Quasi-Realism vs Realism

“Earning the right” to define the criteria for “earning the right”

Does this sound like viscous circularity? Let’s step back for a moment.

Blackburn claims quasi-realism earns the right to realist-sounding talk by showing that certain norms – consistency, coherence, sensitivity to evidence¹ – generate something functionally equivalent to moral objectivity from the inside. But notice what’s doing the work: those norms are not themselves neutral. They are the epistemic and moral commitments of a particular tradition – broadly post-Enlightenment, liberal, coherentist. When Blackburn says he’s “articulating existing norms rather than legislating,” he is selecting which existing norms count. The norms of a feudal peasant community or a fascist state also exist. They are also “our practices” for somebody.

So when Blackburn adjudicates between competing attitude sets using coherence and evidence-sensitivity as criteria, he’s using criteria that are themselves expressions of a prior attitude set – roughly, the attitude set of a mid-20th century Cambridge analytic philosopher. The circularity is not that he’s using logic (unavoidable) but that he’s using substantive normative commitments to validate substantive normative commitments, while presenting this as a neutral constructive procedure.

A sophisticated fascist system can be internally consistent. It can be sensitive to evidence about hierarchy, group selection and historical patterns of dominance. It can achieve reflective equilibrium among its own commitments. By Blackburn’s stated criteria – coherence, consistency, factual sensitivity – it is not obviously disqualified. Blackburn needs an additional move to rule it out, and that move will inevitably draw on substantive moral commitments that are not themselves earned by the quasi-realist procedure. The procedure is thus not doing the work it claims to do. It’s laundering prior commitments rather than grounding them.

This is the vicious part: the circularity doesn’t just say “coherentism is circular” (which is tolerable), it says the specific circle drawn by quasi-realism already contains the conclusion hidden in the premises. Blackburn hasn’t escaped the need for grounding – he’s obscured it.

But wait, let’s red team all that..

1. All normative frameworks face this regress – moral realism included.

How do moral realists access mind-independent moral facts? Not perception directly. Intuition is demonstrably unreliable and evolutionarily contingent. Reason alone can’t cross the is-ought gap. Whatever epistemic faculty the realist posits to access moral facts will itself require justification by normative standards – which are themselves either arbitrary or grounded in something further. Neurath’s boat² applies universally: you repair the ship at sea using the planks you have. There is no dry dock. Demanding that quasi-realism justify its criteria from a view from nowhere is demanding something no normative framework can supply.

2. Coherentism is not the same as vicious circularity.

Vicious circularity assumes the conclusion. Wide reflective equilibrium (Rawls, which Blackburn draws on) operates with multiple simultaneous constraints – moral intuitions, mid-level principles, background theories of moral psychology, evolutionary biology, social facts – pulling against each other. This is more like triangulation than circular reasoning. The constraints are mutually correcting rather than mutually confirming.

3. Fascism doesn’t actually survive full reflective equilibrium.

Blackburn would argue that a genuinely worked-through fascism – one that takes seriously the facts about human suffering, the absence of principled basis for racial hierarchy, the self-undermining nature of dehumanisation when applied consistently – collapses into incoherence under sufficient scrutiny. It requires compartmentalisation and special pleading that a coherent system cannot sustain. This is an empirical claim about what happens when you actually push the reflective equilibrium procedure far enough.

4. “Earning the right” is deflationary, not inflationary.

Obviously Blackburn as a quasi realist isn’t claiming to have discovered the objective moral truth. He’s claiming the practice of moral discourse is legitimate as a practice, and that “true,” “objective,” and “wrong” function properly within it. He’s not asking you to accept that there are spooky mind-independent moral facts – he’s asking you to accept far less: that moral reasoning is not merely arbitrary preference-expression. The circularity objection expects more than he’s promising.

Where the red team runs out of road

Blackburn’s sensitivity to evidence is a genuine epistemic virtue for moral reasoning, but it’s may not be considered the same thing as grounding³. Grounding answers a different question – one that Blackburn thinks doesn’t need answering, but I think it does.

The valence-discloses-value is underappreciated as a realist response to the “no moral perception” objection. If valence is a real physical property of conscious systems, then moral acquaintance isn’t mysterious or spooky – it’s phenomenal experience directly disclosing a real property. You don’t need a sixth sense or non-natural faculty. Pain doesn’t require inferential justification to be known as bad; the phenomenal character is the disclosure. This is far more naturalistic than Blackburn tends to acknowledge when he dismisses realist perception claims.

Redteam 1 may be the strongest – but it’s essentially a “everyone faces this problem” argument, which shifts the debate rather than winning it.
My reply is: agreed, so maybe we should bite the bullet and accept that grounding (in the ontological sense) is necessary, rather than treating its absence as acceptable in everyone’s framework.

