it to refute core social-democratic premises. Women and men think differently about sex and babies. Intelligence and personality are largely determined by genes, and those genes are differently distributed in different partially reproductively-isolated human populations. Etc.

The difficulty is bringing these two conceptions of human nature into one frame. If the deep satisfactions are triggered by our biology as given through eons of natural selection, then it is hard to see how Barack Obama can seriously threaten them. On the other hand, it may be that wealthy twenty-somethings caring more for fast cars and loose sex partners than for the virtues is also coded in the genes, and was as familiar to Aristotle and Plato as it is to visiting professors in Zurich. To the extent social change is making this attitude more common, it is just the spread of wealth and education. Wealth makes it easier to avoid hard satisfactions, and the educated sensibility cannot just return to the naive faith without becoming an angry fundamentalism. In other words, if anything is at fault, it is capitalism (for generating the wealth) and the Enlightenment. In other words, it is a product of the same forces that will drive those advances in genetic science.

Is Knowledge a Type of Belief?

When I was an undergraduate in philosophy, everyone knew that knowledge was a kind of belief. The only issue was what kind of belief (was it "justified, true belief" or something else. "S knows that p" entails "S believes that p", although not the other way around.

The interesting blog Experimental Philosophy has a result that suggests many people intuit otherwise. Apparently, people given a scenario about a corporate chairman causing damage to the environment are more likely to agree that the chairman "knew" harming the environment was wrong than that the chairman "believed" harming the environment was wrong.

Is this just a bias, like when we are told that Sandra is a strong feminist and are asked to evaluate which is more likely, "Sandra is a Christian" or "Sandra is a liberal Christian". People will say the latter is more likely, contrary to fundamental axioms of probability.

Or do people have a different conception of knowledge?

The Post-Modernist and the Dinosaur

In response to the my defence of post-modernism, "Antirealist" asks two different questions:

Are you saying that prior to the time when people grasped the concept 'living thing', there were no living things, or no facts about whether, say, algae is alive?

The answer to the first is "no" and the second is "yes". On the plausible assumption that bacteria have no concept of life and death, there were innumerable (if yucky) living things before there was a concept of "living thing." However, there were no facts about living things, at least not if facts are true propositions. You can't have propositions without concepts, so you clearly can't have true propositions without them.

It may be that there is now a fact about whether there were bacteria 4 billion years ago. But there wasn't back then.

Update: "realist" says, I'm assuming you'd agree that the truth of straight empirical propositions like this one depends on goings on in the world

Here is where we might locate the difference. I would more or less endorse Foucault's views on this issue. Empirical propositions do not really stand on their own. They are situated either in a science (or other specialized discipline like engineering, accounting or law) or as part of common sense. In other words, without all the background that makes up the science or or other technical discipline or common sense (collectively, "discourses"), the proposition wouldn't be meaningful, and therefore wouldn't be capable of being true or false.

"Discourse" may be a misleading term because Foucault confirms that the discourse embodies both linguistic and non-linguistic elements. By definition, *empirical* discourses use some physical interaction with the extra-linguistic world as part of their way of determining whether propositions are true or false. A proposition in chemistry has to lead you to some lab experiment that verifies or falsifies the proposition (or, at very minimum, raises or lowers your Bayesian prior about that proposition).

So, yes, the truth of a proposition in an empirical discourse depends on extra-linguistic goings on in the world. But what goings on it depends on is part of what makes it the discourse it is. Which external events trigger truth/falsity depends on the discourse, not the external world. And until the discourse comes into being, nothing "out there" in the world has any effect on the truth or falsity of any propositions.

What's interesting about all this is that the production of new concepts is a historical event. It occurs because someone sees the new concept as useful and others agree. Figuring out why they see the new concept as useful depends on figuring out what problems they think the new concept helps them solve. And figuring out why other people oppose the new concept depends on figuring out what new problems it creates for those people. In other words, the rise or decline of a concept is a political event.

