Why realists are wrong

When all other rhetorical gambits fail, restraint advocates and Trump resort to their ultimate card: Blame some earlier intervention for creating the problem in the first place, as if this absolves them from dealing with the actual consequences of the policies they advocate. They seem to argue that if we can trace the current situation to an earlier policy decision we opposed, we get a free pass and can blame all of the bad consequences of the next policy we recommend on the previous policy we opposed.

This is a fundamentally flawed approach to policy evaluation. If the direct results of withdrawal are disastrous costs, those costs are properly attributed to the withdrawal proposal—especially if, as we argue here, there is a lower-cost alternative of sticking with the sustainable policy.

Sometimes restraint is the right decision. Sometimes it is not. For instance, advocates of restraint were right that intervening in Iraq was a mistake in They were wrong that the correct decision in and was therefore to withdraw rather than implement the surge. Advocates of restraint would never allow advocates of the Iraq War to wash their hands of the costs of the conflict on the grounds that it could be traced to President George H.

Why should advocates of restraint today deserve a pass from history that they would not give their policy opponents? The current debate over the Syria policy presents this problem in its purest form. The cost of the strategy Trump jettisoned was not nothing, but it was, in policy terms, quite small. The 1, or so U. In exchange, the United States realized benefits such as inflicting severe losses on the Islamic State, protecting Christians and other ethnic and religious minorities, creating a partial safe haven for Syrian refugees, and preventing Russia and Iran from having a free hand to operate.

It was by no means a perfect policy, and Trump supporters were correct in saying that it was itself a lesser-of-two-evils choice driven in part by mistakes the Obama administration made five years ago. But most realists simply avoid wrestling with these facts and prefer instead to speak in vague terms about the undesirability of a commitment without an obvious endgame or exit strategy already in place.

They likewise warn about mission creep—the idea that a minimal investment can, over time, grow out of all proportion to the interests at stake. These dangers are real, but they are not the trump cards realists believe them to be—especially not in the case of Syria.

For instance, the minimal force presence there, in a largely supporting role, presented few of the costs or pathologies that often come with the combat deployments of large conventional forces, such as in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The U. Rather, the locals overwhelmingly welcomed the U. Nor did it create passivity and dependency on the part of local military forces. Rather, the Syrian Democratic Forces fought with courage and effectiveness, losing some 11, fighters in combat compared to eight U.

The United States did not divert scarce troop resources from other vital missions, sow major political divisions on the home front, or impose unsustainable strain on the U. It is reasonable to ask how long the inherently unstable arrangement between U. It was untidy, to be sure, but the president was not forced to make a decision by circumstances on the ground. Rather, this was unambiguously a retreat of choice, not of necessity. The benefits of the Syria mission were considerable and the costs not too onerous.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of Islamic State adherents have escaped detainment. This could potentially lead to a resurgence of terrorist attacks in Europe and even the United States.

The potential slaughter of Kurdish soldiers and civilians, untold numbers of whom have already been killed, is an ongoing risk. A new round of displacement has begun in a country that has already endured the largest refugee crisis since World War II.

Iran has been bolstered by the regional retreat of its principal great power foe, the United States, the consolidated power of its main ally in the Assad regime, and the completion of its land bridge to Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea which also puts Israel at further risk. Russia has gained strength, replacing the United States as the great power holder-of-the-balance in the Middle East. The regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has grown ever stronger, putting millions of Syrian civilians at further risk.

The withdrawal could lead to the destabilization of Iraq as it sees its primary great-power patron, the United States, casually abandon another longtime ally without regard to the consequences. An incomplete mission and the abandonment of a devoted ally will demoralize the U. Of course sometimes those goals coincide, and sometimes they even coincide with other people living in the same nation-state.

Each of them trying their hardest to milk the UN for all its worth. Realists of all stripes start from three premises: 1 we live in a self-help system; 2 rational states are the basic unit of international analysis regime type is irrelevant ; 3 states want to survive.

