[Serious] Moral Obligations toward Possible Worlds

[The Grand Nudger]

That's my response most of the time, too. To an extent, I think it's an effect of having been bred for affability.

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You've explicitly and repeatedly made such an argument, laying out examples of moral disagreements, and then declaring that is it thus clear that we're arguing opinions or intuitions rather than facts.

No, I have not.  As I prefaced my very first post, I'm not arguing whether or not there are moral facts or that if such facts exist we cannot reason from them.  What I have argued is that there appears to be no way to inspect moral propositions other than intuition.  

-all evidence to the contrary in both cases - we're rationally inspecting moral propositions in this very thread - and none of the moral disagreements you reference or that we have imply or demonstrate that we have no way other than intuition to do so.  

All reasoning starts from things which are assumed to be true.  Thus all reasoning is without an ultimate rational foundation.  This is no less true of arguments about color than it is about morals.  What is different is that there appears to be rough consensus about which things are reasonable to assume in the case of color, but not as much in the case of morals.  Color is rooted in experience.  What is the experience of morals rooted in?  So far you've given me no alternative to intuition.

I would certainly agree that morality is no more objective than color and that all rational positions inherit the limits of reason. I think that a more thorough review of the descriptive moral field might lead you to a different conclusion about consensus in moral foundations. That still doesn't put them out of the weeds with regards to my own skepticism - but if this sort of thing interests you it's a fascinating subject.

The apparent (and apparently severe) disagreement over abortion, for example, doesn't often arise out of any actual disagreement over the moral nature of the act of killing a child, or even the issue of whether we have responsibilities to them. Even in thematically religious terms - it doesn't arise out of a body of literature that agrees with either side of the issue in this regard - despite the line being firmly planted in the general vicinity of religious demographics. To use Vulcans example...anti-abortion sentiment seems to have a causal relationship with religiosity that it doesn't have with moral disagreement. This, I would say, is good evidence of intuition driving a moral conclusion - but the mere existence of rational counterarguments which directly address that intuition while accepting their assertions to moral facts would also, then, be an indication of the availability of reason to moral systems and statements.

In a realists formulation, and trying to account for the idea that on balance moral objections to abortion are misplaced - it would seem as though the arguer apprehends a little less than half of the moral import of the situation - and..generously, a human being can be shown some other portion of a thing they didn't previously see and resolve whatever disagreement exists. Ideally, when you go to explain the relevance of that other portion, you'll leverage something that they already believe about things like that. This is why we so often ask about our responsibilities to the mother when told we have responsibilities to other people like unborn children. To the taxpayer when told about the mother. To society when told about the taxpayer - so on and so forth.

All of that - but..in a truly objective moral system, it's almost inevitable that some moral questions won't just have disagreements, but would be completely unresolvable in actuality, not as a result of some mistake or misapprehension or some specific inability of a moral agent. It's possible for two things to have equivalent weight or value. More than just possible - happens all the time.