I'm glad to hear Michael speaks about Meta-Aesthetics(or whatever), I've wanted to hear his thoughts about it since I read his Baby Shark Vs Beethoven article.
Thank you for sharing this. It was a really interesting conversation…I’m not a philosopher, but have thought some about all of this. In fact, I posted about this yesterday!
I think, perhaps, your proposed connection between the platonic realm and the physical universe is information.
What I find a bit frustrating in this conversation is that both of you are just rounding up "This is obviously wrong" to "this is obviously objectively wrong", and interpreting people who say "It is not obviously *objectively* wrong" as saying "it is not obviously wrong", and then attributing this to immature undergraduate style over-philosophising, because when you think about stuff abstractly for too long you lose track of what is obvious.
No!
We all agree that torturing babies is wrong. We just disagree about what this means. This is about as frustrating as insisting that illusionists deny the existence of consciousness. You have a particular view of what morality/consciousness are, metaphysically. Not everybody agrees. But everybody (approximately, broadly) agrees on which things are conscious and which things are moral. Just because your account of morality or consciousness is rejected does not mean that your opponents are saying that things are not moral or conscious.
Torturing babies is obviously wrong. How I do I know this? I judge it to be obviously wrong. What does judging it to be obviously wrong consist in? It just seems wrong. What does that mean? Well, I think that a lot of this has to do with my noticing my own reactions to it. I'm repulsed by the idea. It's wrong, and it's wrong even in a society where everybody thinks it's cool. How do I know this? Just the same way that I know it's wrong in this society. When I ask myself if it's wrong, I don't magically turn myself into a member of that hypothetical society. My judgements are my own, no matter what society we are discussing.
So none of this gives me any reason to think it is objectively wrong. Every bit of evidence I have that it is wrong in this or some other society derives from my own judgements and reactions. I can't step outside my head and see that it must be wrong independently of these. And antirealists have well-documented reasons for thinking that this idea must be false.
Even if I accept phenomenal conservatism, which I don't, really, then these arguments would only work if it were the case that torturing babies seems objectively wrong. But it really doesn't. It just seems wrong. The wrongness being objective is an unnecessary extrapolation, a meta-ethical position you can only come to by over-philosophising.
I feel this is a bit of an over-reaction. Obviously it's going to be a different kind of discussion given we both have the same view, and I will definitely have on anti-realists and have that discussion where we get more into comparisons of the relative merits. I think the first hour of this was about me and Mike putting forward to case for robust realism, rooted in something like phenomenal conservatism and the rejection of scientism. But I don't think it's correct to say we didn't say anything against anti-realist views. Mike said at the start his argument that torturing babies would be wrong even if everyone was keen on it (can't remember exactly how he put it). Is the view you outline consistent with that, or does it reject it? If the latter, then the phenomenal conservatism kicks in, and how you need that to respond to skepticism. And I outlined how it seems to me that there's an encounter with value when I listen to Beethhoven that goes beyond mere preference. Now you might say that seeming is false, but now we're back again to phenomenal conservatism.
Yeah, your assumptions here are a good illustration of the problem, actually.
I agree with Mike that torturing babies would be wrong even if everyone was keen on it. But you expect that an antirealist would disagree. Maybe some would. But not me or Lance, I'd say.
That I think torturing babies would be wrong even if everybody were keen on it does not imply moral realism. If you're asking me what I think would be wrong, then you're asking me to make a judgement, and when I make judgements, it's my actual attitudes that matter, not the attitudes of some hypothetical society where everybody is keen on baby torture. Appraiser relativism.
I think realists get this wrong, so let me spell it out with two subtly different propositions.
1. If I were keen on baby torture, then I would think baby torture is good.
2. I think that if I were keen on baby torture, then baby torture would be good
I agree with 1 and I disagree with 2.
1 is just a tautology. 2 is an actual judgement about what would be the case in a hypothetical scenario. They are not the same.
