Sometimes I see anti-realist YouTube comments say something like: "Give me ONE example of an objectively true moral fact. I'll wait 😏"
I don't know about moral fact, but here's an objectively true value fact:
AGONY: If life were nothing but a series of agonizing moments, then it would be better to not be alive.
If someone says "It's better to be alive and experience an endless number of agonizing moments than to be dead" or if they say "It's a toss-up between experiencing an endless number of agonizing moments and being dead", then they have said something false. AGONY is true independently of anyone's judgment of its truth. That's an objective truth.
AGONY is not, however, mind-independently true. Value depends on consciousness, so of course value facts depend on minds. But, as Sharon Rawlette points out in her book The Feeling of Value, what we care about when discussing objectivity is not mind-dependence, but judgment- (aka stance-) dependence. Something can be mind-dependently true while being stance-independently true. Consider the following exchange:
P1: "Wow, I had a great time last night!"
P2: "No you didn't."
End scene. That P1 had a great time last night is mind-dependently true, and because it is in fact true that P1 had a great time last night, P2 says something false about P1's experience. P2's stance has no bearing whatsoever on the truth of P1's experience.
So for every phenomenal fact—a fact of experience—that fact is mind-dependently yet stance-independently true. The facts a) that the experience took place when it did and b) that the experience had the quality it had do not depend on judgment.
The anti-realist might try to argue that AGONY is judgment-dependent. To judge one thing as better than another always involves... a judgment! The reason why, the anti-realist might say, it would sound so strange to hear someone say "It's better to be alive and experience an endless number of agonizing moments than to be dead" is because that's a judgment no one (or virtually no one) would make. But just because AGONY is an "inevitable" judgment doesn't change the fact that it is in fact a judgment. In theory, if someone were to judge "It's better to be alive and experience an endless number of agonizing moments than to be dead", then that judgment would be true for the person who judges as such. So AGONY is a judgment-dependent claim. (An anti-realist could argue that AGONY is not true in a judgment-dependent or judgment-independent way because it's not a real proposition, but an expression of emotion. But I take emotivism to be obviously false so I'll move on.)
But this fails to explain why AGONY is an inevitable judgment. It's inevitable because it's not a judgment but a conjunction of phenomenal facts; pain has as part of its essence a not-worth-it quality while happiness has as part of its essence a worth-it quality. Pain, by virtue of what it is, makes life less worth living while happiness, by virtue of what it is, makes life more worth living. (Some pains are worth it exactly because they are necessary for certain kinds of happiness.) This not-worth-it-ness (or, badness) and worth-it-ness (or, goodness) of pain and happiness respectively is found in the phenomenal experience itself of pain and happiness. So goodness and badness are directly accessible via immediate experience.
So we directly access the badness of pain, we directly access the goodness of happiness, and therefore we directly access the phenomenal preferableness of happiness over pain. Therefore, happiness being better than pain is not grounded in a judgment, but is grounded in immediate experience. The concept 'better' is itself not grounded in judgment, but in experience.
I could not possibly deny AGONY because the badness of pain is basic and self-evident, the goodness of happiness is basic and self-evident, and the preferableness of happiness to pain is basic and self-evident. The self-evident, experience-based truth of AGONY, that a life that is nothing but a series of agonizing moments is not worth living, is why it's impossible to deny.
I think this gets at what might be at bottom the most fundamental disagreement between realists and anti-realists, which is whether pain is bad independently of judgment and whether happiness is good independently of judgment. The realist claims there is no judgment here, only immediate experience, while the anti-realist claims that while there might be immediate experience of some of the qualities of pain and happiness, you cannot immediately experience badness or goodness itself, and in fact what is taken to be an experience of badness or goodness is really an interpretation of one's immediate experience.
