Proving What We Already "Know"

[bennyboy]

I'm confused how a moral system works, in your view.  I agree that a social consensus is a poor basis for objective morality-- because if you look at the objective mores across time, they are often polar opposites.  One would assume that truth itself is unambiguous.

Not, not poor, completely invalid.  That's not what objectivism is.  Moralities of social consensus are moral relativism.  

But I can only see an objective MECHANISM for morality-- feelings predicated on hormones predicated on brain function predicated on DNA predicated on pre-humans, pre-mammals, pre-vertebrates and so on.  An incredible amount of living and dying has gone into every SHOULD decision that we make.

Feelings predicated on hormones is not an objective mechanism.  That's noncognitivism - distinct from realism, relativism, and subjectivism..because it's not about truth apt statements at all - emotivism, instinctualism, etc.  "Yuck!" "Yay!" and "Rawr!" are not true or false propositions about anything.  

What would an objective fact be, and how would it do anything other than sway which subjective mores we adopt in a particular culture, clime or era?  (not an argument, by the way, but I need some simple and concrete examples in order to really understand what you're saying)

You see all the claims to fact you've made in this post?  That's you purporting to report facts.  Realism or objectivism are systems in which moral statements are handled the same way.  That's it, that's all.

Is a realist understanding that important or useful?  Sometimes.  Let's ask the witches.

I've never been too much a fan of "-isms."  Overcategorization always reminds me of when I read 20,000 Leagues under the sea as a kid.  There would be several pages of exciting, swashbuckling adventure, and then Verne would make a big point of cataloguing a few dozen fucking sea creatures by their Latin names.

The problem is that "-isms" gloss over or straight-up amplify the kinds of categorical conflations that we're talking about-- putting an idea in a box doesn't actually give us any useful tools for approaching knowledge, or for proving anything other than which "-ism" cranks our respective shafts.

Or to bring things back to the OP thesis-- they represent academic contexts, and if the truths held in one are to be useful among the others, the question remains-- how do we do that?