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DanArmak comments on Lesswrong 2016 Survey - Less Wrong
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As before, I found the question on metaethics (31) to be a tossup because I agree with several of the options given. I'd be interested in hearing from people who agree with some but not all of these answers:
I'm a subjectivist: I understand that when someone says "murder is wrong", she's expressing a personal judgement - others can judge differently. But I also know that most people are moral realists, so they wrongly think they are describing features of the world that don't in fact exist; thus, I believe in error theory. And what does it mean to proclaim that something "is wrong", other than to boo it, i.e. to call for people not to do it and to shun those who do? Thus, I also agree with non-cognitivism.
The intended difference is something like —
It's like the difference between asserting, "I appreciate that musical performance," and actually giving a standing ovation. (It's true that people sometimes state propositions to express approval or disapproval, but we also use non-proposition expressions as well.)
I don't understand how this difference leads to different (and disjoint / disagreeing) philosophical positions on what it means for people to say that "murder is wrong".
If someone says they disapprove of murder, they could be wrong or lying, or they could actually disapprove a little but say they disapprove lots, or vice versa. And if they actually boo murder, that's a signal they really disapprove of it, enough to invest energy in booing. But aside from signalling and credibility and how much they care about it, isn't their claimed position the same?
Are you saying non-cognitivists claim people who say "murder is wrong" never actually engage in false signalling, and we should take all statements of "murder is wrong" to be equivalent to actual booing? That sounds trivially false; surely that's not the intent of non-cognitivism.
If moral claims are not propositions, then propositional logic doesn't work on them — notably, this means that a moral claim could never be the conclusion of a logical proof.
Which would stop us from deriving new moral claims from existing ones. I understand now. Thanks!
So, if I understand correctly now, non-cognitivists say that human morals aren't constrained by the rules of logic. People don't care much about contradictions between their moral beliefs, they don't try to reduce them to consistent and independent axioms, they don't try to find new rules implied by old ones. They just cheer and boo certain things.
It's worth noting that there are non-cognitivist positions other than emotivism (the "boo, murder!" position). For instance, there's the prescriptivist position — that moral claims are imperative sentences or commands. This is also non-cognitivist, because commands are not propositions and don't have truth-values. But it's not emotivist, since we can do a kind of logic on commands, even though it's not the same as the logic on propositions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-cognitivism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperative_logic
("Boo, murder!" does not logically entail "Boo, murdering John!" ... but the command "Don't murder people!" conjoined with the proposition "John is a person." does seem to logically entail the command "Don't murder John!" So conjunction of commands and propositions works. But disjunction on commands doesn't work.)