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Peterdjones comments on Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory - Less Wrong
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Can you interpret the word "morality is subjective"? How about the the words "morality is not subjective"?
"Morality is subjective": Each person has their own moral sentiments.
"Morality is not subjective": Each person does not have their own moral sentiments. Or there is something more than each person's moral sentiments that is worth calling "moral." <--- But I ask, what is that "something more"?
OK. That is not what "subjective" means. What it means is that if something is subjective, an opinion is guaranteed to be correct or the last word on the matter just because it is the person's opinion. And "objective" therefore means that it is possible for someone to be wrong in their opinion.
I don't claim moral sentiments are correct, but simply that a person's moral sentiment is their moral sentiment. They feel some emotions, and that's all I know. You are seeming to say there is some way those emotions can be correct or incorrect, but in what sense? Or probably a clearer way to ask the question is, "What disadvantage can I anticipate if my emotions are incorrect?"
An emotion, such as a feeling of elation or disgust, is not correct or incorrect per se; but an emotion per se is no basis for a moral sentiment, because moral sentiment has to be about something. You could think gay marriage is wrong because homosexuality disgusts you, or you could feel serial-killing is good because it elates you, but that doesn't mean the conclusions you are coming to are right. It may be a cast iron fact that you have those particular sentiments, but that says nothing about the correctness of their content, any more than any opinion you entertain is automatically correct.
ETA The disadvantages you can expect if your emotions are incorrect include being in the wrong whilst feeling you are in the right. Much as if you are entertaining incorrect opinions.
What if I don't care about being wrong (if that's really the only consequence I experience)? What if I just want to win?
Then you are, or are likely to be, morally in the wrong. That is of course possible. You can choose to do wrong. But it doesn't constitute any kind of argument. Someone can elect to ignore the roundness of the world for some perverse reason, but that doesn't make "!he world is round" false or meaningless or subjective.
Indeed it is not an argument. Yet I can still say, "So what?" I am not going to worry about something that has no effect on my happiness. If there is some way it would have an effect, then I'd care about it.
The difference is, believing "The world is round" affects whether I win or not, whereas believing "I'm morally in the wrong" does not.
That is apparently true in your hypothetical, but it's not true in the real world. Just as the roundness of the world has consequences, the wrongness of an action has consequences. For example, if you kill someone, then your fate is going to depend (probabilistically) on whether you were in the right (e.g. he attacked and you were defending your life) or in the wrong (e.g. you murdered him when he caught you burgling his house). The more in the right you were, then, ceteris paribus, the better your chances are.
You're interpreting "I'm morally in the wrong" to mean something like, "Other people will react badly to my actions," in which case I fully agree with you that it would affect my winning. Peterdjones apparently does not mean it that way, though.
Whether someone is judged right and wrong by others has consequences, but the people doing the judging might be wrong. It is still an error to make morality justify itself in terms of instrumental utility, since there are plenty of examples of things that are instrumentally right but ethically wrong, like improved gas chambers.
The fact that you are amoral does not mean there is anything wrong with morality, and is not an argument against it. You might as well be saying "there is a perfectly good rational argument that the world is round, but I prefer to be irrational".
That doesn't constitute an argument unless you can explain why your winning is the only thing that should matter.
Yeah, I said it's not an argument. Yet again I can only ask, "So what?" (And this doesn't make me amoral in the sense of not having moral sentiments. If you tell me me it is wrong to kill a dog for no reason, I will agree because I will interpret that as, "We both would be disgusted at the prospect of killing a dog for no reason." But you seem to be saying there is something more.)
The wordings "affect my winning" and "matter" mean the same thing to me. I take "The world is round" seriously because it matters for my actions. I do not see how "I'm morally in the wrong"* matters for my actions. (Nor how "I'm pan-galactically in the wrong" matters. )
*EDIT: in the sense that you seem to be using it (quite possibly because I don't know what that sense even is!).
The fact that you are not going to worry about morality, does not make morality a) false b) meaningless or c) subjective. Can I take it you are no longer arguing for any of claims a) b) or c) ?
You have not succeeded in showing that winning is the most important thing.
I've never argued (a), I'm still arguing (actually just informing you) that the words "objective morality" are meaningless to me, and I'm still arguing (c) but only in the sense that it is equivalent to (b): in other words, I can only await some argument that morality is objective. (But first I'd need a definition!)
I'm using the word winning as a synonym for "getting what I want," and I understand the most important thing to mean "what I care about most." And I mean "want" and "care about" in a way that makes it tautological. Keep in mind I want other people to be happy, not suffer, etc. Nothing either of us have argued so far indicates we would necessarily have different moral sentiments about anything.