he most important reason for my favoring moral realism is my sense that some goals
Your sense is just vibes.
In the same way that some things are true and worth believing, some things are good and worth desiring.
Some things may be true depending on what you mean by true. worth believing would presuppose realism depending on what you mean by “worth”. If this sentence matters to your argument then the whole thing is circular.
We should ultimately find the notion of justified goals to be no more deeply mysterious than that of justified beliefs.
obviously not true, but peter addresses this.
To deny the objective reality of either goodness or truth would seem to undermine inquiry, and there’s no deeply compelling reason to do so.
again you are presupposing and/or being circular.
There isn’t a coherent argument here. It’s just you coming to the table with your priors and handwaving them. I appreciate you saying your piece but I don’t find this even mildly compelling and struggling to understand the level of agreement.
Everyone has fundamental assumptions. You could imagine someone who disagrees with yours calling them “just vibes” or “presuppositions”, but that doesn’t yet establish that there’s anything wrong with your assumptions. To show an error, the critic would need to put forward some (disputable) positive claims of their own.
The level of agreement just shows that plenty of others share my starting assumptions.
If you take arguments to be “circular” whenever a determined opponent could dispute them, I have news for you: there is no such thing as an argument that lacks this feature. (See my note on the limits of argumentation.)
I am trying to articulate (probably wrongly) the disconnect I perceive here. I think ‘vibes’ might sound condescending, but ultimately, you seem to agree with assumptions (like math axioms) not being amenable to disputation. Like, technically, in philosophical practice, one can try to show, I imagine, that given assumption x some contradiction (or at least, something very generally perceived as wrong and undesirable) follows.
I do share the feeling expressed by Charlie Guthmann here that a lot of starting arguments for moral realists are just of the type ‘x is obvious/self-evident/feels good to be/feels worth believing’, and when stated in that way, they feel equally obviously false to those who don’t share those intuitions, and as magical thinking (‘If you really want something, the universe conspires to make it come about’ Paulo Coelho style). I feel more productive engaging strategies should just avoid altogether any claims of the mentioned sort, and perhaps start with stating what might follow from realist assumptions that might be convincing/persuasive to the other side, and vice versa.
Your sense is just vibes.
Some things may be true depending on what you mean by true. worth believing would presuppose realism depending on what you mean by “worth”. If this sentence matters to your argument then the whole thing is circular.
obviously not true, but peter addresses this.
again you are presupposing and/or being circular.
There isn’t a coherent argument here. It’s just you coming to the table with your priors and handwaving them. I appreciate you saying your piece but I don’t find this even mildly compelling and struggling to understand the level of agreement.
Everyone has fundamental assumptions. You could imagine someone who disagrees with yours calling them “just vibes” or “presuppositions”, but that doesn’t yet establish that there’s anything wrong with your assumptions. To show an error, the critic would need to put forward some (disputable) positive claims of their own.
The level of agreement just shows that plenty of others share my starting assumptions.
If you take arguments to be “circular” whenever a determined opponent could dispute them, I have news for you: there is no such thing as an argument that lacks this feature. (See my note on the limits of argumentation.)
I am trying to articulate (probably wrongly) the disconnect I perceive here. I think ‘vibes’ might sound condescending, but ultimately, you seem to agree with assumptions (like math axioms) not being amenable to disputation. Like, technically, in philosophical practice, one can try to show, I imagine, that given assumption x some contradiction (or at least, something very generally perceived as wrong and undesirable) follows.
I do share the feeling expressed by Charlie Guthmann here that a lot of starting arguments for moral realists are just of the type ‘x is obvious/self-evident/feels good to be/feels worth believing’, and when stated in that way, they feel equally obviously false to those who don’t share those intuitions, and as magical thinking (‘If you really want something, the universe conspires to make it come about’ Paulo Coelho style). I feel more productive engaging strategies should just avoid altogether any claims of the mentioned sort, and perhaps start with stating what might follow from realist assumptions that might be convincing/persuasive to the other side, and vice versa.