Defensive realists argue that states pursue security in a risk-adverse manner. War, after all, is very costly. Much better to balance or bandwagon. Offensive realists, on the other hand, argue that states are security maximizers. The only way to guarantee security is to try to eliminate every other state in the system. The best one can generally hope for, however, is to become a regional hegemon, which contains rising foreign powers by supporting their local enemies an offshore balancer.

Security is maintained by gaining a relative power advantage or parity at the very minimum. Realism is also pretty clear on the means. Alliances are ephemeral. Institutions are epiphenomenal. What does this mean? To say that moral requirements are prescriptive is to say that they tell us how we ought to act, to say that they give us reasons for acting. Thus, to say that something is morally good is to say that we ought to pursue it, that we have reason to pursue it.

To say that something is morally bad is to say that we ought not to pursue it, that we have reason not to pursue it. The reasons for action that moral requirements furnish are not contingent upon the possession of any desires or wants on the part of the agent to whom they are addressed: I cannot release myself from the requirement imposed by the claim that torturing the innocent is wrong by citing some desire or inclination that I have.

Reasons for action which are contingent in this way on desires and inclinations are furnished by what Kant called hypothetical imperatives. So our concept of a moral requirement is a concept of a categorically prescriptive requirement. But Mackie claims further that our concept of a moral requirement is a concept of an objective and categorically prescriptive requirement. What does it mean to say that a requirement is objective?

Mackie says a lot of different-sounding things about this, and the following as outlined in Miller a is by no means a comprehensive list references are to Ch. To call a requirement objective is to say that it can be an object of knowledge 24, 31, 33 , that it can be true or false 26, 33 , that it can be perceived 31, 33 , that it can be recognised 42 , that it is prior to and independent of our preferences and choices 30, 43 , that it is a source of authority external to our preferences and choices 32, 34, 43 , that it is part of the fabric of the world 12 , that it backs up and validates some of our preferences and choices 22 , that it is capable of being simply true 30 or valid as a matter of general logic 30 , that it is not constituted by our choosing or deciding to think in a certain way 30 , that it is extra-mental 23 , that it is something of which we can be aware 38 , that it is something that can be introspected 39 , that it is something that can figure as a premise in an explanatory hypothesis or inference 39 , and so on.

Mackie plainly does not take these to be individually necessary: facts about subatomic particles, for example, may qualify as objective in virtue of figuring in explanatory hypotheses even though they cannot be objects of perceptual acquaintance.

But his intention is plain enough: these are the sorts of conditions whose satisfaction by a fact renders it objective as opposed to subjective. This issue cannot be discussed in detail here, except to note that while it seems plausible to claim that if our concept of a moral fact is a concept of a reason for action then that concept must be a concept of a categorical reason for action, it is not so clear why we have to say that our concept of a moral fact is a concept of a reason for action at all.

For exposition and critical discussion, see Miller a , Ch. For a useful discussion, see Brink The argument from queerness has both metaphysical and epistemological components.

Thus, the world contains no moral states of affairs, situations which consist in the instantiation of a moral quality. In short, our ordinary conceptions of how we might come into cognitive contact with states of affairs, and thereby acquire knowledge of them, cannot cope with the idea that the states of affairs are objective values. So we are forced to expand that ordinary conception to include forms of moral perception and intuition.

But these are completely unexplanatory: they are really just placeholders for our capacity to form correct moral judgements the reader should here hear an echo of the complaints Benacerraf and Field raise against arithmetical platonism. Evaluating the argument from queerness is well outwith the scope of the present entry. Examples of the latter version, and attempts to provide the owed response to the argument from queerness, can be found in Smith , Ch.

For an example of such a strategy, see Cuneo For a general discussion, see Lillehammer Mackie claims that the error-theory of moral judgement is a second-order theory, which does not necessarily have implications for the first order practice of making moral judgements Suppose we can extract from this story some subsidiary norm distinct from truth, which governs the practice of forming moral judgements.

See Kalderon and Joyce for examples. For a book-length treatment of moral error-theory, see Olson The error-theories proposed by Mackie and Field are non-eliminativist error-theories, and should be contrasted with the kind of eliminativist error-theory proposed by e.

