A new argument for moral realism?

Geoffrey Sayre-McCord has an article, "Moral Theory and Explanatory Impotence." In the last section he presents an argument for moral realism. Here's what he writes in his article on moral realism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I find it clearer than what he writes in his article.

Still another reply, compatible with the first two but relying specifically on neither, shifts attention from science and from mathematics and logic, to epistemology itself. To think of any set of considerations that they justify some conclusion is to make a claim concerning the value (albeit the epistemic as opposed to moral value) of a conclusion. To hold of science, or mathematics, or logic, that there is a difference between good evidence or good arguments and bad ones is again to commit oneself evaluatively. This raises an obvious question: under what conditions, and why, are epistemic claims reasonably thought justified? Whatever answer one might begin to offer will immediately provide a model for an answer to the parallel question raised about moral judgments. There is no guarantee, of course, that our moral judgments will then end up being justified. The epistemic standards epistemology meets might well not be met by moral theory. But there is good reason to think the kinds of consideration that are appropriate to judging epistemic principles will be appropriate too when it comes to judging other normative principles, including those that we might recognize as moral. This means that any quick dismissal of moral theory as obviously not the sort of thing that could really be justified are almost surely too quick.

The claim is that inference to the best explanation** presupposes the existence of some facts about which explanation is best. Sayre-McCord claims that this means that we have to believe in some values. The obvious counter is to try to give an analysis of what it means to be the best explanation in terms of non-normative, non-evaluative language. For example, if I were to tell you that values exist because we know that there are facts about which baseball teams are better than others, you would have an easy way to counter this: "THAT'S not what we mean when we say that some baseball teams are better. Rather, we mean that they win more games, not that they are good, or that you ought to approve of them or something." In the same way, we could analyze what it means to be a better explanation and avoid any committment to values.

"The obvious response to this point is to embrace some account of explanatory quality in terms of, say, simplicity , generality , elegance, predictive power, andso on. One explanation is better than another, we could then maintain, in virtue of the way it combines these properties. When offering a list of properties that are taken to be measures of explanatory quality, however, it is important to avoid the mistake of thinking the list wipes values out of the picture. It is important to avoid thinking of the list as eliminmating explanatory quality in favor of some evaluatively neutral properties. If one explanation is better than another in virtue of being simpler, more general, more elegant and so on, then simplicity, generality and elegance cannot themselves be evaluatively neutral. Were these properties evaluatively neutral, they could not account for one explanation being better than another."

Now, under one interpretation this is a horrible argument. After all, what's wrong with the analysis of the baseball team above? Would we say that we're faking, that "winning games" is actually a value-laden attribute? Certainly not, it's dry, evaluatively neutral. So why can't we say that better only means simpler (and other stuff)? To put things more clearly: we're not saying that the best explanation is the simplest one. If that were the case, then Sayre-McCord would be right. Rather, we're saying that you should eliminate the word "best" and replace it with the word "simplest." If you remove the word "best," then there's no more value-ness hanging around inference to the best explanation.

Maybe, instead, he's just making the argument that SOMETHING needs to justify inference to the best explanation. He writes, "any attempt to wash evaluative claims out as psychological or sociological reports, for instance, will fail--we will not be saying that one explanation is better than another, but only that we happen to like one explanation more or that our society approves of one more." So maybe he's just asking what justifies inference to the best explanation as a principle. And even if you replace the word "best" with "simplest" you still need to find a way to justify the principle. And however you justify it will require you to say that "you ought to beileve the best/simplest/prettiest/most predictively powerful explanation." And that will need to be a value claim. Of course, this argument would need to be distinguished from the kind of ought-ness that we find in rationality. If I tell you that you ought to believe that 2+2=4, what I mean is that rationality requires it of you. Granted, there's some sort of normativity there perhaps, and that's another approach to take. But S-M is clearly not trying to make that argument. So he needs to be saying that there is no other good justification of IBE, I think.

In which case this argument is the argument: justification runs out at IBE, and you then need to accept some kind of evaluative fact that you can't otherwise justify in order to accept IBE. This is different than the claim that whatever justifies IBE also justifies normative facts (which is closer to Enoch). Rather, his claim is that if you chase IBE up to it's source, IBE needs to make some sort of evaluative claim.

You could avoid this argument, as I said in the last section of my paper on Enoch, by refusing to justify IBE. Justification needs to run out somewhere, and by giving a bad justification you, arguably, make your job too easy. And also, as Sayre-McCord notes, this is just a model and not an argument.

**Sayre-McCord actually seems to reject inference to the best explanation as a sufficient condition for belief-formation, but he thinks that it's at least plausible to say that it's necessary. Meaning, if something doesn't count in the best explanation, Sayre-McCord is willing to consider that its explanatory impotence would count against it being knowledge.