[Serious] What is goodness?

[Porcupine]

In all of the usual ways.  A crackhead wants crack in the past, present, and future.  Their desire is always harmful, and removing them from the fulfillment of their desire is always helpful.

The way I see it is: the desire itself is not harmful. The desire is morally bad because it leads to harm. But the harm itself that it leads to can still be understood in terms of a violated desire! Sure, the crackhead wants to experience the pleasure of the crack ... but the crackhead doesn't want the moments of experience involving the withdrawal and pain that comes about via that desire for crack. And what is the experience of that withdrawal and pain like? It's like "I really don't want to feel this way. Give me some crack." Desires can be in conflict. And, like I said, some desires can be stronger than others. When one first starts taking an addictive substance the strongest desire may indeed be a desire for pleasure---but once one becomes an addict the strongest desire tends to be the desire to not be in pain. More specifically---the desire to not be in the pain of withdrawal that one is in when one is not taking the addictive substance.

Again, realists do not refer to -any- fact of the subject as moral grounding.  They can't, that's the defining issue between subjectivism and objectivism.

Once again---that's not necessarily the case. There are versions of moral realism called 'minimal moral realism' that absolutely do not have this requirement for moral realism. See, for instance, Connie .S. Rosati---who in The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics wrote a chapter called 'Mind-Dependence and Moral Realism' in which Connie argues that the mind-idependence requirement for moral realism needs to be rejected. And Connie is not alone in this view.

  Realists deny that facts of the subject are moral facts, therefore...for a realist, nothing can be explained, morally, by reference to those facts.

This is silly to me because, in fact, the opposite is true---there can be no moral values without reference to the subject because it is only the subject that can suffer or have values. But this doesn't necessarily stop me from being a moral realist. I don't have to resort what is called 'simple subjectivism'. Once again, see Connie .S. Rosati and other minimal moral realists.

P.S. Minimal moral realism may be the minority sort of moral realism---but it is still, nevertheless, generally accepted in contemporary metaethics that the mind-independence requirement is only a requirement for robust moral realism and that it is not necessarily a requirement for minimal moral realism.