According to a recent survey of philosophers, a majority —but not a large majority—would tend to agree that there are objective moral truths. But the minority who don't is not small. So yes: there are "many" philosophers who don't believe in objective moral truths.

Now these philosophers would say it's not true that it's always wrong to torture people purely for pleasure. Of course, this doesn't mean that they think it's okay to torture. They think that moral claims aren't the sorts of things that can be true. But why?

The easiest way to get a feel for this is by appeal to the old chestnut that "is" doesn't imply "ought." No statement of non-moral facts ever entails a moral claim. We might be revolted by what torture amounts to, but "torturing people for pleasure revolts me" doesn't add up to "torturing people for pleasure is wrong"; there's a logical gap between "X revolts me" and "X is wrong."

This isn't enough by itself. After all, there's a gap between biological truths and mathematical truths. But that doesn't mean there are no mathematical truths. Maybe there's a separate category of moral facts, and the wrongness of torturing for fun is among them. But the second arrow in the anti-realist's quiver is aimed at the claim that moral facts are somehow supposed to put objective constraints on our behavior. It's one thing to say that if we want to accomplish some optional goal, we need to do what getting to the goal requires. It's another thing to say that some special kind of truth can oblige us to act in a certain way even if we don't recognize the obligation and regardless of whether there's anyone to enforce it. The difficulty is part of what the philosopher J. L. Mackie called the "queerness of morality". If there are moral facts, they are apparently quite different from all other kinds of facts, or so the story would go.

So it's not that these philosophers think it's okay to be gratuitously cruel. It's a safe bet that most of them are just as distressed by torture as you are. Their point is at a much more abstract level: they don't think there are moral facts, because they don't see how there could be. But that's consistent with believing that overall, life will go much more smoothly if we act as well-known moral principles would require, with believing that this will help prevent pain and produce more joy, with wanting whole-heartedly for fewer people to suffer and more to live happy lives, and with doing what they can to bring all that about.

You wrote, "The determinist states: Our decisions are bound to causation, and thus we are not truly free." In the context of free will, what you say describes not determinists in general but only hard determinists, i.e., those determinists who also say that determinism rules out free will. The other kind of determinists -- soft determinists -- accept determinism but say that it doesn't rule out free will and may indeed be essential to acting freely. Unlike hard determinists, soft determinists allow for the combination of determinism, free will, and moral responsibility. You'll find details in this SEP entry.

First, let's ask what relativism means. The usual understanding is that it says what's right and wrong is not universal, but relative to some non-universal reference point—the predominant opinions in one's culture, typically.

Your question appears to assume that relativism is the only good explanation for differences in behavior, but it's not clear why we should believe that. After all, many differences in behavior are matters of preference. I prefer to eat chocolate ice cream; you like rum and raisin. Neither of us is wrong, and relativism is neither relevant nor useful in explaining the difference between us. I like swing dancing; you don't. I don't like playing basketball; you do. We'll behave differently on that account. But neither of us is "right" or "wrong," and once again, relativism doesn't provide any additional insight. Wh do our taste in ice cream differ? Why do we prefer different leisure activities? Who knows? The answer is probably a complicated mixture of a lot of things, some having to do with our individual histories, some with our neurological wiring, and others to do with who knows what. But we've gotten nowhere near what's usually called relativism and we've seen lots of reasons for differences in behavior.

The reply might be that I'm being obtuse. When you ask why people behave differently, you're asking about differences in behavior around matters we take to have a moral dimension. So let's focus there.

What people think is right and wrong is sometimes not well-thought-out. For centuries, most people thought that homosexuality was wrong. But what they thought didn't make it so, and when we look at the question carefully, we see that the age-old opinion was based on nothing that stands up to scrutiny. The fact that some cultures don't see it this way is, indeed, a fact, but the predominant view of a culture on some moral matter can be just plain wrong. Enslaving people was wrong even when it was common, and is wrong even where it's practiced now. This isn't an arbitrary dictum. We can say why slavery is wrong. It's cruel, it's degrading, it treats people in ways we wouldn't find it acceptable to be treated ourselves... Morality isn't arbitrary. Moral claims aren't (or shouldn't be) just made up. We can reason about moral matters, and those reasons, rather than often unexamined norms, are what matter.

