The realism/unrealism and objective/subjective frameworks are poor and underspecified.

Everything that is subjective is also objective - it exists on people's brains and can be modelled as a thing in itself.

Everything is real, but sometimes not in the way people think it is.

Whether moral realism is false or not depends on the particular characterization of realism. I think some naturalist accounts are true but trivial, some realist accounts are false, and still others may be neither true nor false, but instead include elements that are completely meaningless. In the latter case, such positions don't even amount to propositions. One might capture this in a trilemma: all forms of moral realism are trivial, false, or meaningless.

Philosophy PhDs and grad students pretty strongly favor Moral Realism.
https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl?affil=Target+faculty&areas0=0&areas_max=1&grain=coarse

I believe the above survey is from 2020. I suspect that if you could somehow survey philosophers from all time periods, the consensus in favor of moral realism would be stronger, although I think non-cognitivism was popular in like the 70s.

@JoshuaFosse Interesting, thanks.

@JoshuaFosse Those results are not from the 2020 survey. Those are the 2009 results (56.4%). There are newer results from 2020, which show the number has increased to 62.1%. I don't know what you'd find if you surveyed philosophers in the past, but I'm skeptical that most would be moral realists in a modern sense. I am skeptical that contemporary characterizations of moral realism reflect, in a clear way, past discussions about the topic, so it may be a bit of an awkward fit categorizing thinkers prior to the 20th century, and those outside the analytic tradition. From anecdotes I've seen from analytic philosophers, antirealism seems to have been popular in the mid 20th century and began receding in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s with the resurgence of naturalist and non-naturalist realist accounts, respectively.

I also wouldn't consider 56.4% "strongly favoring" moral realism. Such language is a bit loose, but I'd think something closer to 80% or more would be a "strongly favoring" position, not barely more than half.

Finally, those results don’t tell the whole story. They combine moral naturalist and non-naturalist accounts of moral realism. 

However, these accounts are so different from one another that there are at least some ways in which naturalist realists and antirealists have more in common than naturalists do with non-naturalist realists. The same holds for non-naturalist realists and antirealists, who may both agree that naturalist accounts are trivial in that they strip their accounts of the kind of authority, clout, or force that some would consider essential to an acceptable realist account. 

A defensible case could be made, then, that collapsing naturalists and non-naturalists into a single measure, while it makes sense from some perspectives (they may share a similar semantic analysis of moral claims), they may differ in others (very different metaphysical positions). Even the semantic similarities would have some overlap with some antirealist accounts: error theorists would endorse the same semantic analyses as well, and they’re an exemplar of an antirealist account!

If you examine another survey question that distinguishes the two in the same survey, you will see that non-naturalists comprise 26.6% of respondents, while naturalists make up 31.6%. Antirealists account for 26.1% in the realist/antirealist question, which is barely lower than the number of non-naturalists. See here: https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5078

This isn’t even getting into the 20.8% that endorse constructivism and the difficulty of classifying such positions (as well as some of the difficulties in classifying some contemporary accounts which blur the distinction between realism and antirealism).

This reveals that the actual breakdown of positions in metaethics is far more fragmented, complicated, and split up than it may initially appear given just the one survey response result. And, in any case, 56-62% just isn’t that much.

@LanceBush "I am skeptical that contemporary characterizations of moral realism reflect, in a clear way, past discussions about the topic, so it may be a bit of an awkward fit categorizing thinkers prior to the 20th century, and those outside the analytic tradition."

That's fair. We certainly think about ethics a lot differently now than we used to. But I still think most of these philosophers would fit better into the moral realism bucket than the anti-realist bucket, even if it's an awkward fit.

"I also wouldn't consider 56.4% "strongly favoring" moral realism."

More than twice as many respondents favor moral realism than moral anti-realism. Seems fair to characterize that as "strongly favoring" to me.

"This reveals that the actual breakdown of positions in metaethics is far more fragmented, complicated, and split up than it may initially appear given just the one survey response result. And, in any case, 56-62% just isn’t that much."

That's fair. Perhaps it would have been more interesting if this poll had more options to reflect the diversity of metaethical positions.

