The piece of paper is not the mortgage, only the physical representation of it. Think of a mortgage as a promise, is that physical? — Sir2u

If you burned all the papers, deleted all the hard drives, and killed (or lobotomized) all the people with knowledge of the mortgage, how would there still be a mortgage? Yet if the mortgage doesn't take up any physical space, then how have I destroyed it entirely just by destroying physical things?

Rather, I'm pointing out that there are ways that it is not. — Banno

Then I'm confused by...

...and then there are those who think what is the case ought be the case. — Banno

Ways that it is not doesn't seem to be part of that kind of confusion. Do you mean to say "ways it should not be"?

The simplest way to show this might be to ask you to explain the difference between a part of the brain that is involved in decision making per se, and these twelve parts of the brain that are involved in moral decision making. — Banno

Are you wondering how to use the word 'moral'?

Edit - in case it's not clear. I'm asking because the difference seems obvious to me - the brain regions involved in moral decision making are those which show consistent activity during moral decision making. Those involved in decision making per se are those which show consistent activity across the board (ie brain regions involved in moral decision making are a subset of regions involved in decision making per se).

But this just derives directly from the meaning of 'moral decision making'. I think we all know (as language users) that moral decisions are just a subset of decisions per se.

No, I asked my dog. — Wayfarer

An improvement.

Only humans can weigh things up, make choices, act better or worse. — Wayfarer

And you know this how? Did your magic sky friend tell you?

We haven't even resolved the dispute about vaccines, or the dispute about flat earth. — Tarrasque

Then whence the notion "It is not an impasse like you would expect if people's disagreements were just brute expressions."? It seems like an impasse, and you were previously imploring that we treat things the way they seem to be until we have good reason to believe otherwise.

These well-considered decisions are often better decisions. — Tarrasque

Do you have any reason to believe this?

and then there are those who think what is the case ought be the case. — Banno

Are you suggesting there's a way moral decision-making ought to be? Isn't the way moral decision-making ought to be itself a moral decision (afterall, the outcome would have serious moral implications). How, then, would we work out how moral decision-making ought to be? Use our moral decision-making as it currently is, or beg the question?

It is not an impasse like you would expect if people's disagreements were just brute expressions. — Tarrasque

Isn't it? You expect the dispute about abortion to be resolved any minute do you? What an endearing sense of optimism you have!

Pretty much every theory in philosophy has "pages full of reasons" in support of it. I can't believe every theory at once. — Tarrasque

Right. So your claim that we should treat moral claims as they appear to be until we have reason not to is irrelevant. We already have reasons not to. What we ought to be discussing is the weight of those reasons, the degree to which you find them compelling.

Some people think these attempts succeed, others think that they fail. — Tarrasque

Again, so the mere existence of these counter-arguments is irrelevant, as is the mere existence of your reasons. The relevant issue is why you find them compelling.

Emotional responses and deliberative thought both play roles in deciding what actions we take. What do you make of people who claim to employ reason in moral decision-making? — Tarrasque

Moral decision-making is extremely complex. Some things we know almost for sure are that...

1) Decisions which we call 'moral' ones are actually a very wide range of decision-types involving (sometimes very different) areas of the brain. I'm loathe to make absolute statements, but one I think I could stand by is that moral decision-making definitely is not one unified thing. It is several disparate and possibly even mutually exclusive processes depending on the exact nature of the decision. we do not involve the same process in deciding to care for a baby as we do in deciding to give to charity.

2) The processes used for for any given decision-type vary across people, ages and circumstance. At any given time a decision might be made on the basis or norm-following, rules, consequences, emotion, empathy... At any given time this decision might be something we're consciously aware of, or something we're process sub-consciously.

So the answer to your question is - I'm sure they do...sometimes.

it ought to be abundantly clear that humans are not necessarily instinctively moral (otherwise, why the need for a legal code or police?) — Wayfarer

You're confusing an instinctively moral desire with an instinctively moral outcome. We need laws and police because the behavioural result of any situational calculus is not always moral. It says nothing of whether any instinctive moral thought went into that calculus, only that other factors outweighed it.

