And if I want to find out if morality really does not exist as an essential property of the universe, it’s worthwhile to try to take it out of my language and see if it comes up missing.
Moral language being reducible to non-moral language is a separate (though entangled) question to whether there are such things as moral facts. A lot of moral antirealists would say there is something special and indispensable about moral language, and that it means something more than liking or disliking, e.g. prescriptivist. Or take this from Three Worlds Collide (written by an antirealist):
The Babyeaters strive to do the baby-eating thing to do, the Superhappies output the Super Happy thing to do. None of that tells us anything about the right thing to do. They are not asking the same question we are—no matter what word of their language the translator links to our ‘should’. If you’re confused at all about that, my lord, I might be able to clear it up.”
Even if moral realism is true and even if moral claims are special in some way, I still think this part is true at least of aesthetic claims (which all your examples were)
there’s no sense in which something can “look good” if there is no observer to assess the quality, so it seems through language we casually mistake preferences for essences.
Perhaps this makes little difference to the rest of your post, but it’s worth noting that the mind-dependence morality isn’t all-or-nothing. A common view is that there are facts about the right and wrong ways to aggregate preferences or turn non-preferences into preferences without there being unconditional facts about what we should do.
Moral language being reducible to non-moral language is a separate (though entangled) question to whether there are such things as moral facts. A lot of moral antirealists would say there is something special and indispensable about moral language, and that it means something more than liking or disliking, e.g. prescriptivist. Or take this from Three Worlds Collide (written by an antirealist):
Even if moral realism is true and even if moral claims are special in some way, I still think this part is true at least of aesthetic claims (which all your examples were)