“Normative” ethical theories

[The Grand Nudger]

It doesn't really matter at this point whether I'm defending the statement. We could pick any moral statement, including one we don't agree with. One we think is false. We could, alternatively, pick a moral statement that something is good..again whether we agree with it or not. The point of the question being what mechanical difference there is between the statements.

Just as you, by the end, come around to the notion that there are murder facts - in your case facts about one killing or another that make some killings murder and some not, moral realists may think that badness is a murder fact, and they may not think that badness is a killing fact. So, when they say that murder is bad, they mean more or less the same sort of thing they would mean if they told you nyx was a black cat. They're not trying to tell you a Lucian fact. They're not trying to tell you a Nudger fact. That is, facts about themselves (or us). They're not even trying to tell you a killing fact. They mean what they say, rightly or wrongly. Let's approach this objection from the other statement though. When we say (in the thought experiment) that nyx is a black cat do we say that because we'd prefer nyx was not a white cat? Because it would make us happier if we treated nyx as though he were a black cat? Would we say that nyx cannot be black because there's no standard of blackness? What would we think about those objections to the statement nyx is a black cat?

IIRC, earlier in thread you noted that reducing fact alike statements about ethics to what is essentially a dispute about or description of our favorite flavors of ice cream, or ones we don't like, doesn't seem to capture what we mean when we make such utterances. A moral realist would agree with this, though they would likely agree that we do have favorite flavors of ice cream, and ones we detest. Likewise, there are probably people who like murder a whole bunch....and.....hopefully, even more people who hate it. Thing is, the statement doesn't seem to be about that. That's not what it purports to report.

We reach the first inflection point in our diverging moral options right there. The statement may be miscommunicated. Maybe what we say and what we mean are not interchangeable. As far as an objection to the statement from emotivist content, we'd have to believe that there is no one who likes to murder -and- believes (rightly or wrongly) that it's bad..or conversely that there is no one who detests some thing they believe (rightly or wrongly) is good. We will probably not have to go far in search of counterexamples to this notion. We are likely counterexamples ourselves. Enjoying things we think are unethical and being irritated by things we believe are ethical. I'd like to see more hookers and blow in my life, for starters. I'm not big on jobs, as another. When I say that I should go to work and shouldn't spend all my money at the strip club I'm not communicating my personal preferences. It's a cognitivist statement which stands at odds with those preferences rightly or wrongly in-fact.

IOW, even if the fact alike statement is wrong, it's not wrong because I'm miscommunicating my dislike of strippers and drugs and preference for wage slavery, lol. In most forms of realist moral ideation evidence and reason are the objective standard...and when you think about it it's kind of a no-shit statement, right? OFC they are, or are contended to be, because what else could be. We could have subjective standards, or relative standards, emotivist standards is a harder flex but we could finesse the language to make it work...and at least descriptively speaking, we do. To a moral realist, though, basing a moral statement on those standards may not be false in fact - you could be accurately relating a fact about yourself...but if you purport to report a fact about the object in question and instead make statements and inferences from the subject (or society) in question...you can get it as right as can be and you will still be left with an invalid moral statement. Incorrect not because it does not report a fact, incorrect because it does not report the fact it purports to report. So if you tell me that murder is unethical because you don't like it, I can't help but conclude that you're wrong. That's not why murder -or anything- is unethical....and frankly, I don't believe that you actually believe that. I suspect that you think there's a bit more to it than that. Even enlightened self interest requires more than just our tastes in things.

In conflict, there's this saying about the enemy of our enemy being our friend, but this is not true in the case of moral grounding. A subjectivist, for example, launching emotivist objections to realist grounding is simultaneously launching an objection to subjectivist grounding. Emotivism is a non cognitive moral theory. Subjectivism and realism are cognitive moral theories. They share a dependency denied by the other. If emotivism is true, then realism -and- subjectivism are false. Relativism and error theory too, just for completeness. Also cognitive moral theories.