I guess this is really the question at the centre of this entire thread.
Well, as I’ve been pointing out and as I think is fairly clear by this point in the thread, @Banno is talking about what truths someone is committed to given their beliefs. He is not talking about what is true. So what you say is correct (as I pointed out here), but the claim about “ethical truths” remains problematic. It is an equivocation between “X is an ethical truth” and “So-and-so is committed to X being an ethical truth.”
Could we just say that Banno is a moral relativist and then ask whether moral relativism counts as moral nihilism?
It is realist about “truths,” and the scare-quotes are deeply necessary.
I point out problems with @Banno’s arguments and he engages in name-calling. That’s our dance. Could what Banno has done in this thread really be considered good-faith engagement? For over 600 posts he has been claiming to oppose moral nihilism by claiming that things like “one should not kick puppies” are ethical truths, and then refusing to justify his claim at every juncture. What he is doing is not philosophy, you’re right about that.
I would say that there are viable forms of teleological ethics that do not require divine commands (and I am sure that @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus agrees with such a claim). That’s what Aristotle is, by the way. Aristotle does not derive his ethics from divine commands.
@Banno follows Anscombe in her claim that normative ethics requires divine commands. I think Anscombe is wildly wrong. I have argued against it many times. Note though that Foot is following Anscombe’s advice of trying to do “moral psychology” by way of virtue ethics. If we read Anscombe as saying, “The current state of ethics suffers because divine commands have disappeared, and we have to refound ethics on more robust theories of psychology, act-specification, and virtue,” then we can agree with her in a limited way. Her history is still confused, but those salves would be of help.
If you want to look at Foot in particular then we would need a text.
Yes - let’s look at that.
On Mackie’s account, when he says “shooting children is wrong” he is making a false claim. I hope we can agree that shooting children is wrong, and so, that “shooting children is wrong” is true.
That is, you and I might agree that Mackie has made an error.
If a nihilist claims that “Shooting children is wrong” is not truth-apt, then they are saying it is neither right nor wrong to shot children. That has some level of coherence. But as soon as they claim a preference here - perhaps that not shooting children is preferable to shooting children - then they commit to the truth of a statement expressing that preference.
Yes. Much appreciated.
If these are made explicit, I am confident that it can be shown they fall to the same problem. We do - must - make judgement about what is better or worse; but those are judgements about how things are, not descriptions of how things are.
I think @Banno’s contributions are frequently very useful.
Is it just that you both disagree and attribute wrongheadedness to the disagreements?
Divine command is pretty crude stuff even for theists. Conceptually, I’ve usually distinguished between ethics formed by human opinion and circumstance, and a higher morality grounded in what’s beyond the human mind. The first is changeable and shaped by perspective, and is open to easy criticisms and disagreements. The second seems to be rooted in the One, the ultimate source of all reality and goodness. From here we might end up looking at reason and its potential sovereignty. If reason truly grasps anything, is it because it participates in this higher order rather than merely constructing it?
Isn’t just about every argument on this site ultimately some variation of the above, and isn’t almost every conflict here just a series of easy potshots at each position?
You wouldn’t know about goodness if you didn’t have evil to compare it to.
Then point to a single place in the thread where he has offered a valid argument against moral nihilism. Seriously. That’s the whole point of the thread. He has posted almost a hundred times. It should not be hard.
I think the thread would have been more fruitful if @Banno had been ignored after he proved unable to substantiate his claims. I raised issues about Hume, about the relation of fact/value to is/ought, about akrasia & smoking, about emotivism, etc. No one wants to talk about those more substantive matters. They would rather criticize Banno because he is the low-hanging fruit. His argument from the premise that, “Everyone hopefully agrees that puppy-kicking is wrong,” is so obviously invalid that the average internet philosopher cannot pull themselves away from that line of argument. The quality only suffers because we can’t help ourselves. We can’t ignore the low-hanging fruit.
Can’t we just say that a “constructed” ethics is not ethics? That a consensus around the wrongness of puppy-kicking will not of itself prove that it is right or wrong?
