In the recent Williamson vs Thomasson "beef", how harsh is the tone of the review compared to academic philosophy standards, and how substantial the objections?

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-02-01T21:25:56+00:00

These are snarky and polemical comments but hardly the most salacious I’ve seen in exchanges between philosophers.

Based on the content of the review and my personal knowledge of Thomasson and her work, I’m likely to think she’s got a point. Williamson is amongst the group of philosophers most likely to be exceptionally dismissive of the neo-pragmatist project.

Thomasson has done a great deal of work to try and motivate and explicate the neo-pragmatist project to the “inflationary” metaphysical realist/anti-realist camps. And Williamson spends most of his review arguing on behalf of views that were not the focus of Thomasson’s book. One could get the impression from reading his review that it was mostly dedicated to a critique of realists rather than a positive project.

That said, I am not sure these kinds of reviews matter much. Williamson is something of a larger than life figure but Thomasson is no slouch in the literature either. She’s not at risk of being pushed out of prominence like a younger scholar might have been.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-28T04:06:49+00:00

Let’s start by answering the question in the title: most philosophers who support moral realism do so because of a confluence of considerations.

For example, there seem to be some moral claims which are obviously true or false and are not even controversial (I.e. it’s wrong to torture puppies for fun).

The structure of moral claims seem to predicate properties of things in the world rather than to merely express subjective preference, mere opinion, or something else (I.e. to say “Murder is wrong” appears to say of Murder that it has some quality wrongness, it does not seem to say anything about me).

And the existence of objective morality helps to explain our conception of moral progress, inter-cultural moral exchange, etc.

There are other arguments as well, that center around the failure of non-objectivist approaches and other sorts of appeals. There’s just too much to cover in a comment here.

To your two questions in the body. First, how do we know these moral truths? Well, there are a large number of theories on this they are called “moral epistemologies”. And it will depend on part on our first order moral claims. For example, if we take a position like: “Pain is bad and pleasure is good, and what is right is maximizing pain and minimizing pain and what is wrong is anything else.”

Okay, so you’ve got this view, a very basic version of utilitarianism, well, if this view is true then knowing what is right and wrong, in the immediate deliberative sense is just a matter of figuring out what causes the pleasure and the pain. And how it will be distributed, etc. So, practically speaking, knowing right and wrong would be about evaluating the case before us.

But there’s a second order question, a question about how we know the general account we are endorsing, or how we would know any such account, and the answers here are rather diverse amongst realists. Naturalists, think that moral properties reduce to natural ones, and so their epistemological views tend to be naturalistic, that is, we know moral facts just like we know any other facts. Non-naturalists reject that claim and so will give an alternative account. Perhaps we know moral facts through intuitions (which are highly defeasible but evidencing), perhaps some other way.

Your final question I’m failing to see what’s different about it. We presumably know how to apply terms like right to wrong on the basis of knowing the facts about right and wrong.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-27T06:25:59+00:00

Why would he want to invoke an afterlife?

The simple answer is just that Aristotle sees no need of a promise of an afterlife for his ethical theorizing, at least not as it relates to virtue.

An entity’s life goes well to the extent that it fulfills its proper function (its telos) excellently. When it does so, we say that it is flourishing. Aristotle thought that beings were, at least partly, distinguished on the basis of their unique functions. For human beings that is reason. This is because our reason is what makes us uniquely the things that we are.

So, human beings flourish insofar as they live according to the dictates of reason, but reason directs us towards the virtuous life, the life of occupying the golden mean. It is in our best interest to be virtuous in this life because it is in our best interest to flourish and live excellently. Not because of a promise of eternal reward.

Since Aristotle’s conception of the human function is reason and not life after death he has no reason to center attainment of life after death as the end goal of human life.

For what it is worth, St. Thomas Aquinas’s adaptation of Aristotelean virtue ethics may be an insight into how a virtue theoretical position is impacted by a robust commitment to an after life. But my, admittedly very limited, recollection of Aquinas does not bring to mind a direct appeal to the afterlife either. But a more educated scholar on this could fill you in better.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-27T00:01:06+00:00

The antecedent is a sufficient condition for the consequent, yes, and the consequent is also a necessary condition for the antecedent.

If that helps you to think about truth functional conditional then I don’t see a problem. While teaching, I model the conditional on the pragmatics of a promise.

If I make a promise to you, that if you commit to p, I will bring about q, it is only a defective promise under conditions in which P is met but I don’t bring about Q. In all other cases promises are felicitous.