Paul Churchland concerning folk-psychological propositional attitudes see Churchland Churchland argues that our everyday talk of propositional attitudes such as beliefs, desires and intentions should eventually be abandoned given developments in neuroscience. Mackie and Field make no analogous claims concerning morality and arithmetic: no claim, that is, to the effect that they will one day be in principle replaceable by philosophically hygienic counterparts.

For some discussion of the contrast between eliminativist and non-eliminativist error theories, see Miller Although some commentators e. There are a number of reasons for this, with the reasons varying depending on the type of reduction proposed. Suppose, first of all, that one wished to deny the existence claim which is a component of platonic realism about arithmetic.

One way to do this would be to propose an analytic reduction of talk seemingly involving abstract entities to talk concerning only concrete entities. This can be illustrated by considering a language the truth of whose sentences seemingly entails the existence of a type of abstract object, directions.

A number of contextual definitions are now introduced:. After all, A , B , and C allow us to paraphrase any sentence whose truth appears to entail the existence of abstract objects into a sentence whose truth involves only the existence of concrete inscriptions.

There is a powerful argument, first developed by William Alston , and convincingly resuscitated by Crispin Wright , Ch. The analytic reductionist who wishes to wield the contextual definitions against the existence claim at the heart of platonic realism takes them to show that the apparent reference to abstract objects on the left-hand sides of the definitions is merely apparent: in fact, the truth of the relevant sentences entails only the existence of a range of concrete inscriptions.

But the platonic realist can retort: what the contextual definitions show is that the apparent lack of reference to abstract objects on the right-hand sides is merely apparent. In fact, the platonic realist can say, the truth of the sentences figuring on the right-hand sides implicitly involves reference to abstract objects. If there is no way to break this deadlock the existence of the analytic reductive paraphrases will leave the existence claim at the heart of the relevant form of realism untouched.

So the issue of this style of reductionism appears to be orthogonal to debates between realists and non-realists. Can the same be said about non-analytic styles of reductionism?

Again, there is no straightforward connection between the issue of reductionism and the issue of realism. The problem is that, to borrow some terminology and examples from Railton , some reductions will be vindicative whilst others will be eliminativist.

For example, the reduction of water to H 2 0 is vindicative: it vindicates our belief that there is such a thing as water, rather than overturning it. On the other hand:.

Thus, a non-analytic reduction may or may not have implications for the existence dimension of a realistic view of a particular subject matter. Again, there is no straightforward relationship between the issue of reductionism and the issue of realism. We saw above that for the subject-matter in question the error-theorist agrees with the realist that the truth of the atomic, declarative sentences of that area requires the existence of the relevant type of objects, or the instantiation of the relevant sorts of properties.

We also saw that an error-theory about a particular area could be motivated by epistemological worries Field or by a combination of epistemological and metaphysical worries Mackie. Another way in which the existence dimension of realism can be resisted is via expressivism.

Whereas the realist and the error-theorist agree that the sentences of the relevant area are truth-apt , apt to be assessed in terms of truth and falsity, the realist and the expressivist alternatively non-cognitivist, projectivist disagree about the truth-aptness of those sentences.

But there are other grammatical moods that are conventionally associated with different types of speech-act. Note that we would not ordinarily think of orders or questions as even apt for assessment in terms of truth and falsity: they are not truth-apt. The expressivist about a particular area will claim that the realist is misled by the syntax of the sentences of that area into thinking that they are truth-apt: she will say that this is a case where the conventional association of the declarative mood with assertoric force breaks down.

There are some very important issues concerning the relationship between minimalism about truth-aptitude and expressivism that we cannot go into here. See Divers and Miller and Miller b for some pointers. There are also some important differences between e. For a useful account, see Schroeder So, if moral sentences are not conventionally used for the making of assertions, what are they conventionally used for?

