Does anyone own "The Moral Landscape"?

[robvalue]

Language is very tricky here. Maybe it would be easier to say that there are truths about reality. So then scientifically speaking, a fact is something that appears to represent a truth about reality, beyond reasonable doubt. Facts are determined by testing falsifiable hypotheses.

Our facts are necessarily going to be some sort of partial approximation of truths. The scientific goal is to approach the truth as closely as possible. Language is again tricky and very important. There will presumably be infinitely many truths out there. If we want to refer to any particular ones, we need to be highly specific. Words alone do not carry enough specificity to identify them. The words need to be part of some methodology.

This is all fairly straightforward and apparent in practice, with things like length. The failure of anyone to ever come up with a "moral fact" that gets accepted in the same way length does speaks volumes to me. It’s not a methodology. It’s a very vague notion, with loaded overtones. You can’t just say, "There might be moral facts" and expect that to actually highlight some truths in any kind of meaningful way. You might as well say, "There could be bibbly wibbly facts". If we don’t have a precise method and are just appealing to emotion, biases and general trends in our evolution, we may as well be talking bibblies.

So that’s where I’m at, for the 1.5 people who made it this far (including me). Science is an attempt to remove biases and subjectivity as far as possible, and it works. We deduce facts which are actionable. If you try and remove the biases and subjectivity from morality, you’re either left with nothing, or vague statements about human behaviour. I might as well add that I find consequentialism hopelessly simplistic anyway, which moral realism seems to rely on, and I would expect a realist to abandon it pretty quickly outside of extremely simple scenarios. And simple is what they are. It’s still trying to establish that "rape rather than no rape is objectively wrong", and failing in my opinion, after all this time. While subjectivitsts (or whatever we call ourselves) simply agree that we value wellbeing, and that rape is bad for wellbeing, job done. There will be people who don’t agree, but calling them factually wrong is of no practical use whatsoever, as well as being inaccurate.