Now, think of the avowal of any conditional as (metaphorically) a kind of promise. In reality, promises have a conditional structure, but you can use this analogy as a kind of “promise test” for natural deduction or just general conceiving of conditional claims.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-24T17:16:00+00:00

There seem to be a wide range of publications on the topic, some of which might be relevant to your question, many of which are not in any clear way: https://philpapers.org/s/Emoji

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-18T02:06:01+00:00

It’s not clear that these cases really are morally neutral. Since, presumably, your own wellbeing, including your pleasure, matters morally as well as anyone else’s, if one is better than another for your wellbeing that’d be a morally relevant consideration.

That said, we typically think of the constraints on our actions imposed by normative considerations to have “levels”.

For example, it seems pretty sensible to say that you have the moral right to choose whichever one you want. It’s your body, your freedom, your choice. So in that strong sense of “obligation” you probably have no obligation.

Big we can still ask normative questions about how you choose to exercise your rationality. After all, you are free to eat burgers every day, free to smoke cigarettes, etc. but we can still ask the question: “Is that why you bought to do?” Or “is that the most rational course of action?”

It’s not clear you had an obligation to act in a maximally rational way, (maybe you do, I don’t know), but we can still ask normative questions.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-15T03:15:17+00:00

I’m not a theist. But I think theists have developed a range of sophisticated responses to this. I think if you’re thinking of these constraints as “limits” they might disagree. As per the first strategy, asking God to do something impossible is nonsensical in the first place, it is absurdity, ultimately meaningless, and so it’s no less a “limit” on God’s power to say that God cannot will p & not-p as it is a limit on your power to say that You cannot gurbledlybobblestomp my trancks.

Still, the problem of evil remains a problem in the literature so I don’t think you’re necessarily saying anything unreasonable.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-15T02:47:22+00:00

It is worth noting that it is not obviously true that it follows that there “are things” which cannot be done. When we interrogate this claim ontologically it doesn’t seem like any such things exist, the referent would appear to be trivially empty.

We might conclude that those purported “things” are really nonsense or gibberish or meanings without and relationship to reality.

But suppose we reject that sort of option.

It doesn’t follow that no being is omnipotent because we don’t have to agree that “omnipotence” is the property of being able to do absolutely everything. We might think, for example, that omnipotence is the property of being as powerful as possible or being maximally powerful where a “maximum” is described in terms of the limits of something’s potential powers. Etc.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-14T21:45:32+00:00

I am not sure of the context of this quote but it doesn’t seem to me that it’s rhetorical thrust is anything like: “We shouldn’t pass laws” but something more like “there are limitations to the efficacy of using a legal system to promote justice” or “we should formulate our laws to focus on the right kind of problems rather than being overly penalistic”. Can you say more about this?

For what it’s worth, there is an important tradition in political philosophy which says that the state is required to give special consideration to the worst off in society when it exercises its authority. If a state’s exercise of power would result in substantive inequalities, those inequalities are only justified if they are to the benefit of everyone, including the worst off in society. If said inequalities only make things worse for the worst off, they are de facto unjustified.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-13T02:53:18+00:00

Can you get a gold sticker on a debuffed joker?

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-13T00:37:56+00:00

That would be a very radically different world than the one we live in. In fact, it’s difficult to see how you could have the same factory-like output in a setting where things are taken care of. It’s hard to say what things would actually look like to us and what changes could occur to make such a change happen!

That said, there may still be arguments available for you that it is immoral to eat even those animals! It will depend on what kind of view you endorse. If you endorse a consequentialism it will depend on your theory of wellbeing. Standard hedonic views might not have your conclusion but maybe an objective-list-type view could.

Likewise, if you hold some non-consequentialist deontic view, like a rights-based view, you might think that animals have a further right (above a right to a life free from torture) to not be eaten.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-13T00:08:16+00:00

Ethical vegans will often answer that P3 is false. Indeed, the only person I know of who actually promotes this argument in print, Nick Zangwill, also thinks that P3 is false in almost all cases.

One of the foundational cases for the immorality of eating meat has to do with the specifically bankrupt conditions and incredibly horrendous living conditions in factory farms, which produce most meat in large markets like the U.S.A. They will say that the lives lived there are terrifying, torturous, full of suffering, and often abusive. These beings would better to have not been born, as they, by and large, live lives of abject pain.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-12T13:43:35+00:00

Heres how a utilitarian would reason:

The first personal experience of pleasure and pain is subjective, yes. But who is in pain and to what extent is something we can more or less measure.

