What does moral language mean?
A convoluted, covert and self-delusional way of expressing how you want other people to behave.
Do moral facts exist?
Moral facts are one's preferences together with the associated instrumental actions and the necessary environmental circumstances to realize them, which are then unconsciously ascribed to the outside world by the use of ought statements.
If so, what are they like, and are they reducible to natural facts?
They are reducible to the interactions of different agents with each other and the environment in order to realize their preferences.
Is there a connection between making a moral judgment and being motivated to abide by it?
The connection is your subjective evaluation of the evidence in favor of a judgement. If you believe the judegment to be correct and binding then you are motivated to abide it.
Are moral judgments objective or subjective, relative or absolute?
I like this explanation.
Does it make sense to talk about moral progress?
No, there is no justification to add the word 'moral'. What we mean by 'moral progress' is how close we are to a preference equilibrium.
What does moral language mean?
A convoluted, covert and self-delusional way of expressing how you want other people to behave.
The uses of moral language we're exposed to is a massivly biased sample that would tend to lead to that conclusion, whatever morality really was.
It's almost always clear what's right and what's wrong (this is true whatever your view of the nature of morality). Go out onto the street and you won't see people massacring other people right and left, because everyone knows how to behave. Importantly, nobody says anything. People do...
lukeprog gave a list of metaethics questions here:
Most of these questions make no sense to me. I imagine that the moral intuitions in my brain come from a special black box within it, a "morality core" whose outputs I cannot easily change. (Explaining how my "morality core" ended up a certain way is a task for evo psych, not philosophy.) Or I can be more enlightened and adopt Nesov's idea that the "morality core" doesn't exist as a unified device, only as an umbrella name for all the diverse "reasons for action" that my brain can fire. Either perspective can be implemented as a computer program pretty easily, so I don't feel there's any philosophical mystery left over. All we have is factual questions about how people's "morality cores" vary in time and from person to person, how compelling their voices are, finding patterns in their outputs, etc. Can someone explain what problem metaethics is supposed to solve?