Debate: Morality is Objective

[Vote explanation]: The most important reason for my favoring moral realism is my sense that some goals (e.g. promoting happiness, averting misery) are intrinsically more rationally warranted than others (like promoting misery and averting happiness).

In the same way that some things are true and worth believing, some things are good and worth desiring. We should ultimately find the notion of justified goals to be no more deeply mysterious than that of justified beliefs. To deny the objective reality of either goodness or truth would seem to undermine inquiry, and there's no deeply compelling reason to do so. (For one thing: in order for there to be a suitably objective normative reason, normative realism would have to be true!)

Morality is Objective

This is mostly a repost from Bentham's blog. I wrote an extensive rebuttal to that post here:

https://www.lanceindependent.com/p/moral-realist-quackery-another-response

Bentham also wrote an earlier, extensive post about moral realism. I offered a comprehensive critique of that here:

https://www.lanceindependent.com/p/benthams-blunder-full-post

I do not find Bentham's case for realism even a little persuasive. I think he relies extensively on questionable methods and presuppositions and does little to advance any compelling argument for moral realism.

I've become increasingly confident that there are no good arguments for moral realism, that it is deliberatively and explanatorily redundant, that we can account for all observations without positing moral facts, that naturalist accounts of moral realism are trivial and fail to achieve the aspirations of any interesting and robust account of anything and largely "succeed" by terminological gerrymandering, and that non-naturalism relies almost entirely on questionable appeals to "intuitions." 

Furthermore, non-naturalist realism routinely appeals to notions such as external reasons and irreducible normativity that may not even be intelligible, and, at any rate, their proponents are unable to provide a satisfactory account of what these concepts even mean.

Like Tyler John, I chose the strongest level of disagreement. Tyler says that he has has a high (>.99) credence in antirealism. I do, too. There are few positions I am more confident about than antirealism. I'd be happy to discuss the matter with anyone who disagrees here or elsewhere.

Something I wish more internet anti-realists were aware of is that most anti-realist metaethicists these days (like Derek!) endorse a form of expressivism or "quasi-realism" on which they can sincerely affirm claims like:

"It's wrong to hit a baby with a hammer no matter what anyone thinks about it"

because (on their view) what this claim expresses is not a belief (that is in any way beholden to what does or doesn't exist in the world) but rather a non-cognitive attitude of opposing hitting babies with hammers no matter what anyone thinks about it.

The tricky thing about this view is that we're naturally inclined to read the "no matter what anyone thinks about it" phrase as external to the moral judgment, asserting its metaethical objectivity, whereas they want to reinterpret it as internal to the judgment, and hence simply part and parcel of the attitude that they are happy to express without any metaphysical commitments whatsoever.

One reason this is worth clarifying, especially in this Forum, is that I think the metaethical question matters much less, practically speaking, than the first order question of whether you're willing to engage in normative moral discourse. Quasi-realists and expressivists are 100% on board with this. Internet anti-realists often aren't: they'll react to a moral argument by saying things like, "That's just your opinion man, you're assuming moral realism, we can't assert anything that other people don't agree with."

I'd like to encourage more internet anti-realists to read their Gibbard, Blackburn, etc., and adopt a more sophisticated anti-realism that's compatible with engaging in normative moral discourse.

I voted 65% but I think anti-realism is obviously true or we're using words differently.

To see whether we might be using words differently, see this post and this one. 

To see why I still voted 65% on "objective" and not 0%, see this post. (Though, on the most strict meanings of "objective," I would put 0%.) 

If we agree on what moral realism means, here's the introduction to the rest of my sequence on why moral realism is almost certainly false.

I'm continually unsure how best to label or characterize my beliefs. I recently switched from calling myself a moral realist (usually with some "but its complicated" pasted on) to an "axiological realist."

I think some states of the world are objectively better than others, pleasure is inherently good and suffering is inherently bad, and that we can say things like "objectively it would be better to promote happiness over suffering"

But I'm not sure I see the basis for making some additional leap to genuine normativity; I don't think things like objective ordering imply some additional property which is strongly associated with phrases like "one must" or "one should". 

Of course the label doesn't matter a ton, but I'm curious both what people think of as the appropriate label for such a set of beliefs and what people think of it on the merits.

(For those interested, I recorded a podcast on this with @sarahhw and @AbsurdlyMax a while back)

I consider myself a pretty strong anti-realist, but I find myself accepting a lot of the things you take to be problems for anti-realism. For instance:

But lots of moral statements just really don’t seem like any of these. The wrongness of slavery, the holocaust, baby torture, stabbing people in the eye—it seems like all these things really are wrong and this fact doesn’t depend on what people think about it.

I think that these things really are wrong and don't depend on what people think about it. But I also think that that statement is part of a language game dictated by complex norms and expectations. The significance of thought experiments. The need to avoid inconsistency. The acceptance of implications. The reliance on gut evaluations. Endorsement of standardly accepted implications. Etc. I live my life according to those norms and expectations, and they lead me to condemn slavery and think quite poorly of slavers and say things like 'slavery was a terrible stain on our nation'. I don't feel inclined to let people off the hook by virtue of having different desires. I'm quite happy with a lot of thought and talk that looks pretty objective.

I'm an anti-realist because I have no idea what sort of thing morality could be about that would justify the norms and expectations that govern our thoughts about morality. Maybe this is a version of the queerness argument. There aren't any sorts of entities or relations that seem like appropriate truth-makers for moral claims. I have a hard time understanding what they might be such that I would have any inclination to shift what I care about were I to learn that the normative truths themselves were different (holding fixed all of the things that currently guide my deployment of moral concepts). If my intuitions about cases were the same, if all of the theoretical virtues were the same, if the facts in the world were the same, but an oracle were to tell me that moral reality were different in some way -- turns out, baby torture is good! -- I wouldn't be inclined to change my moral views at all. If I'm not inclined to change my views except when guided by things like gut feelings, consistency judgments, etc. then I don't see how anything about the world can be authoritative in the way that realism should require.

Morality is Objective

Evolutionary debunking arguments - we can explain the vast majority of moral beliefs without positing the existence of extra substances -- therefore, we shouldn't posit them! 

Morality is Objective

What would this even mean? If I assert that X is wrong, and someone else asserts that it's fine, how do we resolve this? We can appeal to common values that derive this conclusion, but that's pretty arbitrary and largely just feels like my opinion. Claiming that morality is objective just feels groundless. 

Morality is Objective

It's epistemically inaccessible, explanatorily redundant, unnecessary for any pragmatic aim, just a relic of the way our language and cooperative schemes work. I'm not sure the idea can even really be made clear. Empirically, convergence through cooperative, argumentative means looks incredibly unlikely in any normal future. I voted for the strongest position because relative to my peers I have the most relativistic view I know and because of my high (>.99) credence in antirealism. But obviously morality is sort of kind of objective in certain contexts and among certain groups of interlocutors, given socially ingrained shared values. 

Morality is Objective

The best defence of this I have seen is Michael Huemer's Ethical Intuitionism. 

Morality is Objective

I've been a moral realist for a very long time and generally agree with this post.

I will caveat though that there is a difference between moral realism (there are moral truths), and motivational internalism (people will always act according to those truths when they know them). I think the latter is much less clearly true, and one of the primary confusions that occur when people argue about moral realism and AI safety.