I think the problem here is you were expecting the kind of in depth critique of anti-realism that would (and will) emerge from me talking to an anti-realist. What we were doing here is giving our reasons for being robust realists. Of course, there are responses to those arguments (although error theorists would be happy to say it's not wrong to torture babies, although of course they would follow that up by some more statements), and they need to be responded to. But it wasn't that kind of discussion.
It's not quite that I think you are unaware of how anti-realists would respond, it's more that this awareness is surprisingly unsurfaced in the video or in your comment above.
Like, I was genuinely surprised when you asked "Is the view you outline consistent with that, or does it reject it?" and then only discussed the latter possibility.
I'm not necessarily expecting a very in-depth critique of anti-realism, it's just from where I'm standing the arguments presented for realism are extremely unconvincing and incomplete. So, again, from where I'm standing, I would have wanted a bit more. But perhaps that's just me.
I think the focus was on the role phenomenal conservatism plays in the justification. I think many people quickly reject robust moral realism because they're implicitly assuming that our knowledge of reality comes from science.
I'm surprised you're surprised, as anti-realists go different ways on that question.
But just to clarify your view: What does the fact that X is wrong consist in for you?
Anti-realists go different ways on that question. Which is why I’m surprised you only really discussed one fork of the dilemma, which comes across as an expectation that this is the fork I would choose.
It consists in the fact that I judge it to be wrong, so it's a function of my attitudes.
But!
That doesn't mean that I think it wouldn't be wrong if my attitudes were different. And I think that's the mistake that is sometimes made by realists.
If my attitudes were different, I *wouldn't* think it was wrong. But I *do* think it would be wrong nonetheless. Because my thinking it would be wrong consists in the fact that I now, actually, judge that it would be wrong, regardless of what my hypothetical attitude might be.
I'm not read up on this part of philosophy at all, but to me objective moral realism is so weird and counter-intuitive. But I'm genuinely interested in watching this, looking forward to it!
To save you some time so you don’t have to read the literature, constitutivism is the way, the truth, and the life! It gets you plausible claim to universal moral truths without all the epistemic and metaphysical problems
I mean, if I found it plausible that there could be such a thing as moral truths, then I would be interested in plausible claims to it. But I don't. Maybe the video will change my mind tho, who knows
Well then you can be a Humean constitutitivist. The position just explains how you ground facts about reasons, but different variants offer different accounts of the content of those reasons. If you are a Humean, you might think different agents have radically different sets of reasons
I think that it's perfectly possible that some species might need to torture human babies in order to survive and that they wouldn't be objectively wrong in doing so. Does that make me a humean?
Well it depends on what you think explains that fact — if you think the creature’s reasons are all explained in terms of its desires (e.g. it has a reason to kill precisely because killing would promote one or more of its desires), then you would qualify as a Humean.
Since you were inclined to appeal to another species as an example, you might also opt for something stronger than subjectivism but weaker than cross-species universality. For example, Aristotelians often view ethical facts as species-relative but not agent-relative. On this view, it might be facts about the capacities or functions essential to a species that set norms. So, certain forms of killing are wrong for humans but not for lions. In fact, this is the view of many realists (e.g. the late Philippa Foot), so if that isn’t absurd to you, you might not be averse to *all* forms of realism, just the more ambitious kinds.
Huemer stated: “You should avoid causing bad things”. In war, causing bad things for the opposite site seem to be what is the goal. So in war you should cause bad things for the other side and prevent the other side causing bad things to your side. Many situation involve two adversarial groups and thus the morality will never be symmetrical/universal but will be asymmetrical. What is good within the group is not the same with the out group.
Huemer declared that statement as uncontroversial and self-evident while it is only for those which do not analyse it. On the surface it is tautological: we should avoid bad. If you assume that it means : you should act in a way that is not bad for you. Even this none so evident restriction in meaning of the statement is not a self-evident statement. One may have to choose death to save other which is not good for my own survival. The very notion of what is ultimately good for me is not at all universal and uncontroversal. One may choose as ultimate good, its own personal survival, while the heroic person will generally choose the well being of others as the ultimate good so will put its own survival at risk since it is not its ultimate good. So this alleged self evidence immediatly evaporate as soon as one start to probe the meaning of the statement and gradually discover multiple possible meaning of the words for different type of person.
