Ah, yes, my apologies. My brain fell into a warp in space-time. By sheer coincidence, while the Devil was being discussed here I happened to be talking about the Tassie Tiger on another forum and I've got my wires crossed. Crazy!

You are quite right, the Tassie Devil is still going strong. I'd hate to see it go the way of the Tiger.

Yes, it's sort of out of the way down here. I like that. And I couldn't cope with the heat on the mainland any more. It was 45 degrees C in parts of the mainland yesterday. That would kill this old bloke. It can get to 40 in Tassie, too, but it's rare. 25C is fine for me.

The Devil is, alas, no more. The last one died in the Hobart zoo in the 1930s. There are attempts underway to resurrect it from DNA.

Regularly.

Born: Melbourne, Australia.
Raised: in a small inland town in the state of Victoria
Have lived in: Sydney, Paris, Chiang Mai (Thailand)
Currently living: Hobart, Tasmania

I agree that it’s easier to talk about moral realism and moral anti-realism if we first specify what we mean by "real".

If we mean objectively “real” like rocks and trees and carrots, then no, moral values are obviously not real in that sense.

As has been mentioned, there are many human conventions that are agreed upon and made real by virtue of our agreement. We agree that certain bits of paper with pictures and numbers printed thereon are worth a certain amount in economic terms. But the value of money is contingent and not real in the same way as rocks are real. And money can fall in value. If we want to argue that moral values are real in the way that conventions such as money, companies, and contracts are real, it would mean that moral values are also contingent, mind-dependent realities which are real only insofar as we agree to recognize them for utilitarian purposes. But this does not seem right and moral realists generally want something more than this as a basis for morality.

Some argue that moral values could be real in the way that mathematical truths are real. I am not a mathematician but I know that we have proofs in mathematics that cannot be disputed in the way morality can be. There don’t seem to be any such proofs when it comes to morality. I cannot prove objectively or with logic that stealing or lying or murder are morally wrong. So morality does not seem to be like mathematics either, because moral assertions can be questioned in a way that 5+7=12 cannot be questioned. People can reasonably disagree about particular moral values but they cannot reasonably disagree about arithmetic. Therefore, I don’t think moral values can be real in the way mathematical truths are real. So where does this leave us?

It has been by thinking about all this that I have come to agree with Hume who says that morality is based in our sentiments. Hume says:

In these sentiments then, not in a discovery of relations of any kind, do all moral determinations consist. . . .… we must at last acknowledge, that the crime or immorality is no particular fact or relation, which can be the object of the understanding, but arises entirely from the sentiment of disapprobation, which, by the structure of human nature, we unavoidably feel on the apprehension of barbarity or treachery.

I feel that it is here, with our sentiments, that we get to some sort of bedrock. Our feelings, our sentiments seem to be about as real and as important to us as anything can be. If we think Hume may be right then we might want to ask where our moral sentiments come from. Perhaps answering this question could tell us something important about the sort of reality our moral values can have.