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Eugine_Nier comments on What is Metaethics? - Less Wrong
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But science isn't about words like "exist", "true", or "false". Science is about words like "Frozen water is less dense than liquid water". I can point at frozen water, liquid water, and a particular instance of the former floating on the latter. Scientific claims were well-defined even before there was enough knowledge to evaluate them. I can't point at anything for claims about morality, so the analogy between ethics and science is not valid.
Come on people. Argument by analogy doesn't prove anything even when the analogies are valid! Stop it.
If you don't like the hypothesis that words like "should", "right", and "wrong" are social signaling, give some other explanation of the evidence that is simpler. The evidence in question is:
The flowchart in the original post has many endpoints about what morality might mean.
There seems to be no universal consensus on what specific actions are moral and which ones are not.
People have strong opinions about morality despite the fact that statements about morality are not subject to empirical validation.
Only because the force of the word "exists" is implicit in the indicative mood of the word "is".
But they can help explain what people mean, and they can show argument prove too much.
I could draw an equally complicate flow chart about what "truth" and "exists"/"is" might mean.
The amount of consensus is roughly the same as the amount of consensus there was before the development of science about which statements are true and which aren't.
People had strong opinions about truth before the concept of empirical validation was developed.
Your criticisms of "truth" are not so far off, but you're essentially saying that parts of science are wrong so you can be wrong, too. No actually, you think it is OK to flounder around in the field when you're just starting out. Sure, but not when you don't even know what it is you're supposed to be studying - if anything! This is not analogous to physics, where the general goal was clear from the very beginning: figure out what physical mechanisms underly macro-scale phenomena, such as the hardness of metal, conductivity, magnetic attraction, gravity, etc.
You're just running around to whatever you can grab onto to avoid the main point that there is nothing close to a semblance of delineation of what this "field" is actually about, and it is getting tiresome.
I think the claim that ethicists don't know at all what they are studying is unfounded.
I believe this is hindsight bias.
Ugg in 65,000 BC: Why water fire no mix? Why rock so hard? Why tree have shadow?
Eugine in 2011: What is the True Theory of Something-or-Other?