So my thesis is that all moral systems are an attempt to answer the question, "What best serves human flourishing?" (I look forward eagerly to a refutation of this empirical observation.) And if it IS the case that humanity seeks to flourish as a species, then we OUGHT to use science to tell us how best to achieve that. There should be nothing controversial about this claim. — Thomas Quine

What about divine command theory? To express that in terms of human flourishing, then you'd have to include flourishing in the afterlife as part of 'flourishing'. If that's the case, then science cannot be used to tell us how best to achieve it.

Yep. Morality is about caring for others.

What's surprising is that so many folk think otherwise. That it is about following universal rules or seeking happiness.

It's a bit of a puzzle. — Banno

Not really. At least twelve different brain regions have been shown to be involved in moral decision making, some of which are to do with reward (happiness) and rule-following. Others are related to social norms, social status assessment, most are related to theory of mind, intention and empathy, a few just to fairly raw visceral feelings. The idea that it's just about one simple thing is not supported by the scientific evidence...

...or did you mean to say "morality should be about caring for others"? Are you trying to describe what kinds of thing we actually use the term to cover, or are you trying to constrain language to suit your own philosophy?

Usually when the semantic content of a type of discourse is a certain way, we use that discourse in ways that match the semantic content. — Tarrasque

Who's this 'we' and from where are you getting your assessment of usually? I certainly don't, and neither do any of my colleagues. We wouldn't get very far understanding the role of things like social influence or group identity if we just presumed everyone meant exactly what they said. If someone after work tells you the would 'kill for a beer' are you concerned for their sanity, or do you presume they didn't literally mean what they said?

"Murder is wrong" is structured the same as "The sky is blue" or "The economy is failing." If we were to take "murder is wrong" to be a blunt expression of "Boo, murder! Grrr!" we would need a reason to do so. — Tarrasque

And we have plenty of them. People have been studying this for hundreds of years, we're not coming to it fresh just now. Have you read the works of any expressivist philosophers? What is it that you think the pages are full of if not reasons? Are they to you just a series of blank pages with ",,,and therefore expressivism" at the end?

I've never seen an expressivist who puts their theory into practice and changes their surface-level speech to match what they claim it means. — Tarrasque

That's begging the question. Their surface level speech already matches what they claim it means, that's why they claim it means it. Why would they match their surface level speech to what cognitivists claim it means? If "You shouldn't murder" means "Boo Murder!", then the expressivist has nothing to change in their surface level speech, "You shouldn't murder" means exactly what they intend it to.

There are also formal issues with expressivism that make it less tenable, like embedding problems or the Frege-Geach problem. — Tarrasque

Just mentioning the name of a problem doesn't really help anyone understand why you think it's applicable. Do you think expressivist philosophers are unaware of the Frege-Geach problem? If not, then presumably they don't think it makes their position less tenable, and they presumably have their reasons. So what's relevant here is not merely the existence of a reason to find their position untenable, it's why you find that reason compelling.

When I say that grass is green, the content of my sentence does not include myself. If somebody wanted to see if they agreed or disagreed with my judgement, they wouldn't check me for the property "thinks-grass-is-green," they'd check the grass, because that's where the alleged property "green" is. If color perception is subjective, we could disagree but both be right. — Tarrasque

Again, you're just making an assumption that the manner of speech dictates how the world is. when someone is determining whether the leaf is green, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is barely involved, neither is the insular cortex. Both are heavily involved in judging something like murder being wrong. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is responsible for regulation of emotional affect and the insular cortex is involved in feelings of disgust and visceral somatosensation. If the question "is murder wrong" was like the question "is the leaf green" then why would completely different brain regions be involved? So we can presume it's not. So why would we presume now that it's grammatical structure had the same meaning? When determining whether to murder someone (or commit some other immoral act) one does not consult one's database of actions to see what property this particular one has attached to it, one consults a wide variety of emotional responses. So, if that's what's actually happening when we make moral choices, then why would our moral talk be all about assigning properties to behaviours, properties which are barely consulted when they consider one of those behaviours?

I included your name only as a curtesy. — Banno

I think you might be replying to the wrong post, but either way If you consider including my name in the repeat of a post in which you insult me as a 'courtesy' then I dread to think what manner of thing you consider discourteous.

