Morality

[The Grand Nudger]

Not at all, which is why I've been trying to familiarize you with moral realism.  


To a non natural realist, the badness of the thing is directly apprehended by the intellect.  It's a non empirical fact which is only coincidentally informed by the empirical facts of the matter (say, harm).  A property that some object has, that many otherwise disparate objects -can- have. 

To a natural realist, the badness of the thing is shorthand for observing a grab bag of empirical properties.  Harm is used illustratively as an umbrella term for these...but it can get needlingly specific depending on which variant of natural realism one refers to.  

So, on the one hand, it's not actually true that a moral fact is an evaluative premise or proposition on it's face..but, if it were..that poses no more difficulty than certifying any other list of empirical premises or propositions.

Do you find that objection difficult to handle in your own divine morality, and how do you address it?

You just seem to be dancing around the question.

So we'll simply if for, with Yes or No, which you can elaborate on if you choose: 

Calling the holocaust morally bad, is a value judgement. Yes or No?

Depends on who you ask, and it's not particularly troubling if it is in that persons answer - as you just quoted me explaining to you.

Values judgements are evaluative proposition, Yes or No?

Are you actually answer these questions head on, or just dance around them like Sarah Huckabee?

Shuckabee!

Why would it matter?  A realist would tell you that we make value judgements by reference to moral facts.  The facts are not themselves the value judgment, but the standard judged by.  Our value judgements are subject to all of our flaws, regardless of whether or not there are moral facts, or that we possess those moral facts, or the manner in which we apprehend those moral facts.  

The objection you've been failing to competently field..is actually not a subjectivist, relativist, or nihilist objection.  It's the objection of moral disagreement...which is also an issue between competing realist camps.  The way it goes is like so.  First, we insist that there is something potentially or meaningfully subjective (or in whatever sense unique) to a persons moral appraisals.  Be it their facts, their evaluative premises, their conclusions...whatever.    

-So far so good, realists also think that this is true.  

Now, having established that, we'll invent someone to disagree with some moral fact, evaluative premise, or conclusion.  Voila, moral disagreement is produced.

-Moral realists also acknowledge that moral disagreement exists.

Now, we posit the question "What do you say to that, huh, how do you prove them wrong?"

-Indeed.  Though the answer is commonly anticlimactic.  

The same way we prove anyone else wrong about any other thing.  We lay out the observations we refer to as facts, we arrange those facts as sound propositions in a valid form of inference.  We then show how the conclusion follows from the propositions.  

....Or.....

If you're a non natural realist, you can just pull a Tim, and tell them to look at the bones!

"But what if that doesn't work?"

-Cages, bricks. Realists also acknowledge that there are people who either cannot be reasoned with, or who have diminished or damage faculties of observation, or are in possession of an alternative set of empirical facts of a matter x with moral import.

You, for example, have indicated that your moral conclusions hinge on the veracity of an empirical fact of a god and having been made in it's image. For a natural realist, or a non natural realist, the solution to the holocaust is simply to show that those facts about the holocaust to which they refer are true. You, on the other hand... must establish that....and... the factual existence of a god, in whose image you are made..for your moral conclusions to be true.

Suppose you both used the same emperical propositions and they are true? In a universe where there is a god you are both correct, though the other guy didn't need your god. In a universe where there is no god..you are not correct, but the other guy still is. You aren't disputing what he considers the moral facts - you both claimed the same to be true, you are disputing some emperical god fact.

This, in sum, is why moral disagreement isn't quite as toothy an objection as people think it is when they first dive into the subject. We disagree about everything, that doesn't mean that none of us can be right about anything..or at least we don't think it means that.