The right response to moral realism isn’t to dispute it’s truth but to simply observe you don’t understand the concept.
I mean imagine someone started going around insisting some situations were Heret and others were Grovic but when asked to explain what made a situation Heret or Grovic he simply shrugged and said they were primitive concepts. But you persist and after observing his behavior for a period of time you work out some principle that perfectly predicts which category he will assign a given situation to, even counterfactually but when you present the algorithm to him and ask, “Ohh so is it satisfying this principle that makes one Heret rather than Grovic?” he insists that while your notion will always agrees with his notion that’s not what he means. Moreover, he insists that no definition in terms of physical state could capture these concepts.
Confused you press him and he says that there are special things which we can’t casually interact with that determine Heret or Grovic status. Bracketing your skepticism you ask him to say what properties these new ontological objects must have. After listing a couple he adds that most importantly they can’t just be random things with this structure but they also have to be Heret making or Grovic making and that’s what distingushes them from all the other casually inaccessible things out there that might otherwise yield some slightly different class of things as Heret and Grovic.
Frustrated you curse the guy saying he hasn’t really told you anything since you didn’t know what it meant to be Heret or Grovic in the first place so you surely don’t know what it means to be Heret making or Grovic making. The man’s reply is simply to shrug and say, “well it’s a fundamental concept, if you don’t understand I can’t explain it to you anymore than I could explain the perceptual experience of redness to a man who had never experienced color.”
In such a situation the only thing you can do is give up on the notion of Heret and Grovic. Debating about whether to say it’s an incoherent notion, a concept you lack the facilities to comprehend or something else would just waste time with a useless word game. Ultimately you just have to ignore such talk as something that lacks content for you and treat it the same way as you would meaningless gibberish.
The fact that when moral realists say the same thing about good and evil they are using the same sounds that we understand to mean something different shouldn’t change the situation at all.
The right response to moral realism isn’t to dispute it’s truth but to simply observe you don’t understand the concept.
I mean imagine someone started going around insisting some situations were Heret and others were Grovic but when asked to explain what made a situation Heret or Grovic he simply shrugged and said they were primitive concepts. But you persist and after observing his behavior for a period of time you work out some principle that perfectly predicts which category he will assign a given situation to, even counterfactually but when you present the algorithm to him and ask, “Ohh so is it satisfying this principle that makes one Heret rather than Grovic?” he insists that while your notion will always agrees with his notion that’s not what he means. Moreover, he insists that no definition in terms of physical state could capture these concepts.
Confused you press him and he says that there are special things which we can’t casually interact with that determine Heret or Grovic status. Bracketing your skepticism you ask him to say what properties these new ontological objects must have. After listing a couple he adds that most importantly they can’t just be random things with this structure but they also have to be Heret making or Grovic making and that’s what distingushes them from all the other casually inaccessible things out there that might otherwise yield some slightly different class of things as Heret and Grovic.
Frustrated you curse the guy saying he hasn’t really told you anything since you didn’t know what it meant to be Heret or Grovic in the first place so you surely don’t know what it means to be Heret making or Grovic making. The man’s reply is simply to shrug and say, “well it’s a fundamental concept, if you don’t understand I can’t explain it to you anymore than I could explain the perceptual experience of redness to a man who had never experienced color.”
In such a situation the only thing you can do is give up on the notion of Heret and Grovic. Debating about whether to say it’s an incoherent notion, a concept you lack the facilities to comprehend or something else would just waste time with a useless word game. Ultimately you just have to ignore such talk as something that lacks content for you and treat it the same way as you would meaningless gibberish.
The fact that when moral realists say the same thing about good and evil they are using the same sounds that we understand to mean something different shouldn’t change the situation at all.