It seems like everyone in the thread agrees to this, with the exception of one person. If that’s right then the next step would be to look at ethics, namely by looking at ethical approaches that are not reducible to claims of intersubjective agreement.
Remember though that I’m agnostic on this. I am interested in arguments in either direction. I also think @Joshs would be closer to @Banno as would @AmadeusD There’s a bit of diversity here, but I’m not keeping score on this.
I think pretty much everyone does. Almost everyone here would agree that pain and suffering are objectively bad and should be avoided (ceteris paribus). Disagreement in threads like this is often manufactured. The thread is entertaining, and without disagreement the thread will cease, so disagreement must be manufactured for the sake of the entertainment.
I’m not sure things like anti-essentialism are actually that popular at an honest level.
You think moral “oughts” might be generated by intersubjective agreement? Earlier you seemed of a different mind:
The reason some people are open to the idea is, I think, because they are desperate. They think, “Well, if bricks don’t exist after all, then maybe we can just build the house out of straw and that will be sufficient.”
Incidentally, there is already the seed of a live disagreement on this point in the thread, and it will almost certainly revolve around Michael’s distinction between “moral” and “practical”:
I think there’s an element of truth to that.
I don’t know, to be honest. I’m agnostic and so I alternate. I sometimes try to test ideas on this site to see how they hold up, what can survive scrutiny. How else can we do it? Dialogue is my preferred approach to problem-solving.
Personally, I think where we land on such matters will depend largely on disposition. I have an intuition that there’s a lot in post-structural ideas and enactivist approaches that gets readily dismissed by, shall we say, traditionalists, who may not be able to get past certain models and modes of reasoning.
To be honest, I’ve often thought it’s likely none of this is determinable, certainly not by me so I might just close the door and forget it.
Whereas I think it’s fairly easy to see that intersubjective agreement does not generate truth. That’s an old fallacy called “argumentum ad populum.”
If you meet someone who disagrees you should ask them to give an argument for the validity of argumentum ad populum and see if the argument is persuasive.
- We have preferences
- We can “reach” agreement
- Therefore, there is a need to engage in ethical deliberation
How does (3) follow? How is agreement “reached”? What does the “ethical deliberation” you speak of look like? What would we be deliberating about?
Very familiar with argumentum ad populum but I think this might be seen as an inaccurate account of the full position, although no doubt some may hold this. Take science: from a poststructuralist angle, it’s seen as an intersubjective community. What counts as knowledge depends on shared language, concepts, and institutional norms that shape what can be said, tested, and accepted as valid. It’s not that facts are just whatever’s popular, but that what we call “objectivity” is produced and stabilised through historically shaped systems of language, power, and peer agreement, rather than some view from nowhere.
Now I imagine this small sketch may have you shut it down rather than be curious on account of your disposition towards more traditionalist, and in your mind, time-honoured, ordered and rational approaches. But perhaps I’m wrong. @joshs is better positioned to describe this school since he is a student of post-structuralism. But I don’t want to drop him into an acrimonious debate. 
I can’t really be poststructuralism’s defender because I only have a mild grasp of it. But it’s interested me enough to feel intuitively compelling, at least in parts. I would consider it reckless of me to ignore it and not try to acquire some more understanding.
And would you say that this view is a species of view which attempts to draw truths from intersubjective agreement? That’s what we’re talking about after all, isn’t it? Because I’m not sure that this view represents a case where truth is being drawn from intersubjective agreement. I think Joshs ends up saying things that are quite different from this.
Going back to @Banno’s subjectivist view for a moment, a good text here is Plato’s Theaetetus starting at 151e (towards the beginning of the dialogue). That is one of the places where Socrates goes after the Protagorean doctrine that “Knowledge is perception,” or that, “Man is the measure.” Intersubjective agreement and argumentum ad populum would be particular instances of that sort of thinking. Have you read much Plato?
From memory just the Euthyphro and the Phaedo, about 35 years ago which I wouldn’t count. I did own a lovely complete works although I gave it to someone who is more likely to read it than me.
Okay, fair enough. I have a Kindle copy of a complete works. I always think I should be reading more Plato. Maybe I’ll take myself up on it one of these days. 
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If I were to pick him up today what would you recommend?