John Ketchum on Fake Noûs

It seems to me that metaethical anti-realism leads to moral skepticism because it leaves moral claims ungrounded, without any standard of good or evil and justice or injustice independent of varying subjective preferences. In that case, it's hard to see how punishing someone for torturing infants is any more justifiable than punishing someone for eating vanilla ice cream instead of chocolate. That's not a refutation of anti-realism but it makes anti-realism implausible. If you find the time, I'd like to see how you'd respond to the following arguments. The only anti-realist theories that permit moral statements to be true—but not objectively true--are subjectivism and relativism (which is a form of subjectivism). Assuming subjectivism is true, if Smith feels that murder is unjust, but Jones feels that it's just, it's true that murder is unjust for Smith but just for Jones. It's as if Smith says chocolate ice cream tastes better than vanilla, and Jones says the reverse. Since there's no objective standard of justice, whether murder is just or not is simply a matter of opinion. Neither man is objectively right or wrong. Neither is objectively better or worse, more or less just than the other. To suppose otherwise is to implicitly reject anti-realism. Hence, if anti-realism is true, it's no more rational to criticize either man for his belief about murder than for his belief about the flavor of ice cream. To illustrate the importance of independent, objective standards, consider a situation in which two men in a room experience discomfort. One man says the room is too cool (say below 65 degrees F) and the other says it's too warm (say above 75 degrees F). Each man is reporting his subjective experience. It's true subjectively that the room feels below 65 degrees for one man and above 75 degrees for the other. But the room can't be both below 65 degrees and above 75 degrees. The claims of both men can't be objectively true, though both can be objectively false. Absent some independent objective standard, such as a room thermometer, there's no more reason to attribute objective falsity to the claim of one man than to that of the other. This is the sort of situation anti-realists find themselves in when they disagree about moral beliefs. On the issue of baby torture, there's no more reason to believe that its advocate is wrong than that its opponent is wrong. It can be objected that metaethical relativism as applied to whole societies is different from subjectivism. But if the moral beliefs of the members of a society are objectively true for that society, that's not a form of anti-realism. So, an anti-realist version of societal relativism requires that those beliefs be inter-subjective rather than objective. It would be like everyone (or a majority) preferring the same flavor of ice cream or holding the same religious beliefs. Versions of anti-realism that don't regard moral beliefs as even subjectively true—such as noncognitivism and error theory-- seem to explicitly reject morality altogether. We seem to be left with these options: If anti-realism is true, then the correct metaethical theory is moral nihilism—the view that morality doesn't objectively exist, and nothing is objectively morally right or wrong. If the correct metaethical theory is not moral nihilism, then anti-realism is not true. A consistent anti-realist must regard all normative beliefs as non-objective because so far as truth is concerned, there's no sufficiently important distinction between moral beliefs and other normative beliefs to justify treating moral beliefs differently from other normative beliefs. As a consequence, the anti-realist can't object to being irrationally criticized without apparently abandoning anti-realism because the belief others ought to be rational is a normative one. And an anti-realist may prefer rationality to irrationality and truth to falsity (or the reverse), but he can't adequately justify the belief that one should be rational and pursue the truth (or that one should be irrational and pursue falsity).