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Music to my ears. Thank you for setting the record straight. It’s so satisfying when someone puts into words exactly what you think so concisely, persuasively, and with such razor-sharp clarity. I wish I had a million dollars lying around to give you. Listening to people argue for moral realism has been just driving me crazy. Indeed, I started to think that I was crazy because I couldn’t put into words my very strong intuitions as to why moral realism is just an absolute nonstarter as a theory. You’ve given me those words and I’m so, so grateful. 🥲 Thank you, and may you succeed in all your future endeavors!

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Lance S. Bush's avatar

Always good to see more people pushing antirealism. However, I think you give realists too much credit. You say:

"There is an intuitive appeal to thinking moral rules can be objectively true or false, since we each2 consider the morals we approve of to be correct and morals that conflict with them to be wrong, and it is vary natural to express this in the language of truth and falsity. It is natural for people to say things like ‘it is false that intentional killing is always wrong. What about war, or self-defense?’"

An intuitive appeal to who? I don’t find this intuitive or appealing, and I don’t think most people do, either. I don’t think my moral standards are “correct” in an objective/stance-independent way, and I don’t think typical English treats moral claims in a presumptively realist way. I don’t know how other languages treat moral discourse, if they even have it. That’s an empirical question.

I checked endnote 2. It says "except for a few philosophers." But ... how do you know it's just a few philosophers? Whether most people find realism intuitively appealing is an empirical question. At present, there is very little evidence to suggest most people do, and the more rigorous empirical studies have found that a majority of respondents favor antirealist responses to questions about metaethics. I think there are methodological concerns with these studies, but even so, what we do not have is any good evidence that most people find moral realism intuitively appealing.

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