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I don't see how you're saying anything other than that you have subjective opinions, vibes-based feelings, and you would like to call those things "moral judgments". You can use that language, but we should be clear about what it means. To that end, I would pose two questions to you about your position:
Do you think that it is possible, in principle, for moral disagreements to be rationally resolved?
Do you think that moral judgments contain truth-value, and if so, in what sense?
I'll preface by saying that I don't think people are rational, so:
Resolved as in, come to an agreement on how to practically deal with mismatched moral intuitions? Yes. We do that all the time. Resolved as in convincing someone that they should adopt your moral precepts? Yes. Resolved as in actually discovering the objective moral truth? As it stands no. Though perhaps there is an argument that would change my mind, which I just have not encountered yet.
Yes, in the sense that someone's moral intuitions are a real and true reflection of their experiences as a person and that these intuitions govern how they act and react and therefore have a measurable impact on the world. And true in the fact that moral intuitions are reflective of the choices a society had to make to get to where it is, and of the standards and beliefs it evolved as part of that process, and of how useful those moral beliefs were to said society. But not true in some underlying sense that lies outside of humanity. Like the laws of gravity or similar.
In other words, whether there is sentient life to observe it or not, mass attracts mass, but if there is no sentient life there is no moral code to the universe. That only exists in the sense of what we project upon it. The stars look down upon us uncaring of whether we murder each other or help each other.
I would like some more explanation of this in context of (1). You say that people can come to an agreement on how to practically deal with mismatched moral intuitions or that you can convince someone that they should adopt your moral precepts; do you think that this can be done rationally, or that it's just done based on vibes?
I read this as saying that the truth-value of a moral judgment is simply attached to an individual. Perhaps attached to a society. That is, a moral judgment could have value "true" for one individual and value "false" for a different individual. As such, there is no "truth-value" to such moral judgments; simply true statements about opinions of individuals (and possibly societies). I'm not really sure why you're opposed to simply saying this outright.
I think when you convince someone of a change to their morality, it is not because they consciously and rationally change. So they can't just decide to either accept or reject your argument based upon a rational approach. They may protest and argue against you, only to find that over some time of it percolating in their subconscious their position has changed. I don't know if I would call it vibes as opposed to a kind of below conscious thought approach. Some of the arguments that might be used to change someone's opinion may well be rational, but the way that is integrated into their belief system is not. What we see as feelings or beliefs are complex interactions of thought processes we are not consciously aware of. But that doesn't mean it is as simple as vibes.
For an example, I can't simply choose that I will now believe that there is an objective morality. Whether I will or won't is not something I can consciously control. Maybe your argument resonates on a deeper level and next week I will have a different idea.
As for the 2nd, I think that the truth value of a society and an individual and a situation is true for their situation. Cannibalizing the dead is in my current situation and cultural context is immoral and I consider that to be true. Were I trapped on a mountain after a plane crash then eating the already dead bodies of other victims is truly moral. If I were kidnapped and taken against my will to work in a mine, then while I think killing is generally immoral, killing my kidnappers to escape is truly moral.
The only way the truth can be judged is within the context of the position (including cultural, physical and mental) that you are in. When I kill a mine overseer to escape it is neither objectively moral or immoral because I don't consider there to be an objective stick to measure it against. If he has kidnapped me, held me against my will then it is moral, if I have been found guilty of a crime which I did commit and been sentenced in accordance with my society, then killing the prison officer to escape is immoral.
So it isn't just that there is no "truth-value" because there is, it just isn't an objective truth value. I will certainly say there is no objective truth value to those positions if you like but there is still A truth value.
One might (and many have) say the same about scientific reasoning. "Science progresses one funeral at a time," and all that. That some people become emotionally attached to ideas rather than progressing rationally does not imply much about the underlying plausibility of rational inquiry. The entire premise of rational inquiry is that this is possible for scientific truths, even though not all humans actually do so in a perfectly rational fashion. It's the reason why we promote norms of rationality on the topic. If we fail to have this for morality, then there is no reason to promote norms of rationality for morality. Ergo, the list of things like cancel culture, etc.
One can, and there is a long philosophical history of, distinguishing the concept of contingent moral facts. That is, one can easily simply distinguish the statements, "It is immoral to cannibalize the dead in normal situations," and, "It is moral to cannibalize the dead in certain, extreme situations." Not needing to take a position on any specifics here; instead, pointing out that contingent moral facts are clearly not a problem whatsoever.
It seems that you are claiming something different from mere contingent moral facts. It seems that you are claiming that the truth-value of moral statements depends on the individual involved (or perhaps their society), apart from any contingent, situational distinctions. That is, would you say that one could conclude, "It is true that Sally can morally cannibalize the dead in Extreme Situation X, but it is false that Bob can morally cannibalize the dead in exactly the same Extreme Situation X"? Would you say that one could come to these conclusions by way of reasoning about Sally and Bob's respective upbringings/dispositions/etc.?
