I think “objective” is not quite specific enough about the axis of variation here. Like in [The Meaning of Right](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fG3g3764tSubr6xvs/the-meaning-of-right) - or that entire sequence of posts if you haven’t read it yet. That post talks about a sense of “objective” which means something like “even if you changed my brain to think something else was right, that wouldn’t change what was right.” But the trick is, both realists and anti-realists can both have that sort of objectivity!
You seem to want some additional second meaning of “objective” that’s something like “testable”—if we disagree about something, there’s some arbitration process we can use to tell who’s right—at least well enough to make progress over time.
One of the issues with this is that it’s hard to have your cake and eat it too. If you can get new information about morality, that information might be bad from the standpoint of your current morality! The arbitration process might say “baby torture is great”—and if it never says anything objectionable, then it’s not actually giving you new information.
Note that epistemic normativity (correct versus incorrect), pragmatic normativity (works versus fails), and ethical normativity (good versus evil) are not necessarily the same. If they are not , then “works” and “correct” can be used to arrive at “good” without circularity.
I think that morality is objective in the sense that you mentioned in paragraph one. I think that it has the feature of paragraph two that you are talking about but that isn’t the definition objective in my view, it is merely a feature of the fact that we have moral intuitions.
Yes, you can get new information on morality that contradicts your current standpoint. It could never say anything objectionable because I am actually factually correct on baby torture.
I think “objective” is not quite specific enough about the axis of variation here. Like in [The Meaning of Right](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fG3g3764tSubr6xvs/the-meaning-of-right) - or that entire sequence of posts if you haven’t read it yet. That post talks about a sense of “objective” which means something like “even if you changed my brain to think something else was right, that wouldn’t change what was right.” But the trick is, both realists and anti-realists can both have that sort of objectivity!
You seem to want some additional second meaning of “objective” that’s something like “testable”—if we disagree about something, there’s some arbitration process we can use to tell who’s right—at least well enough to make progress over time.
One of the issues with this is that it’s hard to have your cake and eat it too. If you can get new information about morality, that information might be bad from the standpoint of your current morality! The arbitration process might say “baby torture is great”—and if it never says anything objectionable, then it’s not actually giving you new information.
Note that epistemic normativity (correct versus incorrect), pragmatic normativity (works versus fails), and ethical normativity (good versus evil) are not necessarily the same. If they are not , then “works” and “correct” can be used to arrive at “good” without circularity.
I think that morality is objective in the sense that you mentioned in paragraph one. I think that it has the feature of paragraph two that you are talking about but that isn’t the definition objective in my view, it is merely a feature of the fact that we have moral intuitions.
Yes, you can get new information on morality that contradicts your current standpoint. It could never say anything objectionable because I am actually factually correct on baby torture.