Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I'm Matt Teichman. I'm Joseph. And with us today is Andrew Cepieli, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. His new book, Pragmatist Quietism, A Metaethical System, is out now from Oxford University Press.
and he is here to discuss quietism and metaethics. Andrew Cepeli, welcome. Great. Thanks for having me.
So quietism is a word that comes up here and there in philosophy, but what does it mean in the context of ethics or metaethics? So a metaethical quietist is somebody who thinks that there are correct answers to moral questions, but there's not what you might call a foundation. There's not the possibility of vindication from some area of inquiry outside of ethics. So for example,
The quietest would think you can neither vindicate nor undermine ethical claims using arguments from metaphysics. You can't do it from arguments in semantics or the philosophy of language, that sort of thing, that ethics is sort of its own autonomous sphere.
So that seems pretty intuitive, right? If you just take a random ethical statement, like it's wrong to be mean to your kids. And, you know, it's kind of counterintuitive that some stuff that linguists would do, analyzing the grammar of natural languages would affect whether that's true or false, right? So does that fit with your sense of your quietest position as kind of the common sense position about ethics where, you know, these other things you could study aren't going to determine whether something's right or wrong?
I think that's right. So I think it's in some ways a very naturally appealing position when you're having an ethical argument. You're not going to be reaching for justification from the philosophy of language or from metaphysics. You're not going to be trying to show how your position is one that you're rationally compelled to accept because you're an agent or you participate in discourse or something like that.
At the same time, when you start to think about it a little bit, it's kind of mysterious how quietism could be correct. You know, the idea that
truth of claims within ethics is independent of what ethical terms mean, or that whether anything's right or wrong is independent of whether there are such things as rightness or wrongness in the world can start to seem a little bit mysterious. And certainly when people get in a kind of skeptical frame of mind about ethics, you know, they find themselves asking these kinds of
questions about the metaphysics of moral properties and so on. They seem to want some kind of justification. And so when the quietus says, well, no such justification is available, I think that strikes people as odd sometimes. So yeah, it's a position that, as I put it in the book, you
I think many people want to believe but don't quite see how they can believe. And so the book is aimed at showing how they can accept this view. So just to walk through an example of like how an argument from metaphysics might impact a view you take in ethics.
you might think that nothing is the right thing to do because maybe I have an argument that the notion of right is like logically self-contradictory or something. And then if it's logically self-contradictory, then we don't get to use the word right. And therefore, it doesn't really make sense to think of anything as actually being right. Is that the kind of argument that you're sort of resisting or? Yeah. The metaphysical argument that I'm thinking of that I've heard many times is
look, if you try to take a survey or, you know, if you try to catalog what there is in the world, you'll think, okay, maybe it includes tables and chairs and protons and so forth, but that it doesn't include values or it doesn't include rightness and wrongness, right? That those things are not, as some put it, part of the furniture of the universe. And if there are no such things as rightness and wrongness, then there's nothing to make claims like this is right, this is wrong, true. Mm-hmm.
Right. So if you're in one of these discussions where we're thinking about, you know, what kinds of entities are real or not. And like so tables and chairs are real. Probably people are real. But then there may be these other categories of things where people, you know, kind of had a bit debate about whether they're real or thoughts and feelings and emotions real. I don't know. You can't look at them and touch them. So maybe they're not real or numbers are numbers real or they're just sort of like collections of things in the world.
And those are the only things that, you know, numbers are just shorthand for talking about groups of things in the physical world, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So in any of these cases where someone has come up with an argument that some kind of thing actually, you know, it's not real, doesn't really exist. If rightness or wrongness makes it onto the chopping block, then that could have an implication for whether stuff is right or wrong. So it's often argued. I mean, I disagree with that view, but, you know, you can see that I think the appeal of it, or at least I think many people can see the appeal of it. Yeah.
Is there another thing other than ethics where you think that kind of argument actually is pretty good, where it's like, oh, yeah, you know, I used to think numbers are real, but they're actually not now I've, you know, or something like that.
