The Equivocation of Musts - Some mental trickery behind moralism
Actually written JULY 23, 2023
I suspect that arguments for moral realism are, well, like this: make what amounts to a bold, unsupportable assertion that morality really exists, but disguise it as something other than a bold assertion. Throw in a bunch of sophistry. Then we can at least have a circular argument. For all a circular argument is, is a bold assertion pretending not to be a bold assertion.
And yet there is a more advanced technique often used, the technique I call the “equivocation of musts”. Like circularity, equivocation is a logical error. And as with circularity, the equivocation is more convincing if you can hide it under some decent sophistry.
And I want to explain all this. But I find that I must first review the fundamental feature of morality: the idea of a way things were meant to be, from which is derived the idea of making our behavior comply with the way things were meant to be, i.e. of doing what we morally must do - our duty.
So now I’ll elaborate on the foundation of all morality, namely, that there exist goals that are meant to be actualized or, loosely speaking, states of affairs that were meant to be. In the case that these states of affairs already do exist, then they are meant to continue being.
Anyway, the first thing I’d like to mention here is the extreme difficulty of simply describing what “meant to be” could possibly mean. We have an intuition about what it could mean. But when we try to state that meaning, we either employ a list of things that “meant to be” is not, or we just go ‘round in circles with synonyms like “sacred” or “divine” which in turn can’t be described without using their synonyms, such as “meant to be”. I’m convinced that “meant to be”' cannot be described, explained, or logically demonstrated in any way, or derived from any other facts. “Meant to be” is inscrutable, inexplicable, inarguable, undefinable. If it exists, one’s acknowledgment of its existence must only be from experiencing it directly. Any attempt to argue for its existence must be either circular folly or circularly dishonest.
If you are a moral realist who thinks I’m wrong for being a non-moralist, I would actually respect your position more if you were to offer no argument at all in support of moral realism. You would impress me with your intellectual honesty. You won’t try to pass off a circular argument as sound. You could even tell me: “For those who understand, no explanation is needed. For those who don’t understand, no explanation is possible.” While that adage is normally considered arrogant, a moralist who said this to me would seem really honest to me, rather than arrogant.
“Meant to be” stands alone, self-evident to those who grasp its existence.
Likewise, the things we must do to either sustain or bring about the existence of that which was meant to be: these things are special instances of “must” that also stand alone, inexplicable and inarguable. We can explain these musts only by reference to that inexplicable state of affairs that are “meant to be”. These are musts that we cannot coherently derive from any account of how things are, but only from accounts of how things were meant to be.
I will call such musts “inexplicable musts”.
In contrast against inexplicable musts, we have regular old explicable musts. These are the musts that can be coherently derived from accounts of how things are. Suppose, for example, this is how things are: a boulder is precariously perched at the top of a hill. For the boulder to roll down the hill, certain prior things must happen. These things that must happen are explicable from a study of nature, of the facts of physics, of causality, of how things are. Given a state of affairs that currently exists, and a potential state of affairs that could exist, we can identify several things that must happen to transition from the former to the latter. Some of these things that must happen are optional, wherein any one of them could do the job. And some of these musts can even be what we humans could do. If I want the boulder to roll down the hill at a specific time of my choosing, I must push it at that time. No-brainer, right?
Explicable musts always reference the way things could be (which are often also the way we want them to be), but they never reference the way things were meant to be. Even when a state of affairs is both the way things could be and the way things were meant to be, the associated explicable musts are aimed at that state of affairs only in terms of how that state of affairs could be, and the associated inexplicable musts are aimed at that same state of affairs only in terms of how that state of affairs is meant to be. The two types of musts cannot be swapped or mixed or substituted for one another.
I suspect that many arguments in support of moral realism rely on equivocating explicable musts with inexplicable musts. Or, correspondingly, equivocating the way things could be with the way things were meant to be. Either of these equivocations implies the other. I see this equivocation as the basic technique, wherein its psychological persuasiveness can depend on the cleverness of its obfuscation.
And this sets me up nicely to analyze one such instance of clever obfuscation that I call “cognitive prerequisite bating”.
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