{"id":193010,"date":"2026-06-14T11:16:34","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T19:16:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=193010"},"modified":"2026-06-14T11:18:31","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T19:18:31","slug":"philosopher-michael-huemer-the-credit-of-appearances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=193010","title":{"rendered":"Philosopher Michael Huemer & The Credit of Appearances"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Huemer<\/a> (b. December 27, 1969) is an American philosopher who has taught at the University of Colorado Boulder<\/a> since 1998. His writing crosses epistemology, ethics, metaethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mathematics. He has authored or co-authored about a dozen books and more than eighty academic articles. Within analytic philosophy he holds a position few others manage to hold at once. Colleagues treat him as a serious contributor to mainstream debates in epistemology and metaethics, and at the same time he defends a list of conclusions that most of the profession regards as eccentric: philosophical anarchism<\/a>, libertarian free will<\/a>, substance dualism<\/a>, and an argument for survival after death. One commitment runs under all of it. Huemer holds that ordinary appearances and common-sense judgments deserve a presumption of credibility, and that the burden falls on anyone who wants to overturn them.<\/p>\n

He took his bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Berkeley<\/a> in 1992 and his doctorate at Rutgers University<\/a> in 1998, where Peter D. Klein<\/a> (b. 1940) supervised his dissertation. Klein built his own reputation on skepticism<\/a> and the theory of knowledge, and a student who would spend a career answering the skeptic learned the problem from a man who took it seriously. Huemer went to Boulder the same year he finished and has stayed there for his whole career, rising to full professor. His prose marks him out among academic philosophers. Much technical philosophy buries its claims under specialist vocabulary. Huemer writes to be understood, and he treats the plain statement of a hard idea as a test the idea has to pass.<\/p>\n

His first book, Skepticism and the Veil of Perception<\/em> (2001), set the themes that would organize the work to come. It attacks indirect realism<\/a>, the view that a person perceives only inner mental representations and never the outer world. Huemer argues for direct realism<\/a>, the claim that ordinary perception puts us in contact with external objects rather than with mental stand-ins for them. Skepticism draws its strength, he argues, from standards of proof no belief could meet and from a refusal to count ordinary experience as evidence. The burden sits with the skeptic who wants to unseat perception, not with the man who trusts it.<\/p>\n

The center of his epistemology is phenomenal conservatism<\/a>. On this view, if it seems to a man that something is true, that seeming gives him at least some justification for believing it, unless other evidence defeats the seeming. Huemer uses “seeming” in a technical sense. A seeming is neither a belief nor a desire. A stick held in water may seem bent to a man who knows it is straight. A mathematical claim may seem self-evident before anyone proves it. A moral judgment may seem correct before anyone turns it into a theory. These appearances, Huemer argues, are the ground floor of justification. Every argument rests at last on premises that seem true, so a wholesale rejection of seemings would take down science, logic, and reasoning along with morality and common sense.<\/p>\n

That framework reached full form in Ethical Intuitionism<\/em> (2005), the book that made his name among moral philosophers. It defends moral realism<\/a> against relativism, non-cognitivism, and error theory. Huemer argues that a man can know some moral truths through rational intuition<\/a>, in the way he can know some mathematical truths through insight. He sees that gratuitous cruelty is wrong as he sees that two plus two makes four, without an experiment. Morality, on this account, is no social construction and no report of private taste. Huemer grants that intuition can be warped by culture, ideology, emotion, or self-interest, and so the work of moral philosophy is to sort the intuitions that survive scrutiny from the ones that fail it.<\/p>\n

His political philosophy grows from the same root. The Problem of Political Authority<\/em> (2013) challenges the assumption that a government holds a moral standing no private person holds. The book takes apart social contract theory<\/a>, the appeal to democratic consent, and consequentialist defenses of the state. Huemer works by a test of moral parity. He asks again and again whether an act we accept from a government would count as legitimate from a private individual. If a neighbor may not take your money by force to fund a project he likes, why may the state? If private coercion is wrong as a rule, what licenses state coercion? No account of authority, Huemer concludes, has earned the state its exemption from ordinary morality. The book made him a leading defender of philosophical anarchism, and it became his best-known work outside the academy even as his epistemology and metaethics drew more citations within it.<\/p>\n

Huemer parts from many libertarian writers in his starting point. He rests his politics less on natural rights, market efficiency, or constitutional history than on plain moral judgment, and he asks that political institutions answer to the standards we apply to ordinary conduct between persons. Admirers praise the clarity and the consistency. Critics answer that the parity test flattens the problems of collective action and political order, that a state is not a large person and cannot be judged as one. Even many of the critics treat the book as a reference point they have to address.<\/p>\n