Sure. So I think there are special features of the debates that tend to be called normative ethical, right? That explain why these sorts of considerations, let's say from parsimony, right? You don't want to have too many things in the world. Why those sorts of considerations don't bear on fundamental ethical questions. By contrast, you know, other sorts of debates, which are, uh,
different, I think, in important ways. So if you're having a debate about whether there are angels or whether there's phlogiston, the fluid that transmits heat from one thing to another, there I think those same kinds of arguments, let's say from parsimony,
Okay, right. So phlogiston, for people who haven't heard of it, was a substance that people back, was it the 19th century? Something like that. Long time ago. Even earlier. People back in the 19th century and before used to think was responsible for transferring heat. And then scientific progress eventually made it clear that there is no such substance that's responsible for the transfer of all heat.
But then also maybe just some reflection on like how the theory of heat transfer via phlogiston was built and does it actually hang together coherently as a theory maybe also could prompt skepticism about that, about the existence of that thing. I mean, I think the crucial difference from my point of view is that debates about the existence of phlogiston, debates about the existence of aphrodisiacs.
of angels or debates about the existence of demons, these sorts of things are what I call deep, whereas the disputes that tend to be called normative ethical are what I call superficial. We can say a little bit more about what deep and superficial sort of amount to, but the important thing maybe for present purposes is that deep disputes are the sorts of disputes that can afford...
sort of representational accuracy, right? Depending on which side you take in these disputes, you can represent the world better or worse. Whereas in superficial disputes, accurate representation of the world in a kind of robust sense is just not up for grabs at all.
at all. There's no possibility of doing better in a sort of representational respect by taking one side or the other. But the thought is these sorts of considerations from metaphysics and semantics and so on could bear on which ethical views to accept only if they could bear on which views, if taken within those debates, would involve representing the world accurately. So what's an example of an ethical claim that
where it doesn't really make sense to say it's representing the world either accurately or inaccurately. Right. So just the sort of ethical claim that you might come across in Ethics 101. So a trolley is headed towards five people and you can turn it so that it hits one person instead. Should you turn the trolley, right? And one position is, yes, you should turn it. The other is, no, you shouldn't turn it. My thought there is,
You're neither representing the world better nor worse by taking, let's say, the first view as opposed to the second. You can also, you know, debates about whether some ethical theory is true, like utilitarianism or, you know, contractualism or any of the other isms. These are various attempts to explain what the good is in terms of something else. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.
So we shouldn't really view superficial disputes in a pejorative sense. Yeah, that's an important point. So often when we say that things are superficial, we mean that they're – Like dissing them, right? We're dissing them, right? They're bad. They're not the sorts of debates that we should be having. They're not respectable. That's not what I mean by it. I think that these fundamental ethical disputes, the kinds of things that you would talk about in normative ethics class –
that they don't afford representational accuracy, but that they're significant in other ways. I think they're significant because they bear on things like action and affect. By contrast, there are other sorts of debates that I would think of as being superficial, right? Where
representational accuracy or mirroring nature, whatever you want to call it, where those things are not up for grabs, but where they're not significant in any other respect either. So an example that I like to use is from William James's book, Pragmatism. It's a case where James and his hiking companion come upon a guy who's chasing a squirrel around a tree, right? And they start having a dispute about whether
The guy is thereby going around the squirrel. And one says, yes, he's going around the squirrel because first he's north of it, then he's west of it and south and east. And the other says, no, no, no, he's not going around the squirrel because he's always in back of it. He's never to the side, never to the front. So it's like if we were looking at it from a bird's eye view on a map, maybe it would look more like he's going around the squirrel. Whereas if we look at it from the man chasing the squirrel's point of view, the position of the squirrel isn't changing. It's always in front of him.
Yeah, he's not like lapping the squirrel. Like, yeah. Like if the squirrel was staying still, maybe that would be the kind of situation in which it was clear cut he's going around it. Yeah, that would be the kind of case where I think almost everybody would say that he's going around the squirrel. Okay. And, you know, that's the sort of debate that James intended his own sort of pragmatist way of doing philosophy to sort of dissolve. Yeah.