I also think that moral truths are knowledge, and we can never know things with 100% certainty. This means that even if there are moral truths in the world (out there), it is very possible to still be wrong about what they are, and even a superintelligence may not figure them out necessarily. Like most things, we can develop models, but they will generally not be complete.

[resolved]

Meta: I see that this poll has closed after one day. I think it would make sense for polls like this to stay open for seven days, by default, rather than just one?^[1] I imagine this poll would have received another ~hundred votes, and generated further good discussion, had it stayed open for longer (especially since it was highlighted in the Forum Digest just two hours prior).

@Sarah Cheng

1. ^{^}

   I’m unsure if OP meant for this poll to close so soon. Last month, when I ran some polls, I found that a bunch of them ended up closing after the default one day even after I thought I’d set them to stay open for longer.

Morality is Objective

I really appreciated this post. Like many here, I find it hard to make sense of our strongest moral convictions, especially about things like torture or slavery, without concluding that some moral facts are objective. As C.S. Lewis put it, we don’t call a line crooked unless we have some idea of a straight one.

I understand the concern that moral facts might seem metaphysically strange, but I don't think they are any stranger than logical or modal truths. Denying them also seems to undermine the kind of moral discourse we often want to have.

Personally, I ground morality in the character of God. Even putting that aside, I find moral anti-realism hard to accept. If nothing is really wrong, then what reason do we have to care about injustice beyond our own preferences?

I'm curious how anti-realists would approach serious moral disagreements, such as those involving human rights abuses, without appealing to something deeper than social consensus or personal feeling. Can we say "this is wrong" in any meaningful way if morality is only expressive or constructed?

Strong disagree. I am not closed to being persuaded on this, though, but I haven't found your arguments convincing yet.

Even before going into details, though, I'd like to start with the end. I see that you find it intuitively very hard to reject the stance-independent wrongness of torture. If it boils down to intuitions, I find it as hard to accept that morality could be anything other than a human invention that is useful for some instrumental needs, and nothing more.

I am still starting to explore the philosophical grounds for my intuitions, but at the moment, I think a valid summary is something like this:

Moral Anti-Realism: moral statements do not express stance-independent truths. There is no objective moral reality analogous to mathematical or physical facts.

Contractarian Ethics: moral obligations are agreements between rational agents. Ethics emerges from social contracts (negotiated, context-sensitive rules for mutual benefit) not from metaphysical truths.

Subjective Preference: Moral norms are built from individual preferences, desires, and aversions filtered through the pragmatic need to live together peacefully and negotiate conflicts. Some preferences (e.g. for not being tortured) are near-universal, but still not “objective.”

Rationality is procedural and instrumental: it is about coherently pursuing one’s preferences and goals, given the available information, constraints and beliefs.

Skeptic of all intuitions: Moral intuitions are evolved (biologically and culturally) emotional heuristics which we've also internalized, policed and indoctrinated into since childhood.

Nitpicking some of the stuff you talk about:

But lots of moral statements just really don’t seem like any of these. The wrongness of slavery, the holocaust, baby torture, stabbing people in the eye—it seems like all these things really are wrong and this fact doesn’t depend on what people think about it.

'Seems' is a verb you use a lot all through this section. Lots of things seem, but we've learned not to trust intuitions. The sun seems to move and rise in the East. With empirical stuff, we can at least make some observations and measurements, develop some theories and put them to the test. We can't seem to have anything similar with ethics. A plausible explanation for these things you list seem morally true to us is the same as for why, from the top of  skyscraper in a city, the streets below all seem to radiate outward from your position. We are Westerners, we are part of a culture with specific values that has, because of accidents, been tremendously materially, economically and politically successful. It is easy to imagine we are, if not at a pinnacle, 'in the right road of history' and that all in the present will have to converge and just deep our project. I find it much more likely that 500 years from now, our successors -probably non WEIRD people, perhaps AI- will look with the same contempt to our moral fantasies as we have for the cults of the Roman and Babylonian gods. You're assuming as obvious a narrative of lineal moral progress which I think is really open to disputation.

If I have a reason to prevent my own suffering, it seems that suffering is bad, which gives me a moral reason to prevent it.

Suffering is bad for me. It seems plausible to assume it will also be so for others, which means I should use this part of information as part of the bargaining set of tools for game-theoretically negotiating with others the satisfaction of my preference with the minimal sacrifice one can get away with while maximizing the overall results (but just because the latter ultimately give a bigger satisfaction of my own than in the lack of agreements and contracts).

But this means that moral anti-realists must think that you can never have a reason to care about something independ of what you actually do care about. This is crazy as shown by the following cases

I fail to see where you're going with these contrived examples of yours. Like, what people desire is (I'd say always, but let's caveat it a bit) what gives them pleasure. It is not plausible to consider cases where this is not the case. But even if that wasn't the case, I don't see the irrationality even in these examples. You’re assuming a very specific, value-laden view of rationality -one that says people are “irrational” if they pursue ends you see as harmful, malformed, or futile. But I imagine anti-realists view rationality as I stated above: as consistency between means and ends. If someone has strange or harmful goals, that may be sad or tragic to you, but it’s not irrational on their terms. You’re just begging the question by smuggling in your own evaluative framework as if it were universal.

But just as there are visual appearances, there are intellectual appearances. Just as it appears to me that there’s a table in front of me, it appears to me that it’s wrong to torture babies. Just as I should think there’s a table absent a good reason to doubt it, I should think it’s wrong to torture babies. In fact, I should be more confident in the wrongness of torturing babies, because that seems less likely to be the result of error. It seems more likely I’m hallucinating a table than that I’m wrong about the wrongness of baby torture.

This analogy fails because it treats moral intuition like sensory perception, but without acknowledging the critical difference: empirical perceptions are testable, correctable, and embedded in a shared external reality. I might trust that I see a table but I can measure it, predict how it behaves, let others confirm it. Moral intuitions don’t offer that. They’re not observable facts but untestable gut reactions. Saying “I just see that baby torture is wrong” is not evidence, it’s a psychological datum, not a method of discovery. You’re proposing a methodology where feeling intensely about something counts as knowing it, even in the absence of any testing, mechanism, or independent verification. That’s not realism; it’s intuitionism dressed as epistemology.

We all begin inquiry from things that “seem right”, but in empirical and mathematical domains, we don’t stop there. We test, predict, measure, or prove. That’s the key difference: perception and intuition may guide us initially, but scientific realism and mathematical Platonism justify beliefs by their explanatory power, coherence, and predictive success. In contrast, moral realism lacks any comparable mechanism. You can’t test a moral intuition the way you test a physical hypothesis or formalize a logical inference. There’s no experiment, model, or predictive structure that tells us whether “baby torture is wrong” is a metaphysical fact or just a deeply shared psychological aversion. You’re claiming parity where there’s a methodological gap.

As for the claim that critics of intuition rely on intuitions too: there’s a difference between relying on formal coherence (e.g., basic logical tautologies) and on moral gut feelings. The probability example confuses things, as Bayes' theorem and the conjunction rule aren't known by intuition but by mathematical derivation, and our confidence in them comes from their internal consistency and predictive accuracy, not how they “feel.”

I'd also like to go into the last two big topics you propose, i.e., evolutionary debunking arguments and physicalism, but this post is already too long, and probably not conducive to a conversation.

