Constant comments on What is Metaethics? - Less Wrong
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People can disagree about gray areas between any two neighboring terms. Take the word "apple". Apple trees are, according to Wikipedia, the species "Malus domestica". But as evolutionary biologists postulated (correctly, as it turns out), species are gradually formed over hundreds or thousands or millions of years, and the question of what is "the first apple tree" is a question for which there is no crystal clear answer, nor would there be even if we had a complete record of every ancestor of the apple tree going back to the one-celled organisms. Rather, the proto-species that gave rise to the apple tree gradually evolves into the apple tree, and about very early apple trees two fully informed rational people might very well disagree about which ones are apple trees and which ones are proto-apple trees. This is nothing other than the sorites problem, the problem of the heap, the problem of the vagueness of concepts. It is universal and is not specifically true about moral questions.
Morality is, I have argued, an aspect of custom. And it's true that people can disagree, on occasion, about whether some particular act violates custom. So custom is, like apples, vague to some degree. Both apples and custom can be used as examples of the sorites problem, if you're sick of talking about sand heaps. But custom is not radically indeterminate. Customs exist, just as apples exist.
Well I agree with this basically, and it reminds me of John Hasnas writing about customary legal systems. I find that when showing this to people I disagree with about ethics we usually end up in agreement:
The quote from John Hasnas seems to be very close to my own view.
Ah, okay! We don't disagree then. Thanks for clearing that up!
ETA: Actually, with that clarification, I'd expect many others to agree as well - at least, it seems like what you mean by "custom" and what other posters have called "stuff people want you to do" coincide.
An important point is that nobody gets to unilaterally decide what is or is not custom. That's in contrast to, say, personal preference, which each person does get to decide for themselves.
Right. Though I'd argue that custom implies that morality is objective, and therefore that custom can be incorrect, so that someone can coherently say that their own society's customs are immoral (though probably from within a subculture that supports those alternate customs).