Right. And, you know, there have been many philosophers throughout history who have looked at debates like that and thought that somehow they're not really in good order. They're pseudo questions. They're non-substantive. They're merely verbal. They've used these kinds of expressions. And the idea there is that in that case, this debate, the one person says the man's going around the squirrel. The other person says, no, no, no. Their relative positions are the same during the entire chase. The idea there is that that's non-substantive because
both of these two ways of thinking, how these two bodies are moving, their trajectories. They're not making any different claims about the trajectories of these two bodies. Is that sort of the idea?
Yeah, well, I think it's actually surprisingly difficult to explain why it's at least sort of intuitively non-substantive, right? I mean, because you want to say they're not making any different claims about the world, but superficially, it seems at least they are making different claims. One is saying he's going around the squirrel and the other is saying he's not going around the squirrel. If you hold the meanings of those words fixed and you put not in front of
You know, one of them, then they're disagreeing, you know, so it appears. Right. It has the form of a disagreement. And, you know, like as somebody who's tried, it's actually pretty difficult to say why this dispute is one where, you
You know, accurate representation of the world is not really up for grabs. I might say they're assuming two different meanings of the word around where one of them is like a relative notion of around and the other one is like a absolute looking at a map notion of around or something. And they're not really disagreeing. They're just not using the words in the same way.
Yeah, I think that's one characterization of what might be going on. Right. It's like something for the philosophers of language to give some kind of diagnosis of. So that's a superficial debate. But then so is should I divert the trolley saving the one killing the one person to save the five? That's also a superficial debate.
That's right. Both debates are superficial, right? And so there's just no prospect of representing the world either more or less accurately by taking one side rather than the other. But the ethical debate is one that's significant or important in other ways because of the way the conclusion bears on what we do and whether we do it for the right reasons or the wrong reasons.
Whereas I think we're inclined to say something very different about the squirrel dispute, or at least I am. So in the squirrel case, I'd want to say, you know, you could go either way or it doesn't matter or what's the point, right? Yeah, it's like, look, let's just define our terms this way versus that way. And then there's nothing left to disagree about once we've done that, is one thing you might say about that. Exactly. Whereas you wouldn't settle an ethical dispute like that. Right. Let's define killing this way and then we'll go home or something.
Yeah, it's like if you're a utilitarian and I'm not a utilitarian, you wouldn't be like, okay, let's just define the right action as the action that maximizes utility. I would take issue with that. Whereas in the James case, if it was like, okay, look, the two different ways to use the locution going around, right? It's your way and my way and let's call it a day. So you sold me now on the idea that the –
about whether or not to divert the trolley is important, you know, unlike the squirrel case. But now I'm wondering, like, why shouldn't we say it's representing the world? Like, why not say you should save the one to kill the five is representing the fact that human life aggregates arithmetically or I don't know, whatever, something, some fact about the world. Why not say it's representing that?
Well, basically because I don't think the conclusion you're forming pursuant to this debate or this inquiry is playing a representational role. For one thing,
the conclusion you're forming is not, doesn't seem to have any influence on how you represent the world non-conceptually, which for present purposes we can just say it doesn't have any influence on the way you would sort of picture the world or the way that you would think things would sound or the way that you think things would taste, right? If you were the sort of perfect artist,
Imagine you were in the squirrel dispute. Whether you think the man is going around the squirrel wouldn't affect the picture you would draw. The other thing is it doesn't seem like the conclusion you form
guides your action in what I think of as a characteristically representational way, like in the way that like a map guides action. And so I actually want to say the same thing about these ethical disputes, like is utilitarianism true or should we turn the trolley?
In these sorts of disputes, the conclusions we form don't affect the way that we, you know, basically picture the world and they don't affect action. Again, in the way that a map or other kind of really characteristically representational device guides action. They guide action in another way, right? They directly give rise to motivation or at least it's, you know, commonly argued that that's the case. But they're not sort of, you know, general purpose, you know,
maps of the world that we can use to guide our action kind of independently of what exactly our ends are, right? Like when we settle an ethical debate, we thereby adopt certain ends, right? Whereas I think when we settle a debate that's truly representational, we don't thereby adopt certain ends. We picture the world in a different way that will either make it easier or harder for us to pursue whatever ends we happen to have.
