I don’t think it’s a misunderstanding of moral realism. I think that versions of moral anti-realism don’t capture things really mattering, for reasons I explain in the linked post. I also don’t think rocks have morality—the idea of something having morality seems confused.
I think you’re failing to understand the depth of both realist and anti-realist positions, since we can reasonable interpret them as two ways of describing the same reality.
Hmm, sounds like your objection is you think if there aren’t moral facts then meaning is ungrounded. I’m not sure how to convince you this is only the only reasonable way to see the world, but I’ll point to some things that are perhaps helpful.
There’s no solid ground of reality that we can access. We’re epistemically limited in various ways that prevent us from knowing the how the world is with certainty, which prevents us from grounding meaning in facts. Yet, despite these limitations, we find meaning anyway. How’s that possible?
We, like all cybernetic beings (systems of negative feedback loops), care about things because we’re trying to target various observations, and we work to make the world in ways that make it like our observations. This feedback process is the source of meaning, although I don’t have a great link to point you at to explain this point (yet!).
This is quite a bit different from how the world seems to be though! That’s because our ontologies start out with us fused with our perception of the world, then we separate from it but think ourselves separate from the world rather than embedded in it, and during this stage of our ontological development it seems that meaning must be grounded “out there” in the world because we think we’re separate from the world. But that’s not true, though it’s hard to realize this because our brains give us the impression that we are separate from the world.
I’m not sure if any of this will be convincing, but I think you’re simply mistaken that anti-realism doesn’t account for meaning. When I look at the anti-realist story I see meaning, it just doesn’t show up the same way it does in the realist story because it rejects essentialism and so must build up a mechanistic story about where meaning comes from.
I don’t think it’s a misunderstanding of moral realism. I think that versions of moral anti-realism don’t capture things really mattering, for reasons I explain in the linked post. I also don’t think rocks have morality—the idea of something having morality seems confused.
I think you’re failing to understand the depth of both realist and anti-realist positions, since we can reasonable interpret them as two ways of describing the same reality.
They may issue similar first order verdicts, but anti-realism doesn’t capture things really mattering.
Hmm, sounds like your objection is you think if there aren’t moral facts then meaning is ungrounded. I’m not sure how to convince you this is only the only reasonable way to see the world, but I’ll point to some things that are perhaps helpful.
There’s no solid ground of reality that we can access. We’re epistemically limited in various ways that prevent us from knowing the how the world is with certainty, which prevents us from grounding meaning in facts. Yet, despite these limitations, we find meaning anyway. How’s that possible?
We, like all cybernetic beings (systems of negative feedback loops), care about things because we’re trying to target various observations, and we work to make the world in ways that make it like our observations. This feedback process is the source of meaning, although I don’t have a great link to point you at to explain this point (yet!).
This is quite a bit different from how the world seems to be though! That’s because our ontologies start out with us fused with our perception of the world, then we separate from it but think ourselves separate from the world rather than embedded in it, and during this stage of our ontological development it seems that meaning must be grounded “out there” in the world because we think we’re separate from the world. But that’s not true, though it’s hard to realize this because our brains give us the impression that we are separate from the world.
I’m not sure if any of this will be convincing, but I think you’re simply mistaken that anti-realism doesn’t account for meaning. When I look at the anti-realist story I see meaning, it just doesn’t show up the same way it does in the realist story because it rejects essentialism and so must build up a mechanistic story about where meaning comes from.