@Aph002 agreed — so one must find a basis where it is sensible or declare it invalid

@Aph002 I guess if you define morals as having to exist in and of themselves then non-realist morality doesn’t exist by definition so I think there’s a broader definition of morality that allows people to be non-realist and it’s what I gave above

@MauroALLEGRANZA - it sounds like the relational formulation merely inverts the ontology vs simplify it. Is that the correct interpetation?

@Rushi - for the second to last paragraph, the people I put in there are examples where the vast majority of people would call them evil. My last paragraph is basically saying that widely help moral intuitions are usually backed by reasons, so it is the person who wants to change the prevailing view who needs to show why it's wrong.

@Rushi - both you and JustSomeOldMan appear to agree with all but the last two paragraphs. However, the last two paragraphs are written in the context of what I wrote in the earlier parts. I'm not saying that every moral rule is absolute, but there is an effective core of moral rules that are very widespread and are related to the functioning of groups. Outside of that, there is a lot of variation. Also, I specifically kept my statement of "absolute" to a pragmatic type vs metaphycial (I don't think there are true right and wrong actions out there outside of a sociobilogical context)

@Rushi: here's a good example: "It is evil to kill a newborn baby solely for fun" - who bears the burden of proof here? Would we be allowing such practices until the person who says this provides us an argument that we'd accept? What if we don't think newborns are persons? In that case, we could "fail to accept" this assertion, but only because we are implicitly relying on positive assertions.

@Rushi -- i see where you are coming from -- for example, in theological debates it's often stated that theists are the ones who need to justify their position, as the atheist position is in some sense the "default" view. I used to have this view as well. But the concept of who has the burden/onus is not as clear cut as that. Well-regarded atheist philosophers have questioned this even though it would benefit them to accept it. Key examples are Graham Oppy and Julian Baggini, both of which write about the need for justification in atheism and elsewhere.

+1 re: IIT. They are making impressive progress here :)

@BuckThorn -- yes, stochastic/random -- but jury is out if its ontological or merely epistemic. For all practical purposes it doesn't matter but there is a conceptual difference between "unpredictable in practice" vs "unpredictable in theory"

@BuckThorn — in ontological randomness it’s not that we don’t know, we cannot know — that knowledge doesn’t exist

@Michael Borgwardt - thanks for the edits!

@MikeSteele -- yeah, Bohm pushes our uncertainty out to the boundary conditions and non-locality refers to the pilot wave, which is modeled as nonlocal.

@MikeSteele correct. Question is if true randomness is really coherent and, even then, does it exist — e.g., Bohmian mechanics is deterministic so all spookiness comes from epistemic limitations and non-locality