Some common-sense concepts (like the distinction between living and non-living things) are so basic to the human condition that it is hard to see them as politcal. But they aren't political in the same sense that a completely settled issue of public policy (like whether the Stuart line will be restored to the throne or who will get Alsace Lorraine) isn't political. No one has an interest in fighting about it. And the concepts of a technical discourse usually aren't contested except by the participants in the technical discourse, who only contest the ones on the margin.

But then there are concepts like "racism", which are contested, and for which understanding the contest requires suspension of worrying about whether it is true or false that A is a racist.

Science: Sociology and Epistemology

Somebody said -- and it is true -- that the key to long-run academic success is to create a research program. Being brilliant and insightful won't do it, unless you give your graduate students something to do.

That seems to be true of all academic disciplines, whether scientific, social scientific, or whatever.

One puzzle for those of us who tend to think that science reveals the truth about the world is why it should do so. It is just another social practice, after all. You constantly run into Popperians on the Internet, but philosophers of science will tell you the positivist project of finding some extra-scientific criterion for why science works hit a dead end.

Could it be that any research project will eventually, through some collective Bayesian process, either die out or become a science? Is that crazy?

A Night in Which All Cows are Totalitarian

Daniel Larison does the Lord's work by pointing out that Karl Popper's case that Hegel was the father of modern totalitarianism (soon to be revisited by laptop-CN-Tower-bombadier Jonah Goldberg) is not based on Hegel's own actual political views.

One always hesitates to get involved in a fight about interpreting history's most obscure Prussian. But by Hegel's standards, the Philosophy of Right is relatively clear on where he stands politically. Hegel endorses private property, freedom of contract, the autonomy of family life and civil society. Hegel isn't a democrat -- the state should mix democratic, aristocratic and monarchical elements, but he does favour a broadly responsible government. He believes that a politically-involved life is "higher" than existence solely in civil society. In the Phenomenology, he has a penetrating analysis of the French Revolution and how it led to the Terror, while at the same time seeing the way that it led to a conception of universal human rights as a positive development in the self-understanding of Spirit. In other words, there is nothing in Hegel's political views that should offend a fan of Edmund Burke.

It turns out that the objections to Hegel amount to pointing out that he was not a thorough-going 19th century classical liberal (what we would now call a libertarian). To some people, the possibility that the state might exist for more than the preservation of property and freedom of contract amounts to totalitarianism. These are not subtle souls. I suppose the nicest thing you can say is that it is better that doctrinaire personalities gravitate to libertarianism than to Marxism or white nationalism.

Which is not to say that Hegel is without danger. Take Paragraph 345 of Philosophy of Right:

Justice and virtue, wrongdoing, power and vice, talents and their achievements, passions strong and weak, guilt and innocence, grandeur in individual and national life, autonomy, fortune and misfortune of states and individuals, all these have their specific significance and worth in the field of known actuality; therein they are judged and therein they have their partial, though only partial justification. World-history, however, is above the point of view from which these things matter. Each of its stages is the presence of a necessary moment in the Idea of the world mind, and that moment attains its absolute right in that stage. The nation whose life embodies this moment secures its good fortune and fame, and its deeds are brought to fruition.

There is something undeniable here. We don't, in the end, judge the Norman Conquest on whether William's claim to the throne was a legitimate one under Anglo-Saxon law, or a moral one from the point-of-view of the deaths it foreseeably caused. Even less does it makes sense to ask whether modernity and the consequent domination of the West was a good thing. We who ask the question are too much a product of the event to stand outside it. Even the denunciation of Western actions since the fifteenth century as imperialist necessarily presupposes norms and principles that this Western domination made conceivable. In this sense, when we engage in "world history", we necessarily suspend the ordinary ethical way of looking at things.

However, it is critical whether this ethical suspension is retrospective or prospective. If I think my nation embodies a necessary moment in the Idea of the world mind, do I get to ignore justice and virtue? In Hegel's own case, the Owl of Minerva flew only at dusk -- there were to be no more necessary moments, so there was no one to suspend the rules. The days of the heros who founded states were over.

