Let’s knock this out with a bang. This time we’re going to look at the section regarding “Semantics” on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for moral realism. I can’t say that I have high hopes that they’ll manage to turn it all around, but I’m willing to give them the chance.

So, will they ever actually try to defend moral realism or will they just continue to whine about how mean the moral anti-realists are? Let’s find out.

“Moral realists have here been characterized as those who hold that moral claims purport to report facts, that they are evaluable as true or false in light of whether the facts are as the claims purport, and that at least some such claims are actually true. Many have thought there are good reasons—even decisive reasons—for rejecting moral realism so conceived.” And we were right. Because it doesn’t matter what you purport, it matters what you can demonstrate. As I said over on the YouTube channel discussion, the moral realists have been doing a particularly terrible job of actually defending anything. Just because you want it to be true, that doesn’t make it true. Again, this is just a faith-based position, not one backed up by anything identifiable as evidence. Funny how awful all of this is, right?

“Yet, with the development of (what has come to be called) minimalism about talk of truth and fact, it might seem that this characterization makes being a moral realist easier than it should be. As minimalism would have it, saying that some claim is true is just a way of (re-)asserting the claim and carries no commitment beyond that expressed by the original claim.” I’m not sure why that’s supposed to be impressive. Again, it sure looks like a moral anti-realist wrote this entry because it’s just been poking holes in the whole asinine idea the whole time. Everything so far has been assertions, based on feelings, not facts, based on evidence. I know nothing about Geoff Sayre-McCord, who wrote the entry back in 2015, but apparently, nobody has thought to revise it since then.

“Thus, if one is willing to claim that “murdering innocent children for fun is wrong” one can comfortably claim as well that that “murdering innocent children for fun is wrong is true” without thereby taking on any additional metaphysical baggage.” That also is true. You can’t take an inherently subjective emotional position like the former and try to turn it into the latter without some kind of rational through line. You can’t just declare yourself to be right without demonstrating that you’re right, which is exactly what the moral realism advocates over on the YouTube channel have been doing. We demand evidence, they wave their hands and change the subject and then pretend that they’ve been right all the time. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s like they know how absurd their own position is but they lack the brains or the backbone to admit it.

“Since even noncognitivists would presumably be willing to claim that “murdering innocent children for fun is wrong,” they can acknowledge that the claim is true too and it would be a mistake to see that addition as any sort of renunciation of their noncognitivism.” Except I wouldn’t be willing to do that in the context that this discussion is taking place. It is wrong, within most societal contexts. It isn’t wrong universally and independent of human minds, any more than cheetahs eating gazelle is wrong. Remember, the whole point of this entire exercise is to demonstrate that morals are mind-independent, that it doesn’t matter what we think, these things exist entirely beyond our say-so. Just saying X is wrong doesn’t make X wrong. That’s an assertion. You have to prove it’s true.

“Having said that “it is true that murdering innocent children for fun is wrong,” it seems similarly innocuous for the non-cognitivists to grant that it is a fact. ” Except I would never do that. Context matters. Wrong within the society that I happen to live? Sure. Wrong within the societies that are most common across the planet? Sure. Wrong, full-stop, everywhere at all times throughout history, period? Not a chance. That hasn’t been demonstrated. In fact, it’s demonstrably not the case. Yet this is the kind of thing that we see the religious pulling all the time. They expect that their opponents are going to accept ideas for the sake of argument so that they can get to the meat of the claim. I won’t do that. You’ve got to prove you’re right and you’ve got to show your work. These people need to get to work.

“After all, they can argue, to say of some claim that what it says is a fact is itself just a way of (re-)asserting the claim and it too carries no commitment beyond that expressed by the original claim. Grammar alone, it seems, renders talk of truth and fact appropriate and does so without incurring the sort of metaphysical commitments that are rightly associated with genuine realism (see Gibbard 2003, Dreier 2005).” Yet it doesn’t. Grammar isn’t necessary here, only evaluating the demonstrable truth. The only thing being applied here is emotion. It is based on the feelings of the one making the claim, something entirely subjective. I don’t accept your claim though. You have to demonstrate it to be objectively correct and we all know they not only can’t do it, they don’t even try. That’s really where this argument falls, when we ask them to provide corroboratory evidence, they just shuck and jive and make excuses for why they can’t. That is not the hallmark of a good argument.

