I apologise for my simplistic understanding and definitions of moral realism. However, my partial experience in this field has been enough to convince me that there are many incompatible definition of moral realism, and many arguments about them, so it’s not clear there is a single simple thing to understand. So I’ve tried to define is very roughly, enough so that the gist of this post makes sense. ↩︎
I think this is mostly because there are lots of realist and anti-realist positions and they cluster around features other than their stance on realism, i.e. whether or not moral facts exist, or said less densely, whether or not moral claims can be true or false. The two camps seems to have a lot more going on, though, than is captured by this rather technical point, as you point out. In fact, most of the interesting debate is not about this point, but about things that can be functionally the same regardless of your stance on realism, hence your noticing how realists and anti-realists can look like each other in some cases.
(My own stance is to be skeptical, since I’m not even sure we have a great idea of what we really mean when we say things are true or false. It seems like we do at first, but if we poke too hard the whole thing starts to come apart at the seams, which makes it a bit hard to worry too much about moral facts when you’re not even sure about facts in the first place!)
I think this is mostly because there are lots of realist and anti-realist positions and they cluster around features other than their stance on realism, i.e. whether or not moral facts exist, or said less densely, whether or not moral claims can be true or false. The two camps seems to have a lot more going on, though, than is captured by this rather technical point, as you point out. In fact, most of the interesting debate is not about this point, but about things that can be functionally the same regardless of your stance on realism, hence your noticing how realists and anti-realists can look like each other in some cases.
(My own stance is to be skeptical, since I’m not even sure we have a great idea of what we really mean when we say things are true or false. It seems like we do at first, but if we poke too hard the whole thing starts to come apart at the seams, which makes it a bit hard to worry too much about moral facts when you’re not even sure about facts in the first place!)