(March 17, 2026 at 11:45 am)Disagreeable Wrote:

(March 17, 2026 at 4:20 am)Paleophyte Wrote: But of course it is. They'd be out of a job if they ever ended a debate. Philosophy is the ancient and venerable art of ensuring that philosophers remain well-fed.

I'd think that the evidence would be pretty obvious.

Slavery? BTDT  and used the holy books to excuse it.
Murder? Yeah, we're down with that. Here's a rock, there's a neighbor you've got a beef with. Or if you want to seem modern, she's a witch! Burn her! We're doing it right now under the guise of 'pre-emptive strikes'.
Even your extreme example of infanticide was broken regularly and gleefully. In Ancient Carthage it was a sacred duty, and there's the father-son outing that Abraham and Isaac took up Mount Moriah. These are hardly isolated incidents. The Mayans drowned infants in their sacred cenotes. The Incas drugged them and left them to die of exposure on mountain tops. The Shang dynasty sacrificed thousands, including infants.

Rape, incest, cannibalism... There isn't a taboo that our species has developed that we don't break, frequently on a society-wide basis. Your 'moral facts' are nothing more than the latest trend. Every one of our barbarous ancestors considered themselves moral.

If moral disagreement is evidence of anti-realism then moral convergence is evidence of realism. The fact that as time goes by we have moral progress, such as less slavery than in the past, can be taken as evidence in favor of realism. The fact that people also have moral disagreements isn't really good evidence against realism. Because, again, this can be just neutralized with the opposite evidence of moral progress.

People used to think that the Earth was flat and that bad smells caused diseases. Is this evidence against science? I think not. Progress is evidence of realism.

But personally I don't think that disagreement or convergence are particularly good evidences against or for realism. People can get stuff wrong and people can get stuff right. What people think doesn't say much about what the objective fact of the matter is. Independent evidence or arguments is what really says whether something is objective or not.

You think that progress is when morality happens to match what we consider moral today? Our Victorian era ancestors thought the same thing and used orphans as a cheap source of expendable labour in the mines.

(March 17, 2026 at 3:06 pm)Paleophyte Wrote:

(March 17, 2026 at 11:45 am)Disagreeable Wrote: If moral disagreement is evidence of anti-realism then moral convergence is evidence of realism. The fact that as time goes by we have moral progress, such as less slavery than in the past, can be taken as evidence in favor of realism. The fact that people also have moral disagreements isn't really good evidence against realism. Because, again, this can be just neutralized with the opposite evidence of moral progress.

People used to think that the Earth was flat and that bad smells caused diseases. Is this evidence against science? I think not. Progress is evidence of realism.

But personally I don't think that disagreement or convergence are particularly good evidences against or for realism. People can get stuff wrong and people can get stuff right. What people think doesn't say much about what the objective fact of the matter is. Independent evidence or arguments is what really says whether something is objective or not.

You think that progress is when morality happens to match what we consider moral today? Our Victorian era ancestors thought the same thing and used orphans as a cheap source of expendable labour in the mines.

If you're saying that moral agreement isn't a sign of moral progress then, by the same logic, you can't say that moral disagreement is a sign of moral relativism. You're trying to have it both ways.

(March 17, 2026 at 3:39 pm)Disagreeable Wrote:

(March 17, 2026 at 3:06 pm)Paleophyte Wrote: You think that progress is when morality happens to match what we consider moral today? Our Victorian era ancestors thought the same thing and used orphans as a cheap source of expendable labour in the mines.

If you're saying that moral agreement isn't a sign of moral progress then, by the same logic, you can't say that moral disagreement is a sign of moral relativism. You're trying to have it both ways.

I'm saying that you don't have moral agreement. You have what's fashionable today.

We agree and disagree over matters of fact with regularity. Not just about morality, about everything. We don't tend to believe this reduces every other mechanically equivalent statement to "what's fashionable today". Animal cruelty and environmental damage are out of fashion today (for some of us, lol)... but even if they were in fashion that would not change anything about animal cruelty or environmental damage itself. It doesn't have a different effect on the animals or the ecology based on whether or not we love it. All of the ways in which we are saying x is bad, the indicators for us to know that it is bad, are true or false independent of that metric.

