If there is such a thing as "moral facts", then there is nothing to discuss, no room for philosophy, only for pedagogy, dogma, and proselytizing.

For most moral realists, of course there is a need to discuss the moral facts so that we can discover them.

Further, moral realism in its crudest form is the principle "might makes right". This means that what is right depends on whoever happens to have the upper hand, at any given time

It absolutely does not. Moral realism is the position that (1) moral judgements are cognitive and (2) there are objectively true moral judgments.

What you described is an anti-thesis to moral realism.

For the purposes of this discussion, what is your definition of morality?

For the purposes of this discussion, what is your definition of morality?

In its most broad sense, the study of that which is right and wrong (viz., what is permissible, omissable, obligatory, and impermissible).

For most moral realists, of course there is a need to discuss the moral facts so that we can discover them.
/.../
Moral realism is the position that (1) moral judgements are cognitive and (2) there are objectively true moral judgments. — Bob Ross

If moral facts are something that some people still need to discover and some already know them, then on the grounds of what should the thusly ignorant trust those who propose to have said knowledge?

Secondly, how do you explain that people disagree on what the moral facts are? And what should they do when they disagreee about them? And especially, when such disagreement is between people where one person has more socio-economic power than the other person?

For the purposes of this discussion, what is your definition of morality?

In its most broad sense, the study of that which is right and wrong (viz., what is permissible, omissable, obligatory, and impermissible). — Bob Ross

So, you don't include your own personal choice, no matter what your society's rules are? I mean, your own personhood -- the internal dialogue that goes on inside your feelings and mind about justice and compassion and fairness?

Hello Baker,

I apologize for the belated response!

If moral facts are something that some people still need to discover and some already know them, then on the grounds of what should the thusly ignorant trust those who propose to have said knowledge?

I am not following the relevance of this (to our original conversation): could you please elaborate? The current state of knowledge of moral facts doesn’t negate the possibility of their existence; and I would suppose that if a person doesn’t buy the arguments for moral facticity that another person is providing, then they shouldn’t trust them.

Secondly, how do you explain that people disagree on what the moral facts are?

People disagree all the time. Why would that negate the possibility or existence of moral facts?

And what should they do when they disagreee about them? And especially, when such disagreement is between people where one person has more socio-economic power than the other person?

Again, to me, this just seems irrelevant to whether moral realism is true. There could be moral facts, confusion between societies about what they are, and disagreement between people about moral facts at the same time.

Hello L’Elephant,

I apologize for the late response!

So, you don't include your own personal choice, no matter what your society's rules are? I mean, your own personhood -- the internal dialogue that goes on inside your feelings and mind about justice and compassion and fairness?

I don’t define morality with a split between society and self: I define it as simply what is right or wrong, period. I am not saying that whatever society says is the standard, nor the individual but, rather, that morality is the study of what is right or wrong (period).

Secondly, how do you explain that people disagree on what the moral facts are?

People disagree all the time. Why would that negate the possibility or existence of moral facts? — Bob Ross

It doesn't negate the possibility or existence of moral facts, but disagreement brings up problems of talking about moral facts, or anything else for that matter. Unless moral facts are somehow something that we can grasp directly, with direct insight, we probably need to learn what they are, and we do so through some kind of conversation with others.

If there is such a thing as a "moral fact", then it must exist somehow independently of persons.
How can people learn what the moral facts are?
How can people know that they have the correct knowledge of moral facts?
On the grounds of what should one person trust another to tell her what moral facts are?

I don’t define morality with a split between society and self: I define it as simply what is right or wrong, period. I am not saying that whatever society says is the standard, nor the individual but, rather, that morality is the study of what is right or wrong (period). — Bob Ross

And with this view, how do you account for persons?

In what relation are persons to right and wrong?

Hello baker,

If there is such a thing as a "moral fact", then it must exist somehow independently of persons.
How can people learn what the moral facts are?
How can people know that they have the correct knowledge of moral facts?
On the grounds of what should one person trust another to tell her what moral facts are?

