ruby sparks
Contributor
There is a difference between moral rules (which apply to all humans) and local rules (which do not).
It's highly dubious to arbitrarily and selectively use the term 'moral' only for certain rules that might better fit with your claims, and not use the word for those that don't, especially when one minute you're counting up and citing the attitudes of other people, expressed in your favourite terms (everyday language), about what are and aren't moral issues, and the next minute ignoring that and conveniently making up your own personal, limited definitions to suit instead.
Excellent example!ruby sparks said:And things like "what consenting adults do behind closed doors is no one else's moral business but theirs."
When people say things like that, even if they do not realize it, they are making a vanilla moral assessment, and they are implying that those who promote the belief that that it is immoral to, say, have same-sex sex, are both mistaken and behaving immorally!!!
No. They could (and speaking for myself, I would) only be saying the exact same thing about those people, that their views in turn, about the sorts of things I listed, including the one above, are relative to their personal judgements or prejudices or their culture or upbringing or whatever. They or I may be disagreeing, sure, but what neither they nor I are necessarily saying is that there is an independent morally-real fact of the matter, which is the point at hand.
Your claim that almost all humans, except for a minuscule number, are moral realists is (not for the first time) questionable, because many people are moral relativists, and possibly pluralists, about many moral issues.
Now, if you want to say most people are moral realists about certain, selected things then fine, that's uncontroversial and was agreed a long way back in the thread, but please then stop using the word 'morality' as if it covered, you know, morality generally.
And so morality is perhaps not really so different from gustatory taste, in that there as there are some things almost all people would agree are immoral, so there are some meals that almost all humans would agree are disgusting. Similarly, perhaps, with beauty, where severe disfigurement would be widely agreed not to be beautiful, possibly disgusting and certainly, in the end, 'a strong reason not to reproduce with this individual'. This is especially true in the rest of the animal kingdom, where unless you look the part (literally look 'fit') you won't get sex. It is also where human 'disgust' and its neural correlates, apparently applies across several domains.
And if it were merely the case (as it seems to be) that people more often had stronger views on morality one way or the other than on gustatory taste or beauty, that of course could say nothing at all about moral facts, let alone independent ones. There could be other reasons, to do with beliefs in free will for example (the human psychological need to have someone to blame), or simply because it may not, as often, matter so much in terms of consequences (potential or actual) whether something is tasty or beautiful. As with gustatory taste, certain (not all, as we have shown) moral issues could merely have more import vis-a-vis maximising chances of surviving and thriving, and we would have an evolutionary explanation for the manifestation of certain imperatives (including about what to eat and not eat, who to have sex with and not have sex with, etc). This is not in dispute.
But we went through all this stuff about moral 'facts' a long time ago, and I agreed there were some. Lately we've been talking specifically about independence. So getting back to that point, you have not yet shown independence from human attitudes in any of your scenarios. And the fundamental differences with something like illness and disease remain.
Although for the umpteenth time, a candidate rule ("my/our continued existence = good") that is at least arguably the basis for morality was suggested by someone quite a while back and has been discussed (I even started a thread on it) and you have for some reason not picked up on it, even though it's independent of attitudes and as such should be right up your street.
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