I was going to respond, but as I was thinking about what I was going to say, I remembered that I already made similar points in this thread, which you largely ignored, as you also ignore most other objections, in favor of recycling the same talking points or digressing on various bits of pop-science. So I'll leave you to it.

So the problem that you identify is that scientific and engineering communication requires a common language. But whatever lingua franca happens to be used (nowadays it is most often English), it won't be native to all speakers. And when people are forced to use a foreign language for communication, that often leads to miscommunication and associated problems.

And your solution to this problem is to invent an entirely new language (never mind that a number of such languages have already been invented over the years) that won't be native to anyone and that no one today speaks at any level of proficiency?

Um, how is this going to help again?...

This group and this artist are amazing!

Roomful of Teeth perform Caroline Shaw's 'Partita for 8 Voices'


Roomful Of Teeth: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

Framing utilitarianism as an imperative to promote human flourishing is actually quite common. — SophistiCat

I've been looking around to find anyone making the same arguments I am making here. If you can direct me to a source you are familiar with I'd be grateful. — Thomas Quine

Geoffrey Scarre's writes in "Utilitarianism" (Routledge, 1996) that "most forms of utilitarianism are welfarist, concerned that lives should flourish or prosper according to some specified criterion of well-being" (noting along the way that not all utilitarians are hedonists).

Or coming at the question from the other side, Gilbert Harman asks in "Human Flourishing, Ethics, and Liberty" (1983):

What kind of ethics do we get, if we begin with a conception of human flourishing and attempt to derive the rest of ethics from that conception? A number of writers have expressed sympathy for such an approach to ethics, although they disagree about details: Henry Veatch, Robert Nozick, Alasdair Maclntyre, John Finnis, David Norton, Philippa Foot, Tibor Machan, Elizabeth Anscombe, Ayn Rand, and Abraham Maslow. — Gilbert Harman

Harman critically assesses various approaches to ethics that fit this criterion, utilitarianism being one of them:

A second feature of this approach to ethics [after relativism - SC] is that it tends toward utilitarianism or consequentialism. The basic value is human flourishing. Actions, character traits, laws, and so on are to be assessed with reference to their contribution to human flourishing.

Hi András - this is an original approach of mine inspired by Aristotle and Darwin. It has no resemblance to utilitarianism apart from being consequentialist. — Thomas Quine

It is, of course, utilitarian in a general sense - not quite in the way Bentham and other classical utilitarians framed it, but then few modern proponents of utilitarianism would own its classical formulation. Framing utilitarianism as an imperative to promote human flourishing is actually quite common.

But yes, I neglected to mention the naturalistic fallacy used as a justification (good = adaptive = flourishing), which again is quite common. (Just as a note, Social Darwinism followed the same justificatory logic. I don't mean this as a smear by association, but I think the only reason you don't follow the same track is that you are unwilling to pursue the less appealing implications of your theory to their logical conclusions, which betrays extraneous moral considerations at play.)

It is a variant of utilitarianism, with some pop-science thrown in. The general approach was formulated by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century, and since then the idea has waxed and waned, but never gone out of circulation. It has its proponents among modern philosophers, including pop-philosophers like Sam Harris - and of course it is regularly being put forward by non-professionals who may or may not be aware of the history.

you-all — tim wood

I am not "you-all." I don't care for Biden. But I am not of an opinion that if I can't get what I want right fucking now, then let the world burn and I'll roast the marshmallows. Unlike X, to me the lives of 1,000 children are not a trifle.

A degenerate ratfuck is one who doesn't care if 1,000 children get bombed.

Really?

Translation: where reality is negative there I bury my head in the sand. — JerseyFlight

What reality? For all I know, those "intellectuals" are strawmen, a figment of your imagination. You ranted a bunch, but didn't identify the target of your rant. Why should I care?

Such general wisdom as "there are terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people" I can easily do without.

Nearly all of them are Elitist. — JerseyFlight

Who are them? "Intellectuals" is a vague concept. If you don't indentify the target of your invective, it loses whatever bite you think it has.