@JoshuaFosse Yea, I agree. I suspect most would probably endorse moral realism prior to the 20th century, if we were forced to categorize them. It might make sense, in some cases, to judge that the categories of "realism" and "antirealism" are just too blunt and poorly drawn to reliably distinguish people one way or another, though.

//More than twice as many respondents favor moral realism than moral anti-realism. Seems fair to characterize that as "strongly favoring" to me.//

I gave an explanation in my comment for why I think that the matter is more complicated than that: naturalists and non-naturalists hold very different views, and it's questionable whether it makes much sense to treat both as endorsing the same position. In any case, a ways over 2:1 still doesn't strike me as very strong. Strong, sure, but "strong" is a bit vague. Still, there are individually more non-naturalists and more naturalists than there are antirealists. Antirealism is definitely one of the least popular subdivisions in the field.

I'm not sure we should put much stock in this, though. I wouldn't find moral realism plausible even if 95% of philosophers endorsed it. I'd just think philosophy was in even worse shape than it already is.

Morality is socially constructed. There are plenty of moral statements that something like 99.9% of people on Earth would agree with - see the other comment's example of "it is wrong to torture babies for fun" - but there's no inherent truth to those statements other than the meaning that we as humans assign to them. The universe doesn't decree that torturing babies is wrong, it's decreed by us as a species. It's not a law of physics, it's broadly accepted social behavior. I don't think there's always a single correct answer to every question.

(This is, of course, assuming that no gods or simulation-runners or anything like that are watching over us. A deity or similarly powerful being could, in fact, dictate an objective morality of our universe.)

@evergreenemily I would refer you to the other comment thread. It sounds like, on your theory, the below statement is true.

"If society says it is right to torture babies for fun, it is right to torture babies for fun."

Is this your view? Are you considerably more pro baby torture than I hope?

@JoshuaFosse No; on my theory, the below statement is true:

"If a society says it is right to torture babies for fun, then within that society, it is viewed as morally correct to torture babies for fun; however, this does not mean that it is objectively morally right to torture babies in that society, or any society."

Objective right and wrong don't come into play here, since I don't really think either one exist. Torturing babies is something I consider morally unacceptable, but it's something I consider morally unacceptable, not something that's objectively unacceptable according to some all-seeing arbiter of morality.

And that raises one of my main concerns with moral realism, actually - who's the arbiter of right and wrong? Who gets to decide which actions are acceptable and which aren't? Is it a deity or another all-seeing, all-knowing figure? Or is it society at large - in which case, morality is socially constructed and will differ from society to society?

That just seems evasive or confused.

Propositions have truth values of True or False, not Viewed as True or Viewed as False. If you don't want to assert a truth value of True or False for a given sentence, you will have to argue that it somehow fails to express a proposition.

As for the question of an arbiter of right or wrong, I don't see what that has to do with anything. No one has to decide that a proposition is True or False for it to actually be True or False.

1 + 1 = 2 is True, regardless of what anyone decides about it, or indeed whether anyone decides anything about it at all. So too for "It is wrong to torture babies for fun."

@JoshuaFosse My argument is that very few things are inherently True or False; the world is significantly more complex than that. 1 + 1 = 2 is inherently True because mathematics and the laws of physics would break down if it weren't. "The death penalty is wrong" is TRUE from my perspective, yet FALSE for 55% of Americans (per Gallup polling.) Who's right? How can we tell if a philosophical or moral argument is actually TRUE or FALSE?

@JoshuaFosse

That just seems evasive or confused

Seemed perfectly clear and cogent to me.

@evergreenemily Propositions are True or False. This is pretty much an ironclad, foundational axiom of philosophy. Yes, you can find a few very idiosyncratic, nuanced criticisms of the concept of a proposition, but virtually all of philosophy for as long as philosophy has existed accepts that propositions are True or False.

Do you really think that you're right and virtually all of philosophy (and arguably mathematics, for that matter) for literally millennia is wrong about propositions? Doesn't it make more sense to accept that it's wrong to torture babies for fun than to discard all of philosophy? Or at least take a different approach to your theoretical defense of baby torture?

@JoshuaFosse

I see what you mean.

Then I'd say that "It is wrong to torture babies for fun." is False, because it does not reflect the reality that there is no such thing as an objective "wrong", which the question implies.

