(March 16, 2026 at 7:19 pm)Disagreeable Wrote:(March 16, 2026 at 7:01 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: Can you point to any "moral facts"?
Well for me personally I think that the fact that engaging in some actions or following some rules tend to increase suffering and engaging in some actions or following some rules tend to decrease suffering are examples of moral facts.
But there are other theories. Some philosophers think that moral facts are non-natural abstract facts that we can know through intuition. There is a philosopher, Michael Huemer, for example, who has said that if moral realism isn't true then if nobody thought that recreational baby torture was wrong then it wouldn't be wrong but it would clearly be wrong no matter what anybody thinks, so that's one example of a moral fact, therefore moral realism is true.
Personally I don't think that non-naturalism is plausible. And I don't think that intuition is enough to know that moral facts exist. I think that we can know what's good and bad phenomenologically through our experiences of happiness or suffering, and then we can know that encouraging actions that decrease overall suffering is moral and encouraging actions that increase overall suffering is immoral, for example.
Even that relies upon an individual defining the minimization of suffering as a moral good, which is of necessity a subjective definition.


