Quote Originally Posted by The Stranger View Post
@sasaki:

you ask all_p to explain why (and perhaps even prove that) there no moral facts. And while it is true that you cannot conclude from the empirical fact that people disagree about their moral beliefs that there are no objective moral facts (aka that there is no truth when it comes to morals) it is equally untrue that you can conclude from the empirical fact that people have moral beliefs (belief a to be good and b to be bad) that there are moral facts (that when person x beliefs a and person z beliefs b, and a and b contradict, that only one of them can be true). It is still the question whether the laws of logic apply to morals, because, amongst others, there is a possibility that morals are fundamentally illogical.

so my question to you is, please explain why you believe (and perhaps prove that) there are moral facts.
Because killing innocent children for fun is wrong, by the definition of "wrong". The analogy I would make is to say that there are facts about what color the sky is, because the sky is blue, by definition. There are not facts about how happy the sky is by contrast, because of what it is that the word "sky" refers to.

Well, it's a two part argument which I kind of jumbled together here. One part is a semantic argument, about whether moral statements are things that can be true or false. The other part is that some such statements are true, and I don't think that alh would disagree that my example is one of those true statements if they accepted the semantic part. Actually I really doubt that "whether there are moral facts" is what we are disagreeing about. I think it is whether any moral facts are universal, with alh claiming that in some cultures it would not be thought wrong to X, and then concluding that it isn't wrong to X in that culture. That relies upon a different definition of wrong.

I think your issue is a broader one of "when are we justified in believing something"? And arises similarly in response to other sophistical claims like "there is no mind independent world".