=========================================

The phrase, like most phrases that have come this far, has a biography. It belongs to the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who used it as a campus-tour slogan in the mid-2010s and who has published a book under the title and a great many videos titled some variation of Ben Shapiro DESTROYS X with FACTS and LOGIC. It has a Twitter career, a meme career, and now a college-Republicans-T-shirt career. By the time it reached me, in conversations I would rather not detail with members of my extended family in Doha, it had acquired the status of a piece of folk wisdom, a thing one says to terminate a discussion (a thought-terminating-cliche!) in which the other party has begun to express something the speaker takes to be ‘merely’ emotional, which is to say in which the other party has begun to make a normative claim the speaker would prefer not to engage with.

I want to write about the slogan because I think it I think it is a bad one. Let me begin with what the slogan, charitably interpreted, is trying to say. The user of the phrase typically means something to the effect of the following: the world is the way it is, regardless of how anyone feels about it; if you are in the business of forming accurate beliefs about the world, you should be guided by evidence rather than by your emotional preferences; people who allow their feelings to determine their beliefs are doing something epistemically irresponsible, and I am not going to pretend otherwise just because pointing it out makes them uncomfortable. This is, on its face, a defensible position. It is roughly the position any working scientist holds about their own field, and it is roughly the position I hold about most empirical questions I encounter in my own life. If you ask me how many people live in Qatar and I say I would prefer it to be three million, I have not given you a useful or informative answer; the population is what it is, my preference does not enter into it, and the slogan is, in that limited sense, correctly describing the structure of the situation.

The problem starts when the slogan is deployed not against a person who is making a confused empirical claim but against a person who is making a normative claim that the speaker has chosen to misdescribe as an empirical one. This, in my experience, is what the slogan is almost always doing in the wild. The trans woman who says she would like to be referred to with female pronouns is not, on inspection, making a claim about gametes or chromosomes that could be refuted by pointing at a karyotype. She is making a normative request about how she would like to be addressed. The person who says certain neighbourhoods should not be policed in the way they are currently being policed is not making a claim about crime rates that can be refuted by linking to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report. They are making a normative claim about how the relevant communities should be related to by the institutions that govern them. The person who says that historical statues of slavers should be removed from the squares of British cities is not making a claim about the historical existence of those slavers that can be refuted by pointing out that the slavers did in fact exist. They are making a normative claim about which historical figures the current culture should be inviting itself to admire.

In each of these cases, the slogan is being used to convert a normative dispute into an apparent empirical one, by means of a small grammatical sleight of hand in which the speaker reframes their interlocutor’s preferred policy as a confused factual belief and then triumphantly refutes the factual belief that nobody had actually held. Trans women are not biologically female is a true statement that no informed person disputes; it is doing rhetorical work in the conversation merely because it has been pretended to be the answer to a question the trans woman was not, in fact, asking. Crime rates are higher in some neighbourhoods than in others is a true statement that no informed person disputes; it is doing rhetorical work in the conversation merely because it has been pretended to be the answer to a question about policing practices that the crime rates do not settle. The factual claims are real. The slogan’s sleight of hand is to make it look as though the factual claims have done normative work that they have not done and could not do.

This is the first thing I want to people to appreciate because it is so common. The world does not, on its own, tell us what to do with itself. It tells emits causal pressures on us; we then have to decide, separately, what to do given the causal pressure, and the decision is normative all the way down. The slogan elides this distinction insofar as pretending that the normative work is imbued into the factoids, that the speaker is merely reporting the verdict, and that the interlocutor’s continued resistance is a refusal to face up to what Reality has decreed. But ‘Reality’ has not decreed anything. Reality has, at the point in which we develop linguistic practices, and in the relevant cases, has already done its causal work.

