Note: This is a beat-for-beat parody of this post, by Bentham's Bulldog. Read the Author's note at the bottom for more discussion and an explanation of why I wrote this
New readers of this blog don't know that in the good old days—back when I was a mere stripling of eighteen, and even nineteen—most of my articles were about food. I wrote a 44-part article series arguing for butter maximalism (no need to read it, I think much of it isn't very good) and one of my earlier decentish posts was a lengthy defense of tastiness realism. Still, that post was much too long, slightly overwrought, and written by my freshman self, who had not yet had good ramen. It's past time I clarified why I'm a tastiness realist.
Objectively delicious cakes. Painting by Wayne Thiebaud.
Let's first define tastiness realism. It's the idea that there are some stance-independent facts about deliciousness. Something is stance-independent if it doesn't depend on what anyone thinks or feels about it. So, for instance, that I have arms is stance-independently true—it doesn't depend on what anyone thinks about it. That murder is wrong is stance-dependently true; it might seem wrong to me but not to you, and a person who disagrees isn't making an error. But that a ripe peach in August is delicious? That's just true. A person who denies it isn't expressing an alternative but equally valid perspective. They are mistaken, the way a person who thinks 7 × 8 = 54 is mistaken.
So, in short, tastiness realism is the idea that some things are delicious and some things are gross, and that these facts don't depend on what anyone thinks about them. Suppose you take a beautiful cut of A5 wagyu and boil it—thoroughly, until gray—in unsalted water. Tastiness realism says:
You have done something gross.
That fact doesn't depend on anyone's beliefs about it. You approving of it, or the diner approving of it, or society approving of it, doesn't determine its grossness. (Of course, it might be that what makes it gross is its effect on the ideal palate, but that's different from someone's higher-level beliefs about the dish. It's an objective fact that a particular pitmaster won a barbecue competition, even though that depended on what the judges thought.)
Tastiness realism says that some tastiness statements are true and that this doesn't depend on what people think. Now, there are only three possible ways any particular tastiness statement can fail to be stance-independently true:
It's neither true nor false.
It's false.
It's true but stance-dependently—so it depends on what someone thinks about it.
But lots of tastiness statements just really don't seem like any of these. The deliciousness of fresh sourdough, of a mango at peak ripeness, of garlic hitting hot oil; the grossness of old gas-station sushi, of rotten salmon, of the raisin that was pretending to be a chocolate chip—it seems like all these things really are as they seem, and that this doesn't depend on what people think. It seems very weird to hold that what makes rotten salmon bad is someone's opinion about it—even weirder to hold that a sentence like "garbage is delicious" is neither true nor false.
The view that these statements are neither true nor false has unique linguistic problems. Proponents claim tastiness sentences are like cheers or commands—they’re not even in the business of expressing propositions. If I say “shut the door,” or “go Dodgers,” that isn’t either true nor false. But because of that, it makes no sense to ask “go Dodgers?” or “is it true that shut the door?” Similarly, it makes no sense to say “if shut the door then shut the door now, shut the door, therefore, shut the door now.” But it does make sense to say things like “is rotten meat tasty?” or “if rotten meat isn't tasty, then very rotten meat isn't tasty." This shows that tastiness statements are, at least in many cases, in the business of expressing propositions—asserting things supposed to be true or false.
Now, there are all sorts of tricky ways people modify the view that tastiness sentences are neither true nor false to get around these counterexamples. I can't discuss them in detail; I can only say that they tend to be very gerrymandered and ad hoc, and while they may end up mouthing the same sentences tastiness realists say, they don't mean them. They’re analogous to religious liberals who say things like “God exists, but by that I mean that there’s love in the world.” Worse, they still imply that "rotten meat tastes bad" is neither true nor false. But it seems true!
Denying objective tastiness is counterintuitive in a second, very different way. If there are stance-independent culinary reasons—reasons to find tasty things that don't depend on what you happen to already feel are tasty—then tastiness realism is almost certainly true. Once the anti-realist admits there's a reason to salt the pasta water that doesn't bottom out in anyone's whims, it seems that reason should give rise to tastiness reasons. If I have a reason to prefer the ripe peach to the mealy one, it seems the ripe peach is better, which gives a reason to prefer it.