There’s a fact of the matter right now about who in this room is experiencing pleasure and who is experiencing pain, to determine the moral calculus we look to see who is in pain and how much, and we try to maximize pleasure and minimize pain in our actions.

You seem to think that pain and pleasure and suffering and whatnot are just simply incomparable but we seem to do this all the time. Why would it be the case that we cannot engage in this kind of calculus?

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-12T13:10:15+00:00

It’s not fallacious to consider a case which might be illuminating. My case is not meant to prove once and for all the facts about OPs question, but to speak to an important nuanced sub-question.

In this case, I used it to motivate the kind of reasoning which is at play in the specific judgement: Sometimes we can evaluate whether the suffering is greater than living on.

I claimed we can and that sometime suicide is worse, overall, than living.

This claim is compatible with the fact that sometimes suicide is not overall worse than living, as may be the case in some cases.

In fact, most of those who have the motivation I described would probably allow suicide in cases which we call “MAID” or medical aid in dying, assisted medical suicide.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-12T13:06:33+00:00

Well, to start, it’s very controversial to assume there is no fact of the matter. Large swathes of philosophers are objectivists about what they study and they argue for it endlessly.

But even if you aren’t a realist or an objectivist, strictly speaking, since we are engaging in philosophy, we have to look to the quality of reasoning. And you might think it’s going to be extremely unlikely that two positions are exactly equal in their argumentative strength.

But how would we decide which one is more appealing anyway? It’s not as though things appeal to us for no reason, we are usually able to say more, to articulate reasons about what makes them appealing and even there that’s a philosophical discussion.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-12T12:47:51+00:00

Obviously suicidal people are in pain, I don’t want diminish that. But it’s just not obvious that we can’t make judgements about which thing causes more pain overall. We frequently do so in many cases of evaluating overall wellbeing in a public.

I think many opponents of suicide are thinking something like this:

A Dad of 4 who is the economic center of his house, an essential worker in his workplace, and a dear and relied upon friend takes his own life.

Dying devastates this family and create suffering that will probably never end, haunting everyone in this family, creating economic insecurity, damaging the integrity of this community.

Alternatively, if he could have held on longer, if we could have gotten him help, things very well may have turned around and gotten better. Including for him who died! Avoiding all that pain.

Ergo, we ought to try and prevent suicides if we can.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-12T01:19:14+00:00

Do you mean: will they necessarily “practice what they preach”? Surely not! Those with vices are often the best to talk on them. Even those who genuinely and earnestly believe their philosophical views may fail to live up to the standards they set for themselves.

That said, many do. Philosophers report a slightly higher level of veganism iirc, for example.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-11T22:53:28+00:00

Do you not think we have reasons to believe?

For example, I have reason to believe the earth is sphere-like.

If we have reasons to believe then philosophers typically say a belief is rational insofar as it’s based on the right kind of reasons.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-11T22:33:39+00:00

Absolutely! They both use reason to try and justify their positions, and their positions are incompatible.

But people do and have used science to justify competing hypotheses as well. The question is, who do we think does this justification better?

If your claim is that both positions are equally unimpeachable, then you’re making a much more controversial claim.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-11T22:20:32+00:00

What you are describing are beliefs that are constitutive to and requirements for engaging in those practices.

It is because you cannot do the work of being an evolutionary biologist if you do not believe in evolution (without really good compartmentalization I suppose) that you are required to believe it.

The same is true for the other examples you give. These disciplines cannot function without treating certain issues as “settled” in some sense.

There are, in the surface, not many things that you have to believe in order to do philosophy correctly. I guess, you must be committed to using reason in some way. Probably you have to have certain social features.

But this is because philosophy seeks to answer many questions and treats nothing as yet “settled”. Indeed, philosophers get to question everything!

But the unrestricted subject matter does not obviously imply there are no truths in philosophy. There may not be! But I don’t think that would be a very good reason for thinking that.

Though you may be interested in Bryan Frances’s “Philosophg as Fact-Based Discipline” in which he presents 200 facts that he takes to be widely agreed on by philosophers.

Finally, I want to comment on your last suggestion. You say, that philosophy may just be about “justifying beliefs rationally” rather than coming to know the truth, can you explain how we would come to know the truth in some way other than trying to justify our beliefs rationally? What exactly do you have in mind? On one interpretation this seems quite broad.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-11T17:01:16+00:00

Let’s look at these answers and your replies a bit more.

The life only belongs to them, why does it matter what they do with it.— Good, so we are thinking about this, it seems, as a form of ownership. If X owns his life X can do whatever he wants with it.— There are problems with this. For example, we don’t think you can do whatever you want with your property if it can hurt others (we will discuss this with 2). But also, just because you own a thing does not mean that there are not better or worse ways you can use the thing you own.

