Working to reduce extreme suffering for all sentient beings.
Author of Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications; Reasoned Politics; & Essays on Suffering-Focused Ethics.
Co-founder (with Tobias Baumann) of the Center for Reducing Suffering (CRS).
Thanks for writing this, Lukas. :-)
As a self-identified moral realist, I did not find my own view represented in this post, although perhaps Railton’s naturalist position is the one that comes the closest. I can identify both as an objectivist, a constructivist, and a subjectivist, indeed even a Randian objectivist. It all rests on what the nature of the ill-specified “subject” in question is. If one is an open individualist, then subjectivism and objectivism will, one can argue, collapse into one. According to open individualism, the adoption of Randianism (or, in Sidgwick’s terminology, “rational egoism”) implies that we should do what is best for all sentient beings. In other words, subjectivism without indefensibly demarcated subjects (or at least subjects whose demarcation is not granted unjustifiable metaphysical significance) is equivalent with objectivism. Or so I would argue.
As for Moore’s open question argument (which I realize was not explored in much depth here), it seems to me, as has been pointed out by others, that there can be an ontological identity between that which different words refer to even if these words are not commonly reckoned strictly synonymous. For example: Is water the same as H2O? Is the brain the mind? These questions are hardly meaningless, even if we think the answer to both questions is ‘yes’. Beyond that, one can also defend the view that “the good” is a larger set of which any specific good thing we can point to is merely a subset, and hence the question can also make sense in this way (i.e. it becomes a matter of whether something is part of “the good”).
To turn the tables a bit here, I would say that to reject moral realism, on my account, one would need to say that there is no genuine normative force or property in, say, a state of extreme suffering (consider being fried in a brazen bull for concreteness). [And I think one can fairly argue that to say such a state has “genuine normative force” is very much an understatement.]
“Normative force for the experiencing subject or for all agents?” one may then ask. Yet on my account of personal identity, the open individualist account (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_individualism and https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/719903), there is no fundamental distinction, and thus my answer would simply be: yes, for the experiencing subject, and hence for all agents (this is where our intuitions scream, of course, unless we are willing to suspend our strong, Darwinianly adaptive sense of self as some entity that rides around in some small part of physical reality). One may then object that different agents occupy genuinely different coordinates in spacetime, yet the same can be said of what we usually consider the same agent. So there is really no fundamental difference here: If we say that it is genuinely normative for Tim at t1 (or simply Tim1) to ensure that Tim at t2 (or simply Tim2) suffers less, then why wouldn’t the same be true of Tim1 with respect to John1, 2, 3…?
With respect to the One Compelling Axiology you mention, Lukas, I am not sure why you would set the bar so high in terms of specificity in order to accept a realist view. I mean, if “all philosophers or philosophically-inclined reasoners” found plausible a simple, yet inexhaustive principle like “reduce unnecessary suffering” why would that not be good enough to demonstrate its “realism” (on your account) when a more specific one would? It is unclear to me why greater specificity should be important, especially since even such an unspecific principle still would have plenty of practical relevance (many people can admit that they are not living in accordance with this principle, even as they do accept it).