But this means tastiness anti-realists must think you can never make a culinary error, so long as you're eating what you actually want (what you find tasty). This is crazy, as shown by the following cases:
A person wants to eat a car. Other than the fact that they like how automobile's taste, they know they'd get no enjoyment from it—the whole experience would be quite painful and unpleasant, and also, it is a car. On tastiness anti-realism, they are not making a culinary error. There is no gastronomic reason for them to order something else.
A person prefers to eat cereal with water. There is milk in the fridge. They KNOW this. On anti-realism, this is not a failing.
A person orders a $90 filet well-done and asks for ketchup. The chef weeps. On anti-realism, the chef's tears track nothing; there is no fact of the matter about which he could be right.
A four-year-old insists their sandwich tastes better cut into triangles. On anti-realism, so long as they're informed of the relevant facts, they're not being irrational.
A person sets a gas-station tuna sandwich beside a bowl of handmade tortellini in brodo and announces, "These are equally good. Just different." On anti-realism, this is a permissible thing to say at dinner.
This is all completely nuts! (Which are, objectively, delicious.) We take it as a totally ordinary assumption in normal life that some foods just aren't worth eating—that one is wrong to enjoy eating garbage, that the person who likes ranch on omakase has made some kind of mistake. Anti-realism can't preserve that obvious intuition. We have an entire genre of television in which a British man screams at people about their bad cooking, and we recognize that he is, in some deep sense, correct!
Chestnuts on a Ledge, by Adriaen Coorte.
Okay, so far I've argued that tastiness anti-realism implies things that are really counterintuitive. It implies things that seem false when you chew on them. But is that a problem? Anti-realists often admit their position is counterintuitive but deny that this is a defect. The facts, they like to say, don't care about your feelings—not even your mouthfeelings.
But I think this gets wrong how we come to know things. Consider the belief that, say, the law of non-contradiction is true. How do we know that? Or the belief that if space isn’t curved the shortest distance between two points is a line. Or even the belief that there’s an external world.
The way we know these things is by relying on appearances. We think about the subject and it appears that, say, a thing can’t both be a way and not be that way at the same time in the same sense. Our foundational beliefs are justified on the basis of them seeming right.
Visual experience is a good analogy here. When I see a table, I think there really is a table. Because it appears that there’s a table, I think I’m justified in believing there to be one unless given a strong reason to doubt it. Could I be hallucinating? Sure! But unless given a reason to think that I am, I shouldn’t think so.
But just as there are visual appearances, there are gustatory appearances. Just as it appears to me that there's a table in front of me, it appears to me that fresh bread with good butter is delicious. Just as I should believe in the table absent a defeater, I should believe in the bread. In fact, I should be more confident about the taste of bread, because that verdict seems less likely to be the result of error. It seems more likely that I'm hallucinating the table than that I'm wrong about buttery bread.
People often object to relying on intuitions. But I’m curious how they get their foundational beliefs. One’s most basic beliefs always seem justified by the fact that they seem right. Such people should explain how they know that the physical world exists, the laws of non-contradiction and identity are true, the greater is greater than the lesser, something can’t have a color without a shape, and that the cumulative case for either atheism or theism is better than the other without relying at all on how things seem.
Now, people point out that our intuitions conflict and are historically contingent. But intuitionists don’t say that intuitions are infallible or that we should never revise them in light of evidence. We say that intuitions are the starting point on which you build your beliefs, but that upon learning new things, you should still obviously update your beliefs. Showing intuitions go wrong in various cases tells us nothing about their general reliability. It would be like saying you can’t trust that there’s a table in front of you because people sometimes hallucinate.
Furthermore, it’s hard to see how, absent relying on intuition, people know that our intuitions really are ever wrong. For instance, a common class of intuition that we know is wrong is that we have weird views about probability—we often think that the odds of A and B are higher than the odds of A alone. But absent relying on intuition, how do you know that the odds of A and B aren’t higher than the odds of A alone? The critics of intuitions rely on intuitions to discredit them.
