Subjective Morality?

[The Grand Nudger]

The word "good" can be used to describe objective AND subjective phenomena. Language has got you hung up. You can say, that piece of cheesecake is "good"-- that refers to your subjective experience. You derived pleasure from it. When you say "Michael Jordan is a 'good' basketball player" you are referring to something objective. He isn't good at basketball in your opinion because there are objective criteria for measuring his goodness.

Michael Jordan is good by established rules.  That's because basketball is a subset of life.  We can say so-and-so is a good salesperson, or perhaps even a good parent, by similar methods.  But when we want to talk about how to live IN GENERAL, we have a problem-- there is no definite context.  It's like telling kids they have to make their own rules, and then saying, "Nu uh uhhhh. . . some rules are right and some are wrong."  It doesn't make sense.

"Good at basketball" is no more or less definite.  Keep in mind, realism isn't making any extraneous demands on the status of fact or truth content of factual claims.  

We did have to make our own rules - it's not as if a tablet fell from the sky( ) . 

It's still possible to say, sensibly, that some rules are right, some are wrong, some are better or worse than others.  You can go over the semantics of this entire class of statement all you like, in any subject.  Either these propositions express beliefs, that are sometimes true, and are constituted by something other than human opinion..or they are not.

Hell, every one of your own statements in this thread has to go through the same criteria.  

It's easy to do the same with specific mores-- I can say "Not picking up after your dog is bad," and we can agree on that rule, and then it's pretty easy to take pictures of people not picking up after their dogs.

If that were true, and you had pictures of a person leaving dogshit behind, then it would be as true and as objective..... as any other true or objective statement..... to say that the dogshit leaver is bad at life and a bad person, lol.

This, ofc, conforms to the moral intuitions of people who take the statement "leaving dogshit behind is bad" to be true. When you see someone do it..you do think "fuck, what a minor asshole!".

A symphony is a bunch of marks on a paper, or certain frequencies of sound traveling around an auditorium.  They are an expression of an artist's ideas and feelings about the organization of sound.  However, to say therefore that music is objective would be a misrepresentation.

-and yet we can confidently say that some compositions are objectively fucking awful.  My son, for example...is not mozart.

I think that you might have a blindspot here. The same things that would call into question the status of a realist's moral facts call any and every other fact into question. This shouldn't be taken to mean that a realist has all their facts right..but that their criteria for establishing a moral fact is the same criteria you use to establish -any- fact...about -anything-. Including whatever it is you're using to call those facts into question. Before skepticism has any weight whatsoever, we have to agree..at least, that there -are or could be- moral facts. Moral facts may, ultimately, be about a person and their judgement or their attitudes....or we may be completely incapable of getting our facts right, or the right facts (this list of possible fails can go on forever) but we have to allow for facts for this to be true, and skepticism requires fact to denounce some other (purported) fact in the first place. We have to allow for a factual criteria by which to fail or fall short or for us to be ignorant of...for any of those claims to be substantial. Any objection to realism that purports that a persons judgement or attitude is the basis of a moral proposition, or that for whatever reason or no reason we can't get it right - agees that there are facts - they are contending that a realist has the wrong set of facts, or cannot access the right set (which, at least hypothetically, does exist).

A person who thinks that there are no and can be no moral facts is not a skeptic. They've taken a position of knowledge, claiming..at least..that there are and can be no moral facts (not even the moral facts that establish subjectivism). They need to have some explanation for their non-cognitivism. A person who thinks that whatever moral facts there are refer to people and their judgement, needs to demonstrate why we can have no mind independent facts of this particular subject even though a consistent use of axioms, semantics, and inference from any other subject would strongly and simply suggest that we do.

Can you see how these two currents of thought are at odds, and how no single response can satisfy both conjectures..? A person leveraging both simultaneously might feel or find that the impasse is insurmountable..they seem to have "defeated realism", that the issue is conceptually settled.... (which would be one hell of a lift, lol)....but it's not because realism can't field a cogent response to either objection..it's due to the fact that they have fielded an incoherent objection with respect to the two different sets of commitments required to maintain them. The response to the error theorist and judgement dependent objection is fundamentally wrong, by the noncogs objection...but then again so are error theory and judgement dependency, by the same. The response to the concogs objection is true, according to error theory or judgement dependent theory..but it doesn't matter that it's true. It's trivial.

Notice how well this dovetails with your misgivings about realism. We need to get past this whole idea that there's something fundamentally wrong with any of these positions. There just isn't. Past non cognitivism or nihilism, they simply disagree on points of fact - not that there are no facts to point to. Error theory and subjectivism state that we either can't get it right, or are wrong. All three (adding realism in) agree that there is something to get right and be wrong. Any position we take -on this issue- comes with a list of implications and consequences for every other equivalent proposition.

Since it's a comment on the availability or accessibility of fact and which facts are the right facts...that's a hell of alot of equivalent propositions.