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blacktrance comments on What are your contrarian views? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Moral realism is true.
Certainly when I dissolved the concept of universal normativity into agent-design normativity, I found myself looking at something that more closely resembles moral realism than any non-realist position I've seen.
Do you mean this (i.e. that a specific morality has or had evolutionary advatage) or something else?
I mean that moral statements have a truth-value, some moral statements are true, and the truth of moral statements isn't determined by opinion.
What does it mean for a moral statement to be true? After all, it is not a mathematical statement. How does one tell if a moral statement is true?
EDIT: it seems like a category error to me (morality is evaluated as if it were math), but maybe I am missing something.
In many religions (which do tend towards moral realism :-/) morality is quite similar to physics: it describes the way our world is constructed. Good people go to heaven, evil people go to hell, karma determines your rebirth, etc. etc. Morality is objective, it can be discovered (though not exactly by a scientific method), and "this moral statement is true" means the usual thing -- correspondence to reality.
It's hard to give a general answer to this, as different moral realists would answer this question differently. Most would agree that it means that there are facts about one ought to do and not do.
How do you tell if something is a fact?
That depends on what it's a fact about. If it's a fact about the physical world, I use my senses. If it's about mathematics, I use mathematical methods (e.g. proofs). If it's a moral fact, I reason about whether it's something that one should do.
How do you know if your reasoning is correct and someone else's (who disagrees with you) isn't?
By engaging with their arguments, seeing what they're based on, whether they really are what one ought to do, etc.
So, what do you do if you start from the same premises but then diverge? Is there an "objective" way to figure out who is right in absence of some mathematical theory of morality?