Debunking Skepticism

Here, I debunk the debunkers — the moral skeptics.*

[ *Based on: “Debunking Skepticism,” in Higher-Order Evidence and Moral Epistemology, ed. Michael Klenk (Routledge, 2020). ]

1. Introduction

Moral skeptics argue that either there aren’t any moral facts, or there are but we don’t know them. Why? Because our mechanisms for forming moral beliefs are not reliably truth-directed. Two sub-arguments:

a) Our moral intuitions are produced by something that is insensitive to moral truth, like natural selection, or the cultural traditions we happened to be born under.

b) There is so much disagreement among moral judgments that we have to conclude that humans can’t reliably judge morality.

I suggest that there are similar arguments debunking skepticism itself: skeptical beliefs are produced by unreliable processes that produce lots of disagreement.

2. Skeptics Are Unreliable

2.1. Philosophers’ General Skeptical Leaning

Philosophers as a group have an extreme skeptical leaning, compared to people from other disciplines. For virtually anything that philosophers talk about (not just morality), one of the leading philosophical theories will be an extreme form of skepticism. This is not true of any other field of study that I know of.

E.g., among chemists, a leading theory is not that there are no chemicals or that we know nothing about them. Among geologists, there is no theory that anyone takes seriously that says there are no rocks. Among art historians, a major view isn’t that there is no art or that it has no history.

But among epistemologists, a leading theory is that there is no knowledge. Among ethicists, a major theory is that there is no right or wrong. When philosophers theorize about free will, someone is going to say that there is no such thing; when we talk about beauty, someone will say there is no beauty; when we talk about time, someone will say it isn’t real; etc. Basically, for anything that philosophers talk about, some of us are going to pipe up and propose that that thing “isn’t real”, or that we know literally nothing about it.

Of course, these radical skeptical positions are usually small minority views. Nevertheless, the profession takes them seriously and spends a lot of time discussing them, as no one in any other discipline would do.

2.2. When Beliefs Are Open to Bias

What kinds of beliefs are most susceptible to being influenced by bias? Here are some:

1. Beliefs based on abstract reflection, rather than observation, scientific study, etc.

2. Beliefs stated in vague terms rather than precise terms.

3. Beliefs that rely on empirical speculation.

4. Beliefs that are ideologically significant.

5. Beliefs that require high-level judgment calls, e.g., weighing up complex bodies of evidence.

I assume it’s obvious why each of those types of belief would be relatively easily influenced by bias. Notice that moral skepticism, or the premises of the arguments for it, have all five of these traits.

(Examples of 3: the claim that moral beliefs are adaptations; specific evolutionary explanations for specific moral beliefs.)

So moral skepticism and the arguments for it are exactly the type of belief and argument that we would expect to be easily influenced by bias, should someone have a pro-skeptic bias.

2.3. Sources of Pro-Skeptical Bias

Why might philosophers have a skeptical bias? There are many reasons. I can’t list them all; here are a few:

1. Some people have an abnormal fear of being duped, which they express by taking extreme skeptical philosophical stances.

2. Some people get a sense of superiority and cleverness, or a pleasurable feeling of rebelliousness, from “debunking” the beliefs of others.

3. Skeptical stances make intellectual life simple and easy. It’s a lot easier to just reject or pretend to doubt X than it is to figure out the actual nature of X. Arguing with others is easier too; just reject every premise that the other person puts forward, or claim to not see why it’s plausible.

4. The profession (academic philosophy) rewards people who give clever defenses of “interesting” positions — which often means surprising and radical positions. Skepticism is perhaps the easiest such position to think of.

   Those are all about skepticism in general. Now a few about moral skepticism in particular:

5. Many people think that it’s bad to be “judgmental”. The ultimate in not being judgmental is being a skeptic.

6. Many people have succumbed to the ideology of scientism. Since ethics doesn’t sound like “science” (i.e., natural science), the science-worshippers have to reject it.

7. Morality is often inconvenient for us.

2.4. Bias or Virtue?

Ok, philosophers are way more skeptical than researchers in any other field. There are two salient explanations: (a) Maybe it stems from philosophers’ intellectual virtues; e.g., perhaps we are more rational, open-minded, and intelligent than other researchers, and maybe these things lead to skepticism because skepticism is correct. (b) Maybe it is a bias, as I’ve been suggesting.

Theory (b) is obviously more plausible than (a), for at least 3 reasons.

1. Again, philosophers develop and take seriously radical skeptic theories about virtually everything they look at. If we did it for just one thing (say, morality), it might be plausible to say that that one thing isn’t real or isn’t knowable. But the prior probability that multiple different things that everyone else thinks we obviously know about are all unreal — morality, time, consciousness, free will, numbers, matter, meaning, truth, beauty, causation, epistemic reasons, theoretical entities in science — is near zero. All of those are things that philosophers have rejected, and been taken seriously by other philosophers. The prior that skepticism is a reasonable position for multiple of those things is much lower than the prior that philosophers have a general bias toward skepticism.