The argument by Huemer that burning babies seem obviously wrong is just asking us to thrust our moral instincts which most people have been doing to a certain extent all their life. So he appeals to our normal way of being instead of the much more frequent appeal of misthrusting our moral conscience for various reasons that is very easy to invoque in our current cultural setting. Fourty years ago in catholic societies, most people would have been horrified by killing babies in the womb of mothers. Even the mothers that were doing it were horrified by it. Nowadays most people in the West would declare that abortion is not horrible or evil. Are they truly sincere? I do not think so; there are still a voice of their conscience telling faintly it is not good but they have muffled this voice by a lot of other internalised societal voices/spirit. In Carthage, many women would get rid of their new born babies into public celebration of babies burning offering to Molloch. The worship to Molloch was a societal approved type of cutl as the Abortion is today. Is Huemer’s argument hold so easily? I think it hold but only those like me which have within the same moral tradition as me will ascent that this is a valid argument.
What is at stake? Whether morality is objective or not, we have to come up with shared norms in order for a sociaty to function. But that leads to disputes and dispute resolution and the need for interpreting the norms, whether they are somehow based on something we regard as objective or not.
Truth and self-understanding. It could potentially impact moral judgements if we think there's no objective constraint on our fundamental goals, although I'd need to think more about that.
Whether or not there is an objective constraint on our fundamental goals, there is always a practical social constraint on them. For non-psychopaths, there is rarely (never?) a difference in practice. We internalize social constraints and moralize them, and reflect on them; sometimes we reject them and seek to modify them. This process does not change significantly if we assume there is something objective to it or not. The result is always intersubjective.
'Good' is what I like, & 'evil' is what I don't. Yes I have to find a way to accommodate my selfish likes & dislikes with society at large (behaving appropriately & not getting caught) but there's no more to morality than that, try though we will to sprinkle holy water on it.
Put differently, the argument is that beyond human prejudices & predilections, which both vary & change wildly over time, the idea of 'morality' as a substantive discipline requiring agonising midnight oil is to waste time on nothing in particular. Also adding a theological dimension - ie my predilections are also what some deity very much likes as well - is to add insult to injury. Yes we codify & punish for societal well-being & cohesiveness, but no one should be fooled that there's more to morality than that. Worse still, the idea of an ultimate 'good' - in which human striving results in the ultimate triumph of some prejudicial idea of 'goodness' over 'evil' - given the essential paradoxicality of all outcomes (ie the worst turns out to be the best) - is simple-minded. Doesn't mean we give in to anything & everything, but it does mean that as 'thinkers' we can see self-interest for what it is.
That seems more like the conclusion of an argument than a complete argument. If we codify & punish for societal well-being & cohesiveness, why is thinking about that a waste of time?
Not a waste of time to codify but a waste of time to believe the resulting codification represents something like an ‘objective morality’; it’s never more than codified prejudice, which given time/circumstance can come to codify its polar opposite. If any codification is entirely & eternally prejudicial, what value (moral) objectivity? (There is none.)
So morality itself is not a waste of time, but meta-ethical questions about whether moral realism is true are a waste of time.
I would nearly agree with that, though I prefer to point out that we end up doing the same thing whichever meta-ethical position we take.
Are we saying the same thing, or am I missing something? Your approach seems more contentious, tempting moral realists to push back. My approach invites them to provide an example of a practical issue where moral realists and anti-realists would necessarily do things differently.
Codifying societal norms – so we all know what’s acceptable & what’s not, even if we (like all of us) don’t plan on always obeying ‘the rules’ – is helpful & interesting, but only the unreflective would be duped into thinking these codified norms somehow represent an objectivity of sorts – how can they be if absolute black & absolute white are eternally interchangeable? Which bit of a capricious, interchangeable ‘norm’ represents the ‘objective’?
You and I have a different opinion on this. But you're not giving an argument that your opinion is more likely to be true. You're just stating your opinion in dramatic terms, and psycho-analysing the alleged hidden reasons why people who have my opinion really believe what they do (this is the ad hominem circumstantial fallacy).