Tastiness realists aren't special pleading. We believe in facts about deliciousness for the same reason we believe in any other basic kind of fact.
Now, anti-realists have a bunch of arguments, and I can't address them all. But let me just address three of them.
The first common one is the argument from disagreement. People argue that because we disagree about food, it can't be objective. But this misunderstands what it means for something to be objective. Something objective is true, and its truth doesn't depend on what you think about it. It won't necessarily be known by everyone.
There’s an objective fact about the right theory of physics, whether God exists, and even whether tastiness is objective. But those things generate plenty of disagreement. So disagreement can’t be enough to necessitate subjectivity. Now, there are more complicated ways of making the argument, but I don’t really think any of them stick. Lots of other domains have similar disagreement to tastiness realism while being squarely objective.
The second common argument is the argument from queerness. This argument says that tastiness facts are super weird. They’re utterly different from anything else. For this reason, you shouldn’t believe in them as they’re just too foreign and alien.
But the world has lots of weird things. Fields, epistemic facts, planets, energy, mathematical facts, propositions, particles, God, consciousness, and much more. Sure, tastiness is different—it's about what is tasty to eat—but all of those things are different from each other too. The world is full of weird stuff, so I don't see why deliciousness's weirdness would be disqualifying.
Furthermore, it's unclear why tastiness realism is even supposed to be weird. It doesn't seem weird to me that some things are delicious. I've never heard a good explanation of what's so strange about it. It just seems to be a brute intuition—one that I don’t share.
The only decent explanation I’ve heard of what’s supposed to be weird about tastiness facts is that they are non-natural. Deliciousness facts aren't made of atoms—they’re not part of the physical world. But, such objectors claim, all the things that exist are parts of the physical world. Therefore, tastiness facts would be a new, radically different sort of thing.
But I reject that all the stuff that exists is physical. I think there’s lots of non-physical stuff—modal facts, God, consciousness, souls, mathematical facts, logical facts, epistemic facts, and so on. Some of those are controversial, but others are pretty plausible.
Take modal facts, for instance. Those are facts about what’s possible and necessary. So, for example, the fact that a married bachelor is impossible is a modal fact. That’s not a physical fact—it’s not about the physical world. It would have been true even if there never had been a physical universe, and it was true before the universe. It’s not merely the claim that there are no married bachelors but that there can’t be any—that them existing is impossible. But that fact isn’t about the physical world.
Or take logical facts. Any argument with true premises of the form “if P then Q, P,” will have a true conclusion. That’s not a fact about the physical world. It didn’t start being true at the big bang. It’s a necessary truth, with similar status to the tastiness facts.
Finally, consider epistemic facts. These are facts about what it’s reasonable to believe—what you should believe. For example “it’s irrational to believe what’s opposed by the evidence,” or “it’s irrational to believe there are square circles just because you find them cool.” That is, once again, not a fact about the physical world. But it’s a true fact. Like tastiness facts, epistemic facts are about what you should do—in this case, what you should believe, what reason demands you believe. Those who reject tastiness realism would seem to also have to reject epistemic realism and thus think that a person who claims that they think tastiness realism is true because they like the idea isn’t being irrational.
The last major objection is the evolutionary debunking argument. This argument says that evolution shaped our taste beliefs. We love sugar and fat because calories were scarce on the savannah. But crucially, believing sugar is delicious would be just as advantageous whether or not it really were delicious. So if our taste beliefs were produced by blind evolutionary pressures, it would be a miracle if they turned out to be true.
But I think even in cases like this, where someone tells a just-so story about how you might come to mistakenly believe what you do about some subject, you still have to evaluate their plausibility. You could tell a similar debunking story about our belief in the law of non-contradiction. But I think in such cases, we just have to consider the plausibility of the belief and see that, even though they can tell a consistent story of how you come to mistakenly intuit some fact, their account is less plausible.
Like, suppose that I give the theory that everything in the world was created by a brain worm. You point out that that’s crazy—a brain worm being fundamental is very complicated, it can’t make the world. I say that the brain worm is fundamental and misleads you into thinking it’s complicated plus that complexity is a virtue plus that brain worms can’t create the world. I point out that people often are misled by brain worms. It’s true that I can tell an internally consistent story of how you come to be mistaken across the board, but the story is just not at all plausible. Same with the story on which all of our beliefs about tastiness are wrong—random side effects of blind evolution.
