Minds will wander even during the Last Judgment.
It is of note that for a long time moral nihilism was a kind of unquestioned default position in analytic moral philosophy.
You should not take the content of your intuitive response as evidence until you have submitted your psychological reaction to what I call cognitive psychotherapy. You should do what you can to learn as much as possible about the origin of your reaction.
If two norms conflict, if they are mutually inconsistent, then at least one of them must be false.
It is true (independently of our conceptualisation) that it is wrong to inflict pain on a sentient creature for no reason (she doesn't deserve it, I haven't promised to do it, it is not helpful to this creature or to anyone else if I do it, and so forth). But if this is a truth, existing independently of our conceptualisation, then at least one moral fact (this one) exists and moral realism is true. We have to accept this, I submit, unless we can find strong reasons to think otherwise.
I believe that one basic question, what we ought to do, period (the moral question), is a genuine one. There exists a true answer to it, which is independent of our thought and conceptualisation.
I am indeed a moral realist.
I put a bullet into the back of the crocodiles neck just behind the head, thus killing it. If a crocodile is hit in any other part of its anatomy it disappears into the water and is irrecoverable.
Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.
Everybody dies, but great souls ressurects in our memories.
Ever since Richard Nixon walloped George McGovern in the presidential election of 1972, political pundits have treated as a truism the proposition that liberals are out of step with the rest of the nation, and therefore all but unelectable outside the precincts of the Northeast -- give or take a college town here or a ski resort there. During the course of every presidential election for the past forty years now, Republicans have sought to wield the word liberal as if it were a six-gauge shotgun.