But, quoting Rawlette:
"In sum, normative phenomenology often comes to be associated with other properties or objects. This can lead us to assume that a feeling of goodness or badness must always be about something further. But normative phenomenology can stand all on its own, and it does not lose its intrinsic normative character in doing so. When normative phenomenology is isolated, as seems to happen in cases of electrical stimulation of certain limbic areas, its positive or negative nature stands out clearly as a property of the phenomenology itself and not of any intentional object. This means that, even if it is clear that our normative phenomenology cannot be taken as evidence of the objective goodness or badness of other objects, our normative phenomenology itself may nevertheless be objectively good or bad." (pg 98)
Response 1: I don't agree that the goodness of happiness and the badness of pain are intrinsically normative like Rawlette claims. I do agree that they are intrinsically worth having and not worth having respectively. I say this because normativity is attached to the concepts of 'ought' and 'should', and indeed Rawlette describes happiness as having an intrinsic ought-to-be-ness, which I take to basically mean the same thing as having an intrinsic normativity. But 'oughts' and 'shoulds' I think are not irreducible properties but can be analyzed in terms of mistakes, failures, successes, and goals. It doesn't seem true to me that my happiness, or anyone's happiness, ought to be, even though it is good. So I feel free to translate this notion of 'ought-to-be-ness' as 'worth-having-ness' or 'worthiness'. Joys (instances of happiness) make life more worth living while pains make life less worth living in virtue of what they are. I don't see how joys ought to be in virtue of what they are or how pains ought not be in virtue of what they are. Indeed, if 'oughts' must be analyzed in terms of goals, and if one's goal is to maximize happiness in an idealized way, then certain joys ought not be promoted (e.g. entertainment at the cost of productivity) and certain pains ought to be embraced (e.g. the pain of serious effort). While Rawlette speaks of pro tanto ought-to-be-ness, I cannot make sense of this idea. I can make sense of the idea of pro tanto worthiness. But given a goal, one action is either the best at furthering that goal / is necessary to further that goal, or not, and so you either ought to perform that action or not relative to that goal. I don't see oughts as coming in degrees.
Response 2: In context, Rawlette is discussing the fact that experiences of happiness and pain are so strongly correlated with objects or events that we can easily make the mistake in thinking that the goodness of our happiness or the badness of our pain is about those objects or events. But that's not true. There are studies where patients have their brains stimulated and they report feelings of euphoria. Per Rawlette, this shows that at least in principle there are experiences of happiness that aren't about anything or directed at any object or event causing the happiness.
But 1) That seems debatable, given that the euphoria the patients experience is arguably about a) their brain being in the state that it's in, and/or b) the event of the brain stimulation.
But this is too quick, because you could ask the patient, "What are you so happy about?" and they might say "I don't know!", showing that the patient is happy about nothing in particular.
But I can imagine someone who defends representationalism of the mind pushing back against this and saying just because a person doesn't know what their qualia is representing, that doesn't mean their qualia isn't representing something, in this case representing a certain internal state or event.
So I'm not convinced that these experiments show that our happiness/pain isn't about something.
And 2) Rawlette doesn't cite any studies. A quick search reveals at least one study: Okun et al 2004, published online 2010, in Neurocase. In that study a single patient reported euphoria during deep brain stimulation. So on just a first glance, apparently euphoria can be induced through brain stimulation.
But 3) If happiness/pain lack aboutness, shouldn't we be able to see that directly? If the goodness of happiness is phenomenal, then doesn't that settle the question? Don't all raw feelings lack aboutness? When reflecting on the appearance of redness, the appearance of the appearance and the reality of the appearance are one and the same. The appearance-reality distinction breaks down when it comes to appearances themselves. You cannot have an appearance of redness without having a phenomenal experience of redness, as the two are the same. That appearance is not about anything; there's no propositional content to it, it's just an experience. The same applies to pain: You cannot appear, from a first-person perspective, to be in pain without actually being in pain. The internal appearance of pain and pain are the same thing. And the badness (the not-worth-it quality) of pain is part of that experience, and so the badness is likewise not about anything.
This generalizes to all "phenomenally defined" terms. If you asked me to define what 'red' means to a person blind from birth, there are no words I can use to communicate phenomenal red. Same with 'pain'. I cannot define phenomenal pain to a robot that doesn't know what it is. This is why 'good' and 'bad' are so hard to define; first, these words are used in different ways, requiring careful analysis in breaking them down, and second, at the core they are phenomenal terms which cannot be defined with words, only with experience.
