Atheism and Ethics

[Lucian]

I think...that you're wondering..how I overcome any and all logical challenges to a given moral schema.  The short answer is that I don't.  I accept the limitations of those things I advocate for.  The possible and existential ambiguities.  I think that's the only honest or genuine thing to do.  

That is totally fair. I don’t have completely compelling reasons for a lot of what I believe. If I were to go back to my Christian friends though and say that there is objective morality without god as it seems that way then they will reject that. I agree with your points that not believing something doesn’t make it false; but that again is what they say about their god.

So, when I think about moral facts - I think it's a necessarily small set. There are more things...and many more things...in the world...than moral things. This is sometimes called minimal or skinny realism. There is a large set of moral assertions. The vast majority are false in-fact. Some portion are ambiguous. There is at least or could be one (or some small number) that are true..and true-in-fact. In my experience, the moral landscape is so cluttered that it's often useful to do even a brief one by one about moral assertions and facts in order to pick out subtle but consequential differences in a given schema. Pick some specific moral assertion - I'll just tell you what I think...and the whys can be easily drilled down..or not..in which case..I'm in error..and the assertion to fact was not a fact, in-fact. Objectively speaking

I think that this is a good position explaining moral disagreement being compatible with moral realism, but only if we accept moral realism to begin with. I think that the argument from moral disagreement is often too readily accepted. Perhaps societies differ because of self-interest by their leaders for example, and this influences how people think. That wouldn’t mean that there was no truth that they are departing from.  


Perhaps a different direction could be interesting here. With is we assume that moral realism is true, how do you see these properties influencing the world? Do they somehow motivate people to act, or do they simply exist as a standard like a standardised measurement that we can be closer to or not? If there is some motivational input how does that happen and if it is just like a standard measurement, why should we care if we are close or not?