2. Philosophers have taken up forms of skepticism that would impugn the work of all other researchers in all other fields. E.g., inductive skepticism would impugn all work in all the sciences. Therefore, either the skeptical philosophers are being overly skeptical, or everyone else in every other field is insufficiently skeptical. The former is obviously more likely.

3. Skeptics are always telling us that disagreement about X supports skepticism about X. But there is huge disagreement among philosophers about the merits of skeptical theses and argument. This shows that the belief-forming methods that philosophers are using are unreliable.

3. Unreliability Undercuts Skepticism

3.1. The Import of Higher-Order Evidence

You might wonder: Why not just directly evaluate the arguments given by moral skeptics? Once we do that, there will be no need to speculate about the psychological infirmities of their authors.

The answer is that if there is a pro-skeptical bias among philosophers, then the people evaluating the skeptical arguments are likely to share that bias, and thus our direct evaluation of the skeptical arguments will be unreliable. We need to look at the second-order evidence, which suggests the unreliability of the belief-forming mechanisms leading to skepticism.

This, by the way, is perfectly parallel to what the skeptics themselves say about why you shouldn’t just directly evaluate moral propositions and see whether any of them are true.

3.2. Third-Order Evidence Restores Belief

What’s the result of becoming skeptical of skepticism itself? Do we just become completely skeptical about everything? Or do we return to our normal beliefs?

The answer is the latter. This is the process:

a. First, we have prima facie justification for believing certain first-order moral propositions, like “you shouldn’t torture babies”, because these things seem obviously correct and we have no reason (yet) for doubting them.

b. Skeptics present second-order evidence that our moral intuitions are unreliable. This undercuts our justification for the 1st-order moral claims.

c. Anti-skeptics present third-order evidence that the (alleged) 2nd-order evidence given by the skeptics is unreliable. This undercuts our justification for believing that our moral intuitions are unreliable. With no justification for believing that anymore, we no longer have an undercutting defeater for the 1st-order moral claims. So the 1st-order moral claims are justified again.

4. Objections

4.1. “Philosophers are superior thinkers.”

More about the theory mentioned in 2.4 that perhaps philosophers’ tendency to skepticism is due to our being better thinkers: There is at least some reason to think this. E.g., philosophers appear to be on average more open-minded, more rational, clearer-thinking, and more disposed to ask fundamental questions than people in other fields.

If philosophers were overall more reliable than other researchers, what would we expect to see? Two things: (a) We’d expect to see philosophers making faster progress than others. (b) We’d expect to see more agreement in philosophy than in other fields.

Needless to say, these predictions are the opposite of the truth. So while philosophers may be better thinkers than others in some respects, there is no reason to think we are better at getting to the truth.

4.2. Is Meta-skepticism self-defeating?

Some of my arguments suggest that philosophical reasoning in general is unreliable. But that would mean my own reasoning for that conclusion is unreliable, so we should disregard it. But then, we should also disregard the reasoning for disregarding that reasoning, etc.

This paradox would confront the view that no philosophical argument provides any justification at all for anything. But that’s a silly view. The paradox doesn’t really confront the moderate view that we should lower our confidence in philosophical arguments, upon learning that philosophers are really unreliable.

Moreover, not all philosophical arguments are equally unreliable. We should be especially suspicious of arguments that

1. contradict extremely widely-shared beliefs that we initially would have ascribed very high credence to;

2. follow a more general pattern of arguments that contradict other widely-shared, high-credence beliefs;

3. turn on subjective, speculative, vague, or otherwise unreliable abstract judgments.

These are all true of arguments for moral skepticism. They are much less true of the argument, here, for disregarding moral skepticism.

5. Conclusion

Appearances can be revealing. A fundamental rule of rationality is to start from the assumption that things are pretty much the way they seem, unless and until you have specific reasons to doubt that.

Sometimes, something surprising is the case. If you have a friend who has a conspiracy theory, perhaps you should listen to him — after all, sometimes there are conspiracies! But if your friend repeatedly comes up with conspiracy theories, for virtually everything he thinks about, then at some point, you should just disregard everything he says about these theories. You shouldn’t listen to all the details and try to rebut each specific argument. You should just disregard them wholesale.

Philosophy is the friend with a million conspiracy theories. Kant called philosophy “the queen of the sciences,” but perhaps it were better named “the Alex Jones of the sciences.” It’s not one time that philosophers came up with the idea that maybe we’re being radically deceived. It’s every goddamned time we talk about anything. At some point, rational people should just disregard everything we have to say about our radical skeptical theories.