Sharon Rawlette on antirealism

"[If antirealism were true] I don't know why I would care about ethics anymore, why I would care about being systematic about the way that I choose what things I'm going to do, or even care about having ethical debates with people. We're not talking about anything real. So you care about people in this difficult situation and I don't, and that's as far as we can go."

 

80,000 hours podcast #138, 14m.

 

"It's not that the goodness or badness of this state [of happiness or pain] supervenes on it, but that intrinsic goodness is a qualitative state, so it's something that you can observe and experience yourself. If we didn't ever experience pleasure or pain, we wouldn't have the concept of intrinsic goodness that we do in fact have and use when making moral decisions. When we experience pleasure or pain, what we experience is something that justifies the desire or justifies avoiding a certain thing. In the book I talk about the feeling of ought-to-be-ness. When you feel pleasure, you're like 'Oh, this is why life is worth living. This is what we're here for. This is worth having.' And when you're experiencing suffering, you're experience something that – if this were all there was to existence, it would better to be dead." (19-20m)

 

"How do we even have a concept of moral facts? We have it through these experiences. We can experience their value or their disvalue. How can we experience the truth or falsity of moral facts? We can directly experience intrinsic goodness or intrinsic badness, that's something directly present to our consciousness, and then from there we can use the information that we have about the world that we live in to determine which other things are instrumentally good and bad because of the way they produce this conscious experience." (21m)

 

"I think that that's generally true [that you cannot derive an ought from an is], that's true for every kind of fact about the world except in these particular experiences of pleasure and pain – I think we see that those two categories come together. You can't describe what it is for an experience to be pleasure without talking about its goodness. It wouldn't be pleasure if it wasn't good! And pain would not be pain if it wasn't bad." (22-23m)