Ultimately, the same way, I suppose, that we derive that there is something at all which exists independently of persons: intuitions and evidence.

And with this view, how do you account for persons?

In what relation are persons to right and wrong?

Morality, as a definition, should include our metaethical commitments: so I say it is the study of what is right or wrong, period. However, I think that morality is an inevitable mixture of facts and non-facts (i.e., facts and tastes). The individual plays a part in it.

Also, if I remember correctly, the person that I responded to with that quote was asking about “personal morality”, which I do not make such a distinction at all (even in the case that some [or even all] moral statements are contingent on subjects) because it draws an invalid line between what one thinks is right or wrong for themselves vs. universally: all moral statements should contain the element of obligation. I cannot say “stealing is always wrong” but caveat it with “personally”: either it is always wrong to steal, or it isn’t.

Everyone,

Although there are still parts of my OP that I still consider true, I think that I have an answer (to myself) of the benefit, if true, of moral realism (and I thought I should share in here): moral realism, if true, would provide a means of living a better life irregardless of one's goals.

To understand this, let's take logic as an example: the reality of our daily lives is fundamentally and inherently logical (i.e., adheres to laws of logic); and, consequently, irregardless of one's goals, it will be to a person's benefit to be logical in their execution of such goals. The more logical, the better it will be: period.

Same thing with morals, if there really are moral facts, then they are, like logic, inherent in the reality of our daily lives and, thusly, irregardless of one's goals, it is to a person's benefit to consider and use them. Just like logic, adhering strictly to the facts may be hard or ruin our spontaneous pleasures; but, irregardless, our actions will be objectively better (in relation to whatever we are trying to accomplish) if we adhere to them.

Like logic, we can abstract morals (if they hold any facticity) as not just useful for our own goals but useful for all goals; and, consequently, are worthy of exaltation as universal commitments.

The valuing of the moral facts is certainly a non-fact, but this does not takeaway from the benefits of moral realism; and, likewise, although a hypothetical commitment is required to be obliged to the moral facts and it is most rational to abide by whatever is the consequences (objectively) of committing oneself to that hypothetical imperative, the commitment to acting as much in accordance with reality as humanly possible requires, as a consequence, the commitment to the moral facts.

Let me know what you all think!
Bob

To be honest, I'm not sure I see why belief in moral realism is required for any kinds of benefits you allude to

Imagine that there was a law ingrained into reality that governed objects (to some extent) where it was defined what is better/best: wouldn't aligning oneself with it benefit them?

For example, no matter what my goals are, it is objectively better to be unified and self-harmonious in that goal to achieve it. If I want to achieve my goals, then I better align my actions with that form of unity and harmony. Of course, whether I want to optimally achieve my goals is up to me (subjectively); but the form of achieving it is not.

I was under the impression you were saying this would be a benefit even if moral realism were not true.

Bob, I wanted to mention that I feel Nietzsche's discussion on the History of Responsibility touches upon and supports your argument for why moral realism is useless for deriving morals --

SECOND ESSAY.
"GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE.

1.

