The Normative Contingency Thesis (NCT) is a compelling objection to Moral Realism.

R4 Theme: Mozart, "Carmina Burana". http://www.youtube.com...For character reasons, "first principles" --> "FPs".I'd like to pick a fight with the notion that my "task" is to differentiate or "validate" my use of logic vis-a-vis FPs in ethics. One, the idea of "validating" FPs is self-defeating. Two, as much as I accept contingency (regression) in ethics, so too do I accept it in epistemology--hence the nihilism. So, as justificatory claims ultimately fail in epistemology, so too do foundational meta-ethical claims fail in ethics. But, I'll move along: Con chews below on the truth/provability dichotomy; however, he eschews, critically, consideration of defaults which are not not only philosophically important, but also key to the victory conditions for this debate.Truth and ProvabilityI think Con misses the point of the truth/provability dichotomy, particularly the Godelian motif of the proposition which we believe to be true, but have no way of proving. The axioms required for reasoned discourse, for instance, are things to whose truth we commit without a concurrent capacity to derive those things (since they're the very things which permit derivation in the first place). Similarly, the "contention" of nihilism, though it cannot be properly so-called, is that there is an inherent flaw/limit condition in the justificationalist search for truth. For every system S, there is always a limit to what can be justified due to reliance on some unjustified assertion. I.e., every chain of justification can be regressed to a place where justification is no longer possible. Hence why, if one considers nihilism, which is really a statement about the limits of justification, "you can't prove nihilism", i.e., "justify your objection to justification", isn't useful. Like an asymptote, you can get really close to the limit, but you can never touch it. No matter how many normative models you shut down, or how many meta-ethical assumptions you deny, if nihilism is true, then it's definitionally non-provable. You can only expose the flaw and provide examples, which is inherently inductive. This is important because, when defining in R1 what a compelling objection entails, the idea of "defaults" is key. In discourse, plenty of people have a "default" about what the burden of proof is, e.g., "Whoever is making the positive assertion has BOP". In my daily life, I default to dealing with the world as if it was externally real, even if I can't be sure. As Hume noted, I've no way of knowing that the sun will rise tomorrow--but I commit to it anyway, developing the expectation that the sun will rise. I could be wrong one day, waking up to find the sun missing, but, for now, it seems to be a useful thing to commit to.Hence, when I ask you whether you find my "case" compelling, I'm asking whether you would, given only the content of this debate, reject realism by default. You already accept plenty of conclusions based on very immanent/difficult-to-avoid defaults, like "sense data is reliable" or "logic holds". I suggest a similar default to nihilism--I mean, even on the face of it, there would be no reason to default to realism. For things like logic or external reality, as I explained in R3, the choice of defaults is at least modified by immanent data. With realism, you only have people making easily-substitutable assertions about foundational values, and asking you to accept normative and meta-ethical truth based on their assertion that it's true. If deep talk on nihilism hasn't convinced you, I suspect a quick digression to the prima facie case against defaulting to realism at least makes you suspicious, which in turn should open you up to the idea of wholesale rejection.So, Con takes up some of this challenge after revisiting my R2 blurb on contingency. I think one interesting move he tries to make is claiming I'm using my "FP certainties" to counter FPs in ethics. On the one hand, I don't claim certainty in the logical FPs. While I think that the performative unavoidability of logic vis-a-vis the easy avoidability of moral axioms is a pretty good reason to default to reason, I think, on the other hand, that, since moral realism can only be meaningfully considered as content of reasoned discourse, you could theoretically fire the nihilism ray at logic and its rules of inference, as well--however, at that point, you'd still vote against realism because you're still playing the contingency card--yet, rather than rejecting realism by inductive default, your default is modified by the fact that you're throwing out the tools required to even make the notion of realism coherent and discussable. At its core, normative contingency is a statement about regression, and, regardless of which brand of normative contingency you choose, you end up in a world in which you default to non-realism, whether that means suspending judgment or making an inductive commitment against normativity. Considering The Biebs' reply, you just have the option of taking the scenic route to get there.For now, let's continue on the trail blazed by Con, and consider the remainder of his commentary.Assorted Replies to Assorted Objections--A Discursive Smorgasbord1. The interesting logic stuff aside (which I'm not entirely sure is relevant, though it is kind of intriguing), I think the bit about intuitions is a little off in a couple of ways:a. I don't think intuitions are nearly so homogeneous as is claimed. You could always retreat to a level of vagueness in which it seems homogeneity manifests. For instance, "everyone has an intuition to pursue the Good." Well, okay, but that doesn't really tell us anything, or give us detail about how self-same moral intuitions are over time or across cultures and people. The fact that there's such a diverse moral landscape on a site like this suggests that intuitions, even if somewhat evolutionary (which is probably likely), are modified by discourse and thought to such an extent that they aren't entirely useful.b. More importantly, recall the definition of realism I'm committed to beating:1. Ethical sentences express propositions. 2. Some such propositions are true. 3. Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world, independent of subjective opinion.Even if Con's generally correct about shared intuitions, the realist is committed to objectivity, not collective subjectivity. We could just define ethics in such a way that target intuitions are the feature of the world which validate ethical discourse, but it just begs the question against substitutability and contingency, since I could confound the whole thing by defining it to match whatever preconceived intuitions I already had. Seems like a post facto justification dreamed up to validate what we already think.2. "Why can't these individuals be right?" doesn't really respond to contingency. "Rightness", on the realist view, implies justification. The point is that they reach a space where they can't demonstrate their rightness, so they just take their argument as an axiom and encourage others to follow suit. But you could literally do that with any ethical FP--the only constraint is whether people will agree with you or not, since "practicality" or some such consequential appeal is usually the hidden cipher of their claims to self-evidence. "Deny X, the results are repugnant; therefore, assume X".EndgameCon can say it as he likes--agree to disagree, best guess, intuition, practicality--at the end, though, the big impact of regression in ethics is a default rejection of realism based on rejection of meta-ethical axiom claims. Nihilism functions as a limit condition that always pops up in moral derivations, and the serious way to reckon with that is to start from a default position of skepticism regarding moral foundations. If you buy that, you respond to regression by making nihilism your starting point, which means you go Pro.To Con, it's been an honor and a pleasure. Thanks. :)