There are no moral facts. So what?

There is an element of truth in what you say.

What, the first bit?

No, this one...

Others say that, if there are no moral truths, there is nothing stopping us from just doing what we want all the time, and being complete egoists. We could rape, pillage, kill, or whatever. It doesn't matter.

Moral truth has stopped me from killing and raping on more than one occasion.

It is an unfortunate albatross to have strung on one's neck.

I still pillage without remorse however.

Plundering is good. That's why I joined the Chamber of Commerce.

Plundering is good, dys, but still doesn't satisfy a man in the same way a good pillage does.

I'll take pillage any day.

Samedi, il a vu sa mère, a parlé au médicin et a trouvé un chat.

I guess you got me.

<Gus stumbles off muttering, "Why do these damn city slickers have to throw this French **** at me?">

Saturday he saw his mother, talked to the doctor, and found a cat.

I take it my post wasn't interesting enough to provoke discussion.

Re: There are no moral facts. So what?

I won't address the first part of that question: there might, after all, still be morality even if there weren't any "moral facts," but you don't want to talk about the existence or non-existence of "moral facts" so I won't go into that.

If, on the other hand, all moral claims are false, then society might indeed plunge into a chaos of murder, rape, and thievery. But then again it might not. People might, for instance, agree on a sort of pragmatic code of behavior that prevents everyone from indulging in their basest desires purely from a calculation premised on self-interest. Or they might all become savages and engage in a perpetual bellum omnium contra omnes that Hobbes envisioned as man's natural state.

Maybe moral is an illusion.

Maybe the only restrain we have is that if you kill my brother I'll come and kill you.

Maybe the only reason most of us don't steal is that we don't want to guard our own posessions 24/7.

In short, our fear of consequences may be what keeps us on the straight and narrow.

Then again, maybe not.

Actions have repercussions, regardless of moral truth. From whatever misgivings about antisocial behavior that we inherit through evolution (we've been a social species for a generation or two now) to the very concrete threat of violent revenge by our victims or their seconds (the government, for instance), there are reasons not to commit antisocial behavior without having to resort to some abstract moral truth.

As far as I'm concerned, this is how human society presently operates. I think the influence of the abstract (e.g., "moral truth") on human behavior is greatly overestimated -- especially by people who peddle moral truth.

I hear gills are making a comeback in generation #3

How retro.

I think I got it but...
If we are to understand the nature of moral claims, and at the same time assume that accounts of meaning and reference are about the ways that actual groups happen to use the term, then we must advance a theory that takes moral disagreement to be a result of a dependency involved in all moral claims.

Despite the fact that the way in which we use moral terms is never without bias, moral claims, as with the moral facts we know, are not justified within any objective framework.

I am confident that embracing cognitivism should be the foundation from which to account for the nature of moral facts. This is mostly because psychological and linguistic accounts help to configure moral reality, or what is ethical from what isn't.

The moral realism needed to explain the real nature of moral claims can be captured in a moral relativism. But, the version of moral relativism that I propose is not a standard view. The more standard moral relativism maintains that where two groups of people make moral statements that appear directly contradictory, there is no direct conflict- rather, both moral statements can be true. Whereas, the version of relativism that I hold maintains that there is direct factual conflict in moral disputes. I agree with the standard view that both statements in moral disputes can be true, but I claim that the truth values of those statements are contingent upon the moral facts formed by some group. Thus, I hold, in opposition to the standard view, that moral disagreement is genuine disagreement about human actions.

There are two reasons for this thesis: a) moral judgments are made after considering which moral properties we ought to stipulate as applying to human actions. For instance, if we stipulate in certain cases that the property involved in taking a human life, for example, is not wrong, then in that instance we will not obtain the judgment that a murder occurred. b) In moral disputes the truth-conditions that mark moral judgments are not physical.

In light of naturally affirming moral knowledge, naturalists claim that they discover moral properties. They even believe their moral judgments are evoked by objective properties that stem from something independent. Yet, moral judgments are determined by whether the truth-conditions collectively formed are met. The success of a moral judgment depends on minds far more than naturalists understand. When the truth-conditions stipulated by the legitimizing group are met, the moral judgment is true. In fact, it is the group's cognitive abilities, in the hands of a (presumed) majority, that determines morality. In collective agreement, certain ethical principles and facts get formed, and certain actions get scrutinized relative to them. Therefore, it is not necessary to believe moral knowledge is grounded by or even relevant to objective human-independent properties in order to affirm that we have moral knowledge about facts.