90% agree

The consciousness argument:

• Consciousness and qualia are the only things I'm 100% certain exist. Here's the key insight: when you fully describe any conscious state, you must include objective properties - its spatial extent, colors, sounds, and crucially, how much suffering or happiness it contains.
• This isn't a matter of opinion. Suffering in a conscious experience is as objectively real as the color red in that same experience. It's a fundamental feature of reality, not something that becomes bad because someone judges it to be bad.

The personal identity argument: 

• Derek Parfit's work on personal identity strengthens this view. If there are no robust, continuous "persons" in the traditional sense - if we're more like streams of consciousness than persistent selves - then subjective preferences become philosophically problematic. Whose preferences? What grounds them?
• But conscious experiences of suffering and joy remain objectively real features of the universe, independent of any "person" having preferences about them.

Why this supports objective morality:

• Among contemporary intellectuals, Sam Harris articulates this position best in "The Moral Landscape." Consciousness creates objective facts about well-being. Some conscious states are objectively better or worse than others, based on the suffering or flourishing they contain.

Philosophical honesty:

• I remain somewhat nihilistic because ultimate justification hits bedrock - we can't justify foundational assumptions infinitely. But for practical purposes, consciousness grounds the only objective moral facts we need.
• (My rough credences: 99% nihilism about most moral claims, 0.9% hedonistic realism, 0.09% other anti-realism, 0.01% non-hedonistic realism)

Morality is Objective

(Vote Explanation) Morality is objective in the sense that, under strong conditions of ideal deliberation (where everyone affected is exposed to all relevant non-moral facts and can freely exchange reasons and arguments) we would often converge on the same basic moral conclusions. This kind of agreement under ideal conditions gives morality its objectivity, without needing to appeal to abstract and mind-independent moral facts. This constructivist position avoids the metaphysical and epistemological problems of robust moral realism, while still grounding moral claims in terms of justification.

(Although their views are not exactly the same, I take this view to be aligned with the metaethical views of philosophers Christine Korsgaard, Sharon Street, Philip Kitcher, and Jürgen Habermas. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/constructivism-metaethics/ )

Morality is Objective

Two claims, one: moral facts do not exist, two: if they did, you could ignore them without making truth broadly your enemy.

One:
Some seemings can be cross verified extensively, such that you end up either believing in those seemings or ending up incapable of functioning in the world. For instance, if it seems like a table exists to my visual perception, this is extremely cross verifiable. If I believe murder is wrong, this is not cross verifiable at all.

If I say "there is not a table here", then to maintain this position I have to hold that all of my senses deceive me constantly, and deceive me when they purport to show other measuring instruments detecting the table, and so on until I am doubting all methods of measuring anything in the world. So either I live in a world where there is a table, or I live in a world that is beyond my ability to meaningfully observe, and I opt to ignore the possibility I am in a world I cannot meaningfully observe.

If I say "there is a fact that jaywalking is wrong", what new predictions can I make over saying "people believe that jaywalking is wrong"? "People will try to stop jaywalkers", "people will be upset about jaywalking", and so on are all predicted under both theories. If there is a fact that jaywalking is wrong, I might imagine that someone could prove that fact, or measure it, but nobody has. Absence of evidence is weak evidence of absence, and I did not start out believing in moral facts to begin with.

Two:
If moral facts were established, it is unclear to me why I would have a reason to care. If you produced before me an infallible machine that told me "it is in all cases immoral for anyone or anything to ever be happy", I don't see why I would have any cause to care about this fact. It seems completely unrelated to facts about what things make me happy, facts about my preferences, and facts about tables and chairs and protons, so it seems like I can ignore this fact and go about my life as normal. I could even decide to maximize immorality (happiness) in response to this claim, without running into logical problems.

Normally when you ignore true things, things you disprefer might happen to you. You might stub your toe on a table that you were ignoring. And if you try to defend your false belief, you may have to contort more and more of your world model, until you believe all sorts of false things, which makes it hard to function effectively in the world. Like that there is an enormous conspiracy by all major furniture companies and consumers and banks to pretend that tables are real.

With moral facts, this does not seem to be the case. I see no route where I start by denying that "jaywalking has an innate property of evil", and end up having to deny that protons exist.

Style Note:
I chose to use jaywalking as my example of something immoral. I apply the exact same reasoning to arbitrarily emotionally loaded concepts. I prefer not to invoke those concepts when they are not necessary.

Other Notes:
Companions in guilt is unsuccessful because there aren't normative facts in epistemology either, evolutionary debunking is successful because yes, it really is extremely plausible that people would end up packaging a sense of disgust/dislike/dispreference at antisocial acts as a property of the act instead of a property of their psychology, more plausible than them being wrong that there is a qualitative experience of love, and more plausible than there being mind independent reasons for action.

This is a deeply unconvincing post.

It just seems to be a brute intuition—one that I don’t share.

Indeed. 

The central focus on "torturing babies" being objectively wrong (and the not particularly subtle hidden basis that this is all due to the existence of God) is particularly odd as a choice in this forum, which is disproportionately Jewish, where by halakhic law people are required by God to circumcise male babies (and is also just common among Americans in general). 
 

The view that these statements are neither true nor false has unique linguistic problems. Proponents claim that moral sentences are like commands—they’re not even in the business of expressing propositions. If I say “shut the door,” or “go Dodgers,” that isn’t either true nor false. But because of that, it makes no sense to ask “go Dodgers?” or “is it true that shut the door?” Similarly, it makes no sense to say “if shut the door then shut the door now, shut the door, therefore, shut the door now.” But it does make sense to say things like “is abortion wrong?” or “if murder is wrong, then so is abortion.” This shows that moral statements are, at least in many cases, in the business of expressing propositions—asserting things supposed to be true or false.

I'm genuinely surprised that anyone continues to present the argument from grammar. The obvious implied part of those sentences if "I would prefer it if you" before "shut the door". "Is it true that I would prefer it if you shut the door" makes obvious sense, as does "if I would prefer it if you shut the door then I would prefer it if you shut the door now, I would prefer it if you shut the door, therefore, I would prefer it if you shut the door now". "Is abortion wrong?" becomes "do you prefer if people not abort?", "if murder is wrong, then so is abortion" becomes "if you would prefer that people not murder, then I would prefer it if you also prefer people not abort", et cetera.

These objections are both obvious and well known.  Neglecting to address them speaks to the seriousness of this level of engagement with the counterarguments - a pattern I see consistently from proponents of moral realism. 

 

Morality is Objective

The arguments presented in this essay are neither novel nor convincing and rely on intuitions the author holds that I do not and that the author does not justify

edit: I did not expect this aspect of my vote to become a comment

Before reading the article: The argument I often hear in support of moral realism appeals to moral experience, but moral experience seems totally consistent with moral anti-realism being true. I don't know what evidence for moral realism would look like even if it were to exist, but that would just mean that there's no reason to prefer either view (anti-realism vs. realism).  

After reading: This Cuneo-style argument that Matthew used in this writing is interesting. I forgot about the bad company argument that I learned about several years ago. Don't I lose epistemic facts if I lose moral facts? Maybe so. It seems self-refuting to argue that people should be indifferent to purported epistemic facts; if you want people to clearly assess the merits of your argument against taking epistemic facts seriously, you seem to need them to have rationality. I don't think you'd want them to misrepresent your argument against epistemic facts, use an ad hominem as justification for rejecting it, etc.