But I think it's fair to point out that the important readers of Hegel -- none more important than Lenin -- read him prospectively. That's the trouble with the Hegelian neoconservatives. They have decided that America embodies the historical moment, and therefore must be kept above any order of right/law or morality. But what they ignore -- like the Leninists before them -- is that they can't know whether this is true yet.

The PreMo as PoMo

For all of you who have written in to say this blog needs more abstruse philosophical argumentification, I point you to Akrasia's post on Richard Rorty, which has led to a debate on the tenability of his "relativism." In the comments box, I try to play the post-modern Thrasymachus, while avoiding Akrasia's Socratic traps.

On an interesting and tangentially related note, this post by Daniel McCarthy (a comment to which "inspired" my heading above) takes note of a new book drawing connections between American conservative godfather Russell Kirk and (formerly?) fashionable European thinkers like Gadamer and Lyotard. The connection seems like a natural one for me once you dispense with the cartoon version of Continetnal thought. The "post-modernists" did not doubt that there can be meaning and reason. With Nietzsche, though, they tended to think that the reasonableness and meaningfulness couldn't go all the way down. Sooner or later, somebody has to fix the signifier and it isn't pretty to watch. Some such acts make possible productive disciplines of beauty, truth and goodness; others don't.

It seems to me that this way of looking at things is a natural fit with conservative anxiety about order and the threat "reason" unmoored from any tradition poses to it. Foucault certainly appreciated all the effort that went into breeding and training the contemporary Frenchman. Should all that effort be lost because it conflicts with a rationalised Europe only Jeremy Bentham could love? It's possible to see such destruction as just desserts for all that went before, but also as a complete waste. Had Foucault's excesses not killed him in early middle age, it is possible to imagine him sympathizing with the Front National.

Theistic conservatives have to ultimately disagree with the po-mos, but can concede they give a good account of life after the fall.

Jacques Derrida card uploaded to flickr by Smarthrob. Photo public.

Are Metaethicists Lying About Their Own Unimportance?

In most realms of human endeavour, specialists are convinced of the importance of their subject. The broader public, on the other hand, is mindlessly indifferent.

A comment at Overcoming Bias reminds me that things are exactly the opposite in meta-ethics. This is the discipline that studies what we mean when we say something is right or wrong, whether there is any truth to such judgments and, if so, whether we can ever know what that truth is. Pope Benedict thinks it matters what your answers to these questions might be. Dostoevsky thought it mattered. Alfred Hitchcock's Rope is about a murder inspired by moral noncognitivism.

Metaethicists, on the other hand, will without exception tell you that it doesn't matter. Noncognitivists, error theorists and skeptics can all oppose torture and donate to Oxfam. Nothing turns on what they do for a living. As the comment says:

Most meta-ethicists tend to be rather impatient with people who think that if objectivism is false then everything is permitted, or morality is undermined, or relativism is true, and so forth. None of these things follow. Nor do any substantive consequences for the major disputes within normative ethics -- e.g. that between consequentialists and Kantians. The fact that someone is an expressivist or subjectivist or naturalist or fictionalist doesn't tell you anything about their substantive views.

But should we non-experts trust them on this? After all, they can't agree about whether morality consists of feelings or judgments -- how come they agree on this? Don't they have an interest in persuading the taxpaying student-spawning public to believe Hitchcock and Dostoevsky wrong? You're going to trust a self-proclaimed moral fictionalist to tell you the truth about the negative externalities associated with his industry?

Post-Metaphysical Culture? Anti-foundationalism? Übermesch or Last Man? Whateverrr...

Reformed theocon Damon Linker and liberal wunderkind Matt Yglesias trade views on whether Richard Rorty was a properly Rawlsian liberal (latest, with the prior links here). Basically, Linker says Rorty's apparent agreement with Late "Political Liberalism" Rawls was superficial, since Rorty was really all about a comprehensive "anti-foundationalism" that would exclude believers in God or natural rights from politics. Yglesias concedes that Rorty's was a "comprehensive" view in Rawls's sense, but says Rawls was cool with that as long as the comprehensive was kept out of the political.

