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bogus comments on A confusion about deontology and consequentialism - Less Wrong Discussion
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Um, that's not a very interesting question, is it. Making a moral claim means, more or less: "I am right and you are wrong and you should do what I say". Note that this is not a morally absolutist view in the meta-ethical sense: even moral relativists make such claims all the time, they just admit that one's peculiar customs or opinions might affect the kinds of moral claims one makes.
What's a more interesting question is, "what should happen when folks make incompatible moral claims, or claim incompatible rights". This is what ethics (in the Rushworth Kidder sense of setting "right against right") is all about. When we do ethics, we abandon what might be called (in a perhaps naïve and philosophically incorrect way) "moral absolutism" or the simple practice of just making moral claims, and start debating them in public. Law, politics and civics are a further complication: they arise when societies get more complex and less "tribal", so simple ethical reasoning is no longer enough and we need more of a formal structure.
Well your attempt to explain what a normative claim is actually includes a normative claim so I don't think you've successfully dissolved the question. You are "right" about what? Facts? The world? What kind of facts? What kind of evidence can you offer to demonstrate that you are right and I am wrong?
That "should" is there again.
I don't imagine there ever was a "simple practice of just making moral claims". Moral claims are generally claims made on others and they are speech acts which means they exist to communicate something. People don't spend a lot of time making moral claims that everyone agrees with and abides by which means it's pretty much in the nature of a moral claim to be part of a debate or discussion.
I can't see the importance or the force of the distinction you are trying to make.
Who says I need "evidence" to argue that you should do something? I could rely on my perceived authority - in fact, you could take this as a definition of what "moral authority" is all about. Sometimes that moral authority comes from religion (or cosmology, more generally), sometimes it's derived from tradition, etc. So I have to dispute your claim that:
since it is quite self-evident that many people and institutions have made moral claims in the past that were not perceived as propely being part of a "debate" or "discussion". It's true that, sometimes, moral claims are seen in such a way - especially when they're seen as originating from individual instinct and cognition, and thus leading people to think of themselves as being on the "right side" of an ethical dilemma or conflict. And yet, at some level, more formalized systems like law and politics presumably rely on widespread trust in the "system" itself as a moral authority, if only one with a very limited scope.
So, you're never going to get an answer to the question of "what a normative claim is", because the whole concept involves a kind of tension. There's an "authority to be followed" side, and an "internal moral cognition" side, and both can be right to some degree and even interact in a fruitful way.