(Deleted my lazy comment to give more colour)

Neither agree nor disagree - I think the question is malformed, and both 'sides' have extremely undesirable properties. Moral realism's failings are well documented in the discussion here, and well parodied as being 'spooky' or just wishful thinking. But moral antirealism is ultimately a doctrine of conflict - if reason has no place in motivational discussion, then all that's left for me to get my way from you is threats, emotional manipulation, misinformation and, if need be, actual violence. Any antirealist who denies this as the implication of their position is kidding themselves (or deliberately supplying misinformation). 

So I advocate for a third position.

I think the central problem with this debate is that the word 'objective' here has no coherent referent (except when people use it for silly examples, like referring to instructions etched into the universe somewhere). And a noncoherent referent can neither be coherently asserted nor denied. 

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, if we don't know what the question is, we can't hope to find an understandable answer.

I think it's useful to compare moral philosophy to applied maths or physics, in that while there are still open debates about whether mathematical Platonism (approximately, objectivity in maths) is correct, most people think it isn't (or, rather, that it's incoherently defined) - and yet most people still think well-reasoned maths is essential to our interactions with the world. Perhaps the same could be true of morality.

One counterpoint might be that unlike maths, morality is dispensable - you can seemingly do pretty well in life by acting as though it doesn't exist (arguably better). But I think this is true only if you focus exclusively on the limited domain of morality that deals with 'spooky' properties and incoherent referents.

A much more fruitful approach to the discussion, IMO, is to start by looking at the much broader question of motivation, aka the cause of Agent A taking some action A1. Motivation has various salient properties:

• Almost everyone agrees that it has a referent (eliminative materialists may disagree, but they're a tiny minority - and perhaps are literally without mental state and therefore don't have the information to understand the referent)
• That referent is still very mysterious - we don't have a clear notion of either 'causation' or 'agents' - so there's plenty of room for empirical and conceptual discussions of its nature
• Whatever it is is is everpresent in our decision-making process, possibly by definition
• Motivated agents can seemingly be changed by receiving information, in a more profound way than any other objects (excepting perhaps software, though the more software can be changed in comparable ways the more it starts to look like a motivated agent - and it's still a long way from the breadth of interaction with input animals have)
• Crucially, many of us would change our motivation in somewhat predictable ways if we had the ability to rewrite our source code

For example, many of us might choose to modify our motivations so that we e.g.:

• Procrastinated less
• Put more effort into the aesthetics of our surroundings
• Were more patient in thinking things through (sort of a motivational aspect to intelligence)
• In general, helped our future selves more
• Felt generally happier
• Perhaps put more effort into helping out our friends and family
• Perhaps put more effort into helping strangers
• etc

I would argue that some - but not all - of these modifications would be close to or actually universal. I would also argue that some of those that weren't universal for early self-modifications might still be states that iterated self-moderators would gravitate towards. 

For example, becoming more 'intelligent' through patient thought might cause us to focus a) more on happiness itself than instrumental pathways to happiness like interior design, and b) to recognise the lack of a fundamental distinction between our 'future self' and 'other people', and so tend more towards willingness to help out the latter.

At this point I'm in danger of aligning hedonistic/valence utilitarianism to this process, but you don't have to agree with the previous paragraph to accept that some motivations would be more universal, or at least greater 'attractors' than others while disagreeing on the particulars. 

However it's not a coincidence that thinking about 'morality' like this leads us towards some views more than others. Part of the appeal of this way of thinking is that it offers the prospect of 'correct' answers to moral philosophy, or at least shows that some are incorrect - in a comparable sense to the (in)correctness we find in maths.

So we can think of this process as revealing something analogous to 'consistency' in maths. It's not (or not obviously) the same concept, since it's hard to say there's something formally 'inconsistent' in e.g. wanting to procrastinate more, or to be unhappier. Yet wanting such things is contrary in nature to something that for most or all of us resembles an 'axiom' - the drive to e.g. avoid extreme pain and generally to make our lives go better.

If we can identify this or these 'motivational axiom(s)', or even just find a reasonable working definition of them, this means we are in a similar position as we are in applied maths: without ever showing that something is 'objectively wrong' - whatever that could mean - we can show that some conclusions are so contrary to our nature - our 'nature' being 'the axioms we cannot avoid accepting as we function as conscious, decision-making, motivated beings' that we can exclude them from serious consideration. 

This raises the question of which and how many moral conclusions are left when we've excluded all those ruled out by our axioms. I suspect and hope that the answer is 'one' (you might guess approximately which from the rest of this message), but that's a much more ambitious argument than I want to make here. Here I just want to claim that this is a better way of thinking about metaethical questions than the alternatives. 

I've had to rush through this comment, but I'm making 2.5 core claims here:

1. One can in principle imagine a way of 'doing moral philosophy' that excludes some set of conceivable moralities
2. That a promising way of doing so is to imagine what we might gravitate towards if we were to iteratively self-modify our motivations
3. That a distinct but related promising way of doing so is to recognise quasi- or actually-universal motivational 'axioms', and what they necessitate or rule out about our behaviour if consistently accounted for

I don't know if these positions already exists in moral philosophy - I'd be very surprised if I'm the first to advocate them, but fwiw I didn't find anything matching them when I looked a few years ago (though my search was hardly exhaustive). For want of distinguishing it from the undesirable properties of both traditional sets of views and with reference to the previous paragraph, I refer to it as 'moral exclusivism'. 

Obviously you could define exclusivism into being either antirealism or realism, but IMO that's missing its ability to capture the intuition behind both without necessitating the baggage of either.

Morality is Objective

I don't see how something like morality could be objective. I can't imagine what it would look like for someone to convince someone else that an action was wrong, for a reason that isn't stance-dependent to them (i.e. a reason they don't already find at least partially compelling). 

When I was reading much more about this, this made me sympathetic to something like Sharon Street's humean constructivism. In short (and from memory) it's the view that we can't avoid feeling reasons for actions (if you see a truck driving towards a child for example, you feel a reason to help them), and also that we want consistency. So morality is just kind of there in our responses to the world, and the work of figuring out what is right is the work of reasoning about the reasons we feel to make them more consistent. 

This does lead to the idea that you can't say "you're wrong" to an 'ideally coherent caligula' i.e. someone who took themselves as having reasons to torture for fun, and in fact were correct about that - in other words, on reflection they would indeed still have reasons to torture. I think this would appear pretty gross to Bentham's Bulldog, but I bite the bullet. I don't think you can honestly say the ideally coherent caligula is 'wrong', but you can obviously say "we're locking you up". 

I'm a little reluctant even to accept this account though, because I'm not sure whether I fully accept that I take myself as having "reasons" to act when I respond to specific circumstances. This is clearly the part of the argument where the more cognitivist elements are smuggled in, and I don't know whether I agree with that smuggling. 

I see morality as objective because positive conscious experiences are objectively good, and negative conscious experiences are objectively bad. Then there is subjectivity in figuring out what increases expected total hedonistic welfare.

Morality is Objective

I do not like the expression ‘Morality is objective’, because it comprises both claims I'm very confident are not objective (“You ought not to kill”) and claims I'm very confident are objective (“Suffering is bad”). More generally, I am a moral anti-realist by default, but am forced to recognize that some moral claims are real—specifically, certain axiological claims—because their objective reality is revealed to me via introspection when I have the corresponding phenomenal experiences (such as the experience of being in agony).

Morality is Objective

People keep forgetting that meta-ethics was solved back in 2013.

Morality is Objective

Um, see above :)

I'm a Christian so well, bit of a slam dunk in the same direction OP...