Right. So it's like when, you know, a friend of mine tells me about what's in a room, like, you know, whatever in the Northwest corner of the room, there's a bookcase and over here, there's a record player. And over there, there's the door to leave. You know, you could, it's like an old video game. Yeah, exactly. I know that's, that's my frame of reference for basically everything. Um,
Like that contains the kind of information that enables me to build a sort of picture in my head of what's in the room. And I'm going to be able to use that picture in my head of what's in the room to maybe be able to walk through the room when I get there and
And this is the kind of thing that's happening in claims that are not superficial in your sense of the term. There's like this mental picturing that happens. And then I file the information from the claim into my mental picture somehow, and that guides my behavior. Yeah. And at least we are, you know, disposed in the right sorts of circumstances to form these mental pictures. It's not my idea that we're constantly going around, you know, creating mental pictures of the world. I mean, you know, that would take a
a lot of brain power, but it's the kind of thing that we would be cutting edge graphics processor in your head. Right. Yeah. I certainly don't have one. Right. But, but we're at least disposed to do that. You know, by contrast, you know, if you say like, you know, how would the world look if utilitarianism was true? Okay. What,
whatever way, how would it look if utilitarianism was not true? And well, it would look the same way. So it's like there's nothing I could change in my mental map of the world when I agree with somebody making this type of ethical claim. Right, right. I mean, again, you might think this sort of debate is important, and I certainly do. But the thought is it's not important in this characteristically representational way. Yeah.
So would you say that superficial claims are sort of an inventory of ethical values? You know, is it, you know, in these sort of thought experiments, like, I mean, in the trolley problem, we're sort of realizing, like, you know, sort of what our values are, rather than actually having a substantive debate about, you know, changing our values or principles, it seems. And I just want some clarity about that is just, does that make any sense? Yeah, I mean, I think in the
if we're having a debate about whether to turn the trolley or, you know, just to use some more examples, if we're having a debate about, you know, whether there are natural property rights or something like that, I don't think that we're just trying to
to discover what our own values are. I don't think it's some kind of inward-looking psychological inquiry. I think we're trying to figure out, yeah, are there natural property rights? Should you turn the trolley? Should you vote for this candidate or that candidate? What would be an example of an ethical question that's deep in your sense of the term? Good. So this brings out something which is important, which is like,
there are superficial ethical disputes and there are deep ethical disputes, right? So the distinction between ethical and non-ethical and deep and superficial, those distinctions cross-cut one another, which is why earlier I said the debates that we tend to call normative ethical, right, are superficial. But there can also be deep ethical disputes. So imagine it's like Friday night and –
We're deciding what we want to do. And I suggest that we go to some club. And then you say, I don't want to go to that club. There are going to be too many assholes there on a Friday night. Very realistic example. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, you can imagine actually having this sort of dispute. And...
There, it seems like what we're trying to do is we are having a dispute about the way that things roughly will sort of look and sound. We are trying to represent the world as best we can in a sort of map-like way. Another way to put it is it's not as if we agree on who will be at the club and then we're just having a disagreement about whether those people are assholes. Yeah, yeah.
It's like, I think they're assholes. And you're like, but maybe they're just like rambunctious and they've got extra energy. Would that be superficial if that was a debate? Exactly. Right. So we knew who was going to be there. And I was like, no, these people are assholes. And you said, no, they're just, you know...
I don't know. You have to get to know them. And once you get to know them, they're actually great guys. Exactly. And gals. So that would be a superficial ethical dispute. Right. But the dispute that I'm imagining would be an ethical dispute because, you know, it involves the application of an ethical concept, right, that of being an asshole. There's even a book reason. Information about what's happening in the world is also part of the discussion. Like which people are here.
