| >It's kind of annoying but cute to see some popular "thinkers" and writers -- fancy-smarty-pants _neuroscientists_ and _atheists_, even -- who actually think morality is real, as though there are actual objective problems out there somewhere. As though you could actually do a "bad thing" or a "good thing." It seems that you conflate real with "made of molecules". Things like morals are real in the sense that people agree on them. Doesn't even have to be all people -- after all some people disagree also for concrete, made of molecules, type of stuff (e.g. a crazy person believing a tree is a demon, or a conspiracy theorist not believing in the moon landing, or a psychotic seeing spiders on his arms, etc.) And, in that respect, it's quite easy to see that helping an old person who fell down to get up is something good, while raping children is not. It's not even the case that people will take sides on the matter, the huge majority will agree on both those labels. >That grinds my gears a little because it's very hypocritical: They'll write an entire book disparaging religious people who believe things without evidence, and they'll write another book on why, according to their pseudoscientific-philosophical horse shit, morality can be "derived from science" [vomit]. You do understand that both your charge against this "hypocrisy" and your disgust at "pseudo-philosophy" is based upon a moral stance, right? |
That is sufficient for a cultural relativist. But not for the bulk of moral realists, who want to say that it is possible for whole cultures, or even the human race as a whole to be just wrong about some moral proposition.
It's not even a hypthetical excercise. For example: to the moral realist, branding slavery as being unacceptable was not just a matter of switching from one social convention to another. It was about switching from being wrong (both factually and morally) to being right.