I somewhat struggle to understand how objective morality works if you are not a theist on religious in some sense, but I'm not a moral philosopher so I'll be missing a lot.

Even though I think morality is objective, most likely I'm as long long way from that true North Star. I shudder to think what percentage I'm right with my own current ideas about morally, especially when I look back and see how much my ideas of morality have changed during my life. 

Morality is Objective

You're selling me a horse and you tell me "this horse is fast". I look at the horse and say "yeah, it looks like it would be a pretty fast runner compared to other horses". To which you reply "no, no, it's not about what you think makes it fast. This horse is fast. Fact. It would be fast even if it were the only horse ever. Even if nobody thought it was fast... it would be."

And you go on to tell me that because the horse looks fast, I should believe it is "objectively" fast.

Now I do presume that the horse is fast, in that it appears likely to be what I and most everybody would consider to be fast for a horse. But that's not the meaning that your words convey. Which is instead that I should regard the horse as "fast" based on what the word "fast" signifies and, I can only assume, by reference to some unspecified basis, something which is of a kind that doesn't rely upon our personal views or values, and which universally governs what counts as "fast" in this context. But if there is such a basis... it is not making any appearances.

BB's intuitions

What's with the horse thing? Well, if I understand BB's underlying pro-realism argument correctly, he's suggesting that we should presume that there are stance-independent moral facts, that we should maintain that belief unless we have cause to update our beliefs, and that there isn't sufficient cause for an update.

I may presume that the horse is fast based on my conception of what "fast" should mean for a horse, but there's no reason to presume that the horse is fast in the stance-independent sense without first seeing even a hint of something that might lead to an objective standard for horse fastness (which doesn't exist).

It appears that torture is wrong? Ok, I can accept that as the basis for an initial presumption that torture is morally bad. That's not the same thing as a presumption that it is stance-independently morally bad. Does torture appear stance-independently wrong? No! The opposite. We might even say that it seems extremely intuitive that torture appears wrong precisely because we already have some stance about the infliction of pain without good cause being wrong (or the like).

Particular responses

 But this means that moral anti-realists must think that you can never have a reason to care about something independent of what you actually do care about. 

Kinda. I only care about reducing suffering (etc.) because I already actually do care about whether people suffer (etc.) and other factors relevant to people's opportunities for fulfillment. If I didn't have those stances... then I wouldn't place a high value on reducing suffering unless I had some *other* stances that led me to value reducing suffering.

1. A person wants to eat a car. ... On moral anti-realism, they’re not being irrational. They have no reason to take a different action.

Irrationality doesn't come into it unless the person is proceeding in a way that is at odds with their objectives. You don't have to enjoy something to prefer it over something else. Maybe eating the car would save a billion lives.

Wanting to eat a car would be irrational if I valued not going through that ordeal more than I valued my motivation(s) to eat the car.

General responses

All it would take to conclusively establish moral realism would be to identify a single moral statement that can be demonstrated to be true without reliance upon any person's stance. That would be setting the bar unfairly high though... let's lower our expectations to merely showing that at least one such statement appears likely to be true to a similar standard as what we apply for other kinds of facts that we regard as established facts.

For example, if you say there’s a table then we might presume that it’s true but we’re not going to treat it as an established fact just because you say you saw it. But we don't need very much before we will regard it as a fact.

That should be doable, if the following is correct:

Moral realists aren’t special pleading. We believe in moral facts for the same reason that we believe in any other basic kind of fact.

You can say “torturing babies for fun is wrong” and we can easily establish that in the stance-dependent sense so long as we have adopted a suitable stance, e.g., that causing suffering without critical need is morally bad. One thing follows from the other (more or less).

But how do you establish that to a suitable standard without employing any basic stance about what moral conduct should or shouldn’t entail?

That’s the case that I think moral realists need to make. 

Analogies

Say that everybody agrees that there is a table in a room and it is blue. The colour of the table could be regarded as an established fact. There is a colour-categorisation-stance involved as everybody must first have at least some idea about what shades/wavelengths “blue” can correspond to.

But... there are some shades that are so clearly within the bounds of what we mean by "blue" that if you didn't consider them "blue" then you'd have to be referring to a different concept than everybody else. For those shades, the stance is inherent to the concept we have in mind. We woudn't have to import any of our own stances. We can have "real" facts about "blue" propositions.

Is the table reflecting light within the range that humans regard as "blue"? Yes. It really is doing that. Is there really a concept called "blue"? Yes. Does it correlate directly with some phenomenon that occurs separately to human perception? No, it's not real in that sense. It's a human construct. There is no "blue" unless we conceive of it, there are only things with characteristics that for some values universally fit what we refer to as blue.

In the same way, if "morally bad" had a universal connotation that necessarily meant that, say, the act of dashing infants against rocks must always fit the definition otherwise you couldn't possibly be referring to same thing that  everybody else means when they say "morally bad", then that would be an example of a stance independent moral fact... Alas, that's not the case. 

If a religion says that dashing infants is not always morally bad, they're still talking about the same idea. Our conception of "morally bad" is more abstract than "blue". 

Which rules out any examples based solely on definitions, like we can have for "blue" and for numbers.

Is there some other way that the moral realist can get from the abstract concept of "bad" to a specific "this is bad" without presupposing that some things are bad or presupposing anything about what makes things bad?

Morality is Objective

I believe that the purpose of morality is to promote everyone's well-being. We can use the scientific method to determine how each action, rule, trait, and motive affects overall well-being. Science is objective. Therefore, it is possible to make objective statements about the morality of actions, motives, and traits.

Morality is Objective

Suffering never fails to be undesirable, even if only individual subjects experience it as such. The redness of red is real, even if not everyone perceives red at the same time.

Morality is Objective

Subjective in the sense that there is no inherently 'goodness' quality to things, but objective in the only useful sense that humanity and maybe sentient life can have better or worse experiences according to a fundamental baseline.

You've written elsewhere that you think even ostensibly good or bad actions only have like a ~50.01% chance of actually having good or bad outcomes in the long run due to the butterfly effect. So let's say that a particular instance of torturing someone, due to a long, unexpected chain of cause and effect, ultimately leads to a flourishing future for everyone. So in your view, was this action then objectively morally right? Or do you say no, since it was bad in expectation, it was still objectively morally wrong despite its ultimate consequences?

If you go with the latter, which I suspect you will, then you must admit that actions themselves cannot be evaluated as right or wrong in a vacuum - you must also consider how knowledgeable the actor is about the consequences of their actions. Whether something is good or bad in expectation depends on your credence in various possible outcomes of the action. If the act of torture was committed by Laplace's demon himself because he really did know it would ultimately lead to a flourishing future, then it would be morally right.

Now obviously nobody can reasonably be expected to have Laplace's demon level of accuracy in their predictions of the consequences of all of their micromovements millions of years into the future. But short of that, what level of knowledge should people be expected to have? And can we ever blame them for making the wrong judgment because they lacked sufficient knowledge? I can imagine someone who is careless and just goes with their gut instinct all the time (in which case it feels appropriate to blame them even if their action was good in their expectation), or I can imagine someone who is thoughtful and reflective about their actions and does thorough research to understand the consequences as fully as possible.