That's right. I mean, ultimately, I'd want to characterize the deep and superficial distinction in terms of what I was calling non-conceptual representation and this map-like effect on action. Okay. Because the thing is you could have a superficial dispute about anything. You could have a superficial dispute about, as you were putting it, which people are there, right? You could have a superficial dispute about –
Any kind of dispute where I make some claim P and you make some claim not P could be superficial. And that's why I think showing how it bottoms out in this difference in non-conceptual representation or a difference in a certain kind of map-like influence on action is what's really important. Whereas if we're debating about whether – we know who the people are, but we're debating about whether they're assholes –
Whether they're assholes or not, it's not going to change my mental picture of what's happening in the club. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, how would you situate quietism and metaethical scholarship? Yeah. So I think that the view it's probably closest to is the view that sometimes gets called noncognitivism, sometimes gets called expressivism. I like the boo-hurrah theory. Yeah.
Yeah. So that's like a kind of early form of, right, of non-cognitivism. You know, now non-cognitivists try to be, you know, very sophisticated. Super fancy now. Do logic and stuff. Yeah. Well, it seems like you should be able to do logic. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. It's not. Yeah.
So it's the position that sometimes gets called non-cognitivism, sometimes gets called expressivism. That's basically the idea that ethical judgments are some kind of mental state other than an ordinary belief.
Some people say, well, they're basically, when you say something's right or wrong, you're basically expressing a plan. Some people think you're expressing something more like a desire. Some say, well, it's this kind of new or different sort of mental state, like a pro attitude or a con attitude.
And so on – Endorsing maybe. Endorsing something, right? So on that kind of picture, you can kind of see why ethical disputes would not be representational, right? Because the mental states that are being expressed, right, the kinds of mental states that ethical judgments are, are not ones that are really, as it's sometimes put, in the business of representing the world, right?
So it's more like you're expressing an emotional attitude as opposed to stating that the world is some way. That's right. Yeah. So for an expressivist, what's doing the work, right, and explaining why these disputes are not representational is the kind of mental state that an ethical judgment is. Right. So they think it's again like moral.
endorsement or pro attitude or a plan or something like that in my view ethical judgments are ordinary beliefs and what's doing the work and explaining why these disputes are not representational is if you will the context right because you're in a context where those ordinary beliefs are not guiding
the way you picture the world non-conceptually. They're not guiding action in a sort of map-like way. And so I think that I at least managed to sidestep some of the many worries that have been raised for expressivists. But yeah, if you wanted like the kind of closest cousin of the quietest, right, it would be like the sophisticated expressivist. Yeah, and then those challenges for expressivism, I guess you could think of as being like
Okay. So expressivist person, you say that when I say you should be nice to your children, I'm giving being nice to your children to thumbs up. Right. But I'm not like expressing a belief about it or whatever.
A natural question to ask about this position is, well, why does it sound like you're stating a view and disagreeing about it? I mean, you know, one person says you should be nice to your children. No one is like, no, you shouldn't. And it sounds like a straight up disagreement. So then it seems like the expressivist is then on the hook to try to explain why just in terms of like the dynamics of conversation, the way it sounds, it seems like people are, you know, stating facts and disagreeing about what the facts are.
Yeah, I think normally we think that people know what they're doing when they use language in this way or that. But the expressivist basically has to say to people, no, you're mistaken about what you're doing. You think you're expressing a belief about the way the world is, but really you're expressing a plan. And as you say, Matt, this is like a little strange. Like, you know, I've had beliefs before. I've had plans. Usually I can tell the difference.
I plan to go to Vermont with my family. That's different than believing that I am in Vermont. But the quietist, whatever other problems the quietist has, doesn't have this sort of problem because the quietist is basically saying, look, even though ethics is kind of autonomous and not dependent on metaphysics and so forth in the way that the expressivist would also say, the quietist doesn't have any kind of revisionary
stance about the kinds of things that ethical judgments are. He just thinks like, yeah, they're beliefs. Yeah. Right. So like disputes, conversations, statements involving ethical terms end up like in many respects, looking like statements, beliefs, and conversations about non-ethical terms more like those than for the expressivist. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious whether quietism sort of supposes real values or are they artificial values?
