More on Sayre-McCord

Here's a bit of rambling (and by rambling, I mean bad) post:

Once it has been granted that some explanations are better than others, many obstacles to a defense of moral values disappear. In fact, all general objections to the existence of value must be rejected as too strong.

The argument seems to be the following: suppose that you have an argument against evaluative/normative claims. You say, "If values were to exist, then YYY. But XXX suggests that YYY is not the case. So values don't exist." Sayre-McCord is saying that such an argument would now be impotent, because we know that some values exist. Since some values exist, the argument fails.

Does this follow? After all, belief is not binary. Some things are reasons to believe something, and others are reasons not to believe. Our beliefs don't have to be clean and cut. We can say, "We believe IBE, believing in IBE requires that we also believe in the existence of some values. We do this despite the rather convincing arguments that suggest that such values do not exist." (Here I'm trying out an argument that I attribute to Hartry Field).

Now, clearly this doesn't always work. If the argument concludes that "No abstract objects could possibly exist ever ever" and then you believe that values exist in order to undergird IBE, and you also believe that values are abstract objects, then your beilefs are in conflict and one of them has to go. And if you are set on IBE, then it seems that the "no abstract objects" argument is going to have to go. But there are other, weaker more subtle arguments, that don't have to lose their force, I think. Think about the argument from disagreement. OK, actually that's a horrible choice because that's an argument tailor made for ethics and not for normative facts more generally. OK. Think about the argument from queerness. Say it concludes that if normative facts existed, then they would be unlike our normal objects, because they would have ought-ness built into them, they are intrinsically motivating or something. And say that we then, following S-M, conclude that normative facts about explanations exist, that values about explanations exist. Why do we believe this? Because our commitment to IBE forces this. But as long as your argument against normative-realism isn't absolute, and just raises the stakes of realism, I see no reason why you can't maintain that argument even after accepting normative facts about explanations.

To put it more clearly: as long as your argument against normative realism isn't definitive, it can be maintained even after accepting some normative facts. You simply say, "In the case of normative facts about explanations we have no choice, epistemically, to accept these values despite their queerness. But there's no similar consideration forcing our hand in morality/ethics, so we remain skeptical of normative facts about ethics because those normative facts would have to be queer."

Was queerness a bad choice? Once you accept that some normative facts exist about explanations, does that remove their queerness? On the one hand we are now saying that we accept abstract objects with to-be-done-ness built into them. But we were forced, kicking and screaming to accept those values. That doesn't mean that suddenly it became any more palatable to believe in them, I don't think it undermines the argument from queerness.