What would be the harm?

[The Grand Nudger]

I've got a lot of catching up to do, but in the meantime I'll simply point out that you have failed to answer the rock objection.  It isn't that subjective accounts do exist, but that objective accounts do not exist.  

This may simply be an intractable difference of opinion.  I maintain that rocks can be damaged, and damage is one use of the word harm, which is an objective use.  I see no sensible way that this can be objected to, itself..though I acknowledge that it may be that the damage done to a rock can be objected to as a self-sufficient or wholly sufficient evaluative moral premise. I see no need to add links to give this statement more weight, because no link to that effect would have more weight than the statement already has. Standard minimalism. The statement "Mountains can be damaged" and the statement "mountains can be damaged is a true statement" -backed up by links..adds nothing to the original statement. It's a content-tautology.

Even in this, however, with my sidebar, I explained how one can maintain it's validity as an evaluative moral premise and yet come to the conclusion that damaging a rock, though "bad" in a plain and consistent reading, can carry little or no weight in moral desert. Leading some to see paradox where others see sensible elaboration by reference to a related but distinct subject.

(keep in mind, in all of this, that I'm a pluralist - it's perfectly okay in my moral schema that no one thing can adequately encompass all that is meant by any given moral appraisal - I don't expect otherwise, and am not surprised when some single metric fails to encapsulate the entirety of the moral landscape. I think that harris' and other's intuitive consequentialism is right, true, but that it doesn't and cant account for the entire field nor can it stand alone. I regard things like that as just one part of some hypothetical naturalists unifying moral theory that we do not currently possess.)

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I'll also state, right at the outset..and carry this with you in every subsequent interaction in some coversational reset between us...that you are not going to find or field some error theorists response to any realists moral proposition that I -don't- think can't be or isn't difficult, that I -don't- think approaches a consequential truth for any given realists proposition even if it were ultimately overcome.

My realism is deeply informed and constrained by error theory.  I don;t think that realist moral theory necessarrily or wholly overcomes any of them in some unique or inarguable way, only that realist moral theory -can- overcome them in the same ways and as much as any other realist conception of anything does...if any of them overcome them in the first place.

There will certainly be a point at which I throw up my hands and say "Damned good question, I have no satisfactory answer..but I side with this". and what, praytell, is the explanation for that whenever it arises? Be it an argument between moral theorists or an argument between realists and anti-realism in the general sense> Fucking intuitionism...son-of-a-bitch!

It may in fact be that moral propositions reduce, somehow and eventually, to an ipse dixit conjecture..but that isn't because moral propositions, themselves and alone or uniquely do so, it's endemic to any proposition if we keep asking for explanations of the explanations, including whatever system we use to ask for and assess explanations of explanations...and that fucking sucks, but it may be the way things are, or it may be a limit of human cognition.

: throws up hands :