On the other hand, the Liar is introduced as a premise, but then behaves like an inference rule. ('Given me, you may introduce not-me.') You have to understand the inference rule to use it, that is true. But that's understanding-how, not understanding-that. Inference rules are deliberately empty, have no 'that' content. They don't say anything themselves; it's premises that actually say stuff. — Srap Tasmaner

Well, exactly, there is nothing wrong with the syntax of the sentence, it is only its semantic content that seems to be a problem. But in order to come to this conclusion you have to parse and interpret the sentence, which means that the sentence is ipso facto meaningful, at least on some level.

It isn't often that practically every OP that someone posts is either jaw-droppingly stupid or nauseatingly disgusting or both.

Also, '... is meaningful' feels like a weasel-predicate. That is, '... is meaningful' deliberately avoids asking, for instance, 'What does it mean?' or 'What does it say?' Ask an average person about the Liar, and you can expect them to reply, 'Well that's stupid. It doesn't say anything.' — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think so. On the surface, the meaning is clear: First, the sentence asserts that something (presumably a proposition) is false. That's not a problem, we generally understand such assertions. The proposition, rather than being quoted, is instead indicated - also not necessarily a problem. For example, "The second sentence on page 23 is false" would be a perfectly meaningful thing to say (but what if the sentence indicated happens to be that very sentence?) It is only once we trace the logical implications that we realize that something is wrong, but in order to be able to do that, didn't we have to first understand what the sentence is saying?

If you refer to some other sentence P, then there is the assumption that P can be either true, or false. For it to have that possibility, it must make a claim against reality. If you say, "That sentence is false," and "that" sentence is, "This sentence is false", its still just nonsense. — Philosophim

Why not? You are just restating your position, but you are not giving reasons for it. What the liar sentence claims is the truth value of a sentence, which all natural and many formal languages are equipped to do.

This sentence is false, does not make any sense. False in what way? — Philosophim

You can state, seemingly unproblematically, "X is false" for any number of X, including X that are sentences of a language. Why does it not make sense in this case? Again, I understand why you want to reach this conclusion, but you are not giving any reasons.

how I long for sweet death — Maw

Komm, süßer Tod

I honestly find them to be useless and outdated words. I have never used them, nor ever had need to use them in constructing a philosophical paper, or argument. I am not saying they did not have a use centuries ago, but when speaking in modern day English with people, I find them unnecessary. Often times people new to philosophy will attempt to use these words to sound like they are making a meaningful statement. I don't hold anything against them, you have to start somewhere after all, and a good place to start is usually using terms that seem to keep popping up. — Philosophim

Try these terms on Google Scholar search (or whatever citation index that is available to you). Here are works just from the last 1.5 years:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2019&q=metaphysics

Granted, these include many works on historical philosophy, but not only.

(Ontology is a little trickier, because it turns up as a specialist term outside of philosophy.)

Don't get hung up on this; there's more than one way to present data, depending on what you want to highlight. Posters are a distinct category, because they are who you actually see and interact with on the forum, so it made sense to me to split that category, instead of the overall number of registered users. under 10 posts seemed to me like representative group before I did the actual count - and so it turned out to be. 95% is kind of a magic number that statisticians like to use. And single-posters are an interesting outlier in themselves; I expected to see a lot of these, but not quite as many.

Shouldn't try to cheat Google :) Added links instead.

Would It help to put it this way?

2/3 registered users have never posted
Of those who have posted, 2/3 have under 10 posts

Or if you like pies (who doesn't?) Edit: added to the OP

The brain is the most calorie rich organ, doesn't matter much now, but it did in our past. It's simply more efficient to trust someone else to have worked a thing out than it is to work it out yourself, the majority are unlikely to be wrong. so long as one or two people in a tribe don't act this way, the tribe prospers as most of them have not had to commit to the calorie intensive work of calculating everything from scratch. — Isaac

Correct me if I am wrong, but my impression was that much of our brain's processing power is dedicated to mundane subconscious tasks like visual processing and motion control. Even when it comes to more conscious activity, much of it would be common to all people: language, social interactions. The more intellectually rarefied activities that we value so much don't occupy a proportionate place in the brain's architecture and power budget.