That said, some things that are morally significant can be relative in a certain sense. Even if treating people with respect is always important, how respect is expressed and what counts as respectful behavior depends partly on custom. The customs shape the meaning of the behavior in the cultural context, and the meaning of one's behavior matters morally. But this kind of relativism is not what people who defend relativism usually have in mind. To take a related example: in the USA, it's wrong and not just illegal to drive on the right side of a busy highway. In South Africa, it's wrong and not just illegal to drive on the left. Which side we drive on matters because lives are literally at stake. But there's no intrinsically right way to pick the convention (or it is a convention) that a country uses to deal with this issue. When I've driven in South Africa, I've driven on the left for the same reason I drive on the right here at home: I don't want to put people (myself included) in danger. Even though "right side of the road to drive on") is relative to an arbitrary choice, once the choice has been made then there's nothing "relative" about whether one should follow it.

Of course, this sort of "relativism" does help explain some (by no means all) differences in behavior. But it's a "relativism" that's ultimately in service of something that's not relative at all.

Someone might reasonably think that the question what personal identity consists of is to be answered by psychology. So we can imagine looking at the formation of individuality over time, through childhood and on, and think we were answering the philosophical question what identity consists of. Clearly psychology cannot pre-empt the answer to the question whether, for example, the bodily criterion of identity is correct. There are a lot of other examples to choose from. The one I am most interested in at the moment is perception. Perceiving, as Ryle points out, is not a process, but the termination of one, like scoring a goal, to use Ryle's example. You can't ask how long it took to perceive some goat or other, and you ask how long the scoring of a goal took. You can ask of course in a different way how log it to Aston Villa to score a goal - the whole of the first half, say. It took them forty-five minutes. But what about the actual scoring? That is as you might say instantaneous. It happens when the ball crosses the goal-line, whenever that is. I imagine it is the first moment at which any bit of the ball, no matter how small, enters the goal or has crossed the line.

Philosophers are usually not the right people to ask for fallacy names. Most of us don't remember many of them, and aside from a handful (begging the question, for instance) seldom mention them by name. You mention the red herring fallacy here. That's probably good enough, but it's not any better than just noting that the response misses the point. If A says that taxing would be more effective than philanthropy and B says that philanthropy does some good, all A need say is "I agree: philanthropy does some good, but my point is that it's less effective than simply taxing people." A might be right or might be wrong, but what B says is irrelevant to the claim at issue, since A's claim is entirely consistent with B's reply.

I notice this a lot on Quora. There's a whole sub-genre of questions in which people people describe a bit of reasoning gone wrong, and then ask for the name of the fallacy. Often the person has already done a good job of saying what's wrong. Sometimes they haven't, but in those cases a fallacy name won't help unless it's accompanied by an explanation.

Back in the day, I taught informal logic regularly. The standard texts always included sections on the fallacies and I dutifully taught them. But every year I had to review the names myself. Looking back on it, I hope that the students got better at spotting errors in reasoning and being able to describe the errors in a way that would be useful to someone who didn't know the fallacy name. But my guess is that, like me, most of the students didn't remember many of the names.

In any case, your "using a nugget of truth to distract from a larger issue" is a perfectly good way of summarizing what's wrong here. And I dare say one could collect lots of examples of this sort of move. But far as I know, it hasn't generated a sub-literature of its own, because bad move though it is, understanding why it's a bad move is pretty straightforward—as you've nicely shown.

If your question was whether there are some unethical landlords, the answer would surely be yes. But you asked if renting living space is a "fundamentally unethical practice." Your implicit argument that it might be is that "at this point" (at which point?) a landlord puts at risk the most inelastic needs of human beings, placing them behind more or less arbitrary paywalls."

Let's agree: people need shelter. They also need food. And clothing. And in very many cases, transportation. And medical care. And many other things. And let's agree, at least for present purposes, that a society that doesn't have a reasonable way of providing such things isn't doing what it should. We can even put it more strongly: insofar as we can talk about obligations that a society has, let's agree, at least for present purposes, that societies are obliged to devise reasonable ways for providing these things. The word "reasonable" is covering a lot of territory, but I don't think that will affect the point I'd like to suggest: what if it turns out that allowing people to be landlords , if properly regulated, is part of a reasonable scheme for getting people housed?

You say that landlords put up "more-or-less arbitrary paywalls." The landlord would reply that s/he has incurred up-front costs and ongoing responsibilities when s/he becomes a landlord. We could agree: if landlords create a situation that makes it difficult or impossible for people to get affordable housing, governments are obliged to take steps to ameliorate the situation. (What steps? That would be another, much more complicated discussion. We're trying to get the background issues straight.) But it doesn't follow that allowing people to rent living space is allowing something fundamentally unethical.

