I think you put your hand solidly on the dull end of the stick here. Lets consider some other moral examples whos violation does come up in real life.
1) I ought not steal candy from Walmart, but its OK if you do.
2) I ought not steal the entire $500,000 retirement from someone by defrauding them, but its OK if you want to.
3) I ought not pick a child at random, capture them, hold them prisoner in my house, torture them for my sexual gratification, including a final burst where I dismember them thus killing them painfully and somewhat slowly much to my delight, but its your choice if you want to.
4) Out of consideration, I won't dump toxic wastes over my neighbors stream, but that's just me.
My point is, the class of "victimless crime" types of morality is a tiny subset surrounded by moral hypotheses that directly speak to harms and costs accruing to others. Even libertarians who are against police (relatively extreme) are not against private body guards. These libertarians try to claim that their bodyguards would not be ordered to do anything "wrong" because 1) morality is real and 2) libertarians can figure out what the rules are with sufficient reliabillity and accuracy to be trusted to have their might unilaterally make right.
So that's my point about the philosophical basis of moral realism. Does that mean I would NOT enforce rules against dismembering children or stealing? Absolutely not. What it means is I wouldn't kid myself that the system I supported was the truth and that people that disagreed with me were evil. I would instead examine the rules I was developing in light of what kind of society they would produce. MOST conventional morality survives that test, evolution fine tuned our morality to work pretty economically for smart talkative primates who hunted and gathered in bands of less than a few hundred each.
But the rest of my point about morality not being "real", not being objectively true independent of the state of the species, is that I wouldn't have a fetish about the rightness of some moral conclusion I had reached. I would recognize that 1) we have more resources to spend on morality now than than what with being 100s of times richer than those hunter gatherers, 2) we have a significantly different environment to optimize upon, with the landscape of pervasive and inexpensive information and material items a rather new feature that moral intuitions didn't get to evolve upon.
My point is that morality is an engineering optimization, largely carried out by evolution, but absolutely under significant control of the neocortexes of our species. The moral realists I think will not do as good a job of making up moral systems because they fundamentally miss the point that the thing is plastic and there is in most cases no one "right" answer.
This is getting a bit tiresome.
That I rejected the previously implied inference rule
R1: For any X where "I ought X" it also follows "I ought force others to X",
doesn't mean at all that I have to add a different inference rule
R2: For any X where "I ought X" it also follows "...but it's okay if you don't X."
To be perfectly clear to you: I'm rejecting both R1 and R2 as axioms. I've never stated them as axioms of moral realism, nor have I implied them to be such, nor do I believe that any theory of moral r...
I was surprised to see the high number of moral realists on Less Wrong, so I thought I would bring up a (probably unoriginal) point that occurred to me a while ago.
Let's say that all your thoughts either seem factual or fictional. Memories seem factual, stories seem fictional. Dreams seem factual, daydreams seem fictional (though they might seem factual if you're a compulsive fantasizer). Although the things that seem factual match up reasonably well to the things that actually are factional, this isn't the case axiomatically. If deviating from this pattern is adaptive, evolution will select for it. This could result in situations like: the rule that pieces move diagonally in checkers seems fictional, while the rule that you can't kill people seems factual, even though they're both just conventions. (Yes, the rule that you can't kill people is a very good convention, and it makes sense to have heavy default punishments for breaking it. But I don't think it's different in kind from the rule that you must move diagonally in checkers.)
I'm not an expert, but it definitely seems as though this could actually be the case. Humans are fairly conformist social animals, and it seems plausible that evolution would've selected for taking the rules seriously, even if it meant using the fact-processing system for things that were really just conventions.
Another spin on this: We could see philosophy as the discipline of measuring, collating, and making internally consistent our intuitions on various philosophical issues. Katja Grace has suggested that the measurement of philosophical intuitions may be corrupted by the desire to signal on the part of the philosophy enthusiasts. Could evolutionary pressure be an additional source of corruption? Taking this idea even further, what do our intuitions amount to at all aside from a composite of evolved and encultured notions? If we're talking about a question of fact, one can overcome evolution/enculturation by improving one's model of the world, performing experiments, etc. (I was encultured to believe in God by my parents. God didn't drop proverbial bowling balls from the sky when I prayed for them, so I eventually noticed the contradiction in my model and deconverted. It wasn't trivial--there was a high degree of enculturation to overcome.) But if the question has no basis in fact, like the question of whether morals are "real", then genes and enculturation will wholly determine your answer to it. Right?
Yes, you can think about your moral intuitions, weigh them against each other, and make them internally consistent. But this is kind of like trying to add resolution back in to an extremely pixelated photo--just because it's no longer obviously "wrong" doesn't guarantee that it's "right". And there's the possibility of path-dependence--the parts of the photo you try to improve initially could have a very significant effect on the final product. Even if you think you're willing to discard your initial philosophical conclusions, there's still the possibility of accidentally destroying your initial intuitional data or enculturing yourself with your early results.
To avoid this possibility of path-dependence, you could carefully document your initial intuitions, pursue lots of different paths to making them consistent in parallel, and maybe even choose a "best match". But it's not obvious to me that your initial mix of evolved and encultured values even deserves this preferential treatment.
Currently, I disagree with what seems to be the prevailing view on Less Wrong that achieving a Really Good Consistent Match for our morality is Really Darn Important. I'm not sure that randomness from evolution and enculturation should be treated differently from random factors in the intuition-squaring process. It's randomness all the way through either way, right? The main reason "bad" consistent matches are considered so "bad", I suspect, is that they engender cognitive dissonance (e.g. maybe my current ethics says I should hack Osama Bin Laden to death in his sleep with a knife if I get the chance, but this is an extremely bad match for my evolved/encultured intuitions, so I experience a ton of cognitive dissonance actually doing this). But cognitive dissonance seems to me like just another aversive experience to factor in to my utility calculations.
Now that you've read this, maybe your intuition has changed and you're a moral anti-realist. But in what sense has your intuition "improved" or become more accurate?
I really have zero expertise on any of this, so if you have relevant links please share them. But also, who's to say that matters? In what sense could philosophers have "better" philosophical intuition? The only way I can think of for theirs to be "better" is if they've seen a larger part of the landscape of philosophical questions, and are therefore better equipped to build consistent philosophical models (example).