I think that, even from a relativist standpoint, assigning the property "wrong" to "slavery" best explains what is happening in a moral judgement. — Tarrasque

So, on what basis are you judging 'best' here? What aspects does this explanation have which, say expressivism, doesn't have?

different types of moral relativists might believe these facts to be an individual's attitudes, or the consensus of a society, or something like that. — Tarrasque

Well then those are not properties of the behaviour in question, they are properties of those regarding it. I suppose you could say that a property of slavery is that such-and-such a group of people think it's bad, but that seems like an unnecessarily clumsy way of just avoiding assigning the property to the person rather than the behaviour.

I can't confidently state some principle about how we can reliably come to apprehend truths in all circumstances. — Tarrasque

Then on what grounds are you dismissing methods?

some primitive tribes might have a narrower view of human flourishing - many tribes name themselves using a word that in their language simply means "the people". Their view of human flourishing may not encompass the whole of humanity, but only the part of humanity that matters to them.

This is not much different from those who went to war and justified it on the basis of their own racial or cultural or religious superiority. — Thomas Quine

So, if what you determine counts as 'humanity' determines how you treat others, then how's this any different from relativism? Different people have different views about who constitutes 'humanity', this determines how these people are treated. Which means in practice all you're describing is a relativistic system dependent on subjective views about who constitutes 'humanity'.

Don't drag me into this. Your misrepresentation of my position is bad enough on its own without implicating it in something even less related.

This has been true in my experience. Even moral relativists do this. They advance their various viewpoints, disagree about moral issues, and believe that others are incorrect(only relative to their own morality, rather than an objective one). — Tarrasque

Maybe (although not in my experience), but you advanced this as evidence of us ascribing properties to objective entities (like slavery), so in the case of relativists they would not be ascribing the property 'wrong' but the property 'something I believe is wrong'. In order to take moral realism as prima facie true on the basis of it seeming to be how we talk about moral dilemmas, you'd have to present evidence of us mostly talking about moral dilemmas assuming realism, and that's just not the case.

People discuss topics we consider subjective, like how good certain movies are, in reasoned ways all the time. — Tarrasque

But this would seem to support the opposite of what you're saying. We advance reasons whilst talking about how good certain movies despite virtually all of us being of the opinion that movie preferences are subjective. So what this example demonstrates is that our mode of conversation (reasoned argument) and our use of terms like 'best' does not in any way indicate that we consider the underlying judgment to be objective. It's just the way we talk.

I do think that people are warranted in believing what seems to be true to them, until it is defeated by a stronger reason to believe otherwise. — Tarrasque

Indeed. The question is what kind of thing here would constitute a reason to believe otherwise, and why this principle then doesn't just apply to moral judgements themselves.

It should not be used as a guiding principle for determining what is true. — Tarrasque

Then what should?

If most people start with an intuition that "slavery is permissible," this intuition is what they have the most reason to assume until it is defeated by a reason to the contrary. This is not in contradiction with my assessment above, but in agreement with it. — Tarrasque

I might have your position confused then, I thought you were arguing against moral relativism. I'm a relativist myself, so we're in agreement here.

I disagree. Even those who intend to serve only the immediate interests of their tribe do so because they identify the interests of their tribe as synonymous with the best interests of humanity. — Thomas Quine

What evidence do you have for this? In the example of a tribe going to war with another to protect their resources (or capture more resources) what reason have you got to believe they consider the deaths of those other tribe members to be in the interests of humanity as a whole?