We could work through various kinds of cases and various scenarios. I have no doubt that we could come up with lots of scenarios—including real-life ones— in which landlords are acting unethically. But as someone who's rented living space in various situations over the years, I also have no doubt that we could come up with lots of scenarios in which it would be pretty unobvious that the landlord is doing something "fundamentally unethical." I've had landlords who've provided safe, well-maintained living space at prices that didn't impoverish me, even at times when my income was not high. The arrangement worked to my benefit and to theirs. I'm surely not the only person who can say this.

From this it doesn't follow that there are no stereotypical slum landlords. There are. And nothing about the overall health of the rental market follows from what's been said. That's an empirical matter on which I have no expertise. But to show that the very existence of landlording is immoral would take a lot more premises than are on offer here. I won't say that I'm sure the case couldn't be made. I'll just say that I have my doubts.

I'm a bit puzzled about where you got the impression that philosophy works this way, Looking at the work of Spinoza, perhaps, might give this impression, but who else? Certainly not Plato. Certainly not Aristotle. Not Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Russell, not a single philosopher active in the last 50 years that I can think of.

The description you quote from your philosophy student acquaintance is pretty reasonable. I'm not quite so happy with the last part—that philosophers determine general principles and rules from their intuitions. The role of intuition in philosophy is much more complicated and also much more controversial than this allows for.

There is no one method that philosophers use. Philosophers worry about consistency and inconsistency. They look for counterexamples and try to avoid them in their own work. They may begin with "intuitions," but they try to develop those intuitions into more precise, well-articulated theses, and they count it as a plus for their view if it covers a range of cases and helps makes sense of things that formerly seemed puzzling. They use thought experiments to explore what their views entail about hypothetical but potentially illuminating cases. They may try to challenge claims made by other philosophers, or they may build on insights that other philosophers have developed. Philosophers also try to make sure that their views don't run into conflict with things we know empirically. But philosophy is not some one thing, philosophers don't all approach their problems in the same way, and just what philosophy is and how it might best be done are philosophical questions.

This all makes perfect sense to anyone who works in the field, because philosophy's issues are by their very nature not straightforward and not capable of being settled in any one way. Questions that yield to the application of a precise "method" are by and large not the questions that philosophers think about.

This frustrates some people. It doesn't frustrate philosophers. It's what gets them out of bed in the morning.

I recommend that you don't think about it this way.

Is mind-independent moral realism true? Geez. I don't know. (And, by the way, neither do you.) But here's some stuff I feel quite comfortable saying.

I want my kids to be empathetic. I want them to give a damn about how their actions affect other people. I want them to take seriously the idea that if they wouldn't be willing to put up with being treated in some way or other, then they'd better have a very good reason, and not just a selfish one, for treating other people that way. I want my kids to treat others decently. I want them to be honest. I want them to be fair. I want them not to be jerks.

Do I want all that because I'm convinced that mind independent moral realism is true? Nope. I want all that because I can't imagine not caring about such things. They seem right to me, and the fact that something called "mind independent moral realism" might not be true seems to me an awfully thin reason for turning my back on my considered judgment that I shouldn't be mean to people, let alone steal from them or cut the brake-lines on their cars.

I also want my kids not to be suckered into buying claims about what's "good" or "bad" that don't stand up to scrutiny. For example: if someone thinks that same-sex romantic relationships are "bad," this may end up making their lives miserable. But it's also moral baloney. The fact that some people think they're bad doesn't cancel the fact that the usual arguments meant to demonstrate this are lousy arguments—and not because they presuppose "mind-independent moral realism." Moral grown-ups who think some things are morally wrong and others are morally right don't think that just because they've been told these things. Moral grown-ups are perfectly capable of seeing through bad moral arguments.

But notice something else. You're looking for advice about how you should raise your kids. You want to know whether you should teach them the highly theoretical and disputable view that you call mind-independent realism or whether you should teach them the highly theoretical and disputable view you hold. You might protest that you're really just asking which approach is less likely to lead to harm for them. But don't you think (leave philosophy aside for the moment) that we should care about what might harm our children? That it would be a bad thing not to worry about this?

This isn't a "gotcha" question. I'm not saying that if you answer yes, you're committed to "mind independent moral realism." I don't know whether that would be true or not, and for that matter, I don't know how much difference it makes to whether moral judgments can be right or wrong. I'm just suggesting that your real worry here isn't about an abstract philosophical question. It's about how best to raise a child—a child who has some hope to growing up to be a wise adult. That's very different from wondering about which abstract, disputable philosophical view you should try to imbue your child with. In this case, I suspect you're likely to do better if you approach deciding what to do from within the midst of things, so to speak, rather than with a highly theoretical idea as your guiding principle.