Does anyone own "The Moral Landscape"?

[robvalue]

I might have identified why moral realism sounds like presup apologetics. I think that's because it is.

If you consider "wrong" or "immoral", they are just words. They have no inherent specific meaning that correlates with reality. They are commonly used in highly subjective ways.

If we want to make scientific statements and determine facts, we need to define our terms very specifically. What does "wrong" mean? It means whatever we say it does, for the terms of the discussion. There’s no way I can demonstrate that some particular kind of outcome is wrong, without first defining "wrong" to include that kind of outcome. In this way, it’s entirely circular. Or we just make emotional appeals, which are of course invalid in scientific discussion.

If we say "wrong" has to be about wellbeing, for whatever reason, then fine. But it hasn’t been demonstrated that wellbeing is wrong in the general sense, just by defining it this way; that would entirely be an equivocation. "Doing bad things to wellbeing is factually wrong, because that’s how I’m defining wrong" is a tautology. It doesn’t tell me anything about reality. It just shows personal biases, although perfectly understandable ones.

So a statement can be true, given certain assumptions and definitions, but that doesn’t mean you’ve necessarily established any kind of fact about reality. There’s always this looming assumption that wrong means "wrong for human society", because that’s all that apparently matters. You either admit this assumption to be the case, and so you have done nothing but slip in your own values by definition; or else you have to start from scratch and define "wrong" in more general terms, and somehow equate that with human society. In the latter case, you’ve still only shown something is wrong within the restrictions of your definition.