The breeding of an animal that can promise—is not this just that very paradox of a task which nature has set itself in regard to man? Is not this the very problem of man? The fact that this problem has been to a great extent solved, must appear all the more phenomenal to one who can estimate at its full value that force of forgetfulness which works in opposition to it. Forgetfulness is no mere vis inertiæ, as the superficial believe, rather is it a power of obstruction, active and, in the strictest sense of the word, positive—a power responsible for the fact that what we have lived, experienced, taken into ourselves, no more enters into consciousness during the process of digestion (it might be called psychic absorption) than all the whole manifold process by which our physical nutrition, the so-called "incorporation," is carried on. The temporary shutting of the doors and windows of consciousness, the relief from the clamant alarums and excursions, with which our subconscious world of servant organs works in mutual co-operation and antagonism; a little quietude, a little tabula rasa of the consciousness, so as to make room again for the new, and above all for the more noble functions and functionaries, room for government, foresight, predetermination (for our organism is on an oligarchic model)—this [Pg 62] is the utility, as I have said, of the active forgetfulness, which is a very sentinel and nurse of psychic order, repose, etiquette; and this shows at once why it is that there can exist no happiness, no gladness, no hope, no pride, no real present, without forgetfulness. The man in whom this preventative apparatus is damaged and discarded, is to be compared to a dyspeptic, and it is something more than a comparison—he can "get rid of" nothing. But this very animal who finds it necessary to be forgetful, in whom, in fact, forgetfulness represents a force and a form of robust health, has reared for himself an opposition-power, a memory, with whose help forgetfulness is, in certain instances, kept in check—in the cases, namely, where promises have to be made;—so that it is by no means a mere passive inability to get rid of a once indented impression, not merely the indigestion occasioned by a once pledged word, which one cannot dispose of, but an active refusal to get rid of it, a continuing and a wish to continue what has once been willed, an actual memory of the will; so that between the original "I will," "I shall do," and the actual discharge of the will, its act, we can easily interpose a world of new strange phenomena, circumstances, veritable volitions, without the snapping of this long chain of the will. But what is the underlying hypothesis of all this? How thoroughly, in order to be able to regulate the future in this way, must man have first learnt to distinguish between necessitated and accidental phenomena, to think causally, to see the distant as present and to anticipate it, to fix with certainty [Pg 63] what is the end, and what is the means to that end; above all, to reckon, to have power to calculate—how thoroughly must man have first become calculable, disciplined, necessitated even for himself and his own conception of himself, that, like a man entering into a promise, he could guarantee himself as a future.

2.

This is simply the long history of the origin of responsibility. That task of breeding an animal which can make promises, includes, as we have already grasped, as its condition and preliminary, the more immediate task of first making man to a certain extent, necessitated, uniform, like among his like, regular, and consequently calculable. The immense work of what I have called, "morality of custom"[1] (cp. Dawn of Day, Aphs. 9, 14, and 16), the actual work of man on himself during the longest period of the human race, his whole prehistoric work, finds its meaning, its great justification (in spite of all its innate hardness, despotism, stupidity, and idiocy) in this fact: man, with the help of the morality of customs and of social strait-jackets, was made genuinely calculable. If, however, we place ourselves at the end of this colossal process, at the point where the tree finally matures its fruits, when society and its morality of custom finally bring to light that to which it was only the means, then do we find as the ripest fruit on its tree the sovereign individual, that resembles only himself, that has got loose from the morality of [Pg 64] custom, the autonomous "super-moral" individual (for "autonomous" and "moral" are mutually-exclusive terms),—in short, the man of the personal, long, and independent will, competent to promise, and we find in him a proud consciousness (vibrating in every fibre), of what has been at last achieved and become vivified in him, a genuine consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of human perfection in general. And this man who has grown to freedom, who is really competent to promise, this lord of the free will, this sovereign—how is it possible for him not to know how great is his superiority over everything incapable of binding itself by promises, or of being its own security, how great is the trust, the awe, the reverence that he awakes—he "deserves" all three—not to know that with this mastery over himself he is necessarily also given the mastery over circumstances, over nature, over all creatures with shorter wills, less reliable characters? The "free" man, the owner of a long unbreakable will, finds in this possession his standard of value: looking out from himself upon the others, he honours or he despises, and just as necessarily as he honours his peers, the strong and the reliable (those who can bind themselves by promises),—that is, every one who promises like a sovereign, with difficulty, rarely and slowly, who is sparing with his trusts but confers honour by the very fact of trusting, who gives his word as something that can be relied on, because he knows himself strong enough to keep it even in the teeth of disasters, even in the "teeth of fate,"—so with equal necessity will he have the [Pg 65] heel of his foot ready for the lean and empty jackasses, who promise when they have no business to do so, and his rod of chastisement ready for the liar, who already breaks his word at the very minute when it is on his lips. The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over himself and over fate, has sunk right down to his innermost depths, and has become an instinct, a dominating instinct—what name will he give to it, to this dominating instinct, if he needs to have a word for it? But there is no doubt about it—the sovereign man calls it his conscience.