You can say, of course, you should be thoughtful and reflective and do research, but how far are you willing to go with that? There are a bunch of morally gray choices where it is unclear what will lead to the best consequences but which you could theoretically eke out a few extra percentage points of confidence in the right answer by doing extensive research about it. Should everyone be expected to perform exhaustive research across many domains of knowledge before ever taking an action? Eventually, the cost of doing this research itself must be taken into account - at what point are you allowed to pull the trigger and take the action? Are the answers to these questions really objective, fundamental features of reality? That just seems bizarre to me.

I just wanted to comment to say I'm very confused about this question/framing - I tried to figure out why and I think it's something to do with uncertainty about what "objective" even means. 
Wondering if anyone has a good exploration of what it means for a thing to be objective?

(My intuition is that I have a "sense of the objective" and that that is pointing at "things I anticipate other people will agreeing with", or "things I'd feel annoyed/crazy if people contradicted", - this would point to there being at thing that is objective morality, but is argued from a subjective frame so I'm not sure that's right - so is there an objective definition of objectivity?)

But this means that moral anti-realists must think that you can never have a reason to care about something independent of what you actually do care about. This is crazy as shown by the following cases:

1. A person wants to eat a car. They know they’d get no enjoyment from it—the whole experience would be quite painful and unpleasant. On moral anti-realism, they’re not being irrational. They have no reason to take a different action.

I think the person wanting to eat a car is irrational because they will not be promoting their wellbeing by doing so and their wellbeing is what they actually care about.

So the reason not to eat the car isn't stance-independent—it's based on their own underlying values.

What is the reason not to eat the car that isn’t grounded in concern for wellbeing or some other value the person already holds?

Morality is Objective

There's no evidence of this, and the burden of proof is on people who think it's true. I've never even heard a coherent argument in favor of this proposition without assuming god exists.

Morality is Objective

The sense of moral objectivity that I'm currently sympathetic to is some kind of constructivist account like the one introduced by John Rawls.

I think morality needs to be objective in some sense so that we can use it to resolve conflicts between different sets of values that different people hold. We need to construct moral principles so that we can resolve disputes between different subjectively held sets of values and live together in ways that are as mutually advantageous as possible. I would define "advantageous" in terms of values and preferences, or perhaps some idealised form of them, so that would make morality stance dependent in a sense, but I still think it would warrant being called objective. 

I would not think of morality as objective in the sense that there are moral facts and properties that exist independently of the judgments and attitudes of subjects. Rather I would think of it as objective in the sense that we can't simply make our own subjective values the standard by which to make moral judgments when engaging in moral discourse and inquiry. We need to justify our moral views to others, explaining why our views are correct/better and why opposing views are incorrect/worse. This is necessary to ensure that there is a common subject matter that we can think and talk about together to solve practical problems associated with living together. We need a commonly agreed upon set of norms and values that we can use to criticise and adjudicate between different subjectively held norms and values.   

I would need to flesh this out but that's roughly where I am at the moment in this debate.

Regarding realist accounts: One reason I am sceptical of non naturalist moral realism is that I don't think you can infer metaphysical truths from intuitions. And I think intuition is the main reason people are non-naturalists.

Even if you do have intuitions that entail the truth of non-naturalist moral realism (which I'm unsure most people even do) this would just tell you how you are disposed to think about morality. Why think that your intuitions give you access to mind-independent irreducibly normative facts? Why think your psychological states are in any way responsive to these facts or to anything that could inform you of them? I think this would apply to other Platonist-type views about things like mathematics as well.

One reason I'm sceptical of naturalist moral realism is that I don't think moral/normative properties are the sorts of things we do/could observe or need to posit to explain what we observe

You could give some naturalistic reduction of moral/normative properties, but then I think you're just changing the subject.

I think "morality" as we discuss it and as I use it has many realish properties - I think things would be good or bad whether or not moral agents had ever come to exist (so long as moral patients did), I think we can be uncertain about which theory of ethics is "right" to begin with, and I don't think the debate to resolve this uncertainty is ultimately semantic. I think ethics has most of the stuff real things have except for the "being real" part.

I'm not super confident on this, but I note that most sorts of explanations of what ethics is either fall into the category of dubious empirical predictions "ethics is the one theory all rational beings would converge on given enough time and thought", or a muddled version of just restating a normative ethics theory "ethics is some hypothetical ideal contract between distinct agents, or what is good for all beings taken together".

Maybe more personally, I think that any explanation of what we mean by "objective ethics" would have to be something that, if we programmed a perfect superintelligence to determine what the correct answer to it was, I would be satisfied deferring to whatever answer it gave without further explanation. To borrow/restate a thought experiment of Brian Tomasik's, if a perfect "ethicsometer" told me that the correct ethical theory was torturing as many squirels as possible, I would have just learned that I don't care about ethics. I would go further than this though and say that the ethicsometer had failed to even satisfy what I mean by "ethics". I've been recommended Simon Blackburn's work on this, it seems possible I have a view most like what he calls "quasi-realism".

Morality is Objective

I'm pretty confused about this, but currently I look at it something like this: 

Moral sentences state beliefs whose validity doesn't depend on whether or not anyone approves of them. These beliefs are about facts in the world, the same world that physics describes, just different aspects of it. 

Epistemically, I am a coherentist: a belief is more justified the better it fits within the most explanatorily coherent system of beliefs. I see reflective equilibrium as a useful method for approaching that coherence. 

In physics, we have a dense and well-corroborated network of beliefs, supported by prediction and intervention. Ethics, by contrast, has a thinner and more contested network, and lacks comparably strong validation tools. So, my confidence in particular moral propositions, and in moral realism itself, is correspondingly weaker. 

Still, I treat improvements in moral theory (better explanations, resolution of paradoxes, maybe convergence across cultures) as evidence that we're tracking real features of the world, just as progress in physics suggests we're tracking reality. The quality and coherence of our moral theories should inform how confident we are in moral realism. 

I'd put my credence around 60%. Coherent moral theories face enough external constraints and show some explanatory success that I slightly lean toward thinking they track real features of conscious beings and their interactions.

Morality is Objective

I was unable to come up with a non-assertive, non-arbitrary-feeling grounding for moral realism when I tried very hard to do this in 2021-22. 

My vote isn't further towards anti-realism, because of:

• Some uncertainty about what people might think I mean by 'objective' (I think I have specific, unchanging, moral reasons to do particular things)
• I was a committed realist before 2021, so maybe I'll become convinced the other way! But I guess not.

Morality is Objective

If morality is subjective, there is nothing that promotes love over hate, peace over war, etc. apart from what we think. And so someone who thinks war is moral IS CORRECT under subjective morality, while another person who things the same war is immoral IS ALSO CORRECT.

The most objective thing about morality (especially utilitarianism) is that some experiential states are objectively 'better' than others by virtue of their valence and that therefore moral projects, however valid they themselves are, at least take root in something real.

yes

A person desires, at some time, to procrastinate. They know it’s bad for them, but they don’t want to do their tasks. On anti-realism, this is not a rational failing.

I am just picking one of these examples, but an anti-realist could call this a rational failing. People can have many different desires, and thus many different reasons for action, e.g. you could have a desire - and thus a reason - to procrastinate, while at the same time, have a stronger desire - and thus a stronger reason - to work. An anti-realist could say that one is irrational for not doing what one has most reason to do, and in this case, as they have more reason to work than to procrastinate, they are being irrational here. You may say that this impossible, but a "stronger" desires does not have to be defined as being "more" motivational. "Stronger" desires could be understood as, e.g., more persistent desires. 

