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I don't have to ignore you. I can just keep responding to stop with amoralism every time you post it in response to a normative argument. I don't have to make an argument that you find convincing. I can in fact just keep pointing out that I want to have an ethics argument, and you are responding with descriptive trivialities after misinterpreting what I said.
You can indeed, of course. But as you are just making a statement and not backing it up, I think anyone reading will correctly take my point which is that descriptivism is not a triviality in an ethics argument.
Do you have an actual argument for why it is just a triviality? An assertion does not an argument make.
And I can claim anybody reading that has progressed beyond Kohlberg's conventional stage of moral development will understand that responding to normative claims by wrongly interpreting them as different descriptive claims is fallacious. Do you have an actual argument otherwise? Your descriptive assertions do not make a normative argument.
Maybe an analogy will help:
It's like saying God tells us not to murder, and then when someone answers that God doesn't exist, complaining that you wanted to talk about God's commandments, not God's existence. One flows from the other. If God doesn't exist, whatever people claim he says about murder is worthless. So someone disputing the existence of God isn't misunderstanding anything. They're attacking your argument one level up, which is entirely valid.
You're assuming normative claims are some kind of freestanding thing in their own right which is moral realism and it's a disputed position. My point is a second order claim, your whole framing of normative claims rests on an assumption you haven't actually argued for.
If you want to have a discussion with the assumption moral realism is correct, then you need to state that upfront. Otherwise you are leaving that surface area of your argument up for debate.
Your fallacy is like saying the following in response to a claim that murder is morally wrong:
You think murder is wrong? But people can murder. They do it all the time. Unfortunately, that is a reality you have to deal with. They might get caught, or they might not. They are hard to stop if they don't care about the risk of being caught. You're going to have to deal with the fact that murder is, in fact, possible.
Questioning the moral frame directly and proposing a substantial flaw with it and alternative frame is a valid argument. What you do is respond to a different, irrelevant, strawman descriptive position, like murder is impossible.
I said
This is in fact a moral argument based on consequentialism. You went on to strip the argument of its moral substance and to strawman the descriptive positions I take: apparently you thought I said that other people don't exist, and that nobody has different views than me. You wrote a rebuttal of that other, strawman position:
This is not a productive reply to what I said. Productive replies include criticizing my consequentialism directly, or disputing my actual descriptive positions.
No my point is that unless you convince those other people of your views, your views are worthless. What ought to be is irrelevant compared to what is and will be. That is what you are fundamentally misunderstanding. Moral substance doesn't really exist, so yes I am stripping that away. That's my point!
My reply is productive because I am attempting to explain what is apparently a very alien framing to you. (Perhaps badly, apparently!)
I'm not misunderstanding anything. Your point is trivial and uttering it appears to be based on several modeling errors. First, you underestimate how obvious your point is. I think I'd have to be below average IQ at least for your irrelevant, but trivially true point to by anything but obvious. Obviously, I am not below average IQ, and if you genuinely thought otherwise, your world modeling was very off. Second, you are modeling me as a politician, when I'm actually just engaging in leisure time. This is what makes your point irrelevant. Even if I did not realize your point, I do not need it and will never use it, because I am not in the business of convincing people of anything. I just want to debate on the internet for fun.
So you don't think rape is wrong? What about racism? Genocide? Torture? I focused more on your strawmanning than your amoralism because honest amoralism is extremely rare. Most people think rape, murder, torture, and genocide are genuinely wrong. Liberals in particular invoke amoralism when conservatives state conservative moral positions, but it's a strawman since most liberals hold deep moral positions on other topics.
You didn't speak clearly about your moral framework until now. Instead, you strawmanned my descriptive positions and my best guess was that you have an average moral framework but wanted to bypass the difficult moral argument to attack a strawman of my position.
Of course, most people also disagree on the exact definitions of these terms, so there isn't true consensus on their "wrongness".
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Not at all. I've worked with politicians. If I was modelling you as a politician I would be appealing to your naked self interest and nothing more. I wouldn't waste time arguing with you. I just enjoy arguing on the internet.
You're confusing the idea that moral substance does not exist in any real way with the idea that morality does not exist in any way.
Like I said before justice only exists in reference to people. It has no reality outside of that. In a universe with no sentient beings there is no justice (or indeed injustice) to be found. So talking about how just something is relative to an individual is of no merit, because what is just is what you can convince people to believe is just. No moral substance but still morality.
Moral error theory says that there is no such thing as moral facts, but that doesn't mean it doesn't recognize that people have beliefs about what is right or wrong. It just specifies these are not in and of themselves either true or false in any objective way.
Is a unicorn blue? No because unicorns don't exist. But the color blue does indeed exist. And someone could paint a picture of a blue unicorn. The representation exists, the idea exists, but the unicorn does not.
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