Nietzsche would argue autonomous individuals give birth to new values. They are those rare individuals who have gone through what Nietzsche calls the "Three Metamorphoses" the final product being the autonomous "child" that free spirit capable of giving birth to new values.

No, I was meaning to describe the benefits of moral realism if it were true; but I think most of my OP is actually still quite accurate: the only difference being that the moral facts may benefit one's morel non-facts. But, upon further reflection (again), I think that the moral facts are not fundamentally doing the 'heavy-lifting' in any ethical theory but, rather, the individual(s) which created it.

I do think Nietzsche got a lot of it right on morality, but I would say that I am taking it a step deeper than him; as he was a moral anti-realist through-and-through, whereas I would say that even if moral facts exist they are only useful insofar as they benefit the moral non-facts; and, so, the conversation is better invested into the non-facts and not the facts.

Ah, fair enough! I think I would agree.

I'm not going to argue with you about Nietzsche's view and the fact that he's already considered that and written about it. If the morality of customs (which moral facts) leads to the autonomous non-moral being as its ripest fruit of that process -- I would say that implies what your saying -- but not limiting it to "only beneficial to non moral facts" because the moral fact would indeed be beneficial for its own factual existence as its own proof there of basically, and it's that tension of morality that teaches the individual how to guarantee themselves as a future. It's like a "strange loop" that self references.

I'm not going to argue with you about Nietzsche's view and the fact that he's already considered that and written about it. If the morality of customs (which moral facts) leads to the autonomous non-moral being as its ripest fruit of that process -- I would say that implies what your saying -- but not limiting it to "only beneficial to non moral facts" because the moral fact would indeed be beneficial for its own factual existence as its own proof there of basically, and it's that tension of morality that teaches the individual how to guarantee themselves as a future. It's like a "strange loop" that self references.

I can't remember Nietzsche ever considering, in his works, the value of moral facts themselves; but only that they don't exist. The idea of "morality of customs" that you referenced was not consider moral facticity by Nietzsche but rather a socio-psychological stringing together of tastes, that is why you won't read anywhere in the Genealogy of Morals that morality is objective.

Well, it's not so much that youre wrong, cause you're not, persay, its the semantics that "moral facts" are merely interpretations of phenomena. That moral phenomena are birthed from the interpretation is the fact of their existence, like how Set theory self references. For Nietzsche Moral Judgement is always incomplete. He says it's a style of sign language that is invaluable to he who knows it, that reveals facts about a person's culture and inner conditions.

I agree; but my point is that I am positing that there really are moral facts which are not just mere interpretations of phenomena, and evaluating their worth. This is what I mean by saying that I am taking it a step further than Nietzsche.

I kinda interpret it the same way, any moral facts that exist in Nietzsche's opinion are irrelevant the concept of an objective morality. They're more facts about the moral phenomena itself not anything to do with how one should be.

:up:

Nietzsche isn't a mutually exclusive guy. He even has room for some Democracy in his heart. And even some aspects of slave morality are praise worthy. Like for Nietzsche the idea of "Free" or "unfree" will mutually exclusive absurdities. That you value moral facts as something more than Nietzsche does only suggests to me you idolize the concept of "truth" more than Nietzsche does is all. The fact autonomy is the ripest fruit on the tree of morality is a moral fact for Nietzsche. Such a fact doesn't inform on any objective morality either. So, just because a guy doesn't flat out effing say it -- look at the formula used. It's how I knew antisemitism was a consequence of Judaism -- observing the formula.

Put it this way:If you wanna feel like you're taking it a step further than Nietzsche go ahead, especially if it is the basis for some line of reasoning for you. I merely came here showing you there's plenty of support for your position, even if not exactly your position. If you're taking it a step further than Nietzsche then certainly it must have some relevant fruit at the end of that tree.

If you wanna feel like you're taking it a step further than Nietzsche go ahead, especially if it is the basis for some line of reasoning for you — Vaskane

Well said. I say that, because it’s pretty much the same sentiment I offered in response to his “Making a Case for Transcendental Idealism”.