Any Nihilists here?

[The Grand Nudger]

Sure, we'll use it as a nihilist acid test, too.

What I mean by moral realism is that moral utterances are attempts to reports facts, and since they're attempts to report facts we should treat them as we treat any other attempt to report a fact. Whether that's disregarding them for being poorly founded, or accepting them for being well evidenced and demonstrably true.

In short, that moral utterances can be right -or- wrong, in fact.

[FrustratedFool]

Seems fair.
Do you mean objective facts or subjective facts?

Like, if I say I like cake, is that a factual statement on a par with moral statements like murder is evil, to you? I mean, if I say I like cake it would still be a factvthat I like cake.

[The Grand Nudger]

Objective, ofc, though that's not to suggest that in any empathetic and compassionate moral system we can totally ignore the subjective. There are, as you just said, subjective facts as well.

You say you like cake, I'm willing to believe you like cake. I like to think I have even more evidence that murder is evil than that you like cake. I guess you could be lying, and you actually hate cake - but that would still be a realist proposition. True -or- false.

[FrustratedFool]

OK. So you believe that there's some objective truth value to moral statements.

Why?

[The Grand Nudger]

For the same reasons that I believe there is truth to any other equivalent proposition - like my own name.

[FrustratedFool]

I'm not sure I follow, sorry.

How would you convince me that moral statements are objective factual statements?

[The Grand Nudger]

It's always frustrating to explain to people that I would do this the same way that I would attempt to convince you of literally any other fact. Moral realism is not a novel position. It's considering moral propositions the same way we consider any other purported fact.

[FrustratedFool]

I appreciate the frustration.

When talking about factual statements that we would both agree are factual/objective, such as agreeing upon the colour of an object we both see in front of us, it seems we can frame our understanding of that objective truth in terms of a statement's verifiability or falsifiability, in empiricism and measurement and sense data, in terms of deduction and logic. And it seems that objective external truths would exist regardless of subjective observers - even if there were no conscious beings to observe it, the earth would still be floating in space.

But with moral statements I can't see how any of those things can even apply. How can we measure, test, observe, falsify, and so on, any moral statement? How can murder be wrong if no agents exist? Etc.

It seems to me that the only ways to hold to moral realism is to either a) place great value on personal intuition, or b) place great value on some source of authority, like divine revelation.

Where am I going wrong?

[The Grand Nudger]

Think about something like assault. Even if human beings were just a hypothetical race - say this was before we came to be or after we cease to be - the explanation for why it is wrong to assault us will hold (or fall) regardless of whether we really, or still...exist...or not.

[FrustratedFool]

I don't see how. That would posit moral truths to be something like a platonic mathematical realm. But with maths we have logical rules within an a priori system that can be described to universal assent. Moral statements appear vastly different.

Let's take just that one example of assault. How can you show me, either by argumentation or by shared external observations, that assault is objectively wrong?