Queerness again

One objection to the view that there really are moral truths is this: "Such truths would be so bizarre! They be about properties (or objects) totally unlike anything science tells us exist!"

The thought behind the objection seems to be something like this: Moral properties are nothing like other properties - they aren't like size, shape, weight, and so on. And we should be suspiscious of things of which are unusual.

I questioned the second of these statements before. Here I question the first.

The problem is that what most properties are like is itself already queer enough:

"there are very good reasons for thinking that there is more to space than we know or can understand. Even when I put aside the (already weighty) points that physical space is non-Euclidean, and is itself something that is literally expanding, and the non-locality results, I can't fully understand how space and time can be interdependent in the way that they demonstrably are. We are also told on very good authority that gravity is really just a matter of the curvature of space; and that string theory is an immensely promising theory of matter that entails that there are at least ten spatial dimensions." (G. Strawson)

The world really isn't the mostly solid, "medium" sized, blocky tangible thing that we ordinarily take it to be. In fact, we have little understanding of what's in the world. So how can we claim that moral properties are unlike other properties? We don't know what either of them are like!

"But moral properties aren't physical!" I'm not sure I understand what physical means here. "Not tangible"? Nor is gravity, most of the dimensions there probably are, or most of the matter in the universe. "They're hardly like trees!". True, but then nor are trees like how we think of trees. Further, trees are also unlike gravity, the brain, dark matter and everything else.

One difference is that moral truths justify things, whereas other truths tend to explain things. But this doesn't help the sceptic! This is a good reason to think that even if science become advanced enough to be able to call moral properties queer, we'd have good grounds to be suspiscious that their methods of inference to best explanation weren't rigged against finding anything like moral truth in the first place.

If I'm right, then there's no need to give up ontological commitment to moral facts. One can be a full-blooded realist, who thinks that there really are actual moral properties and facts. God knows what that means, but that's precisely why scepticism about it is so premature.