Does anyone own "The Moral Landscape"?

[Angrboda]

It sounds like you’re saying there must be some objective moral facts, which line up with your views, because you’d be uncomfortable if there weren’t.

I think generally people are uncomfortable with the idea that their moral intuitions don't pick out something real about the world. That in itself is hardly a point against their intuitions pointing out something real. Quite the contrary. It is evidence that their intuitions might well point to something real, just as any other observation is evidence of the thing being observed.

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Well I don’t know. Are you saying rape is categorically right or wrong, or not? I’m saying it’s a malformed question, with any answer being meaningless. I’m saying that if absolute right and wrong exist, it would make no difference to anything. They would be interchangeable.

To "show" that rape is "wrong", you have to define "wrong" very specifically, and then the whole of morality hinges on that definition. Since people have never been able to agree on a precise definition, which one should we use? Why should we use any of them? You seem to very much be assuming that the wellbeing of humans is an essential part of what is right and wrong, and that you’d discount any other definition.

If I take a ruler and measure my phone and find that it is 5" long along the long axis, then there is an objective fact about the length of my phone. I could define inch differently and it would be a different length according to my new definition of an inch, but my doing so doesn't change the actual fact of the phone's length. In that case, our definitions aren't what's doing the work, it's the actual physical length of the phone which is determining things. Likewise, with moral realism, we may choose a definition, and that definition may pick out actual moral facts in the world such that if our definition is violated, the moral fact is being violated. But just as in the case of the phone, it isn't the definition which is doing the work but rather that our definition makes the fact itself intelligible to us. It may be that well-being describes a set of obligatory behaviors and that definition is wrong. It could be that well-being picks out moral facts in cases like rape, but fails to do so or incorrectly does so in other cases, like the trolley problem or the five organ transplant recipients problem. The definition is a description of the underlying fact, not the fact itself. Our justifications are just an attempt to demonstrate that our description of morals aligns with what morals actually are. The question is not whether the definition itself can be justified, it need not be justified at all. We could develop a laundry list of things that are morally right and morally wrong, and so long as that list aligned properly with objective facts of the world, that list would be an accurate description of morality. Again, it isn't the definitions or their justification which are doing the work but the objective facts themselves that are doing the work. You could argue, as you have, that you equally as well could have chosen a different standard, say that doing harm is what's moral. Your ability to pick a different standard doesn't show that a different morality is possible, if moral facts exist, but rather that one can be wrong in one's description of morality. If there are objective moral facts, and you choose to define morality in a way that doesn't align with those facts, you haven't shown that you can have a different morality by choosing differently, all you've shown is that it's possible to be wrong about what morality is, and that we can choose things that aren't actually moral as our guide to morality. Our ability to do so tells us nothing about whether morality is objective or not. (I tried to explain how objective morality is not dependent upon the justifications or definitions we use earlier, but you appear not to have read that post. I have to move on to other matters now, but I'll try to dig out that post for you later.)