According to one classical form of expressivism, emotivism , they are conventionally used for the expression of emotion, feeling, or sentiment. Thus, A. Ayer writes:. Emotivism faces many problems, discussion of which is not possible here for a survey, see Miller a Ch. But what about contexts in which it is not being applied to an action type? But now there is a problem in accounting for the following valid inference:. So the above argument is apparently no more valid than:.

According to theories like these, moral modus ponens arguments such as the argument above from 1 and 2 to 3 are just like non-moral cases of modus ponens such as. Throughout, the semantic function of the sentences concerned is given in terms of the states of affairs asserted to obtain in simple assertoric contexts.

Philosophers wishing to develop an expressivistic alternative to moral realism have expended a great deal of energy and ingenuity in devising responses to this challenge. For an overview, see Schroeder and Miller a , Chs 4 and 5.

For very useful surveys of recent work on expressivism, see Schroeder and Sinclair Examples of challenges to the existence dimension of realism have been described in previous sections. In this section some forms of non-realism that are neither error-theoretic nor expressivist will be briefly introduced. The forms of non-realism view the sentences of the relevant area as against the expressivist truth-apt, and against the error-theorist at least sometimes true.

The existence dimension of realism is thus left intact. Classically, opposition to the independence dimension of realism about the everyday world of macroscopic objects took the form of idealism , the view that the objects of the everyday world of macroscopic objects are in some sense mental.

As Berkeley famously claimed, tables, chairs, cats, the moons of Jupiter and so on, are nothing but ideas in the minds of spirits:. One such philosopher, Michael Dummett, has suggested that in some cases it may be appropriate to reject the independence dimension of realism via the rejection of semantic realism about the area in question see Dummett and It is easiest to characterise semantic realism for a mathematical domain.

It is a feature of arithmetic that there are some arithmetical sentences for which the following holds true: we know of no method that will guarantee us a proof of the sentence, and we know of no method that will guarantee us a disproof or a counterexample either.

It is possible that we may come across a proof, or a counterexample, but the key point is that we do not know a method, or methods, the application of which is guaranteed to yield one or the other.

To say that the notion of truth involved is potentially recognition-transcendent is to say that G may be true or false even though there is no guarantee that we will be able, in principle, to recognise that that is so. To say that the notion of truth involved is bivalent is to accept the unrestricted applicability of the law of bivalence, that every meaningful sentence is determinately either true or false. Thus the semantic realist is prepared to assert that G is determinately either true or false, regardless of the fact that we have no guaranteed method of ascertaining which.

Note that the precise relationship between the characterisation in terms of bivalence and that in terms of potentially recognition-transcendent truth is a delicate matter that will not concern us here. See the Introduction to Wright for some excellent discussion. Dummett makes two main claims about semantic realism. First, there is what Devitt a has termed the metaphor thesis : This denies that we can even have a literal, austerely metaphysical characterisation of realism of the sort attempted above with Generic Realism.

Dummett writes, of the attempt to give an austere metaphysical characterisation of realism about mathematics platonic realism and what stands opposed to it intuitionism :. According to the constitution thesis , the literal content of realism consists in the content of semantic realism. Thus, the literal content of realism about the external world is constituted by the claim that our understanding of at least some sentences concerning the external world consists in our grasp of their potentially recognition-transcendent truth-conditions.

As Dummett puts it:. Few have been convinced by either the metaphor thesis or the constitution thesis. Consider Generic Realism in the case of the world of everyday macroscopic objects and properties:.

Tables, rocks, mountains, seas, and so on exist, and in general there is no guarantee that we will be able, even in principle, to recognise the fact that they exist and have properties such as mass, size, shape, colour, and so on. On the face of it, there is nothing metaphorical in GR2 or, at least if there is, some argument from Dummett to that effect is required.

This throws some doubt on the metaphor thesis. Moreover there is nothing distinctively semantic about GR2 , and this throws some doubt on the constitution thesis. Whereas for Dummett, the essential realist thesis is the meaning-theoretic claim that our understanding of a sentence like G consists in knowledge of its potentially recognition-transcendent truth-condition, for Devitt:.

He writes:. Would it follow that the arguments Dummett develops against semantic realism have no relevance to debates about the plausibility of realism about everyday macroscopic objects say , construed as a purely metaphysical thesis as in GR2?