That obviously doesn't mean that it's "good" to torture babies for fun, or that I think it's good, that should go without saying.

@MarioCannistra Okay, good, you've at least gotten to a coherent position.

I would like it noted for anyone undecided how they will vote in this poll that the current best opponent of moral realism on Manifold does not think it's wrong to torture babies for fun. I would advise caution around this dangerous person.

(Please don't take that last sentence too seriously, I'm just having fun. Since I do think it's wrong to torture babies for fun, I am more limited in my options.)

@JoshuaFosse You're not addressing my major point here: who decides what is TRUE and what is FALSE? If you and I have a moral disagreement about something, how do we determine who's right? Somebody or something has to be the arbiter of this, otherwise it's impossible to have a genuine philosophical discussion because we can both claim that we're objectively correct and the other is objectively incorrect, ad infinitum.

1 + 1 = 2 is provably true. How do you prove that moral statements are true? Is there a way to prove something like "It is morally right to rehabilitate prisoners instead of punishing them, even if this may not give victims or their families a sense of justice having been done?" What about "It is morally wrong to destroy the habitat of an endangered species, even if this cuts off local access to resources and may result in forced resettlement for the local human population as a result?"

Philosophy is considered part of the humanities and not part of the social sciences for a good reason - philosophical claims are very rarely falsifiable in the same way scientific claims are. Your starting assumptions about the world and how it works can lead to drastically different conclusions about what's correct and what isn't - and often, these assumptions are practically impossible to change. My assumption that "every human being is born equal, and all deserve equal respect and dignity" leads me to very different philosophical conclusions than, say, Thomas Hobbes. I'm fairly certain that there's nothing I could say or do to change Hobbes' mind.

@JoshuaFosse Alright. Yes, that would be an extremely cheap strawman.

Oh, I'm the best opponent of moral realism? That's nice.

But just to make sure, you realize "False" doesn't mean I think it's false, right? Do you understand the difference between subjective and objective?

"Yes, that would be an extremely cheap strawman."

@MarioCannistra It's not a strawman, it's the exact position you expressed.

"Then I'd say that "It is wrong to torture babies for fun." is False"

@evergreenemily
"You're not addressing my major point here: who decides what is TRUE and what is FALSE? If you and I have a moral disagreement about something, how do we determine who's right? Somebody or something has to be the arbiter of this,"

I did address this. As I said before, propositions are True or False, regardless of what anyone decides about them. I do not understand this alleged need for an arbiter. We determine who is right in the normal way, which is by examining the premises, the logical connectors which get us from the premises to the intermediate conclusions, and finally by seeing if the assertion has any absurd implications. All perfectly ordinary, intuitive, ubiquitous techniques.

"1 + 1 = 2 is provably true"

I am not a mathematician, but I presume that there are various proofs of this, of varying degrees of rigor. But even the most rigorous of these proofs will have axioms that are simply given, that we simply have to intuit to be true. These axioms will not be much more facially plausible than "it's wrong to torture babies for fun," if at all. Therefore, despite the existence of proofs, "1 + 1 = 2" is on epistemically similar ground to "It's wrong to torture babies for fun." Which is to say, extremely strong ground.

@evergreenemily Objectivity is not about whether something is "inherent". A random quantum event is not inherent to anything that happened before yet it's an objective event.

Still tough, a lot of moral principle can be said to be a consequences of the laws not of physics directly but of game theory and the way societies work. They can be discovered independently by isolated civilization, therefore they are objective.

@JoshuaFosse

@MarioCannistra It's not a strawman, it's the exact position you expressed.

"Then I'd say that "It is wrong to torture babies for fun." is False"

The strawman is implying that because I said that "It is wrong to torture babies for fun." is False, I must then think that torturing babies for fun is "good", which is obviously not the case.

Again, it seems you're confusing the meaning of subjective vs objective.

What do you think is the difference between these two statements?

"It is wrong to torture babies for fun." is False.

"I think it is wrong to torture babies for fun." is True.

Yes, I know the difference between objective and subjective. No, it doesn't make what you're saying any less wrong.

@JoshuaFosse just for the sake of clarity, what's the difference?

Also, do you realize why that was a strawman?

@MarioCannistra Objective things have real existence in the world, while subjective things depend on minds.

