blacktrance 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.
I don't agree with any of these options, but I proposed the question back in 2014, so I hope I can shed some light. The difference between non-cognitivism and error theory is that the error theory supposes that people attempt to describe some feature of the world when they make moral statements, and that feature doesn't exist, while non-cognitivism holds that moral statements only express emotional attitudes ("Yay for X!") or commands ("Don't X!"), which can neither be true nor false. The difference between error theory and subjectivism is that subjectivists believe that some moral statements are true, but that they are made true by something mind-dependent (but what counts as mind-dependent turns out to be quite complicated).