Morality

[The Grand Nudger]

We've decided to call the holocaust being bad a moral fact, remember?  

What you and I might mean by this are two different things, you don’t subscribe to my form of realism. In an external reality that posses moral aims, or a transcendent moral law.

Or as the Buddhist scholar Bodhi puts it:

“. If morality is to function as an efficient guide to conduct, it cannot be propounded as a self-justifying scheme but must be embedded in a more comprehensive spiritual system which grounds morality in a transpersonal order. Religion must affirm, in the clearest terms, that morality and ethical values are not mere decorative frills of personal opinion, not subjective superstructure, but intrinsic laws of the cosmos built into the heart of reality."

You don’t believe in such a moral reality.

You mean I don't believe in such a -spiritual- reality.  No, I don't.  I'm a moral realist, not a moral spiritualist.  Thing is, the empirical fact of a spiritual world is irrelevant to my moral positions anyway. They don't have anything to do with the empirical fact of a spiritual world. Only whether there are moral facts of a matter x..what they are, and what valid conclusions can be drawn from them.

Not a value judgement, or an evaluative proposition.

If thats a moral fact, then, no, in a realists moral description it is neither a value judgement or an evaluative proposition.

It as an evaluative proposition, bad is a value judgement, as a result holocaust being bad is an evaluative judgement.  Now for me evaluative propositions  can be facts, but you on the other had reject this. As  result  your position contradicts itself, if evaluative proposition can’t be facts, then the holocaust being bad can’t be a fact.

You expect us to close our eyes and deny that that attaching a moral value of bad to the holocaust, isn’t an evaluative judgement. It’s like saying “it’s raining outside, but I don’t believe it.”

I think that our evaluative premises are not moral facts...that doesn't mean that evaluative propositions can't be facts. So nothing above is relevant to what I think.

Here's what I think. I think you should stop looking for ways that moral realism is somehow incoherent or contradictory. It's simply not. It may be wrong, that case can always be made, but it's coherence is not novel or based upon any novel thing.

It posits that there are moral facts of a matter x. It derives deontological obligations by applying an evaluative premise (at least one) to a purported moral fact. So, in simplified form....

If x is bad
-and if y contains x
-and if we want to avoid the bad
Then we should not do y.

For this statement above to be incoherent..rather than just wrong...we would be discussing a situation in which a much more dire problem faces us than the ontological status of morality.

To use our example.

If holocaust is bad
-and if the course of action in front of us includes holocaust
-and if we want to avoid the bad
Then we should not pursue the course of action in front of us.

We can reformulate this to include holocaust being bad as the conclusion of an evaluative premise, but we will then need some distinct moral fact..so

If X is bad
-and if holocaust contains x
-and we want to avoid the bad
Then we should not do holocaust.

In this second case, we can see that the statement "and if holocaust contains x" is potentially a factual statement, but it's not the moral fact, which is that x is bad.

So....now....I'm going to include your empirical fact of a spiritual world..just so you can see why it doesn't concern me.

There is a spiritual world.
If x is bad
-and if y contains x
-and if we want to avoid the bad
Then we should not do y.

There is no spiritual world.
If x is bad
-and if y contains x
-and if we want to avoid the bad
Then we should not do y.

Can you identify any moral or deontological difference in the statements above on account of the empirical fact of a spiritual worlds existence being posited in either direction?