byrnema comments on Questions for Moral Realists

[byrnema]

E.g. A realist position on ghosts doesn’t include the position that “ghost” is a kind of hallucination people have even though there is something that exists there.

I see, thanks for that distinction! I now need to reread parts of the metaethics sequence since I believe I came away with the thesis that morality is real in this sense… That is, that morality is real because we have bits of code (evolutionary, mental, etc) that output positive or negative feelings about different states of the universe and this code is “real” even if the positive and negative doesn’t exist external to that code.

So I find it weird that anyone thinks they can be described by something like preference utilitarianism of Kantian deontology. Those are the kind of parsimonious, elegant theories that we expect to find governing natural laws, not culturally and biologically evolved structures.

I agree...

That makes these grand theories about these attitudes silly to argue about: positions aren’t determined by things in the universe or by logic. They’re determined by the cognitive styles of individuals and the cultural conditioning they receive.

and I don’t disagree with this. I do hope/​half expect that there should be some patterns to our attitudes, not as simplistic as natural laws but perhaps guessable to someone who thought about it the right way.

Thanks for describing your positions in more detail.