Really, has anyone here ever in their lives thought "I'm a moral paragon for eating this big hunk of steak"...? We probably all understand that killing and eating things isn't our best behavior, no? I've got this cat over here. I could pet it, or I could eat it. Which one is worse for the cat? Easy. Which one is better for the environment? Probably eat the cat - but I'm still not going to do it, even if it's the right thing to do. Pretty common experience in my life. I assume everyone else has these sorts of transgressions real and imagined, minor or major?

(March 17, 2026 at 4:02 pm)Paleophyte Wrote:

(March 17, 2026 at 3:39 pm)Disagreeable Wrote: If you're saying that moral agreement isn't a sign of moral progress then, by the same logic, you can't say that moral disagreement is a sign of moral relativism. You're trying to have it both ways.

I'm saying that you don't have moral agreement. You have what's fashionable today.

And assuming that moral agreement is just "what's fashionable today" is just question-begging again.

(March 17, 2026 at 5:53 pm)Disagreeable Wrote:

(March 17, 2026 at 4:02 pm)Paleophyte Wrote: I'm saying that you don't have moral agreement. You have what's fashionable today.

And assuming that moral agreement is just "what's fashionable today" is just question-begging again.

To take this aaaall the way back to the start. It's not just fashionable to believe that there are differences between animals that could lead to different conclusions about how we must treat them each . Nor is it merely fashionable to believe that there are differences between people that could lead to different conclusions about how we must treat them as individuals or a group. Cats and children don't vote. Children have more rights than cats, cats have more permissible autonomy than children. If you ate a cat you just put something disgusting in your mouth - we've all done it. Don't eat kids.

-I personally think that we extend our moral protection, often in error, to ourselves and things most like ourselves (really and only seemingly) because that's what we're most familiar with. That's what we know. We're more certain that the signifying conditions are present in those situations than others - a partial explanation for the phenomenon of moral weighting. What I tend to see as moral progress, is the extension of that protection over time, in culture. We find out these people over here are just like us. That this or that animal is more like us than we thought - and so, kicking and screaming, we expand the umbrella of duty and taboo as we learn more ways these situations as we describe or experience them are manifested in the world. We've at least started to think about a sense of global permissibility (and impermissibility) that includes things as conceptual and dissimilar to us in particular as "ecology". If we got rid of all those concerns we would turn our attention to the slugs and moles and countless other bits of life that die prematurely due to our intentional and unintentional interventions.

(March 17, 2026 at 6:26 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: To take this aaaall the way back to the start.  It's not just fashionable to believe that there are differences between animals that could lead to different conclusions about how we must treat them each .  Nor is it merely fashionable to believe that there are differences between people that could lead to different conclusions about how we must treat them as individuals or a group.  Cats and children don't vote.  Children have more rights than cats, cats have more permissible autonomy than children.  If you ate a cat you just put something disgusting in your mouth - we've all done it.  Don't eat kids.

-I personally think that we extend our moral protection, often in error, to ourselves and things most like ourselves (really and only seemingly) because that's what we're most familiar with.  That's what we know.  We're more certain that the signifying conditions are present in those situations than others - a partial explanation for the phenomenon of moral weighting.  What I tend to see as moral progress, is the extension of that protection over time, in culture.  We find out these people over here are just like us.  That this or that animal is more like us than we thought - and so, kicking and screaming, we expand the umbrella of duty and taboo as we learn more ways these situations as we describe or experience them are manifested in the world.  We've at least started to think about a sense of global permissibility (and impermissibility) that includes things as conceptual and dissimilar to us in particular as "ecology".  If we got rid of all those concerns we would turn our attention to the slugs and moles and countless other bits of life that die prematurely due to our intentional and unintentional interventions.

In a very real sense, what we think of as progressive morality is to my mind just the wider extension of empathy to species or constructs (i.e. ecologies and so on). Nothing wrong with that to my thinking, but then I'm not an oil baron or battery manufacturer.

I'd say also rather than just. Fortunate thing for the cats too.

(March 17, 2026 at 7:05 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I'd say also rather than just.  Fortunate thing for the cats too.

I say "just" because it costs me nothing.