Thanks for opening this important debate! I'd like to offer a different perspective that might bridge some gaps between realism and anti-realism.

I tend to view morality as something that evolved because it has objectively useful functions for social systems—primarily maintaining group cohesion, trust, and long-term stability. In this view, moral judgments aren't just arbitrary or subjective preferences, but neither are they metaphysical truths that exist independently of human experience. Rather, they're deeply tied to the objective requirements for sustainable group existence.

Some moral norms seem universally valid, like prohibitions against harming children. Why? Because any society that systematically harms its offspring simply can't sustain itself. Other norms, like fairness and autonomy, emerge because they're objectively beneficial in complex groups: fairness keeps group interactions stable and predictable, and autonomy ensures individual concerns are incorporated, helping the system adapt and flourish.

So perhaps morality can be seen as having both subjective and objective dimensions:

• Objective dimension: Morality serves objectively measurable functions that are universally beneficial across human groups (like trust-building, protecting vulnerable members, and promoting long-term cooperation).
• Subjective dimension: How exactly these functions translate into specific norms can differ across cultures or contexts (though within limits).

In my recent post "Beyond Short-Termism: How δ and w Can Realign AI with Our Values", I explored this idea through the lenses of two key moral parameters—Time horizon (δ) and Moral scope (w)—showing how expanding these parameters corresponds to what we typically view as higher morality.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this functional view of morality: do you think it might bridge the realism–anti-realism divide, or does it fail to capture some key aspect of the debate?

Morality is Objective

While I don't necessarily think these are all the best arguments out there for moral realism - and I would even reject a few points that Bentham makes, since I'm a naturalist myself - I still think it's a great introduction and I find many of the antirealist responses to these sorts of concerns completely unconvincing. 

When you say “objective” here, do you mean epistemic or ontological objectivity? Because it seems like you mean both at different parts of the post. But that’s not fair. You need to stick to one usage. It would be like telling someone to meet you at the bank, and when they ask “do you mean the money place or the edge of the river?”, and you say “both”. 

Morality is Objective

Moral truths don't semantically work the same way as prototypical truths, and they are not objective the same way, but they are objective in a way that is just as important. I think I will translate an essay I have explaining this and publish it here on the forums.

Morality is Objective

There are many "moralities". Also, every moral framing is something we have to choose for ourselves and "breathe life into", as it were. Morality is therefore, by definition, subjective.

Morality is Objective

I used to think morality is objective. However, I think people's perspective of what exactly is morale and isn't morale (the range or spectrum) is much more subjective. How much weight to give to each element? So it depends if we're talking about the concept or theme of morality as a "whole" or a scale of morality. Based on the scale weight, I voted with somewhat disagreeing.

Life has meaning only because we, as extremely biased living creatures, decide to give it meaning.

Morality is Objective

As an atheist-leaning agnostic, I find Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape to be the closest approximation of objective morality I have encountered, and it best captures the form of subjective morality I follow. However, I still view morality as a human construct: the flourishing of life is not objectively good, and the suffering of life is not objectively bad.

While there are different value functions, I believe there is a best possible value function. 

This may exist at the level of physics, something to do with qualia that we don’t understand perhaps, and I think it would be useful to have an information theory of consciousness which I have been thinking about. 

But ultimately, I believe that in theory, even if it’s not at the level of physics, I think you can postulate a meta-social choice theory which evaluates every possible social choice theory under all possible circumstance for every possible mind or value function, and find some sort of game theoretic equilibrium which all value functions and social choice theories for evaluating those functions and meta-social choice theories for deciding between choice theories converge on as the universal best possible set of moral principles—which I think is fundamentally about axiology; what moral choice in any given situation creates the most value across the greatest number of minds/entities/value functions/moral theories? I believe this question has an objective answer, there is actually a best thing to do, good things to do, and bad things to do, even if we don’t know what these are. Moral progress is possible, real,  not a meaningless concept. 

I lean towards moral realism, but I think the reliance on intuition in a lot of arguments for moral realism is a deep methodological misstep. If a fact seems true to someone and false to someone else, the truth or falsity of that fact is not going to be enough, standing alone, to explain its intuitiveness. 

If I say “X seems true, and the truth of X is a salient explanation for why it seems that way,” this isn’t actually a good or salient explanation until we can also offer some account of why it seems false to others. Perhaps their intuitive faculties are deficient - but really all we could say for sure is that at least one person, you or them, has deficient intuitive faculties. What I find is that, generally, this leads to weird, gerrymandered epistemologies and rhetorically inert positions which depend, for their success, on appeals to intuition which simply may not be there. By my lights, this is the wrong way to argue for a claim - even a true one!

To rely on intuitions regarding contested matters, we must prescribe some methodology of checking the quality of your intuitive faculties against theirs, and even if we can do this reliably, we then need some other methodology that rules out the possibility that both intuitive faculties are somehow broken. I don’t know how to do this, I’ve never met anyone who can, and in any case, I lack the instruments to pull it off.

But casting intuition aside entirely, within this context, I think moral realism can still be salvaged. I think people have normative experiences which can ground moral claims - even if we can’t trust our intuitions that “X is good” seems true, there are experiences we have which seem good directly - namely, enjoyment. And there are experiences we have which seem bad directly - suffering. This is more than just intuition. If I put my hand on a hot stove, regardless of what I might be contemplating at any given moment, I am going to have experiences which lend themselves to the conclusion “I should move my hand from the stove.” The apparent badness of a thing which causes us suffering shifts our normative beliefs and inclines us to dislike it - it shapes our wants, and can create new likes and dislikes where there were none before. If our experiences provided purely descriptive information, this would be wholly unexplainable.
 

But all we really know for sure is that enjoyment seems good, and suffering seems bad - and it then falls to our varying metaethical approaches to explain why these seem the way they do. It doesn’t follow, deductively, that suffering is bad because it seems to be. Lots of things we experience aren’t as they seem. But suffering seems bad to everyone (even if different things cause suffering in different people), and enjoyment seems good to everyone (with the same caveat) - so badness and goodness being universal properties of suffering and enjoyment, respectively, is a plausible, simple, and salient explanation of why they seem to be. 

“Enjoyment is good,” then, is justified in a manner more akin to a scientific theory than a mathematical theorem. We need never attempt to cross the is-ought gap - we sidestep it entirely, the same way we do for claims about gravity or chairs. The goodness of enjoyment is a highly salient explanation for why it seems good. It is an excellent fit to the available evidence. The theory that enjoyment is good is simple and has predictive value - I can predict that future enjoyable experiences will incline me to believe that experiences of that sort should, all else being equal, happen more. And I can predict that future instances of enjoyment will seem good to others too.

At first glance, the main challenge to this approach is evolutionary debunking, which can be held out as an alternate hypothesis that better explains why we are seemed good and bad to. If evolution fully explains the apparent badness of suffering, positing that suffering also by coincidence happens to be bad is pointless and redundant. If I show that the image of a chair is explained by a hologram, there’s no point in also positing that there just by coincidence happens to be a chair where the hologram is.

But I don’t think that evolutionary debunking actually attacks this theory at all. Evolution has tremendous explanatory power and no inherent normative conclusions, but what it explains is why we enjoy and suffer from the things we do, rather than why enjoyment and suffering seem good and bad to us. Evolution explains why, for instance, our bodies are tuned to deliver enjoyment when we eat nutritious food and why we suffer from having our limbs destroyed. Evolution explains the wiring that governs what we enjoy and suffer from. It explains why there are slight variations in how different people are wired. And further, evolution debunks any claim that the set of wiring we presently have is in any sense “correct,” since how we are wired isn’t the result of any sort of virtue-tracking process.

