August 2026 · jacob@brokensandals.net

Brief reviews

NYC trip highlights

The infectiousness of normative trust

Pham continues to show an alarming lack of interest in ethical theory

I’m trying to expand my exposure to different views on meta-ethics now that I’ve finally gotten through Parfit’s tomes on the subject (which mostly played to my existing bias toward moral realism). Allan Gibbard’s 1990 book Wise Choices, Apt Feelings presents an expressivist theory he calls norm-expressivism which holds that:

To call something rational is to express one’s acceptance of norms that permit it. (p. 7)

What Gibbard means by “rational”

Gibbard’s using “rational” to refer to the most general kind of normative judgment:

The word ‘rational’ has a learned flavor, but the notion I have in mind is familiar. It is the one we use when we talk about ‘what it makes sense’ to do or to believe, or when we speak of ‘the wise choice’ in a situation. It is the one we use when we ask what we ‘ought’ to do, or search for the ‘best thing to do’, in a way that does not already presuppose we are talking morality. With feelings, it is the notion we use when we talk of anger, say, as warranted, or of pity as apt or misdirected. (pp. 6-7)

I feel like, if I thought this sort of self-expression were all there is to ethics (I don’t), I would stop caring about ethics. Why make any sacrifices to live up to my values if there’s no ultimate justification for having those values? Why consider arguments for changing my values if there’s no objective sense in which the new values could be better than the old? Gibbard has an interesting argument in chapter 9 that goes something like this:

I don’t think there’s anything in this argument that’s particular to expressivist meta-ethics; a moral realist could use it too. It doesn’t explain what makes normative judgments trustworthy; it just tries to show that denying they can be trusted at all leads to greater absurdity than you might initially think.

Notably, Gibbard thinks that even questions of instrumental rationality involve normative judgments—not just questions of “ultimate goals” (see pp. 12-18). If he’s right about that, then the argument above doesn’t just say that you need to take others’ normative judgments seriously if you want to take seriously your own goals and moral beliefs. It says you need to take others’ normative judgments seriously if you even want to take seriously your beliefs about how best to pursue a given goal in a given set of circumstances.

I doubt this argument precludes you from concluding that some entire categories of normative judgment can be dismissed. If your friend thinks abstract art is terrible but you think abstract art is awesome, you might decide all aesthetic judgments are just equally-valid personal preferences. You don’t have to adopt an unlivable hyperskepticism to believe this. Couldn’t you also dismiss all moral judgments as mere preferences while still recognizing, say, the pursuit of one’s own self-interest as a worthy goal?

It may be hard to justify drawing that line, though. Aren’t our desires for survival, sex, power, etc the product of the same evolutionary forces that shaped our moral beliefs? Don’t all those drives exist because they help propagate genes? If the belief that one should look out for oneself and the belief that one should look out for one’s neighbor both trace back to similar origins, why treat one as legitimate and not the other?

Or, if the moral beliefs are just a byproduct of reasoning faculties which natural selection favored for their other benefits, then as Lazari-Radek and Singer point out in an argument I discussed a couple months ago, our altruistic beliefs might be more credible than our more clearly-evolutionarily-beneficial ones.

I like Gibbard’s argument as far as it goes, but I’m not satisfied with how he justifies trusting (to some degree) one’s own normative judgments. He thinks it’s impossible not to have such trust, and also that eliminating it would leave us in an unappealing state of hyperskepticism (see pp. 178-179). That’s true, but maybe hyperskepticism would be the clear-eyed view, and our inability to fully embrace it just reflects a fundamental absurdity in the human psyche. (If you suspect that’s the case, I imagine this suspicion will impact your behavior: even though you’ll never be able to stop trusting some of your normative judgments, you’ll likely trust fewer of them and trust them less, and put less effort into living in accord with them.) I still don’t see how an expressivist can avoid that conclusion. A moral realist, on the other hand, can say some of our judgments aren’t just inevitable or practically necessary, but actually right. And when I think about a judgment such as experiencing intense suffering is bad, it seems to me that trusting it involves trusting my ability to accurately perceive a certain truth about such experiences. If I stopped believing there could be such truth, I might still be biologically/psychologically destined to try to avoid suffering, but this would no longer be because I was making a judgment that I trusted; it would just be a fact about me, like how I have a tendency to tap my foot or fidget. (Or more likely, cognitive dissonance would be involved: I’d be unable to stop implicitly believing in objective normative truths even while simultaneously believing them impossible.)

An uninspiring utopia

Woman on the Edge of Time is a novel written and set in the 70s about a woman who is unjustly committed to a mental hospital and psychically time travels (or believes she does) to a future utopia in Mattapoisett. The (then-)present-day sections of the book are depressing: almost everyone in the protagonist Connie’s life is cruel to her, and the people who aren’t are either dead or are fellow powerless inmates. The utopian sections feel like a mashup of all the things that would appeal to a hippie / New Age-minded person, e.g.:

I want to draw attention to two questionable utopian tendencies I sense in this book (and elsewhere). First: idealizing both a relatively extreme individualism and a radical communism and presenting them as natural bedfellows. The people of Mattapoisett seem to care a lot about self-exploration and celebrating the things that make each of them unique, but they also treat e.g. costumes and bicycles as communal property. Can we really expect humans to focus so much on their own personal identity without developing attachment to particular objects that are important to that identity? (Aren’t cyclists gonna want to customize their bikes?)

Second: glorifying the idea of tradition and ritual while fantasizing about a radical revolution that would destroy most actual tradition. The Mattapoisett people in the novel see themselves as Wamponaugs [sic] so perhaps they preserve some traditions from that culture, but a lot of the structure of their society and their sacred rituals seem built from whole cloth to fit the author’s sensibilities. (And where are, say, the Catholics or the Muslims in this world—have their traditions just been swept away?)

One idea I did like is this check the utopian culture puts on the tendency of leadership roles to become rungs on a social ladder:

…after a year on the economic council and ninemonth chairing it, Gray Fox may come to identify with that job. A job that affects the lives of many people. May come to feel that it’s part of the essence of Gray Fox to make big decisions while others look up to per. May come to feel that being Gray Fox involves being such a decider, such a big visible doer. So right now Gray Fox is on sixmonth sheepherding duty. After we’ve served in a way that seems important, we serve in a job usually done by young people waiting to begin an apprenticeship or crossers atoning a crime. (p. 274)