Subjective Morality?

[The Grand Nudger]

Whether the wrongness of rape is real or not, then, would depend on whether people accept that color is real. Some deny it's real just because it only appears in the mind. They say that it has to appear outside the mind to deserve the label "real." But other people will say that a reaction every normal person has to a certain stimulus -- whether a color reaction or a moral reaction -- does constitute a real thing. 

Is this a relevant description of what you have in mind?

Not exactly.  Whether or not x is wrong..to a realist, doesn't depend on anyone's acceptance of what is or isn't real.  We could repeatedly kick a rock while claiming that rocks aren't real - but that won't change anything about the rock, and realism encompasses naturalism and non naturalism.  I know that seems super pedantic, but consider the discussion so far. Yes, all realists together accept that -something- is real....but, they don't all think that the same things are real in the same way - so..a person can disagree on what they accept as real, and still be a realist. Most realists also think that whats happening in the mind is real..but objectivity, by definition, requires something more than just the contents of ones mind. It can include the contents of one's mind..but those contents must be referent to be objective in the meaningful and operative sense.

I'd add an important caveat to that.  While I accept that others respond to red, their version of "red-ness," whatever that might be, is not directly accessible to me.  We can both acknowledge the physical reality, i.e. that there's light of a particular wavelength.  What we cannot knowingly agree on is what it's like to experience redness.  In fact, "red-ness" does not exist outside our experience of it, and conflating the experience with the thing it is about is an error.

That's not a problem for moral realism as a whole.  A cornell realist would tell you that morality is like wavelength.  A non naturalist would tell you that your own personal experience either is or isn't compelling. Both are empirical, one makes additional demands on claims, neither can be discounted.

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We're not far off from agreement, I think.  We'd both agree that red light is real, and say that this or that thing "is" red, though that's a bit of a simplification.

Sure, and a realist can assert...in the same way..... harm is bad is also a simplification.  Hell, "harm" and "bad" both are simplifications of a massive set of variables.  

But in all cases, there are things and properties of them.  We can talk about red light, and consider its wavelength a property.  We can talk about an apple, and consider being red a property.

Are there things and properties of things, though?  If you think that there are - the realist is telling you that the only moral properties they are referring to are those "properties of things" (with wiggle room for idealists, ofc).  

But for moral ideas, this seems much less clear to me: what's the object, and what's the property?  Is wrongness a property of rape?  Is wrongness itself an object, and our moral instincts a kind of sense of it, such that some of us sense it well, and others poorly?

The object is the act itself.  Not your opinions about the act, not your emotional response to the act.  So..in the case of your example, rape.  To ask which property this is is going to be a wash..because both "harm" and "bad" could refer to many properties and the answer is fundamentally different between different realist positions.

I'd argue that I experience red.  That's an experience I can have which is not really subject (for the most part) to interpretation.  Most people will look at a stop sign and immediately see that redness is one of its properties.

Non naturalists can assert that morality is just like that.

But I'm convinced that many people actually do not believe, and cannot perceive, that rape for example is wrong.  Suppose you give up your ten best cows for a healthy young teenage girl, one who is known in your community as a bit of a troublemaker but whom you are willing to take under your wing, and she spurns you on your wedding night.  What an outrage!  How lacking in understanding she is!  How immoral she is!

You'll find that such a culture does not consider what happens in the marital bed (or in the bed of property) rape.  Consider magic book.  There are fines and penalties for rape...but are there fines and penalties for raping one's spouse?  No.  So..here, you're discussing an example of how we can get it wrong.  How we can fail to identify one act as being like (or even the same act) as another.  Realists are fully aware that we do this.  OFC, realism...they would contend, is the antidote to such silly fuckery.  

So either wrongness is not a property of rape, or cultural bias prevents people from accessing their sense of wrongness.  I think the former is infinitely more likely-- that wrongness is neither a thing, nor a property of any thing.  Instead, it's one of the human emotions-- no less familiar and no better understood than love or a sense of beauty.

I can state with confidence that you don't believe that at all, lol. I'm willing to go out on a limb and state that you actually do think rape is wrong. Hell..... just a few pages back you told me that begging the question was wrong..and rape...somehow...seems worse than that.

You're just going to get yourself yelled at with this, lol, and for no reason. Do you really want to maintain that you cannot conceive of a single property of rape...that might...just might...make it wrong? Wouldn't it be alot more productive to explain why you don't think that those things satisfy, particularly if you're going for the skepticism route?