The explanatory power lies in the observation that we discuss moral facts the same way we discuss other facts. We debate, disagree, and use reason to draw conclusions from premises. When we disagree, we believe that one or both of us are incorrect. As you are discovering, reforming our language and logic to compartmentalize moral facts is a Herculean task. Some might call it unpragmatic. Postulating that when we say "slavery is wrong," we descriptively assign a property "wrongness" to an act "slavery," and do so either correctly or incorrectly, is easy. It reflects what we appear to be doing with moral language, prima facie. The only substantive objection you've offered to seeing things this way is the argument from queerness, which just asserts that moral facts seem too weird to exist. That's not something that would deter a pragmatist. — Tarrasque

As I raised with Pforrest earlier, this is simply not true so a s a basis for believing prima facie in moral truths it's sketchy at best. Currently, a significant number of surveys show most people to be moral relativists (or at least not moral absolutists). Even if this were not the case, however, what you'd be setting up here is the principle that we should, no matter the absence of mechanism, no matter the lack of parsimony, take as true whatever it is that most people believe to be true. "Most people believe there are objective moral facts, therefore we should assume there are objective moral facts". You have, however, in your assessment of those very moral facts just discarded the idea that what most people believe to be the truth about those moral facts is indeed the truth about those moral facts. This is a contradictory approach on the face of it. Likewise we could go the other way and ask whether most people believe prima facie that "what most people believe should be taken as being the case". I've no surveys to go on here, but I'd wager not many would agree with that, so even if it were true that "most people believe there are moral facts", adhering to our first principle would mean that we should not take this as reason to believe that there are moral facts.

I was surprised that you thought that not only were Kohlberg's explanations wrong, you thought that his punishment stage was overthrown, because I've never seen Gopnik really touch on that subject. (Again, happy to learn otherwise.) — Kenosha Kid

I won't be able to get to this until tomorrow, but in advance of that, can you outline what kind of null hypothesis you'd have were you to test something like the absence of second-person agency concepts in under 3s, or the necessity of a primary stage of moral development associating behaviour with punishment. What sort of thing could I show you that would compel you to discard Kohlberg's first stage, or some similar developmental theory. I don't want to focus necessarily on Kohlberg, just the general picture of what you see as satisfactory evidence in this general regard.

The reason I ask, bringing it slightly back round to topic, is that it seems to that the way people use terms like 'bad' are instrumental to their concepts. We can ask the linguistic child whether X is 'bad', but we're doing little more there than checking they can use the word correctly... the word we just taught them to use. But what would it mean to say that a pre-linguistic child associated punishment with 'bad' behaviour, or that they felt 'bad' when punished? If we make assumptions based on their responses then we're begging the question in the later studies. If we don't, we've no data to base any extrapolation from.

Yeah man, chuck it up. It'll be interesting to discuss. — Kenosha Kid

It was a hypothetical. I'm not so much interested in discussing the actual papers (you've clearly got a very broad grasp of the issues in developmental psychology, but, as I've said, I only find these kinds of discussions worthwhile under very limited, usually professional, circumstances. Online it's just too much effort for too little gain). I was just trying to get at whether you felt compelled by the evidence to take the stance you do, or otherwise. Can I ask, did you have some other theory before reading Kohlberg. Did he compel you to change your original position, or did he confirm what you already suspected?

the reason I might dismiss a system that allows me to prove p ∧ ¬p or that has the single axiom p isn't "ultimately ... because it trivialises truth" but because it isn't usable. — Michael

I'm not going to pretend to be able to understand things like Godel, but this position sounds like the same conclusion Ramsey came to about deflating truth to something more like utility.

So, just to explore these beliefs... Say I could present evidence of babies exhibiting second-personal agency, would you prefer that to be the case? You'd have a choice then - look for the flaws in this new evidence I presented (there will be flaws), or accept that it demonstrates Kohlberg et al are not necessarily right, and so open up alternatives. Which would you choose? (or just decide you're not going to waste your time indulging me in hypotheticals - up to you, of course!)

how children begin making associations between behaviours and badness before, or rather as part of the process that, they have fully-developed rational models of morality. — Kenosha Kid

Yes, that's the bit I was interested in. The idea that children make associations between behaviours and badness before they have fully-developed rational models of morality is not necessitated by the empirical evidence. It might be the case, it equally might not. There's nothing so powerful in the literature to compel any rational person to fall down on one side or the other; so there needs to be something more than just Kohlberg's experiments that's made you think this way. It's that I'm wondering about.

