Veganism

[Thumpalumpacus]

You just said you found the idea of morality existing without a mind to encompass it incoherent?  We're the only known minds so I started there.   I could add aliens, and robots, and anything else we want to imagine as having a mind and that detail also doesn't matter to what realism is saying.  I could take away all the known (or hypothetical) minds and it still wouldn't matter to what moral realism is saying - because moral realism is talking about mind independence in the sense that the facts which a valid and true moral proposition refers to would be facts regardless of whether or how many minds did apprehend things that way, or even if no minds did.

So, for example, let's say that current livestock management is done the way it is not because of any mind involved, but because some set of great and ancient but truly simple analog machines designed for another thing, whose creators have long since vanished, has gone off kilter through time and wear.... this is the product of it's unthinking unguided actions.  Change anything about the harm to animals or the environment, or is that harm still there, unapprehended and unencompassed by any mind?

I would say the harm is still there.

If a tree falls onto a cow and kills it, is that moral, immoral, or morally irrelevant? Why or why not? The cow sure ain't happy. The tree sure ain't happy for being broken. But somehow this has a moral aspect even though none of it is mindful?