Episode 145: Andrew Sepielli discusses quietism and metaethics
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What is meta‑ethical quietism and why does it matter?
Yeah, no.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I'm Matt Tekman. I'm Joseph. And with us today is Andrew Seppieli. Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. His new book, Pragmatist Quietism, a meta ethical system, is out now from Oxford University Press. And he is here to discuss quietism and meta ethics. Andrew Sapelli, welcome.
Great. Thanks for having me.
So quietism is a word that comes up here and there in philosophy, but what does it mean in the context of ethics or meta ethics?
So a meta-ethical quietist is somebody who thinks that there are uh correct answers to moral questions, but there's not what you might call a foundation, there's not the possibility of of vindication from some uh area of inquiry outside of ethics. So for example, um the quietist would think you can neither uh vindicate nor undermine ethical claims uh using arguments from metaphysics. Uh you can't do it from arguments in uh semantics or the philosophy of language, uh that sort of thing, that ethics is sort of its own autonomous uh sphere.
So that seems pretty intuitive, right? If you just take a random ethical statement like it's wrong to be mean to your kids and you know, it's kind of counterintuitive that some stuff that linguists would do, analyzing the grammar of natural languages would affect whether that's true or false, right? So I'm it d does that fit with your sense of Your quietist position as kind of the common sense position about ethics, where, you know, these other things you could study aren't going to determine whether something's right or wrong.
I think that's right. So I think it's a in some ways a very naturally appealing position. When you're having an ethical argument, you're not going to be reaching for justification from the philosophy of language or from metaphysics. You're not going to be, you know, trying to show how your position is one that you're rationally compelled to accept because of, you know, uh because you're an agent or you participate in discourse or something like that. At the same time, it's when you start to think about it a little bit, it's kind of mysterious how quietism could be correct. Um, you know, the idea that the truth of claims within ethics is independent of what ethical terms mean, or that whether anything's right or wrong is independent of whether there are such things as rightness or wrongness in the world can start to seem a little bit mysterious.
Um and certainly when people get in a kind of skeptical frame of mind about ethics, you know, they find themselves asking these kinds of um questions about the, you know, metaphysics of moral properties and and so on. They seem to want some kind of justification. And so when the quietist says, well, no such justification is available, I think that you know that strikes people as as as as odd sometimes. So yeah, it's like it's a position that like as I put it in the book. You know, I think many people want to believe but don't quite see how they can believe, and so the book is aimed at showing um how they can accept this view.
So just to walk through an example of like how an argument from metaphysics might impact a view you take in ethics, you might think that nothing is the right thing to do because maybe I have an argument that the notion of right is like logically self-contradictory or something. And then if it's logically self-contradictory, then we get we don't get to use the word right, and therefore it doesn't really make sense to think of anything as actually being right. Is that the kind of argument that you're sort of resisting? Or not.
Yeah, or so the metaphysical argument that I'm thinking of that I've heard many times is look, if you uh try to take a survey or you know, if you try to catalog what there is in the world, you'll think, okay, maybe it includes tables and chairs and protons and so forth, but that it doesn't include values or it doesn't include rightness and wrongness, right? That those things are not, as some put it, part of the furniture of the universe.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is meta‑ethical quietism and why does it matter?
0:15–5:09
2
How does the quietist distinguish between deep and superficial moral statements?
5:09–9:57
3
Why can’t metaphysics or philosophy of language settle trolley‑type dilemmas?
9:57–14:36
4
What does the James‑squirrel thought experiment illustrate about deep vs. superficial debates?
14:36–19:38
5
How does quietism relate to expressivist and non‑cognitivist theories of ethics?
19:38–23:50
6
Why does the quietist claim we can have confidence in our ethical judgments without special expertise?
23:50–28:34
7
Who are the main opponents of quietism and how does the guest respond to nihilism and semantic objections?
28:34–34:55
8
What practical implications does quietism have for everyday moral decision‑making?
34:55–39:28
Speakers
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