It seems I fail at expressing myself clearly. Sometimes I write posts formulated as questions (e.g. this one, complete with "please help!") but they come across as position statements instead. I'm not proposing or defending any solution (to what?), I'm asking where the philosophical problem of "metaethics" lies, modulo the (obvious) understanding that our moral intuitions come from some mechanical source. I'm asking what sense lukeprog's questions can make, when reformulated in such mechanical terms. Why oh why can't people just answer directly?
I'm not proposing or defending any solution (to what?), I'm asking where the philosophical problem of "metaethics" lies, modulo the (obvious) understanding that our moral intuitions come from some mechanical source.
That final clause is your proposed solution to the questions you quoted from lukeprog, and it fails to dissolve them. It's like answering "how do living things work?" with "atoms!".
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?