‘Argument’ is in plain sight & nothing to do with personal opinion: 2 unquestionable facts preventing morality from ever having an ontologically objective foundation: (1) no codified moral principle can prevent its replacement by its polar opposite (2) good vs bad or good vs evil is forever open to contradictory reinterpretation (paradoxicality of outcomes, ie it was thought to be evil but now seen as good). No amount of conceptual fine-tuning can overturn these manifest characteristics of moral judgements; even declarative scriptures are awash with glaring contradictions, only ever resolved by dictatorial decree. Point: moral judgements are mere moments (arbitrary points) on a dynamic, ever-changing, ever-unstable open-plan continuum.
Again you're just stating what you think without making an argument in support of what you think. Take your (1), for example. The moral objectivist thinks there are moral facts, e.g. torturing kids for fun is wrong, just as it's a fact that 2+2=4. If there are such facts, they can't be 'replaced'. So your (1) just assumes that the person you're arguing with is wrong.
There are many societies (& ethnicities) in which torturing kids for fun is considered spiritually beneficial (is this news!?), as is the torturing of animals; these examples do not even scratch the surface. There is nothing a human being can do - no matter how unspeakable to some - which some society or the other (primitive or advanced) will think is both justified & delightful. (To give specific examples would be to invite retribution from 'pillars of society', religious & secular.) So yes, a person arguing for eternal moral verities is denying the painfully obvious.
Better to be a moral nihilist
https://substack.com/@walterveit/p-185156306
Still waiting on responses to these journal articles purporting to refute Mike’s views:
https://philpapers.org/rec/ARVMLO
https://philpapers.org/rec/ARVFRS
look interesting, thanks for sharing.
Definitely disagree with his contention but looking forward to hearing his take!
I'm glad to hear Michael speaks about Meta-Aesthetics(or whatever), I've wanted to hear his thoughts about it since I read his Baby Shark Vs Beethoven article.
Thank you for sharing this. It was a really interesting conversation…I’m not a philosopher, but have thought some about all of this. In fact, I posted about this yesterday!
I think, perhaps, your proposed connection between the platonic realm and the physical universe is information.
If you have time, please consider reading what I post below and let me know what you think. Please poke holes. https://substack.com/@fogameiro/note/p-185641507?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=73ked0
What I find a bit frustrating in this conversation is that both of you are just rounding up "This is obviously wrong" to "this is obviously objectively wrong", and interpreting people who say "It is not obviously *objectively* wrong" as saying "it is not obviously wrong", and then attributing this to immature undergraduate style over-philosophising, because when you think about stuff abstractly for too long you lose track of what is obvious.
No!
We all agree that torturing babies is wrong. We just disagree about what this means. This is about as frustrating as insisting that illusionists deny the existence of consciousness. You have a particular view of what morality/consciousness are, metaphysically. Not everybody agrees. But everybody (approximately, broadly) agrees on which things are conscious and which things are moral. Just because your account of morality or consciousness is rejected does not mean that your opponents are saying that things are not moral or conscious.
Torturing babies is obviously wrong. How I do I know this? I judge it to be obviously wrong. What does judging it to be obviously wrong consist in? It just seems wrong. What does that mean? Well, I think that a lot of this has to do with my noticing my own reactions to it. I'm repulsed by the idea. It's wrong, and it's wrong even in a society where everybody thinks it's cool. How do I know this? Just the same way that I know it's wrong in this society. When I ask myself if it's wrong, I don't magically turn myself into a member of that hypothetical society. My judgements are my own, no matter what society we are discussing.
So none of this gives me any reason to think it is objectively wrong. Every bit of evidence I have that it is wrong in this or some other society derives from my own judgements and reactions. I can't step outside my head and see that it must be wrong independently of these. And antirealists have well-documented reasons for thinking that this idea must be false.
Even if I accept phenomenal conservatism, which I don't, really, then these arguments would only work if it were the case that torturing babies seems objectively wrong. But it really doesn't. It just seems wrong. The wrongness being objective is an unnecessary extrapolation, a meta-ethical position you can only come to by over-philosophising.
