I presume the existence of morality and value judgments because human interaction revolves around rules of behavior. And clearly in each community it must be decided what those rules will be.
Now, can these rules be predicated on an objective morality? If you think so, note a context in which values might come into conflict, and describe the behaviors that you would either prescribe or proscribe.
Show us how you would go about differentiating them.
And, historically, the objectivists are often thumped by the nihilists when it comes to horror stories.
For example, the nihilists that own and operate the global [capitalist] economy today, pretty much wrap their moral narrative around “show me the money”.
And this is the world they own and operate: statisticbrain.com/world-po … tatistics/
Wealth and power and self-interest is generally what they worship.
Communism, on the other hand, is an ideological contraption. The horrors that it precipitated often revolved around the dictum that you are either one of us or one of them. The either/or mentality of all objectivists. It then becomes a matter of how authoritarian you are willing to be. And [of course] the extent to which you have the political power to enforce your rigid doctrinaire agenda.
With communism [as with fascism and other such dogmas] the nihilistic horrors often revolve around the assumption that the end justifies the means.
He accused me LOL of being an epistemologist. But he does not seem to realize that his posts claim ONLY to be about epistemology - since he has no way of knowing what is good or bad, good or evil - despite his motivation being precisely that, an urge to reduce the horrors caused by objectivists. If he truly thinks there is no way to know the objective good, he might as well talk about a sports team, because otherwise, this is only a discussion of epistemology, something he thinks is a bad thing to be, a la Will Durant. Talk about irony, since they just stack up and stack up.
Again, bring this down to earth. Note the sort of conflicted human behaviors that precipitate horrors. For example, with abortion some argue that the horror revolves around killing babies, while others insist that, on the contrary, the horror revolves around forcing women to give birth.
Now, how would a competent epistemologist address this? What can in fact be known here such that it is able to be demonstrated as applicable to all of us?
Or you pick the issue and the horrors it can bring about.
The only possible end to the discussion is precisely what he accuses objectivists of demanding: agreement with his values and epistemology.
All I can do here is to note that I do not construe my own argument as any less an existential contraption. And that in a world bursting at the seams with contingency, chance and change, a new experience, relationship or idea might propel me in another direction. As has been the case many times in the past.
What I suspect however is that this common reaction among the objectivists to my frame of mind “here and now” revolves more around my speculation that it is applicable to them as well.
Good and bad as “existential contraptions” rooted in dasein just freaks them out. The idea that in a No God world construed by some to be essentially meaningless and absurd, “I” can rest only on the “intellectual contraptions” they concoct “in their head”, is just too discomfiting to seriously consider.
After all, look what is at stake: the comfort and the consolation derived from the conviction that right and wrong behavior must be distinguishable. Why? Because they have in fact already distinguished them.
And that’s often when the focus shifts from dealing with people like me, to dealing with all the other moral/political objectivists who share the conviction that right is right and wrong is wrong. But then insist it is their own agenda that nails this.