ata comments on What is Metaethics? - Less Wrong
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I must confess I'm having trouble with that flowchart, specifically the first question about whether a moral judgment expresses a belief, and emotivism being on the "no" side. Doesn't, "Ew, murder" express the belief that murder is icky?
To put it another way, I'm having trouble reconciling the map of what people argue about the nature of morality, with what I know of how at least my brain processes moral belief and judgment.
That is, ISTM that moral judgments at the level where emotion and motivation are expressed do not carry any factual grounding, and they motivate action or express what people "should" or "should not" do. I'm having trouble seeing how this doesn't merge both branches of your diagram.
Of course, if the diagram is merely to illustrate what a bunch of people believe, then my immediate impression is that both groups are (partially) wrong. ;-)
(Another possibility, of course, is that these people are arguing about mind projections rather than what is actually happening in brains.)
I don't think that's a belief. What factual questions would distinguish a world where murder is icky from one where murder is not icky?
Beliefs can be wrong, but that doesn't make them non-beliefs.
Any belief of the form "X is Y" (especially where Y is a judgment of goodness or badness) is likely either an instance of the mind projection fallacy, or a simple by-definition tautology.
Again, however, this doesn't make it not-a-belief, it's just a mistaken or poorly-understood belief. (For example, expansion to "I find murder to be icky" trivially fixes the error.)