Subjective Morality?

[Angrboda]

Fine.  Rape is wrong.  That isn't predicated upon negative feelings.  I may have negative feeling about rape, but my belief that it is wrong isn't predicated on them.  Satisfied?

As I said in my last post, "predicated upon" doesn't mean that once established, moral feelings aren't verbalized.  If nobody cared about rape, and strongly so, there would be no moral rule about it.

The entire code of law is pretty dry, but I'd argue that under the hood, 100% of all of it represents a mediation among various feelings (read: instincts, if you want).  We have feelings about property, about health, and so on.

How does one arrive at any value judgment rationally, if it does not have at its foundation some desire or fear?  All we can do is say, "We've arrived at the idea of social contract, through a desire from mutual protection from harm (which we fear), and for opportunity (which we hope for).  We each want liberty, and are willing to extend it."  And then say that rape constitutes a violation of those ultimately emotional value judgments?

I wasn't saying anything about whether my feelings are or are not verbalized. To say that something is predicated upon something else is to say that it is based on that something else. I may have feelings about rape, but if morals are objective, my feelings are predicated upon the fact of it being immoral, not simply a circle jerk in which my feelings themselves constitute the moral fact. I object to rape because it is wrong and because I have negative feelings about it. My having negative feelings about it isn't necessary for it to be wrong, or for me to object to it based upon it being wrong. That's essentially a form of non-cognitivism, which if that is what you believe, then you need an actual argument for it. Having values about objective things does not make those objective things subjective. If I have values regarding right and wrong behavior, the rightness or wrongness of my behavior doesn't necessarily exist solely as a function of my having values about it. Having values about something isn't evidence that the something doesn't exist. I don't really have any values about fairness other that unfairness is wrong. To a moral realist, unfairness would still be wrong whether or not there were any feelings about it. I can argue in the abstract, that any situation, whether I can imagine it or not, is wrong if it is unfair. Obviously in that case, I'm not reacting to my feelings about some concrete reality but about the concept of fairness itself. Are you suggesting that fairness is only subjective? Your argument has been, more or less, that having feelings about it refutes the possibility that those feelings are about an objective fact, and that's basically a non sequitur if that is the entirety of your argument. I may have feelings about the moon, or about the number 7. That doesn't in itself demonstrate that the moon and the number 7 only exist as examples of my contemplation or feelings about them. So unless you're going to deny physical realism, or mathematical realism, and show that neither is possibly true, then you really don't have an argument that moral realism may not also be possibly true.

And I'm still waiting on your definition of morals and moral to see why you think morals and moral facts are necessarily subjective.

ETA: If no one had feelings about rape, and moral realism is true, there would still be a rule about it because that is what moral realism is saying, that moral propositions, rules about what is or is not moral, exist independent of minds. There might no longer be anybody to act on those rules, but the rules themselves do not require that someone exist to contemplate and act on those rules if moral realism is true.