Any Nihilists here?

[The Grand Nudger]

The same way that anything is purported to be objectively right or wrong. This is what I;m talking about with frustration. Theres no trick, theres no other shoe, There's nothing up the sleeve.

If I want to make the case that assault is objectively wrong I will appeal to the details and consequences of assault. That's the only way -to- make an objective case. About anything. It's the same way we posit every other fact.

[FrustratedFool]

I think your frustration is coming from the fact that moral statements aren't like other facts not from the fact that they are.

For example, how did you come to believe and maintain the assent that WW2 occurred or that the sea is wet and blue?

Now compare how you came to believe that assault is wrong. I suspect that you had different journeys to those beliefs and hold to them for different reasons.

It seems you cannot offer me any argument or evidence for assault being objectively wrong. Whereas you could convince me of some historical fact.

[The Grand Nudger]

Why aren't they? In what way would my description of the details and consequences of an assault be a different kind of fact or set of facts than any other?

Fundamentally, I'd share your concern here. I wouldn't want to assert moral facts that were unlike any other kind of fact.

[FrustratedFool]

Let's find out and see.

A) Alex punches Bob. This damages Bob and hurts him. We can then say, generally, that punching people hurts people. If I was unconvinced of this I could be presented with the evidence via sense datum that it is so, and could reasonably be convinced.

B) Alex has a one metre long length of rope. I can use a rule/measure to measure that rope and become convinced that it is, truly, one metre long.

These are similar.

But where is the statement 'Alex punching Bob was wrong' coming from? How is that being measured, observed, deduced?

Oughts don't follow from is. And moral statements are oughts.

[The Grand Nudger]

I suppose nowhere if, while being punched in the face, you're fine with it? Boxers do it for a living.

[FrustratedFool]

Whether fine with it or not it still wouldn't be coming from anywhere.

It would still be the same ballpark methodology to argue that Bob being hurt/punched was against his preferences and the measure of the one metre rope.

But then adding on the extra statement, 'And thus punching people who don't want to be punched is objectively wrong' is coming from out of space. It cannot be verified or falsified, cannot be observed or measured etc.

What units is 'wrongness' measured in? How are they detected? How can the wrongness of punching be falsified or verified?

You get the gist. They are different. The thing you said you wanted to avoid. That's why, I suspect, you find trying to convince someone of moral realism more frustrating than, say, convincing them of some historical or physical fact.

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm really not sure what to do with that. It wouldn't be coming from anywhere? Any cognitive statement can be verified or falsified. That's what it means to be such a statement. That it's capable of being true or false. So, for example, if we want to know whether it's okay to punch someone in the face....we ask them......? This hardly seems like a moral or factual dilemma.

I guess they could lie, and say they were cool with it when they weren't....but it doesn't seem like we'd be morally responsible in that case.

[FrustratedFool]

It wouldn't be coming from anywhere except your intuition. That's the problem.

You can't derive oughts from an is, Hume was right on that. And the logical positivists and emotionalists were correct in that all moral statements boil down to just yay/boo responses that have no objective grounding, unlike statements of physical fact.

Moral language is quite different to other language, I'm afraid.

Every moral injunction, like 'You shouldn't punch infants' etc, can always be met with a 'Why?'. It's why all the way down. For most other fact statements there is a bottom point where it simply is and can be verified and falsified as such.

Saying that Biden is POTUS and a human is entirely different to saying that murder is wrong.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well there's our disconnect. It's not because you're a nihilist that you disagree with me, a realist. It's because you're a noncognitivist. You think that things mean things, just not the things they purport to mean. I'm sure we do alot of that too. I'm just not convinced it's all we do.

You do realize that I could ask you an endless procession of whys about the very claim you just made, right? This doesn't distinguish a purported moral fact from any other. I'm not gonna bore you by drawing that out. I could cut to the chase. You're not going to find anything logically amiss in moral realism. It literally -is- the idea that we should only make fact/fact-alike statements in moral propositions. The best criticism is probably that, insomuch as strict realism expresses true propositions, they are trivially true, trivially moral. The hard questions are still hard. Perhaps harder, with more exacting criteria.

[FrustratedFool]

We've already laid aside the nihilist term since we mean different things by it.

But we have a disconnect in terms of moral realism because as a physicalist I can't see that something that can only be accessed by intuition has any likelihood of being an objective external truth.

So, I guess we have an impasse. I sincerely don't believe in objective moral values, and hold that all morality is just preference (whether chosen or innate).

Previously you had suggested that someone couldn't live as such, but I do. Do you agree that I do, and that therefore some can?