I feel this is a bit of an over-reaction. Obviously it's going to be a different kind of discussion given we both have the same view, and I will definitely have on anti-realists and have that discussion where we get more into comparisons of the relative merits. I think the first hour of this was about me and Mike putting forward to case for robust realism, rooted in something like phenomenal conservatism and the rejection of scientism. But I don't think it's correct to say we didn't say anything against anti-realist views. Mike said at the start his argument that torturing babies would be wrong even if everyone was keen on it (can't remember exactly how he put it). Is the view you outline consistent with that, or does it reject it? If the latter, then the phenomenal conservatism kicks in, and how you need that to respond to skepticism. And I outlined how it seems to me that there's an encounter with value when I listen to Beethhoven that goes beyond mere preference. Now you might say that seeming is false, but now we're back again to phenomenal conservatism.
Yeah, your assumptions here are a good illustration of the problem, actually.
I agree with Mike that torturing babies would be wrong even if everyone was keen on it. But you expect that an antirealist would disagree. Maybe some would. But not me or Lance, I'd say.
That I think torturing babies would be wrong even if everybody were keen on it does not imply moral realism. If you're asking me what I think would be wrong, then you're asking me to make a judgement, and when I make judgements, it's my actual attitudes that matter, not the attitudes of some hypothetical society where everybody is keen on baby torture. Appraiser relativism.
I think realists get this wrong, so let me spell it out with two subtly different propositions.
1. If I were keen on baby torture, then I would think baby torture is good.
2. I think that if I were keen on baby torture, then baby torture would be good
I agree with 1 and I disagree with 2.
1 is just a tautology. 2 is an actual judgement about what would be the case in a hypothetical scenario. They are not the same.
I think the problem here is you were expecting the kind of in depth critique of anti-realism that would (and will) emerge from me talking to an anti-realist. What we were doing here is giving our reasons for being robust realists. Of course, there are responses to those arguments (although error theorists would be happy to say it's not wrong to torture babies, although of course they would follow that up by some more statements), and they need to be responded to. But it wasn't that kind of discussion.
It's not quite that I think you are unaware of how anti-realists would respond, it's more that this awareness is surprisingly unsurfaced in the video or in your comment above.
Like, I was genuinely surprised when you asked "Is the view you outline consistent with that, or does it reject it?" and then only discussed the latter possibility.
I'm not necessarily expecting a very in-depth critique of anti-realism, it's just from where I'm standing the arguments presented for realism are extremely unconvincing and incomplete. So, again, from where I'm standing, I would have wanted a bit more. But perhaps that's just me.
I think the focus was on the role phenomenal conservatism plays in the justification. I think many people quickly reject robust moral realism because they're implicitly assuming that our knowledge of reality comes from science.
I'm surprised you're surprised, as anti-realists go different ways on that question.
But just to clarify your view: What does the fact that X is wrong consist in for you?
Oh yes, meant to say: I’m surprised you’re surprised I’m surprised.
Anti-realists go different ways on that question. Which is why I’m surprised you only really discussed one fork of the dilemma, which comes across as an expectation that this is the fork I would choose.
It consists in the fact that I judge it to be wrong, so it's a function of my attitudes.
But!
That doesn't mean that I think it wouldn't be wrong if my attitudes were different. And I think that's the mistake that is sometimes made by realists.
If my attitudes were different, I *wouldn't* think it was wrong. But I *do* think it would be wrong nonetheless. Because my thinking it would be wrong consists in the fact that I now, actually, judge that it would be wrong, regardless of what my hypothetical attitude might be.
You seem to be assuming I'm completely unaware of how anti-realists respond to these arguments.
I'm not read up on this part of philosophy at all, but to me objective moral realism is so weird and counter-intuitive. But I'm genuinely interested in watching this, looking forward to it!