It's an interesting dispute because it gets at what struck me as a basic ambiguity in Rorty. Rorty says he agrees with both the continental and analytic critics of metaphysics -- he synthesizes Nietzsche and Quine. But the "continentals" all seem to think that the death of metaphysics (and with it God, History and Reason) is a big deal. The analyticals generally think that we are dealing with a conceptual mistake that will have no major bearing on the culture -- it's technical and not something the ordinary believer in Christianity or Democracy should worry about. So the critique might seem similar, but the stakes are very different.

I haven't had the time to collect the evidence, and I may never, so I'll just state my opinion: Rorty doesn't so much synthesize these two views as flip between them.

The Consequences of Consequentialism

Over at Andy's, we've been discussing the dilemma of the "consequentialist" who thinks her moral views, while true, would create bad results if widely believed.

At the risk of sounding didactic, I'll back up and try to explain the jargon (especially since I might be misusing it). A consequentialist is someone who thinks that the only things that matter morally are the consequences of actions. The most familiar kind of consequentialism is utilitarianism, which evaluates those consequences on how they promote average or total happiness or preference satisfaction.

It is fairly well-established that humans do not, in fact, think about moral issues like consistent consequentialists. It matters to us whether harm was intentional, and whether it was the result of an act or omission, and whether the person who suffered it was the kind of person the actor owed loyalty to. Lies that cause no harm are still considered at least presumptively wrong. Most people think at least some kinds of consensual sex are morally problematic. Etc.

It isn't immediately obvious that this fact about our moral psychology is a problem for consequentialism. After all, our intuitive sense of astronomy conflicts with Copernicus and our intuitive sense of physics with Einstein. So it could just be that our "natural" assumptions about morality are wrong.

But what if this fact about our moral psychology means that we will actually do more harm if we try to reason as a consequentialist than we would if we used our common sense? In addition to the fact that we have moral intuitions, it is equally well-established that these are easily biased when our interests are involved. It might be that a non-intuitive consequentialist morality would be even more easily biased. Rationalizing "thou shalt not steal" may be harder than "thou shalt steal iff. the consequences of stealing on aggregate/average well being are greater than if one had not stolen."

One lesson from Hayek is that in conditions of radical uncertainty about other people's knowledge, rules-of-thumb may work better than a rationalism that implicitly assumes omniscience. Even some consequentialists seem to have thought that humans make bad consequentialist moral reasoners -- IIRC, both Stephens and Mill thought this. Robert Wright, in The Moral Animal, seems to conclude both that utilitarianism is right about the moral facts and that natural selection has provided us with a non-utilitarian moral sense and a strong ability to rationalize. He doesn't quite say that utilitarianism is bad for us, but I think it is implicit that it very well may be.

Personally, I am inclined to think that moral truth just is what normal humans would tend to converge on if they underwent both Rawlsian reflective equilibrium and a Habermasian ideal speech situation. If so, then I think thorough-going consequentialism is false. But I can respect the dilemma of a consequentialist who has thought through the implications of moral psychology. She'd have to conclude that we just can't handle the truth.

Is There an Ontologist in the House? Or, how I learned to stop worrying and accepted Lamer as my personal Galileo

The Pithlord may maintain a chin-pulling ambivalence about the merits of the Charter. But he becomes an unhinged, screeching partisan in opposition to the Supreme Court of Canada's post-1997 "discovery" that it can invalidate legislation on the basis of "unwritten principles" not found in the actual constitutional text.

Over at The Court, the Pithlord has been bitching about the fact that the Supreme Court of Canada changed the fundamental locus of sovereignty in our system without any of 35 the lawyers appearing before them even arguing that this was possible. I was then accused by a David Cheifetz of making a fallacious argument from authority:

So now the validity of an argument - either the procedural validity of the analysis or the substantive content of the premises - may be supported by counting the number of apparent experts who are prepared to agree it is right?

Do tell what school of (il)logic teaches that.

It follows from your assertion that that when most of the people on the planet believed the earth was flat, it was correct to say that it was flat. Or would you say we don’t have to count them because they weren’t experts.