The second would be that there would have to be groups of evaluating behaviours, not one. I referred to it as such above, but I don't think you did, so I'm not sure what your thinking is here. Neurologically, it's getting increasingly difficult to make the argument that moral evaluation is a single process, it's almost certainly composed of several processes involving different parts of the brain in different contexts. This matters because if you want to argue that the groups we evaluate these behaviours into are themselves natural kinds, you have to have a different pair of natural kinds corresponding to 'good' and 'bad' for each process because the results are different in each case.

Say for example processing in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex will be the emotional response to options (patients with severe damage to this region consistently give purely utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas, no emotional content even though they might be emotional in other ways). The result, therefore will be some emotional content which we will have to sort (say feel warm and cosy about it='good', feel sickened by it='bad'). But then another dilemma might involve more some area like the superior temporal sulcus which is involved in processing social perception. That might output - will be perceived negatively by my social group='bad', will be perceived positively by my social group='good'. I won't go on, but other areas might produce paired results like disgusting/attractive, salient to me/not salient to me, affects a valued member of my group/affects an outsider, conflicts with a learnt rule/complies with a learnt rule...

I don't think there's necessarily a problem with saying there are natural kinds for each of these groupings, just that it would be some job of work demonstrating the case. — Isaac

Well, this assumes that the determination of a "natural kind" is to be made by means of a reduction to the neurological framework and then checking whether the phenomenology can be accounted for by a single process or by a number of heterogeneous processes. There is some attraction in this approach, but it is debatable. I was actually thinking more in terms of phenomenology and its "folk" classification, which is more vague and squishy. But that's OK, I am not making an argument for some sharp Platonic ontology of moral phenomena.

Interesting research though.

The conclusion I draw, might be different though. My feeling is that as soon as we introduce a large quantity of biological function into the picture, then it becomes more proper to say of the extremes (say someone thinking hitting old ladies is morally 'right') that they are either damaged, or mistaken about the language. There's either something wrong with their brain - it's not assigning behaviours to the usual 'natural kind' (ie not working properly), or there's something wrong with their understanding of the language - they're describing what they get a kick out of doing and that's not the group of things we call 'moral', we call that group something else). — Isaac

If someone says that he gets a kick out of hitting old ladies, but by "getting a kick out of smth" he actually means moral aversion (in the usual sense), then that is a language issue. If he is actually getting a kick out of it (in the usual sense), and no moral aversion, then I am still not sure what language has got to do with it.

This is what riles me about moral objectivism too. It takes an incredibly complex process involving an almost impossible to disentangle web of emotion, socialisation, indoctrination, theory of mind, tribalism and self-identity and claims that some simple process can deliver the 'correct' answer better than the ones we already use. It's like throwing away most of the world fastest and most complex supercomputer (the human brain) and saying "we don't need all that, we can do this just with one small section at the front that deals with predicate logic". Why would anyone want to do that?... Rhetorical gain to help push an agenda. — Isaac

You make it sound like there is a 'correct' answer to be found, and our natural moral sense is just better at figuring it out than a rationally constructed ethical system. For that to be the case, there has to be an independently defined problem and an independent means of evaluating the fitness of the solution to the problem. But here is the thing: if you reject moral objectivism, then it follows that moral problems are framed by the very moral agent that has to solve them, and the same agent then has to evaluate the fitness of the solution. Is the answer actually 'correct'? Such question doesn't even make sense in the absence of an objective standard. Whatever answer you converge upon has to be the right answer (as far as you know), because rightness and wrongness are normative metrics, and a normative evaluation is exactly what you do when you answer moral questions.

I look at it from a somewhat different angle. If you are a naturalist about morality: no God's laws or other supernatural impositions - and many proponents of objective morality are naturalists - then why would you even suppose that for something as complex and messy as natural moral landscape appears to be, the Enlightenment-age paradigm of a simple, rational, law-driven system would be a good fit? A much better paradigm would be something equally complex and messy and organic - biology, neurology, psychology, sociology.

