[Serious] Generally speaking, is philosophy a worthwhile subject of study?

[The Grand Nudger]

It might help to be sure that you're correct in your reasoning there, Poly, rather than referring to some small subset of some ethics, or even aesthetics. The point, at any rate, is not to get fundamental assumptions (those would be axioms - and we can play with any number of them, in any groupings), but conclusions about fundamentals.

The ethicist I offered as an example didn't start with any fundamental ethical assertions, or assertions about any proper ethics in describing what he calls the geometry of desert. Didn't end with any assertions of any particular or proper ethics either. He studied the relationships and correlations between ethical statements as they exist, out in the wild. He discovered that ideas about desert are quantifiable, predictable, testable, even repeatable. They're also falsifiable.

This would strongly suggest that whether or not we actually succeed - we're at least trying to be moral objectivists. Not biological or cultural relativists, or subjectivists. Does he think we get it right at least sometimes by that set of metrics that has every defining factor of a scientific hypothesis or idea...yeah. I think scientists get things right, at least sometimes, too.

Perhaps, if you wanted to see objective ethics, you'd have to read about objective ethics, rather than descriptive relativism? That's also the case in the sciences, right, you don't read something by a botanist if you want to learn about birds. You go to an ornithologist for that. It would certainly be ludicrous to say "these scientists don't know shit about birds" because a botanist kept telling you about plants, after you sought out a botanist to ask about birds. I mention this, because objectivism, moral realism, is the majority position in normative ethics.