If a conscious person were created from scratch, as a result of some process other than evolution, evolution would make no predictions about what this person would enjoy or suffer from, nor would it make any predictions about how good or bad enjoyment/suffering would seem to them. I predict that enjoyment would still seem good to this person (though I have no clue how we might build such a person) and that suffering would seem bad to them. I would also say that, regardless of what they are wired to enjoy or suffer from, it is good to give them the things they’re wired to enjoy, bad to give them the things they’re wired to suffer from, and good to shape their wiring in a manner which promotes their long-term wellbeing. And I would say the same is true of everything that can experience - you, me, shrimp, aliens - without exception.

Well it's different for each one and each culture have a different way to express it

Morality is Objective

Human nature is objective, so human morality must be so too

Morality is objective, but I think some of it changes over time based on new information we uncover and/or changing sentiments, and that change may not always be objective at first

Morality is partly objective. It is hardwired into our brains in terms of aversion to death and the suffering of others, all else being equal. Anyone will slow down if a dog crosses the road, unless it is an emergency.

Morality is Objective

Like this slider- objectivity is a spectrum. The most subjective thing possible is a pure taste satement 'I like ice-cream'. A pure objective statement is '1+1=2'. 

In the world of inter-subjectivity there are statements like 'Democracy is superiour to dictatorship'. This has elements of both objectivity and subjectivity. 

I think morality is an intersubjective agreement (hence the influence of culture) but supported by biological roots (we possess a biological distaste for suffering and injustice, and a biological capacity for abstract reasoning). These intersubjective agreements combined with objective biological dispositions result in something which is not as objective as mathematics or natural sciences, but possesses a degree of objectivity.

Morality is Objective

Roughly speaking, I find emotivism to be the most convincing metaethical theory

Morality is Objective

Infinite

Morality is Objective

The universe just is. Putting right and wrong on various states is fundamentally subjective. I think that given certain goals or conditions, you could get to objective morality, but those conditions are themselves subjective

I'm a multi-level utilitarian with a classical notion of wellbeing. That of a time integral of the value-component of momentary consciousness. "Objectivity" I here interpret as "there being an absolute truth about it", and for this absolute truth I rely on my strong belief that the concept of omniscience is ultimately coherent, although unimplementable.

Morality is Objective

My impression (admittedly based on limited exposure and minimal formal study of Philosophy) is that moral anti-realists make the mistake of selectively applying scepticism a la Agrippa’s trilemma to moral claims that they don’t apply to non-moral claims. 

A super brief summary of my reasoning is as follows:

-The only empirical information we have is qualia

-Qualia is often valenced as ‘good’ experience and ‘bad’ experience

-Therefore ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ exist and moral realism is true to the extent that we trust any form of empirical information whatsoever.

Important Clarification:

People asking to define terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ lexically (i.e. using a word-based definition rather than an experience) fall prey to Agrippa’s trilemma in the context of lexicography. 

Every word can only be lexically defined by other words and so on until we get infinite regress or circular definitions unless we tilt at some point toward non-lexical definitions e.g. semantics inferred by context. 

Learning semantics via context is how a baby first learns language. This empirical method of learning the meaning of words is how a definition can be obtained without making reference to other words. 

Thus, it simply isn’t necessary to define ‘good’ and ‘bad’ solely in terms of words as long as we can use words to direct our interlocutors to experiences they’ve had of positively and negatively valenced qualia (i.e. pleasure and pain respectively). 

We all have good and bad experiences and thus we have as much certainty that moral realism is true as we can about any empirical claim. Of course, Philosophical Zombies wouldn’t have access to that information so I’d forgive them for being moral sceptics…and philsophical zombies that mechanically act as if they know qualia are real are curious automata indeed!

Morality is Objective

Universal subjectivism (which gets most of what you want out of realism) or non-naturalism are the best options in metaethics 

"So, for instance, suppose you take a baby and hit it with great force with a hammer. Moral realism says: 1. You’re doing something wrong."

Moral realism doesn't say that hitting a baby with a hammer is wrong. Moral realism entails that there is some fact about the morality of hitting a baby with a hammer. Probably, that moral fact is that it is wrong to do this, but moral realism is not a theory about specific moral facts. It's a theory that moral facts are possible. 

This is a pedantic point, but the more commitments you unnecessarily build into moral realism, the more likely someone is to reject it. Someone might be open to there being moral facts, and yet believe that the wrongness of torturing babies isn't one of these facts. If someone like that accepted your claim that moral realists necessarily believe it is wrong to torture babies, they might think, "Oh, I guess I'm not a moral realist then." The belief that it's wrong to torture babies is a promising contender for one of the world's most popular moral beliefs. Still, the less you commit the moral realist to, the more plausible moral realism is going to seem. 

Morality is Objective

I find it intuitive that there could be a small set of objective moral facts but much smaller than is generally believed for moral realist positions + i do not think this can be justified rationally to a large degree. I think there can be contextual moral facts (as in "rational agents in a society would agree to cooperate on problem X" or "rational agents would agree to behave in a certain way on a moral problem, given following constraints"), but I do not think these are enough to justify an objective moral realism position.

I think the set of sensible moral views and positions is large, and thus think that morality is mostly not objective.

Morality is Objective

I think morality is objective in the sense that there as some stable state of the universe with the maximum pleasure over time, which is the morally ideal state, but I don't think we'll ever know exactly how close we are to that ideal state. But it is still an objective fact about the territory, we just don't have an accurate map of it

Morality is Objective. I am psychologically unable to believe otherwise.

Executive summary: This exploratory argument defends moral realism—the view that some moral truths are objective and stance-independent—by asserting that denying such truths leads to implausible and counterintuitive implications, and that our intuitive moral judgments are as epistemically justified as basic logical or perceptual beliefs.

Key points:

1. Definition and Defense of Moral Realism: The author defines moral realism as the belief in stance-independent moral truths and argues that some moral facts (e.g., the wrongness of torture) are too intuitively compelling to be explained away as subjective or false.
2. Critique of Anti-Realism's Consequences: Moral anti-realism, the author argues, implies that even clearly irrational behaviors (e.g., self-harm, extreme sacrifice for trivial desires) are not mistaken as long as they are desired—an implication that runs counter to ordinary moral and rational intuitions.
3. Epistemology of Moral Beliefs: The author analogizes moral intuition to visual and logical perception, claiming that moral beliefs are justified in the same way as foundational beliefs in other domains—by intellectual appearances that seem self-evident unless strongly refuted.
4. Rebuttal of Common Objections: The post addresses key arguments against moral realism—such as disagreement, the supposed “queerness” of moral facts, and evolutionary debunking—and contends that these objections either misunderstand objectivity or rely on assumptions inconsistent with other accepted non-physical truths (e.g., logical or epistemic norms).
5. Moral Knowledge and Evolution: The author argues that our ability to access moral truths is best explained by evolution endowing us with rational faculties that can discover such truths, paralleling our capacity to grasp mathematical and logical facts.
6. Theistic Perspective (Optional): As a supplementary note, the author, a theist, adds that belief in God further supports the idea that humans are equipped to discern moral truths—though this point is acknowledged to carry less weight for non-theists.

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