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Andrew comments on Suffering - Less Wrong
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1) "pretty large" tends to mean the same thing as "fundamental", "general", "widely binding" -- at least in my experience. E.g., "Godel's Theorem was a pretty large rejection of the Russell program."
And no, I'm not defending MacIntyre. All I'm trying to demonstrate is that his arguments against emotivism are worthy enough for emotivists to learn.
2) No. You've never heard someone say, "I may not like it, but it's still good?" For example, there are people who are personally dislike gay marriage, but support it anyway because they feel it is good.
3) Defining "moral approval" as "when people express approval using moral language" says nothing about what the term "moral" means, and that's something any ethical system really ought to get to eventually.
4) Yes: deontological systems don't give one whit about the syntax of a statement; if your 'intention' was bad, your speech act was still bad. Utilitarianism also is more concerned with the actual weal or woe caused by a sentence, not its syntatic form.
And I'm done. If you want to learn more about MacIntyre, read the damn book. I'm a mathematician, not a philosopher.
You said that emotivists you know go into "absolute denial" at point 2; how do they react to an example like this?
I would expect them to say that the people are lying or feel constrained by social conventions. In Haidt terms, they feel both fairness and disgust or violation of tradition and feel that fairness trumps tradition/purity in this instance. Or they live in a liberal milieu where they're not allowed to treat tradition or purity morally. (I should give a lying example, but I'm not sure what I meant.)
ETA: if MacIntyre treated deontology the way he treats emotivism, he'd say that the morning is not an actor, therefore it cannot be "good" so "good morning" is incoherent. But I guess deontology is not a theory of language, so it's OK to just say that people are wrong.
For reference, I think you've done MacIntyre sufficient justice here.
I think that's putting the cart before the horse. Figuring out what 'moral' means should be something you do before even starting to try to study morality.