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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Questions for Moral Realists - Less Wrong Discussion
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See this comment. If Omega changed the attitudes of all people, that would change what those people mean when they say morality-in-our-world, but it would not change what I mean (here, in the real world rather than the counterfactual world) when I say morality-in-the-counterfactual-world, in the same way that if Omega changed the brains of all people so that the meanings of "red" and "yellow" were switched, that would change what those people mean when they say red, but it would not change what I mean when I say red-in-the-counterfactual-world.
I deal with exactly this issue in a post I made a while back (admittedly it is too long). It's an issue of levels of recursion in our process of modelling reality (or a counterfactual reality). Your moral judgments aren't dependent on the attitudes of people (including yourself) that you are modeling (in this world or in a counterfactual world): they're dependent on the cognitive algorithms in your actual brain.
In other words, the subjectivist account of morality doesn't say that people look at the attitudes of people in the world and then conclude from that what morality says. We don't map attitudes and then conclude from those attitudes what is and is moral. Rather, we map the world and then out brains react emotionally to facts about that world and project our attitudes onto them. So morality doesn't change in a world where people's attitudes change because you're using the same brain to make moral judgments about the counterfactual world as you use to make moral judgments about this world.
The post I linked to has some diagrams that make this clearer.
As for the linked comment, I am unsure there is a single, distinct, and unchanging logical object to define-- but if there is one I agree with the comment and think that defining the algorithm that produces human attitudes is a crucial project. But clearly an anti-realist one.
Edit: rewrote for clarity.
I'm not sure what you mean by this.
Yes, but logical objects aren't.
If I said "when we talk about Peano arithmetic, we are referring to a logical object. If counterfactually Peano had proposed a completely different set of axioms, that would change what people in the counterfactual world mean by Peano arithmetic, but it wouldn't change what I mean by Peano-arithmetic-in-the-counterfactual-world," would that imply that I'm not a mathematical Platonist?
I literally just edited my comment for clarity. It might make more sense now. I will edit this comment with a response to your point here.
Edit:
Any value system is a logical object. For that matter, any model of anything is a logical object. Any false theory of physics is a logical object. Theories of morality and of physics (logical objects both) are interesting because they purport to describe something in the world. The question before us is do normative theories purport to describe an object that is mind-independent or an object that is subjective?
Okay. I don't think we actually disagree about anything. I just don't know what you mean by "realist."
Yes, that sounds right.