Inescapability

I think the language of inescapability is a very good one for considering these issues. I'm just going to do an intuition dump here. Don't expect arguments. But then again, I don't expect any readers, so it's all good!

Why is it that we think that epistemology is real, factual? Cuneo draws three undesirable conclusions from Epistemic Nihlism, and then claims that anything besides Epistemic Realism succumbs to these undesirable results. Let me focus on the last two: if epistemic nihlism is right and it's not self-defeating, then no entity can display an epistemic merit or dismerit and there can be no arguments for anything. But this doesn't seem to follow through all the way (though he comes closer when he talks about epistemology being indispensable for theorizing). Enoch's analysis is a good one for this, it seems. Epistemology is inescapable, because the evaluation of beliefs, evidence, arguments and reasons to believe as better and worse is an inescapable one for a human being. And Enoch analyzes this into two parts: that epistemology is indispensable to some project, and that project is itself inescapable. Put most strongly, the issues with epistemology not being real is that epistemology seems indispensable to every rational project, and rationality itself is inescapable. Epistemology goes very deep to human psychology, that's the real source of our confidence in its reality. Without it we're lost.

Logic is similar. Just as every cognitive adventure requires our ability to evaluate some evidence, justifications, beliefs as better and others as worse at depicting reality, every cognitive adventure seems to require our ability to deduce valid conclusions from statements, to understand what is entailed by various propositions. (Inasmuch as much of math is logic, much of math is normative in this sense.) So in a similar sense, if logic is a myth then so are all of our cognitive efforts. We're left drowning, with no where to go and we'd just have to give up. So logic is inescapable.

How does this count in favor of epistemology and logic? I don't know. Maybe Enoch's right. Maybe Plantinga's right. Maybe William James is right. Maybe they're all wrong. I dunno.

But what about ethics, then? Enoch argued that ethics is inescapable in the same way that epistemology is. The point is that ethics is inescapable for our cognitive adventures as well, because how can we embark on our projects without the ability to deliberate between choices of action? But this seems troubling to me. The intuition is clear, I think--if ethics is false we still know how to do science, we still know how to know things, and maybe that's enough for us to be justified in. Maybe well be OK knowing that as far as deliberation goes, we're irrational. We're more deeply committed to the cognitive adventures that require epistemology and logic than we are to those efforts that require us to deliberate (and I wonder if the way the debate has gone in philosophy is evidence of this claim). That seems to be psychologically true.

So, why isn't ethics as inescapable as epistemology or logic? Because it doesn't invade the rest of our intellectual efforts the way epistemology and logic do. It does invade our everyday living and decisions. I don't think it just comes down to preferring the explanatory project over the deliberative one. If epistemology and logic aren't true, then that's a threat to ethics as well, we're lost in deliberation too. Epistemology and logic are just BIGGER, and WIDER than ethics in this sense. They invade more stuff. And the failure to have ethical obligations wouldn't threaten our scientific practice, for example.

So ethics is more like biology than epistemology in this picture, which is exactly why it's not inescapable. If biology is false, we don't feel lost, we feel as if we've gained some insight.

There a only a few ways, then, to argue for ethics being real on the model of epistemology or logic. First, you could argue that ethics is as inescapable as epistemology or logic is. This is, in short, what Enoch tried to do. I argue that he didn't succeed, and that this is a hard way to go because epistemology does seem more difficult to resist than ethics. Enoch tried to show that ethics is indispensable to deliberation, and that this makes ethics sufficiently "Too Large to Fail." Is there a way to make ethics any bigger? So that it invades the rest of our lives the same way that epistemology does? This is one way to proceed. The other way to proceed is to argue that even if ethics isn't inescapable the way that epistemology is, it is dragged along by epistemology. This, in short, is what Cuneo tried to argue. And how can you do this? You can argue that commitment to episteomlogy (which is inescapable) commits you to certain views that will vindicate ethics. For example, epistemology is normative, so if you thought that there was no normative knowledge you'd be in trouble. And Sayre-McCord made this point too. I've argued that this argument is unsatisfying unless you identify where the arguments against moral realism went wrong, because otherwise we can just shrug our shoulders and say that the inescapability of epistemology made us do it.

So where to go from here? Either find a problem with one of the arguments against moral realism, or show that moral realism is inescapable by puffing it up until it's too big to fail. Or find parts of ethics that are inescapable. Or (as Cuneo's backup argument does) try to claim that ethics just is epistemology (at least sometimes). Or, claim that epistemology just is ethics, all the time.