The thread after that focuses on the merits of the Provincial Court Judges' Reference and the ethics of posting pseudonymously. Both are interesting issues, worthy of further discussion. But if I am ever going to crack the two digit mark in AdSense revenue, I am going to have to get better at giving the people, especially the critical veteran demographic, what they want. And what they want down at the Legion, I am told, is more post-structuralism. Fortunately, Mr. Cheifitz's question does raise some interesting issues about the ontological status of legal propositions, so I can easily segue into the relationship between power and knowledge,

Is it really fallacious to conclude from the fact that all or almost all experts with an opinion on a point of law believe P to be true that P is in fact true? A cartoon post-structuralist would say that about the shape of the earth or the number of planets in the solar system. In fact, a real post-structuralist would agree that some propositions about astronomy are true and others false, but would say that the development of astronomy as a discipline with epistemic criteria is (a) necessary for there to be astronomical propositions that could be true or false and (b) not itself the kind of thing that can be true or false. And our real post-structuralist would point out that the question of how many planets there are in the solar system depends critically on what counts as a planet, and that is a matter of stipulation and therefore politics. But this is the Internet, and we certainly aren't supposed to be fair to post-structuralists on the Internet.

Even if we assume a naive realist account of truth as "out there" and even if we were talking about scientific propositions, I still wonder if the argument from authority is really fallacious. After all, courts rely on the "consensus of the experts" all the time. Isn't that just the rational thing to do when the acquisition of knowledge is necessarily specialized? The fact that the relevant experts all think P may not prove that P is true, but it should move you to revise your Bayesian priors upward somewhat.

Nonetheless, and all caveats aside, I suppose that we all agree that Galileo was right that Jupiter had moons and everyone else was wrong, including the experts in the Holy Inquisition. It might not have been wise to have said so, but it was still the facts.

But does this mean that when Chief Justice Lamer "discovered" that he had the power to overturn statutes based on unwritten principles, contrary to what the legal profession and judiciary as a whole had thought from the seventeenth century on, he was analogous to Galileo. Could he have just seen further, understood better than the staid conformists who came before?

I think most of us would say, "No. That can't be. Law, unlike astronomy, really is a social construct. If all the lawyers think that legislatures are supreme within the bounds of the written constitution, then that must be the law." When it comes to law, we are all Foucauldians -- knowledge and power, in the end, amount to the same thing. So Lamer might have had the ability to change the constitution, but he couldn't really discover that it was always as only he knew it to be. The implication would be that Mr. Cheifetz's reproach was unjustified. It does follow from the fact that all the lawyers arguing before the Supreme Court in 1997 assumed that they would only invalidate legislation for violating the written constitution, and that they were representative of their profession in this respect, that this was then the law. If the law is different now, it is not that some new truth has been discovered, but that some new power has been won (and therefore lost).

All of this is true enough. But legal advocacy is nonetheless structured around the idea that there IS a law. "Out there", just like the starry heavens above. And, to a suprising extent, this assumption works. The big question is "why" and the answer, I am pretty sure, will come from evolutionary biology.



Photo of "Galileo" by beanic. Photo credit for portrait of former Chief Justice Lamer Phillipe Landreville, Supreme Court of Canada Collection.

I wish I was better at coming up with titles for blog posts

Because if I were, I could compete with Akrasia's "You Damn Dirty...MORAL...Apes". But since I know I'm outclassed, I am instead going to see if I can drag him out on the substance of his post.

Anyone even slightly into popular science has noticed a lot of talk recently about apparently "moral" behaviour among great apes (along with shockingly immoral and treacherous stuff too). Akrasia cites a New York Times piece on Frans de Waal, and comments:

Boringly, the author initially seems to imply that the evolutionary origins of human morality mean serious trouble for moral philosophers. And while one of the main subjects of the piece -- primatologist Frans de Waal -- seems to cling to a rather naïve understanding of the relation between empirical investigation into the emotional bases of moral agency and critical philosophical analysis of moral claims (or, to put it in rather quaint terms, the relation between ‘is’ and ‘ought’) [...]