Or suppose that I try to debunk the existence of love. I note that it would be evolutionarily beneficial to think you’re in love because that aids in reproduction. Adding love to your ontology is an extra posit. While I could tell an internally consistent debunking story, one would need to evaluate its plausibility. And such a story wouldn’t be plausible—it would be very unintuitive, just like the debunking story of the anti-realist.
Now, is it true that our evolutionary beliefs are the byproducts of blind chance so that it would be a huge coincidence if they were true? No, I don’t think so. Here's my account of how we have true tastiness beliefs: evolution makes us super smart, and then we figure out the tastiness truths. This is the same way we come to have true beliefs about modal facts, logical facts, mathematical facts, and so on. There's no special challenge for flavor (now, I think us having such rational capacities is surprising on atheism, but to account for how we know tons of other things, we should already grant that we have those rational capacities even if we’re atheists).
So if you think you know stuff about math—like that there are infinite prime numbers—then however you explain that will apply also to the tastiness domain.
Why should we accept this account? Well, mostly for the reason I explain above—that it’s the only way to make sense of our tastiness knowledge, which we have, as shown by the arguments given above. But furthermore, it’s a better explanation of our tastiness beliefs.
We believe lots of things about tastiness with no clear evolutionary payoff. We believe that a cake on the other side of the world is as intrinsically tasty as one closer to us (some people don’t but many do), that the tastier than relation is transitive (if A is tastier than B and B is tastier than C then A is tastier than C), that spatiotemporal location doesn’t affect an item's tastiness, that if A is not tasty and B is not tasy then eating both A then eating B is not tasty, and so on.
Many of these don’t plausibly enhance survival, and are niche and formal. This makes sense if we’re really figuring out the tastiness facts. In contrast, on anti-realism, you’d expect most of our tastiness beliefs to be geared towards survival—believing eating 15 tons of cake is tasty. It would be surprising that many of the strongest intuitions—like the belief in transitivity—are things that are formal, non-emotional, and don’t plausibly directly enhance our survival.
Of course, I’d grant that many of our tastiness intuitions are affected by evolution. Evolution gives us many false tastiness inclinations, but those can be overcome by sufficient reflection. Because of variation in the OR6A2 gene, some people may (initially) find the taste of cilantro repulsive. However this is incorrect, and cilantro is objectively tasty (which is clear when you reflect, and rationally discover the tastiness framework of Cilantrotarianism, which is objectively true). This is not dissimilar to how someone might be born with psychopathic traits or selfishness (which might be partially selected for during evolution), but a moral realist would claim that acting on those traits is still objectively wrong (a false inclination). An analogy with mathematics is appropriate—we have some unreliable mathematical intuitions because of evolution, but we can still form many true mathematical beliefs by reflecting.
Finally—and I know this won’t move atheists, but just explaining my views—I reject the evolutionary debunking argument because I believe in God. If God exists and wants us to know the truth about tastiness, it makes sense that we’d have true tastiness beliefs and set up the world such that the evolutionary process produces us with true tastiness beliefs.
Tastiness anti-realism is certainly an internally consistent position. But it's a very implausible one. It gives up many of the most obvious truths about the world—the stance-independent deliciousness of fresh bread, the objective badness of raw meat—on the basis of super lame arguments. Absent some extremely compelling reason to accept it, we should remain convinced that it's false.
Some things really are objectively delicious.
Author's note:
Epistemic status: the parody above is a parallel-argument exercise quickly written during lunch, not a proof of any particular position (and I don't actually believe in objective tastiness)! This post should be considered in comparison to the original post. I consider myself an anti-realist, but I am not confident in this position.
I think this post localizes a real problem for one popular style of argument for moral realism, found in the original post. While I consider myself an anti-realist, the point of this post is not (only) to litigate metaethics, I'm also trying to highlight the logical fallacy of Proving Too Much. I think much of the original post "proves too much", in that it extends just as well towards arguing something that most people believe to be false, including the author (at least this much is implied by the article, although maybe he holds different beliefs now).
