Manipulative non-bastards

One of MacIntyre's more brilliant points is that anyone who really holds that moral statements are nothing more than statements of personal preference looses any distinction between moral argument and moral manipulation. One of the best examples of this phenomenon is Matt Yglesias. He famously argued against moral realism a while ago:

"I don't want this to be misunderstood, but I'm a moral relativist. Or, rather, I reject moral realism, the view that "moral claims do purport to report facts and are true if they get the facts right."

He then goes on to confront the argument made by some, he cites Foucault, that this sort of moral relativism leaves us no criterion for judging between moral goodness and evil as follows:

"Tragically, I don't have time for a full-throated defense of my meta-ethical views at the moment. But this kind of claim, oft-made, is clearly false. Is there a universal criterion by which I judge whether I like chocolate ice cream better than vanilla ice cream? Presumably not. Is there, therefore no way to prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla ice cream? Obiously, no; people are walking around with preferences about this as we speak, and it's fine."

We can see the problem with his argument if we consider what it would take to change someone's mind. Suppose we meet someone who prefers chocolate as Yglesias suggests and we want to convince them to change their prefernce to vanilla. Is there any way to have a genuine moral argument about this point that would differ in a non-trivial way from moral manipulation? Of course not.

This is interesting because Yglesias is clearly a nice guy. he is not a manipulative bastard. And yet if you look at his arguments they often have no moral substance and amount to nothing but various attempts at manipulation. Here for example: Ungovernable America.

To pick apart the shallowness and hypocrisy of the argument Yglesias makes is to go for the low-lying fruit and lots of others have done so before me. The deeper point however, is that anyone who really believes what Yglesias says he believes about moral relativism would have no choice. You can't actually convince anyone by appealing to legitimate criteria so you have no choice but to use emotional manipulation, which is what Yglesias increasingly does.

And it's not a character flaw, it's sloppy philosophy that gets him to where he is.