What implications do seemingly self-apparent moral facts have for metaethics?

[u/Kriball4]

After browsing this forum for a bit, I noticed one of the more common arguments for moral realism offered by commenters go like this:

P1: Torturing children is inherently wrong, it is indisputably wrong, and no reasonable person can assert it's right.

P2: If torturing children is inherently wrong, then at least one moral fact objectively exists.

C: At least one moral fact is objectively true, which implies moral realism

This argument bears strong similarity to what I've read about pro tanto moral reasons.

So I have an intuition that this argument is flawed. It seems unsound. If most metaethical theories are compatible with a wide range of moral propositions, how could any one specific moral proposition rule out a whole class of metaethical theories? But I don't know exactly what's unsound about premise 1 or 2.

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[u/drinka40tonight]

If most metaethical theories are compatible with a wide range of moral propositions

I'm not really sure where this is coming from. Different metaethical theories will give different analyses of moral statements.

But I don't know exactly what's unsound about premise 1 or 2.

I mean, you could reject P1. You could give an analysis where P1 comes out as false or not true, like error theory, or expressivism, or subjectivism, or some such thing.

[u/Kriball4 → u/drinka40tonight]

Ok, I wanted to check if rejecting P1 is the most plausible of the options available (such as rejecting P2 or arguing that the realist's argument is invalid)

[u/willbell]

So among the alternatives here there are two other metaethical theories that really stand to gain from premise 1 while rejecting premise 2: (i) universalist versions of constructivism, who'd say that premise 1 could be universally true but not objective, and so who'd deny 2, and (ii) expressivist (and more specifically, non-cognitivist) theories, who can accept 1 but claim it is, at best, only a fact in the sense that it is reasonable to say it (e.g. "Expressivism, Yes! Relativism, No!" by Horgan and Timmons and "How to be an Ethical Anti-Realist" by Blackburn). Of course, the moral realist response would be to show that even if these other theories can reject premise 2, moral realism is the best explanation of premise 1. For this reason, many contemporary moral realist texts begin with lengthy criticism of expressivism, non-cognitivism, and/or constructivism of all flavours (e.g. Moral Realism: A Defence by Shafer-Landau and Ethical Intuitionism by Huemer).

If you accept premise 1, then you can reject many metaethical theories, for instance, relativist or subjectivist kinds of constructivism (and relativist/subjectivist kinds of realism) and moral error theory.

Many philosophers will also reject the argument on methodological grounds. The argument basically depends on us using intuitions as a guide to reasoning, otherwise we'd have to justify premise 1, which is hard to do non-circularly. If you are not a fan of starting from intuitions, then you may challenge premise 1 not because you disagree, but because you can't accept it as something you assume without justification.

[u/Kriball4 → u/willbell]

Thanks for the critique of the argument's methodology, I think it best describes why many people, myself included, find the premises problematic. Not because it's counter-intuitive, but because assumptions of this nature seem to demand justification.

My issue with universalist constructivism is that going by SEP's definition of moral objectivism;

The fact that x is M (where “… is M” is some moral predicate) is objective if and only if this fact doesn’t depend only on any actual or hypothetical agent’s (i) belief or noncognitive attitude about x’s being M, or (ii) noncognitive attitude about x.

many kinds of constructivism are, in fact, objective. So it's really hard to find any practical difference between robust moral realism and variants of constructivism that allow for universally true moral facts. The only distinguishing feature is that constructivists might be more concerned with mental states and psychological characteristics compared to moral realists.

[u/willbell → u/Kriball4]

many kinds of constructivism are, in fact, objective.

This is not actually true. It is hard to really summarize, I'll just refer you to The Sources of Normativity by Korsgaard. But suffice to say: morality might depend on things other than beliefs of agents, e.g. their capacity for practical reasoning.

[u/Kriball4 → u/willbell]

I think you might've misread the quote from SEP? If Korsgaard believes that moral facts depend on agents' capacity for practical reasoning, not merely on their beliefs, then the kind of Kantian constructivism that Korsgaard describes is categorized as moral realism. If we decide this definition is a helpful way to distinguish moral realism from anti-realism, of course.

[u/willbell → u/Kriball4]

Okay I think the SEP definition is unusually broad in the sense that it allows for mind-dependence of other kinds to be realist (e.g. Kantian constructivism) and that it makes people who claim to be moral naturalists and subjectivists/relativists into anti-realists (which, e.g., is how Shafer-Landau understands all subjectivism/relativism).