You seem to want it both ways. You want moral propositions to be False so that you can avoid there being objective moral facts, but also True, so that you don't have to say that you think torturing babies for fun is A-okay. This is confused.

Moreover, this seems to be a very common confusion for people who haven't formally studied philosophy. If you haven't already, I would recommend that you enroll in an introductory moral philosophy class. Actual philosophy professors are better equipped to clear up this kind of confusion than I am.

@JoshuaFosse That's the issue. There are no moral "facts", there are only moral preferences.

It's the same thing to say that there is a "best" ice cream flavor, that's obviously false, it depends on subjective preference. Lots of people like chocolate, doesn't mean that it's objectively "good". You can think it's good (for you), and that's fine. That's doesn't make it a fact, it is a preference.

You want moral propositions to be False so that you can avoid there being objective moral facts,

It's not about what I want. There are no moral facts, whether I like it or not.

All moral proposition that imply an objective moral truth are false, because there are no moral facts. That doesn't mean that there aren't subjective moral preferences, those are two different things.

Of course torturing babies for fun is wrong, but that's a subjective preference, not an objective "truth".

I don't know how much clearer I can make it. What is "confused" about this?

Anyway, we can just drop it if you want, it seems we're just going around in circles.

@MarioCannistra Yes, we ought to drop it.

@JoshuaFosse You stated that "No one has to decide that a proposition is True or False for it to actually be True or False."

In some cases they might, e.g., naming something.

Some propositions reflect a person’s decisions, attitudes, values, and so on. In these cases, the truth status of the statement will be true or false depending on facts about that person’s decisions, attitudes, values, and so on. For instance, whether the statement “I like the taste of this cake” is true will depend on who the speaker is, and what their taste preferences are. If one person likes the taste of the cake, and makes that assertion, it is true, while if another person who doesn’t like the taste of the cake makes that assertion, it is false. 

Relativist accounts of moral claims likewise treat such claims as having a (typically implicit) indexical element, such that the truth of a statement like “murder is wrong” will vary depending on some set of conditions, such as the standards of the speaker. If Alex thinks murder is wrong, the statement “murder is wrong” just means, when Alex says it, “murder is inconsistent with my moral standards.” Such a statement would be true. Yet if Sam thinks murder isn’t wrong, the statement “murder is not wrong,” would be true when Sam states it. 

Indexicalization is a standard feature of languages and there’s nothing confused or evasive about suggesting that moral language could (at least in principle) be used with implicit indexicalization. Such implicit indexicalization is already plausibly in play when people make statements like “this food is delicious.” Such claims need not invoke the notion of objective gastronomic facts.

Moral antirealist accounts that involve relativism need not think that the moral facts are made true by decisions, though they could. Using the term “decide” implies that the matter is one under voluntary control. But if moral claims express our attitudes or desires, these may not be under our control. For instance, I like the taste of chocolate, and I could not simply decide not to like the taste of chocolate. Nevertheless, some claims can be made true by decisions, e.g., people can decide what price to set on an item they are selling, or decide what to name a new invention. The name of that invention would be made true a by decision. One could, in principle, maintain that moral facts are a matter of decision. That might not be a plausible descriptive account of how people actually do engage in moral judgment, but it would strike me as more plausible than moral realism, at least.

@JoshuaFosse //1 + 1 = 2 is True, regardless of what anyone decides about it, or indeed whether anyone decides anything about it at all. So too for "It is wrong to torture babies for fun."//

Why do you think that’s true? 

//Do you really think that you're right and virtually all of philosophy (and arguably mathematics, for that matter) for literally millennia is wrong about propositions? Doesn't it make more sense to accept that it's wrong to torture babies for fun than to discard all of philosophy?//

Moral utterances like “it’s wrong to torture babies for fun,” may not reflect propositional claims or may have relative truth conditions, though, so it’s not necessarily the case that the sentence “it’s wrong to torture babies” must be either true or false, rather than the sentence having either no truth conditions or variable truth conditions.