I think you've misunderstood my intention regarding the reading suggestions, I meant literally nothing more by it than that you might be interested, and was even careful to acknowledge the possibility that you'd already read these studies and had your own opinion on them. That really is all there is to that, I don't understand how it got so misinterpreted, but I apologise for being confusing. Let's leave that there.

what do you think exists in Gopnik's research that demonstrates this not correct? That's what I'm trying to figure out. — Kenosha Kid

I'm not really interested in presenting my own position on the matter. I've spent a 25 year career in psychology (and my wife's a psychologist too, so it didn't even stop when I got home!). At no point in time in those two and a half decades have I ever managed to convince anyone of a viewpoint they were not already amenable to. Our data simply isn't robust enough to have that kind persuasive power such as you might find in physics or chemistry. If you want to believe in an 'Obedience and Punishment' Pre-conditional stage, nothing I present will have sufficient gravity to dissuade you. Just think about the quality of evidence from Kohlberg which persuaded you in the first place - a few answers to hypothetical dilemmas...

If you're looking for alternative ways of looking at this, I'm more than happy to discuss, but if you want me to deliver my stunning coup de grace, you'll be disappointed. I've really nothing more to offer than that there's another way of framing this that's equally valid.

What interests me far more is how you arrive at your beliefs, especially if you've read the more modern research, what compels you to stick to an obedience and punishment model? What attracts you to that idea. Most of my comments are only engineered to find answers to those sorts of questions I'm afraid.

Data doesn't expire. — Kenosha Kid

It does in psychology. When research methods are shown to be flawed, or problematic (such as Kohlberg's), the data coming out of that research is considered less robust than it was.

Ideas are developed, rarely overthrown. — Kenosha Kid

Agreed, but the aspects of the ideas of Kohlberg relevant to this discussion are the degree and form of socialisation involved in the development of morality. It is exactly those aspects of his overall idea which have been 'developed'.

I only thought you might be interested if you hadn't already heard about it, and then was surprised to hear you suggest that it doesn't really change things and wanted to know more about why you thought that. No one's patronising anyone. I'm just confused by your answers, that's all.

Rather, I'd cite something that I thought contradicted you. Wouldn't it be simpler and better to post something that's more up-to-date that contradicts what I wrote? — Kenosha Kid

As I said, I only thought you might be interested in some newer research, nothing more. I really wasn't expecting such an odd exchange.

Both Hoffman and Commons published over two decades ago. A lot has changed since then, and Kohlberg's methodology would laughed out of the office these days if it were a new research proposal. Psychology is not like other sciences where there's a clear set of theories which match experimental data and a clear set which don't. A lot of interpretation relies heavily of the model framework through which it's analysed. Fo this reason you see a lot of psychology textbooks and courses still citing older models in much the same way philosophy papers will track the history of an idea. It doesn't mean they think those models are still the best approach, it's just that it's important to track how we got to where we are so that the assumptions are obvious. I can guarantee you that neither Kohlberg, Hoffman nor Commons will be taught on a modern Child Development degree without detailing the extent to which their assumptions have been shown to wrong.

It would be weird if child development went: nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, EVERYTHING! — Kenosha Kid

Exactly. So weird in fact, that no-one has even bothered testing such a model. So the entire debate is about when and how developmental stages take place. Kohlberg got the when and the how wrong. There mere fact that development takes place in stages was not Kohlberg's invention, nor even Piaget's. No one ever even questioned that assumption, so it's not true to say their work is still relevant simply because people still talk about staged development. The issues are the rate of progress, the path taken and the influences effecting that progress.

Your field is Physics I believe. Imagine if I cited some old ideas about black holes or quantum mechanics and you said "Oh there's been a lot of new developments since then", citing the latest research and I just said "Oh yeah, but these old guys are still cited so your new lot haven't done a very good job have they?". I think we both know that's not how science works.

I'm not aware of any radical overthrow of Kohlberg's stages themselves. His interpretations are old hat, but the empirical data and the broad structure and concepts of his theory are still cited regularly today. It is, after all, just Pavlovian learning, something even babies are capable of, and which will always precede any learning based on later psychological development. — Kenosha Kid

Most of Gopnik's work, together with say, Tania Singer's and Karen Wynn is about overthrowing Kohlberg's stages. Newborn babies show empathy, one year olds show signs of Theory of Mind etc... I'd be very interested to hear what you got out of those advances if not the up-turning of Kohlberg, always interesting to hear a different perspective. I'm not sure this is the place for it though, I've already had one slapped wrist for derailing the thread, I don't want to incur another.