Sure, but science can put you in a lab with a column with the air sucked out and drop a lead sphere and have you time it. Or show you a picture of a supernova. So far, no seeker of objective morality has come close to demonstrating the same. Now maybe objective morality is more like quantum physics than observing gravity, and it is really hard to observe/discover, and we'll have an objective morality rush at some point. I think it's fine (admirable even!) for people to try to be rational, it's one of the reasons I was drawn to the rationalist community in the first place, but I think they do often overlook the fact that most people (including themselves) are not rational agents, though their behavior can be modelled a such under certain conditions. For example looking at the prisoner's dilemma, the idea of not snitching on each other isn't reasoned out by actual prisoners. It's enforced through social conditioning (snitches get stiches) Which is incorporated into their world view, by the distributed network of agents they live in. Because criminal enterprises that do snitch on each other regularly will not last very long. The social rules are emergent from which behaviors are adaptive.
I would also point out that cancel culture could be rational. If people are doing X and X is immoral (according to your moral code) then using shame as tool to reduce the prevalence of X might be entirely rational (which doesn't mean that the people using it are actually thinking about using it rationally, just as above with our criminals). Cancel culture is just a social technology, like shunning and so on. One where it leverages the opprobrium of the community to enforce behavioral norms. Even if there were an objective morality, (say Christianity was true) it is likely cancelling and shunning people in order to disincentivize their objectively wrong behavior would be a net positive. Societies which shun, and socially shame, and cancel their members to maximize compliance thrive above others which do not. Therefore even an entirely rational agent may decide cancelling people is the correct thing to do. Especially where there is an objective morality, (unless a core part of that objective morality is that shaming people is wrong of course).
For the last, yes if Bob is from culture which believes (and he concurs with this) that eating the dead will condemn their souls to an eternity of torment then probably it would continue to be immoral for him, even while Sally is lighting up the cook fire. I think given enough information you could probably predict what Bob finds immoral, but it might depend on how much he derives from his community (probably legible) and how much he derives from his experiences (potentially less so). If he is an apostate (who thinks the eating the dead prohibition is nonsense) and has never told anyone, you are unlikely to be able to reason this out in advance.
Obviously, the tools used to rationally investigate morality are going to be different from the tools used to rationally investigate science. Same as how the tools used to rationally investigate history are different. That doesn't seem to be much of an impediment to rational inquiry into the nature of any of those things.
Sure, and on many scientific matters, there are tons of nonrational folks out there who don't reason their way into their positions, either. Again, not an impediment to the possibility of using a rational approach. I think it would be perfectly fine to have a rational approach to game theory in order to understand a rational, objective methodology for answering hypothetical imperatives (e.g., if you're being interrogated and your payoff function is such and such, you should do such and such). That many folks are mere adapters rather than rational agents WRT science or game theory doesn't imply much about whether science or game theory have an objective quality.
Ok. I think we have the most important conclusion at this point. Your perspective is that the truth value of a moral judgment depends on the individual. So, in the future, when people ask you why you think that murdering people is wrong (even for silly-sounding religious disputes), I think it would be more accurate for you to say that it would be wrong for you to do such a thing, but your meta-ethical position is that it may be entirely morally right for others to do this sort of thing.
No, but game theory at least posits what the best option is under a series of conditions. The fact that distributed social behaviors match that somewhat is an indicator there might be some truth to it. If the same outcome is derived different ways that is evidence of a sort. Given that the same when applied to morality results in a huge different swathes of moral codes, including exceptions that might be an indicator that if there is any sort of objective morality it is very, very narrow, or almost impossible to discover.
And as to what I should answer, in general I am not answering the question why do I think other people think it is wrong or right. I was asked why do I think it is wrong. I wasn't asked whether it could be right for other people. Every post I make here I could go into more detail, but usually there is a trade off. So unless I have the time to expand I think I will stick with "Because I do". It's punchy and accurate. Why I think that is not usually germane to the discussion at hand. In this instance why I think murder is wrong doesn't really have any relevance to deciding whether Christian nationalism is likely to rekindle problems between Catholics and Protestants which is where we started this. Even if religious murder is not morally wrong, Catholics and Protestants murdering each other over religion in the US is not likely to be practically positive. How that impinges on the morality of murder is at best an (interesting) diversion.
Do they? There's a whole field of behavioral economics that shows alllll sorts of situations where people tend not to do the "rational" thing. Some settings have more or less adherence. I don't see what conclusions follow.
RE: What you should answer. If the question is concerning morality of religiously-motivated killing, and you are not religious, then your answer that you think is completely confined to only applying to your non-religious particular self would be utterly vacuous. It would be like saying, "I don't think lions should eat people," and hiding the fact that you really mean, "I don't think that I should eat people, but I am not a lion, and I don't actually have anything relevant to say about what lions should/shouldn't do." It violates the norms of discourse to play this slight of hand. Vastly better to speak plainly and state what your actual position is. However, if you find brevity to be too valuable to you, in the future, I can try to endeavor to chime in with the appropriate caveats as I find time. I think it will save a lot of people much confusion.
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