What do you mean by real values? And like in the realist sense, like that they're out there to be discovered rather than like in JL Mackey's sense that they're created and it's sort of an error approach to values. Well, I mean, there are maybe two ways of reading this question about whether there are real values, right? If the question is,
are there some things that are right and wrong and maybe is there rightness and wrongness independent of what anybody happens to think or judge, then that strikes me as just like an ordinary first order ethical question and the quietest is going to say yes.
There's another way to read the question where you're asking something that seems more like metaphysics than ethics. So you're asking whether there are such things in the world as the properties of rightness and wrongness, right?
And there, different quietists say different things about that question. So some quietists like Ronald Dworkin think that when you say there's a property of rightness or there's not a property of rightness, that you're really making an ethical claim and that all this property talk is almost just a way of pounding the table, but it doesn't have an extra cognitive content to it. My view is that
these metaphysical disputes are irrelevant to ethics. So it's not like I think you're not saying anything else when you talk about moral properties. It's just that I think that whatever you say is irrelevant to the question of whether anything's right or wrong. I also think that these
metaphysical disputes are ones that are superficial, right? And so there's no prospect of either representing the world accurately or inaccurately. But what's really important for my purposes is just that, look, the ethical disputes themselves are not representational. And these other fields like philosophy of language, right, like theory of reference or sense, right, metaphysics and so on, that these fields could be relevant to ethics only if these fields
The normative ethical disputes like about whether utilitarianism is true or whatever were representational, right? And so because they're not representational, these other things are beside the point. That's my view. So in your book, you argue that we should have more confidence in our ethical positions. I'm just wondering why this is the case.
Yeah, so on the quietest view, there are sort of fewer rationales for somebody else's like your peer or your equal when it comes to sort of ethical questions. So sometimes when people are having an ethical discussion,
dispute, or at least if I'm in an ethical dispute, I will think about the other person like, this person seems as empathetic as I am, maybe more so, right? This person seems like a pretty smart person. They're good at computing things and so forth. This person seems not to have some kind of clear bias on the question. So if we think of
ethical disputes as kind of akin to disputes about whether there's a coffee shop around the corner or disputes about who wrote the Declaration of Independence or something like that, then you might be inclined to say, well, anybody who's about as smart as I am, about as empathetic as I am is my peer, right?
But if you see ethical disputes as being crucially different than a dispute about who wrote the Declaration of Independence or whether there's a coffee shop around the corner, then the mere fact that somebody has these kinds of neutral, all-purpose characteristics sort of becomes less compelling.
Or suppose we kind of shift our attention to questions about the, you know, metaphysics of morality, right? If you're the sort of person who thinks that what, you know, ultimately makes, like I say, an action right or wrong is that it has some kind of
irreducibly normative property of rightness or wrongness, then the question becomes who's best at sort of reaching out to that property and making contact with it. And if I don't think that I'm any better equipped to reach out to such a property, right, then I might think, well, that I'm in no better position than you are to sort of apprehend the moral truth. But if you think the provision and distribution of property
irreducibly normative properties is just irrelevant to ethics, then you can be more confident in thinking that you're likely to be right about some ethical question that maybe somebody else is likely to be wrong. Even if you don't have some kind of story about how you're better at reaching out to and making contact with these kinds of ethical properties.
So it seems like the thought is that if it's harder to be a moral expert, which it seems like it is on your view, then you also kind of have to worry less about other people being bigger experts than you are. Yeah, I think the way I might put it is that there are fewer constraints on expertise on my view on this.
view of like a more typical moral realist, to be an expert, you'd have to somehow be better at reaching out to and making contact with these moral properties, or you'd have to be better at unpacking the senses of concepts or something like that. Maybe really good linguists, really good at understanding the semantics of modal auxiliary verbs like ought and stuff.