So an even simpler claim than AGONY would be:
BAD: This pain is bad. Or: That pain was bad.
Laurence BonJour describes what we allegedly have immediate access to (Epistemology, 2nd ed., pg 100-101):
"What things are we supposed to be immediately aware of or 'acquainted' with . . .? . . . Descartes' view is apparently that we are immediately aware of the existence and contents of all of our conscious states of mind, a view that has been adopted by many others. These would include, first, sensory experiences of the sort that we have just been discussing . . . Included also would be, second, bodily sensations, such as itches, pains, tingles, and the like. These are naturally regarded as experiences of various events and processes in the physical body, but Descartes' point again would be that there is in each of these cases something directly or immediately present to consciousness, something that cannot be doubted, even though the more remote bodily cause certainly can be. The third main category of states of whose existence and content we are allegedly immediately aware are conscious instances of what are sometimes referred to as 'propositional attitudes': conscious beliefs or acceptances of propositions, together with conscious wonderings, fearings, doubtings, desirings, intendings, and so forth, also having propositional content. In these cases, the view would be that I am immediately aware both of the propositional content . . . and of the distinctive attitude toward that content that such a state involves . . ."
So, if this view about direct access is right, not only do I have direct access to conscious states, including experiences, but I would even have direct access to the propositional content of BAD along with direct access to my acceptance (or rejection) of BAD (i.e. whether a particular mental state of mine can be expressed as BAD).
And as Rawlette brings to mind, how could it be possible that I be aware of the idea of badness? Rawlette suggests that it is exactly phenomenal badness that explains where we get the concept.
"When we ask ourselves what it is we mean by 'goodness,' we can turn to this basic phenomenal experience for the answer." (100)
Continuing:
"While a particular person's judgments or attitudes will determine whether he or she feels a positive or a negative quale, the positive or negative nature of the phenomenology is intrinsic to the phenomenology itself. If a particular person feels a negative quale, no one can experience that same quale and have it be positive rather than negative." (99)
And:
"When we stop trying to project the qualities of normative phenomenology onto perceptions with which they are merely associated, we realize that, far from being an illusion, judgment-independent value exists in the realm most immediate to us. Judgment-independent value exists as part of the very fabric of our mental life." (100)
So not only is the badness of pain not a judgment, interpretation, or theoretical posit, but the badness of pain is pre-judgment, pre-interpretation, and pre-theory. The badness of pain is not a posit to explain data, but is itself data, and data of an incorrigible kind (directly accessible).
Whenever there is judgment, there is a gap that allows for error. But when you have a phenomenal-noumenal collapse, something pre-judgment, there is no possibility of error. Compare: "I remember that I had lentils and rice for breakfast" to "I had lentils and rice for breakfast." What is certainly true is that I have a memory or a memory experience. But when I interpret that memory of having had lentils and rice for breakfast as entailing that I actually had lentils and rice for breakfast, that's where memory is not perfectly reliable. It may have been the day before yesterday that I had lentils and rice, and I'm misremembering and thinking it was today. This is generally true of introspection: Introspective beliefs constituted by phenomenal experience are incorrigible, but when I use those beliefs to interpret a further conclusion, that inferred belief is not incorrigible. This is why Descartes' cogito "I think, therefore I am" contains an error (a mistake I don't think Descartes himself made, but is found in the common Latin and English translations); it should say I see that I am. There is no 'therefore', there is no inference.
Thus, Josh Rasmussen (Who Are You, Really? 27 & 29 fn8):
"My analysis of eliminativism, then, is fundamentally this: by the light of introspection, I think it is possible to know something about your experiences directly. In particular, you can know some thoughts, feelings, and intentions. On this analysis, the subjective aspects of consciousness are not theoretical posits that explain some data . . . Rather, conscious states are part of your data—which I think you can access directly."
". . . in my analysis, a belief based directly and solely on a direct experience is the most secure a belief could possibly be, for it has the fewest sources of possible error. . . . necessarily, if one directly experiences x . . . and on that basis alone believes that x exists, then that belief is true."