Moral Realism

Richard Carrier (author of Sense and Goodness Without God) has a longish blog post up about moral ontology, well worth reading if you're into that sort of thing. (Via Russell Blackford.) Carrier is a secular materialist, but a moral realist: he thinks there are such things as "moral facts" that are "true independent of your opinion or culture." Carrier goes to great lengths to explain that these moral facts are not simply "out there" in the same sense that the laws of physics arguably are, but rather that they express relationships between the desires of particular humans and external reality. (The useful analogy is: "bears are scary" is a true fact if you are talking about you or me, but not if you are talking about Superman.) I don't buy it. Not to be tiresome, but I have to keep insisting that you can't squeeze blood from a turnip. You can't use logic to derive moral commandments solely from facts about the world, even if those facts include human desires. Of course, you can derive moral commandments if you sneak in some moral premise; all I'm trying to say here is that we should be upfront about what those moral premises are, and not try to hide them underneath a pile of unobjectionable-sounding statements. As a warm-up, here is an example of logic in action: