🔍 Key insights
Metaethics’ Real Fight Is About Method: Realist vs. anti-realist is the shallow divide. The deeper one is over which tools we trust to answer philosophical questions: armchair intuition or empirical evidence.
Ordinary Moral Talk Doesn’t Take Sides: When people say “that’s wrong,” nothing about how they speak commits them to realism or anti-realism. The claim that realism is “common sense” has little evidence behind it, yet it gets used as a rhetorical weapon.
Philosophers Are The Weirdest Of The Weird: Trained on the same mostly Anglophone canon, analytic philosophers generalize their own intuitions to everyone else. A method built on analyzing English sentences can’t tell us how 7,000 languages handle morality.
📚 Go deeper
🎥 Related videos:
The Origins Of WEIRD People – Joseph Henrich (UBC Psychology Colloquium) – A talk from the University of British Columbia’s psychology colloquium series by Henrich, the researcher behind the WEIRD work discussed in the episode
Daniel Dennett Explores The Problems Of The Human Brain (Big Think) – A short clip where Dennett explains the “user illusion”: our brains give us a simplified picture of our own workings. It’s a good entry point to the illusionist view Lance discusses
📖 Further reading:
The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World – Morten Christiansen & Nick Chater: This is the book Lance recommends at the end of the episode. It treats language as improvised behavior rather than a fixed system of meanings, which is the foundation of his “use view.”
Quining Qualia – Daniel Dennett (1988): The paper behind Lance’s skepticism about qualia as a philosophical concept
💡 Think for Yourself
When you say “that’s wrong,” are you describing a fact, expressing an attitude, or issuing a command? Could you tell the difference from the inside?
Which of your deepest philosophical intuitions would you keep if you learned that almost nobody outside your own culture shares it?
☁️ Thought Experiment
Imagine two worlds that are identical in every observable way. In one, objective moral facts exist; in the other, they don’t. No one in either world could ever tell the difference. Is the difference real, or is it just a label stuck on the same world, like the squirrels versus “schmirls” example from Lance’s example in the interview? And if it’s only a label, what exactly were we arguing about?
Cheers,
Kevin