What would be the harm?

[The Grand Nudger]

I can toss you a lifeline, btw, give you something to chew on that actually -is- problematic for moral realism and realist moral theory and theorists as it relates to consequentialist ethics and those who advocate for them, such as Harris. 

What if doing The Good™ actually leads to some terrible consequence?  What if doing The Bad™ leads to the The Good End™?  Far more worrisome than cornering oneself into arguing for absurdities, eh?

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You're still not engaging.  Harm -is- bad, that's the proposition.

And when asked why it is bad, you end up chasing your tail.  I am engaging the proposition.  You have failed to support it.  If you cannot provide a rational reason for believing that harm is objectively bad, I'm under no compulsion to believe it.

Again, you are not, because the contention offered by harris and other intuitivists is not that "harm is bad because" in any way, shape, or form.  There is no because.  Your circular arguments that follow from "because" are your own, not theirs.  

Follow?

In that framework, there is no because or why. Harm is bad as a brute fact, it's what, or one of, the things we are talking about when we say "bad"....and we are capable of observing harm...objetively, though this ability is not uniform and not all things considered harmful are valid examples of that thing. The frustrating thing about intuitivist arguments is their ability to implicate all other intuitions..such as your intuition that they may be wrong.

For reference, Harris underlying claim - that the greatest possible suffering for the greatest number of beings..if bad means anything...is........ bad. Well, okay. Is this not a sensible statement, do you object?

No, you haven't.  What way have you shown that harm is bad?  I count two.  First that harm is bad because it is contrary to goals.  But goals are subjective, so that doesn't make harm objectively bad.  The other thing you've appealed to is that harm might be bad based on something other than subjective desires.  That something might be bad does not in any sense demonstrate that it is bad and so that objection goes nowhere.  You keep claiming to have provided things that you have not in fact provided.  If you feel otherwise, you need only show one thing that makes harm objectively bad, whatever it may be.  And it can't be that harm is bad for the obvious reason.

Then you are making a claim.  That we can show the depth of a wound or a pile of rubble is not, you contend, objective. An implicit claim is still a claim..and, you know me..I'll tell you right up front that at some level, if you drill it down far enough, I can't give you a satisfactory explanation of objectivity or even demonstrate that there -is- an objective world. It's that, however, that you'll have to object to in order to object to the objectivity of harm...and as soon as you do..I'll object to the objectivity of your objection on the very same grounds.

So, another possible answer to your question, of whether or not realists are building their house on a foundation of sand..is..maybe, but no more or less so than any other house, including your house of objection, is built on the same.

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I still think, btw, that you'd benefit from being more careful in separating moral justification from moral compulsion, and moral justification and compulsion from moral agency.  

It's not that I think you'd end up agreeing with me if you did..I know that you wouldn't in point of fact.  I think you'd be able to field more damning arguments -against- my advocacy - and that would be a hell of alot more fun.

There are, after all...positively destructive arguments against each of those three things and their relationship to each other.