Thanks. I think you'd enjoy some of the more modern works on child development. There's been a considerable amount of progress since the likes of Rosenhan and Kohlberg, much of it up-turning the older models quite radically. Alison Gopnick has written a few good books 'The Scientist in the Crib' and 'The Philosophical Baby' are the best, I think. Alternatively I can give you some paper recommendations if you prefer the original sources. Either way, I think you'll find the developments interesting.

If, on the other hand, you've already read all that and just disagree with it, then ignore the above and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. It's very hard from a few posts to judge someone's investment in a topic. One doesn't want to seem unhelpful, but on the other side one need avoid being condescending - apologies if I miss the mark.

As I understand it, our original conceptions of good and bad in childhood are based on what feels good abd bad. Two gamechangers are the development of empathetic responses, which I have read are astonishingly profound in many cases, and the ability to identify agency. 'It is bad for me to cut my finger' becomes 'It is bad for Alice to cut her finger' and 'Billy cutting my finger was bad' which become 'Billy cutting Alice's finger is bad' and finally 'Billy is bad for cutting Alice's finger'. It is one of many model-building capacities we simply exercise without the necessary intervention of reason.

This extends to socialisation. Punishment is an apt example: Drawing the crayon mural on mum and dad's bedroom wall felt great, but the judgement, the yelling, perhaps the hitting afterwards felt bad, so drawing on people's walls becomes bad. We're forced to identify ourselves as the agents of the bad thing, say sorry, be told we are bad. This too is added to our mental model of morality.

From that model we can draw conclusions about our behaviour and that of others. To us these seem at least approximately objective, that we have learned some things about the world. Until we meet someone with a different model. — Kenosha Kid

Just out of interest, what sources are you relying on for this take?

Does the mind occupy a space? — Daniel

What would it occupy if not a space?

Thanks for that — apokrisis

No problem. I've also just noticed your link in another thread to the Cheryl Misak lecture which I didn't know was available (her work on Ramsey is really interesting), so all round a good day for the accumulation of electronic resources.

As a child, pain is objectively bad. So is suffering, starvation, dehydration, neglect, abuse, etc. Any who disagree well I'm frankly curious. — Outlander

It depends what you mean by 'bad'. Pain, hunger and other physiological states are states whose causes are external to the mind responding to them, it can only infer the causes of those states and some response (aimed at minimising the degree of error in that inference, but that's not important right now). The brain is arranged in cortices each with a heirachical relation to others. What you have with the application of the term 'bad' is one end of one section of a very long collection of inference models - in this case, the end where you decide what term in your language is best used in your effort to communicate something. By necessity, the selection of this term is contextual and non-exhaustive of the mental states associated with pain, hunger etc.

So saying pain is bad is superficially nothing more than to say that "bad" is an appropriate term to use when one is experiencing pain, it's an statement about correct language use, not morality.

If you look at the issue more behaviourally, we might say that we tend to avoid 'bad' things. This gives us some observable action associated with 'bad' to take the matter outside of mere semantics. We don't have to accept a behavioural equivalent, we could associate some area(s) of the brain and use fMRI, or something. Either way, we see complications immediately, because young children do not avoid that which is painful. In fact, in cases where caregivers also produce pain, they can even, unfortunately, seek it out.

So at the very least, we have a range of physiological affects which some cortex of the brain tries to model the cause of an present to the next level cortex. At each point some interaction with the modelled causes may be initiated, there's no reason at this stage why any such response would need to be coherent with the other models.

One of these responses might be to talk to other people using the term 'bad'. There are scores of other responses not accounted for by this particular expression, many of which may also result in verbal expressions, not all of which we'd even expect to be part of some unified conception.