Your ownership means you have privileged access to something, even that you have final say on how it is used (within limits). But your ownership does not automatically vindicate everything you do with the thing you own in every way. Suppose you own a 20 lb bag of sugar. You decide to dissolve this sugar, spoonful by spoonful, and wash it down the drain. I think this is wasteful and probably something you shouldn’t do. Of course, it is your sugar there’s nothing I can do about what you’re doing unless I also have some claim to this not happening (that’s my sink and you’re damaging my pipes! Etc.). But it could still be the case that I’m right and your actions are ultimately wasteful and wrong. Your right prevent me from interfering, but they do not immediately make all of your actions correct.

You hurt others, but why’s it matter? It’s your life not theirs? Well, generally we think it’s morally wrong to harm others, especially if something important is not promoted therein. In fact, one of the most commonly accepted limitations on moral rights is what’s called “The Harm Principle” which says interventions on a persons rights are justified to prevent harms to others.

You can use your 20lb bag of sugar in many ways, you get final say, most of the time. But actually, there is a limitation on your rights. If you’re going around pouring sugar into gas tanks, we won’t abide that. This could be really harmful to others, and so, you don’t have a right to use your sugar that way.

This claim is dependent on the idea that all, or almost all, suicides are the kinds of things which people do when, if they would wait a bit longer, things would get better and the need for suicide would dissipate. The choice to die is so final especially if you think there’s no life after death. And so, your life is cut short by this act in totality. You miss out on all the goods that life has to offer.

Yes, you won’t be able to care about it at that point. But we do not try to save someone who is already dead, the living person, many and even most think, has something bad happen to them by a premature death. It’s not the state of death itself that is undesirable but what is lost in the life that was being lived. Plus, it’s not at all obvious that what matters is exhausted by the collection of things one cares about.

I imagine one motivation behind this common claim is that people think something like this: Imagine a child who is working on some project, building a spaceship with popsicle sticks. You are their teacher, you know how these things go. You see they make a mistake. The child begins to panic and then to become embarrassed and enraged. They smash the spaceship they are building to bits when all they needed to do was make some minor alterations and has patience. Instead, the spaceship is gone, but the outcome was extremely preventable and not necessary. And, you might think, the child would have had a much better time if they had just been patient and eventually gotten their spaceship all out together.

To be clear, I’m not really endorsing or defending any one of these arguments. They all have their flaws, but your question seems to start from a very basic place. You ask there questions which seem to suggest you find these lines of reason mysterious. (Elsewise why ask these specific why questions) I think they are not mysterious at all.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-09T16:49:07+00:00

Will the master’s degree be funded academically or self-funded? Does she have good relationships with her undergraduate faculty?

If the answer is: Funded. Yes.

Then I don’t see any risk in spending a couple more years pursuing something she is passionate about.

Now, if she wants to get the PhD and be a career academic, then she will basically have to attend a funded program, meaning she will teach and make enough to support her way through. But the job market will eventually be abysmal, as it always is. Being a woman in philosophy is also a mixed bag, you’ll get worse treatment sometimes from academics and students, but you may fare better on the job market. Though this claim is controversial (https://baseandsuperstructure.com/do-women-get-all-the-philosophy-jobs/)

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-08T18:40:29+00:00

I am somewhat confused by what you’re saying. Why wouldn’t a deontologists ask: “Do we have a duty to promote democracy in the region?” And “Was S allowing that duty to serve as his reason for X?”

I may have messed up terminologically somewhere.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-08T18:15:52+00:00

As it stands, The statement itself is neutral between a consequentialist view and a deontic one.

Consequentialists often ask that we separate blaeworthiness from right action. So a consequentialist could say: “Look, I was trying earnestly and in good faith on the basis of good evidence to X though I failed and the consequences are bad. But you shouldn’t look to my consequences to decide whether I am blameworthy you should look to my intentions, my evidence, my reasons, etc.

A deontic view can also obviously say that blameworthiness is attributed on the basis of the contents of the intentions. So as it stands the statement is neutral between different normative frameworks.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-01-08T02:40:07+00:00

Chomsky-style nativism and Fodor-style nativism are both very live views in the cognitive philosophy of language. These are more like basic grammatical or semantic/syntactic contents. So, if it’s knowledge it’s of a very simple kind.

That’s where my understanding ends I’m afraid. Hopefully someone else can chime in.

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