That is clearly a word problem, and you are arguing my definition.
I can see that it is a word problem, and I woud argue that anyone would be hard pressed to guess what you meant by "objective moral facts".
It is moral for A that A kills B and it is likewise moral for B to not be killed by A. Let the fight begin.
What fight? You have added the "for A" and "for B" clauses that were missing last time. Are you hilding me to blame for taking you at your word?
Really? You're going there?
You claimed a distinction in meaning between "morality" and "ethics" that doesn't exist. Pointing that out is useful for clarity of communication. It was not intended to prove anything at the object level.
I have a hard time even inferring what you mean by this rather irrelevant-seeming metaphor. I'm not talking about laws and saying "The law should only punish those that act against their intuitions of morality, oh derp!" -- I'm not even talking about justice or legal systems or ideal societies at all! Have I somewhere accidentally made the claim that we should just let every single human build their own model of their own system of morality with incomplete information and let chaos ensue?
I don't know how accidental it was , but your "moral for A" and "moral for B" comment does suggest that two people can in contradiciton and yet both right.
Yes. And in case that wasn't painfully obvious yet, this "something" of their own is exactly what I mean to say when I use the word "morality"!
I am totally aware of that. But you don't get to call anything by any word. I was challenging the appriopriateness of making substantive claims based on a naming ceremony.
I'm not attempting to convince anyone that "morality" "exists".
You said there were objective facts about it!
Yup. If I agree to use your words, then yes. There's an intersection of a set of tablets. These tablets give us some slightly iffy commandments that even the owner of the tablet would want to fix. The counterfactual edited version of the tablet after the owner has made the fixes, checked again to see if they want to fix anything, and are happy with the result, is exactly what I am pointing at here. I've used the words "objective morality" and "true moral preferences" and "moral algorithms" before, and all of those were pointing exactly at this. Yes, I claim that there's nothing else here, move along.
You haven't explained that or how or why different individuals would converge on a single objective reality by refining their intuitions. And no, EY doesn't either.
If you want to have something more, some Objective Morality (in the sense you seem to be using that term) from somewhere else, humans are going to have to invent it.
if they haven't already.
And either it's going to be based on an intersection of edited tablets, or a lot of people are going to be really unhappy.
So values and intuitions are a necessary ingredient. Any number of others could be as well.
I can see that it is a word problem, and I woud argue that anyone would be hard pressed to guess what you meant by "objective moral facts".
If individual moralities have enough of a common component that we can point to principles and values that are widely-shared among living people and societies, that would certainly count as a "fact" about morality, which we could call a "moral fact". And that fact is certainly "objective" from the POV of any single individual, although it's not objective at all in the naïve We...
I think there’s a confusion in our discussions of deontology and consequentialism. I’m writing this post to try to clear up that confusion. First let me say that this post is not about any territorial facts. The issue here is how we use the philosophical terms of art ‘consequentialism’ and ‘deontology’.
The confusion is often stated thusly: “deontological theories are full of injunctions like ‘do not kill’, but they generally provide no (or no interesting) explanations for these injunctions.” There is of course an equivalently confused, though much less common, complaint about consequentialism.
This is confused because the term ‘deontology’ in philosophical jargon picks out a normative ethical theory, while the question ‘how do we know that it is wrong to kill?’ is not a normative but a meta-ethical question. Similarly, consequentialism contains in itself no explanation for why pleasure or utility are morally good, or why consequences should matter to morality at all. Nor does consequentialism/deontology make any claims about how we know moral facts (if there are any). That is also a meta-ethical question.
Some consequentialists and deontologists are also moral realists. Some are not. Some believe in divine commands, some are hedonists. Consequentialists and deontologists in practice always also subscribe to some meta-ethical theory which purports to explain the value of consequences or the source of injunctions. But consequentialism and deontology as such do not. In order to avoid strawmaning either the consequentialist or the deontologist, it’s important to either discuss the comprehensive views of particular ethicists, or to carefully leave aside meta-ethical issues.
This Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article provides a helpful overview of the issues in the consequentialist-deontologist debate, and is careful to distinguish between ethical and meta-ethical concerns.
SEP article on Deontology