//I would like it noted for anyone undecided how they will vote in this poll that the current best opponent of moral realism on Manifold does not think it's wrong to torture babies for fun. I would advise caution around this dangerous person.//

A moral antirealist can think that’s wrong to torture babies without having to think that it is objectively wrong. And, in any case, even someone who doesn’t think the sentence “it’s morally wrong to torture babies” is true isn’t necessarily a dangerous person. What would matter is the person’s normative moral standards and attitudes, and their behavior. Not their position on the semantics and metaphysics of moral claims.

@LanceBush I think 1 + 1 = 2 is True because I understand the concepts of 1, 2, and +. Do you want a more rigorous answer than that? I don't think one is necessary, to be honest. We can know that 1 + 1 = 2 without any formal proof. I'm a little confused what you're looking for.

"Moral utterances like “it’s wrong to torture babies for fun,” may not reflect propositional claims or may have relative truth conditions, though, so it’s not necessarily the case that the sentence “it’s wrong to torture babies” must be either true or false, rather than the sentence having either no truth conditions or variable truth conditions."

Right. I mentioned the possibility that the sentence could fail to express a proposition. I was prepared to give a brief argument against non-cognitivism, if anyone wanted to defend non-cognitivism. I'm not sure what you mean by variable truth conditions.

"A moral antirealist can think that’s wrong to torture babies without having to think that it is objectively wrong."

What would that look like? They believe other moral statements are objectively true, but not the baby torture one, and they simultaneously hold some kind of subjectivist position about social norms determining right and wrong? Not sure I follow you.

"What would matter is the person’s normative moral standards and attitudes, and their behavior."

Isn't a person's assertion that it is False that it is wrong to torture babies for fun an expression of their normative moral standards? Anyway, as I said in the comment, I wasn't being serious about him being dangerous.

@JoshuaFosse Sorry, I was asking about the second part of the statement:

"So too for 'It is wrong to torture babies for fun.'"

I'm asking why you think this statement is true regardless of what one decides about it (I'm also a bit wary of the "decide" language; antirealist accounts, including relativist accounts, don't necessarily center on whether one decides whether the claim is true).

"I'm not sure what you mean by variable truth conditions."

I am referring to relativist accounts.

"What would that look like?"

They could understand the notion that it's wrong to torture babies to reflect their personal standards, the standards of their culture, the output of a constructivist process, the standards of an ideal agent, the commands of God, or a variety of other options. Compare to statements about food preferences. A person who says "this pizza tastes good" does not have to think there are objective facts about what food is tasty or not. Such a statement could simply reflect their personal taste preferences. And in that case, such a statement could be true (or false, if the person is lying).

"They believe other moral statements are objectively true, but not the baby torture one, and they simultaneously hold some kind of subjectivist position about social norms determining right and wrong?"

No. They could just think moral statements are true or false without thinking they’re objectively true or false. Nothing about truth and falsehood requires objectivity of the sort characteristic of moral realism (I prefer the term “stance-independent,” which is becoming the norm in contemporary metaethics).

"Isn't a person's assertion that it is False that it is wrong to torture babies for fun an expression of their normative moral standards?"

It could be, yes. And a person does not need to be a realist about their normative moral standards.

"Anyway, as I said in the comment, I wasn't being serious about him being dangerous."

I'm very public about endorsing and defending moral antirealism, and I routinely see people suggest that moral antirealists are psychopaths, or dangerous, or evil (including, on occasion, professional philosophers). Some people take these seriously.

@LanceBush
"A moral antirealist can think that’s wrong to torture babies without having to think that it is objectively wrong."

Sorry, I misread this as a moral realist, not anti-realist. My bad.

Yeah, if you think it's wrong, but not objectively wrong, then we're back at the problem of "if society says its right to torture babies for fun, then it's right to torture babies for fun." I said a little more about this in the other comment thread.

"I'm very public about endorsing and defending moral antirealism, and I routinely see people suggest that moral antirealists are psychopaths, or dangerous, or evil (including, on occasion, professional philosophers). Some people take these seriously."

Alright, fair enough, I won't make that joke again.

@JoshuaFosse //Yeah, if you think it's wrong, but not objectively wrong, then we're back at the problem of "if society says its right to torture babies for fun, then it's right to torture babies for fun.//

I'm a moral antirealist, I think baby torture is wrong, and I don't think that if a society thinks it's right to torture babies for fun, that it is. An antirealist who thinks baby torture is wrong isn't limited to cultural agent relativism.