Proving What We Already "Know"

[The Grand Nudger]

People are inconsistent, we have many faults. You've drawn an inference about the nonexistence of a thing by it's violation, for example. It would make as much sense to say that women don't exist because they're violated. Is this notion one of the things that you hold to be so true and so apparently true that you'd have to doubt your entire worldview if it were not?

I don't think morality is a special case, personally. I think any morality that required a person to hold to objective untruth would be a poor morality - but ofc I would think that as a realist, eh? Similarly, I don't think that a persons willingness to do an immoral thing (or societies failure to be aligned with our moral goals aat a given point in time) suggests that there can be no moral truth. I can know it's not a good idea to have that second piece of cake and still do it, too. My eating that second piece of cake doesn't change anything about it, or whether or not I should. Society may strongly insist that I do eat that piece of cake, maybe it's my birthday, or maybe it's rude to refuse, etc etc etc.

Perhaps that's a hangup that leads to the question of how we prove what we know? You're looking for a special case. There's a possibility that morality is not, in fact, a special case. You mention that x can be violated, and so, a defeater for that argument on it's own grounds could only be to show that this x is not violated...morality's special case there being some hoped for ability to prevent us from doing bad things, because (or when, or if) we notice that they're bad. We can (at least potentially) prove our moral statements in the same way we can prove our names or that the sun rises in the east - but having done so won't grant some further ability or desired state of affairs, and so, seeing that this desired state of affairs fails to materialize is not a demonstration that the moral assertions cannot be true or have not been proven true. If I say "x is bad because of a b and c" and you take a look..and, objectively, a b and c are all present - in what way has this moral statement failed to accurately report the relevant facts of an object? If someone then did x, would a b and c suddenly not be there?

That rights don't exist or that morality is subjective because rapists rape, because they can't do things no one claims they can do, and no one expects them to do... is...to put it bluntly, nonsense. Morality may in fact be subjective..but that certainly isn't a cogent approach to proving that truth, if you already know it, and your entire worldview depends on it. What you're angling for when considering objective morality (or rights) is something akin to a natural law, where we only have the right not to be raped if we cannot, in fact, be raped. Where morality is only objective if no other outcome can prevail. That's not what rights or objective morality are, but if that's what you go out looking for you won't find much of it and I suppose that could easily lead to statements such as these in your posts. I usually tell people, when it becomes clear that they're looking for some greater or grander x than objective moral statements are or even can be - to think smaller. More mundane.

It's true that objective moral statements can't do many things x, that they fail to force many outcomes x - but all that matters with respect to their objectivity as opposed to their subjectivity, is that they accurately report a set of relevant facts about a thing which do not depend on a given observer.