While I disagree with the original post, I think I am otherwise mostly aligned with the author's preferences and enjoy much of his work (including, but not limited to, his posts on animal welfare). I encourage other readers to look at his work directly!
Otherwise, I think having good metaethics is important for a variety of topics I care deeply about, such as AI alignment and social planning. It (at a glance) seems like many people on this forum share my inclination against moral realism, although I don't believe this is widespread and I think this topic is still important to discuss.
I selected taste since the original post itself stipulates that taste is stance-dependent, and I agree.
"A person wants to eat a car."
Note: This is a beat-for-beat parody of this post, by Bentham's Bulldog. Read the Author's note at the bottom for more discussion and an explanation of why I wrote this
New readers of this blog don't know that in the good old days—back when I was a mere stripling of eighteen, and even nineteen—most of my articles were about food. I wrote a 44-part article series arguing for butter maximalism (no need to read it, I think much of it isn't very good) and one of my earlier decentish posts was a lengthy defense of tastiness realism. Still, that post was much too long, slightly overwrought, and written by my freshman self, who had not yet had good ramen. It's past time I clarified why I'm a tastiness realist.
Objectively delicious cakes. Painting by Wayne Thiebaud.
Let's first define tastiness realism. It's the idea that there are some stance-independent facts about deliciousness. Something is stance-independent if it doesn't depend on what anyone thinks or feels about it. So, for instance, that I have arms is stance-independently true—it doesn't depend on what anyone thinks about it. That murder is wrong is stance-dependently true; it might seem wrong to me but not to you, and a person who disagrees isn't making an error. But that a ripe peach in August is delicious? That's just true. A person who denies it isn't expressing an alternative but equally valid perspective. They are mistaken, the way a person who thinks 7 × 8 = 54 is mistaken.
So, in short, tastiness realism is the idea that some things are delicious and some things are gross, and that these facts don't depend on what anyone thinks about them. Suppose you take a beautiful cut of A5 wagyu and boil it—thoroughly, until gray—in unsalted water. Tastiness realism says:
Tastiness realism says that some tastiness statements are true and that this doesn't depend on what people think. Now, there are only three possible ways any particular tastiness statement can fail to be stance-independently true:
But lots of tastiness statements just really don't seem like any of these. The deliciousness of fresh sourdough, of a mango at peak ripeness, of garlic hitting hot oil; the grossness of old gas-station sushi, of rotten salmon, of the raisin that was pretending to be a chocolate chip—it seems like all these things really are as they seem, and that this doesn't depend on what people think. It seems very weird to hold that what makes rotten salmon bad is someone's opinion about it—even weirder to hold that a sentence like "garbage is delicious" is neither true nor false.
The view that these statements are neither true nor false has unique linguistic problems. Proponents claim tastiness sentences are like cheers or commands—they’re not even in the business of expressing propositions. If I say “shut the door,” or “go Dodgers,” that isn’t either true nor false. But because of that, it makes no sense to ask “go Dodgers?” or “is it true that shut the door?” Similarly, it makes no sense to say “if shut the door then shut the door now, shut the door, therefore, shut the door now.” But it does make sense to say things like “is rotten meat tasty?” or “if rotten meat isn't tasty, then very rotten meat isn't tasty." This shows that tastiness statements are, at least in many cases, in the business of expressing propositions—asserting things supposed to be true or false.
Now, there are all sorts of tricky ways people modify the view that tastiness sentences are neither true nor false to get around these counterexamples. I can't discuss them in detail; I can only say that they tend to be very gerrymandered and ad hoc, and while they may end up mouthing the same sentences tastiness realists say, they don't mean them. They’re analogous to religious liberals who say things like “God exists, but by that I mean that there’s love in the world.” Worse, they still imply that "rotten meat tastes bad" is neither true nor false. But it seems true!