Let me put this more philosophically. The fact-value distinction has had a long career in twentieth-century philosophy and the standard formulations on it are familiar. Hume’s guillotine, i.e., no ought from an is. Moore’s open question, i.e., any descriptive characterisation of a thing leaves open the further normative question of what to do about it. Wittgenstein’s the world is everything that is the case, the famous opening of the Tractatus, leaves entirely untouched the question of what we should do given what is the case. The slogan facts don’t care about your feelings is assumes that the inferential move from descriptive premise to normative conclusion is available without further argument, and as if anyone resisting the move were resisting facts rather than resisting the argument-that-was-not-made-in-the-open. Again, they are not resisting the facts. They are resisting the unstated normative premise that the speaker has smuggled in alongside the facts and that is doing the actual rheotrical work.

There is another version of the position which I want to engage with because it is the one that the more philosophically careful conservative does in fact hold. It’s not that facts settle normative questions directly but that there is a real human nature, a set of facts about what human beings are and what they need in order to flourish, and that the relevant normative conclusions can be derived from this human nature in a way that escapes the Humean problem, because the ought in question is the ought of human flourishing as determined by what we actually are. On this version, the slogan is shorthand for the facts about human nature are what they are, regardless of your political preferences; if you want human beings to flourish you have to take those facts seriously; people who try to engineer human flourishing from political preferences while ignoring the underlying nature are utopians and history shows that utopian projects of this kind tend to produce catastrophes.

There is a long tradition of conservative thought, going back through Burke and Hume to Aristotle, that does serious work on the idea of human nature and what follows from it, and the contemporary Shapiro-type slogan is a debased version of a position that has more sophisticated defenders. The most sophisticated current version is probably that of natural-law theorists like John Finnis, but you can find it in attenuated forms across the conservative intellectual landscape.

But notice that facts about human nature on which the natural-law conservative wants to build are not facts in the same sense as Doha has a population of around three million. They are claims about what human beings essentially are, claims about what kind of life is essentially fulfilling for them, claims about what social arrangements are essentially compatible with their flourishing. These are claims that the natural-law conservative believes can be defended on broadly empirical grounds, but they are not claims that any actual empirical investigation has settled or could settle. The history of attempts to settle them is the history of a great many incompatible accounts of human nature, each of which has been confidently presented by its defenders as the deliverance of careful observation, and each of which has turned out to be a more-or-less direct projection of the cultural arrangements the defenders happened to have grown up in. The Aristotelian human nature is suspiciously well-suited to the social arrangements of a fifth-century-BCE Greek polis. The Thomist human nature is suspiciously well-suited to the social arrangements of medieval Christendom. The Burkean human nature is suspiciously well-suited to the social arrangements of late-eighteenth-century England. The contemporary American conservative human nature, which the Shapiro slogan is implicitly drawing on, is suspiciously well-suited to the social arrangements of late-twentieth-century suburban America. This is not, I want to insist, a coincidence. The facts about human nature that any given thinker discovers tend, with remarkable regularity, to be the facts that vindicate the social arrangements that thinker happens to prefer.

The pragmatist diagnosis of this pattern, which I find broadly correct, is that the appeal to facts about human nature is doing the same kind of work that the appeal to the verdicts of empirical fact was doing in the simpler version of the slogan. It is converting a normative position into an apparent description, by means of a vocabulary that disguises the conversion. Where the simpler version disguises the normative work as a report on the present state of the world, the more sophisticated version disguises the normative work as a report on the underlying nature of human beings; the move is structurally the same, and the rhetorical payoff is the same, which is that the speaker gets to present their preferred normative conclusions as the unavoidable consequences of facts that any honest person would acknowledge. The dishonest interlocutor, on this framing, is the one who has allowed their feelings to override the facts. The honest interlocutor is the one who has been brave enough to face the facts and to draw the conclusions the facts demand. In both cases, the slogan is functioning as a piece of moral-epistemic flattery directed at the speaker and the speaker’s allies, who are constituted as the people on the side of reality, against the various marginal populations who are constituted as the people on the side of mere preference.