Then it goes into a discussion on non-cognitivism, but I’m not a non-cognitivist. I’m perfectly fine with moral statements being propositions, I just don’t accept that those propositions are objectively true. I don’t know that “true” can be demonstrably applied to them at all. Just because you want it to be true, that doesn’t mean that it is. This is the same problem that we see with religion. Funny how many parallels we’re seeing between the two.

“Error theorists also can find no special comfort in minimalism about truth and fact. After all, to defend their view, error theorists need to advance grounds for thinking that, while moral claims are truth-evaluable, none of them are actually true. This requires resisting the minimalist urge to make truth so cheap that any sort of claim can have it. That is not to say that an error theorist cannot be a minimalist about truth and fact. But it is to say that the minimalism does not make her position easier (and it may actually make her position more difficult) to sustain.” I’m also not an error theorist. I don’t think that these moral statements are trying to get to truth. They are trying to get to emotional comfort. Once achieved, the moral realist simply declares the comforting propositions as true without ever being able to demonstrate that they are. Remember, the whole point of this exercise is to demonstrate that moral precepts exist beyond the realm of the human mind. It has to be real beyond our ability to change. It is true because it is true, not because we’ve decided that it is. That’s something that this article hasn’t remotely tried to justify.

“Minimalism is, then, no panacea for moral anti-realists. But it is not poison for them either. ” Wait a minute, what is this article supposed to be about again? Moral realism. So why do they spend all of their time trying to poke holes in moral anti-realism? Are they assuming, like the religious often do, that if they can dispose of the opposition, that their position must automatically be true? That’s yet another logical fallacy, false dichotomy. It doesn’t work that way. You have to defend your side and show it to be reasonable to accept, you can’t just assume it is until something comes along and defeats it. Exactly what is going on here? Moral anti-realism should never have come up in the discussion at all, yet it’s all they’ve been talking about!

“Whatever one thinks of minimalism, of the importance of explanation, and of mind-independence, moral realism travels with the burden of making sense of the semantics of moral terms in a way that will support seeing claims that use them as genuinely truth-evaluable.” Yes it does, yet in this article at least, they have entirely failed to do so. They haven’t even made an attempt to do so. They’ve simply gone after their detractors, poorly IMO, and pretended that somehow, that makes them right.

It does nothing of the sort.

“At the same time, though, some aspects of the ways in which children acquire moral terms and the ways in which those terms are bound up with various emotions pull against seeing the terms as simply on a par with nonmoral terms.” You know where children get their morals from? Either they are taught them or they utilize enlightened self-interest and empathy, the actual basis of where morals come from. Yet that isn’t mind-independent, it’s purely subjective from individual to individual, which is why we have such a variance in moral positions, even within the same society. If everyone followed the same moral code, we wouldn’t need prisons, would we? That’s really the most damning fact about all of this, that we can prove, conclusively, that there isn’t a pervasive moral code floating out there in the ether to which we are all magically bound. The observations that we make in reality simply don’t support that contention.

I think it’s all summed up in the very last sentence, all of the places that this has gone wrong. “The burden is on the anti-realists about morality to argue that that this involves a mistake of some sort.” No, it isn’t. That’s shifting the burden of proof, yet another logical fallacy. We don’t have to prove you wrong. You have to prove yourself right, yet they haven’t even tried. Again, this is a religious tactic that we see constantly, assuming they’re right until someone proves them wrong for emotional reasons, because they really want it to be true. I thought these were supposed to be credible philosophers, not emotion-driven children but that’s exactly what they come off looking like.

Sad, isn’t it?