Corrected one figure: 95% of posters have < 626 posts (was 130). Added stat drive-bys.

Note that "posters" are a subset of "users," and posters with < 10 posts are a subset of posters with < 626 posts.

I'll take issue here. The request was for my thoughts, which I provided. — tim wood

Their intellectual temper is (as everyone remarks) the reverse of dogmatic, in fact pleasingly modest. They are quick to acknowledge that their own opinion, on any matter whatsoever, is only their opinion; and they will candidly tell you, too, the reason why it is only their opinion. This reason is, that it is their opinion. — David Stove

I've been on TPF and its predecessor for a middling long time, and it seems to me that we're awash at this time with an unusual number of posts from people who are confused about what philosophy is. This includes the ignorant and the stupid - I plead guilty to both, ignorance all the time and occasional stupidity. And these, ignorance and being stupid, our human condition, redeemed in the willingness to be corrected and the effort to learn. But here also many who are not willing, those who just want to rant and are oblivious or hostile to argument or even sense. Those agenda-driven whose methods are mainly Prucrustean; Trumpian who insist their nonsense is sense and have zero interest in real sense; woo-mongers interested in nothing but their own woo, impervious to reason. And those who do not understand, and aren't willing to. These appearing in every one of the main TPF categories. — tim wood

And then there are the bigots...

My thoughts on the middle east is that it is one of the places on the planet where civilization "as we know it" first appeared. But middle-easterners have been fucking it up from day one to the present. I've met middle-easterners; I've known middle-easterners; and it seems to me that being one is just a disease of intellect and spirit. — tim wood

I imagine that two people being in love is a rather vague thing involving the dispositions, acts, social context... It'd be hard to draw a line around a bunch of phenomena and go "Yep, that is the truth condition for X and Y are in love". Are you suggesting that dispositions aren't included in that blurry-at-the-edges web? — fdrake

Sure, both the disposition of being in love and the associated behaviors and social context are blurry. But so are all things psychological and social.

Whether or not one's conduct is adequate to one's beliefs and attitudes (when there even is a conduct to speak of) is a separate question from whether beliefs and attitudes are right or wrong. — SophistiCat

I don't think it's separate; if we separate an action's pragmatic consequences on stakeholders its agent's disposition from evaluations of rights and wrongs, it isn't clear that we're still talking about the same thing. All I'm trying to say are that statements like "You're right, I shouldn't've treated you like that" can be true! — fdrake

I agree that acting or failing to act in accordance with one's moral dispositions is itself subject to moral valuation. ("I did as I thought should have done - Hooray!" "That which I should have done I did not do") But that comes in addition to the original disposition.

Your discussion with @Dawnstorm is along the same lines as the one we've been having (my position being largely in line with Dawnstorm's), but I am not sure how much you have managed to converge. I'll give it a try - hopefully I won't confuse matters more.

As Dawnstorm has pointed out, there are two aspects to moral valuation. There is the moral activity: judging the rightness and wrongness of actions and situations, actual and hypothetical. And then there are moral valuations that come as a result, which we often think of as properties of the things that we evaluate: whether they are good, bad or neutral (roughly speaking). I get the impression that you are mixing up these two aspects, perhaps deliberately, because you think of them in the same key.

When I was saying that morality is a "natural kind," I was talking about the activity of moral valuation: the having of pro and con attitudes, the influence that these attitudes exert on emotions, decisions, and social dynamics. This activity is fairly recognizable and relatable, so I don't think that it is subject to Wittgenstein's private language argument. I admit that, as you say, "all rationalisation of our mental states and activities is mediated through socially defined parameters." But although the boundaries are somewhat vague and mutable and culturally specific, and much can be made of uncertain relationships between morality and related categories like duty, social shame, etc., it is not completely arbitrary what gets grouped in the category of moral valuation. Nor is this category as mutable and capricious as moral vocabulary can be. Nor is it shaped by the same processes that shape the language (although there can be mutual influence between the two).