Denying objective tastiness is counterintuitive in a second, very different way. If there are stance-independent culinary reasons—reasons to find tasty things that don't depend on what you happen to already feel are tasty—then tastiness realism is almost certainly true. Once the anti-realist admits there's a reason to salt the pasta water that doesn't bottom out in anyone's whims, it seems that reason should give rise to tastiness reasons. If I have a reason to prefer the ripe peach to the mealy one, it seems the ripe peach is better, which gives a reason to prefer it.
But this means tastiness anti-realists must think you can never make a culinary error, so long as you're eating what you actually want (what you find tasty). This is crazy, as shown by the following cases:
This is all completely nuts! (Which are, objectively, delicious.) We take it as a totally ordinary assumption in normal life that some foods just aren't worth eating—that one is wrong to enjoy eating garbage, that the person who likes ranch on omakase has made some kind of mistake. Anti-realism can't preserve that obvious intuition. We have an entire genre of television in which a British man screams at people about their bad cooking, and we recognize that he is, in some deep sense, correct!
Chestnuts on a Ledge, by Adriaen Coorte.
Okay, so far I've argued that tastiness anti-realism implies things that are really counterintuitive. It implies things that seem false when you chew on them. But is that a problem? Anti-realists often admit their position is counterintuitive but deny that this is a defect. The facts, they like to say, don't care about your feelings—not even your mouthfeelings.
But I think this gets wrong how we come to know things. Consider the belief that, say, the law of non-contradiction is true. How do we know that? Or the belief that if space isn’t curved the shortest distance between two points is a line. Or even the belief that there’s an external world.
The way we know these things is by relying on appearances. We think about the subject and it appears that, say, a thing can’t both be a way and not be that way at the same time in the same sense. Our foundational beliefs are justified on the basis of them seeming right.
Visual experience is a good analogy here. When I see a table, I think there really is a table. Because it appears that there’s a table, I think I’m justified in believing there to be one unless given a strong reason to doubt it. Could I be hallucinating? Sure! But unless given a reason to think that I am, I shouldn’t think so.
But just as there are visual appearances, there are gustatory appearances. Just as it appears to me that there's a table in front of me, it appears to me that fresh bread with good butter is delicious. Just as I should believe in the table absent a defeater, I should believe in the bread. In fact, I should be more confident about the taste of bread, because that verdict seems less likely to be the result of error. It seems more likely that I'm hallucinating the table than that I'm wrong about buttery bread.
People often object to relying on intuitions. But I’m curious how they get their foundational beliefs. One’s most basic beliefs always seem justified by the fact that they seem right. Such people should explain how they know that the physical world exists, the laws of non-contradiction and identity are true, the greater is greater than the lesser, something can’t have a color without a shape, and that the cumulative case for either atheism or theism is better than the other without relying at all on how things seem.
Now, people point out that our intuitions conflict and are historically contingent. But intuitionists don’t say that intuitions are infallible or that we should never revise them in light of evidence. We say that intuitions are the starting point on which you build your beliefs, but that upon learning new things, you should still obviously update your beliefs. Showing intuitions go wrong in various cases tells us nothing about their general reliability. It would be like saying you can’t trust that there’s a table in front of you because people sometimes hallucinate.
Furthermore, it’s hard to see how, absent relying on intuition, people know that our intuitions really are ever wrong. For instance, a common class of intuition that we know is wrong is that we have weird views about probability—we often think that the odds of A and B are higher than the odds of A alone. But absent relying on intuition, how do you know that the odds of A and B aren’t higher than the odds of A alone? The critics of intuitions rely on intuitions to discredit them.
Tastiness realists aren't special pleading. We believe in facts about deliciousness for the same reason we believe in any other basic kind of fact.
Now, anti-realists have a bunch of arguments, and I can't address them all. But let me just address three of them.
The first common one is the argument from disagreement. People argue that because we disagree about food, it can't be objective. But this misunderstands what it means for something to be objective. Something objective is true, and its truth doesn't depend on what you think about it. It won't necessarily be known by everyone.
There’s an objective fact about the right theory of physics, whether God exists, and even whether tastiness is objective. But those things generate plenty of disagreement. So disagreement can’t be enough to necessitate subjectivity. Now, there are more complicated ways of making the argument, but I don’t really think any of them stick. Lots of other domains have similar disagreement to tastiness realism while being squarely objective.
