07 Aug '16 12:58>1 edit
Originally posted by LemonJelloAs I get this argument I think Fetchmyjunk is appealing to some sort of ideal observer theory, although I'm not sure it does exactly what he wants it to do. There's an assumption that the ideal observer knows all the relevant facts and has moral preconceptions which are ideal. So the properties of the ideal observer entail ethical reality, in other words that there are ontological objects that are morals. So either you are right and Fetchmyjunk has a sort of unipolar subjectivist account, with a single moral superpower and moral choices reduced to a decision on whether to "get with the program" or not, or he can't avoid making an ontological claim for morals being real in some sense.
I don't think moral facts get "established" at all in the sense you mean, just like I don't think facts in any other realm of discourse get "established". I think facts as entities are rather sui generis. However, I don't make any special pleading for the case of moral facts, as opposed to any other sorts of facts. On my view, facts deal with wa ...[text shortened]... r to plausibility and much deeper in explanative substance than a subjectivist views like yours.
Theft makes a useful specific example of something we might intuitively think of being immoral, in English law it's defined as taking without consent with the intention to deprive permanently. The second part of the definition concerns criminal intent and is objective, the ideal observer knows all the relevant facts including the state of mind of the accused so can make an objective call on the presence of mens rea. The first part has an action, taking some object, and a reference to a protocol surrounding the taking of objects. The action is clearly a fact, either the accused took the object or not. The protocol assumes an ownership relation between objects and people that entail exclusive rights over the object. Suppose the object stolen was a book, the owner entered a bookshop, handed the chosen book to a shop assistant who used a scanner to read information about the book, the person handed over a small rectangle of plastic and information on distant computers changed. The assistant put the book and a piece of paper with a record of the changes on the distant computers into a bag and this somehow generated the ownership relationship between the book and the person. Had either the taker had the owner's consent to take the book or had the book not had an owner then the taking of the book would not have broken the consent protocol and couldn't be construed as being immoral. The data on the distant machines concerned amounts of money but, although there may be a record of the purchase the identity of the thing bought is not necessary to the accountancy procedure. So the question of whether our ideal observer could know all the relevant facts given the legal definition and make a decision based on what English law seems to make it an objective procedure. The problem is that what the law is is well defined whereas in assessing the morality of the situation we have no way of deciding whether an ideal observer recognizes the ownership relation and associated protocol as being relevant to deciding the morality of the situation. Unless one insists that the taking of books is always wrong then the only facts are the owner's rights over the property and the protocol regarding respecting those rights. I don't see any plausible reason that an ideal observer should necessarily agree that the way humans generate protocols for their social structures has any bearing on moral questions. So, although the question of whether an action is moral or not seems at least in part to surround whether a protocol has been followed its not clear that an ideal observer should of necessity agree that the requirement to follow protocols determines the moral status of an action. That taking without consent is immoral seems to hang on whether a protocol needs to be followed in a given situation. So Fetchmyjunk's position seems to make a huge ontological claim that a requirement to follow protocol is somehow built into the fabric of the universe which seems absurd.