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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Strong moral realism, meta-ethics and pseudo-questions. - Less Wrong
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I think there's an ambiguity between "realism" in the sense of "these statements I'm making about 'what's right' are answers to a well-formed question and have a truth value" and "the subject matter of moral discourse is a transcendent ineffable stuff floating out there which compels all agents to obey and which could make murder right by having a different state". Thinking that moral statements have a truth value is cognitivism, which sounds much less ambiguous to me, and that's why I prefer to talk about moral cognitivism rather than moral realism.
As a moral cognitivist, I would look at your diagram and disagree that the Baby-Eating Aliens and humans have different views of the same subject matter, rather, we and they are talking about a different subject matter and it is an error of the computer translation programs that the word comes out as "morality" in both cases. Morality is about how to save babies, not eat them, everyone knows that and they happen to be right. If we could get past difficulties of the translation, the babyeaters would agree with us about what is moral, we would agree with them about what is babyeating, and we would agree about the physical fact that we find different sorts of logical facts to be compelling.
I have a pending post-to-write on how, to the best of my knowledge, there are only two sorts of things that can make a proposition "true", namely physical events and logical implications, and of course mixtures of the two. I mention this because we have a legitimate epistemic preference for simpler hypotheses about the causes of physical events, but no such thing as an epistemic preference for "simpler axioms" when we are talking about logical facts. We may have an aesthetic preference for simpler axioms in math, but that is not the same thing. If there's no preference for simpler assumptions, that doesn't mean the issue is not a factual one, but it may suggest that we are dealing with logical facts rather than physical facts (statements which are made true by which conclusions follow from which premises, rather than the state of a causal event).
Added: Since I have a definite criterion for something being a "fact", I defend the notion of fact-ness against the charge of being a floating extra.
Yes -- and the important thing to remember is that the second view, which all of us here agree is silly, is the naive, common-sense human view. It's what people are automatically going to think you're talking about if you go around shouting "Yes Virginia, there are moral facts after all!"
Meanwhile, the general public has a term for the view that you and I share: they call it "moral relativism".
I don't recall exactly, and I haven't yet bothered to look it up, but I believe when you first introduced your metaethics, there were people (myself among them, I think), who objected, not to your actual meta-ethical views, but to the way that you vigorously denied that you were a "relativist"; and you misunderstood them/us as objecting to your theory itself (I think you maybe even threw in an accusation of not comprehending the logical subtleties of Loeb's Theorem).
What makes the theory relativist is simply the fact that it refers explicitly to particular agents -- humans. Thus, it is automatically subject to the "chauvinism" objection with respect to e.g. Babyeaters: we prefer one thing, they prefer another -- why should we do what we prefer rather than what they prefer? The correct answer is, of course, "because that's what we prefer". But people find that answer unpalatable -- and one reason they might is because it would seem to imply that different human cultures should similarly run right over each other if they don't think they share the same values. Now, we may not like the term "relativism", but it seems to me that this "chauvinism" objection is one that you (and I) need to take at least somewhat seriously.
Unfortunately, it's not that easy. An agent, given by itself, doesn't determine preference. It probably does so to a large extent, but not entirely. There is no subject matter of "preference" in general. "Human preference" is already a specific question that someone has to state, that doesn't magically appear from a given "human". A "human" might only help (I hope) to pinpoint the question precisely, if you start in the general ballpark of what you'd want to ask.
I suspect that "Vague statement of human preference"+"human" is enough to get a question of "human preference", and the method of using the agent's algorithm is general enough for e.g. "Vague statement of human preference"+"babyeater" to get a precise question of "babyeater preference", but it's not a given, and isn't even expected to "work" for more alien agents, who are compelled by completely different kinds of questions (not that you'd have a way of recognizing such "error").
The reference to humans or babyeaters is in the method of constructing a preference-implementing machine, not in the concept itself. What humans are is not the info that compels you to define human preference in a particular way, although what humans are may be used as a tool in the definition of human preference, simply because you can pull the right levers and point to the chunks of info that go into the definition you choose.
That's not a justification. They may turn out to do something right, where you were mistaken, and you'll be compelled to correct.
Yes.