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Matt_Simpson comments on A Sketch of an Anti-Realist Metaethics - Less Wrong
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For the definition of "moral" that includes how people tend to use the term, this seems about right. However, the word "morality" is used in many different ways. For example, the "morality" I think about when I am legitimately wondering what action I should take - and not letting just an emotional reaction guide my actions - is in the ideal map (it's my preferences).
If your preferences were different (say you had a genuine preference to murder innocent people) would that change what is moral?
Nope. Define original preferences as moral1 and murder preferences as moral2. I'm asking what is moral1 to do, and that doesn't change if my preferences change. What changes is the question I ask (what is moral2 to do?).
Okay, then your morality isn't different from what I outlined here. You're just maybe less emotional about it (I probably overemphasized the matter of emotions in the post). When evaluating morality in the counterfactual a realist would have to look at facts in that world. You project your internal preferences on any proposed counterfactuals.
Put another way- I'm guess you don't think your preferences justify a claim about whether or not a given action is moral. Rather, what you mean when you say some action is immoral is that the action is against (some subset of) your preferences. That sound right?
That does sound right, but moral realism could still be true - actually, the term "moral" is meaningless in our example. Moral1 realism and moral2 realism are what's at stake. Consider two scenarios - scenario1 and scenario2. In scenario1 my preferences are moral1 and in scenario2 my preferences are moral2. In scenario1, moral1 exists in the ideal map - my preferences are an instantiation of moral1 - so moral1 realism is true. Moral2 realism may or may not be true, depending on whether some other agent has those preferences. Similarly, in scenario2, moral2 realism is true and moral1 realism may or may not be true.
As written this isn't clear enough for me to make sense of.
Let me try to be more clear then. Your definition of moral realism is:
In our toy example, there is morality1 and morality2. Morality1 is my current preferences, morality2 is my current preferences + a preference for murder. So is moral1 realism true? What about moral2 realism?
Consider scenario1. Under this scenario, my preferences are my actual current preferences, i.e. they are morality1. Now we return to the questions. Is moral1 realism true? Well, my preferences are a subset of the ideal map and in this scenario my preferences the same as morality1, so yes, moral1 realism is true. Is moral2 realism true? My preferences are not the same as morality2, but someone else's preferences could be, so we don't have enough information to decide this statement.
Scenario2, where my preferences are the same as morality2, is analogous (moral2 realism is true, moral1 realism is undecidable without further information).
Is that clearer?
It sounds like you are arguing for meta-ethical relativism where whether or not a moral judgment is true or false is contingent on the preferences of the speaker making the moral judgment. Is that right?
Not really. Whether a moral judgement is true or false is contingent on the definition of moral. If I say "what you're doing is bad!" I probably mean "it's not moral1" where moral1 is my preferences. If the hypothetical-murder-preferring-me says "what you're doing is bad!" this version of me probably means "it's not moral2" where moral2 are those preferences.
But those aren't the only definitions I could be using and in fact it's often ambiguous which definition a given speaker is using (even to the speaker). For example, in both cases in the above paragraph when I say "what you're doing is bad" I could simply mean "what you're doing goes against the traditional morality taught and/or practiced in this region" or "what you're doing makes me have a negative emotional reaction."
To answer the relativism question, you have to pin down the definition of moral. For example, suppose by "moral" we simply mean clippy's utility function, i.e. moral = paperclip maximizing. Now suppose clippy say's "melting down 2 tons of paper clips is immoral." Is clippy right? Of course he is, that's the definition of immoral. Now suppose I say the sentence. Is it still true? It sure is since we pinned down the meaning of moral beforehand.
If we substitute my own (much more complicated) utility function for clippy's as the definition of moral in this example, it becomes harder to evaluate whether or not something is moral, but the correct answer still won't depend on who's asking the question since "moral" is a rigid designator.
Of course.
But it just doesn't solve anything to recognize that 'moral' could be defined anyway you like. There are actual social and linguistic facts about how moral language functions. The problem of meta-ethics, essentially, is that those facts happen to be paradoxical. Saying, "my definition of moral is just my preferences" doesn't solve the problem because that isn't anyone else's definition of moral and most people would not recognize it as a reasonable definition of moral. The metaethical answer consistent with that position might be "everyone (or lots of people) mean different things by moral". That position is anti-realist, just instead of being skeptical about the metaphysics you're skeptical of the linguistics- you don't think there is a shared meaning for the word.
As an aside: I find that position less plausible than other versions of anti-realism (people seem to agree on the meaning of moral but disagree on which actions, persons and circumstances are part of the moral and immoral sets.).