Two claims, one: moral facts do not exist, two: if they did, you could ignore them without making truth broadly your enemy.
One: Some seemings can be cross verified extensively, such that you end up either believing in those seemings or ending up incapable of functioning in the world. For instance, if it seems like a table exists to my visual perception, this is extremely cross verifiable. If I believe murder is wrong, this is not cross verifiable at all.
If I say “there is not a table here”, then to maintain this position I have to hold that all of my senses deceive me constantly, and deceive me when they purport to show other measuring instruments detecting the table, and so on until I am doubting all methods of measuring anything in the world. So either I live in a world where there is a table, or I live in a world that is beyond my ability to meaningfully observe, and I opt to ignore the possibility I am in a world I cannot meaningfully observe.
If I say “there is a fact that jaywalking is wrong”, what new predictions can I make over saying “people believe that jaywalking is wrong”? “People will try to stop jaywalkers”, “people will be upset about jaywalking”, and so on are all predicted under both theories. If there is a fact that jaywalking is wrong, I might imagine that someone could prove that fact, or measure it, but nobody has. Absence of evidence is weak evidence of absence, and I did not start out believing in moral facts to begin with.
Two: If moral facts were established, it is unclear to me why I would have a reason to care. If you produced before me an infallible machine that told me “it is in all cases immoral for anyone or anything to ever be happy”, I don’t see why I would have any cause to care about this fact. It seems completely unrelated to facts about what things make me happy, facts about my preferences, and facts about tables and chairs and protons, so it seems like I can ignore this fact and go about my life as normal. I could even decide to maximize immorality (happiness) in response to this claim, without running into logical problems.
Normally when you ignore true things, things you disprefer might happen to you. You might stub your toe on a table that you were ignoring. And if you try to defend your false belief, you may have to contort more and more of your world model, until you believe all sorts of false things, which makes it hard to function effectively in the world. Like that there is an enormous conspiracy by all major furniture companies and consumers and banks to pretend that tables are real.
With moral facts, this does not seem to be the case. I see no route where I start by denying that “jaywalking has an innate property of evil”, and end up having to deny that protons exist.
Style Note: I chose to use jaywalking as my example of something immoral. I apply the exact same reasoning to arbitrarily emotionally loaded concepts. I prefer not to invoke those concepts when they are not necessary.
Other Notes: Companions in guilt is unsuccessful because there aren’t normative facts in epistemology either, evolutionary debunking is successful because yes, it really is extremely plausible that people would end up packaging a sense of disgust/dislike/dispreference at antisocial acts as a property of the act instead of a property of their psychology, more plausible than them being wrong that there is a qualitative experience of love, and more plausible than there being mind independent reasons for action.
Morality is Objective
Two claims, one: moral facts do not exist, two: if they did, you could ignore them without making truth broadly your enemy.
One:
Some seemings can be cross verified extensively, such that you end up either believing in those seemings or ending up incapable of functioning in the world. For instance, if it seems like a table exists to my visual perception, this is extremely cross verifiable. If I believe murder is wrong, this is not cross verifiable at all.
If I say “there is not a table here”, then to maintain this position I have to hold that all of my senses deceive me constantly, and deceive me when they purport to show other measuring instruments detecting the table, and so on until I am doubting all methods of measuring anything in the world. So either I live in a world where there is a table, or I live in a world that is beyond my ability to meaningfully observe, and I opt to ignore the possibility I am in a world I cannot meaningfully observe.
If I say “there is a fact that jaywalking is wrong”, what new predictions can I make over saying “people believe that jaywalking is wrong”? “People will try to stop jaywalkers”, “people will be upset about jaywalking”, and so on are all predicted under both theories. If there is a fact that jaywalking is wrong, I might imagine that someone could prove that fact, or measure it, but nobody has. Absence of evidence is weak evidence of absence, and I did not start out believing in moral facts to begin with.
Two:
If moral facts were established, it is unclear to me why I would have a reason to care. If you produced before me an infallible machine that told me “it is in all cases immoral for anyone or anything to ever be happy”, I don’t see why I would have any cause to care about this fact. It seems completely unrelated to facts about what things make me happy, facts about my preferences, and facts about tables and chairs and protons, so it seems like I can ignore this fact and go about my life as normal. I could even decide to maximize immorality (happiness) in response to this claim, without running into logical problems.
Normally when you ignore true things, things you disprefer might happen to you. You might stub your toe on a table that you were ignoring. And if you try to defend your false belief, you may have to contort more and more of your world model, until you believe all sorts of false things, which makes it hard to function effectively in the world. Like that there is an enormous conspiracy by all major furniture companies and consumers and banks to pretend that tables are real.
With moral facts, this does not seem to be the case. I see no route where I start by denying that “jaywalking has an innate property of evil”, and end up having to deny that protons exist.
Style Note:
I chose to use jaywalking as my example of something immoral. I apply the exact same reasoning to arbitrarily emotionally loaded concepts. I prefer not to invoke those concepts when they are not necessary.
Other Notes:
Companions in guilt is unsuccessful because there aren’t normative facts in epistemology either, evolutionary debunking is successful because yes, it really is extremely plausible that people would end up packaging a sense of disgust/dislike/dispreference at antisocial acts as a property of the act instead of a property of their psychology, more plausible than them being wrong that there is a qualitative experience of love, and more plausible than there being mind independent reasons for action.