If you look at FJ’s responses to the arguments in his second post—where he addressed the actual arguments—all you find is a one-line sentence, to each argument, denying some premise, (e.g., “P1 is false”). That’s not a refutation, that’s just a denial of a premise. If there’s some reason to think the premise false, it needs to be layed out. I think I’ve said plenty to render the premises initially plausible. You seem to recognize this when you say that I had a better showing in the debate, but somehow lost it. That strikes me as incoherent. I’m not sure what it is supposed to reveal but that you think one position is less true from the start, and thus harder to argue for. Typically that’s something to avoid for a judge; it’s like saying, “yes, your side presented the better evidence for your case, but I thought your case wrong moreso from the start, so you had further to go”.
This is patently false. If I am talking with someone who is talking about Juxtaglomerulars, Agammaglobulinemia, and Amazias----I have no idea what these are, but I have no reason to think they don’t exist simply because I don’t know what they’re supposed to refer to. And if I were to suppose they didn’t exist, I would be dead wrong.
What you want to ask is what they refer to. If you want to know what a moral fact is, it’s a fact about the world (including the kind of creature that you are) that gives you a reason to act one way rather than another. Take the example of pain. That an action causes pain is an objective fact about the world, and it often furnishes you with a reason not to act in a certain way. I took it to be quite straightforward. If some people like pain, then it doesn’t show that moral facts don’t exist, it shows that whether pain gives you a reason to avoid an action is non-universalizable. Personally, I think that’s false, but it’s tangential to the debate. Masochists get a sort of psychological pleasure that outweights any physical pain, and can’t be gotten without the physical pain. That doesn’t mean they like physical pain, and would pursue it even in the absence of the greater psychological pleasure. That both of you are standing here saying, “yo, pain is good” is incoherent. But even if you could make sense of that claim, then it would support my position—because it’s a fact about the world that gives you a reason to act one way rather than another.
There’s simply no strength in a “no it doesn’t” position unless you justify the denial. This isn’t an argument on a playground.
Morality is just defined by a set of questions to outline the topic that it is: E.g., “How should I act?”, “What is good and bad?”, “What is right and wrong?”. All I have to do is show you that there are objective facts that give you reasons to act one way rather than another. And if that’s the case, then I’ve won, unless FJ wants to claim that the fork example, the rape example, the throwing his child off the bridge example don’t actually give him any reasons to act one way rather than another, or unless he wants to argue that moral facts are subjective. If the latter, that’s fine—but then there’s a handful of arguments about that that he is yet to address at all. What FJ wants is someone to lay out particular criteria for answering moral questions, so that when they do, he can say that that is not what he means by morality. That’s tantamount to insisting on defining morality as something non-sensical in order to prove it’s non-sensical. If ordinary language matters at all, then that’s unjustified.