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Eugine_Nier comments on 2013 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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Assuming "should" is meant in a moral sense, we can say that "We should paint all the buildings in town blue!" is in fact a claim in need of evidence. Specifically, it says (to 2 decimal places) that we would all be better off / happier / flourish more if the buildings are painted blue. This is certainly true if it turns out the majority of the town really likes blue, so that they would be happier, but it does not entirely follow from Bob's claim that he likes blue—if the rest of the town really hated blue, then it would be reasonable to say that their discomfort outweighed his happiness. In this case he would be factually incorrect to say "We should paint all the buildings in town blue!".
In contrast, you can treat "We should make sure women remain barefoot and pregnant" as a claim in need of evidence, and in this case we can establish it as false. Most obviously because the proposed situation would not be very good for women, and we shouldn't do something that harms half the human race unnecessarily.
That's just looking at one of the direct consequences, accepting for the sake of argument that most women would prefer not to be "barefoot and pregnant". The problem is that, for these kinds of major social changes, the direct effects tend to be dominated by indirect effects and your argument makes no attempt to analyze the indirect effects.
Technically you are correct, so you can read my above argument as figuratively "accurate to one decimal place". The important thing is that there's nothing mysterious going on here in a linguistic or metaethical sense.
But in a practical sense these things can't be computed from first principals, so it is necessary to rely on tradition at least to some extent.
I partly agree, but a tradition that developed under certain conditions isn't necessarily optimal under different conditions (e.g. much better technology and medicine, less need for manual labour, fewer stupid people (at least for now), etc.).
Otherwise, we'd be even better off just executing our evolved adaptations, which had even more time to develop.
<not totally serious>Revealed preferences of women buying shoes and contraception?</not totally serious>
Depends on the context :-D In China a few centuries ago a woman quite reasonably might prefer to be barefoot (as opposed to have her feet tightly bound to disfigure them) and pregnant (as opposed to barren which made her socially worthless).