To save you some time so you don’t have to read the literature, constitutivism is the way, the truth, and the life! It gets you plausible claim to universal moral truths without all the epistemic and metaphysical problems
problem: that’s false
problem: your false
I mean, if I found it plausible that there could be such a thing as moral truths, then I would be interested in plausible claims to it. But I don't. Maybe the video will change my mind tho, who knows
Well then you can be a Humean constitutitivist. The position just explains how you ground facts about reasons, but different variants offer different accounts of the content of those reasons. If you are a Humean, you might think different agents have radically different sets of reasons
I think that it's perfectly possible that some species might need to torture human babies in order to survive and that they wouldn't be objectively wrong in doing so. Does that make me a humean?
Well it depends on what you think explains that fact — if you think the creature’s reasons are all explained in terms of its desires (e.g. it has a reason to kill precisely because killing would promote one or more of its desires), then you would qualify as a Humean.
Since you were inclined to appeal to another species as an example, you might also opt for something stronger than subjectivism but weaker than cross-species universality. For example, Aristotelians often view ethical facts as species-relative but not agent-relative. On this view, it might be facts about the capacities or functions essential to a species that set norms. So, certain forms of killing are wrong for humans but not for lions. In fact, this is the view of many realists (e.g. the late Philippa Foot), so if that isn’t absurd to you, you might not be averse to *all* forms of realism, just the more ambitious kinds.
Thanks, I appreciate it. However don't see why I'd want a plausible claim to universal moral truths? That sounds totally bonkers to me 😅
Huemer stated: “You should avoid causing bad things”. In war, causing bad things for the opposite site seem to be what is the goal. So in war you should cause bad things for the other side and prevent the other side causing bad things to your side. Many situation involve two adversarial groups and thus the morality will never be symmetrical/universal but will be asymmetrical. What is good within the group is not the same with the out group.
Huemer declared that statement as uncontroversial and self-evident while it is only for those which do not analyse it. On the surface it is tautological: we should avoid bad. If you assume that it means : you should act in a way that is not bad for you. Even this none so evident restriction in meaning of the statement is not a self-evident statement. One may have to choose death to save other which is not good for my own survival. The very notion of what is ultimately good for me is not at all universal and uncontroversal. One may choose as ultimate good, its own personal survival, while the heroic person will generally choose the well being of others as the ultimate good so will put its own survival at risk since it is not its ultimate good. So this alleged self evidence immediatly evaporate as soon as one start to probe the meaning of the statement and gradually discover multiple possible meaning of the words for different type of person.
The argument by Huemer that burning babies seem obviously wrong is just asking us to thrust our moral instincts which most people have been doing to a certain extent all their life. So he appeals to our normal way of being instead of the much more frequent appeal of misthrusting our moral conscience for various reasons that is very easy to invoque in our current cultural setting. Fourty years ago in catholic societies, most people would have been horrified by killing babies in the womb of mothers. Even the mothers that were doing it were horrified by it. Nowadays most people in the West would declare that abortion is not horrible or evil. Are they truly sincere? I do not think so; there are still a voice of their conscience telling faintly it is not good but they have muffled this voice by a lot of other internalised societal voices/spirit. In Carthage, many women would get rid of their new born babies into public celebration of babies burning offering to Molloch. The worship to Molloch was a societal approved type of cutl as the Abortion is today. Is Huemer’s argument hold so easily? I think it hold but only those like me which have within the same moral tradition as me will ascent that this is a valid argument.
my meta ethics are better please read my article
morality is created, actually everything outside human consciousness is created and therefore not real/reality or truth.
What is at stake? Whether morality is objective or not, we have to come up with shared norms in order for a sociaty to function. But that leads to disputes and dispute resolution and the need for interpreting the norms, whether they are somehow based on something we regard as objective or not.
Truth and self-understanding. It could potentially impact moral judgements if we think there's no objective constraint on our fundamental goals, although I'd need to think more about that.
Whether or not there is an objective constraint on our fundamental goals, there is always a practical social constraint on them. For non-psychopaths, there is rarely (never?) a difference in practice. We internalize social constraints and moralize them, and reflect on them; sometimes we reject them and seek to modify them. This process does not change significantly if we assume there is something objective to it or not. The result is always intersubjective.
only a philosopher would have such a hard time agreeing with someone else's views! it's ok, even good, to agree in a conversation, Philip!