The second common argument is the argument from queerness. This argument says that tastiness facts are super weird. They’re utterly different from anything else. For this reason, you shouldn’t believe in them as they’re just too foreign and alien.
But the world has lots of weird things. Fields, epistemic facts, planets, energy, mathematical facts, propositions, particles, God, consciousness, and much more. Sure, tastiness is different—it's about what is tasty to eat—but all of those things are different from each other too. The world is full of weird stuff, so I don't see why deliciousness's weirdness would be disqualifying.
Furthermore, it's unclear why tastiness realism is even supposed to be weird. It doesn't seem weird to me that some things are delicious. I've never heard a good explanation of what's so strange about it. It just seems to be a brute intuition—one that I don’t share.
The only decent explanation I’ve heard of what’s supposed to be weird about tastiness facts is that they are non-natural. Deliciousness facts aren't made of atoms—they’re not part of the physical world. But, such objectors claim, all the things that exist are parts of the physical world. Therefore, tastiness facts would be a new, radically different sort of thing.
But I reject that all the stuff that exists is physical. I think there’s lots of non-physical stuff—modal facts, God, consciousness, souls, mathematical facts, logical facts, epistemic facts, and so on. Some of those are controversial, but others are pretty plausible.
Take modal facts, for instance. Those are facts about what’s possible and necessary. So, for example, the fact that a married bachelor is impossible is a modal fact. That’s not a physical fact—it’s not about the physical world. It would have been true even if there never had been a physical universe, and it was true before the universe. It’s not merely the claim that there are no married bachelors but that there can’t be any—that them existing is impossible. But that fact isn’t about the physical world.
Or take logical facts. Any argument with true premises of the form “if P then Q, P,” will have a true conclusion. That’s not a fact about the physical world. It didn’t start being true at the big bang. It’s a necessary truth, with similar status to the tastiness facts.
Finally, consider epistemic facts. These are facts about what it’s reasonable to believe—what you should believe. For example “it’s irrational to believe what’s opposed by the evidence,” or “it’s irrational to believe there are square circles just because you find them cool.” That is, once again, not a fact about the physical world. But it’s a true fact. Like tastiness facts, epistemic facts are about what you should do—in this case, what you should believe, what reason demands you believe. Those who reject tastiness realism would seem to also have to reject epistemic realism and thus think that a person who claims that they think tastiness realism is true because they like the idea isn’t being irrational.
The last major objection is the evolutionary debunking argument. This argument says that evolution shaped our taste beliefs. We love sugar and fat because calories were scarce on the savannah. But crucially, believing sugar is delicious would be just as advantageous whether or not it really were delicious. So if our taste beliefs were produced by blind evolutionary pressures, it would be a miracle if they turned out to be true.
But I think even in cases like this, where someone tells a just-so story about how you might come to mistakenly believe what you do about some subject, you still have to evaluate their plausibility. You could tell a similar debunking story about our belief in the law of non-contradiction. But I think in such cases, we just have to consider the plausibility of the belief and see that, even though they can tell a consistent story of how you come to mistakenly intuit some fact, their account is less plausible.
Like, suppose that I give the theory that everything in the world was created by a brain worm. You point out that that’s crazy—a brain worm being fundamental is very complicated, it can’t make the world. I say that the brain worm is fundamental and misleads you into thinking it’s complicated plus that complexity is a virtue plus that brain worms can’t create the world. I point out that people often are misled by brain worms. It’s true that I can tell an internally consistent story of how you come to be mistaken across the board, but the story is just not at all plausible. Same with the story on which all of our beliefs about tastiness are wrong—random side effects of blind evolution.
Or suppose that I try to debunk the existence of love. I note that it would be evolutionarily beneficial to think you’re in love because that aids in reproduction. Adding love to your ontology is an extra posit. While I could tell an internally consistent debunking story, one would need to evaluate its plausibility. And such a story wouldn’t be plausible—it would be very unintuitive, just like the debunking story of the anti-realist.