Huemer has carried the same reasoning past questions of government. Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism<\/em> (2019) argues that industrial animal agriculture causes suffering on a scale no ordinary benefit can justify. He casts the book as a dialogue to bring the argument into public reach. His own position, sometimes called ostroveganism, permits eating simple organisms such as oysters and scallops that lack the nervous systems for conscious suffering, while it condemns most conventional meat.<\/p>\n

Questions of justice and state force return in Justice Before the Law<\/em> (2021), which he wrote on sabbatical in New Orleans. He examines criminal punishment, plea bargaining<\/a>, the price of legal services, and legal equality through the same plain moral principles. Governments, he argues, claim permissions that would count as grave wrongs from a private hand. He presses the case that judges, prosecutors, jurors, and lawyers should put justice ahead of the law, and should refuse to enforce an unjust statute or impose a sentence out of all proportion to the offense. His case for far freer immigration flows from the same regard for non-harm and voluntary dealing that anchors the rest of his politics.<\/p>\n

Away from ethics and politics, Huemer has given long attention to paradox, infinity, and the foundations of mathematics. Approaching Infinity<\/em> (2016) takes up the puzzles that gather around infinite quantities and works through classical paradoxes of time, space, and number. He declines to treat infinity as a plain feature of the physical world, sorts its different forms, and traces what each form means for metaphysics and cosmology. Paradox Lost<\/em> (2018) widens the survey to a range of philosophical paradoxes and the errors of reasoning that breed them.<\/p>\n

Huemer has also turned into a sharp critic of academic culture. Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy<\/em> (2021) joins an introduction to the field with an argument for plain speech. Many philosophical quarrels, he holds, grow murky through technical language and a competition for status dressed as rigor. He calls a good deal of it academic high-status babble, and he insists that a philosophical idea should go into ordinary words whenever it can. The conviction reaches past style. Real understanding, on his view, should make a thing simpler.<\/p>\n

His work on political disagreement asks why intelligent people split so far apart on politics. Huemer argues that political belief answers to social incentives, group loyalty, and identity more than to evidence. The private cost of a mistaken political belief is low, and the social cost of dissent can be high, so men adopt the views that secure their standing in a group. The same skepticism toward ideological certainty leads him to press the left and the right by turns, and it keeps him hard to file on a single side.<\/p>\n

In metaphysics and the philosophy of mind he holds several positions that sit outside the mainstream. He has shown sympathy for substance dualism, the view that consciousness does not reduce to physical process. He defends a libertarian account of free will against determinism, a stance he carried into a public debate with the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky (b. 1957). He has explored arguments for survival after death. In his paper “Existence Is Evidence of Immortality” he argues that certain assumptions about infinite time carry surprising consequences for personal existence and reincarnation. The arguments remain contested. They show a man willing to follow his premises to conclusions the profession resists, when he judges the premises sound.<\/p>\n

Huemer belongs to the line of common-sense philosophers that runs through Thomas Reid<\/a> (1710-1796) and, to a lesser degree, G. E. Moore<\/a> (1873-1958). With Reid he holds that ordinary belief carries a default credit. With Moore he holds that many skeptical arguments are less sure than the common-sense claims they attack, so that a man does better to hold onto his conviction that he has hands than to give it up on the strength of an argument he cannot fully answer. The stance sets him apart from philosophers who try to rebuild knowledge from abstract first principles. Huemer starts from the way things look and asks what reason there might be to leave that starting point.<\/p>\n

Outside the university Huemer has built a wide public following. Through his Substack newsletter Fake No\u00fbs, which carries more than fourteen thousand subscribers, along with podcasts, debates, interviews, and essays, he reaches readers well past the academy. The public writing shows the marks of the scholarly work: clarity, independence, and an appetite for testing fashionable claims. Whether the subject is morality, politics, consciousness, diet, or skepticism, he looks for the belief that seems most obvious on reflection and then asks whether any theory has given sufficient ground to drop it.<\/p>\n

Huemer stays hard to classify. He is a moral realist in a skeptical age, a defender of intuition in a profession wary of it, a philosophical anarchist who rests his politics on ordinary morality, and a common-sense philosopher who defends uncommon conclusions. Admirers count him among the clearest and most rigorous defenders of common-sense reasoning now writing. Critics charge that he leans too hard on intuition and gives too little weight to history and social complexity. Both camps tend to grant that he holds a distinct place in contemporary analytic philosophy.<\/p>\n

The unity in the work lies in his conviction about where inquiry starts. Perception, morality, political authority, mathematical truth, consciousness: across all of them Huemer returns to the thought that the way things seem gives reason its first footing. Philosophy, on his account, should not open by distrusting ordinary experience. It should open there and leave only when the evidence requires.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Huemer (b. December 27, 1969) is an American philosopher who has taught at the University of Colorado Boulder since 1998. His writing crosses epistemology, ethics, metaethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mathematics. He has authored or co-authored … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27596],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t