None of this has any bearing whatsoever on what I want to get other people to do or allow me to to do. I am not dictated to by the meaning of the word (nor is anyone else). I might use it's rhetorical power to add persuasiveness to my argument, but that would be nothing but rhetoric. If the entire world got together and told me that what I wanted was called 'flurb', it wouldn't make any difference at all to whether I wanted it. — Isaac

I agree with this.

And I would say the same about so-called "objective morality." The language of "objective morality" is usually deployed as a kind of rhetorical cudgel, in lieu of banging the table. But thinking of this dispassionately, if I approve of something as morally right, and then someone assures me that it is not just my opinion, but the thing is objectively right, that wouldn't make it any more right in my eyes than it already is. And if someone tells me instead that it is objectively wrong - well, I would just disagree with whoever holds that opinion.

Natural language terms are not like taxonomic terms. — Isaac

Yes, they are. We don't just put together a random collection of things and give it a name; we group things for a reason. This isn't an exact science, but neither is defining the boundaries of biological taxa.

There is considerable diversity within moral outlooks, which results in different people using moral terms somewhat differently. This is the direction of fit, not the other way around. Moral valuation is not just a matter of labeling: it goes along with certain mental attitudes, the actions that they inspire and the social facts that they bring about. "Good" and "bad" are natural kinds, to put it crudely. Playing around with labels doesn't change what they are.

A moral assertion carries no such ontological commitments, at least not implicitly. — SophistiCat

You seem to have just restated your conclusions, I was more wondering how you got there. — Isaac

With this I was just trying to restate my position without appearing to contradict myself, i.e. without appearing to refer to some state of affairs that non-trivially validates moral beliefs.

With what is 'moral', for example. How does someone who feels differently to the rest of the population about, say, violence, learn what the term 'morally right' refers to? All they're going to see growing up is people using the term to refer to 'good' stuff (being kind to old ladies etc). I don't understand how you imagine they'd ever learn that their preferred behaviour (hitting people) is somehow the same thing in essence that everyone else in their language community is really referring to when they use the term to describes helping old ladies etc. — Isaac

I seems like you are talking about moral vocabulary, such as the meaning of the words "good" and "bad." I don't really see the connection to the present subject. We learn how to use such words by correctly matching them to the respective classes of good and bad things. But the identification of members of the class is not just a matter of learning to use words correctly, surely?

I'm a bit uneasy attaching right and wrong to arbitrary ought statements myself; I don't like ought statements to begin with. It construes "ought" as an operator on "is", and "is" contains all the truth conditions in that framing. — fdrake

Like I said, I meant only ordinary, colloquial senses of right/wrong, true/false. Formal analyses of truth, I feel, rarely touch on matters of human interest. I understand your worry about the truth conditions for moral assertions. But it is precisely this ambiguity of moral expressions (never mind whether we explicitly assert their truth; what matters is that moral talk does not much differ from empiric talk) that prompted my crackpot theory about what motivates moral realism.

Regardless, Sally and Lizzy are in love, so it should be true, no? — fdrake

I don't see this as a problematic enmeshment of dispositions and states of affairs. The statement can perfectly well refer to something empirical, such as observed behavior or verbal report. And of course Sally and Lizzy having the disposition of being in love is itself a state of affairs. A statement that refers to a disposition as an existing state of affairs (e.g. "Sally and Lizzy are in love," or "fdrake believes that hitting babies is wrong") would be comprehensible and defeasible.

I take a pragmatic view of what it means to hold a disposition. A disposition has pragmatic consequences. — fdrake

Well, you go on to distance morals from their consequences by pointing out how the latter are not always true to the former (when we fail to act in accordance with our original dispositions). And of course moral attitudes are perfectly comprehensible even in the absence of any notable effects. Whether or not one's conduct is adequate to one's beliefs and attitudes (when there even is a conduct to speak of) is a separate question from whether beliefs and attitudes are right or wrong.