You seem to be making this very personal (as in about me) and being very uncharitable to my motives. — Pfhorrest

You shut down conversation about the actual issue. I'm interested in how people think (that's why I'm here). Your ideas about morality were put off limits, so I thought I'd explore your ideas about discussion. You can put those off limits too if you want, there's plenty of other people to talk to. You are free to completely ignore me if you don't like the way I discuss things, I routinely ignore some people here for exactly that reason, we're not here out of duty, it's supposed to be interesting, not drudgery.

There are substantial chunks of people who find each of the listed positions insufficient, for reasons I've listed. I agree with all of their reasons -- even though they mostly disagree with each other. I want to discuss ideas with other people about what possibilities remain when all those reasons are accounted for. — Pfhorrest

You realise that's not just a 'more blunt' version, that;'s a completely different proposition. In the one you invite discussion about whether people find these reasons plausible, in the second you say you only want to discuss solutions to them with people who already agree that they are.

It's almost like you're on a witch hunt for any philosophical claim that could allow for the possibility of moral statements being objectively right or wrong. — Pfhorrest

Ha! That's really funny that you should put it that way, it gives an interesting insight into the other side of the coin, you think I'm on a witch hunt to destroy any philosophical claim of moral objectivity, it puts me as the active player (destroying the claims) and the people actually making the claims as merely passive. For me, of course, if you didn't keep setting up new threads to make the same claim I wouldn't have six different places in which to dispute it. To me it feels like you just really really want this system of yours to be accepted and everywhere some part of it isn't you say "I don't want to discuss that bit" and make a new thread about some other aspect of it. But each new thread you can't resist mentioning the parts you claim not to be discussing in the hope that they'll be thereby tacitly accepted.

I don't know you so I'm not making any claims to your personal situation, but as a psychological phenomena, it's very common in those who've turned away from religion in adolescence or later. Neural pruning early in childhood, I think, makes it difficult for those who've been raised with the idea of 'religious absolute truth' to deal with a world in which there's no such thing. They construct elaborate (usually pseudo-scientific) models to derive their replacement 'absolute truth' because they've simply no mechanisms to manage the uncertainty.

This may or may not be the case for you, I couldn't possibly know, but the thought processes which accompany these super-constructions, fascinates me. That's the reason why I engage with them whenever I find them. If that's a 'witch hunt' then so be it.

there is virtually zero moral literature that takes the perspective of a "systems physicalism". — apokrisis

Have you tried “The role of interoceptive inference in theory of mind,” by
Sasha Ondobaka, James Kilner, and Karl Friston, Brain Cognition, 2017 Mar; 112: 64–68. It doesn't cover all of what we might call morality, but it does tie Theory of Mind, empathetic responses, in nicely with Active Inference. I don't have a link, I'm afraid, but you might be able to track it down.

the point is not that we can expect everybody to agree with moral realism, the point is that it's not some completely out-there idea that everyone is going to balk at. — Pfhorrest

So. You said

The faults of the other views surveyed boil down to failing in some way or another these criteria:

-Holding moral statements to be capable of being true or false, in a way more than just someone agreeing with them, as people usually treat them
-Honoring the is-ought / fact-value divide.
-Independence of any controversial ontology (i.e. compatible with physicalism).

What you end up needing is some kind of non-descriptivist cognitivism.

I’m going to ignore Isaac’s constant harping on that first criterion above and just move on to actual philosophy of language stuff. — Pfhorrest

As far as I'm following the OP you've listed all the meta-ethical positions you've read about, claimed that something is wrong with each one and asked what other people to...

...discuss whether all of these conventional options are so far insufficient, and we're in need of something new and different — Pfhorrest

But less than a page in, you're going to ignore talk on the exact topic you specified (whether these theories are insufficient) on the grounds that at least a large minority of people already think they are. I'm confused as to what would be left to discuss.

You seem to have declared all previous meta-ethics inadequate on grounds which you refuse to discuss ("some people agree with me so there's no matter here to be argued"), then revealed incremental parts of your solution (the flaws in which you, again, refuse to discuss). As I said earlier, this is not an appropriate platform for proselytising. It's a discussion forum. If you want to present you ideas in a format which is less open to critique you might be better off with a blog or something.

that same discussion today doesn’t first have to established heliocentrism: we can take it for granted that most people just assume it and go on from there — Pfhorrest

So, from where are you getting this idea that moral realism is the equivalent of heliocentrism. Phil Papers Survey has 56.4% lean toward moral realism. A recent survey in America has only 35% believe in objective moral truth. I don't know what sources you're using to arrive at this idea that non-relativist moral truth is taken for granted by most people so much so that discussing any alternative would be like proving heliocentrism.

