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Nisan comments on Blues, Greens and abortion - Less Wrong Discussion
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I personally consider it virtuous to (politely and respectfully) speak my mind without worrying about offending people, so I can't sympathize with the particular challenge you're facing. But I want to say that I find your solution clever and I like it:
I believe moral psychology agrees with you. Joshua David Greene says:
He also quotes Jonathan Haidt:
Now lots of people would say this is an atrocious state of affairs — we ought to base our moral judgments on reasoning, not on intuition. But there are few people who could criticize you for it without being hypocritical.
Your attitude is also a clever solution to your problem because you disavow responsibility for your moral intuitions; your job is to merely interpret your intuitions.
Thank you for holding up a mirror to my thoughts. I agree these are my views/solutions and I iterated them here.
My Less-Wrong-Story is that sometime in the first year I gave up on an external/objective morality because the arguments here were compelling that there couldn't be one.
I had been clinging to the idea of the existence of objective morality because without it, value would be 'arbitrary'. By this I include determined (e.g., by evolution), complex, and potentially spontaneous and beautiful but not instrinsically "correct". Also, not deducible or reducible or necessarily logical like things embedded in physical reality must be. (Morality is technically embedded in physical reality in the way that it actually objectively exists, but describing this entity would describe how a person feels about X, not how they should feel about X.)
I spent a lot of time worrying that my brain wanted to give reasons for every value. I want to break this egg because I want to make a cake. I want to make a cake because I want the birthday party to be fun. I want it to be fun because I want to be happy. I want to be happy because ... because why? The terminal values aren't pinned to anything, but my brain expects them to be. In theory, religious people should pin the terminal values to God, but I don't believe the mapping is very thorough or accurate.
Ah, yep! There's a fact of the matter regarding how a person feels about X, and about how a person feels they should feel about X, and how a person feels they should feel they should feel... and so on. And the recursion continues forever.
But you can only ask why someone wants X a few times before we have to stop, or we go in a circle, or we get confused.