Yeah, like whatever you think makes for a good like conceptual unpacker, right? It might be somebody with like, you know, kind of finely honed, you know, aesthetic sense, right? It might be a linguist. Philosopher king. Some kind of philosopher king, right? Whereas, you know, again, I don't think there are...
as many constraints on expertise. So on a quietest picture, I can look at features of a person and say, well, these are the kinds of things that might make somebody a good judge when it comes to fundamental ethics, even though I can't show that by having those features, they're thereby better at making contact with non-natural moral properties or something like that.
So it seems that we have some self-evident ethical truths, like murder is wrong, don't inflict pain onto innocent people. I'm wondering how that figures in your framework. Right. Well, I do think that there are certain ethical truths that are...
obvious. That's not part of the quietest position. You could be a quietest and think that there are really no obvious ethical truths. I happen to be a quietest who thinks there are some obvious ones. Are they self-evident? If by that you just mean obvious, then yes. But it's not like I have some kind of separate notion of self-evidence that's supposed to be doing any kind of work vis-a-vis the epistemology of
ethics or morality. There are a lot of epistemological questions that are hugely important for people who have other meta-ethical views, right? For example, how is it that we can, as I was saying before, reach out and make contact with moral properties, right? That are not- Using a special radio transmitter, obviously, picks up normative signals from
Like a Geiger counter or something like that. That's how I do it. How do you do it? See, the great thing about being a quietist, you don't even need to buy a moralometer, right? That's good. It's more economical, literally. It's so cheap. So there are all these questions that are such pressing questions for people with other meta-ethical views that aren't really questions for the quietest. Like I don't think that –
in order to apprehend the moral truth or in order to be the sort of person who's good at apprehending the moral truth, you need to
show that you have whatever is required to reach out to these normative properties. You don't need to show that normative concepts have these senses that you are particularly expert in unpacking. You can still have lively disputes about who are the good judges of morality and who are not so good judges, but settling that question is not going to depend on settling these questions about
Again, reaching out to normative properties or anything like that. It'll all kind of happen within ethics. And the way I've sometimes put it is like on the quietest view, ethics is like this autonomous sphere. And then there's the, you know, the book is basically concerned with trying to explain how that like appealing but somewhat mysterious view could actually make sense.
So your opponent would be sort of the nihilistic person, whereas for Kant, it's, you know, the liars and...
Those who are upsetting these universal norms. This is a good question. So I have many opponents. So one of them is the nihilist. But actually the person that I'm most concerned with is not the nihilist. And nihilist thinks that nothing is good or bad? That's right. It doesn't matter? Yeah. That's right. So I think it's a mistake to fall into nihilism of that sort. But the person I'm really most concerned with is the person who –
is trying to leverage considerations from metaphysics or semantics or like the theory of what agency rationally commits you to. The person is trying to leverage those kinds of considerations in support of particular ethical views. And so, for example, just to give you like a kind of, you know, public enemy number one, right? So like in her...
very impressive paper, Modern Moral Philosophy. Elizabeth Anscombe argues, among other things, that the concept of the moral ought that philosophers these days use lacks sense. So that's the kind of semantic claim about this concept, that it lacks sense. And then she says utilitarianism is
only makes sense as a theory of what you morally ought to do. It doesn't seem to be very good as like, for example, a theory of justice, right? But if it's a theory of anything, it's a theory of what you morally ought to do. But since the concept of the moral ought lacks sense, the concept doesn't have conditions of correct application. So there's nothing that you morally ought to do. And so this seems like an argument against utilitarianism. But
But regardless of what you think of utilitarianism, this strikes me as just the wrong kind of reason for rejecting the theory, right? That we're moving from some claim about the structure or content of concepts, right? What I think of as a semantic claim to a claim, you know, that has, you know…
implications for, you know, how you ought to run society. And so like that would, that's the person I would regard as more of my chief enemy, if you will, than the nihilist. The nihilist could be harmless. Andrew Sapielli, thanks so much for a wonderful interview. It was great. I don't care what the experts say. All right. Thanks again. The Elucidations blog has moved. We are now located at elucidations.now.sh. On the blog, you can find our full back catalog of previous episodes.
And if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out on Twitter at atelucidationspod. Thanks again for listening.