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Bongo comments on What is Metaethics? - Less Wrong
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But first you need to identify x. Which is a question about the meaning of a word.
Though Bongo is surely right there would be moral sentiments even without language, now we are dealing with something identified: specific emotions like empathy, sense of justice, disgust, indignation, pity. Yeah those would exist without language. And yes, language has made things much more complicated, and the preoccupation with analyzing sentences makes it even even worse.
If people can realize all that without looking at the very nature of communication, that would be great, but in my experience most people feel hesitant about scrapping so many centuries of philosophy and need to see how the language makes such a mess of things before they can truly feel comfortable with it. If Bongo is ready to scrap language analysis now and drop all the silly -isms, I'm preaching to the choir.
Ethics is unique, at least to me, in that I still have no idea what the heck people are even referring to most of the time when they use moralistic language. I can't investigate X until I know what X is even supposed to be about. Most of the time there is a fundamental failure to communicate, even regarding the definition of the field itself. And whenever there isn't such a failure, the problem disappears and all discussants agree as if nothing.