“Nihilism” sounds bad but I think it’s smuggling in connotations I don’t endorse.
I’m far from a professional philosopher but I don’t see how you could possibly make substantive claims about desirability from a pure meta-ethical perspective. But you definitely can make substantive claims about desirability from a social perspective and personal perspective. The reason we don’t debate racist normative advice is because we’re not racists. I don’t see any other way to determine this.
Distinguish how we determine something from what we are determining.
There’s a trivial sense in which all thought is “subjective”. Even science ultimately comes down to personal perspectives on what you perceive as the result of an experiment, and how you think the data should be interpreted (as supporting some or another more general theory). But it would be odd to conclude from this that our scientific verdicts are just claims about how the world appears to us, or what’s reasonable to conclude relative to certain stipulated ancillary assumptions. Commonsense scientific realists instead take our best judgments to reflect fallible verdicts about a mind-independent truth of the matter. The same goes for commonsense moral realists.
“Nihilism” sounds bad but I think it’s smuggling in connotations I don’t endorse.
I’m far from a professional philosopher but I don’t see how you could possibly make substantive claims about desirability from a pure meta-ethical perspective. But you definitely can make substantive claims about desirability from a social perspective and personal perspective. The reason we don’t debate racist normative advice is because we’re not racists. I don’t see any other way to determine this.
Distinguish how we determine something from what we are determining.
There’s a trivial sense in which all thought is “subjective”. Even science ultimately comes down to personal perspectives on what you perceive as the result of an experiment, and how you think the data should be interpreted (as supporting some or another more general theory). But it would be odd to conclude from this that our scientific verdicts are just claims about how the world appears to us, or what’s reasonable to conclude relative to certain stipulated ancillary assumptions. Commonsense scientific realists instead take our best judgments to reflect fallible verdicts about a mind-independent truth of the matter. The same goes for commonsense moral realists.