The rheotric is so successful because it lets the user feel intellectually serious while doing what is in fact intellectually rather lazy and because it shifts the cost of the conversation onto the interlocutor in a way that the interlocutor often cannot easily refuse without seeming to concede the point they should be challenging. Are you saying facts don’t matter? is the recurring question that the user of the slogan can fall back on whenever pressed, and the answer to this question is of course not, but that is not what is at issue, and the conversation almost never gets past this point, because the slogan has been engineered to make getting past this point look like an evasion.

Now that I’ve shown its rheotrical sleight of hand, I want to spend a few paragraphs on what I think the slogan is actually doing philosophically. The slogan, in both its simpler and its more sophisticated forms, depends on a particular picture of the relation between language and reality. The picture is roughly this: there is a way the world is, antecedently and independently of any human description of it; the function of language is to track this antecedent reality as accurately as possible; the better one’s language tracks reality, the closer one is to the truth; and the truth, once attained, is binding on any rational agent regardless of their preferences. The slogan is intelligible on this picture and largely unintelligible without it. It says that the reality is what it is, your language should track it, your normative conclusions should follow from your accurate language, and your feelings are an obstacle to all of this and are not at all relevant.

This picture has had a long career and has serious defenders, but it has also had careful critics, and the critics have been, in my view, decisively in the right. The critics (Wittgenstein, Sellars, Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Rorty, Brandom, more or less the whole post-analytic mainstream) have spent the last sixty or so years pointing out that the picture cannot be made to work even on its own terms. There is no way to specify what tracking would mean, in the relevant sense, without already having committed to a particular vocabulary in which the tracking is to be done. There is no neutral standpoint from which one could compare a piece of language to the world and verify the correspondence relation; any comparison is itself made within some language, with its own commitments. The world causally pushes against our descriptions (it is not the case that one can describe the world however one likes) but the causal push does not select among the descriptions in the way the picture requires. Different vocabularies, all of them adequate to the relevant causal pressures, can produce different descriptions of the same situation, and the choice between vocabularies is a question that the world itself does not settle.

What the world does, on the post-analytic picture, is supply the conditions under which our linguistic practices have to operate. We cannot say just anything and have it count as a description of the world, because the world will push back in ways that our linguistic community will register and respond to. But within the very large space of linguistic practices that the world’s pushback is compatible with, the choice of which practice to adopt is a choice that we make, on the basis of considerations that include but are not exhausted by the practice’s empirical adequacy. Other considerations (what work does the practice do for us, what kinds of human flourishing does it support, what kinds of injustice does it enable, what is the cost of switching to an alternative) are also very relevant, and the slogan facts don’t care about your feelings is, on this view, an attempt to suppress these other considerations by pretending that the only relevant consideration is the empirical-adequacy one. It is not. The empirical-adequacy question is one question among several. Pretending it is the only one is itself a normative move and the move is being made without acknowledgement and without defence.

Robert Brandom, in A Spirit of Trust, makes the structural point about why this matters more pointedly than I have so far. The image in which our normative conclusions are determined by facts about an antecedent reality is, he argues, the contemporary descendant of a much older picture in which our normative conclusions are determined by the will of a non-human authority, be it God, in the medieval version; nature, in the early modern version; facts and reality in the contemporary version. The image works the same in each form, which is to relieve the people inside it of the responsibility for their own normative commitments by relocating those commitments outside of human agency. I am not the one demanding that you live this way; the facts are demanding it; my role is merely to report. Brandom calls this an authoritarian structure, in a specifically philosophical sense rather than a political one. The authority being deferred to is non-human; the human is constituted as the subordinate; the subordinate’s role is to obey rather than to negotiate; and any attempt to negotiate is reframed as a refusal of the underlying authority, which is itself a kind of impertinence.