Neurath’s boat is a general anti-foundationalist argument, not a targeted weapon against moral realism. If Blackburn deploys it against moral foundations, a scientific naturalist who also rejects moral realism is in genuine trouble – because they’re also committed to epistemic norms like “proportion belief to evidence” or “prefer simpler hypotheses,” and these are normative claims about what we ought to believe. Either those have some stance-independent force, or they too are just attitude expressions – in which case science loses its normative grounding. Most scientific naturalists will not pay that price. Blackburn, to be consistent, would have to be a quasi-realist about epistemic norms as well, which leads to the 4th point about “earning the right” (more on that later).

The “dry dock” point also deserves more credit. A priori moral knowledge (Parfit’s route) and Cornell-style natural fact grounding are both genuine alternatives that Blackburn’s Neurath’s boat move doesn’t dispose of – it just relocates the problem.

Redteam 2 has problems. I’m not accusing reflective equilibrium of being circular – you’re identifying a dilemma at the meta-level that Blackburn cannot escape cleanly: Either the rules governing “earning the right” are themselves attitude expressions – in which case they have no genuine normative force and cannot do the work of distinguishing better from worse moral systems – or those rules are genuinely normative in a stance-independent sense – in which case Blackburn has smuggled realism in at the meta-level to run what is supposed to be an expressivist procedure.

This is a genuine dilemma, not a rhetorical one. Gibbard’s norm-expressivism tries to handle this by having second-order attitudes about norms – but this just pushes the dilemma up a level. At some point the regress either terminates in something stance-independent or it doesn’t terminate at all. If it does terminate, you have covert realism. If it doesn’t, the procedure has no genuine normative authority. Blackburn needs to choose a horn, and neither is comfortable.

Redteam 3 is the weakest. The claim that fascism collapses under full reflective equilibrium is precisely what needs to be argued, and it draws on exactly the substantive moral commitments (human dignity, impartial concern) that the procedure is supposed to generate neutrally. Blackburn would have to show that those commitments emerge necessarily from the procedure, which he hasn’t demonstrated.

The claim that fascism collapses under full reflective equilibrium only works if:

• The facts about human suffering carry moral weight independent of the attitude set running the procedure
• The reasoning standards applied (“sound reasoning”) have normative force that isn’t itself just another attitude expression

If both of these are just attitude expressions, then “fascism collapses under reflective equilibrium” simply means “fascism conflicts with the liberal-humanist attitude set we happen to operate from.” A consistent fascist running their own reflective equilibrium arrives at a different equilibrium. Blackburn cannot rule that equilibrium out without invoking standards that are, in effect, stance-independent – which is precisely what he’s trying to avoid positing.

This is arguably question-begging dressed up as proceduralism. The conclusion (liberal humanist values are correct) is embedded in the starting attitudes fed into the procedure. He’s not deriving anti-fascism; he’s assuming it and calling the result “earned.”

Redteam 4 is weak too, I think.

Calling your position deflationary sounds modest and philosophically careful, but it’s actually evasive on cases of serious moral weight – genocide, torture, slavery – “this is wrong” deflated to “I disapprove and you would after full reflection” is not a satisfying account of what’s being said. The stakes of the deflationary move are not evenly distributed; they’re felt most acutely precisely where moral language matters most.

On science: this is the pressure point. If Blackburn is consistently quasi-realist – applying the same deflationary treatment to “true,” “objective,” and “wrong” in science – then he faces the pragmatic success problem. Science works. Its predictions are confirmed, its technologies function. This is exceedingly difficult to explain if scientific claims don’t correspond to a mind-independent reality in some robust sense. Deflating “true” to “endorsed in coherent reflective practice” leaves the success of science looking like a massive coincidence.

If, on the other hand, Blackburn is a realist about scientific truth but a quasi-realist about moral truth, he owes a principled account of why the two domains deserve asymmetric treatment. The most natural response – “science tracks mind-independent facts, morality doesn’t” – is simply the point at issue, and it can’t be assumed without begging the question against the moral realist.

So, quasi-realism’s apparent middle path between what looks like appeals to robust realism and crude subjectivism may be narrower than advertised – it either tacitly relies on stance-independent normative commitments to do the heavy lifting, or it loses the resources to rule out coherent but monstrous moral systems. That’s not a comfortable position to be in when your project is precisely to earn the right to say some things are genuinely wrong.

Footnotes

1. Blackburn’s sensitivity to evidence is primarily epistemic: moral attitudes should update in response to empirical facts about the situation. If you think factory farming is acceptable partly because you believe pigs don’t feel pain, and that factual belief is corrected, your moral attitude should shift – only if you actually cared about pain in pigs – if you didn’t then this evidence would not move you. ↩︎
2. Neurath’s boat (or ship) is a famous metaphor in philosophy of science, created by Otto Neurath, which argues that human knowledge has no secure, absolute foundation. It illustrates that we are like sailors forced to rebuild their ship on the open sea, constantly replacing parts while staying afloat, rather than rebuilding in dry dock.
   “We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.“
   See Wikipedia article. ↩︎
3. Empiricism being not the same as grounding is something I found confusing. ↩︎