Subjective Morality?

[robvalue]

I’ll put it another way. I understand what realism is trying to do, but I think it fails completely. It just asserts what is good/moral/desirable/whatever based on things the reader is supposed to consider reasonable. That’s fine, within the content of the system itself. It then asks, "Can I make factual scientific statements about goodness?"

Yes, you can, within the system you’ve set up. That’s trivially true. Have you said anything at all regarding morality in general? No you haven’t, unless you want to start (a) equivocating or (b) excluding anyone who disagrees with your definition of what is good/moral.

So the question of whether realism "is true" is where the deepity comes in. It’s a loaded question. I’m really just summarising and formalising the criticisms I’ve made all along. The whole thing is sleight of hand, to be appearing to say more than it actually is. That’s my opinion. It’s not even addressing morality/ethics in general, so there’s nothing there to be "true".

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PS: I’ll give an example. I think the existence of humans in general is a bad thing. That’s not a hypothetical, I actually do. So I could make an argument that wiping them out completely while leaving all other life on earth intact would be a good thing.

People are free to disagree with my evaluation of humans, but it requires the admission that morality/ethics is way more complicated to refute my argument.

I think the whole thing conflates morality and ethics, in much the same regard. It treats the individual as being the same as some sort of average of the whole. Morality is about personal decision making, whereas ethics is about an agreed standard. Which is it talking about? If it’s the former, then general factual statements become meaningless. At best you can notice trends in human behaviour. If it’s the latter, then it’s trivially true for any particular ethical system.

The underlying problem is that it tries to force desirable outcomes to be "well defined", when they are not, often by analogies to things which are much more narrowly defined. The things it tries to draw a parallel with have definitions which are agreed upon, and are useful exactly because they are agreed upon. What is "good" in general does not, historically speaking, so it relies on popular opinions at any given time.

It’s in this definition stage where the problems occur. You need to first establish scientifically what is and isn’t "good", and you can’t do that without already having a criteria in place. It’s the whole disagreement about what goes in what category that morality and ethics are all about. Realism tries to dodge this, and it fails, in my opinion. You can’t show things are agreed upon by assuming they are agreed upon.