To me there's two things going on here. There's the question of what is/isn't morally good. For a large number of questions I think there's a right answer to that question. It's a linguistic question, no different to asking "what is the correct way to use the term 'morally good'". In proper Wittgensteinian sense the answer is not clear cut, it's fuzzy at the edges, but this fuzziness cannot be resolved ever. Likewise with social contexts. When the grocer delivers potatoes, you 'ought' to pay him because that's the meaning of the work 'ought'. It means 'that action which the social context places an imperative on you to do'. So if someone were to say "When the grocer delivers my potatoes I ought to punch him in the face" they'd be wrong. That's not what 'ought' means. — Isaac

I don't think this thread has a point as such (it's just a poll), so I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this. — Isaac

OK. First, rules of communication and social rules, like rules for purchasing goods, are not necessarily moral. Knowingly transgressing such rules can be a moral act, but it is the act of following or breaking rules that is moral, not the rules themselves. Second, disagreements about moral questions are not similar to disagreements about the meanings of words.

Is it that your moral attitude is not a 'thing', or is it that your moral attitude is not an 'opinion'. Absent either of those things it does seem as though you're agreeing with the latter statement. The thing which serves as the truthmaker for your moral statement would correctly be identified as your opinion. — Isaac

Yeah, I realize I was courting confusion with this talk about truthmakers. Let me put it this way: there are different kinds of assertions. Some assertions - assertions made about the world - imply a referent and at least a theoretical possibility of checking their truth against this referent. A moral assertion carries no such ontological commitments, at least not implicitly.

Continuing from above, it seems to me that often what motivates moral realism/objectivism is almost like a language confusion. When we affirm something, we must be referring to something "out there," right? So if you deny objective morality, then you deny that anything is moral - any thing is moral. For something to be moral, there has to be a moral thing out there. And if you insist that you do have moral beliefs, then the realist will say: "Oh, so you believe that what's moral is just a matter of opinion?" (Saying it in the same incredulous tone in which we talk about those "postmodernist" ditherers who think that nothing is true and everyone is entitled to their own facts.) When they say that, they still assume that there must be a thing that serves as a truthmaker for a moral statement, and they interpret you as saying that that thing is your (or anyone's) opinion.

Let me see if I can make an argument that consolidates both your points. — fdrake

I don't agree with Isaac that what is moral is

...a linguistic question, no different to asking "what is the correct way to use the term 'morally good'". — Isaac

But I probably shouldn't hijack the thread to debate the point. I don't have a problem with the rest though.

(1) In order for "moral objectivism/universalism" to be true, there would need to be true statements about moral conduct.
(2) In order for a statement to be true, it has to correspond to some (physical or external) state of affairs. — fdrake

...

(7) Therefore there are no statements concerning moral conduct which are true or false — fdrake

It should be made clear that by statements being true in this context we specifically mean truth in the sense of correspondence with some external/objective state of affairs. There is an old-standing debate in moral philosophy about whether moral statements are truth-apt (moral cognitivism/non-cognitivism). I find that much of this debate is essentially over philosophical language and coherence with this or that analytical framework. I don't get exercised over such controversies; I am happy to use "true" in its ordinary sense, so that if I am willing to make an affirmative statement, I am also willing to say that the statement is true (otherwise we would find ourselves making Moorian paradoxical pronouncements like "It's raining, but it is not true that it's raining.") But when I say "Hitting babies is wrong" I don't mean it in the same way as when I say "It's raining." There is no referent implicit in the former statement. Its truthmaker is my moral attitude.

It's confusions like this that caused me to stop using the word "moral" altogether in most speech (unless I'm describing what I don't believe in). — Avery

I don't know - I've been trying to do just that for many years...I think communication has improved a lot as a result! — Avery

Communication is all about mutual understanding. Being able to reduce an informal concept in some chosen scientific framework is not a requirement for communication. Do you avoid using the word "chair" just because defining "chair" in chemistry or quantum physics would be hellishly difficult?

