As far as I can tell, in this comment you present an analogy between moral judgements and empirical judgements. You then provide arguments against a specific claim saying “these two situations don’t share a deep cause”. But you don’t seem to have provided arguments for the judgements sharing a deep cause in the first place. It seems like a surface analogy to me.
Perhaps I should have said “reason for skepticism” instead of “argument”. Let me put it this way: what reasons do you have for thinking that moral judgments can’t be right or wrong, and have you checked whether those reasons don’t apply equally to empirical judgments?
Occam’s Razor, I suppose. Something roughly like emotivism seems like a wholly adequate explanation of what moral judgements are, both from a psychological and evolutionary point of view. I just don’t see any need to presume that moral judgements would be anything else, nor do I know what else they could be. From a decision-theoretical perspective, too, preferences (in the form of utility functions) are merely what the organism wants, and are simply taken as givens.
On the other hand, empirical judgements clearly do need to be evaluated for their correctness, if they are to be useful in achieving an organism’s preferences and/or survival.
As far as I can tell, in this comment you present an analogy between moral judgements and empirical judgements. You then provide arguments against a specific claim saying “these two situations don’t share a deep cause”. But you don’t seem to have provided arguments for the judgements sharing a deep cause in the first place. It seems like a surface analogy to me.
Perhaps I should have said “reason for skepticism” instead of “argument”. Let me put it this way: what reasons do you have for thinking that moral judgments can’t be right or wrong, and have you checked whether those reasons don’t apply equally to empirical judgments?
(Note this is the same sort of “reason for skepticism” that I expressed in Boredom vs. Scope Insensitivity for example.)
Occam’s Razor, I suppose. Something roughly like emotivism seems like a wholly adequate explanation of what moral judgements are, both from a psychological and evolutionary point of view. I just don’t see any need to presume that moral judgements would be anything else, nor do I know what else they could be. From a decision-theoretical perspective, too, preferences (in the form of utility functions) are merely what the organism wants, and are simply taken as givens.
On the other hand, empirical judgements clearly do need to be evaluated for their correctness, if they are to be useful in achieving an organism’s preferences and/or survival.