The slogan is therefore not merely a rhetorical move; it is (also) the contemporary expression of a long philosophical tradition that locates the source of normativity outside of human practices, and that experiences any attempt to relocate normativity inside human practices (into negotiation, deliberation, the ongoing collective work of figuring out what we owe to one another) as a kind of presumption. The slogan-user who insists that the facts are the facts is not, on this analysis, defending facts; he is defending a particular picture of the relation between human agency and authority, in which the agency is supposed to be subordinate to an authority that has not been democratically constituted and that does not include the parties whose lives the resulting normative conclusions will affect. This is what Brandom calls the ‘hierarchical ontological structure of superiority and subordination, in which superiors have the authority to command and subordinates the responsibility to obey’. The slogan is the structure’s contemporary slogan, and the structure is what is being defended even when the defender is not aware of defending it. Richard Rorty, Brandom’s teacher, had framed this as a kind of authoritarian-temperament versus a democratically-alligned one in a more political sense.

The pragmatist alternative, which I find broadly correct and which I have been arguing for in various ways across these essays, is to give up the picture entirely. There is no non-human authority. There are only us, in conversation with one another, trying to work out what to do given the situations we find ourselves in. The conversations are constrained by the world in important ways (we cannot treat the cat as if it were a mat) but the conversations are not settled by the world in the way the picture requires. They are settled, in so far as they are settled at all, by us, on grounds that include considerations the picture refuses to admit as relevant: who is being affected, what the affected parties want, what kinds of life the various candidate arrangements would support, what the historical record of similar arrangements has been. These considerations are the substance of normative deliberation and not ‘feelings’ in the dismissive sense the slogan uses the word. Refusing to admit them by labelling them as feelings is a refusal of the deliberative process human communitiies do in order to answer questions.

I want to end with a small observation that I think is overlooked. The Shapiro slogan, and the broader rhetorical complex it belongs to, presents itself as the position of the brave and the disciplined, against the wimpiness of the feelings-led progressive. This self-presentation has been quite successful, and I have met members of my own generation, who are not stupid people, who have come to think of themselves as having graduated into intellectual seriousness by adopting it. The successful framing is what gives the slogan its purchase; if it sounded like cowardice it would not work, and the success depends on being able to recruit the listener into a kind of self-flattering intellectual vanity in which one becomes the kind of person who ‘can handle the truth’.

But, as I have attempted to argue, the slogan is not the position of the brave and is in fact the position of the person who would prefer not to genuine engage with the normative point that questions require. Engaging with normative questions is hard. It involves listening to people whose situations one does not share, weighing considerations that do not reduce to a single metric, holding open the possibility that one’s own current commitments are wrong, and accepting that the resulting deliberation will not produce the kind of black-and-white answers that empirical investigation produces. The slogan is a way of avoiding all of this. It allows the user to feel that they have done the serious intellectual labour without having actually done any of it, and it allows them to dismiss the people who are doing the labour as soft-headed feelings-merchants.

The actual brave thing, and I notice that this is the position I am about to recommend, which is awkward, is to be willing to say openly that one is making a normative claim, that the claim is not the deliverance of any non-human authority, that one is responsible for it, and that one is willing to defend it on the grounds that actually motivate it. This is much harder than appealing to facts. It is, however, the only kind of normative engagement that the people on the receiving end of one’s normative claims can actually take seriously. That is, to address them as the parties to a deliberation rather than as the recipients of a verdict. The slogan is therefore, despite its self-presentation, a piece of intellectual cowardice. It would be useful, I think, to start saying this out loud because the longer it goes unsaid the longer the slogan continues to allow people to feel intellectually serious when declining to take seriously the people whose lives their normative conclusions are about.

That is what I think about facts don’t care about your feelings. The substance of the position it is defending is largely conceptually confused; the rhetorical work it is actually doing is to relieve its user of the responsibility for normative commitments they would rather not own; the philosophical framework it implicitly relies on has been refuted by sixty years of post-analytic work that the slogan-user has, mostly, not encountered; and the self-presentation of the position as one of intellectual bravery is the inversion of what is actually happening.