Just because the informal concept of morality is not easy to characterize in the framework of neuroscience, for example, doesn't mean it is problematic in other contexts. I think "morality" is actually one of the less problematic words: even when we don't agree on what's right and what's wrong, there is little disagreement on which questions belong in the moral category in the first place.

Pace yourself, man. So much stupid at such a high rate is not good for you or for the forum.

Thoughts? — Bert Newton

Meh, this is basically epiphenomenalism.

I meant our biology in the widest sense, including what general kind of psychology that comes with that. — ChatteringMonkey

- we know the virus has certain adverse and lethal effects on us
- we generally agree that those effects are bad and should be prevented as much as possible
=> Therefor we should have a moral norm that people should stay indoors as much as possible and otherwise keep their distance if they can't. — ChatteringMonkey

Then why single out biology? Why not geology, for example?

- we know that building in a seismically active zone has certain adverse and lethal effects on us
- we generally agree that those effects are bad and should be prevented as much as possible
=> Therefore we should have a moral norm that people should build earthquake-resistant houses in seismic zones.

All moral norms are entangled with non-moral facts, otherwise they would have no relevance, like those Jewish laws about sacrifice in the Temple.

And you find it unpersuasive that the event corresponding to "my partner and I agree I should try to be more courteous towards her after a shit day at work" entails that I ought to try and satisfy the agreement? — fdrake

Logically entails (or implies), yes.

I don't think that what you are talking about here is the same as what the OP and the rest are talking about. I like to think of "objective morality," or moral realism, as a kind of correspondence theory. Just as with the non-moral correspondence theory, where the truth of a proposition is judged by its degree of correspondence to a putative true (physical) state of the world, a moral proposition is supposed to be true to the extent of its correspondence with some true normative state - this "objective morality." And this correspondence cannot be trivial; it cannot simply be implied by what the words mean - otherwise, of course, seeking moral truths would have been a trivial matter.

For your moral attitudes to be really, truly, objectively right it would not be sufficient for you to have them, nor would it be sufficient for them to be consistent with other moral attitudes that you might have, such as acceptance of social commitments. They have to be true to this third thing that is independent of what you or anyone else thinks about it (the reality that doesn't go away when you stop believing it).

To take a stock example, in a Nazi world where everyone believes that it is right to kill Jews (which beliefs would of course manifest in social facts, i.e. people committing to act together on their beliefs - guard concentration camps, manufacture poison gas...) it would still be objectively wrong to do so.

It is also worth lingering a minute on the impersonal character of social facts. The existence of Amazon the company existentially depends upon the collective action of humans, but it does not depend existentially upon the individual action of individual humans. It does not disappear if an individual ceases to have it in mind, it does not cease to exist when unwatched. It only ceases to exist if it ceases to function as an institution. That old Philip K. Dick quote about reality applies to institutions as much as it applies to nature; "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.". Emphasis on the "you". — fdrake

There is a difference between accepting the reality of other people's beliefs (and the social facts, such as institutions, that depend on those beliefs) and being a participant in those beliefs. An anarchist is well aware of the existence of the state as an actual institution, even though she doesn't believe in states. A psychopath is usually aware of the existence of moral forces that act on other people, even if he is not subject to them himself. He still has to contend with how those moral forces impinge on his life through the social facts that they create, and the most socially adept psychopaths can live quite comfortably in this world (just look at Trump).

Arguments can be made, for instance by appealing to our biology, to try to change the moral rules — ChatteringMonkey

Hm? I wonder how such an argument would go?

Broad agreement with those things. — fdrake

I think you are conflating facts about moral evaluations, moral conduct, and all that which influences them - with moral facts:

[1] It is a fact that moral conduct depends on social facts.
[2] It is a fact that such and such conduct is right.

Of these only [2] would be a moral fact (if it were fact).

Psychopaths can be quite competent with factual knowledge about moral agency, but that doesn't make them competent moral agents themselves. As with other empirical knowledge, knowing facts about the way people make moral evaluations can help you anticipate moral attitudes and predict moral conduct in other people and even in yourself, but that knowledge cannot tell you what you ought to do - not without some bridge principles or intuitions.