He promises more, but so far has not delivered (and with the possible exception of Larison, none of us are without that particular sin). I thought I'd try to provoke him with my own naive thoughts.

I doubt Akrasia would deny the potential importance of this work for moral psychology, as opposed to moral philosophy. It would be significant if our capacity for formulating moral beliefs and judgments is an adaptation, since this would mean that its features could be explained by the selection benefits they gave our ancestors. Moreover, if we share some moral capacities with great apes, then we share even more with other humans, including those in other cultures and other historical periods. That's significant because it undermines a radical historicism about moral opinion. In jurisprudence, de Waal's findings tend to give support to people who look for universal principles across legal systems, against those who think everything is culturally relative..

The real question is the relationship between moral philosophy (critical reflection on what we believe about what we should do) and moral psychology (empirical inquiry into what we believe about what we should do). Akrasia seems to police that boundary using a meta-normative/positive distinction. In other words, moral philosophy (in its metaethical rather than applied form) is about what we should believe about what we should do, while moral psychology is about what we do believe about what we should do.

One problem with this approach is that it would place a lot of the tradition of moral philosophy on the side of moral psychology. Andy can give me trouble if I'm wrong, but Hume would seem to be more interested in what we do feel about moral matters than in telling us what we should feel. Mikhail points out that even Kant believed he was providing a rational basis for generally held moral intuitions. Plato's Socrates thinks that the mass of humanity is wrong about what is good, but Aristotle's account of the virtues does not seem to be meta-normative. The natural law tradition seems to be moral psychology. IIRC, Mill claims (wrongly) that our moral intuitions comply with utilitarianism. Everyone who thinks they disprove utilitarianism by showing how counter-intuitive its consequences takes empirical data in the form of undergraduate intuition as capable of counting against a theory in moral philosophy.

And unlike some of the traditional philsophers, contemporary academics working in meta-ethics rarely try to act as moral reformers. (Peter Singer seems to be the main exception.) And few would take them seriously if they tried. (I know a number of vegetarians, not one of whom became that way as a result of Singer.) So it would seem that they are not placed to tell us what we should think about the right or the good, as opposed to making clearer why we think what we already do. But if that is what it's about, then the distinction with theoretical moral psychology seems pretty blurry to me.

Underlapping Consensus

Matt McIntosh, libertarian, writes:

Value pluralism is a brute fact that any serious ethical theory has to deal with somehow, and so far as I can tell there are only three ways to do so:

1. Subjective values are are all there is, and there is no objective fact of the matter about what’s good or bad.

2. There really is only one true Good, and when people pursue anything else it’s simply due to error.

3. There are lots of things that are good and bad, and these things aren’t reducible to a single underlying variable.

Position (1) is usually taken by libertarians of an economistic bent, but is unsatisfactory when we consider meddlesome preferences because it doesn’t allow us any basis on which to discuss and evaluate states of affairs: I want this and you want that, and where these conflict we have to hash it out either by votes or violence. Position (2) is the one taken by members of various One Big Thing schools of thought, like utilitarianism and Objectivism, but runs into epistemological difficulties.

So far, all I can add is amen and hallelujah (although I'd say there are better arguments against Position 1 and maybe Position 2). But then we get this:

Position (3) appears to be Will [Wilkinson]’s, and strongly informs his contractarian reasoning: if there’s no consensus on value, the best we can do is to build a neutral framework in which people’s pursuit of multifarious values can be accomodated to the maximum extent possible.

If this is a fair statement of what WIlkinson is arguing, the fallacy is obvious. It starts by saying there is no summum bonum, no meta-value, and then it turns around and makes consent the meta-value.

Once you accept value pluralism, then you have to accept that any argument about how we should order our affairs has to be specific to the situation we find ourselves in. You might as well abandon hypothetical consent, and accept that actual consent is usually going to have to give way to something else. In fact, you ought to abandon "political philosophy" in the sense of designing trans-historical principles to evaluate societies by.

(To be fair, McIntosh says he is going to distance himself from this position later.)