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lessdazed comments on A Sketch of an Anti-Realist Metaethics - Less Wrong
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Fantastic post. It goes a long way toward dissolving the question.
Rhetorical question one: how is the singular term "agent" justified when there is a different configuration of molecules in the space the "agent" occupies from moment to moment? Wouldn't "agents" be better? What if the agent gets hit by a non-fatal brain-altering gamma ray burst or something? There's no natural quantitative point to say we have "an agent who has changed to become a different agent, such that when talking about the present and past agent, I will use 'agents' rather than '(a substantially unchanged) 'agent'", and neither is there a qualitative difference.
Answer: don't be crazy. It's basically one person.
Rhetorical question two: May I say that "Chocolate ice cream is more delicious than getting beaten with tire irons by a troop of gorillas", or should I stick with "I would prefer eating chocolate ice cream to getting beaten with tire irons by a troop of gorillas"?
Answer: words are handles, don't be confused by them, not all possible minds would have that set of preferences, but enough "human" ones do that it's reasonable to say: likewise for the class of beings I include under "human", there is a reasonable thing to mean by it.
I would say that this first phrasing actually provides more information than the second, in that it refers to the nature of the preference, which is relevant for predicting how the agent in question might change it's preferences over time. Deliciousness tends to vary with supply, so the degree to which you prefer icecream over gorilla assault is likely to increase when you're hungry or malnourished, and decrease when you're nutritionally sated. In fact, if you were force-fed chocolate ice cream and nothing else for long enough, the preference might even reverse.
Does it imply that all possible minds find the experience of eating ice cream more delicious than being beaten by gorillas with metal bars? For that would be untrue!
I question the assumption of error theorists that statements like the first have such expansive meaning, I hadn't meant to change the variable you pointed out - the reason for the preference.
My understanding is that when someone talks about matters of preference, the default assumption is that they are referring to their own, or possibly the aggregate preferences of their peer group, in part because there is little or nothing that can be said about the aggregate preferences of all possible minds.