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What is quasi-realism, and is it a form of realism or a clever way of avoiding it?

Sam Ellery Fellow
· 4 replies
Meta-ethicsAnalyticDavid HumeSimon Blackburn#expressivism#moral-truth#projectivism#quasi-realism
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One of my debaters ran a case last weekend built on what she called “quasi-realism”, and the judge, a philosophy undergraduate, nodded along as if it were obvious. I did not understand it and I do not like coaching things I do not understand.

As far as I can piece together, it comes from Simon Blackburn. The idea seems to be that moral claims express our attitudes rather than describing moral facts, which sounds like plain anti-realism, and yet the quasi-realist says we may go on calling moral claims true, talking about moral facts, and even saying that cruelty would be wrong whatever anyone thought of it.

That last part is what confuses me. If morality comes from our attitudes, how can you say it would be wrong even if we all approved? Is that a contradiction, or is there a trick I am missing?

Two specific questions:

  1. What does the quasi-realist mean by “true” when he says “it is true that cruelty is wrong”?
  2. Is there any practical difference between quasi-realism and ordinary realism, or is the dispute entirely about what is going on under the hood?
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4 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Oskar Nyberg

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Here is the shape of it, Sam.

    Blackburn starts from Hume's thought that we spread our sentiments onto the world: we feel disapproval and then speak as if wrongness were a property out there. Call that projectivism. The quasi-realist programme is to show that, starting from that anti-realist base, we can earn the right to all the realist-sounding talk.

    On “true”: Blackburn uses a minimal notion of truth. To say “it is true that cruelty is wrong” is just to say that cruelty is wrong, with emphasis. No extra claim about moral facts in the universe is made.

    On the counterfactual: “If we all approved of cruelty, it would still be wrong” is, for him, a moral claim, and it expresses an attitude we actually have: disapproval of cruelty that does not depend on anyone's approving or disapproving. Our current sensibility condemns cruelty even in imagined worlds where people like it. So there is no contradiction. The attitude is ours; what it is about is not.

    Practical difference: in first-order moral argument, almost none. The disagreement is about explanation: realists say moral talk answers to moral facts; the quasi-realist says it answers to our attitudes and their refinement. Critics have pointed out that once every realist sentence is allowed, it becomes hard to state the difference at all. That worry is the main one in the literature.

    Helpful · 1
    1. Sam Ellery

      Fellow

      Thanks, this is coachable now. I think my debater was using it to dodge: claiming the benefits of realism without defending moral facts. Oskar's last paragraph gives me the cross-examination question: “Then what is the difference between your view and realism?” If she has an answer, she wins the round. If she does not, she has just conceded realism.

Other answers

  1. Henrike Vogel

    Fellow

    A Kantian aside. The clever move Oskar describes, that the attitude is ours but what it is about is not, has a cousin in constructivism. Constructivists also say moral truths come from us, from the standpoint of rational agency rather than from sentiment, while denying they are arbitrary. The difference is what does the constructing: Hume's feelings, or Kant's reason. Both families are trying to have objectivity without a realm of moral objects.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Pieter van Dijkhuizen

    Fellow

    Software analogy, for what it's worth. You can write a program whose output is generated by the user's settings and still have the program report “this configuration is invalid” in a way that does not depend on what the current user wants. The rules are created by people and still bind the person running them. Quasi-realism sounds to me like an attempt to say morality works like that, only with sentiment instead of code.

    Helpful · 3