Now, is it true that our evolutionary beliefs are the byproducts of blind chance so that it would be a huge coincidence if they were true? No, I don’t think so. Here's my account of how we have true tastiness beliefs: evolution makes us super smart, and then we figure out the tastiness truths. This is the same way we come to have true beliefs about modal facts, logical facts, mathematical facts, and so on. There's no special challenge for flavor (now, I think us having such rational capacities is surprising on atheism, but to account for how we know tons of other things, we should already grant that we have those rational capacities even if we’re atheists).
So if you think you know stuff about math—like that there are infinite prime numbers—then however you explain that will apply also to the tastiness domain.
Why should we accept this account? Well, mostly for the reason I explain above—that it’s the only way to make sense of our tastiness knowledge, which we have, as shown by the arguments given above. But furthermore, it’s a better explanation of our tastiness beliefs.
We believe lots of things about tastiness with no clear evolutionary payoff. We believe that a cake on the other side of the world is as intrinsically tasty as one closer to us (some people don’t but many do), that the tastier than relation is transitive (if A is tastier than B and B is tastier than C then A is tastier than C), that spatiotemporal location doesn’t affect an item's tastiness, that if A is not tasty and B is not tasy then eating both A then eating B is not tasty, and so on.
Many of these don’t plausibly enhance survival, and are niche and formal. This makes sense if we’re really figuring out the tastiness facts. In contrast, on anti-realism, you’d expect most of our tastiness beliefs to be geared towards survival—believing eating 15 tons of cake is tasty. It would be surprising that many of the strongest intuitions—like the belief in transitivity—are things that are formal, non-emotional, and don’t plausibly directly enhance our survival.
Of course, I’d grant that many of our tastiness intuitions are affected by evolution. Evolution gives us many false tastiness inclinations, but those can be overcome by sufficient reflection. Because of variation in the OR6A2 gene, some people may (initially) find the taste of cilantro repulsive. However this is incorrect, and cilantro is objectively tasty (which is clear when you reflect, and rationally discover the tastiness framework of Cilantrotarianism, which is objectively true). This is not dissimilar to how someone might be born with psychopathic traits or selfishness (which might be partially selected for during evolution), but a moral realist would claim that acting on those traits is still objectively wrong (a false inclination). An analogy with mathematics is appropriate—we have some unreliable mathematical intuitions because of evolution, but we can still form many true mathematical beliefs by reflecting.
Finally—and I know this won’t move atheists, but just explaining my views—I reject the evolutionary debunking argument because I believe in God. If God exists and wants us to know the truth about tastiness, it makes sense that we’d have true tastiness beliefs and set up the world such that the evolutionary process produces us with true tastiness beliefs.
Tastiness anti-realism is certainly an internally consistent position. But it's a very implausible one. It gives up many of the most obvious truths about the world—the stance-independent deliciousness of fresh bread, the objective badness of raw meat—on the basis of super lame arguments. Absent some extremely compelling reason to accept it, we should remain convinced that it's false.
Some things really are objectively delicious.
Author's note:
Epistemic status: the parody above is a parallel-argument exercise quickly written during lunch, not a proof of any particular position (and I don't actually believe in objective tastiness)! This post should be considered in comparison to the original post. I consider myself an anti-realist, but I am not confident in this position.
I think this post localizes a real problem for one popular style of argument for moral realism, found in the original post. While I consider myself an anti-realist, the point of this post is not (only) to litigate metaethics, I'm also trying to highlight the logical fallacy of Proving Too Much. I think much of the original post "proves too much", in that it extends just as well towards arguing something that most people believe to be false, including the author (at least this much is implied by the article, although maybe he holds different beliefs now).
While I disagree with the original post, I think I am otherwise mostly aligned with the author's preferences and enjoy much of his work (including, but not limited to, his posts on animal welfare). I encourage other readers to look at his work directly!
Otherwise, I think having good metaethics is important for a variety of topics I care deeply about, such as AI alignment and social planning. It (at a glance) seems like many people on this forum share my inclination against moral realism, although I don't believe this is widespread and I think this topic is still important to discuss.
I selected taste since the original post itself stipulates that taste is stance-dependent, and I agree.