I do listen carefully to everyone — Pfhorrest

I didn't say 'carefully' I said 'with humility'.

Majority doesn’t make right, but it shows that this isn’t some crazy new idea of mine that needs to be conclusively proven before we can move on. — Pfhorrest

I'm not seeing the difference. If majority agreement does not act as any kind truth-maker then how is it that ideas which have majority support can be taken as a reasonable background assumption? From what consequence of majority agreement does it derive its reasonableness if not some greater liklihood of being right?

What else is someone who has as far as they can tell original thoughts supposed to do in such a situation, besides talk about them with other amateurs? — Pfhorrest

Listen with some moderate humility to what those others have to say where you've no reason other than your personal disagreement to dismiss them.

The fact that YOU don’t agree with one point isn’t reason to halt the entire discussion that wasn’t even supposed to be about that point — Pfhorrest

Fine. The polite way of achieving that is to say something like "let's come back to that, I want to discuss other things", not snipe at someone for 'harping on' as if objection to your position was an irritating side-track.

waste pages and pages on pointlessly trying to convince YOU of something most people don’t need convincing of.... Moral nihilism or relativism (same thing really) are far, far from universally accepted — Pfhorrest

So now the majority does make right? Your meta-philosophy is very mixed.

The point of this thread is to explore the possibilities a meta-ethics that is not vulnerable to the common objections to all those ones surveyed in the OP. — Pfhorrest

If what you're discussing here really is new and not something that philosophers before you have already thought of and dismissed, then you need to publish. Do you even realise the monumental unlikelihood of you having come up with some solution that 2000 years of moral philosophers haven't?

That you are unconvinced by one of those objections shouldn’t stop the whole rest of the discussion. — Pfhorrest

It's not. The rest of the discussion can carry on and still address the issues I raise, you're having several discussions at once already. You're not obliged to answer, you're quite welcome to chair your own discussion in whatever way you see fit, but there's no reason to treat those who disagree with you as an irritant. It just makes you come across as dogmatic and proselytising, rather than discursive.

Well, my argument is that we managed to go from "intuitive empiricism" but controversial and variously flawed natural philosophies to scientific empiricism and scientific materialism. — Echarmion

I see. I think though that such progress was not really about metaphysical commitments as much as expanding the line of answerable questions. During the era of, say, religious beliefs about reality, no one built ships according to how a priest suggested, no one sought advice from the clergy as to whether their table might bear their cup. Religious explanations only had any power where empirical answers were difficult. OK, there's always a couple of decades of 'culture wars' as the new areas of investigation impinge on previously religious territory, but by and large it's still a question of adopting empiricism everywhere it is possible, all that changes is the fields it is possible to draw evidence from.

Therefore, it doesn't strike me as prima facie absurd that we might go from intuitive moral judgement and controversial and flawed moral philosophy to some more universally accepted system of practical morality. — Echarmion

And 2000 years of complete and utter failure to do so hasn't dampened your enthusiasm any?

I wouldn't say that we cannot make "the slightest progress" on a joint idea of meta-ethics. I think you can use Hedonism, to take your example, as a fairly reliable heuristic to how people approach everyday questions. — Echarmion

I agree. I didn't say one couldn't use it in some circumstances. The argument is that it does not cover all that we refer to when we talk about morality, and that we could not, even in circumstances where it might apply, appeal to any shared axioms to persuade dissenters of this.

Well there is a basic notion underlying a lot of philosophy that reason is a basic ability all humans have, and that therefore a correct reasoning will be understood and accepted by everyone. — Echarmion

Again is refer you to the 2000 years of abject failure to agree on anything outside of empirical knowledge. If reason was a basic ability and its recognition universal, then why so much disagreement over the validity of reasons?