Proving What We Already "Know"

[The Grand Nudger]

The problem is that 500 pages of facts that don't answer the moral question still don't answer the moral question.  Instead, they serve as a red herring.

Perhaps not to you, but that may be down to you preferring some other moral system.  In moral realism, that's exactly what answers a moral question - and the only thing that answers a moral question.

If the question is, "Why do you define change of state of a mountain as harm, and why is it bad?" there's really no point listing how deforestation causes erosion which leads to landslides and silt in the water table from which people draw their water, how using explosives to open a mine breaks large sections of mountain into rubble and so on.

Seems like -the- point, to me.  What else do you think a realist is talking about when they talk about bad things, harmful things....than things like erosion, landslides, water pollution, and detriment to the health of plants and wildlife, through the destruction of the the natural environment?

These so-called objective facts are meaningless without there ALREADY being some evaluation of current-state, feared-state, desired-state, and so on, most of which are not factual in an existential sense.

They're not meaningless, you're just asserting the basis of your preferred moral systems.  It's the whole "prove it's coherent" thing all over again.

I think that a much more illustrative question will be whether or not you approach all facts this way, or only moral facts? Every asserted fact in your many doomed arguments against moral realism, for example? Are they facts, or similarly meaningless without evaluations of your fear and desire states, which are themselves not factual in an existential sense? Would the fact that a thing apprehended as bad can be desired and not feared be a factual refutation of your claim here? Or is that equally meaningless? We're obviously not afraid of mountaintop removal mining, and we clearly want the stuff.

As for changes from some then-current state. Your current state is to prefer some other moral system. As you tell it, you prefer the others because they allow you to say and believe what you do right now, and because realism would mean that you had to acknowledge things you'd rather not. Could this be the actual source of your objection to moral realism, all these meaningless assertions to fact being irrelevant to that belief, which is not (and need not be) accurate with respect to any existential reality?