(Posted on X but there may be other passersby.)
'Good' is what I like, & 'evil' is what I don't. Yes I have to find a way to accommodate my selfish likes & dislikes with society at large (behaving appropriately & not getting caught) but there's no more to morality than that, try though we will to sprinkle holy water on it.
Thank you for sharing your view, but what's your argument for it?
Put differently, the argument is that beyond human prejudices & predilections, which both vary & change wildly over time, the idea of 'morality' as a substantive discipline requiring agonising midnight oil is to waste time on nothing in particular. Also adding a theological dimension - ie my predilections are also what some deity very much likes as well - is to add insult to injury. Yes we codify & punish for societal well-being & cohesiveness, but no one should be fooled that there's more to morality than that. Worse still, the idea of an ultimate 'good' - in which human striving results in the ultimate triumph of some prejudicial idea of 'goodness' over 'evil' - given the essential paradoxicality of all outcomes (ie the worst turns out to be the best) - is simple-minded. Doesn't mean we give in to anything & everything, but it does mean that as 'thinkers' we can see self-interest for what it is.
That seems more like the conclusion of an argument than a complete argument. If we codify & punish for societal well-being & cohesiveness, why is thinking about that a waste of time?
Not a waste of time to codify but a waste of time to believe the resulting codification represents something like an ‘objective morality’; it’s never more than codified prejudice, which given time/circumstance can come to codify its polar opposite. If any codification is entirely & eternally prejudicial, what value (moral) objectivity? (There is none.)
So morality itself is not a waste of time, but meta-ethical questions about whether moral realism is true are a waste of time.
I would nearly agree with that, though I prefer to point out that we end up doing the same thing whichever meta-ethical position we take.
Are we saying the same thing, or am I missing something? Your approach seems more contentious, tempting moral realists to push back. My approach invites them to provide an example of a practical issue where moral realists and anti-realists would necessarily do things differently.
Codifying societal norms – so we all know what’s acceptable & what’s not, even if we (like all of us) don’t plan on always obeying ‘the rules’ – is helpful & interesting, but only the unreflective would be duped into thinking these codified norms somehow represent an objectivity of sorts – how can they be if absolute black & absolute white are eternally interchangeable? Which bit of a capricious, interchangeable ‘norm’ represents the ‘objective’?
You and I have a different opinion on this. But you're not giving an argument that your opinion is more likely to be true. You're just stating your opinion in dramatic terms, and psycho-analysing the alleged hidden reasons why people who have my opinion really believe what they do (this is the ad hominem circumstantial fallacy).
‘Argument’ is in plain sight & nothing to do with personal opinion: 2 unquestionable facts preventing morality from ever having an ontologically objective foundation: (1) no codified moral principle can prevent its replacement by its polar opposite (2) good vs bad or good vs evil is forever open to contradictory reinterpretation (paradoxicality of outcomes, ie it was thought to be evil but now seen as good). No amount of conceptual fine-tuning can overturn these manifest characteristics of moral judgements; even declarative scriptures are awash with glaring contradictions, only ever resolved by dictatorial decree. Point: moral judgements are mere moments (arbitrary points) on a dynamic, ever-changing, ever-unstable open-plan continuum.
Again you're just stating what you think without making an argument in support of what you think. Take your (1), for example. The moral objectivist thinks there are moral facts, e.g. torturing kids for fun is wrong, just as it's a fact that 2+2=4. If there are such facts, they can't be 'replaced'. So your (1) just assumes that the person you're arguing with is wrong.
There are many societies (& ethnicities) in which torturing kids for fun is considered spiritually beneficial (is this news!?), as is the torturing of animals; these examples do not even scratch the surface. There is nothing a human being can do - no matter how unspeakable to some - which some society or the other (primitive or advanced) will think is both justified & delightful. (To give specific examples would be to invite retribution from 'pillars of society', religious & secular.) So yes, a person arguing for eternal moral verities is denying the painfully obvious.