For a full development of this line of argument, see Miller a and Here is the argument See Dummett and the summary in Miller , chapter 9 :. We then add the following premise, which stems from the Wittgensteinian insight that understanding does not consist in the possession of an inner state, but rather in the possession of some practical ability see Wittgenstein :.

The key claim here is 8. The semantic realist views our understanding of sentences like this as consisting in our knowledge of a potentially recognition-transcendent truth-condition. How can that account be viewed as a description of any practical ability of use? No doubt someone who understands such a statement can be expected to have many relevant practical abilities. He will be able to appraise evidence for or against it, should any be available, or to recognize that no information in his possession bears on it.

He will be able to recognize at least some of its logical consequences, and to identify beliefs from which commitment to it would follow. And he will, presumably, show himself sensitive to conditions under which it is appropriate to ascribe propositional attitudes embedding the statement to himself and to others, and sensitive to the explanatory significance of such ascriptions.

In short: in these and perhaps other important respects, he will show himself competent to use the sentence.

But the headings under which his practical abilities fall so far involve no mention of evidence-transcendent truth-conditions Wright For a full response to the manifestation argument, see Miller See also Byrne Wright develops a couple of additional arguments against semantic realism. For these—the argument from rule-following and the argument from normativity—see the Introduction to Wright For a robust defence of keeping issues in metaphysics sharply separate from issues about language, see Dyke Suppose that one wished to develop a non-realist alternative to, say, moral realism.

Suppose also that one is persuaded of the unattractiveness of both error-theoretic and expressivist forms of non-realism. That is to say, one accepts that moral sentences are truth-apt, and, at least in some cases, true. Then the only option available would be to deny the independence dimension of moral realism. But so far we have only seen one way of doing this: by admitting that the relevant sentences are truth-apt, sometimes true, and possessed of truth-conditions which are not potentially recognition-transcendent.

But this seems weak: it seems implausible to suggest that a moral realist must be committed to the potential recognition-transcendence of moral truth. It therefore seems implausible to suggest that a non-expressivistic and non-error-theoretic form of opposition to realism must be committed to simply denying the potential recognition-transcendence of moral truth, since many who style themselves moral realists will deny this too.

As Wright puts it:. Henceforth a non-error-theoretic, non-expressivist style of non-realist is referred to as an anti-realist. The idea that the explanatory efficacy of the states of affairs in some area has something to do with the plausibility of a realist view of that area is familiar from the debates in meta-ethics between philosophers such as Nicholas Sturgeon , who believe that irreducibly moral states of affairs do figure ineliminably in the best explanation of certain aspects of experience, and opponents such as Gilbert Harman , who believe that moral states of affairs have no such explanatory role.

One could then be a non-expressivist, non-error-theoretic, anti-realist about a particular subject matter by denying that the distinctive states of affairs of that subject matter do have a genuine role in best explanations of aspects of our experience. And the debate between this style of anti-realist and his realist opponent could proceed independently of any questions concerning the capacity of sentences in the relevant area to have potentially recognition-transcendent truth values.

The states of affairs in a given area have narrow cosmological role if it is a priori that they do not contribute to the explanation of things other than our beliefs about that subject-matter or other than via explaining our beliefs about that subject matter. This will be an anti-realist position. One style of realist about that subject matter will say that its states of affairs have wide cosmological role: they do contribute to the explanation of things other than our beliefs about the subject matter in question or other than via explaining our beliefs about that subject matter.

It is relatively easy to see why width of cosmological role could be a bone of contention between realist and anti-realist views of a given subject matter: it is precisely the width of cosmological role of a class of states of affairs—their capacity to explain things other than, or other than via, our beliefs, in which their independence from our beliefs, linguistic practices, and so on, consists.

Again, the debate between someone attributing a narrow cosmological role to a class of states of affairs and someone attributing a wide cosmological role could proceed independently of any questions concerning the capacity of sentences in the relevant area to have potentially recognition-transcendent truth values.