(March 17, 2026 at 11:45 am)Disagreeable Wrote:(March 17, 2026 at 4:20 am)Paleophyte Wrote: But of course it is. They'd be out of a job if they ever ended a debate. Philosophy is the ancient and venerable art of ensuring that philosophers remain well-fed.
I'd think that the evidence would be pretty obvious.
Slavery? BTDT and used the holy books to excuse it.
Murder? Yeah, we're down with that. Here's a rock, there's a neighbor you've got a beef with. Or if you want to seem modern, she's a witch! Burn her! We're doing it right now under the guise of 'pre-emptive strikes'.
Even your extreme example of infanticide was broken regularly and gleefully. In Ancient Carthage it was a sacred duty, and there's the father-son outing that Abraham and Isaac took up Mount Moriah. These are hardly isolated incidents. The Mayans drowned infants in their sacred cenotes. The Incas drugged them and left them to die of exposure on mountain tops. The Shang dynasty sacrificed thousands, including infants.
Rape, incest, cannibalism... There isn't a taboo that our species has developed that we don't break, frequently on a society-wide basis. Your 'moral facts' are nothing more than the latest trend. Every one of our barbarous ancestors considered themselves moral.
If moral disagreement is evidence of anti-realism then moral convergence is evidence of realism. The fact that as time goes by we have moral progress, such as less slavery than in the past, can be taken as evidence in favor of realism. The fact that people also have moral disagreements isn't really good evidence against realism. Because, again, this can be just neutralized with the opposite evidence of moral progress.
People used to think that the Earth was flat and that bad smells caused diseases. Is this evidence against science? I think not. Progress is evidence of realism.
But personally I don't think that disagreement or convergence are particularly good evidences against or for realism. People can get stuff wrong and people can get stuff right. What people think doesn't say much about what the objective fact of the matter is. Independent evidence or arguments is what really says whether something is objective or not.
You think that progress is when morality happens to match what we consider moral today? Our Victorian era ancestors thought the same thing and used orphans as a cheap source of expendable labour in the mines.


