Ingliz wrote:Moral facts are inaccessible and moral intuitions inconsistent.
Therefore, even if some moral intuitions are "true" many must be "false", and we have no way of knowing which is which.
This is true only if you extend moral intuitions to non-basic moral claims and it is a danger, in general, to extend intuitions to complex matters and I think this captures what you are getting at and where I agree (about the unreliability of intuitions). That being said, moral intuition
is consistent with the most basic moral claims (i.e. it provides consistent answers) upon which complex super-structural morality is built. On this point I am in agreement with you -- I do not think, for example, that "everyone has a
right to X" is a moral claim with an objective truth-value (in fact I do not think it is a moral claim at all, but a useful legal fiction).
Intuitions are consistent when it comes to certain basic beliefs: do no harm (for example) or the external world is real. Complex moral and scientific structures are an attempt to build from these basic beliefs.
One way out is to say that these basic beliefs were selected for because they are advantageous to an organism, like ourselves, capable of cognition. But this would only work if you see no necessary connection between selecting for these basic beliefs (which are generated by a cognitive process - intuition) and external reality. One could, in a sense, deny such a connection at all, but I do not think that this is all that helpful (and produces a pretty bizarre metaphysics). It is not necessary to have basic moral beliefs to have a functioning community - animals have no such cognitive processes to generate beliefs (maybe this is contentious) and can set up successful communities (successful in the evolutionary sense).
Finally, I have given an account of how we can have access to moral facts -- by fixing the truth-conditions of all statements involving moral assertions. I think your point is that we cannot fix these truth-conditions (if moral facts just are the truth-values of moral sentences. This is the Russell-Wittgenstein view of a 'fact' but I'm not sure you are using it in this way), but this can only be because they do not have truth-conditions (being possibly metaphysically true is not the same as saying they have a truth-value) so, on your view, you are committed to the positivist view that moral claims are
meaningless (metaphysics cannot save you here). You may find Carnap's position on moral claims interesting since he believed that they are meaningful but have no truth-conditions. This is because he thought all moral sentences are masked
commands. That it is "wrong to do harm" is, rather, a command "Do no harm" -- commands are neither true nor false but they are not meaningless but are pseudo-propositions (like mathematics - they assert nothing about the world, at least this was an early positivist view taken from Wittgenstein). We still cannot save ourselves from relativism here, and relativism is an ugly thing.
Ingliz wrote:Given this, why not treat moral claims as scientists treat claims concerning unobservable entities? As not literally true or false, but instead merely useful devices.
Indeed we can treat them as useful fictions, but more is at stake with a moral claim than there is with a claim about unobservable entities in science. So much is lost when abandoning moral realism, so much that I think it is irrational to do so.
Ingliz wrote:Deontic logic has a number of problems, and that number is large.
Indeed, but the number of problems with treating moral claims as useful fictions is sufficiently large as well. My point on deontic logic was only to show that morality can be captured formally, since this seemed to be a contentious point with Tainari (that there is something different between mathematics and morality only because they latter is expressed differently in different natural languages.) In fact, I just realized that when I edited back in my comment on deontic logic, I put it in the wrong place (it should follow Tainari's second quote).
Ingliz wrote:I have argued that it is impossible to attach a reliable truth value to one.
One could, in principle, verify the cognitive origins of basic beliefs and say that such a cognitive process is reliable (in fact many natural epistemologists and cognitive scientists give this kind of story to generate knowledge) - the question turns on whether basic moral claims are properly basic beliefs. I think they are, but this is certainly a contentious issue. Moreover there are problem with evolutionary psychology (as it is applied in philosophy -- it is not all too clear that it helps sort out philosophical problems).
Tainari wrote:I have never studied prosaic philosophy before. But I loved philosophy in college and was tempted to major in it. I just took basic courses in philosophy. I also over the years did an A-Z on philosophers, and tried to cover all of them. I then went through comparative religions. But philosophy is a favorite of mine. Maybe I can persuade you VP to educate me on prosaic philosophy? I would love to explore that.
Sure. First things first though, there is no such thing as
prosaic philosophy. Philosophy just
is prosaic. That other stuff is at best provoking poetry, at worse nonsense. Most continental philosophy is also prosaic, it is just that it has a very different technical jargon that may appear poetic on the surface. Did you study any analytic philosophy?