Failing to live up to anti-realism

"Moral antirealists such as Timmons, Horgan, and Richard Joyce agree that a moral antirealist position should not be so revisionary as to recommend that we cease to engage in moral discourse. According to these philosophers, such a recommendation would be fruitless, for moral concepts are so deeply entrenched in ordinary discourse that we couldn't jettison them even if we tried." (Cuneo 106)

Hogwash. Right now there are buses and billboards advertising against the once deeply entrenched philosophical position that God exists. If you're an antirealist you can't wuss out at the last step. Belief that some people are evil leads to an untold amount of death every year. How many wars have been fought over the mistaken belief that the enemy was evil? Why, think of all the German lives that could have been saved in World War II if people didn't believe that there was an objective good and evil!

(Or else, isn't morality a companion in guilt to religion?)

Hypothetical and Categorical Reasons

The distinction seems right to me: there are some reasons--like sports reasons--that provide reasons to act but only if you care about them--only if you care about playing football well. There are other things--such as ethical reasons--that apply to a person even if he doesn't care about them. We would probably agree that someone who doesn't care about the outcome of a sports game doesn't have much of a good reason to follow the rules of football during a certain time, but we wouldn't agree that someone who doesn't care about ethics has no reason not to kill! So the distinction makes sense to me.

But for a while I've been puzzled about how a realist could explain this. Doesn't this seem like an odd feature of the world, that you have all these norms that are hypothetical, and they (we surely agree) are not objective features of the world, but then you have one sort of norm that is objective and an actual feature of the world? Isn't this something that the realist needs to explain? Or am I missing something. If anything pushes me to constructivism, this is it. But does this make any sense? Do I have any readers? If I have any readers, could you explain this to me?

Something I've learned about the writing process

Strike while the iron is hot, and not necessarily on a blog.

I'm finding as I'm trying to actually write down some of the ideas that developed on the blog a week or two ago, that it's really boring to revisit some of these arguments. Yes, craft is important. But getting a draft can be excruciating, especially when I just feel like I'm rehashing boring ideas that are just waiting to be written again. So in the future if I write a blog post I'll attempt to make it crisper and closer, if I think I have something that will become part of the larger project.

The next 20 pages or so

If all goes well, much of this week will be spent writing 20 pages or so of material, focusing on Cuneo's work. Unless I lose faith in these arguments between now and then, here's a first outline of what I hope to do:

I. Cuneo's Core Argument
A. Limitations of Companions in Guilt style arguments
B. Doubts about explanatory argument
C. Doubts about argument from disagreement
D. Diagnose his successes--normativity of epistemology

II. Cuneo's Backup Argument (The Normative Web)
A. Reconstruct (Chap 2 and Chap 8)
B. Proves too much? Other hybrid statements from science
C. Does epistemology hybridize with many other discourses?
D. Differences between ethics and epistemology
E. I do see what he's saying though, and it is attractive. It does work nicely, so maybe I could patch up these arguments and defend Cuneo's web.

Then, my hope is to have a brilliant insight that allows me to write a third part:

III. My brilliant insight on Ethics, Epistemology, and Everything
A. Hmmm...what could this brilliant insight be?
B. What would it mean if epistemology is normative but unlike ethics in other ways?
C. Like an existence theorem in math, you really wanna be able to construct the object whose existence you've proven. Likewise, this sort of argument shows that there is a flaw in our arguments that poke holes in normative existants, and we have to figure out where that went wrong. Maybe?
D. Maybe there's another way to argue for Cuneo's Normative Web?